See the list of topic categories here.
The current crisis of Christianity has not been caused by science, or by history, but by the new media. Religious progressivism is the effort to adapt the Christian doctrines to the opinions sponsored by news agencies and advertising agents.
A constant flow of news invades existence today, destroying the silence and peace of humble lives, without putting an end to their tedium.
The public confession of certain ignominies only serves to muddy the waters and hide the lowest.
The media today and the modern means of communication allow the average citizen to learn about everything without understanding anything.
Every day it is easier to know what to despise: whatever the modern admires and journalism praises.
The abuse of the printing press is due to the scientific method and the expressionist aesthetic.
To the former because it allows any mediocre person to write a correct and useless monograph,
and to the latter because it legitimizes the effusions of any fool.
It is surprising that the advocates of democratic culture do not suspect what a grim future they prepare. The spectacle of the leisure activities of the current bourgeoisie and working class should make it clear that the best the future can promise is an abundance of cheap detective novels, light comedies, and sentimental films, propaganda shorts, and a plethora of lectures on popular science.
Every topic that circulates in the newspapers is debased.
Journalistic news is the modern substitute for experience.
Apart from a few lofty spirits, men’s views on contemporary events are so similar from ages to age, from day to day, that we can imagine a newspaper, written once and for all, which intelligent people would be content to read only once, but which would be published daily for everyone, with care taken only to change the names and locations each day.
The public listens only to the one who moans or the one who lies.
These days, companies are writing advertising jingles for leftist causes.
Liberalism has not fought for the freedom but for the irresponsibility of the press.
The journalist imagines he is as important as what he reports.
With the invention of the radio, illiteracy no longer protects the masses against the invasion of bourgeois ideals.
If the cultural loudspeakers were silent for a moment, the public would return to the aesthetic of the last century. The admirer of abstract paintings would again hang on the walls of his house, with a sigh of relief, those narrative scenes, sentimental works, or discreetly sexual paintings.
The leftist press conjures for the left those great men that nature and history do not create for them.
Media which is technically “for adults” is not for mature minds.
In every era there are two types of readers: those curious about news and those fond of literature.
The stage of history has become suffocating. From the wide open space of prehistory, we have reached the possible ubiquity of the most trivial event.
To become a journalist is to receive dispensation from applying intellectual rigor.
The cultural propaganda of recent decades (academic, journalistic, etc) has not resulted in conversion but has, like so many a missionary, only caused the natives to celebrate their ceremonies in secret.
So long as the entertainment is sufficiently vulgar, no one complains.
Where it is possible to say whatever one wants to say, no one makes the effort to say only what matters.
The modern means of communication give imbecility a seductive prestige.
The importance of an event is inversely proportional to the space dedicated to it by the newspapers.
Sentences on the day of Judgment will be less strict and emphatic than those of any journalist on any topic.
It is likely that filth abounded in past ages as well, but those eras did not have the speeches that justify, endorse, and popularize it.
Publicity does not curb a single evil. On the contrary, it multiplies the harmful consequences of events. The “complexes” we do not strengthen by making public, instead of poisoning us, often self-destruct.
The newspaper picks up all the garbage from the previous day and serves it for breakfast.
Clerics and journalists have smeared the term “love” with so much sentimentality that even its echo stinks.
The press always chooses what to praise with exceptionally poor taste.
Journalists and politicians do not know how to distinguish between the development of an idea and the lengthening of a sentence.
The celebrities of our time are permeated by the smell of the advertising laboratories where they are manufactured.
Journalism means writing exclusively for others.
Vulgarity colonized the earth.
Its weapons have been the television, the radio, the press.
Journalists offer passing commentary on passing events. No writing begins with such vigor, but none dies and is forgotten so quickly. There are, however, genres of journalism that are candidates for the same immortality as other literary genres: that journalism which is a commentary on eternal things, written in the spirit of the day, or that commentary on the things of the day written in a spirit that judges according to eternal principles.
The modern mentality is the daughter of human pride inflated by commercial propaganda.
The press provides the modern citizen with his morning depravity, the radio with his midday depravity, and the television with his evening depravity, and all of this serves to coarsen him.
It is difficult to tell whether contemporary journalism is a cynical attempt to profit by debasing man, or the cultural evangelizing of the hopelessly stupid.
The onslaught of words unleashed by an unlimited freedom of expression ends up reducing truth and lies to equal significance.
In times when the media is broadcasting endless nonsense, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows, but rather by what he chooses to ignore.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique end-papers from the Bergen Public Library. source
