Francis Berger
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A Life That Is Atomized, Comfortable, Sinful, Meaningless, and Long

8/12/2020

8 Comments

 
When I take a cursory glance at the past three or four centuries of Western history, I detect the occasionally wavering but nonetheless steady ambition to transform human life for the majority of people from something poor, nasty, brutish, and short into something affluence, pleasant, civilized, and long. Overall, I believe the ambition was a noble one, but only within the context and framework of a Christian worldview because the Christian worldview is the only one that can properly structure these much sought after quality of life improvements. Perhaps the impetus to improve life quality for the general population in the West was fueled by the hope that such improvements in material quality would lead to an improvement in spiritual and religious quality.

At first glance, this seems incorrect. After all, it could be argued the general population of the West was at its most spiritual and religious when living standards for the average person were quite low, and that rising standards of living demonstrate an inverse relationship to religion. In short, increases in material comfort and wealth led to decreases in spirituality and religion. To me, it seems the opposite should have occurred, if not immediately, then perhaps sometime shortly after the Industrial Revolution. The extra wealth, time, and freedoms rising standards of living provided the average person should have been invested into spiritual and religious growth. Instead, the increases in material wealth and comfort were invested into the acquisition and enjoyment of more material wealth and comfort at the expense of spiritual and religious growth.

Of course, what I have stated above is a sweeping generalization of the grossest kind, and Western history is filled with various religious movements that attempted to buck this trend through various forms of asceticism, but I think these religious impulses toward severe material abstinence amounted to little more than regressive reactions against the weakening of religion in the face of the strengthening of the material in the minds of men. In my mind, rising standards of living themselves were not the cause of the wrong turn; the wrong turn occurred when people became seemingly incapable of framing rising standards of living within the required context of religion. 

The inverse relationship between religion and material comfort and wealth is often presented within an either/or paradigm, a paradigm that is apparently supported by the Synoptic Gospels, especially the passages dealing with serving two masters and rich men getting into heaven. Heaven was an easy sell when life for the average Westerner was poor, brutish, and short. Denied means or access to material comfort and wealth during mortal life, heaven became a sort of panacea and reward for the afterlife. The rich, on the other hand, could enjoy a sort of heaven on earth, but this enjoyment put their chances of getting to heaven at risk.

This sort of either/or framing never made much sense to me. As far as I'm concerned, the dichotomy of a high standard of living and religion is a false. The either/or division it has created should have been short-lived, and it should have given birth to the harmony of 'and'. Generally affluent, pleasant, civilized, and long mortal lives should have manifested generally deeper, more intense, more meaningful, and purposeful religious lives, but this required a radical shift in human consciousness, a radical shift that did not occur and has still not occurred. This radical shift should have entailed some sort of recognition that increases in material comfort and wealth, though good, provide human life no real meaning or purpose, as well as the understanding that these increases in material comfort and wealth are positively poisonous to the soul once the framework of religion is discarded.    
8 Comments
Drew
8/12/2020 15:46:12

There is a “retire early” movement in the US (break free from the chains of work by 30 or so by radical savings/expense reduction).

Most people involved are intelligent, but not religious. Agnostic engineer types. They too think a sort of enlightenment or spiritual awakening will happen once free - but many just fall into depression, go back to work, or get bored. Instead of freedom and happiness they largely enter a malaise and continue to worry about wealth preservation.

They mostly fail to escape because the problem wasn’t ultimately about account balances, but about lacking purpose in life itself and having no guiding religion.

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Francis Berger
8/12/2020 19:18:27

@ Drew - That's a good example. I believe something similar will ultimately underpin initiatives like universal basic income, which is why such initiatives ultimately won't work, not even from the simple material standpoint of improving human 'happiness'.

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Jacob Gittes
8/12/2020 15:53:35

This is an interesting topic.
Is it possible that the type of person and even society that prioritizes the material, and modern science, simply is unlikely to value spiritual life?

After all, focusing one's mind on science, as I did when younger, really does lead one to discount the existence of spirit and unseen things.
It is not logical in terms of pure logic, but it makes sense when one takes into account the fact that most people have average IQ and average discernment. It takes extra discernment and intelligence to see beyond shallow materialistic explanations. It takes guidance. It takes thinking.

