Thinking less "what am I against" and more "what am I for?" I am a democrat who is baffled by the direction of my party, feels like I have been left behind on something resembling the right.
I think you'd probably really like Modris Eksteins' book "Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age". But then I suspect it's the kind of book you've probably already read Paul. You may have even cited it; I can't quite recall.
It's hard to draw neat parallels, really, I think. In some ways there is a "break with the existing order" that is taking place, but it hasn't had a mass bloodletting event like WW1 as its impetus, but rather the marination of the broader culture in trends that have been afoot for decades which are now coming into full fruit, thanks both to the passage of time and the catalyst effect of communications technology, particularly when this is spectacularly weaponized in cultural terms, as it is today.
I don't have the sense that we are heading into another WW1 at this point, but rather a slow burn, a kind of continued slouch into a global popular psychosis which will have elements of both Huxley and Orwell, as well as much besides. But I could be quite wrong. I mean, we could be all wiped out by a catastrophic nuclear war inside of a week's time, the way things are going, so who knows?
Assuming that we aren't incinerated and/or sent into a nuclear winter/MadMax type scenario in the near future, my reading is rather than an abrupt sense of definitive departure from the ante-bellum regime that prevailed in the aftermath of WW1, or the sense of "we'll be home by Christmas" that prevailed at the entry to that conflict (a kind of widespread obliviousness about what was about to occur), we seem to instead be in a place where we are surprised by little to nothing, already arrayed in well-worn (and in many ways worn thin) camps engaged in throwing familiar tropes at each other to no great effect other than making our own "side" feel better.
All the while the machine drones on, ever growing in strength and presence, ever growing in the liminal space in our heads that it occupies, regardless of one's "ideology" or "side". There is a very strong sense that the world is being duped, well and truly, but it isn't clear at all to me who is doing the duping. It certainly isn't some ill-conceived uber-conspiracy, as imagined by some. But what is it? Is it the mass of humanity itself that is engaged in a collective exercise of self-duping? Is the machine itself a self-sustaining autonomous mass-duping mechanism under control of no-one, but operating by strict principles of its own inscrutable, inevitable logic? Or is it something more personal and sinister, yet unseen, which lies behind the collective duping we see everywhere? It's truly hard to say.
I think was already touched on a bit in Paul’s essay on transhumanism, but I am thinking a lot about the Machine in regards to fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. The amount of social pressure women over 30 put on each other to freeze their eggs or to start with IVF before even trying to conceive naturally in the US, is starting to feel over the top to me, and a bit alarming. While I do know fertility declines with age, and some women in their 30s face more problems with it (and I don’t judge women struggling with infertility for seeking fertility assistance *at all* it’s totally understandable in that circumstance) it feels like so many women automatically assume having a child is not something they can’t do --- either without having a lot of money first or without technology before they even try without it. With surrogates becoming very popular with celebrities and the transhumanists talking about artificial wombs in the future, are we moving to a world where pregnancy is becoming desacralized? Or having children is becoming a luxury good?
One thing I have noticed as I plan to start a family myself, is I see images of the Virgin Mary and the Buddhist deity Tara everywhere, and it feels like the spirit of the holy mother is transcending into my every day life and guiding me, it’s beautiful. And it makes me sad that the archetype of the holy mother seems to be losing respect in modern times (not to say that it is the *only* feminine archetype, but just a very important one).
On Hemingway specifically, I’ve a brief story. It’s very well known he was a severe alcoholic. During the war he stayed here in this village for a short time, stationed as a correspondent. The place he stayed was a former mill, and he was the guest of the owners.
They had a really large wine cellar, as they were the richest family here. However, unbeknownst to them, Hemingway was drinking through their entire stock. To hide it from them, he’d fill the bottles with his own piss and recork them, expecting to be long gone by the time they noticed the full bottles were not full of wine.
There was a problem though, something the people in this village still talk about. He was so drunk that he’d go back down to the cellar for another bottle but, because he’d drank so much during his stay, he’d never be able to keep track of which of them were full of wine and which ones were full of his urine.
Apparently, quite a few nights the neighbors would hear him shouting in a drunken rage after the first deep gulp of the wrong bottles.
The crazy part is that this apparently happened so many nights that it’s all he’s remembered for here...
