I’ll ramble a bit in a way suited to a discussion of a life lived in the chaos and moral coarseness of Western Civilization in its period of advanced decay.
Why are there so many men, mostly white and middle-class, who are said to have been living good lives and said to have been happy, and yet they are committing suicide? There are, of course, the relative many men who have various problems in their family lives or their memories of their participation in the criminal wars of the leaders of the US and its allies or their frustrations at finding a `spot’ in a West built by white European men which has been stolen and is being wasted by those who don’t see the rather obvious differences between the races (indeed there are significant differences between some ethnic groups inside the races) or the more obvious differences between men and women.
I’m no expert in suicides or severe mental/emotional problems, though I learned a bit from occasional comments of my late sister who was such an expert—officially a psychiatric social-worker. I’ve also gotten into conversations with men back from the war-zones to which we send young men after doing our best in church and school and in `entertainment’ products to make those men soft inside so they can meet the standards of the priests who never heard of King St Louis and school-marms wishing everyone to be well-behaved in those horrible bla-bla sessions they hold in classrooms and the Hollywood creatures who’ve never met a lie they won’t tell if it can make them some money.
More to the current point: this is very personal to me for I find myself in a strange position. Moment to moment, I usually enjoy life. I think I’m doing important work which God has called me to. Yet, I feel strangely unmoored, dissatisfied with a life where I’ve bypassed the chance to have a wife and children, to gain some sort of moderate prosperity—the best kind in most cases, and I develop ideas and literature which could be part of a new Christian civilization… And I get nowhere. And I get to watch the of ongoing processes of moral and spiritual and intellectual decay in which I’m trapped as well as other human beings in the modern West. (See Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for a magnificent analysis of the decay in quality of literacy from 1500 to 2000.) Even in the Catholic Church with its deep ties to the traditions of the West, I was told more than 20 years ago by a priest running a prominent press that American Catholics don’t (can’t?) read difficult books. So…pep rallies. We publish books of low intellectual and moral caliber and think we are honoring the Creator by turning His ideas to childish mush—not childlike but childish. Guides to a better pep rally do well as to guides to feeling comfortable in your ignorance and complacency. After all, we’ve been trained to expect something different from the upcoming television season or movie year.
And nobody wants to look at the elephant in the room. Catholics and other Christians claim they wish to restore the Christian West and then, as one example, they go off to Masses or other worship services in which they joyfully howl out music which would have horrified the musicians of the rise and magnificent height of the West: Palestrina and Byrd and Bach and Mozart and so on. I’m not a expert in music and only a wannabe expert in Christian theology, but I’ve gathered that Bach’s Mass in B minor is a magnificent synthesis of what might be called the heart of St Francis of Assisi and the mind of St Thomas Aquinas. The Gospel message at the very heights of Western art. Now we have… Well, Luther himself and Samuel Wesley (a convert to Catholicism who was the nephew of the founder of the Methodist church) wrote some pretty good, singable hymns. If you can’t do better than what we already have, why produce stuff to crowd out that better stuff. If you can’t ascend in mind and spirit toward Heaven, then you maybe should work on that rather than propagating mediocre stuff which can’t be part of the life of God which the saved will share. We aim low to middling and wonder why we aren’t shooting bulls-eyes.
This is very depressing to watch the horrors building up around me and to know that I could help move forward a process of rescuing much which will otherwise have to be rebuilt over generations. And the depressing mood is intensified as I see ever more clearly the truth of the claims made by better thinkers, such as Joseph Ratzinger and Etienne Gilson, that the West was not destroyed by enemies from the outside—it was ours and we gave in to the enticements of dangerous thinkers and doers who were our younger brothers and our nephews and the sons of our friends from college. The West was corrupted and destroyed from the inside, by its own residents and by some of its seemingly respectable citizens and also by well-meaning citizens of the West, even clergy and old-fashioned teachers and others who just wished to make it easier for all to understand or participate. To which I would respond: If the medium was mediocre, then the message wasn’t Jesus Christ.
I repeat: Moment to moment, I usually enjoy life. This was a problem for me. I was a gifted student in a completely inadequate school system—at least, it was inadequate for me. Despite the statement of one teacher that he hated to watch what that high school did to me, I managed to enjoy myself much of the time. And I managed to respond too well to the gentle pressure of my peers, nice children who grew up into well-behaved adults—some of who are practicing Christians. Yet, I had to give up some of my reading time during which I had been discovering history in order to watch shows such as The Monkees but also a few `family’ shows about plastic creatures living in suburban gatherings of individuals and `nuclear families’. So it was that a number of Christians and others with at least nominalistic ties to rich and profound traditions watched with approval as individuals and “nuclear families” held beach parties with the tsunami waves already moving in; so it was that more families moved off the remaining foundations and set up their flimsy shelters on those sands. I didn’t like it but had neither a well-formed moral character nor a well-formed mind which would have helped me to object or at least quietly protect myself or maybe some others around me such as my younger siblings.
