It is, in a very real sense, upon us – the barbarians are not at the gates, but are amidst us:
I bet it never crossed the minds of many living during the Dark Ages that they were particularly dark, or of those living during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that it was speedily declining, let alone falling. Since the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and hindsight is 20/20, it appears to be an inexorable law of both history and human nature that men recognize the “signs of the times” only after those times have passed.
One of the most astute “sign readers” of today is the reigning Pope. Here is one of Benedict XVI’s most startling yet accurate readings: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goals one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” If I might put it into less philosophical terms, what the Holy Father is telling us is that Western culture is descending into barbarism.
We tend to associate barbarism with images of primitive savages looting and pillaging villages, razing the walls of cities, and enslaving women and children. However, the Holy Father is suggesting here an entirely new kind of barbarism, one with a distinctly spiritual character. Civility is the quality of soul and society by which we recognize not only that other people exist, but also that they have the right to our courtesy, dignity, and respect. Civilization, then, as the opposite of barbarism, is founded upon the recognition of the dignity and rights of the other. Thus, a culture in which “the highest goals [are] one’s ego and one’s own desires” is the very definition of barbaric.
And so we abort, we euthanize, we enslave – heck, we even vandalize when we consider the plague of graffiti and the installation of “art” which would have made Attila the Hun puke. Future generations will marvel that the bigoted, narrow-minded barbarians who are destroying civilization consider themselves a breath of fresh air – in the strange days of today, the painted savage holds himself to be freer than the dedicated father. Very weird.
But, also, very dangerous. The gladitorial games of ancient Rome didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. They started off slowly and, to a certain extent, even respectably…but time went on and eventually people were being fed to lions for the amusement of a jaded, degraded mob which told itself, over and over again, that it was civilized. We aren’t yet at the point where we are lighting dissidents up as torches at our garden parties, but we’re not too many steps away from that sort of thing…and the oddest turn of all is that it is, once again, Christians who are being prepared for the lions, just as in the old days.
Its going to be a long fight to save the remnants of civilization and then rebuild it, but with leaders like Benedict XVI, we will do it – and there will be, once again, a time when people appeal to our noblest selves rather than pitch to the lowest common denominator.
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