"The machine" has been under constant construction since the dawn of technology. Its growth process seems to always involve greater and greater centralisation of power, with occasional hiccups (such as the collapse of the Roman Empire, World Wars, fall of Soviet Russia), followed by quick recovery. Crisis results in major step changes towards centralisation. War may involve a step backwards from centralisation in some places, but more centralisation in other places. Post-war, the machine gets straight back to work, assembling and centralising. The machine now seems to be entering some sort of new phase in its path of self-assembly where its very unclear where the levers of true power are, and even less clear what its ultimate goals could be.
Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening.
The question puts me in the mind of the opening chapter of “The Guns of August,” with the old monarchical order of Europe gathered together in 1910, just before their highly advanced, civilized, globalized world imploded.
The armies of WWI followed the internalized logic of industrial warfare all the way down, and burned away the old world in the process. The stunned survivors were divided between abandoning that world or striving to reclaim it. They hashed that out in WWII and got a new world in the bargain.
In some ways, this is where we stand today. We had our WWI when the postwar order ended in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We had a couple decades of peace, but we never really resolved the causes of that time of social upheaval. Now we’re going to finish what we started.
Today’s America is the most deranged, most revolutionary, most destructive society and culture that has ever existed. We believe things that no human being has believed in all of human history. We are, in the strictest sense, incomparable.
I’ll try my luck here articulating a dilemma. I know many of you are Christians, and other than a slight connection with Dark Mountain, that’s why I came over to Paul’s blog—his story of conversion (that’s too light a word…how about revelation) inspired me.
I won’t lay out all the details, but I was deeply Catholic (with a touch of Baptist, typical American stew) as a child. Then I had a crisis of faith my first year in college, followed by a full monty mystical experience that blew apart my convictions and faith into some kind of pleasant agnosticism that privileged practice over belief. I then took the familiar tour of Eastern religions, all of which greatly inspired me, but about ten years ago walked away from it all. I’d gotten very sick with an autoimmune disease that honed me in on more somatic matters, but I’d also grown very weary of spiritual talk—especially talkers.
Anyhow, last year my frame blew up. I was living in my camper out West here in the wildfire smoke, and I could no longer make sense of the world (I wrote a brief essay about that for Dark Mountain here: https://dark-mountain.net/remembering-water/ ). Suddenly I felt an opening again, the first in two decades, not just towards codified religion, but for my ancestry and the frames of my ancestors. I realized: I don’t want to be the point at which their long transmission stops. I don’t want to make up the world anymore.
My mom told me to ask God for guidance, and I felt silly on my knees, but I did so. Soon enough I had a copy of the New Testament, and strange things happened, such as my saying before opening it “God give me a sign” and turning exactly to the phrase that Jesus utters, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you, your generation will receive no sign.”
Then I got swept up by the Spirit. Lots of all-nighters, lots of outpourings of love, lots of more strange things...
But I hit a block, and that’s why I’m here writing about it. My issues with Christianity have always been manifold, and they came back from their long snore to plague me. I won’t articulate them here, except to say that I struggle intensely with the theology (especially the Trinity), with the insistence on belief in particular miracles (I do conceptually believe miracles are possible), with the Christians who draw firm lines and castigate those on the other side, with the arrogance that occasionally shows up in salvation conviction, and so on.
So I stepped off the path for a few months, the Spirit left me, and I found myself entirely confused again. Now I feel the Spirit knocking on my door once more, but I’ve got a lot more patience than I did last year, and am willing to open that door more slowly rather than dive through. I made a leather cross that hangs in view from my bed, so it stands there every morning staring me down, and while I have no clue what it means, it’s staying put.
I feel called, I suppose. And trapped—partly by logic, that ‘ratio’ Paul mentioned last time, or maybe it’s better called skepticism (cynicism?). But called to where? Well, I want my Christian faith back, and I want to transmit it forward, and I want to be animated by God more precisely. And yet, I have this deep feeling that with the beliefs of Christianity that I currently hold, I wouldn’t be welcomed by many of the faith, including here. I’d feel that “unless I accept so-and-so premises,” I’m not Christian. Again, those firm lines (yes, lines aren’t always bad, but usually are, and in my view as a nondualist, always are when cordoning off God). I do take some solace in: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
For those of you who are followers of Christ who deeply believe the basic tenants of the religious claims—only Son of God, physical resurrection, physical return—how did that conviction arrive for you? Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)? Do you still hold a little room for being wrong about the faith’s core claims, or is it a done deal, and does that feel liberating? What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?
