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CHAPTER 3
News 235
The Advertiser, Sept 17, 02
Machining Minds
through Snipping Words,
Deleting Dimensions
and Cartoon-Style
Frippery
The article in The Advertiser, concerning new ways of
curtailing speech via upbeat technology, is not particularly original in thought; but
it is revelatory in substance of even further machining. The dream of the
roving heart of man is being machined into conformity to littleness, language
crimped, the terse and the truncated grinning, increasingly witless in their
ways.
There was always
Newspeak, a tidied up language, deprived of many abstract terms, of
signification of the invisible but manifest power of God and such things, from
Orwell, author of 1984. Indeed, he tells us in his Appendix, it was a language
DESIGNED to make other than party speech impossible! Dying of TB and using some small attic,
Orwell was himself crimped; and it was indicative of things to come: for he saw
with some clarity the disposition to SUPPRESS expression, the thought police
being at hand. Huxley in his Brave New World had other methods of
imagined futuristic control, while with Solzhenitsyn in his
Now in
So the dream is
machined, the desire is conformed, the permissible is announced, and society
beats its drum to the marching feet of the spiritually expropriated. Or that,
it is the system of the thing.
The sale of the
soul is taken for granted. Neither truth nor reality matters very much in the
new model; convenience, custom and comfort make demands like a teething baby,
yet their teeth are already sharp.
PERSONALITY, DEPERSONALISING AND
SEIZING THE HEAVENS WITH VELVET GLOVES
ON
However in the
article noted above we find some technical facilitation of the wayward commerce
of the soul.
We come alive to what bears the name “SMS”,
short message systems. This is an “e-messaging craze which avoids any
face-to-face or verbal contact.” That is, one does not communicate with any
thought of communing with the other person, so much as connecting
thought-receptors. You might say that this is the nature of email in any case;
but here it is accentuated. Shortened forms of words do service (as ‘comm8’ for
communicate), and the scope for RSI improves as more and more lavish latitude
and longitude feelers go out to touch from afar, typing the quick symbols, each
the recipient of compressed verbiage in shortened format, to make the very
playground of partisans.
But of what are
they becoming partisan ? In Flinders University, there is cited a Dr
Rahamathulla Mubarak Ali. He plans a study of school-age children to
determine effects of SMS text messaging and other remote means of
communication, upon the general communication skills of the children. Further,
he is cited as stating that studies in South Korea, the US and Japan have shown
significant deterioration in the physical skills associated with
communication … “Social skills and socialisation can be very affected by this
phenomenon,” proceeds the report of his thought. Moreover, “this sort of
short-form communication can also affect language skills.” A US
university analysis of text messages shows the content conveyed less rich, and
the comprehension of those using this means, less.
All this is
scarcely surprising. There is not only the medium and its constraints,
but there is the ground for the medium, or rather there are some of the grounds
which relate to the result; for social constraints of what is ACCEPTABLE in
email arise, and inter-personal and even professional results may accrue if you
break the breaking convention, which shows its strength like the sun arising at
dawn, but forgetting the day, thinking it was night, and rising black, in
error.
There are the obsessive
compulsions associated with the LUST (often rather unconscious) for
DEPERSONALISATION, which come into play according to their day, the stimuli and
the situation. There is the thought of unisex, pepper-salt in protest against
such long restraints, by mixture, whatever this may be thought to
produce, other than lack of variety, individuality and expressiveness in the
dull mental conformity to the latest of the humanistic (but not at all
humanitarian) creeds. Again, hair must be tossed, not pleasantly as if
simulating wind-swept nature, but in spiky protests against anything smooth or
meaningful. Man must play the unmeaning, the martyr who INJECTS meaning
by meaning nothing, so subsiding into
the slime of psychic irresponsibility: this is the play. This at least appears
to be the aspiration, or muted thought, which again, is an increasingly popular
… invention ? no, not that, pre-occupation!
You MUST not think. That is de
rigueur!
The TV will help you avoid thought; and thus endless music, with jerky
little beats, or space age expansive nothingness must align your psyche to the
suffering and the discomposure of things. Then, however sinful you may be, you
may at least congratulate yourself on DOING something, by doing NOTHING, and so
registering your meaning.
How on earth, however, or out of it, you may address meaning by
first resolving that it is absent and then inserting it from yourself as
meaning-meter, grand assessor, creator of meaning, when you are yourself a mere
creation; or in denying meaning even while you are asserting absolute truth and
your own infallible access to it, so that you do not surge in psyche, but
comment on fact: this is one of the great mysteries of iniquity.
