What is his or her real and honest motivation? “Who” is doing the seeing? Is it the “cut-off branch,” the egoic self, trying to do the seeing? Is it a person needing to be right, or is it a person who wants to love? There is a very different kind of seeing from a branch that has remained lovingly and consciously connected to its Source (God, Jesus, our Higher Power). When Jesus spoke of a “cut-off branch,” he meant a person who can only see from its small position of “me” and what meets “my” needs. It seems our society is largely populated by such cut-off branches, while a commitment to the common and real good has become a rarity.
.. This primal communion immediately communicates a spaciousness, a joy, and a quiet contentment. It is not anxious, because the essential gap between me and the world has already been overcome. I am at home and do not need to prove myself to anybody, nor do I need to be “right,” nor do you have to agree with me.
How Paper Shaped Civilization
The material gave rise to currency, bureaucracy, and modern communication—and caused panic over technological change.
The anonymous person who snagged the @Plato Twitter handle eight years ago took these words to heart and has never tweeted anything. So far, it’s been a brilliant performance.
.. so parchment was next in line, made by scraping and processing animal skins. As many as two hundred animals were needed to make a single book.
.. Rulers also fretted how rising literacy and access to new ideas might affect their populations.
.. But Europe lagged behind. It’s unclear why the continent used parchment for so long, but like all areas that that were slower to adopt paper, this hindered its advancement. Up until the thirteenth century, many kings and princes were still illiterate. The greatest argument for why Europeans eventually switched to paper is because it was cheap. They first used it to make better Bibles, then quickly learned to rely on it for other obsessions, like money and banking.
.. a major subplot: people complaining about change. “As with every other new technology, there were those who were disdainful,” he writes, “some who thought it was barbarism, some who thought it was the end of civilization, and some who thought it was a threat to their jobs.”
.. Kurlansky illustrates his points with journalism, an industry whose fate is tied to the history of paper more than any other.
.. In the next decades, cheaper paper meant a transition from broadsides to pamphlets, which were longer and more reflective. This came just in time to enable writers like Thomas Paine ..
.. As Kurlansky writes, it’s merely a response to our demands: faster, cheaper, and “an innate desire for connection.”
Consciously Connected
Many today have settled for religion as attendance or belonging, which would surely be baby food, instead of religion as inherently participating in Love.
Consciously, trustfully, and lovingly remaining on “the Vine,” which is to be connected to our source, is precisely our access point to deeper spiritual wisdom. We know by participation with and in God, which creates our very real co-identity with Christ: We are also both human and divine, as he came to reveal and model.
Is ‘Commitment Pluralism’ the Answer?
The point is, conservative Christians are right to be fearful and anxious about this stuff, because it’s going to cost them their institutions, their livelihoods, and even their jobs. There is going to be very little tolerance and no respect for them in the fast-emerging order. Pulling in the tribal walls is plain common sense when the tribe is under attack.
Similarly, when working-class people are losing their jobs and their financial security because of de-industrialization and the kind of policies promoted by liberals (= classical liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike), why shouldn’t they “distrust the outsiders” who are attacking their sense of stability? Being mistrustful of the people who will do you and your tribe harm if they have their way is not a character flaw.
.. My point is simply that people’s anxieties these days are often (but not always!) justified by the facts on the ground.
.. I have proposed the Ben Op mostly because fundamental forces stand to eliminate orthodox Christianity. These forces include radical individualism, globalism, hedonism, materialism, skepticism, and … well, the forces that created the modern world, and in so doing brought us many wonderful things. The forces of liberalism, which have the effect of depriving us of our past for the sake of freeing us to make our own future. But we are at a time in which that liberalism, and the radical autonomy upon which it is premised, appears unsustainable.
.. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are allrelationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.
.. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself
.. The Civil Rights marchers didn’t find the strength to face down Bull Connor, and to return hatred with love, from the pseudo-Christianity we call MTD. I want to be strong enough to stand up for what is right, and to stand against my own temptations to give in to fear and hatred — and I know I am not strong enough to do it on my own. As I see it, churches and Christian communities that practice the Benedict Option will do so to remember their (our) own stories, and to strengthen each other through the present and coming trials, which will wipe out all the MTD churches — but also be there to welcome those escaping the maelstrom and the plague. Because that’s what Christians do.