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Jack Leahy's avatar

I am a suburban-raised, American Gen X'er. My grandparents lived in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. Their life in the 1970s and '80s was a throwback even then. One of the first things I would do upon arriving was to raise up a yell from their front yard to hear it echo in the hills. Once, when walking with my grandfather we came upon a spring bubbling fresh water up from the ground -- it was like magic to me! My grandfather grew corn and hunted deer to eat. Their lives weren't centered around the TV, though mine was. In the late 90s, I visited Ireland a few times. There was still a sense there of a similarly rooted sanity (whatever one might otherwise say about Ireland, and people do, I loved it). These experiences haunt me. Though if I talk about them too enthusiastically now it seems like I am breaking a taboo. That to desire roots and a love of place and a deeper connection to the people around you is akin to incipient Fascism (as noted above). I have lived instead shuttling between the parking lots of the endless shopping mall. Working mindless jobs to pay for it. Most of my friends have moved away looking for something else -- who knows what? Nobody's fault but my own, I guess, that this is how it is. Still, I would rather have been suckled in a creed outworn...

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Ben Collier's avatar

Thank you so much for this - it made me reflect.

There was a computer programmer called Terry Davis. Not a lot of people have heard of him, but Terry suffered with schizophrenia, and he wrote an operating system called TempleOS. It was a technical achievement, and was remarkable because Terry said that God had told him to build it as the third temple, for God himself to live within. What was unique about the system was that it held fast to design principles from the 1980s, when Terry had been a boy, growing up. God had commanded him to stick to those design parameters. When I think about TempleOS, I feel that somewhere inside there was a little boy trapped in a prison of a mind that he couldn't understand and couldn't control, and Temple was the only place that he felt safe.

And that's where I think we all find ourselves now, and have done for a long time. We have this instinct, as humans, to find the things which made us safe in our youth, and reassert them in adulthood, perpetuating tradition and continuing to build something that lasts across generations. But modern culture overwrites tradition in children and replaces it with other things, and so the natural drive to tradition is replaced by grown men fetishising old computers, steam trains, Star Wars, comics, and Pokemon.

In as much as man is made in God's image, the drive to tradition, which is obviously a natural impulse, is a reflection of the nature of God. So in as much as that must be true, it must also be true that the perversion of that instinct into the unnatural channels that we see today are de facto evil.

Perhaps the job of "rewilding" humans is discovering authentic expressions of our instincts. And perhaps they can be found by identifying these aberrant behaviours that we associate with modern life and understanding what they once were, that they can be rebuilt, not just as a regressive return to savagery but in a new and greater form.

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