(Editor’s Note: Deacon James H. Toner, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of Leadership and Ethics at the U.S. Air War College, a former U.S. Army officer, and author of Morals Under the Gun and other books. He has also taught at Notre Dame, Norwich, Auburn, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and Holy Apostles College & Seminary. He serves in the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C. He has previously contributed to The Wanderer.)
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An essay, a report, a book — together they make the melancholy case that publicly and privately we live at a time, as Alasdair MacIntyre tried to tell us about forty years ago, “after virtue.” We scramble for the best term to describe our plight: “Modernity,” “Post-Modernity,” even the “Age of Aquarius.” These recent publications, however, are not concerned with ideological designations but with the corrosion and the erosion of the means we have had to preserve the good, the true, and the beautiful and to infuse them, insofar as possible, into national life.
In “Losing Faith in the Humanities,” Simon During tells us: “We now live in a doubly secularized age, post-religious and post-canonical. The humanities have become merely a (rather eccentric) option for a small fraction of the population.” He continues: “What happened to Christian revelation and the Bible is now happening to the idea of Western civilization and ‘the best that has been thought and said,’ in [Matthew] Arnold’s famous phrase.”
Stanley Kurtz, in The Lost History of Western Civilization, rues the destruction of serious university courses in Western civilization and the rise of such specious would-be substitutes as Intersectionality. One such “intersectional” group has identified, in their judgment at least, the ultimate enemy: “Christological Racial Capitalism.”
With the late Allan Bloom, Kurtz finds that many contemporary students are “ungrounded,” lacking “any shared or solid basis for choosing how to live.” Anticipating the closing of this article, we might say that these students’ souls are not right in themselves.
Yuval Levin, in A Time to Build, following upon an earlier effort in which he described our “Fractured Republic,” tells us that our institutions have largely become performative platforms for display rather than formative agencies which anneal character. “The culture of celebrity,” he writes, “turns out again and again to be the enemy of a culture of integrity.”
To the question of why has cultural secularization occurred, During replies, “Globalization, of course, has been one of its causes — globalization intertwined with both feminism and decoloniality. As such, it is a slightly contradictory globalization that affirms a relativism for which all cultures are ascribed equal value at the same time as it downgrades European high culture as a product of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy….In this context, canonical European culture is dismissed as a vehicle for dead white men, of little interest to those who are neither men nor white nor dead.”
Levin struggles to argue that today’s campus activists “aren’t fundamentally nihilists or relativists” but, rather, radical progressive egalitarians. But hubristic belief in such egalitarianism can’t fairly escape the relativist or nihilist brand because it refuses to see society against the moral horizon of the Truth such solipsistic ideology adamantly rejects.
Those subscribing to the “egalitarian” ideology are iconoclasts and antinomians who, so often, believe only in nonbelief. Virtue consists in the denial of virtue; only the absence of absolute, objective, or universal value is commendable, permissible, or even discussable. They contend that one ought to be free (a word too rarely examined by modern libertines) to do or to be whatever one pleases, especially in the area of sexual ethics. But, as Kurtz writes, “Remove the family linchpin and the wheel flies off the axle.” The wheel has, indeed, flown.
Levin recovers some lost ground, I think, in offering two models of institutions. One sees humans as wholly formed and requiring only liberation from oppressive politics to flourish. The other model sees us as fallen but capable of moral learning: “Improvement happens soul by soul. . . . This improvement — the formation of character and virtue — is the foremost work of our society in every generation.” He adds: “To fail to engage in it is to regress to pre-civilizational barbarism. This work is the essential, defining purpose of our institutions, which must therefore be fundamentally formative.”
If the humanities are in chaos; if Western Civilization is only propaganda; and if our institutions are badly splintered — how are we to form virtue and character and decency? (Imagine a contemporary collegiate seminar on the topic of “decency”!) Indeed, there is hardly broad agreement any more on the proper definition of these nouns.
The chief ethical problem of our day lies precisely in this: Everyone is thought to be able to judge for himself what is virtuous; no one is permitted to proselytize for what he judges as timeless and truthful, for that is perceived as hate speech and a violation of the highest prize of autonomy.
Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, quotes James Madison: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” Benjamin Franklin, too, thought that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Murray points out that, by about 1950, the notion that school was the place to teach virtue had largely been rejected — to the delight of “progressives” everywhere. Teachers, for example, used to be liable to being fired for “moral turpitude.”
Could any teacher today be fired for “depravity”? I suppose so — if he or she (or “ze”) were pro-life!
Murray tells us that “the founders were right. The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century.” But at a time when, and in a place where, the grand imperial wizard of the self predominates in society and politics and, much too often, in religion, how are we to define virtue, and who will do so, risking opprobrium?
We so much want to answer: Look to the Catholic campus for true faith and allegiance. Look to our Catholic professors, playwrights, poets, politicians, pundits, and, indeed, to all of our Catholic public intellectuals. “The very testimony of their Christian life and good works done in a supernatural spirit have the power to draw men to belief and to God” (Vatican II: Apostolicam Actuositatem, n. 6).
Does anyone, however, need the marshalling of substantial data to support the lugubrious conclusion that it is not so — that our Catholic “public servants” seem altogether too rarely to be practicing Catholics or good servants of the “king” but of God first.
What is good and true and beautiful is so often trashed by the very people anointed by their Confirmations “to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1303).
There ought to be formed and informed consensus about goodness and truth and beauty, of course, on the campuses of Catholic colleges which (I quote Levin again) must be — but clearly are not — “fundamentally formative.” The center of such a campus is the church or chapel, in the tabernacle of which we find Christ the King, to whose teaching we are called to conform our lives (cf. Romans 12:2).
That teaching calls us to virtue in what we think and say and do (as in Phil. 4:8 and 2 Peter 1:5-9). There ought to be valiant, vigorous, and virtuous leaders on our campuses, reminding us that Catholics are called to be ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor. 5:20) in private and in public; there ought to be a spiritual wealth of Catholic teaching in — and emanating from — our colleges, testifying to our daily call to work “in fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) to achieve our first goal, our eternal salvation (1 Peter 1:9).
An essay, a report, a book — none of them conceived or written as Catholic publications. They carry a message for us all but, I think, especially, if unintentionally, for Catholics. Levin says: “The demolition crews have for too long been allowed to define the spirit of this era in America. But where we’re headed will be up to the builders and rebuilders.”
We fallen humans have built both concentration camps and cathedrals, “architecturally” knowing, thank God, the difference between their purposes — one given to evil and the other devoted to good. We were able, in our history, to teach and to preach the vital distinction between virtue and vice, even if, tragically, we did not always wisely match deed to declaration.
We must rediscover the truth of the Douay-Rheims biblical admonition — “Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable” (Prov. 14:34). To continue down the path we are headed will lead, not just to misery (which is evident today), but to the destruction prophesied by, for example, Habakkuk (2:4): “Behold, he that is unbelieving, his soul shall not be right in himself: but the just shall live in his faith.”
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