That’s funny, but I don’t think they should worry about it. Nobody gives a crap about Yasser Arafat. Isreal’s annexation of Gaza will be completed in 26 and that will be that. Should’ve been done 50 years ago.
Pilkington treats liberalism as a zombie — animated but hollow — yet fails to account how liberalism’s core achievements (individual rights, pluralism, institutions, rule of law) emerged from, and responded to, centuries of social conflict. His post-liberal remedy reads like a second coming of Christian-classical autocracy, thinly inventive but tyrannical in epistemic posture. The specter of illiberal renewal outranks his diagnosis: fewer cures, more incantations of civilizational doom.
Institutions didn’t descend intact from the Middle Ages; they evolved by curbing the clerical monopolies that once claimed to embody “order.” If the modern West is less free than it imagines, that’s because markets replaced the Church as the universal creed. But your “goodbye” sounds less like analysis than relief — as if collapse absolved thought. History rarely grants such tidy farewells; it prefers irony.
In the Dark Ages, the clergy were the only educated people and just about the only people interested in education. They did embody civilisation and order after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century.
And they did more and more educate the laity - Henry Bolingbroke, for example, was a very learned English king. The clergy were innocent of hogging education for themselves.
Yes, I feel relief at the collapse of the modern West, as it's such a truly hellish thing in some respects. But I'm not expecting the collapse to be pleasant or tidy.
I don't need to analyse the collapse, though, which is grimly obvious both in its causes and its unfolding.
We're now in an age that is apocalyptic from both the practical and spiritual points of view. Not much room for irony.
The clergy preserved learning, yes—but also circumscribed it. The same Church that copied manuscripts banned books and burned thinkers. Civilization isn’t measured by who reads Latin, but by who may speak freely. Relief at collapse is no argument, only fatigue dressed as prophecy. Every age imagines itself apocalyptic; few are. Irony remains, because decline never fulfills its own script.
In the Middle Ages people spoke more freely than in modern Britain. Apart from Giordano Bruno, no "thinkers" were burned, only deeply religious theological dissidents.
The collapse of the West is happening now; I'm not prophesying ! The West's demographic collapse has already happened .
As for our age being apocalyptic, climate scientists will confirm that. To say nothing of WMD'S.
The decline of the Roman Empire - so like that of the American - fulfilled its script.
Read "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilisations Fall" by William Ophuls. Every civilisation follows the same script, as we are faithfully doing.
No age has a monopoly on freedom—or on censorship. To claim the Middle Ages allowed freer speech than modern Britain confuses privilege with permission. The few who “spoke freely” did so because authority approved it. Those who questioned authority hid or died. If the modern West feels oppressive, it is not because it forbids belief but because it no longer enforces it. Collapse may comfort those weary of doubt, but resignation is not understanding. History does not reward relief; it remembers who called retreat revelation.
I studied under Marshall McLuhan’s son, Eric at York university. Both are gone now, but I will speak for them (silly me).
There is no more deterministic theory than that espoused in McLuhan’s ‘s “understanding media”. He says Our inventions are extensions of ourselves; They re-order how we live on a scale that dwarfs how we use those inventions. Gutenberg and moveable type face leads to Protestantism and all that entails. Scholars of Catholicism could probably opine on that topic: yes, lol.
McLuhan says that Guttenberg gave birth to a new galaxy. I would say that’s deterministic.
But the big invention for Marshall was electricity which he described as the extension of our human nervous system to envelop the entire earth and all its inhabitants. Electricity usurped time and space, so, instantinaity is now the immutable ordering principle, and thereby collapsed the world into a global village (tada!). Like it or not we all now live cheek by jowl, all perspectives all voices available to all in a deafening din.
Re-civilize or die: it’s not up to us. Instant communication planet wide eliminates any opportunity to return from whence we came. The McLuhans, father and son would admonish you and in no uncertain terms. Your failure is from the start: recivilize is not an option. It is no longer available. The medium is the message is a truism of which you fall afoul. It is wishful thinking, this business about return. As Catholic scholars is not the ongoing and endless dilution of Christs teaching by wishy-washy Protestantism sufficient proof of the McLuhan theory. Protestantism has killed Christianity. The churches are empty because the message is meaningless. Out here on the hustings we are not smart, but we do have intuition. We realize the church is of no value. Its message is deluted unto irrelevance: it is meaningless. I think any good Catholic scholar would argue that Protestantism is the embrace of meaninglessness.
The point of electricity and instantaneity is that the availability of all messages simultaneously renders all meaning moot. And this is not about to change, so there will be no return. So say the McLuhans.
We are not going to recivilize we are going to collapse. It is told.
Suggest 'PLO' may not be the most felicitous acronym for the Post-Liberal Order.
That’s funny, but I don’t think they should worry about it. Nobody gives a crap about Yasser Arafat. Isreal’s annexation of Gaza will be completed in 26 and that will be that. Should’ve been done 50 years ago.