Man WILL not
have, by a sort of bravado and bluster, increasingly, any meaning EXCEPT what
he chooses to assert, and increasingly, in the end, this is that he is a great
old soul, a find contender, a wonder amender of life, and will
PUT from his infinite resources of knowledge and skill, into this life a meaning
it will bear from HIS CREATION OF IT. Playing God, however, is hard work, and
the results are not playful. To give an opinion of the meaning of all things is
not meaningful unless the soul itself has meaning, which it then manages to
impart, in conformity to reality. At once that abandons the concept of the
meaningless. HE or SHE makes sense, and because this makes sense, the thoughts
of this sense-making and so eminently meaningful person makes sense, so that
here is the very height of sense, its depth, its stay.
Further, to give something its TRUE meaning, you need truth which,
without God, is simply not available, for the destruction of the absolute
by the whim of caprice does two things: it removes appeal to it for truth and
prevents its impartation to you in truth. What is not there, is not admissible
as a model ploy, for action! Thus, in such parameters, the concept is
meaningless by being a contradiction in terms. (Cf. Preface
above.) Even hoping it might be true, is no different, for the same reality of
God is a necessary preliminary even for the admission of the possibility, for a
relativistic world admits no absolutes, and impressions of flitting imagination
are not to the point, but the truth, the question at issue alone here
relevant. Knowing what is not there to
be known may be classed a miracle, but it is certainly a self-contradiction,
and without God, miracles are the same!
If a man,
however, is simply to declare it, then that man is deploying what God only
knows, and is not merely acting as God, but equally denying Him, making
himself, his own little self, into an
apotheosis, a fine outcome for the majesty of man, but unimpressive when you
are born without consent, die without consultation and are equipped with DNA
without giving your advice first about its composition. Fairy tales are always
best left for children.
That is only one
of the payments for this mental machining, this savage machining of the soul,
to elevate it above the heavens, while it devastatingly shows its own
infantility by such delusions and departure from logic, even while USING IT!
If, after all,
meaning does not exist, YOU cannot create it, for if you could, you as a
meaning maker do exist, and hence your own meaningfulness is a priori, which insufferably is at
cross-purposes with your chosen martyrdom – to have no meaning, and your
own creation; for if meaning precedes you, how can you assign it ? And if it is
what it is, how can you invent it ? If however meaning is so fluent from the
thought of man, then its absence is not possible. If it is present, then the
pretence of its absence is not logically possible. Imaginatively calibrated by
an articulate reality denied existence, this dream of man which therefore
denies access to such a deleted Being for such a purpose, becomes the delusion
of the Age reaching its fore-ordained conclusion: like terminal cancer in the
last stages of morphia inducing dream-like state, but not health!
It is an
exquisite caricature of logic, writhing and tormented like the gates of hell.
WHEN you resolve
the crusade into anomaly and antilogism, you find just this, that this psychic
movement of martyrdom, this twenty-first century blues seeing red, is merely a
symptom of the spiritual syndrome.
Which ?
It is this. It is the desire to dispense with God within the soul,
just as brigands have sought to do in the past, with the body and its
background, but in vain. So is this new movement in vain.
Ø All
you do is dispense with the truth in making idiotic blarings of blind
misfitting style,
Ø into what is not the void,
Ø but the avoided presence,
Ø that of God who made you meaningful,
Ø made you to love meaning, and to insist on
meaning,
Ø even when in the wildest anomaly,
Ø man ‘makes’ by psychic and delusive invention,
Ø machined souls that CANNOT have meaning.
How does he
attempt this ? It is by applying his meaningful powers of creation, and
ignoring the creation of those very powers with an assiduity which does nothing
to validate his saga, or make it logically operable (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7).
Such nightmares
are syndromatic (what a delightful word, add it to the list if you have not
heard of it): they reek as a drunk does with whisky perhaps, while clutching at
the street light.
Of what are they
the evidence ? Of what combination of pathological causes do they
represent witness ? AWAY from God (as normal in man’s abnormality which is the
calibre-supplier to history), man grows ‘wise’. Oh it is nothing new in type,
since alien wisdom for the alienated is as old as the record of Genesis 3 (esp.
vv.2-5). THEN YOU WILL BE WISE AS GOD IS, knowing good and evil. This
was the thrust of the devil’s propagandizing to Eve, touching her thought of
venturing into rebellion against her
Creator. Bucking the Maker of your system in order to get beyond Him is rather
an anomalous thought, like a car trying climbing the no-no lamp-post in a
sudden dramatic surge of automotive autonomy, and expecting some new access of
power, to be on par with the manufacturer. Actually, it comes rather nearer to
be on a par with the (automotive) morgue.
It is the lust to
be what you CANNOT be, since not only were you you were too late to be
God, but by being born at all in your existence as such, you fail to have the
requisite eternity, being a mere derivative, in fact by creation (cf. TMR Ch. 1). Bypassing that fact slitheringly, it is
this which was the thought of the serpent-formatted devil from the first.
