The Monthly Salon: June
Plus a nod to the future
Greetings to all of my readers. The west of Ireland has been basking in unseasonably hot weather this past ten days. Out in these parts we grab hold of this sort of thing while we can, because it doesn’t come often. Here is a cow in the Burren enjoying the impacts of man-made climate change.
Paid subscribers will have noticed, I imagine, my announcement that last week’s essay was the penultimate chapter in the series I began here over two years ago. It seems almost impossible to me that this series would ever end, so deeply have I immersed myself in the entrails of the Machine these past two years. But end it will, in two weeks’ time, when the final essay in the series will hit your screens.
Part of me would like to retire at that point, and spend more time with that cow, but this is not an option that is given to me. Instead, I will be taking a summer break, and then returning to the Abbey with a series of new projects and a slightly shifted focus. I have some new ideas I’m quite excited about, all of which will build on the work I’ve been doing here since 2021 while also giving me some new avenues to explore and some more ways to explore them. The end of one project is always the beginning of another. God willing, it will blossom. We’ll see.
I’ll write more on what I’m planning at the end of this month. For now, I have another essay to get on with. While I do that, please feel free to use this monthly space as your own, and talk about whatever you like. More from me in a fortnight.
I recently re-read Solzhenitsyn's famous commencement address, and it made me think instantly of your fantastic recent essay. Here, with apologies for the length, is Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978:
"How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century."
Is that not perfect? If only Harvard had listened...
full speech here:
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
Tangentially related, in the shameless self promotion department, please don't miss my piece on CS Lewis and rainbows at the Federalist today:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/07/how-to-protect-your-childrens-innocent-awe-of-the-rainbow/
Thank you for all you do!
gaty.substack.com
Enjoy a well-earned rest, sir.
Did anyone else find that this week was a great opportunity to internally say, "absolutely no, Satan?" I've seen things coming out from Apple and their new blinding pro...whoops.. I mean.... "Vision" Pro device. It feels as if the moment was given to us as an opportunity to practically opt-out. Is this where we begin to say no more?
For those of you without a phone, you've already done this bit. But for some of us new luddite-ish folks, this feels like a great moment to stand firm and just say... "I'm out." Or am I making too much of this?