GAIL AGGEN writes:

When I read the reasons Theodore Dalrymple gives for the increase in domestic violence in the U.K., I felt that more needs to be said about specific causative behaviors, and the dehumanizing influences that spawn and maintain them. For example, if you visit Britain, you cannot help but notice that excessive alcohol consumption is rampant, as is here illustrated. When I was there, I saw this myself.

Our tour guide commented that, whereas in some countries people like to go out and have a drink or two with dinner, in Britain, people go out with the deliberate intent of getting really drunk, and they do it really regularly!  Especially the younger folks. Alcohol and for that matter, drug use, have long been proven to be positively associated with violent behavior. Therefore, whatever the underlying causes might be, drinking and drugging really help people devolve. So does purposelessness. It dismantles a human being.

Is it going too far to say this dehumanization is caused by a society where technology and the government provide people with the means to procure necessities and the vices, but does not require them to work, take care of themselves or be productive in any other way? Because of this, people have restless energy and excessively much time on their hands. You know, when you live like this, your waking life becomes dull and hellish and then you cannot even sleep right. There is an old saying from colonial times, that the devil tempts every man, but an idle man tempts the devil! 

As well, people on both sides of the Atlantic have, as we all know, become desensitized to violence and the perverse through the ubiquitous offerings of the entertainment media and the 24-hour news cycle. Indeed our exposure to these has risen at precisely the same rate that morals and respect for each other have declined. At least it seems so to me. 

In my view, when people are idle (and therefore miserable) with no guidance in right living, when they are being trained in wickedness and can acquire mind-altering substances, their very souls are being sucked dry. The obliteration of sexual mores of which the doctor speaks is another condition arising from this aridity. Indeed, as the Bible states, “The rebellious shall live in a dry land.” 

They shall also go insane. The new phenomenon of the “prejudice against prejudice” speaks to this, since one hallmark of insanity includes the lack of the natural instinct of self-preservation, at which point one becomes a danger to oneself.  When people value neither their own lives nor the lives of others, they become inhuman, not mere animals, but rather more like robots or monsters. Hence, the coarsening of society, and the domestic violence. 

One last observation: I used to own a farmhouse in upstate New York that was built during the Revolutionary War. Its foundation was dug out of clay and shale rock after the land had been cleared of dense hardwood forest. The people who did this had no electricity, no power tools or earth moving machines, but only daylight, hand tools and perhaps oxen, but mainly their strong backs and solid determination. Of course there were no supermarkets, either, or ready-made shoes and clothing. They probably had all they could do, even if they had an ample supply of food, to consume enough calories a day to keep them going at their hard labor. Regardless of their faith or personal righteousness (but probably because of these), they had minimal, if any, problems with vice and obviously no tendency towards sloth. They lived cleanly and purposefully as human beings created in God’s image are meant to do. They could not have accomplished what they did, otherwise. Women and men were, of necessity, true partners in life and labor, with mutual respect and honor following as a matter of course. And when they laid their tired bodies down beside each other at night; surely their sleep must have been swift, sound, and sweet.

                                                                                                   — Comments —

N.W. writes:

When Gail wrote, 

“Women and men were, of necessity, true partners in life and labor, with mutual respect and honor following as a matter of course. And when they laid their tired bodies down beside each other at night; surely their sleep must have been swift, sound, and sweet.” 

I couldn’t help but think about St. Augustine’s conception of sex before the fall, 

“In Eden, it would have been possible to beget offspring without foul lust. The sexual organs would have been stimulated into necessary activity by will-power alone, just as the will controls other organs. Then, without being goaded on by the allurement of passion, the husband could have relaxed upon his wife’s breasts with complete peace of mind and bodily tranquility, that part of his body not activated by tumultuous passion, but brought into service by the deliberate use of power when the need arose, the seed dispatched into the womb with no loss of his wife’s virginity. So, the two sexes could have come together for impregnation and conception by an act of will, rather than by lustful cravings (City of God, Book 14, Chapter 26).” 

I guess, in some respects, the late 18th and early 19th century could be imagined as Americas time in the Garden. It’s nice to imagine, and assuredly, such day dreams are far superior to anything Mr. Lennon conceived.

Laura writes:

They still had “lustful cravings.”  : – ) And many hardships we lack.

It seems as if Augustine is saying in Paradise there would be no desire and no passion. That’s a challenging idea. It’s hard to desire a world without desire.

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