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This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value—a dignity—that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of divine commands.
technology
constant re-creation of markets,
Fashion,
The present is only momentarily satisfying; the future will bring new and better delights.
Perhaps pride of place in the intellectual pantheon of those who helped give a rationale for the rejection of history goes to Karl Marx.
Yet Marx’s subversion of history is the result of the way he regards the dynamic of the historical process: it is essentially the story of oppression, specifically the oppression represented by the domination of one class by another.
the history of class struggles.
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
one long story of oppression.
For those who see history through this lens, historians will thus fall into one of two camps:
reactionaries
who use history to justify expl...
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rad...
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who use history to unmask the exploitatio...
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“being on the right side of history”
history is about victimizers and victims, with the former being the villains and the latter the heroes.
“deathworks.”
Psalm 2:1-3
an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.
Deathworks make the old values look ridiculous. They represent not so much arguments against the old order as subversions of it. They aim at changing the aesthetic tastes and sympathies of society so as to undermine the commands on which that society was based.
Piss Christ,
Serrano is not simply mocking the sacred order in this work of art; he has turned it into something dirty, disgusting, and vile.
The sacramental is made into the excremental.
Religion is not rendered untrue. It is made distasteful and disgusting.
A deathwork can be anything that sets itself in opposition to the second-world culture.
Satire could also be considered a deathwork. The subtle mockery of established authority that characterizes a satirical TV show
slowly but surely undermining the established order of things.
The modern age has come; the quest for beauty and transcendence in nature is now implausible and even somewhat childish. This is the work of the deathwork.
Perhaps the quintessential deathwork
is pornog...
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Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties.
becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.
takes human sexual activity and divorces it from any moral content.
The sex in pornography is presented as an end in itself.
it repudiates any notion that sex has significance beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order.
The important thing about deathworks is that they subvert and destroy the sacred order without really having anything with which to replace it.
“forgetfulness”
a dominant trait of modern education.
It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history,
abortion.
Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education. This form guarantees that we, of the transition from second to third worlds, will become the first barbarians.
barbarism,
is our ruthless forgetting of the authority of the past.
Abortion, too, is a deathwork—not simply because it works the death of the unborn child but because it profanes that which the second world regarded as sacred: human life made in the image of God from the moment of conception.
The works of Rieff, Taylor, and MacIntyre provide us with very helpful categories for analyzing the pathologies of this present age and for avoiding a common mistake.
“What makes the contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a movement of negation against all sacred orders and directed, in its particulars, against the verticals in authority that mediate sacred order to social order.”
“the ideology of the apostate,” which is summarized by the fact that “contemporary thought is structured around a rejection of the former morality.”
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself.
all I need do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself.
though he nowhere in the Confessions explicitly acknowledges his influence, it is obvious that Augustine’s own autobiography, with its psychological concerns,
