Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

It was a matter of general concern among intellectuals, artists and writers of the mid-twentieth century that Man had become internally 'divided' - and it would be a good idea to heal this.My interpretation is that this internal division was experienced as a consequence of living in several or many of the increasingly differentiated and specialized worlds of industrial society: differences between home and the workplace, the personal and the political, arts and sciences, and even within the sciences. The work of CG Jung was influential - sometimes explicit - in addressing this internally-divided experience (albeit, failing to solve it). 
But since the middle 1960s this experience has been much less discussed - and for the likely reason that all of life has been 'reunited' by leftist ideology and bureaucracy. Nowadays the world of experience is more and more fully like living in a managed bureaucracy - being monitored and controlled, with every aspect reduced to measurable, quantifiable operational definitions. Since around 2000, modern Man has been internally, more-or-less, unified; by having become assimilated into The System, the Matrix; and with that system having been massively expanded outwards and internally. The System now encompasses all of public life, and within these domains more and more of the detailed functioning. Furthermore, The System extends into Men's thinking; especially his habitual and expedient thinking. He accepts The System as The World - and lives in that context: 'life' becomes a natter of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering within The Matrix. 
So, the sense of division is now between this unified world and... what lies outside of it, what is excluded from it - but the sense of anything being excluded from it or outside is itself disappearing, due to the addictiveness of The System, the habits of thinking it inculcates; and the basic metaphysical assumptions which The System incorporates which make the concept of 'outside' into a thing both unreal and incomprehensible. Even the radicals and rebels of 2021, nearly all operate within The System - trying to improve it is small ways, while accepting the fundamental assumptions. This applies equally to mainstream religion - including Christianity - as can be seen by the way that Churches and Christians have marched in lockstep with the  secular, left, anti-Christian Establishment throughout the birdemic, and with respect to the antriracist-diversity agenda. 
How may the division be cured? Well what is needed is quite simple - albeit not many institutions or authorities will tell you about it, and none will support any re-integration; and achieving it will surely be incomplete and infrequent (given that integrated being goes against so much of public discourse and work). Re-integration would be a lived, and thinking, awareness of the whole; and this would include the fact of creation and a loving and personal God, spirits, and the whole world (animal, vegetable and mineral) as animated and conscious beings. It would also include an awareness of life as a whole which extends (at least) into a future eternity. And, because the world is as the world it; it would entail some solid acknowledgment of that fact that it is each person's unique responsibility to determine such matters for himself. Because, in a world where The System is nearly everywhere (on a moment to moment basis), where The System is so habitually internalized, and where The System excludes acknowledgment of its own exclusions - only the individual who embraces the fact and Goodness of his own agency will be able (even in principle) to leave The System.