The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky

[Sanguine]

The end of the twentieth century of the Christian era is not far distant, and all about us things fall apart. There comes to my mind the last drawing from the pencil of William Hogarth, who died in 1764: it is a sufficient representation of the state of civilization today.

Hogarth’s final drawing is known as “The Bathos” or “Finis.” This word “bathos” signifies the depths, or the bottom; also it is applied to the process of sinking from the sublime to the ridiculous. Hogarth’s pencil shows us a devastated and desiccated world in which all things have come to an end. In the shadow of a ruined tower, Father Time himself lies expiring, his scythe and his hour-glass broken. In the last puff of smoke from Time’s tobacco pipe, one discerns the word “Finis.” A cracked bell, a shattered crown, the discarded stock of an old musket, the tottering signpost of a tavern called “The Worlds End,” a bow unstrung, a map of the world burning, a gibbet falling, an empty purse, a proclamation of bankruptcy, the stump of a broom, a broken bottle – this litter lies about fallen Father Time. Overhead the moon wanes, and Phoebus and his horses lie dead in the clouds. What once was sublime has descended to the ridiculous; thus the world ends, “not with a bang but a whimper.” A month after he executed this famous tail-piece, Hogarth himself ceased to be.

This is the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; and it is the actual state in many lands of what once was a civilized order. Will the wave of the future, perhaps by the end of this century, engulf us all? Are there means for resisting this inundation? Or do we, like Canute, vainly command the tide to retreat from the beach on which we have taken our stand?

Most of us, reflecting now and again upon our present discontents, are tempted to feel that “the struggle naught availeth”; that the freedom and justice and order of our civilization are trickling away, like the sands in Father Time’s hour-glass; that at best we will become the isolated and powerless individuals of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “democratic despotism,” never permitted to come wholly to man’s estate. That would be a society infinitely boring; but the alternative might be the ghastly slaughter and starvation that already have devastated much of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The naive meliorism of the nineteenth century has vanished from among us; it has been succeeded by gloomy vaticinations, among the young as among the old.

Perhaps you fear that I am embarking upon a long tale of woes. But I mean to spare you that. Rather, my purpose is to suggest that you and I are not the slaves of some impersonal force of the sort that Hegel and Marx called History; for history after all is no divine power, but merely a series of written records of what has happened in past times. I come to you not as a gravedigger, but as a diagnostician. Indeed our whole civilization is sorely afflicted by decadence; yet it need not follow that, already having passed the point of no return, we must submit ourselves to total servitude and infinite boredom. Just as renewal of soul and body often is possible for the individual person, so whole societies may recover in considerable degree from follies and blunders.
...........

Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, recently pointed out that “literal-minded, narrowly focused computerized research is proving antithetical to the free exercise of that happy faculty known as serendipity – that is, the knack of achieving favorable results more or less by chance.” This word “serendipity,” like that quasi-scientific word “entropy,” is a tag attached to the inexplicable: an awkward twentieth-century acknowledgment that now and again, in certain persons, there may penetrate to the imagination perceptions of truth which ordinary rationality cannot attain.

“Computers act as very narrow filters of information,” Lovell continues. “They must be oriented to specific observations. In other words, they have to be programmed for the kinds of results that the observer expects.” For the past sixteen years, he remarks, no major discovery has been made in radio astronomy. “Could it be more than a coincidence that the wholesale application of computers to the techniques of observation is associated with this puzzling cessation of serendipitous discoveries?”

Just so. Computerized knowledge already may have begun to choke the springs of imagination. Of course it is not merely the device called the computer that works this mischief: rather, it is the mentality of the dominant Knowledge Class, one of whose instruments the computer is. Damage to the imagination – whether we call that mysterious faculty serendipity or intuition or the illative sense – may extend to many other fields than radio astronomy. It may extend to attempts at renewal of the person and of the Republic – to the life spiritual and the life temporal. If so, the wicked things written on the sky may be graven upon tablets of stone and set amongst us for our obedience to the commandments of the Savage God.

Then let us seek our redemption from outside the ranks of the Knowledge Class. Let us remember that even a common soldier, a child, or a girl at the door of an inn may change the face of fortune. Sometimes we Americans seem trapped in what my old friend Max Picard called “the world of the flight” – that is, the flight from God. We flee; God pursues. God may catch up; He can if He chooses. Often He works through the imagination. But so does Lucifer. Our personal and our public future may be determined by the sort of imagination that gains ascendancy among the rising generation. Nothing is inevitable save death and taxes. It is not too late to write some good things on the sky.

Books by Dr. Kirk may be found at The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Reprinted with the gracious permission of Modern Age (Spring 1985).

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/wise-men.html

Very interesting read.  And, much easier to read at the site.

[Oceander]

In particular, bathos is associated with anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one. This may be either accidental (through artistic ineptitude) or intentional (for comic effect).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathos

[Sanguine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathos

Hmmm.   OK.  I'm missing the point.

[Oceander]

Hmmm.   OK.  I'm missing the point.

Probably 'cause I didn't really say what I meant to say.  The author's understanding of the term bathos isn't really spot on; however, bathos is in fact the perfect title for the drawing because it portrays something grandiose that came to a tawdry, vulgar end.

Not so much criticizing as being a little vocab nazi.

[Sanguine]

LOL.  OK, got it now.