Before I read this I read a tweet by Alaric the Barbarian about how Christianity isn't about avoiding sin but rather fighting it. The way sin promulgates is through apathy or acedia. Your essay shows that we are struggling because we would rather do what is easy and instant than what is hard and gradual. Great work as always Dave. Thank you.
“People don't like real work, hard conversations, real humility, and real reconciliation. But if we want actual solutions to our problems, as they exist, we have to be ready to pursue the hard things and undertake the heavy lifts that are in no way fun.”
So very true. The long march begins with first steps.
It will take a concerted effort from both men and women to resolve the dysfunction between the sexes. Women need to let go of their pain and distrust (no easy thing). Men reclaiming the role of leader will eventually help with this, but we must be willing to take on the additional burdens and responsibilities implied therein. Both will need to let go of their pride and do a great deal of soul-searching so that we can all find our way back to sanity. They’ll need also to show some patience for each other as they try to establish healthier relations. Taking on these extra burdens will not seem fair at times. But as you said, Dave, the question is not whether it’s fair, but how interested are we in fixing this?
As a parent trying to raise a child to avoid the traps of modernity that his mother and I fell for, the major challenge I see with the “shelter-in-place” strategy is achieving a degree of isolation. Before “the turn,” everything is still very much interconnected and there is little shelter from the relentless and powerful messages of the mainstream.
In "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" the hero and heroine find little satisfaction in the bacchanalia around them. They try to connect with people to whom they were close in the past. Eventually, at the end (spoiler) they connect with each other. Those two people sharing their final moment is all that matters.
In "The Last of Us", again, it's the connections. The Long, Long Time episode has a prepper ready to survive any apocalypse, but what he ends up needing is a human relationship. At the end of Season One, it's Joel and Ellie who've fought to foster a father/daughter relationship out of the apocalypse around them.
Storytellers know the answer, even if they don't realize it. The Communion of Persons is the best we can do and our highest goal for our time on earth. The first thing each of us can do, if we want that Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle to return, is stay married. Be an example. Love our children as they journey into adulthood. We can't control their choices, but we can genuinely listen.
As for the online world, it's a brutal place. For me, Twitter became a near occasion of sin and I quit. I see others who are in danger, who love the clickbait and opprobrium more than is healthy. Again, we can be an example by disengaging.
Be as faithful as we can to the moral order and to our relationships. Trust in the Lord. Pray. These are within our power. Keep despair at bay as much as possible.
A fine essay. It's simultaneously liberating and banal to realize that sin is the real issue. After seeking for increasingly esoteric political grievances, finding the potential for evil in each human heart is both clarifying and frustrating. And not only that, but even after being delivered from sin we experience that continual slouch towards evil we call original sin. Sustained personal effort towards virtue and defense against lies about suffering are required. Thanks be to God for showing us that suffering is not futile, but can be supernaturally fruitful.
This is a fantastic read Dave, one of the best Substacks I've read. I think/feel the same way about what we face and we must/should do. It's a burden of great magnitude, knowing what we do, but it's a burden we must shoulder if we're to have a future at all.
What "sexual libertinism"? The only people getting lots of sex are porn actors, gays and the 1%. I have a bazillion single friends that get laid every 6 months. I agree that the modern world is degenerate as fuck, especailly in music and pornography (i think i've never ever seen well done pornography), but trust this young fella when i say the world of today is FAR from a big satanic orgy. Inceldom and blackpill got to extreme levels. Boys rather play video games than chase girls, and the boys are blaming everyone but themselves. The real menace is not some phantom "sexual libertinism", it's this black pill b.s that gets pushed by everyone on the right. We should be encouraging young men to have sex because they will naturally settle down and have a family when and if they do. I know a gran total of zero people who ever seen a heterossexual orgy. Where is this babylon you speak off?
