Most excellent, sir! As the son of Southern soldiers I salute and thank you for your honest account of the June holiday. I think that there should be a day to remember the slaves. Just as there should be a day to remember the Confederate soldier. One does not exclude the other.
"This is where we are headed unless God decides to intercede. He has done so before and may again. Just don’t expect it to be in any way we can possibly imagine." So, if that bullet would have been a couple inches to the right, we would probably have had exactly what you were writing about not two days before. This was a fantastic essay. It's a boiled down version of the interrogation of the old Bolshevik and the Nazi camp officer in Life and Fate, but adapted to our own times. Witnessing God's intercession, or worse, the hated MAGA's belief that God interceded, will enrage these people and drive them to even greater folly. I have one question, what is the Future Primitive? Is it the struggle for a return of the lost Republic?
Thanks my friend. I haven't read Life and Fate. I looked it up and now will have to read it.
As regards the future primitive - I didn't really express it in the piece but to me it represents something like a post-apocalyptic future. Either a post-nuclear war future or one, not so extreme, but where things fall apart and our civilization breaks apart, technology gets lost because no one has maintained the knowledge and complex society breaks down into smaller local and regional communities - like the city-states of Italy or Germany in the middle ages.
History is filled with eras where knowledge grew and then was lost. The Roman Empire represented a height - they had plumbing and sewage systems, aqueducts, and then when it collapsed so much was lost that wasn't regained for over a thousand years. So we've lived through future primitive eras before this.
It does feel like we might be headed for another such era. It could happen so easily. Even without a nuclear war, imagine a massive sunspot that generated a powerful EMF wave that burned out most of the transformers on earth and how quickly societies would break down after that. Or just simple cultural exhaustion and the competency crisis we are seeing build around us.
My best professor in college, Joachim Weintraub, taught us in our Western Civilization course that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and it’s our calling to provide the shoulders for the next ones to stand upon. But, as you pointed out, sometimes it breaks down. I always wanted to ask him if it’s not the case that some periods run ahead of themselves and their ability to stabilize themselves long enough to be a platform for the next generations to come along and build upon. To me, that would be the benefit of conservatism, acting like a sea anchor to steady the sailboat in times of turbulence and heavy winds. That would be family, civil society and religion,, the nation. Of course, those who see possibilities for future development strain against those constraints, in my family I would certainly be one of them, but when you’re young and strong and fearless you don’t grasp the importance of those other virtues. Maybe that’s the genius of the American form of government, to provide a mechanism for those two forces to wrestle with each other over time. But as for your July 12th article, I thought immediately of the following clip from the film The Good Shepherd, and how the deep state people think of themselves. When you think like this, what are you not capable of?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbxQqKXUIk
Most excellent, sir! As the son of Southern soldiers I salute and thank you for your honest account of the June holiday. I think that there should be a day to remember the slaves. Just as there should be a day to remember the Confederate soldier. One does not exclude the other.
Holy crap brother this was great. I would have thought Kunstler wrote that.
"This is where we are headed unless God decides to intercede. He has done so before and may again. Just don’t expect it to be in any way we can possibly imagine." So, if that bullet would have been a couple inches to the right, we would probably have had exactly what you were writing about not two days before. This was a fantastic essay. It's a boiled down version of the interrogation of the old Bolshevik and the Nazi camp officer in Life and Fate, but adapted to our own times. Witnessing God's intercession, or worse, the hated MAGA's belief that God interceded, will enrage these people and drive them to even greater folly. I have one question, what is the Future Primitive? Is it the struggle for a return of the lost Republic?
Thanks my friend. I haven't read Life and Fate. I looked it up and now will have to read it.
As regards the future primitive - I didn't really express it in the piece but to me it represents something like a post-apocalyptic future. Either a post-nuclear war future or one, not so extreme, but where things fall apart and our civilization breaks apart, technology gets lost because no one has maintained the knowledge and complex society breaks down into smaller local and regional communities - like the city-states of Italy or Germany in the middle ages.
History is filled with eras where knowledge grew and then was lost. The Roman Empire represented a height - they had plumbing and sewage systems, aqueducts, and then when it collapsed so much was lost that wasn't regained for over a thousand years. So we've lived through future primitive eras before this.
It does feel like we might be headed for another such era. It could happen so easily. Even without a nuclear war, imagine a massive sunspot that generated a powerful EMF wave that burned out most of the transformers on earth and how quickly societies would break down after that. Or just simple cultural exhaustion and the competency crisis we are seeing build around us.
My best professor in college, Joachim Weintraub, taught us in our Western Civilization course that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and it’s our calling to provide the shoulders for the next ones to stand upon. But, as you pointed out, sometimes it breaks down. I always wanted to ask him if it’s not the case that some periods run ahead of themselves and their ability to stabilize themselves long enough to be a platform for the next generations to come along and build upon. To me, that would be the benefit of conservatism, acting like a sea anchor to steady the sailboat in times of turbulence and heavy winds. That would be family, civil society and religion,, the nation. Of course, those who see possibilities for future development strain against those constraints, in my family I would certainly be one of them, but when you’re young and strong and fearless you don’t grasp the importance of those other virtues. Maybe that’s the genius of the American form of government, to provide a mechanism for those two forces to wrestle with each other over time. But as for your July 12th article, I thought immediately of the following clip from the film The Good Shepherd, and how the deep state people think of themselves. When you think like this, what are you not capable of?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbxQqKXUIk