Tuesday, November 06, 2007

There is something really silly about this.
I've read through a few of the posts and beyond the boilerplate expressions of professional courtesy deployed to preface disagreement,they're all based on identical assumptions.
History is not just the history of ideas even though it is written by people who have them; the history of ideas is the history of articulate speech not the history of events. We live in a world of forms and we're forced to use form to describe form, so our models of the world are partial and for the rest of our perception of it. The trauma of secularization is a trauma of philosphers and priests and a percentage of the population, not all of it.

Secularization is no more or less than the record of our expanding sense of self-determiniation, but the boundaries of that self-determination are evident not in the successive ideologies of enthusiastic intellectuals who proclaim us free or not free depending on their sympathies but in the continuing necessity of people at large to watch movies and read works of fiction, works that are made as fabulous resolution to unresolvable disagreements among conflciting loyalties. We seek comfort in pattern. One can enjoy both the comfort and the awareness that that's all it is; one can be a materialist and know that our perceptions are fogged.

Secularism originates at the same moment as faith: the moment an event becomes a story. In theater, in actions as fiction, secularism eclipses it. This is not news.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is enabled.