He was a more drifting through an infinity of darkness touched with transient gleams. Sparkles which vanished as soon as observed; shimmer s which spread as if to illuminate the universe and then yielded again to darkness. An analogy Avro could understand, as it was a model he could appreciate for a its bare simplicity. A birth repeated again and again and each time, as yet, flaring only to die. Sense and logic destroyed time and time again by the forces of brute ignorance, but one day the cold glow of reason would eliminate all shadows and would illuminate the entire universe with its radiant splendor. (EC Tubb, Earth is Heaven, page 35)
The demonic Cyclan sound quite affable in this quote from the Dumarest saga but, of course, it depends whether you choose to think of Enlightenment values as good or bad! As has been noted previously, the future we (or 'they') seem to be heading towards is not so much a sequence of events (past-present-future) as a state of mind.
Without a course of progressive events -in terms of bodily movements - we are ever-nearing a sentience of sameness (the Amazon House of Things), and the sentence is delivered by the dragon of news, that itself seems to resemble motion-capture and expressive algorithms (prev.)
There was an Angus McKie story in HM with the punchline 'It all depends if you're an optimist or a pessimist', and that's about the size of it. If optimism is wrong, then all the ideals in the world aren't going to change the miasmic events.
That is to say, Enlightenment optimism that the values of the Enlightenment are right. While Enlightenment values may produce capitalist democracies, there has always been an alternate culture existing alongside or counter. In the 60s, Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolfe was a typical counter-culture motif (of anomie and danger to delicate psychic strands). The psychic strength of Art Nouveau figured in hippie posters.
There are other factors, such as Japanese prints and the oriental line. There is, of course, Nietzsche's flamboyant Zarathustra and the expression of the moment. Do, in fact, momentary acts run counter to the Enlightenment, in that they are not thought-out? Does the presence of thought and description destroy poetry as in Alan Moore's essay 'Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas'? (in Watchmen).
The sentience of sameness may just be another word for death (as in Korvac, W8). If the future is a state of mind, the course of events by contrast in a physical sense is cyclical and revives from decay. In other words, analytical thinking, for all its technical benefits, has limits.
The limits are those of the body, and Jean-Luc Godard made a similar point with the scene in Goodbye to Language of the guy on a toilet seat adopting the pose of The Thinker. Greek lewdness and innuendo are the other side of the coin to Apollonian reason (or the mirror of illusions) of modernity.
Where the body is concerned, differences count instead of mental sameness, in that the body is a fighting instrument. The anti-Enlightenment attitude espouses ritual fights between differences or sexes, much as in animal displays (see the Siena Palio.)
Ritual fighting (I mean as in boxing or martial arts) is in-the-moment and reactive, and there is a limit to the amount of thought possible (see Raducanu passim). Bruce Lee developed a system for this called Jeet Kune Do, which has no inflexible style and so is very flexible to events.
The body is a cyclical instrument of power as opposed to a mental system of information. In The Way of the Dragon, Lee pokes fun at Western morés when toward the beginning he's sitting on a toilet seat with the door wide open. The coarse humour grates on western sensibilities (of hygiene and reason.)
Momentary action and coarseness are the values that run counter to the Enlightenment and could therefore represent a counter-revolution (from Descartes and the course of technology.)
Partly, I guess, it's a religious choice. I noticed the von Trapps, the singing Austrians who went to America, have similar attitudes to the Amish. Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding, and if one understands religious precepts as opposed to technological ones that could be fair enough (especially psychically and in terms of physical strength.)
Coarseness, in that sense, could be horse manure (dirt which cleanses with strength). In that way, the cyclical life is strong and clearly takes place in invariable time (of the stars and Earthspin) as opposed to the variable time of machines and Relativity (or Relativity-machines).
Physical coarseness and fighting. This could be pulp heroes; it could be blues (Canned Heat, prev); it could be the self-government of rough neighborhoods (see Detroit, Drama3).
Fights, or ritual conflict, is not ideal but has a type of glamour (West Side Story). As an alternate to the sentience of sameness there may be something in it. Low-level feuding may simply be the best way for people to interact and retain independence of spirit.
In the reality of low-level feuds (often in a group as in Canned Heat), momentary action and coarseness are the key. One experiences life as opposed to being told what it is (by teacher stroke algorithm). In that sense, there's bound to be a much better balance between the abstract Apollo and the physical Dionysus.
In Fito de la Parra's memoir, Canned Heat are a stirring summary of that. The Bear in fact died virtually penniless, and it was only under Fito's expert guidance that the band regenerated.
Anything that's anti-Enlightenment (anti-establishment) has to have a much wider horizon of understanding (than technology). It has to essentially take in psyche and physical strength (beat-up volkswagens, the power of rust). This might imply that momentary action and coarseness are left to just 'happen', as was often the case in the 60s.
The fact is that without spirit and dirt there is zero momentary action and the whole thing is choreographed by social-media, algorithms and motion-capture. The future of dark psychology where truth is just the latest fiction.