Aging, Civilization: A Look Through Life's Rear-view Mirror

I've worn it out, but I had a tee shirt the color of red dirt found in "red rock" country, that said on the back "Older Than Dirt". Humorous to be sure, but it's how I feel sometimes as I sit on the cusp of the far side of middle age. I'm in my early 60's now, and the world I came into is passing away. It's not just that my body isn't as dynamic as it once was, but the moral values that contributed to a stable civilization is passing out of existence.

I've thought for many years the Victorians had it right, and the morals and values of the mid-twentieth century were correct. There are behaviors the rend the social fabric, but in previous times these were indulged in quietly, behind closed doors. Now we do such things openly with braggadocio. I can't see we are better off for it.

When I was in high school in the 1960's it was a shock when a girl got pregnant. Premarital sex was something most of us didn't even consider; it wasn't a good thing. I recently saw a vid with Ann Coulter and John Stossel in an auditorium filled with young libertarians. Coulter said divorce was too easy, it's violation of a contract. The idea was met with boos and hisses. I think now people enter into marriage no longer viewing it as a sacred relationship and as entirely disposable. The family is all but destroyed since marriage has become that, and we're moving toward marriage meaning a State sanctioned coupling of anyone. Our schools are being allowed to teach first and second graders that homosexuality is a desirable thing. In my school days, we didn't get sex ed until seventh grade, I think. Homosexuality, and I don't care who you're poking, is not normative, yet it's being promoted over cross sex relationships. 

When I was a kid, most everybody went to church. There we were in contact with all ages, and there was continuity and exposure to other's knowledge and wisdom. It's were we were taught ethics and values that formed the foundation of our society. How we were to treat people, how and why to serve others.  That and our families were the focus and center of our lives. Life was in fact more simple then.

Things fall apart. There now exists the idea since these values can't be lived up to, don't even try. If one does try, and fails, you're a hypocrite. I remember studying existentialism in high school and college, and part of that philosophy was nihilism. From Wikipedia: Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived. Nihilism can also take epistemological or metaphysical/ontological forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or that reality does not actually exist.  [emphasis mine]

From that I ponder if our country, our civilization, is too far gone into nihilism. Any behavior is acceptable, even if it destroys the family (the foundation of civilization), exploits kids sexually (pedophilia is on the rise and becoming more acceptable, parents dressing their daughters like street walkers as examples), and destroys the Church, the foundation of care and charity, the source of moral teaching. Now that schools have become the source of that, the moral teaching is any traditional behavior is to be rejected, religion is to be rejected along with the church, pastors and priests are to be reviled and mocked and replaced by the State and politicians. Politicians are now the priests. Judges wear priestly robes, but ignore the law; interpret it anyway they want. Together they enforce the secular religion of the State.

We have degenerated in moral relativity and nihilism. It saddens me that 5000 plus years of tyranny being the norm of civilization, the United States comes along and rights things with the Declaration and Constitution, providing law based on moral Judeo-Christian foundations, and that is being rejected in favor of returning to tyranny and the embracing of a meaningless existence except pleasing one's self, mostly materially.

Despite all the problems existing in my childhood, life was simpler then, and I would say better. Many of those problems were resolved or at least partially corrected, but it was because of Faith, Family, Communion and Service with each other.

Life was simpler then. This is from the Monkey's song “Only Shades of Gray” and I share this lament (though it meant something different when I was a kid).

When the world and I were young,
Just yesterday.
Life was such a simple game
A child could play.
                            
It was easy then to tell right from wrong.
Easy then to tell weak from strong.
When a man should stand and fight,
Or just go along.
                             
 Refrain:
But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray.
                             
I remember when the answers seemed so clear
We had never lived with doubt or tasted fear.
It was easy then to tell truth from lies
Selling out from compromise
What to love and what to hate,
The foolish from the wise.
                             
It was easy then to know what was fair
When to keep and when to share.
How much to protect your heart
And how much to care.

 In case you're not  familiar with the Monkees

This lament combined with aging and what comes with it. Once again from much rejected scripture.

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come And the years approach of which you will say, I have no pleasure in them; Before the sun is darkened. and the light, and the moon, and the stars, while the clouds return after the rain; When the guardians of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, And the grinders are idle because they are few, and they who look through the windows grow blind; When the doors to the street are shut, and the sound of the mill is low; When one waits for the chirp of a bird, but all the daughters of song are suppressed; And one fears heights, and perils in the street; When the almond tree blooms, and the locust grows sluggish and the caper berry is without effect, Because man goes to his lasting home, and mourners go about the streets; Before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, And the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the broken pulley falls into the well, And the dust returns to the earth as it once was, and the life breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, all things are vanity! (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8)

Things fall apart. I lament the falling apart of our nation's traditional mores and values, but don't lament my aging. I embrace it. I'm saddened that following generations may not know the sweetness of liberty and making decisions and judgments for oneself. 

Yet another blow to the “black legend” of the Crusades

~ “LETTERS FROM EUROPE” - by Rob (Wind Rose Hotel) ~

Recruiting for the Crusade, Oil on canvas (1621)

Palazzo Ducale, Venice

Every now and then I feel like paying tribute to the Crusades, one of the most controversial and misinterpreted issues—mostly because of the shadow cast on them by the Enlightenment circles to use them as a weapon in their anti-religious campaigns—in Western intellectual, religious, and political history. So here is yet another blow to the “black legend” of the Crusades, worshipped by almost every sworn enemy of the West and its Judeo-Christian values and heritage. This time it is G. K. Chesterton’s turn to be the Advocate of the Christian Cause. Here is an excerpt from his 1920 The New Jerusalem (CHAPTER XI, THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE) :

The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe. There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so. Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first division involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last developments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base. And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act, that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wandering of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential to consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill's introduction of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason, and it is a perfectly reasonable reason?
I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history to the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity. But just as the German Hospice after all stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building, so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous, which the German historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possibly have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade does differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be what these critics mean. But the difference is not in the evolutionary, but rather the revolutionary spirit.
The First Crusade was not a racial migration; it was something much more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand this religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of history as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them. The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that it was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal. In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished, as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.

What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world. For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any support from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classes came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural, that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded. But it was the uneducated who educated the educated. The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong. In the First Crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong. He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images or private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy. There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages; but the typical leader of the Crusade was not Abelard or Aquinas but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag. And it was his army, or rather his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die for the deliverance of Jerusalem.