Month: August 2020

Ross Douthat is a writer, film critic and cultural observer I admire. He writes well on Catholic matters as well. Most recently he has written a book called, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success.

He is writing on the allegedly stagnant state of affairs in what we’ll call “Western Liberalism”. Economic stagnation, institutional decay, cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.

The long shadow cast by many long narratives of  Rome’s decline and fall once again  falls over the pages of yet another volume. Douthat believes we must be aware that this is an insidiously gradual process. Rome lasted for centuries in a state of enervation and without any palpable hope of recovery. A slow death.

The indices Douthat cites might not seem obvious symptoms of decline. Productivity, he says, is slowing down and becoming less sustainable; richer people are having fewer kids leading to an older society. Space travel has been remarkable but is not likely to save us.  Decadence on the ground is still decadence in space. “Forever wars” have drained and demoralized us, the very divisive culture wars, and  pop culture amounts to endless recycling of material so seemingly bright and new but so very much the same old things.

And in a society seemingly so preoccupied with sex and its joys and agonies — according to Douthat, people aren’t having sex like they used to — if they ever used to as much as we’ve been led to believe. I’ve always had my doubts. As a character says somewhere in Graham Greene’s novel, The Burnt Out Case, there are only so many ways to drive a nail.

In fact, the Atlantic’s Kate Julian has identified what she calls a “sex recession.”  But the reasoning here is that proliferating “virtual vices” available via Playstation and pronography, Tik Toks and Twitter distract and divert us from the angst to a point where we don’t entirely register the fact that we are standing still, i.e., not advancing in some vital areas — pandemic or  no pandemic. There has  grown up too much simulated stimuli, though apparently this is one area where we’ve kept advancing technologically. (I did a story about an absurd device allegedly in development — but perhaps long since abandoned — in which one could kiss a pair of artificial lips, thereby causing corresponding fake lips across the world to vibrate against the lips of your beloved. Haven’t heard anymore about the long distance kiss “innovation”.)

Douthat claims, in another real downside, that networks for propaganda and disinformation (and fake news?) and “soft” censorship abound across the world. (What’s this have to do with decadence? Well, it’s hard to be creative and original with Big Brother looking over your shoulder.)

Does any of this sound familiar or plausible? My summary is far from complete or, perhaps, entirely coherent or even accurate, for I’ve not read more than excerpts from the book. Suffice it to say ( I hate that phrase!) there is much to ponder here. I guess pondering is a way of forestalling the onset of decadence.

Someone may have been fiddling, but was anyone pondering while Rome burned?

August wanes, statues and reputations lie in the dust, memory and reverence get lost beneath the wild scrawl of  black spray paint, the heat intensifies, at least here in Florida, and perhaps, too, in my native New England. The political climate is toxic. Violent history is being made by those who have no sense of — or respect for —  history or historic figures, even the most virtuous. For that matter, virtue, objectively defined and understood, is in eclipse.

Excuse a random political meditation, therefore, on one of those people who has suffered at the hands of vandals and historical Marxists in the current vile culture war — I speak of the the man many of us still call the Father of Our Country.

A probing into the life and legacy of George Washington reveals a man who, among all the Founders, was undeniably unique in stature. In his lifetime, he enjoyed the unequaled esteem of his countrymen. The veneration has continued into posterity — and rightly so. Ignore the testimonials of ignorant vandals.

It has become a part of the current rancorous narrative of the culture wars to point out that George Washington was a slave owner, freeing his slaves only very belatedly, though clearly, from the record and his own writings, tortured by the cultural realities from which he knew our nation — and he personally — must aspire be liberated, just as he helped liberate us from the British.

But let us speak about Washington’s well-documented magnanimity — ultimately toward those slaves but also toward the religious — especially the Catholics — of his day who regularly endured hostility in the Anglosphere out of which our nation emerged.

I have learned that when the Continental Army first mustered on Cambridge Common north of Harvard Square in 1775, some soldiers sought to re-enact the anti-Catholic English custom, so popular in the England AND New England of that day, of burning the Pope, the Vicar of Christ in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day.  This was in raucous observance of the foiling of the November 5, 1605 Gunpowder Plot, the failed attempt on the life of King James I, Guy Fawkes being one of the prime conspirators.

Washington issued a  General Order on November 5, 1775 that spoke of the “ridiculous and childish Custom” of keeping such a prejudicial observance and expressed surprise “that there should be Officers and Soldiers, in this army so void of common sense as not to see the impropriety  of such a step at this juncture at a time when we are  soliciting and have really obtain’d the friendship & alliance of the people of Canada” (which was overwhelming Catholic at the time). Washington went on, “to be insulting their religion is so monstrous as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are much indebted for every late happy success over the common enemy in Canada.”

