Black Friday: The High Holy Day of Stuffism

G.K. Chesterton once remarked in several passages some idea to the effect that when a man will no longer believe in God, it is not so much that be believes nothing, rather, it is more the case that he will believe in anything.  As was so often the case, Chesterton’s words were not only descriptive, but prophetic, for a modern world that proclaims the death of God has not replaced its belief in God with belief in nothing, but belief in all sorts of things.  Man today has not rejected religion, but has simply chosen new religions, among them: Materialism, Secularism, Individualism, Liberalism, worship of celebrity, and Stuffism.  They have their own rituals, own houses of worship, own set of beliefs, high priests, and high holy days.  On the day after Thanksgiving, falls the holiest day of the Stuffist calendar, Black Friday.  

In his important, if challenging book, The Unintended Reformation, Professor Brad Gregory of the University of Notre Dame has remarked on the increasing secularization of Western Society that had been an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation.  As a result of hyper-pluralism--a proliferation of religious (and non-religious) beliefs-- society has reached the point where it can no longer agree on anything.   Like Chesterton’s unbeliever who would believe, not in nothing, but in anything, a society that can longer organize itself around shared religious beliefs must organize around something.  That something, is Stuffism.  

Society today may be able to agree on little, but most people can agree that they want stuff and they want alot of it.  Gregory calls this the religion of Stuffism.   Its followers are as devoted as followers any religion have been.  Its main doctrines involve the pursuit of material goods as the highest principle of life; meaning in life is comes from pursuit and attainment of new stuff.  Man’s appetite for the infinite (for what  save the infinite could satisfy man’s endless longing), once met by an infinite God, is now to be met  by an infinite amount and quality of stuff.  Man must own the newest I-pad, Tablet, car, or fad.  Salvation comes not from a personal relationship with God, but from having the latest and best stuff.  

Stuffism has its own houses of worship, more ornate and decorated than any Church.  A popular and rather shallow attack on Christianity has sometimes dwelt on its ornate Churches while many starve—as if the poor do not  need beauty as well as food!  Stuffist houses of worship, though, are more ornate than nearly any Church.  The young and old gather devotedly at Macy’s, Abercrombie and Fitch, the Mall.  Cardinal Dolan once observed sadly that when he saw young people lined up at a house of worship on Sunday morning, they were lined up, not outside a Church, but outside an Abercrombie and Fitch store.   

Stuffism has its own rituals, sacraments, and holy days.  Its Confirmation/Bar Mitzvah/coming of age ritual is receiving one’s first credit card when one becomes a fully initiated Stuffist.  Its rituals include waiting in line to purchase the newest I-pad.  The Holiest day of the Stuffist calendar falls on Black Friday.  Early Black Friday morning, devout Stuffists gather outside their houses of worship for the newest deals, intent on acquiring the newest stuff at the best price (the better to get even more stuff).  They can even worship from the comfort of their houses thanks to the ease of online purchasing.  

Such is the religion of Stuffism in brief.  There is, though, something unsatisfying about the Stuffist creed, the idea that man’s greatest purpose lies in gaining more stuff, that this can be the organizing principle of society, and that enough stuff might satisfy the human heart, for it never does.  Those who follow the Stuffist religion most devoutly are the least satisfied.  They must always have the newest thing and more stuff and so can never be more than briefly satisfied by what they have.  The Stuffist creed leaves one wanting where it most claims to satisfy, a poor religion for the human heart.  

Bullying, Relativism, and Youth Suicide

In September 2010, Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge after a roommate video-taped him having an intimate encounter with another older man.  He became a nationwide symbol of the problem of bullying, especially among homosexual youth, and youth suicide.  The nationwide reaction included anti-bullying campaigns and calls for greater tolerance of homosexuality. 

It was not only Clementi; in the preceding year another thirteen year old girl hanged herself after bullying from peers that included sexting, text messages of a sexual nature.  The problem is not only homosexuality, but bulling and youth suicide more broadly.  The philosopher Peter Kreeft has recently pointed out that since the 1950s, we have seen a 5,000 % increase in youth suicide (1).   Increasing intolerance toward homosexuality simply does not explain this. 

Since the 1950s, American society has only become more tolerant and accepting of homosexual behavior, not less.  Until 1973, the American Psychiatric association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder.  So did the American psychological association until 1975 (which caused my grandfather to leave the APA in 1975).  In the 1950s movie, The Road to Bali, starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, a character commented that the gods would never allow the abomination of a marriage between two men.  Today, however, homosexual practice is widely accepted and surely had no stronger supporters than Hollywood itself.  So, on the contrary, as homosexual practice has become more widely accepted, the rate of youth suicide has not decreased, but has actually increased.  Why is this so?  Why has youth bullying and suicide become more of a problem, not less?