What you're describing is the sexual libertinism. When anything goes, nothing matters, and you might as well stay home and play video games. A low trust, low responsibility, sterilized sexual economy equals sex becomes meaningless and then becoming non-existant. This is the Satanic orgy in the truest sense of the Satanic.
Yes, somewhere in the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes (in the character of a demon) something like this (don't remember the exact quote): the sweetest sin from the point of view of the devil is one where even the pleasure of the sin has been drained.
Exactly! And also from Lewis, but from The Abolition of Man or That Hideous Strength, he observes that the point of secual libertinism is not for people to have tons of sex but instead for sex to first become disconnected from reproduction, then to become meaningless, and then to be abandoned. Sexual libertinism is everyone being addicted to porn, an unsatisfying at sterile dating life of serial monogamy only out of a fear of being alone or a need for validation from another person, or sexual acts so far divorced from intercourse that they are hardly sex at all.
And all this actually did come from a wild sexual movement that did involve tons of casual sex, so OP is not really off the hook by pretending that didn't exist either. The sexual revolution was real too.
A lot more people believe in natural law than in Christian doctrine. Should they suspend disbelief, role-playing Christianity in order to be part of a community that believes in natural law?
You need something more than natural law, you need believe in a transcendent relationship. You either have that or are looking for it. I respect the seekers.
I agree that people need to believe in a transcendent relationship as well as in natural law.
So, here's the revised question: A lot more people believe in a transcendent relationship and in natural law than in Christian doctrine. Should they suspend disbelief, role-playing Christianity in order to be part of a community that believes in a transcendent relationship and in natural law?
It seems to me that its natural for, functional parents to try their best for their children, that men will prefer virgin women and women will seek men with resources. Outside corrupting influences, why wouldn't this make functional ethics and societies?
The women won't stick to their men long term unless the marriage is communally-authorized, communally-supported, and communally-enforced, though. So there has to be a community in which the family is embedded. And communities form around shared "transcendent relationships," as Dave says.
I was just pointing out that most people are never going to believe the Nicene Creed except in a role-playing way. The same with any other Creed -- I'm only singling that one out because it's the only live option for most people. Maybe role-playing is the way to go. Maybe it morphs into faith, or there's a blurry line between role-playing and faith so that it doesn't really matter.
Its a weird modern idea that you must first believe something to act on it. Human nature goes the other way: you know what virtue is. Starting acting on it. Belief, if you choose it, will come after, for most people. This is the biggest problem with the Jordan Peterson, Bishop Barron types. They think if you just understand and believe their knowledge, it will somehow make you s better person. In reality, you will never understand the truth in certain ways until after you have begun to act on it.
Don't convert to any Christian sect until after you start feeling some kind of faith. But start attending church now.
Also, there's a bit of advice from a Catholic theologian, I can't remember who: desiring to feel contrite, is the same thing as feeling contrite. Or in the words of a man from the Gospels: "I believe, help my unbelief." If you actually desire that you have faith, that is faith, by any definition that makes sense.
Just don't actually lie to yourself or other people. That is not virtue and will only make whatever lifestyle you choose to lead a facade, which will likely crumble in a messy divorce and mess up your kids.
Suspension of disbelief doesn't require lying to oneself or to other people. It just requires imagination. In the absence of this imaginative activity I don't see how anyone would be able to sit through a church-service without severe mental discomfort.
It's easy to believe that a primordial Self continually generates all other entities. It is not at all easy to believe in the trinitarian doctrine and in the proposal that a certain entity, Jesus, was both entirely human and entirely the primordial Self that continually generates all other entities. It is hardest of all to believe that anyone who does not believe those things will be tortured forever.
christianity isn’t necessarily trinitarian or even affirming of the hypostatic union (though I think it makes a lot more sense than the trinity and could explain it if you like), basic beliegs about god are heavily contested outside of catholicism and orthodox christianity, adoptionism, arianism, psilanthropism, socinianism, unitarianism, and gnosticism are just a few non trinitarian positions on the nature of god.
