The Basics¶
The fundamental insight of the West is tragedy. It cannot be cognitively mastered, assimilated, or overcome. At the end it will be as unsurpassed as it was at the beginning. The essential insight is already fully achieved within the fragment of Anaximander, at the origin of Occidental philosophy.
There are English translations of the fragment here, and here. A definitive version still awaits us. This is the Wikipedia rendering:
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
Payback and compensation are baked into the nature of things. The tragedians will understand this as the dynamics of hubris and nemesis. In mature modernity, we call it cybernetics. Compensatory mechanisms demonstrate it, in toy form, assisting comprehension. It is the machinery of fate.
The signature of tragedy in history is a rhythm — at a large scale, the rise and fall of civilizations. The West, as a whole, is a pulse. It has a beginning, and an end. All of this is already written, in the Anaximander fragment.
We might think it is possible to master this fate. Progressivism is such a thought. That is hubris distilled, in programmatic form. Anaximander, Homer, and the tragedians anticipate its outcome, which evokes pity from us.
In our hubris, we are incapable of pitilessness, or acceptance, so nemesis comes. This is the entire destiny of the West. It is a necessity that can only be denied, and in this denial — implicit and inexorable — is the completion of its fatality.
You will writhe on the hook, and then die. So it will be.
ADDED: A Short Moral-Religious Dialogue
“Are you saying that it is our pity, for which we are
punished, in the end?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I am saying — or, in fact, merely passing
on. It is the entire message of the right, insofar as this
communicates the truth.”
“So Malthus then?”
“That name will do.”
ADDED: If you name your civilization after the Land of the Dead there’s no point complaining later.