Personal Musings

The Pope, in Portugal, claimed abortion and gay marriage to be among the most dangerous threats on earth. Interesting.

I suspect the Pope, having a hotline to God, must have heard of this imminent gay threat from Him. Because I have to believe that in his infallible knowledge, the Pope knows Europe is on the verge of a financial catastrophe. I suspect that he has been informed by someone at the Vatican that the government in Thailand is basically a shambles and there's a real possibility of continued political violence. I suspect that he has been told by at least one or two of the American cardinals that there are hundreds of thousands of troops, American troops -- constituting the most formidable army in the world -- occupying two countries in the Middle East. I suspect someone mentioned to him that there is a hole in the earth, a mile below the ocean, which is spewing raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Apparently, not. It seems the Pope actually knows little about the current state of world affairs, except this one thing. He knows that for five centuries the Church has been fighting a losing battle for the soul of Western Civilization. He knows there was a time when the Church controlled every aspect of life in Europe and its political dependencies. A person was not a person until his baptism. That same could not leave earth (for the wonders of Heaven) without his last rites and a burial in dirt blessed by the Church. Anyone lucky enough to be educated recieved his education from the Church. Meanwhile, the great masses who lacked education were involved in an economy related to the building of Europe's cathedrals and feeding its pilgrims. Charity was dispensed by the Church or at its doors. It consecrated wars. And of course it defined the family in terms of the sacrament of marriage -- in so doing, it legitimized the movement of titles and property from one generation to the next. Children born outside the bonds of Church-sponsored matrimony were deemed illegitimate and often became orpans (wards of the Church) to avoid the inconvenience they might cause their "alduterous" or "fornicating" parents.

But science and the printing press began the end of the Church's grip on the lives of Europeans. With time, rational government co-opted the prerogatives of the Church. The State now issues birth certificates and death certificates. The State provides pensions and poor relief. The State provides education to the people. The State governs economic affairs. The State gives license to marry.

The Church has remained relevant under the ascendancy of the State so long as it has been allowed to exercise cultural control over marriage. This relevance is now become marginal, at best. When the State moves from honoring the Church's notion of marriage to honoring its people's notions of marriage, then the Church will become finally and completely irrelevant. The Pontiff, if he knows nothing else, knows that the advent of gay marriage is not truly a threat to the world. But it is an absolute threat to his Church.

Being human is no comfortable state of being. It requires compassion, tolerance, temperance, resilience and patience--none of which is easy to achieve. And these traits are regularly tested because we live in a world full of people similarly struggling with their humanity. It is difficult to suffer the intolerant, to have compassion for the cruel, or to be temperate in the face of extremism.

My friend Tyson once asked me how I reconcile an obvious misanthropy with my secular humanism, and I had no answer for him. For the few weeks following I turned my mental energies toward understanding how it is that I am able to do so. I considered my opinions on mob mentality, individual liberty, free will, tyranny, democracy, republicanism, distribution of wealth, persistence of poverty, crime, war, religion, art, and literature. The exercise was neither comprehensive or strictly organized. It occurred in disjointed moments on the subway, during lunchbreaks, and through conversations with friends.

Tyson's question forced me to evaluate the two facets of my worldview. The first is that people, when left to their own devices, are selfish and self-serving. They seize advantages which accrue benefits to themselves and think little of the consequence to others. In such a world, each of us is responsible for his own safety. Each of us must be constantly vigilant to avoid becoming victims of another's greed, perfidy, or general machinations. The second is that we love success, beauty, and happiness. We have created institutions to pursue and secure personal liberty. Our great artists have wrought masterworks in paint, prose, and poetry. Charity and generosity surface in moments of great calamity.

Knowing these two things, and recognizing man's deep capacity for each, I accept that we must allow people to be what they are. To tame man's negative spirits tames all of man's spirits. We must seek a middle point where our basest motivations are balanced by our noblest pursuits, and when behavior becomes destructive to the social order (rape, murder, theft, fraud) we must condemn and contain it. Otherwise the relative anarchy of pure self-interest will crowd out the beautiful things in life -- no artist will display work which the vandal has equal right to destroy.

So I answered Tyson's original question to my own satisfaction. Nonetheless, I still wonder, "How do we best encourage man's greatness in a healthy productive society? What form does that society take? Can it ever be free of crime? of poverty? Would we honestly want it to be?"

I don't have the answers to these questions yet. But I'll keep thinking, and as I form my opinions, you can expect me to share them.

I was just reading through my archives. Some of this stuff was pretty good. Since I included "writing more" among my New Year's resolutions, I need to increase the frequency of the graffiti here. I'll post some of what I've published on facebook. I'll also post those self-same resolutions.

Conflating the lack of writing with a lack of time is weak. The blog is a decent medium which I ought to employ more.