“True civilization does not lie in progress or
(technology). It lies in the diminution of the marks of original sin.”
Charles Baudelaire
The catalogue of decline continues...
GET
THEE TO A CHURCH
It is widely known that religiosity has shrunk tremendously. You might think
that meant people stopped going to church, but that’s not true. The same people
still go, and the people whose faith was unserious or merely cultural now
reject that. The result is a sharp increase in pseudo-scientific beliefs, things
like astrology, UFO’s, and, (sigh) trolls and elves. What dominates, however, is
not those. The God-shaped vacuum in the heart is usually filled with God,
Government, or Gaia, and the current winner is a political faith. Social Justice
Warriors are the new Puritans, scouring the countryside for victims to brand
with a scarlet R for racism. For those who are religious, who understand the
nature of faith, creeds, moral certainty, and fundamentalism, Wokeism checks
all the boxes. It is a religion, full stop. There are
responsive readings, confessions, kneeling, saints and martyrs like George
Floyd, and actual talk of “sin.”
RIBALDRY!
In a race to the bottom, the country is increasingly coarse
and vulgar. Sitting next to me in the coffee shop as I write this is a woman
with a baseball cap that just says, “F__k.” Regardless of my agreement with the
sentiment, it is a sign of cultural decay. Foul language is increasingly
accepted. A congresswoman recently used the F word in a speech. There is a
pizza restaurant in L.A. called “Best F___in’ Pizza. Then there is the disturbing
popularity of the rap song “WAP”, which stands for…ahem, lubricated female
privates. A string of celebrities filmed Youtube videos singing the song, and
it was discussed in a flippant tone on talk shows. And, despite the virtual
synonymity of Rock and Roll and depravity, it was usually kept in hotel rooms
and tour buses. This
story, however, is pure bonkers: A female singer during a recent
show squatted and peed into the open mouth of a willing fan, who then sprayed
it into the air while pumping his fist to wild cheers. Indeed.
IT'S
NOT RAINING MEN
I have noticed something about motorcycles. They’re
missing. And what remains on the road are not the muscular sport bikes that dominated
the I 5 while doing mile-long wheelies at 90 mph. What’s left are these
250-500cc “sport-ish” bikes that sound like a 10-year-old boy’s long fart. Apparently,
millennials and Gen Z do
not like motorcycles as much. But mention a Tesla with its
giant touch screen…Ooooh!
Remember
this guy?
There is a war over the very idea of what it means to
be a man. Conservatives like Josh Hawley have been calling for a "revival
of strong and healthy manhood in America." The term “toxic masculinity”
has been popularized, and one can be forgiven for being confused whether it means
the toxic elements of masculinity, which are easily recognizable, or it simply
means masculinity itself. In a recent
speech, Hawley blamed the left for wanting to define
traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence, and assertiveness as a
danger to society. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are
the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are
withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?...American
men are working less, they are getting married in fewer numbers, they're
fathering fewer children, they're suffering more anxiety and depression,
they're engaging in more substance abuse." In Omnipotentblog’s “The War On Men,”
which Obscure Blog Magazine called “…one of the most prescient and insightful pieces
of 2012,”* I noted how liberal notions
of collectivism and unity are challenged by the very ideas of competition. Everyone
gets a trophy. Think of the typical responses to a young boy falling and
skinning his knee during a race. The mother may “poor-baby” the child until his
body dehydrates from tears. The man will often encourage the child to stop
crying and finish the race. Masculine love is often conditional and sometimes
the only thing that gets a child to move out of the basement. But if your view
of love is always the “poor baby” version, you might see the enforcement of
standards as crude and thuggish. As modern life becomes safer, as the economy
moves from factory and field into the office, the need for tough and aggressive
men doing dirty and dangerous jobs is diminished. As this happens, men are told
that the fire inside them, the thing that makes them risk and compete and be
great, is actually cause for shame. And now we have a generation of men unmoored,
angry, and confused. BTW, nobody ever talks about toxic femininity, which,
trust me, is a thing.
* This may or may not be completely fabricated.
EMOTIONAL
FRAGILITY
In the last decade plus, the mental health of
America’s youth has plummeted.
I first noticed a rise in psychiatric issues around 2014 when I tried to
hospitalize a runaway 15 y.o. wildly psychotic with voices and delusions. He
was breaking into businesses at night, watching porn on their computers, and
leaving Cheeto dust on the keyboards. Hospitals would not take him. No beds. A
psychiatrist finally admitted there indeed had been a sharp rise in admissions,
and MediCal had raised criteria. Why is this happening? For one, woke-ism is
busy encouraging the replacement of objective reasoning with “lived
experience”. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and science, has
guided Western Civilization for centuries, but that is changing. Cultural
leaders now embrace a more Romantic vision where the passions rule. Naturally,
self-control and virtue are devalued, and when emotions dominate the inner life,
they become like a wild beast, unmanageable and difficult to tame. Now, if
humans are born good, if their natures are altruistic and eager to spread joy if
only societal barriers were removed, this would be a good thing. This is the
vision now being implemented. How’s it working out? Universities are awash in
Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces. Uncomfortable speech is silenced to protect
students from ideas that hurt their feelings. In the Woke scripture “White
Fragility,” Barbara DiAngelo infantilizes People of Color, portraying them as
wounded victims incapable of challenge, while in a tautological and stunning
lack of self-awareness, she claims pushing back against the idea of collective
white guilt is evidence of emotional weakness and defensiveness. For the woke,
the strange solution to the problem of emotional fragility is the removal of
the stigma of emotional fragility rather than the development of
strength and hardiness. Seems kinda dumb.
LONELINESS
In 2000, eminent sociologist Robert Putnam wrote
“Bowling Alone,” a study of the decades-long decrease in civic
involvement and the increase in loneliness. The loss of social capital has only
worsened. Republican Senator Ben Sasse wrote, “Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And
How to Heal,” claiming that loneliness is the primary driver of the endemic
tribalism and hate in this country. Crushing isolation is such a problem in
Britain that former Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a “Minister
of Loneliness.” Academics note today’s children have far
less personal contact than generations past. Years ago, one teen told me,
“Nobody really parties anymore.” I just couldn’t understand that. Now I do. Needless
to say, Covid lockdowns accelerated a crisis already in progress.
At this point, I must apologize, because I lied. This
is really not the theory of “everything.” One could go on and on about the
social ills of the world, maybe write a book or two, or six, but this is a blog.
At some point, I just gotta wrap it up. Is American civilization rolling gently
down a hill or running towards a cliff? I don’t know, but people are angry, and
we all sense something is wrong. The solution, IMHO, is to look back, not to
the evils of the past, which are often uglier than today’s, but to the riches
of tradition, of belief in Providence and humility before God, to the mix of
conservatism, notions of human sin, and hopeful liberalism of the American
Constitution informed by the belief that man is created in the image of God.
The solution is to realize the only true reform, as Nathaniel Hawthorne believed,
is reform of the human heart. Will our Democratic Republic last? Only if we
embrace this observation by James Russell Lowe:
“Democracy in itself is
no more sacred than monarchy. It is man who is sacred; it is his duties and
opportunities, not his rights, that nowadays need reinforcement. It is honour,
justice, culture, that make liberty invaluable, else worse than worthless if it
mean only freedom to be base and brutal…”
Amen.
