Jose Ortega y Gasset “was a Spanish philosopher, and essayist. He worked during the first half of the 20th century, while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and republicanism infiltrated by communist agents, and dictatorship of a stabilizing and fascist-tinged sort. His philosophy has been characterized as a “philosophy of life” that “comprised a long-hidden beginning in a pragmatist metaphysics inspired by William James, and with a general method from a realist phenomenology imitating Edmund Husserl, which served both his proto-existentialism (prior to Martin Heidegger’s) and his realist historicism, which has been compared to both Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce.” Despite all that, he makes a lot of sense and is worth reading. Warning: he was one of the most insightful of the `pessimistic’ thinkers of the modern West. He also produced powerful and pithy and insightful quotes, such as:
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, from Brainy Quotes.]
This parallels one of the major themes in my writing: if Christian Civilization—the entirety of the Body of Christ—is to survive, we have to rebuild an understanding of God’s Creation in light of our small stock of revealed truths which are mostly those of the ancient Creeds or of very carefully enriched readings of the Bible from which those Creeds were drawn. This new understanding must also reflect modern knowledge which is not some `science’ opposed to humanism and revelation but rather knowledge of the effects of God in His Creation.
We certainly have no such understanding—outside of my writings. Otherwise, the best Christian understandings are to be found in the more openminded Latin-Rite Catholic communities but they haven’t reacted so well as they need to do to new knowledge of human nature and what that tells us about the reality of human communities, human individual and communal morality, the possibilities of Hell (dubious in my opinion) and the world of the resurrected (the recognition of human nature along with a belief in Christian salvation seems to force something like a complex Purgatory), and so on.
To be sure, some Christians—most effectively strong-faithed Baptists and Mormons, can bracket their beliefs to hold two worldviews: one covering their religious beliefs and one covering modern empirical knowledge. There’s much more to be said about this, especially about the ability of some religious believers to accept technology fully while not even consciously acknowledging the underlying understandings of Creation. All of this is beyond the scope of this essay and also not matters of the greatest interest to me. So, anyway…
Mainstream Christians are more than a bit confused because of their cowardly and weak-faithed intellectuals and other leaders who have adopted more and more of modern empirical understandings while trying to fit it all into an inherited worldview which was and is no more than a transitional worldview out of well-reasoned but excessively idealistic Medieval worldviews into… Well, we never made the transition because we never had the courage, or perhaps the good-quality thinkers, who could complete the transition by producing understandings capable of integrating quantum mechanics and evolutionary theory and modern historical knowledge into a Biblical framework. (There is much else which was and is revolutionary in modern empirical knowledge, especially the general theory of relativity which is the first truly coherent definition and understanding of a physical universe; as such it opens many other doors being ignored by Christian thinkers.)
Without a good Christian understanding of Creation, there is no such thing as a Christian Civilization, there is no such thing as a Pilgrim Body of Christ. That brings me back to Ortega’s quote: we of the West have (now diminishing) powers to create in some sense but we don’t know what to create and thus we fail to create, considering our deformations of human being and other parts of Creation to be `creative—rah, rah!’. If we were still a Christian people living in a Christian civilization, we would not know exactly what to create and there would be a healthy diversity of opinion about the set of possibilities, but we would be a more truly creative people—a people whose creative impulses and activities would make sense in terms of a coherent understanding of Creation.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, from Brainy Quotes.]
We Americans, and others under our influence, are barbarians inhabiting the cities of a great civilization which is as if abandoned by those who truly knew and loved it, those who could maintain and protect it, those who had some chance of fixing it if things were broken, those who would defend it if under attack from inside or outside. We are left, the barbarians who are both childlike and childish and not ourselves capable of distinguishing between those two conflicting states nor the many others which provide us with many a cognitive and emotional roller-coaster ride.
We are a vulgar, badly-behaved people—good-hearted children who were never taught the basics of good manners and respect for others. We are entranced by trashy, degrading entertainment; even that which is not degrading and destructive of well-ordered human being is stupid—we, in fact, glorify ignorance and stupidity in choosing our leaders, in our jokes, and in the ways we mis-educate children both those having intellectual talents and those needing basic education to get on with their truer callings. As the West rose, sophistication grew and the well-ordered music of the Cathedral and monastery expanded also into the (truly) secular music written by the likes of Palestrina and Byrd and Bach and Hayden and Mozart and so on; vulgarity of a different and richer sort was found in the truly wonderful folk music; we abandoned also that music since it tied us to traditions which would have constrained us.
On our way down, we have rap music and flat-toned singers moaning on about their lives of mass-market coffee shops and love affairs neither tragic nor uplifting.
On our way down, we have people texting each other at the same restaurant table or while walking down the street as part of a group.
On our way down, we have leaders—including those of Christian groups—who don’t even pretend to care for or even care about the needs and desires of those for whom they bear responsibility.
Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, from Brainy Quotes.]
Torn from communal structures—do we not have communal human being as well as our individual human being?, modern men find themselves missing much of their minds and hearts. Even hands don’t do so well since we are creatures of habit and most habits of our ancestors were customary—communal at some level, perhaps village and perhaps continent-spanning empire.
Torn away from that communal part of our human being, we sometimes take a while to realize how badly damaged we are. We might feel some pain, even great pain, or we might live in the way of what some might call “worldly joy.” One way of relieving that pain, however temporarily, is to form opinions or to take on opinions from some talented demagogue. Most of our truth, most of our thinking, most of our healthy moral habits, come from the parts of us—our communal human being, which has been torn away. Any sense of loss is covered by shouting or shoving or shooting where we once would have thought or felt or acted in accord with the traditions of our ancestors. Those traditions would not have been perfect and often not even good, but they would have been some sort of guidance from what had helped a people to survive and to maintain their human being, individual and communal, in some sort of healthy form.
We can’t directly undo the complex of problems Ortega referred to in the above quotes. We can’t undo them because they are caused by a multitude of morally irresponsible decisions over recent centuries. We tore our own communal being away by turning away from our own civilization, by choosing flashy and degrading entertainment over the music and art and literature which takes an effort to understand and appreciate; we are willing to put in the effort to play a decent game of tennis but not to learn how to listen properly to either a symphony by Howard Hansen or to the earthy folk songs collected in a large number of volumes by Smithsonian. That is only a pointer to a number of ways in which we destroyed the Christian Civilization which was to be found, first and foremost, in the communal being of its members, in their thoughts and feelings and behaviors.
The future of the West is barbarism, at least for Europe and most of the Americas. The future of Australia and New Zealand might be found in a fortune cookie, so to speak; thus can they perhaps avoid that collapse into barbarism—by leaving the West.