I'm just going to propose, again, that you feel that way because you have a modern notion of belief and also of reason. If those specific angles bother you, you have two choices. The way of the common man: accept the teaching of your spiritual betters as true but beyond your understanding, believe without trying grasp. Or the way of the inquirer: study, but not a little, deeply. A little knowledge is worse than none.
But all belief requires imagination by definition. As Aquinas himself points out, the only thing we can know by reason alone is that there is something which we call God. Beyond that, we must depend upon things besides reason. Even morality and the natural law are not based upon reason in the sense a modern person would mean. To the ancients, the natural order is obvious, not something to be deeply analyzed. And so on.
It is the 'announcement' before community that provides support and acceptance BY the community. If your "tribe" accepts that you two are married, then your marriage exists. Bed, hearth, breakfast, may be sufficient; speech before neighbors may do; $100,000 party with 1,500 "friends" may do. It's the community ACCEPTANCE that counts. And the community "peer" pressure that helps hold the line.
IF one or the other decide s/he wants to 'go find' ... self, happiness, fun, someone else, whatever... the strength of that community acceptance and pressure helps 'hold fast.' If that one still decides to undo the bond, the pledge before others, the community may and probably should decide that this was not acceptable -- and thus that person loses not only 'nuclear' family, but community and tribe -- and thereby safety from 'the tiger.'
I look with pleasure and hope on the "Bears" forming Beartaria... Men and women, ~their 30s, 'following' the "Big Bear" -- Owen Benjamin -- who left the libertine / Hollywood lifestyle (partly by choice, partly by censorship and shunning for his overtly rejecting as child abuse a father declaring his 4-yr-old was trans!) Owen and 'his folks' are doing all the things (sorry: vaguely) described here above. They are (to the extent they can) leaving cities and setting up homesteads, marrying and making children, investing in monogamy, most also in Christianity, setting back into place the kinds of social boundaries -- and social SUPPORT -- that our nation used to have. And quite successfully.
I used to tell the "girls" (mostly 30-somethings on my advice list) who swooned over Mr. Darcy and they SO wanted him to come calling, that there was a tradeoff required OF THEM to have men doused in formality and manners and marriage without her needing to protect against him leaving...
I'd direct them to go watch AGAIN -- and look specifically at the GIRL'S lives! The tradeoff FOR having a world of Mr Darcys and the society his kind created, was that the WOMEN had to be exceedingly restrained and polite; they did NOT get to go out to see Beyonce' and drinking after! They did not get to chase men and act the harridan. In today's world, they needed to act within artificial boundaries that they themselves drew around them: e.g., I insisted on chastity until 'ring-on-finger'; no moving in and giving up the status of a 'good woman' and giving him a free wife.
(And, mainly, I taught them HOW to gracefully say no to a man's importuning -- a skill no longer taught. A man has a 100% RIGHT to ask for sex without commitment; a woman has a right (and, I'd suggest, a duty!) to say no. Politely, gracefully, and because SHE was )and needed to be!) a prize he would need to win. Dating is for fun; COURTING is for marriage and for real!) Anyway -- it CAN be done. Look around -- talk to nephews and nieces, neighbors' kids if they'll let you... WE, who dropped a lot of the balls, need to start picking them in up ways big and small!
Enforcement is only one of the three things that I mentioned. I also mentioned authorization and support. And enforcement can consist merely in shaming; this will be sufficient for people who are, practically speaking, unable to leave the community.
Great Essay.
Thanks
Before I read this I read a tweet by Alaric the Barbarian about how Christianity isn't about avoiding sin but rather fighting it. The way sin promulgates is through apathy or acedia. Your essay shows that we are struggling because we would rather do what is easy and instant than what is hard and gradual. Great work as always Dave. Thank you.
Excellent essay.
“People don't like real work, hard conversations, real humility, and real reconciliation. But if we want actual solutions to our problems, as they exist, we have to be ready to pursue the hard things and undertake the heavy lifts that are in no way fun.”
