Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography

The U.S. is not only “upside down” from the traditional forms of world map, but compressed into a narrow area near the top margin. The promotional text for this map urge the viewer to “See the World From Another Perspective.” […]

At an international conference in 2001, Hao presented a paper describing the projection eventually used to produce this world map, the “Generalized Equivalent-Difference Latitude Parallel Polyconic Projection.” […]

This map has been employed since 2004 by China’s Oceanic Administration and since 2006 as an official military map of the People’s Liberation Army, used in establishing and maintaining the nation’s strategic navigation system. This topographic version of the map was first released to the public in 2014.

A sympathetic theme threaded throughout…

Romano Guardini:

Indeed man has always known anxiety, and even if science and technology succeed in giving him the appearance of security he will continue to know anxiety. But the causes and the nature of anxiety differ with differing times.… Modern anxiety … arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a “real” or a symbolic place in reality. In spite of his actual position on earth he is a being without security. The very needs of man’s senses are left unsatisfied, since he has ceased to experience a world which guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence.

____

Most intensely modern man sought for answers within his own soul. The loss of the old, accepted vision of the world denied to man his chance of coming to terms with himself, of answering the questions posed by existence. He was shaken, insecure, exposed to the mystery of limitless realities. As occurs during all crises the depths of human nature were excited. Anguish, violence, greed, rebellion against order—more compellingly than ever these primitive drives stirred the soul of man. Both word and deed had been stripped bare by the new vision of man, shaking his deepest-held convictions. Enigmatic powers awoke out of the religious spirit; the force of the numinous impinged itself directly upon the human spirit, either from within the spirit itself or from the world at large. Not only was the numinous beneficent now but also bewildering, even destructive in its impact. Every fundamental question shook man with a new intensity: salvation and damnation, man’s just relation to God, the true ordering for human life. As time passed the tensions within man’s soul between the will to truth and the drive toward error, between good and evil, increased and weighed down his spirit. As the age moved on even the probity of human existence itself struck against the oppressed soul of man.

____

Assuredly the world as a whole no longer encompasses and shelters man as once it did; it has become a far different thing. And it has gained thereby new significances for the religious life of man. […]

The modern era was fond of justifying technology and rested its defense upon the argument that technology promoted the well-being of man. In doing so it masked the destructive effects of a ruthless system. I do not believe that the age to come will rest with such an argument. The man engaged today in the labor of “technics” knows full well that technology moves forward in final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the race. He knows in the most radical sense of the term that power is its motive—a lordship of all; that man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature. His action bespeaks immense possibilities not only for “creation” but also for destruction, especially for the destruction of humanity itself. Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers grow day by day. Once the “autonomous” state has broken all bonds, it will be able to deliver the last coup de grâce to human nature itself. …

Within this area of choice an emotion partaking of the religious seems to penetrate again. This religious feeling has no link with the natural piety of Giordano Bruno or of Goethe; rather, it is bound up intrinsically with the dangers for himself and for his earth which man has found locked up with his technological power. The new religious emotion wells up from a sense of the profound loneliness which man knows in the midst of all that is now summed up by the term “the World”; man’s emotion grows out of the realization that he approaches his ultimate decision, that he must face it with responsibility, with resolution and with bravery.

____

If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding “Christian” culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: “it will, if possible, deceive even the elect” (Matthew xxiv, 24).

Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? …

These eschatological conditions will show themselves, it seems to me, in the religious temper of the future. With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here … If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger.

---

And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

---

Romano Guardini:

Those who maintain that these values and cultural attitudes are simply one with the autonomous development of human nature misunderstand the essential role of a Christian economy of Revelation, Faith and Grace. In fact the misunderstanding leads—permit me to speak plainly—to a kind of dishonesty which, as anyone who takes a clear-eyed view can see, is integral to the contemporary world itself.

… This truth becomes clear, however, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation … When man fails to ground his personal perfection in Divine Revelation, he still retains an awareness of the individual as a rounded, dignified and creative human being. He can have no consciousness, however, of the real person who is the absolute ground of each man, an absolute ground superior to every psychological or cultural advantage or achievement.

Robert Inchausti:

The incarnation, like the resurrection, and like the very notion of divinity itself, cannot be reduced to a precept, fact, or theory; nor is it even, strictly speaking, a doctrine. It is, rather, a revelation that must be experienced in order to be understood, a reality wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, miniaturized into a narrative that proves itself apodictically true by the realities it reveals.

