Austin Hall Library

Are We in an Apocalyptic Age?

Christopher Dawson, in The Movement of World Revolution, said:

"There are moments when the obscurity of history seems to be suddenly illuminated by some sign of divine purpose. These are the moments of crisis in the literal sense of the word--times of judgement when the powers of this world are tried and condemned and when the  course of history suddenly flows into a new channel. Such was the age of the Hebrew prophets, such was the age of St. Augustine, and such is the age in which we have the privilege and the misfortune to live today. For the present century has been an apocalyptic age--a time of judgement in which the established powers and authorities of the world have been put through the fire and destroyed or renewed, and when civilizations that have endured for thousands of years are being forced into a new mold."

 

 

 

The Forgotten Virtues of Community

Having traveled to downtown Chicago recently, I recall a reading recommendation of a friend mentioned some time back in a blog post comment. He recommended Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s.

I have the book and it is a provocative look at three Chicago neighborhoods at a time generally considered the "golden age of community": the 1950s. With keen analysis, Ehrenhalt reveals the glue that held each community together: the limitations of life and accepted authority figures. Beneath the author's analysis, it is not difficult to see that the breakdown of authority in society is a source of cultural decline, and even personal happiness.

This book does not romanticize or whitewash city life in the 1950s, but it does challenge some of the commonly held assumptions about the unmitigated value of progress. And it brings to light a theme increasingly suspected in society today: the rise of unlimited personal freedom and breathtaking cultural progress is not a friend of community.

Question Authority?

Some ideas seem to stand as manifestos for entire generations. Perhaps there is no idea more powerful for the generation born in the baby-boom years than the idea that authority is inherently suspect--nobody should have the right to tell another person how to think or act.

Along with the idea that unrestricted choice is a good thing, the idea that authority should be questioned are the two dominant social ideas of my generation. And the signs that these ideas are ruining us are everywhere. For unsettling illustrations, spend an hour observing classes in a public school, visit a local church, or invite a family with young children home for dinner. I can still remember my shock when years ago I moved to a Western state to find that parents there uniformly taught their children to refer to adults by their first names. I didn't analyze it at the time, but it just seemed so subversive.

Where inherent suspicion of authority and the enshrinement of individual choice began is difficult to say, but Robert Paul Wolff's landmark book In Defense of Anarchism, written originally in 1970, seemed to form the modern theoretical/philosophical basis for a denial of the legitimacy of authority. "The primary obligation of man," Wolff asserted, "is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled."

Ideas obviously begin in a mind somewhere. Often without regard to whether they comport with reality, they eventually find a legitimization and theoretical defense in the work of an academic. But, they do not really take hold until they spill over into popular culture--often through the media. For example, the enormously influential 1955 James Dean movie, Rebel Without a Cause, was the first time American popular culture was faced with the idea that juvenile delinquency was the apparent result of a lack of communication between parents and children and a failure of parents to listen to their children. It caught on like wildfire.

The 1987 Robin Williams film, Dead Poets Society, took this idea to new heights and captured the  imagination of scores of young people and adults (I continue to hear it referred to as a favorite film of members of my generation). Williams played the role of a prep school teacher of the 50s who brings tragedy (in the literary sense) by challenging mean and misguided authority figures--the school's headmaster and the father of a talented drama student. The message of this movie is clear and powerful. The affirming community of individual thinkers is rare, fragile, and beautiful. And, authority is its enemy. So intoxicated with this idea were the powers behind this film that they even glorified youthful suicide in the process of advancing it. This deeply disturbing movie in 1987 catered to the growing mortal fear (by that time) of seemingly arbitrary rules and authority figures--particularly fathers (portrayed as tyrants).   

The unraveling of culture, at its source, is so simple. Today, my generation (and subsequent generations) worships unrestricted individual choice and what is seen as the intrinsic right (sometimes duty) to question and deny authority. It probably all began with a simple moral problem--some creative person somewhere wanted to do something of questionable moral legitimacy. And the prevailing authority supported the belief that such an action was illegitimate. So, the idea, as a proposition, was born--that authority is inherently suspect, and unrestricted individual choice is the only moral imperative. 

When Culture Becomes a Burlesque

Saul Bellow said, “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

It may be that one can spend too much time in libraries and books, but I am not sure. Considering the alternative ways of using one’s time these days, losing my life in a library does not immediately strike me as unattractive.

Neil Postman, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, abruptly introduced me in the late 80s to the idea that “. . . the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations.” I have since then watched with growing dismay the formation of the intellectual life of our modern culture by taking note of the popular media.

