The Dreadful Curse of Modernism

I know that people argue about the terms "Modernism" and Post-Modernism", and disagree as to in which era we live, but that, nor the fact that the author is writing from a Roman Catholic viewpoint, should not distract you from some of the truths to be found in the essay, "Tradition is No Dead Thing" by Anthony Esolen.

"The dreadful curse of the Old Testament is that a people’s place will know them no more. That curse is modernism’s demand. If I say, 'You are graduating people with degrees in English who do not recognize the name of George Herbert,' the modernist response is to shrug and say, 'So what?' or to cock the head and say, 'Exactly.'

But there is a terrible self-contradiction here, one that many people have noted. You cannot consign your forefathers to irrelevance without instructing your son to do the same to you. The blade turns against the hand. See what that implies. We have set aside polyester bell-bottom trousers in their loud colors. They are an embarrassment now. So is Jesus Christ, Superstar. Who sings that pleasantly trivial song by Soeur Sourire, beginning Dominique-nique-nique s’en allait tout simplement? Let it go. But then, let go also of all the would-be revolutionary social understandings that come from that time. Liberation theology? Mold is growing on it. Nothing can lay claim to permanence...

;...Move away from the arts to the natural human things that all cultures must accomplish. Here our colossal failure is like a dead beast in the yard, stinking under the sun. We have not one wholesome custom to get the boys and girls together. Our marriage rate has sunk into the cellar, even as nearly half of marriages end in divorce. People who do not venerate their fathers bring fatherless children into the world; and the boys and girls, each sex in its own way, go bad.  Our children will see a hundred pornographic videos for every innocent kiss they take. That may be an underestimate.

Our churches, like our children, are few, and not innocent. The secular hope that people would be united once they gave up belief in God has been shown as the anthropological absurdity that human culture and history could have demonstrated. Man is united from above, not below.  Appetites are boundless—for sex, vengeance, wealth, rank, fame, and power; but self-denial, humility, forgiveness, and divine worship allay the rage of the appetite and its frustrations, and they raise the mind to higher things, where the old saying really is true, the more the merrier.

To say that the Church should be 'acculturated' is to assume that there is a culture to begin with. There is not. There are mass habits, developed by the mass phenomena—mass schooling, mass entertainment, and mass politics, perhaps three forms of the same thing. The Church must then do the hard, patient work of building up a culture where there is none. 

As the ad for Progressive insurance says, Progressive can't protect you from becoming your parents, and I pray that Modernism can't either.