Modus Operandi

Why am I writing about the Seven Deadly Sins? It's a long story...

Gustav Dore, Inferno (Plate 5)

Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto I

Sometime in 2016 I began to wonder if the world had gone mad. By 2017 I no longer had any doubts. People I had known offline (and, in a few cases, Biblically) were now indistinguishable from propaganda-spouting bots. Journalism had lost all semblance of neutrality and fact-checking, and mass media news outlets were now a collection of click-driven rage generators shrieking like Chicken Little about endlessly falling skies. I suspect many of my readers have had similar experiences.

COVID and Ukraine did nothing to clean up the information pool. Neither did teams of highly paid “fact checkers” improve online accuracy. Like jaded comrades in the post-Brezhnev Soviet Union before me, I realized that I could no longer trust the media to provide me with anything outside an ever-narrowing Narrative. Neither could I trust “alternative” sources that insisted COVID-19 vaccines contained nanobots and that dozens of pedophile celebrities had been executed at Guantanamo and replaced by body doubles. But while the present is muddy, I found the past was solid as marble ruins.

Granted, you don’t have all the facts. There’s no Zapruder footage of Julius Caesar’s assassination nor any laptop containing evidence of Napoleon’s ne’er-do-well son smoking crack with underage prostitutes. Historians certainly disagree on facts and interpretations. But by and large there is far less concern with things that happened centuries ago than with things that are happening today. Which means there is less time spent on rewriting history than on reframing current events.

When you see that A, B, and C have inevitably led to X since the Bronze Age, it’s a pretty safe bet that A,B, and C will lead to X in the Internet era. You can also spot contemporary deviations from long-held norms and standards. When you examine the modern world using that two-pronged approach, you can get a pretty good idea of where we are and how we got there.

I turned my gaze backward in that trackless wood. I stopped looking to the news and focused instead on history. Instead of trusting the experts, I put my trust in my ancestral Faith. And while my erstwhile friends spouted this week’s slogans to show their loyalty, I searched for the Truth.

Destruction of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The Greeks looked back to Minos and Wilusa. The Romans looked back to Greece. Western Europe looked back to the glory that was Rome. Civilizations have typically seen themselves as the inheritors of a greater past, as part of an unbroken Tradition.

Today the West sees itself not as an heir to history but a victor over it. Instead of deifying great men, we tear them down. We pride ourselves on overcoming the superstitions that held our benighted ancestors in bondage. History is a nightmare from which we have awakened. If we look back on history at all, it’s only to gloat about how much better things are today.

We certainly excel in technological achievements. Our ancestors could not build computers, airplanes, or nuclear weapons. But while we have more toys and diversions than those who came before us, we are neither healthier, wealthier, nor wiser. It’s easy enough to discover this through a quick look at the past. But few bother with the past in a world that focuses all its attention on the here and now.

When we reject the past, we reject the future as well. If we don’t know where we came from, we’ll never know where we’re going. To live in the eternal presence is to lead an animal’s existence, running mazes to find rewards and avoid shocks. For those who believe humans are just chimpanzees with less hair and more brain cells, this is not an big issue. Those of use who believe that we were meant for something greater would predict that such an existence leads ultimately to existential despair as we grow tired of our toys and jaded with our quests for new sensations.

In response to this despair, we would expect that many would find some ways of scratching that itch through religion, or through movements that behave like a religion. We’ve seen a rising interest in Christianity on the right, which fits what Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiousness. But since the French Revolution dethroned God, we’ve also seen any number number of quasi-religious revolutionary movements.

Radicals who scorned Christians for their “pie in the sky” ideas sacrificed their lives for the triumph of the masses. Christians transformed the Torah into an Old Testament which foretold the coming of Jesus. Secular revolutionaries transformed history into the long prelude to an inevitable proletarian paradise. And where empires once built temples to their Gods on conquered soil, today the American empire flies rainbow flags and promotes Neoliberalism with the same fervor Spanish colonists spread Catholicism.

We have evidence of religious behavior stretching back well before historical times. Even if we are just high-IQ hairless chimpanzees, we still have to contend with the fact that our slower and hairier cousins also engage in religious ritual. We can engage with it or we can react against it, but for good or ill we must deal with the religious instinct.

Otto Dix, Christ at Gethsemane, 1948

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter (1960)

Many of my readers are neither Catholic nor Christian. We all choose our path and accept its consequences. I’m a cultural critic, not an evangelist. I view the world through a Catholic lens because Catholicism is what I know best. And for all the bleating about “Christofascism” and “Tradcath Nazis,” I have found that my Catholic studies have only served to instill a deeper respect and reverence for other traditions.

