Where are we?

How we inhabit this immanent framework is related to our view of the transcendent. Some may choose to live within the frame of immanence as though it is open to something beyond. But because everything within it is self-standing we can, and many do, treat it as closed – admitting of no beyond. Nature no longer needs supernature in order to function and so many simply discard the transcendent altogether. Science exists as a result of theological underpinnings which recognized that creation was ordered and saw that this spoke of the creator. The existence of God was offered as a reason for the consistency and order we see in nature. It is now widely assumed that science is at odds with faith. But the two opposing ideas here are actually theism and naturalism rather than faith and reason. This new paradigm of a pure unadulterated immanent nature gave birth to the religion of scientism. Science produces all sorts of technological jewels which is exactly what we might expect it to do. But as a religion, it’s rather feeble. Science only tells us what is; it will never tell us what ought to be. The immanent frame also gave rise to Christian fundamentalists lacking intellectual and imaginative resources who read the Bible as if it provides historical data, a concept completely foreign to the early Christian tradition. Believers today who strenuously seek to defend the ‘supernatural’ and ‘intervention’ of the transcendent are deeply embedded in this immanent framework.

This immanent frame effectively disentangles knowledge and belief. Knowing is attained by passive observation. Religious belief is treated as mere personal preference instead of what it actually is; a claim about the nature of reality. Every problem related to transcendent qualities like questions of value or meaning become insoluble. So there’s a tendency to prescribe technical solutions for every problem. And anything that doesn’t have a technical solution isn’t admitted as an actual problem. Things like suffering and beauty vex us. Without the language of the sacred we cannot articulate why beauty matters, or even why a forest or river is worth protecting aside from the utilitarian ‘ecosystem services’ these provide. We treat suffering not as something integral to virtually every purposeful act, but instead as a problem to be solved with either opiates or anti-psychotics.

Within the immanent frame, scientific knowledge is seen as the only valid form of knowledge. Other modes of inquiry like phenomenology, spiritual contemplation, artistic endeavor, logic, or subjective experience are discounted. Belief is merely seen as personal preference. Anyone who challenges the assumption that belief is purely optional is a heretic. People are scandalized when a Christian school demands their teachers and staff live according to its tenets. This immanent framework demands that we be willing to sacrifice goodness, beauty, and truth. The terms persist in our vocabulary, but their meaning confounds us.

The immanent frame isn’t the only way to look at things. We all experience “fleeting moments of aesthetic enchantment or mundane haunting” that provide “fugitive expressions of doubt and longing, faith and questioning.”³James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular There must be more than just matter. We are moved by art and nature. We act in ways inconsistent with ‘base’ instincts. We exercise agency by building and creating. Agency, ethics, and aesthetics are undeniable components of the human experience that do not fit neatly in this immanent framework we’ve constructed.

Humans have never been more technologically powerful. But at the same time, humans may have never been more confused about what our humanity is for and where the source of meaning and purpose lies. We call scientific advances ‘progress’. But how can something be called progress if it isn’t directed toward some valuable end? Technology has done a lot to alleviate material scarcity and ameliorate suffering. But it’s abundantly clear looking back at the 20th century that humanity itself hasn’t changed all that much. Technology can, and is, used to oppress and destroy. As science advances at breakneck speed, the gap between our technical acumen and our understanding of what to value and how to act only widens.

When you start with the false assumption that the earth is stationary, you must come up with evermore complex equations to describe the motion of the sun, moon, and other planets. The math quickly becomes insoluble. It’s like this with an immanent frame that is closed. “All meaning and value exist only as subjective by-products of matter, within our brains.”⁴Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic We must seek meaning, significance, and fullness without any reference to the transcendent. The natural world, culture, tradition, religion, art, and even the body are conceptualized and deconstructed. Intuition, imagination, and, to some degree, reason become subordinate to science. “The heavens are beginning to close. But we barely notice, because our new focus on this plane had already moved the transcendent to our peripheral vision at best. We’re so taken with the play on this field, we don’t lament the loss of the stars overhead.”⁵James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular But like any falsehood, these bad assumptions accrue a debt to the truth. Eventually, those debts come due.

One key area of confusion is in how we see ourselves. At the atomic level we are made up of tiny particles, but we are something distinctly different and apart from those particles that are always coming and going. We are more than our material history. A person is body and spirit indivisible. It’s a whole from which the content cannot be subtracted from its form and be left with anything resembling what it was. We are not just matter. Our body is animated and energized with something that isn’t itself matter. Whatever we call this non-material thing, when it is subtracted we are left not with a person but with a corpse.⁶paraphrasing Thomas Howard, Chance or Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism It may be helpful to think of things in terms information rather than simply matter. In this context the unity of form and content is apparent. Information must have an intelligible form; e.g. binary 0s & 1s, alphanumeric symbols, a modulated waveform, DNA, a narrative, or even the physical universe itself.⁷This information-theoretic view in which information is even more fundamental to the universe than matter and energy is beginning to look like a more accurate description of reality. But these forms themselves are not information. Context matters. There must be meaning embedded in the form; a picture, a message, a radio broadcast; a story. Form makes it intelligible. The content implies an intellect. Subtract either form or content and we are left with nothing. A closed immanent frame denies the very possibility of an intellect and thus it precludes any actual content. It is one thing to treat nature as a closed system and ignore all other modes of reality in order to better understand the form of the natural world. It is quite another feat to convince ourselves that there is nothing but matter and energy, denying the possibility of something beyond nature.

When form and content are severed disunity follows. Even the most basic human endeavors like art and sex become incomprehensible. The artist once saw form in unity with content. Imagination was at home always making images and seeing correspondences and shaping experience. But there has been a fundamental shift from art imitating nature (mimesis) to art for its own sake (poeisis). When art imitates nature this suggests there is something in nature that is not in the artifact. The natural thing has its own being, its own end and purpose. The artifact is not its own project. Its purpose is imposed from without. Michael Hanby uses the example of a wooden squirrel. The purpose of the wooden squirrel is not in the wood, but instead bestowed by the carver.⁸Michael Hanby, A More Perfect Absolutism, First Things, October 2016 As Hanby describes, the lens of science has inverted and collapsed the analogy between nature and art. Knowledge of the creator is no longer necessary once nature is collapsed into artifact and creation is seen as mere contrivance. It becomes sufficient to only know the laws of nature. We succumb to the genetic fallacy, assuming to fully understand the thing if we can just understand its material history. There are no depths to contemplate, just facts to analyze, because nature has no telos. As John Dewey said, “things are what they can do and what can be done with them.”⁹John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 115. And with this inversion artists are now metaphysicians, probing the possibilities of aesthetic satisfaction in new mediums goading us into visual experiences. The world once furnished rich material for our imagination. There was a correspondence between the appearance of things and the nature of things. But after this great divorce, we are left to seek aesthetic satisfaction apart from meaning and significance. We are left to pursue visual experiences and embark on aesthetic exploration.

