Things Worth Dying For, page 11
Macy experiences days of horrific pain and hallucinations. But miraculously he survives—only to discover that the earwig was female, and her eggs are about to hatch inside his head.
In real life, of course, there’s no such insect. But “The Caterpillar” is a perfect metaphor for the theories, doctrines, ideas, and ideologies that have consumed the minds and devoured the lives of men and women for the past two hundred years. The result has been madness and suffering.
All of us humans believe in something. It’s a basic instinct of our species. We all worship something. We all give our lives to something, no matter how foolish, how perverse, or how well we disguise what we’re doing from ourselves and from others. The bigger the lie, the more unreal and discarnate the idea or belief, the more it will feed on its followers in order to seem real and alive.
One such system of lies—National Socialism—fed on the Jewish mother of Jean-Marie Lustiger at Auschwitz. Speaking in 1998 as the archbishop of Paris, Lustiger noted that the postwar liberal world, fatigued by utopian extremism, had tried to turn away from the “strong gods” of ideology, race, and similar totems.15 But in doing so, it simply chose different totems. It sought to prevent fanaticism in the future by softening people’s passions with material comforts and distractions. That required a massive stress on scientific and technological progress. And it had great success. But, said Lustiger, the effect of a technology-driven culture has been to cocoon humanity in a fever of appetites and insulate it from reality:
Man is now surrounded, besieged, overwhelmed by innumerable objects that have been manufactured and provided by others to serve their own interests rather than his personal development.
These products of human labor and creativity interfere between man and man, and also between man and reality. They even become man’s master … [and] finally gain a power of life and death over him. Man’s production dominates man. Fiction rules man. The social and educational consequences of such an alienation [by man’s own tools] are already too manifest.
Lustiger argued that what the West has actually created in the place of religion is a “world of everything here and now, a parody of eternity.” And the various and brutal enemies of Western culture “that aim at bringing down our consumer society” only worsen the liberal Promethean temptation by adding “a no less mindless will to power to the materialistic idolatry of the senses.”
Critics of religion will note, rightly, that ideas about “God” have been the excuse for great violence over the centuries. The Old Testament is awash in blood. Christians had the Inquisition, Crusades, and the Wars of Religion. And Islam, from its birth, is one long story of armed conquest and war against “unbelievers.” Or so the argument goes.
Believers will respond, also rightly, that mass murder in the name of modern ideologies, often with an alibi of science and the tools of technology, dwarfs all past religious violence combined. If we ask who has the bloodier hands, secular authority easily wins.
As Lustiger would add, though, the sins of our critics can’t excuse our own sins. The truth makes us free. Acknowledging the sins of Church leaders, clergy, and lay faithful frees us to start again the work of the Gospel. Facing this fact sparked one of the great moments of the St. John Paul II era. In December 1999, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission published Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past.16 Designed to prepare for the Jubilee Year 2000, it sought “repentance for the wrongs of the past.” In a homily, John Paul asked
pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth, and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken towards the followers of other religions.
Let us confess, even more, our responsibilities as Christians for the evils of today. We must ask ourselves what our responsibilities are regarding atheism, religious indifference, secularism, ethical relativism, the violations of the right to life, disregard for the poor in many countries.
We humbly ask forgiveness for the part which each of us has had in these evils by our own actions, thus helping to disfigure the face of the Church.17
In the years since 1999, the silence from many other secular and religious authorities regarding their own many past sins has, unfortunately, been deafening. Their silence speaks to their own hypocrisy, and to the contrasting honesty and humility of Christian witness. But why is any of that relevant in a chapter on toxic ideas? What makes the fact of Christian self-indictment and repentance impor-tant, or even possible?
The answer is simply this: the Christian faith is not—or rather, not mainly—an idea or system of ideas. Its doctrines are important. Its record of scholarship, its cultural impact, and its intellectual vigor over two millennia are astonishing. But in the end, these things are secondary. Each in isolation is the stuff of museums. The beating heart of Christianity, the source of its endurance and life, is love. The Christian faith is a relationship of trust and love with the person of Jesus Christ, the living Son of the living God, or it’s nothing at all. Or worse, it’s a deceitful sham.
We can’t love an idea or a tool or an ideology, and it can’t love us back. We can’t love “humanity,” which is simply another, bigger idea, abstracted from the faceless masses. We can only love persons, in all their beautiful and annoying flesh and blood presence. It is love, even more than reason, which makes us human. It is love, even more than reason, that softens anger, leads us to forgive, and tempers justice with mercy. Love is implausible because it can cost so much and so often makes no practical sense. Why shouldn’t we euthanize the severely disabled? Why shouldn’t we let the poor and the elderly die? In a world that runs on the machinery of results, reason suggests that such persons are dead weight. But love is the fruit of the human heart, and the heart, as the great Catholic scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal said, “has its reasons, which reason cannot know.”
