Preventing Grace
There was an interesting piece a long time ago on Patheos, the writer of which has entirely escaped me, called something like The Reason You’re Depressed Is Civilizational Collapse. It was a brief article that made the useful point that none of us are just on our own, isolated in our homes and minds–not really. Unseen cultural forces press in. We are formed and shaped by the ideas and troubles around us. Eventually, those anxieties become our own. So anyway, of course, it was very depressing in the early gray, filtered light of dawn to read first this:
Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical modeling unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”
It’s sad to watch my generation collapse into nihilism and fear as our bodies begin the process of dying. The men become bugmen, living to consume, filling shelf after shelf with toys their adult brains can’t find amusement in, because they know of nothing else to do. The women are in a panic, desperately trying to hold onto their evaporating youth, trying to prove to themselves that a woman can be just as sexy and alluring at 35 as she could at 23. There’s a lot of rage at the Boomers, but it’s aimless and uninformed. Mostly, people are mad that they “crashed the economy” or “destroyed the climate,” as though the double-digit inflation and choking smog of 1978 were so much better.
No, what the Boomers did to us was what their parents did to them. They ruined us by trying to give us the life they never had. Our grandparents grew up in the Depression, and overindulged their children with toys and attention to the point the boomers failed to develop any real sense of self-awareness. And what, you may ask, did the Boomers lack? The Boomers had their idyllic teenage years cut short. WW2 & Silents still ran the world, and made our parents put on a tie, go to work, and serve The Man before they were ready to stop playing. Your average Boomer male looks back at the summer of ’69 wistfully, wishing it could have gone on forever, slightly resentful that just a few years later, he was driving a shitty Toyota, getting nagged by his wife, and listening to a baby scream. The Boomer female thinks that if it wasn’t for that marriage and those babies she had by the time she was 26, she would have been an editor of a fashion magazine. She never would have gotten that baby belly. She would have been young and sexy forever.
One of the mistakes Christians tend to make is assuming that the sexual revolution was something that happened in the 1960s as part of the general loosening of conventional morality which that decade witnessed. In fact, it is of much deeper and longstanding origins. We can tend to miss this because we focus on the phenomena associated with the sexual revolution—for example, widespread changes in attitude to premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion. What we often fail to realize is that these phenomena are actually symptoms of deeper changes in society, particularly those associated with what it means to be a fulfilled human being. The sexual revolution rests on the idea that fulfillment is a matter of personal, psychological happiness and anything which obstructs that—specifically traditional sexual codes—is by definition oppressive and preventing us from flourishing. And that psychological construction of human purpose stretches back at least as far as Rousseau and the Romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of a broader culture of what we might call expressive individualism.
All three pieces are well worth the time, however depressing they may be. One of my chief amusements is peering at secularists trying to make sense of what’s going on around them without a Biblical context to tell them what is right in under their noses—which, of course, is the point. The Bible is seen as one of the least useful books available to read at the moment (or even to listen to). But I love the contrast—having read all those pieces as I fought to be awake—and then landing on this at the surest moment of despair:
We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bullworks. Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy…If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the Lord. O Lord, you hand is lifted up, but they do not see it. Let them see your zeal for your people, and be ashamed. Isaiah 26:1-6, 10-11
And:
Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell in Meshech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar. My soul has long dwelt among those who are enemies of peace. I labor for peace, but when I speak to them of it, they make themselves ready for battle. Psalm 120:4-6
A cultural mindset unused to suffering of any kind, whose expectations have been formed and shaped not only by material ease and personal “fulfillment” but by the decadent idea that all their peculiar desires at any moment are good and holy, will not be able to long endure more months of covid, nor the sweeping poverty that surely must be coming to the West. Lots of other places know about this, but America and Europe have, for a long time, felt sorry for those forgotten lands, have reached out a magnanimous, if condescending hand of generosity. They have never, in recent memory, wondered if their own ideals might not be blessed by God.
This is not just from the right—the America-is-the-greatest-place-in-the-world. It is very strongly from the left–those who are ready to scold those on the right for their patriotism, while in the same moment preaching a gospel of progressive death to those who haven’t yet learned that the natural rhythms of marriage and childbirth must certainly be repressive and wicked.
Anyway, I found strange comfort this morning in the reminder that God does not bring peace even in temporal terms to those who reject him—not for long anyway. Eventually, the laws of the universe exact their due. We have squandered our years of plenty, not saving up anything or remembering the God who made us and who knows whereof we are made. But our forgetting doesn’t lessen his wisdom, not his goodness. We may still cry to him in any small or great catastrophe and he will still be God and still be able to sort it all out.
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