Post a response:
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But did the death of God have to lead to nihilism of the sort you so comprehensively summarise? The wheel turns. Paganism ran out of steam and was overrun by the bright-eyed Christians. And they've had a good run. Today, Christianity has been in a state of long-withdrawing-roar for some time. The sixties should have been the moment a new and revitalised paganism arose. Not the daffy new-age stuff that seemed suspiciously crypto-Christian at times, but the replacement of Christianity with Art, high and low. Art, in its fullest scope, both for the hard-core intellectual and the man in the street, as a vital spiritual enterprise. Mass media is a purely pagan phenomenon. The time was at hand. The big screen gave us back our gods. (Gays were onto that back when they were still relevant.) For a brief time it seemed even the Beautiful Boy might regain his rightful pagan halo. The sixties had some enticing prophets, but it flamed out badly, any spirituality quickly bulldozed by sterile politics. Surely the nihilism and sterility come from deranged secular attempts to hang onto a Christian world-view when the roots of that world-view are at the same time despised. For some reason WASP puritanism has proved inescapable. The apotheosis of homosexuality's modern unfruitfulness is represented by Pete Buttigieg. All I can ever see in him is the triumphant stunting and sterilisation of adolescence. And he doubled down on it by marrying a clone of his sterilised self. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, lickspittling their way to the throne, now set to fill the land with digitally perfected replicas. |