Motus Mentis

Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote five years ago. It still seems current, so I thought I’d repost it here today.

The expanded modern liberal Western mind, stripped of reverence for its cultural heritage ”” and having shed, as a snake sheds an outgrown skin, the scaffolding and buttresses of traditional standards and valuations with whose support it was originally constructed ”” now floats, weightless, somewhere above the ground, inflated and unmoored, with no point of leverage from which to engage the massive objects moving all around it. It can only push against its internal parts, standing on one piece of itself to grapple with another; it has no longer any place to stand from which it can seize and take the measure of anything outside itself. It occupies a seductively agreeable vantage; from above the hills and valleys one can see a long way. But as it drifts away, it leaves behind on the ground below some very attractive real-estate ”” our ancient home and birthright ”” that will not lie vacant for long.