On Brexit, or the Contraction of Political Communities?

It has been a rather long time since i’ve bothered to put up a blog post, mostly due to a sharp increase in work offline.

But in a few short days a vote of some historical import is about to occur.

For many people across the Earth, it will simply be a Thursday – like any other Thursday that has come and gone in the history of man.   Undoubtedly there will be love, laughter, death, and tears as the world keeps spinning onward.

But for a small, if sturdy, island nation and its neighbors, June 23rd is a true test of a rather bruised and battered dream.

Since the end of the Cold War, much of the modern world had been sold an idea of the world “coming together.”   How this would happen was validated in many ways.  Off the top of my head…

1. The Internet will Unite the World.
2. Its the Dawn of the New American Century.
3. And of course, European Integration as a first step toward something bigger.

 

Taking a quick look in the current time period, I can’t help but notice how the trajectory has gone in the reverse direction.

1. Brexit.
2. Scottish Independence.
3. Catalan Independence in Spain.
4. East Timor leaving Indonesia.
5. The Virtual Break-up of Iraq along Tribal/Sectarian lines.

 

The above is a mix bag of course – but whether its the effects of a civil war, the desire of a free polity to leave a greater union, or undoing the inheritance of colonialism one thing is clear – people aren’t so keen on forming greater political unions of any sort.

Where once we dreamed of some sort of “End of History” style unification, people now seem to operate on the adage that “smaller is better.”   That, when all is said and done about the virtues of cross-cultural or international experiences, a desire still exists in many people to have some patch of this Earth where we can be around others “like-us.”

And so the pendulum swings toward favoring smaller social communities…….

…for now.

 

 

 

 

Turn Inward: Augustine on the Natural Sciences

In the past two decades or so, debates about science vs. religion have become all the rage.

Frankly – I have found such discussions to be absolutely useless, if only because the participants who engage in such matters usually end up creating caricatures of ideas and viewpoints.

As time has passed though, the whole “Creationism/Evolution” controversy has essentially hit a dead-end.   Lots of people I know who were jumping up and down like mad jack-rabbits for one side or another went on to other things to argue about – limits of free speech versus Political Correctness, the migrant crisis in Europe and the UK, Islamism – Islamophobia?   etc. etc.

In the midst of my Augustinian studies for this blog, I did run across a rather intriguing paragraph from Augustine of Hippo’s De Genesi ad Litteram, one that I wish I had known about a very very long time ago.

As Augustine is remarkably modern in his tone and sentiments, I’ll just quote without commentary.

There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions or even the magnitude and distances of the constellations, about the predictable eclipses of moon and sun, about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and everything else of this kind. And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments. Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one’s guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be toto caelo, as the saying goes, wide of the mark. And what is so vexing is not that misguided people should be laughed at, as that our authors should be assumed by outsiders to have held such views and, to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned, should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket as so many ignoramuses.

Whenever, you see, they catch some members of the Christian community making mistakes on a subject which they know inside out, and defending their hollow opinions on the authority of our books, on what grounds are they going to trust those books on the resurrection of the dead and the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, when they suppose they include any number of mistakes and fallacies on matters which they themselves have been able to master either by experiment or by the surest of calculations? It is impossible to say what trouble and grief such rash, self-assured know-alls cause the more cautious and experienced brothers and sisters. Whenever they find themselves challenged and taken to task for some shaky and false theory of theirs by people who do not recognize the authority of our books, they try to defend what they have aired with the most frivolous temerity and patent falsehood by bringing forward these same sacred books to justify it. Or they even quote from memory many things said in them which they imagine will provide them with valid evidence, not understanding either what they are saying, or the matters on which they are asserting themselves (1 Tm 1:7).