My mind has been brooding on strikingly similar thoughts the past few days - trying to get a better grasp on the scope of Western decline - so your post is disconcerting in that it seemed to be of a piece with my own dark mood. Having encountered Barfield through this site I have been slowly digesting the implications of his thoughts on modern materialism so the phrase 'spirit-denying materialism' in your post now makes sense in that context. Materialism runs deep in my experience. I can remember as a boy of eight shooting woodchucks in the head and seeing how destroying the brain apparently destroyed the trembling terrified creature that had existed a moment before. The questions raised by those moments still linger and remain unanswered in my mind over a half century later. But I did not accept then and do not accept now that the inner life of all creatures is anything less than real. To my astonishment there are people who apparently have no idea that such could be possible. Not to pick on him, but Ray Kurzweil, talks about how silicon based intelligence is going to exceed carbon based intelligence in quantity in 2040. He talks as if there is no qualitative difference. Between his iPhone and my woodchuck - when it lived. He really means it and, I suspect, so does our age.
@Igude - What 'most people' think about intelligence/ consciousness isn't coherent! - not even a bit. And it's the usual problem - unexamined or denied metaphysical assumptions which undermine and subvert...
Glad to hear you are gaining from reading Barfield - I also continue to do so. I re-read Unancestral Voice - perhaps his most personal book; and am looking again at some of the essays in Rediscovery of Meaning (a very rich book).
5 July 2017 at 16:32
When I continue to read Leftists ranting about the evils of "capitalism", which they delusionally imagine rules this world, I wonder what it would take to awaken them to reality.
There is no capitalism. We live in a world of massive bureaucratic surveillance, regulation and monitoring - almost everything is controlled.
The winners don't compete - they are allocated. The losers are absorbed into the system. There simply isn't anywhere for "capitalism" to operate!
There is now just one vast, interconnected bureaucracy comprising all the smaller ones, interlinked.
And of course this uni-bureau is totally, without exception, run by Leftists. So billionaires are Leftists, all significant global and Western leaders are Leftists, all mainstream political parties are Leftists - because all are spirit-denying materialists, this-worldly utilitarians and sexual revolutionaries.
Democracy is bureaucracy, so is egalitarianism, so is multiculturalism, so are all radical transformative programs... All share an underpinning bureaucratic imperative.
Can civilisation escape the bureaucratic cancer? I think not. There is no pendulum swing. When the parasite grows large enough, it will kill the host.
Post bureaucracy is post civilisation.
It will happen either way; but maybe it is for the best (though I won't survive mortal life to experience it).
But for Heavens' sake, let's hear no more about "capitalism" !
"This isn't "capitalism" ! We live in a world of total-bureaucracy"
2 Comments -
My mind has been brooding on strikingly similar thoughts the past few days - trying to get a better grasp on the scope of Western decline - so your post is disconcerting in that it seemed to be of a piece with my own dark mood. Having encountered Barfield through this site I have been slowly digesting the implications of his thoughts on modern materialism so the phrase 'spirit-denying materialism' in your post now makes sense in that context. Materialism runs deep in my experience. I can remember as a boy of eight shooting woodchucks in the head and seeing how destroying the brain apparently destroyed the trembling terrified creature that had existed a moment before. The questions raised by those moments still linger and remain unanswered in my mind over a half century later. But I did not accept then and do not accept now that the inner life of all creatures is anything less than real. To my astonishment there are people who apparently have no idea that such could be possible. Not to pick on him, but Ray Kurzweil, talks about how silicon based intelligence is going to exceed carbon based intelligence in quantity in 2040. He talks as if there is no qualitative difference. Between his iPhone and my woodchuck - when it lived. He really means it and, I suspect, so does our age.
5 July 2017 at 14:52
@Igude - What 'most people' think about intelligence/ consciousness isn't coherent! - not even a bit. And it's the usual problem - unexamined or denied metaphysical assumptions which undermine and subvert...
Glad to hear you are gaining from reading Barfield - I also continue to do so. I re-read Unancestral Voice - perhaps his most personal book; and am looking again at some of the essays in Rediscovery of Meaning (a very rich book).
5 July 2017 at 16:32