Revolt Against The Modern World

 

(Hat Tip:  Glen Filthie)

Revolt is a sturdy word.  It implies action. It is not as ethereal as "disdain" or "ignore"; it implies active engagement.  It is the sort of thing that you would see in books from the 1950's and 1960's:  Revolt on Janus, Revolt On Mesa Gordo, that sort of thing.

Of course, revolt also implies a sort of short term of local event.  Long term revolts we call revolutions or civil wars or war of independence (depending on who wins, of course).  

There are plenty of things not to revolt against modernity, of course.  I like my morning coffee, and treasure the fact that virtually anything that is in the world can (within reason) get delivered to my door in a matter of days.  Electricity is useful too, as it having the availability of modern medicines and a way to get tomatoes if the plant does not bear them (as happens to me every year).

But  trinkets (and I would argue some of these are such, and others are simply conveniences not necessities) are not all there is to life.

There is a deadening of modernity, a splitting of the soul.  People crowd into urban environments ("human feedlots" as Hobo says), yet take the weekends to drive their cars out to the wilderness to "get into nature".  We have far more things, but far less humanity.  Too often our neighbors - at least in urban areas - are only known by the cars coming out of driveways and garages in the morning and going into them in the evening, while our friends and acquaintances live far away.  We deny the existence of numinous, yet then try to pour eternal meaning and value into things and systems that cannot bear them.

Modernity deadens instead of enlivens, bifurcates instead of unifies, and turns all things into the marketed to and the product:  any aspect of the person is now a potential source of power and profit for a government or corporation or anyone that feels they are not "heard".

So revolt.

A revolt can be a small thing:  Not using television.  Reading.  Making something with your hands.  Actually speaking with your neighbors.  Building a haven of nature in your urban world instead of leaving your urban world to inflict yourself on Nature (or even better, just moving to a more rural location).  

Even the simple act of failing to pay attention to one thing in the modern world that "demands" attention is an act of revolt.

Imagine.  A nation, a state, a world of revolutionaries, quietly going about building and living lives of meaning and significance and purpose instead of being a product or customer, of being a partner of the real Natural world instead of a consumer of Nature on their terms, of knowing the seasons and the chance of a good crop of garlic or the next handcraft product but not knowing (and frankly, not giving a damn) about what the powerful or glamourous say or think or demand that we listen to.

Long Live The Revolution.