I use many non-Catholic and non-Christian sources in my cultural study. I’m not interested in preaching to the choir, and I can’t expect my non-Catholic readers to treat the Church Fathers as authoritative. I also find it useful to seek confirmation from multiple sources. When several frequently squabbling religious traditions all arrive at the same conclusion, perhaps there’s something to that conclusion.

Catholicism believes there is a Natural Law, what St. Thomas Aquinas called “the rational creature's participation in the eternal law.” No matter their faith traditions, intelligent people who ponder moral questions will generally come to very similar conclusions. Very few will argue that theft, rape, and wanton murder of the innocent are praiseworthy things. And all will agree that 2+2 does not become 5 just because you can torture somebody into saying so.

Yet today many intellectuals will deny that there is any eternal law. For them morality was produced by the same blind forces that shaped amino acids into dinosaurs and mammals. Gods are shared delusions, truth is a matter of interpretation, and laws are organized structures of oppression built to protect the haves from the have-nots. There is no Truth, there’s just your truth which is wonderful unless it disagrees with my truth. But while this nihilistic rejection of reality may be fashionable, it’s also doomed to failure.

The Original MC Martin H

[P]hilosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor.

Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinknig and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

Martin Heidegger, 1966

Deconstruction is popular today among intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. Like Marxists analyze capitalism, Deconstructionists seek to find the contradictions and inconsistencies within a text. An example which you might find in both Marxist and Deconstructionist analyses would be America’s Declaration of Independence, wherein slaveholders asserted that every human had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Deconstruction can be a useful tool. But ultimately even the most clever deconstruction can itself be deconstructed. Deconstruction can discover internal contradictions and logical fallacies, but it can’t provide a solid structure on which we can build something better. The world becomes an eternal dance between thesis and antithesis. Synthesis becomes a bandage we place over a gaping wound knowing that it will soon be ripped off and thrown away.

Deconstruction was inspired largely by Heidegger’s idea of Destruktion as described in his Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). But whereas the end goal of Deconstruction is more Deconstruction, Heidegger started his journey with a destination in mind. He hoped that by removing misunderstandings and reinterpretations we could get closer to the primordial state of Being that he called Dasein.

For Heidegger the human experience was one of “thrownness.” We are tossed into a world we did not create, a world built by a past we did not create and moving toward a future we cannot know. Our experience of Sein is inevitably shaped by Zeit, and vice versa. We can understand the Here and Now only by looking backwards as we move forward. But we must first acknowledge that there is a Now, and a Was, and a Will Be.

By scraping off the detritus of past and present errors, we can open a clearing and create a new and better place from which we can dwell within Dasein. Like the Deconstructionists and Church Fathers, Heidegger did not believe that we could ever fully understand Being. Like the Church Fathers, he felt that the journey itself could improve both the individual and the world.

Let’s destrukt the word “Sin.”

Dana Carvey as the Church Lady

Today “Sin” is primarily used in a comical context. It evokes images of finger-waggling busybodies and scolds who can’t rest so long as they know somebody somewhere is having fun. It’s also used with a nudge and a wink to signify delightfully naughty entertainment. The fact that you’re not supposed to be doing this only makes it more enjoyable. (Christian scholars call this “concupiscence”).

But for our forbears “Sin” evoked not laughter but fear. We tend to focus on the Hellfire and Damnation imagery because we now see those ideas as outdated and silly. But while our ancestors certainly recognized the pains of Hell, they were also aware of the mental and physical consequences of Sin.

From Christianity’s earliest days the Church Fathers recognized Seven — or Eight, depending on whom you asked — Deadly Sins. Those Sins were deadly because they distracted sinners from God and from their life’s purpose. (Heidegger and the Existentialists he inspired would call this “living inauthentically”). But they were also deadly in the literal sense. If followed too enthusiastically, these Sins could destroy the soul, the body, and the community.

Proving the existence of God is no small matter. Indeed, most mystics would argue that a God you can prove empirically is no God at all. Weighing and measuring the consequences of different behaviors and emotional states is much easier. We can examine the historical and contemporary effects of these Sins. We can see how the data lines up with the predictions made by earlier theologians and philosophers of different faiths and denominations. And we can even make steps toward behaviors that might counter their influence and dissuade others from falling into their clutches.

The world wanders in a trackless wood. I have wandered in that wood, and I have found a clearing. And I have sketched out a map in the hopes that the world may find that clearing as well.

Populus qui ambulabat in tenebris vidit lucem.