New Year's Day 2012

Sunday Night Journal — January 1, 2012

I've seen a couple of cartoons in the past few days making fun of the arbitrary designation of one day in the year as its beginning, and a moment for new starts and second chances. I normally think such spoilsport demystifying is petty, but I'm a little more sympathetic to it this year than I would ordinarily be, because I've had to work much of this week in spite of the fact that my place of employment is officially closed from December 23 through January 2. Not only that, I'm leaving ten days of 2011 vacation unused and therefore lost, as we aren't allowed to carry unused vacation into the next year. So apart from Christmas Eve, Christmas itself, and the day after Christmas, when we had some family over for a big seafood feast, I haven't had much time off, and almost none to relax, or to get done any of the things I'd hoped to do over the break. Moreover, the work situation is a complicated and very visible project with a pretty firm deadline, so just knowing that it's there has been producing a lot of stress even when I wasn't actually working on it. 

So I'm not in much of a Happy New Year! mood. However, my wife cooked the traditional New Year's dinner of ham, hoppin' john (black-eyed peas and rice), and turnip greens, and it was tasty and heartening, so maybe the year will actually get off to a better start than it seemed to be doing earlier today. 

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David Bentley Hart has written what strikes me as the best thing I've ever read about religion in America: "America & the angels of Sacré-Cœur." I read it once, and thought it was very good. A couple of weeks later I read it again, and thought it was great. It's in the December issue of The New Criterion, and it seems to be available to non-subscribers. However, in case you don't want to read the whole thing, I'm going to quote some of the passages that struck me most:

There may not be a distinctive American civilization in the fullest sense, but there definitely is a distinctly American Christianity. It is something protean, scattered, fragmentary, and fissile, often either mildly or exorbitantly heretical, and sometimes only vestigially Christian, but it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion—and it is a powerful religion. It is, however, a style of faith remarkably lacking in beautiful material forms or coherent institutional structures, not by accident, but essentially. Its civic inexpressiveness is a consequence not simply of cultural privation, or of frontier simplicity, or of modern utilitarianism, or even of some lingering Puritan reserve towards ecclesial rank and architectural ostentation, but also of a profound and radical resistance to outward forms.... What America shares with, say, France is the general Western heritage of Christian belief, with all its confessional variations; what it has never had any real part in, however, is Christendom....

America may have arisen out of the end of Christendom, and as the first fully constituted political alternative to Christendom, but it somehow avoided the religious and cultural fate of the rest of the modern West. Far from blazing a trail into the post-Christian future that awaited other nations, America went quite a different way, down paths that no other Western society would ever tread, or even know how to find. Whereas European society—moving with varying speed but in a fairly uniform direction—experienced the end of Christendom simultaneously as the decline of faith, in America just the opposite happened.... [R]ather than the exhaustion of religious longing, its revival; rather than a long nocturnal descent into disenchantment, a new dawning of early Christianity’s elated expectation of the Kingdom....

Just about every living religion has found some kind of home here, bringing along whatever institutional supports it could fit into its luggage. Many such creeds have even managed to preserve the better part of their integrity. Still, I would argue (maybe with a little temerity), such communities exist here as displaced fragments of other spiritual worlds, embassies from more homogeneous religious cultures, and it is from those cultures that they derive whatever cogency they possess....

I regard American Evangelicalism in all its varieties—fundamentalist, Pentecostal, blandly therapeutic—as the most pristine expression of [the American religious] temper.... [I]t is a form of spiritual life that no other nation could have produced, and the one most perfectly in accord with the special genius and idiocy, virtue and vice, of American culture....

Whatever one’s view of Evangelicalism, only bigotry could prevent one from recognizing its many admirable features: the dignity, decency, and probity it inspires in individuals, families, and communities; the moral seriousness it nourishes in countless consciences; its frequent and generous commitment to alleviating the sufferings of the indigent and ill; its capacity for binding diverse peoples together in a shared spiritual resolve; its power to alter character profoundly for the better; the joy it confers. But, conversely, only a deep ignorance of Christian history could blind one to its equally numerous eccentricities....

It is very much an open and troubling question whether American religiosity has the resources to help sustain a culture as a culture—whether, that is, it can create a meaningful future, or whether it can only prepare for the end times....Will its lack of any coherent institutional structure ultimately condemn it to haunting rather than vivifying its culture?....

[T]he secularist impulse can create nothing of enduring value. It corrupts the will and the imagination with the deadening boredom of an ultimate pointlessness, weakens the hunger for the good, true, and beautiful, makes the pursuit of diversion life’s most pressing need, and gives death the final word. A secular people—by which I mean not simply a people with a secular constitution, but one that really no longer believes in any reality beyond the physical realm—is a dying people, both culturally and demographically. Civilization, or even posterity, is no longer worth the effort. And, in our case, it would not even be a particularly dignified death. European Christendom has at least left a singularly presentable corpse behind. If the American religion were to evaporate tomorrow, it would leave behind little more than the brutal banality of late modernity.

Here's the link again. Really, it's worth it. Though if you're like me and find it difficult to read anything lengthy and serious on the web, you might be better off to seek out the print edition, if that's at all possible. I give my back issues of TNC to the library, for their give-away table. I hope they aren't just throwing them out.

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In the same TNC, James Panero compares Occupy Wall Street to the Paris Commune of 1871, and puts his finger on an aspect of the movement which continues to produce the adjective "creepy" in my mind, and which was very much present in the radical movements of the 1960s. 

There is an undeniable romance in doomed idealism, even if the ends are worse than the beginnings. The deadliest form of idealism invites its own ruin, either from outside or within, so that the purity of the ideal can be measured against the severity of its destruction—cataclysm as a defense against compromise. 

Like the radicalism of the '60s, the Occupy movement is really two things: on the surface, and probably in the minds of most of its participants, it's a specific protest about specific things. In the minds of a certain core of participants, including at least some of its guiding figures, it's the old romantic dream of establishing an absolutely pure society. For these, the particular object of protest is almost irrelevant; any stick will do to beat the dog; the real point is that society is corrupt through and through, and must be replaced with something new and pure. The belief that this is possible is at best an illusion, leading those who follow it deeper into a wilderness, at worst a mania inciting a rage to destroy or be destroyed. The idealism that cannot tolerate the actual is not much different from nihilism.

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I have two predictions for 2012. One, the world will not come to an end. Two, Barack Obama will be re-elected president of the United States. I am ambivalent about the first of these. Both are pessimistic.

Comments

[Mac]

"The media are likely less influential now than they have been at any time since the Depression, so I would not give to much thought to that."

I agree with the first part of that, but I think they're still a factor. I think they are pretty powerful still in forming those "unassailable impressions" you accurately describe. I expect there are people walking around who today believe Rick Santorum is more or less insane, but didn't believe it a week ago and perhaps would have struggled to recognize his name.

I do think it's going to be a rough year. The campaign will be ugly, though maybe not more than has become usual. Nothing personal to the president, but I hope the autumn proves very disappointing for him.

[Paul]

I'm not well up on current canon law. Is the papal bull "Cogit nos" no longer in effect?

[Mac]

I believe the general rule is that it depends on whether it supports one's argument.