The Spectacle Podcast: The Tao vs. The Machine
In this week’s Spectacle Podcast, we’re talking about BIG things – or, perhaps better put, THE big thing.
Namely, that we’re not in the middle of a “culture war” as it’s most often described, but a religious conflict in America. And our guest this week is John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, who wrote a brilliant column on this very subject carrying a headline of “Corporate America Has Launched A Religious War. It’s Time To Choose Your Side.”
Davidson borrows a formulation for the conflict from a couple of authors – most prominently C.S. Lewis, who described the side of traditional values and morality, mostly in the West originating from Judeo-Christian doctrine, as the Tao. People subscribing to the Tao understand that there is such a thing as objective truth, natural law and the definitive nature and place in the universe of mankind, and most of the established religions largely agree on those basics.
But opposing the people of the Tao is…something else. Davidson calls it The Machine, and it’s defined by the fiction that man can be God – that you can change your sex, or that you can change the climate by using a gas stove or not, or that ending a life through an abortion isn’t actually ending a life. Or any number of other things which fly in the face of what we’ve known from 5,000 years of civilization. The Machine believes it is God and it will employ whatever means it deems necessary to make true its lies.
Davidson says you have to choose between the Tao and the Machine. Not choosing means choosing the Machine. It means choosing horror.
It’s big stuff, and it’s a great episode. Enjoy!
