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Overview
"The Sins of the Fathers" is An indictment of "The Three Sins of Modernism," namely, Imperialism, Materialism, and the Quantitative Standard.
* * *
An excerpt from the beginning of the:
INTRODUCTION
BEYOND the Alps lies Italy!" Beyond The War lies The World after the War. Black and red, the holocaust of an era envelops the world; black with the heavy shadow of catastrophe, red with the flame of a penitential purgation. Black and red, the smoke-clouds of a great burning open fitfully, and only a little way, to reveal a far country, in hope rather than in reality, but it is on these poor gleams of far promise that already the eyes of men are fixed, for there alone lies the prophecy and the forecast of compensation.
The world has become a great interrogation. Why was this thing permitted and why does it endure? Faith fails in those of short sight, and the heaped-up horror of four years, the ever-increasing sorrow of personal loss, seen only so, and regardless of past and future, force the question that too often finds its answer in doubt, infidelity and despair. Widen the vision until the strange history of the last five centuries is seen with clear eyes, until the possibility of the future becomes a reality, and doubt disappears, faith returns, and despair is transformed into a great hope.
It is impossible to understand this epic war except in the light of recent history; it is impossible to endure its terror unless we look beyond. It is no casual and untoward event, the rash precipitation in time and space of the insane illusions of matoids and paranoiacs, the accident of industrial warfare, the catastrophe that might have been escaped. It was conceived in the very beginnings of modernism when first the Renaissance began to supersede Medievalism; it grew and strengthened as the Reformation entered into its final form; it quickened and stirred as the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shook the foundations of law and order in all Europe; it struggled for birth as industrial civilization waxed fat and gross in its century of blind evolution. Medici, Borgia and Machiavelli, Huss and Luther and Calvin, Cromwell and Rousseau and Marat; the regraters and monopolists of the seventeenth century, the corporations and exploiters of the eighteenth, the iron-masters and coal barons, the traders and the usurers of the nineteenth, the triumphant, Imperial Great Powers of industrialism in the twentieth century, prepared all things for its nativity, and when, on the first of August, 1914, a group of "supermen" in Berlin acted as surgeons and midwife, it came to its birth, after long gestation, a thing neither to be denied nor escaped, an inevitable event, born "that the prophecy might be fulfilled."
In the first months of Apocalyptic revelation, when it became dismally evident that modern civilization was doomed, and while the smug prophets of enduring peace, of the end of war and of the assured triumph of modernism were running around in circles, wild-eyed and panic-stricken, vainly endeavouring to find some adequate explanation of the failure of their system and the shattering collapse of their house of cards, it all seemed blind, unreasonable, impossible. Surely it was all a nightmare, a fiction of auto-suggestion (to borrow from the pseudo-scientific jargon of the time). This thing could not be; it cut square across the acceptable theory of evolution, it implied a basic lack in what was demonstrably the unique and crowning civilization of all time; it even cast a doubt on the great dogma of the ultimate (and immediate) perfectibility of man achieved by automatic and irresistible processes. This could not be, therefore the Thing, the unimaginable, impossible War with all its collateral horrors on its head, was either illusion or a rebellious and intolerable "sport"; not to be endured, but to be crushed and utterly cast out that the world might return to the status quo ante, to resume its triumphant progress towards that perfection and universal triumph so clearly indicated, so unhappily and unscientifically diverted in its course.
Four years of war and of the revelations of war have wrought a change. It is not now that reasons are not forthcoming, it is that they are legion. " Any stick will do to beat a dog with," and any and every defect and weakness incipient in the world before the war is seized upon as the sufficient explanation of the catastrophe. Many are justly chosen, many are but remotely connected, if at all, with what has happened. The process, however, is an wholesome one: the superstition of the excellence of modernism is now revealed and discredited and they that were its most zealous adherents are now its most angry accusers. All this is good; the veil must be, and has been, torn away. It is now for us to weigh and estimate the qualities inherent in modernism which were its undoing...
