As I've said in previous posts, we live in a culture with some very interesting factors to it: the Internet, modern philosophy and its effects, feminism of every possible degree or wave, and modular movements in art and communications. The Medieval in me, while recognizing that the many doesn't always reduce to the one, wants to understand what principle would explain all these changes. It is the rallying cry of the day that we have “a new understanding” of women, reality, communication, and anthropology; that the “newness” of our culture is a process of discovery and not invention, and that we are more enlightened today than in yesteryear. While I would love to believe that one may rest secure knowing that the popular outlook of our day is motivated entirely by truth, since that would mean life would be perfectly peachy in the end, the suicide rate, the unhappiness one sees all around, and in general, the complete malaise one witnesses in everyday life seems to belie any such neat explanation.
If one may express the entire set of movements in our culture (modularity in art and technology, the self-determination of gender, popular relativism, and other such trends) as a theme, it seems to me the theme of “possible dynamism.” Our culture sees power in the possession of options. These options take many forms. If one feels clamped in by sexual norms, one may pursue an “alternative” lifestyle. Money enables us to “be” anything if we throw enough at our problems. Our technology is geared towards adaptability; the iPhone, the paradigm of a multifunction device, is an example of this, and the Internet is more than an example, almost to the point of becoming the frame of such technologies. Our classes, in academia, are viewed as modular tinker-toys we may put together to build a career's foundation; so that one often sees someone studying philosophy as a prerequisite, but rarely as a pursuit. Modular art, the idea of “evolutionary” music and fine art, has come to be in vogue, with the prodding, goading and occasional shoving of Wired magazine. One is no longer a citizen of a country, but a citizen of the world or of a cyberculture, a culture characterized by every possible piece of information conceivable being at hand.
With this range of possibility, we prize above all else this ability of self-determination of the individual. God forbid one judge the choice to act in a homosexual manner (which, I note, I contrast with “having un-acted-upon homosexual inclinations”, which is a defect of chemistry and not virtue) because one is then subjected to a withering barrage of self-righteous comments, usually involving the word choice; simili modo the obvious connection to the abortion debate. To claim that one religion, one philosophy, one viewpoint is innately superior by being true, presentation not being the concern, is considered to be a horrific social faux pas. We have come to accept that one does not discuss religion, politics or philosophy in polite company, as though these do not tell us the most about a person and reflect the purpose of their politeness; such a discussion inevitably demands that people take a stand on anything, which they may be unable to recant when it becomes inconvenient. Lastly, and in a way that may seem to many peripheral in relevance, we have come to regard that objets d'art ought always to be multi-functional or multi-interpretational, to the neglect of the dignity of things that do one thing and do it well, or say one thing and say it better than anything else. For this latter, modern art is an example, or the much-maligned comment of Gwen Stefani about “Hollaback Girl”; when asked what the song meant, her response was “Well, what do you think it means?” in a pseudo-sophisticated tone. We have come to associate beauty with complexity, forgetting that the reflection of simplicity is the purpose for which complexity exists. To put it another way, our culture is a maladjusted collection of chimerical opinions.
Against this attitude of “complexity as best”, Catholic philosophy (and by this I mean “Thomist philosophy”) has proposed a remarkable thing, that God is perfect and perfectly simple, and the complexity of the created world is the way by which natural things strive to imitate the simplicity simpliciter of their Maker. In this view, one may still have such dynamism, but only for the purpose of such dynamism, to know, love and serve God. One may still have possibility, but only for the purpose of such possibility, to be united in charity with God, Who is pure act. Through this, we gain the purpose of such dynamism, and it is in this understanding that I view Catholic anthropology. We are complex beings, but we are complex for a certain purpose: that we may love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our being, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, which love itself involves the love we have for ourselves because God loved us first into being. In this one purpose anthropology may be understood according to virtue ethics, because the existence of our supreme happiness is guaranteed by revelation, our Way to Him being that revelation Himself, and our whole being is made for him, as Augustine is so frequently quoted to say. But since in the very nature of love is justice, and in the very nature of justice is choice, there is a way we were meant to act, a way which we give up through sin; Dante's “straight and true.” And like Dante, we often need guides along the way. It is the education the guides we are given provide for us that help us to properly “determine” ourselves at every step of the way.
