Lex Anteinternet: The Political Left, having recently rediscovered democracy, now rediscover's shame. A blog entry by Robert Reich.

Lex Anteinternet: The Political Left, having recently rediscovered d...: 

The Political Left, having recently rediscovered democracy, now rediscover's shame. A blog entry by Robert Reich.

Marjory Taylor Greene, left, Howler Monkey's right (By Steve from washington, dc, usa - howler monkees doing their thing, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963947).  One of these examples is shameful, and it ain't the one on the right.

This is an interesting and in my view largely correct, insightful blog entry by Robert Reich:

The death of shame

It also comes, I'd note, on the same day that a Wyoming Republic commentator made what are somewhat similar comments, calling a member of the GOP Central Committee a hypocrite in no uncertain, and indeed highly crude, terms, although if true, they'd be deserving ones.

And hence, I guess, my comment.

While I think that what Reich is complaining about is in fact shameful, which starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like a Howler Monkey during the State of the Union Address, how the crap can anyone on the hardcore political left sincerely make this claim? The hard left in the country has spent the last 50 years totally dismantling any concept of shame in absolutely everything whatsoever.

And that's a lot of the reason why we are exactly where we are.

Do we have no shame?

Of course not. We were told that nothing is shameful.

And indeed, this tracks well into the purpose of this blog, looking at then. . .and now.  And, moreover, we often fail to note this trend, i.e., descent, in literature, as we assume that everyone in the past was living in the sewer or wanted to be like us, in the sewer.

That's truly not how it was.

I'll admit that I am torn in how to present this post.  When I started drafting it, I found I went into detail on where shame has exited.  I hadn't intended in the first place that the thread be a catalog of things formerly shameful, and now no longer shameful.  And in looking at it, I don't think that's the correct approach.  Maybe I'll expand on individual items later.

But what I will note, is there are a lot of things that were once regarded as highly shameful, in the arena of personal conduct, that no longer are, and in some instances, left-wing social engineers have gone so far as to impose shame on anyone commenting on them, or not engaging in them. Shame hasn't really left in that sense, it's been transferred.

Taking what is a short arch of history, but a long one in terms of individual lives, since World War Two, and really, since the late 1960s, a massive effort has been expended on this by the left.  Even as late as the early 1980s, for instance, many things that are now not shameful, were.  

Sex outside of marriage, particularly for women (or girls) was shameful.¹   Having a baby out of wedlock was shameful.²  Homosexuality was shameful.³   Men dressing in women's clothes or affecting a female appearance was shameful. Prostitution was shameful⁴ . Avarice was shame, including avarice in these areas.⁵

Even into the 1970s, being divorced conveyed an element of shame.⁶   Living with the opposite gender and not being married was shameful. 

Well beyond that, having a child and not supporting the child economically, even to the point of your own well-being being impaired, was shameful.

While it was definitely changing during the 60s, putting yourself on display, i.e., being an "exhibitionist" was shameful.

Pornography, even after Playboy, and its consumption, was shameful.

All this started getting ripped down in the late 1940s, it accelerated in the 60s and 70s, and it's gone on to really stretch the balloon in our present age.  The results have quite frankly been a disastrous assault on nature.

Now, I don't wish to suggest that every conveyance of shame was warranted or a good thing. There were some really bad results.  The high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s were partially due to it being simply too shameful in many people's minds to bear a child out of wedlock, with the shame being imposed both on the young woman, but also on her family.  That this has ended is a good thing.

But the Me Generation's deep dive into themselves, and "if it feels good, do it", as the ethos, has been hugely destructive.  The KIA, MIA, and WIA of the Sexual Revolution has caused a limping society.  The focus on "me" lead to a focus on "mine", destroying community and boosting greed.

And in no small part, it's lead to where we are in things like Reich has complained about, and not just in this post.  It's all sort of the same package.  If the whole world is about me, me, me, and my needs, needs, needs, I really don't need to care what anyone else thinks or even reality.  The difference, therefore, between Marjorie Taylor Greene howling for attention and a transgender advocates demanding that a man be viewed as a woman, as he wants to be, are really thin. Likewise, the difference between a AoC and Elon Mus isn't all that much.

Also, really thin is the difference between individualized self-expression, including pantless individualized self-expression, and Harvey Weinstein pulling the latter off of somebody else.  It all just goes together.  In a way that they likely couldn't recognize, Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are all fellow travelers on the same destructive cultural bus.

