“We Can’t Go Back”
February 7, 2019
JAMES H. writes:
About 35 years ago I attended a party with several friends and acquaintances. An acquaintance, Alan, a graduate of the finest local schools and the Ivy Leagues was holding court and pontificating on our country’s predicament. Alan was a melancholy sort not given to enthusiasms of any kind. He possessed a morose serious air that lent credence to his various pronouncements. He acknowledged our sorry state of affairs and the troublesome trajectory our nation was on but declared that the nature of progress was such that we could expect to establish a new more stable order guaranteeing happiness for far greater numbers. I argued that our nation’s travails could only be solved by embracing tradition, order and transcendent authority without which the centrifugal forces tearing us apart would continue to work inexorably to our detriment.
He then pulled his trump card, insisting that even were it so, “we can never go back,” that the fruits of “progress” once tasted can never be forgotten or forgone. Nearly all at the party were Catholic, all of us thankfully having grown up in an insular pre-Vatican environment. And all nodded their heads in solemn agreement with this great sage amongst us.
Except I didn’t agree.
Not only can we go back, I insisted, but we must if we are to salvage any of what is left of our sacred patrimony, fast slipping away. For in embracing progress and rejecting our past we break faith with our fathers and their Faith which bequeathed to us all that we enjoy today. Alan sadly and benevolently closed his eyes shaking his head ponderously and sighed, dismayed that I was unable to appreciate one of the verities, the cornerstones of our new modern era.
About two weeks later, Alan went missing. His friends, frantic with worry, scoured all his usual haunts to no avail. Days later his body was discovered several miles away in a forest with a bullet in his head.
We humans need to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. Instead the modern world has deracinated us, uprooted us from all the essential sources of happiness – tradition, order, authority, family, our ancestors and our people. We are taught the futility of “going back” to the tried and true. We have become enslaved by our base passions. Our cognitive processes and moral compasses have become so corrupted that we no longer posses the tools necessary to diagnose much less solve our problems and our unhappiness. Today, the lie has become the truth and the truth the lie. Instead of the truth becoming our solitary lodestar we reject it because we are conditioned to reject it as anathema.
The structure of the moral universe I was taught as a child now can only be had by those willing to reject all that surrounds them as false and dangerous. And then undertaking the arduous process of slowly and deliberately reconstructing a moral edifice that came to our ancestors in their mother’s milk. Not a task suited to the faint-hearted.
