Not a dream

Some excerpts from several essays by David Warren:

How many people have said, “I am basically a good person,” without noticing that no one ever asked? And it is true that real monsters are a small minority, though I often think they are closer to being saved.

What we haven’t confronted, is that very emptiness, that loneliness, that hopelessness — together with the self-pity that explains it all away. For the modern man is a childless orphan, and the modern woman is a modern man, and this goes double when they are married to each other.

An example would be the sanctity of human life. Once it is grasped that it is wrong to kill people, as a way to solve your problems, and that a human is human from the moment he is conceived, opposition to abortion naturally follows. That is why it is incumbent on every faithful Catholic to oppose abortion, as he would otherwise oppose murder. This can’t be optional. It is incumbent, too, on every other one of us: on every Christian, and as it happens, on every decent human being regardless of religious affiliation. For in every other religious tradition of which I am aware, the sanctity of life is in some way affirmed. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that abortion is evil, and against divine law.

Similarly, once some notion of the connexion between sex and babies has been grasped, it is no longer possible to dismiss moral guidance. Nothing so elemental to the condition of human life than our means of reproduction could be otherwise than shouting with moral significance; and far from being a side issue, sexuality is at the heart of all human relations.

The contemporary teaching that it is merely a source of pleasure — so incredibly crass — has consequences that are unambiguously evil. Consequences that can be spelt out rationally, step by frigging step. Which were in fact spelt out, very rationally, in Humanae Vitae, by the late Pope Paul. (I know this because as a clever young atheist, I read it through repeatedly, with the intention of mocking it; and could find in it not one connective that was logically unsound, and became thereby convinced, even as an aspiring young Helot, that contraception could not possibly be correct.) A rule remains a rule, and continues to be a rule, until someone can show an internal contradiction.

And in the depths, likewise, the principle of marriage must still be affirmed, no matter how many of the mad may oppose it. One woman and one man must be courageously vindicated. Deep, and deeper than that.

While it has entirely escaped media attention, the most massive public demonstrations on this continent are pretty much invariably the various annual marches against abortion — in which I have observed that females outnumber males, and the young outnumber the old, often by quite large margins. For the mainstream media, ten sign-waving feminist old crows can be important breaking news. But ten thousand marching young women, proclaiming Christian truth to their indifferent surroundings, does not quite rise to sending a junior reporter. This is how things are, and it is that craven media that impinges on public consciousness hour by hour, and day by day, de-moralizing and corrupting.

From my own experience on the pro-life “front line,” for instance walking along with fifteen thousand or more mostly young people in Ottawa a couple of years ago — and past e.g. the CBC television stand, whose cameras were trained on a small handful of old-crow feminist counter-demonstrators for the footage they would actually be using — I should like to make an observation.

First, a joyous observation, of how invigorating it was, to be in the company of so many ebullient and purposeful young. These were, in the main, the products of the catechism classes I was mentioning above: bright and cheerful young faces in contrast with the grim and cheerless I pass on the sidewalks every day. The same comment for events such as the Papal Youth Days, when quite literally millions of the children of good Catholic homes, or converts, are assembled. I wish to say about them nothing snide, but rather how much I love them.

At the Rose Dinner, in Ottawa, in the evening after the spring pro-life march, I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my much younger companions in arms. And again: they were impressive, case by case, as I was coming to see them not as a mass, but as many fine and particular faces, each already with a complex life story, and not one an interchangeable happy-clap zombie, of the sort the media stereotype portrays — though not entirely from malice. (In my experience, the overwhelming majority of journalists belong to a self-consciously brahmin, “progressive” social class, which eschews contact with those it considers “lower,” i.e. the worker bees and water-carriers of the “flyover country,” whose views could hardly matter to them.)

They were young, very young to my now ageing eyes, but in their ebullience we are all made timeless. Not only did I converse, I overheard them chatting about what “young people” chat about, as everyone chats: from out of the fodder of their daily lives. And in this mush, I heard so many of the clichés of the media also being mindlessly repeated, and saw the flip gestures that go with them. They, too, had inherited the wind from a godless society, and blew the wind on without even thinking. They had thought through their principles, and were basically obedient, as most young people are — whether it is to authority or to fashion. Still, do they have the deeper instinct, and the fortitude with the instinct, sometimes not to obey? To stand alone, under real and excruciating peer pressure, without external support, against the overpowering Zeitgeist?

