Even more on Lukacs

We're going to miss Lukacs when he becomes missable. I only mention this because his American Scholar piece, as referenced below, carries that farewell sort of elegaic tone that makes the bystander feel like it's rather late in the day ... the sun, you know, is going persimmon and low.

In his screed on Lukacs, Walter Uhler makes it clear that there is a lot about Lukacs that he will not miss. He and the other "progressives" at OpEdNews (how we love those neologisms with quirky caps and no spaces) don't mind the octogenarian's complaints about the Cold War and his condemnation of the 2003 invasion of that storehouse of WMDs. But it's too much to take, lying down, when that same octogenarian votes for history above evolution.

That leaves the door wide open for God to come traipsing back in, after all.

Don't look to Uhler and friends for a nice take on Lukacs. The Wikipedia stub is okay. This article of Boston's Jeet Heer is even better. In it, we find a conservatism that we can taste without grabbing the pink bismuth. Lukacs settles us with the notion that it is better to hold out for conservation than conservatism. He announces, among other things, that the Bushes were not at all traditional ("populist," yes, and that is not a good thing). That William F. Buckley was inadequately historical.

(I don't know if anyone's had the temerity to ask about satin black clad Poobah.)

Jeet notes that "He favors conservation rather than conservatism; he defends the ancient blessing of the land and is dubious about the results of technology; he believes in history, not in Evolution.''

Plus, he takes aim at abortion, pornography, genetic manipulation, cloning, and the other usual enemies of the Church's moral witness.

But he says something else, which stretches back all the way to his seminal studies on the heroism of Winston Churchill and the near victory of Adolf Hitler: populism degenerates, repeatedly, into demagoguery.

Especially in moments of societal stress. Like now. Ergo, enter Poobah, Weird Al, the Toronto Blessing and the Liturgy for Stations -- not of the Cross -- of the Millennium Development Goals (I kid you not. I want to be kidding. But I cannot).

One more thing. At the end of his article, which itself concludes his new and ultimate, Last Rites (eponymous?), he raises the issue that science itself is contained in history. He suggests that mind comes before matter, and that meaning is not to be found independently of mind.

This should be clear, for how could meaning mean anything but for a mind to mean it?

But it isn't clear. Or at least, it isn't clear in a culture that is predicated upon the notion that history is contained in science, and that the equations of science are the permanent things, and that God and man only need defined, equated, conflated, and repressed.

I have wondered for some time as to just why it was that Parmenides thought that being itself was a sign of the divine. Because it was irreducible? Why not the atom? Surely Democritus thought so. But here is Lukacs saying that the atom is infinitely reduce-able, that there is no end to the splitting, banging, and production of bosons and higgs and charmed spinners.

That there might be a self-wrought end to the human world -- Lukacs says for the first time since Paradise, this is now true. A potentiality and not a reality, yet.

That might work out to be a Sign, certainly a sign of the time: that time began in Eden, and that it might end not when Adam returns but when he blows, or mucks, it up (or at least, this world its sign).

Comments

[Andrew]

If you like Lukacs you may want to take up and read Jacques Barzun.

[Eddie B]

Father, thank you for these thoughts. If reduction of matter is infinite, than what about the mind? It is an interesting thought to me that mankind may be intellectually reducing itself to the lowest common denominator. Animal/machine. Thought has become a burden. Government to the rescue. Reminds me of a 1961 Twilight Zone episode called the Obsolete Man. Very prophetic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obsolete_Man. Also:http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/video.php?cid=649555532&pid=VL5KIZDUNVaYHT24eg1rYVbPBkWVhryg&play=true. Neo-cons are persistently trying to "elevate" the thought of Americans through "taking the high road"(hard to do if a flat-panel tv is on your wish list), while leftists are wining the day with a philosophy of demonizing opponents and promising a worry-free life with the fulfillment of all passions at your fingertips. It's everyone else's fault and not ours the leftists say, while the right is significantly insufficient in philosophy and spirituality to pursuade people otherwise. After the obliquitory pro-life and pro-family speaches, it becomes a dramatic downhill slope after that. In any event, have a very penitential lenten season and God Bless.