Reich cites to shame being a necessary social engine, and it is.  But you can't partially restore shame, really, as it has to be based on a larger something.  You can't just say "bad", and it's bad, because it's bad.  Bad things are bad, but due to something else making them bad. 

We've been seeing a lot of this recently, interestingly, and some of that's a good sign.  The Me Too movement is an effort to restore shame where it had once been.  At least up into the 50s, if not beyond, men who expected women to put out were called "wolves", and to be tagged that was shameful.  While the name was no longer around by the late 70s, early 80s, the same conduct was still not admired at that time, but Hefner and company were ripping it down, and in deed, raping it down, basically.  Hollywood, where actress self prostitution was pretty common all along, was interestingly the first to really say "enough", on an individual level, and try to reverse it.

But you really have to restore the metaphysical basis for why that's wrong, to really get anywhere.

Young people, left without the guide rails of the culture that was torn down, have partially restored it as well, although groping for a basis for it remains.  And in some odd ways, as we recently addressed, even the transgender movement, deep down, is an effort to reach out to get back to a less material, less perverted, time.

So here we now are.  Having become comfortable with a Quasi Judaical Dictatorship that's suddenly betrayed autocracy and restored democracy, the left finds itself now championing what it had become comfortable omitting, and here at last, its rediscovered, shame.

So is this a "everything was better in the past" post?  No it isn't.

But shame exist for a reason, and excising it wholly was a mistake.

Footnotes.

1.  People will instantly claim that there was a double standard, and to some degree that was true, but not to the degree that people commonly imagine.  It is true that it's becoming public knowledge that a girl had sex outside of marriage would tarnish, and often severely, her reputation, and if it was a case of multiple men, it would put her in a category that would be difficult to ever get out of, but men who were multiple standard violators likewise got tagged with a permanent, indeed lifelong, reputation they couldn't get out of either.  They had greater leeway than women, but not absolute leeway.

2. As noted in later in the thread, this probably partially lead to the high abortion rates of the 70s and 80s.  It also, however, lead to a lot of children being given up for adoption in a process in which the pregnant girl often absented herself, or her family absented her, for a period of time so that the pregnancy would not be discovered.  I know at least one person who experienced, this, later going on to a very respected adult life and the pregnancy not being discovered until after she had died.  As there was a high demand for healthy infants to adopt, and frankly white healthy infants (and there still is), this often worked out well for the adopted as well. Again, I personally know one such person whose mother was a college student when she became pregnant and the father never knew.

Indeed, that latter item is surprisingly common.  You'd think the distressed young woman would have always told the father, but often, they didn't.  This is because they didn't want, quite often, to be faced with the choice of marrying the individual, which also often occurred.  Such marriages usually happened quickly before the woman "showed".  In cases in which the women were in their 20s, they often just didn't want to be married to the man in the end, and for teens, their families didn't want to put them in that spot, quite often.  And of course, date rape wasn't really a concept at the time, and therefore in cases in which that resulted in pregnancy, not wanting to marry the man made sense.

3.  This tended to have an arresting influence on open displays of homosexuality, and it also led to quite a few homosexuals simply suppressing it individually, or even refusing to acknowledge it in any sense.

4.  It still mostly is, of course, but there are ongoing efforts to break this down.

The degree to which prostitution is shameful, although not really being a prostitute, tends to change by era.  In rough and ready frontier areas, the institution tends to exist pretty openly, and it also tended to very much be associated with certain armies, sometimes by compulsion.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the individual shame associated with it evaporates, but rather the tolerance of it is pretty open.  In other eras, there's very low tolerance for it.

There tends to be a myth that prostitutes were the founding women in a lot of regions of the frontier, which is just flatly false.  I've heard this myth associated with one local, now long deceased, historian, but as I've never read his work, and for acquired bias reasons I'm unlikely to, I don't know if that's really true.  Be that as it may, the most typical fate for prostitutes was early death, due to the lack of protection from disease.

5.  But not just in these areas.  Being "greedy" has been something that's always been around, but which wasn't tolerated in the way it now is until after the Reagan Administration came in.  

Americans have always had a very high tolerance for the accumulation of wealth, but not to the present level.  Simply being wealthy is not a sign of avarice, but having wealth was at one time very much associated with a social expectation of charity. Quite a few wealthy people still exhibit that trait today.

"I pay my taxes", while something nobody likes doing, was actually something the very wealthy used in their self-defense at one time, as the upper tax rate was extremely high.

6.  Fault, of course, had to be demonstrated for divorce up until nearly everyplace, or maybe everyplace, adopted "no-fault divorce".

Divorce is really regarded as being routine today, but even into the 1970s it was a mark against a person.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...:   

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

 

Basically- Save the tomboys, let little boys paint their nails, don’t be a jerk to your kid because there are bad people/groomers in the world- protect your child and teach them they’re great the way they are and doing those things doesn’t mean they’re a different gender

Luka "Bunny" Hein.

Last Sunday I had a long item on community, and how we're lacking it, and need to restore it.

In that, I also noticed the operation of synchronicity.  And here I find it at work again.

Among the various bills pending in front of the state's legislature are two regarding the horrific abuse of minors in the name of "gender affirming care".  Chemical and surgical attacks on gender and surgery to "reassign", or at least partially remove, a person's gender characteristics is "care" in the same way that the Holocaust was a "solution".  It isn't, it demonstrates extreme moral depravity, and it's an absolutely insane rejection of nature.

Some of this topic, and that one, started off with various items I'd read or heard, which was then followed, by what I just noted here:

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.

I noted in that I'd post another one on this particular topic.

And then the very brave Luka "Bunny" Hein testified in front of the legislature, saying a lot of this stuff more bravely than I could have.

I so thoroughly killed off my younger self to become what I was, what I am, that I truly feel as though trying to find any part of her left in me would just feel like resurrecting someone else’s corpse 

I suppose that metaphor is appropriate with how Frankenstein-like I feel now

Luka Hein.

Hein isn't alone.  She's joined by Chloe Cole, whose name has been given to one of the proposed statutes, "Chloe's Law".  Cole, like Hein, is an activist against this horror, but she's gone further and is crusading generally against what we might call the perversion of youth.  If you want to know why there's so much furor over a certain book that keeps getting mentioned in regard to school libraries, look at her Twitter feed. She put the pages of the book up, complete with the male on male dick sucking images, which are the reason people are complaining about the book.¹

I've known little boys who played with dolls who grew up to be men's men, and I've known plenty of girls who took up what had been formerly regarded as very male activities, or male habits.  Indeed, ironically in our day and age, younger women who have retained highly traditional ideas, or perhaps I should say highly feminine behavior, have been ridiculed and belittled, while women as a whole have been pushed into entire roles that are not only traditionally male, but in some (limited) instances, such as combat soldiers are likely genetically so.  Up until just recently, however, it wasn't the case that the conclusion was made on some societal level that this must mean those boys want to be girls, or those girls want to be boys.  

Now that's being shoved down upon them.² 

What's really going on here?

We discussed some of that just the other day, but there are a number of things going on, the first of which is the complete rejection by the WASP class of the concept of nature and standards, which we touched on in our earlier essay.  That's left them a ship adrift, and subject to the winds of forces which very much have an agenda.

As we've already gone into it in some depth, we won't here. But basically to sum it up, up until after the Second World War the dominant American culture, the WASP culture, was rooted in a Protestant sense of Christianity, which means that it was rooted in a Christian world view.  Even people who were not Protestant Christians picked up large portions of this world view, given us the oddity of Protestantized Catholics and Protestantized Jew, as well as Protestantized Agnostics and even Protestantized Atheists. Humorist Garrison Keiller has a joke in one of his monologues about claimed non believing bachelor farmers going to Lutheran Easter services and noting that "it was a Lutheran God they didn't believe in", but there's something to that.

As part of that, or related to it, American society, and European society wasn't all that far removed from nature in a way up into the early 1960s.  You certainly can find examples of people who lived an urban life for generations by the 60s, but more often than not you'd tend to find some recent rural connection.  People's parents, or grandparents, had been farmers quite often.  And certainly in North America, as Gene Shepherd noted in one of his essays, even urban people retained outdoor activities to some degree if they had no farm connection.³

Why does this matter? Well, for a couple of reasons.  Starting in the 60s, this really started to breakdown.  The Spirit of 1968 essentially rejected all conventions, existential or otherwise, and started society on a path of radical self defined, "if you feel good, do it" type of thinking, inroads into which were already being advanced by the Playboy culture that started attacking the family, in essence, in 1953.  Things were well advanced in this direction by the time Tom Wolfe redefined the Boomers as "The Me Generation" in 1976, by which time the Greed Is Good ethos was also taking root.  By the late 1970s the WASP culture was so diluted it was already about individual self definition, as long as that also included monetary success.  Ties to the land were being lost, in spite of efforts to revive it in an unrealistic idealized sense, so lessons that are plain in nature, were gone.⁴ 

With the guardrails removed, it's no wonder where things ended up, but it didn't happen, of course, overnight.  Indeed, it really took until the Boomers children raised in the larger WASP culture started having their own, and passed on only a very diluted sense of anything whatsoever, with that mostly being "be yourself" and "be successful".  Nobody was a loser, everyone (up until you needed to make money) a winner, and whatever you wanted to do was okay.

