@UssamaMakdisi 1/ Essentially, we've arrived at a 'paradigm apocalypse' - a reckoning with a form of civilizational exceptionalism characterized by structures of consciousness and power functionally consistent with the rationalizations of a kind of universalized, psychotic absolutism.
Image description
Original X alt text
Copy of tweet thread: As Adorno observed in MINIMA MORALIA, the catastrophic present demands visions of the future “that display and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” This seems impressively meaningless. Care to offer a translation? History tends to the fuller and fuller revelation of the mystery of evil. History, therefore, follows an apocalyptic logic. Not apocalyptic in the sense in which the word is used colloquially to refer to catastrophes but in the word’s original sense of revelation or unveiling.
@davidrieff I beg to differ, David. Abraham Joshua Heschel, succinct: “History is not a blind alley. Beyond the mystery is meaning. And the meaning is destined to be disclosed. Ultimately there is only one factor upon which the shape of history depends: the moral conduct of the nations."