Wal-Mart Isn't An Eschatology, Either

As the old folks say back home, I'm "outta heart" with Doug Wilson. First of all, I can't remember my username for his blog, and since he changed the furniture around on there, I can't figure out how to get it to send me a reminder. Second, he posted something on there that I desperately want to respond to, but, like I said, I can't remember my username.

In this post of his, he starts out talking about the Pretenders song in which Chrissy Hynde asks what happened to the Ohio she used to know, since now instead of rivers and trees, it's a shopping mall. Then he goes into how folks who get fixated on the good old days are experiencing a type of arrested development and refusing to move ahead with the general eschatological momentum. He sums all of this up by saying that "Nostalgia is not an eschatology".

Well, let me begin by confessing that I decide what I am going to think largely by checking Doug's blog to see what he thinks. I am a product of American public education. As a result, I am mostly untrained in the art of thinking for myself, and my ideas are largely derivative. Whatever, it's one of the things us average folks just accept at some point. Nevertheless, I'm going to go out on a dialectical limb and disagree with the guru on this one.

Now on one hand I can of course appreciate what he's saying. The past is filled with many heroic epochs infinitely more valuable the 1950's but nevertheless infintely less valuable than whatever it is we will experience when God's will is done on Earth as it is in Heaven. From this perspective, for me to lament the archetypally fecund first half of the 2oth century is a bit retrograde. If eschatological man is going to be infinitely greater than Charlemagne, it goes without saying that he will surpass Barney Fife.

But on the other hand, the sentimental thing we refer to as nostalgia is not the only thing folks experience when they meditate on, or value, or even long for, the past. C.S. Lewis touches on this in The Weight of Glory. Wordsworth was wrong to consider his childhood the actual source of the loftiness and transcendence he perceived in the world, but he was not wrong to mine his childhood for the intimations of glory that his childhood actually did contain. The past is as much God's work as the future is. The acorn exists for the sake of the oak, but an acorn is not contemptible because it is not an oak.

Speaking of Lewis, I think he might agree with me that what we call decadent nations are those which more nearly attained their own measure of glory in the past than they are doing at present. I am thinking of something like what Lewis calls Logres in That Hideous Strength: that true angel of the British Isles that has always existed along with that other development we call merely England. If anything like this is possible, then looking back is sometimes really a type of looking forward, a way of hoping that what is and always has been best and most glorious about a nation will finally prevail.

Lastly, there's the whole thing too where what we call progress really ain't. That's what I mean when I say that Wal-Mart isn't an eschatology, either. Nostalgia or no, I would have preferred the indigenous live oaks and cypresses around Orlando to all the plastic trees in Disneyworld.