Cultural Hypocrisy

President Obama's speech from Sandy Hook on Sunday night exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of our culture.  Here's a salient quote:

It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself.  That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.  And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.  This is our first task — caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.  And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations?  Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm? [emphasis added]


This is, of course, a fundamental truth.  The whole point of "culture" is to raise children into virtuous, competent adults, and to reinforce by the continuous formation of adults the same virtues being passed on, in a manner consistent enough across time and space to be a shared and unifying vision of the Good.  Successful cultures are successful, stable, and enduring exactly in these terms.  People come to share this commitment to the Good that is envisioned, because it is demonstrably a Good, and because it tests positively against human experience.

But in this speech, Obama moves too easily from truth to truism, and thence to misdirection.

The truism is that threats of violence against our children come from outside, from disordered elements of the culture (like mental illness, or the apparent randomness of many forms of violence):

We gather here in memory of twenty beautiful children and six remarkable adults.  They lost their lives in a school that could have been any school; in a quiet town full of good and decent people that could be any town in America....  As these difficult days have unfolded, you’ve also inspired us with stories of strength and resolve and sacrifice.  We know that when danger arrived in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary, the school’s staff did not flinch, they did not hesitate....

This dichotomy is partly true, at the level of personal experience, and yet wholly false, morally.  Obama alludes to this falsity when he says:

[T]his job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.  And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.

But if that's true, then there's not an "us" who try to protect children from violence and raise them in virtue, and a "them" who try the opposite.  Those who harm our more vulnerable members are also "us."  But from  the ambiguity of the superficial truism, the speech is able to misdirect:

In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.  Because what choice do we have?  We can’t accept events like this as routine.  Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?  Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

The misdirection here is actually three-fold.

First, there is the straw man of opposing "freedom" with "preventing more tragedies like this."  Politically, this is a false dichotomy because freedom - true freedom, virtuous freedom, not license (as "freedom" is often cast) - is what makes a culture strong and resilient.  Only a society characterized by humility, fortitude, and prudence is capable of reining in the impulses to violent brutality, without resorting to strict tyranny.  Morally, this is a straw man because moral freedom is essential to love, and to the meaningfulness.  Without moral freedom, life just is; neither good nor evil, but simply to be endured.

Second, there is the implied "big government" thinking, that only (or perhaps, best) the federal government is equipped to deal effectively with this problem.  This is typical of this president's work (bailouts, Obamacare, etc).  This is misdirection in this context to the extent that it belies the need for vigorous subsidiarity in making and enforcing good laws, and so forth.  (The whole question of proper care for the mentally ill can be hooked onto this point.)

Third, and most blatantly, there is the elephant in the room of abortion, and indeed of the whole contraceptive mentality of behavior without natural consequence.  Mr. Obama said, "Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm?"  Abortion is the most grievous form of violence visited upon our children - in scale (roughly 3000 children murdered daily), in social damage (emotional consequences, lives and relationships gravely harmed, etc), and in moral damage (abortion justifies other grave evils, because if this person's humanity can be denied, then so too can this one's).  Abortion is a fatal cancer at the heart of our culture.

A society that teaches people that actions don't have natural consequences is doomed.  Likewise, a society that teaches that some people aren't really human.  A healthy society, by contrast, teaches natural virtue, respect for human dignity regardless of "utility" or circumstances, and the truth that love requires self-sacrifice.  A society that doesn't "accept events like this as routine" is one that also condemns abortion, adultery, promiscuity, infidelity; that also upholds chastity, the sanctity of marriage, and the high dignity of the vocation to parenthood.  Hence my opening comment about fundamental hypocrisy.  It is viciously hypocritical to condemn violence against children in a school, and to propose sweeping societal changes to counter it, while also promoting systematic, devastating violence against children in the womb, and resisting efforts to counter it.

