Month: June 2025

Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD

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The last twenty-five hundred years of Western History seem to be divided roughly into five-hundred-year chunks.  500 BC to the beginning of the Christian Era was dominated by the Greeks and their successors the Macedonians and the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great’s conquests (remember I said roughly, the Romans finished off the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms in 30 BC).

Then the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe for the first five centuries of the Christian era.  When Rome fell, we had five hundred years of interregnum.  From 500 AD to about a 1,000 AD the petty kings fought each other over the carcass of the Roman Empire and the Church attempted to keep the peasants alive and give them hope.  By 1000 AD some stability had been restored and the “Dark Ages” were replaced by the High Middle Ages and civilization began to coalesce and Europe was no longer just a maelstrom of savagery.  And just exactly around 1500 AD Europe exploded into the Age of Reason and the Age of Discovery.  Science, technology, commerce and learning were everywhere and the Renaissance Civilization of Europe conquered the world.

And now here we are at 2,000 AD and European civilization is collapsing into some kind of squalid self-hating cult.  All of the remarkable triumphs of science and technology are despised and feared by the technophobic ignoramuses that crowd around the campuses of the universities where pseudo-intellectuals pose as philosophers and preach a false gospel of defeatism and anti-European hatred.

So, are we doomed to repeat the five hundred years of dark ages that swallowed up Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?  I guess it’s possible.  It certainly looks that way.  But history doesn’t repeat itself.  We live in a very different world.  Even the powerful Islamic caliphate wasn’t able to roll any farther than Iberia and Asia Minor so Europe had a chance to reassert its independence.  But the world is a very different place today.  China and other non-European powers are emerging.  If Europe and the United States were to decay into weak entities their independence and survival would be far from a guaranteed result.  It truly behooves the leaders in the West to address the loss of morale and direction that is currently ubiquitous in Western countries.  It is basically an existential necessity at this point.  And there is very little time left to reverse the situation before it becomes impossible to solve.

What is needed is a cultural revival.  And a revival requires a leader.  Someone has to focus the resources of the state to purge the negative aspects of the present culture and replace them with institutions and goals that will strengthen society.  And the institution that must be restored and strengthened the most is the family.  All the reforms should work to restore the nuclear family to vigorous health.  Laws that encourage women to stay home and care for children while their husbands work are the most important aspects of a revival.  All elements of society that are detrimental to the family should be weakened and discouraged.  No one should be telling children that they can decide what sex they are or any other madness like that.  Traditional sex roles and other stabilizing patterns should be showcased and encouraged in entertainment and educational media.  Society as a whole should be focused on restoring healthy lifestyles and activities for everyone.

If a program of renewal is pursued strenuously, I think it’s not impossible for us to stave off the destruction of Renaissance civilization.  But where do we find the leader to initiate it?

All God’s Children

photog photog's Corner, Religion ,

Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been “discovered.”  In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light output measured by their instruments to infer the diameter of a planet transiting in front of its star.  And what they’ve discovered is there are thousands of these planets.  In fact, they seem ubiquitous.  Everywhere we look we find them.

And this has convinced an awful lot of people that life must be ubiquitous in the universe too.  And that intelligent life must be common too.  This would go a long way to encouraging the crowd who believe that human beings are nothing special and any belief in the divine origin of the human race is completely unfounded.  The story goes we’re just some monkeys that got a little smarter than the other monkeys and have become a blight on the face of “Gaia.”

I have to say, I completely disagree.  I look at the Earth and compare it to the other planets in our solar system and I’m struck by how many factors conspire to make Earth a paradise while leaving all of the other planets different flavors of hell.  Everything from the effect of our large satellite, to the strength of the magnetic field to the balance between elements and compounds that make up the oceans and atmosphere, to the exact orbit of Earth around the Sun.  And that’s not to mention the remarkable way terrestrial life has shaped the environment in remarkable ways.  Plant life has increased the oxygen content of the atmosphere and life has changed the environment in innumerable ways.

And then we have the fossil record demonstrating the prodigious changes that have gone on for billions of years to produce the current flora and fauna of this remarkable world.  From the one-celled origins of life to the present-day complexity of creatures as varied as hummingbirds and blue whales; birds of paradise and Siberian tigers; dragonflies and giant pandas.  And us.

I’m sorry, I cannot believe that all this is just the random result of fermions and bosons rattling around the aftermath of the “big bang.”  To quote the immortal words of Vizzini, “Inconceivable.”  And I know he was dead wrong every time he said it but that is my rock bottom intuition.  All of this is purposeful.  All of this was directed.  We are here because life has meaning and human life is the soul behind the giant mechanism.  We are the witness and the object for which the whole dizzying array was created.