I know there’s a ton out there that discusses such issues, and I read a lot, but I’m interested in hearing from y’all who are here right now in this mysterious little corner of the electromagnetic field.
Do folks here know the energy expert Nate Hagens? He is predicting a massive reset over the next 10-20 years that we will be forced into, based around specifically energy. Perhaps no big news for people here - but his Youtube videos are interesting, particularly now as energy has shot up the agenda.
Enjoying your writing as always, Paul. I found one thing to quibble with in your most recent essay, There Were Giants in the Earth (a lovely phrase from Genesis 6), related to the role of the Reformation in this narrative you are telling. Full disclosure: I am a full-blown protestant, of the Canadian and reformed Baptist type. But if I don't say a word for us poor maligned protestants, who will?!
So the nub of it for me is that I think part of what you assign to the reformation really needs to be blamed on nominalism, the medieval rejection of the existence of universals (from classical Platonic metaphysics). It's pretty clear that the early reformers retained the classical metaphysics of the early church, but that the reformed churches lost their grip on it as Enlightenment modernity swept through all of society. I wonder what you would make of the narrative laid out here by a fellow Baptist, Craig Carter: https://craigacarter.substack.com/p/ideas-have-consequences
You wrote: "After the Reformation, the stage was set for Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, all of which can be seen as new eruptions of Machine consciousness into a world in which the sacral worldview was in retreat." But I think the start of that chain has to go back to nominalism, and then - yes - the reformation contributes in some ways to the rest of that process.
Lastly, it pained me a little to read about your visceral allergy to the automobile. I do see your point, and I don't deny what the car did to the world. Yet I have always loved cars and I still do. There's a beauty, grace, and power that is undeniable there, a genuine artfulness. I guess I just have to live in that tension.
When one makes a commitment to god (any god or gods) and a group that follows and one stops following the word, the teachings, does one become lost in the world?
Or is one allowed to follow another god without recrimination from the prior commitment?
David cut Goliath’s head off; with Goliath’s sword.
There is a way to read the story of David and Goliath with the giant representing the serpent from the garden metaphorically grown into a dragon (evil itself) and David representing God come to deal with it. In this way of picturing the story it strikes me that Goliath is COVERED in technology as both a defensive and offensive strategy, yet David denies the armor and advanced weaponry that Saul offers to him. David instead defeats the technologically altered Goliath with a simple stone from the earth that had not been altered in anyway - a non technological weapon. I like the image of David overcoming evil without using advanced technology, but once Goliath is dead, David uses Goliaths sword to cut his head off... is there meaning behind that?
I’m wondering if you (Paul, if you read this) or anyone else has considered this story from this angle and if so, is there a reason David used the technology of the enemy to prove that the enemy had been slain and how that may apply in todays battle?
I've heard more than a few times how older people involved in the nuclear abolition movement cannot get young people—of any skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity—to care about the issue. It made me wonder how nuclear war went from being this dreaded, fearsome prospect that millions opposed in the streets to something yawn-inducing. Even today, where a recent study estimated the use of a single tactical nuclear weapon anywhere in the world would result in at least 90+ million deaths (https://www.icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war), there is a blanket of cud-chewing indifference. This as NATO escalates its involvement in the Ukraine war and Putin runs out of everything save for his vast arsenal of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/11/fcqp-o11.html). People seem to be in something approaching a drugged stupor as the end of their lives, their family's lives, and their civilization looms directly ahead.
I've thought at times that perhaps Fukushima had a strange impact on worries over nuclear power and nuclear weaponry. "See, here we had not one, but /three/ meltdowns and it was perfectly fine! A little cleanup of the mess and voila!" There is also maybe a kind of learned helplessness going on, as the e-news has been shrieking for decades now about one calamity or another. 'Wolf!' has been cried too many times.
Let me assure you, nuclear war is one nasty wolf.
Perhaps it's as simple as pervasive despair in this our culture of death. A terminal moral degradation has set in. People are prepared to sit placidly on their couches and watch the end of the world until the electricity cuts out and their internet connection is lost. One suspects if somehow only a couple of major cities, say one in Russia and one in Western Europe, were vaporized, there would scarcely even be an uptick in activism to ban nuclear weapons, even though perhaps 15 million people may have died.
https://compactmag.com/article/why-conservatism-failed
in short, technology kills tradition.