Growing so very
wise now technically, and constantly looking with amusing and predictable
frustrations into matter as if it had mind and spirit and power to make
the man who looks into it*1, and finding alas no mirror at all, but
merely a handle for one, man is in his frustration and bombast seeking to
devise some way … some aspect, some avenue to become GOD.
It is so easy
really, when you are deluded. All you have to do, is this: bring God down to
cultural clichés, and bring man up to idealist seeking of the beauty which is
denied him with the soul which is not and refuses to be spiritual, and then
they will meet. Precisely what will meet ? It will a meeting of the denigrated
deity on the way down, with the aspirant for eternity, on the way up, somewhere
in space.
Actually, as in
these things in general, it does come back to earth. As we see the prediction
from millennia ago, concerning the “man of sin” who
is likewise deeply endowed and involved in the “little horn” person at the end (II Thessalonians 2,
Daniel 7, Revelation 13, 17 cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 2, Highway of Holiness Ch. 5, The Other News Ch.
5, Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4), the
delusion comes to the point that he actually in sheer grandeur of self-importance,
SHOWS HIMSELF THAT HE IS GOD. It is some show, like the consummate of the
magicians!
What a spiritual
mannequin parade is this! Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me, who is fairest
of them all ? When he is in power, of course, he feels it is himself, and
perhaps as a representative of mankind (look at what Stalin and Mao got
away with – or do you prefer, managed to impose of themselves and
their personas), he takes the accolade (IIThess. 2:4). As some even now say
when greatly praised, “I am deeply humbled by this reception” and so on. WHAT
is so humbling about praise ? is it the thought that you receive it from
someone else, so that after all, you are merely a part of the procedure ? Even
that is hard to regard as having a humbling effect, except perhaps on a
paranoid! Alas, praise rarely has such an effect, though it may help the godly
who love God, to receive it at His hand; and while this is not an argument to
dismiss it from the data bank of man on man, it is a warning and it is a
predictive reality when sin arises like a fuming boil, surfacing with suitable
inflammation on the body politic.
GAWKY-TALKY
Let us however
return from that brinkmanship to come (with God of course! man is becoming so humble
that God is to be seen as beneath Him, when you are in the mode – and the
capital letter here is NOT here an error, but a temperature reading of
this fever!), and so consider further the effects on communication of
movements at the present time; and indeed, move from the genesis of the crushed
communication craze – or some of its social genetic elements – to its
direct effects.
“We have,” says
Dr Such, “people finding romance on the Internet but people on trains and
buses who don’t feel comfortable talking to each other. We have people
who won’t talk to their neighbours, but can talk to people on the other
side of the world.” So goes the report being cited.
Doubtless this is
the trend, and as such, it is
broadening; and we have considered some of its basis, but now turn to its
deplorable effects. In short, it is very much more than a technical offshoot of
inventions; but it is not without aid from that source.
Brevity has long
been regarded as essential in the modern age especially, and taking science as
a measure, many have made it – yes, explicitly so,in teaching “English” - a form of utter elegance and necessity. It is
like having steel and glass architecture. Now there is perhaps some place for
this; but it is neither first nor only place. Gothic castles and the odd
brilliant cathedral, perhaps with numerous styles combined, or in some
synthesis of grace and loveliness, are not hard to appreciate, if not placed
everywhere, but rather seen with inspiration as a stimulus to what can be done
in the expression of vision via matter.
The vision
moulds; the material holds.
Each does its
part. It is long past time to consider the redundant reductionisms which
like to ignore this or that, for philosophical penchant reasons, and spiritual
obsessive causes, perhaps. It is, to the contrary, always necessary to consider ALL the
facts, for otherwise you become an intellectual orphan, and so could join
Darwin, Marx, Freud and the rest (cf. SMR pp. 611ff., and indexes), who have hopped
about, or rather their disciples and spirit, like the frogs of Revelation
16:13ff..
Brevity can be
beautiful, and so can, in a way, the elegant steel set of drawers
in the office, the clear-cut window line, set in steel, while the sun shines
in, with its morning glimmer. It is different of course at 3 p.m.; but there,
it has its points. A whistled tune from the butcher’s boy (when there
were such) is perhaps joyful, though one would not dismiss the Adelaide
Symphony orchestra at once, on hearing it. Brevity and simplicity have points,
decidedly; but so does grace and prolongation (like the idle gloaming, carrying
the finished day, to a sort of after-dinner conversation mode, with great
gentility).
Straightforward
discussion of essential matters can be refreshing; but so can loving meditation
on beauty and truth, and communing along with communication with the source of
communication, when “your message of April 14” is not the criterion, but merely
an event among many of varied character.