Well, nature is nature, sometimes cruel, and that's not the way things work.

And hence we see the fork of a dilemma here, which is impacting the modern age, and the rise of transgenderism in confused, mostly female, adolescents, and confused males in their early 20s.

And that means the root is likely not the same.

The Confused Girls

Luka Hein describes this, having lived through it, about well as anyone can.  By and large, what we see with these girls, and that's what they are, is this.  They're mostly distressed female teenagers with ADHD, some of whom are Tomboys, who are pushed in this direction or find temporary refuge in the identifier.  Totally lacking a community, with parents who are about as firm as milk toast and who have no existential concept of anything, they head that way and then are pushed that way.⁵

In a society grounded in nature, let alone the existential, they'd get real support from their families, which would like be sports, the outdoors, and a community with external standards.  Instead, they get "support" which amounts to pushing them into mutilation.

The big root in this is the lack of a community, combined with an exposure to the perverse early on.  Girls this age don't want to be pushed into sex, let alone pushed into sex, which up until very recently was regarded as extremely weird.  Now they are.  They're pushing back and away. Getting away is the real desire.  Given enough time, and support, to realize that they don't have to yield to whatever weird conduct Reddit is boosting at the moment, or appearing on the cover of "teen" magazines, and they'd be okay.  Moreover, being somebody like Hein, whose Twitter photo is a baby rabbit sitting on a large caliber handgun, doesn't mean you have interest which mean you have to be a closet male.

Polish mountain climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, Tomboy extraordinaire, difficult personality, married woman, and a real woman.  Polish Olympian Maria Magdalena Andrejczyk provides another, very contemporary, example.

The Confused Young Men

Some of what we noted above applies to men as well, but I suspect that we have more often is a cry for attention, or the Laying Flat culture, or both, at work.

While it's not popular in any fashion to say it (although it is being said), it's always been hard to be a man.  This is not to say that it's been easy to be a woman, but frankly the burdens of life have traditionally fallen on men and women quite differently. The historical burden on women is indeed tied to their biology, bearing children is dangerous, or at least was up into the 20th Century, and hard on the body.  And up until the Government stepped in to be the husband of women who cared not to marry the father's of their children, having even one child tied a man to the father if she kept the child permanently as there was no other economic option for the most part.  People have tended to therefore look back and be wistful on the "patrimony".

Truth be known, however, male roles in societies have been blisteringly simple traditionally, if not always easy.  Men were expected to take a societally defense role, with their first obligations being to protect their families first, protect women and children in general secondly, and protect their nation last.  On that last one, you can put in tribe if you are thinking of a more aboriginal society.

Men were also expected to "provide" for their families.  When I was young, it was still the case that people would excuse some other real or imagined failure of a man by stating "he's a good provider".  This had all sorts of meanings in context.  In one hand, a man might have some real moral failings, perhaps he hit the bars a lot, or perhaps he dallied with other women, but if he made a good income and brought it principally home to his family, that was regarded as excusing a lot of other conduct.

Conversely, it was also used in the instances in which a man might otherwise be regarded as boring, plain looking, or not an otherwise romantically attractive person.  "He's a good provider" would be regarded as excusing those failings on one hand, or be used as a basis for suggesting to an unmarried woman why somebody should be regarded as a prospect for marriage.⁶

This goes back to the dawn of the species and reflects the original genetic dimorphism, physically and psychologically, that our species exhibits.  In modern industrial times it reflected itself in a number of interesting ways that directly made, if you will, men's life "hard".

Men working themselves to death wasn't really regarded as abnormal and in certain societies with thin resources, such as Finland, men died much earlier than women did. Men in general still generally die younger than women for that matter.  And dangerous work was a male role, including not only industrial work, but the most dangerous work of all, war.  Indeed, in spite of feminism and a general societal effort to suppress this, this is still largely true.

Much less true, however, is how society reflected this.  

Men were expected to respect women in a much more formal manner than they do now, where this is very much no longer the case.  They were expected to defend them, even in a situation in which they really didn't know them.  They were expected at some point to plan to make a living which "would support a family", or if they didn't feel up to that, and not all did by any means, to drop out of the family raising role for some other societally acceptable one.  They were expected to support families if they had one, including marrying a woman if they got her pregnant and were not married. And they were expected to bare arms if need be.

