The Whirlwind

"This is the dead land, this is cactus land, here the stone images are raised, here they receive the supplication of a dead man's hand under the twinkling of a fading star." (T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men)
                               
Do you ever find yourself, or the people you know, saying that we (and by "we" I mean the West in general, and the United States of America in particular) are the greatest civilization of all time? It's a concept that most Americans hold, either subconsciously and vaguely, or very clearly and explicitly.  We believe that the eras that passed before us were marked by ignorance, barbarism, poor health, and superstition. Even the various improvements, advancements, and enlightenments of past generations are viewed with something amounting to condescension, much like a parent would pat a child on the head and say, "Good job, you tied your shoes!" Because we have come that far. Because we are that superior, that much better.

Have you ever stopped to think about this? Have you ever wondered if this is so, or why we think that it is so? What, precisely, is the litmus test that we apply to civilization that determines ours to be so vastly superior to all those that went before? I don't have all the answers, but I do have an idea. To understand this, perhaps we should first consider the reasons why we think that previous generations were less civilized. This may give some insight into how we define a great civilization.

I think, in the end, that we have adopted a dangerously evolutionary viewpoint of history that tells us that mankind necessarily improves, and we criticize the civilizations of  previous eras primarily on the grounds of science and technology. Modern Western civilization seems to judge quality and greatness by words that end in "er". Bigger, faster, newer: these things are better. Quantity over quality. Past generations were presumably uncivilized because they were superstitious (which often means simply "religious"), unscientific, and unhygenic. In fact, they were probably downright stupid, because they got their scientific facts wrong. After all, consider the treatment of Galileo. How barbaric must a people be to imagine that the sun revolves around the earth! This is surely evidence of base savagery. Look at the Crusades and the Inquisition. Only a benighted, superstitious people would have wars about religion, or torture people for their beliefs. I guess this must be true--that never happens anymore! (Please forgive the sarcasm....)

We think that we are more advanced because advancement is determined in our minds by science and technology. The Medieval Era is discarded out of hand, because the thinkers of its time made certain scientific errors. But are we really more intelligent? How many professors of philosophy today could go mind-to-mind with St. Aquinas? Or Scotus, who, with his dunce's cap, is a far finer thinker than most of the relativist thinkers of today. We pride ourselves on having more education and more people receiving an education, but is it really a better education?

And what other tests may we apply besides philosophy, education, science and technology? What about literature? Where are the Dante's and Virgil's of today? Or the Shakespeares, or Goethes? Even the T. S. Eliot's and Edith Sitwell's of our generation seem virtually non-existent. Furthermore, the technology in which we take so much pride may actually tend toward the destruction of our language. Fewer and fewer people in our times have a really good grasp of grammar and the  English language. I fear for a time when "text" becomes our standard form of writing....

There is not time enough here to mention the rest of the arts and other factors that contribute to a great civilization. Suffice it to say that the results of this more comprehensive litmus test are not as favorable towards Western culture and civilization as the limited tests of science and technology. But one key issue needs to be treated here briefly, and that is the respect (or lack thereof ) for human life. It doesn't require a historian or scholar to know that all the wars and tortures of the Middle Ages cannot even begin to compare to the horrors of death and destruction of just the last century. Granted, many of these deaths are not attributable to the West (Russia, and China come to mind). Yet even our own country has been involved in numerous wars these last hundred years (not all of which were justifiable!), and Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone bear witness to our failing respect for human life. And, remember, it was our vaunted science and technology that enabled us to successfully kill so many people. If the hearts of men remain uncivilized, then science and technology will lend themselves to the cause of  greater destruction. But even war is only a part of the story of human life.

