What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community
For a variety of reasons, I've been pondering the topic of community recently.
Indeed, this is one of those threads I've taken up, put down, and it's lingered on. Looking at my list of draft posts, there are a bunch of related ones that I ought to fold in. This may reflect that.
Added to that, so much so that a whole string of random community related items have sort of floated by me recently, with it rising to the level that synchronicity is getting hard to ignore.
For anyone who knows me well, that might seem pretty odd. I'm highly introverted, and posted a recent thread relating to that just the other day. But that might give me an insight into community that others lack. Indeed, in thinking on this, part of the problem with people who tried to "build the community" in certain groups is that they treat a community like a club. I think they actually can't see the distinction between clubs and communities, quite frankly. And because those people are extraverted, I can see why they can't grasp it.
This doesn't mean that extraverted people are shallow or anything. According to at least once source, extroverts are "people people", i.e,. they really really like people. I do think, however that they don't grasp at all that not everyone wants a giant bear hug and to be compelled to go to parish pizza and bowling night, and that even having a pizza and bowling night doesn't do much for community.
Put another way, there are people who should be part of the community that would be, in an existential manner, if a solid community existed. Building that, however, is tough, and impossible if not done in a fundamentally natural way.
Want to join the man's parish bowling league and Chesteron night?
No, I don't.
Anyhow, while it sounds weird for an introvert to be saying it, the lack of authentic community is a crisis.
I'm not licensed as a homilist, rather obviously. Shoot, I'm not a cleric. But something occurred to me the other day when pondering the topic of transgenderism, which has been constantly in the news of late.
Eh?
Bear with me.
The topic is, again, community.
And what occurred to me is the story of the rich young man who approached Jesus, which was addressed in a homily.
Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”
He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.* If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said, “Who then can be saved?
Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”
Then Peter said to him in reply, “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us?”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you that you who have followed me, in the new age, when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory, will yourselves sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.
But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.
Matthew, Chapter 19.
Now, the meaning of this seems pretty clear. But for the first time something else struck me.
Students of scripture often note that individual passages can have multiple meanings and that they can all be true. Here, it's clear enough, that the promise is that the individual's sacrifice for the Lord would result in eternal life.
But note that what was also indicated, in a way, that those sacrificing weren't going to be abandoned. Yes, they were giving something up, but they were getting something right away, which was membership in the community.
I'll get back to where I started above, but consider this in relation to recent legislation down in Cheyenne. One legislator, who represents herself as some sort of Christian, made this statement the other day in regard to a bill to extend medicare coverage for recent mothers:
"Arguing that if you’re pro-life you have to be for the expansion of entitlement programs does not follow,” Ward said. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”
That statement, which we've already addressed, is blisteringly anti-Christian, and coming from the Old Testament, as it does, it also flies in the face of a basic tenement of all three Abrahamic religions. You are your brother's keeper, or in this case, your sister's. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree on this, even if certain self-declared Christian legislators don't. But the reason we raise this again here is this, when somebody in the situation these women are in are expected to do something, as we tell them to, it is of course reminding them of their moral obligation as human beings, but it's also the case that those who comply should be part of the community. Rep. Ward's statement basically would kick them out of the maternity ward and then let us ignore them. That's not the way thing should be.
Back to the transgenderism item.
Studies of this tend to show that transgenderism is mostly concentrated in young teenage women, I.e., girls who are young teens, although just the other day I was in the book store and ran into a young man who was attempting to affect, quite unsuccessful, a female appearance.
Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.
And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.
The teenage girls who exhibit this are pretty much all mildly ADHD and have been pretty much all exposed to pornography. Basically, what they're doing is reacting to that. Too young really to even be thinking about sex, they're getting a dose of the weirdest thought of our fallen species right off the bat. Women doing weird things to men, and vice versa, and saying they want no part.
Indeed, for those who watched the recent documentary on Playboy, a similar thing happened to its early "bunnies" in clubs, who were pretty routinely sodomized, with the reaction that a lot of them came out of the experience heavily traumatized.
The point is this. The young girls live in a society that doesn't protect them at all, and they have no place to turn. If they turn to their parents, who are mostly white, educated and liberal, the Americans who have no community at all, they'll get "support" by verification, which in reality is no support at all. Same with the young man at the bookstore or the young man otherwise mentioned above. The one is definitely a child of a white, liberal, well-educated household and is receiving "support". My wager would be that the other young man, who was definitely white, could be described the same way.
Set another way, the WASP class that runs the country has completely abandoned any concept of community. They've abandoned their own community standards in favor of a sort of unthinking soft nihlism. There's no place for distressed people to go. If they do go somewhere, they'll simply get verification that their "feelings" are okay.
And community is community oriented. Not individually oriented.
Let's state that again, the community is community oriented.
Kith and Kin, Tribe and Identity.
The thing is, we're a "social animal", as some folks like to note.
But what does that mean?
In our early, early days, when we looked out on a sleepy morning, after the dog got us up early, as dogs are wont to do, we'd see, once we cleared our tipi/lodge/tent/lean to, a group of identical dwellings inhabited by people we all know. Not only did we know them all, we were likely to be related to all of them, and pretty closely at that.
Indeed, the inheritance of language even demonstrates that. The English word "King", comes from "kin", a word that survived in English as sort of a folk word, not too surprisingly, for close relatives. People who are your "kin" are related to you. At one time the King was related to you also. A king was just a tribal chieftain, and a tribe was just a band of cousins, basically.
Over time this obviously changed, but even today, if we stop and think about it, an element of the "nation" in nation states, which the U.S. is not, is that everyone is actually related. The Swedes, as an ethnic group, all descend from less than 40 people, for example. The Sámi and Finns, who are routinely regarded as the happiest people on earth, have an ancient, ancient origin and have been living basically where they are since the Bronze Age. They're definitely all related.
Indeed, the Finns provide a good example of what we're trying to get across here.
All Finns are descended from tribal folks who moved into Finland, from Siberia, thousands of years ago, and whose relatives stretched far out into northern Siberal for a very long ways, forming the native and majority people of the region until the Rus moved in. There are still small populations of Finno Ugeric people in the very far north for a long ways who can really be regarded as left behind Finns. And as we would suspect, the Finns share a common culture with a common Weltanschauung, a common history, and very significantly for their happy status, a close association with nature in a real sense.
Sociologist constantly try to figure out what makes the Finns such a happy people, but there you have it to a large degree. They're living their with their kin, in a common culture, and are pretty close to nature for a modern nation. Most people living in that state would be pretty happy too.
Indeed, all would be.
Note that this doesn't say that things can't go badly, they certainly can. But what this does demonstrate is that community, in a real sense, matters, as we're all communal in a way.
Looking outward
But what that also means is that as members of a community, it has expectations and standards that dominate over the individuals. There are no individualistic communities.
Americans worship a cult of individuality, and over time, we've infected the rest of the western world with it, or at least helped to spread the infection. We don't like any standards that are inconvenient to us, and have worked to defeat them.
The problem with that is that some standards, indeed a lot of them, exist for a fundamental reason, even if we've forgotten what they were. At some point, in the advancement of the concept of liberty, we failed to consider Chesterton's Fence.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
That gets us back to our "transgendered" friends.
Conventional culture held that there were two genders, and if you "felt" yourself to be outside of them, you should conform to them, or get help as you might have something else going on. Modern liberal thought, being libertine in all such matters of personal conduct, has said no, go ahead and take it down. The results have played out in suicides, increasing definitions of what a person "feels" as the felt change didn't make a person happy, later life regret, and the destruction of social institutions to the determent of the individual and children in particular.
Culture is a library of answers. Not all of the are right. But a lot of them are. The species has been around for a long time, 250,000 to 750,000 years, and a lot of the answers are baked into our genes or were worked out long, long ago. Telling you to ignore hte culture, and hence the community, is a lot like handing somebody a book and them telling them to interpret the words they way they should feel them to be.
Destroying the community.
The United States has always had a multiplicity of cultures, although nothing like what it currently does, but it also had communities. The Frontier often really strained this, after the Mexican War, but communities managed to reestablish themselves pretty readily.
In a large sense, the overall community standards were set originally loosely on Protestant Christianity. As time went on and the country took in large numbers of Catholics, and then Jews, it changed, in an overall sense, to some degree to accommodate the newer immigrants, but it never really went away. The newer communities of people, moreover, formed communities within the larger community. Put another way, Catholics in Wyoming in 1940, let's say, were part of a distinct community and knew it, in the overall larger Protestant, and not terribly religious, Wyoming of that period.
The anti community
At the same time, the same forces, developed into sort of an anti community.
