 
# Self, Other, Community:

# Meditations on Social Order and Social Breakdown

## by George A. Kendall

### Smashwords Edition

### Published by the St. George Press

### Grand Marais, Michiga

###

### TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ESCAPE FROM THE BLOB

THE SACRIFICE OF COMMUNITY TO PROGRESS

MORE ON THE TWO KINDS OF ENERGY

WHY I AM A LUDDITE

SOME THOUGHTS ON WAGE LABOR

WORK: MAN'S SHARE IN CREATION

SEPARATION OF COMMERCE FROM RESIDENCE

ECONOMICS: SERVANT OR MASTER?

SUBSIDIARITY FOREVER

MOBILITY

CLARIFICATION ON SUBSIDIARITY

SUBSIDIARITY AND THE MARKET

BUREAUCRACY AND SUBSIDIARITY

THE MANAGEMENT DELUSION

MOBILITY AND DISENGAGEMENT

VILLAGE LIFE

GREED AND THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY

TRUST

HATRED OF ORIGINS

ECONOMIC DETERMINISM

AUTHORITY: PERSONAL AND BUREAUCRATIC

THINKING OUTSIDE THE "ENLIGHTENMENT" BOX

HEALTH CARE: NO SOLUTION OUTSIDE CHRISTIANITY

IS COLLEGE EDUCATION REALLY A GOOD IDEA (FOR MOST PEOPLE)?

THE PREGNANCY PACT AND THE CLUELESSNESS OF THE ELITES

LIBERALS AND CHANGE

SEX AND AUTONOMY

SEX AND THE SPLITTING OF THE PERSON

GOOD ENOUGH IS GOOD ENOUGH

YOU CAN LIVE IN THE PAST

GRATITUDE AND RESENTMENT

OBNOXIOUS ADS AND WHAT THEY REVEAL

EDUCATION FOR HUMILITY—A RADICAL IDEA

CAN WE REALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT? SOME THOUGHTS ON TIME

IS OUR GOVERNMENT LEGITIMATE?

RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY: HOW DO WE GO ABOUT IT?

IS GOVERNMENT A NECESSARY EVIL?

MORE ON RESISTANCE

TOTALITARIANISM: THE IDOLATRY OF THE STATE

THE WAR AGAINST SPIRITUALLY DISEASED ELITES

EPILOGUE: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS, OR, BACK TO THE PIGSTY

SECOND EPILOGUE: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT FORGETTING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

### INTRODUCTION: ESCAPE FROM THE BLOB

When I was a young man, living outside the Church and wandering through the dark forest (see _Inferno_ , Canto I), I became much enamored of a kind of pantheistic metaphysics (what we would now call New Ageism) that basically saw all of reality as one huge, undifferentiated subjectivity—in essence, one huge "blob"—to which all the particular realities of the external world could be reduced, because all of them were illusory and only this underlying, ultimate subjectivity was real. That meant there was no self and no other, just pure identity. One day I wrote a long, tortuous, convoluted letter to a friend trying to resolve some philosophical problems in these terms, and sent it off, though deeply dissatisfied with it—sensing that I was trying to force something into a framework where it just didn't fit. Now I've noticed for many years that often getting a bad piece of writing out of my system paves the way for something better (arguably the only excuse for some of my articles), and that is what happened in this case. The day after sending the letter I dashed off another one to the same friend (who must have begun to doubt my sanity) completely repudiating what I had said in the first letter, because in the meantime it had suddenly become very clear to me that without self and other as fundamental categories it was impossible to make any sense out of reality, that self and other and their relation, are the fundamental, underlying structure of reality, not identity. It was like being in a dark place and coming out into the light of a sunny day. It was, I realized long afterwards, the beginning of an understanding of the structure of being as Trinitarian. I have spent the more than forty years since that time exploring and developing this basic insight, and will doubtless continue doing that until my departure from this vale of tears. That was the day I escaped from the Blob (or at least began to).

One thing in particular that I have come to appreciate more and more during those years is how crucial this insight is to a sane understanding of human community—i.e., the social order. In what follows, and throughout this collection of essays, I will try to develop this theme.

To judge by 90% of what our politicians say, you would think that practically everything in the world was about economics—the production and distribution of material goods. It is a commonplace that people vote their pocketbooks, something summed up in Clinton's phrase, "It's the economy, stupid." This reflects an underlying, tacit assumption that material wealth is our highest good, hence the principal object of political activity is to further its growth.

It is an assumption, in other words, about the hierarchy of goods. In contemporary political discourse, material wealth is always right at the top of the hierarchy, and other goods are automatically subordinated to it. We see that in the casualness with which people dismiss family farms and mom-and-pop stores as institutions which have been left behind in the "dustbin of history," because factory farms and Wal-Mart are more efficient at providing lots and lots of cheap goods. The contributions family farms and mom-and-pop stores make to community life are dismissed, because to people who think this way community life is a kind of luxury, something not really "practical," which must make way for economic efficiency. People who see anything positive in these institutions are dismissed as "nostalgic."

But this way of thinking conflicts drastically with the Christian understanding of the hierarchy. For Christians, material wealth, while necessary up to a point, is probably right at the bottom of the hierarchy. It is there to serve higher goods, such as life, health, the development of the life of the intellect and of culture, and so on. And above all other earthly goods, it is there to serve the good of community.

This is something we really need to focus on, because contemporary culture seems determined to deflect our attention from it. The highest good, for Christians, the good which is, without qualification, a good in itself and not for the sake of anything else whatever, is communion with God. But communion with God is inseparable from communion with one another, as the commandment to love God and the commandment to love one's neighbor are inseparably united in the Great Commandment. The communion of persons, with its vertical axis, the love of God, and its horizontal axis, the love of human beings for one another, is the highest good. All other goods are subordinate to it and are there to serve it. The horizontal community, the communion of persons in Christ, is embodied, above all, in the Church, but it is also embodied in lesser human communities, especially small, face-to-face communities like the family, the neighborhood, and the small town. The communion of persons in such communities is, purely and simply, after communion with God, but inseparable from it, what God created us for.

The first thing that we need to be clear on is that the self-other relation is built into the very structure of being. We don't start with _x_ number of individual beings, then bring them into relation with each other as if the relation were something added on. The relation is part of the being. We are made to extend, to stretch out, to the other, and to receive the other extending to us. The extension makes the being the individual being that it is. An unextended being would be a nothing, a kind of infinitesimal point. The autonomous, i.e., unrelated individual is a construct if anything ever was, a product of abstraction. So the social contract theory, in all its forms, is nonsense, with its idea that we start out with unrelated, autonomous individuals who, at some point, construct society as a way to protect themselves from one another. In fact, from the first instant of our existence, we are part of a world, a community of beings, because the extending to the other is already a part of our being. What is the first thing an embryo does after fertilization? It extends to the mother by implanting itself in the wall of her uterus. There is no time or place prior to or outside of community. It is always the primary reality. The very first humans came into existence already formed into a community. The social contract theory only has validity insofar as it means that already existing communities may find it necessary to consolidate themselves more firmly, and will do so when their members, or their leaders, act together to do so, thus, perhaps, creating something _we_ would consider a government, when previously there had not been one, though, certainly, the activity of governing had been going on from the beginning.

But the modern world doesn't see it that way. To the modern, "progressive," way of thinking, there is really no communion of persons, because the world is made up of autonomous individuals who form relationships of their own choosing based on utility—i.e., mutual self-interest. They sometimes like to talk about love, but generally this means either sexual lust or vague sentimentality. The modern take on the institutions that embody the communion of persons tends to be that these are principally about such sentimentality. They are seen as, at best, a positive force because they support important activities like economic growth. Strong families, for instance, furnish us with a steady supply of workers. Churches can instill a work ethic in people, and that keeps the economy going. At worst, they are seen as a kind of charming, "quaint" remnant of the past, a sort of luxury which people can enjoy after they have gotten the really important things done, but of no importance in the "practical" world.

The problem is this: However unimportant the modern world may think community life is, it draws on it for its own life, but in doing so it weakens that community life and the institutions that embody it. When they are gone, the whole industrial-economic enterprise will collapse. Since the industrial revolution got into full swing, it has steadily attacked and undermined the family, the Church, the local community, the family farm, and the rest. But without these institutions there is no social order, and without the social order there is no economy, industrial or otherwise. I like to think of all this in terms of the relationship between two kinds of energy.

A number of years ago, Eric Voegelin summed up the problem of social justice more or less in this way: That a just social order balances the interests of the more energetic and the less energetic members of society—the more energetic being what we today call the "movers and shakers," the go-getters, the gung-ho types who have got to change the world, to do the "big things," etc. They are neither the best nor the worst people—they include the highly talented people, the great artists, scientists, etc. as well as the power-mad politicians, greedy businessmen, and such. The less energetic would be the ordinary people, people who live, or try to live, stable, outwardly uneventful lives in a traditional social milieu which doesn't change drastically from generation to generation, the kind of people quite ably captured in Wendell Berry's novels. The problem of social justice is, on the one hand, to keep the ordinary people from interfering with the legitimate rights of the go-getters, out of envy and resentment, and at the same time to keep the go-getters from oppressing and exploiting the ordinary people.

In my vocabulary, I would think, not in terms of energetic v. non-energetic, so much as in terms of two kinds of energy—binding energy and explosive energy. The ordinary, stable, settled people, the farmers and small town dwellers of Berry's novels, basically put their energy into creating and maintaining bonds, among people, among things, between people and things. Creating and preserving community is what life is about. For the other type, life is about innovation, creating new things, changing the world; it is about explosive, expansive activity. Neither group is absolutely right or wrong. Without strong communal bonds, no society, not even an expansive industrial one, can survive, something we are discovering now as our expansive society more and more disintegrates in the absence of stable families, stable local communities, and a stable cult of the divine. When we cultivate expansion and progress at the expense of these bonds, we end up with collapse, because even the most expansive society needs them. On the other hand, an absolutely static society will also disintegrate. Someone needs to build the cathedrals. Someone needs to build railroads. Someone needs to provide government beyond the local level, though, one would hope, not too big or too intrusive. Someone needs to provide for defense against enemies. The two groups need to be kept in balance both as a matter of justice and because, pragmatically, society cannot survive if they get out of balance.

The two groups, of course, correspond pretty closely to the city-dwellers and the rural people. This is where we can see how out of balance things have gotten. By the very nature of things, we need to have the great majority of people living in rural areas, dedicated to cultivating the land and preserving community, supporting, by so doing, a minority who live in cities, where the go-getters can meet and exchange ideas. A world where practically everyone lives in cities can only be a gravely disordered and unhappy world, where elites dedicated to change and progress without limits oppress a majority who can never be go-getters but are no longer able to cultivate bonds of community because they have been uprooted from their place. And the absence of those bonds will ultimately pull the rug out from under the elites, who cannot survive without community any more than the ordinary people can.

It has become customary to say that in pre-industrial times, we had to have the majority of people engaged in faming just to support the city people, but that modern methods of agriculture make this no longer necessary. This is a typically technocratic analysis. The truth is, people need bonds of community at least as much as they need food, and it is the rural people who are the principal "producers" of these bonds. The rural people are the stabilizing element in society, and if they are not, as a group, substantially larger and weightier than the destabilizing elements, things will come apart. Cities can be wonderful places when their principal function is to bring creative people together. They become hell on earth when they function primarily as a dumping ground for uprooted peasants.

So there is the energy that binds things, that holds the world together, and there is the explosive energy that tries to transform the world. The industrial revolution has to be understood as a breakdown of the balance between these two types of energy, the exaltation of the explosive energy at the expense of the binding energy (there is a fascinating parallel here with physics—between the energy that holds the fundamental constituents of matter together in the atom, and the explosive energy of the expanding universe). When we break up the bonds of human communities, we can, up to a point, free up energy for "progress," but eventually, this leads to disintegration. The modern world has been built by channeling into technological and economic progress, the energy which, in the normal and right order of things, sustains and holds together the communion of persons which is actually the highest good for which humans exist. It makes the higher serve the lower, and ultimately creates a hell on earth. Eric Voegelin summed this up well:

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrifice God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.

We are, I suspect, very closely approaching the end of this process.

An afterthought: A few years ago, I found myself watching the PBS documentary on the lives of the nineteenth century feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Overall, it was worth the time, though as Feminists for Life pointed out shortly afterwards, PBS somehow omitted to mention the embarrassing (for feminists) fact that both these ladies were strongly opposed to abortion. The documentary mentioned a speech Stanton once gave entitled "The Solitude of Self," a speech which epitomized so much of the modern ideological mindset that I thought it would be worthwhile to quote a couple of representative passages:

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul—our Protestant idea; the right of individual conscience and judgment—our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.... The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear — is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.

And there you have it — the isolation and loneliness of the Puritan self, a self cut off from a world, a self not by its nature embedded in a network of relationships, obligations, rights, etc. but floating in the void. That is what modern man (and woman) is about. Hillary Clinton once said that every morning she has to decide who she wants to be that day. In such isolation, there really is no self, just an empty subjectivity. So the end result of the assertion of the autonomy of the self _vis à vis_ institutions, customs, laws, morality, etc. is the disappearance of the self, because the self is a self only in relation to the other and to an ordered world which is not the self's work.

The thing is, we are suspended between the one and the many, neither monistic unity (pure identity), nor pure otherness—the structure of being is analogous—neither identity nor difference but both in relation. Were that not the case, reductionism would not be possible. If reality were a monistic unity, it would already be as reduced as it could be and no further reduction would be possible. If it were simply an aggregation of unrelated atoms or monads or whatever, there would be no connection among them to make a reduction even thinkable. It is because reality is made up of beings which are distinct and yet related, which are one but not by the unity of identity, that there can be the temptation to reduce—i.e., to take the unity of community and try to turn it into the unity of identity. To the gnostic mind, the unity of community must seem an incomplete unity, and such a mind will therefore seek to complete the incomplete by replacing community with identity. Because there are analogies, parallel structures and patterns, etc. running all through reality, there is the very great temptation to say that one or more of these is "nothing but" another. Thus, because there is a real analogy between the love between God and man and sexual love, Freudians types will tell you that the love of God is "nothing but" sexual love (i.e., sublimated sexual lust).

To use yet another analogy—a loaf of bread. A leavened, risen, loaf of bread is full of holes. A certain kind of mind could therefore regard the loaf as incomplete. But if we get rid of the holes either by smashing the loaf down or by just not using yeast to start with, we get a different and certainly much less appetizing loaf of bread. Similarly, that mysterious something by which things that are truly different are united in community with one another may seem unnecessary to the ideologue. But take it away and you get something like the modern world.

Gnostics get derailed in their search for God because what they want is identity with God, not participation in Him—i.e., communion with Him. They are not satisfied with communion, even though Christians know that communion is better than identity. The oneness of communion is more deeply one than that of mere identity. Even God has to "settle" for communion—i.e., for Trinitarian life. His Trinitarian oneness with himself is a deeper oneness than what the God of Islam would have as a pure identity, if such a God actually existed. A God who was a pure identity would be turned inward on Himself and incapable of loving or creating.

A note about the structure of this book: It is a collection of essays written over a period of about 15 years starting in the nineties, embodying my reflections on the social order. As such, it is a bit of a _pot pourri_. I considered trying to tighten up its structure with some serious rewriting, eliminating repetitions, and so on, and decided against it. This decision may have been dictated by laziness, but I would like to think it reflected something else—a sense that the essays, as they are, embody a certain spontaneity that might be lost by too much editing, and also that they embody the kind of unity in multiplicity that is such a central theme of my thinking, that they in some way express the analogy of being itself. I would like to think of them as something like a set of musical variations, which basically draw from a theme, then express it, now from one perspective, then from another, emphasizing one aspect of the theme, then another. It is perhaps in that spirit that they should be read (though I suppose non-Catholic readers may be tempted to respond to all this by shouting, "No _pot pourri_!"). Like the community of beings itself, the subject matter of these essays is a complex, intricate unity which no one should try to reduce to a rigid system.

A note on my use of the word "gnosticism," which may be confusing to some readers: This comes to me from Eric Voegelin, a political philosopher who had a huge influence on me in my youth. Voegelin saw the political movements which characterize modernity as rooted in a contemporary form of gnosticism which "immantizes the eschaton"—that is, it tries to make the Kingdom of God a reality in the material world while rejecting a transcendent God. Like earlier forms of gnosticism, it tends to see the structure of the world as God created it as evil and oppressive, and wants to replace that order with its own impossible Utopian fantasies, leading to pleasant outcomes like concentration camps, mass murder, and the most destructive wars in history. Voegelin's discussion of all this can be found in his book, _The New Science of Politics_ (Chicago, 1952).

### THE SACRIFICE OF COMMUNITY TO PROGRESS

It is easy to characterize ideas like distributism, agrarianism, and such as ideologies which seek a return to traditional society. The fact is, there is no such thing as traditional society. There is just society and _not_ society—the latter being a state that has been called "anarcho-tyranny," where autonomous individuals are ruled over by the total state, an inherently impermanent state of things (thank God!). There are certain basic institutions necessary to any society whatsoever, institutions rooted in tradition and which form the foundation for the whole life of society.

(The same thing applies to talk of "traditional Catholicism." There is no such thing as traditional Catholicism. There is just Catholicism and non-Catholicism. If you are a Catholic at all, you are traditional. If not, you are a non-Catholic.)

What we call modern society today is in reality traditional society insofar as it is a society at all—i.e., what keeps it going is the social order, however vestigial, that it retains from the past—from tradition. Our "modern" society survives only insofar as it still has institutions like the family, local communities, and the Church. Unfortunately, it pursues the delusional goal of progress by cannibalizing these institutions, sacrificing them to progress. But there is a limit to that. When the institutions are gone, the superstructure of "progress" will be gone too. If you have cancer, the cancer grows out of control by cannibalizing healthy tissue, but eventually it will destroy the body, and itself in the process, because it depends on the body, on the very tissue it is destroying, for its own life.

Under the regime of "progress," we get an approach to economic life which strives to satisfy human appetites completely. But that is impossible, because human appetites have no limit (God made us for Himself, and no finite good can satisfy us). We can always want more, and do. So it is a finite process trying to achieve an infinite end. To have any order at all in human life, people have to be able to put limits on their appetites (which won't limit themselves), to say, "This is enough," even when you want more (and you always do). That is called self-control. If people can't control their appetite for sex, for instance, if they insist on that form of "progress" known as "sexual liberation," they wreck their own lives and those of others, destroying families, giving themselves STDs and so on. This delusion of infinite satisfactions in a finite world is part of the sacrifice of the social order to "progress."

A related example of this sacrifice is free-market economics. If free-market economics simply means that the government should butt out of the free market unless there is some really compelling need for intervention, I am inclined to see myself as a free-market economist. If it means an economic system under which all economic decisions are made on purely economic grounds, unlimited by anything other than economic forces, then I am not.

The problem is that in our time, the institutions of traditional society—the family, the Church, the local community, and so on—have been drastically weakened, to the point that a very large number of people function simply as autonomous individuals, living principally for the satisfaction of their appetites. In their economic behavior, these people will look for the most they can get at the lowest price, period. They easily get caught up in the quest for something for nothing. They "want it all."

In traditional communities, economic behavior is dictated, not just by the economic bottom line, but by relationships to persons and to the community formed by persons living a common life. In this situation, when you do business with people, you consider, not just whether you're paying or getting the best price for something, but also how a transaction affects your relationship to the person you're doing business with. You may be willing to pay a bit more for something or to make a smaller profit from a sale for the sake of your relationship to the person. (This state of things still exists to a degree in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I live, though I fear it is fading as the older generations pass away.) This puts limits on the free functioning of the marketplace.

In a traditional society, you would not have global free trade, no matter what laws might be on the books regarding such things as tariffs, because relationships to persons and communities matter. In a traditional community, you do business with a family member before doing business with someone outside the family. You do business with friends in preference to strangers. You do business with people in the local community rather than with outsiders. And you do business with fellow countrymen rather than foreigners ("Buy American!"). You trade with foreigners for things that it is not possible or extremely inconvenient for your own country to make, especially luxury items. The integrity of the community and the integrity of the personal relationships that make up the community take precedence over abstract economic efficiency.

So in order to get a modern, "progressive" economy, you have to weaken the primary relationships which underlie human communities. Only then can you convince people that the "bottom line" is more important than things like kinship, friendship, and love of place. You have to convince people to become autonomous individuals who are capable of conducting their economic lives on the basis of pure economic rationality. You have to turn man in community into economic man. But this is ultimately self-destructive, because if a society comes to be made up wholly of autonomous individuals, who want the most they can get at the least price, it will eventually find itself in a situation where people want everything at no price—to be able to have everything they want without giving anything in return—i.e., without producing anything. They will want something for nothing. But if we get to that point, then we will have no economy, because no one will produce anything, no one will work.

The destruction of community for the sake of "progress" also has a lot to do with the "dictatorship of relativism" that Pope Benedict has warned us about, because it is closely tied to the attack on the basic relationships that make up the social order. That dictatorship began when people began to ask the epistemological question about the possibility of knowledge—Can I know reality? Can I know truth? That question is, in the last analysis, a product of sin, a disturbed state of the soul. When I ask whether I can know reality, I am really asking, how can I, an autonomous, separate self, know what is out there, how can I connect to the non-self? Asking that presupposes that I actually am such an autonomous, unconnected self, and that requires a prior act of the will in which I withdraw from the non-self because I want to make myself a kind of God, not limited by others or responsible for them. This is a deliberate abolition of the reality of my connection to the world, a reality which is primary. In philosophy, it means the abandonment of being as the object of the intellect. In social life, it means the abandonment of community. We find it embodied in the absolute conviction, on the part of many people today, that we are responsible only for the relationships that we enter into by our own free, autonomous choice (so much for the Fourth Commandment). But in real life, I come into existence already part of the world, knowing the world, able to love the world and to rejoice in the world. I come into the world already involved in a whole network of relationships, rights, and duties—in short, being. The self in relation to the other is our primary reality, not the autonomous self, which is a distortion. I come into the world already knowing the world, and my knowledge of the world is not problematical at all. As long as I accept this reality, I will not be asking questions about whether I can know anything. Only when I assume that the autonomous self is primary does knowledge become a problem. And that assumption has poisoned human existence since the Reformation, and especially since the so-called Enlightenment.

You can only know yourself at all in relation to the other. So the idea that the unrelated, autonomous self is a primary datum of experience is nonsense—it is a delusion engendered by rebellion against the order of creation. And that rebellion is at the very heart of the relentless attack on human community that we see everywhere in our world today.

### MORE ON THE TWO KINDS OF ENERGY

A bit more on this whole business of binding energy vs. expansive energy, especially as it ties into the ethic of success. I have inveighed on numerous occasions against the whole notion that a man who simply finds some good work to do, then devotes his life to doing that work, supporting a family, etc., without ever trying to "get ahead," to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a CEO, is somehow a failure, a loser, when in fact he has devoted his life to creating and sustaining bonds that are essential not only for his own well-being but for that of the community. Something similar could be said, I think, about what happens when people apply the success ethic to businesses. There is a kind of expectation today that if you own and operate a small business, you will keep trying to expand it, making it bigger and bigger and, who knows, maybe eventually growing it into a chain of businesses. It has been my observation, at least, over a number of years now, that this mentality is a principal cause of small business failures.

Let me cite an example. There used to be a wonderful bookstore in East Lansing, Michigan, named Jocundry's. It opened up in the mid to late 1970s, and closed in the early 1990s. For most of its life, Jocundry's was located in a small place in downtown East Lansing, a sort of hole in the wall. Books were crammed into every available bit of space. It was crowded, but cozy. Coffee was available, as well as places to sit down. Most of the time, if you stopped in there to browse, you would run into friends. It was a comfortable place to "hang out," and became a bit of an informal community meeting place (the best kind—the meeting places we create on purpose tend to be avoided by everyone). It was a wonderful store, and made a real contribution to the local community. The problem was, the owners got restless. They became dissatisfied with owning a small store holding a small niche in the market, and wanted more. So they went deep in debt to have an enormous new building put up, and eventually moved into it, expecting a whole new era of business success. Funny thing—it didn't happen. Several factors came into play. For one thing, the new location was less convenient to get to. It was right out on the main street running through town, with no convenient parking nearby. The old place had been a few steps from the parking ramp. The new place had an enormous amount of open space and was well lighted—and not cozy at all. It had the atmosphere, not of a quiet little nook where one might stop in to browse through the books for a while, but of a department store or (God forbid) a government office. It just wasn't comfortable. It was the kind of bookstore that you went to, got the books that you wanted, and left. The customer's connection with the place was now purely commercial. The situation could be summed up by saying that the new store had no soul. The other thing that happened about then was that two chain bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Schuler's, moved into the area. These were in or near the malls outside town, and parking was no problem. These establishments, like the new Jocundry's, were soulless places where the only connection between store and customer was a purely commercial one. But Jocundry's, not having ties to a huge national chain, could not possibly compete with them as that kind of store, especially when they were deep in debt as a result of their efforts at expansion. So before long they went belly-up. Now I'm sure Jocundry's owners attributed the collapse of their business to the competition from the chains, and certainly that was part of it. Yet I suspect strongly that Jocundry's, continuing as a hole-in-the-wall bookstore and informal community center, would have occupied a niche in the market which it could probably have held onto had it not been deeply in debt and generally overextended. People would still have gone there for the atmosphere, the feel of the place, the coziness, and out of loyalty, something the chains do not generally inspire. Jocundry's started out as an institution which helped to bring people together, a binding force in the community. It tried to turn itself into an expansive force, and failed miserably. When you try to gain the whole world by losing your soul, you generally end up losing both.

It is not, I think, absolutely true that small businesses can never compete successfully with big ones. The problem is that the small businesses have to be willing to stay small, to occupy a niche, doing something that they can do better, within that niche, than the chains, and keep on doing it. If they try to compete with the chains on the chains' own terms, they are done for. The same goes, I think, for small farms. I am told that there is no point in anyone in the Grand Marais area, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, trying to farm, because they could not possibly compete with the huge agribusinesses in places like Iowa. Well, yes, that would be true if a local farm tried to turn itself into an agribusiness, borrowing huge sums of money for all the latest and most expensive farm equipment, borrowing still more to acquire thousands of acres, and so on. However, if someone were to acquire a relatively small parcel of land here, say 50 acres, and grow vegetables and sell them right here in town to local stores and to local individuals and families, my guess is that they could stay afloat. After all, the produce would be fresh, and there would not be the huge expense of shipping it for hundreds or even thousands of miles. A lot of the trade could probably be done on the barter system, so that, with any luck, the Infernal Revenue Service (anathema sit in saecula saeculorum!) would not need to know about it. But of course, anyone who did this would have to be willing to settle for a simple life and not be obsessed with fantasies about expansion and great wealth. In other words, we _can_ fight back against the mega-businesses, but only if we are willing to sacrifice to do so, to drastically change our whole notion of what does or does not constitute "success," for an individual or for a business.

### WHY I AM A LUDDITE

I just recently realized that I am a Luddite. This realization came so late because, like nearly everyone else, I had misunderstood what Luddism is, or was. Most people understand it simplistically as the rejection of technology. Almost all of us find ourselves, as we, for instance, wrestle with the many glitches and vagaries of our computer software, loudly announcing that the Luddites were right. But this is historically inaccurate. The Luddite movement was in fact a rejection, not of technology, but of its misuse. It was a rejection of the use of technology in the service of a kind of industrial organization that dehumanized people, that violated the dignity of the human person and undermined human community. It began in England in the early 19th century as a protest against the use of machines that made possible the mass production of textiles, which had previously been manufactured by skilled craftsmen in small workshops, a kind of cottage industry. The significance of this is that it represented a fundamental, tacit decision that the industrial revolution, as we have known it, made about the production of goods—the decision to mass produce large quantities of cheap, relatively low-quality and not particularly durable goods, made by cheap labor, rather than produce smaller quantities of more expensive, high quality, durable goods made by skilled craftsmen. This could really be seen as the original sin of industrial society, one that has culminated in today's extremely wasteful consumer economy, an economy in which nothing lasts, nothing works for very long, and when things stop working we throw them out and replace them, because it is cheaper to do that than to get them fixed (besides that, hardly anyone knows how to fix things anyway). This involves fundamental disorder in the organization of production and in the relationship between man and his work.