This brings me to the point of this note. When we vote for politicians, when we elect people to safeguard and promote our good, the idea that we should support “family values” has fallen somewhat out of fashion. Family values, to the mind of the modern American, are static. They are not dynamic. No longer does one, hearing that term, think of parents teaching us to ride a bike, or fathers teaching us to work a trade, or other such mental pictures of reality; when one suggests family values as a good, the image is rather that of a deliberately idealized Norman Rockwell painting, or picture of “the idyllic 50s” which to the rather clever modern teenager represents a picture of propaganda. This, to me, indicates the failure of the duties of those people in their lives and the lives of their influences, because this is not at all what the family is made to be. Fundamentally, the family is not a static reality. And although the idea of conditioning has been taken to an absurd degree of late, it is absolutely undeniable that parents make us who we are in principle as actors, by their virtues and their vices. While they do not write our lines on the stage of life, they as much as set the initial conditions of the act, define with what sort of people we are forced to associate, and generally give us the condition of all our conditions. It is only the very strong-willed child who can cease to be in the conditions in which parenting places him or her. If their conditions are good, doing bad things becomes painful to them, because good parenting breeds virtue. If their conditions are bad, it is tough to escape the vices which pick up new appeal. With such a powerful role in making children human beings, parents should be encouraged at every point.
But this is not the fashionable view. If one is in favor of family values, one tends to be against allowance of abortion and encouragement of homosexuality, because these things do prevent children from having a family, through all sorts of myriad ways. With abortion, there are accounts and accounts of psychological damage to the would-have-been parents, difficulty for the kids who survive, and whatnot. With homosexuality, the encouragement of such a lifestyle is itself a repudiation of the idea of man having a certain sexual nature, to the point that it is always the villain in any movie who becomes angry at something being “unnatural.” One rarely notices this de-nuancing of the meaning as a child, but one is certainly deluged with it. (If one wishes an example, I would provide (out of so many) the episode of Firefly where Summer Glau's character is almost burned as a witch because of her “unnatural” psychic powers.) To judge anything as unnatural is now taboo, yet it goes further; homosexuality is viewed as “a perfectly natural thing.” Abortion, likewise, falls under this defense; while perhaps unnatural, it is done in order to defend the supposedly natural “freedom of choice”, as though no choice anyone makes should ever be punished.
These are just two ways in which proponents of Catholic anthropology are (unjustly) considered squares. But going back to that same anthropology, we realize that it is in fact the dynamists for dynamism's sake who are squares (and eventually, so do they.) Because the family, in the end, is anything but static. Good parents are able to raise their children to do whatever those children will love, irrespective of how unusual that calling may be, because good parents love their children. Family values is shorthand for those values which allow children and parents to live in a way which will bring them both true happiness, a happiness which is anything but static (although He is immobile.) And in fact, while we never, ever acknowledge it, it is the reason why children grow to the point they can even protest such values; the good protestor is the good speaker, and the good speaker is one who has learned to speak properly, and who taught them to speak, or enrolled them in a class to learn? Indeed, anyone who protests that the father in a family is unimportant in the development of a child or the life of that family is deluded, and yet in a way that is telling, sad, and which should provoke a degree of charity, because they are no doubt a victim of this very philosophy, or the hateful things men do to prompt it.
Or, to put all this in another, more concise way: education is the cause of dynamism, as most will admit, but it is the educator who is the principal cause of the good of that dynamism. I study philosophy, and I do well in it. But it is my parents, biological and spiritual, who taught me my most basic principles of thought and the understanding of what makes life worthwhile, and that is what makes my study something to be loved, pursued even when it is difficult. Were it not for my father teaching me to be a man, I would not know what it is to be one. Were it not for my mother teaching me my faith, I would not (ultimately) know why one would ever want to try so hard to be so. Were it not for the good Fathers I know who taught me what it is to follow that faith in one's life the way they were called to do so, I would not have the strength to attempt it. Were it not for the grace of my Father in Heaven, none of us would. That's parenthood. And were it not for my sisters to keep me in check, I might still be a wreck, so I suppose that's family.
Family is important because life has meaning. Life has meaning because we have natures. We have natures because we have a Father in Heaven. Fathers are really, really important. Happy belated Father's Day, Dad.
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