Where do we go from here?

There isn’t much left for the archaeologists to study. Most of the great cities from before the fall have long since been mined for their their high concentrations of scarce aluminum and steel. They are able to piece together evidence of cavernous athletic stadiums among the ruins of most of the larger ancient cities. They deduce that people from this period might have worshiped athletic prowess. They learn a lot sifting through the massive rubbish heaps. The fact that the archaeologists will need to wear hazmat gear speaks volumes. There are even archaeologists specialized in nuclear physics trying to make sense of the radioactive material left behind. Whether they find this material well contained or widely dispersed is still an open question. Either way, they will get a sense of the general disregard we had for future inhabitants. These highly specialized archaeologists might back-calculate the cumulative strength of humanity’s nuclear arsenal and conclude that our civilization ended in a nuclear winter. This is another open question at the moment.

Records from this period could be scarce. It’s hard to say whether much of the digital information stored in large data centers today will be preserved indefinitely considering their huge demands for electricity and cooling water. After periods of neglect it is conceivable that the data might not be recoverable. Oddly, the information age could become a digital dark age. If the contents of these data centers do became unreadable this might actually reflect better on us. Future generations might be more willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. But it’s possible that technologies not yet invented might allow for more permanent archival of the digital information. Suppose these archaeologist stumble upon the entire internet perfectly persevered. Many of their questions about us would be answered. They would immediately see that a large portion of the information infrastructure was devoted to pornography while social media and marketing were the other major components. Imagine historians pouring over social media to get an idea of what life was like leading up to the global collapse. They’ll find society preoccupied with ‘bread and circuses’ right up until the moment things fell apart. Historians will find people who are disembedded from both their ancestors and descendants. They’ll see traditions disregarded. They’ll be appalled by the way children warehouse their aging parents in institutions. They’ll see a society casually incurring debts they can never repay. They’ll come to loath all the grifter politicians. It will be clear that nihilism and narcissism played a part in the collapse. All this will give the archeologists important clues about what their ancestors endured leading up to the great cultural collapse.

People will wonder how a society as advanced as ours could let this happen. Historians will be disturbed to learn that ethics and culture became subordinate to politics and economics. They will be amazed at how nations scratched and clawed their way out from under the sin of racial segregation only for the same progressive forces which fought to dismantle legal segregation and racial animus to turn around and champion re-segregation into various affinity groups. They will be amazed at how deranged mainstream institutions became as educators, journalists, corporate interests, and even clergy embraced these divisive identarian politics at a time when racial hegemony was in decline.⁴Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe how this works in modern universities today in their book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’… “By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, identify more distinct identity groups, and see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent.” Students of history will be perplexed at how people gave up on classically liberal traditions, the very aspects that offered the best hope for a racially pluralistic society, and instead embraced false constructions of reality. Pseudo-realities emerged, reinforced with paralogic and paramorality, which were socially enforced. They used linguistic distortions to prop up these alternate versions of reality. Reason and logic were deemed unreliable. Common sense was denigrated and science was replaced by a form of scientism. People became wholly unconcerned with facts and were unwilling, or unable, to change their minds. Dissenters weren’t just wrong, they were evil. It’s not just that people held different opinions; they couldn’t even agree on the facts themselves. Witnesses to the same event couldn’t agree on what they saw. People might disagree on who won a ball game or an election, or what a specific piece of legislation said. Even the most ludicrous positions were reinforced as it was always possible to find someone willing to confirm every conspiratorial idea. Of course there was no shortage of bad actors who nurtured unreasonable doubt and cynicism. Divergent versions of history emerged. The meaning of historical documents changed even though their exact wording was perfectly preserved. Things meant whatever people wanted them to mean. This became enshrined in the legal system. Ministries of truth were established to contort the truth in service to power. Scholarship was instrumentalized to reinforce a predetermined narrative following the Marxist playbook. The academic suicide has parallels in the Islamic world which had achieved advanced scholarship before a decision to subordinate all knowledge to Koranic studies in the 12th century led to its intellectual death.⁵Tamim Ansary, Destiny Denied: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes But in this case it happened to be a new secular religion subordinating all knowledge to the inner self. Truth came to be defined by one’s desires, completely self-defined and untethered to any cosmological or metaphysical framework. Man became the autonomous ruler of himself. This was the death of the western world. It was years in the making. And it would ultimately drag the whole world down with it.

Deception was ingrained in everything. Political speech, advertising, and even basic online service agreements were no exception. Loopholes were intentionally left open. Blackmail and bribery become part of the cost of doing business just like network security and physical security are. The proliferation of special interest groups should’ve been a clue that power had replaced justice as the organizing principle.⁶Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction The average person becomes so used to being bamboozled by scams and telemarketers that they stop answering their phone when it rings. Instead of lives being more open and connected, people withdraw. Nothing is ever done to identify and expose the spammers so they become bolder. The most talented architects of these scams find jobs within financial institutions and marketing agencies. Customers are no longer seen as people to serve, but as consumers to manipulate. They market the same products under different brands at several price points to capture as much market share as possible. But it’s all smoke and mirrors. They stop trying to create anything of real value. Rather than create more robust and durable products, engineering departments devote resources to concepts like “planned obsolescence” to ensure future demand. They employ addiction specialists who coach them on how to dribble out new features to stimulate unarticulated desires to guarantee sales for next year’s model. Advertising employs state of the art mind hacks, only slightly more subtle than mass hypnosis. People aren’t educated, but rather groomed to be highly suggestible. They lack any real will-power “in the sense of self-control and self-motivation, but not of will in the sense of acquisitive greed and desire to manipulate.”⁷Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary It’s a world in which the most successful governments and businesses “are mills for the mass production of deceit.”⁸Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Of course we lie not just to manipulate, but to hide the bad things we know we have done. Pornography is promoted as harmless. Countless souls become ensnared. There’s shock when a neighbor or coworker or even family member is busted for distributing child porn. Is it really any wonder though considering they were introduced to this when they were only children? Desires are formed within this milieu. Online platforms may be zealous about policing the bounds of speech, yet they are unwilling or unable to shutdown solicitation of minors. Untold numbers of damaged individuals are left in the wake. Society has no idea how to rehabilitate perpetrators or provide redress to their victims. There is no technological solution for that yet. A morality unmoored from anything fixed struggles to even articulate why certain behavior is abhorrent. As fast as norms are changing, it’s possible to imagine the acceptance even of pedophiles as being true to their inner self.

