In an episode of his popular 1950's television series Life is Worth Living, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen described communism as a vulture; a scavenger, that picks on the bones of decaying civilizations. He was referencing Jesus' words from the Gospels about the end times (Mt. 24:28, Lk. 17:37). For a communists revolution to succeed the society being taken captive must already be in an advanced state of decline, if not total collapse. The great driver of the world wide communist movement at the time was Soviet Russia. Far from condemning Russia, Sheen claimed that communism only represented a phase that that nation was passing through. Eventually, he assured the audience in dramatic fashion, Russia would convert and lead a Christian revival in the world.
The Soviet Union did eventually implode under the weight of socialist central planning and communist repression. The Russian Federation that has emerged in the last three decades is far from the Christian beacon Sheen envisioned. It's not to say that his prophesy will not eventually come to pass, but it's not there yet.
The Soviet Union's collapse was not simply a matter of geopolitical and economic miscalculations. Communism's underlying materialist philosophy is the reason why it and other kindred economic and social theories have never and will never succeed. Whatever its sunny, universalist rhetoric may express, it reduces the human person to members of classes, pitting them against one another. There is no individual self, only the collective that is either working for or against the common economic good. Humans are thus reducible to their class and defined by economic criteria.
Today we no longer speak so much of class struggle, but contemporary Marxists still divide people into groups pitted against each other. These groups are defined by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. If the previous iteration of Marxist thought was materialistic, the present version is hyper-materialist. Both deny the spiritual, but the previous understanding wasn't quite so crude. It united people around an ideology that doubled for religion or spirituality. The goal was universal fraternity and equality; the ushering in of a utopian new age that left the old world behind, never to be remembered but for its oppressive injustice. This equality would come at the cost of individual identity and initiative. This was no sterile, intellectual endeavor. Tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people lost their lives in the Marxist pursuit of utopia.
We in the West, especially in the United States, individuality is an obsession (the same is even more true for inclusiveness, but I won't be dealing with that explicitly here). Conformity is to be avoided at all costs. There is nothing that demands conformity, not simply of appearance, but of thought more stringently than Marxism. For contemporary Marxism to gain traction, especially with young people, individualism is feigned under the guise of a dizzying kaleidoscope of ever shifting identities. Just to keep everyone more than a little on edge, as Douglas Murray has pointed out, which identities are stable and which are fluid can shift depending on the needs of the moment and the enemy being confronted. In the end though, we are all just members of groups. Some are favored and some are vilified. Some are innocent and some are guilty. All this is based on a deprived understanding of human nature, simplified view of history, and an at times cringeworthy ignorance of the present as well as the past.
Many young people, and even those not so young, often spend an inordinate amount of time self analyzing, questioning every aspect of their being, reducing their essential selves to their physical or emotional wants and desires. The natural self discovery of adolescence becomes a labyrinthine journey extending into adulthood. One aspect of what it means to be human is bracketed off and made the overarching qualifier. At once someone can be so unique as to constitute a singularly constituted gender, while at the same time absorbed into a minority group struggling against the oppressive standards of the dominant culture. Questions of race are also in play, but as with the topic of inclusivity, I'm going to leave that topic for another time lest this become a book length treatise.
All this is rooted in the flesh. There are no higher, abstract, dare I call them spiritual questions of the beautiful, the true or the good at play. In place of economic theory the chief concerns revolve around emotional comfort and physical gratification. In the contemporary world sex and gender are bracketed off, as I wrote; separated from any sense of family, community or responsibility. Discovering who we are has nothing to do with an eventual turn outward to the world but either becomes a never-ending spiral downward into the self or a destination that is its own reward.
It dies though, with the atomized self. It is a sterile self fulfillment for which fertility is an option, at best. I am not suggesting that sex should be detached from pleasure, romance or even eroticism, for lack of a better term. To make an analogy with eating, must we only eat that which is strictly nutritious with out reference to taste? Isn't a multi course meal of sumptuous foods and fine wines a greater, more human experience overall than getting a burger at the drive thru? And aren't these experiences part of what makes life special? Continuing in the context of food, if we were to feast like this every night we would easily fall into gluttony and the health issues which follow. We understand that the mundane everyday meal makes the feasting even the much more satisfying. We eat to live, as the rule, not the other way around.
In the sexual arena, childbirth and family place natural limits on sexual desire. These responsibilities contextualize human sexuality, leading us away from self indulgent and possibly even reckless behavior. Now that the pill has successfully divorced sex from procreation, eroticism can live in unfettered independence. Strangely enough, in spite of the new openness, the supposed demystification of sex, the nature human sexuality seems to be a greater enigma than at any other time in human history.
