Am. History & Culture
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Boomer Culpability (Updated)
MZ in response to my "Soft Tryranny" post asked what I thought about boomer culpability in getting us where we are. I’ll share a few thoughts here, but what do other boomers think? Non-boomers–what’s your take on the responsibility of your elders in getting us all into this fix? I’d say first of all, the
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Soft Tyranny
When any system of politics devours the surrounding culture, we have totalitarianism, the attempt to bring the whole of life under authoritarian control. We are bitterly familiar with totalitarian politics in the form of brutal regimes which achieve their integration by bludgeon and bayonet. But in the case of the technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because
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The Myth of Objective Consciousness III
In the two previous posts with this title, I was leaning on Theodore Roszak to make a fundamental point about the arbitrariness and the severe limitations of modern consciousness we take for granted as "objective" when it is in touch with the truth. That’s only true in the world of things and bodies, and while
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The Myth of Objective Consciousness II
I have nothing against science per se. My problem is rather with scientism, which takes a limited tool for learning about the mechanics of the material world as the ground for developing a comprehensive worldview. Scientism is not science. It is, rather, "a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and
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The Myth of Objective Consciousness i
Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness? I think not. For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of
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Lake of Fire
From a Salon review of the three-hour film about abortion in America: In a pair of sequences guaranteed to unsettle any viewer, Kaye shoots two abortions in intimate detail, one of them a late-term intervention and the other a much earlier, more routine procedure. In both cases, we see exactly what comes out of the
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Loss of Faith in America
It amazes me how little confidence the right wing in this country has in the strength of American values and ideals. It's probably because so many are heirs of that strain of American thinking which never understood or cared about them in the first place. This strain of right wing American always lived primarily in
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Subversive Orthodoxy
Readers put me on to a very interesting book with this title by Robert Inchausti. He says in his intro that the the public perception of Christianity is that it is inherently reactionary, unconsciously wedded to class, race, and gender prejudices, bound by foundational metaphysics and littered with outworn superstitions. . . . This book
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Breaking out of the Box
Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding. –Heraclitus When we think about the word Thinking today, we ordinarily mean by it something which is confined within our skins or, if you like, in a corner of our brains.
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Freedom’s Paradox
The following is a slightly adapted repost of a piece I put up in early 2006. It’s another layer, and I want to work with it in relationship with some of the other things I’ve been trying to articulate about Christian eschatology. **** I think that freedom is best understood as a paradox. We human