On the other hand, to look upon some worthwhile good as impossible to achieve, whether alone or with the help of others, stems from extreme depression, which sometimes can dominate someone’s affections to the point where he begins to think that he can never again be given aspirations towards the good. Because acedia is a kind of sadness having this depressive effect upon the spirit, it gives rise to despair. – St. Thomas Aquinas, ST, II-II, 20, 4.
Gay marriage is the new abortion. We’ve been provided with this helpful shortcut by the New York Times and other major media organs. Culture interlocutors across the spectrum seem generally content with such an explanation, since it economically delineates the terms of the issue and anticipates the opposing camps. Pro-lifers, we can readily assume, are pro-marriage, particularly those of traditional religious persuasions; supporters of abortion — with some qualifications — are predictably sympathetic to the gay cause. The story, in a sense, is already told, since the plot-line is immediately on-hand. With the culture wars dragging through their fifth decade, the antagonists are well-defined, as are their respective “bases” and intellectual engines. In the present moment, gay marriage quickly and smoothly assumes its spot on the “life issues” roster, and a new front opens. Cue passionate denunciations, cacophonous rallies, dueling op-ed pieces; memorize the talking points, counterarguments, statistics. Once more: once more to the breach, dear friends. Ready? Excited?
Thoughtful, younger conservatives engaged in contemporary intellectual debate are prey, I would like to suggest, to a subtle type of acedia, that “form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, [and] carelessness of heart,” as defined by the Catholic Catechism. Lacking the automaton zeal of the recklessly rabid ideologue, and resisting the upwardly mobile indifference of the secular twenty and thirty something professional crowd, those who are actively and dispassionately committed to the renovation of our public square may find themselves, on occasion, overwhelmed into sloth. We seek to redeem the age, though we are perhaps too immersed in its chronicles.
In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner provides an acute description of the intellectual and spiritual maladies debilitating the West at the turn-of-the-twenty-first century: “There is, I think, in the climate of spirit — a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry, the contracts with time which so largely determine our consciousness, point to late afternoon in ways that are ontological — this is to say, of the essence, of the fabric of being. We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers.” I’d like to re-position this premise — an elegant articulation of the general problem that many have noted — to appraise the current situation among younger intellectuals with orthodox religious commitments. By this stage in our thinking lives, we know well the ills that have befallen our world. We have heard and learned from the elite minds of the intellectual and spiritual Right as they have bemoaned the situation. Responsibly and often sympathetically, we seek to add our voices and ideas to their efforts, yet in attempting as much, we are greeted with cold comfort, boredom and disillusionment, which in turn can lead to laxity, to less vigilance, to careless hearts. To sloth.
This condition occurs when we sense how well-grooved are the tracks we are expected to run in, and how crowded the traffic already is. Consider: the Times runs a stomach-turning op-ed that encourages women to take proud comfort in loving their “actual, extrauterine” children and to “get past the guilt” of their aborted counterparts (July 22, 2004). We feel it incumbent upon ourselves to compose the “bearing witness” letter, but why take the time to do it? Within a couple of days, missives of that sort and their opposites are dutifully and unsurprisingly printed, largely saying the same things that we would have written, or that we have read so many times before. Core-tiredness. Likewise, inevitably someone else will organize a letter-writing campaign to the ostensibly Christian Congressman with a questionable voting record; someone else will initiate a boycott of the popular company guilty of unseemly production practices. The daily bulge of pleas, offers, and warnings that breaches the readerly Christian’s mailbox suggests as much. One fears the lines of the interminable arguments aren’t shifting, though the volume grows louder and the tone shriller; the output faster and ideas thicker.