It has been noted by C.J. Doyle, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, that “Washington’s sympathy for the one percent of Americans who were then Catholic was unusual, profound, longstanding and without possible political advantage.”

Just thought I’d mention this amid the current iconoclastic, venomous and decidedly anti-Catholic atmosphere in which we find ourselves at this hot and ragged end of the summer of this year we shall not soon forget — and that, to borrow another President’s phrase, shall live in infamy — unless we can redeem ourselves before it draws to a close. And I count victory not as mere tolerance of one another, but of the triumph of the kind of magnanimity and virtue so obviously manifested by, yes, our national Patriarch.

It was none other than “Silent” Cal Coolidge who broke his silence long enough to instruct us wisely that any act of truth-telling is an act of patriotism, because our system of government is based  on a true understanding of human relationships. Therefore Americans should never fear to learn the true story of the founding of America. We just must make certain that it is the TRUE story.

“Searching self-criticism” is good thing, Cal submitted — among individuals and among nations — especially the American nation, given our worldwide influence.

There is a great deal of “searching self-criticism” going on now in the American nation, especially over the issue of race relations.

And the truth is that our Founders worked to organize a system of ordered liberty out of pretty raw material. For instance, they did not “found” or create slavery, thought it was everywhere being practices in the new nation (and, by the way, is still practiced today in obscure parts of the globe.)  But it can truthfully be said, I believe, as did Abraham Lincoln,  that the founders laid out a structure of “self-evident” truths that would ultimately make the practice of any kind of human bondage self-contradictory.

We mortals can, out of disordered self-interest, be slow to realize truths, no matter how “self-evident” , or to adapt them into our common lives. I personally believe this will become the story of our gradual future national consensus on the truth about abortion, growing out of the emerging scientific and medical knowledge of pre-natal life and recognition of the psychological and emotional impact of  abortion on women — and men. And then this consensus will find its way into law as we uphold the principle of “liberty for all” — born and unborn.

Lincoln understood the meaning of “liberty to all” but even he, battling contemporary political and sectional realities, only gradually led the movement to legislate it into existence for Americans who were manifestly NOT free, i,e. African-born slaves whom we’d yet to regard as fully human, much less as fellow citizens. Writing after the 1860 election, Lincoln stated  that “no oppressed people will fight and endure as our fathers did (during the American Revolution) without a promise of something better than a mere change of masters,” referring to how the Founders threw off their British masters in hope of a better life.  Lincoln saw a united America as “the last best hope of earth.” And, I believe, it remains so.

It frightens me, therefore, to see our union and our common sense of hope in jeopardy, as, indeed, it is at this moment in our history.

Stephen Tootle, to name just one academic on one relatively obscure American campus ( The College of the Sequoias, a public two-year college in Visalia, California in the San Joaquin Valley) stated not long ago that his students “are mostly poor, and most of them have brown skin. But they are not stupid and they are not lazy. They have been told for most of their lives — by people claiming to help them — that the system is rigged, that the past is nothing but a record of oppression, that they should not want to participate in our sick society, that racism is the answer to racism, and that freedom exists only to crush the weak. Yet something inside them has always led them to believe that those ideas are wrong.”

Tootle wrote this exactly one year ago  — in marginally better times —  in a review of University of Oklahoma Professor Wilfred M. McClay’s newly published book called Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. It sounds like a text book.

Any new account of the American founding comes, as I noted, at a time when our union is being severely tested by division, disease, disorder and new cries of racism.

From the sounds of it, McClay’s book could be an antidote to the late Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, a revisionist Sixties-era version of American events widely celebrated by the left when it was published so long ago and embraced, sadly, by such contemporary great Americans — to name just one — as Bruce Springsteen (at least Bruce states his debt to Zinn at, for me, a dispiriting point in his otherwise mostly heartening  memoir Born to Run. I like Bruce; I hate it that he, in singing of America, might believe Zinn’s take on our national history — that it is essentially a story of oppression of the have-nots by the haves.

I have not read McClay’s book but, from the reviews, gather that it does not paint a jingoistic, simplistic story of America as some might fear based on my description of it —  that it is full of complex ideas that  might shed new light — if you accept McClay’s version of events — on many of the story lines about our founding that we have accepted for generations as American gospel.  I suppose such an unsettling of old assumptions is what those on the left celebrated about Zinn’s history. So be prepared to have your understanding adjusted once again by Professor McClay as we continue on the American journey of self-understanding.

For instance, McClay apparently does NOT assert that the free market or the  stock-market crash of 1929  caused the Great Depression or that FDR and the New Deal brought about an economic recovery or that isolationist in the U.S. caused Hitler to come to power in Europe.

I will be very interested to read how McClay handles the whole story of slavery in the United States as we continue to strive to tell the truth to one another about the true nature of human relations. Remember what “Silent Cal” told us: to do so in an act of patriotism.