Oswald Spengler wrote in the chapter entitled Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell-
Quote: Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth, by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward light-heartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the repulsive, and even, the merely silly.
He then gives examples in Buddism and Hellenism ( the Serapis cult), the goings on surrounding Isis worship in ancient Rome, Chaldean astrology, occultism, theosophism and the arts and craft business. He doesn't seem to have considered aliens.
The idea being that these things are a "pastime". A relaxation. A "let's pretend".
He continues after that with-
Quote: Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.
The scientific undermining of Creationism is neither here nor there in the face of such forces and one presumes the ID movement is the beginning of the response and which can only be discredited by asserting that it is Creationism in another guise. A snake-oil sales technique.
Of course one could argue that the first statement quoted here is an assertion but it is backed up by the folk wisdom that man does not live by bread alone and that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. One could assert the opposite and say that the materialist does not need to ease the intellectual tension and that his "playfulness" could seek an outlet in forms of control freakery based on him having worked out from first principles, scientifically, what everybody should think and do. That is a serious business though and has the expected effect upon his general personality. He frowns a lot and looks at one over his threatening spectacles as if one was a worm.
When the Temple of Isis was opened and closed at regular intervals depending on the problems created by the intellectual tensions not being eased, a real problem for the daughters of the Goddess in their earthly manifestations, and those created by the disgraceful scenes of self-indulgent debauchery, which I will forbear providing details of, when the intellectual tensions were eased, it provided empirical evidence that these two forces which Spengler draws attention to present a real and felt opposition in human social life of the developed type which the leadership must address. (The Temple of Mars, who was traditionally born of the virgin Juno, was always open.)
A pale shadow of the situation in Rome, where they were a bit up front about things, can be seen in our religious festivals and other spiritual events such as Thanksgiving and July 4 and even on weekends. This shadow or dim echo of the past is faint enough to be congruent with the intellectual tensions in Western civilisation under the influence of American ideas and which a visit to a mall is usually sufficient for the purpose. (The 7 minute principle).
I might have discovered a scientific law in the social patterns of Megalopolitan man. That the level of intellectual tension is directly proportional to the amount of debauchery required to relieve it and can thus be measured accordingly.
Of course, some people have difficulty with "inward light-heartedness" so they might not understand and if they came to power they would cancel all these reliefs we have won ourselves and have our noses pressed to the grindstone every day, without relief, sustained on rice and water, in order to make the nation great and powerful. (Like as if it isn't now).
But Mr Spengler can have the last word-
Quote:Every "Age of Enlightenment" proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason--always associated with the type of the megalopolitan--to an equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness, cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it, cognises nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world, (its straw man), which it has cleared of everyday sense experience, and continues to do so till it has found at last the subtlest result, the form of the form, --itself: namely, nothing.
