This is one of my first diaries first posted in October 2004. I had hoped to never see its message in play again.
I was wrong. So very wrong.
The Enlightenment has come and gone.
Welcome to the Diminishment.
Empiricism as the fundamental epistemology is dead, that once-great the validator of knowledge, the means of proving what is true and what is false, is out the door.
We are being dragged back to impulse, to ecstatic decisionmaking, liberated from personal responsibility for our judgments and actions by immersion in an all-knowing, all-encompassing Party.
The Nazis introduced this, (Godwin can go straight to Hell) and destroyed not only millions of lives but two centuries of some of the best intellectual discourse the world had witnessed since the Age of Pericles.
The Republicans are doing the same. Since their ideology, a direct descendant of the original fundamentalist reaction against science and the Enlightenment, cannot bear the scrutiny of reason, reason has been handed a fatwa by the right. Simply put, for the right to lie, reason must die.
The consequence has been the bifurcation of the country into two camps, one armed with reason, the other with ignorance.
We are faced with the prospect of an America that is ruled not only by people who do not know the facts, but do not care to know them, and do not care to know how to find them if they ever do change their mind.
This movement, this accursed plot, this Ignorance, is handing the keys to world dominance over to our enemies, all so that an especially selfish, self-centered, self-incognizant faction can feel better about itself. No, check that. This movement is far more dangerous. They seek to become a danger to others, in order to feel better about themselves, same as the competing extremists elsewhere.
Unstopped, they will harm themselves and take the rest of the world down with them.
Part of the brazen character of their actions, the crimes grand and petit that are the texture of Republicanism in this day and age, is a reflection of the inability of modern-era Republicans to reflect.
They do wrong, because they simply cannot envisage that it is wrong when it is themselves who are doing it, or wrong when someone with whom they share affinity is perpetrating such acts as blatant lying, affirmation of killing as its own unqualified good, impoverishment of Americans, etc.
It truly escapes their awareness that these acts, reprehensible out of context or in association with persons outside the fold, are wrong when fellow-travellers do them.
Ignorance allows this; it is the selective blanket that allows the barbarian to kill with relish, decry killing by others as suspect, and swear vengeance when bereaved by the killing of kinsmen.
The idea that bloodshed is morally problematic, for the reason that it is bloodshed, is not only impossible to receive -- it is offensive to hear the concept uttered.
Tell me I am wrong.
I wish that were the case.
We are seeing the willful flight to barbarism by a significant portion of the American popoulation, a catastrophic breakdown of civic values as a response to...overstimulus of civic values.
There is always the possibility that a dynamic society will progress so far that is begins to leave much of its own membership behind.
I am of the opinion that this has indeed occurred, and we are seeing the full-blown reaction to this phenomenon.
It has happened before in modernity; the clearest example being the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, where a society slowly went mad.
I hope to say that there is good news,that enough Americans can see the danger (I pray) to slap some electoral sense into our countrymen.
That if they are not challenged by the ballot, then we must halt their onslaught regardless.
Somehow we must make our brethren see the danger of the leadership refusing to concede anything to reality that is against a secretive partisan agenda.
In lieu of that, we must fortify our own minds and those of as many of our countrymen as we can, and save as much of the legacy of power, principle, prosperity and prestige bestowed upon us by our forebears as we can.
If possible, we must roll back the onslaught of ignorant darkness.
If necessary, build strongholds of learning and enlightenment to wait out the storm. In extremis, send the best works and seed of our civilization into exile.
This is the onset of the end of the world if we fail.
The line must be drawn here.
We must succeed -- for our brethren on the right as much as for ourselves...even as they prepare to fight everything that their own country is about.