In Rod Dreher’s Monastic Vision An orthodox Christian says his side has lost the culture wars—and argues for a “strategic retreat.” -By Joshua Rothman. The New Yorker notice how all the locations are the eastern half of the US? In places where the landscape is underwhelming, a place where "human nature" and the social sphere could gain more primacy when talking about fundamental reality. In other words, from a scientific perspective, rather shallow really, kind of a middle ages level inquiry.
They ask big questions...for a person stuck in 1200 AD.
Big tech is for sure mutating us socially and even fundamentally, and these people see that as unnatural, and thus abhorrent. Which is why in my AnthroTechne I say we need to create a future where a "good" person of the past would die trying to live in it. My meaning is the old prudences become a maladaptation for the present or future world. I once lived in that side of the US locked in some of those philosophical inquiries. Then I discovered the high plains deserts and mountains, then tech, then a complete understanding of evolution and science....all things that are bigger and indifferent to inquiries of even the brightest Christian monks, whether a monk of the past or present.
The people of this article are focused on the deeply personal within a tight knit group held together by both daily work, socializing and faith. These are hipsters affirming Dunbar's number -a theory that humans are best suited to know and interact with no more than 150 people. A theory that, in essence, promotes a sentiment humans were meant for villages, not cities.
The people of this article inquire with weight and depth the local and personal while holding on to a long view for unchanging good and evil and their relationship to God.
They invest in vanities, the small, the stunted of growth. Then they wrestle with the dynamics of these poorer performing choices in a Universe that honors and grants survival and thriving to exactly the opposite.
They make literature and conversation, of high quality, which puts on record their downward spiral, their contrived and chosen lower station, their emotional rush of victory while in the outward objective reality they are so thoroughly the loser.
The Universe has one method of crafting beauty, of crafting what the Universe is and is becoming, and that is evolution. Evolution in biology, evolution in culture, and evolution in technology.
These people record in amazing eloquence what it is like to fail on all three.
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