A good example of this in the early 20th Century is interestingly the Titanic.  A monument in Washington D.C. introduces to us the reason why on its front and back inscriptions:

TO THE BRAVE MEN WHO PERISHED IN THE TITANIC

APRIL 15 1912

THEY GAVE THEIR

LIVES THAT WOMEN

AND CHILDREN

MIGHT BE SAVED

ERECTED BY THE

WOMEN OF AMERICA

Back:

TO THE YOUNG AND THE OLD

THE RICH AND THE POOR

THE IGNORANT AND THE LEARNED

ALL

WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES NOBLY

TO SAVE WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The men on the Titanic, rich and poor, stepped aside so that women and children would live.  This was the traditional expectation, and they fully fulfilled it, stupid modern movies notwithstanding.

The reward, so to speak, for the role was in part simply genetic.  Husky's, the dog, are happy pulling sleds, which coyotes would not be.  Much of this just worked the same way.  Additionally, however, male life tended to result in male societies, formally and informally, going all the way back to tribal society.  Membership in them was part of being male, and amazingly universal.⁷ Indeed, it started off in childhood, with the first "band of brothers" usually being a "band of boys", and later some formal organization, like the Cub Scouts.

Now all of this is shattered.  A society that confused equality of the sexes, which existed much more than imagined prior to feminism, but which has been confused by the failure to understand how technology impacted that, with samism, has created a societal requirement that, save for professional sports, the physical differences between women and men are not to be mentioned.  Men have become shy about defending women the way they once did, least they receive a rebuke. Well-intentioned government subsidies combined with the society wide adoption of the "Playboy Ethic" has blinded society to the physical and psychological impacts of sex so that not only are men not really expected to take care of any children they cause, or the women who bare them, but they're actually expected to put out irrespective of the consequences.  This is so much the case that in a fairly recent notorious event in which somebody was unjustly killed, the press was full of his being a "good father", which in real terms simply meant that he'd fathered a lot of children, and not all by the same woman.  Not that he was acting as a parent.

Added to that, the traditional role of "defense" has seen female intrusion as something that must be accepted, although in reality it hasn't gone that far at the armati homines level.  

Male societies now are completely verboten. You can't do that.  The Boy Scouts must admit girls, and is the Scouts.  Men, basically, have no larger societal refuge from their male lives.

And the point of those lives is now warped. The "get a good job" pressure is still there, but point is missing. Getting a good job is supposed to occur, so you can buy toys.  In the WASP end of things, many of the upper middle class WASPs avoid children entirely.  Ultimately procreation, a reality of earlier years, is just regarded as recreation, and therefore the object of it on the giving and receiving end easily disposed of.

As feminist author Susan Faludi has put it, men have been "Stiffed".

That gets to this.

If young teenage women, on the cusp of becoming young women, have been freighted by the Reddit/Internet portrayal of their expectation that they serve as harem concubines for men in general, and have opted out through transgenderism, young men, a little past their early teen years, and perhaps fully past them but still in their very young 20s, have looked at this in some instances and looked for the door out.

In the past, as noted, there was an outdoor, even before much of this became so perverse.  In rural societies, bachelor farmers, who often weren't terribly good farmers, were a pretty common and accepted thing. Farming, and ranching, was good honorable work, and not getting married as part of that was more common than a person might suppose.

The unmarried industrial worker was also surprisingly common.  A sort of portrayal of this, combined with one man's desire to get married, is shown in the movie Marty.  Enlisted men in the Army, with the exception of senior NCO's, sometimes, tended to be unmarried.  Indeed, junior officers were usually unmarried, and in some militaries, such as the British Army and, while a bad example, the Imperial Russian Army, marriage was highly frowned upon. Moreover, certain male occupations tended to fall towards unmarried men by default, and some, such as the Catholic priesthood, required it.  Just as male society tended to accept the mentally off a bit into it's ranks in the larger group, it accepted unmarried men into it as well.⁹

With the rise of the societal acceptance of homosexuality as ostensibly normal, this dynamic completely changed. While there have always been people with same sex attraction, unmarried men were not assumed to be "gay", they were assumed to be unmarried.  Homosexual men did fall into the categories mentioned, as the wealth in society started to rise mid 20th Century and certain low paying occupations became increasingly societally unacceptable to obviously intelligent men, this increased. But the postwar economic boom, the Playboy culture onset, the Sexual Revolution, and Feminism completely destroyed what had been.

