From 2b5a0cf2149f0ccb4a1992311cc68e6212f9449f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Joe Carstairs Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:46:58 +0100 Subject: chp3: remove irrelevant tail on role of imagination, perspective --- chapter3.md | 28 ---------------------------- 1 file changed, 28 deletions(-) diff --git a/chapter3.md b/chapter3.md index 82998d5..94842d5 100644 --- a/chapter3.md +++ b/chapter3.md @@ -316,31 +316,3 @@ John steels his audience for suffering, and reassures those who are already suffering that their troubles are part of a cosmic context. And with his treatment of the end times, John inspires his audience with hope that their sufferings will not be wasted. - -\[TODO: see if next three paras are relevant.\] - -John's apocalyptic imagination uses mythological language to reveal the world of -appearances for what it really is. The ideology of Empire is a pretender God, -and the suffering of the martyrs is in fact God's way of conquering evil. John -may have created a crisis for a people that didn't see one, a people that needed -'waking up'. So, while catastrophism imagines that all humanity approaches the -catastrophe more or less from the same perspective, and thus works to kill -politics, John's apocalyptic imagination imagines precisely the opposite: he -enlivens political criticism and active resistance to dominant structures by -identifying how people relate unequally to them. - -So people today, when they equate apocalypticism with catastrophism, are cutting -out most of the apocalyptic imagination and distorting its message. This is now -new. This is a very traditional move which functions to shut down radical -dissent against dominant structures. - -Meanwhile, those who have read the Apocalypse 'from below' tend to emphasise how -it has a visionary interpretation of the tribulations of this world, and a -visionary expectation of this world being transformed, and use this vision to -motivate movements for transformational social change. - -The apocalyptic form is therefore not the reason that green rhetoric is failing. -As explored in chapter 1, green rhetoric is failing because it is failing to -diagnose the root causes of the problem, present a credible route to a credible -solution, and address an audience that could be persuaded to make a difference. -Were rhetors to solve these problems, they could use apocalyptic effectively. -- cgit v1.2.3