______

More from Guardini:

No man truly aware of his own human nature will admit that he can discover himself in the theories of modern anthropology—be they biological, psychological, sociological or any other. Only the accidents of man—his attributes, his relations, his forms—make up these theories; they never take man simply as he is. They speak about man, but they never really see man. They approach him, but they never truly find him. They handle him, but they never grip him as he actually is. They take hold of him by statistics; they integrate him into organizations; they put him into use. Forever they play out the same grotesque and fearful comedy, but its incidents strike always upon a phantom. Even when man is subjected to forces which misuse him or mutilate or destroy him, he is not the creature at all which those forces aim to subject.

As seen by the contemporary mind man does not exist. The mind of today attempts continually to lock man into categories where he will not fit. Mechanical, biological, psychological or sociological abstractions are all variations of [the same] basic urge…

The threefold result is evident. Insofar as modern man saw the world simply as “nature,” he absorbed it into himself. Insofar as he understood himself as a “personality,” he made himself the Lord of his being, and insofar as he conceived a will for “culture,” he strove to make of existence the creation of his own hands.

… Culture arose before the vision of modern man and took its stance opposite God and His Revelation.

It is cheap and false to condemn the medieval use of authority as “slavery.” Modern man makes this judgment not merely because he enjoys the discovery of autonomous investigation but because he resents the Middle Ages. His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution. But authority is needed not only by the childish but also in the life of every man, even the most mature. Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque—force.

Again we must insist that the utterly crucial truth for medieval man was the fact of Divine Revelation. Above and beyond everything given man in this world Revelation was the absolute fulcrum. Set forth within the dogma of the Church, Revelation was accepted upon faith by the individual. From one point of view the Church bound and limited man by its authority; from another point of view the Church made it possible for man to surmount his world. She gave a vision which of itself was vast and liberating in scope. Revealed truth was conceptualized by means of a delicate logic which distinguished and then united all of reality. The theological system erected upon these foundations unfolded itself as a great synthesis. In the modern sense of the term, however, scientific explanation was almost unknown.

As usual, the poem is superior …

Romano Guardini:

One readily sees how little man today is prepared to take charge of this awful inheritance of power acquired up to the present moment, when one adds to these dangers the lulling sense of security for all with which man now accepts the current power culture. […]

Nature is rising up in that very form which subdued the wilderness—in the form of power itself. All the abysses of primeval ages yawn before man, all the wild choking growth of the long-dead forests press forward from this second wilderness, all the monsters of the desert wastes, all the horrors of darkness are once more upon man. He stands again before chaos, a chaos more dreadful than the first because most men go their own complacent ways without seeing, because scientifically-educated gentlemen everywhere deliver their speeches as always, because the machines are running on schedule and because the authorities function as usual.

Jean Follain:

FACE THE ANIMAL

It’s not always easy 
to face the animal 
even if it looks at you 
without fear or hate 
it does so fixedly 
and seems to disdain 
the subtle secret it carries 
it seems better to feel 
the obviousness of the world 
that noisily day and night 
drills and damages 
the silence of the soul.

Translated from the French by Heather McHugh

Robert Inchausti:

Our five-hundred-year fascination with calculation is withering on the lonely, dissipated vine of the disseminated postmodern “self.”

Romano Guardini:

Man has the right, a right in self-defense, to seek the original freshness of his dual nature—in his body and in his soul—in order to feel at home again even in this lost world of symbols which has been advanced within the last decades, which has been demanded by all the exertions of technological man.

Every man who meditates on these issues senses the need for decision which confronts him.

Alexandra Petri’s satirical piece in The Atlantic reminded me of one those never-posteds, something from Nijay Gupta on the Slow Theology podcast.

Petri:

The terrorists are the ones without masks. They’re the ones yelling “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shame!” or blowing whistles. Sometimes they brandish cameras at federal agents. Sometimes they wantonly swallow whole canisters of pepper spray. These are just some of their diabolical tactics.

Gupta, on the 9th commandment:

It makes a lot of sense why this commandment meant so much to God to make it into the top 10. Because if God‘s people are intended to be the light of Yahweh in the ancient world, and they are not trustable — nothing matters. Nothing whatsoever matters if these are not people who can be trusted for their words. It is impossible to be a covenant of Yahweh, a community of Yahweh, and be a deceptive community, because this is a God who cares about reality.

I think this is essentially the same thing that Hannah Arendt was saying when she said, in defense of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that much more meaningful than declaring “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let justice be done though the world may perish”) is to say “Fiat veritas pereat mundus” (“Let truth be done though the world may perish”).

