the comedy is always tragic...

The Earth these last few months has held to the same course that it has kept, relatively unchanged, for much of the past four billion years. There were no orbital deviations of consequences to report, although the entire planet did move a few millimeters off axis when the Sumatra earthquake hit early this year. The planet's magnetic field continued to wane, as we approach the period of the poles reversing, a process we can't even begin to understand. For an outside observer who wasn't paying any attention to the surface nuisance, things would have seemed just as they had the last time they visited, say a billion years before.
For the surface nuisance, things have changed greatly.
Our anthropic tendencies (tendencies because we are what we are and cannot deny it) cannot be explained away--we are products of an evolutionary system that has been at least three billion years in the works--three billion years of code errors and transcription problems and mutations from radiation, three billion or more years of the program we call life running non-stop, perpetuating itself until we came along to realize what was happening--an evolutionary system that spawned highly clustered neural nets that house our consciousness, our ability to turn these random elements on this screen into what constitutes language in our minds. We are not so separate from the world that we alienate ourselves from at every turn. Technology has made us masters of the moment--we can control our moment to moment existences in almost excruciating detail. There is, for those of in what constitutes the West, no elements of surprise. There are no challenges, save for those that we create ourselves, and to really be tested, you must be tested by situations that you have absolutely have no control over. When we do faces crises, we flip out. We become conspicuosly aware that technology has not allowed us to become masters of the whole--that no matter how many helicopters we have, no matter how many cameras we have placed throughout cities, no matter how many UAV's you have flying, you cannot control the random element that is the human being.
And of course, the prompt: the opening of the Eurabian civil war, which has for years engaged in an even lower level of activity against mostly Jewish targets throughout Europe, and has now of course become the potential fuse to the powderkeg.
There were plenty of signs, such as this one, long, long ago, and more recently some have been saying stuff like this, but the one thing that I want to point out is this: in roughly seven days, the affected areas went from one suburb of 40,000 some odd thousand, to three suburbs three days later, to three hundred cities eleven days after the initial electrocution, ostensibly as good as "lighting" of the fuse as any other (think assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, that type of thing) and then to a few random isolated events in Brussels and Germany.
A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote that "the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley is off its tracks." And I read that with the specific intent of letting it sit. Of letting it settle. Too much is decided today without the necessary reflection that decisions of weight require--I'm not talking about the time required, I'm talking about the quality of the reflection. I'm talking about realizing that for the Islamists, the Battle of Tours was but a momentary blip on their eventual desire to extend the umma globally, just as the Ottoman Turks defeat at the gates of Vienna was only a roadbump--it has obviously not derailed their attempts to create Eurabia. That kind of reflection. It's important to put into perspective when we consider how unusual our period of history has been in that for the most part the wheels of the trolley were on and the trolley was in its tracks. That is an abberation in the great continuity of the human comedy, and it is also our tragedy. We find any time that things don't work exactly as they should that something must be done about it. We are astonished when the cable internet goes out, or our cellphone inexplicably cuts out, or any of the conveniences that we not only take for granted, but assume that our mastery of the moment extends to a mastery of the whole. We don't need to know how the cellphone works, only that it should. We don't need to understand how the internet works, only that it does. We have completely decoupled knowledge from experience and instead have made propietary knowledge, speciality knowledge the key component of our life experiences. One form of information, one form of thinking, one form of employment, and yet what we do in that time, what do we achieve, what do we personally build? I don't mean to diminish a person's hobbies, those things spent in "free time" (another modern concept), interests that may include the "amateur" tag, such as, "oh he's an amateur horticulturalist" or "she's an amatuer birdwatcher." What distinguishes one person as a professional and the other as an amateur? And who gets to make that determination?
We have for decades churned graduates out in the most proto-industrial manner: speciality of focus equals mastery of the moment. Specialists of every ilk and manner have been conceived and people who attain such speciality, i.e. those at the master and Ph.d level, dedicate their "careers" to usually that one specific area of study. What are the statistics on those who achieve one master's degree or Ph.d, how many of those choose to pursue another? And how many of those use their degrees in truly interdisciplinary research?
No one said that the division of labor would always indefinitely remain indispensable--indeed we have reached the point where soon all of our "labors" will be completely automated, where Westerners will not have to engage in any physical activity to maintain their survival at all. We are already nearly at that point. The division of labor has produced a cornucopia, but at the same time it has stolen something essential from us--the instinctive need to survive. We have blunted, meddled, contracpted, aborted, liberated the instinct to survive. Lest us never forget, we are as much a primate as any other primate alive today, domesticated or not, because that is what we have become. Domesticated, overcivilized, and unwilling to do the things necessary to preserve our common civilization. Much as it pains me to do so, France is a member of Western civilization. What better way to expose French hypocrisy than to offer a Marine division to help win back each of those "little Fallujahs" that pockmark the French landscape? What better way to make them see the unreality that they have been living? These acts of vandalism which constitute nothing more than abject abhorrence of the law and the concept of civil society should be met with exactly the kind of force that only a full Marine division can bring to bear against such reprobates. How would the French public respond to a public offer from the President of the United States to the President of France to give whatever military support necessary to thwart this beginning that could end quickly or build to something much, much worse. The worst would be France ceding control of those areas that are Muslim to Muslim authorities and setting the stage for the end of France as a Western nation-state. The best, Chirac mobilizes the Army and begins shooting on sight anyone doing anything that violates the provisions of curfew and the normal law and order expectations of a civil society.
Can we expect any other European country to stand up to this latest threat to Western civilization when none of them value the civilization that we have built? Can we expect the EU to bring it's Common Defense Force or whatever its called into action to preserve law and order? Can we expect anything but more of Noonan's feeling that the wheels have come off the trolley, or perhaps we should get used to the idea that things are indeed broken, that we cannot just put the trolley back on the tracks and keep going, that we might have to sacrifice something of the comfort that our ancestors earned for us, how blissfully unaware they were that it was the very fact that they had to work for whatever they had in order to appreciate it that made them great and that makes us merely dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. It makes all of our vaunted technological prowess seem as vaccuous as the vaunted singularity that approaches will lead us to be, for what is it to possess life if one no longer hears its music? If the sublime fails to touch you in some small way, seeing first light at dawn, feeling the vast abundance that the division of labor within nature produced long before humanity ever conceived of language or humanity itself and knowing that there is something there, there is some greater meaning than just being masters of the moment. That if we truly do believe in a culture of life that it is our responsibility to build nobler goals than sales pitches and Sunday brunch with your Sunday best and Wednesday night bible study--to believe something is not enough anymore, we must do it. We must understand that the only logical conclusion of a culture of life is the recognition that spreading humanity and life, life in our image, culture and belief systems, must be our penultimate goal. That again, we can do little to change a culture's mind whose penultimate goal is the destruction of all other religions and the incorporation of all people of planet Earth into the umma and a permanent static existence that they would gladly force upon everyone, just as they trying to force it upon the people of France this very day.
It becomes my belief more and more each day that we cannot defeat an enemy that we will not call out in name, that we cannot win a war in which we continue to trade with known enemies, that we cannot ever hope to proclaim victory if we do not first declare war. And that unfortunately, we may not be able to pacify an enemy who believes they are the only truly spiritual people on the planet, that they and they alone possess the truth, and that that truth is laid down in one book. Remember how dangerous Western civilization was when people believed that the only truth that existed was contained in the Bible? Truth flows not from an authority, but from experience, in the cumulative experiences of the billions of people who lived on this planet that tonight continues its present course and speed. Ahead at roughly one half impulse Mr. Sulu.