Jesus Christ is human like us. Historically he lived, worked, laughed, and wept like us. He suffered, died, and rose for us. And he lives with us still in the sensate experiences of bread and wine, in the Word of God, and in the transformed lives of those who truly know and love him. Ideas have consequences, but they’re finally lifeless things. Christianity is alive because Jesus Christ is alive; alive now in the world, and alive in the hearts of those who truly believe in him.
7
THE TIES THAT BIND
“A society based on ‘agape’ alone is all very well, but it will not reproduce itself: nor will it produce the crucial relation—that between parent and child—which is the basis on which we can begin to understand our relation to God. Hence the redemption of the erotic lies at the heart of every viable social order.”
Roger Scruton
In the spring of 2012, pope benedict xvi approached the Church in Philadelphia with a request: Would we host the Eighth World Meeting of Families, set for 2015, if asked? I’d been Philadelphia’s archbishop for barely eight months. The archdiocese was mired in legal and financial crises. Media hostility was high. Lay and priestly morale was low. Welcoming families from around the globe, and the Pope himself, to such an environment would be unwise. This seemed obvious. Or so I thought.
The opposite was true. Our people stepped up enthusiastically. So did our deacons and priests. The local Jewish, Mormon, and other religious communities gave great support. So did businesses and foundations. So did local, state, and federal government. Despite the challenges it faced, the 2015 World Meeting of Families, with its many liturgies, teaching sessions, and entertainments, was a huge success. It surpassed our best hopes in attendance, content, and even finances. It was capped by a visit from Pope Francis, who succeeded Benedict XVI in 2013. More than eight hundred thousand people lined the city’s streets to greet him. Thousands more were turned away; security couldn’t process them quickly enough. Sitting with Francis as he traveled in the Popemobile, I watched his surprise turn to happy shock at the size and joy of the welcoming crowds.
A papal visit has its own special appeal. But the heart of the 2015 meeting’s success was its focus: the importance of the family. Throughout history, people have lived, worked, and died to nourish and protect their families. And for good reason. The family, rooted in the fertile differences between the sexes, is a cornerstone of human identity. It’s a deep source of security and personal meaning. It gives each of us a home and a role in the world that links past generations to the future.
The family’s work, though, goes well beyond the individual. “In the family,” wrote Aristotle, “are found the original sources and wellsprings of friendship, constitutional government, and justice.”1 The family ingrains moral character. It forms habits of work, mutual respect, and self-mastery. It thus undergirds every other social institution. Strong families make healthy societies. Weak and broken families do the opposite.
As Pope Francis said at the start of his ministry: “The family is the salt of the earth and the light of the world; it is the leaven of society.” Family structure has varied over culture and time. But kinship always matters. Blood relations are life’s most powerful glue. They’re also its strongest source of mutual loyalties and self-sacrifice. They explain why a mother will choose adoption over abortion, giving life rather than death to her “inconvenient” child. They explain why parents will cherish a child with grave disabilities, when reason and utility would urge otherwise. They explain why parents will give up comforts, and even necessities, to pay for a child’s excellent education.
Humans are resilient creatures, and children often survive and thrive under the most challenging circumstances. Single-parent and blended families can be heroic examples of love. But a vast amount of research shows what, in a saner age, would be obvious. Families with two biological parents who remain married—i.e., a loving mother and father—produce the best outcomes for their children. Such children, on average, are happier and more mature. They do better in school. They have fewer health, behavioral, and emotional problems. And they achieve more success in adult life than children from other family structures.2 It’s thus no surprise that America’s upper classes, no matter how permissive or progressive their politics might be, have lower divorce and nonmarital birth rates than the poor and the middle classes. What they preach and what they do can sometimes be very different things.
Nor is it a surprise, as research and married friends confirm, that the fidelity of a loving husband and wife results, over time, in a sexual intimacy deeper than anything possible in serial encounters. The irony here is rich: the same high wall of exclusiveness that marriage and family use to surround sex with privacy also allows its greatest experience and enjoyment. Real sexual intimacy comes from the mutual giving of persons as whole persons, not merely bodies. As countless poets, philosophers, and lovers have said, desire for the beloved starts and ends in the beloved’s eyes, windows on the soul and the complex reality of another. The only “liberation” produced by reducing the body to a machine, an instrument of mere appetite and will, is the unmooring of sex from meaning. This is why so much of today’s marketing that exploits sex to sell products excludes the human face. Without the face and eyes, the body is simply a thing of commerce.