The overall WASPish American culture did have a central existential Weltanschauung, that of a combined Christian worldview of Protestant reformers of the Reformation and American religious evangelist of the Awakening movements. Catholics and Jews were clearly outside those traditions, or even in philosophical opposition to them, but to a surprising degree they adopted some of the core tenants while retaining their own beliefs.
After the Second World War, however, the WASP order began to breakdown, again for reasons that aren't really clear. The United States remained a majority Protestant country, but the various Protestant faiths, much more than others, began to suffer serious erosion while also abandoning core tenants. Over time, this has happened to such a degree that Protestant faiths that now retain them are regarded as subcultures, while mainline Protestant Churches careen towards irrelevance. Catholic intellectuals who like to worry over these topics in the Catholic world should take note that the problem is actually much more expressed in the Protestant world, in which it also saw a universal retreat from orthodoxy toward liberalism. Some Protestant churches today have so weakened on long-established tenants that they basically only really stand behind the concept that we shouldn't kill each other, and we shouldn't steal, tenants that are easy to adhere to. Otherwise, they pretty much license going for it, with many members simply going out the door never to return.
There's definitely a lesson in there.
Anyhow, as this occurred mainline Protestant churches that started off with trying to be more accommodating started to simply evolve towards total non judgmentalism, and the members of their now mostly lapsed congregations adopted that world view. In many cases, highly Protestantized Catholics and Jews did the same. In the end, the only thing that this class is now willing to be judgmental on is seemingly being judgemental. A person could literally have all of the vices listed by St. Paul and be accepted as A OK, while a person warning someone not to do those things will be condemned.
That has lead us to where there's no help for those who really need it.
Take again our transgendered example. Exposed to pornography, as nobody is willing to do anything about it, and raised in a world in which the only thing that really matters is your financial success, grossed out by what they see on the net, and freaked out by the expectation that they have to move away and take jobs as major league accountants, or whatever, they're looking for answers from a community. If their parents won't provide an answer, and they won't, as they don't want to be judgmental, and if the society at large has been told to shut up, least it be judgmental, at least they have refuge in the intentionally self marginalized. That'll get attention from somebody, sympathy from somebody, and nobody is going to step in to keep them from falling.
The counter community
At the same time, certain groups that move counter to this direction have done well, often to the surprise of the larger culture, which is telling.
Some years ago, for example, there was a definite trend in Europe in which European women were becoming Muslims. The number wasn't gigantic, but it was notable. Some even moved to the Middle East.
To the liberalized, no community, Westerner this was astounding. But by becoming Muslim they were opting for a community which provided support, comfort and answers. Indeed, the trip to transgenderism, and Islam, isn't really all that much different, although it would shock both groups to hear that. These women had found a place where their appearance wouldn't be a major factor in their lives, where they weren't going to be expected to act like porn stars, and where they could act according to their long held ingrained DNA based behavior without criticism.
While I'll address orthodoxy more below, in another context, the same forces have seen the move of an appreciable number of main line Protestant Christians into the Orthodox Church. Faced with coming into churches in which the message was it's nice to be nice to the nice, and we're all nice, and don't be judgmental, they're opting for a Christian religion whose adherence to tradition is open and obvious. Some Catholics, while I lament it, from liberal dioceses have taken the same path.
Other Protestant have moved from the main line churches or the old "Reformed" churches that have softened, into really hard core Protestant churches. Indeed, from the outside, it's obvious that the Reformation, which never claimed the majority of Christians, is dying, but in that process the most "reformed" of the Protestant churches and the most lax are simultaneously growing, as the adherents of the center either drop out of attendance all together, comfortable that they are still Christian but okay to do that, or they opt for either a clear message, or ratification that all of their personal vices are completely okay.
It's also worth noting that the LDS have maintained and gained during this period. Knowledgeable Apostolic Christians have a hard time grasping this, as it's clear to them, with their knowledge of the Apostolic Fathers, that they are the original Christians and there was never a Great Apostasy, but that' probably doesn't have much to do with the attraction to the LDS by those who join it. It offers a solid community with a clear set of answers, irrespective of whether they are based on truth, and which again provides cover for acting very traditionally.
And they're not alone.
Most Sundays I drive from a well attended Catholic Church, early in the morning, past a well attended Lutheran Church. I've been to a wedding there. It's pastor clearly bears the flag of orthodoxy and against the world (so much so that I really wonder why he isn't a Catholic priest). At the wedding reception, a large group of young people all danced certain dances they'd learned in the church's wider community, of which they're very clearly part.