Another way we lie is by choosing not to see things as they are. People increasingly choose to believe lies. We all become willing participants in the deceit. No institution is strong enough to withstand this. Journalism gives up trying to represent reality in a way that informs the public, opting instead for a more lucrative model that requires reporters to provoke readers. Journalists, and all sorts of other opportunists who go by the name, transform opinions into facts in order to manufacture enough outrage to inspire readers to cross their paywall in support of their causes. They become activists protecting ‘vulnerable’ readers from ‘harmful’ opinions. Initially these distortions are troubling to many. That’s because some people still remember a time when they could trust the newspapers. The outrage subsides as people forget. Eventually, people become cynical of anything authorities tell them, much like in the old Soviet Union when people learned to ignore Pravda. It’s not only the press that is corrupted. Academics find that it is much easier to tear down than to build up. Coming up with new ideas or building something novel proves to be too taxing. Many find that the safest path to tenure is by attacking established ideas and accepted norms. Critical Theory becomes the preferred framework across most fields. This relieves faculty from the burden of creating new knowledge. All they need to do is challenge old ideas. Hacks flock to these once venerable institutions of learning to chip away their piece of the spoils. They fail to see that condemning classic ideas and even whole cultures is just as irresponsible and simplistic as the unconditional admiration of them which they staunchly oppose.

What cannot go on forever won’t. All the grand narratives begin to fall… Providence; man in the image of God; one nation indivisible; the idea of a promised land where something better awaits us and actual strategies exist that we can employ to get us there; and even the notion that there is only one truth and it is discoverable. Impossible to sustain or unpopular to defend, each unifying narrative crumbles. Distinctions between mankind and god and between mankind and beast are obliterated. The given nature of man and woman becomes deeply suspect. People are taught to not recognize the obvious, that a person comes in the form of man and woman and these two forms are purposed to become a husband and father or wife and mother and that this demands commitment to the family unit from which larger social structures are built to reflect the political, economic, and spiritual needs of the family. Staples of classic liberalism like freedom of expression and freedom of religion are no longer assumed. A highly skeptical world has replaced these pillars with new dogmas.⁹E.g., the crusading desire to right perceived wrongs” or the “weaponization of identity” according to Douglas Murray in The Madness of Crowds. New narratives are beginning to form, but these tend to lack the power to unite, e.g. the myth of progress, the myth of human self-definition, and the myth the man disembedded from nature. They re-purpose Christian ideals when it suites them and dismiss those same ideals as oppressive whenever they please. They make non-falsifiable claims¹⁰E.g., many today make the racist claim that every white person is racist., excusing favored groups and condemning those they disfavor, and they couch it as some progressive movement toward justice and tolerance. Identity and intersectionality games that grant certain privileges on the basis of group status rather than competency guarantee a certain level of incompetence. Services inevitably become degraded. Chaos emerges bit by bit. Resentment piles up.¹¹“Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything, as the shared society and negotiated order of the household reveals itself as inadequate, or disintegrates, in the face of the unexpected and threatening. Everybody whistles in the dark, instead. Communication would require admission of terrible emotions: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace. But in the background, in Billy Bixbee’s house, and in all that are like it, the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. It lifts the very household from its foundations.” -Jordan Peterson, Twelve Rules for Life

The resentment and lack of trust becomes debilitating. Negotiation and compromise become impossible. Contradictions abound.¹²E.g. A drunk driver might be charged with two counts of homicide after killing a woman en route to a legally sanctioned abortion. Or governments might justify domestic trade restrictions as “protection” while applying similar restrictions for the entirely different purpose of “sanctioning” another nation as if the degree of economic restriction somehow produces an opposite effect. Or people, treating their own bigotry as liberation, who come to believe that a white European male living during a time when women and minorities were oppressed could have nothing to say to us today which isn’t substantively different from prejudiced whites saying there is nothing to learn from non-white cultures. When trust breaks down lenders require information brokers to help them evaluate risk. Agencies emerge to keep detailed records of people’s transactions and note any defaults. What these credit agencies say about a person determines whether someone qualifies for a loan and it sets the lending rate for that individual. This is intended to keep people honest and is welcomed by all parties since it allows a person’s loan rate to be calculated independent of the swindler down the street. When we cannot trust our neighbor to do right we have no choice but to trust these brokers to accurately report payment histories and use this sensitive information only as it was intended. Of course, aggregating this much information makes these credit agencies prime targets. Nonetheless, the service they provide to facilitate lending appears to be worth the risk. It’s only a matter of time before the power to determine who can own land or start a businesses proves to be too much. In an era when dissenters aren’t just wrong, but evil, any means of keeping evil at bay is justified. But the ledger is difficult to game and errors can be disputed. More subjective measures are needed. Initially busy bodies take it upon themselves to root out heretics, scouring public information to identify ideological deviants. Soon the tech industry lends its artificial intelligence to the problem by flagging wrongthink and manipulating search results so that heterodox views disappear. They seek and destroy those causing people harm. They will need to redefine what constitutes harm since their targets are ideas.¹³Redefining the meaning of ‘harm’ is effortless in the age of nominalism. Anyone who steps out of line is suspect. Saying the wrong thing can cost a person their job. Even their housing options might be limited. Initially, those on record saying something provocative will be denied entrance into elite colleges and other prestigious institutions. Eventually they’ll be shut out of all institutions, not only the elite ones. It won’t matter if the thing that draws the ire occurred in their youth. It won’t even matter if the thing they are accused of actually happened. An accusation is enough to taint someone. If a person is bothersome or challenges those in power they must be discredited. In fact, if it’s determined with enough confidence that a person is engaged in wrongthink or simply poses enough of a risk they’ll be presumed guilty. There is no need to wait for a mistep. Evidence can be conjured up with deep fake technologies.¹⁴An immersive project by the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality demonstrates new technologies “In Event of Moon Disaster” that “bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth” to create an alternative history. People will beg for something like a social credit system, preferring that to an arbitrary cancel culture with ever-changing rules that retroactively destroy people. They’ll willingly sanction a social credit system if it affords a few common sense reforms like weighing recent offenses more heavily than youthful indiscretions and providing a means to re-establish credit after some prescribed amount of penance. People will trust the social credit score over their own eyes. Just because my neighbor is always polite and even plows my driveway whenever it snows doesn’t mean his son is fit to date my daughter.¹⁵For an example of this distorted thinking see Virginia Heffernan, ’What can you do about the Trumpites next door?’ Los Angeles Times Better check his social credit to determine that. People will opt into this social credit scheme, but there will be no opting out. Social credit will be used to bully people into silence and fake compliance. No one will dare express their true views in public. People will be forced to submit to doublethink. For example, “Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.”¹⁶Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies They are conditioned to believe in a world where numerical abstractions and amoral power are more real than our actual experience of value, purpose, and meaning.