The divorcing of form from content is not limited to art. It plays out in our most basic and fundamental relationships, particularly in the realm of sexuality. Sex is no longer mysterious and hallowed. The juncture of two bodies is treated about as serious as shaking hands. Sexuality is reduced to biological urges. Limits on sexuality are seen to impinge on the radically autonomous self. Consent is about the only barrier recognized. This is worse than depravity. Depravity assumes some sort of meaning to transgress against. This is more of an intense nihilism – meaningless self-indulgence. We forget the human body (form) cloaks and reveals a human person (content). Authentic meaning emerges from the form and content of our sexuality. This ritual act between two bodies (form) is on a quest for knowledge of the other (content). Of course, sex must be consensual. Entering without admittance, taking what wasn’t given, exposing what wasn’t revealed is both an assault on the body (form) and also a desecration of the person (content). But consent alone is a terribly low bar. Anything that takes the form (the body), but discards the substance (the person) is debasement. The tendency to disconnect body from soul severs sex from love and procreation from marriage. Settling for cheap imitations leaves us empty. ¹⁰For example, masturbation seizes a special kind of pleasure (orgasm) that comes with the carnal knowledge of another while the other is present only in fantasy. Authentic meaning from a real union of form and content cannot emerge from such an act. On the other hand, homosexuality seeks union with a second image, but not the complementary image of the opposite sex. It fears to go out of itself to give itself to the other in conquest and surrender, and to receive the same. (paraphrasing Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance)

Sex cannot be reduced to biological urges. Everything is wrought with meaning. Even a handshake has meaning. It says, “Hello, I see you. I greet you.” If we accept that the sexual joining of two bodies is indeed categorically different from, say, a handshake which we clearly do both in law and custom, then it’s worth exploring this distinction further. Hydrogen and oxygen come together to form water and we get life. When two notes are joined we get harmony and beauty. So it is when two persons are joined together. We get family and communion. Man’s desire to know woman “finds its perfect form in the enactment by the two unveiled images, the images of male and female, of the energy that strains toward total union.”¹¹Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance

Sexuality has long been a fenced-off protected area. But the widely celebrated sexual revolution demolished many of the age-old societal guardrails that were put up around sex. The world of sex has been thrown open. There are those who see this as a good thing. They assume the door was closed merely out of embarrassment or shame. In truth, there is a sacredness about this rite that demands exclusivity. When we destroy this separation it’s an annihilation of the distinctive qualities of the thing that was set apart. We’re not making sex fuller and richer as many like to think. We’re cheapening it. And open access does nothing to make this fraught landscape any safer. What should be the price of admission? Is the ticket into the fenced-off area simply desire? Or mere consent? Or should it demand permanent and exclusive commitment?

Marriage has long served to contain sexual relations. Today, there is mass confusion on what marriage is, and what it is not. This is a particularly vexing problem since “marriage is a good that must be chosen to be realized — and must be roughly understood to be chosen.”¹²Girgis, Sherif; Anderson, Ryan T.; George, Robert P., What is Marriage: Man and Woman: A Defense Many enter into marriage not knowing what it is that they are embarking on. It’s been “reduced to something of an emotional union involving domestic life.”¹³ibid. Virtually every previous society distinguished such relationships, not just for their degree of emotional union, but for their ability to produce new dependent human beings. The enduring union between the two forms, man and woman, is a ‘good’ basic to the constitution of human life. It irrevocably transforms our personhood (content) into father and mother. Sex not only joins husband to wife, but also parents to children and families to the community. We need an enlarged view of marriage, not some uninspiring hedonistic union. Marriage, family, divisions of work, responsibility, and authority exist to mitigate the dangers of sex and to preserve its progeny, its beauty, and its pleasure. Marriage is a comprehensive union of persons. It unites two people in their most basic dimensions, their minds and bodies. It necessarily includes bodily union in order for it to be comprehensive. Those who favor a more expansive and inclusive definition of marriage have the misguided impression that this would expand the pool of people eligible to marry without changing the basic understanding of marriage. Marriage is good so expanding it must be good, they think. But doing so abandons the idea of comprehensive union for mere emotional union. Marriage comes to be understood has having no fixed core, nothing more than a legal construct. But the state did not invent sexual complimentarity. The thing we’ve traditionally called ‘marriage’ is inherently valuable. But calling something else by the same name does not confer that same value. When we dismiss permanence, exclusivity, or sexual complementarity, we end up with something else entirely. This only makes the thing we wished to attain unattainable.

Those who say anti-gay animus shaped marriage law are ignorant of marriage’s history. Even in cultures that celebrated homoeroticism, as in ancient Greece, only opposite-sex unions were recognized as marriages.¹⁴ibid. That’s not to deny anti-gay animus as another historical fact. There are admittedly and unfortunately those who wish to denigrate persons who are same-sex attracted. But to assume bigotry is the only motivation for opposing gay marriage is dangerously naive. It’s important to recognize that the two sides in the same-sex marriage debate are describing different things with the same word. One refers to an emotional union or a legal status, the other involves a comprehensive union between two people that by its very nature is permanent, exclusive, and complimentary. If the former is correct and there are no important differences between same- and opposite-sex relationships then those who insist on the conjugal view are making arbitrary distinctions. But that doesn’t seem correct. It is incontrovertible that male-female union stands alone for its biologically complementary aspect. “No same-sex or group relationship will include organic bodily union, or find its inherent fulfillment in procreation, or require, quite apart from the partners’ personal preferences, what these two features demand: permanent and exclusive commitment.”¹⁵ibid. Still, one need not denigrate, nor deny, the existence of those who are same-sex attracted, ignore their needs, or assume that their desires could change.

