Fake Young People

I took the title for this post from Bruce Charlton's recent discussion about old age, and the lack of lived wisdom that comes through in our culture. While I don't think elders were ever extensively revered to youth culture in the modern West, I do believe there were was a time when there were pockets of individuals that were able to transmit a certain degree of cultural inheritance that had significant influence. There was a reciprocity in this intergenerational relationship where the older generation was seen as valued as they bequeathed their life long gifts to the younger generation. But today, much of this has diminished as all generations are complicit in their denial of what is truly wise.

First, the older generation has refused to age gracefully. Instead, they fight it on every level. They make every attempt to keep their bodies young through strenuous exercise, health remedies, and cosmetic surgery. Sexual decline is manipulated through drugs. Recreational time is spent on travel, frivolous activities, and socializing. Their minds defer to youth culture, and the need need to “always stay young” by being in touch with whatever is novel. Instead of inspiring wisdom for the youth, it inspires pure vanity. The young will comment about how so-and-so looks great for their age, and yet it does little to impart any purpose for growing older other than making every attempt to delay the appearance of it. (sidebar: I speak from personal experience on this, as I am guilty of some of this vanity.)

The younger generation, although more innocent in regards to time, have their part to play. As they've grown up with internet culture, generational hierarchies of respect and reverence have collapsed. Images have taken over deep ideas. The youth are more prone to learn from memes and video clips than from perusing books. And if they read anything, it is rarely the classics. It's not that they stay outside of any ideas, it is more like they have become indoctrinated into the shallow ideas that permeate the stream of culture. Every so often, a viral father figure like Jordan Peterson will appear on the scene and inspire something that has been lost. Still, this needs to be made more pervasive for the impact to be enduring.  

Jacques Barzun once articulated as to what makes a nation. He says, “A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories. When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it.” It does seem this is what we are up against on a socio-political scale. How are we to impart tradition if those with experience don't live it themselves?

It seems getting older should really be about embracing the transition—instead of struggling against it—all while cultivating and deepening our spiritual, intellectual and moral growth and maturity. Only through embodying any sort of depth, will we be able to inspire it. Chesterton said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” If we really want to be alive and youthful, we really need to, as David Bentley Hart once quipped about wisdom: recover our innocence at the far end of our experience! We can do this not by being pompous or didactic towards our ideas about life, but by being possessed by faith and reason.

We all know getting old isn't easy. We may see health issues begin the creep in, we lose attention from others as our appearance dulls, we may find ourselves lacking energy, and we tire of the need to keep up appearances that may have led us astray from what we really wanted. So it's easy to see where curmudgeonliness, shame, and regret can take hold if we are not centered! Or maybe we have been too enamored with our life's successes and refuse to allow for our demise. The bottom line is getting old is truly a time to prepare for death. It doesn't mean we stop living, but the finiteness of time gives us urgency towards life's significance. 

Despite all our advances it health care technology, we are still given a finite amount of time—and that has been the case for thousands of years. The Bible says explicitly, “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.” If you look at today's life expectancies, we have not moved too far off this scale. It is as if the human body has a generally defined time limit. So while youth may be wasted on the young, do we really want to allow old age to be wasted on staying fake young? It may be better we accept our days remaining and use them to impart our traditions and gifts among the youth who can truly hear/see, and prepare our transition to God's eternal home. 

Persons as Mystery (and Not Problems to Be Solved)

Frank Sheed says, “A Mystery is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind's thirst.”

Persons are mysteries. They are not questions to be solved, or an ambiguities to the resolved. If they were, that would mean persons would be like problems that could be finitely determined. As such, that would end thought as well as the creative impulse to understand and wonder. It doesn't mean a person can't be understood, but like any mystery it can't be understood completely. There is something to a person that is inexhaustible and endlessly knowable. 

Today's secular world loses sight of this. Instead it prefers to see persons in terms of collectives or groups of collectives. This undermines the dignity of the person, and reduces the freedom he/she has to choose good and evil. We are very good at hiding this, because acknowledging sinful choice requires something of us. As Stanley Jaki notes about having sin move to the background: “moral responsibility is dulled so that sinful acts may not cause psychic trauma if they do not cause physical discomfort.”

