On Tuesday, 2010/11/09, I posted an article Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict: The Promise and Comedy of Modernity commenting on a talk he gave while in Spain to consecrate the basilica of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, though I mistakenly implied it was in Santiago de Compostela which was his other stop. (I made a minor edit in that article to clarify the location of the basilica.) I ended with this sentence:
In a day or two, I’ll address a specific aspect of Pope Benedict’s efforts to revive Christian Civilization, one which should bring out a sense of shame in Americans.
Why should we feel shame? Do we Americans even feel shame? Solzhenitsyn said, “No,” and labeled us a uniquely evil people as he prepared to return to what was still the Soviet Union. He didn’t believe we were particularly evil in the number or magnitude of our crimes, compared to other powerful peoples of the modern world, but he saw in us a self-righteousness and ability to delude ourselves that kept us pure in our own eyes even as we walked away from our crimes. This wasn’t exactly a shot out of the blue, though Solzhenitsyn had himself been fooled to nearly the end of his time in the United States into thinking Americans to correspond, at least approximately, to our own high opinions of ourselves. See a relatively early article I posted, My Ends are Mad and Now I’m Also Stupid, where the title plays off the claim of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick:
My means are sane, it is my ends which are mad.
In fact, Ahab, a courageous example of an American type if not all Americans, was a man at war with Creation, deserting a young wife and their baby to return to the sea, disdaining human society, striving to destroy that in nature and human society which constrained him or prevented him from being what he wished to be and from doing what he wished to do. Over-estimating his own importance in the general scheme of things, he took personally all that he suffered at the hands of nature.
As Melville saw things even before the War Between the States, there was already a streak of moral insanity in the American character, refusing to accept the world as God had made it, acting towards it as if it were what we wish it to be. And we were blessed and cursed by a remarkable run of successes where we could harvest from the bounty of the world and act as if it were our right to be prosperous and powerful in a world made for us. It might well be that our streak of luck has ended and we’re about to suffer instead from our tendency towards moral insanity and our increasing stupidity as shown by our growing incompetence in maintaining the former pride of the United States — the American infrastructure from transportation systems to sewer systems. I’ll also mention in passing our inability to win wars though we have the most expensively equipped and trained military in history. Best or most powerful military in history? The results of wars from Korea to Afghanistan indicate it’s more accurate to say “most expensive” rather than “best”.
And, yet, we think we are a special people of God, an exceptional people who are truly what we feel ourselves to be. I know many who are aware of their personal weakness and sinfulness and yet, in their roles as American citizens, feel themselves to be part of a nation which can do little wrong if any at all and can even reshape the world to be a realm of democracy and justice and prosperity. More generally, we don’t see any need to respond to Creation, knowing in our American hearts that we’re already what God intended men and women to be, knowing in our American hearts that the world is what we believe it to be, though it might need a little tweaking. For a century or more, we’ve talked and acted as if the American Way is the path to Heaven and this very delusion that we’re already God’s blessed and chosen people relieves us of the responsibility of examining our actions as a people, of responding to Creation and becoming the best we might be.
We saw what what seemed to be in our grasp, a leadership role for the United States as the core regions of Western Civilization aged and lost some energy, but we simply assumed that we were already prepared for that role as a 13 year-old might assume he’s already prepared to take on the role of family head. We assumed we could lead the world into a better future by just being what we already were.
Let me back up to note a point raised by the historian Carrol Quigley in The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis:
When troubled or aging civilizations are re-energized, sometimes a revival of some sort will occur in a younger region of that civilization. Sometimes one or more of those younger regions will even mature into a new center for a new phase of that decayed civilization.
The United States had grown prosperous on abundant natural resources and the various cultural resources which flowed from Europe and the American people had the opportunity and duty to take on a leadership role in reviving the West. Instead, we — as was said more than a century ago — passed directly from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through a state of civilization in between. We failed to do our duty to ourselves, to our children, to the Christian West. Most of all, we failed to do our duty to the God we claim as our Maker and King. We’re unfaithful, cowardly, miserably poor servants. Not only have we Americans, as a nation, shown an excessive concern for our own safety and wealth, we’ve also shown a rather shocking desire to demonstrate our toughness by stomping on the faces of human beings mostly defenseless against us, at least in the short-run.
Yet, I think an unlikely event to be still possible: God may yet force Americans to develop the virtues we’ve chosen not to develop on our own however much we claim them. If so, it will be a painful process, probably far more painful and also more humiliating than the simple collapse into relative poverty and relative powerlessness that seems to be the fate of Americans as a people. We’ll have to shed our illusions and delusions, our willful and culpable ignorance, our self-nurtured stupidity, and face up to reality, to God’s Creation.
Few would believe at this time, the end of 2010, that the American people could play any such noble role in God’s narrative.
And so it is that Pope Benedict appeals to Europeans to revive the West, to discover new ways to read “the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture and the book of the liturgy” and to create new forms of art and music and literature and technology, new ways of living a Christian life based upon those new readings of God’s thoughts as manifested in this mortal realm. I remember reading Joseph Ratzinger’s comments about the time he was elected Pope when he noted American Christians have made as big a mess of things as their brothers in Europe and he said the Church doesn’t have the resources to save American Christianity. The Church, in his opinion, would have to concentrate on saving Western Civilization, the home built by the Church for herself, in Europe.
I think Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger if you prefer, is right to estimate low the possibility that the American people will summon the courage, faith, and moral integrity to save this country let alone to contribute much to any revival of Western Civilization. It would seem almost impossible at this point that we Americans can form a new center for that Civilization — we threw away that chance decades ago and perhaps even by 1900. Yet…
I’ll do my best as a child of the American region of the West, my best to provide a literature and a way of philosophical and theological thought which can part of the foundation of a new phase of Western Civilization, perhaps a phase in which the American people mature and play a noble role in God’s narrative.