Marriage is, and must always be, oriented towards family. Man and woman are made for one another. And this couple was made for children and family. Family is for society and the world. We’re not only saying yes to our bride, but to the world. The individual turns outward from the self to the spouse. The couple turns outward toward children. The rightly oriented family turns outward to the world. Marriage is not just something we collectively imagined. Marriage is a real place. It’s a place where two people compliment one another and become stronger together. It’s a place that cultivates the love and honesty needed for sexual intimacy to properly integrate into our lives. It’s a place that puts children first. Marriage is not self-expressive; it’s self-denial. Every day we endure and succeed in a faithful union with our spouse and children is a heroic act of grace-filled living. It’s about acceptance and response. This is not passive and blind submission. It’s love and Alexander Schmemann reminds us that love is always active. Father Stephen Freeman observes that, “an eloquent case for traditional families is currently being made by the chaos and dysfunction set in motion by their absence.”¹⁶from a 2015 post Marriage as a Lifetime of Suffering by Father Stephen Freeeman, an Orthodox priest No combination of legislation and social programing is going to fix all the social ills that follow from the deterioration of the family and the community.

Ours is no longer a Christian society. But returning to the old pagan gods is no longer an option. Those gods have departed and we are left with an unshakable faith in nothing but ourselves. It is against this egotheism that we measure all value and meaning. This is the faith upon which we entrust our souls. The chief moral value is now understood as the absolute liberty of the sovereign self, whose personal will gives us the power to choose what to believe and want. By sanctifying individual liberty we make all other goods subordinate to it. It’s as if truth and beauty are irrelevant to freedom. It’s a radical freedom not just to obey or disregard moral law, but to choose which moral standards we adopt. Ironically, the very concept of freedom gets narrowly restricted. Liberty, once broadly understood as the learned capacity to conquer our appetite, is now understood only as freedom from any outside constraints. This is now the only freedom recognized. It more closely resembles slavery to one’s appetite. In order for freedom to truly be good in any objective way it must have an ultimate object or aim. So we must ask, what is freedom for? It’s a question few can answer today. And in this era of radical freedom even truth becomes suspect. It’s up to me to decide what I understand humanity to be and how I want to fashion it. This type of freedom has no direction or purpose. We are free to accept or reject, want or not want, but not to obey. This whole notion of the autonomous individual is based on a falsehood about human nature. We take for granted that we depend on others for our very existence and survival. But we prefer to see ourselves as independent. In other words, we wish to be like God, depending on nothing and no one.

The global coronavirus pandemic exposed the moral incoherence of the new anti-culture. There were real trade offs that needed to be made. But in order to make such choices, the things being chosen should be roughly understood. People had very different ideas on what an economy was for; which jobs were essential; and whose life was most worth protecting. People asserted their rights, but in this fragmented world we fail to see that every right has a corresponding duty. Can society effectively function without loyalty and honor, simply treating every life as a possible trade-off? Brad Littlejohn points out that a military unit cannot.²⁰LittleJohn challenges the ‘triage’ mentality as it relates to ‘quarantine vs. the economy’. Instead, he points to the ‘no man left behind’ mindset that military units instill in their soldiers. Honor and duty dictate that a unit must be willing to assume any risk in order to rescue or recover a fallen comrade. He points out that “a military unit that subjected its fallen comrades to a utilitarian risk/reward calculus would not be a unit, because it would not have the bonds of honor and loyalty to hold it together.”Brad Littlejohn, No Wealth But Life: Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic in Mere Orthodoxy March 2020 There are times when utilitarian risk/reward calculus simply doesn’t work. Mustn’t society have its own non-negotiables? If so, what are they?

It seems we embrace freedom as the fundamental commitment. But we are poorly equipped to choose what is best. We embrace an (anti)culture that is hostile to families and gives us a disordered view of success. Power appears to be our only way to adjudicate competing interests. We fail to recognize the disconnect between our stated ideals and actual practices. We focus on our differences and never attempt to address the falsehoods we pathologically agree on like the pretense of value neutrality; the untethering of relationships and economies; the state of permanent impermanence; scientific hubris. We cannot find it within us to critically examine, or even recognize, these delusions that threaten to undo us. That’s because we live in an era and culture that is increasingly imbalanced towards mechanistic thinking. A society captured in this dysfunctional madhouse finds it hard to get out of the mechanistic fragmented decontextualized world that it created, particularly when traditional routes of escape through art and religion have been blocked off. Mechanistic thinking is externalized in the world around it. “In our contemporary world, skills have been downgraded and subverted into algorithms: we are busy imitating machines” according to Psychiatrist Iain McGilChrist.²¹Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Moral law represents essential facts of human nature. These are not arbitrary laws based on human dictate. “These statements do not rest on human consent; they are either true or false. If they are true, man runs counter to them at his own peril.”²⁵Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker No serious person would object to the laws of physics as being ‘unfair.’ We understand that we must work within the constraints that the universe imposes on us. Moral laws are no different. The moral law also holds things together. When we stray beyond it, we put ourselves and others at risk. Dorothy Sayers makes the distinction between arbitrary law and law rooted in fact:

There is a difference between saying: “If you hold your finger in the fire you will get burned” and saying, “if you whistle at your work I shall beat you, because the noise gets on my nerves.” The God of the Christians is too often looked upon as an old gentleman of irritable nerves who beats people for whistling. This is the result of a confusion between arbitrary “law” and the “laws” which are statements of fact… Matter is apparently not tempted to contradict its own nature, but obeys the law of its being in perfect freedom. Man, however, does continually suffer this temptation and frequently yields to it.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Morality is comprised of both moral law and moral code. Moral law is discoverable like any other law of nature. It’s a question of objective fact rather than subjective opinion. Religious codes are valid only in so far as they are right or wrong about the essential facts of human nature. This distinction is not lost on the authors of the Bible:

The law code started out as an excellent piece of work. It represents God’s good and common sense, each command sane and holy counsel. What happened though, was that sin found a way to pervert the command into a temptation. The law code, instead of being used to guide me, was used to seduce me. Once sin got its hands on the law code and decked itself out in all that finery, the very command that was supposed to guide me into life was cleverly used to trip me up, throwing me headlong. So sin was plenty alive, and I was stone dead.

Romans 7:8-12, MSG

There is a sense that God’s laws are somewhat arbitrary. It’s no different with the laws of nature. The gravitational constant may very well be arbitrary. But it is what it is. Paraphrasing Gerard M. Vershuuren, our conscience does not create moral laws. It merely receives them. The conscience has to be truthfully formed before it can echo the natural law. Conscience is a judgment — a judgment that can be either correct or in error. Our understanding of physical or biological laws needs revision each time we reach a better understanding of those laws. Something similar holds for natural law. The natural law is intrinsically right, even when we do not yet see it. It’s our duty to educate and inform our conscience properly.²⁶Gerard M. Verschuuren, Aquinas and Modern Science Even nature is subordinate to God as David Bentley Hart points out:

The whole of nature is something prepared for us, composed for us, given to us, delivered into our care by a ‘supernatural’ dispensation. All this being so, one might plausibly say that God — the infinite wellspring of being, consciousness, and bliss that is the source, order, and end of all reality — is evident everywhere, inescapably present to us, while autonomous ‘nature’ is something that has never, even for a moment, come into view. Pure nature is an unnatural concept.