So very true. The long march begins with first steps.
It will take a concerted effort from both men and women to resolve the dysfunction between the sexes. Women need to let go of their pain and distrust (no easy thing). Men reclaiming the role of leader will eventually help with this, but we must be willing to take on the additional burdens and responsibilities implied therein. Both will need to let go of their pride and do a great deal of soul-searching so that we can all find our way back to sanity. They’ll need also to show some patience for each other as they try to establish healthier relations. Taking on these extra burdens will not seem fair at times. But as you said, Dave, the question is not whether it’s fair, but how interested are we in fixing this?
As a parent trying to raise a child to avoid the traps of modernity that his mother and I fell for, the major challenge I see with the “shelter-in-place” strategy is achieving a degree of isolation. Before “the turn,” everything is still very much interconnected and there is little shelter from the relentless and powerful messages of the mainstream.
In "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" the hero and heroine find little satisfaction in the bacchanalia around them. They try to connect with people to whom they were close in the past. Eventually, at the end (spoiler) they connect with each other. Those two people sharing their final moment is all that matters.
In "The Last of Us", again, it's the connections. The Long, Long Time episode has a prepper ready to survive any apocalypse, but what he ends up needing is a human relationship. At the end of Season One, it's Joel and Ellie who've fought to foster a father/daughter relationship out of the apocalypse around them.
Storytellers know the answer, even if they don't realize it. The Communion of Persons is the best we can do and our highest goal for our time on earth. The first thing each of us can do, if we want that Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle to return, is stay married. Be an example. Love our children as they journey into adulthood. We can't control their choices, but we can genuinely listen.
As for the online world, it's a brutal place. For me, Twitter became a near occasion of sin and I quit. I see others who are in danger, who love the clickbait and opprobrium more than is healthy. Again, we can be an example by disengaging.
Be as faithful as we can to the moral order and to our relationships. Trust in the Lord. Pray. These are within our power. Keep despair at bay as much as possible.
Cheers.
A fine essay. It's simultaneously liberating and banal to realize that sin is the real issue. After seeking for increasingly esoteric political grievances, finding the potential for evil in each human heart is both clarifying and frustrating. And not only that, but even after being delivered from sin we experience that continual slouch towards evil we call original sin. Sustained personal effort towards virtue and defense against lies about suffering are required. Thanks be to God for showing us that suffering is not futile, but can be supernaturally fruitful.
The whole time I was reading this I kept saying to myself, "This is a picture the Gospel of Christ"
This is a fantastic read Dave, one of the best Substacks I've read. I think/feel the same way about what we face and we must/should do. It's a burden of great magnitude, knowing what we do, but it's a burden we must shoulder if we're to have a future at all.
Thanks Yiz !
Yw fren! Bless~
> Does that mean we must "RETVN" to Ozzie and Harriet?
Frankly, yes.
What "sexual libertinism"? The only people getting lots of sex are porn actors, gays and the 1%. I have a bazillion single friends that get laid every 6 months. I agree that the modern world is degenerate as fuck, especailly in music and pornography (i think i've never ever seen well done pornography), but trust this young fella when i say the world of today is FAR from a big satanic orgy. Inceldom and blackpill got to extreme levels. Boys rather play video games than chase girls, and the boys are blaming everyone but themselves. The real menace is not some phantom "sexual libertinism", it's this black pill b.s that gets pushed by everyone on the right. We should be encouraging young men to have sex because they will naturally settle down and have a family when and if they do. I know a gran total of zero people who ever seen a heterossexual orgy. Where is this babylon you speak off?
What you're describing is the sexual libertinism. When anything goes, nothing matters, and you might as well stay home and play video games. A low trust, low responsibility, sterilized sexual economy equals sex becomes meaningless and then becoming non-existant. This is the Satanic orgy in the truest sense of the Satanic.