As such, persons are seen as dependent on impersonal forces around economic conditions, social constructions, and systemic prejudices. Since persons are determined by outside forces, the mystery gets lost. Persons are now problems to be solved, where creativity gets stifled as these solutions can be seen simplistically through the eyes of packaged ideologies. Is this justice served, or just an approach to solve a problem and move on?

There is no doubt that modernity requires something of us to solve issues. After all, the whole impulse is about the perfectibility of man. But man can not be perfected when the mystery won't allow for monocausal origins. Moreover, social ills are always deeper than the materialistic plane will allow for.    

Rod Dreher notes,

“What we call social justice today, in a contemporary secular way, defines itself wholly in materialistic terms. The individual becomes nothing more than a bearer of his identity, within the cosmology of identity politics. Justice is determined mechanically, as if judging the affairs of men was no different than herding sheep or sorting butterbeans. Social justice, understood in this way, becomes monstrous.” 

Our material problems are truly spiritual solutions. As such, we need to recover the deeper metaphysic of persons as mystery, with the dignity to make choices and that those choices are rooted in something beyond the person himself. It does not mean that our choices will resolve the problems we endure, but that the nature of what we endure has meaning beyond the choice.

Living Not By Lies, Dying to Know Truth

Spending holidays with family is good way to know what ground you stand on. Sometimes it feels a tad shaky, but when you hear something that doesn't sit well with Reality you can find yourself standing up straight pretty quickly. I suppose that's what gets us closer to Truth, as it only happens some of us when we get a whiff of lies. Apparently, that's how it happened to Chesterton when he met someone with nihilistic tendencies he coined as the Diabolist. If we met this guy today, he'd probably be too commonplace to notice, and yet Chesterton was shocked enough by him that it propelled him to know its opposite—the Good and the True.

Chesterton was also astute to fact that the Good and True needed to be recognized through the veneer of cultural ideas of moral superiority: “We are altering, not the evils, but the standard of good which is the only standard by which any evil can be detected and defined.” Today's woke progressives adhere to the idea the good is redeemed by acknowledging privilege and demanding normalization and redemption to the marginalized. The evil is baked in the half-truths to the notion that justice can only be served to those victimized in group identities over the individual and universal. Therefore the system must be in control to serve justice—since nothing else can be: not I, not God. 

How does this differ from Chesterton's standard of Truth: which is always consistent, changeless, distinctive, whole, and of course, good!? Well for one thing, his version of Truth is so much more freeing! Yes, we know the Truth will set us free; however, the inverse is almost more important, in that in order to find Truth, we must be free to begin with. Sadly, the soft totalitarianism of cancel culture does not permit this to be the case. Since the system is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and fill in your favorite marginalized group phobia here, you are not allowed speak out of line with the tolerant (ironically intolerant) woke that knows best. (I suppose if your foundational pillars are fragile, then best to rule out disagreeing voices that may blow them over.)

Chesterton distilled some other essentials about Truth: that it is fun to put those ideas to the test and “that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy” (when does this ever happen with the left?). 

As such, it would seem to me the Truth should be on the short list of things worth preserving in this world. So that takes us to Rod Dreher, whose book Live Not By Lies takes on this very topic. Once we know Truth, we need to protect it, or conserve it (hence, the political movement known as conservatism). But it appears this is the least of our worries since we now don't understand ourselves “to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who travelled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness as the ultimate goal.” Hence, our values have become more therapeutically driven, and therefore very few are prepared to suffer for what matters.

Dreher notes, “We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.” This is the nature of soft totalitarianism—it does not terrorize us into surrendering our wills to the state like its harder form does—instead it lures us in with the therapeutic promises that will permit one a shallow happiness.

But real happiness requires more. We must love (and want to redeem) our neighbor, but as they are in the likeness of God. Unlike the woke social justice of today that divides LGBTQ+, BIPOC, women, and white European males, “Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.” 

The answer to this problem is a spiritual one: it starts with acknowledging the sin in each of us, the gift of suffering, and the gratitude for existence. Once we know this, we can die for it.