In fact, it
is CHARACTER which appears to be going on vacation. Spiritual lust is one of
the driving dynamics, but depersonalised MORALS and NATURE is one of the
defects which seeks to capitalise on the new vacuities. After all, if there is
nothing to give, why give it ? and why take time about it ? If the soul is
small and parched, where is the need for
luxuriance ?
If the Simpsons
sort of mentality – the cartoon denudation of life into a prolonged cynicism
perhaps, in some sort of reductionist morgue for man – if this is to become
increasingly a picture of the exhausted psyche of soured man, then why take
time about its representation. If you are touring, why linger on many snapshots
of a steel mill, especially if it be one like those the author once passed
through (without delay) in Gary, Indiana (from memory) which stays as a sort of
(physical) haze in the mind, with much dimness and a sense of pity. It WAS a
pitiful sight because a piteous site.
As the life of
the rat becomes even more popular among the survivalists, for
whom it is supreme to BE and to be RICH
or SUCCESSFUL (= plenty of money and very accepted … but by whom!), and
as the pretensions become the substitute for the heart in the domain of the
moral, brevity can even be merciful! There is no delight in gazing on the
broken limbs of an accident victim. The need is their binding up.
The change that is coming like a new season seems here to be this:
that no longer is it the Christian morality which is spewed forth from the
lavish tongue of the artificial, as well as spilled down from the vertical
falls with gleaming purity attested by the saint; but rather is it the humanist
variety, which shows its pearl-white teeth in fast-set smile. It is this which
is rich in tone and empty in understanding, doing its ‘bit’ without
comprehension of one bit of the expected result, let alone with any just
expectation from it all.
The actual Christian morality remains at all times, but requires a
heart, and a willingness for personal surrender to God, daily and for ever, and
there are those who would displace rather than please Him, for reasons forever
obscure, in the spiritual steel works of the ways of man. The DISPLACEMENT
SYNDROME is becoming like a mosquito-borne fever, infectious and weakening.
What it secures is man’s displacement from the destiny of the children of God:
on God its displacement effect is zero. The ‘steel’ was merely the ingredient
of sand. Its last stand is to fall.
COMMUNION IS NOT JUST A SACRAMENT
BUT A REALITY ADORNED WITH WORDS
WHO, however, is
like Christ ? Who is near it ? (cf. Psalm 73:25, 89:6, 45, John 1:1-14). None
is within an infinitude of distance of His power, perception, spirit, and deed,
His programmed place and His personal treatment of it, His resurrection
and His predictions! (cf.SMR Chs. 6, 8, Biblical Blessings Ch. 15, *2, A Spiritual Potpourri 15, esp. *1). How could they be ?
History is dumb, except for one. As God is one, so that witness is ONE,
and science is merely ONE of the many ways in which Christianity attests its
truth, for whereas science varies with fashion, and changes with
perception, the Bible changes not at all; and though science grows old like
man, in 50 years, to an astonishing degree, the Bible is young at 3400 years of
age, yes and more!
Thus crimped
souls and abbreviated diction unite in a common crusade, or parade ? What they
show is what Eve showed, what the man of sin will show, and what threadbare
suits show: the underlying weakness of being worn out. The peacock for a
prodigy of shimmering, colour-changing beauty, the rose for purity of
expression in delicate crispness, suffused with quiet joy, but worn-out man ?
It is not here that one should look, in whatever compressed brevity or levity,
but to the source of all these things, with
quiet inter-personal communication which is filled with grace, indicative of
the place of the race, and the need for the restoration to source, and the
removal of the worm which eats the heart.
For that, there
is necessity for return to the faith, for turning in faith to the One whose
face was so marred more than that of any man (Isaiah 52 predicted it so, the
priestly faction made it so, thus serving God by fighting Him, for GOD! He is
deep) and finding in One the answer to ALL THINGS (cf. SMR Ch. 5). But all things ? what is this compared with their Maker... It
is to the Maker man must return, and to His redemption, that far greater work
than creation, that he must hasten his feet. Already, they come near to slipping
off the cliff of sharp edges into the sea a confusion that swallows, like a
shark, distressing, absorbing and treating as garbage, its unwitting
recipients.
END-NOTE
*1 Cf. Earth Spasm… Chs. 1, 7 , Wake up World! … Chs. 5, 6, 7, Spiritual Refreshings Chs. 13, 16, Divine Agenda Ch. 4, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9, Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 3, The
Frantic Millenium and the Peace of Faith Ch. 2 ). These show the factitious community
of disunity, the actual diversity of creation and the necessity of realism in
seeking the basis, background and meaning of all things.