By GEORGE A. KENDALL
We are constantly being told that change is good, that we should embrace change, that we should welcome it, that the only thing constant is change, and so on ad nauseam. Of course the people who relentlessly hammer us with these slogans are not really advocating for change in general but only for certain kinds of change — those changes that involve undermining and destroying a society’s traditional institutions and, in particular, destroying Christianity and the Christian morality that goes with it.
Now, when we advocate banning abortion, or clipping the wings of the federal judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, the kinds of people who urge us to embrace change lose no time telling us that such actions would be “irresponsible.” Yet those actions would certainly involve change. The changes we are supposed to embrace are the ones that further the process of remaking the world, indeed all of reality, into something radically different from what it has always been, creating a radical discontinuity between that reality and everything that preceded it — in other words, the politics of “transformation.”
The “embracing change” ideology is a tool used by elites for forcing certain kinds of change on people who don’t want them. The Industrial Revolution, aided and abetted by the ideology of the so-called Enlightenment, is a central case of this kind of process. I don’t think most of us quite realize just how ideological a thing the Industrial Revolution was (and is), how much of its spiritual underpinning was (and is) tied to utopian fantasies of creating a paradise on earth through technological progress.
I have said in other writings that there are two kinds of energy working in the world: The binding energy that holds the world together through the right ordering of relationships, and the explosive energy which transforms the world, embodied in the work of the kinds of people we call “trailblazers,” “movers and shakers,” whatever.
The ideology of the Industrial Revolution seems to me to be one that exalts the work of the latter group over that of the many, many ordinary people who hold the world together, who stabilize it by simply working, having families, passing traditions from generation to generation, and so on.
When people come to believe that transforming the world is the only truly important work to be done, and look with contempt on all the people whose lives are devoted “merely” to the work of holding the world together, then destruction of the social order becomes the whole object of their lives.
Modernity despises those who work at holding the world, and society in particular, together. Farming certainly epitomizes the work of holding things together, and accordingly we regard farmers as ignorant hayseeds, an attitude epitomized by Marx’s reference to “the idiocy of rural life” in the Communist Manifesto. We regard the work of maintaining the home and raising children as drudgery and despise women who embrace this vocation. Feminists don’t merely advocate allowing women to choose vocations other than that of housewife, but actively hate that role and, I suspect, would like to ban it. Their propaganda makes it very clear that as far as they are concerned, being a doctor or a lawyer or a CEO is of far more value than being a homemaker (Chesterton said once that feminism is a movement based principally on a dislike of things feminine).
The work that keeps the world, especially the social order, going is always denigrated by our elites and by the mass media, and those who dedicate themselves to such work are made to feel like failures.
Instead of this lopsided affirmation of the work of the movers and shakers vis-a-vis the keepers of order, we need a balance between them, and not a 50-50 balance either. If we want to stabilize society while allowing room for change, the balance needs to be tipped heavily toward the keepers (a ratio of ten keepers to every mover seems plausible to me). If the movers are too powerful, they will inevitably interfere with the work of the keepers and even actively attack them and their traditions and thus undermine the social order, leading to the kind of chaos our elites have created in the name of progress.
How did we get into this mess, anyway? At the time the Industrial Revolution was getting underway, we needed powerful institutional resistance to what the Church calls “the spirit of innovation,” and that resistance should have come from a united Christianity — meaning the Catholic Church. That did not happen, because by that time Christianity had been divided and weakened by the Protestant Reformation, and what resistance the divided Christian churches managed to put up was too little and too late.
Clearly, industrialization was already in the works by the early modern period. The medieval society was already making steps in that direction. But equally clearly, it needed to be done in a way that protected the social order — meaning much more slowly and judiciously. Instead we ended up with the notion of rapid and unstoppable change, tied to the idea that as soon as it became possible to do something, it had to be done.
That made all of us passengers on a runaway train. “Progress” of this kind rules out any kind of rational decision-making along the lines of how a potential change would affect the community (this is how the Amish make decisions on whether or not to use technology), hence it takes away human freedom and makes us prisoners of a process over which we have no control.
Had industrialization been encouraged but managed judiciously in a way that kept the common good paramount, things might have been very different. It is impossible, obviously, to know the precise form things might have taken, but it can be interesting to speculate. Perhaps we would only now be building railroads, with the automobile somewhere off in the future. Perhaps when we got to that future, we would have rejected the temptation to practically eliminate railroads and make the automobile the predominant form of transportation. And, still later, we might have decided that we could, on the whole, get along better without air travel. But these are merely my speculations, and who knows, really?
