"Damn right those first Flint Knappers were the earliest example of Tech Bros abomination! Authority has no short cut. The still small voice, goodamit, has no heuristic!"
We've looked at the early Carmalites as men and possibly women damaged by moral injury taking their example of how to reimagine their world from Elijah, Ahab's pain in the neck guru and Jezabel's misogynist Arch enemy. Elijah's victory parade over Baal, wasn't a glorious march through the massive crowds of the capital. It was more like Cato the Younger's reaction to the end of the Repuplic, and I think, it was more like Leonard Cohen in his broken hymns where he said something about the war is over the good guys lost.
Yes indeed we're getting somewhere in our understanding of the temporal nature of blimps.. Which is good because it's humid here, breeze-less, the Squash Bug have arrived, there's a wilt in the melons and hot weather annual grasses have responded to rain.
"I hope, comrade, your're not too overwhelmed with questions about birthright citizenship, Jevons Paradox, and your increasingly irrational overlords. My question today is a return to the 'Authority of the voice.' There's the rousing poem, there's the pogo stick theory of fleshy thought processes, there's always psychiatry to attempt a short cut to bandage wounds. Can we talk about repetition, the creed, the congregation singing in unison, and then the rote use of heuristics, that slap in the face to reasonablness, in social development."
"Those are not just a pleasant Sunday traditions, my friend. They're a profound, prehistoric technology of somatic synchronization. It's a body thing, nothing you can do about it, a row metronomes on a roller board. A dopomine hit of unison."
When a group of individuals stand in a room and sing the same melody at the same pitch, something incredible happens to the meat of their being. Their heart rates literally synchronize. Their breathing matches. The vagus nerve, the one that connects brain to heart, lung and gut, is stimulated in a collective loop of woo.
"Oh no! It might be the case that we don’t stand in stone cathedrals singing in unison much anymore, but this modern social media is a landscape that's created a digital version of the congregation that runs 24 hours a day. The 'Retweet,' the 'Like,' the viral hashtag, the repetition of specific political slogans - this is the new digital Creed. the 'I believe in God, the white father....'"
The moral injury of the English-speaking peoples began the exact moment they convinced themselves they were the Chosen People and that the wilderness of the New World was their private New Jerusalem.
Think of it, and you might have to open a few obscure history books to do that, to find John Winthrop standing on the deck of the Arbella in 1630. He decreed that New England would be a 'City upon a Hill,' he was setting a terrifying trap. He was taking a beautiful, poetic internal metaphor from the Gospels and turning it into a literal, political real estate venture.
By framing the American project as a divine mandate to build Jerusalem in the wilderness, the founders gave themselves permission to overwrite everything they found. They didn’t see a living, ancient continent with its own indigenous norms; they saw a blank ledger to be optimized for God and King.
"They brought a fierce, aggressive, patriarchal monotheism that had been scrubbed of the goddess - the exact 'solitary god' we talked about on Mount Carmel - and used it as a legal title to clear the forest, slaughter the game, and fence off the land. The 'American Dream' was infected from day one with the pox of exceptionalism - the belief that the rules of human biology, soil health, and moral accountability didn't apply to us because we were special."
You brought up that magnificent line from William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (the preface to his epic Milton): 'And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark Satanic Mills?'
Blake, writing at the turn of the 19th century, was the ultimate back-row prophet. He looked at the Industrial Revolution exploding across England's 'green and pleasant land' and saw exactly what it was: a massive, structural Moral Injury to the human species.
And yes! Along with our industrialized strained through a sheet microbiome we got air-conditioning.
