EVERYBODY, EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE.
In several non-fiction books I have read lately, grandfathers feature prominently. My life story too follows that pattern.
Take my maternal grandfather, who, born in 1870, died in 1940. His entire life he lived the way his forefathers had done for generations. Well, no, not quite. He had a bicycle, while his forefather used horses. My paternal grandfather, also born in 1870, died in 1960, just before the great societal and religious upheaval everywhere.
Is this my nostalgia showing?
True, the 19th Century was largely peaceful and static mostly. Both grandparents represented stability, sincere piety and frugality: nothing was wasted: They truly lived ‘holy’ lives. Perhaps that’s why I treasure them: my own life is so full of fakery: it is now impossible to live the way they lived, because ‘everybody, everything, everywhere’, has become unholy, contaminated, out of whack.
Everything is different.
“Make America Great Again! MAGA. An empty slogan. We cannot go back, because everything is different. That ‘everything’ also includes everybody, church, society, family formation, sexual orientation. With right-wing politics, Trump leading the way, even democracy is at stake. It seems that evil is becoming more pronounced, and even encouraged.
Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places beyond. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the former has wrought havoc on the latter.
Evil everywhere.
A while ago I had a unique experience. I suddenly was confronted with personal pure evil. It has become so commonplace, because our entire lifestyle is based on God-denying, Creation destroying substances, now integral in our mode of living that both stopping and continuing Carbon-based substances would lead to total economic collapse. Here pops up my Calvinistic basis: “we are conceived and born in sin, and therefore children of wrath!”, now more and more evident in wars, in deteriorating climate, in billionaires ruling the world.
Even the church embodies this evil. The church – or what little is left of it – is no stranger to this evil, calling ‘the God’s world’ evil, promising heaven as reward for soul piety.
I believe that human nature is unfolding in a direction that spells trouble for our future as the human race, reminding me of the pre-Noah times, when God thought it wise to make a new beginning.
We live in a new world where all connections to God and his ordinances are severed. There no longer is a God- Consciousness. In Noah’s time. God directly intervened. Now we are in full control of our destiny in multiple ways. This, more integral dimension, reflects the state of spiritual life, so alien to the era in which, as a child, in pre-WWII, I grew up: the church itself has become a godless entity, in spite of pious words, no longer understood.
These drastic developments are suddenly visible in historic changes everywhere, in the climate, in political preferences, in unprecedented monetary policies, in warfare, in the entertainment world. All previous constrains have disappeared: in everybody, everything, everywhere we see the signs of death and pollution, of the prominence of poverty and the expanding power of plutocrats. Suddenly, overnight, as it were, these hitherto invisible forces leap to the fore, a truly historic transformation, whose outcome places the future of the West and the entire humanity in jeopardy.
In the current, June 10, issue of the New Yorker, there is a long article asking, ARE WE DOOMED? Its subscript reads, A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through. Here’s a quote: “Hinton, a computer scientist …spoke about whether artificial intelligence poses on existential threat”.
In short – at 76 – he believes that THE END will come coinciding with his life expectancy – say 10-15 years, that only the old and very old, will escape DOOM.
What is important, is, that an awareness is growing that we are approaching the END, and that:
A new world is coming.
A new world is in the making, as the existing order teeters and its faith in its continuation diminishes. It is time to dream the depiction of the Bible’s last chapter: “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations,” and expect what Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet, writes:
“Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them”.