Thinking less "what am I against" and more "what am I for?" I am a democrat who is baffled by the direction of my party, feels like I have been left behind on something resembling the right.
Is it not written that everything that can be done, will be done?
I think you'd probably really like Modris Eksteins' book "Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age". But then I suspect it's the kind of book you've probably already read Paul. You may have even cited it; I can't quite recall.
It's hard to draw neat parallels, really, I think. In some ways there is a "break with the existing order" that is taking place, but it hasn't had a mass bloodletting event like WW1 as its impetus, but rather the marination of the broader culture in trends that have been afoot for decades which are now coming into full fruit, thanks both to the passage of time and the catalyst effect of communications technology, particularly when this is spectacularly weaponized in cultural terms, as it is today.
I don't have the sense that we are heading into another WW1 at this point, but rather a slow burn, a kind of continued slouch into a global popular psychosis which will have elements of both Huxley and Orwell, as well as much besides. But I could be quite wrong. I mean, we could be all wiped out by a catastrophic nuclear war inside of a week's time, the way things are going, so who knows?
Assuming that we aren't incinerated and/or sent into a nuclear winter/MadMax type scenario in the near future, my reading is rather than an abrupt sense of definitive departure from the ante-bellum regime that prevailed in the aftermath of WW1, or the sense of "we'll be home by Christmas" that prevailed at the entry to that conflict (a kind of widespread obliviousness about what was about to occur), we seem to instead be in a place where we are surprised by little to nothing, already arrayed in well-worn (and in many ways worn thin) camps engaged in throwing familiar tropes at each other to no great effect other than making our own "side" feel better.
All the while the machine drones on, ever growing in strength and presence, ever growing in the liminal space in our heads that it occupies, regardless of one's "ideology" or "side". There is a very strong sense that the world is being duped, well and truly, but it isn't clear at all to me who is doing the duping. It certainly isn't some ill-conceived uber-conspiracy, as imagined by some. But what is it? Is it the mass of humanity itself that is engaged in a collective exercise of self-duping? Is the machine itself a self-sustaining autonomous mass-duping mechanism under control of no-one, but operating by strict principles of its own inscrutable, inevitable logic? Or is it something more personal and sinister, yet unseen, which lies behind the collective duping we see everywhere? It's truly hard to say.
I think was already touched on a bit in Paul’s essay on transhumanism, but I am thinking a lot about the Machine in regards to fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. The amount of social pressure women over 30 put on each other to freeze their eggs or to start with IVF before even trying to conceive naturally in the US, is starting to feel over the top to me, and a bit alarming. While I do know fertility declines with age, and some women in their 30s face more problems with it (and I don’t judge women struggling with infertility for seeking fertility assistance *at all* it’s totally understandable in that circumstance) it feels like so many women automatically assume having a child is not something they can’t do --- either without having a lot of money first or without technology before they even try without it. With surrogates becoming very popular with celebrities and the transhumanists talking about artificial wombs in the future, are we moving to a world where pregnancy is becoming desacralized? Or having children is becoming a luxury good?
One thing I have noticed as I plan to start a family myself, is I see images of the Virgin Mary and the Buddhist deity Tara everywhere, and it feels like the spirit of the holy mother is transcending into my every day life and guiding me, it’s beautiful. And it makes me sad that the archetype of the holy mother seems to be losing respect in modern times (not to say that it is the *only* feminine archetype, but just a very important one).
On Hemingway specifically, I’ve a brief story. It’s very well known he was a severe alcoholic. During the war he stayed here in this village for a short time, stationed as a correspondent. The place he stayed was a former mill, and he was the guest of the owners.
They had a really large wine cellar, as they were the richest family here. However, unbeknownst to them, Hemingway was drinking through their entire stock. To hide it from them, he’d fill the bottles with his own piss and recork them, expecting to be long gone by the time they noticed the full bottles were not full of wine.
There was a problem though, something the people in this village still talk about. He was so drunk that he’d go back down to the cellar for another bottle but, because he’d drank so much during his stay, he’d never be able to keep track of which of them were full of wine and which ones were full of his urine.
Apparently, quite a few nights the neighbors would hear him shouting in a drunken rage after the first deep gulp of the wrong bottles.
The crazy part is that this apparently happened so many nights that it’s all he’s remembered for here...
