By GEORGE A. KENDALL
In the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, the latest in a long series of such shootings, which are starting to seem almost like routine events, we are hearing our esteemed pundits remark, hardly for the first time, that these atrocities are perpetrated by young people who live very isolated lives. This is certainly true, but there seems to be little insight, on the part of said pundits, into why the phenomenon of the isolated individual is becoming so common.
Well, why wouldn’t isolation be commonplace? As Christianity becomes more and more marginal, the dominant ideology in our society, indeed, the world-taken-for-granted in that society, is one which says that the fundamental human reality is the autonomous individual.
In every normal society (not to be confused with ours), there is something known as a social order. In such societies, an individual comes into the world already part of a whole network of rights and duties and relationships which are the context in which he becomes and is himself. You come into the world as part of a family (so you can’t say “I didn’t choose my parents”— a statement that, though true, is irrelevant), part of a neighborhood as well as a larger community, part of a nation, part of a spiritual tradition.
You are born into a time and place where a particular language is spoken, even though you don’t actually start speaking it till later. You don’t choose any of this. All of it is a given — and a gift. Within this whole context, the selfhood which is unique to you grows and develops throughout life (at 76, I’m still working on it).
Now, the modern world is the product of a series of revolutions against all this, revolutions which are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, destroying the whole framework of meaning and community within which our humanity is made actual. First, we have the Renaissance and the “Reformation” (a/k/a the Protestant revolt), then the so-called Enlightenment, characterized principally by the darkening of the intellects of those who took part in it, then the French and Russian Revolutions with the totalitarian regimes which they created, and, last but not least, the Industrial Revolution.
I can’t go into detail here, but the end product of these revolutions has been twofold:
1) The loss of community: The Industrial Revolution in particular recklessly destroyed traditional small communities based on agriculture in order to maximize wealth from manufacturing.
2) Culturally, an ideology which mostly dominates the modern world: It says, in sharp opposition to the understanding of life outlined above, that each of us is an isolated self. I come into the world basically alone, not bound by any relationships, any culture, any traditions which I do not myself choose. I decide, as an individual, what is real and what is not, what is good and what is evil, who and what I am, even to the point of deciding, autonomously, which of a long list of genders I belong to, perhaps even having my body chemically and surgically altered to support my choice.
So I decide for myself what (or if) God is, what the world is, and what I am. I am even free to conclude that nothing is real.
And so what can we expect? We live in a world now where a large number of people are isolated — isolated from God, isolated from the world, isolated from families and communities, in a way even isolated, split, within themselves. This is a horror beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined.
It is the horror of life without love. Life lived within the context of things like Church, family, community, and tradition is life lived in a world made by love, embedded in some way in the very life of the Holy Trinity, Love itself. Right now, I’m reading a book called Always Believe in Love: Selected Writings of Elizabeth of the Trinity (about whom I hope to write more). Marian Murphy writes the following in her introduction:
“Elizabeth reminds us that the Christian life begins and ends with being loved, for as Benedict XVI wrote, ‘Only being loved is being saved.’ The deepest source of the joy which Elizabeth radiated and the foundation of her totally positive spirituality is the conviction that God loved her exceedingly. Not to be loved is the greatest of human tragedies, leading to aggressive behavior that is destructive of self and society. In contrast, to know and love in the utter certainty of God’s love is the greatest gift anyone could receive and generates positive relationships and productive activity in all areas of our lives.”
And so, there is no reason to be surprised by mass killings like the one in Florida, or the one in Las Vegas a few months ago. People who live outside this realm of divine and human love live without the knowledge that they are loved and consequently without the ability to love. They are homeless in the deepest sense of the word. As the number of these deeply disordered individuals grows, their acts of violence are going to become more and more common.
I remember how in 1966, when Charles Whitman went to the top of a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and shot and killed 16 people, everyone was in shock, regarding such an event as unthinkable. Today, events like that come close to being seen as normal. People react by saying the usual things about isolation (without understanding what it means), the need for gun control, and, inevitably, tell us that we have to make sure that things like this can’t happen again (but they will). And before long we stop hearing about it.
Is there a solution? Probably not a large-scale one, one on a macro level. Barring a miracle, the political and social order will, I’m fairly sure, keep on disintegrating and ultimately collapse, leaving people to slowly climb back up, over centuries, toward some kind of civilization.
But even now, people can work on creating islands of community and spiritual order, as St. Benedict did in the sixth century.
There are many kinds of things that could be done. For instance, we can encourage groups of home-schooling Christian families, groups of Christian scholars who could help with advanced education for home-schooled children and put out samizdat publications relating to their fields, other Christian professional groups doing comparable things, and so on.
These groups may need eventually to go underground as the Satanic forces grow stronger, and anyone involved would have to be prepared for the possibility of martyrdom. But this kind of work can and should be done. God help us all, and I mean that, not as an expletive, but as a prayer.
(© 2018 George A. Kendall)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress