the decline of the West « Elberry's Ghost

the decline of the West « Elberry's Ghost
Excerpt:
During our tandem we talked about the “decline of the West”. i told her about the shithead apprentices i taught in Kassel, whose only interests were horror/porn movies, computers, mobile phones, and cars. The West has been in decline for at least 100 years, before even the First World War: it is to do with the erasing of any extra-materialist (religious or otherwise) apprehension, the destruction of the sacred.
To be human is to impinge, however dimly, on that which is beyond the human – or beyond the material, the visible and known. Science has inculcated a false model of knowledge. Science can only deal with the empirical; its basis is repeatable scientific experiment, statistical analysis (which can only deal with probablities). Anything not subject to empirical observation & statistical analysis is invisible to science (at best, scientists can proffer impressionist, manifestly pseudo-scientific “explanations”), yet scientists in their indomitable arrogance are unable to admit their limits – this is not remarkable, for they are generally ignorant of philosophy or epistemology; they are mathematicians, knowing about as much of epistemology as my 19-year-old engineering apprentices. They are often ostensibly fuelled by hatred of Christianity, and its long history of persecutions & inhumanity, though one feels these scientists would be quite happy in Stalinist Russia, as long as they were on the winning side. Fundamentally, their visceral loathing of the now almost wholly discredited Christianity (where they seem lukewarm about real threats like Islam or China) may be competitive – that is, they are the new priests and so naturally set their sights on the old priests. They wish for power and for that they must discredit the old priesthood.
Although most people are incapable of really understanding religion or philosophy, the concepts seem to (somehow) filter into their lives. So now, whenever scientists discover that bananas cause cancer, or that cigarettes are good for the heart, etc., people accept this as they would once have accepted the priest’s sermon. This false mode of knowledge – that only the empirically observable exists, and everything else is a lie – has brutalised its subjects. For to be human is to have an extra-material fidelity, which one could call the imagination, in Wallace Stevens’ usage (could a scientist understand anything of Stevens?).
Along with the scientific onslaught, the humanities have been destroyed by race/gender/sex apparatchiks, English traditions have been largely eradicated by Nu Labour, and the family has likewise distintegrated (assisted by appropriate legislation). So in the West there is no longer any obvious extra-material object, to which one might give one’s fidelity – the only cause now is money. It is not surprising that the West is breeding no-good jihaddist boyos, violence, riots, destruction – for human beings require some extra-material (or “spiritual”) component, and this is no longer requitable by religion, by education, by tradition, except in highly isolated cases. Islam, while vile & bearded, has made no compromises with its essential nature (hatred & violence & savagery), and so it continues to command considerable support. Christianity, in watering itself down for the masses, has lost everything.
Without the sacred, humanity will devolve into a state of grunting bearded savagery, as we see in Islam...