Terribly Depressing

Nothing that happens in the Conciliar Church surprises me anymore. I rarely even read about it these days. However, today I read Rod Dreher’s Cardinal Screwtape. I’m sure many readers will have problems with Dreher. He’s not always a coherent thinker—a journalist masquerading as a thinker, you could say, perhaps a bit unkindly. It’s not my intent to recommend Dreher as a kind to anyone—it’s simply that he often does hit on important points. Today he writes about a charlatan name McElroy who published a secular humanist screed in the Jesuit magazine America. Follow the link for a discussion, which is largely on point.

What I want to do here is simply reproduce Dreher quoting himself from his book, Live Not By Lies. That’s sound advice, but more to the point, read this and ask yourself whether it fits in with Soros’ views and with the society around us. You’ll find echoes of Anthony Kennedy’s libertarianism in here, as well—it’s all tied together. And we also see exactly what Putin is fighting back against in defending Russia’s traditional culture. The triumph of the therapeutic vision of human being is the end of Classical Liberalism:

How did maximizing a feeling of well-being become the ultimate goal of modern people and societies? The American sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff was not a religious believer, but few prophets have written more piercingly about the nature of the cultural revolution that overtook the West in the twentieth century that defines the core of soft totalitarianism.

In his landmark 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff said the death of God in the West had given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures and to managing emergent anxieties. Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life’s purpose was to find one’s own way experimentally. Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal.

This was a revolution even more radical than the 1917 Bolshevik event, said Rieff. For the first time, humankind was seeking to create a civilization based on the negation of any binding transcendent order. The Bolsheviks may have been godless, but even they believed that there was a metaphysical order, one that demanded that individuals subordinate their personal desires to a higher cause. Almost a quarter century before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rieff predicted that communism would not be able to withstand the cultural revolution coming from the West, one that purported to set the individual free to pursue hedonism and individualism. If there is no sacred order, then the original promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden—“[Y]e shall be as gods”—is the foundational principle of the new culture.

Rieff saw, however, that you could not have culture without cult—that is, without shared belief in and submission to a sacred order, what you get is an “anti-culture.” An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways. Even church leaders, he wrote, were lying to themselves about the ability of the institutions they led to resist the therapeutic. Rieff foresaw the future of religion as devolution into watery spirituality, which could accommodate anything. Rieff lived long enough to see his 1966 prediction come true. In 2005, the sociologists of religion Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton coined the phrase Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe the decadent form that Christianity (and all faiths, in fact) had taken in contemporary America. It consisted of the general belief that God exists, and wants nothing more from us than to be nice and to be happy.

In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left. These cultural revolutionaries found an ally in advanced capitalism, which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires.

The article Dreher analyzes is a signpost along the way the Conciliar Church is headed. No society can exist coherently for long on the basis of such vacuity—life and action in history ultimately requires meaning in history. But this is where we are in America and most of the West. Our ruling class has embraced this emptiness and is aggressively attempting to foist it on an increasingly lost populace.