The Blackberry Walk

It's New Years, so I'm going to write a short piece on why the world isn't going to shit, and why there's hope as we emerge from covid. The two World Wars dealt a devastating blow for society. The horrors and death of war had never been so great; and the Nazis... the Nazis were a kind of evil the modern world had never seen and has never seen since. Nazism threw the Christian ethics we take for granted in the rubbish, filling in the hole it left with an unholy mix of Nietzschean philosophy and pagan mysticism. Hitlers opinions on the Jews were common in mystic communities like the Theosophists who saw Jews as a more primitive race compared with Aryans. Pagan ideas also suffuse Nazism. For instance, Himmler carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on him at all times - Hindu ideas went beyond just the Swastika, with the influential French-Hindu mystic Savitri Devi preaching that Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu. Nazism was also basted in motifs of German paganism such as the works of Wagner and the hero Seigfried, with Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Nazi party's culture division, part of the pagan 'Thule society'. Nazism was by all accounts a religious moment; a religious moment where all the evil corked in man's soul by Christianity burst out like champagne. The world which birthed from the ashes of the war was one of sterility. There was a general sense of fear with regards to the sacred, the spiritual, or anything beyond the mundane since Hitler managed to harness the mystical to corrupt Germany, one of the most civilised nations to grace the Earth, into madness. Mysticism is what led to the evils of Nazism; and mysticism is what has to be suppressed and ignored, they thought. Look at the movements emerging in the '50s like Brutalism, an architecture which possesses no hint of beauty, of the divine, and Sartre's Existentialism, a philosophy which aims at cutting man off from anything beyond himself, leaving him in a flat world of 'choice' and 'me'. The students in the 60s - the first generation to not have lived through the war - believed "all you need is love" (and in LSD) to achieve some kind of spiritual enlightenment; and, in the dearth of active spiritual traditions in the West, many turned to the Orient, where they imported an occult Christianised corruption of those spiritual traditions. The hippies' project was a failure; their movement was a kind of harsh counteraction to the sterile times they lived in but wasn't authentic spirituality. We today live in their ashes, following a materialist nihilism where the divine nor the spiritual exist. Something changed in the public consciousness over the passed decade, however. It's as if WW2 and Nazism finally became history rather than a living complex in the memory. As a society, we've processed the terror of the war, the evils of Nazism, and have felt that there's an emptiness in our hearts where the transcendent once was. We had lost our connection to the heavens, to the transcendent, to that which is beyond man. The forces which after the war we feared and repressed are finally being let out in a natural form. The 60s saw a kind of counteraction to their parents spiritual fear - but now we're free to experience the transcendent without any dark shadow tainting its beauty. We've forgotten how to relate to the transcendent, however. We see simple idol worship, such as praising brand names like "Supreme", a god which people are willing to queue for hours to honour. Very similar is the church of Apple, whose aesthetic and philosophy some embody entirely. And then there's the mystery cult of the 'geeks', like those who are part of the cult of Star Wars or Game of Thrones; they participate in shamanic rituals (cosplay) and make pilgrimages to holy sites (conventions). It seems like everyone's a geek today, with Marvel films, once restricted to the nerdiest of nerds, becoming the most popular films of all time. Religious movements are also found in politics such as the modern 'intersectionality' and similar movements. Whatever you think of these new religions, it's a healthy sign that the West is once more able to look for spirituality. Even if the spirituality found is often unbounded and at times primitive, it is the first wrung of the ladder to greater things. People are looking for the sacred and, even though they are often looking in all the wrong places, it's the beginning of greater things.