Metanomad
One of the writers I've discovered since I started using Bear Blog is Metanomad.
I've enjoyed going through his archive of posts at a leisurely pace, and decided to give his podcast a listen today. The title intrigued me 'A Search for the Soul of the West'.
The conversation plows through a lot of philosophy that I'm not well-versed in, but it's edifying and seemed of a piece with Paul Kingsnorth's discussions re: his latest book Against the Machine (haven't read it).
This passage from the guest, Sean McGrath, jumped out at me:
What happened to the artistry and the genius of the Renaissance? Well, it all became advertisement. So it's still full of genius and creativity, but it's dedicated to a different project—not celebrating Florence or the human being, but selling products endlessly to keep an economy going ... what is most frightening to us is an economy that stops growing.
But nobody's actually asked themselves why that is so darn bad. I suppose the ecologists have ... This is the ideology of our time. And the consumer advertisement machine is dedicated, almost in a virtuous sense, to serving these unquestioned values such as endless economic growth.
And the way it does so, of course, is by tapping into the Christian unconscious. Even the idea of endless economic growth is so deeply Western, it's all bound up with the eschatological attitude ...
I'm aligning myself with people like Max Weber, Karl Löwith—Karl Löwith, in particular, strikes me as very important in his book Meaning in History where he speaks of modernity really as the nihilism that follows from an eschatological civilization which no longer believes.
And so you get things like faith in scientific progress. We all have faith in scientific progress, but exactly what are we progressing to? Is it the world of Star Trek? What are we looking forward to?
Of course, the point is that we're not looking forward to anything, because it's a faithless faith in progress. It's a progress into nothing.
McGrath has a new book on the topic of the episode.
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