The Time of Our Time by James Howard Kunstler
We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776. A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives
Let’s face it: most people will not read Justice Alito’s carefully crafted arguments about what the constitution says or doesn’t say about abortion, or the meaning of “ordered liberty” through our history. We do not live in history. We live in the time of our time. And, until just recently, this has been a time that discarded former modes of conduct between men, women, and children as inconvenient to the presumably greater project of self-actualization.
To be-all-that-you-can-be is a stirring notion, and it seemed to work nicely within the colossal techno-industrial armature of the past century, with all its inducements to thrive personally, at least for the comfortable elites who pulled the levers of that system — though not so much for those below caught in the gears, who produced children despite all the novel means for avoiding it. For the fortunate, motherhood became just another “no” box to check off, while fatherhood merged into the odious mists of obsolete patriarchy. History is made up of things that seem like good ideas at the time. The hard part now is moving out of a familiar time into the undiscovered country of a new time.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
The support system for all that is going, going, gone and in the ensuing flux all that rousing self-actualization starts to look more like Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, a savage and pre-human state of nature. As this occurs, all human beings have to fall back on are modes of conduct that include a moral and ethical dimension, which is to say, what is right and what is wrong, not just what is allowed at a given moment.
Which is also to say: maybe the time of smashing boundaries is over. As that scaffold of techno-industrial comfort and safety disintegrates, and all the dazzling promises of becoming transhuman dissolve — sorry, Klaus Schwab — we will likely have to settle for being human again, and in the best way, not the worst way. That includes a certain reverence for our nature and for each other. That suggests not killing children.
These days, this place on the planet that used to be a nation groans under a tribulation of bad ideas, bad choices, bad conduct, bad management, and bad faith. We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776. A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives. Everything it touches breaks, wilts, withers, splinters, rots, poisons, and infects the body politic, driving it deeper into derangement. It doesn’t even pretend to make sense because that would require making distinctions between what is true and what’s not true. We follow-the-science into pure evil.