As emergent intellectuals, we are expected to energize our established and aging cohort in the culture wars; more importantly, we are called to help bring the fray to a just conclusion. Yet at times, the tightly-wound news cycles and intellectual circuits of our age seem to render the debate over why and how we ought to live together the intellectual equivalent of a stationary bike: predictable in its direction, sterile in its motion, discouraging in its lack of forward movement. (See James Nuechterlein’s farewell editorial in the February 2004 issue of First Things, in which a similarly tired mood draws on a much deeper storehouse of experience). Given our religious commitments, we must confront a conjoined intellectual and spiritual form of sloth that arises not from the sadness of knowing how hard it is to do the good (Aquinas), but from the sadness of knowing that decades dedicated to as much by hundreds of fine minds has brought us only to what feels like, at times, a static agon that we are fated to perpetuate, ad infinitum. Sloth, onward to despair.
In responding to this difficulty, there are at least three options. The easiest, we can understand as the “typist at tea” choice. In Eliot’s The Waste Land, a listless young woman, representative of a lost generation, shares an afternoon tryst with a “young man carbuncular.” She is “bored and tired,” and passively allows her amorous and hideous assailant to “[make] a welcome of indifference.” No matter how tiresome we might find the culture wars, we cannot grow so careless of heart, lest contemporaries in opposition to our first principles sense this ennui and pounce. Nor, however, should we given in to the easy temptation of “ideologuery.” Reflexive and un-reflective cultural engagements — those daily belches that shudder through the blog world — are a rather easy way to commit to the struggle, but to choose this route, with its characteristic rash exuberance, might provide personal advancement and cheap glory at the expense of adding to Babel’s din.
The third way I am proposing is far less exciting; it requires patience, humility, and integration. During this time in-between the first fires of the life of the mind and the smoldering commitments of the aging polemicist, we can enter into rigorous hibernation to avoid the sloth of indifference and the sloth of ideology. This choice demands that we avoid the lax presumption that to follow and contribute to the thrust-and-parry amongst the chattering classes is alone enough of a commitment to solving our cultural predicament. It requires instead a willingness to engage our friends and family on the most pressing issues of the age, with a total openness about our commitments and intentions. We must do this when it is easier to avoid ugly truths for social niceties, or to sidestep them out of situational charity, or to ignore them through pride-filled noblesse oblige to the less-engaged, or to reserve them for more potentially dramatic and attention-winning arenas. But by fully immersing ourselves in the most immediate and natural, if the least-romantic and exhilarating, fronts of the culture wars — the chat with a neighbor, the argument with an uncle — we are reminded of the personal and personalist stakes of the debates we know too well in their dry ink forms.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s end declaration from the rapidly aging After Virtue remains in need of constant fulfillment, in every direction of our lives: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” Agreeing with his recommendation, we must look beyond MacIntyre’s gloom. To do more than endure the age of the ever-widening gyre, to in fact prevail over it, we must consciously and constantly order intellectual discourse to its proper horizon: the acting and reacting human persons in our everyday midst.
Now and then, and especially when we find ourselves bored of the public front of the culture wars, we need to remind ourselves that to be responsible, engaged religious intellectuals means more than maintaining subscriptions and having faith-informed positions on the latest book, controversy, and broadside. It means joining the free-traveling life of the mind to the local embodiments of human community. The demanding solution to intellectual fatigue and its sloth-inducing consequences is a total integration of one’s personal relationships, cultural interests, professional ambitions, intellectual aims, and spiritual development. To move in this direction might mean accepting that an overemphasis upon intellectual pursuits, even those with religious, charitable, and sacrificial principles behind them, can lead to disillusionment, sloth, and despair, especially when we sense how close-shouldered, expected, and internalized the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly skirmishes of the culture wars tend to be.
Eventually, it will fall to us to lead (or write) a column. This will likely occur at a time when the wider world will be so far removed from core principles as to be not even tired of them anymore, but simply strangers, despite the best efforts of our predecessors. In such a situation, we will need a deep reserve to draw upon if we aim to make peace across the divide and heal our wounded culture. This effort will need more than an encyclopedic knowledge of editorials and articles and book reviews, interests that can too often sap our spirits instead of enlivening them. It will need fully integrated intellectuals formed by their faith and ideas as these take shape their everyday relations: well-read Samaritans, humble, patient, and willing to travel the back-roads to the greater glory.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.