David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

It is hardly any wonder that the notion of freedom from constraint has superseded the idea of freedom as enjoyment of the highest good. In the absence of constraint, the only thing limiting our capacity to act, speak, or to refrain is power. Other people, as well as nature and society, represent limits. We must demonstrate that we own our bodies, not God or nature, or other people and certainly not tradition. Protest is found everywhere from gender fluidity to self-debasement and self-mutilation to one’s ‘right’ to an abortion or euthanasia. This radical freedom makes it impossible to see the world as having any fixed nature or essential purpose. In turn, we loose the ability to discern what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. Good is simply measured by self-satisfaction or personal fulfillment as defined by the majority. Freedom and truth become open-ended possibility. And so the state reserves the power to allow and to prohibit practically anything in the name of protecting freedom. But conflicts inevitably arise when one’s freedom over their own given nature conflicts with another’s freedom to remain true to the giver of that nature.

When we refuse to recognize the bounds of natural law the law code becomes ever more complex. We bind each other with elaborate laws and contracts. Even something as simple as a music streaming service which used to be free over the radio (and still is at the time of writing this) now comes with elaborate terms and conditions. We put up with algorithms that are designed to plant thoughts in our heads just for the opportunity to post incriminating things on social media. And we eagerly take on loads of debt, reducing ourselves to a form of indentured servitude. We become slaves to long commutes and the outsourcing of parental responsibilities. No matter how careful we are we cannot be certain we won’t end up crosswise with the law. There’s always the possibility someone might choose to prosecute us for violating any of the onerous terms and conditions we have to agree to when registering for any number of web-services required just to do our jobs, pay our bills, and educate our children which by design aren’t meant to be read and understood. All this in a society where freedom is sacrosanct. We hardly notice all the ways freedom is receding. It never seems to occur to anyone that this (anti)culture predicated on the modern idea of autonomy and freedom might actually be based on falsehoods about human nature. We fail to recognize that the autonomous individual is free from limits only in proportion to the amount of power each individual possesses. It becomes impossible to redirect society towards anything higher than power itself. Liberty must be “secured by military power, science, and technology, and the expansion of capitalist markets.”²⁷Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

One group that doesn’t face the dilemma of choosing which car to spend their soul-deadening commute in is the Amish. They exercise their freedom in a manner that constrains many of their choices. The Amish way of life is far less irrational than it might seem. The Amish evaluate new technologies on the basis of whether or not the new technology supports the fabric of their community. It hardly occurs to us that we might be less free than they are. The Amish also avoid social innovations like insurance markets. That’s because they see it as their responsibility to take care of each another. Insurance denies them the opportunity to personally bear one another’s burdens. It’s a radical idea. But wouldn’t it be nice to know that your neighbors have your back? Most of us don’t even get that from our own families. What’s more crazy; the Amish for putting their faith in neighbors instead of an insurance agent or a society that entertains looting as a protected form of political speech, rationalizing the destruction of property because affected businesses have the option to purchase coverage for that?³²Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action You don’t have to embrace Amish theology, nor eschew technology, to appreciate how the Amish reject the false choice that pits freedom in opposition to other goods. The Amish exercise their freedom to preserve community. Technology is arguably a great liberating force, but we need to recognize that these same technologies can become a source of anxiety, imperil our environment, and deform our personhood. Patrick Deneen observes that “in our remaking of the world — through obvious technologies like the Internet, and less obvious but no less influential ones like insurance — we embrace and deploy technologies that make us how we imagine ourselves being. And in a profound irony, it is precisely in this quest to attain ever-more-perfect individual liberty and autonomy that we increasingly suspect that we might fundamentally lack choice about adoption of those technologies.”³³Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism FailedUnlike the rest of us, the Amish retain choice over the adoption of various technologies. And this allows them to preserve their communities while the rest of us sit powerless, unable to even slow the fragmenting tide of atomization and immanentization rolling over us.

No one rules over this “technological absolutism” as Michael Hanby calls it. There is no police state forcing this on us. The institutions lording over us answer to no executive, much less any lower level members. It’s a self-perpetuating system accountable to no individual or political entity. The fact that few even notice this is happening is even more concerning. As Hanby postulates, under a truly absolute rule we wouldn’t even be aware that we are being coerced. Certain truths simply wouldn’t be perceptible; certain ideas couldn’t be thought; and certain experiences couldn’t be had. Nobody would even know that something was missing.³⁴Michael Hanby, A More Perfect Absolutism, First Things, October 2016 Most of us are living under a form of technological totalitarianism in which owning a car, a computer, and a smartphone are not really optional. And we cannot imagine life any other way.

Regardless of what we profess as our religion, every day we put our faith in the unfounded belief that somehow by conquering nature we can supply ourselves with enough fuel to allow nearly infinite choices. There’s a perception that we can dispose of ancient norms without losing anything important. This mindset doesn’t recognize any linkage between “the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources.”³⁵Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed We fail to see a connection between the decline of the Western family and that of Western civilization.³⁶Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization

“The sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”³⁷Michael Hanby, ‘The Brave New World of Same-Sex Marriage: A Decisive Moment in the Triumph of Technology over Humanity’, The Federalist, Feb. 19, 2014 Technologies like ‘the pill’ promised liberation, but the hookup culture this fostered is now a prime example of how this technological revolution has turned against us. “If modern attitudes about sex have ‘liberated’ us, what precisely have we been freed from? Security? Commitment? Trust?”³⁸Matt Walsh, ‘Abstinence is Unrealistic and Old Fashioned‘ Like many acts of so-called freedom, the hookup (anti)culture destroys freedom. There are the obvious concerns about sexually transmitted diseases and the fact that hookup behavior can lead to depression and poor mental health. But that’s just what’s on the surface. It’s becoming evident that as the nuclear family disintegrates many of the children of this new hookup culture are increasingly unable to form stable marital bonds themselves. We’ve made stable comprehensive unions that are essential for any society virtually impossible. As Maggie Gallagher plainly states, “sex makes babies, society needs babies, and babies need a father as well as a mother.”³⁹Maggie Gallagher, ‘Marriage Matters: For Kids, for Parents, and for Religious Liberty‘, Public Discourse, October 31, 2008 How are we better off if we are unable to choose the very thing that virtually all evidence suggests is best for our children? This is the antithesis of liberty.

