Our Disintegrating Society

I think that America and Western Europe have reached that stage that most societies eventually come to; the society, as a whole, is tired.

In slightly over a hundred years, we have been through two world wars and countless smaller ones; we have been through the upheaval of a total economic meltdown during the Great Depression; we have exhausted trillions in a facedown with expansionist Communism; we have been through two worldwide pandemics; we have been assaulted with a rise in ever-more complex technology that never allows for a breath or adjustment before the next huge changes come along; and we have seen our ethics, morals, social foundations, the interpretation of our history, and even our understandings of what it means to be human, go right straight to hell on a handcar, if you'll forgive the expression. We're bombarded daily with protests, outlandish rhetoric, shootings, uprisings, threats, and the most vile hatred poured out on each other and accepted as legitimate political viewpoints.

Meanwhile, most people are struggling along, trying to do their best. They're trying to maintain some form of reasonable conduct, they're trying to raise families, to hold onto employment, to put food on the table, to maintain a decent place to live.....but it has gotten pretty difficult to do. Inflation has made healthy dining nearly impossible; adult children still live with their parents because housing prices are absolutely forbidding; our infrastructure keeps eroding thanks to decades of economic waste, imbecilic administration, and neglect from public officials; simple solutions to thorny problems (let's say gasoline prices, as one example) are rejected in favor of pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams such as "green energy", without offering any relief to consumers, who are simply expected to suck it up and do without; and heaven forbid you should get sick, because if you do, the price of medical care will consume every last cent you have and destroy everything you have spent four generations building up, just as surely as a hurricane or a tsunami would wipe it right off the map.

Faced with all of this on a daily basis, most people don't have enough energy or conviction to worry about wars in the Middle East, or famines in Africa, or what trials some Hollywood starlet is going through; they have their own, real, immediate problems to deal with. "Can I afford to replace the bald tires on my 1997 Honda Accord and still get Jenny the new shoes that she needs for winter? My company is downsizing, and I may lose my job....how am I going to pay for my mother's hospice care? They have raised property taxes again....we may end up losing our house. I hate feeding my kids bologna and beans for the fourth night in a row this week, but with chicken prices at nearly $4.50 a pound, I can't manage to provide good food for them and still keep the electricity on for the rest of the month." And along comes news that homosexual activists are marching in New York City; there are race riots in Minneapolis; a highly-placed Congressman has been accused of dallying with a seventeen year-old girl; governments advocate assisted suicide; angry people demand that a mentally-ill 45 year-old man has the right to use a junior-high school girl's bathroom....and how do people react?

They sigh. They shrug. They shake their heads and say, "No more. Please. Just go away---I can't do anything about it right now. I have enough to deal with."

Is it apathy? Or is it exhaustion? It seems as if most people are willing to sit back and let the world implode, because they feel like they can't do anything about it anyway. And so the snowball continues to roll downhill, gathering mass and velocity, and it won't stop now until it impacts with the trunk of the huge oak tree at the bottom of the slope.

I have a book on my shelf; a compact volume of world history, published in 1973. In the section outlining the decline of the western Roman Empire, it states that by 200 A.D., Rome was facing multiple signs of decay: they were besieged with foreigners entering their territory, looking for handouts and weakening the Empire's cultural norms and stability; they experienced severe economic depressions and a gradually increasing loss of affordable food; there was a decrease in population, mainly due to the fact that for hundreds of thousands of lower-class Romans, they just couldn't afford to raise children, and therefore did not have them---they either avoided marriage and family altogether, or they practiced the 3rd-century form of abortion, and simply left newborn infants on barren hillsides to die of exposure or animal predation. Most tellingly, there was a cultural decay: the backbone of the society, the middle class, withered away due to lack of money and opportunity. Earlier Romans had a great pride in themselves and in their nation, and a vital interest in the world in general; for 1300 years, Rome had stood as the pinnacle of human civilization. But by 200 A.D., due to economic disparity, a failing demographic structure, the rise of barbarian hordes inside their borders, and a rapidly evaporating concern with their own society, most Romans were tired. They were concerned with just making it through the day, to get enough food into their stomachs and to keep the Emperor's tax collectors at bay for a little while longer---they had little care for the former glories of their society; and some of them viewed it with outright disdain.

Sound familiar? The passage in this book which struck me very profoundly when I first read this book, 50 years ago, was this: "Many thoughtful Romans were led to the depressing conviction that the world was a place of darkness, that mankind was evil, and life was a burden. As a result of this change in mental attitude, the problems that the Empire faced did not receive the consideration that they should have received if the minds of these Romans had not been occupied with other problems." In short, the Romans didn't have the time or energy in trying to turn the tide of disintegration engulfing them, because they were too busy trying to keep body and soul together. The country was falling apart, but they lacked the money, the organization, and the conviction to counteract it; the Empire fell because they were tired, broke, poor, and disgusted.

This trend has been repeated many, many times over the course of human history; I think that Rome, particularly, bears a very close parallel with what we're seeing around us right now, but Rome isn't the only example. Bear this in mind as you contemplate our porous borders, the influx of foreign freeloaders into our countries, our endless wars, our titanic levels of debt, the bumbling incompetence of our so-called "leaders", the descent of our moral practices into suicide, infanticide, sexual depravity, murder, and greed, and the ever-rising difficulties we are experiencing in simply trying to maintain a decent standard of living. Things cannot continue along this course, and believe me, they won't.

Ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

Oh dear, I've just come across this very gloomy thread and feel the need to inject it with the hope and joy that makes us Christians. In Pope St JXXIIIs opening address at the 2nd Vatican Council, he notes a similar air of despair of the culture then, 64 years ago.

In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.

We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.

In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men's own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfillment of God's superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church.

It is easy to discern this reality if we consider attentively the world of today, which is so busy with politics and controversies in the economic order that it does not find time to attend to the care of spiritual reality, with which the Church's magisterium is concerned. Such a way of acting is certainly not right, and must justly be disapproved. It cannot be denied, however, that these new conditions of modern life have at least the advantage of having eliminated those innumerable obstacles by which, at one time, the sons of this world impeded the free action of the Church. In fact, it suffices to leaf even cursorily through the pages of ecclesiastical history to note clearly how the Ecumenical Councils themselves, while constituting a series of true glories for the Catholic Church, were often held to the accompaniment of most serious difficulties and sufferings because of the undue interference of civil authorities. The princes of this world, indeed, sometimes in all sincerity, intended thus to protect the Church. But more frequently this occurred not without spiritual damage and danger, since their interest therein was guided by the views of a selfish and perilous policy.

In this regard, we confess to you that we feel most poignant sorrow over the fact that very many bishops, so dear to us, are noticeable here today by their absence, because they are imprisoned for their faithfulness to Christ, or impeded by other restraints. The thought of them impels us to raise most fervent prayer to God. Nevertheless, we see today, not without great hopes and to our immense consolation, that the Church, finally freed from so many obstacles of a profane nature such as trammeled her in the past, can from this Vatican Basilica, as if from a second apostolic cenacle, and through your intermediary, raise her voice resonant with majesty and greatness.

Christian hope has raised us out of despair in the worst circumstances imaginable and it's no different today.