Folks who would be conservative, who would preserve what is good and even holy in the heritage of Western Civilization, still don’t get it. At least not fully, but some are trying hard to figure out what to do in a decaying and possibly collapsing West and some of those are risking their futures in experiments in ways of living which might allow them to provide a greater moral order for themselves and their children.
It’s certainly true that things are going badly in the West, in a multitude of ways including the sacrifice of traditional truths and beliefs and behaviors to political scheming and mere, mindless change-mongering labeled self-righteously as `progress’. Parents and others feel a need to protect the children though few claim that or act as if a complete separation from the mainstreams and centers of human life would be good for those children or the world they will eventually inherit.
In the article, Benedict Option, Rod Dreher tells us that:
Christians have been here before. Around the year 500, a generation after barbarians deposed the last Roman emperor, a young Umbrian man known to history only as Benedict was sent to Rome by his wealthy parents to complete his education. Disgusted by the city’s decadence, Benedict fled to the forest to pray as a hermit.
Dreher summarizes the historical mess resulting from the collapse of Rome:
Rome’s collapse meant staggering loss. People forgot how to read, how to farm, how to govern themselves, how to build houses, how to trade, and even what it had once meant to be a human being. Behind monastery walls, though, in their chapels, scriptoriums, and refectories, Benedict’s monks built lives of peace, order, and learning and spread their network throughout Western Europe.
We have to be a little careful here because the more immediate change brought about by the collapse of Rome was the loss of contact between communities as barbarians began to control major regions and much of the roads just as we can still see in some countries such as Afghanistan and some countries in Africa. Initially, a lot of knowledge and skills remained intact. The more general damage, where knowledge and skills became quite local and often restricted to monasteries and maybe communities clustered around cathedrals or royal estates, came afterward and probably—at least in my opinion—as a result of the global breakdown, that loss of safety on the roads connecting the somewhat intact Italian cities to those of Western and Central Europe, as well as points east and south. Even at the beginning of the development of great trading enterprises as Europe started slowly to increase wealth and standards of living, the roads could be guaranteed as safe only in small regions where the king’s men or the duke’s men held sway. Early capitalism (pre-industrial) began to explode when the kings and other men of arms were able to guarantee safe movement through much of Western and Mediterranean regions so that the merchants were able to move the English wool, perhaps already processed into raw cloth by craftsmen in the low-lands, to Italy in exchange for silks and spices and even aesthetic objects.
In other words, fairly extreme localization was a result of the breakdown of Rome and, by the grace of God, St Benedict and his followers were able to retain much knowledge and skills in their communities, holding them in treasure for return to better times when Europe began to re-form, eventually on a greater scale than the Roman Empire though never so centralized. The Benedictines also advanced knowledge, certainly in the production of spirits old and new, and those monkish fellows and the laity who lived in partial community with them played a major role in teaching and guiding Europe in the great project of building a Christian civilization which we know as the West, a synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens and Rome, but also including the peoples and traditions from barbarian Europe—Germanic and Celtic and a few others. That true prize, a civilization making it possible for the many to be at least tentatively part of the Body of Christ and also making it possible for various creative thinkers and doers to advance that Body in its mortal form, could be gained only with the communications, even communions, which started to connect various regions of Europe into something describable as a whole, a very complex and often self-destructive whole.
Civilization is built upon foundations and with bricks which come from created being, from human responses to the thoughts God manifested in this thing-like world. Increasingly, as the human race has advanced, civilizations—especially that of the West—have drawn upon the abstract being from which thing-like being was shaped, the abstract being which we can come to know and understand because of that advance. The foundations and bricks of a civilization are the human individual and communal minds and hearts and hands which are the manifestation of human responses to Creation over course of true (conscious and recorded) history as well as the preceding eons of biological evolution. Our civilization is us and our decay is really the decay of our individual and communal selves in the West, not the decay of some `civilization’ out there and independent of us.
The material aspects of Western Civilization are manifestations of our inner selves, increasingly barbarian and—not coincidentally—increasingly incompetent no matter how much shock and awe can be generated by our armies which can no longer defeat a determined and intelligent counter-force of desert nomads armed with rifles left over from the Korean War period. Those teenagers walking down the street with smart-phones glued to their ears are a sign of exploitation in a collapsing West, not a sign of good technology wisely used. I’m enough of a nerd to wish I’d had time to learn a bit more about the intelligent use of computers (especially the use of that gray-haired language, LISP, to write self-editing programs) and modern metal-working equipment, but this smart-phone stuff just leaves me cold, leaves me wondering, “Why bother?” Much of our technology is just more grease for our slide down the ramp, stuff to help us become more complete barbarians who are somewhat clever at using advanced technology we no longer understand—chimpanzees are capable of some levels of such cleverness.
If we retreat from Western Civilization, we can carry a far smaller chunk of that civilization than Benedict and his followers were able to do. We lose far more than Benedict and his earlier followers did because there is more to lose and it’s interconnected. The reclamation effort would be far greater than it was during the early Middle Ages (after Augustine and Gregory the Great and Benedict and up to 900 or so). We in the modern West no longer work only with stone and wood but rather with engineered materials, no longer work only with pen and paper but with computers, no longer work only with horse and wagon but with planes and trains and submarines. Like it or not, this technology and the cultural uses of that technology and even our attitudes toward it are part of us, part of the man of the modern West. There is no road back to, say, early 19th century man so that he can begin a wiser movement forward—if you believe that he would even be likely to be wiser in that situation. Without modern technology, billions will die, others will be enslaved or at least reduced to primitive farming and handcrafts.
Much will be lost, even much of the internal richness of life possible to a civilized human being. We may well have misused much of our technology but that technology and our misuse of it was a reflection of our misshaped minds and hearts and hands, themselves misshaped by inappropriate responses to Creation; in a sense, we’ve already lost much of that internal richness I referred to above. If at all possible, we would be better off struggling to reform and recover, however impossible the task might seem. We would even be better off helping along the processes by which the center of the Body of Christ might shift, as I think it will, to the Pacific Rim or perhaps to Russia, that a greater Body might begin to grow. Yes, I do claim that the Body of Christ in this mortal realm is the greatest and most inclusive of civilizations, of which the Christian Church (as an ecclesiastical organization rather than a home for the Christian’s complete life as it was for St Paul) is only an organ though the most important organ, the organ of worship and of direct communion with God and the organ which gives the rest of the Body of Christ a focus for fulfilling the purposes God gave to us. I would interpret the current events and trends as indicating it be time to allow the various great and simple peoples of Asia to integrate themselves into the Body of Christ; I would fear and hope they will come to dominate over Western Christians become fat and lazy and stupid. I would rather an alliance but we’re doing little to make our Western selves attractive allies or partners.
I realize, and Mr Dreher stated this, that many of these modern followers of St Benedict are trying to remain in contact with the greater part of modern Western Civilization and plan to let their children come into such contact when old enough that their moral characters have been properly formed. That’s not good enough, though some might have to choose such a path. Benedict’s true children will be trying to restore the greater part of the Body of Christ to health and not just moving out to the outer regions of that Body, however much they try to remain in contact with that sick Body. Again, as that Body of Christ returns to health and begins to grow and mature, it may well move beyond the West. We would be wise to cooperate with God if He wills this or something else we might find disturbing to our pride (hubris?).
The spirit of St Benedict would have us serve God in forming the Body of Christ rather than struggling to protect our individual selves, though children—to be sure—must often be protected from harsh realities.