Covid-19 will never end. Once invented the public health emergency must remain. I am in this post bringing a few voices to your attention. Remarkably only 3% of books in these United States are in translation. The bulk of these books are not new, or if new typically not philosophy. As a child I used to wander bookstores and libraries scouting for books which spoke to my imagination. I ignored age appropriate books.
I ignored them likely because aside from a few titles by H.G.Wells, or Jules Verne, or Jack London or Conan Doyle these books were aimed at a mentality I did not hold.
In any case many years later I still read. My preference of late has been writers of history and philosophy from abroad. Or writers living here in exile. And smiling as I write that line I recognize anyone in the USA who goes against the grain is in exile.
First Veneziani: What world do we live in? We have lost the sense of the present and we are no longer able to have a general vision of reality. It's like we're under a hood. You feel its weight, even if it has no features and no boundaries, it is ineffable and enveloping. The Cape hides the beauty, the greatness, the symbol, the myth, the sacred, the real world ».
A hood envelops the world and takes away vision and breath. We have slipped from the open society to the covered society, trapped in a globalitarian system that controls and corrects everything: nature, sexes, health, history, language, thought, religion. Bioliberal to death, but under a total surveillance regime. Meanwhile, the Great Mutation is looming. To pierce the suffocating hood that oppresses the mind and the world, it is necessary to have a special sword.
Then Ernst Jünger, Die totale Mobilmachung (1930), ‘As a mode of organisational thinking, total mobilisation is merely an intimation of that higher mobilisation that the age is discharging upon us. Characteristic of this latter type of mobilisation is an inner lawfulness, to which human laws must correspond in order to be effective. Disregarding its much-diminished allowances for freedom and sociability, it is starting to rule nations in ways not very different from those of an absolutist regime. In many cases, the humanitarian mask has almost been stripped away, to be replaced by a half‐grotesque, half‐barbaric fetishism of the machine, a naive cult of technology. Forms of compulsion stronger than torture are at work here; they are so strong,that human beings welcome them joyfully.’
Leon Bloy: But Bloy’s critical assessments were born out of charity, not ill will: he sincerely loved the people he criticized. A priest wrote a friendly letter to him that included the line, “I do not have the soul of a saint.” The priest undoubtedly meant this as humility, , but Bloy corrected him, and reminded him that (p. 223), “There is a deceptive form of humility that resembles ingratitude.” Authentic humility recognizes the startling reality that we each do have the souls of Saints (pp. 222-23):
Well, then I answer you with certainty that I have the soul of a saint; that my fearful bourgeois of a landlord, my baker, my butcher, my grocer, all of whom may be horrible scoundrels, have the souls of saints, having all been called, as fully as you and I, as fully as Saint Francis or Saint Paul, to eternal Life, and having all been bought at the same price: You have been bought at a great price. There is no man who is not potentially a saint, and sin or sins, even the blackest, are but accident that in no way alters the substance.
This, I think, is the true point of view. When I go to the café to read petty or stupid newspapers, I look at the customers around me, I see their silly joy, I hear their foolish nonsense or their blasphemies, and I reflect that there I am, among immortal souls unaware of what they are, souls made to adore eternally the Holy Trinity, souls precious as angelic spirits; and sometimes I weep, not out of compassion, but out of love at the thought that all these souls, whatever may be their present blindness and whatever the apparent acts of their bodies, will all the same go invincibly to God who is their necessary end.
All of us, by the grace of God, are capable of being Saints, and if we fall in this endeavor, it is not because we were created with an inferior kind of soul.
Then Berdyaev: We face the question, is that being to whom the future belongs to be called man, as previously, or something other? Berdyaev warned about the rise of technology and its impact on human flourishing. “The greatest victories of man in the realms of science, as in that of the technical mastery over nature, have become the principal cause of man’s dehumanization. Man is no longer master of the machines which he has invented. Our contemporary mechanized civilization is fatal to man’s inner life, for it destroys his integrity, disfigures his emotional life, makes him the instrument of inhuman processes, and takes away from him all possibility of contemplation by a rapid increase in the tempo of life.”
Lastly Archbishop Vigano: The faith of the disciple of the Coronavirus in the media narrative is the grotesque parody of the act of faith required of the Catholic, with the difference that the dogmas of the health religion to which unconditional assent is required are totally irrational, unreasonable, and illogical; there is not an adhesion to a truth that transcends reason but rather to a dogma that contradicts it, showing that, like all false religions, Covid crosses the line into superstition. Those who believe in Covid thus find themselves in the position of having to give proof of their submission to its sacred ministers, even in the face of concepts that are repugnant to medical science and common sense: the use of masks is obligatory even if they do not protect against contagion; the vaccine is imposed even if it does not give immunity, treatments not approved by the Health Sanhedrin are prohibited even if their effectiveness is obvious. And we should add: the more absurd the order that is given, the more the disciple feels that he is a member of the sect precisely by the very act of obeying.
It is disconcerting that those who today abdicate from reason in the face of the proclamations of the virologist-pontiffs declare that they are “rationalists” and convinced supporters of science against any sort of dogmatistic fideism. On the other hand, when people do not believe in God, they end up believing in anything.