Reconnect with Reality!

Reconnecting with Reality: An Interview with Caleb Stegall, by David L. Jones (for Godspy) is an excellent read!

Caleb Stegall is co-founder of the fabulous New Pantagruel. He offers a refreshing vision of how to re-envision contemporary society and participate in God's salvation of us all in unique and personal ways. No, he's not advocating forming yet another Christian nation-state; far from it. No, his ambition is nothing less than fostering the sense of space and place that allowed humanity to participate in relationship with God. Thus liberated through salvation, humanity will better order the social life of all society so that life, family, love and service to one another become honored principles rather than empy platitudes. He see's classical liberalism--the philosophy--as the principle source of the utilitarianism that plagues society's thinking and has facilitated so much of the Reasonable thinking that upholds the culture of death.

Hear him out:

I'm sure many people reading this are wondering—why? What's so bad about the modern world?

The overwhelming moral sense I have when surveying the modern world is one of loss. A sense that what we have left behind in our affluence and mobility is a certain kind of Good that flourishes in rootedness and struggle—a way of being human that was always understood as the good life; a kind of self-provisioning that took place within a small network of interconnected social obligations, each to the other and all to a particular place, and to the customs and rites that naturally complimented that place. The spiritual order—both personal and social—of this good life is nourished on a veneration of children, work, craft, a sense of honor in commitments, and a common responsibility.

In place of this, modernity has given us the atomized individual, armed with a plethora of rights, making his way in a system of "opportunity" that requires the spiritual symbolization of society as a ladder to be climbed, which leaves a wake of personal disorder, the destruction of exploited people, places, and traditional communities, and loss of meaning on a massive scale.
-------------------------------------------
You talk a lot about the sense of "place." What do you mean?

One of the phrases I like to trot out is the "discipline of place." It is a discipline we moderns have almost completely abandoned. The idea is to learn—and it is a learning process—to live in love within the limits of one's existence. To suffer one's place and one's people—their joys and sorrows and history which weave a network of memory to which we belong—in service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is the true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. And really this is the heart of what Christ and the Church Fathers teach us about Christian holiness: master one's passions, deny oneself, and love others. This is the Christian answer to the spirit of death which dwells in the old man, and which, in the increasing absence of Christian holiness, becomes writ large as a Culture of Death. I talk to a lot of Christians who are flummoxed by their relative lack of political success in beating back the culture of death, even at a time of supposed conservative ascendancy and the power of the "values" vote. Of course there are multiple reasons for this, but foremost in my mind is that it does no good to vote an anti-abortion ticket if in one's life and community there is no drive and discipline towards holiness.

Tell us more about how you understand our current situation and why the drive and discipline towards holiness is so essential.

When one lives as a modern—and we almost all do to one degree or another—he is implicated by nearly all the habits of his heart in the same culture of choice he believes he is voting against. When we fail to resist the symbolization of the modern world as a giant machine in which each part relates to all the others in a purely mechanical way, we give in to thinking in the most utilitarian way possible: how can I fulfill my needs and desires most efficiently? And the political question becomes: how can we configure the machine so that each part has the maximum freedom to pursue its own end as efficiently as possible, without interfering with the ends pursued by the other parts.

Inevitably either we fail the place or person or idea we are committed to or it will fail us. That’s real life though.
Society and work and even family and church become ladders to be climbed, and the central spiritual motifs of our time become mobility and choice, and the fruits of this are pretty apparent—massive dislocation, family breakup, the end of meaningful small town and rural life, center-city rot, the end of functional education, economic ruin of small producers and landholders, the devolution of political life into identity and victimization games, and on and on. The end result of which is a profound existential alienation in the soul of modern man; he is without a home.

And the pernicious logic of choice (which has a kind of weedy genius) in turn capitalizes on its own discontented and confused search for home and meaning by churning out a-hundred-and-one cheap and easy anecdotes. So we are awash in this expansive sea of popular mass culture which offers everything from Martha Stewart to easy birth control to empty entertainment to mega-lo-mart churches and discount-store religion. All of which functions to shield people from ever even approaching anything real: real faith, real truth, real meaning and contentment.

Any philosophy that attempts to divorce God from reality ultimately leaves society with a distorted perception. The skewered vision of our Reasonable elites makes them truly vulnerable to utopianism. The trouble with utopianism is that it assumes a perfect order can exist in an imperfect world. The materialism inherent in classical liberalism denies the fundamental reality of sin. Therefore, it makes assumptions about persons that simply don't square with reality. Sooner or later, ideas that rely upon this fallicious materialism fall short. The sexual revolution is a good example.

Ask at least half of Generation X what the sexual revolution did for them. Ask them how the liberalization of divorce laws contributed to their happiness. Ask how the advent of terrifying sexual diseases with no cure truly liberated them. The list goes on and on. So do the sad consequences.

Mr. Stegall and his partner in crime, Dan Knauss, understand this. Their work at tNP offer Fools that strive for a Carnivalesque carving-up of the public square a forum. Thank God, and them, for that!