One thing that will baffle historians is how people got so caught up in magical thinking, expecting society to display virtues that individual members lacked and even scorned. Individuals were encouraged to be selfishly hedonistic, but society was somehow expected to be charitable and just. They thought they could practice vice virtuously. They thought they could serve their own appetites and yet remain free. They delegated literature and art to the chronically depressed and nihilistic. They cultivated cold calculating machines expecting this to provide warmth and beauty. They saw society convulsing but never connected it to their own sickness. They cheered the demise of the family as if the fate of the family was completely unconnected from the fate of their civilization. They failed to see a connection between their beliefs and these outcomes because belief was seen as mere expression of personal preference rather than a set of claims about the nature of reality. But by holding up the expressive individual as an ideal they are in fact making a profound claim. Anyone who subscribes to this has adopted the religious precept in which he views himself as the autonomous ruler of himself, able to determine right and wrong. This may be the greatest feat of magical thinking ever contrived. Sentiment is his supreme source of authority. Subjective feelings are sanctified, giving him absolute certainty in his convictions. He uses the word ‘just’ to describe whatever is emotionally desirable. Virtue is whatever he finds pleasant or useful. Any constraint put on him, including truth, is a violation of his freedom. If people are their own god, they must transgress all apparent limits since the one thing an omnipotent god lacks is limitation. One’s freedom then ultimately depends on the degree of power the person has over all external constraints. That includes power over other people. If the individual can do as he pleases, why shouldn’t the commissar do as he pleases?¹⁷ A question posed by Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction Man ultimately finds himself at war with nature and culture and anyone who stands in the way of his self glorification.¹⁸ Most people wouldn’t describe their life as a self-glorification project. The majority have not read Herbert Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich and are not all that familiar with Marxist-Freudian storylines. But these philosophies have infiltrated the modern social imaginary nonetheless. Carl B. Trueman outlines several of these trajectories in modern thought in his book ‘The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self’. Trueman specifically identifies the reimagining of the self with an inward focus; the primacy of expressive individualism in which authenticity is achieved through the public display of inward desires; and suspicion of culture as an oppressive force rather than something that is largely formative. Truth is a hurdle that must be overcome to maintain his sovereignty. He turns reason around on itself, drafting it into service to calculate the best means to satisfy whatever end is desired. Institutions once oriented outward towards something larger than the individual became subordinate to the individual’s sense of inner well-being. Instead of teaching various practices and disciplines and molding character to prepare individuals to take their place in society, schools and churches become places of performance where people display themselves to the world. They become “places where one goes to perform, not be formed – or, perhaps better, where one goes to be formed by performing.”¹⁹Carl B. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self The individual becomes his own de facto meaning maker. And since personal preferences are beyond the bounds of rational scrutiny, falsehoods about the nature of reality go unquestioned. Any consequences of such lies are blamed on others because of an inability to see any connection between outcomes and beliefs. These expressive individuals are ultimately unable to express themselves as words take on divergent meetings. They’ve only managed to construct a Tower of Babel.

It proves impossible to take this contrived meaning seriously, knowing full well the arbitrary nature of its source. So society is left with no real basis for morality or meaning. A sense of boredom and loneliness feeds a craving for novelty and stimulation. The body comes “to be viewed as a machine, and the natural world as a heap of resource to be exploited.”²⁰Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary Nihilism is the default, yet people act shocked when this nihilism lashes out in the form of mass shootings or epidemics of suicide. What’s more, this idea of the sovereign self inverts love into a type of pathological abandonment. At its pinnacle, love is the giving of oneself up for another.²¹John 15:13 But now love comes to be seen as just another subjective feeling linked to chemicals in the brain. Love then has as much authority as all the other sentiments. In other words, total authority. The feeling is both tyrannical and fleeting. And so when the chemicals inevitably subside and the feeling wanes, love ceases and so does our obligation and duty to the other. Love eventually gets inverted and collapsed in on itself. This concave form of love is characterized by ‘giving others up for oneself.’ According to this, if I’m not happy in my marriage then the wife and kids must go. The further we go along the path from ‘love as self-sacrifice’ to ‘love as sentiment’ the more unsettled things become. Herbert Schlossberg points out that when individual autonomy is affirmed and the primacy of sentiment rules, “there can be no complaint when the grossest brutalities are committed in the name of serving the poor, the nation, the purity of the race, the supremacy of religion, or other values that are deemed to be ‘high’…There is no bar to Hitler. There is no bar in sentiment to killing some people if it benefits others.”²²Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction

This is the scene of the enlightenment project gone awry. The self is elevated beyond any reasonable measure. Gradually the familiar scenery begins to change as we barrel along in this tragic delusion. We start to exhaust the reservoirs of belief and commitment and meaning that once sustained us. Accumulations of practice and experience, i.e., culture and tradition, are no longer passed to future generations. Social pathologies begin to manifest. Self-contradictions pop up everywhere. The light begins to dim.

