Political Interest wrote:Thank you very much for your response as well! You are not incomplete in addressing what I've written in the slightest. I do hope you will excuse me for my late response, yet again and for any incompleteness on my part.
Life in the cities was perhaps not as rich as life in the country. It was always this way in the East, and in the pre-industrial West, that you would send son by son, daughter by daughter into the urban settings where they would get higher paid work and pursue education at institutes.
Social ties are broken by modernity. The West as the utmost expression of modernity lacks strong social bonds precisely because it is ultra modern or indeed post-modern.
So much was wasted as well, all because of the need to tick the intellectual boxes of these ideologies. For example, the communist insistence on central planning at all costs without any sort of economic pragmatism, it in the end was a major contributing factor to the collapse of Russia in 1991.
These ideological suppositions and dogmas lead humanity in the wrong direction because they're entirely arbitrary in many cases. They lack a basis in the material conditions if we are to speak with some level of irony.
Yes, and entirely pretentious and boring.
Confucian societies are also very much modern societies these days, but Confucianism seems to provide a fundamental social stability that is lacking in the West, in spite of post-modernity. This is not to say I would advocate for the adoption of Confucianism in the West but it is at least a useful point of interest and we could take some influences from it, for example the respect for elders, politeness and an emphasis on social harmony.
It also offers a sense of preparedness, preparedness in the sense that we know that we will face the Final Judgment.
From Lithuania:
@Political Interest , I want to thank you for that video (
note how everything in the singer's story is not only alive but also has volition, a will, true in the Old Lithuania and the Koran and Holy Bible and Old Russia too!), and to address what you're saying in a slightly different manner than my usual format with people in general. I'll tell a story, then ask some questions.
Recently by some strange twist of fate, I have been reading Lev Shestov (as an aside, @Potemkin and @Verv , you guys might be familiar with him too) , and had a 'weird' urge to familiarize myself with his arguments against modern philosophy all the way down to the Greeks and Socrates....
I then entered into, again by an unplanned twist of fate, a kind of private polemic with a gentleman who is something of a modern conservative philosopher, who as it turns out practically worships the Greek Philosophers... It did not end well.
And reading your replies @Political Interest , it strikes me that I have been talking past people when confronting the problem of Modernity....Socrates and his ilk built Modernity, 2400 years ago It began. It is not a revival of ''Paganism'' as such, and Hellenism is the construction of Greco-Roman Philosophy. It unsettles all relations. The Athenians who executed Socrates had a point.
Greek Philosophy blasphemously asks if anything is good because the holy gods decree it,or are the gods holy because they follow ''the good'' out of an iron Necessity which they themselves cannot change. I can tell you that nobody before Socrates believed in the latter.
Dostyoevsky said somewhere that ''with God all things are possible'', that with God, nothing is impossible to Him.
One can follow God, and be liberated from our miserable ethics and morality and notions of ''Necessity'', or we can follow God's commandments and trust that He is Good and can do anything. We cannot constrain Him. After all, what do
we really know, we Moderns? To quote Lev Shestov;
''A = A. —They say that logic does not need this postulate, and could easily develop it by deduction. I think not. On the contrary, in my opinion, logic could not exist without this premise. Meanwhile it has a purely empirical origin. In the realm of fact. A is always more or less equal to A. But it might be otherwise. The universe might be so constituted as to admit of the most fantastic metamorphoses. That which now equals A would successively equal B and then C, and so on. At present a stone remains long enough a stone, a plant a plant, an animal an animal. But it might be that a stone changed into a plant before our eyes, and the plant into an animal. That there is nothing unthinkable in such a supposition is proved by the theory of evolution. This theory only puts centuries in place of seconds. So that, in spite of the risk to which I expose myself from the admirers of the famous Epicurean system, I am compelled to repeat once more that anything you please may come from anything you please, that A may not equal A, and that consequently logic is dependent, for its soundness, on the empirically-derived law of the unchangeableness of the external world. Admit the possibility of supernatural interference - and logic will lose that certitude and inevitability of its conclusions which at present is so attractive to us. ''
Who the Devil are we to limit the possible and the real? To shorten the Hand of God, however else we may think and believe of Him?
@Political Interest , what we discuss is a sealed book, is it not?
The implications are staggering. As you've been saying, no basis in actual reality, am I right? They can speak of''material conditions'' but fail to understand the ontological and vital dimension that provides the foundation for what they call ''matter''. They live in a different and in my opinion highly unreal Cosmos. There then can be no common polity or social order with them. I used to make fun of the thinkers of the traditionalist school, ambiguous and nebulous their thought seemed. But they're saying the same thing many people have always said, most of Humanity; ''what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?''
EDIT; perhaps I'm venting some of my spleen, but really my friends, I want to say to some out there;
''Fuck your miserable 'ethics' and 'morality' and your 'consolations of philosophy'. Your lies have corrupted the Earth and filled It with innocent blood.''
Again with Lev Shestov, (as with Tertullian and others), about the trials of St. Job (in an essay about Kirkegaard) ;
'' The words that the friends of Job addressed to that tormented old man, lying in filth, show them to be no less educated than the Greek philosophers. Their lengthy speeches, put more concisely, all come down to what Socrates was in the habit of saying, or, if we may believe Epictetus, what Zeus said to Chryssip: if it is impossible to prevail, then men and gods alike must accept their fate. And on the other hand, if a brief version of Job's answer to his friends is wanted, it could be stated this way: nowhere in the world is there a force strong enough to make him "accept" what happened to him as proper and unquestionable. In other words, not just necessity's "right" but also its "power" is being questioned. To be exact, does necessity really have the power to arrange the fates of men and of the world? Is this a "self-evident truth" or a dreadful nightmare? How did it happen, how could it happen, that human beings accepted this power and humbled themselves before it? Furthermore, how could the "ethical," which men associate with all that is most important, most essential, most valuable in life, come forward with its "you must" to champion that meaningless, disgusting, dull, stupid, blind thing, Necessity? Can a man live in peace as long as he is dominated by necessity? Is it possible for him not to give in to despair if he has convinced himself that necessity, not satisfied with the methods of outward coercion at its disposal, has managed to win over to its side his own "conscience," and forced it to sing the praises of its evil deeds? ''
Thank God that God vindicated St. Job's point of view and specifically condemned his philosopher friends, restoring St. Job himself and everything and everyone else back to him, with interest!