I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I know that the modern fantasy world will fall and burn. You can only sin against normality for so long. I am not saying that the answers will be ideal, or even Christian, but mankind cannot live in delusion against basic human and biological truths forever. History is never static; values, norms, and manners vary with time and place. Many of these historical applications may never return, and frankly, there are a great many that I hope never will. However, there is a baseline of truth, a basic understanding that human beings need certain things that can be traced in virtually every culture even if that culture twists it. In times of greatest degeneracy people try and bend even these eternal guides. We are living in just such an age. We not only deny God, but we also deny biology. We don’t merely worship a false God, but in mad idiocy, we claim that all worship of any god is equally valid. At least the Muslim has the humility to bow before his God; we bow to nothing. Tradition, gender roles, religious observance of any kind, and the family lie smashed beneath our feet. I am not claiming we can, or even should, return to a different historical point nor that the past was uniform until our era; the history is far too messy for such a possibility, but there are basic patterns that are a part of who we are as human beings, and these basic, fundamental, elements can not be pushed away forever. Here are a few things I believe will make a comeback into the modern world (of course these things are not wholly absent, but modern man is starving for them in a fuller sense). 1. Man must have something or someone to worship that is outside of himself. And no, the quasi-worship of materialism does not count; it will not satisfy forever. 2. People were meant to exist with more familial connectedness. What this looks like can and probably should vary across time, but what we have is near breakdown, instability, and isolation which is only possible in our postindustrial and pre-very-hard-times-coming-again. People are gregarious animals, even Aristotle knew it. 3. The land cannot be abused in the name of consumerism forever or we are finished. We are called to be stewards, not pimps, of creation. We will see a return to smaller farms, at least on a subsistence level, and better stewardship of nature. We are people of this earth, and as such, cannot cut ourselves off from it as we now have been doing for the past sixty-five years. 4. Tradition will return. The fads of pop culture are a historical anomaly. People have always viewed themselves in connectedness to the “democracy of the dead” to borrow from Chesterton. Postmodernism, the idea that there is no Myth only myths, will be replaced by metanarratives that will inform people what it means to be a human in their society.
A return to these things may be beautiful, or it may be bloody and cruel, depending on the degree to which the light of Christ’s gospel purifies them, but one thing is certain, “the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter (will) return.”
Reflective Wanderer 