But, reading about Cyprian's conversion to Christianity, this passage resonated with me.
Cyprian's first Christian writing is "Ad Donatum", a monologue spoken to a friend, sitting under a vine-clad pergola. He tells how, until the grace of God illuminated and strengthened the convert, it had seemed impossible to conquer vice; the decay of Roman society is pictured, the gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success; the only refuge is the temperate, studious, and prayerful life of the Christian.
"The gladiatorial shows, the theatre, the unjust law-courts, the hollowness of political success.." Sound familiar? Well, if you replace theater with our electronic entertainments and gladiatorial shows with football and mixed martial arts, I'd say it was a perfect description of life in the decay of Western culture which is championed by both right and left and has been for most of the past century. If they hadn't had the depression and WWII to sober them up, the twenties could have gone right on being one big party right up till today. For the current crop of "secularists" it has been one, most of them being relatively affluent.
The continual valuation and devaluation of human and other life to objects of utility and use, economics as practiced and taught in academia never being more than an extension of materialist Mammonism, is entirely related to the presentation of people as bodies to be used in blood sports and the cynical pornofied entertainment media. I hadn't thought about the extent to which it is all a manifestation of the same reduction of lives into things to be used by those with the resources and power to use them or to be disposed of by the same people, as they deem fit or just whimsically brush aside. When you notice that it is obvious that any culture that exhibits the symptoms that ours does is a culture that is rotted out with all of the deadly sins and our academic culture is as rotted out as popular culture, right up to the replacement for moral authority under a secular system, the legal profession and the courts which they staff.
I don't see any way to stop that under the very forces that brought us into decadence. What I wrote about the consequences of the atheist-materialist academics attacking the validity of our own minds is the ultimate in decadence and it is certainly has become the pervasive belief among the educated elite, even in science, even in philosophy.
If the Islamic world looks at the spectacle of Western decadence and doesn't buy it, is it any surprise that they over react so as to avoid becoming what we have become? That some of the worst of our corruption used the language of freedom, the First Amendment, among others such documents espousing liberty, to establish itself has certainly done nothing to inspire a suspicion that they won't lead to a regime based on lies and the use and destruction of the weak, the powerless, members of minorities and the exportation of murder and wars of conquest. The claim heard from the past half century that "more speech" in answer to lies will prevent such catastrophes is entirely shown to be a lie by the imperial wars, the degradation of people into first, industrial resources and then industrial waste, abroad and at home under the rule of such law.
I know that a lot of the change in my thinking over the past decade has come in response to the internalized hated fostered by pornography among gay men, the destructive sexual practices that brought us an endemic infection which forces the alternative of continual and damaging medical treatment or death, and the fact that in the full knowledge of that, anal sex is to be regarded as cool and desirable among young, hip, straight folk, as well as ubiquitously deemed the "real" gay sex among gay men. The present status of anal sex among gay men, a group that has lost enormous numbers as a result of anal sex, shows how pernicious the habit of that thinking is, how engrained it becomes, how pointing out the problems it leads to is speech that is to be mocked and suppressed, shows how bad things can get. Even people I know, men who saw their friends, their loved ones decaying through lesions on their bodies, in their brains, brought to total dementia, covered with seeping, bleeding lesions, have not really been changed by that experience. Only people who have internalized the hatred of others towards us could devalue ourselves, our loved ones to that extent.
My conclusion is that it will take a real conversion to save us. And by us, I mean Western society and all of us, everywhere. I think I understand a bit more about how the early Christians, in the age when their movement was outlawed and suppressed with the kind of violence it still meets must have experienced the rampant decadence everywhere around them and why they reacted as they do. If, by some miracle, statements by Christians, such as Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment and just distribution of wealth seriously challenged the oligarchs who are the real government here, there would be persecution, including, if necessary, murder. If Christians, today, would be willing to face death rather than become a cog in our decadent imperial system is a question. Would we be as brave as those Christians in other countries, some of them missionaries from the West, who are being killed now?
Update: I should have mentioned this kind of entertainment, shown to the entertainment and glee of so many here as so many there were getting killed and maimed and which would set off the next dozen years of carnage, up to and including the recent events surrouding ISIS or whatever it's being called this week.
We are the movie audience in 1984 watching lifeboats being blown up and our free press took the lead in that.
"The claim heard from the past half century that "more speech" in answer to lies will prevent such catastrophes is entirely shown to be a lie by the imperial wars, the degradation of people into first, industrial resources and then industrial waste, abroad and at home under the rule of such law."
ReplyDeleteSpeech, of course, acceptable to the status quo. The speech of liberation theology, just to name a true and radical outlier, is not speech acceptable to the status quo. It isn't suppressed speech (well, not anymore; the Vatican and the CIA, separately, worked mighty to do so at one time, but then Romero died and the world's gaze moved on, and....), but it is ignored.
Because it is so radical. The hardest part of my seminary education was learning to listen to other points of view, was realizing that almost everything I knew was wrong, was understanding that "liberal" ideas like "Free speech" were just pasting over the true problems in society, not because they were evil concepts, but because Rome didn't fall and disappear, it was just transmuted.
It's interesting if you look honestly at Europe to see how Roman it still is. Britain still has it's "circuses" (in English we call them "circles," but in London....). It's legal system still starts its education with training in Roman jurisprudence. The very ideal of Rome, centrality of power and commonality of control (all roads lead to Rome because everywhere is Rome) is reflected in England as well as France (all places in the world under French rule are considered to be France. They might as well be an arrondissement in Paris, under French law and culture.) This is a comment box, not a place for a dissertation, but the bones of Rome are still the skeleton of Europe and so, America. Is it a wonder Scottish law and politics are more liberal than England's? Thank Hadrian's Wall.
Seriously.
When you notice how much similarity there is between life today and life in 1st century Palestine, and then life in the Bronze Age for Moses in Egypt or Abraham in Canaan, you realize the French are right: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
And when you take that to heart, it creates a radical shift in your thinking, indeed. But that's probably the hardest intellectual work I've ever done: realizing the ground upon which I stood was not ground at all, just my preferences and preferred assumptions.
It is no wonder most people don't want to do it. But it's no excuse for not doing it, either.
"I think I understand a bit more about how the early Christians, in the age when their movement was outlawed and suppressed with the kind of violence it still meets must have experienced the rampant decadence everywhere around them and why they reacted as they do."
ReplyDeleteI would recommend, too, Merton's "Wisdom of the Desert Fathers." Especially how he puts their retreat into the desert into historical context. It's not everything; but it's another source. As is their wisdom.