Clementi did not commit suicide because he felt bullied because he was gay.  He committed suicide because for some reason, he decided that there was nothing in the world worth living for.  If decreasing tolerance cannot explain youth suicide, what else can?  What else changed at the same time?

The answer is secularism and increasing moral relativism.  If I asked a class of my students today whether objective moral values existed (by which we mean moral values that exist independent of what people think), their answer would nearly be identical.  Most students would reply that of course objective moral values did not exist “because different societies thought different things.”  I do not dwell here on the disastrous lapse in logic, the confusion between moral epistemology (perception of moral values) and moral ontology (existence) of moral values.  Obviously to say that a person does not believe in x is not proof that x does not exist.  Otherwise we would have to say that the fact that 12^th century Europeans did not believe in America was proof that American did not exist, which is absurd.

What really concerns us is the terrible consequences that follow when the youth become convinced, as they are today, that moral values are wholly subjective.  If a person thinks that moral values are subjective, then he thinks that they are wholly dependent on what other people think.  If a person thinks that moral values, including his own moral value are wholly dependant on what other people think, then what other people think becomes of paramount importance.  If moral values depend on society, and if one’s society, whether American, college, fraternity, or high school peers decide that a person does not have moral value (through bullying), then it necessarily follows that that person does not have moral value.  If subjectivism is true, then what is left to such a person save to throw himself off of a bridge?  If moral values are subjective, they depend on what other people think, and if everyone else thinks that that person is worthless, then he really is!  Second, moral subjectivism also provides an enormous incentive to be the bully.  Better to bully other people into thinking they are worthless than risk being thought worthless oneself. 

The cries for greater tolerance will not solve the problem.  Society is more tolerant and accepting than it ever has been, yet the problem of bullying and youth suicide is worse than ever.  The only hope is for people to begin to recognize again that human beings really do have objective moral value.  Modern secular society provides no basis for this.  Having denied God, it has denied any basis for objective moral values.  Without God, morality is just the result of evolutionary conditioning or societal norms- there is nothing objective about it.  As secularism and denial of God has increased since the 1950s, so has bullying and youth suicide. 

Hope for the youth lies not in more secularism, but in less.  For in Christianity a human being knows that they have objective moral value, no matter what anyone thinks.  They know that they have been created by a perfectly good, loving God, who made them in his image, suffered and died on a cross for them, and wants them to enjoy eternal union with Himself.  What bully could have a chance against such knowledge?

(1) http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2011/11/dr-kreeft-how-to-win-the-culture-war/ 

Into the Fire: Towards a Life Worth Living

“If [Jesus] is what he claimed to be, a Savior, a Redeemer, then we have a virile Christ and a leader worth following in these terrible times; One who will step into the breach, crushing sin, gloom, and despair; a leader to Whom we can make totalitarian sacrifice without losing, but gaining freedom, and Whom we can love even unto death.  We need a Christ today who will make cords and drive the buyers and sellers from our new temple; Who will blast unfruitful fig trees; Who will talk of crosses and sacrifices and Whose voice will be like the voice of the raging sea.  But He will not allow us to pick and choose among his words, discarding the hard ones and accepting the ones that please our fancy.  We need a Christ who will restore moral indignation, Who will make us hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water.”

            --- From The Life of Christ (p.8), Archbishop Fulton Sheen

For years in his radio and then television show, Fulton Sheen insisted to American audiences that life was indeed worth living.  It was a message  needed as much then as it is now. 

Sheen wrote in a time of continuing industrialization, consumerism, and materialism in both senses of that terrible word.  As man denied God, either by the fast route of outright and immediate denial taken by the atheist or marxist or the slow route of increasing apathy, non attendance at mass, and increasing deism, modern man found there was nothing left to lend meaning, purpose, or value to his life.

Nietzche, one of the earliest prophets of the God-is-dead movement proclaimed that since God was dead, nihilism, the destruction of all meaning, value, and purpose in life was the consequence.  Others proclaimed the absurdity of life as well.  Heidegger wrote “If God... is dead... then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.”  The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre  spoke of the “nausea” of existence. Camus (The Stranger) has the hero of his novel realize in a flash that the universe had no God and hence no meaning.  Indeed, to Camus the only serious question in life was whether or not one should commit suicide. 

Unfortunately, our world today followed these thinkers in denying both God and hence any meaning or purpose in life.  Nietzsche was right, the death of God leads only to nihilism.  Confronted with an apparently pointless and meaningless life, many choose to leave it.  Thence the current problem of suicide among the youth.  It is hard to live in a world where everything means nothing and nothing means anything.  After a century of world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, abortions, how is man to look on life without despair?

