theseus at labyrinth

This is an important and very well thought out essay. It is a tad long by internet attention span standards. I wish everyone who holds strong opinions would read it and take it as a guiding light.

The internal and possibly fatal inner contradictions which beset our civilization at large are also destroying the intellectual and cultural life of Canada.

“As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life-more akin to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism-which it would be bad form to take too seriously…”

“Yet this value-liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument-also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural.

Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice.”

Terry Eagleton suggests a way forward in the context of an articulate and detailed analysis of our current predicament.

“Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way”.

Culture&Barbarism