Postman noted that American public discourse was increasingly taking the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of "amusing ourselves to death."

This has had a profound and embarrassing impact on education. There was a time when attending school meant learning to read, for without that ability, one could not participate in the culture's conversations. Today, if one does not spend countless hours watching Fox News, ESPN, the latest sitcoms, and MTV, one often cannot participate in the culture's conversations.

A shallow mind and hollow soul are not the only negative results of this affinity for amusing ourselves to death. The characteristics we formally associated with mature discourse: an ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high estimation of reason and order; an aversion to contradiction; a capacity for objectivity; and the ability to organize coherent thoughts into articulate and complex sentences are virtually gone.

Postman asserted that there are two ways the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. "In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque.” While  certain world cultures may be Orwellian, our own certainly tends toward Huxleyan. In the words of Postman, "What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

I believe Neil Postman was a modern prophet. That's one of the reasons I read books. I do not want to die (figuratively or literally) being entertained by Fox News. I would rather lose my life in a library, preferably my own.

That is not the only reason I read. I read to be educated, to defragment the files of my cluttered mind, to be inspired, and to try, as best I can, to learn how I might contribute in some small way to lifting our culture out of the Huxleyan mire.

Emily Dickinson, in her poem titled, "A Book," aptly wrote:

“He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings!”

Juries: A Microcosm of Modern Society

One need look no further for a microcosm of modern society than the the jury room of the local courthouse. While juries are normally made up of a mixture of fine people, the collective psychology of the modern jury is frightening. Frightening, that is, for what it discloses about the mindset of society in general.

Sentimentality is the dominant characteristic of juries these days. As the constitutive parts of the word imply, sentimentality is the subjugation of the "mental" to the "sentient." It is an attempt to found a philosophy, outlook, or decision on feeling. Of course, all human beings have sentiments. Sentiments, if subject to the reason, are good. Sentimentality is, however, the subjecting of reason to desire or feelings.

Sentimentalism is sentimentality raised to the level of a first principle and, in the context of law, it is a very serious weakness that challenges justice itself. The sentimentalist doesn't simply subject reason to feeling; he unwittingly denies the difference. Whatever he feels or desires, appears transparently right to him. When the collective psychology of a jury is sentimentality, the rule of law is overturned.  Examples of this appear in the news every day.

A person who commits a crime has indulged his will against his reason. A jury that indulges its feelings against its reason converts a court of law into a hospital, a school, a social agency, or some other such place. Ultimately, such a jury denies the free will of man. It treats man more as a pet and less as a human being responsible for the choices he makes.

But, where did sentimentality as a dominant characteristic in modern society originate? It is hard to  say--not because the precursors are so hard to find, but because there are so many. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries immediately come to mind, as well as late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism. Like most ideas, there were likely many related causes converging into a concept. If one is interested in reading about one aspect and possible precursor to modern sentimentalism, Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion: With Special Reference to XVII and XVIII Centuries is a great place to start. The connection may not be immediately apparent, but if one sticks with this insightful and solid book, the contours of incipient late-twentieth century sentimentalism may be made out. Go to Amazon and read the Excerpt from Enthusiasm posted there. It should be read slowly and thoughtfully. Then buy the book and take your time reading it. It is a good start to understanding at least one aspect of modern sentimentalism.

The Era of Relativism

I am seldom surprised these days at the ideas expressed by people. But, during a very recent cross-examination of a witness in court, I was momentarily taken aback by the young female witness who asserted that the rightness and wrongness of her actions depended solely upon the circumstances. Moreover, she was quick to add that she was the sole interpreter and judge of her curcumstances.

I was mildly surprised at this not because of the witness' brazen relativism. I have encountered that under oath before. Rather, I was surprised by the fact that the witness in this case was not a sophisticated, college educated, quasi-intellectual, but a highly unsophisticated and extraordinarily simple high school graduate from the rural south. She had much more in common with the Beverly Hillbillies than she did with some university philosophy professor extolling the virtues of free thought.

It dawned on me that the only thing this simple woman has in common with the American intellectual elite, where moral, philosophical, and cultural relativism is now commonplace, is that she also is the product of our national educational system. An educational system that, more than any other nation, has chosen to look upon its schools at all levels as a means of shaping the mind and personality and not merely imparting information. And the predominant shape of American education these days is relativism.

A good practical and popular lay treatment of relativism may be found in Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl.

