The Trees of Eden
“Christ is the only exit from this world; all other exits – sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence – are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.”
Fr. Seraphim Rose
Generative artificial intelligence, incessant media consumption, breakneck cultural trends, colonization of the cosmos: a handful of humble preoccupations of the modern man.
The current, contemporary human condition would likely be unrecognizable to a person just a century our senior. The noise, the lights, the “culture,” the manic self-centeredness, the screens attached to our hands and hips – in certain regards, we have more in common with cyborgs than serfs. We throw ourselves, willingly, into an ocean of psychic chaos and stand stupefied at the results.
Inputs and outputs.
Mankind, collectively, possesses an individual and institutional fixation on “progress.” Faster, more efficient, easier; more juice, less squeeze – more outward, less inward. If “progress” isn’t subject to measure, number, and weight, it goes out with the garbage. There is no need for poetry in a world of automatons.
Despite our intellectual ornamentation and slightly greater degrees of egotism, we’re not all that different from our great-grandfathers – the conditions of our hearts have changed very little. Man has been given greater matériel for his exploits, but the causal mechanisms are ancient – pride, envy, lust, wrath, and the like.
Wars, rumors of wars, economic uncertainty and instability, rampant corruption within the public sector, megalomaniacal scheming within the private sector, tribalism, I, and me, and mine, and countless other forms of “sin” remind us that, despite our technological “progress,” we are not so different from the men of the Dark Ages. Cain is still killing Abel, time and time again – this time, more efficiently.
“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”
Ecclesiastes 1:14
In fact, we’re living in our own sort of dark age – an age where Spirit has been wholesale rejected in favor of Mammon – individually and collectively. We choose our sides, we dig our fortifications, and we throw stones from our glass castles; the Truth has been sacrificed on the altar of selfhood. It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m right.
In general, the American sociopolitical landscape can be summarized as such: “my God-eclipsing delusion is better than your God-eclipsing delusion.” The arguing, the gnashing of teeth, the us, the them, and everything else in-between yields the same results: sorrow, division, and an ever-declining degree of personal autonomy. Freedom given for the perception of safety; the personal psychological landscape, yielded and submitted to group-identity and collective insanity.
Perhaps we should consider the landscape of our own hearts, before we attempt to remake and remodel the world. Our current predicaments, which are not all that different from those of our ancestors, may be symptoms of spiritual poverty – amplified by our collective obsession with technology, material indulgence, and homogenized mass-information. Poisoned roots bear poisonous fruit; to expect anything else is lunacy.
“Revolution must take place at the root of our being.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