First of all, mass production requires adoption of the factory system, what Blake called the "dark, satanic mills," and that has meant the loss of individual and family proprietorship of the means of production. When we lose this, we begin to lose our freedoms. As Belloc points out in _The Servile State_ , we end up with a proletariat, people who are politically free but not economically free, and this is an inherently unstable situation, one that, if not reversed, will ultimately lead to the loss of political freedom and to slavery.

The factory system requires the separation of work from the home and hence undermines the family. As it becomes more and more centralized, it also leads to the separation of work from the local community, undermining small communities and neighborhoods and the kind of shared life they embody, a life which is an end in itself and not just a means for economic activity. Community is a real human good, and its destruction is an attack on humanity.

The elimination or marginalization of craftsmanship is also an attack on humanity, because craftsmanship is also a human good, not just an instrumental one. When we make things we also in some way make ourselves, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in _Laborem Exercens_ :

... _The primary basis of the value of work is man himself_ , who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work." Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the preeminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by _the measure of the dignity_ of the subject of work, that is to say the person, _the individual who carries it out_. On the other hand, independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose—at times a very demanding one—of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man—even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service," as the most monotonous, even the most alienating work."

Anyone who has experienced the satisfaction and sense of fulfillment, the joy, that comes from growing things or making things, knows this.

None of this requires the rejection of technology. Rejecting technology would mean rejecting the use of tools. To be consistent, we would have to reject even the simplest tools. We could not even use a stone axe. That would be absurd. Tools are good. The problem is to use tools in an appropriate manner, to use them in those circumstances where they do good and contribute to the building of an ordered world, and to eschew them where their use is destructive and harmful. To elucidate:

We need to use tools to meet real human needs, not manufactured ones. Many of the things people consider absolutely necessary today would never be considered necessary by any sane person. Millions of people think they need to spend hours every day playing computer games to entertain themselves, or surfing the net to satisfy idle curiosity about various things (or to find pornography), or watching vulgar and immoral TV sitcoms (which I like to characterize by an alternative, rhyming expression).

We need to use tools to do things we can't do for ourselves or can do only very inadequately for ourselves. It makes sense, for instance, for cars and trains to be used to get us to places too far away to walk to. It makes no sense to use these machines to get an able-bodied person to a place he could walk to, especially when walking would be better for him. It does make sense to use machines, like power wheelchairs, to enable someone who is not able-bodied, like myself, to function more independently and participate more fully in life, but it would certainly make no sense whatsoever to mass-produce these devices so everyone would use them and no one would have to walk. Is that coming next?

We need to make and use tools whose use is compatible with our stewardship of the earth's resources and with the frugality and care which we are obligated to exercise in our use of these resources. Christians need to be much more aware than they are that frugality is not just a good idea but a virtue and a duty, and that waste is a sin. An economy which is grounded in waste to the extent that ours is, is an economy grounded in mortal sin. The throw-away economy is an abomination unto the Lord.

We need to use tools in a way that is compatible with the dignity and value of the human person, and that is why using them for a mass-production, factory-style economy that takes away individual proprietorship and the fulfillment that comes from the development and exercise of skills, is a misuse.

And, of course, we need to use tools in a way that is compatible with community life. If a new technology or its use will inevitably disrupt communities, for instance, uprooting people from small towns and villages and herding them into cities, then that technology (or its use) has to be excluded. The Amish, when deciding whether to use a particular machine, always ask the question: How will this affect our community? And that is the question we should all ask. When it is a choice between "progress" and the common good, the common good has got to come first.

Industrialization is a perfectly legitimate process which was derailed right at its beginning, a beginning which, tragically, coincided with the breakdown of Christian civilization. Christianity was always more open to technological innovation than other religions. This was evident even during the Middle Ages, when monks led the way in inventing new tools and new methods for practicing agriculture more effectively, then shared these with farmers outside the monastic walls. This was possible because Christianity has always affirmed the goodness of the creation, including the material creation, which many religions tend to see either as something evil, or as an illusion and something that doesn't matter. For Christians, the life we have in this world, here and now, is good and important, even though it is not final. Had western Christendom continued to be vigorous and to inform the lives of communities and peoples as it once did, industrialization would most certainly have happened, but not the derailed industrial revolution we actually experienced.

The difference can be thought of in this way. Throughout history, Augustine tells us, two loves have been in competition for the direction of men's lives: The love of God, the _amor Dei_ (and this includes the love of neighbor, which is inseparable from the love of God), and the love of self, the _amor sui_. Until the end of time, both are always present, like the wheat and the tares in the parable, but in a still vigorous Christian civilization, the love of God was a powerful force in men's lives. As the spiritual order that defined that civilization disintegrated, the love of self became more and more dominant. By the time the industrial revolution got underway, Christianity, with its focus on the love of God, had become extremely weak in the souls of western elites, and so it was the love of self that determined the way in which industrialization was pursued. This to the point where it became embodied in classical economic theory, which held that economic activity can be legitimately pursued without reference to any love other than the love of self, with no reference to a moral order or a common good. So the decisions that had to be made were made on the basis of motives like greed and the lust for power, not on a concern for moral and spiritual order and for the right ordering of the human community. Again and again, the social order was sacrificed to what industrialists and their ideological defenders saw as "progress."

Had the technological and industrial impetus set in motion by Christianity managed to stay on course, we would have experienced a very different industrial revolution, one that would doubtless have been more an evolution than a revolution, a more cautious, deliberate process where change would have taken place gradually, so that human beings and their institutions could adjust. But the industrialization that we actually got, while giving us many genuinely good things, has been profoundly destructive of the right ordering of human life. Either the destruction will proceed until the whole system collapses, reducing us to a pre-industrial situation, with the tremendous suffering and loss of life that such a collapse would necessarily entail, or we will find a way to rein in the industrial juggernaut and learn to use our tools to enhance and build up human life and human community rather than undermine them. I am not optimistic. We, or our ancestors, should have listened to the Luddites.

### SOME THOUGHTS ON WAGE LABOR

The older I get, the more I look at all the assumptions about the nature of reality that comprise modern man's world-taken-for-granted and realize how radically abnormal all or most of them are. Among the most abnormal of them is the assumption that the ordinary way for people to make a living is to get a job and work for a company or other organization. Whenever the economy is in any kind of trouble, the first thing we hear from the politicians is the need to do something to create more jobs. We never hear them talk about the need to create more opportunities for sole proprietorships, such as small businesses or family farms. It is always jobs. Now what this limitation in our thinking about work reflects is an understanding of work as something controlled by a small number of large, centralized organizations like corporations or government agencies. The idea of work as something controlled by individual workers, families, and local communities, is completely lost. This in contrast to centuries and centuries during which it was pretty much the norm for most people to be small businessmen or small farmers, with wage labor holding the marginal place small proprietorship now holds. Wage work, in the past, was often something people might do temporarily until they could get established on their own, not a lifelong commitment to dependence on a centralized organization.

It is a central principle of Catholic social teaching that the dignity of the human person be respected in all social and economic relations. But the control of work by a few large, centralized organizations means, of necessity, the bureaucratization of work, the organization of work around positivist-utilitarian principles which cannot and do not respect the dignity and value of the human person (something Catholic social teaching requires of employers) but must see and relate to individual human beings in purely instrumental terms—that is, their usefulness as means to the organization's ends. Wage labor in centralized bureaucracies is purely and simply incompatible with respect for the human person—it diminishes and degrades the person. It could be argued, in fact, that an organization of work which violates the dignity of the person is the very essence of slavery, hence wage labor is slavery. That was the contention of at least some of the old-time socialists, such as the syndicalists, who maintained that the principal error of mainstream socialists as well as welfare-statists was that they saw poverty, lack of money and consumer goods, as the worker's principal problem, when the real problem was slavery, the loss of freedom in work. Modern consumerism just means we now have well-paid slaves, but slavery is still slavery.

There is a passage in Wendell Berry's novel, _Jayber Crow_ , where Jayber, following the death of his foster parents, is sent to an orphanage. When he arrives there, he finds himself sitting across a desk from an official of the orphanage, and suddenly realizes that this man across the desk has total power over him, and that he has none over himself. The image of the man across the desk haunts him for the rest of his life. Most of modern life is about dealing with the man across the desk, whether he be the policeman, the IRS agent, or one's employer. The man across the desk cannot and will not respect your human dignity. In the novel, the man even tells Jayber what name he is to be known by.

Wage labor in its modern form, involving, as it does, the suppression of the person, requires the establishment of a whole culture of harassment and intimidation in the management of workers. Humiliation, we might say, is central to the treatment of persons in a bureaucracy. Hence we have the growth of thoroughly vile institutions like the humiliating performance reviews to which virtually all office workers are subjected today. Not to mention unspeakable things like requiring workers to submit to random drug testing, where you are required to urinate into a cup in the presence of a witness (to avoid cheating). There seems to be a constant effort to keep people under control by attacking their self-esteem and thus taking away their will to resist. The government agency I used to work for did this in a variety of ways over the years. For a long time, the major stress was on productivity goals, which involved statistical measures of performance which few people succeeded in reaching _in toto_ , but which gave management a beautiful opportunity for brow-beating people. Later, management shifted to a program called the Performance Appraisal System, whereby each case you worked on would be evaluated by a supervisor when an action was taken on that case, and you would get it back with a list of things you had done incorrectly. In a bit of comic relief, some genius in management decided to rename this monstrosity the Performance Management System, or PMS. Or maybe it was done deliberately by a saboteur within management— who knows?

When the human person is systematically violated, there can be no respect for reason, which is, after all, exercised by persons with intellects. Rules and policies are expected to be carried out without question, no matter how irrational they are. Now when reason is forced to submit to unreason, that is a reversal of the right order of things, hence an iniquity.

Obviously, where reason is forced to submit to unreason, truth must be suppressed in the relation between employer and employee. That happens from both sides. Anyone who has ever worked in an office or a factory knows that almost anything management tells workers has to be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise (something like the government). At the other end, we get the phenomenon of flattery, telling the boss only what he wants to hear, sometimes known as "sucking up," sometimes known under less printable names. Here again the dignity of persons is violated on both sides. Being lied to diminishes one's personhood, and being forced to lie in order to keep one's livelihood is probably even worse.

Conscience gets even shorter shrift (to make a somewhat obscure pun) than reason. The person as a center of moral judgment has no place in a modern bureaucracy. The agency I worked for processed social security disability claims, and the federal policies we had to administer in the course of in effect deciding the fate of human beings were often arbitrary and unjust, hence violating the personhood of both the client and the employee. Yet those who raised questions about the morality of the system were rudely told that no one was interested in their "opinions."

It is also important to keep in mind that man, in virtue of his personhood, is a social, communal being, called to form relations with others which affirm and build them up rather than exploit them. This aspect of personhood is also violated by the modern employer, who expects employees to compete with one another rather than cooperate. There was a lot of public discussion a few years ago about Ford Motor Co.'s new system for evaluation of employee performance. This system basically divided the work force into fifths, the top fifth being the superperformers, the bottom fifth being the inadequate performers, who were required to improve or be fired, with the rest somewhere in the category of "acceptable." The system seemed to be in use principally as a way to get rid of older workers who stood in the way of the company's politically correct "diversity" policy. The iniquity of such a system is that it pits workers against one another, since 20% have to be in the bottom rank—i.e, the people likely to be canned. There is no incentive for cooperation in such an environment, since if you help a fellow worker who is in trouble, you may end up hurting your own standing. A system like this turns the workplace into the war of all against all.

For similar reasons, modern employers like to move their workers around a lot within the company, because this helps to discourage the formation of friendships and the cohesive groups which result. Such groups may, after all, be a source of resistance to managerial regimentation. Interestingly, practices like this actually interfere with the ostensible goals of the organization—e.g., making cars, processing disability applications. When the employees in a workgroup have been together a long time and become friends, they will help each other. If one guy is behind and another is caught up, the one who is caught up will help the one who is behind. In a competitive environment, without friendships, the one who is caught up is more likely to just sit back and watch the other guy sink, hence less work actually gets done.

So employers habitually attack the social nature of man, and reduce the human person, made for community, to the isolated individual. Wage slavery is, like everything else about modernity, drastically reductionistic.

When employees find themselves in this situation of being owned by a bureaucratic organization, one of the ways they try to protect themselves is by drawing a sharp line between their work life and their personal life, declaring the latter off limits to the employer. "As long as I get my job done, it's none of my boss's business what I do in my own time." The problem is that employers are increasingly unwilling to respect this boundary, demanding the right to own the whole person. Thus, as already noted, the obsession with a drug-free workplace leads to the terrible violation of human dignity and privacy involved in compulsory drug testing on the job. More and more employers also refuse to hire or keep on the payroll any employee who smokes, even though he does not smoke on the job. The courts have tended to uphold practices like this. They may be legally correct, and of course getting the government involved in situations like this probably just means a quick trip from the frying pan into the fire. The fact remains that the employee who wants to call his soul his own is increasingly beleaguered. And, of course, this whole state of affairs no longer just affects the peons who labor in factories and offices. Increasingly, "professional" people, doctors, lawyers, college professors, etc. find themselves facing this same demand for total ownership of their persons by the employer.

It is interesting to note that slave-owners in the old south liked to rationalize slavery by claiming that they only owned their slave's labor, not the person. That strikes me, as I imagine it does most people, as a distinction without a difference. Employers today also in theory own only their employees' labor, but in fact they are claiming more and more rights over employees' souls. Of course, to continue the analogy, it is true that there was great variation among slave-owners when it came to the harshness or kindness of their treatment of slaves, and similarly employers differ substantially in the degree to which they exercise their rights of ownership over their employees. But they always have the power to do what they will, whether or not they actually exercise that power. Apologists for slavery in the old south also frequently alleged the existence of mutual loyalty between slave and master, claiming that the better sort of slave-owner would never think of selling his slaves. But that was often only true until the slave-owner found himself hard up for cash, and then he would most likely be found heading for the nearest slave auction, "merchandise" in tow. Corporate employers today are full of much of the same nonsense about mutual loyalty, claiming to be big happy families. But when circumstances seem to dictate the need for downsizing, the heads of these big happy families rarely lose any time axing family members who have given, in some cases, 30 or 40 years to the corporation. I doubt they lose any sleep either.

There has been a great deal of talk in recent years about "stress" in the workplace. But what is "stress" if not the anxiety any human being experiences when his very being, his personhood, is under attack? Only a change in the very foundations of the organization of work could alleviate this stress. Instead, of course, employers respond by bringing in alleged experts who make recommendations about changes in the employees' diet, or maybe even resort to having new age meditation sessions during staff meetings (that actually happened at my former place of employment).

The terrible anxiety and sense of impotence entailed by this situation is, I think, a major part of what fuels the extreme hyperactivity of the stock market today. People enraged and horrified at finding themselves in the state of slavery hope, by playing the stock market, to rescue themselves from the situation—to be able, in effect, to buy themselves out of slavery, retire early, and live happily and freely ever after. Some succeed, of course, but most do not. The motives for much of our stock market investment today probably have a lot in common with the motives for buying lottery tickets—the hope of magically acquiring a large enough sum of money to be able to tell employers, in the words of a popular song of some years ago, that "you can take this job and shove it."

Slavery, of which modern wage labor is a form, violates the very order of creation, in which respect for the dignity of persons, and in some way, of all beings, is a central ordering principle. It is not something Christians can really accept if they are to be faithful to the gospel. It is a violation of being itself—unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendental attributes of being, are all violated by it. It is truly an abomination unto the Lord.

Real escape from slavery has never been easy, of course, and may be impossible for many, but we have to start somewhere. Real escape means beginning to make different kinds of decisions, using different criteria. It means such things as not accepting promotions that will disrupt your family and community life, not sending your children to worthless public schools or universities which are nothing but a con operation, etc. It means for many the decision to learn how to do some real work and go into business for oneself, even though this may mean living on far less than you could get on the corporate ladder. Really, it means being willing to live in poverty rather than be unfree. The whole organization of work today is a drastic departure from normality, and the problem for all of us today is to begin looking for ways to return to normality—in effect, for ways to return home. We are kept far from home by promises of a kind of divinization to be conferred on us by technology, wealth, etc., and we have to recognize those promises for what they are—lies. The Odyssey, the great poem about homecoming, begins with Odysseus living with Calypso, a goddess. He is promised immortality and hence, in effect, godhood, if he will just stay with her. He chooses, instead, to return home to his family and community. We need to do the same.

### WORK: MAN'S SHARE IN CREATION

My readers are unlikely to be surprised when I tell them that the modern age is typified by rejection of God's creation and hence rejection of the cosmos, the ordered material universe. Indeed, I have expressed this sentiment so many times that I doubtless give vent to it in my sleep.

Application is another matter, however. In the following reflections, I would like to suggest that modern man, as a consequence of his rejection of cosmic existence, has an exceedingly distorted understanding of the nature of work. This takes the form of a devaluation of activities like making, growing, and raising children, activities wherein we share in the life of the cosmos. He dismisses these kinds of work as mere drudgery, without meaning. To him, real work, meaningful work, has to transcend cosmic existence. Practically speaking, this means that real work has to be abstract. It has to involve doing such things as sitting in front of a computer keyboard manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet, or sitting in an office wearing a suit and administering something or other, usually with the enjoyable bonus of being able to boss other people around and make their lives more or less miserable. This is, to such people, real, "self-actualizing" work, where things like growing crops or baking bread are not. This is, to say the least, a bizarre mindset.

Christianity, too, looks for transcendence, but without rejecting immanence. For Christians, immanence participates in transcendence and manifests it. That is possible because the reality of the Incarnation is at the very center of Christianity, a mysterious reality in which there is a meeting and a joining of transcendence and immanence—a marriage, actually, to use the language of the New Testament. When we see the cosmos from the vantage point of the Incarnation, everything is sanctified, and work which entails intense participation in the cosmos entails, by that very fact, intense participation in the Incarnation of the Word of God. The Incarnation makes all things new and it makes all things partakers in the divine glory.

Work that brings us into intimate contact with the creation and hence with the Incarnation has a tendency to be satisfying in itself, even while serving other ends. This is in sharp contrast to work which has merely instrumental value, work which leads to an extrinsic result which we desire but which is boring and unsatisfying in itself. Typically, modern man, with his utilitarian leanings, values the latter more than the former, another bizarre distortion of the right ordering of things. Interestingly, modern technology, promising to deliver us from drudgery so that we may do "fulfilling" work, often deprives us of the work which is intrinsically satisfying, while condemning us to unsatisfying work which we hurry through to get it over with as soon as possible. Marilyn Kendall, a Canadian writer (widely rumored to be a sibling of the present writer), has put this quite well.

What is it we miss about the work our machines have supposedly absolved us from? Take the dishwasher: I had mine removed years ago. I disliked the noise, buzzers going off, having to fish out my favorite knife (before it had been washed), forgetting to turn the machine on or empty it at appropriate times (oh, more stress).

Then one day, while making bread — the old-fashioned way — and enjoying the feeling of the dough under my hands and the muscles in my arms working, I knew the answer. I saw clearly that machines seldom engage our senses.

We are physical beings who revel (or should) in the stimulation of our five senses: in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. Think of the dishwasher and dryer. Do they involve any physical sensations (except our hearing, and that negatively)? What about the bread machine, the food processor? (Both of which I find the clean-up of much worse than the task I'm saved from.)

But those are factors I didn't like about that particular machine. What do I like about doing my own dishes? For one, I like having my hands in warm, soapy water; it's somehow comforting. I like looking out my kitchen window at the mourning doves lining my deck rail in the winter. I like sharing the task with my husband. And when the job is done, it's really done; everything is put away and off my mind.

I especially like the notion of work that engages the senses. Work that engages the senses is work that participates in a cosmic order that shares in the reality of the Incarnation.

A closely related point is this: Work, as Pope John Paul II tells us in _Laborem Exercens_ , is for the sake of the person, it actualizes the person. Here is what the Holy Father has to say:

... _The primary basis of the value of work is man himself_ , who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work." Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the preeminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by _the measure of the dignity_ of the subject of work, that is to say the person _, the individual who carries it out_. On the other hand, independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose — at times a very demanding one—of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is _the purpose of the work_ , whatever work it is that is done by man — even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service," as the most monotonous, even the most alienating work.

That means that a world in which machines did all the work while people goofed off would not only not be a good thing but would be a positive evil (if there can be such a thing) because it would interfere with the good of the person. The fantasy of a world in which machines do everything is part and parcel of the gnostic insanity which has ruled our world since the so-called "Enlightenment." If work is a good for man, then machines are good insofar as they help us to do the work, but not insofar as they do the work for us. Here is an example. I have been gardening for a number of years now. The problem is that the steady deterioration of my physical condition due to late effects of polio has made it more and more difficult, and finally impossible, to get down on the ground and work in the garden (to be more precise, I can get down on the ground, but getting back up is another matter altogether). I now get around using a motorized wheelchair, so if I am to work in the garden I must be able to reach everything from the chair. To that end, several years ago I acquired several large earth boxes, filled them with potting soil, and managed to successfully grow tomatoes, Swiss chard, green beans, zucchini, and cucumbers in them. Now without the power wheelchair, I could not do this work. However, it should be noted that the chair does not do the work for me, it merely helps me to do the work myself. If someone were to invent a robot that would do all the work for me, that would till, plant, weed, cultivate, water, fertilize and harvest, while I sat and watched, I would regard it as worthless. In that case, the work would do nothing to build up my humanity. I would get nothing out of it, except the finished product (and who knows, perhaps the robot could be programmed to eat the vegetables too, and I could just take a pill containing all the nutrients I need, and thus be saved the drudgery of eating).

One of the disturbing truths about the modern world, in cities and suburbs and even, to some extent, in the countryside, is that hardly anyone knows how to do anything. Hardly anyone knows how to cook anything more complicated than hotdogs and baked beans (from a can, of course), or how to bake bread, or how to use basic tools, or how to grow vegetables, and so on. The standard response to this by modern people is something along lines of "We don't need to know how to do those things." Of course, changing historical circumstances could, in fact, put us in a situation where we needed to do those things in order to survive, and we would have to hope we were fast learners. Beyond that, however, need is not really the issue. Having skills, knowing how to make and grow things, is part, and an important part, at that, of being human, it has value in itself, not just as a means to survival. Significantly, the Incarnate Word of God himself knew how to use carpenter tools. If we end up being just drones, something terribly important is missing in our lives.

Through work, we share, in a certain sense, in God's work of creating and preserving the world. Because, with the Incarnation of the Word of God, that world has been transformed and redeemed, work, done rightly, is also our way of participating in Christ's work of redemption. To engage in silly fantasies about liberation from work through technology is thus to reject our true vocation as human beings, and, far from freeing ourselves, to condemn ourselves to new forms of slavery.

### SEPARATION OF COMMERCE FROM RESIDENCE

I will start with a brief note on urban planning and epistemology. Modern life tends to be lived out in an atmosphere of unrelenting abstraction. In particular, there is the phenomenon of bureaucracy, characterized more than anything else by the habit of dealing with the whole world in the most abstract possible terms. Now one of the key features of city life today, one discussed at length by Jane Jacobs in _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ , is the separation of residences from businesses. The classic urban neighborhood consisted of residences, whether houses or apartment buildings, with a whole assortment of businesses—grocery stores, delis, bakeries, butcher shops, bars, barber shops, etc., etc.—scattered among them. For kids in particular, that made the neighborhood an endlessly fascinating place. In such neighborhoods, life was lived out amid all the gritty activities of everyday life. In today's suburban neighborhoods, in contrast, you can go for miles and never even see a store. There seems to be the attitude, on the part of the planners and of the people buying these homes, that all business activity is just too crass, too earthy, to allow near their homes. Instead, those things are kept out of sight, in places like shopping malls where you can go when you need something but need not look at otherwise (in the case of shopping malls, of course, that is something positive). Homes are understood to be exclusively places of retreat, where you seal yourself off from the world and "cocoon" with your TV sets, entertainment centers, personal computers, and so on. And, of course, when so much ordinary human activity is absent from the streets, no one goes there (that is why suburbs so often lack sidewalks) and there is little or no interaction among neighbors. The suburban neighborhood epitomizes the idea of society as a collection of atomistic individuals, it is a society of sorts without community.

Now "abstraction," from the Latin "abstrahere," basically means "to draw or pull away from," to isolate something from everything else. When we isolate ourselves and our homes and neighborhoods from the active, vital life of the human community, which the multitude of businesses in the old neighborhoods embodied, we are choosing to live in abstraction from the human community and the community of beings in which it, and all things, participate.

If it is true that the separation of residences from businesses reflects the attitude that the day-to-day business of providing human necessities to people is somehow just a bit too crass and vulgar, and needs to be kept apart where we can avoid having to see it, it has to be especially true when we are talking about the processes involved in producing the foods that we need—i.e., farming. Most of us want to get our food without ever having to see what all had to be done to make it our food—that is, without ever planting a seed, plowing a field, slaughtering and gutting an animal, etc. In fact, we would just as soon get our food without even having to cook it.

That being the case, much of the zoning in our cities and suburbs today can be understood as the effort to keep rural life as separated as possible from urban life. There was a time, and not all that long ago either, when many bits and pieces of rural life still survived in our cities. For instance, my mother grew up, not on a farm, but in a city neighborhood in Saginaw, Michigan during the 20s and 30s of the last century. My grandfather kept a huge vegetable garden in the family's yard, and this made it pretty much possible for my grandmother to feed her large family during the oftentimes prolonged periods that my grandfather was out of work. The neighbors pretty much did the same thing. These gardening efforts were helped along by the fact that once a year the Saginaw River flooded in their neighborhood, and deposited large amounts of fertile matter in the soil. Its work was also enhanced by the fact that hardly anyone in the neighborhood had an indoor toilet in those days, and the flooding of the river had a way of freeing up some especially fertile material from the outhouses. My grandparents kept chickens, mainly for the eggs, but when one of them reached the age where it was no longer producing these, Grandpa would get out the axe and the family would have chicken dinner. (My mother can still remember headless chickens running around the yard and somehow squawking even without heads, a phenomenon that would doubtless put our too tender suburbanites today off poultry forever, except that they have insulated themselves from it). It was not unheard of in those days for people to keep a cow in my grandparents' neighborhood. Even in my own childhood, in the 40s and 50s, many of these rural vestiges were still around. At that time, there were still some horse-drawn milk wagons in town. There was also such a thing as an eggman, generally a poultry farmer who came into town to sell his wares. Until the early 60s, we had an Italian truck farmer who, during the summer months, regularly came into town with his horse-drawn red wagon full of fresh produce (out of which he would often allow us kids to feed the horse, an easy-going elderly mare named Molly, some choice morsel). This was where we got most of our produce during the summer.

Today we find that virtually every city or suburb has ordinances that preclude anyone even thinking about keeping livestock. Usually, people can get away with small unobtrusive vegetable gardens, kept as a hobby, but someone like my grandfather, who basically turned his whole yard into a small truck farm, would be run out of town just like that. In many suburbs, pickup trucks are forbidden. Basically, anything that might remind people of the countryside and our dependence on it is forbidden. City neighborhoods used to be fascinating places, especially for children. Today's suburbs are supremely boring, because they are the product of relentless abstraction. We don't just think abstractly, we live abstractly, and it shows. Wendell Berry has said that divorce is the absolutely central concept for our times, because our whole way of life is based on endlessly separating things, and then complaining because life is fragmented.

