Delaying work, I often find occasion to gaze out of my 12th-floor window at New Haven. I usually note two buildings. The first is Phelps Hall. Inside, Yalies celebrate the beauties of classical learning. They read Georgics, lyricize Arcadian joys, and translate an epic about a pious man who remembered gods, family, and country. They are humanely educated.
Away in the near background rises the steeple of the Dominican Church of St. Mary, a bastion of traditional religion. Within its walls, the friars preserve the ethic and praxis established by St. Dominic 800 years ago. They watch and pray in a century which seems wholly indifferent to faith and devotion.
Looking at these two landmarks, I used to wonder: what have they in common? If there be opposites, they are traditional religion and classical humanism. Or so ran all the clichés. But how different are they? How far apart in goals or method?
Not so far. Compared with the ethos which now rules the West, the teachings of the Jesuits and the Stoics are radically philanthropic, in that word's true sense. Heirs to a tradition of place-rootedness, family, and sacrifice, we have lately loved social atomism, and along with it self-indulgence at all levels.
We have discarded the higher humanism of Christian and classical times, for a new and terrible ethic. Now, our families dissolve on trivial pretexts, as husbands and wives pursue their own selfish interests (never mind the children's tender psyches). Now, our political leaders, left and right, preach the gospel of free trade and consign national self-interest, along with the American worker, to history's ash-heap. Now, the infirm, the aged, the unborn, and the terminally ill are swept side, institutionalized if lucky and "euthanized" if not - so that someone else may preserve his or her "self-determination" and "freedom." The higher humanism has become the lower barbarism.
What we now experience is the hypertrophy of Enlightenment liberalism: licentious individualism - the naked assertion of the self and its lusts, and social goods be damned. What matter the family farm or the American factory worker? They stand in the way of efficiency. They prevent the maximization of economic gains via free trade - so out they go. Progress will not suffer to be slowed on its march. One can't make a social omelette without breaking some eggs.
But these "eggs" are not abstractions, or inputs, or ciphers. They are people with faces and names, family traditions, and lifeways, and they are swiftly being left behind in the mad rush to "progress." As Pope John Paul II writes in his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life): "The eclipse of the sense of God and of man inevitably leads to a practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism...the values of being are replaced by those of having...so-called 'quality of life' is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure."
Oddly, this egoistic culture has made strange bedfellows of religion and humanism. Whether you believe that man is the creation of God or that he is the apex of evolution, transcending the brutishness of the lower animals, you should be alarmed by the turn our ethics have taken. I think this moral rot is nicely captured in a phrase from the quasi-literary Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's 1957 paean to egoism: "I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
How breathtakingly repugnant. This is a paradigm for the worst of our modern ways. In our Lockean, or even Hobbesian, times, men treat one another contractually. Coldly, they calculate gain, efficiency, and interest, devoid of either beneficence or humor. There is no room in their universe for charity, or, as we term it nowadays, love.
This grieves me no little bit. But higher humanistic virtues themselves forbid raising my voice to wail and lament the death of altruism. I propose instead to follow the advice of Seneca, who would have us resign ourselves to creeping vice, yet refuse it mastery over our thinking. And I further propose to adhere to the dogmas of the Church, one of the last, outspoken defenders of the older and humane ways. It's true: Christian or pagan, the higher humanism is beleaguered and liable to fall before the onslaught of self-centeredness. But virtue is its own reward. And even if it weren't, who said everything had to have a reward?
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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