* * *
An excerpt from the beginning of the:
INTRODUCTION
BEYOND the Alps lies Italy!" Beyond The War lies The World after the War. Black and red, the holocaust of an era envelops the world; black with the heavy shadow of catastrophe, red with the flame of a penitential purgation. Black and red, the smoke-clouds of a great burning open fitfully, and only a little way, to reveal a far country, in hope rather than in reality, but it is on these poor gleams of far promise that already the eyes of men are fixed, for there alone lies the prophecy and the forecast of compensation.
The world has become a great interrogation. Why was this thing permitted and why does it endure? Faith fails in those of short sight, and the heaped-up horror of four years, the ever-increasing sorrow of personal loss, seen only so, and regardless of past and future, force the question that too often finds its answer in doubt, infidelity and despair. Widen the vision until the strange history of the last five centuries is seen with clear eyes, until the possibility of the future becomes a reality, and doubt disappears, faith returns, and despair is transformed into a great hope.
It is impossible to understand this epic war except in the light of recent history; it is impossible to endure its terror unless we look beyond. It is no casual and untoward event, the rash precipitation in time and space of the insane illusions of matoids and paranoiacs, the accident of industrial warfare, the catastrophe that might have been escaped. It was conceived in the very beginnings of modernism when first the Renaissance began to supersede Medievalism; it grew and strengthened as the Reformation entered into its final form; it quickened and stirred as the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shook the foundations of law and order in all Europe; it struggled for birth as industrial civilization waxed fat and gross in its century of blind evolution. Medici, Borgia and Machiavelli, Huss and Luther and Calvin, Cromwell and Rousseau and Marat; the regraters and monopolists of the seventeenth century, the corporations and exploiters of the eighteenth, the iron-masters and coal barons, the traders and the usurers of the nineteenth, the triumphant, Imperial Great Powers of industrialism in the twentieth century, prepared all things for its nativity, and when, on the first of August, 1914, a group of "supermen" in Berlin acted as surgeons and midwife, it came to its birth, after long gestation, a thing neither to be denied nor escaped, an inevitable event, born "that the prophecy might be fulfilled."
In the first months of Apocalyptic revelation, when it became dismally evident that modern civilization was doomed, and while the smug prophets of enduring peace, of the end of war and of the assured triumph of modernism were running around in circles, wild-eyed and panic-stricken, vainly endeavouring to find some adequate explanation of the failure of their system and the shattering collapse of their house of cards, it all seemed blind, unreasonable, impossible. Surely it was all a nightmare, a fiction of auto-suggestion (to borrow from the pseudo-scientific jargon of the time). This thing could not be; it cut square across the acceptable theory of evolution, it implied a basic lack in what was demonstrably the unique and crowning civilization of all time; it even cast a doubt on the great dogma of the ultimate (and immediate) perfectibility of man achieved by automatic and irresistible processes. This could not be, therefore the Thing, the unimaginable, impossible War with all its collateral horrors on its head, was either illusion or a rebellious and intolerable "sport"; not to be endured, but to be crushed and utterly cast out that the world might return to the status quo ante, to resume its triumphant progress towards that perfection and universal triumph so clearly indicated, so unhappily and unscientifically diverted in its course.
Four years of war and of the revelations of war have wrought a change. It is not now that reasons are not forthcoming, it is that they are legion. " Any stick will do to beat a dog with," and any and every defect and weakness incipient in the world before the war is seized upon as the sufficient explanation of the catastrophe. Many are justly chosen, many are but remotely connected, if at all, with what has happened. The process, however, is an wholesome one: the superstition of the excellence of modernism is now revealed and discredited and they that were its most zealous adherents are now its most angry accusers. All this is good; the veil must be, and has been, torn away. It is now for us to weigh and estimate the qualities inherent in modernism which were its undoing...
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940016374086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OGB |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 369 KB |
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