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist is concerned that as a society we are loosing our mental acuity as we become more inclined to a reductive mechanistic view of reality. McGilchrist ties this to the physiology of the brain. The brain is structurally and functionally asymmetrical. One side tends to ground experience in context. It’s intuitive, synthesizing, and integrative. The other is more analytic. We live in an era and culture that leans heavily towards the mechanistic side. “Articulating and making explicit… are treated as a mark of truth, and their inverse are treated with increasing suspicion.”⁴⁰Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary Today metaphor and narrative are easily discarded as myths or lies. McGilchrist is particularly concerned because the natural world, the human body, culture, tradition, religion, and art have been so thoroughly de-constructed that they can no longer help us see intuitively beyond this hermetically sealed world of the mechanistic mind. We cannot see beyond the immanent horizon. As a result, we are becoming more limited in what we see, less capable of understanding what we do see, and less aware of these limitations.

The following is McGilchrist’s thesis in his own words:

I have come to believe that the cerebral hemispheres differ in ways that have meaning. There is a plethora of well-substantiated findings that indicate that there are consistent differences – neuropsychological, anatomical, physiological and chemical, amongst others – between the hemispheres. But when I talk of ‘meaning’, it is not just that I believe there to be a coherent pattern to these differences. That is a necessary first step. I would go further, however, and suggest that such a coherent pattern of differences helps to explain aspects of human experience, and therefore means something in terms of our lives, and even helps explain the trajectory of our common lives in the Western world… My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

The mechanistic mind looks at matter and energy and that is all it sees. Anything that doesn’t fit this model is shaved off. We “isolate ‘real’ objective things from ‘constructed’ subjective meanings,” and as a result we cannot “integrate knowledge and wisdom, facts and meanings, truth and quality, instrumental power and morality, beauty and science, technology and goodness, …faith and reason.”⁴¹Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic This reductive materialistic view of the cosmos excludes anything that doesn’t exist materially. The confusion about the cosmic order that ensues, which even grips most religious people, fails to address value and meaning since these are non-material. Matter is essentially all that matters. The transcendent and timeless realities of purpose, value, significance, meaning, community, friendships, pride, and dignity which exist apart from space-time, the very qualities of being that are more real than reality itself, are negated. We conclude that beauty, joy, suffering, and evil are not actually real because they are not matter and energy and we know that only matter and energy are real because we know that we know. As David Bentley Hart says, it’s a “feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.”⁴²David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God McGilchrist likens this to a hall of mirrors. A society captured in this dysfunctional madhouse finds it hard to get out of the mechanistic fragmented decontextualized virtual world that it created, particularly when traditional routes of escape through art and religion have been blocked off. This is the type of society that embraces technology and bureaucracy. It sees virtually no other solutions. This mechanistic vision of the world is…

a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value… This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Perceptions about success and our relationship with work are another aspect of modern life conspiring against us. Work is no longer about serving one’s family or the larger society. Now it’s about having a career that is self-fulfilling. A career that confers a degree of status, notoriety, wealth, power, and influence is the new measure of success. A man used to be successful if he could provide for his family while offering something of value to his community. Most men are capable of succeeding by that standard. But inherently few can accrue the appreciable status, wealth, and power needed for the new careerist standard of success. Those who can are pitted in a mad competition with each other. Those who cannot are burdened with a sense of failure and listlessness. It is generally assumed, and often lamented, that men hold all the power in society. This might be true of a handful of men, but only a small subset. There simply isn’t room for the vast majority of men or women at the apex of these narrowly defined measures of success. The average Joe is just as disenfranchised as everyone else. It’s not like he gets to chart his own course. The typical guy spends the bulk of his life obeying orders, “putting one dull brick on another dull brick” or “adding one dull figure to another dull figure.” as Chesterton said.⁴³G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered If that wasn’t bad enough, women are now told they need to aspire to this. Men are scolded for their desire to protect and provide which is deemed ‘sexist’ while women are persuaded that they are better off without men. The children, whose care gets outsourced to strangers, certainly aren’t better off.

Our warped thinking ends up warping the world around us. We are not just shaped by our environment; our habits of thinking shape the world into its own image. Functional shifts occur in the brain that are initiated by the imitation of beliefs and practices, ways of seeing the world and ways of being in the world. These shifts can favor one hemisphere or another. Epigenetic mechanisms can give them permanence by replicating the brain changes that go with such habits in subsequent generations. Such shifts in emphasis can be seen throughout various periods in the history of Western Civilization from the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, on through the present post-modernism. As we imitate and acquire mechanistic ways of being in the world, this mindset can become entrenched. McGilchrist believes this is what’s happening today. He observes an ‘asymmetry of interaction’ between the two hemispheres in modern society. Instead of each hemisphere fitting together intelligently to form a single coherent entity, the mechanistic mindset has been externalized in the world around it. “In our contemporary world, skills have been downgraded and subverted into algorithms: we are busy imitating machines.”⁴⁴Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary Instead of celebrating all this as a sign of health and progress, we should think about the pathologic disorder and social disintegration that we are inflicting on ourselves. We need to recognize this as the existential threat that it is, not just to Western Civilization, but to our collective humanity.

The most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world… The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation. This means we have a grave responsibility, a word that captures the reciprocal nature of the dialogue we have with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

To the mechanistic mind the world is deterministic. We are pushed along by causes that precede us. But what if the world is not a mechanism? Are we not also “pulled, drawn, attracted forward towards and by things that have a sort of magnetic power (such as archetypes), rather than pushed or prodded forward by what’s happened?”⁴⁵ibid. And do we not have some degree of say in the direction we are pulled? We owe a lot to our genes. It’s genes that are largely responsible for making us adept imitators. Humans are better at imitation than any other animal. This ‘meta-skill’ of imitation, or mimesis, allows us to acquire an array of other skills. It’s the gift of ‘skill acquisition.’ “The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we will become what we imitate.”⁴⁶ibid. So how are we to decide what skills and behaviors to imitate?

