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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 26 - Page 2 |
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Balkanisation of the mind The lesson of history is unclear to us: Rome was divided around the end of the first millennium, but was it destroyed by the barbarians outside it, or by the weakness inside it? Now our once-Christian civilization is fast becoming equally sick. Its sickness first became clearly visible with the Weimar republic in the 1930s, but is now becoming almost universal. The symptoms are the same, and people’s unwillingness to recognize them as symptoms is also the same. All around us, we see increasing poverty and homelessness; the decay of skills, and the inability to create today the things we use today; the disruption of family life; the cult of ugliness and the desire to shock; an interest in excitement and even violence as a way of forgetting what lies around us. Today, the gospel of the kingdom has been preached in all the world for a witness to all nations ( Matthew 24:14), and today Western civilization is moulding the world with its technology, its obsession with trade, its gigantic organizations, and the millions of specialists that sustain them, crippled and made dependent by their specialization. Today the barbarians abroad have been turned into overseas customers, but we are threatened instead by a new demon, the barbarian within ... the barbarian within ourselves. Economic dependency becomes psychological dependency, and psychological dependency becomes chemical dependency. It is because of this inner enemy that so many doors are double-locked, cars are electronically protected, and people hurry home early for fear of the barbarian who lives within our civilization; drug-crime, street violence, sexual abuse, callous abuse of authority and wealth, and a tendency to turn our backs on those in trouble, are the most obvious but not, perhaps, the worst forms of this decay. More important still, modern specialisation of mind - and the dependence of the individual on massive organizations that is one of its results - have led to this phenomenon without understanding it, and a result they have failed to find an answer to it. No form of discursive thought can reflect clearly upon itself without the aid of the still and undivided nous, and specialization is founded on division. Specialization silences that potential Socrates which sleeps within each one of us, who, wakened, would first question then rectify the patterns of our thought, and so prevent them crystallizing with age as now occurs. Socrates’ thought represented - some say originated - the trend in Greek thought that began to question inner meanings, providing an alternative viewpoint to the embryonic empiricism of the Presocratics. |
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