When I went to college, I had no work habits worth talking about. Despite a significant—but not total—recovery by my junior year, that sent me into a spin for about 10 years, at which time, I began a conversion to a Christianity which was largely alien to me after my upbringing in a mainline Protestant church where I’d learned Jesus was a nice guy and I should be as well. I went through Hell for nearly another 5 years and destroyed my career which was less than booming to start with.
Others might have had different problems, such as gentle children in a modern school system struggling to deal with the moral coarseness of the modern West. Some might have brutalized by a more traditional form of coarseness in their homes. But that moral coarseness isn’t softened by current school curricula, especially those white males of European descent who learn of their innately evil nature and who learn they’re responsible because Africa and Haiti and most regions of Latin America are remarkably lacking in sewage and fresh water systems and have not produced a lot of Nobel prizewinning physicists.
Actually, a lot of students are out of place in their schools and a lot of Westerners, most certainly including Americans, are out of place in their workplaces or churches, their communities in general. The modern workplaces and other sorts of human spaces are different from anything encountered by even our fairly recent ancestors. Of course, we are adaptable and opportunistic creatures, but we aren’t being presented with natural, random or patterned, changes to our various sorts of spaces. Some of the talk about the alienation of human beings in the modern West is on the mark—because the West has moved ahead so rapidly in so many ways and also because the leaders, cultural and academic and political and religious, in the West have been so, shall we say, inadequate in providing guidance and assistance to those most affected by those rapid changes.
In fact, our leaders have become our enemies, maybe not so murderous as Stalin nor so destructive of traditional values as Mao, but they are our enemies as they realize they’ve made an utter mess of things, are about to fall, and need to secure their power and to grab any available wealth—soon to be that which is needed to operate American public schools and hospitals.
We are being presented with potential changes limited to those which suit the established powerholders and wealthholders. I’m not trying to advocate any radical sort of cynicism. I am trying to note that we live in a world not so different from that of any collapse from an age of great prosperity. I am also trying to convince my fellow Americans, and all Westerners, that the world has not changed since the “bad, old days of kings and emperors and conquerors on horseback.” Psychopaths, exploiters and outright gangsters, gravitate towards centers of power and wealth. See the interesting study, Psychopathy by U.S. State for a discussion of the very dense concentration of psychopaths in Washington, DC—Connecticut has the highest concentration of any state but Washington’s concentration is far greater. In the case of Connecticut, think of all the hedge-fund managers and investment bankers who live in the Southwest of that state and work in New York City. But there are hints that some of these psychopaths were created by their nearness to power and wealth and maybe to the stresses of living in a region filled with aggressive, ambitious men and women. So it is that I can repeat some quotations from Lord Acton that I’ve used before:
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. [From BrainyQuote.]
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [From BrainyQuote.]
Note that the first of the quotes supports the idea of psychopaths being drawn to power and wealth and the second of the quotes supports the idea that some maybe not psychopathic, or not so much, can be corrupted by exposure to temptations greater than their moral character can handle.
I provided these quotes in A Plea From Syrian Christians—Will Any Western Christians Respond? which was followed by two other essays on the same general topic of the criminals who form the `elite’ of the United States: Not a Deep-State But a Chaotic Battleground Where Barbarians Fight for Power and Wealth and The Real Reason for the Insane Actions of American Leaders?.
Following the prophet Jeremiah and Lord Acton, I plead with God for some insight into the reasons He has made a world where such moral wretches are so disproportionately powerful and wealthy. So far as I can tell, God is leaving us to answer the question by proper exploration of reality and by intelligent analyses of the results through the disciplines of evolutionary biology, history, genetics, moral philosophy, etc. Another depressing matter: there is a notable lack of Christian thinkers dealing with these issues and a great number working to dumb-down the thoughts of earlier great thinkers so that we can have shallow explanations of the Creator and His work with those explanations set in the context of pre-modern empirical knowledge and theories. Of course, everyone is quick to note they accept evolution—but it has remarkably little to do with explaining such matters as the moral nature of human beings; everyone is quick to accept quantum mechanics—but it has remarkably little to do with explaining that physical stuff which is a necessary part of a sacramental world, a necessary part of the Sacraments—including the Real Presence on the altar.
With my depression deepened, I go off to Mass or to pray by myself in front of the Tabernacle holding the Blessed Sacrament and…I find the darkness inside of me breaking up. Or I might go off to a volunteer project, perhaps scrubbing pots at a pasta dinner or starting off a pie-cooking project for the day—at 6:30AM, and…I find myself joking with the other volunteers and being concerned that a spouse is suffering badly from allergies. Some ordinary sad news and some good fellowship on top of work which should now belong to the young men and women who don’t show up for worship or for volunteer projects.
