Albert Jay Nock wrote of a friend of his who had spent some years in the United States and was returning to Europe. This friend spoke of his admiration of many American characteristics, but said he was disturbed on realizing that Americans are the first people in history to pass directly from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through a state of civilization. Nock and his friends didn’t see the real danger in this sad state of affairs—as the wealthiest and most energetic frontier region of the West, the United States had a chance to take on the role of leader of the West, the role of nurturing and, in fact, rebuilding the West which was already showing the wear and tear of dealing with the Industrial Revolution followed by the less promising conversion of parts of the economy to financial, bank-based capitalism and the parallel conversion of the productive parts of the economy to a sort of monopoly capitalism allied with government regulators. But that wasn’t all. Economic problems, usually opportunities missed or misused, were not the entirety of the reason for that wear and tear on the West. Not by a long shot. Christian leaders, ecclesiastical and cultural and intellectual, had failed to produce a new understanding of Creation which reconciled modern empirical knowledge with Christian beliefs. Leaders and shapers of opinion and great practitioners in the fields of literature and science and philosophy and history and so on achieved, at best, partial success dealing with the problems and opportunities of the Enlightenment era and the succeeding centuries; their success was limited partly by the cowardly and faithless failures of Christians who loudly claimed to be brave and strong in their faith, but failed to face up to the new knowledge of the world and more as being knowledge of some of God’s thoughts manifested as created being.
As the Catholic and Lutheran and Anglican and Calvinist churches had become corrupted in their own ways, they had turned inward, no longer in fruitful conflict with non-Christian peoples; Christian thought and customs began to soften and to simplify in various ways. When we Christians had engaged other peoples in fruitful and mostly peaceful ways, their very existence as well as their specific beliefs and intellectual or cultural traditions, even their personalities and ways of life, had been a spur to Christian understanding of a greater part of God’s Creation, a part which wasn’t and isn’t us. They spurred us on in ways somewhat similar to a thorn in the flesh but should have been experienced as similar to the frustrations of trying to explain difficult thoughts and feelings to a good friend over a mug of beer or a glass of port.
The ancient Fathers of the Church developed the theologies we falsely think to be transparently true to human vision and they developed them in conflict and in fruitful collaboration with both pagan thinkers and with those who were seen, truly or falsely, as having strayed from Christian truth. For example, Augustine of Hippo developed a Christian understanding of history (largely still plausible and fruitful) in respectful conflict with both the traditional pagan idea of history as being cyclical and also in respectful conflict with the ideas of post-Constantinian pagan thinkers who had argued that Rome had decayed and was collapsing because of Christianity.
Many of the problems of the modern West come from those successes of Christian thinkers from ancient times and the Medieval centuries and, to a lesser extent, the early centuries of the so-called Modern Age. To the heirs of those earlier Christians, all of Creation seemed transparent to examination by Christian leaders, ecclesiastical or intellectual, and the Protestant Reformation didn’t even shake this confidence that God’s Creation was understood fully and was subject to imprisonment to the pages of textbooks—the conflicts between Catholics and others concerned other matters of apparently greater importance than the understanding of God’s acts as Creator, matters such as control and ownership of various assets including entire countries.
Meanwhile, as the story goes and it’s mostly true to reality, Galileo and his successors headed out to explore those parts of Creation which were subject to exploration by their limited tools. Galileo was himself a follower of the Catholic tradition of respect for empirical reality, a tradition given us by Augustine and Jerome, Anselm and Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and so on. Over time, as Popes and bishops and Catholic professors, and their Lutheran and Anglican and Calvinist counterparts, stuck to politics and financial matters, an implicit truce came into being: theology and much of philosophy and parts of history would separate from physics and mathematics and biology and other parts of history and of philosophy. If any conflicts arose, everybody would refuse to engage in fruitful encounters; all parties would instead wave their hands spasmodically and sing in unison: “There are no conflicts between religion and science.” That is, all would agree to an unfruitful misunderstanding of Creation and of human knowledge. This agreement was extended to Jewish ideas and the ideas of other peoples; we extended to them the charity of respecting their ideas by ignoring them and saying, “There is no conflict between the ideas of men of good will, no matter the ideas.” We even extended to them the further charity of thinking it possible they could be like us, think like us, feel like us, at least in the most important areas of human life, such as finance and politics.
It’s most obvious in the Catholic Church—partly because it’s more intact than most Christian churches in 2015, but all Christians accepted in public the fragmentation of knowledge of God’s Creation in such a way as to imply strongly a fragmentation of the created being of which we have knowledge. Inside our own classrooms or sacred spaces, we talk and act as if the binding power of our small stock of Christian revelations applies to the entirety of our particular tradition of understanding the world, of writing greeting-card poetry and making elevator music as well as engaging in philosophical speculation or explorations of history which are far more shallow than what I saw in my childhood in old-fashioned Bugs Bunny and Mr Peabody cartoons. Knowledge became unified in a horrible and wrongful way: Christians forgot that all knowledge concerns God’s direct revelations or those of His revelations which are His effects in the world as some Medieval thinkers put it in partial understanding of the greater truth of God’s absolute power over all created being. Knowledge became unified in the mind of the knower, priest or professor, rather than being unified as a mostly communal image or mostly communal encapsulation of created being, one subject to change as we come to know more about God’s effects in Creation, or His acts-of-being as I prefer.
