Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this true breaking of the pact between the body and the soul. . . .Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire. . . . Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy--it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. . . . Is it therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure, and without an echo . . . (but without an echo, no art).
--From Gravity and Grace, p 151
To put it another way, the politics of the future must come into being as genuine art does. The poets must become the acknowledged legislators of the world. It must be the product of people who are inspired by the Real. It must be the work of genius in the mode of a poet/prophet like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela--people through whom the god or the inspiring muse Justice shines. I say this not because I know that it will happen but because I believe it must happen if there this to be a human future. The machines must otherwise win by default.
Our current social order is like the dyke in the story of the Dutch boy who plugs a leak in it with his finger. The Dutch boy at this point is the liberal political/media class. Its main function now is to buy time in the hopes that true greatness of spirit, a greatness that Weil describes that "must take another course", might emerge and so come to support the boy, who by himself is incapable of holding back the flood. I believe this other kind of greatness is developing now quietly in the souls of the solitary and obscure where it is struggling to be reborn.
Greatness is not to be mistaken for the grandiose. People long for greatness but are easily seduced by the grandiose. Something is great to the degree that is disclosive of the Deep Real, which has always been mediated to us by the world's true poets and prophets. And when they do, they awaken awareness of it in the rest of us. Such a prospect in a moment like ours seems farfetched, and yet I believe it will happen because unless it or something like it does, the liberal order will break apart and we will all get washed away in the flood.
For a more expanded articulation of what I hope will be the alternative to the flood, see this post about what I call the Nunes/Bannon Mind, the mindset that longs for the flood as a kind of eschatological baptism that will wipe the world clean so it can start anew. Needless to say, this is a delusion with deeply destructive potential.