1) Capitalist and Communist Culture Are the Same At This Historical Moment:.
Consider the following observation of Ratzinger-Benedict XVI on Communism and Capitalism:
“The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized – so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals – the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger – above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler” [“who believed that he had identified a natural law for the great moments in cultural history: first came the birth of a culture, then its gradual rise, flourishing, slow decline, aging, and death. Spengler argued his thesis with ample documentation, culled from the history of cultures that demonstrated the law of the natural life cycle. His thesis was that the West would come to an end, and that it was rushing heedlessly toward its demise, despite every effort to stop it.
2) The Revolution of 1962: Gerard DeGroot: “1968 When the Social Revolution Fell Apart.”
HISTORY OFTEN provides an excuse for a party. In Europe and
But what was 1968? In
In truth, instead of being the time when “the movement” came together, 1968 was the year it flew apart, its pieces scattering in weird directions. The year was more a death rattle than a glorious birth. If we must celebrate, let’s honor a different year, say, 1964. On Dec. 2 that year, Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul Hall at the
“There’s a time,” he shouted, “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it … that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Those early 1960s radicals revolted against the tyranny of conformity. In an essay, Savio had complained that “
Futility
When I ask my students today to read Savio, they invariably agree with him. They admit that they live in a world of “sterilized, automated contentment” in which meaningful choices are few. But they also see no point in revolt since, unlike Savio, they have decided that fighting the system is inevitably futile. It’s so much easier to stick their headphones in their ears and retreat from the world.
We tend to forget just how liberal those early student radicals were. The word liberal comes from the Latin root liber, which means free. That’s all the students wanted. They weren’t Marxists, or even socialists. They were simply liberals who wanted to put their country back in touch with the ideals of the American Revolution.
To back up a bit, in 1962, the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society, proclaimed: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.” On the subject of youthful alienation, the document maintained: “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.”
Backfiring
Unfortunately, in the supercharged climate of the 1960s, the call for freedom and love sounded dangerous. The SDS was labeled un-American, when in fact it was quintessentially American. By 1965, frustration was already apparent. A disillusioned Carl Oglesby, SDS president, admitted that, to some, his campaign might seem unpatriotic. “To [them] I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
Frustration led inevitably to desperation. Thwarted at every turn, student radicals turned increasingly to violence. Theory provided justification: Violence, it was claimed, would expose the authoritarian nature of the establishment. In fact, violence destroyed the purity of the student revolt by opening it up to those who couldn’t give a fig for freedom but loved the sound of breaking glass. Violence also gave every nihilist desperado the chance to be a star on the 5 o’clock news. For the “establishment,” the turn to violence was a godsend. Rebellious students could now be easily dismissed. Their misbehavior became justification for ever more repressive measures. Meanwhile, the silent majority cheered the authoritarian backlash.
By 1968, the jig was up: The revolt had been taken over by a group of lunatics in thrall to mayhem and in love with their own television image. The great irony of the ’60s is that a movement that started out as a worthy attempt to revive liberalism ended up as an agent in its destruction. Gerard DeGroot is a professor of history at the
Thursday, May 15, 2008.
3) Occupy Wall Street Protest Goes Global: October 2011
Occupy Wall Street protest goes global
Tens of thousands gathered in cities across the world on Saturday in protest marches modeled on
Tens of thousands gathered in cities across the world Saturday in protest marches modeled on
Media reported that more than 150,000 people from across
Tax office and defense-ministry buildings in
In other parts of the city, teenagers reportedly smashed shop windows.
At least 70 people — including 30 police officers — were injured in
Police said around 5,000 people took part in a march on the European Central Bank building in the German financial hub of
In
In
"Why are we paying for a crisis the banks caused?" asked Laura Taylor, a supporter of OccupyLSX. "More than a million people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of homes have been repossessed, while small businesses are struggling to survive."
The Guardian reported that thousands of protesters had gathered in
In
Hundreds also gathered across
In
Earlier, hundreds of Australians gathered in
Around 100 people also took to the streets of
Thousands of demonstrators protesting corporate greed filled
The demonstrators had marched north through
Marchers throughout the country emulated them in protests that ranged from about 50 people in
Elsewhere in the
In
4) Whittaker Chambers former Communist, convert to the central reality of God, Senior Editor of Time Magazine in 1948 and principal witness in the spy trial of Alger Hiss:
“As I continued to pray raggedly… What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind - the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for god, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected only Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility, the most persuasive because the least hypocritical in announcing its prpose and forcibly removing the obstacles to it. If I had rejected only Communism, I should have changed my faith; I would not have changed the force that made it possible. I should have remained within that modern intellectual mood which gives birth to Communism, and denies the soul in the name of the mind, and the soul’s salvation in suffering in the name of man’s salvation here and now. What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: ‘Man cannot organize the world for himself without God, without God man can only organize the world against man.’ The gas ovens of
The Problem: Today, as never before, the human person is trapped in an acquisitive inward turn to self, aided and abetted by a cyber technology that has mesmerized him in a fictitious virtual replacement of reality. Consider the observation of Benedict XVI on October 9 in a Carthusian monastery in
“Technical progress, especially in the area of transport and communications, has made human life more comfortable but also more keyed up, at times even frenetic. Cities are almost always noisy, silence is rarely to be found in them because there is always background noise, in some areas even at night. In recent decades, moreover, the development of the media has spread and extended a phenomenon that had already been outlined in the 1960s: virtuality risks predominating over reality. Unbeknownst to them, people are increasingly becoming immersed in a virtual dimension because of the audiovisual messages that accompany their life from morning to night.
“The youngest, born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, out of fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer able to remain for long periods in silence and solitude.
“I chose to mention this socio-cultural condition because it highlights the specific charism of the Charterhouse as a precious gift for the Church and for the world, a gift that contains a deep message for our life and for the whole of humanity. I shall sum it up like this: by withdrawing into silence and solitude, human beings, so to speak, “expose” themselves to reality in their nakedness, to that apparent “void”, which I mentioned at the outset, in order to experience instead Fullness, the presence of God, of the most real Reality that exists and that lies beyond the tangible dimension. He is a perceptible presence in every creature: in the air that we breathe, in the light that we see and that warms us, in the grass, in stones.... God, Creator omnium, [the Creator of all], passes through all things but is beyond them and for this very reason is the foundation of them all.
Blogger's Commentary
What is going on world-wide? Perhaps the beginning of a revolt against a materialist atheism powered by a capitalist economic methodology that has the trappings of religious tolerance. But there really is no freedom since it has been lost internally. It is valuable to requote Benedict's words just mentioned above:
"In recent decades, moreover, the development of the media has spread and extended a phenomenon that had already been outlined in the 1960s: virtuality risks predominating over reality. Unbeknownst to them, people are increasingly becoming immersed in a virtual dimension because of the audiovisual messages that accompany their life from morning to night.
“The youngest, born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, out of fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer able to remain for long periods in silence and solitude.
Hence, I continue, the Wall Street Protest could be a very good thing, provided that it be illustrated and educated as to what exactly is the force powering it. Otherwise, it will be corrupted by its own exaltation of the self – as DeGroot described the SDS of 1962 degenerating into the nihilism of 1968 and beyond spawning contraception, abortion, euthanasia, divorce, abandoning marriage altogether, gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, etc. In a word, it needs Christian formation and the practice of prayer and sacrifice for the development of the human person made in the image of God. It is the image of God that is tending to emerge with these thrusts toward freedom, but it can easily be infected with lazy selfishness that in its frustration will turn to violence, further corrupting itself and the very abuse it wants to heal.
No comments:
Post a Comment