REMINISCENCES OF HOW THE WEST SEEMS TO HAVE LOST ITS WAY

  REMINISCENCES OF HOW WE HAVE LOST OUR WAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 12, 2014

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Readers have asked why I have not gotten “more political” in my missives.

That surprised me because politics are all about power and control, and that imposition on our freedom.

The disposition of my writing has been to make clear our individual need for freedom, autonomy, self-regard, purpose and authenticity.  This, to my mind, amounts to a personal political manifesto.

Moreover, the inference of these essays is that we are unfree, and have misplaced our moral compass and spiritual guidance system, and consequently have lost our way.

The effort to republish a nearly book length essay given for a graduate seminar some forty years ago (“Search for the Real Parents of My Soul") is meant to bring attention to the roots of our tradition against the modern dilemma of the absence of limits in contrast to diminishing will and confused priorities about what is essential and good.  Why? 

Because the world in which we find ourselves today is hostile to freedom.  We see it at every turn even in these United States of America.  The fact that it has been given up voluntarily for safety and security with 24/7 intrusive ubiquitous surveillance does not escape the fact of that hostility.

To regain our authentic liberty we must take charge and display reasoned confidence in our capacity to understand the truth about ourselves.  We attain this knowledge through self-reflection with our soul reaching beyond itself to the foundation of its existence and rationality in our Western tradition.    

The Christian-Judaic tradition is in trouble, but it has taken a long time for that trouble to be so pervasive to be finally felt.  These reminiscences are my reflections on that situation. 

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

We in the West consider our culture Christian-Judaic dating back to the birth of Jesus, and beyond Him to the early Christians.

Momentous change was in the air when Jesus was born, many thought it was the end of days, especially the Jews.  It was however the end of days for the Roman Empire as it eventually crumbled leaving a vacuum finding a rag tag Christian sect graduating to a persecuted faith then to become the State Religion of the Roman Empire, and in due course the Roman Catholic Church.

Catholicism would dominate Europe and Western Civilization for more than a thousand years.

Historian Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 79 AD) expressed in a letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan (53 AD – 117 AD) his discontent with the Christians:

“From their dirt, their lousiness, their mendacity, they argue with conviction that they are called to redeem the world.”

Pliny was baffled at the early Christians’ belief in their divine calling to redeem the world.  The Roman Emperor and his chief advisers were unable to view the Christians as a threat to Empire, while, at the same time, unable from a Roman school of thought to comprehend what the Christians were about. 

Even with the scourge of flagrant persecution could the colossal power of the Roman Empire counter the Christian narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead, which it saw as nothing less than pure absurdity or unfathomable poppycock.  

Rome had the army, the weapons, the wealth, the power, the political clout and control, yet Rome could not stem the tide or make inroads into the indomitable spirit of Christians. 

When persecutions and threats failed, Rome attempted to bribe Christians into the comfort of Roman citizenship as long as they would pledge allegiance to the Emperor and bow before the Roman gods, which Christians would not do.

Rome, devoid of the energy or the will to prevail, would fall in 476 A.D., while Christianity established as the state religion in 313 A.D. would continue to increase its dominion in the known Western world. 

Could we say it was a surprise, or could we say the “more things change the more they remain the same”?  This is mentioned in a different context as godless Communism would use a similar ploy to that of the Christians to move the cultural norm of the West from a confident Godliness and divine spirituality to godlessness and dialectical materialism.

THE WEST LOST ITS WAY AFTER WWII

The West after two catastrophic world wars (WWI and WWII) found the movement of Western Civilization away from the theology that formed the Christian culture to adopt many of the verities of upstart Communism.  These had been established when Russia deposed Czar Nicholas II in 1917, twenty-eight years before the end of WWII in 1945.

As the Roman Emperors were confounded by the imposition of God fearing Christians, the West was baffled by the appeal of Communism and unable to successfully grapple with its social, economic and political godless remedy. 

Each attempt to neutralize that appeal seemed only to enhance its existence and subsequent dominance.  Who can forget the embarrassing McCarthy Hearings and “Red Scare” of the 1950s?  Politicians and pundits, in a rage, attacked Communism’s threatening dogma, making little attempt to understand its widening allure, especially to intellectuals. 

Communism was an idea formulated by Marx and Hegel that had energy and imagination while the West seemed to be devoid of both. 

The West decried the misanthropic depravity of Communism and its totalitarianism, but what was the philosophy of the West? 

The hidden answers were in Christian assumptions of the Founding Fathers that no longer appeared to be true or viable in the United States.  They needed to be recovered, but by whom and why?

