A reason to fear

Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

                             Quote from: Spengler vol II p.505-506

I used to have an unabridged copy of Spengler on my bookshelf in the long ago, toted the damn thing around from 1979 (fresh out of the Infantry) to 1988 (move to the great Northwest).  The damn thing was a gravity check and an means of weirdo-class brainiac signalling.  It sat next to my Will and Ariel Durant series and below the Harvard Classics.  Truth be told, I doubt that I had read 30% of the collection.  Probably less than 20% of the Spengler (look, the damn thing is HUGE!!)

Enough woolgathering.  I am addressing the move away from pure rationalism and it's fellow travellers economics and science that I have been making and a similar movement which I think might happening in the general population here in the good old USA.

Philosophers seem to make the assumption that the rules of the world do not change.  That may well not be a truth.  I think that the rules of the world are plastic things, the system of the world defined by Newton may be more porous to change than people generally believe.

It may well be that the magic that was put in restraints by the belief in the mundane emboldened by the scientific revolution is beginning to push back.  I can't be for certain of this, but it appears that the whole "modernity" thing is under psychic attack from any number of directions.  I think that the concept of "magic" might have something to do with this. 

But we have to define "magic".  Stealing blatantly from JMG:

Dion Fortune (Violet Firth Evans), one of the most important magical theorists of the twentieth century, defined magic as "the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will."(1)

The rules of rationality and the cage of science gave us what we have now.  For a while, the piling up of physical comforts and totems of status was fun, but now we are entering a period where the bills that we didn't anticipate are beginning to come due.  As always, the bills will be coming due from directions that people take for granted.  I cannot understand why most people cannot wrap their arms around the idea that it is what you don’t expect, that most needs looking for.

We began caging the demons back in the day of Francis Bacon.  But from what I can see, the demons were never all that thrilled about being caged.  I am also reasonably certain that they didn't like being labelled as "demons".   But now I tend to think that these other-than-human entities of various kinds are beginning to strain at the cages imposed on them by the rationalists.  One has to remember that the cages they inhabit are of recent construction.  They were conceptualized by Bacon and his ilk, planned and drafted by Newton and his cohort, and executed by the likes of Faraday, Milliken , and Smith.

But the cages are starting to age, and the metal that comprises them are getting brittle.  Oh, don't get me wrong, the engineers of the world, those who have held sway all this time will assure you of their failure-mode analysis numbers and their Newtonian-grade metallurgy and assure you that all is well, but those with eyes to see watch the strain on the cage bars as the beast throws itself against those cage bars.

So here we stand.  At the edge of a new world, with no true idea of where we should go from here.  It appears that the old rules aren't really appropriate for the world we are going into.  But the new rules haven't be promulgated yet.  Trying to work out the new rules is a difficult thing to do without a written rulebook.  All of our written rulebooks in this society are getting pretty dated.

Look, a major portion of my mental being is firmly entrenched in the rational.  Having been a working scientist for thirty some odd years tends to do that to a man.  But things aren't right anymore in scienceland.  Truth be told, I am coming to the conclusion that they were never all the way right and many folks other than your respectful correspondent put blinders on and ignored science not working where science doesn't work.  In today's world hypothesis non fingo is just not said by the priesthood.