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist paints a picture of what things might look like as we become further dis-integrated from the world itself.²⁶Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary Wisdom becomes too nebulous for us to grasp. So there is a greater emphasis on knowledge. Information becomes a surrogate for knowledge as we grow increasingly proficient at processing information. So we disassemble the world into computable bits. We start to view the world as merely a collection of parts. Skills are reduced to algorithms. Knowledge and the economy become more and more specialized. We fixate on metrics like ‘growth’ and ‘efficiency’ while the broader picture is lost. Knowledge won through hard fought experience is no longer prized. In fact, it becomes incomprehensible. So instead we substitute paper qualifications. Work ceases to contact things that are ‘real’. Instead it involves plans, engagement strategies, system architectures, information management, and bureaucratic policies and procedures. More time is spent documenting or justifying what was done than actually doing. Bureaucrats efficiently follow rote procedures with little understanding of what the procedures actually mean. The whole system grows brittle as we become more and more dependent on databases, computing, and connectivity. We cannot conduct commerce or mount a defense against invaders without these technologies. Whole industries exist to prop them up, ‘hardening’ virtual environments from inherent vulnerabilities. People who are surrounded by wealth and can freely walk about their neighborhoods with hardly any threat of extortion or kidnapping choose to spend huge chunks of their lives online where bullying, doxing, and resentiment are rampant. They are afraid to send their child to the store at the end of the block, but they send them out into this virtual landscape without even the equivalent of a can of mace. Instead of questioning this logic, they double down on technologic solutions to problems created by technology itself. They build virtual firewalls. They fight lies with censorship having given up on truth. Algorithms are used to moderate discourse. Anything on the fringe is deemed a threat and must be removed from search results, made to disappear. Pretty soon the bounds of acceptable speech narrow to the point that even widely held beliefs are considered marginal.

After marinating inside these machines, we start to approach the real world as if it were a machine. Increases in speed and scale are seen as unquestionably good. We neglect the fact that “changes in scale, speed and precision in the real world all change the quality of the experience, and the ways in which we interact with one another: increasing them no longer gives a clearly positive outcome – it can even be very damaging,” says Iain McGilchrist. “In human affairs, increasing the amount or extent of something, or the speed with which something happens, or the inflexible precision with which it is conceived or applied, can actually destroy.”²⁷ibid. We become highly proficient at manipulating numbers but less inclined to know what the numbers mean. In order to compute ‘solutions,’ qualitative responses to the things around us are turned into an inflexible binary, or at best are reduced to simple matters of degree. Matthew Crawford points out the absurdity of this logic by noting that a pure cost benefit analysis would conclude that stealing from someone is essentially neutral since the degree of loss matches the degree of gain by the thief.²⁸Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head And if the thief pledges a portion of his haul to charity some would even argue there is a net benefit to the world. This sounds far fetched, but its the same logic bureaucrats invoke to justify all sorts of appropriation schemes. They mask their graft with numbers and appeals to “science.” It is impossible to oppose these schemes without a more robust understanding of the common good that is more nuanced than simply the greatest good for the greatest number. We conspire in our own annihilation when we make each other objects for manipulation by these algorithms. This might seem dramatic. But understand algorithms are being employed on unmanned drones to identify and eliminate targets.²⁹Peter Finn, ‘A future for drones: automated killing’, The Washington Post These drones mete out death to individuals who are never charged or tried. The identities of targets aren’t always known. Instead they’re identified by their patterns of behavior, associations, and contacts. Bystanders and those mistakenly targeted are written off as collateral damage in wars that were never declared and fought indefinitely on battlefields that have no geographical limits. Most concerning is this outsourcing of judgment and responsibility to machines. Consider that the same type of software is used to determine the extent that humans are allowed to discuss this and other important issues on social media.

When an increasingly desperate populous inevitably lashes out recklessly and nihilistically, again technological solutions are always the answer. No one thinks to ask why this particular (anti)culture produces so many lost and disillusioned individuals who sometimes become unhinged, or why mental health treatment so often makes them worse instead of better. They point out that suicide is preventable. But preventable by whom? None of their policy solutions make any difference. Could it be their mechanistic model of the brain is the thing that is flawed? Nonetheless, they double down calling for increased surveillance and further curtailment of liberty. Liberty might receive lip service, but it always takes a backseat to the goal of panoptical control. All communications must be intercepted. All movements and associations must be monitored. It’s for our own good. Many welcome this. They enthusiastically embrace technologies that enable them to anonymously snitch on their neighbors and seem genuinely perplexed when the technology turns against them.

Like technology, bureaucracy flourishes as a means of controlling and manipulating the world around us. Technocratic attempts to circumvent authentic character formation employ thinly veiled attempts to “nudge” people to “act” virtuously. ‘Choice architects’, who may not have our best interest in mind, act with no accountability to manipulate us in ways we do not even perceive. Policy solutions are proposed for problems that are moral and spiritual in nature like sexism or racism. As any parent knows, children are unique and different situations call for different measures. But this sense of uniqueness gets lost in the push for standardization. Justice gets reduced to equality. Laws and regulations become over explicit when there is no shared sense of implied moral responsibility to one another. Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘soft despotism’ becomes more real every day with its “network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules”.³⁰Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America This over-explicit language also applies to art and religion. And with it comes a loss of metaphorical power. Anything that inspires awe or wonder is suspect. Religion is treated as pure fantasy. Anyone exemplifying values other than power and control, either in art or in life, is not tolerated. Historical figures and literary heroes are targeted and undercut. The physical embodiment of these cultural memories becomes insufferable. The toppling of statues and banning of books is sure to follow. Assaults on these symbols are an affront on the values they embody. Their defilement or removal is a type of enforced forgetting. Cultural memory is devalued and dismissed to make way for a future society held together solely by human will.

Eventually, people would loose their godlike power to determine their own meaning. Meaning becomes synonymous with utility. And morality would be reduced to a utilitarian calculation based on some subjective idea of what is good as determined by the über powerful. Material things are emphasized at the expense of living beings. “Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible.”³¹Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary People are treated as interchangeable and expendable. Exploitation supplants cooperation as the default relationship between people. Building resentiment puts a greater emphasis on uniformity and equality. Equality of outcome, what is meant by the term ‘equity’ today, transcends all other goods. But since interests and abilities are far from uniform, elaborate interventions must be imposed in the vain attempt to achieve the illusive ‘equity’. Inequity is everywhere and this overly simplistic univariate explanation attributes it all to discrimination. The idea that everyone is racist turns everyone into racists.³²For example, in his widely popular book ‘How to be Anti-Racist’, Ibram X Kendi writes, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Identity gets distilled into categories like race, sex, socioeconomic status, and their intersections. All these groups come to see themselves in competition with, and resentful of, the others. This is a recipe for paranoia and a breakdown of trust among individuals and between groups as well as between the governed and those who govern.³³Governance itself may look very different. The state may continue its monopoly on the use of force, but other less accountable entities might govern in the way that culture typically regulates society by setting norms of behavior. Media, academia, and powerful corporations may prove to be much more effective governance structures in many regards than the state. These could provide arguably more effective means for control. For example, individuals or businesses could be denied the use of online payment systems, companies might be barred from online marketplaces like app stores, dissenting voices could be barred from social media, HR departments might cross reference industry blacklists to appease the social media mob. The targeted individuals have almost no recourse. As quasi-private entities it would be easier for them to skirt constitutional protections while acting on their own volition, in collusion with others, or in response to pressure from the state or other regulatory, accreditation, or finance structures. This type of governance is likely to appear arbitrary and may prove to be rather fickle as self-interested parties jockey for power and control. Individual responsibility is downplayed as powerful actors seize more and more control. Anything beyond our control would be seen as threatening. Accidents and illnesses would have to be blamed on someone. Death would become taboo since it is the ultimate challenge to our control and robs life of meaning. Death would be written out of literature and art. Few would dare speak of it. Those having to face death would do so largely on their own.

Benedict is no better off than anyone else, but he freely shares what knowledge he has. No matter how much of it he gives, his own knowledge is never depleted. This is the thing about intellect, it reveals abundance. When he discovers new medicines or finds ways to feed more people it benefits all. This abundance spreads like fire. The intellect contains a creative potential. It conjures up all sorts of things. And by better understanding the things that are made, we gain an understanding of the One who made them. Creation itself means something. It signifies. It speaks.³⁸“So let us not be afraid to plumb the depths of the mysteries of the world. Let us build institutions of education, or research, of exploration, in the full confidence that what we’ll learn will not contradict our faith, but will speak of God’s abundant majesty and grace. Let us explore that we may be more, that we may serve more, that we may know and love God more, that we may wonder at His magnificence.” -Stephen Grabill, David Michael Phelps, Evan Coons, and Stephen Pell, For the Life of the World, Letter to the Exiles Series, Acton Institute, 2014 There is something about light, about water, about bread, about life, and even about death that speaks of the one who made everything from nothing. Knowledge becomes wisdom when it recognizes the Creator as Benedict has. And in learning his true nature as gift giver, Benedict toils in service to others. It matters not whether he is a second class citizen or a slave. He creates goods and services enjoyed by others. He appears to be toiling alone. But he doesn’t see it that way. He sees work as the blending of the creativity of his mind with the creativity of others. He sees it as the blending of the labor of his body with the labor of others. He sees it as relational. He sees it for the gift it is. He shares the products of his work with others in free and open exchange. To him work is not merely a way to provide for himself. The economy is not an impersonal force for efficiency or a lever of control. It’s not an impersonal machine. Work is creative service. Work is communal. Economic activity is relational. This mysterious collaboration is a “glorious opportunity to join with others, literally millions of others, in the divine project of a vast creativity, vast abundance, for the meeting of needs, for the flourishing of cities, for the life of the world.”³⁹Stephen Grabill, David Michael Phelps, Evan Coons, and Stephen Pell, For the Life of the World, Letter to the Exiles Series, Acton Institute, 2014 He sees every product, every purchase for what it is; “a touch point, a nexus of millions of relationships.”⁴⁰ibid. Value is found in the relationship of exchange. The fruit of his work is found in relationship with countless others. Work is a reminder that he is not alone and was never meant to be.

Benedict lives in a world of substantial hurt and dysfunction. It is a world that is broken and cries out for order. It is a neglected garden in need of someone to tend to it, creating conditions that allow the possibility of fruit. Frankly, it is a world in which trust requires a heroic act of courage. What hope could there possibly be for justice? Nonetheless, Benedict looks at those who despise him and spit on him with generosity and compassion. He sees something within his neighbors that they cannot see themselves. He sees their creative potential, their capacity to be gifts to the world. He sees their dignity. He is willing to give himself away to keep that memory alive. He puts their glory on his back. It’s a load that suffocates any pridefulness within him. He knows that even the dullest person he meets may one day become such an everlasting splendor that he’d be tempted to fall down and worship, or else an immortal horror so corrupted as to belong only in a nightmare. There are no ordinary people, only “immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”⁴¹“It is possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most interesting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations cultures, arts, civilizations – those are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and that is, in fact the merriest kind) which exist between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners – no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory And to some degree he is helping them become one or the other. Somehow this does not make him perpetually solemn. With this knowledge comes appreciation. He doesn’t see people for what they can do for him, but for what they are. He doesn’t see creation as something spoiled and rotten, but as something to be imbibed and enjoyed. He has developed a palate for what is good. He beholds spoiled grapes and tastes wine. Because he is a stranger in this strange land, he knows no stranger. He makes space at his table for all, knowing that he can give more than outward necessities. He can give the look of love which they crave.⁴²Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est He understands that the justice that he deeply desires requires love.