At some point, by the late 1980s, society would no longer let men who wanted to basically drop out of things, for whatever reason, do it.  A couple of decades prior society accepted that a guy could take an industrial job, for instance, and work it his entire life as a single man, with a single dwelling, and not be homosexual. By the late 80s, no longer.  And no longer was such a person really even allowed to peaceably dwell in that condition, but an absolute need for sex of some sort was presumed.  Such people were presumed to be homosexual and if they were younger, relationships they might not really want were forced on them.  The Friends and Big Bang Culture had arrived.

At the same time, the rise of the Me Generation meant that money for individual hedonistic purposes was now the point of being.  You needed a "career" so you could live well, even if living well really meant that everything was for entertainment, including other people.

How do you get out of that?

Well, "transitioning" will work.

Based at least on some observation, young men just getting ignored in their plight, with parents who aren't going to provide any guide rails, is a big factor in this.  They aren't really seeking to change genders, they're trying, ironically enough, to get back to the 1950s.

How does this end?

I'm usually pretty cautions about quoting Rod Dreher.  I like some of his stuff, and not so much others.  Be that as it may, he's spot on here:

There will be no justice until every damn doctor, hospital, and medical association responsible for this atrocity has been sued into the ground, and some of them imprisoned. Forgiveness? Yes, in time (though that's easy for me to say, as I have not suffered what this father has suffered) -- but only after full lustration, only after Nuremberg-like tribunals, only after the trials, only after utter and complete shame shattering all the luminaries and the institutions -- including the Democratic Party, the TV networks, the major newspapers -- which brought this evil onto the lives of American children and their families.

Those who did this to young women like her -- people like Dr. Gallagher above, who revels on social media in her success in slicing the healthy breasts off of women -- God willing, they will pay within the limits of the law for what they have done. As evil as the Tuskegee Experiment was, this is even more damaging, because it has created, and is creating daily, thousands of more victims.

He's exactly right.

Indeed, it's already happening. Chloe Cole has filed suit.  My prediction is that if she doesn't win, somebody soon after her will.  And like the Opioid lawsuits that are now so common, they'll drive this out of the societal field by litigation force and judgements.  In the meantime, the same society that was just lately pushing pills will be "oh my, oh my, how could this terrible of thing have happened.

But that won't solve the larger problem.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.

Philippians; 3:19.

This pretty much defines where we are, even though's worshiping their stomachs and glorifying in their shame don't recognize it.   That has to change, and changing that is a tall order.

Because in order to do that, the lens, in society has to be turned back to me, towards the whole, and the existential.

Footnotes:

1.  I really haven't tracked the library debate much and have discounted it, but Cole's posting makes it plain how far things are gone.  The book clearly illustrates the author's descent into homosexual conduct and is frankly pornographic.  It shouldn't be in a school library, and it does amount, intentionally or not, to transgender propaganda.

At no point prior to our current era would there even been a debate on whether a book which graphically depicts sexual acts, let alone homosexual acts, should be available to be checked out of a public school library. The fact that there is such debate now is a sign of how far gone things really are, and additionally how entrenched certain interests are that not only want to defend their contra natural lifestyle, but actually promote it.

2. To state this bluntly, what people feared about the Obergefel decision has not only come to pass, but it's surpassed those fears.

This should not have surprised anyone.  Many years ago the homosexual book After the Ball, according to those who have read it, and I have not, not only argued for the normalization of homosexuality, but apparently for the dismantling of marriage and the traditional and long-established incidents of male/female relationships.  Presently, not only are those campaigning for the normalization of transgenderism, but campaigning for it, which is accompanied by foisting medial "treatments" upon the very young, and the accompanying large-scale transfers of cash that entails.  

This has happened before with other industries.  Think, for example, this:

3.  Shepherd noted in one of his books how the men in the Indiana city in which he grew up all subscribed to Field & Stream, even though they largely were not outdoorsmen.  It was a retained desire.

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

5.  Both Hein and Cole have been reluctant to criticize their parents, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be criticized.  These strong daughters honor their parents by providing the backbone that their parents completely lacked.

Having said that, this illustrates the point I noted above.  These young women are roughly in their early 20s, which means they were born either in this century, or the tail end of the last one.  This means that their parents were likely born in the 70s or 80s, to parents who had come up in during the 60s.  So in effect they are the grandchildren of Boomers whose children were often raised with the ethos of the 60s and 70s, which combined would be there are no standards and your goal is to make money.  Additionally, their parents came up during the GOP's gutting of science funding in schools.  So they were born to parents whose grasp of the physical and metaphysical is weak, and whose principal world view is that it's nice to be nice to the nice.