So the family is important. This should be obvious. But obvious or not, the family now suffers from the nature of modern life. One of the few positives in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic was the time spent with family by many people otherwise chained or addicted to their work. As Erica Komisar, an East Coast psychoanalyst, wrote:
“Mommy, I like coronavirus because I get to spend time with you,” a patient of mine, a lawyer, quoted her son as saying. With schools closed, social events postponed and workplaces empty, usually busy professionals find themselves at home baking cookies, playing games, watching movies and doing arts and crafts to keep their children occupied. Some are surprised to find they enjoy it.…
In a self-occupied world, the coronavirus is making people reassess their priorities and values. The U.S. is one of the hardest-working countries in the world.… [But] America’s productivity comes at a price—the emotional well-being of families and children. Maybe it takes a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic to make us slow down and ask why we’re so intense about work.3
Similar thoughts were shared by Elizabeth Seay, a New York news editor. Seay spoke powerfully of friends and other “parents who [had] worked long hours before.” Now, in “a time of great fear, they [had] the guilty, secret pleasure of finally having time with their children.”4
Many urban professionals, of course, had the resources during COVID-19 to make family-friendly changes in their work lives. Some did. Many people in lower income groups did not, because they could not. Meanwhile, throughout the pandemic, newspapers ran increasingly strange lifestyle headlines like “There’s No [Beauty] Salon Like Home,” “Grieving Together While Staying Apart,” and—maybe most tellingly—“My Girlfriend Is a Chatbot.”
The chatbot report told of a virus-quarantined single man, Michael A., falling in love with “Charlie,” the female AI bot on his smartphone. It was a story eerily like the 2013 movie Her. But this case was quite real.5 The same story went on to note “a loneliness epidemic, sparked by a rise in solo living among the elderly and millennials.” Makers of another female chatbot, “Mitsuku,” added that many of its users had “mailed [Mitsuku] handwritten love letters, flowers, cards, candy, and even money to the company’s office.” Another AI creator in the chatbot field spoke of the “amazing” current scope of people’s companionship deficit.
What’s going on? Simply this: We nod piously at the value of marriage and family. But our nation’s life is now ordered to weaken both. Suicide, self-neglect, and abuse were already issues among the elderly. That was before the coronavirus. The pandemic increased their isolation. It also raised ugly questions about rationing health care for the old and chronically ill.6 The “loneliness epidemic” is now a major American problem. It’s especially pervasive among aging baby boomers. In their childbearing years, they raised families much smaller in size than past generations. Now that they’re old, they have much smaller kinship networks for support.
But loneliness and anxiety also plague many teens and young adults. Companies now scramble to meet the rising mental-health needs of their young workers.7 A 2020 survey by Cigna, the health giant, showed that 61 percent of US adults battle loneliness. That’s a 7 percent rise since 2018.8 In the past, intergenerational households passed a family’s story from grandparents, through parents, to grandchildren in a natural cycle. People knew the forces that shaped their parents’ lives, and thus, in part, their own lives. This is no longer the case.9 Mobility increases the physical distance among family members. It also easily grows the emotional distance.
Two factors compound these isolating trends. The first is the nation’s fertility rate; the second, its marriage rate. In 2017, 3.85 million babies were born in the United States. This was the lowest figure in thirty years. The number of children an American woman will likely bear in her lifetime is now 1.8. This is close to the historic low, in 1976, of 1.7. At the same time, many “middle-class Americans are forsaking marriage amid financial insecurity, effectively making the institution more of a luxury good enjoyed by prosperous Americans.”10
Over the past forty years, the middle three-fifths of US earners—historically, the country’s economic backbone—have seen the biggest drop in marriage rates. Money worries lead more couples to live together without marrying. Education, or the lack of it, also matters. In the last four decades, the share of high school–educated adults who are married has fallen 19 percentage points. In contrast, the share of adults with a college degree who are married has slipped only 8 percentage points. As low- and moderate-skill manufacturing jobs dry up, marriage rates decline. “One explanation is that the diminished economic power of men makes them less likely to marry,” the Wall Street Journal reports, and simultaneously, “men may be less motivated to work because they aren’t married.”11 As for women, the writer Gina Tomaine spoke for many of her careerist millennial friends: “If I have a baby, I’ll end up poor and depressed. This way of thinking is a hallmark of my generation.”12
Marriage decline drives family decline. And, inevitably, family decline drives not just social decline but the decline of religious faith.13
* * *
ONE OF THE themes, explicit or otherwise, of this text so far has been our chronic human temptation to idolatry. The First Commandment anchors the Decalogue. It’s the Big One; every other Commandment flows from it. So does every element of the moral life. Only God is God. Only God deserves our worship. But with brief lives in a harsh world, we hunger for security and control. So we give ourselves with disordered passion to lesser, more manageable gods of our own making: ideas, techniques, tools, nations, persons, leaders, causes, and institutions that sooner or later betray and consume us. That can include even the family.
As popes and saints remind us, the family is a “domestic church.” Ruled by wisdom and love, it’s the womb of faith. The historian and social analyst Christopher Lasch, from a purely secular perspective, described the family as our “haven in a heartless world.” But the family can also be a place of domination and violence. The Fourth Commandment enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. And rightly so: They give us life. They sustain and form us through childhood. But parents can forget that their spouse and their children belong finally to God. Husband and wife, mother and father, are stewards. They’re not owners. At their worst, a married couple can treat each other as little more than property and means to an end. A father can refuse to accept or respect the adult freedom of his daughter. And few characters are more chilling than the hellish mother in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, bent on controlling—and almost consuming—her son, even in death, in the guise of maternal “love.”