Of course, all this can be viewed from a slightly different perspective as the product of that abomination unto the Lord known as the Global Economy. The interpenetration of rural and urban life in earlier times was to a great extent a result of the fact that local economies still to some degree persisted—a local economy being one where a city depends on local farmers for its food supply. When food as likely as not comes from thousands of miles away, the link is broken.

It occurs to me, in this connection, to wonder if there might not be something to say for amending the Constitution to give states the right to impose tariffs on products coming from out of state. That could be an important tool in restoring local economies. Of course, amending the Constitution at this late stage is a bit like, as the cliché has it, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But if we ever get around to writing a new Constitution designed to restore genuine federalism, it is a possibility worth considering.

### ECONOMICS: SERVANT OR MASTER?

There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with the science of economics. That science outlines for us the structure of reality as it pertains to one particular aspect of human existence, the production and distribution of goods and services. It provides us with guidelines for determining what is and is not possible in these areas and hence for what public policies are and are not workable when it comes to the production and distribution of wealth. It tells us, for example, that if we were to seek to make working people more prosperous by raising the national minimum wage to, say, 50.00 an hour, the only result we could be sure of is massive unemployment and economic collapse. Or that if we were to try to make everyone wealthy by having the government send a check for a million dollars to every man, woman, and child in the country, the only result would be runaway inflation, leaving no one any richer. Short of cases this extreme, economics can give us some notion what a particular course of action is likely to cost us.

Where we run into problems is with the reductionistic use of economics, i.e., the outlook which sees economic activity as practically the only activity that is of any importance, which hence makes the science of economics a kind of magical key to understanding the whole of man's social and political existence. We see this in a crude form in the many TV talk shows dealing with business, shows whose participants seem never to have considered the possibility that life could be about anything more than making as much money as possible, or producing as many goods and services as possible, and so on. In other words, the abstraction of economic man is imposed on all things human, and we end up separating economic activity from the social and cultural context in which it occurs, as well as from the moral order. We are told, again and again, that certain policies are right because they maximize economic growth, or the availability of cheap goods, or something of the sort, without regard to the moral, political, or communal consequences, often quite negative, of these policies.

I found much of this epitomized in a column by "conservative" economist Walter Williams, entitled "Stupid, Ignorant or Biased?" in which he uses economics to glibly dismiss all objections to things like global free trade as merely expressions of, as the title says, stupidity, ignorance, or bias.

One of the biases Williams goes after is "the make-work bias, where many believe that labor is better to use than conserve." This, Williams says, leads people to the strange idea that the destruction of their jobs is a danger to them. But this, he assures us, is an illusion, since, when things like technology and outsourcing throw some people out of work, they actually free these workers for better things. For example, "...in 1800 it took nearly 95 of every 100 Americans, working on farms, to feed the nation. In 1900, it took 40. Today, it takes three. Workers no longer needed to farm became available to produce homes, cars, pharmaceuticals, computers and thousands of other goods....Outsourcing, just as technological innovation, frees up labor to produce other things as well."

How odd, that anyone should think of the destruction of his job as something negative. This epitomizes what I am talking about here. In the abstract universe of economic theory, individuals have no flesh and blood reality. They are abstract, interchangeable, free-floating units of production and consumption who can readily be moved around a kind of gigantic chessboard to the place where they will produce and consume most efficiently, then moved again when conditions change, and so on.

But the lives of actual individuals, actual persons, are embedded in a complex network of institutions and relationships, including, very importantly, relationships to particular places and communities. Continuity is enormously important to the well-being of individuals and communities. That continuity requires what Burke called "the contract of eternal society" embodying the bonds that unite, not just the present members of a community, but their ancestors and their progeny. The sense of being part of a whole greater than oneself, a whole which was there before one and will be there after one is gone, is vital to moral, spiritual, and emotional health. For example, children who grow up in families that constantly move about the country or even the world, military families, for instance, have huge problems in their emotional and personal development. It is not good for people to be constantly on the move. We need stability and we need continuity. So if new technology, or outsourcing, causes a man to lose the job he has done all his life, perhaps the only job he knows how to do, forcing him to move to another part of the country, learn a new job, and start over again, that is likely to do substantial harm to him and to his family. Assuming that others, perhaps many others, also lose their jobs, the community may die, multiplying the harm that is done. There is also the fact that many people are not able to make the transition to some other work in some other place, and these will most likely end up swelling the ranks of the underclass, a substantial source of crime and disorder. It sounds very innocuous to speak of freeing up labor for other uses, but the reality is often profound violence to the social order. One sees here none of the classical and Christian sense that there is a hierarchy of goods, within which material goods have a place, certainly, but far from the top. Instead, we are left with the feeling that the only reason for human beings to exist at all is to maximize the quantity of cheap material goods in the world. This is actually a failure to take costs into account, a violation of the first law of economics—that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The example of farming is particularly instructive here. The destruction of small family farms has had several repercussions for society as a whole. One is the replacement of these by huge industrial farms operated by people who are not owners and hence have no stake in the enterprise and who could not care less what the agricultural practices involved are doing to the long-term viability of the soil. This can actually lead to a lessening of efficiency, though that is largely hidden, as Wendell Berry has pointed out, by shifting the costs to future generations. This, of course, actually violates the first principle of economics (see above). Someone, somewhere, sometime, has to pay for these things.

Another is the destruction of rural communities and the consequent herding of large numbers of former farmers into cities, where they very often turn into a rootless proletariat which does great harm to the social order. Traditionally, rural communities have been a strong conservative force in the life of nations, a kind of anchor that stabilizes society. And, of course, with the loss of rural life goes a loss of the kind of family and personal life that goes with it, and the enormous harm to individual persons which this loss entails. It is almost certainly good for society as a whole for the majority of human beings to live and work in rural areas, even if this means a less efficient and more costly production of food, something which may not actually be the case. The common good has to take precedence over economic efficiency.

An important benefit for society as a whole of the presence of many farmers is that farmers tend to be a conservative element in society, they tend to anchor the rest of us. Farmers are always the first to resist efforts to force totalitarian pipedreams on the world. In a largely agrarian society, the far left, what I like to call the spiritually diseased elites, could never exercise the kind of power we see them exercising today.

Another important point is the reality that, as Pope John Paul pointed out in _Laborem Exercens_ , work is not just about the extrinsic end that it realizes, the production of goods, but is also about the actualization, the humanization, of the worker himself:

"... _The primary basis of the value of work is man him_ self, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is 'for man' and not man 'for work.' Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the preeminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by _the measure of the dignity_ of the subject of work, that is to say the person _, the individual who carries it out_."

Williams goes on to speak of the "anti-foreign bias": "...There are," according to Bryan Caplan, an economist Williams cites, "two methods for Americans to have cars. One is to get a bunch of workers into Detroit factories. Another is to grow a lot of wheat in Iowa. You harvest the wheat, load it on ships sailing westward on the Pacific Ocean, and a few months later the ships reappear loaded down with Toyotas. We have cars as if we produced them. In other words, exchange is an alternative method of production."

Here we see the ideology behind the free trade movement, and it has a kind of surface plausibility. The idea is that each nation or community produces the goods it can produce most cheaply and efficiently, then trades them for the goods other nations can produce most cheaply and efficiently, and lo and behold, everybody benefits from cheap goods. But this leaves the reality of international politics completely out of the picture. The whole thing is workable only on the assumption that all these nations trading with one another are on good terms, which is never the case. But if a nation relies on another nation for products that it needs to survive, it renders itself vulnerable. Its access to those goods can be cut off if the other nation becomes an enemy. In fact, national security requires that a nation try to be economically as self-sufficient as possible, meaning that its own people produce, to the extent possible, the goods that it needs, even if this means a reduction in efficiency and higher prices. It is better for a nation to be poor than to be conquered by its enemies.

It is easy to say that if we are dependent on another nation for necessary goods, like oil, and that nation becomes hostile, we can always get the industries involved up and running again. But that is easier said than done. Any industry requires that there be a whole infrastructure to support it, including a pool of skilled workers. When we let an industry die, and try to revive it, we have to rebuild these resources, something that can take many years, time we may not have. The leaders who have economically disarmed us through policies of free trade really should be regarded as traitors.

The kind of economic analysis Williams and others are engaging in really sees society as nothing more than autonomous individuals seeking to maximize utility for themselves, and that leaves no room for any concept of a common good. That is why it is so easy for them to ignore the effect of policies like free trade on institutions like the local community, the family farm, and the family, as well as the continuity and stability needed for human life to be worth living, because these things have no reality in the rarefied, abstract world of their analysis. They have transformed economic analysis from a legitimate tool to an idol, and we are all paying the price. Thomas Sowell, a colleague of Williams and a man who is often very insightful, has actually gone so far as to say that he can really attach no significance to the whole concept of social justice. So much for the social teachings of every Pope since Leo XIII. What he is saying is that the economics of the marketplace makes it possible to do an end run around social justice and the moral order itself, because the workings of the market will always result in the most just state of things possible.

Economic analysis can be a good servant. When it becomes the master, however, when it tells us that all concerns with the dignity of the human person, the common good, social justice, and community life, have to be sacrificed to the sole good of maximizing wealth, then it has to be put back in its place.

### SUBSIDIARITY FOREVER

Many were quite euphoric about the outcome of the 2010 congressional election, with its many victories for Tea Party candidates. That was understandable, but euphoria is no substitute for clarity about what to do with power once we possess it. I believe I can best bring out what I mean here by quoting a passage from Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_. The context is a meeting of the leaders of Middle Earth over the question of what to do with the Ring of Power created by the evil Sauron to enable him to rule the world. The ring has come into their possession, and they are trying to decide how to either hide it or destroy it so Sauron cannot get his hands on it. Boromir speaks up:

"I do not understand all this,' he said....Why do you speak ever of hiding and destroying? Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem.

"The Men of Gondor are valiant, and they will never submit; but they may be beaten down. Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon. Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has such power as you say. Take it and go forth to victory!"

"Alas, no," said Elrond. "We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart....If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it."

And this really captures the essence of the temptation to which we are now exposed. We have the possibility of gaining control of an extremely powerful tool, a weapon really, which we are tempted to see as one we can use to solve our own problems, even though we have long seen it as the cause of those very problems. For months now, we have been talking of little else but the evils associated with "big government," and now we have the possibility of actually getting control of that bloated central government and gaining access to the many unconstitutional powers which it exercises. There is a huge temptation to become what is known as "big government conservatives," attempting to impose a right-wing revolution on the nation by using the power of the central government for that purpose. Going that way would be a disastrous error

Sauron's Ring, you will recall, is an intrinsically evil tool, in the sense that it was made for the sole purpose of doing evil. It was not designed to do good. It has to be said that our central government is intrinsically evil. When I say "our central government," I am not referring to the legitimate federal government put in place by our founding fathers. That government was created with the ability to accomplish certain genuinely good works within sharply defined limits. But the central government we have today, with its very extensive use of all kinds of powers never granted to it under the U.S. Constitution, is an entity that came into being principally as a tool to be used by what I have called elsewhere our spiritually diseased elites, for the purpose of imposing on American society the dream world notions those elites have about what constitutes a perfect society. As a tool, it is adapted to that kind of undertaking. Any effort to use it for other purposes — that is, to bring back some kind of non-dream world normality to the world, is doomed to failure. The people who try to do that will find themselves more and more trying to force on us the kind of utopian fantasies our present rulers are obsessed with. They will find themselves becoming more and more like the elites they have displaced. And we will have Sauron all over again.

Another way of putting it, is to say that the principal evil of our present government is the utter failure to respect the principle of subsidiarity, which dictates, in the words of Pope Pius XI in _Quadragesimo anno_ , that "it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them." Our central government today is founded on the concentration of all tasks, to the extent possible, at the highest and most central level. It is a contradiction to try to use such an institution to restore subsidiarity, and it is the restoration of subsidiarity that should now be our principal task.

So we should not be aspiring to take over Leviathan, but to do away with it. Removing some people from the controls of this machine and replacing them with others, even though the others are "our people," won't work. Perhaps a few could resist being corrupted by all that power, but it would be very few indeed. It is a truism that power corrupts, but it is a true truism. It is not just a matter of taking power away from the people who have it now, but of doing away with that kind of power entirely by returning to the principle of subsidiarity. We need a revolution in the very concept of sovereignty. The reason modern governments so egregiously violate subsidiarity is that they are deeply committed to the idea that the authority of the state, its sovereignty, is so absolute that it cannot acknowledge any higher authority to which it could possibly be answerable. Really, it acknowledges no other authority at all. That is a sovereignty that can belong only to God; hence the claim to such a sovereignty is one that no Christian can possibly accept. St. Peter's assertion before the Sanhedrin that we must obey God rather than men has always been anathema to a modern state which has, in effect, declared itself to be God.

Belief in the notion of American exceptionalism seems to have become something of a litmus test among the Tea Party types. I find it very questionable. Certainly if what people mean by it is that America has some kind of messianic mission to the world, such as bringing democracy to all of mankind, then it is not just nonsense but very dangerous nonsense, resulting in all kinds of stupid and unnecessary wars that come about because we cannot mind our own business. It is comparable in malignancy to the utopian fantasies of our present ruling elites. If it means that America is somehow destined to last forever, that our nation cannot be destroyed or lose its freedom, that is equally nonsensical. So when I hear people say things like "Oh, that can't possibly happen in America," I get alarmed because this mentality can lead us not to take action to prevent real evils that threaten us. The truth is, it is the fate of mankind, in this world, to struggle again and again to create some kind of a tolerable and just order only to have it last for a time and then begin to crumble, like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill again and again, only to see it roll to the bottom. So when we find ourselves up against a regime that is trying to impose a totalitarian system on us, we are likely to refuse to acknowledge the danger if we labor under the delusion that "that can't happen in America."

Yet there is one sense in which we really can assert the notion of American exceptionalism. Our nation was exceptional, in its origins, insofar as our founders made a deliberate effort to swim against the tide at a time when nation-states everywhere were consolidating and centralizing their power and institutionalizing that power in the form of the bureaucratic state. The whole trend was then and is now the systematic violation of subsidiarity. The founders tried to build the principle of subsidiarity into the very structure of the Constitution, creating an order in which most power would be concentrated at the level of states and local governments and in the private sector, leaving only minimal power in the hands of a central government. This effort to restore subsidiarity in a world which was more and more rejecting it was in fact a truly exceptional and glorious aspect of our founding, and it is an effort to which we need to rededicate ourselves.

There is a good theological reason why the principle of subsidiarity should commend itself to us. That is the fact that God himself practices it. That perhaps sounds a little flippant. What I mean by it is this: the principle of subsidiarity is not just a political idea. It is part of the natural moral law. Now the natural moral law is not the law and is not binding on us simply because God says that it is. It is not arbitrary. It is the law because it is grounded in the very divine essence and, in the act of creation, flows into the created universe. God does not simply rule the creation alone, but shares His causality with creatures, conferring on them, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, the dignity of causality. He makes creatures who are not just passively moved by their creator but actually exercise a kind of created causality. It is therefore most appropriate that such a way of doing things should be reflected in the social and political order, that from the very top to the bottom of the hierarchy of society we have people and institutions which act efficaciously, which exercise authority and power, not a hierarchy in which only the top truly acts and all other persons and institutions are merely passive recipients of that action.

Now it is interesting that Protestant, or at least Calvinist, theology does not see God in this way. It sees a God who exercises absolute arbitrary power ruling over a universe which exercises no power at all. In this way of thinking there is no natural moral law which flows from God's essence, there are only his arbitrary commands which He could change at any time. This is the way both Calvinists and Muslims see the creation. Accordingly, they tend to create states that are ruled absolutely from the top and in which all other persons or levels are expected merely to obey. Yet that is, almost miraculously, the kind of state the founding fathers of our country, albeit mostly Calvinists of one kind or another, wanted to avoid, working instead for a political system far more in accord with the Catholic view of the universe. One has to suspect that the Holy Spirit was at work here.

A far better project than a takeover of such a government, which is godless by its very nature, is for what Angelo Codevilla has called the Country Party (normal people not part of the ruling elite) to take control of state and local governments, which can then proceed, not so much to resist federal power, as to resume the exercise of their own rightful powers, applying the nullification doctrine to situations where the federal government tries to stop them from doing this. We don't have to wait for the federal Leviathan to crumble before beginning to restore power to the subsidiary levels of authority. The whole idea will be to get into the state and local governments and stiffen them up, get them to stop playing the role of lackeys to the feds and go back to exercising their legitimate authority to govern within their territories.

If we are to abolish the federal Leviathan rather than just take it over, we have got to get the message across to people that state office is actually higher than federal office, because, despite what we have come to take for granted, the federal government is meant to be subordinate to the states rather than the reverse. The original idea underlying our constitution was that the states, needing things like a common defense and a common foreign policy, but not wishing to create a "consolidated" central government, delegated certain powers to a central government, not relinquishing these powers in order to transfer them to this government, but merely empowering it to perform certain tasks on behalf of the states, much the way an employer delegates authority to employees without giving up any of his own authority in the process, or relinquishing the right to resume the direct exercise of that authority. The federal government is an employee of the states. Now, when an employee gets too big for his britches and tries to run the company in his own right, while robbing his employer blind, there is only one thing to do—fire him.

So we need to educate our people to understand this reality, and to understand that holding an office in a state or local government is a more noble and honorable thing than being a U.S. Congressman or even president. There is a story that once, during Washington's administration, the latter paid a visit to Boston, while John Hancock was governor of Massachusetts. Some expected that Hancock would call on Washington to pay his respects, something protocol would require a lesser ranking official to do for a higher ranking one. Hancock refused, on grounds that, within the state, the governor outranked the president of the United States, hence Washington should call on him.

So we need to encourage good, able people to seek such offices as mayor, city councilman, state senator, state representative, and governor. Those promoting candidates for such offices would be well advised to exact a pledge from them not to seek federal office over a certain number of years. It would be unenforceable, of course, but if they violated it, that would be usable against them politically. Having gotten these people into office, we will then need to hold their feet to the fire and make sure they use their new authority to reclaim the legitimate sovereignty and powers of the levels of government they represent, rather than to curry favor with the central government in the hopes of having some table scraps thrown in their direction from that source.

All this is of course, only the political aspect of the solution, in the narrow understanding of the word "political" as referring to the structures of government. We need to go far beyond that to reestablish subsidiarity. We need to reestablish the rights of the private and social realm in general — the rights of communities, the rights of families, and of course the rights of the Church. All of us need to fight, for example, for the legitimate authority of the family to educate children, a fight that will mean working to do away with government schools. We need to expect our state and local governments to back us up in these endeavors, and remove from office any officials who fail or refuse to do so. We need to work for the replacement of weak-kneed, statist bishops and clergy who worship Leviathan, and would rather curry favor with the central government than work to restore the rights of their flocks. What all this is about is restoring a society where there are many, many centers of power, replacing one in which all power is concentrated in one central government, leaving everyone else powerless. It means restoring what Donald Livingstone has called "divided sovereignty." It means an end to the so-called Enlightenment's idea of sovereignty. Only with this restoration of genuine diversity (as opposed to the counterfeit variety now being foisted on us by our elites) can we hope to return to the civic friendship which Aristotle saw as the very essence of a true state—a state that exists for man, not one where man exists for the state.

### MOBILITY

Extreme mobility has to be a source of a lot of personal disorder today, especially in the young. When children are forced to move away from a home which may be the only one they have ever known, and to leave friends and neighbors behind, this has to be emotionally very disturbing and disorienting. It will be all the more so if it happens several times in someone's childhood, not an uncommon phenomenon today. I remember that when I was seventeen, just starting my senior year in high school, my family moved out of the home where we had lived since I was a year and a half old—the only home I remembered living in. It was in an urban neighborhood, inhabited by an odd assortment of people, some of them quite interesting and eccentric, both working class and middle class, a variety of ethnic groups, etc. There were businesses here and there among the residences—Mom and Pop stores, a barber shop, an ice cream parlor, a gas station. There were sidewalks and front porches where people sat and chatted with their neighbors. We moved into a basically suburban neighborhood, where the people were all middle to upper middle class, there were no businesses, and no sidewalks. The latter made it quite difficult to take walks, and besides there was no place interesting to walk to. I was homesick for a long time. For me, the move represented a real loss.

What this constant moving pretty much teaches children is that it is normal to be constantly on the move, perhaps the first principle of the gnostic empire, and that nothing is permanent. That means we had better not get too attached to any place or situation or to any person. No wonder there are so many divorces. Long-lasting friendships are practically impossible in this situation. In the little town of Grand Marais, where I now live, it is commonplace for there to be people in their seventies and eighties who have known each other and been friends since infancy. Outside rural backwaters like Grand Marais, how often does that happen anymore? Friendships are formed in the neighborhood or the workplace, they last a few years, then end as people move on. There are always promises to keep in touch, but those promises are almost never kept. Yet friendship is one of the major sources of a sense of personal and social stability and continuity, and their loss contributes to the kind of social atomization which enables the evil empire to absorb everything and everyone into itself. Somehow we have got to start resisting this before it is too late (if it is not already). People have got to begin seceding from the empire in their personal and communal lives. They have got to refuse to be part of the consumer society and resist buying anything they do not truly need or want. They have got to withdraw from the popular "culture," preferably throwing out their television sets. They have got to learn to live on less, so women can stay home and take care of their families. They have got to learn that a promotion that involves a move to a different city or state or even country may be less important than the stability of family life. They have got to opt out of our abominable public schools and home-school their children. Unless large numbers of people begin to resist in this way, forming an enclave in the midst of the empire, the empire will win.

### CLARIFICATION ON SUBSIDIARITY

The topic of subsidiarity needs to be clarified a little. The underlying reason why subsidiarity is such a basic principle of right order and its violation such a violation of right order, is that the state and all human community are, in the order of creation, for the sake of man. That means that the dignity and fulfillment of the human person is the principal reason why we have communities, including political ones. By the human person, of course, I do not mean the autonomous individual who tends to be at the center in all the thinking of the so-called Enlightenment, but the human self, which is actualized and is real only in community with other selves. The relationship to the other is part of the very substance of the individual self, not an extraneous something added to that self, as Enlightenment ideologues imagine. For the good of the individual person, as well as for the common good of the community in which the person lives and breathes and has his being (they can be said to inhere in one another, while always remaining distinct) it is necessary that the individual be, as far as possible, a participant, an actor, in the many and varied processes and activities which create and build up the community. When I say that he needs to be an actor, I mean simply and obviously that he acts, that he is not merely a passive recipient of the acts of others, nor is he merely, in his behavior, passively obeying the commands of others. But to be an actor, to participate in the life of the community, is to exercise power and authority of some kind or other, however limited its sphere. (This becomes obscured to some extent by the fact that we tend to identify power with domination, that is, with controlling and exploiting other people. This is no doubt a result of the fact that definitions tend to be set by our elites, in whom the lust for domination is perhaps the most important drive.) Thus the good of person and community requires that power be spread throughout the community, throughout the system. It requires that there be many, many centers of power. Now if you have a system where the only actors are those at the top of the pyramid, then everyone else in the system is a nonparticipant and is not able to fully actualize his humanity. When that happens, man is for the state, not the state for man. The human good is not achieved. Subsidiarity is so fundamental because it is essential for this human good to be achieved. We get off the track when we identify things other than the good of man as the goal of the state or community, for instance, when we see the production of wealth as the principal goal rather than as a means. When this happens we are likely to take the view that if we can produce wealth most efficiently and most cheaply by a system where all the production is going on within a very limited part of the social hierarchy, and everyone else just consumes what is produced without participating in its production, we have somehow achieved the common good. We have not. We end up with a society of passive consumers who are not being humanized by their participation in production. This is the case, for instance, when practically all food is produced by huge factory farms, to the exclusion or near exclusion of small family farms distributed throughout the society in very large numbers. You can produce the food either way, and possibly more efficiently and cheaply in the factory farm (though this is doubtful), but you are not serving the good of man, hence the factory farm is an abomination. R.H. Tawney summed it up well when he said that a "society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means."

### SUBSIDIARITY AND THE MARKET

Free-market advocates have a tendency sometimes to act as if the principle of subsidiarity applied only to governments. Clearly, it applies in other areas, notably economics. It is in terms of subsidiarity that we need to look at the free trade issue. If it is reasonably possible to produce something at the local level, that is where it should be produced. And that does _not_ mean—if it can be produced most _efficiently_ at the local level. Efficiency generally means being able to produce the finished product in the least costly way—that the ratio of inputs to outputs is most favorable to the latter. But, as Pope John Paul pointed out in _Laborem exercens_ , human work is not only for the sake of the finished product, but is perhaps even more for the sake of the worker. By working, we actualize our humanity. If a local community could get all its food from outside, get it all grown, processed, and prepared, without local people having to do anything but eat it (which is about where we are now), that would be a bad thing, because the activity of growing, processing, and preparing the food is itself a satisfying and valuable thing. Something very good would be taken away from the people for the sake of efficiency relative to the end product.

Subsidiarity also applies to the use of technology, at least by analogy. We need a technological principle of subsidiarity, one that says that, in using technology, we should always use the least complex level of technology that will get the job done. A lot of evils, and a lot of inefficiency, today seem to me to result from the inappropriate use of high technology, electronics and such, where it is not needed, often, I suspect, simply because of a superstitious awe of such technology, and often, also, because, when incorporated in a product, it makes the product far more expensive than it really needs to be (it also opens up more possibilities for the device to break down).

Power wheelchairs, like the one I use, are a case in point. Mine is priced at about $20,000 (paid for by Medicare, otherwise I would have to go without). You can buy a car for that amount! It is loaded with computer chips, it has lights which will blink in certain sequences that provide mechanics with codes to tell them what may be wrong when the chair breaks down. It is monstrously complex. Now it seems to me that this is totally or mostly unnecessary. An electric motor, powered by a battery, is far from a high-tech device. A good mechanic could attach one to a manual wheelchair and install whatever gears, etc. are needed to transmit power to the wheels and make steering possible, and it would cost far less than $20,000. But people have a mindset that tells them that a machine really isn't much good unless it has zillions of computer chips. There is also the fact that they can get Medicare and some insurance companies to pay these incredible prices. There is a lot more money to be made in souped-up wheelchairs than in basic ones, so the souped -up ones are the ones that get made. Of course, people who don't have a third party to pay for one are out of luck, unless they are wealthy. This is an abuse of technology that harms human beings.

In a society where things were organized in a right relationship to the true hierarchy of goods, technology would always be a means, rather than an end, so that, when we undertook a project that required technology, we would always choose the least complex technology that would get the job done. But where technology is an end, the very existence of a more advanced technology leads people to think they have to use it, whether or not it will do the job better than simpler technology. They just feel they must worship at that altar, no matter what.

### BUREAUCRACY AND SUBSIDIARITY

The more subsidiarity we have, the less bureaucracy we need, and the less subsidiarity we have, the more bureaucracy we need. This is so because, where subsidiarity is not respected, decisions are made at a very great distance, not just geographically but psychologically, socially, even spiritually, from the point where they will have an impact—what we could call the end-point of the decisions. Contrary to what we have been propagandized to believe, that does not lead to increased efficiency, but the opposite, because decisions end up being made by people who have no direct knowledge of the situation on which the decision has an impact. In the absence of such knowledge, bureaucrats are forced to construct an abstract model of the world on which they act, and on the basis of that model, to create a veritable labyrinth of rules and regulations and procedures—what we call, colloquially, red tape. But models of this kind tend to have a quite tenuous relationship to reality, and make rational decision-making quite unlikely (expressions like "rational bureaucracy" and "bureaucratic rationality" are thus obvious oxymorons).

