Counter-Enlightenment. Analog nostalgia.
Counter-Enlightenment. Analog nostalgia.
Plus, Passover, purple, and Pikes Peak [Two Things 4/23/24]
Coffee this Friday, April 26, at the usual time (6:30 am) and place (Loyal North).
(1) Worse than pagans? (Better?): At First Things, N.S. Lyons reviews and critiques John Daniel Davidson’s new book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, suggesting that ours is not an age of repaganization but of the full flowering of modern, post-Christian materialism. Lyons’ essay is a grab-bag of debatable insights:
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is the slogan [Davidson] repeats many times throughout the book to encapsulate the core proposition of paganism, ancient and modern. This, it strikes me, is wrong. The pagan of the ancient world may have held a moral worldview alien to ours, but he was no nihilist….
It is not, then, the slogan of paganism, but something else entirely: the worldview of materialist modernity, produced by the centuries of metaphysical drift that first pushed God out of the world and then pushed the Western mind deeper and deeper into cold rationalism….
C. S. Lewis, for one, was always skeptical of such claims…. In fact, he pointed out, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”…
What is happening? Citing a recent wave of religious conversions by formerly atheistic public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson has argued that we are experiencing the beginning of a “Counter-Enlightenment.”… I think he is right: The whole edifice of modernity is in crisis. But this should be a cause for Christian hope, not panic. In fact, it seems possible that our time may witness a transition not into Davidson’s new “pagan dark age,” but out of what Lewis called the true dark age of modern materialism.
(2) Analog nostalgia: “Things used to work in this country,” proclaims Pennsylvania writer Clare Coffey in her essay at The New Atlantis. She writes eloquently of the beauty of old analog machines over against our new technocratic devices:
The GE radio is not a family heirloom for its design features, however. It is an heirloom because it has accompanied us through three generations of baseball games and school closure announcements and Saturday morning public radio folk hours. And it has accompanied us not because it had any particular emotional significance to begin with, but because it just works, and has worked, and continues to work. You can take it anywhere, plug it in anywhere….
[W]hen I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.
Other Things
Biblical archaeology: Scarlet, purple, and sapphire hues used in the Temple in Jerusalem “likely came from sea snails processed at a 3,000-year-old dye factory in modern-day Haifa.”
Colorado’s 14ers get a height adjustment from new NOAA data: “Pikes Peak is two feet shorter at 14,107 feet.”