Just imagine if there were ten men and women like Benedict. Imagine the impact that would have on a community. While other’s fight over scraps, they see beyond scarcity. While families break apart they offer healing and harmony in God’s family. They become fathers to the fatherless. Like Christ’s body, they are beaten and bruised yet they give themselves freely. Their response to His divine plan is simply, ‘Let it be.’ Their bodies are offered as a gift for the life of the world. They go to work cultivating the conditions necessary for society to flourish, realizing that this is generational work and they might not live to taste the fruit borne of their efforts. Nonetheless, they become curators of order. God sustains them in each moment. When faced with His eternal power and glory in this grand collaboration they are reminded of their own humility. They learn to fear the Lord. This is the beginning of wisdom. Theirs is a lived memory of God pouring himself out and so they continually offer themselves back to Him. It might sound like drudgery, but it’s not. It’s more like a perpetual feast. They not only have the ability to look back, but to see forward. They have eyes to see the not yet in the now. The oak is apparent in the acorn. They are the embodiment of hope. Hope begins to spread like fire from community to community and from generation to generation. Their collective gifts comprise the gift that is the Church. This small but mighty contingent of saints joins themselves through Christ’s body, his Church. Their participation has nothing to do with pursuing competing and incompatible ends like security, prosperity, or peace of mind. They don’t even necessarily seek personal atonement. Instead, their participation is solely for the glorification of their Creator and Savior. They don’t treat worship as some “mass therapy session” or a “pep rally” to get people through the week ahead.⁴³In his short book ‘Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World’, Jonathan R. Wilson offers a ‘litmus test’ for worship: if the things we seek through worship can be attained apart from worship that is an indication our worship is disordered. That is not the true church, merely a religious edifice through which we encounter the same old secular world. Remembering that God is all and in all, worship must simply be always, and only, directed at glorifying God. It is irrelevant whether worship is in a ‘high’ liturgical form or a less formal ‘low’ style of worship as long as the worship means participation in the body of Christ, the one intrinsic good that worship does provide. This is the key.

The Church is the passageway through which we meet Christ and His Kingdom. The Church rejects the religious divide, remembering that “God is all and in all” and man’s whole life depends “on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God.“⁴⁴Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World There was no need for any Temple built in stone.⁴⁵Christ’s body is not like temples built in stone. Rather, temples built in stone are ‘like’ Christ’s body. “Christ’s Body, the Church itself, the new people gathered in Him, was the only real temple.”-Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World There is no geography to hold sacred. These things are all in the past.⁴⁶In a profound sense, Christ brought an end to all religion. The new testament never presents Christianity as a cult or a new religion. Religion is only necessary when there is a wall separating God and man. Christ, who is both God and man, broke down this wall. It was this freedom from religion among the early church that led pagans to accuse Christians of atheism according to Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World Instead, the Church looks out and surveys the fallen world and is astonished. It’s a world strangely bifurcated into the “spiritual” and the “material,” the “sacred” and the “profane,” the “religious” and the “secular.” It’s as if people imagine the material world existing adjacent to some spiritual “superstructure.” Religion accepts this reduction of God to an area called “sacred”. We commonly mistake secularism for the absence of religion.⁴⁷The term ‘religion’ was originally related to life under monastic vows. Only relatively recently has it come to mean something like a unified system of beliefs about the sacred, which most certainly applies to secularism. This modern definition of religion assumes “the reduction of God to an area called ‘sacred’ (’spiritual,’ ‘supernatural’) — as opposed to the world as ‘profane.’” as Alexander Schmemann says. “It is, in fact, itself a religion, and as such, an explanation of death and a reconciliation with it.”⁴⁸Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World Secularism “is the religion of those who are tired of having the world explained in terms of an ‘other world’ of which no one knows anything, and life explained in terms of a ‘survival’ about which no one has the slightest idea; tired of having, in other words, life given ‘value’ in terms of death. Secularism is rather an ‘explanation’ of death in terms of life.”⁴⁹ibid The only world the secularist knows is this world and the only life given to them is this life and so it is up to them to make life as meaningful, as rich, and as happy as possible. The core tenet of this faith is that “life ends with death.”⁵⁰ibid It is a rather odd and non-falsifiable eschatology that rationalizes death. They speak of death by natural causes, but the truth is there is no such thing as a ‘natural death’. Anyone who has looked upon a corpse and been unsettled knows that death is not normal; that a body devoid of life is not natural; and that form without content is vapid. The Church understands that death is abnormal and thus truly horrible. The secularist is correct in thinking that religion cannot heal or redeem the fallen world. But secularism, with its peculiar divide with the sacred, is without a doubt ‘religious.’ The Church is something else entirely. Christ’s sacrifice abolished religion because it destroyed that wall separating the natural and supernatural, the profane and the sacred, the this-world and the other-world which was the only justification and reason for religion.⁵¹Man’s sin is not that he neglected his religious duties. Rather, it was by thinking of God in terms of religion that we pitted Him in opposition to life. “Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.”-Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World Thus, Christ abolished religion when he established the Church. Christ himself was the answer to all human hunger for God. In Him the Life that was lost by man was restored. Life in all its totality was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, to show our meaning and mission in the world. The basic question for the Church is not how to employ better marketing to attract younger demographics. The basic question is, as Schmemann says, “Of what are we witnesses? What have we seen and touched with these hands? Of what have we partaken and been made communicants?”⁵²Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Virtue must be acquired through practices. It is a grave misunderstanding of man’s fallen nature to assume men are born free and virtuous and that the only role for education is to fill us with knowledge. Anyone who has met a two-year-old can see the folly of this. The child must learn to be free and virtuous. The modern educational assembly line doesn’t even attempt this. And the university model which separates knowledge from commitment and belief is insufficient. Churches and seminaries cannot afford to emulate this model where even the most ‘educated’ person can remain unaffected by the knowledge acquired. Education must involve practices that sediment knowledge, commitment, and belief into our being so we can possess and exercise those goods that are internal to such practices. Practices like cultivating the land, craftsmanship, worship, storytelling, remembering, and tradition are all humanizing components that are part one’s overall formation.⁶⁰“The kind of work done by the vast majority of the inhabitants of the modern world cannot be understood in terms of the nature of a practice with goods internal to itself, and for very good reason. One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work. The means-end relationships embodied for the most part in such work —on a production line, for example— are necessarily external to the goods which those who work seek; such work has consequently been expelled from the realm of practices with goods internal to themselves. And correspondingly, practices have in turn been removed to the margins of social and cultural life. Arts, sciences and games are taken to be work only for a minority of specialists: the rest of us may receive incidental benefits in our leisure time only as spectators or consumers. Where the notion of engagement in a practice was once socially central, the notion of aesthetic consumption now is, at least for the majority.” -Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue Seminaries, especially, must focus on the formation of the seminarian to produce disciples who show others how to live out the teachings of Jesus in this corrupt world. This is what is needed if we hope to communicate what it is we have partaken and been made communicants of.