I can think of only one way out and one hope for the world.  It was given by St. Augustine when he said “you have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  It was given by Thomas Aquinas, who when told by God that he might ask for any one thing replied, “I will have thyself.”  It was given by St. Francis when he proclaimed “My God and My All.”  And it is given above by the Archbishop Fulton Sheen. 

In Jesus there is a leader Who we can follow into the fire, because He went through it first.  In Him is someone not only worth living for, but worth dying for.  In Him is hope not only for the sunrise beyond the veil of this world, but hope for the world itself.  In Him the world becomes a place of meaning, purpose, and value.  In Him is hope that suffering and death will not have the last word.  And, in Him, is our Captain, and banner, and Resurrection.

Marriage (or just Weddings) in Mainstream Culture

My husband’s recent post, “materialism, materialism and marriage,” and my own experience shopping for a wedding dress, make me think back to our general experience in planning for the wedding. I have contemplated all of the effort and money that is too commonly put into the wedding itself, and how typically disproportionate it is to the time and preparation put into the marriage. I think many people forget that there is a distinct difference between planning a wedding and preparing to be married, and it frequently looks like too many people put too much emphasis on the former and not enough on the latter.

Sometimes the two seem to become connected in rather inappropriate ways. One example of such a connection is exhibited in the NPR article, “Why are Wedding Dresses So Expensive” (1). I showed it to Matthias who mentioned it in his previous post, before I posted it on facebook with sarcastic remarks on how our priest failed to properly assess my fittingness and disposition to marry by inquiring the amount I spent on the wedding gown. My husband should probably know about this, since the gown was on clearance and the veil bought off ebay. Joking aside now. The things that are pointed out in that article point to a societal separation between weddings and sacramental marriage, and a focus on weddings as events of great (monetary) value in their own right. Christine, in her comment on Matthias’s post, puts it pretty well. Weddings have become a ritual in “self-realization” and “adulthood,” and mark an entrance into another stage of life (but not necessarily the rest of your life together).

The term, “wedding” unfortunately, seems automatically to mean the reception in many people’s minds, not the ceremony in which you actually become married. A number of the people who asked me where the wedding was going to be, after my response indicating the particular church, indicated that what they meant by “wedding” was actually where the reception was going to be held. As if where we were actually getting married to begin with hardly mattered. As if the sacrament were only a brief prelude to the “real” wedding. Likewise, the questions about how the wedding planning was going also revolved around things related to the reception or other extra things. Did we choose the menu, the cake (we did cupcakes, actually), get a photographer, get a DJ, is the dress done? No one (except our priest and music director) in these “wedding-planning” conversations asked if we had chosen the readings for the Mass, or the music for the Mass, or anything about the Mass.

The popular ideal for a wedding seems to be about making it a perfectly designed and choreographed production that will amaze your guests. One of the biggest wow-factors of a wedding is the gown, so we end up with articles like the one mentioned above, and we observe a culture of glamour, rather than sanctity, surrounding weddings and their preparation in mainstream culture.

(1) http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/05/138760908/why-are-wedding-dresses-so-expensive?sc=fb&cc=fp

Materialism, Materialism, and Marriage

When my wife was searching for a wedding dress, she spent some time shopping before finding a discontinued dress on clearance. The dress looked lovely and the saleswoman told my then fianceé, "and you don't even have to tell anyone it was on clearance!" As if spending an insufficient amount on a wedding dress were a piece of moral turpitude best hidden from friend and foe alike. To some people, it is. Today wedding dresses not uncommonly cost thousands of dollars. Salespeople and friends ask if a bride is certain she has found “the” dress. Each bride a special snowflake to be matched only to the perfect dress.

What is true of the search for the modern wedding dress is true of modern weddings in general. . Flowers, bridesmaids’ dresses, photography, music, the reception all combine to make the average spectacle of a wedding today cost about $22,000. A recent article suggested various reasons for this particularly: showing of social status and, showing off how seriously a bride takes her marriage.

And yet as the costs of the wedding get higher and higher, the length of the marriages get shorter and shorter and the divorce rates ever higher. How is a society that values marriage so much more than it ever has (at least by the measure of mammon) unable to prevent marriages shorter from when they ever have been? Might the measure have gone wrong?

In the Christian tradition and the Christian ages, marriage stood as a channel of divine grace and a symbol of the union between Christ and his Church. The spouses were to mirror the self-giving, self-sacrificing, love of God. As God’s love was creative and led to the creation of the world (as well as the Incarnation and crucifixion), so a husband and wife are called to a procreative love in children. As the love of Father and Son eternally binds them together and leads to the Holy Spirit, so human love is to be open to the third in children. Fulton Sheen says that love is always triune. When the entire world can be a symbol of the divine, as it was to St. Francis, Augustine, and the entire Christian tradition, the world is a larger and richer place. When marriage can be a symbol of God, marriage is better off for it.

