We are DOOMED!

Rome was not built in a day and it did not fall in a day either.

A philosopher sat in a city surrounded by social decay, but also promising religious developments and wrote learned books. Read those books and you realize that Saint Augustine did not know if he lived at the edge of great cultural revival or the end of Rome.

Rome had been sacked, but this could have led to renewal. Eastern Rome would buy itself another thousand years and a centuries of cultural splendor. Western Rome might have done the same.

We know now as we read that the West was on the edge of doom, DOOM, not just CG doom but bloody real pain, but the doom did not come quickly. There were recoveries, local heroes like Arthur, and mistakes seemed not to matter. Judging the good or harm of any action is hard except in the long term.

For example, few actions are so base that they do no good and few goods are so great that they are unmixed by our evils. Social decay and revival are hard to measure.

That is why it is so facile for conservatives to point to disasters and attribute them to a favorite worry or sin “x.” It is equally foolish to have confidence that a few years of a social experiment (say pornography easily available) show harm or a lack of harm. Time will tell, but by the time it tells, we will be out of time.

Conservatives just now, when going bad almost seem to be rooting for apocalypse. That will show our leftists friends, we think, but Augustine demonstrates the folly of such a position. It is uncharitable and stupid, a rare double moral disaster. We are wishing harm to fall on our friends and burning down our own house to achieve it.

Are we doomed? We don’t know. For all we know, five hundred years from now they will date the Fall of America to last week. For all we know, five hundred years from now they will date our renewal to last week. Augustine teaches us that the Shiny Events of the last month are unlikely to have mattered, but that some person someplace did something almost unnoticed that began our ruin or renewal.

It will amuse our descendants no end our fixation of the Shiny and our missing the Now-Unknown Person who was changing the world. I believe Bill Bright will someday be obviously more important to the history of the twentieth century than most presidents of the century and yet most of our leadership class do not know his name.

Blessed Augustine reminds me today that I don’t know where I stand in history: at the Fall or the Renewal. I don’t know if I live in decaying Rome or burgeoning New Rome (Constantinople). My job? Do my duty. Be charitable as I can. Love God and do what I can.