>>11872294"When Tertullian said that the Incarnation is an absurdity and therefore certain, it expressed a viewpoint of religious fanatic, who worshipped what he called absurd. The modern cult of absurdity is different: the Dadaists and their ilk do not worship public urinals or Hamlet slipping on soap or Beethoven symphonies played backwards.
When real Oriental mystics proclaim the primacy of Nirvana, their self flagellating, insect-revering lives are testimony to the fact that in some terms the mean it. When twentieth century Western Orientalists say that all is "nothingness", they say it on a full stomach; the zero they preach through the latest microphones does not disturb their routines, their footnotes, their cocktail parties, or their royalties.
When the art of savages portrayed man as a cringing monstrosity, it was a terrified attempt to placate the jealous gods of the tribe. When modern savage emulators portray their vision of man, they do not believe the witchcraft they borrow; they do it not in terror, but with a snicker; while their counterparts in the humanities expressing the same vision, take pride in being "flexible": they are not disturbed if someone denies the Oedipus complex, and substitutes as the key to human nature an inferiority comlpex or an orgasm complex or a collective unconsciouss or any equivalent, so long as it is an equivalent, which leaves a single constant untouched.
What the moderns actually believe in and seek to accomplish is not the exaltation of an absurdity above the power of science, but the sabotage of science; not the adoration of das Nichts, but the defeat of this world; not human abasement as a desperate plea to the gods, but human abasement for the sake of human abasement."