In contrast, where subsidiarity is respected, it is possible for decision-makers to exercise personal rather than bureaucratic authority and to make decisions based on common sense applied to the actual situations and persons affected by those decisions, matters of which the decision-maker has direct knowledge.

I worked for a number of years as a disability examiner for a state agency which processed Social Security Disability claims for the federal government. My job involved collecting medical evidence on disability applicants, often interviewing them, sometimes securing an independent medical exam by a doctor paid by the agency, then plugging in the myriad federal regulations we had to work with to determine whether the person met the federal definition of disability. Frequently, this led to decisions which those of us who actually handled the cases on the "front lines" believed to be unjust, even cruel, though sometimes it was possible for us to take a borderline situation, and by putting a little extra attention and effort into documenting the case, sway it toward a more just decision (I still recall some memorable battles with the bureaucracy, some of which I even won). But innumerable volumes of federal regulations made most of our decisions only questionably related to reality (some of them were correct, of course, in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day).

In contrast, had all of this been handled at the local level, examiners who interviewed the claimants and got to know them as human persons, not "cases" (a supervisor once told me my problem was that I thought of the claimants as people), as well as doctors who actually examined them, could sit down, without all the rules, and use common sense to determine whether a claimant could, realistically, work or not. Some people would be awarded benefits; others would be firmly told that it was time for them to get off their lazy behinds and get a job. The process would be far less costly, and would be based on direct knowledge of the people and circumstances involved, not on abstract models, so the decisions would be more likely to be correct. The process would be rational. This of course presupposes a situation where programs for poor relief, disability insurance, and such, are handled either by local governments or the private sector with neither state nor federal governments having a thing to say about them. And yes, given fallen human nature, there would be injustices resulting from favoritism or its opposite. No system can hope to eliminate these completely, but the injustices perpetrated by centralized bureaucracies are built into the very nature of the system, and are much harder to eradicate.

### The Management Delusion

It was Senator Fulbright who, during the Vietnam era, addressed the assertion that we must support the war because, after all, President Johnson knew things we did not know about what was going on in Vietnam, things he was not allowed to divulge. "Acquiescence in Executive war, [Fulbright] wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn 'not upon available facts but upon judgment,' with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge 'whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve their overall interests as a nation.'" (from Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly).

The statement that the president had access to secret knowledge which justified the war was, in all likelihood, a lie, like most of what our federal government tells us (if a representative of the federal government told me it is presently 5:03 PM, I might believe him, but only after looking at my watch—trust, yet verify!). But putting that aside, decisions on matters as critical as going to war need to be based, in the end, not so much on factual knowledge or expertise but on sound judgment based on common sense (something nearly non-existent in the governing class).

You can't let the experts make the decisions about where the ship of state sails to, not unless you want to eliminate the very concept of citizenship in a republic. For one thing, even those of us who happen to be experts are generally only expert in one area, so even they can only make judgments about matters that could be completely addressed within that one area of expertise, a condition seldom met, if ever. That would mean that no decisions could be made. Political decisions need to be grounded in some form of wisdom, not expertise, wisdom grounded in experience of how the world works. Usually, they are not, and we see the results all around us.

To illustrate: like most people, I have no expertise in the intricacies of the banking and financial systems. So many would say that, given my abysmal ignorance, I have no business having an opinion on something like the Federal Reserve. But what I do have is a basic understanding of how very difficult it is to manage any very complex system, especially when the managing is done from a central location far removed from the results of management decisions. And I am inclined to seriously doubt that any person or group, no matter how expert, can really effectively manage a nation's banking and monetary system. It is just too complex, and on that basis I have to seriously question the wisdom of even having an institution like the Federal Reserve, which tries to manage that system. I have the same reaction to people who think we can manage international order. And when it comes to free trade, it is totally evident to me that this whole idea bears the stench of the "Enlightenment" all over it, that it is grounded in an abstract concept of man and the world which is contrary to reality, as is the whole notion that we can manage everything. Conservative economists are quite right in pointing out that markets are far too complex to manage, but this is true of most large scale institutions. And of course, there is something inherently ironic about the whole idea of setting up international bureaucracies to manage "free" trade—the whole thing makes me think of the individualists' club.

It is possible, though difficult, to manage a household. Some do it better than others (I being one of the "others"). A small town—maybe. A city or a state—doubtful. And as to managing a huge nation like ours—forget it. Within the limited purview of national defense and foreign policy for which we actually need a central government, there are no doubt some limited tasks for which management techniques may be appropriate, but the idea of managing the unlimited array of matters which our elites think a central government can manage reflects a complete dream-world mentality. And anyone who thinks it is possible to manage world order needs to be placed in a nice home where he will be prevented from harming himself or others.

### MOBILITY AND DISENGAGEMENT

There has been a certain amount of discussion in recent years on the subject of "disengagement," an attitude found widely among contemporary people, particularly the young. It involves an almost total inability to take anything seriously, an attitude of responding to almost everything with a shrug of the shoulders, perhaps even a remark along lines of, "Excuse me, but you appear to be laboring under the delusion that you are speaking to someone who gives a s—t." Indeed, the inability to give a s—t, or at least the inability to give, is the essence of disengagement. It is why, for instance, disengaged people are incapable of taking education seriously, studying only those subjects which will enable them to make money or build a career for themselves, while ignoring everything connected with a cultural tradition which others might feel an obligation to learn and care for but which serves no practical purpose for the isolated, disengaged individual. It is the inability to see oneself as belonging to a world for which one has a vocation to care. The world, for the disengaged, is just something we are passing through but which has nothing to do with our being—it is only there to be exploited and/or endured until such time as we leave it. As the bumper sticker has it—"Life's a bitch, then you die."

I would suggest that this disengagement has a lot to do with the hypermobility of modern man, though that does not, of course, explain it completely. We do not relate to a world considered as an abstract whole. It is through particular places and situations that we come to know and care for the world as such. We do not come to love humanity through one great leap (Bergson to the contrary)—we come to love it in and through our relationships with particular human beings, such as our families and our neighbors. If so many modern people feel no sense of belonging to the world, it is because they have never had a sense of belonging to a particular place within the world. Failure to be rooted in a particular place leads to failure to be rooted in the world. I am reminded here of the questionnaire Bill Kaufman talks about, the one designed to distinguish rootless from rooted people. It consists of two questions: 1) Where are you from? 2) Where do you want to be buried? The rootless person will reply to the first question with something along lines of, "Oh, nowhere in particular," or "here, there, and everywhere." The rooted person will say, quite definitely, "Grand Marais, Michigan," or "Saginaw, Michigan" (fill in the blanks). As to the burial question, the rootless person will say something like, "Oh, just plant me wherever I happen to be when I croak," or, "Just cremate me and scatter the ashes." The latter is an especially good answer. What better metaphor for the rootless, disengaged person than ashes being blown around by the wind. The rooted person's response will be along lines of, "The Catholic cemetery in Grand Marais." When a person really, genuinely doesn't care what happens to his mortal remains after he passes from this life, that suggests to me that the person deep down feels that his life in this world has meant nothing—it is not even worth remembering. After all, it is through our bodies that we are part of the world, that we are planted in it, so to speak, that we are able to relate to it, to love it, to give ourselves to it. If the fate of that through which we are rooted in the world matters so little, then our relation to the world also matters very little. All of which reminds me of an interesting pattern found in Dante's Inferno: In the upper circles of hell, where the less serious sinners are found, many of the damned souls Dante talks to are much concerned about being remembered in the world of the living, and are curious about what is happening in that world, and eagerly ask Dante for news about the living. In the lower circles, in contrast, the souls are quite reluctant to tell Dante their stories, and just want to be forgotten by the living. What does that tell us about the many people today who just want to be forgotten after they die? The lack of fruitfulness by modern people is also an aspect of this whole complex of things. The world matters so little to the disengaged that they do not even want progeny in the world to remember them.

Of course, it is important to emphasize here something that "particularists" like Thomas Fleming of _Chronicles_ (more below) don't seem to appreciate—that our involvement with the particular really and truly does involve us with the universal. The universal is encountered in particular things, just as, in Thomist-Aristotelian metaphysics, universals have reality only as they are embodied in particular beings. But the universality is real. People like Fleming, in their zeal to defend the rights of particular places and particular communities against an ideologically distorted universality, seem to want to dispense with universality entirely. But that can only lead to a skepticism and relativism which will, in fact, reinforce the ideological mentality and further the destruction of particular communities and places.

### VILLAGE LIFE

The longer I live in my little village out in the sticks, the more subject I am to little revelations about life in places like this and how that life contrasts with life in our cities and our suburbs—for example: how much people seem to enjoy one another in small communities. I see this constantly in the little everyday interactions at places like the post office and the grocery store, and, of course, church. Grand Marais often has community dinners at the Lutheran church (there I go, consorting with the accursed heretics, again) to celebrate holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. It was one of those dinners some years ago that brought this whole business to a focus for me. These people enjoy one another. That is the way community is supposed to be. Being part of a community is not just an onerous duty, though sometimes, certainly, people have to work at it. Ultimately, community is supposed to be an end in itself, something we engage in because it is one of the principal goods associated with being human, a good which, looked at theologically, is ultimately rooted in the life of the Trinity itself. When you come right down to it, there is nothing less surprising really than people who belong together in a community enjoying one another. What is surprising is how often that enjoyment is absent in what purport to be communities—cities and suburbs, for instance.

To enjoy other people, and not, like Sartre, regard the other as the enemy, you have to be comfortable and unafraid in the presence of the other. That tends to be impossible in urban and suburban life today because the breakdown of community and the prevalence of crime make it necessary for survival for people to be constantly on guard against one another. The other has to be regarded as the enemy until he is proven otherwise. That situation is hardly conducive to mutual enjoyment. I had this brought home to me a few years ago when my friends Greg and Elaine came here from Detroit, where both have lived all their lives, to visit me for a few days. One day we went to the local diner for lunch, and sat for a while and chatted about numerous things over our sandwiches. Afterwards, Elaine reported to us about a low-level spat that had been going on while we talked between Rick, the owner, and his wife, and also mentioned a conversation some neighbors of mine at another table had had about the importance of attaching all your appliances to surge suppressors, given the low quality of electric power in these parts. I had been oblivious of everything except the conversation with Greg and Elaine, and was amazed that she could have been alert enough to keep track of these extraneous goings-on while holding down her end of the conversation. She explained that in a large, crime-ridden city like Detroit, you have to be constantly aware of everything that is going on if you don't want to end up being a victim, and eventually it just becomes second nature, to the point where you don't even know you're doing it. Even though I myself had spent a few years in Detroit going to college, with my background in a quiet neighborhood in a small city I had never acquired this radar. That is probably why I was mugged twice when I was younger.

Thank God, a little bit of community, however imperfect, still survives here and there in enclaves like Grand Marais.

### GREED AND THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY

The extent of contemporary greed, our obsession with money and possessions, is really something calling for an explanation. Why are people so greedy when they have so much? Why not just settle back and enjoy what we have? Is it just that people have appetites which have no natural limit, or is something else at work?

I got a bit of clue on this not long ago in talking with a retired friend of mine. I raised a question which is a bit of a favorite of mine, namely: Why is mobility, both spatial and social, so important to people? What is wrong with just living your life without all this ambition to change your lot? What is wrong, for instance, with a man getting a job (a reasonably decent one) simply staying with that job all his life without seeking promotion, having a family and taking the best care of them he can, and staying put, preferably in his home town? Why is becoming a CEO at some dinosaur of a corporation really any better than that? The problem, my friend pointed out, is that you need to amass wealth beyond what is needed for your everyday needs simply in order to survive in an insecure world. For instance, medical costs, especially in old age, can be enormous, and no one in his right mind is going to count on Medicare to take care of them, especially when Medicare bureaucrats lie awake nights thinking of more and more reasons to deny claims. Government programs make promises of cradle to grave security, but those promises are not always kept. The typical political process for such programs goes more or less this way: Politicians pass laws promising paradise on earth, and by doing so manage to buy votes. But they also set up gate-keeping bureaucracies designed to deny the benefits of the programs to as many people as possible (because of course the programs would go bankrupt if they actually kept the promises), then when the complaints pour in about denial of benefits, the politicians get all self-righteous and blame the bureaucrats. I used to work for one such gate-keeping bureaucracy—the one that determines eligibility for Social Security Disability benefits, and observed again and again how the medical criteria for determining who is and isn't disabled are formulated, not on the basis of medical reality, but simply for the purpose of excluding as many people as possible. The politicians made themselves look like Santa Claus when they created the disability program, but they manage to disassociate themselves pretty thoroughly from the whole thing when the bills come due.

What all this suggests is that greed is a direct consequence of the loss of community. Economically, we are up against the fact that, despite government programs that make extravagant promises, no one can really be counted on to take care of us in our old age or the many other less than pleasant vicissitudes of life. In traditional communities, people could count on their families and neighbors to aid them in economic crises, they could count on their families to take care of them in old age, etc. Today, you are on your own. So you push and shove to get as far up the economic food chain as you can, given that the alternative is to be left high and dry in time of need.

Of course, it goes beyond economics. The loss of community turns people into isolated, autonomous individuals, who feel helpless and powerless (despite the wonderful "freedom" they are supposed to be enjoying). Money and possessions can give the spiritually isolated person the illusion of power and control over his life. There is the feeling that if you just have enough money in the bank or in investments, and if you just have enough gadgets, you can pretty much protect yourself against the whole world, maybe even against death. Right now, we are becoming more and more drunk on computer technology because it can make us feel like, sitting at a keyboard with a mouse, we are all-powerful. As if any of that will really help us when the grim reaper shows up at the door. Communities, which, to function, have to be ordered around a relationship to transcendent reality, give people support and comfort in facing death. Without that kind of genuine support, Pascalian _divertissements_ become necessary. It is high time people began to reject all this illusory power and illusory security, and begin real communities again. Easier said than done, I know, but if we never start, we will never get there.

### TRUST

When we look at the whole split in the modern world—the fundamental doubt about whether we can know anything, indeed, about whether there is any truth at all, especially in the moral sphere (the "dictatorship of relativism") much of it can be reduced to a fundamental lack of trust, a deep suspicion about the world and its order. Normal people (a rarity today) don't think about whether they can know anything or not. If you asked them about it, they would laugh and say something like, "Well, of course, I can know the world—I belong to it, after all. Would God have made a world which the people who were part of it couldn't know? Don't be ridiculous!" We have here a kind of faith—not, in itself, the theological virtue of faith, but a sort of proto-faith which basically trusts God and his creation and its order, recognizing that while it is badly damaged due to sin, it is fundamentally good and makes sense. An example of this is an experience I had many years ago, as a troubled youth who had left the Church, thinking he had lost his faith. I was shaving one day (hard to imagine a more mundane activity than that) and just for an instant I had this sudden awareness that somehow I was being held up, supported, that there was ground under me that I could stand on. It came and went almost instantly, and there was no particular emotion connected with it. It was not a "mystical" experience by any stretch of the imagination, yet it has stayed with me throughout the forty-plus years since. It was just a flash of awareness of the solid reality, the order, in which I lived and moved and had my being, despite all my efforts to deny it (I also realize today that I experienced Love in that moment—sometimes people have overpowering spiritual experiences, like St. Paul getting knocked off his horse, and sometimes there is just the still, small voice).

This sort of proto-faith involves a kind of openness to the order of things and of the creation, which makes possible this sense of being upheld, the sense that God holds us in the palm of his hand. What today we see so disastrously everywhere is the closing of this openness, the refusal or inability to trust, and with it terrible distrust and suspicion of everything, and constant anxiety. When we trust, we are willing to receive everything as a gift. When we lose this trust, we accept only what we can confer on ourselves, which is, precisely, nothing. And of course, the modern breakdown of community, especially family life, with the loss of ability to trust other people, especially in intimate relationships, feeds into this and reinforces it. "Unhappy man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?"

### HATRED OF ORIGINS

A hundred years or so ago, I wrote an article about the hatred of origins that seems to characterize modern ideologues—their way of hating their own sources—their families, their country, their civilization ("Self-Hatred, or, The War on Origins," _The Wanderer_ , September 14, 1989—not quite a hundred years, actually). Just look at the left's attitude toward western civilization. At the time I didn't understand what this meant as well as I do now, so herewith a few more thoughts on the subject.

Much of what this is about is the hatred many have of the sources of their being. The problem is a metaphysical one. Modern people see themselves as autonomous, and hence as the source of their own being, absurd though this notion may be. That is the idea behind existentialism—that I create myself, because I am only what I autonomously choose to be. Everything else that people might think defines who I am, relationships to family, country, church, etc. has nothing to do with my true selfhood. These are merely things that were "imposed" on me, violating my autonomy. This means, among other things, that only the relationships that I freely choose are part of my true self, hence binding on me (at least till I decide to unbind myself). That means that all these things that are the true sources of my being, like, again, family, tradition, church, and, ultimately God, have to be hated and rejected. Hence the hatred of origins. Liberals like to call these things social constructs. What I find ironic is that, when we reject these supposed social constructs we in reality reject our real selves and impose on ourselves an egotistical construct, leading us to slavery, not freedom.

### ECONOMIC DETERMINISM

Economic determinism has become pretty much an integral part of most people's world-taken-for-granted. It informs not just our theoretical view of the world, but our assumptions about practical matters—that is, what we must and must not do. It has come to be taken for granted that we must always act in accord with the economist's model of economic man—that is, act to maximize our benefits and minimize our costs. For instance, practically everybody today just "knows" that you can't turn down an opportunity for "advancement." Invariably, if you quit a job because you have an offer of another job that pays more, people at the old job will say things to the effect that, "We'll miss you, but of course, you've got to take advantage of the opportunity." And this is seen as quite rational, even if you like the old job and enjoy the friendships you have formed there, and it doesn't interfere unduly with your family life. And, of course, we all know that you never, ever, turn down a promotion, even though anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that becoming part of management is a sure and certain way to utter misery (I tried it once, so I know). And, of course, you must always get the lowest price on things, and get them delivered most conveniently, even if that turns out to be bad from a social standpoint. For instance, for some years I got my prescriptions filled at a small-town pharmacy 50 miles from home. This involved a certain amount of inconvenience, and, with the insurance I had as a state retiree, I could have arranged to have all my medications shipped to me, with a three months supply in each shipment. This would have saved a lot of driving, and probably some money too. The problem is, I had gotten used to the pharmacy. The owner, Mike, was a somewhat curmudgeonly old Scotsman whom I liked very much. I ended up forming a friendship with Mike and his wife Billi, who was not a curmudgeon (but I liked her anyway). It was taken for granted that when I came to get my prescriptions, I would stop for a while and have some of Mike's coffee (about which I was expected to make some disparaging remarks, such as, "I'm only drinking this because the doctor says the lining of my stomach is getting dangerously thick") and chat. This relationship was more important to me than saving a little money or avoiding a little inconvenience. Of course, someone could say that even if I had stopped getting my medications there, I could still have stopped in to chat, but we all know that that never happens. These things happen in the normal course of our lives or not at all. They are not something we can schedule. Sadly, one thing such customer loyalty can't prevail against is the grim reaper, and when Mike died at 84 and the store was closed, I was forced to bestow my patronage elsewhere.

What you learn quickly when you take up residence in a rural area is that, when it comes to economic transactions, you cannot do everything on a purely business basis. You always have to ask: How will this affect my relationship to the person I am doing business with, or to the community. If you always demand the last cent that is owed to you, or the lowest price you can get, you may get these things, but you will lose out on the great good of community life.

Yet most of the time, we take it for granted that we have to do the most cost-effective and profitable thing, no matter what effect that has on other and usually greater goods. That is why everyone sends their kids to college, because, even though people kind of sense that the whole thing is a scam, they know it is the only way for their children to secure "advancement," so they send them. People will tell you they find it sad that the family farm is disappearing, because family farms are a good from a cultural and social and community standpoint, but of course there is nothing we can do about it because everybody "knows" that the big agribusiness farming operations are much more efficient at producing food than are family farms. So we continue to let communities be destroyed because we are so sure that we can only act in accordance with the economic forces behind the industrial revolution. What is desperately needed is for a large number of people to wake up to the fact that we are not forced to live that way, that it is possible to say no, though of course at real cost to ourselves (but that's the way it is with everything, one thing the economists are right about). If enough people say no, things will change.

### AUTHORITY: PERSONAL AND BUREAUCRATIC

In order to get a sense of our modern problems regarding authority, we need to grasp the distinction between bureaucratic authority and personal authority. Personal authority operates within a community, a network of relationships among persons. Bureaucratic authority is exercised by the state or some other impersonal organization which is external to the communities where the people over whom it is exercised live. When personal authority is exercised in decisions that affect human beings and their welfare, the basis for those decisions is common sense, by which I mean a shared, a common understanding of the order of the world and the community, things like right and wrong, fairness, and so on, what C.S. Lewis calls the Tao in his book, _The Abolition of Man_ , and the Church calls the natural law. In a situation like that, when you are dealing with an authority figure who makes a decision about matters that concern you, a parent, for instance, or maybe a teacher, or a priest, you and the person making the decision share a common framework in regard to the meaning of the world and of human life. You are part of the same community. That means that it is possible to argue with the authority figure and even have a chance of winning. You can, for instance, point out that the principle on which the authority figure bases his decision is not really properly applicable to the particular situation, and if you make a persuasive enough case you might win. The decision maker is free to take into account the unique features of the situation. When you try to do this with a bureaucrat you have no chance whatsoever. The bureaucrat bases his decision on certain abstract principles, generally ones that you can't even understand (he may not understand them either), and doesn't much care whether the principles make any sense in relation to your unique situation. This is what infuriates people about bureaucracy—the sense that you are dealing with a brick wall, with something that is impervious to anything you might have to say about the particularities of your situation. You can't talk to a bureaucracy, you can't reason with it, any more than you can reason with a machine (another situation that infuriates people, especially computer users). When a person makes a decision, the criteria are his own, shared with the person affected. When a bureaucrat makes a decision, the criteria are rules made by others, and his stock response to any effort to reason with him about the decision is, "I don't make the rules, I just implement them" (a variant of the Nuremberg defense). This brings many of us very quickly to the brink of apoplexy.

The criteria used by bureaucracies are abstract and esoteric—understood, as I have said, only by the bureaucrats and often not even by them (think of the federal tax code, understood by no one, in or out of the IRS). Hence decisions involve forcing abstractions on concrete reality, abstractions which take precedence over unique situations. Personal authority takes place in a community where all participate in the Tao, which, while universal, is embedded in the concrete reality of community life. Personal authority is exercised in and for the community—bureaucratic authority is in a state of perpetual war against communities.

The relationship of bureaucratic authority to communities can be compared to that between a cookie cutter and dough. When we use a cookie cutter, every cookie ends up the same. That is how bureaucratic authority works. When we make free-form cookies, they are all different—a lot less tidy but also a lot less boring. That is personal authority. Better yet, we can think about making bagels, something I like to do from time to time, having discovered baking in my old age. A recipe I found on the internet said you can form the bagels with a cookie cutter (a bagel cutter, maybe?) so that they are all the same size and shape, but these are not authentic Jewish bagels. I believe the author of the recipe called them Protestant bagels. When I make them, I take a ball of dough, stick my thumb through it, then flatten it out and throw it in the water. While my bagels could not be thought of as Jewish (though I do have some Jewish ancestors on one side of the family), I like to think that they are at least authentic Catholic bagels.

The real order of the creation is not one of rigid regularity and uniformity. It is a great unity in multiplicity, an infinite variety of beings ordered to one another in community, something like an intricate and lovely dance, to use C.S. Lewis's metaphor in _Perelandra._ Concrete communities, as participants in the order of the creation, are such a unity in multiplicity, a differentiated unity, to which uniformity does not come naturally. Personal authority, in dealing with such communities, behaves, not like a cookie cutter, but like a baker making free-form bagels, always focused on the uniqueness of the particular situations that occur within the community. It applies the Tao to the dough, you might say.

The human cost of bureaucracy is immense, but often is not consciously focused on, because, like the proverbial death of a thousand cuts, it happens in small increments, not in great, dramatic, catastrophic events. A major part of the cost to us is the loss of respect for the dignity of the human person, something that happens inevitably when the Tao is rejected. This is one of the themes of Wendell Berry's novel, Jayber Crowe. Jayber, an orphan, is placed in an orphanage after the death of his foster parents. When he arrives at the orphanage, he is ushered into an office where he finds himself confronting an administrator who sits across a desk from him. This administrator decides, arbitrarily, that he will be called Jonas, showing no interest in what he may want to be called. In essence, the administrator takes charge of Jayber's identity. This experience remains with him the rest of his life; the encounter with "the man" who sits across a desk from him and controls his whole life. A long time afterward, when Jayber has been a barber in a tiny town for many years, a government bureaucrat comes to inspect his shop, and informs him of a variety of ways in which his shop violates bureaucratic requirements. Jayber responds by immediately closing down the shop and moving to a location out of town where his customers come to him for "free" haircuts, for which they make "donations." He will not have "the man" taking control of his work away from him.

The endless harassment we experience at the hands of government bureaucracies is certainly an important aspect of this lack of respect for the person. We need only think of the IRS, with its requirement that citizens annually report their income in great detail to the government (as if any government could possibly be entitled to such information), a grievous violation of privacy. Along with this, we see the practice of treating ordinary, law-abiding citizens as if they were criminals. The IRS is, again, Exhibit A. And now we are beginning to treat everyone as a potential terrorist, doing bizarre things like using whole body scanners in airports, devices which can see through your clothes, so the inspectors end up seeing you naked, when the real answer is to target only those who fit the profile (e.g., people of middle eastern appearance, Muslim religion, whatever), people there is some reason to suspect. But respect for human dignity plays no role in bureaucratic thinking.

Something the bureaucratic state and its functionaries need to reflect on is this: It is not the occasional acts of horrific violence that induce people to rise in revolt, so much as the daily petty acts of disrespect for the human person. The civil rights movement in the South, for instance, was not, I suspect, so much a response to acts of violence such as lynchings, as to the daily humiliations people faced—things like not being able to use the whites only restrooms or having to sit at the back of the bus. Things like this wear people down eventually.

There is also no place for forgiveness when bureaucracy reigns. There is the old saying, "God always forgives; man sometimes forgives; nature never forgives." But in the bureaucratic state, man too never forgives. It is amazing that we live in a society where traditional morality has been almost totally jettisoned, yet there are more things than ever before that you can be punished for. Just make a mistake in arithmetic on your federal tax return, and see what happens.

We have lost personal authority in our lives, something we need desperately, and have at the same time been saddled with a huge weight of bureaucratic authority, which despises and tramples on the human person. That is a grave violation of subsidiarity. It is a reversal of the right order of things, where personal authority should be the norm, with a limited and subordinate place for bureaucratic authority where it is needed. If we do not restore that order, and soon, our social order will die.

### THINKING OUTSIDE THE "ENLIGHTENMENT" BOX

Liberals are always exhorting us less sophisticated types to "think outside the box," though no one does so less frequently than they do. But they are not alone. The truth is, the historic darkening of the western intellect which, in an egregious violation of truth-in-labeling, has come to be known as "the Enlightenment," has become the world-taken-for-granted for practically everyone today, the box inside which nearly everyone thinks, including most of those labeled conservatives, and the result is an almost complete inability, for most of us, to think outside its parameters. Those parameters include such things as the centralized, consolidated state, whose sovereignty is absolute and indivisible; centralized, bureaucratic organization; the primacy of economics; the primacy of the autonomous individual and his rights; the dismissal of community as "traditional society," now eclipsed by progress; the dismissal of all motives other than self-interest, hence the inability to take the love of God (which implies love of neighbor) seriously as a factor in the life of society. When we try to solve social problems without going outside these boundaries, nothing we come up with is going to work—period.