3 September - Pope Saint Gregory the Great

On loving God in the active life – wisdom from Pope Saint Gregory the Great

Before he was chosen as Pope, Saint Gregory was a monk (under the Rule of Saint Benedict), and a deacon (yea, go deacons!!). He had a monastic contemplative life, based around his monastic schedule – Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina, meditative prayer, and silence of tongue, mind, and opinion. When he became Pope, he complained bitterly about the loss of this schedule and this spiritual routine. He feared greatly the damage this lack of contemplation could do to him, and through him to the souls in his care.

But in the course of his pontificate, Saint Gregory came to understand another path of contemplative prayer, suitable for those in the active life. Here in very schematic form are the six steps he sketches out on this path.

1. The pursuit of natural virtue in one’s duties in the world. The four cardinal virtues – prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance – are part of the natural law, and we know about them, and what makes them good, from our ordinary experience in this world. No one in the active life can deny that to pursue these virtues is a good thing in itself. Those who strive for these virtues are “better” people, and they are more admired and respected, in general. The more systematic and self-disciplined the pursuit of these virtues, the more admirable the person.

2. Humility. Saint Benedict says that humility is the root of all virtue, and the self-disciplined pursuit of even natural virtues tends to humility. But humility creates in us the capacity to love the other more than one loves oneself. Humility perfects natural virtue, and, if we’re looking in that direction, leads us to Christ.

3. Obedience. Obedience is another fruit of growing in natural virtue. “Obedience” here doesn’t mean taking orders from someone else; it means choosing to put the good of someone else reasonably high in our priorities. For example, husbands and wives practice this obedience to each other daily, when they choose to do household chores out of love. Employees practice this obedience when they choose honesty rather than lying or stealing from their employer. And so forth. In a larger sense, what we’re doing when we obey in this way is choosing the good more effectively. We’re submitting ourselves more wholeheartedly to the demands of that vision of the good, through the practice of natural virtue perfected in humility. Already at this level there is a degree of joy which draws us further along this active path. As the saying goes, "Virtue is its own reward."

4. Unity and peace, then, are the practical fruit of natural virtue, humility, and obedience in one’s state in life. It is the lack or the imperfection of virtue that separates us from each other, and that breaks our peace with each other, for example in anger. But, looked at from the other direction, unity and peace are also the means of encountering the true unity and true peace of the Mystical Body of Christ. That is, natural unity and peace are the historical expression of supernatural unity and peace in Christ. So again, natural virtue leads us to Christ. The more our growth in virtue orients us to the good of others, the harder it is to maintain a vision of the good separate from the good which is Christ.

5. In the Church, the submission of one’s judgment to the reign of Christ is purified. The fruit of unity and peace in the Church, the mystical Body, is an encounter with Christ the Head. We therefore begin to apply the humility and obedience to the Church, also. We come to love God’s providential will in the Church. We submit ourselves more and more to her wisdom in doctrine; we look more and more to her moral guidance in daily matters; we find increasing happiness in fulfilling her precepts. The joy of loving Christ, and of loving like Christ, begins to make our attraction to merely created goods less compelling.

6. Loving the Church, we can finally envision love for God Himself as perfect Love. We find, in the depths of our most basic motive for meeting our duties in the active life, the eye of our heart gazing upon God’s divinity. To put it simply, we live the divine praises.


The attractive object of contemplation for those in the active life -- what draws our attention and our attraction out of the created order and toward God -- is, then, the providential will of God. By learning to love the will of God, starting at the most general level of natural virtue and working “up” to the most personal level of my vocation and what God wills me to do, right now, today, in order to serve in that vocation, we come to love God Himself – which is, of course, what we are created and baptized for.

I stress that following this path doesn’t happen automatically. We still sin. Even without sinning, we choose contradictory and retrograde goods every day. God doesn’t deprive us of the good of our will. We must choose to love him, at every moment. But what this path showed to Saint Gregory was that he need not regret leaving the monastery. It is possible to be a perfect imitator of the perfect love of Christ, even in the midst of active life in the world – in the world, that is, but not of the world. This path, finally, is one of interior conversion -- a different path of interior conversion than the monastic vocation, but that’s precisely why we who aren’t monks need it.