In contrast, I also drive past an old Presbyterian Church here, which has declined. They proclaim themselves to be reformed out of that church itself. There's never anyone there.
Is this the General Proselytization Thread?
Well, it hadn't started out to be.
Nonetheless, it's worth noting that religions are so much a part of the deposit of knowledge in a culture that if they're centrality to a culture is destroyed, the culture follows.
Indeed, it's interesting to note that some deep lovers of certain cultures who were either agnostic or non-believers so appreciated that, they were nonetheless deeply appreciative of their culture's religion. Roberto Rosellini, the Italian film director, was not religious himself, but he was enormously attracted to the Catholic Church, its traditions, and ethics, which were central to his world view. Catholic Priest play a heroic role in one of his Rome Trilogy movies, and the centrality of a Catholic world view is obvious in his films. He lamented the rise of materialism in opposition to Catholicism. George F. Will, who is agnostic to some degree, is the same way in regard to Christianity in general. And of course there are many examples of individuals who returned to their faiths, or converted to faith, mid life or even late life, such as C. S. Lewis, William Butler Yeats, and Ernst Jünger. These individuals stand in stark contrast to "insiders", if you will, who attempt to take their faiths in the opposite direction.
And societies that succeed in ripping religions down often end up reinstating their elements in any event. The Russian Communists espoused a highly libertine world view as revolutionaries, but by the 1930s Soviet Communists had become as conservative on some matters, particularly on sexual behavior, as any Christian religion ever had been.
It's often noted that religion is nature to human beings, and that very humans actually fail to have one, even people who proclaim they do not. Even with avowed lapsed or agnostic, the confession of resort to prayer is pretty common. In theological terms, theologians hold that humans, a creation of God, are built for their creator, and look for him naturally. The widespread belief in the divine, if not in a universal concept of that divine, is too large to be ignored.
That comes close, of course, to returning to an argument for universalism, which we're not making. All humans may have some concept of religion, and in reality true atheists are probably so rare as to not exist at all, but not all religions are equal. Ultimately, there's only one truth on any one thing, religion included. That's not the point of the thread.
The debased community
Because forming and living in communities is man's natural state, when one community is destroyed, others will spring up in their wake. Where a community has intentionally been destroyed or suppressed, and it's a natural community, the result is that the community that fills the vacuum will be debased and dangerous, either individually or collectively.
Criminal communities provide an example. Nearly always formed of the dispossessed and disadvantaged, they offer an income, and community. Indeed, often made up of strong ethnic ties (kin and kinship) and having strong rituals, they offer a warped substitute of what a stronger more natural and metaphysical community would otherwise offer. And they stand in stark contrast to the dissolved nice to be nice to the nice ethos that WASPish culture has come to offer. They're ancient, in a way, recalling tribal bands of the raiding type that existed in the larger European culture before Christianity caused it to fade.
In cultures where religion has been strongly attacked by modernity, and culture accordingly decayed, Communism and radical fascism offer another example. Communism, it is often noted, was practically as civil religion wherever it took hold, in contrast to its nature when it was revolutionary. Modern North Korea has actually managed to cross over the line and actually deified Kim Il-sung (김일성), giving him mystical and postmortem divine qualities. Everywhere it took charge, irrespective of its stand as a revolutionary body, it recreated a structure that was essentially religious in nature in order to create a false community in the place of the one it destroyed, centered on a theoretical universal "working man".
Nazism, in contrast, which is sometimes claimed by some to be a species of Socialism, attacked, but with less success, Christianity in its own land, and then with some more success Christianity in the lands it conquered, and directly proposed to establish, ultimately, a new religion based on the Germanic myths of old. Center to its ethos, however, was the worship of the German Volk, an idealized tribal identity which argued that the Germanic peoples were superior to all others. Suppressing the Christian culture of Germany, which was already split into two due to the reformation, it sought to supplant it and went a long ways towards creating alternative community expressions through first the party and then the state.
Restoring the community.
Well, how do you do that?
I.e, once you've destroyed the community, how do you restore one?
I won't pretend to have the answer to this, but I think there are at least some clues, some of which I noted above.
One thing is to remember Yeoman's Third Law of History, which holds:
Yeoman's Third Law of History. Culture is plastic, but sticky.Eh? What could that mean. Well, just this. Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize." They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat. Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks. It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.Examples? Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead. Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks. Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival. Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian. Nothing had actually gone away.This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US. The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain. Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.
However, you secure a hundred times more.
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