The split between the self and the world, grounded in the hatred of the Creation, is the essence of the "Enlightenment." It is the default setting for "Enlightenment" thinking. Politically, it leads to the centrality of the autonomous individual and the idea that the political and social order exists principally to protect the autonomous individual in the exercise of rights which inhere, not in the human person, but in the pure subject. Epistemologically, it leads to skepticism and nihilism based on the split between the mind and reality. This, of course, is the source of the "dictatorship of relativism" Pope Benedict has warned us against. The split leads to the mind producing "ideas," abstractions, which it tries to force on reality, to imprint on the world. Hence the phenomenon known as ideology. This way of dealing with reality leads directly to a seriously disordered way of governing that turns the principle of subsidiarity on its head, insisting that decisions be made as far as possible from the point where they will have an impact, leading to the cancer known as bureaucracy. This happens because, when we try to force abstractions on reality, we violate reality, and reality tends to let us know that. The victim screams. This is uncomfortable for the people doing the forcing, and they try to remedy the discomfort by keeping themselves at as great a distance as possible from the point where their actions have their effect. That way you can't hear the screams. (I am reminded here of the incident Whittaker Chambers mentioned in his autobiography, involving a very pro-communist German diplomat who rejected communism after hearing screams in Moscow one night). Hence decisions which will have ruinous effects on ordinary people are generally made, not by local communities or families, but by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., who will never, in all likelihood, have any contact with the victims. This precludes any possibility of correcting bad decisions by the rulers, even were the latter willing to correct them. Think of the difference. A father makes a decision which will affect members of his family. If it is a bad decision, that is likely to become evident very quickly, and he will, one hopes, correct it. He gets immediate feedback. He can hear the screams. Bureaucrats make decisions, and this never happens.

I worked for a number of years as a disability examiner for a state agency known as the Disability Determination Service, which, under contract to the federal government, processed the medical part of Social Security Disability claims, determining whether claimants actually met the criteria for disability. These criteria involved exceedingly abstract norms drawn up by bureaucrats at the federal offices, and often grossly violated common sense. Frequently, people that any reasonable physician would say could not possibly work, had their claims denied because the abstract criteria drawn up by bureaucrats who lived in a world of abstractions simply blocked out the concrete lived reality of the lives of ordinary working people. This was often very obvious to us examiners, because we actually had contact with the claimants. We got feedback. We could hear the screams, often literally. Claimants would call us up, yell at us, sometimes cry, and, yes, occasionally scream at us. Sometimes we could help—looking for loopholes in the system that would make it possible to allow the claim. I recall cases where doing battle with the bureaucrats paid off (for the claimant, at least—it didn't exactly help the examiner's "promotional potential," so you had to be willing to put conscience first). Otherwise, all you could really do was make sure that a claimant who was wronged knew his options for appealing the decision. (Don't misunderstand—not all the decisions were unjust—a lot of these people _were_ just looking for a free ride—the system wasn't always wrong).

Experiences liked this led me to discover the principle of subsidiarity before I ever realized it was part of the Church's teaching.

Unfortunately, this whole orientation toward life informs the thinking of almost everyone who tries to find solutions to our problems today. Without even realizing we are doing it, we more or less automatically gravitate toward solutions that embody this paradigm of centralized bureaucratic power making decisions at a very far remove from the point of impact, with predictably disastrous results. The "Enlightenment" makes us incapable of imagining answers of a wholly different order.

So, we worry about an educational system that produces more and more illiterate and semi-literate people, and the only thing we can think of is something like the No Child Left Behind program (the work of alleged conservatives, would you believe) which concentrates even more power at the federal level, hence at a greater distance from the reality of what happens in the classroom or the family. Then we wonder why things get worse. Or else, without going that far, we try various _ad hoc_ modifications, like merit pay or vouchers, which, much as they outrage liberals, do not really venture outside the paradigm of government as educator. It occurs to very few, even among Catholics, to throw out the very premise that education is a legitimate function of government at all, and, instead of placing the ultimate authority for education at the top, in a centralized government, put it right at the bottom, in the family. In other words, get rid of government schools, establish that parents have the ultimate authority, under God, for the education of their children, and leave them free to educate them at home, or in schools which do what the parents want them to do.

Likewise with health care. Right now, we have a for-profit health care system which sometimes works very well but frequently operates in a way that shows zero respect for the human person. HMOs which casually decide who lives and who dies based on the bottom line are among the more egregious abominations. When reformers approach this from within the "Enlightenment" box, the only answer they seem to come up with is to turn the whole thing over to the government. But if the human person, the image of God, is disrespected under the present system, that will be the case in spades when the government takes over, because decision-making will be even further removed from the point where health care is actually delivered to real, flesh and blood, patients. Under a for-profit system, a person might be denied life-saving treatment on the grounds that he is unable to pay. Under a government system, people will be denied life-saving treatment on grounds that it is not cost-effective for society to keep them alive. Just how this would be better is beyond my comprehension. Either way, a person is put to death on wholly utilitarian grounds. Almost no one seems open to the idea that health care should be neither a government program nor a for-profit industry but a work of Christian charity organized and provided by the Church gratis but with individuals and families contributing financially on the basis of ability (For more on this theme, see "Health Care: No Solution Without Christianity," below). And no, I'm not talking about "faith-based" organizations operating under the auspices of the government, but about autonomous institutions not answerable to the state.

We could go on through practically the whole range of our institutions and find ways to reconstruct them outside the "Enlightenment" box, and that is precisely what we need to be doing—that, and beginning to rebuild these institutions on the foundation of the new (really old) principles, even if that means "going underground." For instance, Catholic health care professionals might, under Obamacare, want to consider joining with other professionals and patients to establish an alternative health care system, funded by private donations. This would probably require civil disobedience and have to be done in secret, but that is what happens when you live under totalitarianism. I think here of the Dutch doctors during the Nazi occupation, who, rather than cooperate with Hitler's euthanasia program, sent back their medical licenses and saw their patients in secret (how sad that their professional descendants have become leaders in promoting Hitler's agenda).

The rejection of subsidiarity in social and political life is a central facet of the "Enlightenment." To solve any of our problems, we have to restore subsidiarity to its rightful place, and to do this we have to reject the "Enlightenment" and return to the classic and Christian principles that prevailed before the _philosophes,_ with their pretension to know better than anyone else what was good for all of us, began their reign of arrogance.

### HEALTH CARE: NO SOLUTION OUTSIDE CHRISTIANITY

Arguments over socialized medicine generally fail to factor in something of great historical importance—the fact that our whole modern health care system, indeed the very concept of a health care system, is largely the invention of the Catholic Church. Hospitals were non-existent in pagan antiquity. The very idea that anyone was in any way entitled to be cared for simply by virtue of being sick was unimaginable, because there was no concept of charity. That concept was absent because there was no concept of universal humanity. Certainly, love and compassion existed even in pagan societies, but they were something people felt for family members and friends, not for others simply in virtue of their humanity. Christianity changed all that. Suddenly, there was the revolutionary idea that simply because a sick or injured person was a fellow human being you owed him whatever help and treatment you were able to provide. More than anything else in Scripture, the parable of the Good Samaritan epitomizes it. Because we are all so familiar with it we fail to notice how absolutely revolutionary that parable is. Pagans would have found it incomprehensible. In the ancient world, if you were sick and had money, you could get medical treatment. Otherwise, you were out of luck. As the Roman Empire fell apart, monastic orders, both male and female, came into being. These were not generally created specifically to care for the sick, but it came natural to them to be centers of hospitality. That included providing lodging to travelers as well as taking in and caring for the sick, both corporal works of mercy (note that the words "hospital" and "hotel" both have their origin in the Latin "hospitalis"). This must have gradually become institutionalized, to the point where a part of the monastery, maybe even a separate building, was set aside for these purposes. Some monks must have been trained specifically to minister to the needs of the sick. Since this cost money, it was only natural that the monasteries would seek to finance it by free will donations. While care would be provided gratis, as an act of charity, there would be an expectation that those who could afford to would donate to the best of their ability. I would imagine that a certain amount of psychological pressure, even manipulation, went into seeing to it that affluent patients contributed generously (I like to think, with some amusement, how very adept the nuns would have been at this). So eventually, we had a kind of socialized medicine, following the principle, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," but without government coercion or government bureaucracy. The whole thing was a function of the communion of saints operating within and informing the human community.

The system was, in other words, grounded in love, grounded in Christianity. Can it survive the demise of Christianity as a major influence on society? No, of course not. As Christian influence in the West has waned during the past few centuries, the health care system has in fact more and more lost its character as an institution grounded in love, and has instead become an industry, a business that operates for profit. Those who cannot pay are likely to be excluded, though there is still enough residual Christianity around to keep this from being total—even people with no money can still get treatment in emergency rooms, for instance. We have been heading in the direction of a return to pagan antiquity, where the rich get treatment and everyone else dies, but we are not quite there yet. We have a kind of hybrid system, part market-based and part charity-based. One of the effects of this situation is to make medical care very expensive by inflating prices. A system that operated simply as a business, providing services only to those who could pay, would be very efficient, and in such a system market forces would keep prices low. But many would be unable to pay even those low prices, and this is unacceptable to people with residual Christianity still in their blood. So we try to avoid this consequence through things like private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., which keep people from dying because they cannot afford care, but which have the effect of inflating costs. More and more, the answer proposed to this is to put the whole system under government control.

Here is the problem—while many people, including a number of Christians, would like to think that this solution represents a return to a system grounded in Christian love, it would in fact be nothing of the kind. It would, on the contrary, have the effect of further extending the dehumanization of health care, bringing us closer to the situation that prevailed in pagan times. Under the medieval system, care was given to people simply because they were fellow human beings, children of God and brothers in Christ, because the human person was seen as having, as such, intrinsic worth and value. Governments are not able to do things that way. Under government-controlled medicine, the criteria will be utilitarian. People seen as having utility, as being useful to society, to the government, maybe even to their families, will be cared for. Others, those, for instance, with severe disabilities, terminal illnesses, or simply old age, will not. They will be offered a lethal injection. It is just too expensive to keep all these old and sick people alive. The cost of caring for them cannot be justified by any utility to society that such care brings, and it will not be offered. As with all our major societal problems, the only thing that will make a difference is a restoration of Christian civilization. Period. The institutions that are falling apart and that we want to resuscitate have their roots in Christianity, in Catholicism, to be more precise, and simply will not work when they are transplanted to the soil of a secularized society. If we finally reject Christianity, we will lose the uniquely Christian institutions and will be condemned to a cruel, inhuman society where the human person doesn't matter except for his utility to the state.

Propagandists for socialized medicine have for some time now been telling us that the costs of such a program can be kept down through preventive medicine. Just prevent enough people from getting sick, and the system will be cheap. This nonsense really highlights the atmosphere of unreality that permeates the thinking behind proposals for national health care as well as the potential of the latter for cruelty and inhumanity toward human persons. In the first place, the assertion that we can cut the cost of medical care through preventive medicine has about as much credibility, to my mind, as the oft-repeated claim that we can cut the cost of government programs in general by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. That just isn't going to happen, at least not as long as that pesky little detail known as original sin continues to be a factor.

What preventive medicine mostly means is life-style modification. If our government is to seriously try to make people modify their lifestyles, e.g., by losing weight, exercising, eating a healthy diet (whatever that is—there is substantial disagreement about this even within the medical community), not smoking, and so on, that is going to require massive invasion of people's privacy, as well as coercion. The coercion will involve the threat to drop people from all coverage if they fail to cooperate with what the bureaucrats tell them to do. The system will thus actually cut health care costs by denying health care to many, many people.

Preventive medicine has always been mostly a will-o'-the-wisp anyway. Most people are just not anal enough to do all the things doctors pester them to do. So the notion of keeping health care costs down through preventive medicine epitomizes the utilitarian direction that socialized medicine inevitably takes.

A pagan recognizes no obligation to help a stranger in need. He might do so, if some utilitarian consideration makes it advantageous. And the same is true of post-Christian man. There might be all kinds of good, pragmatic reasons to take care of sick people—the costs of their illness to the economy (how often we hear that one), getting them back to work so they can contribute to the economy (it always seems to be about the economy!), and so on. But the idea that someone in need has a claim on our help simply by virtue of his humanity, the image of God that he shares with us, even though he is neither relative nor friend, indeed, even though he is our worst enemy, is something unique to Christianity, something that will disappear when Christianity disappears.

### IS COLLEGE EDUCATION REALLY A GOOD IDEA (FOR MOST PEOPLE)?

If our society is to turn away from its present destructive course, people will have to begin making drastically different decisions about their lives. For instance, a mother may have to decide that staying home with her children is important enough to be worth the sacrifice of the consumer goods her wages would buy if she were employed outside the home. A father might have to decide that a promotion that required moving to a different town (or state, or even country) wasn't worth the disruption of his children's lives, taking them away from a neighborhood and community where they had roots. At the risk of being considered an extremist (like there was anything new about that!), I am going to suggest another decision that many parents arguably need to make—the decision not to send their children to college.

Let's examine the situation. Currently, a small number of young people (a very small number, indeed) go to college and get a solid traditional liberal arts education. To do this, of course, they need to pick the right institution or be very good at self-education (in which case they don't need an institution). A somewhat larger number attend our colleges and universities to get specific training for a profession—law, medicine, engineering, for instance. For these two groups, going to college probably makes sense. A very large number, however, spend four years at some institution like the University of Michigan and study things like women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, "how to be gay," and in general undergo a thorough indoctrination in the current political orthodoxies, and come away with their heads full of mushy "ideas" which pollute their brains and will pollute the body politic until they die (and after). For them, college is positively harmful. The only reason they submit to this procedure is that they need a college degree in order to get a job. But that doesn't mean there is anything in what they learn in college that will actually suit them for the job they hope to get. It just means that employers are in the habit of requiring a degree as a condition for even considering them for employment. And employers do that, not because they think the degree actually contributes something of value to their companies, but because they can use the degree requirement as a screen. If they only have to interview people who have been processed through a diploma mill like the University of Michigan, it saves them a lot of work. Parents want their kids to get good jobs, so they go along with the whole fraudulent business. And the politicians keep looking for ways to send even more people to college.

So what is next? When everyone has a B.A. or a B.S., will we decide we need to send everyone to graduate school, because employers use a Ph.D. as a screen? And of course there is no way we could possibly realize the dream of universal college education without lowering standards even more than they have already been lowered. My grandparents, some of whom had eighth grade educations or less, were, I must say, better educated than most of today's degree-holders are. A college degree will become what a high school diploma is now—something you get more or less automatically if you just stay put and don't drop out.

The thing is, as long as we continue to supply employers with lots of college graduates, they will go on using the degree as a screen until there are so many graduates that they will have to up the ante and require a graduate degree. And everyone pays through the nose, not least the students, who lose several years of their young lives and then are in effect in a state of indentured servitude for years afterward as they struggle to pay off all the debts.

There are other costs, too. This whole business of indefinitely prolonging adolescence has to be very bad both for young people and for society. It probably accounts for a lot of the drinking, drugging, and sexual promiscuity on our campuses. It has been my observation that the vast majority of college students today are bored and restless. They are at an age when they should be starting jobs and families and assuming adult responsibilities, but our higher education bureaucracy keeps them in Limbo for years (except that it is not a state of happiness, natural or otherwise).

And that is not all. Universities right now have a huge incentive to accept students who are so poorly qualified that their chances of ever actually getting a degree, even with academic standards as low as they are, are very poor. But even such students can get college loans, so the universities accept them, they spend five or six years in school, running up a huge debt, then drop out and end up flipping burgers or washing dishes for a living, while saddled with a debt they can never repay. This is a recipe for misery, something Marty Nemko, in an article entitled "America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree," talks about:

...Most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

And it is fraudulent too. It is a criminal enterprise which ought to be stopped. If there are any institutions which ought to be investigated under our RICO laws, it is our universities, not the pro-life groups which have been so victimized by them. But that is not likely to happen. Nevertheless, the whole business of our universities acting as gatekeepers for the occupational world has got to stop, and the only people who can stop it are those who now patronize it with their time and their money. If a sufficiently large number of people just flat-out refused to play the game anymore, and the supply of college graduates dried up, employers would have no choice but to drop the degree requirements and start evaluating potential employees on their merits. The answer is to stop feeding the monster.

So what are the alternatives? Well, if your child has the kinds of interests and aptitudes that would enable him to benefit from a traditional liberal education, there are still institutions which can provide this—places like Christendom College, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Franciscan University of Steubenville, for instance. There is also the possibility, for parents who have sufficient educational background, to provide a liberal education for their children themselves. In other cases, parents can look for ways to enable their young adult children to acquire marketable skills—for instance, to become, say, electricians, or builders, or carpenters, or computer programmers. Ideally, some kind of apprenticeship program would be best. Failing that, community colleges often provide courses purely designed to teach practical skills.

It is quite difficult for people to get their heads around this, of course, because almost everyone has been conditioned to think that their children absolutely must have elite occupations. People have the attitude that, yes, somebody must dig ditches and build houses and work the land, but it's not gonna be my kid! We have a whole culture which denigrates the value and dignity of manual labor. I spent years myself working in a cubicle in an office building pushing a pencil, and I find it very difficult to understand why anyone would consider that somehow more dignified or more fulfilling than farming or building, yet a huge number of people think just that. Their thinking has been distorted by a whole ideology that stresses getting ahead of others over doing honest work for the benefit of one's family and of the world. And this ideology ignores the obvious reality that it is logically impossible for everyone to get ahead of others. Parents are more concerned about getting their children into elite occupations than they are about their happiness or about the salvation of their souls. Yet people who work with their hands will tell you that making things and growing things can be very satisfying. It is common, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I live, to encounter educated people who have chosen to work with their hands rather than pursue elite careers. There may be a practical need for a society to have a small class of Mandarins who do only mental work, but for the sake both of society and of individual happiness, it is certainly best if that class be no bigger than is really necessary.

### THE PREGNANCY PACT AND THE CLUELESSNESS OF THE ELITES

The degree to which the ideology of the far left has taken over the consciousness of our elites (a phenomenon that could almost be compared to possession) is nowhere more evident than in the way these elites deal with serious disorder when it is so egregious that they can't just go into denial about it. It jumps right out and bites them, so they have to acknowledge it. But that does not mean acknowledging disorder for what it is—i.e., acknowledging its sources in the modern revolt against God and the order of His creation—i.e., in spiritual disorder. Instead, what we see them doing is blaming it on everyone and everything but the real culprits. When Soviet communism somehow failed to produce a paradise on earth for workers, the Soviet ruling classes did not draw the obvious conclusion, that the system itself and the ideology it was drawn from were so contrary to reality that they could not possibly work. Instead, they decided that the failure was due to sabotage—to bourgeois revisionists, "wreckers," and the like, who were undermining the system. So the answer was to kill or imprison these persons. When the system still didn't work, that only proved that they hadn't gotten all the saboteurs, so the answer was more campaigns to track them down and eliminate them. When our utopian programs for creating absolute racial equality, that is, equality of outcome as well as opportunity, fail to produce that result, our elites don't ask themselves whether the goal itself was ever a realistic one—instead, they start hunting for racists who are undermining their efforts. And so on.

The human suffering and disorder spawned by the sexual revolution is dealt with in the same way by our elites. Fox News, supposedly a conservative network, really epitomized that in one broadcast, as a group of their talking heads got into a discussion about 18 teenage girls who made a pact to get pregnant (17 of them succeeded). Everyone on the show was outraged, but the outrage was completely misdirected. They were mad because we don't have more school-based clinics to promote contraception and abortion, or spend more money on sex education to convince kids that there's something terribly wrong with them if they're not sexually active, etc. (ignoring the obvious'—that these girls got pregnant because they wanted to, not because they didn't have access to contraception). A couple of people even identified the problem as the fact that this community is heavily Catholic and the Catholic Church is against these things (that was predictable, of course). Nobody even mentioned the dirty word "chastity." In the minds of these morons, it was a given that nothing can be done to stop these kids, with their "raging hormones," from having sex. We just have to accept that and work around it, trying to prevent teen pregnancies by putting everyone on the pill and distributing condoms to everyone. Never mind that actual experience seems to show that doing these things actually increases teen pregnancy, because it gives the kids the message that it is all right to have sex. Teenagers are notoriously unreliable in using contraception, so the outcome is predictable to anyone but a liberal. But that's all right, because there's always abortion as a backup.

Now, as far as the impossibility of stopping teenagers from having sex goes, funny thing—nobody mentioned that to my parents or my grandparents. The fact is, more traditional societies did, generally speaking, manage to keep young people from having sex before marriage, though it was hardly 100%. The problem now is that the whole population is constantly saturated with sexual imagery, by way of such things as advertising, TV, the Internet, and books (for those who still read). Even adults (even elderly adults) can have difficulty dealing with this, but for teenagers it is nearly impossible. Without the constant stimulation, chances are the hormones wouldn't rage anywhere near as much. In addition, young women seem to be getting told that their whole object in life is to turn themselves into sex objects by the way they dress and behave. Boys, of course, are told that the greatest possible disgrace and stigma is to be still virgins after the age of maybe 11 or 12. And of course, fragmented families, often without fathers, are just one more thing that feeds into all this. These are the things we need to be doing something about, not just accepting all the disorder and trying to put sort of a bandage on it with contraception and abortion.

One of the fallacies I noticed in the mentality of the talking heads was the apparent belief that the only thing wrong with all this sexual activity among people so very young is that it might lead to pregnancy. No one seems to be thinking about the terrible emotional harm done when people as young as 12 or 13 get involved in sexual relationships which they are not emotionally able to handle, with the whole atmosphere of exploitation, where people are used as a means to someone else's pleasure, then discarded (no one, that is, except the stupid, benighted Catholic Church, but then what do those celibate old fogies in the Vatican know?). There is a whole culture of dumping and being dumped, being (apparently) loved and then rejected, all in accordance with what Dale Leary, in her book, _One Man, One Woman: A Catholic's Guide to Defending Marriage_ , calls the Sexual Utilitarian ethic:

According to the principles of sexual utilitarianism, as long as both (or all) parties are experiencing pleasure and have given consent, any sexual acts are permissible. But what happens when one person ceases to receive pleasure from the relationship? Then, according to the Sexual Utilitarian ethic, he is not bound to consider the feelings of the other, or to honor any promises and commitments he has made. The other has become to him an object he has used and can now cease to use, not a person whom he must continue to love.

Now, what does that kind of thing do to self-esteem, in other areas of life such a major obsession with liberals? Kids who go through that meat grinder have to end up terribly damaged when it comes to their ability to love and trust anyone, something that makes high divorce rates virtually inevitable later in life for these young people. It's heart-breaking, yet all our elites seem to be able to focus on is making sure these kids whose lives are being destroyed are kept supplied with pills and condoms while the destruction goes on. In promoting their pseudo-solutions and ignoring the reality of moral and spiritual disorder, they take on themselves a heavy responsibility for almost unimaginable human sufferings that could be prevented.

I would suggest, by the way, that the behavior of the 18 girls in the pregnancy pact could be seen as, in a bizarre way, a revolt against all this, an affirmation of the natural law against all the efforts to separate sexuality from the human person and from procreation. It's a sad thing that no one showed them a better way to fight back.

### LIBERALS AND CHANGE

Liberals habitually strain out a gnat and swallow a camel on the subject of change. Liberals love change, usually. They have no qualms whatsoever about lustily proceeding with projects that have the effect of destroying urban neighborhoods for the sake of social engineering schemes like urban renewal, interstate highways, or racial integration. They have no problem tinkering with the soul itself by doing such things as destroying beautiful old churches and replacing them with meeting halls, or destroying a beautiful liturgy and replacing it with a monstrosity whose principal claim to fame is the idiotic expression "and also with you" (now, praise the Lord, finally removed). When you try to tell them that you do not lightly mess around with the very foundations of the social order, the culture, or even the life of the spirit, they can blather endless about how change is the great law of life, the only thing constant is change (users of that one should arguably be put in the stocks for a week at least), that people who are not "comfortable" with change are neurotic and perhaps need to be reeducated. Yet when you suggest to these same people that institutions that in no way go to the foundations of human life, institutions that clearly are not achieving their putative aims and are actually doing harm, institutions like our university system, the government monopoly on postal service, and public schools, ought to be done away with, suddenly you are some kind of wild-eyed radical needing to be restrained, a promoter of "irresponsible, risky schemes," and thus not a true conservative at all. (Note for future editions of Webster's dictionary: "True conservative=liberal)." Liberals rush in where angels fear to tread, yet get the vapors when anyone promotes what are in fact merely prudent measures to restore right order.

Lest I leave the reader with the impression that this paradox in the thinking of liberals is nothing more than a quaint oddity on their part, perhaps a slightly endearing sign of the persistence of human nature, with its need for continuity and stability, in spite of all the efforts to suppress it, I have to say that it is nothing of the sort. The liberals' choice of institutions to defend and institutions to attack is not, in fact, at all random. The following pattern is clearly evident: liberals invariably defend institutions which have demonstrably not worked and have even had disastrous results (things like our public school system, affirmative action, sex education, and so on), while attacking those institutions that demonstrably have worked—things like the traditional family, the Catholic Church, family farms, small towns.

The significance of this pattern should be easy to see. The left, with its gnostic roots, is the party of opposition to reality, the party that relentlessly seeks to destroy the world as God created it and replace it with a reality of the gnostics' own making. So the liberals, the left, create institutions of their own, institutions designed to transform reality—i.e. institutions designed for social engineering. Since it is of the very essence of these institutions to be grounded in unreality, they must of necessity come into conflict with reality and lead to disastrous consequences. But even when this happens, their creators cannot acknowledge failure and reject these institutions, because to do that would require rejecting the counter-reality and making their peace with reality, something few are willing to do. At the same time, the left goes on attacking and undermining the institutions that work because these are the institutions that support and maintain reality, that hold the real creation together, institutions that create and preserve community and with it moral and spiritual order. Since they uphold the very reality the left is sworn to destroy, they must be destroyed, even if ordinary, normal, sensible people (there are still a few around) might think those institutions produce good results and hence could be said to work. Normal people love being and want to care for it; spiritually diseased ideologues hate being and lust after its destruction. There is a world of difference.

A related point: Sometimes I think I have spent my life mourning for good things which were still alive or at least cast long shadows during my early life but which people who lacked the good sense to appreciate them have since wantonly destroyed. Chief among them are the Catholic Church and the American Republic. Of course the Church is not quite dead yet, but the harm to its visible aspect has been so enormous that it is quite difficult for most of us to really sense its presence, hence the aching sense of loss. The Republic, on the other hand, has, strictly speaking, been dead for a long time, since 1861, to be exact, when the arch-traitor Lincoln replaced it with an empire, yet its shadow was long enough to extend even into my early life-time. That was possible because even as late as the mid twentieth century, many of the habits of life in a republic still persisted in America. There was still, at the practical, day-to-day level, a substantial amount of self-government on the part of states and local communities, without undue federal interference. The political space for unlimited federal power had, of course, been open since the War of Southern Independence, but in practice the federal government had not yet moved to take full advantage of that fact. The Republic was dead, but the corpse had not yet decomposed, and it still provided us with a sense of what the Republic had once been. Alas, no more.

