The problem with this article is that it misses asking the single most important question. Why is it so?? Why did and do we take THIS course? Theodore Roszak wrote about this some forty years ago now in his great book Where the Wasteland Ends. And he reached back into cause and then reflected(rather as night lights do!)the phenomena back into its psychological foundations. Lighting up the night and modern Capitalism come from the same root, they are borne of the Calvinist Puritan terror of the dark. It is Christianity put on Stephen King steroids and pumped full volume, the modern city buried in the ashes of the same era as the Witch Hunts and the rise of the extreme evangelical sects. In this age of dark shadows(that ironically is pre en light enment)the dark symbolism of the prehistoric moon goddess, the mother of forms out of which forms arise in the lumescent afterglow of the sungod - her father, husband and son at once - the light of the world is lost to the worship of the sun god no longer once removed by the feminine interval, the luminescent Gnostic Sophia made mother Mary in Classical Catholicism. The rupture of Catholicism coincides with the eclipse of the Western Goddess, the Virgin. Men then yearn to be BLINDED by the SUN. All that is evil is then connected to the dark(and post-colonial writers have been swift to note the coincidenal{?} terror of darkness rising in the West exactly at the time white westerners began their oppression of dark skinned peoples the world over), darkness is the puritan terror, the boogie land of Satanic horrors. The Puritan settler looked out upon that dark, Indian infested continent of America with shivering foreboding. Its symbolic playing out is the Salem Witch Trials. The horrific predestination of such dark terrified Puritanism lead to the search for grace that Max Weber saw rightly as the root stock from which rose the Capitalist Hydra. Roszak directly saw the conquest of night, the defeat of the dreaded dark as the inevitable endgame of that Calvinist Capitalism, one that playing itself out, ironically through the scientific principle of reductionism would finally provide the Calvinist with the long awaited solace of looking upon the world with the dead mans eyes, meaning upon a world finally reduced to a mere cypher, all the mystery, and thus fear in it, scientifically reduced to a nothing but. The death of night and eternal day would be the final, apocylyptic victory of the dour Calvinist Existential dread. Roszak wrote of futuristic plans by some Capitalists(still bandied about from time to time) to fill the atmosphere with satilites with giant mirror panes that could be used to reflect the sun from one side of the earth to the other such there never had to be night, and more importantly Capitalist Business(the escape pod of Calvinist dread) could then go on all night, 24/7 365. Theodore Roszak called this coming world........THE AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE. Welcome to the air conditioned nightmare. Are you, as I, yet a Nightmare walking.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 06:52:48 +0000
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