"The machine" has been under constant construction since the dawn of technology. Its growth process seems to always involve greater and greater centralisation of power, with occasional hiccups (such as the collapse of the Roman Empire, World Wars, fall of Soviet Russia), followed by quick recovery. Crisis results in major step changes towards centralisation. War may involve a step backwards from centralisation in some places, but more centralisation in other places. Post-war, the machine gets straight back to work, assembling and centralising. The machine now seems to be entering some sort of new phase in its path of self-assembly where its very unclear where the levers of true power are, and even less clear what its ultimate goals could be.
Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening.
The question puts me in the mind of the opening chapter of “The Guns of August,” with the old monarchical order of Europe gathered together in 1910, just before their highly advanced, civilized, globalized world imploded.
The armies of WWI followed the internalized logic of industrial warfare all the way down, and burned away the old world in the process. The stunned survivors were divided between abandoning that world or striving to reclaim it. They hashed that out in WWII and got a new world in the bargain.
In some ways, this is where we stand today. We had our WWI when the postwar order ended in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We had a couple decades of peace, but we never really resolved the causes of that time of social upheaval. Now we’re going to finish what we started.
Today’s America is the most deranged, most revolutionary, most destructive society and culture that has ever existed. We believe things that no human being has believed in all of human history. We are, in the strictest sense, incomparable.
I’ll try my luck here articulating a dilemma. I know many of you are Christians, and other than a slight connection with Dark Mountain, that’s why I came over to Paul’s blog—his story of conversion (that’s too light a word…how about revelation) inspired me.
I won’t lay out all the details, but I was deeply Catholic (with a touch of Baptist, typical American stew) as a child. Then I had a crisis of faith my first year in college, followed by a full monty mystical experience that blew apart my convictions and faith into some kind of pleasant agnosticism that privileged practice over belief. I then took the familiar tour of Eastern religions, all of which greatly inspired me, but about ten years ago walked away from it all. I’d gotten very sick with an autoimmune disease that honed me in on more somatic matters, but I’d also grown very weary of spiritual talk—especially talkers.
Anyhow, last year my frame blew up. I was living in my camper out West here in the wildfire smoke, and I could no longer make sense of the world (I wrote a brief essay about that for Dark Mountain here: https://dark-mountain.net/remembering-water/ ). Suddenly I felt an opening again, the first in two decades, not just towards codified religion, but for my ancestry and the frames of my ancestors. I realized: I don’t want to be the point at which their long transmission stops. I don’t want to make up the world anymore.
My mom told me to ask God for guidance, and I felt silly on my knees, but I did so. Soon enough I had a copy of the New Testament, and strange things happened, such as my saying before opening it “God give me a sign” and turning exactly to the phrase that Jesus utters, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you, your generation will receive no sign.”
Then I got swept up by the Spirit. Lots of all-nighters, lots of outpourings of love, lots of more strange things...
But I hit a block, and that’s why I’m here writing about it. My issues with Christianity have always been manifold, and they came back from their long snore to plague me. I won’t articulate them here, except to say that I struggle intensely with the theology (especially the Trinity), with the insistence on belief in particular miracles (I do conceptually believe miracles are possible), with the Christians who draw firm lines and castigate those on the other side, with the arrogance that occasionally shows up in salvation conviction, and so on.
So I stepped off the path for a few months, the Spirit left me, and I found myself entirely confused again. Now I feel the Spirit knocking on my door once more, but I’ve got a lot more patience than I did last year, and am willing to open that door more slowly rather than dive through. I made a leather cross that hangs in view from my bed, so it stands there every morning staring me down, and while I have no clue what it means, it’s staying put.
I feel called, I suppose. And trapped—partly by logic, that ‘ratio’ Paul mentioned last time, or maybe it’s better called skepticism (cynicism?). But called to where? Well, I want my Christian faith back, and I want to transmit it forward, and I want to be animated by God more precisely. And yet, I have this deep feeling that with the beliefs of Christianity that I currently hold, I wouldn’t be welcomed by many of the faith, including here. I’d feel that “unless I accept so-and-so premises,” I’m not Christian. Again, those firm lines (yes, lines aren’t always bad, but usually are, and in my view as a nondualist, always are when cordoning off God). I do take some solace in: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
For those of you who are followers of Christ who deeply believe the basic tenants of the religious claims—only Son of God, physical resurrection, physical return—how did that conviction arrive for you? Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)? Do you still hold a little room for being wrong about the faith’s core claims, or is it a done deal, and does that feel liberating? What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?