6.  While citing to fiction is always dangerous, an interesting example of this are well depicted in the fiction of Jane Austen.  Not really intended for wide circulation, and limited to the concerns of her class, they nonetheless demonstrate the basic nature of male and female relationships across the ages, which is why they remain incredibly popular, particularly amongst young women who tend to see themselves in the characters.

A feature of this is the "provider" aspect.  Tending to focus on families made up of women, the unmarried women are the concerns of their parents and concerned themselves.  Finding a suitable match, to so speak, dominates the novels, with tension between that and romantic love.  An example in Pride and Prejudice, her best novel, is found in the character of Charlotte Lucas, the protagonist close friend, who opts to marry the Episcopal Churchman, William Collins, who is the epitome of boorish and overbearing, as she's 27 and has no other prospects, and his position is secure.

7.  An example of this given that at some point, it must have been in the 1950s and perhaps early 60s, my father was a member of the Knights of Columbus.

Now, my father was not a joiner by any means, but in the 50s and 60s a man would almost by default be a member of some organizations.  He was the President one year of his profession's statewide professional association, which means that he had been active in it.  And based on some recollections he related to me over the years, he'd been a member of the Knights when the Knights still had a downtown clubhouse.  So had two of my uncles, at least.  Maybe, and probably, all four of them were.

The Knights were a much different organization then, at least locally, than now.  Now I know that they act as a mutual benefit society, as I am sure they did then, and I note them most frequently for having pancake breakfasts at one of the parish churches every Sunday after the early morning Mass.  They may have done that then as well, but the big difference is that their clubhouse, like most men's clubs of the day, had a bar, and it could get a little rowdy.  The long serving Parish Priest of the era stopped in every night at closing time to make sure that they were actually closing, and their St. Patrick's Day parties were legendary.

Be that as it may, it's almost impossible to imagine my father in that setting. Probably after he married, or at least after I was born, he chose not to be, which was in keeping with his character.  Still, it's interesting that you pretty much had to be a member of some social club, probably male only, if you were a man prior to the 1970s.

I've never been a member of anything like that, really, although when I was first practicing law the county bar association was amazingly active and often met one evening, right after work, in a bar, ostensibly to present a CLE.  My enduring memory of one of those meetings was getting there in time, but just in time, and having to squeeze into the back row of table seating, only to have one notoriously rude female lawyer saying something like "so you think you can get around my fat ass?"

She later was subject to a scandal when her husband turned her over to the authorities for molesting him when he was a minor.

9.  This is reflected back to us by the culture of earlier eras in some odd ways.  

For instance, in cartoons, an unmarried male character was really common. Gasoline Alley's central protagonist was, at first, unmarried, with this changing as female readership was low.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...: 

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.

Russian children, 1909.

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?

Crowd of miners in Mogollon, New Mexico.  Note the wide vareity of ages.

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.

This is not trivial.  Being part of such a community came with a Weltanschauung, a set of expectations, and an expectation of help.  I just ran across such an example of the latter which, in today's' world, would have had a very different ending, but which had a happy one, in context, at the time.  It also had a very Catholic one, and one heavily based on the support of a large close net family spread over three states, but which remained close nonetheless.

After the Second World War there was a sort of super heated concept of the proverbial "melting pot".  Ironically the desire that everyone be an American (and then later a European, in Europe) lead from what was essentially an anti diversity position to a hyper diversity position, to an extreme individualistic position in the society at large.  Whatever it was about the times, and I tend to think it was a reaction to the murderous fanatic nationalism of the Axis powers of World War Two, there was a very distinct "there's no difference between people" and "we're all alike" which didn't celebrate diversity at all, but hugely opposed it.  Indeed, this was evident in the early opposition to the Civil Rights movement which opposed integration partially on the basis that African Americans, one of the oldest demographics in the United States, present since 1619, were "not yet ready" to enjoy full American citizenship. When John Wayne stated in Playboy magazine in 1971 that “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility", he was speaking for a huge percentage of Americans and ironically on the right wing backside of a left wing program of melting everyone and every culture into a single American one.  That goal had been there for decades, but in the post-war economic boom it took on a new, and quite successful, form.

The overall problem with that is that it not only sought to incorporate every element of American society into one, it sought to diminish the differences between individual cultures down to nullities.  The American Civil Religion, never really dominant until that time, came to be, with a sort of loosely Judeo-Christian, Protestantized, pantheism, which held that all religions were basically the same, as long as they more or less were related to Abrahamic faiths.  This isn't true at all, but it became a very dominant line of thought and remains one in the US today, followed by, during the 60s, the same line of thought to include all religions of all types.  All people's cultures, all people's faiths, everything, was all the same.