A Microcosm of Recent Centuries

I am enjoying John Senior's The Death of Christian Culture, which opens with a story that reminded me of a recent trip to Rome. At left is a picture of Michelangelo's sculpture of the Pieta', which I took in St. Peter's Basilica last October. The statue stands in the first chapel on the right as one enters the Basilica and, as I recall, is the only work to which Michelangelo ever attached his name. If one enlarges and looks closely at this picture, it is obvious that there is a glare from glass that separates the viewer from the statue. That was not always the case (see clearer picture at right below).

David Allen White opens the Introduction of Senior's provocative book with this paragraph:

On May 21, 1972, Lazzlo Toth, an Australian geologist of Hungarian birth attacked Michelangelo's the Pieta' in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. As he raced at the statue with a hammer in his raised arm he proclaimed, "I am Jesus Christ--risen from the dead." When he had finished his assault on the marble, he had broken off the Virgin's arm at the elbow, taken a large piece off one of her eyelids and shattered her nose. No charges were ever brought against him, for, as horrified as the world claimed to be, the authorities were convinced only a madman would commit such an act. He spent two years in an Italian psychiatric hospital and then was released and deported to Melbourne, Australia, where he is believed to reside to this day.

White goes on insightfully to say:

This single act contains within it all of the madness of recent centuries--a belief by man that he has become God, an assertion of the primacy of the individual will, a burning anger at the glories of the past and the beautiful art that embodies them, an attempt to remove the Blessed Virgin and Mother from her central place in God's plan for man's redemption, a lack of respect for the sacred sanctuary, and an assumption of innocence toward all the destroyers.

As Senior makes clear:

It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity."

Culture and Agriculture

Persuaded as I have become, that far too long I neglected local soil and local memory, I recently acquired several acres in the land of my birth and renewed my acquaintance with the thoughts of Wendell Berry. I simply woke up one morning and thought I was in hell, only to discover that it was Washington, D.C. And my thoughts turned to home and Wendell Berry.

I am currently reading Berry's What Are People For?, a collection of twenty-two essays that deal with agrarianism, environmentalism, politics, and assorted other subjects. I am also reading The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, which is a collection of twenty-one essays that clearly outline and promote a vision of culture for people who are dissatisfied with the stress-filled direction of contemporary American culture. Filled with insightful social criticism, these essays present a deeply human response to our dominant urban and technological culture. Finally, I am reading The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, originally published in 1977, which is generally considered a Berry classic. In this book, Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and a spiritual discipline. Berry's ideas deserve thoughtful and reflective consideration and perhaps his lifestyle deserves greater emulation.

The Oddities and Horrors of Life

My work has always been the source of interesting experiences and interesting people. Lately, I seem to be coming into contact with the "unusual" character more often than in the past. I enjoy it, and It frequently brings to mind one of my favorite authors--Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor's novels and short stories sometimes struck her critics as being filled with oddities and grotesques, and some critics even described her fiction as "horror stories." But, O'Connor responded that her critics had "hold of the wrong horror." For her, the horror wasn't the wickedness reflected in the lives of people she wrote about. As George Weigel noted, the horror of the modern world is that, if nothing is really of ultimate consequence, then "the wickedness isn't really wicked" and "the good isn't good".

The horror of life in the modern world is not the existence of morons, grotesques, or even evil, it is the growing loss of any moral sense in those who see themselves as normal.

On Civilization and Culture

Perhaps the best book to read to understand the concepts of "civilization" and "culture" is T.S. Eliot's short volume Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. It is occasionally difficult to find and might only be available on the secondary market. Eliot was one of the greatest modern poets and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. While his literary work has met with a variety of criticisms (including from C.S. Lewis), Eliot was a consistently traditional and deeply profound critic of modern culture.

It is from the line of recent thinkers on culture including Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk that I was introduced to the idea that cultures arise from cults (a cult is a joining together for worship--the attempt to commune with a transcendent power). In one form or another, these eminent historians and thinkers expounded the idea that religion is the fundamental foundation for culture. As Kirk writes, "Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government--all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious tie."

But, what if the cult withers; that is, what if the religious foundation weakens over time? What then happens to the civilization or culture that is rooted in the cult? For an answer to that disturbing question, one need look no further than an analysis of the twentieth century in the West, particularly Britain and America (which are essentially one culture).

When the loss of faith occurs in a culture, or when faith has been enfeebled, the culture swiftly decays. Untethered from its roots, a culture displays indices of social disorder and psychological angst--increasing rates of family chaos, abortion, infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and suicide. Faced with the loss of any transcendent moorings, society turns in on itself and grasps for some sense of happiness (security) like a drowning man claws at his would be rescuer. The reason for this is that the material order of the universe rests upon the spiritual and moral order. The decay of the latter is the doom of the former.