Where we are Going

What follows are a few points I hope to work out in detail in a book bearing as working title the final line of this meditation. I offer this as an invitation for the contibution of those who share this dream, who can see where the soul of man is heading, and like myself has little tase for anything less.

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Our world, by which I mean the post-war Western world, has been entirely seduced by ideas. It would be clear to the casual extra-terrestrial that the problems that beset our species are not in the realm of ideas, but in the realm of being.

We have been held in stupor by a Cartesian gnosticism which pits the intellectual spiritual man against the embodied physical man, leaving some radical individualists to embrace bodily pseudo-identities such as ‘transexual’ or ‘trans-species’, and others to embrace ideological pseudo-identities such as ‘conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’.

The divisions between man have been presented to us as the playing out of a sort of species wide ‘self-actualization’ of the un-inhibited fringe warring with a reactionary inertial force of common sense, cultural habit, and religious or political conservatism.

What has in fact happened is that a radical belief in ideas themselves as the only supreme-beings in our godless cosmos has driven humanity mad, on the one hand racing towards an undefined and ineffable progress, and the other standing in the way shouting ‘stop’, clinging to the progressive ideology of mere generations ago.

There are very few remaining who understand ideas as secondary to being, and those who do often falsely enter the trap of a severe epistemological nihilism, embracing ‘personal truth’ or ‘lived experience’ as the only remaining tether between thought and being.

What remains to be done therefore is that work commissioned by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to ascend to the next anthropological stage, in which the spiritual man is not sacrificed for man’s physical nature, and the latter is not persecuted on behalf of the former.

Western humanity does not need a new ideology, or a new political party, or any other such atheistic soteriology to ‘save’ him from himself. We must begin the work of ‘showing’ not ‘telling’, ‘being’ not ‘berating.’

A new sort of man must emerge, one who can reference his doings against the vast history of ideas, understand himself in their light, yet not be held captive to his intellectuality.

An age of builders must arise, who build not for paltry gain or greed, but because what they build is an expression and home for their spiritual natures. An age of new thinkers must begin, who’s task is not criticism and polemic, but rather understanding, synthesizing, and defending.

This new creature will not be a rugged individual, that archetype has long failed our species. It will be an organism of many individuals, a whole taking shape from autonomous but cooperative parts. It’s law will not be gain but service, and it’s god will not be ‘self’ but rather the eternal act of being in which mankind plays a role, not of conductor, but of orchestral section - discovering and inhabiting the divine will, not warring against it.

The new law of such men will be: self-discipline, self-restraint, and virtue; but also love, embrace, and encounter. They will not be utopian, they will not seek to build a tower reaching into heaven. They will be Catholic, but not theocratic, orthodox, but not self-assured, Protestant, but not autocephalous.

The new man will achieve these things not through learning and education (though these tools he will assuredly make use of) but in how he lives with those around him. In short, he will again make man the standard of man, and God the standard of God. He will not grow anxious when men fail to be gods, nor bitter when God does not fit the minds of man.

In summary, he will be content with no project, no idea, no theory, that does not take account for the whole of human experience from the first cave painting to the most elusive vision of the greatest sage.

He will have no use for demagoguery, democracy, the ‘new’ media, or any other such distraction. Those who oppose him will not so much be defeated as ignored, their most cruel tortures will be for him but a passing amusement, not because he is stoic, but because he has remembered that what is dead can never die.

He will be an aristocrat, and a peasant, in love with all that is best, but equally at home in the simple joy of the festival. He will tip his hat to the absolute and raise the corner of his lip to the absurd.

No more will be heard of ‘new’ ways and ‘old’ ways, there will be only ‘The Way,’ that is

The Way out