Whatever is good in liberalism, it has inherited from Christianity.
The rest is mere egotism.
Pilkington treats liberalism as a zombie — animated but hollow — yet fails to account how liberalism’s core achievements (individual rights, pluralism, institutions, rule of law) emerged from, and responded to, centuries of social conflict. His post-liberal remedy reads like a second coming of Christian-classical autocracy, thinly inventive but tyrannical in epistemic posture. The specter of illiberal renewal outranks his diagnosis: fewer cures, more incantations of civilizational doom.
The institutions and the rule of law go back to the Catholic Middle Ages.
Today's West is ruled by the global economy, therefore is not nearly as free or individualist as it likes to imagine.
In any case, it's collapsing - so goodbye to it and its extreme liberalism, which is being destroyed by illiberal pluralists like Muslims and woke.
Institutions didn’t descend intact from the Middle Ages; they evolved by curbing the clerical monopolies that once claimed to embody “order.” If the modern West is less free than it imagines, that’s because markets replaced the Church as the universal creed. But your “goodbye” sounds less like analysis than relief — as if collapse absolved thought. History rarely grants such tidy farewells; it prefers irony.
In the Dark Ages, the clergy were the only educated people and just about the only people interested in education. They did embody civilisation and order after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century.
And they did more and more educate the laity - Henry Bolingbroke, for example, was a very learned English king. The clergy were innocent of hogging education for themselves.
Yes, I feel relief at the collapse of the modern West, as it's such a truly hellish thing in some respects. But I'm not expecting the collapse to be pleasant or tidy.
I don't need to analyse the collapse, though, which is grimly obvious both in its causes and its unfolding.
We're now in an age that is apocalyptic from both the practical and spiritual points of view. Not much room for irony.
The clergy preserved learning, yes—but also circumscribed it. The same Church that copied manuscripts banned books and burned thinkers. Civilization isn’t measured by who reads Latin, but by who may speak freely. Relief at collapse is no argument, only fatigue dressed as prophecy. Every age imagines itself apocalyptic; few are. Irony remains, because decline never fulfills its own script.
In the Middle Ages people spoke more freely than in modern Britain. Apart from Giordano Bruno, no "thinkers" were burned, only deeply religious theological dissidents.
The collapse of the West is happening now; I'm not prophesying ! The West's demographic collapse has already happened .
As for our age being apocalyptic, climate scientists will confirm that. To say nothing of WMD'S.
The decline of the Roman Empire - so like that of the American - fulfilled its script.
Read "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilisations Fall" by William Ophuls. Every civilisation follows the same script, as we are faithfully doing.
No age has a monopoly on freedom—or on censorship. To claim the Middle Ages allowed freer speech than modern Britain confuses privilege with permission. The few who “spoke freely” did so because authority approved it. Those who questioned authority hid or died. If the modern West feels oppressive, it is not because it forbids belief but because it no longer enforces it. Collapse may comfort those weary of doubt, but resignation is not understanding. History does not reward relief; it remembers who called retreat revelation.
I studied under Marshall McLuhan’s son, Eric at York university. Both are gone now, but I will speak for them (silly me).
There is no more deterministic theory than that espoused in McLuhan’s ‘s “understanding media”. He says Our inventions are extensions of ourselves; They re-order how we live on a scale that dwarfs how we use those inventions. Gutenberg and moveable type face leads to Protestantism and all that entails. Scholars of Catholicism could probably opine on that topic: yes, lol.
McLuhan says that Guttenberg gave birth to a new galaxy. I would say that’s deterministic.
But the big invention for Marshall was electricity which he described as the extension of our human nervous system to envelop the entire earth and all its inhabitants. Electricity usurped time and space, so, instantinaity is now the immutable ordering principle, and thereby collapsed the world into a global village (tada!). Like it or not we all now live cheek by jowl, all perspectives all voices available to all in a deafening din.
Re-civilize or die: it’s not up to us. Instant communication planet wide eliminates any opportunity to return from whence we came. The McLuhans, father and son would admonish you and in no uncertain terms. Your failure is from the start: recivilize is not an option. It is no longer available. The medium is the message is a truism of which you fall afoul. It is wishful thinking, this business about return. As Catholic scholars is not the ongoing and endless dilution of Christs teaching by wishy-washy Protestantism sufficient proof of the McLuhan theory. Protestantism has killed Christianity. The churches are empty because the message is meaningless. Out here on the hustings we are not smart, but we do have intuition. We realize the church is of no value. Its message is deluted unto irrelevance: it is meaningless. I think any good Catholic scholar would argue that Protestantism is the embrace of meaninglessness.
The point of electricity and instantaneity is that the availability of all messages simultaneously renders all meaning moot. And this is not about to change, so there will be no return. So say the McLuhans.
We are not going to recivilize we are going to collapse. It is told.