With a decent education, i.e. true discipleship, men will finally be able to grow into the freedom that has been waiting for them; free to pray fervently, fight honorably, and love discreetly; and to become the truest, kindest, goodliest, meekest, gentlest, sternest, and most courteous. This sort of man is free to be both conservative and progressive; defending and protecting the things he loves while overturning tables to right injustices. Indeed, such a person would be a rather odd shape. But like a key that fits a lock, he would be just the right shape.⁶¹”Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance… Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Such men would be an odd shape indeed, “humble among their friends, proud and bold against their foes, tender and merciful towards those who need assistance, cruel avengers against their enemies.”⁶²Geoffroi de Charny, A Knights Own Book of Chivalry They are happily forgiven and yet well aware of the grief of being wounded. They enjoy “the peace of the finished work of Christ and yet suffer to win others; to find God and yet be always pursuing Him.”⁶³A.W. Tozer, Man – The Dwelling Place of God This man is not a mixture of things. That would be a dilution. To mix pride and humility would be to loose “both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.”⁶⁴G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man Instead he separates the two ideas and exaggerates them both. As far as he is a man, he is the chief of creatures. And, likewise, in so far as he is a man he is the chief of all sinners. Like the eagle soaring freely on the wind is acting in harmony with the laws of nature, man is only free to be a man when he is in harmony with his given nature. “Any one might say, ‘Neither swagger nor grovel’; and it would have been a limit. But to say, ‘Here you can swagger and there you can grovel’ – that was an emancipation.⁶⁵G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy He is set free, as John of Salisbury writes, “To defend the Church, to assail infidelity, to venerate the priesthood, to protect the poor from injuries, to pacify the province, to pour out their blood for their brothers, and, if need be, to lay down their lives.”⁶⁶John of Salisbury on the duty of a Knight, Policraticus, 12th Century He makes it his practice to treat his spouse as the most precious, his priest as the most holy, his brothers as the most worthy. It is not his role to make them such, but only to act it out, prodding them towards something better than they currently are and seeing the gift that they might one day become. Those who separate practice and belief from knowledge will not persevere. Those that reduce faithfulness to sin management will not make it. Those who look to the church for goods that are available outside it will not remain committed. In other words, things that are extrinsic to the church, even good things like acceptance, belonging, nourishment, and encouragement, will be insufficient because they can be had elsewhere at a much lower cost. Only those congregations that single-mindedly seek to glorify God will survive. Liturgical styles, musical tastes, decor, and growth campaigns will not make a difference in the end. Churches that employ a CEO model of leadership relying on success metrics like attendance, building projects, and revenue won’t make it. Only those who seek that which is intrinsic to the church, in other words Christ, will be fortified. This will require pastors who believe Jesus was who he said he was and who teach what Jesus taught. Even that won’t guarantee the Church doesn’t falter. The line separating good and evil doesn’t run between the church and the world. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”⁶⁷Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago We might as well expect monumental failures to occur.

Chesterton remarked that “each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”⁶⁸G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi “The man who is going in a wrong direction will never be set right by the affable religionist who falls into step beside him and goes the same way. Someone must place himself across the path and insist that the straying man turn around and go in the right direction.”⁶⁹A.W. Tozer, Man – The Dwelling Place of God A world that views man as “the autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he defines as just” is directly at odds with any orthodox Christian believing that “man is created and sustained by a holy and just God who declares on matters of right and wrong in the form of law.”⁷⁰ Herbert Schlossberg points out in ‘Idols for Destruction’ that both views are religious views held by faith. There is no reconciling such views. We have to understand that there is a war on. It is “a holy struggle in which love and hate engage in mortal combat.”⁷¹Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship And it’s not without a price. “The moment you love anything the world becomes your foe.”⁷²G.K. Chesterton, Heretics “To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger”⁷³G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered By its very definition, love is costly.

In a world where being free from all constraints is everything, a person is free to the extent that one has power over competing interests. Power is paramount. This worldly wisdom sees power rooted in human strength. But paradoxically, true power lies in a form of weakness. “The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”⁷⁴G.K. Chesterton, Heretics There is victory in surrender and strength even in weakness.⁷⁵Romans 8:37 In a world in which everything is about power, note the contradiction that is courage:

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die… A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life with furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Vulnerability is what makes strength a possibility.⁷⁶2 Corinthians 12:9^{, 77}As long as we cling to the possibility of escaping, we fight tepidly. There must come a point when a soldier dies to himself and dismisses his fear, enabling him to advance. Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War, “The only chance of life lies in giving up all hope of it. Place your army in deadly peril, and it will survive; plunge it into desperate straits, and it will come off in safety.” Sun Tzu was so convinced of this point that it was his practice, once he entered into enemy territory, to burn the boats and bridges that brought him there “to make it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home.” We see this starkly in the incarnation. The one thing an all powerful God lacks is limits, yet the omnipotent God comes in all the vulnerability of a babe. The Creator stooping to serve. It should be no surprise that we find in God’s love a perfect blend of ordinariness and blessedness. He is both awesome and welcoming. He blends self-denial with self worth. He has a plan for me, but it’s not about me. His decrees aren’t arbitrary or whimsical. Rather, His rules are few and fixed.

Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable… The criminal we must forgive seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all… There is room for wrath and love to run wild. He that will lose his life, the same shall save it… A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

I am the chief of all creatures… I am the chief of all sinners… One can hardly think too little of oneself. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

It is a paradoxical faith. Yes, all men are free to act. And yes, all men are under authority. God is merciful yet severe.⁷⁸Romans 11:21 The wisdom of the world is foolishness⁷⁹1 Corinthians 1:20,21, we are filled by giving⁸⁰John 4:34, we are to boast in our faults⁸¹2 Corinthians 12:9. Be humble but not self-rejecting; aspire to excellence but not to outdo; rejoice always while sharing others’ heartbreak; have an enormous capacity for pleasure but don’t be driven by lust.

God took a most enormous risk in loving us.

Surrendering a portion of His omnipotence, because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell [both men and angels], He could work a deeper happiness and fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit.

C.S. Lewis, Miracles

So let us risk loving a world that hates us. How are we to do this? In a word… sacrificially. Die to Self. Give up on the idea of comfort and leisure. Instead, find joy in work. Become indifferent to heat and cold. Don’t sleep too long or too late, for “the longer you sleep the less time you will have to acquire knowledge and to learn something useful.”⁸²Michael Warren Davis, The Francis Option, Crisis Magazine, 2 Oct. 2020 Forget past accomplishments. Forgo future plans. Expect to be called away from your career and perhaps be separated from those you love.⁸³Luke 14:25-33 Embrace the strenuous life.⁸⁴“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
– Theodore Roosevelt in a speech he gave in Chicago, Illinois, 10 April 1899 while governor of New York ^,85“Working out is a good start, but fitness is more than just muscle mass. Men of the Middle Ages were men, and they did manly things. They hunted and fished and wrestled. Television and video games would have disgusted them. Social media would have bored them to death. Wine-tastings would have struck them as a waste of good wine. They would have mocked men who remain single into their mid-thirties because they ‘hadn’t found the right girl.’”
-Michael Warren Davis, The Francis Option, Crisis Magazine, 2 Oct. 2020 Be strong in body, sound in mind, and pure in heart. Learn to get by with less. Fast and abstain. Learn to appreciate hardship. Become useful to others. Start by cleaning your room!⁸⁶Jordan Peterson points out in his Twelve Rules for Life book and lecture series, we all have some space right in front of us which we exercise some degree of control. It’s our little part of the cosmos. We may arrange it in a way that facilitates us fulfilling our purpose or as an obstacle to doing so. We must slay the dragon of chaos as we “proceed with eyes open towards the good.”

Vanquish any thought of retreat or surrender. The continual exercise of love is the shortest way to God. To love Him is to renounce everything that is not He.⁸⁷Luke 14:26 This is not for the faint of heart. It requires the boldest courage. By daring to love, we expose ourselves to rejection. So we might as well stop seeking the approval of others. Expect to meet resistance. And when you do, be ready to cast your life aside even for those who oppose you.⁸⁸Matthew 5:44 Although we have a right to seek retribution for evil,⁸⁹Exodus 21:23-25 it is better to forgo our rights for the sake of others. Heaping evil upon evil is not the right sort of retribution.⁹⁰Matthew 5:38-42 “Let evil run itself to a standstill when it does not find the resistance it was looking for. Then evil cannot find its mark and can breed no further evil.”⁹¹a spiritual form of jujitsu offered by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship By exercising patient enduring love, evil is overcome. This isn’t permission to be a pushover. “The shameful assault, the deed of violence, and the act of exploitation are no less evil though we do not match them.⁹²Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship Such things must not be tolerated. Tolerance itself is not a virtue. If we tolerate evil, that too is evil. Instead, match evil blow for blow with love. Be “governed by love… seeking Him only, and nothing else, not even His gifts.”⁹³Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”⁹⁴G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, Jan. 14, 1911 Love fiercely in order to reverse the fragmentation and isolation of this world. Live a life centered around church and community instead of ourselves and our career. Be the son or daughter who stays close by to help their parents. Go against the grain and move back to one’s hometown or put down roots in some new ancestral home. Refuse to profit at the expense of the less fortunate. Be chivalrous. “Chivalrous men don’t have opinions: they have convictions, and their convictions become actions. They build things: relationships, families, parishes, communities. They ‘live loyally and joyfully,’ as Sir Geoffroi said, ‘always expecting victory, not defeat,’ in a ‘true and certain hope that comes from God.’”⁹⁵Michael Warren Davis quoting Geoffroi de Charny, A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry, The Francis Option, Crisis Magazine, 2 Oct. 2020 This is an opportunity to prove our fidelity to Christ.

“The West is on its way to another Dark Age. Ours is no longer a Christian society, but a pagan one. Our liberal democracies are now succumbing to the same twin errors – decadence and gnosticism – that destroyed the Roman Empire. Within a few centuries, nothing of the old order will remain. We Christians will have to rebuild civilization from its ruins… The fact of the matter is that we Christians, as much as our neo-pagan countrymen, are decadent. We’re dangerously unprepared for the coming Dark Age… Men in the West, and especially Christian Men, have a duty to prepare ourselves for the coming Dark Age. We have a duty to harden ourselves – physically, morally, and spiritually – so we can protect ourselves, our families, our communities, and the Holy Mother Church from the new totalitarians… This is what soft totalitarians are going to do: they’re going to use our addiction to comfort to control us… To be soft, cowardly, or weak is now positively immoral… This trial is a gift, and we should thank Him for it. May we be happy warriors, fighting (as Chesterton said) not because we hate what’s in front of us, but because we love what’s behind us… Great Christian men of past ages would have relished this chance to prove their fidelity to Christ and His Church. And I’m convinced that our grandsons and great-grandsons “shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.” They’ll envy this faithful remnant: the valiant knights who lived and died with that sacred banner in their hands, who kept the holy Faith alive.”

Michael Warren Davis, The Francis Option, Crisis Magazine, 2 Oct. 2020