From Whence, Whither To?

 

Here, on the precipice of the Brave New World, we have reached a nexus in history as seems to happen every 500 years.  The Age of Exploration and the Renaissance was the last moment of choice, and the outcome of our current age will steer history for centuries to come.

There are three contexts which are in flux, as they always are at these nexus points - culture, reason and politics.  Within the context of culture, we find religion, art and education.  Under the topic of reason, we find science, health and philosophy.  The topic of politics encompasses law, social order and economics.

That culture is in turmoil is indisputable by even the most bovine character.  Religion of all flavors has been in decline for the last century.  Art has devolved from ascendant aesthetics to taping bananas to the wall.  Education, particularly in the West, is completely wrecked by any classical standard.

At the last nexus point, the Catholic Church dominated the West, and by extension of the Age of Exploration, much of the world.  In AD 1000, the Church declared dominion over the entire Earth in trust for the return of Christ.  This moment set up the following nexus, where the European powers were subservient to Rome, though in the 1500s, Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg were already planting the seeds that would flower in our current nexus. We now see the Church as a faded and corrupt relic of a day long past.  This is only one example, but the ability of religion to dominate and control culture is withering fast.

Art is quite nearly dead, and has been in the throes for a century.  For centuries, art was the elevation of raw materials to sublime beauty.  Canvas, pigment and stone were manipulated to draw out form, balance and harmony to transcend the materials used.  In the last nexus, art exploded in an orgy of creativity and new techniques that reformed the degraded culture in the Great Rebirth.  In our current nexus, we see herds of mindless sycophants applauding piles of garbage, a pair of glasses and regurgitated milk.  Even our newest art form - film/video/photography - has rotted and putrefied in less than a century, to the point it no longer elecates and educates, but dictates and castigates.  Art has crossed the line from the sublime to the propagandistic.  It has become a celebration of the ugly, the profane and the sacrelege. 

When it comes to education, it is nearly impossible to find an example of it anywhere in our nexus.  The very concept of teaching the tools of critical thinking is derided, and people with degrees in "education" are lauded while simultaneously being self-contradictory - how can one be "educated" in education?  Rote recital of doctrine has replaced logical inquiry at every level and in every college  The humanities are little more than ideological clap-trap, and the sciences have devolved to grant chasing.  One no longer learns to question assumptions, but to regurgitate them as Truth and never question them.  This is not education.  Reasoning with letters and numbers is derided as antiquated foolishness, while universities literally offer doctorates in foolishness.

As the culmination of culture, reason is a fundamental quality of civilazation.  That science, health and philosophy are the results of applying art, religion and education to the great questions of existence.  Science is supposed to seek fects in repeatable patterns that are free of bias and assumption.  This leads to greater health and logetivity, providing us with more time to pursue truth, and this, in turn, leads to philosophy, where facts are intrepreted for meaning within the randomness of the Universe.  Sciene, though, has been perverted into providing plausibility to stupidity, which undermines our health, and robs us of the search for meaning by corrupting facts and diverting our time to circular pursuits.

Take for example the scourge of our nexus point - the COVID pandemic.  The most profound assumption of this whole event is that viruses make us sick.  Rather than constantly examining the facts underlying the pandemic, science has been co-opted to uphold the dictates of organizations with agendas, the most crass of which is profit.  This undermines our health, not because we are getting sick from a virus, but because the reactions we are told to have are based on an incorrect assumption.  This culminates in a philosophy of humanity versus nature, rather than us against our selves, and so our search for truth is completely derailed by a simple, inccorect assumption.  How much different would our world be right this moment if we assumed that illness was not caused by the virus, but rather our body's response to its presence was making us sick?

At the apex of the foregoing sits politics.  How we conceive of and institute the legal, ordinal and economic structures of our civilization are completely dependent on our cultural and rational underpinnings.  What we call moral and acceptable is a function of our art, education and science.  Though all of these things may be categorized and typed, they are ultimately and completely dependent on each other to craft moral law, order and exchange.  Art determined harmony.  Harmony crafts fairness.  Fairness informs the law.  The law establishes order.  Order allows for exchange.  Exchange buys us health.  Health delivers philosophy.  Undermine any of these, and our world is thrown out of balance.  Undermine all of them and we arrive at a nexus point of choice.

At the last nexus 500 years ago, we chose the secular nation-state over genetic sovereigns; we chose capitalism and a vibrant middle class over command economies and rigid class systems; we chose free and open inquiry into the nature of the Universe over superstition and magic.  In other words, our species entered its puberty.  It is interesting that a debate now rages over puberty-arrestng drugs and gender fluidity, as a kind of metaphor for our civilization at large.

In our current nexus, we are faced with the ultimate choice - turn back to childhood, or proceed into adulthood.  Do we cling to Santa Claus and the Eater Bunny?  Or do we open our eyes to reality and responsibility?  In AD 1000, our species chose to turn back to childhood, and it was another 500 years before we finally accepted the inevitable.  Once again, we face reversing course and cowering in our myths and legends, or boldly and maturely stepping into our next stage of development.

We don't wake up one day and find that we are adults.  It is a process of develoment in which certain values and realities become inevitable.  In the same way, our species has been making a series of choices over the past century or so that have been leading us to a moment of critical choice.  It is not whether we wear a mask or a certain individual becomes president of a country tha tultimately matters.  It is rather that what we choose now will accelerate or inhibit our journey towards the inevitable.

That we will be forced eventually to mature as a species is inevitable.  When we will accept that reality and the responsibility that goes with it

We all know individuals who were responsible and mature at a young age, and others we generally refer to as "late bloomers".  This is the nature of our current nexus.  It is as simple, yet as complex as that.  Watching an individual mature at the gross scale seems fairly straight forward, but observing the process on the cellular level is mind-numbingly complex.  In either case, the process happens and only our understanding and appreciation of the process differes.

Like all adolescents, there are powerful forces pulling us in different directions.  Part of our species wants to remain in the familiar and carefree world of magic and fantasy, while the inexorable force of Nature herself is dragging us into the realm of adult responsibility and mature wisdom.  We are each a cell in the body politic, a neuron in the collective mind.  Consciously or not, we each are pushing or pulling, advancing or regressing

At some point, though, we must realize as a species that remaining forever children will be hazardous to our health.

This is the true Great Reset.