And it was more in overhearing little unthinking remarks that I inwardly wept for them.

To be sure, they had the rules down. I did not meet one who could not articulately expound why he (or more usually she) was “protesting” against abortion. Yet that very word “protesting” gave part of the game away.

Nor really do I think that there was one whose firm belief was not rooted in the connexion between sex and babies. Nor, possibly, even one who did not therefore follow the connexions on through a range of other Christian teachings. They’d been taught, well enough.

Yet still there was something that seemed missing from them; something that curiously had not yet gone entirely missing, even from the hippies who were my own contemporaries in youth — self-conscious “fashion hippies” who had inherited many more of the “social conventions” and “unquestioned beliefs” of their “square” post-war parents than they could ever realize.

“Rules” were being “questioned,” way back then. And yet, viscerally, they were still being followed. The profound idea of “one man, one woman” was often outwardly rejected, even volubly rejected, but it was still viscerally there. It would take another generation of media indoctrination, lewd commercial advertising, and the ministrations of Nanny State, to root the very instincts of Western Civilization out of their souls and bowels. All that my own generation had lost, in the first instance, was the power of resistance, founded ultimately on those old unquestioned rules that told one through one’s conscience when one was doing wrong.

But more than this: told one through the same conscience when one was doing right. And sometimes, filled the soul with some distant echo of a pleasure, that was our Lord’s pleasure in the creation of His world.

Conscience still exists, however poorly formed, or twisted. The propensity to guilt will always be there, so long as we are human. As well, the propensity to moral satisfaction, however twisted that becomes. But what one ought to feel sorry for, or badly about, or thoroughly ashamed by, can be quite substantially altered by the intervention of ceaseless propaganda, and ruthless fashion, and the inversion of a system of reward and punishment through the social engineering of the State.

We have faith, of a kind, shaken sometimes even by minor earth tremors. We have faith vested essentially in a political order; in the belief that, where problems arise, they can be solved, and our “human spirit” (which is incidentally no material thing) will ultimately rise to the occasion. We are, in the voice of every political commander, “the people of this great nation,” and we are repeatedly assured that we will prevail.

Failing which, we fall into utter despair. For we have no other faith to fall back on, when the earth indeed trembles and our artificial tower comes tumbling down. And, whether or not it is in our strictest modern sense “historical,” the story of Babel in Genesis tells us what will be our fate.

If there is one use for the calendrical New Year, it is provided, unintentionally, through the media, and through the accidents of social life. Towards the end of the old year, and bleeding into the new, we are exposed to a higher density of “signs of the times” than at any other time of year. Partly this is a by-product of the media habit of looking backward and forward: precisely twelve months back and twelve months fore. It is an arbitrary thing, but usually their cycle is twenty-four hours, or less with the advance of consumer electronics. Christmas, now for many years an essentially secular holiday, with little pretense of Christian thanksgiving but a modicum of “traditional” good cheer, adds more to this density. In some moments, even for those whose Christian affiliation evaporated before childhood, there are juxtapositions, contrasts.

In the media, or if you will, at a Christmas Party, or on New Year’s Eve, a lot of human experience can be compacted into a very small space, and much quickly passes before our eyes and ears. One has glimpses of the radical opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the true and the false, exhibited as if on signboards that anyone can read.

There is, especially in cold northern countries, a kind of post-partum depression that sets in after the holidays have passed. The weather plays some part in this: we who live in the vast conurbations do not look with relish on the next few months. In the countryside, a fresh snowfall can be uplifting; can be the making, for instance, of a “white Christmas”; in the city it can only mean service delays, traffic hell, dangerous sidewalks. The let-down after excessive eating and drinking comes into this, too: the sense that the party is over, and it is back to work for us.

But I think something deeper also contributes to our sense, however mildly it is taken, of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness.

I had a dream like this, the other evening. A baby was lying in the snow and slush. He’d been left there, accidentally discarded. People were busy, they were passing him by. I thought, he is cold, he has fallen on the sidewalk. Some woman must have dropped him on her way home. She’ll want to have him back, I must get him to her. But it was Christmas, there were legs on all these shoppers; the baby on the sidewalk kept sliding out of reach. I was trying to tell them, but no one could hear me; I could not even hear myself. Why can’t these people see there is a baby? A living baby, right at their feet? Why does no one stop for this baby, why doesn’t someone pick him up? And I awoke, thinking, “Jesus!”

But what I refer to is not a dream.