Whitaker Chamber posed the question:

“In a war for men’s minds, what is it that we are offering whose inherent force is so compulsive that it instantly seizes on the imagination of men and incites them to choose it in preference to Communism?”

Freedom and individualism were the answers as understood by the West since the “Age of the Enlightenment,” which was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th-century Western Europe.  It emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition.  It spread across Europe and to the United States.

When Communism came on the scene, it unhinged the Western idea of freedom and individualism from its moorings in a similar fashion to how the Christians unhinged power and purpose from the Roman Empire.

With Christians, this was not by force but by a collective spiritual synergy without palpable markers other than belief in God, belief in God as the center of man’s spirituality, belief in the human soul, and belief intrinsically in human freedom.  With Communism, it was belief in a godless empire of central authority in a totalitarian state.    

The fact that Christian beliefs have eroded significantly in the West can be discerned from the noteworthy rise of cynicism, sarcasm, atheism, agnosticism, distrust and paranoia that is unusual for an open egalitarian system, while quite to be expected in a closed authoritarian system such as a communist state.

Since Communism has come on the scene, liberty’s veracity no longer seems as plausible or possible as an extended exercise in autonomy. 

Yet there is a role the Christian West might play to bridge Western Christians with Eastern Christians that thus far has fallen short of the mark.  

Imagine the status of Georgia and now the Ukraine, for example, had the West proven less ambivalent when a foreign country threatened the integrity of these two nations’ borders.  Had the West acted decisively it would have secured these borders, as well as its own.    

The West has drifted into skepticism and indifference when it comes to oppressed Christians in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

Closer to home, American churches, suffering declining attendance and escalating scandals, (re: sexual abuse scandals of Catholic priests), seem unable to see or deal effectively with the cultural intrusion that godless Communism has had on the US and other Western societies.  

You don’t declare Communism evil.  That only telegraphs its appeal.  You determine instead why it finds facile reception in the Western mind, and then you take steps to generate a more attractive alternative. 

This laxity in understanding what is at issue has been compounded with the rise of terrorists’ factions of Islam since 9/11, most recently ISIS, demonstrating a crippling if not diminishing capacity to thwart this threat and still maintain the freedom of Islam devotees to practice their faith without being hassled. 

When real or imagined threats to national security reach the consensus of those in government, a broad brush is likely to be brought out that taints the innocent along with the guilty.  We have seen this most recently with the harassment of people of the Islam faith, and we saw it with the “Big Red Scare” of Soviet Communism after WWII.

This hysteria produced Senator Joseph McCarthy and his madness of seeing scores of unnamed communists in the Federal Government.  Then there was The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives.  By dint of appearing before this committee many were blacklisted and unable to continue working as entertainers, intellectuals, writers, or in other occupations.

This committee was originally created in 1938 to uncover citizens with Nazi ties within the United States. However, it became better known for its role in investigating alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties.

In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security." When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's anti-Communist investigations are often compared with those of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had no direct involvement with this House committee.  McCarthy was the Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, not the House.

To put this in perspective, while the natural inclination of Americans is to crisis manage situations, history has not been kind to the US in its darkest hours.  Too often blatant attempts to control a situation show little evidence of civility or decorum.  Currently, the Christian West is vulnerable to decline if not derailment due to this predilection.

It would seem that the United States has been hobbled in its understanding of the Christian plight in its own midst which mirrors the plight of Christians in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

At the same time, Islam and Judaism and other great religions should enjoy the same individual freedom and autonomy that Christians enjoys in the West. 

Should great religions be diminished or destroyed that could be the plight of Christianity tomorrow.

Answers for Americans may be found in returning to our beginning by the recovery of individual freedoms and truths forgotten by the modern world and its progressive change.

Without this recovery, without this return to our cultural moorings, the meaning and purpose inherently part of our spiritual construction could appear senseless and our freedoms spineless.

Christians once understood the soul’s need for freedom to flourish.  In the face of this, life in the West instead has become a set of ceaseless attempts to secure material and economic status without concomitant consideration of proper ends.  

For what does a man profit, if he should gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his soul? (Matthew 16:26).

THE WEST WON THE COLD WAR, HAS IT LOST THE COLD PEACE?

Once the prevailing norm of Western society was that the universe was one of divine creation that afforded a ground and purpose to man’s actions, and the opportunities for such freedom to be heroic, devious, or more likely mediocre. 

Today, there is massive evidence that many believe Christian thought no longer serves man.  This is due to perceiving Christian thought in a mainly religious context failing to realize that Christian thought is a mindset, a cultural norm and construct that dictates pervasive behavior elementally from every quadrant of society high and low.