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Not long ago, I found the following quotation from Albert Einstein on the Internet:
“I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.
“For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process.
“If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe,’ then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real purpose or meaning.
“But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.”
Einstein was neither a Christian nor an Orthodox Jew, yet there is something here which resonates with the Christian experience of the order of the creation. He speaks of the universe as a “friendly” place. Presumably this does not mean the universe somehow goes around with a big smile on its face, slapping people on the back, and so on. But friendly implies friendship, one of the forms of love.
Thus Einstein’s words hint at a universe ordered by love, and hence a kind of convergence with the Christian understanding, which sees a creation which is, first of all, brought into being and ordered by divine love, which is then reflected back, returned to the creator by the creation, which seeks to return to God in friendship with Him. The right relationship between creator and creation is communion, desired by both creator and creature. Such a communion can certainly be called friendly, and in fact friendship with God is central to Catholic teaching.
Einstein was a strong believer in an ordered universe, hence his strictures against the idea of God throwing dice. There is order in the creation because that creation is, first and foremost, the work of divine love, giving creatures their being and, with it, the power to love, and calling them to turn toward the creator in love, to order themselves to their creator. Hence the universe and its order is all the work of love.
Einstein’s idea of God was a somewhat pantheistic one, influenced by Spinoza, yet I think that the Christian vision of the creation came to be a presence in his thinking and perhaps triumphed over a defective theology. He may have been closer to Christianity than even he knew.
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Why is war apparently a constant in human history, to the point that, since the beginning of recorded history, there has probably never been so much as a day when war was not being fought somewhere in the world? The general answer is, of course, original sin. As St. James says: “What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions which are at war in your members? You desire and do not have, so you kill. And you covet and do not obtain; so you fight and wage war” (James 4:1-2).
One of the contributors to this reality is that, not only do wars break out, but having done so they have a way of perpetuating the state of war so that each war leads to the next one. This is true even of necessary, just wars. In theory, such wars are necessary because another nation (or nations) engages in behavior which creates disorder in the international community (if there really is such a thing) and it is necessary to suppress the disorder in the hope of stabilizing the situation.
The problem comes when the war ends in the victory of one side. Ideally, at this point, the winners and the losers shake hands and try to establish a framework for peaceful coexistence. But frequently that does not happen. Instead the winners decide to humiliate and punish the losers. That creates resentment on the part of the losers, resentment which leads to the next war.
World War I was the textbook case of this. After the decisive defeat of Germany, the Allied powers decided to hold Germany responsible for the outbreak of the war, even though the parties to it probably shared responsibility about equally. So they made an all-out effort to humiliate Germany and ruin her economy through indemnities, creating the ideal situation for a monster like Hitler to come to power, thus making World War II very probable.
One of the reasons this happens is that the victorious nations are often victims of their own war propaganda. When a nation’s government carries on a relentless campaign to encourage people to hate and dehumanize an enemy, then the very success of that propaganda makes it very difficult for a government to reverse course and convince its people that we now need to seek friendship with the defeated enemy.
This was the kind of mess we got into at first at the end of World War II, particularly with Japan. This was most evident in the unnecessary and intrinsically evil nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which led to Japan’s surrender. We justified this atrocity on grounds that the only alternative was an extended land invasion of Japan, with perhaps as many as a million American casualties, because the Japanese were determined to fight to the death rather than surrender.
But this was largely a result of the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender. Had we been willing to negotiate the terms for surrender, the need for the land invasion would have been a non-issue. People will say, of course, that the American people would never have accepted a negotiated settlement, because they so bitterly hated the Japanese. Yet that hatred was largely a product of years of propaganda depicting the Japanese as subhuman monsters.
A negotiated settlement would have required political courage as well as a willingness on the part of officeholders to risk ending their careers, but was still possible and the clearly right thing to do. Instead, we got the surrender by mass destruction.
Fortunately, when the dust began to settle after World War II, our leaders had an attack of good sense (or perhaps it was the Holy Spirit at work) and realized that, if they wanted to avoid another war with Japan, they needed to help the Japanese to rebuild and become allies, not enemies.
We did comparable things with Germany. And we have so far gone 71 years without another war with either of these nations. All of which suggests that morality pays — that if we behave in conformity with the Christian just war teaching, we have a chance of preventing some future wars and at least to a degree lessening the terrible evil of war.
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(© 2016 George A. Kendall)
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