Ever since George Bush left office and Rod Dreher dropped his "Bush Lied, Troops Died" meme, Rod's been readable. That's a good thing, because I genuinely like the guy and what he has to say. Today's opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News was another gem. Although framed as advice to recent graduates on what he wishes he'd heard from a commencement speaker, that subject is only a platform for one of Dreher's customary themes: there exist truth and virtue and the pursuit of both is the goal of a meaningful life. These are laugh-worthy concepts to a relativist, but meat and potatoes to we bipeds whose knuckles still scrape the asphalt when we walk.
An excerpt:
...[U]nless you're
an incurable romantic or an American politician, you eventually will
learn that life is more tragic than you were led to believe. You will
discover your own limits. You will fail at something, even if you
succeed by the standards of the world.
That failure may
save you; success may destroy you. A friend grew comfortably wealthy in
high finance but looked around one day, horrified to see what luxury
had done to his colleagues' character. Shaken, he left the firm and
embraced his ancestors' Judaism. He eventually quit finance entirely,
fearing the inevitable consequences of Wall Street's money-driven
collective madness. They all thought they were invincible.
Four months later, the stock market crashed. Every one of his friends
was wiped out. What happened to them is tragic, in a way, but not the
worst thing. Leon Bloy, the French Catholic novelist, had it right when
he ended one of his novels with the following line: "There is but one
tragedy, not to be a saint."
In secular terms, this means
the only thing that matters is a life of self-sacrificing virtue,
whether a prince's or a pauper's. People wonder how to get what they
want but rarely think about what they should want. Don't be
true to thine own self; be true to the truth. Most of us will never
become rich or famous or even be remembered over time. But the capacity
for everlasting greatness, as Bloy saw, lies within us all.
You don't fully control your fate, but you do control the formation of
your character. That matters in ways we cannot foresee and can only
appreciate once we lose the illusion that we are self-created.
To some extent, I think Dreher's like Garrett Morris' character on Saturday Night Live, whose closed captioned translation of the weekly anchor report for the deaf consisted of shouting. No matter what Morris said, the deaf weren't going to get it because they didn't comprehend the medium, much less the message. Dreher's offering his opinions in the opinion section of a daily newspaper. The people he needs to reach aren't reading newspapers much anymore. More importantly, so many of them have been raised in a secular, relativist culture that scoffs at many of the concepts discussed by Dreher, like "virtue" and, certainly, "truth." Dreher's shouting at the deaf.
Dreher's often speculated as to how a culture that doesn't share basic truths will survive. Greatly influenced by philosopher Alasdiar MacIntyre's bleak view of contemporary moral discourse, as set forth in his work After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Dreher's as pessimistic as is MacIntyre about the ability of Westerners (that includes us, folks) to comprehend one another when we discuss the concept of what it is we "ought to do," much less come to any consensus about "virtue" that we can use to bind ourselves together in a coherent body that will survive from generation to generation. Rather, we face the increasingly likely prospect that while we continue to talk past one another, we will become "atomized" (as another political theorist, Francis Fukuyama, put it so well), with few ties that bind us and little strength to those few ties that do. As a consequence, MacIntyre speculates and Dreher asserts, that a "new Benedict" will emerge, a successor to the original St. Benedict, whose monastic order kept alight the flame of intellectual, spiritual and religious virtues of Western civilization during the long, dark period following the collapse of the Roman Empire.
For Dreher, this light will remain shining through the coming dark ages in small communities of like-minded Christians who, like the earliest Christians, will suffer for their beliefs but will not relinquish them nor permit the light to be extinguished. They will be, I assume, as Chesterton (again) so well described those early martyrs to the faith:
And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosporescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has
struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made
it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable:
the halo of hatred around the Church of God.
Once again, at some future point, the civilization we know will fall, as it must from its own lack of common purpose or, severely weakened by its relativist ethos, is overcome by a more robust, less atomized culture, one that rejects "whatever floats your boat" as the measuring stick for civic and personal virtue. Eventually, after the inevitable darkness that will follow, Christianity will prevail, and the small flame will, once again, blaze brightly and beat back the darkness. Dreher seems to be engaged in rallying those with similar views to engage in building these communities of light within a culture that is filled with lengthening shadows. He's said many times that fights like those against homosexual marriage and abortion "rights," while they should be waged, must be waged in a manner that preserves some small "right" to be different in a popular culture that will inevitably overwhelm the conservative Christian principles that have been rejected by a majority of those inhabitants of Western civilization today. In other words, he says the war for the popular culture is lost and we must look to preserve the legal right of minorities to believe and act on cherished principles of virtue in a society that has little, if any, truth left in it, other than to hold Christian values to be false ones.
That seems a bleak prospect, and no matter how much it appeals to my natural, man-given inclination to surrender to the pessimist I was and would be without my faith, I can't get onboard that train. Not only do I not understand how the new Benedict will find mountain redoubts that cannot be breached given modern mass media and technology, from what I've seen of the secular jihadists, they'll never be satisfied until traditional religious belief is extinguished from public life. I'd just as soon go down swinging than take that path, which I don't think will work.
However, before I can effectively engage in swimming against the tide of the deracinated mainstream of popular culture, I need to worry first about my personal circle of influence, which at the moment seems to be limited to me and my loving wife. Only if I succeed in getting out of God's way in my personal life will I have a chance of being saved. Only if I am saved will I be transformed in a positive manner. Only if I am transformed in a positive manner will I have any chance of influencing others in a positive manner. Only if those of us who profess to be believing Christians actually exhibit the transformative power of Christ to make ourselves stewards for the good of others will we have a prayer of transforming the culture.
I'm not surrendering to what Rod believes to be inevitable. On the other hand, until I get my own house in order, I'm not fit to fight this fight.
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