We are the guests of honor in a parade that stretches out to the detectable limits of the universe and back and forth in time from, “Let there be light” to the end of “Revelations.”  We’re here to make sense out of the wonders of creation and to use them to figure out the full potentialities of the human mind and soul.

And I don’t believe for a minute that we’ll destroy ourselves utterly.  History has shown just how stupid and cruel we can be.  Humans can be more vicious than any predator.  There are no depths we can’t sink to.  But that is lowest part of our nature.  We have not yet begun to figure ourselves out.  We’re still ignorant children.  But we will grow up and we will grow out of our ignorance.  And then we will become what we are supposed to be.  God’s children.

Tom’s World – 16JUN2025 – Minnesota

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TomD

Trying to remember what year, I was out of the Marines and hadn’t yet returned to Ga Tech, working as a carpenter. So it had to be 1971 or 1972. We were framing some houses and somehow a traveling pair of carpenters on sabbatical from some college in Minnesota ended up working with us. I wasn’t exactly the same person then as I am now but I was leaning even then. We were on an similar age so I ended up being fairly good friends with the pair so we ended up in a number of discussions with them and found they had a decidedly liberal bent. My biggest disagreement with them was the space program, this was the early 70’s and the Apollo was going full bore.

Their position was that no money at all should be spent on space exploration until earth was a paradise. I thought that was total madness because that condition would never be met and I thought (still do) that the advances from the various programs were the ultimate salvation.

Hard core liberalism must be in the water up there.

There’s Gotta Be

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Now all the stuff comes at us left and right.  Today is Father’s Day and that’s great.  But also, I went to the high school graduation commencement ceremony for one of my grandsons.  It was raining so we were sitting in raincoats on chairs covered in plastic with another sheet of plastic over our legs.  So, it wasn’t exactly relaxed and carefree.  But you come out to support the family and these ceremonies have their logic and things will go according to this logic.  There are the two main speeches by the kids with the best grades and there might be a poem from the poet laureate (imagine, at eighteen!).  And all that’s fine.  It’s all about beginnings and endings and growing up and moving out into a larger world.  And that’s great.  The kids are thinking about all the friends they’ve made and all the growing up they’ve done and being excited for the future.  None of the sentiments are all that original.  But that’s not the point.  For the adults it’s nostalgic and for the kids it’s marking the day and saying goodbye to childhood.  All good.

But then they send up this girl whose speech is associated with some kind of a prize.  Maybe the speech was what won her the prize.  Although if that were true, I have to wonder who is in charge of the curriculum at this high school.

First of all, it was way too long.  The valedictorian’s address took about seven minutes.  This other thing seemed to go on and on.  Of course, maybe it just seemed to go on for hours.  The thesis was that the classroom was the only place where she was happy.  And she hammered away at all the other parts of life where she was unhappy.  Home with her family, between classes at school, at events with “friends,’ working on projects with her classmates and interacting with other people in general.

She described how only in the classroom did she feel accepted and valued by those around her.  Her family, her friends, her classmates in general and just random members of the human race made her feel unappreciated and negatively valued.

After this had gone on for what seemed forever Camera Girl and I looked at each other with the same expression, “What the hell is this!”  So, I looked around and I could notice at least a few of the spectators had a pained confused expression.

Finally, it ended and there was applause but compared to even the poet laureate it was short and half-hearted.  Later on, I was thinking about this speaker.  She was sort of odd looking.  Short, heavy, noticeably unattractive and her expression was a sort of grimace.  And I wondered whether her speech had been vetted by whoever is in charge of the commencement.  I’m guessing not.  Maybe that’s part of academic freedom.  The speakers are free to say whatever they want.  Well, if that’s so then I would at least hope they would make an effort to choose for speakers only those who weren’t undergoing a mental breakdown.

Honestly, I wouldn’t allow someone that morose to speak in front of a crowd of high school students and their friends and family.  It might convince them that the faculty and the administration were nuts too.  I think this girl is symptomatic of the general breakdown of mental health in this generation.  This girl’s maladapted view of life seems to have been selected as a virtue by whoever selected her to speak.  I think we were supposed to empathize with her point of view.  I didn’t empathize with her.  All I felt was sympathy for her friends and family for having to live with someone so messed up that sitting in a classroom was preferable to all other forms of human interaction.  I’m guessing she is part of the LGBTQ “community.”

I guess in a way I should take comfort from the experience.  When school ends this week, I’ll be seeing my grandkids.  And we’re bound to get along better than the antisocial nightmare I listened to.  When I see the graduate, I have to ask him what he thinks of the girl who made this speech.  There’s gotta be a story behind that trainwreck.  There’s gotta be.