Should We Cancel Culture?
By DONALD DeMARCO
When future archeologists examine the ashes of a once proud country, they will find the cause of America’s extinction in her rejection of life. A symptom of her demise is the canceling of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing them with an entire month dedicated to those who can neither be mothers nor fathers. It was sterility that precipitated her downfall.
T.S. Eliot predicted this many years ago where, in his monumental poem The Waste Land, he spoke of “The rattle of dry bones”…“dry sterile thunder without rain,” and “the empty chapel.”
The American literary critic Leslie Fiedler has stated that modern man has decided to abolish himself, creating “impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labors with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer…having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.”
In a less dramatic manner, C.S. Lewis penned The Abolition of Man in which he noted that “many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.”
According to Lewis, people have decided to separate themselves from the past and on the basis of sheer will, seek to inaugurate a new era. Yet, without the wisdom of the past and a respect for life, the new era is a call for death.
Wesley J. Smith states in his book, Culture of Death: “The hour is late. The cause is urgent. The risks are real. As a greater writer than I once put it: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” We are all involved, and we all must pay the price on a culture that has lost its way. The culture of the past seems to be at the root of the problem. Perhaps it should be canceled!
Eliot, Fiedler, Lewis, and Wesley Smith paint a rather gloomy picture. But they basis their outlook on incontrovertible facts. Abortion has been installed as a primary right. Those who witness for life are parodied, persecuted, and punished. One celebrity has suggested that all pro-life advocates should be murdered. California has launched a bill that, if passed, would require all doctors to participate in physician-assisted killing. Reason has been drowned out in favor of will.
As the Irish poet William Butler Yeats expressed it, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Talk abounds about the possible end of the world.
The situation is dire, but as Christians, we cannot despair. Hope is our refuge and strength. It is a force within us that continually drives us despite the persistent disappointments we encounter. The modern world rejects the wisdom of the past and places its hope in progress. It is tempted to cancel the culture of the past and begin anew.
Technology, allegedly, will serve the needs of progress which is assumed to provide us with a better and more comfortable form of living. Yet, the hope for a better world through progress is the very attitude that has led to a separation from the traditions of the past to a culture of death, and a life without God. Even more hopeless is placing our hope in politics.
In his encyclical letter, Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope), the late Pope Benedict XVI states that Christians must learn anew in what hope truly exists. Progress is highly ambiguous. As one philosopher offered, does it go “from the sling to the bomb?” G.K. Chesterton had no illusions about the uncritical acceptance of progress. It is “simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” Moving from a Culture of Life to a Culture of Death on the wings of science and technology, is a progression in the wrong direction.
“If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation,” writes Benedict, “then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.” “Let us put” it very simply, the former Pontiff goes on to say, “man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope.”
Progress in science is possible because it builds on preceding scientific knowledge. However, this is not the case with morality. Moral decisions concerning new situations are themselves always new. Freedom can affirm or deny various levels of scientific progress. Its nature is fundamentally different than the march of science. The promise of a better world is a deception if one overlooks the freedom factor.
The impressive progress in all fields of science has distracted modern man from the essential importance of the road to personal salvation. Moral values are neglected while scientific achievements are mesmerizing (consider how spellbound the young are with electronic games and electronic forms of communication). This situation makes it difficult to have genuine hope.
Therefore, to avoid despair and have hope, attention must be given to moral values. In addition, it must be stressed that hope is personal. It is futile to place one’s hope in the world. True hope begins with a personal relationship with God. This does not mean that the individual Christian is unconcerned about the world. But the more people have true hope, this hope will be contagious and affect others. Hope, based on a relationship with God and armed with moral virtues, begins with the person before it can spread to the world.