Eugène Delacroix "Liberty Leading the People" 1830
But sex, even sexual imagery, detached so completely the basic concepts of fertility, family and community is rendered either vulgar or incoherent, and often both. There is a photo making the rounds of a naked woman protester sitting on the pavement in Portland, Oregon, legs spread, exposing herself to a group of riot police. She is masked, and the photo is taken from behind. I immediately thought of Eugène Delacroix's portrait "Liberty Leading the People," though as of now I seem to be the only one. In the famous painting inspired by the 1830 French Revolution, a bare breasted woman, the personification of liberty, leads a charge, with the French revolutionary tricolor flag in one hand and a musket in the other, over the corpses of the fallen. She is an inspiration for the people, representing the idealized robust French peasant woman leading her people, in spite of dangers and setbacks, to victory over the forces of monarchical reaction. Her bare breasts are not a sexual fetish, but a sign of nurturing strength, as well as freedom.
What is one to make of the anonymous "Athena of Portland," as the unknown woman, and her photo, is being called? One could say that what she engaged in was a piece of performance art as protest. She didn't just accidentally show up on a random street at night wearing nothing but a head covering. Surly she knew photos would be taken, if such an eventuality wasn't arranged for ahead of time. She was trying to be provocative, but other than a display of public nudity, what was it she was trying to provoke? The female genital organ today is presented as a symbol of feminist power. There is a popular play, and later movie, based on the idea. But what power does it have, really, when it is detached from a wholistic vision of the human person?
Today there is a greater awareness of something Jesus taught two thousand years ago, namely that women shouldn't be objectified as sex objects (men shouldn't be either, by the way). To reduce a person to body parts, or as purely an object of sexual desire is to fail to see the person as a fully realized human being, created in the image and likeness of God. Yet this woman covers what makes her identifiable as an individual, her face, to highlight what makes her a part of a group. It is the part of herself that, in the contemporary popular mind is associated with sexual gratification to the exclusion of reproduction. That it has the awesome power of bringing a new human life into the world isn't even an afterthought in a age when conception is treated as a problem to be solved instead of a gift to be cherished. She is passive, sitting down, daring her opponents to act violently. Her sexuality is her weapon, but is that really all she has to offer the revolution? If sex is power and pleasure is her right, it still all begins and ends with her. There is no higher good beyond a moment's ecstasy, no future to carry on the struggle for. She is trying to be a living allegory, but in the end is a nameless, faceless sex object - the very thing the revolution says its trying to overturn.
Paradoxically the allegorical, paint on canvas Liberty is a more fully realized human being than the flesh and blood Athena. The artist allows her a face, a personal identity. Her clothing associate her with a community. Her head dress, a Phrygian cap, calls to mind the 1789 Revolution, not shielding her personal identity, rather binding it closer to ideals she is willing to die for. She is no passive provocateur, but a woman of action who risks an uncertain engagement with the enemy. The display of her body points to values beyond the flesh. It isn't a manipulative provocation for its own sake, one that she is all but certain of walking away from unharmed. She represents both the general and the particular, the complexity of human existence presently reduced to body parts and empty gestures.
All this would not be happening if we were not living in a society in decline. In our way, we are materialist. As a people we have lost touch with our heritage, both national and religious, and are generally ill-informed about the present. We live in a world where technological advancement is confused with human progress, and human worth is judged by economic and therapeutic criteria. Religion is reduced to either social action or a form of self help spirituality. We are riddled with self doubt and questions. We abandoned organized religion because we were skeptical it really held the answers. We have no sense of tradition, believing we can make our own meaning here and now. Rather than enlightenment and personal fulfillment it has lead to constant revolution. A great tearing down is taking place, because such a rootless society can not endure. There is part of this whole process that is a natural consequence of materialism, some is purposeful. But those who are willfully dismantling the present system don't really know what it is they are abandoning and have even less of an idea about what will replace it.
A quote from the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago is making the rounds on the internet these days. He said once that, as a result of the steady disintegration of Western society, he expected to die peacefully in his bed, his successor would die in jail and his successor would die a martyr in the public square. In an interview published only days before his death in 2015, George clarified his words, which he felt were misunderstood. They are generally taken as a prophesy, but he places them in the context of a conversation he was having with a discouraged brother priest. His words were not so much meant as a prediction, but to say rather, with the world going the way it is what is the worst that could possibly happen and what if the worst was to pass? What then? His answer is that if the civil society crumbles, along with persecutions, the Church will be there when the dust settles, as she always has been, to pick up the shattered pieces and rebuild the culture anew.
I am no prophet, and I don't believe the collapse of the United States is necessarily going to come to pass in these days. I believe there is something worth saving, and pray the majority of Americans feel the same. My ultimate faith is in that God's will will be done in the long term, no matter the fate of particular nations. Let us not lose heart, let us return to the Lord ever confident in His abiding mercy.
