You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 11th, 2008.
I’m going to blog the crap out of Saturday.
Warning! Video in Quebecois French!
Anyway, this video has always struck me as being about the sacredness of physical love. Enjoy.
Anyone else ever notice the similarity?
DarwinCatholic has an excellent post on the curtain WWI cast over the twentieth century, providing a clear delineation between “the past” and “modern times.” It’s true to an extent; it was a Hegelian “world-historical” event that even the second war couldn’t match, becauase by then, we knew that sort of thing could happen. I’m particularly interested in the “Eighty-Year War” thesis, and how it might provide an explanation of this distinction that DarwinCatholic discusses.
See, the fundamental idea of the Eighty-Year War thesis is that the span of 1914 to 1989 is one continuous conflict, an endless war that define a century, which, like the Hundred-Year War, was broken up into subconflicts. I think it’s a useful idea toward explaining this sort of cultural explosion in a coherant narrative rather than as a series of separate, but related, events.
Of course, as the post above indicates, there’s much less a clear break than we might otherwise assume; while the first war certainly began the processes of political change and collapse that spanned the century, the radicalism that exploded onto the scene in 1918 had been brewing for many years in many countries, and the whole Belle Epoche had been rocked by political instability across the Western world. I mean, that’s the era that originated the phrase “bomb-throwing anarchist.”
Of course, this is also the era that saw the release of Rerum Novarum and the birth of Catholic social teaching, a Christo- and anthropocentric response to economic and political radicalism that affirmed the dignity of every man, from capitalist to proletarian dreg, the unjustness of every conflict born of class hatred, and the need to peacefully create a society built around that dignity inherant in all men. It is, like the whole Gospel, a call to repent of our evil.
The twentieth century, the century of the Eighty-Year War, was a moral catastrophe marked by the world’s wholesale rejection of that notion, and the brutal pitting of ideologies against each other, two scorpions in a bottle, with the eventual winner marked the moral better.