How we direct our attention, aims, and values are of the utmost importance as these largely determine what we become. Yet reductionist thinking blunts our ability to understand what is happening to us and what to do about it. Science and reason cannot tell us where we should direct our attention. They do not tell us what our aims ought to be. And they cannot inform us on whether we should value one thing over another. So we have no basis for how we are to act. We willingly consent to marketing campaigns that collude with Big Tech to co-opt our attention. They control the devices in our home and in our pocket, not us. We blindly accept school curriculum designed to perpetuate the illusion of value neutrality. Underlying it all are unspoken values that are never questioned. It’s never explained why tolerance has suddenly been elevated as the highest virtue or why science and reason trump intuition and imagination. The fact that we cannot properly apply science or reason without intuition and imagination is completely ignored. We cannot properly direct our aims in this world that denies any overarching telos. Self-indulgent pleasure becomes our defacto aim when we fail to acknowledge the possibility of any higher purpose. We fail to see the obvious truth in our own analogy; that every mechanism is built for some purpose. And this mechanistic mode of being is sterile as far as it relates to questions of value, meaning, and purpose.

The fact that many in our society dismiss such questions as unintelligible, unanswerable, and uninteresting is tragic. And it may very well be our undoing. What reason do we have to believe that a society predicated on a particular metaphysical framework can remain intact once the metaphysical foundation is removed? How can we dispose of the idea of man created in the image of God for a purpose and expect to retain the West’s tradition of humanitarianism. “The collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else… Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.”⁴⁷Louis Betty, scholar of French literature who wrote a book about Houellebecq’s metaphysics, in an interview France’s Master of ‘Materialist Horror’ with Rod Dreher for the American Conservative

The particular brand of liberalism that we now practice turns “humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.”⁵²Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed We’re committed to an ever-changing formless society that disregards even the possibility of factual history, preferring to write its own version of events. Change is the one constant, and uncertainty the only certainty. People talk about a fear of missing out. But there’s an even deeper fear. It’s a fear of being left behind. Even when things appear to be going well there is a pressure to upset everything by jumping to some other opportunity. If we aren’t prepared to do so we risk being left behind when everyone around us goes off to pursue their next opportunity. It’s like a giant game of chicken we play with each other, waiting to see who will blink first. This instills a sort of neuroticism. And yet we seem genuinely perplexed by the mounting anxiety, depression, addiction, and mental disorders pervasive around us. It hardly occurs to anyone that this mental health epidemic might run deeper than chemicals in the brains of individual patients. We have no idea what demons we’re conjuring. Our metaphysics won’t allow it. Instead, we maintain the illusion that we are somehow moving through time along an ever ascending arc of progress. Without a doubt, real gains are made through science. But that doesn’t mean that scientism as a religious belief is necessarily true. And it doesn’t make science more credible than other modes of inquiry like phenomenology, spiritual contemplation, artistic endeavor, logic, or subjective experience. “Faith in progress is not false in every respect. What is false, however, is the myth of the liberated world of the future, in which everything will be different and good.”⁵³Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Freedom The course of human history is less a path of ascendance than it is a series of advances and retreats. We should question whether anything is really progress if it isn’t directed toward valuable ends. No doubt, modern man is more powerful than at anytime in human history. But as Paul Tyson points out, “There is no necessary connection between advances in powerful means and progress toward valuable ends.”⁵⁴Paul Tyson, De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being

We have little reason to think that we are better equipped to wield this unprecedented power. We have the means to surveil and censor that would make Stalin envious. And we have an ability to edit the genome that would make Hitler blush. We have mass marketing and social media campaigns which Mao’s Red Guard would have found incredibly useful. We have all this and yet we’re governed only by sentiment with hardly any ability to mediate differences aside from pure power. Our smart bombs can facilitate regime change but how do we know which regimes to topple? When sentiment governs, there is no bar to Hitler. As Hebert Schlossberg says, “there is no bar in sentiment to killing some people if it benefits others.”⁵⁵Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction But we stubbornly cling to the myth of unremitting progress. We not only think too much of ourselves, we short-change early man in order to fit this imaginary arc of progress between us. We say, “He used crude tools so he must have been crude.” Or, “He told crude stories so he clearly didn’t share our sophisticated understanding of the world.” All while blinded to the highly compressed truths contained in many of those archaic myths. We never stop to consider who wields the cruder weapon; a stone axe or a hydrogen bomb? We would do well “to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.”⁵⁶Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

There is a documentary about the Omotic-speaking people of the Omo River Valley in Ethiopia. The Omo people have a long held belief that certain children are cursed.⁵⁷Tyler and John Rowe, Omo Child: The River and the Bush (2015) These children are called ‘Mingi’. They are kids born to parents whose union has not been blessed by the local elders, the equivalent of being born out of wedlock. They associate Mingi children with drought and famine. In order to protect their community from the Mingi, these children must be killed. So these babies are taken from their parents and dispatched. Usually this is carried out by women in the community as prescribed by a group of tribal elders. The children are typically killed in one of two ways. They are either drowned in the river or they are taken into the bush where dirt is packed into their mouth and throat and then they are left for the wild animals to feed on. Peculiarly, there is one category of Mingi that includes children whose first tooth emerges from the top of the mouth rather than from the lower jaw. So in addition to the bastard children, you have children in many cases who are nearly two years old, dearly loved by their parents and integrated into their families, who are then discovered to be Mingi. If the parents won’t give these children up willingly they are forcefully taken from their parents and killed in one of the prescribed manners. The fear of Mingi is so great that some parents willingly submit to this practice. Even those who accept and defend this practice admit the lasting pain that it causes. They do not relish the killing of these children. And they mourn the loss. Yet they view it as necessary. And because of the arbitrary nature of cutting teeth, nearly every Omotic family has personal experience with this harsh practice. Some refuse to give up their Mingi children and are banished from the community. They flee into the wilderness to avoid having their child snatched and killed. They are forced to live in isolation on the other side of the river. Without the support of their community, life is extremely hard. More often than not they are unable to make it on their own so most reluctantly return and submit to the killing of their child. Christians naturally find this abhorrent. Secularists will point to examples like this to illustrate the dangers of irrational religious belief. The Ethiopian government does not condone the practice. There are efforts to stop it. Technically it’s illegal.

