Modernity is characterized by the belief that there are no ultimates. Reality is flat like an impressionist painting. No depth, no meaning, just a kaleidoscope of sensation. Reality can be arbitrarily divided into professional enclaves, where it can be metered out in dribs and drabs. This supply side reality is widely supposed to be the ultimate human accomplishment. It will stand from now until the alleged heat death of the universe in another 20,000,000,000 years! Well, if my calculations are correct, it might last for as long as twenty of those years, and that is being generous!

Does this mean that we are returning to the dark ages of theocratic fascism? No, it just means that we will come to our senses, and once again attempt to grapple with meaning and mystery. Something like capitalism will stumble on into the future, but it will become an item of vague nostalgia.

What exactly it is that will turn the tide of our public pursuit of triviality is not predictable. There is a private thirst for things spiritual, a thirst which has yet to find a guiding vision or voice. Such a voice will emerge, and hopefully prior to some calamitous spiritual emergency. Priming the spiritual pump is not an exercise in rationality. It could be entirely spontaneous, or it could be a deliberate act of irrationality.

In the modern fragmentation of reality, no one is licensed to address the large picture. There exists no authority which could grant such license. Merely to question this lack of vision is to brand oneself as a misfit, dilettante, kook, anything but serious or pragmatic.

There is no logical, incremental manner in which a visionary may go about her task of communication. There is no modern equivalent of the prophet. The voice of the prophet has only its ancient themes and variations. There is no plastic in which it can be packaged and measured out. It still comes full strength or not at all.

Science refuses to be confronted about its foundations or lack thereof. I have been trying for two decades to begin a dialog. The scientists pass that responsibility off to the philosophers for whose profession they show palpable disdain. Even the most theoretical scientist will scorn what they suppose is the empty rhetoric of the philosopher, which they deem as only slightly more concerned with reality than is theology. The philosophers have in this manner been cowed by the scientists into eschewing anything that waxes speculative or cosmological. Postmodernism is making some inroads in academia, but the pace is positively glacial, and the results are, of course, only deconstructive.

Modernism may go out with a whimper, it may go down with the modern ship of state. It could end with a single dramatic public demonstration of the paranormal. But the historical, canonical harbinger of the spirit is the voice out of the wilderness bringing us back to our senses, waking us to ourselves out of our materialist slumber.

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rev. 5/21/97