Flatland

R. A. Lafferty didn't like modern society. He used the term "Flatland" (possibly inspired by Edwin Abbott's novel) to characterise a world which he he saw as unstructured and bereft of an spiritual dimension. Furthermore, Lafferty believed that the ability to remember the previous -more wholesome- state, and to perceive the degradation of the current one, was lost in the transition.

I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization', happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was 'The World' for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all 'ends of worlds'. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

(R. A. Lafferty: The Day After the World Ended. Collected in his essay volume It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs)

Maybe Lafferty selected the year 1962 as the "upper bound" of the End of the World because of Vatican II?

There is a vage memory that this late world had a large and intrincate superstructure on it, and that this came crashing down. There is some dispute as to whether we gained by the sweeping away of the trashy construction, or whether we lost a true and valid dimension in the unstructuring of our Old World, and wether we do not now live in "Flatland." There is no way to settle this dispute since the old structure cannot be recaptured or analyzed.

There is even some evidence that "Flatlands" are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a Time Machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see a dimension not contained in Flatland.

(ibid.)

The fourth (as yet unpublished) volume in Laffety's autobiographical series In a Green Tree is titled Incidents of Travel in Flatland. It covers the sixties and the seventies. I would love to take a look at it.

The idea that "it sucks, you just don't realize it sucks" is interesting, but the catch is that it can be used to argue that anything sucks. It's not that different from the approach taken by the Frankfurt school when they, too, tried to show that "it sucks". (Not that Lafferty would agree on anything with that bunch of pinkos, mind you.) On the other hand, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle".

This concern of Lafferty shows in many of his works, most of the time in a veiled manner. Which is probably good, because I suspect I wouldn't like his philosophy if he had made it completely explicit. Instead, we have his stories and novels.