“Is it not obvious,” she asks, “that [every virtue and every principle] become mere chimeras if the world, where alone they can be manifested, is in jeopardy?” She goes on:

[N]o human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely, λέγειν τα έόντα, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.

Here’s how Arendt ends that famous essay “Truth and Politics”:

Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion. In short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were ruled by interest and power, that there would be no political realm at all if we were not bound to take care of life’s necessities.… From this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life—of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. However, what I meant to show here is that this whole [political] sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is limited—that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence.  It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will.  And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

— Wendell Berry

That is the poem with which Paul Kingsnorth ends his October 2025 Wendell Berry lecture at The Berry Center.

A few things from/on the lecture:

• Mary Berry: “My father has told me all of my life that if you set an intention and make a commitment to something, the help you need will come. … Since starting The Berry Center in 2011, I’ve known this to be true. Tonight, I am happy to say that the right person has come to us, and he has written the right book.”
• Kingsnorth: “And the reason I don’t have a comforting and cohesive answer is that there isn’t one really. And why should there be? Because if we’re going to identify our enemy as a giant, soulless machine, and the alternative as a local, human-scale, creative act of rebellion and rootedness, then we’re not going to arrive at a nice five-point plan for the government to implement, or a new revolutionary theory by which we can abolish techno-feudalism.” What I will add to this is something I have said before and have been saying more often: Sometimes, even often, it is enough for humans to know what to say no to, because the imago-Dei-scaled soul remains. As Kingsnorth says a bit later, “I am optimistic about the fact that people wish to remain human, and I think that’s what’s going to save us. … Because the good thing about human-scale work is that it is human-scale.” But of course, we have to actually say no.
• For the Kurt Vonnegut “envelope story” Kingsnorth tells, here’s a short CBS transcript of the original where I believe it first appeared.
• There is, in the poem above, a hint at the cards I have not yet shown — that is, my own hesitancy or caution regarding Kingsnorth and the Machine and all that. The bulk of that caution is basically covered in an unpublished (unposted?) essay last year, but it had nothing to do with Kingsnorth and was written before his book crossed my radar or was even published.
• But… the boy wakes and there are thoughts left for another time.

Charles Carman:

And yet I don’t find Kingsnorth’s story overall to be specious. Something indeed is afoot, and it may indeed destroy us. And this is the terrible challenge of Kingsnorth’s book. I might wish for a more compelling account. Yet, being slowly destroyed is itself a state of ambiguity, the definiteness of which is found precisely when it is too late. Something is being unmade, and if we wait till we are certain of the details, the risk taken in delay is complete forfeiture. A human future, whatever may come, may depend on taking definite steps before one has complete confidence.

Finally a review I can get onboard with and that touches what is, to my reading, the heart of much of the hesitancy around Kingsnorth. Carman’s analogy with Poirot’s hesitation is spot-on. (And don’t miss the title of the piece.)

I still think that much of the disappointment is more or less par for the course. For example, given the differences between Kingsnorth and McGilchrist, just in the type of writers and thinkers they are, the contrasts between them that Carman points to are largely ones that I have a hard time imagining not being present.

I have offered two defenses of Kingsnorth, both prompted almost exclusively by what I take to be unfair, dismissive readings and comparisons. I have one more in me, one that very much preceded the other two. And it touches the same question Carmen asks: How much do we believe it? Will we take the train today?

And of course, how do you get more people on that train?

Hopefully I will coalesce its scattered notepad existence soon.

Dan Alcantara:

The mourners are gathered around. Jesus is moved and troubled by Mary’s weeping. And so he says…

“Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. (John 11:34-35, ESV)

When Jesus says, “Come and see”, it is a call to believe and so have eternal life. When Jesus says, “Come and see”, it is the voice which brought all creation into existence calling his lost sheep home from the wilderness. When Jesus says, “Come and see”, he is pointing toward the cross upon which he hung.

But when the mourners say, “Come and see”, all they can show Jesus is the consequence of sin. The grave. Our legacy is one of death. Come and see what humanity has wrought in its rebellion. Come and see the fruit of free will and liberty. Come and see, and it is a grave.

It is no wonder that Jesus weeps. But, of course, the story does not end there.

For, with a word, Jesus calls Lazarus to life from death. From darkness to the light. He shows that even the worst outcome, death, is no match for the words of the one who has life in himself even as the Father has life in himself.

There is a richness to God’s word that you can only begin to experience after repeated readings and time meditating. The Bible isn’t an information book or a rule book. It isn’t a magic book or a talisman. But it is powerful.