Zeitgeist

These are interesting times.

It seems we are in a world where common sense and reasonable discourse are breaking down, leaving us with social outcomes that only a few years ago would have seemed impossible. As Buffalo Springfield sang, “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

This morning I sit contemplating the social upheaval and the speed of it.  One of the problems, if history can be considered, is that if this is the beginning of an upheaval then the speed will only increase greatly. 

The economist Neil Howe says this cultural shift is a natural feature of an 80-year cycle of generational change; and, lucky us, we are now entering the most volatile and critical period of that cycle, one that often produces crisis and relief from strong repressed emotions.  Consider that 80 years ago the U.S. was in the Great Depression and about to enter WWII.  80 years before that, the U.S. was about to enter the Civil War.  80 years before that was the Revolutionary War.  The critical year, if we have to be completely accurate, is 2020.  That is when the 80 year cycle lines up the truest.

If we do not see that there is a deep cultural shift happening then we are not living in reality.  Heraclitus said “The only thing that is constant is change” (around 500 BC).  And things are a-changing. 

Did I ever think I’d see a day when society would accept re-labeling bathrooms because a few people don’t know what sex they think they are?  The thought or slightest consideration never, ever entered my mind.

Did I ever expect that we’d go through racial fights, shootings, and protests like they did back in the ‘60s?  Especially since blacks have EVERY advantage.  We are living in an economy that promotes all things black, offers assistance in every way at every level, and we still can’t find enough blacks who will walk through the door and be successful.  It is a time of unprecedented black privilege and it still isn’t enough.  Now that there is a substantial poor white class, if this black unrest persist, I do not see how there will be anything short of very real violence.  I never, ever thought this would happen again.

Did I ever consider that America would be a country that would persecute Christians or Christian morals and ideology?  I could never, ever have possibly imagined such a thing. 

Very simply, people try to minimize pain and maximize pleasure.  If you can anticipate how they will do so, you can forecast results, economic or otherwise, not with perfect reliability but with high confidence.  Timing is the main challenge.  Today, we have a majority of people who do not want to persist in the pain of work for the pleasure of reward.  No one wants to sow in the sun so they can reap much later at the dinner table.  There is an absolute absence of own our reality.

No one want to admit that this sexual perversion is a moral sin.  No one is willing to confront the able poor and say that unwillingness to sacrifice your time in vocation is a sin.  How dare we be so unloving they proclaim.  Yet it is they who promote these unsustainable social existences who are unloving by allowing people to live in circumstances that will never allow them to be successful.  So it is no wonder that there is persecution of the Christian community.  No one likes to be told the truth of their reality.

Whatever our country is doing to solve these problems, it isn’t working.  One of the problems we all encounter is we want a return to equilibrium.  We want to go to what we knew.  But there is no equilibrium – you are where you are.  Winston Churchill said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”  The current results are unpleasant to consider.

Ben Hunt, another economist, says this shift is because of a failure of narrative.  The Narrative around these events is being shaped and reshaped.  This Narrative seems to determining the path and outcome of government policy.  The assumed politically correct reaction to these events are actually forming social policy and re-writing the laws.  It is not the known moral laws being used to shape social policy.  THIS IS ANARCHY.  It is anarchy in public order and simultaneously, it is anarchy in the Christian church order.

There is a rebellion against police and laws.  There is a rebellion against the church and God’s Word.  Society is trying to change both and not for the better.  Our national laws will bend and be possibly changed.  God’s Word will not; He is always true.  The true church will simply go underground.

Another writer said, “How is the zeitgeist shifting?”  Zeitgeist is the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

It is very important for us today to do our very best to consider this and to prepare as best as we know how to prepare for what seems to definitely be a cycle of crisis.