Reviewing a new book on the Bible, co-authored by a Jewish and a Christian scholar, Spengler finds that the Scriptural view of human nature endures, and will provide the basis for whatever will succeed Modernism and Post-Modernism. Excerpt:
It is a conceit of modern materialism that identity no longer is social, but rather individual; we choose our pleasures, and, if the mood strikes us, shop for a religion the way we might choose a neighborhood. We fancy ourselves rational beings. If we are not quite beyond good and evil, for law and custom still discourage rapine and murder, we certainly are beyond sin and redemption, which we have replaced by stress and therapy.Modern materialism has weaned the industrial world off spiritual food, like the thrifty farmer who trained his donkey to eat less by reducing its rations each day. "Just when I got I had him trained to live on nothing," the farmer complained, "the donkey had to die!" Like the donkey, the modern world has died when its spiritual rations were cut to nothing. We refuse to acknowledge that our deepest needs are no different from those of Biblical man. We fail to nourish them and we die.
What Benedict XVI calls the anti-culture of death will reduce most of the industrial world to a geriatric ward by the latter half of his century, and to ruins to be picked over by immigrants not long thereafter. We experience death in life, but our intellect and our technology enable us to deny the prospect of death.
Not so the peoples who emerge blinking into the modern world from the wreckage of traditional society. Globalization spells the end of traditional society, and no amount of sentimentality will save it.
But those who still retain some fragments of traditionalism will have solid fragments to shore up against the ruins. Yet as Rieff has observed, they will require a leader, or leaders, with charisma to make those dry bones live again. See Chris Caldwell's review of Rieff's posthumous "Charisma." And: "There is no charisma without creed." Culture is essentially religious. But we've been there before on this blog, and will no doubt go there again.
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Sorry for the double post.
Remember, these are people who want us all to live in mud huts and spend what little time is left after digging the soil with sticks to plant what few crops may grow in our climate praying.
Granted modernity has been good,i.e medical advances and such, but somewhere along the line, for all the progress,something did die in the heart of the West and say in Japan.In the end all that progress was for naught if, we as a culture or group of cultures cannot even do a basic thing like make enough people to carry on our culture. A couple bits of the New Testament come to mind,such as "what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if his loses his soul" and "man does not live by bread alone".
The demographic transition is larger than the West. Since 1970, China's TFR fell from 5.8 to 1.6; India's from 5.8 to 2.9; Indonesia from 5.6 to 2.4; Japan's from 2.0 to 1.3; Mexico's from 6.8 to 2.4; Brazil's from 5.4 to 2.3; and South Africa's from 5.9 to 2.7. The U.S. TFR dropped from 2.55 in 1970 to around 2.1 today.
Haven't read the book in question (will start looking for it in the public library), but with all due apologies for that fact, I have real trouble with "the scriptural view of human nature." Which scriptures? Which view? While there are bits of Genesis that can be retro-read to imply original sin (the desire of man's heart is evil from its beginning, etc.), the Jewish scriptures as a whole imply no such thing. Indeed, the gospels don't imply it either, except maybe John.
The "Bible", or for that matter even the "Old Testament", isn't a book, it's a curriculum. It/they don't/doesn't oh-the-heck-with-this-you-get-my-point, there's no really consistent view of human nature even within specific books of scripture, much less the Bible as a whole.
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