A Dis-topian Family

The world has been slowly on a trajectory towards a sense of disenchantment since Descartes’ fateful utterance of his Cogito Ergo Sum, ushering in an age of intellectual insecurity which renders thinkers incapable (or unwilling) to deal with any reality which does not appear to be measurable with such mathematical certainty as can be found in a geometrical proposition.  From its lowly beginnings with Cartesian individual skepticism to full-blown political and social philosophies organized and formulated based on the premise that nothing is to be accepted if not “scientifically” proven (itself a misnomer), man has rapidly progressed towards an absurd and untenable worldview which ultimately aims at leaving him as nothing more than an organic robot.  The underlying premise of this is that if we could only get rid of the human element in the world (be it free from selfishness and greed through socialism/communism, or human poisoning the world with wanton chemicals through climate activism, or  even from humans themselves in arguments for abortion and overpopulation theory), we would be able to establish and maintain  sort of Utopia here on earth and live happily ever after.  No one encapsulated the foundational flaw this argument better than Dr. Rose Lemmons when she wrote in her essay Modes of Re-enchantment that “Original sin beaches all Utopian ships”.  For those of us called to live as the Catholic Laity within the family life, this results in the frequent disconnect between our knowledge of how life is supposed to be vs. how it actually is.

I have a clear example in my mind.  I was acquaintances at one time with a young man whom I usually refer to as “hen-pecked”.  He was from a very traditional Catholic homeschooled family, was older brother to two sisters, had a very head-strong mother, and a rather hands-off approach father.  It was clear from context and interactions with this family that priority was given to the younger sisters, and this young man was generally left to find out how to become a man all by himself.  At every event the sisters were featured in, the parents were there to support them.  This young man never had any parental visits, and was as a result very emotionally unstable (in spite of full knowledge of good Christian Masculine virtues).  The particular example I have in mind was upon one occasion when he was loosely involved in the same event his sisters were, and so by technicality his parents were in a sense present also supporting him.

It was the night before the event, and I was tasked with moving about 100 chairs from one place to another.  About halfway through my duties, this young man pulled his father into the back hallway through which I had to travel to talk to his father.  As the conversation went on, the young man tried to open up to his father and discuss some sensitive matters with him, and became increasingly emotional and exasperated at his father’s apparent naïveté, apparently unaware of what sort of  conversation was actually happening right in front of him.  At a certain point, the father instructed his son to stop mid sentence, clearly distraught, to reach out to me as I passed by to ask if I needed any help moving chairs.  To the father’s eyes, he was exhibiting Christian charity as a good Christian man, offering the help of himself and his son.  But in spite of all his knowledge of technical Catholic teaching and a life presumably lived at focusing on God, this father could not see that his own Utopia which he assumed his family embodied was falling apart.  He, like so many today, assumed that knowledge of an issue renders one free to live as if that issue does not matter.

In this it is worthwhile to contemplate the coming of the Holy Spirit, whose task it is to remind man of good and evil and to return them to a state of being able to call sin by its proper name.  Simply being able to name something and recognize what it is does not free us from the responsibility and necessity to live according to the truth.  The temptation is always to see the world as being totally under the domain of human reason, that if we understand the fact that we are fallen humans and therefore not perfect, we can somehow still be perfect: understanding and knowledge in this equates with the highest power of humans.  Without a true understanding of human weakness, a recognition of the all-pervasiveness that the effects of Original Sin has upon the human condition, and living as though these truths matter, man fools himself into thinking that he can build himself a utopia here on earth by his own power.  Too often the constructor of this utopia is the last one to realize and acknowledge the failed state - and then it is too late.