What most miss are the parallels with modern Western society. Silicon Valley and the Omo Valley are worlds apart, but not as far as some might think. It’s easy to condemn the backward beliefs of those from the Omo Valley. We dismiss the idea of curses. We see the fear of Mingi for what it is, irrational and unfounded. Yet, we sacrifice our children for our ambition, avarice, lust and convenience. We would never consider this a form of child sacrifice. We are appalled by cultures practicing infanticide like the Mingi or the Carthaginians, who according to tradition sacrificed their sons and daughters in fire as an offering to Moloch.⁵⁸Some historians have dismissed this claim as a slur by the Romans against their Carthaginian rivals. But what cannot be denied is the great necropolis near Carthage filled with the bones of little babies. It is believed that Carthaginians saw this practice as purely transactional. The Carthaginians served up their children to Moloch because they believed that the fertility god was economic in the most exacting sense: if you want bountiful harvests, you had better give up some of the products of your own fertility. It was an exchange; it was what went on at the Wall Street of Carthage. If you were rich, you could buy the baby of a poor woman and claim the sacrifice as your own. Anthony Esolen points out that we do something very similar. “We kill children for the sake of a richer paycheck, a nicer house, a nifty vacation to Cancun, a college degree, admission to the bar; or to avert having to stretch the paycheck, to sell the second car, to forgo the vacation, to drop out of college, or, as a feminist writer once put it, shuddering in disgust, to buy extra-large jars of mayonnaise at Costco. If we kill children for these things, we certainly will not scruple to put them in straitjackets, or to let them languish in the infested schools, or to sit them in front of a screen that is at best novocaine for the mind, at worst positively toxic.”⁵⁹Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture In his essay ‘Christ and Nothing’ David Bentley Hart isn’t buying the myth of progress. He writes, “It would be willful and culpable blindness for us to refuse to recognize how aesthetically arid, culturally worthless, and spiritually depraved our society has become.”⁶⁰David Bentley Hart, essay ‘Christ and Nothing’ appearing in First Things He draws parallels between the degeneracy in Carthage and our own. He writes, “When the Carthaginians were prevailed upon to cease sacrificing their babies, at least the place vacated by Baal reminded them that they should seek the divine above themselves; we offer up our babies to ‘my’ freedom of choice, to ‘me.’”⁶¹Note: Baal and Moloch are variants for the same Canaanite deity. Today, modern courts and human rights councils have invented the ‘right’ to abort babies. It’s one thing to view abortion as tragic but necessary. That’s not enough for our degenerate society. We must celebrate it as a triumph of morality. As far as I know, the people of the Omo Valley don’t cheer when a Mingi is tossed in the river.

Subscribers to this myth of progress expect man to evolve into a new kind of god-like species. Yuval Noah Harari treats it as a foregone conclusion.⁶²Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow One of Harari’s premises is that man imparts meaning on the world. Man no longer discovers meaning, giving names to the things he encounters. Instead, man creates meaning ex nihilo simply by thinking. This idea is no longer seen as blasphemy. In fact, it’s taken quite seriously by many who ought to know better. They are infatuated with the idea of humanity’s march of unremitting progress. Facts will not dissuade them. These are the same people who talk of being on the right side of history as if they were in a position to know.⁶³Nevermind that Lenin, Hitler, and Southern slave holders all felt certain they were on the right side of history too. They are right about one thing. Humans do seem to be evolving. We now have a new species of man called the ‘consumer’. But instead of being like the Creator, this sub-human is so far removed from production that practically no thought is given to where his things come from. He has been conditioned to respond to stimuli like an amoeba. Lost is any real sense of the eternal and any sense of contemporaneity with past events.⁶⁴Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments Instead, “we have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.”⁶⁵Charles Taylor, A Secular Age We allow nothing “higher” to impinge upon our calendars. We won’t be bothered to celebrate any of the feast days. Good Friday is just an afterthought. Instead we have Black Friday.⁶⁶Black Friday is a cult holiday in America that falls on the Friday after the secular holiday of Thanksgiving. Ironically, Black Friday unofficially marks the start of the Christmas holiday shopping season. The lack of self-awareness is striking. No wonder we cannot imagine ourselves among the crowds shouting, “Crucify him!” Our imagination is a prisoner to the immanent. We confuse temporal beginnings with metaphysical origins. Creation itself is seen as some distant event rather than “the complete causing of the existence of everything that is—in the past, now, and in the future.”⁶⁷Gerard M. Verschuuren, Aquinas and Modern Science

No longer connected to the past or future, the transient and ephemeral take precedence over the durable and the permanent. Mirroring the hookup culture, virtually all our relationships become transactional. (Anti)social media produces latent friendships whose purpose is to get each other addicted to the little dopamine hits they get from receiving ‘likes’. Economic activity has long been like hookups. The procurement of a mortgage is no longer based on relationships that developed over time and place. Law and culture evolved for the sake of efficiency. Community banks were displaced. Trust and local knowledge was discounted. Bankers interests no longer align with the interests of the community. Trust, reputation, memory, and obligation are omitted from the equation. As Patrick Deneen observes, the mortgage industry rests on “the financial equivalent of college ‘hookups’, random encounters of strangers.”⁶⁸Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Bankers are no longer honest observers of conditions in the community. Instead, as Deneen points out, “training at dorm parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career in the mortgage bond market.”

Near term intentions only make sense in the context of longer term intentions. Behavior can only be characterized adequately when we know what the longer and longest-term intentions are and how the nested shorter-term intentions relate to the longer. MacIntyre gives the example of someone who is writing as sentence. In isolation, that activity would be pointless. But it’s not. The sentence is meant to convey an idea, the idea tells a story, the story contributes to a debate, and the debate clarifies truth. All this is for the life of the world. Our lives are like this. Life on its own terms is fleeting. We tell ourselves that we only live once in order to convince ourselves to take whatever we can get while the getting is good. We fail to see that we are writing a narrative history and our life is just a paragraph. We are not isolated observers in the universe. We are not passive bystanders. We’re agents acting in the world. And we mustn’t forget the world we act in is inhabited by other people. These aren’t just people who happen to be present for us to perceive. As Matthew Crawford puts it, “we find ourselves thrown into the world midstream; it is already saturated with sediments of meaning” and thus other people have “set up shop in our consciousness in ways that condition how we perceive and use everything.”⁶⁹Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head In other words, we are never really free of authority. We are born to parents and must develop from infancy under their authority. This freedom from authority is a fiction we tell ourselves. And in this fiction all must be equal. Tocqueville observes that this radical equalization reinforces the mythical elevation of Self. Individuals who are equal owe nothing to anyone and expect nothing in return. “They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his decedents and separates his contemporaries from him.”⁷⁰Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Nature no longer has any claim over the sovereign self. We are whatever we wish to be and we assume no obligations that we haven’t consented to. Sex carries no obligations. We use others to gratify ourselves. Where does this get us? Children become incidental to sex. They may be ‘terminated,’ and their mothers can be discarded. There are unseen costs with the loss of unseen lives who will never be able to contribute anything to the life of the world. And millions more fail to reach their potential as they are raised fatherless and often consigned to poverty. Countless women are left hurt, lonely, and unmarried after men have used them and moved on to someone else. We shouldn’t assume men fare all that well in this (anti)culture either. Men are dropping out of school and the workforce, their life expectancy is decreasing in large part due to their disproportionate struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Instead of channeling biologically rooted masculine characteristics that society desperately needs, e.g. achievement, eschewing of weakness, seeking adventure, and taking risks, these traits are pathologized.⁷¹APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (2018), American Psychological Association If modern attitudes about sex have “liberated” us, its unclear what we’ve been freed from. Security? Commitment? Trust?

