It’s another to ignore the reason he was interested and to forget his area of study back in Vienna. It’s one thing to disregard an old man doubling down on his writings out of his expertise. Myths are myths, not edited history, they whispered. Catastrophes just never have happened as he enquired of in Worlds in Collision, they screamed. The story goes that his sidelining was because of bad geology (sin of anti-uniformitarianism) and orbital science (the effects of electro-magnetism along gravity, a theory since rehabilitated). This professor was still at home or going to his first school when Velikovsky, a doctor trained in psychiatry by Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Stekel, came up with “cultural amnesia.” Alas, the doctor has been a victim of the process. If you believe Hobbes was looking back from the city on the hill of modern enlightenment, please remember that they still hung convicts in cages and left heads on stakes on London Bridge and other places for the people to see.Ī careless Wikipedia read could lead you to think Russell Jacoby coined the term in the mid 1970’s. Perhaps its course is like the background violence that (still) surrounds life in many settings too much like the “nasty, brutish and short” Hobbes supposed of earlier times. Perhaps it is most like our reactions to vicarious trauma which is at some distance from the individual. As amnesia is one of the defense mechanisms of man (or woman) so social amnesia is a defense against collective traumas. So can institutions.īecause I throw the term “social amnesia” around so freely, I want to take a little time to give it a chance to become part of your tool-set for interpreting the world at large. Just as the child violently abused might loose recall, so may a society loose the truth of its past. Just as individuals have mechanisms to forget inconvenient truths or traumatic events from the past, so does the community, nation and globe. When I started this podcast as Spurgeon Audio, I had no idea how long I was going to keep it going or what I was going to do with it ultimately.Social Amnesia and American Corrections and Rehabilitation Honestly it served as a way for me to both study one of the most influential preachers and teachers for me personally, as well as a way to just begin to exercise some of the ways that God has gifted me. It gave me an excuse to read, write, to dive deep, to talk to some really interesting people, and to grow my own faith apart from simply repeating what I heard from others. I started it right when the heyday of reformed-_ podcasts were just taking off, when the Reformed Pubcast was roaring along and the network it spawned cranked out nearly a dozen shows with similar ideas behind them. Many of them including the flagship show have gone away, and now, time has come for this podcast to close its doors for the time being. I’ve taken some hiatuses of varying lengths in the past, but the intention was always to return to the same show, or to revamp and refresh it. I’ve decided that it’s time to relinquish this to the annals of yet another podcast floating in the ether. Grace links mankind in a common brotherhood grace makes the great man give his hand to the poor, and confess a heavenly relationship grace constrains the intellectual, the learned, the polite, to stood from their dignity to take hold of the ignorant and unlettered, and call them friends grace weaves the threads of our separate individualities into one undivided unity. Let the gospel be really felt in the mind and it will toll the knell of selfishness, it will bring down the proud from their elevated solitude, and it will restore the downtrodden to the rights of our common manhood. I want to thank everyone for their prayers and support as I’ve been taking a little hiatus from podcasting. The past few months have been extremely busy. Among other things I have been involved in my church’s committee responsible for seeking a new pastor, I’ve been making my own contributions to the Sunday sermons (which you can hear on the C3 Denton podcast), and of course I’ve been adjusting to fatherhood of our now 1 year old sweet little boy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |