In judging cultural movements, permanence is a bad standard. Precisely the best things become the worst. That does not mean they were never good.
Endurance does matter, but endurance is relative. Culture is a kind of life, and living things are born, they mature, and they die.
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Babies are not adults in a more perfect form. They may be purer, but purity is negative perfection. (To have no other standard is not merely stunted, but outright dangerous. The Myth of the Fall that underlies the most reactionary and toxic forms of modern/post-modern “conservatism” — the notion that an embryonic natural humanity lost its value/innocence as it became cultural — is spiritually and practically harmful. Brainless faith in progress is little better. Rather than hellish catastrophes, it leads to hellish, colorless flatness. Meliorism is the transcendent synthesis: hearing the divine “quiet voice” with our all-too-human ears and owning responsibility for what one learns.)
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Infancy is negative perfection. Maturity is positive perfection.
Potential is cheap.
Successful actualization is rare and precious.
Let’s not overvalue the embryonic, especially not as a means to deny the value of maturity.
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The being specific to human being is self-creative: our nature is perpetual reinvention of ourselves through the medium of cultural tradition. Consider the meaning of the term “Son of Man”. Man, by its own process, produces the next way for human beings to be. And the child someday parents a child, and that child parents a child, and so on. If you are a nerd, you’ll be interested in the fact that this is a nonlinear process, which means it is all orderly and inevitable but utterly unpredictable.
Conservatism perpetually ensures there is never a place for the new to lay its head.
(Maybe this is exactly as it ought to be.)
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Each human being emerges from embryonic oblivion.
Humanity as a whole emerged from simian oblivion.
Our hopes always belong to now and are oriented toward the future. As we approach the future, now and the future and the past retransfigure themselves. TIME IS WEIRD.
We should have learned by now: We can not and should not go back.
It hurts like a bitch to be a human being, but it is good to be human. Let’s not try to escape being human. Let’s live it out.
Let’s decide how we want to be. We can do this. We are allowed to do this. Or, if you prefer, why not?: we are supposed to do this.
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Embryo songs:
Erik Satie – “Embryons desséchés”