A collection of posts looking for value in the brownfields of more recent popular culture. How some of the more abstract insights from the regular Band play out in general culture from after early 20th century Modernism settled down. After our World War I "big picture" cut-off. Things that resonate today in some way other than deep historical and or structural meanings. Immediate stuff that packages truths in appealing forms.
There are a few good reasons for this. The first is that it furthers our fundamental mission of promoting logos-based morality through truth and beauty. Sharing pathways to the good that the beast system hides and distorts and how to find them.
We’ve never wanted to be anyone else’s visionary. We do want people to see for themselves.
The main point of the Band is to explore what we can know and how we can know it. For our own purposes and as a counter to the ever deeper and more insane lies blanketing the modern West. This has led us to personally-transformative insights into the nature of reality. The problem is that it's abstract and general. It's one thing to know that at the ultimate reality level of God the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are synonymous. And that we walk in the footsteps of our Creator when we mold the decaying stuff of an entropic universe into things of utility and beauty. But what does that mean if you're just looking for something unpozzed to read?
These posts bridge the gap between the big ontological and epistemological patterns and everyday life in the material world. Loose deontology - a sort of moral reasoning applied to cultural objects. As he often does, C. S. Lewis captures the larger point.
These posts look at the hows.
There are a lot of reasons to do this. It serves readers by making abstract concepts visible in concrete illustrations and showing pattern recognition at work. Big picture, the 20th century is too recent and wrapped in deception to take sweeping views like older times. But the occult posts showed us we can get at larger truths from small pieces without having to settle on grand conclusions. The same applies to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Finally, it's a way to explore logos on the material level. This the foggiest and most varied level of reality and hardest to approach systematically. But the way we approach the material empirically makes little pieces of logos the only real way to develop discernment.
This links to a summary of the central concepts running through the Band - the ontological-epistemological hierarchy and vertical logos mainly. Plus links to the posts where they were developed for further reading.
As for us?
We're still looking for truth in culture.
Here's where we're at...
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