The other day Cardinal George Pell of Australia, a very brave and good conservative Catholic, dismissed the Ben Op because it seems elitist to him. This, I think, is what’s behind the people - often on the Christian Right - who construe the Ben Op idea as “head for the hills and burrow down deep”: they find the diagnosis deeply disturbing (and they should!), and are grasping for reasons to reject it all. To put it another way, it’s not that I think these questions are unimportant, but that I think they are often asked in the spirit of, if we can show that the Benedict Option causes people to behave in illiberal ways, or other problematic ways, then we negate the entire critique. I get the idea that some of the people proposing them, though they probably don’t realize it, are basically saying that if the Apocalypse is not going to be kindly, and allow us to construct a civilizational ark that follows building codes set down by late liberal civilization, well, then, we are not going to have truck with this dark vision! What people like that don’t understand is that if I’m right about the decline-and-fall, then we are all going to be faced with a sauve qui peut (“save who you can”) situation regarding our religion and culture. People sometimes ask me, “Where is a place for queer people in the Benedict Option?” or “What about poor people?” or “What about people of color?” These questions are not unimportant, but they are very much second-order questions. Watching Foundation gave me a certain perspective on particular objections to the Benedict Option. It might not take place in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.
If we hope to stop it, we are going to have to live in ways that few people are willing to live. I believe that we are headed for a very nasty crash, and that it’s probably too late to stop it. Watching the show, and taking note of the parallels, it struck me that “the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop” is exactly the way I would put it regarding our own Empire. Seldon and his protege barely escape with their lives. In the show, the Emperors (they are a triad) do not want to hear this bad news, because they are correctly afraid that it would demoralize the imperial population. The Ben Op tie-in, obviously, is that Hari Seldon (played by Jared Harris in the new series) foresees the Empire falling, and wants to preserve its knowledge in these Foundations settlements - scientific monasteries. To implement his plan, Seldon creates the Foundations-two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy-to preserve the spirit of science and civilization, and thus become the cornerstones of the new galactic empire. Although the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. The premise of the stories is that, in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematical sociology.
#Ark invisible floating foundation tv
This Wikipedia summary is accurate, and covers most of what you learn in the first episode of the Apple TV series:
#Ark invisible floating foundation series
Well, obviously I haven’t had time to read the books, but the first episode of the Apple series tells me a lot.
Then yesterday, a friend in Texas texted to tell me that I should read those Asimov books to explain the Ben Op to people. I did, and really liked the first episode. The other night, a friend in Kansas said that I should watch the new Apple TV take on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels, because it sounds like the Benedict Option.