With a new pope to be elected soon, the Internet as well as print publications are filling once more with suggestions about radical or moderate reforms. “Let priests marry.” “Ordain women priests.” “Be more liberal allowing reception of the Sacraments.” “Allow divorce and remarriage.” “Allow artificial birth-control.” “Re-consider abortion, use of embryonic stem-cells, etc.”
Similar periods of frenzied proposals for reform come with greater or lesser reasons in various levels of American government, often when the results of a particular election disagree with the recommendations of some part of the pundit class. Often the suggested reform is the elimination of the Electoral College.
These observations could lead to the criticism of efforts to build a better world in the way we might build a better car or house. The point I wish to raise here is a little different, though related. We can’t even make a truly better car, at least for anyone but a hobbyist, if we simply set out with goals focused on the hypothetical car itself. For nearly all users of a car, it must be designed to consider a greater context, the roads and what is to be moved and the needs to park it securely or even the possibility that we don’t need so many cars. Over time, this context corresponds to some fairly substantial understanding of the existing economy and society and polity, the existence of proper mechanics and the property crime-rate and existing or likely restrictions on use.
The West, and probably most of the rest as well, is being destroyed in various ways; it’s a slowly progressing train wreck. Do we Catholic Christians have problems that can be fixed by letting priests marry? Can we fix our economic problems by selling houses more rapidly to each other? By nursing each other or teaching each other’s children? By selling body parts from lab-grown embryos to each other that we might live a good, healthy 90 years after retirement? Let’s assume you choose a consistent program of reforms. Do you think it will really fix anything or just start a new round of power plays so that the pros and cons fight for control of the government to enforce one set of reforms on all of us? Or to undo reforms they deem unwise? Are we more than a reform program away from an all-out breakdown in social order? A civil war?
Despite the efforts of thinkers such as Kenneth Minogue and Alasdair MacIntyre, we act and usually think as if our problems are so shallow that they can be fixed by some reform program, putting down a new carpet in the caboose as the train continues to crunch up against a cliff wall. We in the West no longer have a largely shared moral or cultural vision; Christians and atheists and neo-pagans don’t even truly share a physical universe, let alone a morally purposeful world. We can’t even talk to each other in meaningful ways, as MacIntyre noted. We have such an exagerated view of our individualistic natures that we can’t form coherent communities, as Minogue gave us reason to fear.
There were deep divides amongst the east coast colonists in 1776 and perhaps deeper in 1787 as groups at the Constitutional Convention carried out various conspiratorial schemes or obstructive acts. Yet, the misnamed Federalists and badly misnamed anti-Federalists shared a more than substantial heritage from Western Civilization. That heritage even resulted in understandings of reality which were plausible given what was known, though less plausible after the discoveries of Darwin and Einstein and the events of the two wars in which Europe tried to commit continental suicide followed by a string of stupid and criminal wars by the American Empire. We are heirs of the idiots and scoundrels who thought to reshape the world by throwing huge armies of Englishmen and Frenchmen against huge armies of Germans or the equally great idiots and scoundrels who thought to reshape the world by sending large armies of American young men into jungles or deserts occupied by peoples who didn’t want to be reshaped.
We no longer have a living and worthwhile tradition to defend, not in the traditional European Christian churches nor in the major countries of the West. We’re in a position more similar to that of the Christians around 400AD who were heirs of a Church tied to a Roman civilization which was no longer seen as having much to offer the world, a civilization falling apart so that it seemed to Augustine and others that it might bring the Church down as well. Those Christians, and their pagan neighbors, found themselves largely incapable of even speaking about hypothetical futures because they’d inherited the view that Rome, so corrupt and so vulnerable to barbarian invasions or conquest by the East, would always be the Rome of the Caesars.
I don’t even know many supposedly well-educated Christians who know much about the history of their beliefs, about the work of Augustine and Gregory and others that proved to be the building of the foundation of Western, Christian Civilization. I suspect those pioneers of Western Civilization might well be astonished as they look down upon what happened from their efforts to carry forward Christian traditions, knowledge of the Bible, and some major pieces of pagan, Mediterranean culture. From what I’ve read, Augustine and Gregory both were pessimistic about the future but they did God’s work as it presented itself to them and that proved to be good enough. In any case, neither Augustine nor Gregory were under any illusions that the decaying Roman Empire, something of a house for the Christian Church for a couple of centuries, could be reformed or even kept alive in a weakened state.
Some of the suggested reforms for our various communities, Catholic Church or the United States or the NFL, might well be good or at least worth trying. But they won’t help in this year of 2013 or for years to come. We’re morally irresponsible, devoted to keeping ourselves comfortable and to maintaining our favorite human institutions as the train wreck goes on. We ignore the disaster we are part of or sometimes even admit it to pretend we can stop it and magically undo the damage. I think we can greatly shorten the period of hardship, and lessen the chances that Christianity will shrink to a small size, if we face up to the situation and respond bravely in light of a true Christian faith or at least a well-motivated pretense.
I’ll leave behind the analogy of a train wreck to make my main point clearly. We modern human beings are out of synch with reality, Christians most of all. A family line of animals out of synch with their environment will not prosper and might well die off. A human community out of synch with the greater world of which it is part, however limited or expansive a view it might have of the world, won’t prosper and might well die off, leaving behind barbarian communities lacking the higher sort of view which is necessary for a civilization or even a smaller-scale culture of a higher sort. Barbarians are often surprisingly capable in technological fields, if only because of a need to produce high quality weapons and they can produce individual cultural works anticipating a more noble future, but a barbarian is not capable of even understanding the concept of civilization, let alone being capable of building or maintaining one. That is a necessarily circular definition. How do we know, how did Ortega y Gasset know, that we are barbarians? Because we show no appreciation for the heritage of the West, don’t generally recognize something is seriously wrong, and show no capability of fixing even specific problems such as our inability to educate our children properly.
If we Christians, or any other people in one region of the world or another, were to move on to building a new civilization, or re-forming an old civilization, it will be necessary to first regain touch with empirical reality, that described by the great thinkers of Western Civilization, most dead but a few still above ground. If we are to claim to speak in the name of the Creator, in any meaningful sense, we should have a better understanding of the Creator’s work, a better understanding of stuff and relationships and the complex, multi-layered story He is telling, the story which is this world. We should at least be able to give a plausible explanation for the Creator offering to share His life with a primate, cousin to chimpanzees and descendant of creatures not so much different from the fish we have for dinner. We should be able to give a plausible, if vague and highly qualified, answer to the question: Where is Heaven and what is it like?
Dante was able to give such an answer within the context of the world as understood by some of the best minds of his age and, some centuries later, Copernicus and Galileo gave us good reasons to doubt that answer. Later researchers showed Dante’s answer was definitely wrong, though he expressed some other truths on his wrongfully described journey.
Nowadays? We mutter something about there being no conflict between science and religion while waving our hands about in a spastic manner. There truly is no such conflict if science and religion are well-matched in sophistication and in recognition of reality as best understood at the time. There definitely is a conflict between science and religion when we deal with a science which has advanced to a sophisticated understanding, in part, of created being as described by modern, disciplined research and religion which still talks and teaches as if created being is what it was understood to be before Darwin and Einstein.