Description of an Imploding Society

In a recent address, Denver Archbishop Chaput offered some historical observations with an application to where we are today. The book he recommends on the subject, Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity, has been recommended to me by others as well.

This society is advanced in the sciences and the arts. It has a complex economy and a strong military. It includes many different religions, although religion tends to be a private affair or a matter of civic ceremony.

This particular society also has big problems. Among them is that fertility rates remain below replacement levels. There aren't enough children being born to replenish the current adult population and to do the work needed to keep society going. The government offers incentives to encourage people to have more babies. But nothing seems to work.

Promiscuity is common and accepted. So are bisexuality and homosexuality. So is prostitution. Birth control and abortion are legal, widely practiced, and justified by society's leading intellectuals.

Every now and then, a lawmaker introduces a measure to promote marriage, arguing that the health and future of society depend on stable families. These measures typically go nowhere.

Ok. What society am I talking about? Our own country, of course, would broadly fit this description. But I'm not talking about us.

I've just outlined the conditions of the Mediterranean world at the time of Christ. We tend to idealize the ancients, to look back at Greece and Rome as an age of extraordinary achievements. And of course, it was. But it had another side as well.

We don't usually think of Plato and Aristotle endorsing abortion or infanticide as state policy. But they did. Hippocrates, the great medical pioneer, also famously created an abortion kit that included sharp blades for cutting up the fetus and a hook for ripping it from the womb. We rarely connect that with his Hippocratic Oath. But some years ago, archeologists discovered the remains of what appeared to be a Roman-era abortion or infanticide "clinic." It was a sewer filled with the bones of more than 100 infants.

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The Freedom of Obedience

There's an excellent series in the May issue of Traces on the question of obedience. The treatment of the problem reminds me of a text I read a few months ago from political philosopher Hannah Arendt, "What Was Authority?" (1959), where she discusses the scope of the crisis. First, she deals with the common misconception about obedience, that it is as equated with coercion.

Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance.... Historically, we may say that the loss of authority is merely the final, though decisive, phase of a development which for centuries undermined primarily religion and tradition.

And why isn't persuasion sufficient? Arendt explains:

Authority, resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone, gave the world the permanence and durability which human beings need precisely because they are mortals--the most unstable and futile beings we know of. Its loss is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world, which indeed since then has begun to shift, to change and transform itself with ever-increasing rapidity from one shape into another, as though we were living and struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment can become almost anything else.

This problem of obedience and authority is addressed in these Traces articles very well from the Christian perspective.

Close-up
Obedience
A Matter for Reasonable Men
by Davide Perillo

For obedience is very closely connected to reason. Even more: it is the primary factor that preserves it, enabling it to light up and to breathe. Just think about it. The first act of reason is to recognize reality, to bow before the data of the real; in a word, to obey. Without this start-up, reason only revs its engine, failing to engage its gears, and certainly doesn’t move forward. It will always remain a few yards short of the truth, which, said Saint Thomas, is adaequatio rei et intellectus, conforming the intellect to reality. Conforming, that is, obeying.

> The Family
by Stefano Andrini

Today, Leoni stresses, “it is difficult to find within families a position of reciprocal obedience between spouses. It seems to me that one of the gravest problems is the absence of a real recognition of the authority of the one toward the other, man or woman–authority, meaning, power to interfere in and influence my life; recognition that the good for me is not given by myself; that without reciprocal obedience there is no sharing, and thus one experiences a substantial solitude.”

> School
edited by Paolo Perego

There’s no obedience without freedom, nor without a goal; obedience is functional to an objective. If there’s no goal, if you’re not trying to get anywhere, obedience has no meaning. This is a primary aspect of the educative paralysis immobilizing our schools. By dint of preaching neutrality, theorizing the absence of absolute values, a teacher can’t then demand obedience. The “neutral school” isn’t capable of proposing a goal, educating, and at this point it also becomes impossible to exert compulsion, as we’ve all seen in recent episodes.

> Vocation
edited by Paola Bergamini
> Politcs edited by Alberto Savorana

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Traces May 2007

Cardinal Ratzinger on Joy

from Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium:

Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.

The Christian Concept of Progress

In an interview with Zenit, Father Thomas Williams discussed Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio.

As Christians we believe that each of us has a specific vocation and a mission to fulfill. In this context, progress means doing our part to bring about the Kingdom of Christ in human society.

Finally, the progress of the earthly city does not exhaust the human condition. No matter how much human society progresses, our temporal existence will come to an end. We are called to eternal life in Christ. True progress must take into account man's spiritual dimension and transcendent vocation as a child of God destined for heaven.