How many Black Princes are out there? The answer: So many that retreating to the castle seems like the only alternative. General Sherman would have approved. Just lay waste to as much as you can.
What’s the alternative for the opposition beside retreating to a place where everyone is likeminded, some castle with impregnable walls of ideology? And so, today, we find ourselves more than ever living in a time of mental isolationism. All the surrounding farms have been destroyed, crops of new thought burned online.
Maybe attempts to obliterate opposing thought have increased in a nuclear age. Wars have always been hard on the innocent, and generals have long obliterated what they could without regard for collateral damage. Our nuclear age hasn’t changed that; it has simply provided a more effective way of accomplishing chevauchée, the method of warfare instituted by the Black Prince during that long struggle between England and France his father had begun in 1337 and that lasted until 1453.
A war that lasts for more than a century is bound to affect its share of innocents. Now we are in the midst of another war, a war of political ideologies that is also more than a century in the running. It’s newest weapon, a weapon capable of devastating the landscape of ideas: The Web.
What are the innocent left to do but retreat where the likeminded imprison themselves behind the fortifications of their likemindedness? And the product of this modern chevauchée? No conquest, but rather a protective, defensive isolationism.
The surrounding farms are no longer capable of producing crops of new ideas. Both warring sides have “heard it all” and label what they hear as “talking points” endlessly repeated. But behind the walls no one can hear what those on the other side are saying.
There’s little benefit to laying waste to every aspect of the opposition. In doing so an army destroys what might serve its own interests at some unknown time. Look around, ideological attacks, like the Black Prince’s chevauchée and Sherman’s March to the Sea leave very little that’s useful to either side of a conflict, even an ideological one.
What are we conquering when there’s nothing left but ideological walls that isolate?
What’s the alternative for the opposition beside retreating to a place where everyone is likeminded, some castle with impregnable walls of ideology? And so, today, we find ourselves more than ever living in a time of mental isolationism. All the surrounding farms have been destroyed, crops of new thought burned online.
Maybe attempts to obliterate opposing thought have increased in a nuclear age. Wars have always been hard on the innocent, and generals have long obliterated what they could without regard for collateral damage. Our nuclear age hasn’t changed that; it has simply provided a more effective way of accomplishing chevauchée, the method of warfare instituted by the Black Prince during that long struggle between England and France his father had begun in 1337 and that lasted until 1453.
A war that lasts for more than a century is bound to affect its share of innocents. Now we are in the midst of another war, a war of political ideologies that is also more than a century in the running. It’s newest weapon, a weapon capable of devastating the landscape of ideas: The Web.
What are the innocent left to do but retreat where the likeminded imprison themselves behind the fortifications of their likemindedness? And the product of this modern chevauchée? No conquest, but rather a protective, defensive isolationism.
The surrounding farms are no longer capable of producing crops of new ideas. Both warring sides have “heard it all” and label what they hear as “talking points” endlessly repeated. But behind the walls no one can hear what those on the other side are saying.
There’s little benefit to laying waste to every aspect of the opposition. In doing so an army destroys what might serve its own interests at some unknown time. Look around, ideological attacks, like the Black Prince’s chevauchée and Sherman’s March to the Sea leave very little that’s useful to either side of a conflict, even an ideological one.
What are we conquering when there’s nothing left but ideological walls that isolate?
RSS Feed