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Fred Reed is one of my favorite writers. I don't know how many venues he uses; LewRockwell dotcom is the one I'm used to using to read him. Yesterday he really outdid himself. It seemed worthy of a long quote:
I wonder whether
something else is not involved. Today most of us live in profound
isolation from the natural world. People in large cities can go
for decades without seeing the stars. Should they drive through
the countryside, it will be in a closed automobile with the air-conditioning
running. On a trip to the beach, the sand will be overrun by hordes
of people, half of them on whining jet skis.
We exist utterly
in a manmade cocoon, as much as desert termites in their mud towers.
This, I think, profoundly alters our inner landscapes. Live in the
rolling hills around Austin, say, as they were before they were
turned into suburbs, with the wind soughing through the empty expanse
and low vegetation stretching into the distance, the stars hanging
low and close in the night, and you get a sense of man’s smallness
in the scheme of nature, of the transitoriness of life, a suspicion
that there may perhaps be more things in heaven and earth. It makes
for reflection of a sort that throughout history has turned toward
the religious.
People no longer
live in large wild settings, but amid malls and freeways. The ancients
believed that the earth was the center of the cosmos. We believe
that we are. There is little to suggest otherwise in manicured suburbs
and cities where the sirens will be howling at all hours. It is
an empty world that begets philosophically empty thinking.
Without the
sense of being small in a large universe, and perhaps not even very
important, the question arises, “Is this all there is?”
and the answer appears to be “Yes.” Without the awe and
wonder and mystery of a larger cosmos, existence reduces to blowing
smog, competitive acquisition of consumer goods, and vapid television
with laugh tracks. We focus on efficiency, production, and the material
because they are all we have. It is not particularly satisfying,
and so we are not particularly satisfied.
I suspect that
the decline of religion stems less from the advance of scientific
knowledge than from the difficulty of discerning the transcendent
in a parking lot.
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