I read an article yesterday that might be too dreadful to reproduce in detail here. But the basic facts are these. A doctor was recently arrested for the manner in which he had performed seven abortions. What was illegal in his actions? When he went to perform the abortion, he first induced labor so that the baby was actually born before he murdered it. Horrifying, indeed, but for all its horror it raises a question in my mind. Why was this illegal? Simply because the baby was outside its mother's womb, and was therefore human life, protected by the law. Yet strangely enough, if he had killed the baby a couple of minutes before, while it was still inside the womb, it would have been a legal act, the embryo would not have been considered human. The fact that our nation cannot see that such reasoning and such actions are utterly stupid, heinous, and absolutely evil causes me to be very much afraid. A nation that kills its own children, Pope John Paul II told us, is a nation without hope.

"A voice in Ramah was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children...because they are not."  (Matt.2:18)

A civilization that has embraced the "culture of death" is not dying. No, it is already dead, and rapidly decaying. We do not pass the test. Art, life, literature, philosophy, culture, education, religion, and language all tell against us. We have bought into a great and terrible lie--the lie that we are truly good (because we are "liberal" and open-minded) and truly great (because our technology is so bloody marvelous). Not only is technology not the only test of the greatness of a civilization, but I specifically thought that the fascination with bigger, stronger, and faster, as opposed to the arts and intellectual pursuits, was a mark of the savage....

When philosophy is lessened or ignored, a civilization declines;
When religion becomes barbaric or is despised, a culture loses its identity;
When language looses its depth and flexibility, so does the culture that speaks it;
When the arts are abandoned or become formless, a civilization has lost its moral perspective;
When culture goes, civilization goes;
When morality loses its importance, violence and revolution become the norm;
Wherever human life has become cheap, consequential death and destruction lurk nearby.

In preparing for this essay I took a moment to look up the definition of the words "culture" and "civilization". They were pretty much what you would expect, no major surprises. But I noticed something of which I had previously been unaware. This is probably familiar to most of you, or else may seem obvious. It so happens that the word "culture" comes from a Latin root meaning "to cultivate".  This was news to me, but it made sense. Cultivation bears to our minds images of soil, seeds, plots of ground, plants, tilling, nature, and growing things. Concepts like growth, life, identity, training, care, etc., attend the word "cultivation".There are numerous instructive associations between culture and cultivation. But my mind went somewhere else, to a passage in the Old Testament that also has to with cultivating: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." (Hosea 8:7)

If high civilization and culture are related to cultivation, then the question we must honestly ask ourselves and our country is, "What are we cultivating? What have we been planting, and what may we expect to gather in?" I am sure that there are many answers to this question, but one seems especially clear right now, right here, in twenty-first century America. Relativism. We have uprooted absolutes and planted relativism. Moral, philosophical, artistic, intellectual, and religious relativism. This is the dreadful seed that we planted in the foolish hubris of our young American civilization. And what may we expect to reap when it has grown up? Destruction, nothing less. When absolutes are denied, relativism reigns. Where relativism is the absolute, anything goes. When anything goes, everything will. And when everything goes, our civilization goes, and we meet with our destruction. Then we come face to face with the crop that we planted, and but for the Mercy of God, we will reap such a whirlwind as we have never known.

And what are we, as Christians, to do as our civilization around us is desperately trying to commit suicide? Do we stand by mourning, but doing nothing? Do we despair? No, there is planting and reaping of another kind still to be done. We shall mourn, indeed, but we will sow another seed, and sowing means doing something very real and very definite. This, then, perhaps is the verse for us today: "Those who sow in tears sing as they reap. He went off, went off weeping, carrying the seed. He comes back, comes back singing, bringing in his sheaves." (Ps. 126:5)

It is dark, but the day is not yet over, the last votives are not yet burned out. The Gospel is still being planted, and laborers are still being called to the great Harvest. The picture is far bleaker than I can paint it here, but despair is a sin into which we must not fall. The West is crumbling like Rome of old once did, but somehow I do not think that God has entirely abandoned it. There is work to be done still, truth to be preached, culture to be preserved, beauty to be admired, souls to be won--and by the Grace of the God Who has never left us yet, we may still reap a different and goodly crop; we may bring in most precious sheaves.

"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, then we thought we were dreaming. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues sang for joy....Restore again our fortunes, Lord." (Ps. 126: 1-2,4)