What's Wrong With the World? Or So The Surprising Thing Isn't The Modern Malaise, It's That Some People Make It Anyway

"Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read."

--Chesterton, from the preface in poetry to "The Man Who Was Thursday"

The modern condition is not an easy one: okay, so we all have sufficient drinking water and calories, but there are so many things that we don't have, including

a) Homes. Eliot tells us that "Home is where one starts from." George MacDonald has one character tell another in a chapter in Lilith titled "Somewhere or Nowhere?," "You did not surely think you had got home? I told you there was no going out and in at pleasure until you were at home!" Until we have homes from which to leave, we have no reason for the places in which we are. Until we have a home--a place where we are truly ourselves and fight like heathens with our siblings but will never be turned away and will always be quickly forgiven, a town with a church and lots of neighbors and relatives--we can't move away and establish our own homes. Until we see what is good in our past, until we really know ourselves and our pasts, anything good that we search for will be an evasion of a part of ourselves and of our past and the influences that formed us. We consider it a tragedy when someone has to give up something from their own life in order to stay home for some reason, like to take care of an ill parent, when in fact, the recognition of the bonds that we have holding us to a particular place are one of the greatest goods we can know. I remember a woman who used to rent an apartment from my parents who said she never goes anymore to visit her family in Nebraska because they never come to see her. In fact, she no longer talks to them. This seems to me to be one of the most serious sins.

b) Marriage. A conception of marriage that admits of divorce is an absolutely gutted version. It seems to me that it's only better than cohabitation insofar as there is at least a nod to respecting societal norms. How are people supposed to find security in a love that depends on the whims and emotions of the lovers? Humans were meant to love stability and security; asking us to forgo this is unfair; it is too much for us to stand. Oakeshott writes, "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." And again, he writes, "Change generates sadness rather than exhiliration: heaven is the dream of a changless no less than of a perfect world." Not only does the government teach us a flawed conception of marriage, but our churches teach us a flawed conception, as well: divorce is strongly argued against, but there is no structure in place that is able to enforce this. Even in the Catholic Church in America, I hear anullments are relatively easy to get ahold of.

b and a half) Sex (properly--we all use birth control). I refuse to disconnect problems with marriage and abortion from birth control. It seems to me that birth control is the symbol of what's disordered in the world--love, which Paul tells us is the greatest thing and the thing that will remain, is being toyed with and imposed upon. Women are going right along with men in a rejection of their fertility. Sex for pleasure and God-keep-the-babies-away becomes an obsession with no limits. Suddenly we're creating all of our babies in test tubes because having sex for only pleasure isn't leading to stable, committed relationships. Please! I'm all for marriage expanding, but not to include new or different partners; rather, marriage needs to expand to welcome children into a family.

c) Vocations (in the secular sense of the word). With the expansion of the potential occupations that are open to ever person in the contemporary world, we are paralyzed by the plethora of possibilities (yes! alliteration!). Particularly among the most educated, who could with relative ease enter a variety of professions, there is a sense that no one job could be sufficiently satisfying. Rare indeed is the man who is truly at peace with himself in the vocation he has chosen; I think I could count the number of men I know like that on a couple of hands.

Goodness gracious, we move all the time, get new jobs, find new churches, new friends, new cars and new (and ever younger) wives (cough*McCain), just at the time that we should be inheriting our grandmothers's pearls and our grandfathers's fishing poles. As my mother always taught me, "Make new friends and keep the old ones; one is silver, the other, gold."