It strikes me that when certain kinds of people act to destroy or undermine institutions like these, institutions we loved in our childhoods, institutions which formed us and which were inseparable from our whole sense of selfhood and of moral and spiritual order, they are attacking our very souls. What they are doing amounts to an attempt at spiritual murder. I, for one, have again and again felt violated and attacked when I see what the left has done to these good institutions, and I think many others feel the same way. So why is everyone so surprised when we try to defend ourselves? Always, in my sense of exile, I come back to that wonderful 139th Psalm, which I have quoted many times but will quote again:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, "Rase it, rase it! Down to its foundations!"

O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!

Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

(Let it be understood that I am not in favor of dashing anyone's little ones against a rock, but I quote the complete psalm because I do think it is important for the sense of anger and outrage, which the Psalmist expresses so graphically, to come through)

The people who are always so intent on forcing radical change on their benighted fellow citizens are in effect trying to destroy the past, just as much as the rulers in Orwell's 1984 were doing when they put things down the memory hole. But in many ways we get our life from the past. As Russell Kirk put it in the title of a chapter of his autobiography, "The dead energize us." The human self and the human community grow out of a past in which they have roots—they do not appear out of nowhere. The modern cult of the isolated individual does not just isolate the individual spatially from other individuals and from the community—it also isolates him from the past. He is a speck of dust in the vacuum existing in an instant of time. There is no duration here and no growth, and certainly no community.

These "change agents" are in fact living in constant violation of the fourth commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother." This commandment, besides indicating our obligations to respect and if necessary assist our actual parents, also requires reverence and respect for the past, a respect which leads us to care for the inheritance we have received from the past. To refuse to do so is to opt out of the community of beings, to cut oneself off from the vine of which one is a branch, and leads to personal and social destruction. Note that the commandment continues, "that you may have long life on the land," i.e., that we may have the kind of continuity with our sources that will make us strong and healthy in our turn.

The 1960s appears to have been the era when people began making the most explicit decisions to reject the past, or at least when such decisions came to be made not just by isolated nihilists and arty types here and there but by large numbers. I still remember how so many of us became convinced that we had such horrible, right-wing, bourgeois parents, from whose influence and power we absolutely had to extricate ourselves (though, this did not, of course mean not accepting their money). The contempt for our parents led in turn to contempt for our extended families, for the communities and neighborhoods we came from, and of course, for our religious heritage. I think this helps to clarify what was really happening when so many of us, myself included, left the Church during college. It was not a matter of becoming sincerely convinced, on the basis of careful reasoning and study, that some or all of the teachings of the Church were wrong. Rather, it was a matter of our conviction that we had to separate ourselves from our roots, and thus the Church became something we had to cut ourselves off from. For me, the separation from the Church was an ordeal that I never recovered from really until I returned some years later, having gotten some sense in the meantime.

This hatred of the past, this desire to separate from our roots, is really quite bizarre. It is more than youthful rebellion. It is profoundly abnormal. A plant cut off from its roots dies, period. When any being cuts itself off from its source in being as a whole, in the community of beings, it dies. The ideology of drastic, forced change is really about spiritual suicide, or rather about murder and suicide, where people who are killing themselves decide to take others with them. May we be delivered from such evil.

By the way, one of the more enjoyable things about returning from this living hell is coming to appreciate what really quite wonderful people your parents are, what great sacrifices and sufferings they endured for the sake of their ungrateful and undeserving offspring.

### SEX AND AUTONOMY

One interesting way to see the contrast between the Church's and the secular world's understanding of sex is this: In the Christian understanding, the fundamental purpose of sex is to create community, to link persons with other persons, to create bonds. It does this first of all through the unitive function properly speaking, by creating and reinforcing a bond of self-giving, sacrificial love between husband and wife, and secondly by leading to the procreation of children, hence a further bond of love. It creates a community known as the family. For the modern ideologue, in contrast, it is through sex , usually outside marriage, that you establish your autonomy, that you set yourself up as an individual not tied to others by bonds of love and duty, but existing for your own fulfillment and gratification. Sex is the means to self-actualization. I actually once heard someone more than usually addicted to psycho-babble remark that a particular woman of our acquaintance engaged in "self-actualization," and I suddenly realized that he meant she was "sexually active." Amazing!

### Sex and the Splitting of the Person

Wendell Berry has well said that divorce is the defining concept for our times—divorce in the sense of splitting. We are constantly finding ways to compartmentalize, building firewalls and so on, splitting reality up into small parts which we think we can keep from being affected by the other parts and control in isolation from the whole. We do this in particular with the human person. Catholic politicians, for instance, think they can personally oppose abortion while supporting it in their political activities. It's all very simple, you see. You just have to compartmentalize, putting your opposition to abortion, with your Catholic faith, in one compartment, your promotion of abortion in another and just make sure they never come into contact with each other. That, of course, presupposes a degree of control over one's life that no one really has. Our selves are in truth a unity, albeit a complex, composite unity, and decreeing parts of them to be separate from and not affected by the rest doesn't make it so. Issuing these decrees of divorce doesn't, in fact, really dissolve the marriage at all, but is just a pathetic attempt to control what we can't really control.

The effects are especially pernicious when it comes to human sexuality, the relationships between men and women. Modern people think that they can separate parts of this relationship from others and forbid them to come into contact, and lo, it will be so. This means in particular that people think they can separate the bodily act of sexual intercourse from the communion of persons. So you have a husband cheating on his wife but telling himself it doesn't mean anything, it's only about sex. Of course there is a good chance that the woman he is doing the cheating with thinks it means something, and certainly his wife, if she knows about it (and chances are she does, or at least strongly suspects), also thinks it means something. There is no way around it—the intentionality, the finality, of sex, in addition to procreation, is the communion of persons, and to try to decree that this finality is not there is to do violence to the human person, to both persons in fact. And we see constantly the horrific cruelty it leads to in the "relationships" that have become the norm in the post-Christian, post-sexual revolution world we live in. A man and a woman have an affair. It's only about sex, as far as he is concerned. He gets bored with her after a while and dumps her (needless to say, the roles of the sexes can be reversed here, with equal accuracy). She is outraged, because as far as she was concerned it meant something. She thought it was about love, the communion of persons, and was hoping for a permanent relationship, marriage. He is outraged that she is outraged. His attitude is, "You had no business getting any ideas about this relationship going beyond sex, and if you got such ideas, that's your problem, not mine." In other words, once you have defined the relationship as meaning nothing except pleasure, you have no responsibility for the suffering you are causing another person, the one who is dumped. I am always appalled by the cold-bloodedness of the things people say in dumping someone—"We should see other people," "I need my space," "let's be friends" (yeah, right!) and so on _ad nauseam_. This kind of meaningless babble (which I am tempted to compare to certain bovine metabolic byproducts) is a cold-blooded way for one person to dismiss another person and that person's sufferings (caused by the first person) as unimportant.

The Church has taught for a long time that it is a perversion and gravely sinful to have intercourse, even within marriage, when you are deliberately acting to exclude the possibility of procreation from that act. I think the Church today is making it more and more explicit that it also gravely sinful to have intercourse with the intention to exclude the communion of persons from the act. _Humanae Vitae_ really brought this out, and the writing of Pope John Paul II on human sexuality have really been an extended meditation on this reality. Indeed, even when we think we are merely excluding procreation, we are, in effect, also excluding the communion of persons, because here, too, you can't split things. Fertility is part of personhood. When you exclude the other person's fertility, you are not fully accepting the other person and not fully giving yourself to the other.

### GOOD ENOUGH IS GOOD ENOUGH

_Time_ magazine ran a cover article some time ago on the subject of divorce, much of it related to research by Wallerstein and others showing that children of divorce suffer more adverse consequences than children whose parents, even though not getting along well, stay together "for the sake of the kids." That, of course, provoked an anguished reaction from those committed to the idea that there is no obligation higher or more sacred than the obligation to look out for number one. One lady was quoted as saying that "America doesn't need any more 'good enough' marriages." Needless to say, I found myself wondering, as I so frequently do, just what universe people like this inhabit. Someone needs to tell them the obvious—that most of what is worthwhile in life is in the "good enough" category. Chesterton once said that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly. If so, it must certainly be worth doing mediocrely (if there is such a word). That has to be so, or hardly anyone could ever do anything. Perfection is just not attainable for most of us, and if we refuse to settle for anything less, we might as well just shoot ourselves and get it over with.

A friend of mine, some years ago, found himself being told by a girlfriend, in the process of dumping him, that what she really wanted was a relationship in which every day was an exciting new adventure. You've got to be kidding. That isn't the way life is. Life is mostly, as the phrase itself suggests, everyday life—humdrum, but with its satisfactions. Yes, there are the "peak experiences," as they like to say. But we can't spend our lives on the peaks. That is the problem with so much of the revivalist preaching that goes on. In the course of a tent meeting, or a charismatic service, or a Cursillo weekend, people suddenly find themselves on a spiritual high. Nothing is wrong with that, except that somewhere along the line you have to come down from it. You may try to keep it up, but it is impossible. Unless the new spirituality you've acquired, the renewal you've experienced in your relationship to God, can somehow be embodied in humdrum everyday life, in pots and pans and things, as Brother Lawrence had it, you will just go away disappointed, concluding that it was all illusory, or go on endlessly looking for the particular church or cult or preacher or guru that can make you high all the time. Our salvation is worked out in everyday life, in the humdrum, and even the saints had to recognize this. So is whatever earthly happiness we manage to find (or, more accurately, that manages to find us). The people who endlessly search for the perfect marriage, the perfect relationship, or the perfect whatever, will just always be abjectly unhappy. Those who settle for something "good enough" may find in the end that that wasn't so bad after all.

### YOU CAN LIVE IN THE PAST

I keep nourishing a sort of pious hope that there will be a particularly unpleasant place in Purgatory (to keep things at least minimally charitable) for the kind of people who habitually mouth the tired platitude to the effect that "you can't live in the past." There should at least be some sort of fine levied for such an offense against public decency.

Now, of course, the statement is really not one you can argue with if it you understand it literally. Obviously, we all live in the present, whether we like it or not. To live is to be in the present, to be present, here and now. There are no other possibilities, despite those who, like the Mead Paper Co., believe they can be firmly planted in the future. But that is not really what the morons who tell us we can't live in the past mean. What they are really urging us to do is to turn our backs on the past, to live without reference to the past, without memory. The platitude is directed against those who believe that memory is an essential element of any kind of human life worth living at all. The fact is, what those who tell us not to live in the past really mean is that we shouldn't live in time at all. To have a present which is extended at all, which is more than an infinitesimal point or instant, requires that the present, the existence here and now, be experienced as growing out of the past, which is known through memory. To live in the present is to live through memory. Russell Kirk titles one of the chapters of his autobiography "The Dead Energize Us," and he is right. The past is fertile, it makes growth possible. I rather like to think of time as a sort of compost heap. Everything we have ever been and done, everything we have ever known, either from personal experience or the testimony of others, becomes a part of that compost heap. But of course, as anyone who composts knows, the things thrown into that heap don't just sit there unchanged in one big lump. They undergo constant change, breaking down, interacting with each other. When I engage in memory, I am not just looking at the static record of past experiences, I am constantly interpreting and evaluating and analyzing those experiences, looking for their deepest meaning. And, of course, I am constantly adding things to the heap. In a sense, the present could be thought of as the topmost layer of the compost heap, the surface, the point where new things are growing in the compost and being added in turn.

In a real sense, the present is not something different in kind from the past, it is the surface of the past. The past makes growth possible, and growth, becoming, is by its very nature an intention of the future, of the beyond. The Greek verbs _phuo_ and _phuteuo_ , to grow and to plant, are etymologically related, in fact, to the word "future." The future is in fact nothing more than the awareness, in the present that grows out of the past, that the process of becoming is real and is conceivable only if it is open. If it stopped with this instant, it would not be a becoming, and the whole thing would collapse in on itself.

So there is really nothing more profoundly creative than the reflection on the past in memory, whether individual or collective. The wonderful thing about societies that have surviving traditions is that there is a real sense in which an individual's memories are not just of the things that have happened to him, but of the things that have happened to others, memories acquired by such means as the process of hearing family stories told over and over again by older people. My mother is a great storyteller, as was her mother, and as a result, sometimes I actually feel that I can remember my mother's and my grandmother's childhoods as if they were my own. I have heard the stories so many times that they just seem that intensely real to me.

The people who tell us not to live in the past are really telling us to live without memory, to live outside time, in a kind of eternal instant, an instant which is, to be sure, a kind of eternity, but not the kind anyone should aspire to live in. It is the negative eternity, the stagnant instant for which the Christian tradition reserves the name Hell.

### GRATITUDE AND RESENTMENT

In an interview in the April 2000 _Chronicles_ , the novelist Dean Koontz, author of terrifying thrillers focused on the cosmic struggle between good and evil, delivered himself of the following comment:

Atheists are always dissatisfied with everything, and you know there is no more evangelical group than atheists. In interviews and conversations, if the subject of faith comes up, they give the usual line, "How can you believe in a god who allows terrible things to happen?" Both Scripture and science tell us that for every force there is an opposing force, throughout nature. It is out of this dynamic tension that we develop our love of beauty and our passion for truth. Without _risk_ , we have no journey, no meaning. An atheist, setting material comfort as his primary goal, thinks I am an idiot when I talk about this.

When you reject God, you reject the creation and its order, and that leads to a rejection of your society's culture and traditions, which are the modes in which society participates in the order of the creation. Once you reject all this, you come to experience yourself as a kind of alien being in the midst of this order, and it is easier to conclude that the order is evil than that you are. From this comes a kind of chronic irritation with things as they are, and especially with anyone who says there is an order in the world with objective norms, with anyone who says there is normality. I have noticed this again and again with homosexuals, especially the militant ones who want the world to give up the traditional family system in order to accommodate their perversion. They seem to relate to the world in terms of a kind of chronic bitchiness, a querulousness (maybe we should say "queerulousness"). Nothing is ever adequate for them. There is this chronic feeling that the world has done them some great wrong, that if it were not for this great wrong everything would be fine in their lives. They are chronically unhappy and their unhappiness is the world's fault, so they spend their lives trying to revenge themselves on the world. There are two fundamental attitudes we can have in life—gratitude and resentment. If we accept the order of the creation, we can be grateful for it because it is an order within which even evil and suffering can make sense. Without it, nothing makes sense. There is just the isolated individual nursing his unhappiness and resentment. We can all recognize the type. The food is never good enough in a restaurant, and even if it is, the service is never adequate. The weather is never quite nice enough. If it rains, that is taken as a personal affront from the universe. And of course if real tragedy occurs, like the death of a loved one, people like this will not just mourn like the rest of us—they will nurse their bitterness forever. They can find no possible meaning in what has happened, and frequently commit suicide. I am not suggesting that the alternative to this is Pollyanna optimism of the "glass is half full" variety (having elsewhere expressed approval of Fr. Brown's statement that if he were ever to murder someone, it would be an optimist). People of faith mourn, too. Sometimes they become angry at God, frequently they feel that God has abandoned them (C.S. Lewis's account of such a process in his book _A Grief Observed_ , chronicling his response to his wife's death, gives eloquent testimony to the nature of Christian mourning). Yet eventually they can work their way through to some kind of peace grounded in acceptance of God's will.

Resentment can be extremely dangerous when it becomes the basis for politics, because it produces the politics of envy and resentment, a politics which is constantly saying things like—"If we could just get rid of all the blacks, or all the Jews, or all the homosexuals, or all the bourgeois revisionists, or all the homophobes, or all the male chauvinist pigs, or all the reactionaries," etc., etc. When people with this mentality get control of a society, things get really grim. They try to impose their program for a godless society on reality, and of course it doesn't work. When that happens, they conclude that it is the fault of certain others who are sabotaging the program, and the answer is to get rid of them. In the Soviet Union, it was "wreckers," "bourgeois revisionists," and of course Christians. And don't forget the Kulaks. So then we end up with a kind of politics which says the solution to our unhappiness is to round up all the members of this or that group and exterminate them. This outlook is the hallmark of the destructive politics of resentment, and needs to be eschewed by anyone seeking genuine reform. Yes, if we are trying to restore order and humanity to society, we are likely to be attacked and may have to defend ourselves, and that defense could include lethal force, as in war. In those situations you do what has to be done, but when it is over and you have prevailed (should you be so fortunate) you make peace with your enemies—you do not line them up and shoot them, or exterminate them more slowly in concentration camps. You seek to restore the order that was broken, not to endlessly look for an impossible utopia by killing people.

### OBNOXIOUS ADS AND WHAT THEY REVEAL

People have told me that I ought to get rid of my TV set, and I am often inclined to agree, especially considering that my own principles probably dictate that course of action. The problem is, TV often provides me with things to write about, in particular the obnoxious ads.

Obnoxious ad number one shows a runner pursuing his way through an assortment of rough terrain, with a voice-over talking about this person, on his run, overcoming every obstacle, breaking every barrier, etc. till finally he comes out into a clear view of a future without limits. Now, of course, strictly speaking, the future is always without limits, since it does not exist and hence is nothing, and only existent things can be said to have limits. The future is a potentiality only, and potentialities have no limits. Obviously, however, what the ad wants us to believe is that somehow, one day, we will live actual lives in what is then the present, where there will be no limits, and that is a contradiction. To the extent that our lives are actual and not merely potential, they will be limited. God's life is the only exception to this. So the ad is really saying that sufficient human striving on the road of progress will eventually make us gods. That is what the modern world is about, of course.

Obnoxious ad number two: A father is talking with his adult son while the mother is out of the room, telling him that he made the mistake of investing on his own and lost everything, hence he needs a loan. The son says, "You sure do—I hope you get one." The father responds, "I was hoping you could help us." The son says, "I'd like to, but Jan and I have to think of ourselves first. We don't want to end up in the poorhouse like you and mom." So here we have an ad which, in the first place, depicts someone committing what is beyond any doubt a mortal sin against the fourth commandment, and makes a joke out of it. The lesson ought to be that the fourth commandment is absolutely necessary for the survival of any kind of decent social and communal life, and people who violate it ought to be shunned and ostracized by everyone. Instead, the lesson of the ad is that you should make sure you get the right stock broker, because you sure as hell can't depend on the people who, under the laws of God and nature, have the obligation to care for you if you need care. Sadly, the latter lesson is, of the two, the one that most closely reflects the practicalities of our present situation.

### EDUCATION FOR HUMILITY—A RADICAL IDEA

One of the reasons community life is dying in the United States is that young people in rural areas and small towns don't stay home. They finish high school and leave. As I have said elsewhere, we get kind of a vicious circle here. On the one hand, the kids leave because there are no jobs. On the other hand, there are no jobs because the kids leave. This is turning small communities like my little village of Grand Marais, Michigan, into geriatric communities, and eventually there will not be enough left in the way of services to even make it possible for old people to live there. Much of this has to do with the fact that the whole mindset behind our process of socializing the young is one obsessed with success and upward mobility. From infancy, children are relentlessly bombarded with propaganda telling them that the whole purpose of life is to escape from whatever rural "backwater" they happen to have been born in, and get to a city somewhere where they can get a college degree, then a job which will enable them to make lots of money and go up several steps on the social ladder. TV, of course, does this. Almost anything the kids read (those of them who know how to read) reinforces this perspective. Parents, sadly, encourage it. Even churches may contribute to this whole way of thinking. But certainly, schools bear a major share of responsibility. The whole ideology behind our schools today seems to be to educate children for success, that is, for upward mobility. The kids are constantly told that they can do anything they set their minds to, if only they believe in themselves, that there are no limits for them, and so on—all lies, of course. My suggestion is this: Why not modify our educational system so that we educate the young for failure, instead—i.e., for what the gnostic empire considers failure? In other words, rather than teach rural and small town children that the most important thing in the world for them is to escape the rural community, rather than educate them for life in the progressive, acquisitive society, why not instead try to form them for worthy membership in the small town? Instead of telling them there are no limits, we should be forming them in a hierarchical view of the world which sees it as an order in which each of us has his place. Instead of fostering in the young an insane belief in themselves as beings with infinite power to do whatever they choose to do, that is, as gods, why not teach them to see themselves as creatures, limited, to be sure, but with a role to play in the scheme of things. A world in which everyone is a little god, or imagines himself to be one, is a world in which community is impossible.

Of course, public schools will never carry out such a program, being by their very nature agents of the centralized government and its agenda, and that is still another argument for replacing them with home schooling and private schools. Schools should be community institutions, with a mission to build up the community where they are located. Hence they should be controlled by the local community and staffed by people with roots in the community. Right now our schools are teaching arrogance, _hubris_ , when they should be teaching humility, if they are to serve the needs of human communities.

A footnote to the above: Fox News did a segment several years ago on an outstandingly successful school in Harlem which boasts that ninety plus percent of its graduates go on to college. Now, I don't doubt at all but that there are kids in Harlem who ought to go to college but don't get there because the worthless schools make it impossible. What irked me, however, was the fact that the people they interviewed, school staff, and so forth, gave the impression that as far as they were concerned, the sole criterion for a school's success was whether or not its graduates went to college. They seemed to think that those students who did not go to college had to be thought of as representing failure on the part of the school. Now it seems evident to me that if 90 plus percent of a school's students, after graduation, get steady jobs and raise families and are responsible members of the community, the school has succeeded. If the school produces good solid ordinary people, then it has succeeded, whether or not it has recruited members for the elite professions. By producing such ordinary people, the school has contributed positively to the community. If it also produces a few doctors, lawyers, and college professors, preferably not too many, that is gravy.

### CAN WE REALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT? SOME THOUGHTS ON TIME

Temporal arrogance is one of the many spiritual plagues of our time, the notion that somehow we, in the present day, have access to all kinds of knowledge and understanding that were denied to all previous generations of mankind, enough so that we can dismiss with contempt things that were universally believed by our ancestors. So what if our ancestors believed in monogamous, heterosexual marriage? We know better. So what if rejection of contraception and abortion were constant Christian teaching for nearly 2,000 years? We know better. We are so much more "advanced." And, of course, you can't live in the past. The present is all there is. Or better yet, live in the future (how anybody plans to do that, I can't quite imagine, though I once heard a radio ad for a company that described itself as firmly planted in the future—we have all heard about the guy who has his feet firmly planted in midair, but this goes him one better). And so much of modern ideology is about trying to erase the past and start the world from scratch, even if that means murdering millions of people who, at least in the minds of the ideologues, represent the oppressive past.

But the truth about time is that it is a continuum. It is the lasting-passing that flows on. It is not divisible in this way. We are part of the flow, we go with the flow (much as I hate to use that expression). We experience it in different aspects, but we cannot legitimately take those aspects as separable components and affirm one at the expense of another. The present is simply, in a manner of speaking, the leading edge of the past, it is the point that the flow has reached, the uppermost layer, whatever spatial metaphor you might want to use. Think of it as a spatial object, a body of some kind, that keeps growing—the present is the uppermost or outermost surface of this body, but the growth is continuous, so that surface is never there as a thing, an object which can be held constant and affirmed as a "place" where you can somehow stay and dwell. In a way, the present is just the uppermost surface of the past. We have a present only insofar as we live in the past and are rooted there. The desire to pull up those roots and separate ourselves from the past is the desire to commit suicide.

People utter a great deal of nonsense about the past being dead, usually followed by advice to forget about the past, not to live in the past, to live in the present and the future and so on _ad nauseam_. Well, in a way the past _is_ dead. And in a way it is not. The past, in my way of thinking at least, can be compared to the soil in which a living thing, a tree, for example, is rooted. But what is soil? It is organic matter, accumulated over centuries, even millennia, matter consisting of the remains of living things that, having lived, have died. So in that sense it is dead—it is made up of corpses. Yet these corpses, in their dying and decomposing, are a source of life, providing nutrition to the living things rooted in them. Their death and decomposition is a source of life, a kind of resurrection that happens when new life emerges out of it. So the idea that we should cut ourselves loose from the past because it is dead is so much nonsense.

Imagine if a tree were to decide to live only in the world above ground, on the surface of the earth (the present) or even in the heavens (the future). It would have to cut itself off from the soil that nourishes it, and it would die. That of course is precisely what our so-called civilization, with its contempt for the past, is doing to itself.

Progressives are fond of dismissing the past as a kind of ladder they had to climb up in order to reach their present height of enlightened wisdom, but that they may now kick away, having no more use for it. But that is the wrong metaphor entirely. The right metaphor would be something like roots, or a lifeline, something that you need if you are to stay in contact with the source you come from, because otherwise you die.

Note that we need to distinguish between the present and the instant, something that is not usually done. We have no experience of the instant, because an instant is infinitesimal, it is an abstraction useful for certain mathematical and scientific purposes, but it has nothing to do with being, it has no ontological status. The present implies _presence._ When we experience ourselves living in the present, we experience ourselves in the presence of being, our own and the world's. But this sense of the presence of being is always a sense of something rooted in and growing out of the past. It is a presence in which the past is included, in which the past is in some way present to us. The idea of cutting ourselves off from the past in order to live in the present is a contradiction. Can we live in the present? Yes, if that means the presence of being; no, if it means the instant, cut off from the past.

Another point: When we deal with time, we are dealing with the reality of continuity in change, something the Greek philosopher Heraclitus seems to have been thinking of when he delivered himself of the aphorism, "Changing, it rests."

There is time because there is change. A being changes, yet it is still the being it was before the change, assuming it was accidental change. I grow older, my hair turns gray or falls out or both, I learn, I develop, I become a better person or maybe a worse one, yet I remain the human person that I am and was throughout it all. Even in radical change, like death, there is still some continuity—e.g., the matter that composed the dead person's body continues in existence, though without a soul to form and order it. And the creation as a whole is constantly in a state of change, yet persists as an ordered world, an intelligible and beautiful cosmos. So it makes no sense to say that we need to forget the past, not to live in the past, just to live in the present. If there is continuity in change, then by virtue of that continuity the past persists into the present. If I am the same person today that I was yesterday, though changed, then the self I was yesterday is still here today, in the present, it lives on. Similarly, the world that existed yesterday, or last year, or 10,000 years ago, in some way lives on in today's world. In addition, my present self lives out of the whole continuity of the self I have been for my entire 70 years. My present self, cut off from my past, would make no sense at all. It could not even exist. A present world, living without connection to the past, similarly would have no intelligible reality.

People who spout the idiocy about living in the present, at least if they are serious and not just mindlessly repeating clichés, hate the past, because the past is associated with continuity in life and especially with the continuity of the self, so closely associated with obligation and with order, in the self and in the community. Because, for instance, even through change, I remain the same self, I have the obligation to respect the commitments that I made in the past. A married man, for instance, cannot say, "I was a different person when I made those marriage vows, so I'm no longer bound by them." That being the case, to the extent that they have the power to do so, they try to attack the past. Of course strictly speaking you can't do that—the past is what it is (or was) and can't be changed. Even the Orwellian rewriting of history so prevalent today can only lie about the past, not change it. What we can do, though, is attack institutions that we associate with the past, institutions connected in our minds with tradition, something these people detest, because it puts limits on the almighty self. So they attack Christianity and in particular the Catholic Church. They attack the family. They attack the local community. They attack the family farm. They attack the neighborhood, promoting a level of mobility that makes it impossible.

The result is the situation people in my age group find all too familiar, one involving the acute consciousness that the world we grew up in, meaning the world in which we were formed as persons, as selves, no longer exists, because the endless tinkering, the endless social and ideological experimentation of the gnostic madmen who dominate our society today, has destroyed it. I spent my childhood in a city neighborhood in Saginaw, Michigan, a neighborhood whose population was a mixture of working class and middle class people, of a variety of ethnic groups, including some prize eccentrics. It included, for instance, an old German lady who swore like a sailor and once chased some kids through the alley near our house with a shotgun, but who somehow became friends with an old Irish lady who went to Mass every day and whose home was so filled with religious statues, holy cards and so forth that it is a wonder there was room for her. When the Irish lady saw the German "lady" coming she would sprinkle holy water around the house in the hopes that maybe her visitor wouldn't swear quite so much (I make this digression only to give a sense of the flavor of life in the neighborhoods so many of us come from). Crime was unthought of. You could go out for a walk at any time of day or night and never even think that you might be in danger. It was an ordered world that made sense, in spite of the old German lady.

Today, that neighborhood has been taken over by Mexican drug gangs, whose principal occupation, besides drug peddling, seems to be getting rid of one another. Shootings are a frequent occurrence. People are afraid to let their children go outside. The chaos which is the hallmark of Satan's kingdom reigns there. Social policies that tolerated crime, that encouraged divorce, illegitimacy, sexual immorality in general, with the family breakdown that resulted, have brought this and so many other communities to this point, policies championed and promoted by our spiritually diseased elites.

The Church which we were formed in, a Church which was concretely present in the form of a parish church located in our neighborhoods, has also, at the level of what is concrete and visible, largely disappeared. People formed by that Church, like me, people who grew up in an atmosphere where the presence of the holy was at times almost tangible, often find ourselves in old age worshipping in churches where the sense of the sacred has all but disappeared, and we just have to trust that by the power of the Holy Spirit the grace of the sacraments is still there for us despite the outward appearances. The parish church I worshiped in as a child was only a few blocks from our home, as was the parish school which I and my siblings all attended. You could stop in at the Church any time of day or night for a "visit" (younger Catholics would respond with, "A what?"). The school has been closed for years now, and the parish was taken over, during the late Kenneth Untener's Reign of Error, by Call to Actionites, who gutted the Church's once beautiful interior. How the city lies desolate!

Now when you find that the world in which you have your personal roots, which is the foundation for your continuity as a self, has not only disappeared, but has actually been destroyed by the insane behavior of spiritually diseased people, you have the sense of having been robbed of something very precious. People should be able to mature and eventually grow old in continuity with the world as it was when their lives began. Yes, there must be change, but change within continuity, not mindless destruction.

The people who reject the past have created a situation in which all of us end up living in exile, in a kind of homelessness.

### IS OUR GOVERNMENT LEGITIMATE?

Catholics and, for that matter, all men of good will and sanity in this country, need to begin seriously considering the question whether the government we live under today in America is in fact a lawful government, one that we are obliged, in conscience, to obey, or whether it is, on the contrary, a tyranny which lacks lawful authority ( _de jure_ sovereignty) and can claim our obedience only because it has the power of coercion ( _de facto_ sovereignty), a regime which we have a right and a duty to resist.

To answer this question, we need first to answer another one: Where does authority come from? How does a government get authority?

Those of us old enough to have used the Baltimore Catechism can answer this easily enough: All authority, meaning all legitimate authority, comes from God. The state must get its authority from God, and to do so, must itself acknowledge the sovereignty of God and of his law, and seek to conform its own actions, in governing the people, to God's law. Does the present government of the United States do this?

Clearly, the answer is a resounding No. The very existence of the _Roe v. Wade_ decision, and the failure, over a thirty-nine year period, of our public authorities to correct it, is sufficient grounds all by itself for denying the legitimacy of our government. A government which arrogates to itself the authority to overrule the natural law, as ours did in _Roe v. Wade_ , is a government which has set itself above God, since it claims the authority to overrule Him. Since all legitimate authority comes from God, a government which does such a thing cannot have legitimate authority. That would be a contradiction. And of course _Roe v. Wa_ de is only one of many instances in which our government has set itself above God.

The history of the modern nation-state, especially since the so-called Enlightenment, has to a great extent been a history of consolidation and centralization of government power (spawning the monstrosity known as bureaucracy), along with a growing claim by the state to a kind of sovereignty that can, in reality, belong only to God. Over time, the resources of those governments have gone more and more into carrying out the agenda of the "Enlightenment," the radically anti-God project of forcing things like radical egalitarianism, sexual libertinism, eugenics, the abolition of marriage and the family, and so on, on their people, trying to replace the Kingdom of God with a secularized, and demonic, Utopia here on earth. And that is what we see happening today in the United States. It has happened relatively late in America. The watershed event in my young life was the rise of the extreme, Bolshevik left to power and influence (and respectability) in the 1960s and 70s. The rise to power of Barack Obama, a candidate groomed and prepared by the surviving leftists of the 1960s, has consolidated their gains. Basically, the anti-Christian, anti-God left (and make no mistake about it—all the talk of liberty, equality, fraternity, human rights, and so on is just that—talk—hatred of God and of His Church has always been the real agenda of the "Enlightenment"), is now in power and will be doing its best, as the French revolutionaries, the communists, and the Nazis did previously, to fully implement the ideology of the "Enlightenment." The essence of the "Enlightenment" is this: We will get rid of God, or, as Nietzsche put it, we will murder God, and then _we_ will be God. But "we" doesn't actually mean all of us—it means whatever revolutionary elite happens to be in power. That elite will then play the role of God over their hapless fellow humans. The "Enlightenment" was based on the rejection of both parts of Jesus' Great Commandment: Love of God and love of neighbor. Our government today is more and more completely committed to that "Enlightenment" vision. That means a government dedicated to a full-scale attack on the social order, an attack on the institutions, founded on primordial human relationships, which hold a society together and make it work—things like the family, the local community, and religion. The health of these institutions is absolutely essential to the realization of the common good, and a government which attacks them is in fact attacking the common good. When it does so, it loses lawful authority. St. Thomas recognized this long ago in dealing with the question whether sedition could ever be justified:

A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler.... Consequently, there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant's rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant's government. Indeed, it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury of the multitude. ( _Summa Theologica_ , Q. 42, Art. 2, Pt. II)

There is, within our government, a whole culture of pursuing the private good over the common good. Officeholders place the private good of getting and keeping office ahead of the common good, and that means that the most powerful lobbies always get their support, lobbies which, again and again, push private interests at the expense of the common good (think of the militant sodomites who are so obsessed with gaining respect and legitimacy for their destructive lifestyle that they are ready to bring our whole family system—or what is left of it—down in ruins to get what they want). Again and again, things that clearly need to be done for the common good have to be written off as politically impossible. Even more dangerous is the subtle but quite deadly form this takes when politicians put the pleasure, the "high" they get out of indulging in gnostic ideological fantasies over the common good. The private good of feeling good about yourself becomes paramount. Al Gore epitomizes this mentality.

Clearly, a state which denies the sovereignty of God and in effect makes itself God, while putting the private good of the rulers ahead of the common good of the community, lacks lawful authority. It is an illegal regime. But that is not all that may be said on the subject. Criteria for legitimacy can also derive from a particular society's traditions and self-understanding, stemming from the way in which it first came into existence as a human community. In the case of the United States, a major part of our self-understanding, and, indeed, self-constituting, as a people comes from the foundation of our nation as a federation of sovereign states which, in ratifying the Constitution, created our national government with certain defined and limited powers. For that national government to have legitimate authority, it is necessary that its acts be grounded in that foundation. The problem is that this foundation has long since been abrogated, yet we have never acknowledged that this has happened. I speak specifically of the so-called Civil War (more accurately, the War of Northern Aggression), whose principal outcome, constitutionally, was to do away with the right of states to secede, and hence to do away with state sovereignty. This was done in the name of preserving the Union, but its actual result was to destroy the Union, because a Union where the states have no sovereignty is a radically different kind of political order from one in which they do have sovereignty. It is precisely the kind of "consolidated government" that the founding fathers were determined to prevent. So here is the problem: The foundation which is the source, under God, of our government's legitimacy is no longer there, but the states and the people have never made a new foundation. Our government has just drifted along doing all kinds of things—fighting wars, creating a huge bureaucratic state, and so on—without legitimate authority, relying on powers never granted to it by the states or the people. Now some may argue that the people have, simply by their inaction, i.e. by not overthrowing the government, given their consent to it and thus given it a foundation of sorts. It seems evident to me, though, that mere passive acceptance is not an adequate basis for legitimacy, but only confers _de facto_ sovereignty on the state. _De jure_ sovereignty requires active consent. It requires the people to come together in some way to refound our republic.

Our present situation in America could be compared to one in which an organized crime syndicate took control of the government and did whatever it wished to the people in order to enrich itself. Such a "government" would have no claim on our obedience. Neither does the government we actually have today. Obviously, prudence would dictate that we obey when what we are ordered to do does not violate the law of God, and of course, conscience requires us always to obey the natural law, which comes to us, not from the state, but from God. But an unlawful government does not, as such, have a claim, in conscience, on our obedience. We need to think long and hard about this. It certainly appears that at the moment we are headed into a period of intensified attacks on the Christian faith and on the common good, quite possibly leading to out and out persecution of the Church. If FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act) ever becomes law, all restrictions on abortion, even partial-birth abortion and the killing of babies who survive abortion, will be done away with, as well as any protection for the right, in conscience, to refuse to participate in abortion. Catholic doctors and hospitals will be required to do abortions, Catholic nurses will be required to assist, and so on. This situation is going to call for civil disobedience on a very large scale. We need to have a clear grasp on the principles on which we base such action. We need to be absolutely clear, as Catholics, on what is or is not allowable in this way. But certainly, resistance to tyranny is a right. A people has a right to defend itself against its enemies, and this is true even when the enemy is its own government.

### RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY: HOW DO WE GO ABOUT IT?

In "Is our government legitimate?" (above), I tried to show that the present central government of the United States has in fact so abrogated the U.S. constitution and the intentions of its authors, while arrogating to itself a sovereignty above even that of God, that it is simply no longer a lawful regime but a tyranny, which we are no longer obligated in conscience to obey. Hence, we have a right and duty to resist it. But how? What is to be done? While I doubt that I can supply a definitive answer, I can come up with a suggestion or two, at least.

One of the obstacles to answering this question is that nearly all of us are caught up, to some degree, in the mystique of the central government, the sense that this is where the power is, so that if we are to restore constitutional government, we need to start by taking control of this locus of power and using it toward that end. That is a major mistake, for several reasons. First, there is essentially zero chance of sane people getting control of the federal government. That government is far distant from ordinary people, who have little or no access to it. We have elections, but those are rigged by our two party system (really a one-party system), which places serious discussion of alternatives to the present way of doing things outside the parameters of allowable debate. But even if we could get past all this and get control of the federal Leviathan, we would still fail, because Leviathan is the problem, and cannot, in the nature of things, be the solution. That is so because precisely what is wrong with our central government is its violation of the principle of subsidiarity, a principle which is part of the natural law. That principle states that, in the ordering of human life in community, things ought to be done at the lowest feasible level of organization, the level closest to the people, the least centralized level, and be done at a higher, more central, level only when the task cannot reasonably be done at the lower level. So, in governing, things ought first of all to be done by families, then by neighborhoods and local communities, then by intermediate communities (in our case, the states) and only then by the central government. But of course today we have turned this upside down, seeing centralized, bureaucratic government as the first thing we turn to for solving any problem, not the last. A host of iniquities flows from this.

If we want to overcome the evils emanating from this terrible violation of subsidiarity, any political program for doing so must itself respect subsidiarity. Trying to use the power acquired by the violation of subsidiarity to restore subsidiarity is a contradiction. The real answer is to work on restoring power to the lower, less central levels. In America, that would involve, among other things, working to restore states' rights, but also working to restore power to families, neighborhoods, municipalities, and so on. So my suggestion is that we forget about any kind of frontal assault on the federal government, and instead focus on taking control of, or at least getting some influence on, these subsidiary levels of government, and using them to rein in the federal Leviathan. We should not even bother to get involved in national elections, but focus all our resources on winning power at the state and local levels. We need to get power at these levels so that we can strengthen them to resist federal power—in effect, transplant a spine into them. Right now, opposition to federal power comes largely from isolated, powerless individuals, but we need institutional opposition, and that requires an effort to resuscitate and reinvigorate the institutions that ought to be providing resistance. We need to give our state and local governments some necessary tools, some weapons, for resisting centralized power.

That means, first, that we need to begin asserting, again, the right of secession, a right that existed in pre-1861 America, and exists even now, though federal propaganda wants us to believe that Mr. Lincoln's War resolved the issue for all time. That would be true if might made right, but not otherwise. Our state and local governments need to stand up and assert their right to leave the Union should they choose to. I'm not really advocating separatism per se, but I am saying that we need to insist on the _right_ to secede, because, if we are serious about it, we can use the threat of secession as a tool against Leviathan, something that was frequently done here prior to the War of 1861. Along with it, we need to restore the nullification principle to its rightful place. That principle, frequently invoked in pre-1861 America, held that the states had power to declare null and void within their boundaries acts of the federal government that they deemed unconstitutional. In one such case, Massachusetts actually told the feds that if they sent a federal agent into the state to enforce a law they deemed unconstitutional, he would be summarily hanged without benefit of clergy (you didn't want to mess with those old-time Calvinists!). Here's an example: If FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act) should become law, abolishing all state restrictions on abortion, the states ought to simply refuse to accept it as legitimate and go on enforcing _their_ laws. That is what they should have done about _Roe v. Wade_. Without the concept of nullification, backed up by the possibility of secession, there is no possibility of limiting federal power, because the federal government ends up being the sole arbiter of the limits of its own power—which means there are no limits.

Political groups like the Constitution Party should probably not even bother to run candidates for federal office—better to put all the effort, as well as resources, into state and local offices. The power we can get within the state and local governments will be far more valuable to us than anything we might conceivably get at the federal level. Similarly, advocacy groups like right to life organizations should not bother endorsing people for federal offices. If we can get control of state and local governments, then use that control to assert, and use, the right of nullification, with the right of secession to back it up, then there is some chance to bring the federal Leviathan under control.

There is still power in the states and localities, if we can only find a way to organize and tap into it. The fact is, the federal government, monstrosity though it may be, is really not that important. It lives as a parasite on the states, and if we can get the states to stop feeding it, we can bring it under control. That will be a whole new ball game. We can tell the federal government to keep it's No Child Left Behind money, as well as all other federal funding for education, because federal involvement in education is illegal, and it is up to us, the people of the several states, to decide what to do about schools (get government out of them entirely, if I have anything to say about it). We can let them know that, while federal officials are entitled to their opinions, however demonic, about abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, and so on, we will make and enforce our own laws in these areas, and arrest any federal officials who try to enforce federal edicts to the contrary (not being Calvinists, we won't hang them, though, tempting as that might be). And so on. I have a kind of fantasy of a time when state governments will forbid their citizens to pay federal income taxes. I don't suppose this is likely to happen, but who knows? Reinvigorated state governments might be able to put serious pressure on the federal government to abolish the income tax.

I don't want to give the impression that I envision somehow restoring the republic to its precise condition as of 1861, or any other year. The problem is not to replicate particular institutional arrangements from the past, so much as to restore order, which means restoring subsidiarity to its rightful place. This is central to Catholic social teaching, which holds that it is a grave violation of right order to concentrate power in central governments while weakening the lower levels and the various institutions of the social order. I think that we have to strive for that kind of restoration, while acknowledging that we have little say about precisely what form it might all take once the dust settles. I'm also not terribly optimistic about a good outcome, but I think that conscience and a respect for our human dignity requires us to struggle for right order even knowing that we may well lose. We can't just keep telling ourselves that we don't dare do anything because after all if we rock the boat it might make things worse. And keep in mind what T.S. Eliot said: "There are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes." The struggle for order just goes on, with no definitive resolution this side of eternity. This needs to be emphasized, because I am noticing a mood of despair in some conservative circles these days, a mood that seems to tell us that restoring order is impossible, that anything we do in the effort at restoration will only make things worse, leaving us with nothing to do but sit back and reflect sadly on the destruction of our civilization (Thomas Fleming of _Chronicles_ magazine, brilliant and insightful though he is, seems to epitomize this mentality). But conscience requires us to make the effort, and forbids surrender. Plato and Aristotle struggled to understand and to overcome the disorder of their times, and failed, yet their work in trying and failing became itself a major contribution to civilization and a major inspiration to future generations (not least in their influence on the efforts, by Christian thinkers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to struggle in turn with the problems of right order in the soul and society). As Mother Teresa said, "God does not call us to be successful. He calls us to be faithful."

Readers who have a talent for political organizing need to be doing some serious thinking about what they can do to organize their fellow citizens—for instance, running candidates for state offices, for city councils, township boards, school boards, and so on, while launching a massive campaign to educate our fellow citizens about the illegality of the present regime (maybe we need to work on a Christian alternative to Alinskyite organizations like the unspeakable ACORN). It is activities along these lines that could enable us to resist the regime, not futile efforts to take over the regime and use it for our own ends, something I like to compare to the good guys in Middle Earth trying to use Sauron's ring to defeat Sauron.

### IS GOVERNMENT A NECESSARY EVIL?

There is an endless argument about whether government is a good in itself or at best a necessary evil. The latter position tends to be taken by libertarians, the former by big-government liberals and the Catholic Church.

Now the Church's position is obviously correct, with some qualifications. Inherently, it is a good thing for some people to direct the activities of others in order to realize the common good. This is what government, in its essence, is about. St. Thomas points out that, even in an unfallen world, such direction would be needed because, even with entirely good will on the part of all men, if everything were decided by the individual, the consequences could be disastrous. If you are building a bridge, for instance, someone needs to be in charge, to direct individual A to do this, individual B to do that, etc., so that the activities of all these individuals are coordinated and the result, the bridge, comes about and doesn't collapse into rubble the moment anyone tries to cross it. Then there are things that are arbitrary in themselves but still require that everyone be "on the same page," like traffic laws. There is no particular reason why people should drive on the right, as in America, or on the left, as in England. But it is very important that, whichever is chosen, everyone drive on that side.

So government, understood as the direction of human activities by some person or persons in authority toward the common good, is a good in itself. What is not in itself good is coercion. Coercion means the threat that someone in authority will do something unpleasant to you (hang you, for instance) if you do not do what you are told. That inherently, to some degree, violates the dignity and autonomy of the person. It would not be necessary in an unfallen world. In such a world, people would freely do what those in authority direct them to do for the common good, because they themselves desire the common good. In a fallen world, however, it is by no means certain that everyone desires the common good. It is in fact quite common for individuals to put their private good ahead of the common good. They will obey only if threatened with some evil. Furthermore, the darkening of the intellect as the result of sin means that even where people sincerely desire the common good, they may be confused and even mistaken both about what the common good is and about how to realize it. There are then disagreements about the common good, and people who do not see the common good in the same way the authorities do may be unwilling to obey. When that happens, force is needed.

Of course, in situations like that, the authorities may be wrong in their assessment of what will serve the common good. This would, I suspect, be possible even in an unfallen world, assuming that unfallen people, though free of sin, would not necessarily be omniscient. That means that someone not in authority may be in a position to correct a mistake on the part of those in authority. In an unfallen world, those in authority would thank him for this, and change course. In a fallen world, however, where people have egos, the response is more likely to be along lines of, "How dare you question my authority!" whereupon the questioner finds himself with a one-way ticket to Siberia or worse. Simply consider the reaction of the authorities in our country to those who questioned their decision to commit us to the war in Iraq, a war which has furthered no genuine American interests and in which we are now trapped for the foreseeable future. Of course, in all fairness, the questioners of authority are not always right, and the authorities are not always wrong. Someone may persist in refusal to obey manifestly just orders from authority purely out of ego, not conviction.

Because government is a good thing in itself and coercion is an evil, albeit sometimes a necessary one, the goal for good government should be to govern with the least coercion necessary. Jefferson may have been wrong in saying that that government is best which governs least, but we may certainly say that that government is best which coerces least. That means, among other things, that the principle of subsidiarity must be respected, whereby decisions are left, as far as possible, to individuals, families, and other social institutions that are not governmental and not in the same position government is in to coerce. It means that as far as possible governments need to try to persuade individuals and groups to do what is needed for the common good, rather than force them, with the added benefit that people who come to be convinced that what they are told to do is in fact good will do it with more effort and more enthusiasm. Force should be a last resort. When all else fails, it may be necessary to say to people, "Shut up and do as you're told," but that should not be where we start. Sadly, governments often see force as the first resort and, in consequence, manage to get things done but at a high cost, because their people come to resent them, and will obey only to the extent that they have no choice, like slaves who work only when the overseer is right there with his whip in his hand. That does not promote the common good.

One of the evil effects of governments having as ready an access to force as today's governments do, is that the availability of force leaves governments with little incentive to try to justify their acts to those they rule. This means that the subjects (for that is what we are, really—citizenship is largely a fiction today) become alienated and resentful, and, as already noted, do only what they have to do. It is so easy for a government to say, "Obey, or go to jail," or "Obey, or the IRS will seize your assets." It is much harder to try to enlist the active support and participation of the people. That is actually close to impossible when the government is engaged in activities that it has no business engaging in, activities that violate the principle of subsidiarity (as well as, in our country, the Constitution). The easy access to force makes it unnecessary for governments even to try. I sometimes toy with the idea that government should be funded, like the Church, by voluntary contributions from the people. If we did things this way, governments would have to sell their programs to the people, they would have to negotiate with people for the money they needed, and if no one was willing to ante up, the project would die, which, much of the time, would be a good thing.

Is government a necessary evil? No, it is not, but much of the governing that happens in our world today is in fact an unnecessary evil, one that occurs because persons in authority use the state's power of coercion to satisfy their own lust for power, a private "good" to which they sacrifice the common good. It is difficult to know just how to correct this disordered situation, but a remark by St. Thomas on the subject may be a useful starting point:

A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler.... Consequently, there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant's rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant's government. Indeed, it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury of the multitude. ( _Summa Theologica_ , Q. 42, Art. 2, Pt. II)

Something to think about.

### MORE ON RESISTANCE

One online response to my legitimacy article was the old canard that if you don't like the government you can elect new people at the next election. Actually, that isn't true. It's true, of course, that the electorate can elect new people. It's not true that those of us who actually have some sense of what the common good is can elect people who will work for the common good rather than for the private good. We live in a nation today where the great majority of people are at best semi-literate, with no understanding of our history, with no awareness of the spiritual foundations of the nation, with no interest in anything but satisfying their appetites. Such people of course also make up the majority of the electorate and will always vote for those who promise the most in the way of bread and circuses—those, that is, who promise to promote private interests at the expense of the common good. Elections are not a remedy. Somehow those who seek the common good have got to push the ignorant electorate as well as the spiritually diseased elites who exploit them, out of the way and take control of the situation.

And of course it is no accident that we have a population of ignoramuses. This is, in large part, at least, the result of letting government operate our schools. Now a good government, one committed to the common good, of course has an interest in having an educated, informed citizenry. But such a government will stay out of the area of education, leaving that to families and local communities, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. Tyrannies, in contrast, have a vital interest in having a mindless "citizenry" to rule over. Our schools don't fail to educate because we don't pay the teachers enough, or because class sizes are too large, or because there aren't enough computers in the classroom. They fail to educate because they are not meant to educate but to miseducate, something they do very effectively, using endless hours of classroom time to indoctrinate kids ideologically to swallow the government party line on everything, while seeing to it that they fail to get the analytical skills which would enable them to question the official ideology and see it for the nonsense it is. As regards these institutions, one can only say, "Écrasez l'infame!"

The civil rights movement can be seen as one that in some sense sought "regime change"—i.e., there was a whole system, a whole way of governing and organizing a society, which they hoped to replace. These people could have been advised to "work through the system," to seek the changes they wanted through the electoral system. But of course they did not attempt to go in this direction because they recognized that they were locked out of the system. They had to go outside of and around the system through civil disobedience, economic pressure, and such. That is what we are going to have to do.

Many will tell us that we are required to tolerate even a very bad regime rather than attempt to get rid of it, because the alternative is anarchy and chaos. That is a false alternative, because the whole object of serious resistance to tyranny is to restore legitimacy, to restore lawful government, not to live without government (but tyrants always try to convince us that it is either them or chaos). Now of course resistance to tyranny always carries with it the risk that we will go from the frying pan into the fire, ending up with a state of chaos soon followed by even worse tyranny, a risk St. Thomas recognized. And sometimes the situation may be such that prudence would direct us to just live with the bad regime, because the risk would be too great. A lot depends on just how bad the regime actually is, and how good the chances are of actually succeeding in restoring lawful government (the Church's criteria for just war are applicable here).

On that, I would argue that the regime we live under right now is indeed very bad—a regime that has presided over the murder of 50 million innocent human beings over the past 39 years, and is on the verge of removing legal protections for people who conscientiously object to participating in this evil, is a pretty vicious regime, comparable in many ways to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But it goes beyond how bad the regime is _now_. People who say, "Bad as the regime is, we can live with it, and the alternative might be even worse," are failing to notice something—that the regime is not static, but is growing in evil. It is a regime that is moving steadily toward totalitarianism. When it gets there, even the people who are now so timid about taking action will recognize that the situation is intolerable, but it will be too late. If we don't act soon, we might as well forget it. I like to compare the situation to that of a malignant tumor. If there is one in your body, you might be tempted to say to yourself that "this isn't so terrible—I can live with it," and on that basis do nothing about surgery, or chemo, or radiation. But you can't live with it, because, left alone, it will grow and metastasize and kill you. That is where we are with the present regime.

### TOTALITARIANISM: THE IDOLATRY OF THE STATE

The great political struggle of the modern age, at least from the side of relatively sane people, has been the struggle against totalitarianism—that is, the struggle for limited government and against unlimited government.

There is a reason for this. The modern state is the political system that emerged from the centuries-long conflict between the Church and the state during the Middle Ages, a conflict in which the Church was ultimately overthrown and the state victorious. Now the Church, the embodiment in time of the Christian faith, is in a way totalitarian, in that through it God makes an unlimited claim on us, a total claim on the human person. God wants the whole person, in Christ he calls on the whole person to be transformed in a process which calls for a very real death to self, i.e., to everything in oneself that in any way rebels against God or embodies the choice of a created good in place of God. But the modern state, emerging out of the struggle between Church and state, in effect replaced the Church. In doing so, it arrogated to itself the right to make an unlimited claim on man. The state in effect made itself God, and arrogates to itself the absolute sovereignty that, in reality, only God can have. Once that happens, it can only, over the long run, come to assert total power over all of human life. Hence the modern struggle has been to prevent it from actually achieving such power—in effect, to prevent a state which has replaced God from fulfilling the logic of its own self-deification.

There is no possibility of limiting the power of a state which claims the prerogatives of God. That is why trying to achieve limited government through mechanisms like checks and balances, separation of powers, and so on, as America's founders attempted to do, is futile unless the state has the humility, so to speak, to recognize its true place in the scheme of things, as a servant of God and of the people but not as God Himself. Constitutional mechanisms for limiting power can put checks on normal human ambition, but they can do nothing to stop the pneumopathological lust for power, which simply rolls over all these mechanisms, something our present regime has done quite successfully. The founding fathers recognized this fact when they acknowledged that the new constitution would work only for a very moral people—that is, a people who were willing to let their appetites, especially the appetite for power, be reined in.

If only a return to acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God against the pretensions of the state to absolute sovereignty can restore limited government, then attempts to restore the American republic by way of the constitution's checks and balances are quixotic and ultimately futile. Even in the event of such a return to Christian faith we would, of course, want those checks and balances to be in place, but by themselves they can accomplish little or nothing. Hence the worthlessness of libertarianism, which seeks to restore limited government without acknowledging the sovereignty of God. It is a contradiction.