That logically lead to the point that, if everything was the same, an individual person's view on anything was just as legitimate as anyone else's, no matter informed or ill-informed that opinion might be. Strong cultural elements which operated as brakes towards the dilution of anyone culture, and strong ancient presumptions about certain conducts, were then regarded as being okay to yield to an individual belief, no matter how anemic or poorly thought out it may be.

A rich society can tolerate this for a while, but not indefinitely. As the elastic balloon fo behavior and conduct began to stretch to its limits, weak points in the balloon began to develop.  We're pretty much at the braking point for those now.

Evidence of that is that people who need help, just don't get it.  The mentally ill are simply allowed out on the street under the belief that their life choice is as valid as anyone else's, essentially meaning mental illness doesn't exist.  Prohibitions on drugs that are known to destroy people's lives are removed on the same basis.  And individuals who previously would have been part of tight families that were part of tight communities, are now basically left on their own to try to fit into a world in which options are really massively decreasing, rather than increasing.  When they cry for help, they don't get it.

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.

What is the point is that religion is part of culture and is central to it.  No religion, no culture, and no culture, no community.  Wipe that out, and you basically have yourself in the world, and your appetites. And while modern culture may tell you that you are the center of the universe, you aren't.  Your appetites will never be satisfied in that fashion, and you'll always be adrift in that situation.

Indeed, you'll look for a community, and you'll probably find one, make one, or end resort, like so many, to dulling the mind somehow.

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.

All of this should serve as a warning as to what happen when a culture is torn down.  The German culture had been under attack for decades prior to its fall to the Nazis in 1932, and had not done a very good job of defending itself.  First attacked from the left, and then the right and the left, its experiment with democracy in the 1920s was undertaken at a bad time during which adapting the German culture to democracy was a tall order.  In the end, the Nazi's co-opted the German identity with a shallow cartoon like reflection of it which turned nearly instantly murderous.

Communism worked much the same way.  Coming into power principally where large industrial classes had been marginalized and left out of their cultures, it created a culture based on nothing more than labor which required the murderous suppression of more natural communities based upon anything else.  Communism, however, would not have come about but for the corruption of the culture itself that first occurred in Imperial Russia and which went down in collapse in 1917 due to World War One.

In both instances, the left and the right operated to pervert and destroy the wider culture.

In the US right now, we see ourselves in the same dangerous position. The left has outright gone against the culture from which it sprang, hating the foundation of all the liberties and philosophic thought that made it possible.  A populist right with a very shallow base in the traditional culture seeks to reclaim what it thinks that culture was, but in an extremely shallow manner.  Put another way, a populist right that thinks itself based in Christianity has no more understanding of the culture than the left does, which is all that can allow it to think that it's not its brother's keeper.

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.

People do retain a lot more cultural knowledge than we might suspect, and when things begin to fall apart, they reach back towards it.

One of the interesting examples of this over the years has been the "Traditional Latin Mass" in the Catholic Church.  It never really fully went away, but it was pretty darned hard to find in any form whatsoever after "the Spirit of Vatican II" went to work in the Church.  The altar rails went out, things were moved, and Latin left the premises.

Except it didn't, and when allowed, it tended to come roaring back in.  When Pope Benedict allowed it to be used fairly freely, it exploded.  Pope Francis (dob 1936) had now taken it back out in a controversial and lamented move which is likely a mistake.  At any rate, no matter what the situation with it was, it tended to attract the young in some areas much more than the old.

There's definitely a lesson in that, and in the overall picture.  A post Boomer generation that was largely abandoned, in cultural terms, by the Boomers, tested orthodoxy and found it meaningful, and not just in the way noted.

And that may well be the point we're at now.  The Boomer generation's "if it feels good, do it", mentality yielded into the "greed is good" mentality in the same cohort.  Both are now fighting it out in what is practically a house to house fight, with lots of casualties.  In the meantime, people are reporting to the hospitals of orthodoxy, which is a trip back into conservatism.

The problem is there's no roadmap, lots of blind alleys, and not too many to lead the way.

And yes, that doesn't really offer much in the way of a suggestion on how to proceed.

What I do know, however, pizza and bowling night isn't it.  And orthodoxy looks outwards at a much greater whole, not inside at your own individual self.  In order to get there, you have to accept that you end up giving up a lot, including the illusion of the primacy of yourself.

However, you secure a hundred times more.