Yes, somewhere in the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes (in the character of a demon) something like this (don't remember the exact quote): the sweetest sin from the point of view of the devil is one where even the pleasure of the sin has been drained.
Exactly! And also from Lewis, but from The Abolition of Man or That Hideous Strength, he observes that the point of secual libertinism is not for people to have tons of sex but instead for sex to first become disconnected from reproduction, then to become meaningless, and then to be abandoned. Sexual libertinism is everyone being addicted to porn, an unsatisfying at sterile dating life of serial monogamy only out of a fear of being alone or a need for validation from another person, or sexual acts so far divorced from intercourse that they are hardly sex at all.
And all this actually did come from a wild sexual movement that did involve tons of casual sex, so OP is not really off the hook by pretending that didn't exist either. The sexual revolution was real too.
Ordinarily when people write a book it gets organized into chapters. And where would yours be if it didn’t include zombies? 😄
A lot more people believe in natural law than in Christian doctrine. Should they suspend disbelief, role-playing Christianity in order to be part of a community that believes in natural law?
You need something more than natural law, you need believe in a transcendent relationship. You either have that or are looking for it. I respect the seekers.
I agree that people need to believe in a transcendent relationship as well as in natural law.
So, here's the revised question: A lot more people believe in a transcendent relationship and in natural law than in Christian doctrine. Should they suspend disbelief, role-playing Christianity in order to be part of a community that believes in a transcendent relationship and in natural law?
Why? Really why?
It seems to me that its natural for, functional parents to try their best for their children, that men will prefer virgin women and women will seek men with resources. Outside corrupting influences, why wouldn't this make functional ethics and societies?
The women won't stick to their men long term unless the marriage is communally-authorized, communally-supported, and communally-enforced, though. So there has to be a community in which the family is embedded. And communities form around shared "transcendent relationships," as Dave says.
I was just pointing out that most people are never going to believe the Nicene Creed except in a role-playing way. The same with any other Creed -- I'm only singling that one out because it's the only live option for most people. Maybe role-playing is the way to go. Maybe it morphs into faith, or there's a blurry line between role-playing and faith so that it doesn't really matter.
Its a weird modern idea that you must first believe something to act on it. Human nature goes the other way: you know what virtue is. Starting acting on it. Belief, if you choose it, will come after, for most people. This is the biggest problem with the Jordan Peterson, Bishop Barron types. They think if you just understand and believe their knowledge, it will somehow make you s better person. In reality, you will never understand the truth in certain ways until after you have begun to act on it.
Don't convert to any Christian sect until after you start feeling some kind of faith. But start attending church now.
Also, there's a bit of advice from a Catholic theologian, I can't remember who: desiring to feel contrite, is the same thing as feeling contrite. Or in the words of a man from the Gospels: "I believe, help my unbelief." If you actually desire that you have faith, that is faith, by any definition that makes sense.
Just don't actually lie to yourself or other people. That is not virtue and will only make whatever lifestyle you choose to lead a facade, which will likely crumble in a messy divorce and mess up your kids.
Suspension of disbelief doesn't require lying to oneself or to other people. It just requires imagination. In the absence of this imaginative activity I don't see how anyone would be able to sit through a church-service without severe mental discomfort.
It's easy to believe that a primordial Self continually generates all other entities. It is not at all easy to believe in the trinitarian doctrine and in the proposal that a certain entity, Jesus, was both entirely human and entirely the primordial Self that continually generates all other entities. It is hardest of all to believe that anyone who does not believe those things will be tortured forever.
christianity isn’t necessarily trinitarian or even affirming of the hypostatic union (though I think it makes a lot more sense than the trinity and could explain it if you like), basic beliegs about god are heavily contested outside of catholicism and orthodox christianity, adoptionism, arianism, psilanthropism, socinianism, unitarianism, and gnosticism are just a few non trinitarian positions on the nature of god.
