I have added brief updates to the Davidson, Vogt, and McCanney Source pages. I hope we hear from Vogt soon. No sooner had I published the update, that the countdown ticker on his website disappeared. Some of us recovering from hospitalization for covid infections are struggling and have good days, and sometimes, not so good days. But see my McCanney update on “diseases from space.”
The intellectual leadership in the West is bankrupt. It has surrendered itself to the nihilists. When the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox nations of Europe and the Americas ought to be finding common ground with the now restored Russian Orthodox Church – and purging the criminal syndicate which has afflicted the world for over a century – instead, they are seeking the dismemberment of the Russian Federation, which if successful, would mean the return of Gog and Magog. (See the Pesher of the Presentation, 2022, scheduled for publication in February).
John Taylor Gatto, the honored public educator in the New York City school system (now deceased) and home school advocate, argued in his pithy and insightful books that it was impossible for modern education to produce the level of literacy and critical thinking which resulted in the generation which founded the American Republic (e.g. The Underground History of American Education, Oxford Village Press, 2000). The common schoolboy could discuss the Constitution competently. Even in my generation, school children were still required to pass a test on the U.S. Constitution to graduate from the 8th Grade, and also, to pass tests for both the federal and state constitutions to graduate from high school. Today, the entire educational system has deliberately failed to produce an “informed electorate”: which was the very legal foundation for the compulsory attendance laws a century before.
But there is an irony: the more ignorant a person is, very often the more self-confident and arrogant he becomes. In other words, knowledge ought to produce humility. Incompetence and the absence of patriotism among educators are being justified by various leveling ideologies such as socialism and critical race theory. Ignorance produces incompetence; incompetence results in impatience, and then, impatience ends in nihilism – the “valley of the shadow of death” which lies before us.
Dr. Francis Schaeffer, the famous Evangelical intellectual from the late 20th Century, said nihilism would be the end result of the atheism of the Western intellectual tradition. His book, How Should We Then Live, The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Fleming Revell, 1976), is well worth your time. It was also made into a 10-part documentary movie production.
— JWS
