Sky-Cult
After some millennia of Christianity it is no wonder that we live in a culture in which the sky is the supreme realm and radical horizon of all endeavors. Every church points triumphantly to the sky and our dumb culture is sky obsessed, with its many exploding rockets, visions of mars, skyscrapers, skymiles, our increasing fear of death-from-above and where the ultimate goal is to climb the ladder into ever increasing latitudes of wealth and success. Verticality is the principle vector, encoded into our religious and economic values, and the life goal, of pretty much everyone, is to get as far away from earth as possible, to become a CEO, to live in a penthouse, to look down from heaven onto the dispossessed in hell. The east, for a long time, somehow avoided this; because earth and sky, yin and yang, are in a state of continual and reciprocal flux, there is no privileging of one term over the over; earth and sky belong to one another; earth holds up the sky, and the sky seeds the earth. Not so in the Christian west where the earth is fallen and cursed, fit to be trashed on our journey to the stars; like in the motto of Kansas: ad astra per aspera. This dichotomy, where earth is hell, and heaven is sky, is precisely the platonic trajectory that got us into our current jackpot of ecological catastrophe and unmitigated wealth transfer, from the earthbound many who do not have to the lofty few who already have way too much. It’s 2400 years of trying to escape the cave. But the cave, of course, cannot be escaped.