I'm just going to propose, again, that you feel that way because you have a modern notion of belief and also of reason. If those specific angles bother you, you have two choices. The way of the common man: accept the teaching of your spiritual betters as true but beyond your understanding, believe without trying grasp. Or the way of the inquirer: study, but not a little, deeply. A little knowledge is worse than none.
But all belief requires imagination by definition. As Aquinas himself points out, the only thing we can know by reason alone is that there is something which we call God. Beyond that, we must depend upon things besides reason. Even morality and the natural law are not based upon reason in the sense a modern person would mean. To the ancients, the natural order is obvious, not something to be deeply analyzed. And so on.
Maybe you should read The Abolition of Man?
> I was just pointing out that most people are never going to believe the Nicene Creed except in a role-playing way. The same with any other Creed
Why not? People are perfectly willing to believe much more absurd things, like that the soul is reducible to matter, or that a man can become a woman.
why wouldn't women stay married without community enforcement? Being a woman happily married this makes no sense to me.
It is the 'announcement' before community that provides support and acceptance BY the community. If your "tribe" accepts that you two are married, then your marriage exists. Bed, hearth, breakfast, may be sufficient; speech before neighbors may do; $100,000 party with 1,500 "friends" may do. It's the community ACCEPTANCE that counts. And the community "peer" pressure that helps hold the line.
IF one or the other decide s/he wants to 'go find' ... self, happiness, fun, someone else, whatever... the strength of that community acceptance and pressure helps 'hold fast.' If that one still decides to undo the bond, the pledge before others, the community may and probably should decide that this was not acceptable -- and thus that person loses not only 'nuclear' family, but community and tribe -- and thereby safety from 'the tiger.'
I look with pleasure and hope on the "Bears" forming Beartaria... Men and women, ~their 30s, 'following' the "Big Bear" -- Owen Benjamin -- who left the libertine / Hollywood lifestyle (partly by choice, partly by censorship and shunning for his overtly rejecting as child abuse a father declaring his 4-yr-old was trans!) Owen and 'his folks' are doing all the things (sorry: vaguely) described here above. They are (to the extent they can) leaving cities and setting up homesteads, marrying and making children, investing in monogamy, most also in Christianity, setting back into place the kinds of social boundaries -- and social SUPPORT -- that our nation used to have. And quite successfully.
I used to tell the "girls" (mostly 30-somethings on my advice list) who swooned over Mr. Darcy and they SO wanted him to come calling, that there was a tradeoff required OF THEM to have men doused in formality and manners and marriage without her needing to protect against him leaving...
I'd direct them to go watch AGAIN -- and look specifically at the GIRL'S lives! The tradeoff FOR having a world of Mr Darcys and the society his kind created, was that the WOMEN had to be exceedingly restrained and polite; they did NOT get to go out to see Beyonce' and drinking after! They did not get to chase men and act the harridan. In today's world, they needed to act within artificial boundaries that they themselves drew around them: e.g., I insisted on chastity until 'ring-on-finger'; no moving in and giving up the status of a 'good woman' and giving him a free wife.
(And, mainly, I taught them HOW to gracefully say no to a man's importuning -- a skill no longer taught. A man has a 100% RIGHT to ask for sex without commitment; a woman has a right (and, I'd suggest, a duty!) to say no. Politely, gracefully, and because SHE was )and needed to be!) a prize he would need to win. Dating is for fun; COURTING is for marriage and for real!) Anyway -- it CAN be done. Look around -- talk to nephews and nieces, neighbors' kids if they'll let you... WE, who dropped a lot of the balls, need to start picking them in up ways big and small!
Enforcement is only one of the three things that I mentioned. I also mentioned authorization and support. And enforcement can consist merely in shaming; this will be sufficient for people who are, practically speaking, unable to leave the community.
I'm glad that you're happily married.
Most marriages have rough patches.
it’s a commitment/responsibility, everyone desires to part from their promise’s eventually, it’s only human nature
Natural law was derived from Christian doctrine.