Even worse, I am now certain that dark forces used and captured the modern era's scientific bent for their ends: they used the white coated elite to disparage and ridicule religion and belief in God, and they are still doing that. They've been so successful, that even most institutional churches are now purely materialistic, and talk about God as though He is a metaphor and a sort of heavenly social worker.
Only in a very rural area have I discovered men and women who actually believe in the way our ancestors did. For that I am grateful. But overall, modernity seems to have rejected God from the beginning, with Bacon. Descartes - well, he seems to have believed, but in a strangely logical, cold manner.

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Francis Berger
8/12/2020 19:30:20

@ Jacob - Good points. Bruce Charlton analyzes some of what you have addressed above in his 'Not Even Trying: The Corruption of Real Science'. Highly recommended if you are interested in the topic.

https://corruption-of-science.blogspot.com/

One need go no further than the trans agenda and the 'science' supporting it to understand that modern science has become a dark force in of itself.

My problem with the science/intelligence-can't be a believer angle is this - it's false. You touch on this in your comment. The vast majority of great scientists and thinkers of the past (and this includes most right up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) were believers, despite their discoveries and work.

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Jacob Gittes
8/12/2020 21:10:02

"The vast majority of great scientists and thinkers of the past (and this includes most right up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) were believers."

Good point. One of the problems now is that modern "scientists" are not the brilliant natural philosophers of the past. They are almost all hacks. Men and women of moderately high IQs with very little discernment or originality.

Jose Ortega y Gassett called scientists and technocrats "modern barbarians." He was right. They see their possession of a bit of specialized knowledge as giving them some kind of authority to pontificate about everything.
And I personally know some of these arrogant atheist scientist types.

Overall, the system imposes that world view.
The brilliant thinkers of the past are no more. No more Newtons or Lavoisiers or Plancs or von Helmholtzes.

Over-specialization kills.

bruce charlton
8/13/2020 02:09:26

@Frank. Good point, well made.

I was a spiritual but not religious teen, a sort of neo.pagan, and part of the mid 1970s ecology and self sufficiency movement. At that time it was pretty widely accepted that we in the UK had enough material stuff to provide a decent life for everyone, and that the future should be more leisure to expend on creative and social activity.thoreau was arguing the same back in the 1850s. I recall being shocked that in practice people nearly always chose More Stuff, and 'wasted' money on overpriced 'designer' fashion and similar nonsense. The problem is that vague goals of creativity were not as powerful as social pressures for women, and status for men - both of which pointed to ever more materialism. What was needed was perhaps that our leisure and creativity should be invested in developing our Christian living.

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Francis Berger
8/13/2020 06:44:19

@ Yes, that's it. In my mind, the goal of materialism should not have been to foment a perpetual obsession with and pursuit of materialism, but to invest the time, space, and comfort increased materialism provided into deeper creative (religious) pursuits.

In the West, the late nineteenth century and the entire twentieth century was devoted to More Stuff. Now the West is being told More Stuff is bad for the planet and bad for people who have Less Stuff. The solution appears to be to redistribute More Stuff, or to consume only Green Stuff. Whatever the case, the Establishment is actively working to reorder the More Stuff world they have created.

I envision a world in which everyone will have Less Stuff yet still remain firmly locked in a material mindset - a mindset dominated and controlled by a totalitarian system that will push 'safety and justice' over values like More Stuff - sold as necessary sacrifice, etc.

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Francis Berger
8/13/2020 09:10:32

@ Yes, that's it. In my mind, the goal of materialism should not have been to foment a perpetual obsession with and pursuit of more materialism, but to invest the time, space, and comfort increased materialism provided into deeper creative (religious) pursuits. I believe our failure to achieve this needed shift in consciousness underlies much of our current malaise - a malaise that has only been exacerbated by the relentless pushing of purely material, consumerist lifestyles.

Our new totalitarian overlords seem intent on ending this experiment and canceling the world of More Stuff for the West (or the Global North) for the purely material aims of protecting the planet and creating a safe and just world for all of humanity.

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