Wednesday 28 March 2007

Pic of the day: American Lightbringer.

Conservative Lightbringers

I dreamed that Lightbringer was setting off a kind of Republican revolution, or Conservative renewal or some such, in the northern United States and in Canada. He was appealing to people to remember their conservative roots, and it succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. It was spreading like a wildfire by the time I woke up.

Ironically this is something the imaginary superhero would never do. The comic specifically stresses his humility, to not believe that you are special in other ways just because you have a superpower. This is why he doesn't want to give interviews, doesn't want to expand beyond the one city where he operates etc.

There is no doubt about his political leanings, though, and little enough about his religion. And he shares those with someone else, whom I suspect is the real "Lightbringer" in my dream.

***

I have been following Robert W. Godwin's blog One Cosmos for months now. It is named after his book, One Cosmos under God, which I have also bought. The book is much more sophisticated. I don't think Godwin could have written it today, and he also admits that he no longer agrees with all of it. Most notably, it seems he has become a more clear-cut, simple-minded conservative believer. Less integralism, more absolutism. But most notable is his current focus on conservative American politics. To say he demonizes the Left would not be an exaggeration. Actually, he is quite frank about calling them Satanic.

Personally I don't accuse people of evil if stupidity is a good enough explanation, and when it comes to socialism, stupidity is its beginning and end. But I have written about that in detail before. It is not an accident that "communism" collapsed when people got access to information technology; it will happen again and again. My native Norway has become far less socialist in my lifetime, although it still has roughly the same political parties it used to have. When I was young, I was labeled a fascist for saying that the State should not have a monopoly on broadcasting. Today, the notion is exactly the opposite: That only a totalitarian state would want to monopolize broadcasting. I also remember when we had to apply to a government agency for telephone, although at the time it was pure formality. After a few months you would always get it. But it was still considered a natural thing for the state to have in hand. Today you can buy telephone subscriptions where you buy chocolates. And so on and on.

I share Godwin's (and Lightbringer's) basic conviction that the Right is right and the Left is wrong, that individual freedom and individual responsibility is the only way forward. At the same time, I certainly don't share Godwin's ethnocentric beliefs in the infallibility of America and the Republican party. They are both falling like lame ducks right now. Unless you think it is perfectly normal for a nation to borrow $2000,000,000 a day with no idea of how to ever pay it back? It is not enough to say "God bless America!" when you're president of it. You also have to follow God's rules, which also happen to be laws of nature. One of these is "The borrower becomes thrall to the lender."

Luckily Godwin does not require people to agree with him. In fact, neither do I, but I would say he does so even less. His purpose is to bring about "centering" in others, that is to say, make it easier for them to turn away from their scattered thoughts and toward the Absolute. This is an ongoing process that he stands in, and shares with his readers. It is for this reason only that I keep reading his blog religiously. He is also a kind of Lightbringer... although the light is filtered through a deep blue stone of American ethnocentricity. Even so, it is better than darkness shining through the clearest of crystal... for the simple reason that darkness doesn't shine at all. In the blue (vMeme) light, one can use one's own knowledge of the true colors to fill inn. Or do we even know the true colors? Here in Norway, almost everything is bathed in the Green light of our own ethnocentricity. I like to think I have transcended and included that, but how much of the spectrum does I really know?

***

That's the kind of thoughts I get from reading, but of course the effect is very different in others. Some are naturally inclined toward confrontation and debate rather than pooling our understanding, so there is always a lot of polemic going on. I am not convinced that this ever brings any Light. I largely agree with the late Christian mystic Elias Aslaksen, who said as a greeting of farewell: "Flee all discussion like the plague, yeah, like the fire of Hell." Debating facts is fine, as I see it, but the moment you feel anger coming into your conversation, you know that you have wandered into the darkness.

So you see, there is always something to learn ... even from a comic book character in a dream.