We try to offset our losses by buying insurance. But Rod Dreher points out that this is a lousy substitute:

The insurance company, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, pays your doctors and pharmacists, but it will not cook for you when you are too sick to cook for yourself and your kids. Nor will it clean your house, pick your kids up from school, or take them shopping when you are too weak to get out of bed. A bureaucrat from the state or the insurance company won’t come sit with you and pray with you and tell you she loves you. It won’t be the government or your insurer who allows you to die in peace — if it comes to that — by assuring you that your spouse and children will not be left behind to face the world alone. Only your family and your community can do that.⁷³Rod Dreher, ‘Coach O. Vs. The Acela Gradgrind’, The American Conservative

Moving for better opportunities is nothing new. “People have long moved for jobs. This has been done before — the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.”⁷⁴Chris Arnade, Dignity The warped careerist view of success now demands mobility. Exile was traditionally used as an alternative to capital punishment. It was considered a terrible fate. Now we self-impose this fate. Once we cut these ties it is extremely difficult to re-establish roots. The process of assimilation into a new community is arduous. Shared experiences on which trust is built take time. You’re more likely to connect with other economic migrants, outsiders like yourself who already moved multiple times and would move again for the right opportunity. These are people who break connections easily and often so don’t get too close, not that they’d let you. Returning home has its own challenges too. It’s never the same place when you return. The distance of time remains after the geographic distance is gone. Naturally, people moved on while you were away. Returning cannot undo the fact that you left. Children in families that are dislocated give little thought to being rooted since there is no deep sense of belonging to start with. This is another example of radical freedom that effectively reduces one’s choices. Home isn’t an option for those who never had a sense of home growing up. They only know ambition.

But even if we refuse to be caught up in the careerist take on success, we are not necessarily protected. The unending quest for greater efficiency creates a system of elaborate supply chains where the consumer is far removed from the individuals responsible for supplying even the basic necessities. Food simply appears in the grocery with little appreciation for the coordination and effort it took to make that happen. Whether that food was grown locally or imported vast distances hardly matters because there is practically no relational experience in these transactions. The producer of a widget is completely cut off from the object of their effort. Producers and consumers are so far removed from one another that there is no perceivable relationship between them. It’s purely transactional. The reality is that there are many who benefit from globalization and a not insignificant number who are devastated by it when the local plant is shuttered. The beneficiaries of the globalized economy are often physically separated from those it leaves behind whose sense of place and purpose is wrecked along with their community. It’s easy to tell them they should go where the jobs are. But what kind of person leaves aging parents? What is the value of staying in the town you were born? What is the cost of rootlessness on families? These are questions that economists can never provide answers to.

We don’t necessarily have to be geographically distant to become displaced. We certainly don’t need to move across the country to become cut off from mediating institutions like family and friendship. Sure, these things can be had no matter where we find ourselves living. And there are lots or reasons, many of them outside of our control, for why we might settle in another geographic region. But our modern way of life itself is out of joint. The dense urban areas where economic refugees tend to gravitate are themselves set up as if fragmentation and isolation where the goal. Consider how our modern technologically-driven cities conspire against the family. In addition to the unaffordability and the lack of space, urban dwellers “voluntarily” leave cities when they have children due to safety concerns, the lack of housing options, the low quality schools, a lack of childcare, overall congestion, and the fact that most cities are generally much more accommodating to cars than to people. Derek Thompson, writing on childless trends in cities for The Atlantic, described the scene he occasionally witnessed of a mother hellishly struggling to come and go from the fourth floor of a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York City with two small children. He described it as “a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.”⁷⁵Derek Thompson, The Future of the City Is Childless, The Atlantic, July 2019 One would be hard-pressed to come up with something less amenable to the life of the family. Segregation of commercial areas from residential neighborhoods is common. Congestion exaggerates the distances between these spaces. Even in small to medium size cities, a thirty minute or more commute to work or school is completely normal. This results in co-workers and classmates who might live an hour or more from each other. They live completely separate lives outside of the office. They cheer for different teams. They socialize with different neighbors. They pray with different congregants. We pick and choose what social circles to move in. Life is served up a la carte. We form into voting blocks; surrounding ourselves with “diverse” groups of people who tend to think more or less alike. We wander in these herds. The same groupthink and dogmatism that many fled religion to avoid are alive and well in these radically secular domains. As Patrick Deneen points out, we hold freedom sacrosanct while we submit to hours of imprisonment in our cars each week.⁷⁶Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Despite the many benefits of living in a digitally connected world, this extensive connectivity doesn’t make it easier for us to be present regardless of our geographic location. Distractions are everywhere and this affects how we relate to one another. Look at our public spaces. Common areas that used to provide sociable experiences are now filled with preoccupied people slumped over their devices. Headphones are found in virtually any setting, signaling to the world that the wearer’s mind is elsewhere. We retreat into virtual worlds of television, video games, social media, and pornography. We escape inward, trading authentic interactions with actual people for the latent friendships offered by social media.⁷⁷Social media gives each of us a voice. But if we don’t have something meaningful to say how is this amplification good? Few of us appreciate the degree to which these digital appendages are engineered to co-opt our attention. Whole industries exist for the purpose of grabbing and holding your attention. Sophisticated research goes into this using extraordinary measures to learn as much about you as possible. That isn’t because they wish to know you as a person, but to manipulate you so that you will read, watch, or buy something. We like to think the virtual world gives us more choice and more freedom but these apps are designed to anesthetize and hypnotize. We fill our home with things designed to rob our attention at a time when our presence is sorely needed. These same distractions literally impair our ability to operate a vehicle. Social media makes us less sociable. For all the real and substantial benefits, the Internet hasn’t decreased depression or anxiety. It hasn’t reduced the number of suicides. It hasn’t reinforced the family. It hasn’t reversed the atomization. And it certainly hasn’t reduced ideological polarization. These aspects of life are unraveling faster than ever.