We are often told, and rightly, that we may not, as Catholics, regard the state as a necessary evil, since it is ordained by God to work for the common good of society and hence is a positive good. But this principle applies only to a normal state, that is, one which subordinates itself to the sovereignty of God. The modern total state has to be regarded as an evil in itself, and not a necessary one, either. It works to undermine, not promote, the common good. That being the case, it is extremely important for Christians to beware of the temptation to think that if they can only capture the power of the total state, they can use it to do God's work. That is, in essence, trying to cast out devils by Beelzebub. The modern state is the problem, not the solution. Pro-lifers have dreamed for years now of somehow passing a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but a government which claims the sovereignty of God for itself cannot possibly uphold the law of God on the sanctity of human life. More recently, many are promoting a constitutional amendment that would define marriage in such a way as to exclude "same-sex" marriages. Their intentions are commendable, but again, the tool they are trying to use cannot possibly accomplish the task they are trying to use it for. Even if they succeeded in the short-term, the long-term effects of their actions would be to reinforce a government which claims the right to control every aspect of our lives. The total state needs to be gotten rid of, not used.

In the history of the west since the fall of the Roman Empire, the only institution which has ever been able to rein in the state has been the Catholic Church. The reformation, in disestablishing the Catholic Church, left us helpless against overweening states, since the new Protestant churches, split into so many sects and denominations, and often directly under the control of the state anyway, could not speak with any kind of unified voice for the sovereignty of God. Furthermore, none of them embody the fullness of the Christian faith. A serious return to the Christian faith will have to be a return to Catholicism. Nothing else will do. The western world can be saved from the totalitarian state only if it returns to acknowledgment of the Catholic Church as the one source of spiritual and moral authority in the world. That, of course, will probably not happen. More likely, our civilization, based on the gnostic hubris embodied in the total state, will work out its own destruction to the bitter end, and when it is all over, the Church will pick up the pieces. If there are any pieces to pick up.

### THE WAR AGAINST SPIRITUALLY DISEASED ELITES

The whole argument between "laissez-faire" capitalism and government regulation of the economy is incoherent nonsense. Laissez-faire capitalism is not an answer to the evils of big government, any more than big government is an answer to the evils of laissez-faire capitalism. In a sense what we call "big government" might also be called "laissez-faire government," i.e., government without limits. It is nonsensical and idiotic to try to overcome one form of unlimited power with another, so both liberals and conservatives, in the most common usages of those terms, are ideologues who need to take a mental laxative.

The real problem isn't capitalism or government. The real problem is social engineering — i.e., the fact that we have, and have had for a long time in our society, spiritually diseased elites trying to force some form of messianic transformation of the world on their fellow human beings, who would like to just live their lives and be left alone. Invariably, these programs call for enormous and rapid changes in life, changes that destroy community, uproot people, wipe out customs and traditions and any form of reverence or respect for established order. Today, when we think of such elites, we are usually thinking of government bureaucrats or communist party leaders, or perhaps of organized feminists or sodomites, busy trying to destroy the last vestiges of order and sanity in human sexual life. Environmentalists, corrupting science in order to impose an agenda to return the planet to a state of pristine nature, presumably after removing most of the people from it, are another case. But these elites can also be what we used to call "captains of industry."

Certainly, when we look at the people who led the industrial revolution from a spiritual perspective, the full truth of Weber's thesis concerning the relationship of this event to Protestant, especially Calvinist, sectarianism, is well born out. People like, for instance, Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, were obviously driven by a messianic vision, seeing themselves as a kind of savior come to transform the world into a technological paradise, much as Marx and Lenin saw themselves. And that phase of the process is not yet over, even as government has moved to a tremendous extent into the industrialist's territory. Someone like Bill Gates, whose word-processing program I am using to write this, clearly has such a messianic view of himself and his role. And I am not sure I am any more thrilled at the idea of a world run by Bill Gates than at one run by Barack Obama.

It is customary to talk about greed as the principle evil underlying the industrial revolution, but that is quite inaccurate. Greed has always been around but never, before modern times, led to such a radical, and devastating, reconstruction (or is it deconstruction?) of the entire human landscape. The modern capitalist is motivated, not principally by greed, but by his sense of a messianic mission. Modern capitalists have acknowledged as much in some of their rhetoric defending themselves against the charge of greed. They are not kidding. And when we look at the extent to which foundations created by these capitalists engage in left-wing politics today, as they try to force such things as abortion, radical environmentalism, feminism, sodomy, and so on _ad nauseam_ down people's throats, we clearly see the noisome end product of their messianism. In this regard, Ted Turner's donation of a billion dollars, some years ago, to the United Nations, doubtless to support such projects, was most instructive.

This sort of thing is not just happening in economics and politics. The spiritually diseased elites have to a considerable extent taken over the once Christian Churches. The Catholic Church held out the longest, but is now badly infected, for instance, by elites consisting of theologians modeling themselves on 19th century German liberal Protestantism. Compared to the mainline Protestant churches, there may be some hope for us Catholics. We still seem to retain a vocal minority of the orthodox, who, as the scandals grow in number and loathsomeness, are beginning to understand more and more clearly their duty to take charge of the situation and suppress the diseased elites, not waiting for their cowardly bishops, many of whom are diseased themselves, to do anything about the situation.

And that is the answer to the political and industrial problems too. The people themselves, or those who still retain some sanity, have to fight back. Simply taking unlimited power away from government zealots and giving it to industrial zealots will not get us out of the predicament. What we have to put an end to is unlimited power itself, as well as gnostic zealotry. This we have to do by restoring the spiritual foundations of our common life and at the same time working to restore institutions like the Church, the family, and the local community. We have to learn to simply refuse the mandates of the diseased elites, and to engage in massive civil disobedience when they attempt to impose them on us. We have to get back to the idea that the centrally important thing in human society is community, a good in itself as well as a means for the growth and development of the human person. Government is not an evil—it has a positive purpose, which is to create and maintain a secure space where community can exist, but people themselves have to create the community by their living together. Neither is industry an evil—it exists to provide human beings with the goods and services and technology that they need in order to lead a viable life together. But it is meant to be a servant of the community, not its master. The industrial revolution made it the master. For its promoters, community existed to provide workers and resources to feed the industrial machine, and consumers to use its products, so that it can produce ever more new things and create ever new markets for them. It is time to drive the spiritually diseased elites out of our communities, to excommunicate them, while letting industry and government exercise their rightful, and limited, functions. But we can only do this if first we restore the spiritual center, and for Catholics, that means especially the restoration of the Mass, where, more than in any other situation, the meeting between man and God which makes order in the world possible takes place. A reconquest of the world by sane people is clearly called for.

A presupposition for that reconquest is the understanding that community is not something to be imposed on people. People live on the earth and under heaven in relation to God and to one another, and out of their interaction emerge forms of living together—culture, institutions, customs, traditions, common law, etc. We only mess with these, at least if we are wise, when it is necessary to do so in order to keep them in good working order, to renew them. When someone comes along and announces that he wants to sweep them all away and introduce some radically new form of society, it is time to lock him up in a well-guarded asylum, throwing away the key.

It is interesting to note that this understanding of the situation makes nonsense of much of the debate that goes on over forms of government, and particularly of the contemporary idolization of democracy. The fact is, the aspiration most people have toward democracy has little to do with being able to vote for holders of government office, but has a lot to do with the desire to live in basically self-governing communities, where people have a fair amount of freedom, in their day-to-day life together, to control their lives and be governed by the kind of people who are the natural leaders of the community. Above all, people want to be free of these madmen who are constantly trying to destroy their community—i.e., social engineers. If we can get rid of the madmen, we can have the kind of self-governing communities that are the real essence of democracy, and it will not be all that important whether the government per se is a democracy, a monarchy, an oligarchy, or even a military dictatorship.

Unfortunately, one very prominent source of irritation when we try to resist messianic social engineering is the tendency of many who declare themselves devoted to taking back our lives and customs from the spiritually diseased elites (perhaps they could be called SDEs, for short, acronyms being the in thing these days) to insist that in doing so we must first handcuff ourselves or even put ourselves in a straitjacket (not an easy thing to do, perhaps almost as difficult as getting out of one). For instance, some traditional Catholic groups insist that we must always be absolutely respectful to the bishops and never, never criticize them, at least not in public, not even when the bishop is demonstrably in the employ of the Father of Lies or is a passive wimp who lets the scandals and atrocities grow while he hides behind pious platitudes. If you suggest to even the most orthodox cleric that a particularly blatant and egregious apostate ought perhaps to be excommunicated, you will be informed, in sonorous and unctuous terms, that "the Church is VERY slow to invoke such a penalty." But if the Church is so slow to invoke it as never, or hardly ever, to invoke it at all, even in the most horrific cases, then why did Christ give her the power in the first place?

(I find it, by the way, simultaneously quite irritating and a little entertaining to hear people congratulate themselves on being slow to carry out their duties. I once knew a gentleman who had a short-lived career as a fireman [oops! I mean "fire-fighter"], a career which ended abruptly when he failed to respond to a fire alarm. I can almost imagine him, had he been a churchman, responding, when called on the carpet, that "I am VERY slow to respond to fire alarms," uttered with the sonority noted above. Presumably, the boss's response would have been, "Precisely. Now get out!" The present situation has much in common with a fire alarm.)

Similar questions come up in the realm of secular government. The Detroit News, a basically conservative but gutless newspaper, ran an editorial some time ago about the efforts of some Republicans in Congress to encourage the impeachment of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, who usurp powers not granted them by the Constitution, and in so doing violate the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold. The News concludes that, while Congress has the constitutional power to do this, it would be very unwise for it to exercise that power, thus making the editors of said gutless rag very much like the hypothetical cleric discussed above ("the Church is very slow," etc.). Again, the question demands to be asked: If Congress indeed ought never to exercise this power, why did the founding Fathers (to use a politically incorrect expression) grant it that power in the first place? It seems evident, to my perhaps rather simple mind, anyway, that it was their intent that, should the judicial branch get too big for its britches, the Congress be able to act to curb it. In other words, Congress's power to impeach judges is precisely part of the constitutional system of "checks and balances" which everyone lavishes such praise on even while allowing the judicial branch to become the sole real power in the nation, leaving largely symbolic and ceremonial powers to the Congress and the Executive. Similarly, it was the clear intent of Christ that the authorities in the Church have the power to prevent spiritually diseased people from corrupting the Church and causing the loss of many souls, by ejecting these persons from the Christian community. So not to exercise it, or to be too slow in exercising it, is a dereliction of duty on the part of Church authorities. It is standing by, lost in cowardice and indecision, while the wolves gobble up the sheep. Such shepherds had better be prepared for a quite disturbing interview with their Creator when the time comes. Prudence is an important virtue, but one that is all too often invoked as a cover for cowardice.

What it comes down is that we have insane people driving semi-trucks all over the world, running over pedestrians, yet it is considered somehow improper to take any action to get them out from behind the wheel and, perhaps, into a very nice asylum somewhere. We have got to start saying No to this kind of gutlessness, and to those who think it is a virtue.

The concept of the present crisis as the struggle between SDEs and ordinary sane people illuminates the real meaning of much of our political rhetoric. For instance, it helps us to understand that the concepts of "civil liberties" or "human rights" so much touted by our liberal establishment have nothing to do with rights for the ordinary citizen. What they really involve is grants of power to our spiritually diseased elites (SDEs) to do what they want to the rest of us. The gay rights movement is a particularly instructive case. If there was ever a spiritually diseased elite in this world, the militant sodomites are it. In a New Ways Ministry conference in Pittsburgh some years ago, one of the speakers actually took the position that teenage boys who believe themselves to be homosexuals have the right to have sexual relationships with older men and thus develop and confirm their "gay" identity. This, of course, implies a right of older men to have sexual relationships with the boys. Furthermore, he argued that parents have no right to stand in the way of the exercise of these rights (I do not have children, but I can tell you that if I had a teenage son and some older "man" showed up at the door wanting to have a sexual relationship with him, that is when I would reach for the shotgun). Militant homosexuals also claim a right to force themselves on landlords who prefer not to rent to them, perhaps because there are children in the home. They claim the right to force themselves on employers, schools in particular, who would rather not employ blatant perverts and may have sound reasons for this preference. None of this has anything to do with discrimination which harms homosexuals economically. Homosexuals as a group are quite prosperous, having incomes well above the national average. They are not being forced to live in poverty or in substandard housing by evil, "homophobic" landlords or employers. What it is really about is an elite ideological agenda involving social approval of homosexual behavior, an agenda to be forced on society. The "rights" they are claiming against discrimination are really a demand for power to force others to approve of their bizarre behavior and facilitate it, for instance, by making their sons available to the perverts. It is, as usual, unlimited power given to SDEs by taking genuine rights away from ordinary people.

Some years ago, I wrote an article that identified ideology as the rejection of all limits. Today, I would add that, more specifically, ideology involves the rejection of limits on the power of SDEs to impose their will on others. They don't really support infinite possibilities for everyone, as if such a thing could ever be. What they do support is infinite possibilities for their elite selves, while relegating the rest of mankind to material for them to operate on in living out those infinite possibilities. That is the way the Marquis de Sade saw the mass of mankind.

Liberals love to condemn and ridicule conspiracy theories, at least those of the right, and they are somewhat correct in doing so, since the kinds of conspiracies so many on the right imagine to exist do not in fact exist. But there is a degree of truth in conspiracy theories, and it is this: that the whole pattern of our modern crisis is that of SDEs forcing their ideological blueprints on the rest of society, using any combination of force, manipulation, and lies that will work to achieve their goals. It is the quite correct awareness that we have these SDEs there plotting and scheming to force their agenda on society, uprooting traditions, customs, the moral order, etc., in the process. There are conspiracies of a sort here—i.e., there are people who think alike, who network, and at least loosely cooperate to achieve their evil goals—they "breathe together," the literal meaning of the Latin conspirare. This creates the perception that there is a massive conspiracy to undermine and destroy the lives of ordinary people. What is, I am quite certain, erroneous here is the perception that there exists a huge, monolithic conspiracy, perhaps in existence for many centuries, which is extremely disciplined, where every part fits into a total plan for social destruction, which is coordinated and enforced by a single person or group (the Masons, the Rosicrucians, the Communists, the Jesuits, etc.) It is not quite that simple. Not even the SDEs are that organized. But the conspiracy theorists do see a substantial portion of the truth. There really are people, and very powerful ones, too (think of George Soros), putting all their energy into the effort to destroy what little is left of a tolerable community for sane people to inhabit, and the resistance to these persons, these traitors to humanity, has been quite insufficient. As Yeats said, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It is time for the best, or at least the tolerably sane, to get busy, and remove the madmen from power.

### EPILOGUE: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS,OR, BACK TO THE PIGSTY

Our ancestors knew a great deal more than sophisticated modern intellectuals like to give them credit for. Their myth and folklore constantly attest to the supreme necessity of men remaining within their limits and resisting the temptation to set themselves up as God's equals. Again and again, someone gets into a rivalry with a god or goddess over something like who can play the lyre better, and gets turned into a grease spot on the pavement in consequence. Those gods didn't mess around. That body of Christian and semi-Christian folk lore known as fairy tales is certainly no exception, something I rediscovered recently when I went digging back through my copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales. I was especially fascinated with one called "The Fisherman and His Wife," which I remember a teacher reading to us in grade school but of course did not really understand at the time. This one story strikes me as embodying the whole wisdom of our ancestors on the subject of human hubris and the nemesis that always follows it and always will. It also in a way says everything there is to say about the modern world and its ultimate fate, since that world is founded upon the very hubris the story decries.

First, a brief summary of the story: A fisherman and his wife live in a pigsty by the sea. One day, he is out fishing and catches a flounder. The flounder informs him that he is in reality an enchanted prince, and asks to be let go, a request the fisherman promptly complies with, without making any conditions. When he returns home and tells his wife about it, she is incensed with him for not asking the flounder to grant a wish, and sends him back to the sea to summon the flounder and ask it to provide them with a nice hut, something a bit more upscale than the pigsty. The flounder grants the wish, and they find themselves living in a quite nice little cottage. After a week or two, however, the wife becomes restless and tells her husband she needs something better, like a castle, and sends him back to the flounder. The latter grants this wish too, and suddenly they are in a palace, living in splendor, attended by scores of servants, and so forth. At this point, you would think she would quit while she was ahead, but no—she is not satisfied with wealth and luxury, she wants to be King. So, back to the flounder, who again grants her wish. But far from being satisfied, she decides next that she wants to be Emperor, and sends her poor husband back to the flounder. Having become Emperor, she now decides she wants to be Pope, and the flounder is able to arrange that, too. Then we get to the grand finale—she wakes up in the morning and informs her spouse that she wants to be "like unto God," telling him that "if I can't order the sun and moon to rise, and have to look on and see the sun and moon rising, I can't bear it. I shall not know what it is to have another happy hour, unless I can make them rise myself." He goes back to the flounder and communicates his wife's latest wish, and the flounder says simply, "Go to her, and you will find her back again in the pigsty." The story concludes: "And there they are still living to this day."

In a way, this remarkable story can stand on its own, requiring no further comment. But considerations like that have never stopped commentators from commenting, and I am no exception. Several features of the story in particular catch my attention.

First, of course, the sea and the flounder could be seen as symbolizing the power of nature, a power both creative and destructive, which man seeks to harness for his own benefit, often with disastrous consequences, as in this case. In the story, every time the husband goes to the sea to summon the flounder, the sea is in a state of disorder. At first it is just rather yellow and discolored, then it turns black and starts to churn, and finally, at the time of the last visit, there is a truly apocalyptic scene: "...Outside a great storm was raging, and blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his feet. Houses and trees toppled over, the mountains trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high as church-towers and mountains, and all with crests of white foam at the top." Human disorder, spiritual, moral, and social, is reflected in nature as cosmic disorder, which, in turn, is a powerful image of the chaos reigning in the disordered soul. The woman's desire to control the sun and the moon is part of this pattern too—it implies the desire to control the very sources of energy in the creation. This brings us very close to our own age, where we are trying to control the sources of energy in the atom, and where we are not only willing to kill human embryos in order to get at stem cells for medical research, cells which hold the extraordinary creative power always associated with the beginning of life, but even want to create these embryos so we can use them this way.

The disordered lust for power in the woman's soul also has terribly destructive effects on human community and relationships, not least that between man and woman. It is quite interesting that the woman assumes male roles in becoming, first King, then Emperor, then Pope. The story doesn't say she becomes queen, or Empress, or even "Popess," just King, Emperor and Pope. She clearly undermines the order of authority in the family, telling her husband at one point, that "I'm King, and you're only my husband," so do as you're told.

The husband, of course, is far from faultless. He might best be thought of as representing the patriarchal institutions which are supposed to keep hubris under control but are all too often too weak and cowardly to do so. He tells the flounder that "my wife, good Ilsabil, wills not as I'd have her will," yet makes no move to put any limits on her disordered will. The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the Catholic bishops who bow and scrape to feminists and militant homosexuals out of fear of the terrible, devastating rage that these groups are so justly famous for. (Perhaps it is not coincidental that he is a fisherman, like St. Peter and some of his brother bishops). Here, again, the final scene between husband and wife bears this out: "Then she fell into a rage, and her hair flew wildly about her head, she tore open her bodice, kicked him with her foot, and screamed, I can't stand it, I can't stand it any longer. Will you go this instant! Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman."

The woman's hubris, like that of the modern state, cannot leave any aspect of reality outside her control. Having gotten power over the secular realm of human community, she has to control the life of the spirit, too, and so demands to be Pope. And even that is not enough—it is intolerable to her to receive the good things of life as a gift. If she cannot control them, too, then they are only a torment to her.

The whole story, like that of the modern world itself, seems almost innocent at first. After all, here are these people living in poverty, in a pigsty, for heaven's sake, and what could be more natural than that they should seek to live in modest comfort. We all want that. And nature is only slightly disordered by the woman's initial request. Even her relationship to her husband is not that noticeably disrupted, as the story tells us that everything went well for a week or two after the first wish was granted. Yet the whole thing grows and metastasizes, as our insane "civilization" has done, and becomes anything but harmless. Note, too, that as the story progresses, it takes less and less time for the woman to grow discontented, just as our own appetites today, in our consumer society, grow more and more rapidly, the latest electronic toy, for instance, becoming obsolete almost as soon as we buy it.

I would add that, over and above these specific considerations, there is a kind of dream-like quality to the story as a whole, a kind of strange spatial and temporal dislocation. A literal-minded person, for instance, would be tempted to ask, as events unfold, What became of the real King, the real Emperor, the real Pope (maybe he was being held prisoner in the basement of the Vatican, as some Catholic "traditionalists" seem to believe today)? Do all these things happen in the real world, the actual world God created, or do they occur in kind of secondary world, a "second reality" (to use Voegelin's phrase), a "reality" generated by the woman's hubris? In a way, such hubris compromises the very structure of being itself. The modern world, with its dream-world ideologies, is most certainly a world founded on the hatred of being.

The lack of continuity in time is also a feature here. Normally, if you become King, or Emperor, or Pope, you so do by succeeding a parent, or by being elected, or by some other process. The fisherman's wife simply assumes these roles out of thin air, without antecedents. There is no past for her. She simply is, and rules, in an instant of time unrelated to past or future, and, indeed, unrelated to a world with continuity in time.

The end result of it all is madness, of course. Here, too, that final confrontation: "Then she looked at him so terribly that a shudder ran over him, and said, go at once. I wish to be like unto God." This is a picture of someone positively demonic, a possessed person.

Happily, it appears that all was not lost, as the lady got off easy in merely being sent back to the pigsty. She might have been forced to live in the suburbs, after all. Evidently, she must have repented, and gotten off with purgatory. Let us hope we can do the same.

I find myself thinking, by the way, that someone really ought to make a movie or a play based on this story, and perhaps focus heavily on what happened after the woman ended up back in the pigsty. Certainly, it must have been a shock to her, yet at the same time I suspect she may have felt relieved. After all, she had come home. The palaces she had been living in were not home, and she could not have been happy living in them—otherwise, she would not have kept on demanding more. The flounder may have been performing an act of mercy when he returned her to the pigsty. Let us hope we, too, can receive such painful mercy, and be allowed to return home from our outrageously abnormal society.

### SECOND EPILOGUE : ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT FORGETTING

Finally, time for a little introspection: What exactly is the nature of a writer and philosopher's vocation? What makes him do what he does? I think a clue is to be found in the passage from Richard Hooker that Voegelin used to lead off his _New Science of Politics_ : "Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream." I think for the writer, remembrance is always the key thing. If there is to be any continuity in life, which is another way of saying, if there is to be being and not just a series of unrelated states or instants, then there has to be memory and things must not be forgotten.

In that light, I can look at my own life. I was born in January, 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into World War II. One of my earliest memories, perhaps the earliest, is of a beautiful summer day when I asked my father why people were riding bikes around the neighborhood with tin cans dangling from them to make noise, and he said, "Because the war's over." That would have been V-J Day. My childhood in the 40s and 50s was spent amidst things like the Korean War, McCarthyism, the Alger Hiss case, the intensification of the Cold War. I can remember the day Stalin died. In the sixties, I lived out such things as the Vietnam War (at least the domestic reaction to it—my physical handicap made the question of military service a non-question) and the rising tide of doubt about the most basic questions of right order in the soul and society—the breakdown of the traditional Catholic Church, the sexual revolution, the new left (all of these closely related, of course). I shared in these to the extent of deciding to abandon my Catholic faith, and spent some years in a kind of moral, spiritual, and intellectual wilderness. The 70s and 80s represented, for me, and I now know, many others of my generation, the slow recovery of spiritual, moral, and intellectual order. For me, that culminated in the return to Catholicism, as it did for so many people I have met since.

That means that my life has coincided, so far, with the most acute, critical phase of the breakdown of western civilization and, with it, moral, spiritual, and intellectual order. That is the external part of it. The internal part has been my own effort, often quite a painful one, to understand the meaning of that breakdown as well as to work for a restoration of order. Even given my living through all this, there is, of course, no way for anyone but God Himself to know what will ultimately come out of it—whether a total breakdown of civilization, a restoration, or what. But I have come to be convinced that my own experience of it all, and the understanding I have come to have as to what it means, ought not to be forgotten, but ought to be there in some way for posterity. Our descendants may well be engaged not, like us, in the effort to defend the city's walls against the encroaching disorders, but in a massive effort to rebuild whatever is left of civilization, perhaps to build a new civilization. They need to have access to the experience and understanding of their ancestors. The history of mankind can be understood, in a way, as the endless struggle for right order in the soul and society, for a life, both personal and communal, that is in accord with truth—with the full truth about God, man, the world, and society (Voegelin called these the four-sided structure of reality). It is an up and down struggle—we fall into disorder, then we struggle back and rebuild some kind of order, then fall again. Sometimes we fall very deeply—it is hard to imagine any darkness greater than that in which we live today, in a society that has rejected God along with the whole moral and spiritual order, and even, indeed, the very idea that there is such a thing as an objective reality which can be known (though, of course, a great many of our fellow citizens, including many of those who call themselves intellectuals, social commentators, or whatever, and enter college classrooms and go on CNN as talking heads who imagine themselves to be the teachers of mankind, imagine this darkness to be light--one of the Prince of Darkness's oldest tricks). After such a fall, our posterity (in the event that we leave any, having failed in the total destruction of our world) ought not to have to start from scratch. They ought at the very least to have access, through books, to the insights of people like myself who have lived in the midst of the storm, so that they can understand something about the nature of the disorders they are recovering from as well as to the insights about the nature of right order that our struggles have made possible. To give one example, that is why I wrote _Witness for the Truth_ , the lengthy book on the history of _The Wanderer_ and of the Catholic Church's struggles with disorder and breakdown in the second half of this century. Without books like this, the memory of the Church's agony during this era might well be lost, and that would be tragic indeed. So my book, for which I am not claiming any great significance, is at least a work of memory, a struggle against the all too human tendency to forget.

In a way, it would seem that we always lose the struggle for order. After all, disorder always comes back, no matter how many times we restore order. Yet over the long run, in our struggle to build and understand right order in the soul and society, we are slowly constructing an immense building, perhaps a Cathedral, a kind of place or structure where men can raise their hearts and souls to the living God. Everyone who partakes in this struggle, this great adventure, shares in the construction of this great work—some in a big way, others in little ways. Plato and Aristotle can really be credited with building the foundations, at least on the purely natural level. Supernaturally, we owe the foundation to Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine may well have each built a whole wing. Pope John Paul II may well have done something similar (though it is, I think, a little early to be canonizing him as John Paul the Great). I myself may, when all is said and done, be found to have added a brick to the edifice, or at least slapped on a little mortar, and that in itself is a good and worthy thing. Enough others doing the same, and the building will grow. We cannot all be St. Thomases. A construction job like this needs common laborers, not just architects.

In the end, the effort to keep mankind's memory of the struggle for order alive is not justified by pragmatic concerns alone. The building, the Cathedral, has value for its own sake, as a work of giving glory to God for His own sake. There is something inherently wrong about forgetting. To allow things loosely to pass away as in a dream is to carelessly allow being itself to be lost, and that is a terrible evil. The writer-philosopher or whatever he calls himself is called in some way to be mankind's memory. And so he keeps on working, with or without hope for a restoration of civilization, because the work he is given is good, and makes life good and worth living.

### About the Author

George A. Kendall was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1942 (canned bios tend to studiously avoid giving any clue to their subject's age, but the author, being a model of humility, chooses to eschew such unchristian vanity). He has a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Detroit, and got to the A.B.D. (all but dissertation) stage at Michigan State University, where he studied sociology. He has been a contributing editor of _The Wanderer_ , a national Catholic weekly newspaper, since 1986 and has published numerous articles (probably in the hundreds) there and elsewhere, including several in journals of philosophy and theology. He has published two books, _Spirit and Community: Essays on Soul and Society_ , and _Witness for the Truth: The Wanderer's 130 Year Adventure in Catholic Journalism_. An old bachelor, he has lived for a number of years now in the tiny village of Grand Marais in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He credits Grand Marais with doing much to deepen his understanding and appreciation for community, as well as being the most beautiful place God ever created.