THE HEAD AND THE HEART

Christian thought is a conscious process that is most unconsciously manifested in behavior, and by definition, personal identity. 

The narrative of Christian thought no longer is believed to answer man’s existential anxiety as he retreats from his heart and embraces his head, believing his head, his cognitive sense of things, is superior to his heart, his instinctive or intuitive sense of survival.

The head has turned to philosophers of the Enlightenment, and to the scientists and rationalists that have followed. 

“The Communist Manifesto” of Karl Marx and its godless dialectical materialism is a manifestation of a philosophic mindset.  Freedom and truth are conditional under Communism where choice is no longer an option as a central totalitarian authority makes the choices for everyone as the placebo of depressing anxiety.

Christian thought makes it apparent that the proper understanding of freedom and truth can only be realized through suffering.  Every life is unique with an immortal soul that must embrace its fears and suffer the consequences of its actions rather than retreat or seek protection from them.

On the other hand, if truth is merely a construction of the will, or the outcome of dialectical material forces at work outside the individual, with no need for a center much less a moral compass, then suffering becomes pointless as a sign of resigned purposelessness packaged in powerlessness. 

In such a system, the heart is dead and the head belongs to the State.

Severance of the heart from the head, and truth from freedom, results in the dependence of human action ultimately issuing into man’s hedonistic pursuit of nothing more than the orgiastic pleasure of his own ego.  

Is there any question that something like this has become accepted as a surrogate norm to the Western persuasion?

In Christian thought, man is servant and never wiser than when he comprehends his fundamental freedom. 

Man is not Nietzsche’s “superman,” nor is he legislator of his will over others, but is subject to the unpredictability of life discovering his dignity and civility in the freedom of human action directed towards and by a body of truth.

Whittaker Chambers, an American who acted as a Soviet spy on the American government during the 1930s and 1940s, defected, and sought redemption by becoming a passionate anti-communist, and Christian sympathizer if not a Christian.  He writes:

“For it is by the soul that, at the price of suffering, we can break, if we choose, the shackles that an impersonal and rigid Fate otherwise locks upon us.  It was the genius of Christianity to whisper to the lowliest man that by the action of his own soul he could burst the iron bonds of Fate with which merely being alive seemed to encase him.”

COLD WAR, COLD PEACE

At the conclusion of WWII in 1945, there was the prospect of World Peace.  Instead, the West entered a Cold War with the Soviet Union that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union crumbled into oblivion after a seventy-two-year reign, or did it?

Were this a treatise on the Cold Peace that followed the Cold War mention would have to be made of the inescapable conclusion that the Cold Peace has found godless Communism taking root in the West not as a dogma but as a lifestyle.  The evidence?

Christians find themselves apologizing for the Christian-Judaic culture that is the foundation of the United States of America, and Western Europe and much of Eastern Europe.  All seem to be retreating from this identity as well as from its constructs, verities and culture.

The Enlightenment’s Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) guided philosophy to becoming an autonomous discipline separate from science and religion, but able to qualify and validate the claims of both.  In emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition, the Enlightenment spread across Europe and into the United States.

Communism twisted the tenets of the Enlightenment to meet its agenda, while science became tantamount to a new religion as Communism’s dialectical materialism gave energy and purpose to science. 

Not only did science attempt to pass through the obfuscating wall of Nature to make new discoveries to benefit man, but science became the unwitting accomplice of technology to inundate the globe with tantalizing products, products that mirrored the fantasies of the head at the expense of the heart. 

To wit, a piece of metal called an automobile often becomes more important than a person, while a smartphone and Facebook often become more important than bona fide relationships.  This is evidence that Communism is still extant and winning the Cold Peace. 

The Western retreat from its Christian norms and traditions, taking flight into weapon of mass destruction while using its material wealth as leverage to its dominance, has resulted in the West going from crisis to crisis unable to meet or deal effectively with mini-conflicts emanating from the Cold Peace.

It seems that the West is devoid of the energy or the necessary will to preserve its own civilization.  While ISIS makes history the West makes politics.  Since 9/11, it has been clear that no imaginative strategy has been developed to deal effectively with this newest tyranny.

Up to this point, the West has enjoyed a measure of peace and separation through its distance from the carnage and displacement that that carnage generates, and through its prosperity and military capability, but its own sure fate has seemingly silently smothered its former spirit, and that gives one pause to wonder.

Communism is winning the Cold Peace, leaving the question, “Has the West gained the whole world and suffered the loss of its soul?” 

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