Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.
Even if Kamala wins on Tuesday, NYT Columnist Bret Stephens asks two provocative questions : “How did Trump still get so very, very close? And how can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?” While science and rationality have brought much progress, they have also made modern life remote and bureaucratic, leaving many feeling abandoned and cast adrift in a sea of unfathomable numbers. Worse yet, income inequality has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age, leaving working Americans struggling to stay afloat. Let’s face it: Modernity is a cold fish.
Folks no longer feel truly seen and appreciated, as they did in the past when they were a seamless part of a close-knit community wrapped in tradition within the timeless rhythms of nature. I’ve been meditating on this topic ever since coming across the esoteric theories of Owen Barfield, someone I had never heard of until this week. He was an original thinker, born in 1898, who influenced, among others, C.
S. Lewis, J. R.
R. Tolkien, T. S.
Eliot, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, and Marshall McLuhan.
According to Barfield, today’s cultural elite is blinded by “chronological snobbery” because they are “incapable of thinking that something can be, at the same time, both concrete and abstract.” That wasn’t always the case. In fact, quite the opposite: it is we today, no.
