“Things coming to a point” has been a central theme of Bruce Charlton’s superb and insightful blogging over the past decade. Dr. Charlton draws the phrase from C.S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, in which the concept is described in the following manner:
“If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family–anything you like–at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”
As I mentioned above, Dr. Charlton has been blogging about things coming to a point – about the line separating good and evil becoming increasingly clearer and the space of neutrality between them increasingly diminishing – for years, but his recent observations on the subject suggest the process has ended in 2020.
Put another way, 2020 obliterated the gray area between good and evil. The sharp, hard point that had been building for decades, if not centuries, has finally materialized. Things are no longer coming to a point. In 2020, things have come to a point.
h/t WRSA
