@AimeTim end/ We will have to reckon with the nuclear question eventually. Why not now?
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Copy of tweet and quote tweet here: 1/ The threat nuclear nation-state derangement represents is immediate, accelerating and planetary. So, anybody got an effective response to a personification of evil on the very threshold of blowing our world to smithereens? Hands up, then. Image: Well, to paraphrase Heschel, one factor ultimately determines the shape of history - the transcendent response to the nationalist shitshow threatening the entirety of life on Earth. As such, our salvation is necessarily universalist and planetary. As for back yard bombshells… QT: end/ So, an algorithmically-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and, all told, a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would inevitably deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes' 'war of all against all', plus nukes. What next, then?
@lukeburgis Our 'war of all against all' exponentiated to the geo-political level of nation-state dynamics? A mob of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish? Endings foretold by countless prophets. Why the mimetic escalation, now? Girard, as apt as any. It's Time.
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“Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. Panic in the system. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst.” René Girard
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Copy of tweet: An intensification of consciousness, yes. And may we have the wisdom to appreciate its necessity as an index of our need for transformation and the fierceness of the fire required to prise us from the falsehoods which have for so long sustained our crippling self-definition. 12:18 PM · Jul 18, 2020