And, yet, I’m happy in various little ways. If you ever have problems being happy in this increasingly degenerate world (degenerate in moral and other aspects), then try a feisty attitude: Don’t let the bastards get you down. The best revenge might be to go on to live a good life, but that’s not always possible in terms of prosperity or worldly prestige. You can also remember the wisdom in the words: smile and the happiness will follow. Soon, I’ll be writing an essay on the true religious nature of human beings, seemingly embodied in our genes: “collective worship of moral gods” and faith or belief will eventually come—but seemingly after generations if you pay attention to the Bible or to the histories of ancient civilizations. Smile first and you’ll be happy; worship God and praise God and thank God and you’ll find yourself starting to believe. It remains hard to do so, especially for men—if you can forgive me for claiming men are different from women in some important ways, perhaps many.
There are different sorts of happiness. The happiness of being with pleasant and good human beings is of greater moral satisfaction than that of a good meal or a good mug of beer. Both are trumped by the happiness which can come even in a miserable life which is lived to a greater good. As for me, I live to better understand Creation and to use that better understanding to better understand our relationship with the Creator. And, so, I could mention…mathematics. I’ve argued for a need to draw concepts from those fields but especially from mathematics. See my book, The Shape of Reality, for an attempt to describe human communities (even the Body of Christ) by way of concepts drawn from the same mathematics Einstein used to describe the universe in his General Theory of Relativity.
When I do such work, even when I prepare a small essay for the purposes of God and the needs of His children, I feel a deeper sort of happiness, perhaps a very weak foretaste of the bliss which is felt when sharing God’s Own Life.
I don’t feel such bliss so often as I once did when I devoted a greater share of my hours to serious study and thinking and writing. With all that is coming out:
- The Church continues to shrink leaving the likes of me to care for those who didn’t pass on their faith to their own children; we, the current volunteers, can look behind us and see no one to do the same for us.
- We, the laity, continue to be surprised by the occasional revelation that there is still more moral filth and rot, more sacrilegious behavior, in the clerical regions of the Catholic Church. There is no reason to believe the situation is different in other Christian churches nor in the schools nor hospitals nor other institutions of the Modern West.
- Recent revelations of filth and rot in the Catholic also reveal that much was known to bishops and other priests free of those particular sins but too cowardly and self-serving to speak out, let alone try to call the sinful and predatory bishops to some sort of account.
So it is that we laity are being protected by our bishops, wise moral giants that they are, from knowledge of how some…ummm…bishops like to stick their penises up the butts of altar-boys and seminarians and also like to force young men into their homosexual networks which are apparently spread across the United States and maybe across the solar system. And, again, there is reason to believe such predators and their networks exist in the leadership ranks of all parts of the West—political and cultural and…
Much there for a practicing Catholic to be proud of. Much to make him happy to give money which partly goes to buy silence from the victims of…ummmm…bishops and priests and…soon to come to a diocese near you…lay bureaucrats and teachers and…
Much there to make me wish to encourage a man to enter the Catholic Church and to bring his children with him. Much to make me wish to encourage parents to send their sons off to seminary.
Just plain depressing. And, yet, while I feel frustrated in not being able to respond fully to God’s call to me, I’m reasonably happy in some ways. I’m looking forward to a Holy Hour at my parish in two days. Next week, I’ll attend two meetings of prayer groups which are populated by holy and very likable Catholics, though not seemingly aware of the well-documented crimes of our political and religious leaders and…DEPRESSING!!!
But I happily make and execute plans to finish the second of four parts of the second volume of a planned three volume novel of a spiritual conversion of a man only vaguely like me. Sometimes I’m happy writing sentences which would be well-structured by old-fashioned grammatical diagramming techniques but…they go deeper, even just three or four levels, than a weak mind can follow. I’d suggest: read good books and your mind will grow stronger. Again, read Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence to understand the destruction we’ve done to the literary standards which were necessary for Western Christian Civilization. I won’t let the bastards get me down and I won’t let a lack of truly literate readers weaken or corrupt the work I do for God and for that human community which is the Body of Christ.
Certain types of happiness are to be actively sought. I think I’ll cut down on my volunteer hours and devote that time to such activities as studying mathematics and writing about new ways to understand relationships between human beings and those between God and human beings. I’m willing to give up some moments of lesser forms of happiness.
And losing myself in an effort to produce a better understanding of Creation, to produce better thoughts in general, is better than drinking more whiskey and beer or using crack or putting a gun to my temple.
If only more of those lost souls could know of the better options, some of which are not available to all, but my study of mathematics and the writing of books could be a career as a volunteer counselor at a center which helps impoverished young mothers or a volunteer tutor or a volunteer companion and aid to an elderly man or woman.
Speak to God, perhaps on your knees at a church which is your own or could be your own. Then speak to a pastor—most are ordinary men who’ve taken on a difficult and important task and are generally more trustworthy than most higher-level Christian leaders. Then speak to God again. And to some of His good friends you might meet at that church or the place where you’re starting as a volunteer.
And smile. And worship. Praise and give thanks. Happiness of lesser and greater sorts will likely come and maybe faith as well.