Americans are an extreme example of moral and intellectual and cultural disorder. We act as if believing that “I absorbed all I ever need to know from the fluids in my mother’s womb.” Not only are Americans not civilized, but we have increasingly set ourselves, as a country and as individuals, apart from and above the rest of Western Civilization and, indeed, all of humanity. If once we Americans were the pioneers on an important frontier region of the West, we are now an aggressive occupier, claiming Europe as our own. We need Europe for the deeper culture we can’t provide through our pep-rally religions nor through our utilitarian science nor, most certainly, through our mass-marketed literature and cinema and music. It’s not only Europe that we claim. The entire globe seems to be a bauble for us to play with, as if we were the god-like star-child from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We have done our best to occupy much of the earth, at least in the sense of having soldiers stationed at about a thousand bases in dozens of countries. We need the entire world for the wealth which can support our way of life, including our grotesquely oversized military, and we can no longer generate enough wealth to even keep our large middle-class consuming strongly. Perhaps we feel an even stronger desire to control the entire earth and all its peoples to justify our sense of being the point of it all, both the end-product of biological evolution and the highest of all divine goals. More simply and more in line with the degraded ways of American thought in 2015: We Americans are the ones who got it right. Whatever “it” is.
I’m going to momentarily step to the side to point to John Hawk’s commentary on some recent work in experimental and speculative evolutionary science: Notable: Coevolution drives biological complexity. Professor Hawks tells us: “One of the most interesting parts of the paper involved removing the parasite from the population, after which the host complexity began to decrease. It’s similar to classic selection experiments, in which the selection condition is removed or reversed partway through.”
It seems to me that one way to look at the global situation in 2015 is: the United States has become a parasite preying upon the culture of Europe and upon the wealth of nearly all countries. In addition, we look for human energy and developed intelligence in immigrants from other countries, largely because American culture sucks the souls and minds and moral characters out of our youth—even those who are good at learning from textbooks and can spit back the heavily schematized and lifeless knowledge on classroom tests and even those who can do quite well in making money on Wall St or in the laboratories and workshops of our high-tech electronic and medical industries.
We Americans need blood to keep going, rich blood of a sort we no longer have, not even in our children born with high spirits and serious talents, not after they’ve been raised on television and cellphones and adult-supervised games. We have allowed our own blood to be sucked out by an exploitive ruling class and we are allowing the blood of our children to be sucked out. We need fresh, rich blood and we have to go overseas to get it or, when it comes to sports, we have to go into the inner-cities or even to such places as the Dominican Republic.
We Americans need to gain natural resources cheaply because that is how we became wealthy; we have not yet learned how to work intelligently as opposed to hitting the lottery, whether the lottery run by the government or the one which is run by the contingent forces which put pools of black gold below some acres and not below others.
We invade. We, being incompetent as conquerors and looters, devastate countries and destroy infrastructure and kill large numbers of innocents. We destroy $10 billion in assets for every $1 billion we manage to steal. We who were once the best-liked of individuals and sometimes even the most highly admired of nations have become hated and feared. We’re not feared because we fight or rule effectively. We’re feared because our leaders are morally perverse juveniles with lots of firepower and we, the American people, join them in their moral perversion. We aren’t the Macedonians or the Romans or the Franks or the Normans; we are Moe as Bismarck, Larry as Napoleon, and Curly as Patton.
And, so it is, that I come to my conclusion by a path long and twisted in many ways: the United States and Americans as individuals have become the thorn in the flesh of the pilgrim Body of Christ, that is, we have become the parasite or opponent or accuser who works for God in the negative way (see 2Cor 12:6-9). We Americans, in our narcissism and selfishness, have taken on the role of the opponent that many peoples are uniting against. We are enemies of the pilgrim Body of Christ, enemies of Creation, enemies of God to the extent that the Body of Christ, Creation, and God don’t serve American desires. We would rule all in our hubris, would subjugate God Himself to our schemes and plans.
And we Americans had the chance to take on the noble role of leader of Christian Civilization, of the Body of Christ. We could have put a part of our once promising, if immature, individual and communal selves into the Body of Christ, could have shaped it in an interplay between God’s purposes and our personal desires and talents, as once did Jews and Greeks and Romans and Armenians and Syrians and even the Germanic peoples when still barbarians. Now, the pilgrim Body of Christ will continue its journey through this world bearing American marks only in the form of wounds and damaged organs. With all that we have to be ashamed of—the ethnic cleansing of native Americans, the brutal war in the Philippines after we pretended to free them, Dresden and Hiroshima and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Libya and others—this is by far the worst of American sins: we claim to be a God-fearing people and we are waging war against God’s Creation and the Body of His Son.