The modern world, however, is a material world. God is dead, or at least widely proclaimed to be so. Life, as life without God must be, is devoid of any real purpose, meaning, or objective value (2). In such a world, marriage can hardly be a symbol of the divine. It can be little more than (as it has become) a temporary contract entered into and broken at the whim of either party. NT Wright wrote, “sex used to be a sacrament, but in the modern world, it has become a toy” (3).

Still, by a basic and wild instinct, man still knows that sex and marriage ought to be something more than mere contract or animal instinct. Unable to value marriage as a sign of God’s love for His Church, however, (since God is dead), he shows his appreciation for marriage the only way a material world can, through money. A philosophically materialist world inevitably becomes materialist in another sense and so the cost of weddings goes ever higher. But so do the divorce rates.

Fulton Sheen wrote that two empty cups cannot fill each other; two sticks cannot be tied together save by something outside themselves, and the modern world has found materialism (in both senses of the word) a poor cord. The Christian Ages of the world had an answer, and to them we turn for ours. There, love could be love because it could be triune. Spouses could love each other because Love Himself was involved. Chesterton called Christianity the answer to a long riddle. If only the modern world cares to see it.

(1) http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/05/138760908/why-are-wedding-dresses-so-expensive?sc=fb&cc=fp

(2) For one assessment of this see, William Lane Craig’s essay, “The Absurdity of Life Without God.”

(3) from Simply Christian.

Modern Man and the Ugliness of Modern Art

I recently made an album of some pictures I took on my recent research trip to several Italian cities. While I would work during the week, I spent the weekends playing the tourist at various historic sites, especially many of the old Churches. When I returned, I made an album of a selection of the photographs that I had taken and was showing them to some relatives at a recent family gathering. They were suitably impressed by the photos, especially many of the Churches, and some remarked that one did not see artwork and architecture like that today. I was forced to agree.

This exchange reminded me of a couple remarks made by the Archbishop Fulton Sheen. In the first, he speculated on why modern art and architecture was so ugly. He suggested that in religious ages, art and architecture was more beautiful because men believed in a spiritual world that they could represent materially. The material was used to represent the spiritual, and the former was dignified by the comparison. In the modern age (or rather, the second pagan age), artwork and architecture is often so ugly because there is nothing to represent materially. All that is left is the weird, and so much modern art has given up on the search for beauty and simply tries for the strange and unfamiliar.

Many of the Churches that I saw and photographs I took inclined me to agree with the late archbishop. The first image here is of the Florence Duomo. The second is of the world trade center in New York City.
If a picture is typically worth a thousand words, then these are worth far more. The former twin towers were little more than large concrete rectangles, The Florence Duomo far more.

It may be protested that this consists of a remarkably small sample size. Very well, the reader is invited to consider on his own whether there might be something to this, and whether myself and my relatives, untrained artists all of us, are right in agreeing that modern art and architecture is far worse than medieval. One wonders then why "medieval" has become almost a synonym for "backward" in the modern world.

If so, then surely this represents an indictment of the modern world. A material world that cannot believe in the spiritual is a far poorer world. And human sense rightly revolts against it.

Some do not. While traveling Italy, I met a young Scandinavian woman on a bus trying to find her way to a hostel. We began talking about our travels and I mentioned my fascination with all of the old Churches. She responded dismissively, "oh, when you've seen one Church, you've seen them all."

First of all, this is hardly true. It is the ugly buildings of the modern city that all look alike. The sheer variety all the all old Churches makes me think of the remark by C.S Lewis, "how monotonously alike all the tyrants of the world, how gloriously different all the saints." Second, it reminded me of a story told by Fulton Sheen. He told of a tourist at the Louvre who, on exiting commented contemptuously to a security guard who was standing by that he (the tourist) saw nothing to admire in those paintings. The security guard responded, "Listen! These pictures are not on trial; you are!"

It was not only that art has become ugly; it is that the modern materialist, like my Scandinavian acquaintance, also gradually loses his ability to appreciate beauty where it may be found. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, that right or wrong, materialism gradually destroyed the modern man's humanity.

What was true of that tourist is true of the modern world-- and of us. The modern world is on trial and the case for the prosecution, the ugly artistic consequences of our materialism alone, is a strong one indeed. The judge is just, the verdict coming. If the modern world does not reject its materialism, it will find, not only will it have lost the ability to produce beauty, but, it will also have lost the ability to appreciate it, with devastating consequences for its ability to enjoy heaven and the new creation that began with Easter.