I know there’s a ton out there that discusses such issues, and I read a lot, but I’m interested in hearing from y’all who are here right now in this mysterious little corner of the electromagnetic field.
Do folks here know the energy expert Nate Hagens? He is predicting a massive reset over the next 10-20 years that we will be forced into, based around specifically energy. Perhaps no big news for people here - but his Youtube videos are interesting, particularly now as energy has shot up the agenda.
Enjoying your writing as always, Paul. I found one thing to quibble with in your most recent essay, There Were Giants in the Earth (a lovely phrase from Genesis 6), related to the role of the Reformation in this narrative you are telling. Full disclosure: I am a full-blown protestant, of the Canadian and reformed Baptist type. But if I don't say a word for us poor maligned protestants, who will?!
So the nub of it for me is that I think part of what you assign to the reformation really needs to be blamed on nominalism, the medieval rejection of the existence of universals (from classical Platonic metaphysics). It's pretty clear that the early reformers retained the classical metaphysics of the early church, but that the reformed churches lost their grip on it as Enlightenment modernity swept through all of society. I wonder what you would make of the narrative laid out here by a fellow Baptist, Craig Carter: https://craigacarter.substack.com/p/ideas-have-consequences
You wrote: "After the Reformation, the stage was set for Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, all of which can be seen as new eruptions of Machine consciousness into a world in which the sacral worldview was in retreat." But I think the start of that chain has to go back to nominalism, and then - yes - the reformation contributes in some ways to the rest of that process.
Lastly, it pained me a little to read about your visceral allergy to the automobile. I do see your point, and I don't deny what the car did to the world. Yet I have always loved cars and I still do. There's a beauty, grace, and power that is undeniable there, a genuine artfulness. I guess I just have to live in that tension.
Hemingway's beret is OK, but that other guy's? Whoa.
When one makes a commitment to god (any god or gods) and a group that follows and one stops following the word, the teachings, does one become lost in the world?
Or is one allowed to follow another god without recrimination from the prior commitment?
David cut Goliath’s head off; with Goliath’s sword.
There is a way to read the story of David and Goliath with the giant representing the serpent from the garden metaphorically grown into a dragon (evil itself) and David representing God come to deal with it. In this way of picturing the story it strikes me that Goliath is COVERED in technology as both a defensive and offensive strategy, yet David denies the armor and advanced weaponry that Saul offers to him. David instead defeats the technologically altered Goliath with a simple stone from the earth that had not been altered in anyway - a non technological weapon. I like the image of David overcoming evil without using advanced technology, but once Goliath is dead, David uses Goliaths sword to cut his head off... is there meaning behind that?
I’m wondering if you (Paul, if you read this) or anyone else has considered this story from this angle and if so, is there a reason David used the technology of the enemy to prove that the enemy had been slain and how that may apply in todays battle?
Thanks!
I've heard more than a few times how older people involved in the nuclear abolition movement cannot get young people—of any skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity—to care about the issue. It made me wonder how nuclear war went from being this dreaded, fearsome prospect that millions opposed in the streets to something yawn-inducing. Even today, where a recent study estimated the use of a single tactical nuclear weapon anywhere in the world would result in at least 90+ million deaths (https://www.icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war), there is a blanket of cud-chewing indifference. This as NATO escalates its involvement in the Ukraine war and Putin runs out of everything save for his vast arsenal of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/11/fcqp-o11.html). People seem to be in something approaching a drugged stupor as the end of their lives, their family's lives, and their civilization looms directly ahead.
I've thought at times that perhaps Fukushima had a strange impact on worries over nuclear power and nuclear weaponry. "See, here we had not one, but /three/ meltdowns and it was perfectly fine! A little cleanup of the mess and voila!" There is also maybe a kind of learned helplessness going on, as the e-news has been shrieking for decades now about one calamity or another. 'Wolf!' has been cried too many times.
Let me assure you, nuclear war is one nasty wolf.
Perhaps it's as simple as pervasive despair in this our culture of death. A terminal moral degradation has set in. People are prepared to sit placidly on their couches and watch the end of the world until the electricity cuts out and their internet connection is lost. One suspects if somehow only a couple of major cities, say one in Russia and one in Western Europe, were vaporized, there would scarcely even be an uptick in activism to ban nuclear weapons, even though perhaps 15 million people may have died.
"We are the hollow men..."