Family Love

        The most important and primal social unit is the family. The human condition is intrinsically familial; hence the greatest variety and degree of human emotions are experienced in and through the family. It is for this reason that the breakdown of society is always coterminous with the breakdown of the nuclear family.

         In once sense it is odd, given the importance of the family, that it would be so denigrated by the secular world. But on a closer look, the roots of this hatred begin to surface. The family is deeply and uniquely Trinitarian; with its three constituents: father, mother, and child. The Trinity is the foundation for not only the family, but love—it is the cornerstone of all romance. It is the first and only real love story.

         The world hates the Trinity, and as a byproduct begins to hate the family. Yet they are smitten with the idea of love and romance, all the while failing to understand that the only true love and true romance is found within the family. “Falling in love has often been regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident.” Adventure however is something that happens to us, it finds us. The man that goes out looking for an adventure is acting against the very spirit of adventure. It is neither spontaneous nor adventurous to back up one’s belongings and head to Africa in search of a great adventure. It is more adventurous to stay at home and deal with the things that happen to you.

On the same token, falling in love has something to do with us. As much as we may “fall in love”, do we not also jump? “In so far as to some extent we choose…falling in love is not truly romantic…The supreme adventure is not falling in love, it is being born.” This greatest of all adventures, breeds true love and true romance. We do not have the slightest choice in picking our families, just as we have no choice in picking our neighbors. Yet Christ commanded us to love our neighbors. That is because there is a deeper love, a deeper romance formed when our choice is taken out of the equation.

              

     One does not get to choose their R&B singing sister. One does not choose to have a sister with a strange obsession with Asian children. One does not choose a sister who has a deep-rooted psychological obsession with Glen Beck that manifests itself by framing her husband with having a strong hankering for Nancy Grace. One does not choose a sister who fails to see the intrinsic likeability of Taylor Swift or a brother who eats 40 hotdogs in a sitting. Yet with this lack of choice comes Christ-like Trinitarian love.

              

     In heaven there will be no husbands and wives but there will be a family of believers. Maybe this is because there is nothing greater, nothing more romantic, nothing more fundamental than the love of family.

Scientific Detachment and Anthropology

            Science is predicated on detachment. The scientist must remove himself from the equation in order to see facts and data as they are—in and of themselves. Science, like math, searches for indubitable certainty. Two plus two equals four.

            One of the greatest defects of modernity stems from Descartes’ attempt at a philosophical mathematics. Descartes told modernity—and like sheep we followed—that all fields of study could be known in the same way things are known in math or science. Hence we no longer study history; rather we study “social science.” We know longer study politics; rather “political science.” We now teach courses on the “science of religion.” This is a strange phenomenon indeed.

            “For the study of primitive race and religion stand apart in one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist; but he can understand a great deal about anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies.” (GKC)

            The detachment that is necessary and helpful in the “hard” sciences can be a great detriment to the so called “soft” sciences. It is as if the anthropologist believes he must detach himself from humanity, or make himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. The saddest part of all is that we tend to believe what the anthropologists say.

            For example:

                        “The natives of MumboJumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat, and will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the fact that they put food in the grave.” (GKC)

            For the anthropologist, having detached himself from his humanity, this makes great sense. To the lay person, the ones who are still acquainted with what it is like to be a human this comes across as madness.

            This is similar to saying:

                        “The 21^st century Americans believed that a dead man could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers.”

            Now it might be the case that ancient men believed the dead could eat, but that is no more a fact than stating that we believe the dead can smell. Mankind does certain things because it is natural for them to do so. It is hard to explain the emotion that brings us to the conclusion that it is natural, but that does not mean it is not so. Most human emotions are irrational and hence can not be explained in scientific terminology.

            Kant showed us that we are restricted to the world of phenomena—we can not get to the noumena or the thing in itself because when we encounter reality it must always be filtered through categories (time, space, the human mind). We take this is a fact, yet we fail to apply its principles to field of anthropology. As soon as matter is perceived and passed through the human mind it is forever irreparably altered. It is spoiled. It is changed and now lacks a sort of objectivity and detachment which is needed for it to be studied as purely scientific data.

            Human emotions, many times being irrational by nature, can not be rationally or scientifically quantified. Maybe those in MumboJumbo land put food in the grave because food is one of the great joys of life. Maybe they did it to attract animals to the bodies in order that the souls of the deceased may live on in another creature. But maybe they did it because it just felt like the proper thing to do. It was natural—and what is natural to man is not the business of science.

The Cowardice Of Nihilism

G. K. Chesterton wrote, “It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter. And this is done universally in the twentieth century.”

               This is a strange age indeed. The world has been turned on its head. The logical man is seen as unprogressive. The man of firm beliefs is seen as narrow minded. The orthodox man is seen as a bigot. Now is the age of feelings. Beliefs have been sacrificed at the altar of inclinations and proclivities. The weeds of Nihilism are overrunning the garden of thought, and the decay of past fruit weighs thick on the air.

               All too often I will hear someone say, “Oh, he is really religious”; as if there was another way to truly be one thing or another. A phrase such as this carries an obvious negative connotation. It is as if they are saying, “I don’t mind if somebody believes something, so long as they don’t actually believe it.” What nonsense. They might as well say “Pink is a running hammer.” We are a generation so removed from truth our language begins to resemble an extended MadLib.

               Nihilism is nothing more than a closet in which cowards hide. We are too scared to stand firm in orthodoxy. It takes guts. It takes grit. It takes real man, of which we are currently running a shortage. The orthodox man, the man who is “really this” or “really that” will always seem absurd in the eyes of the world. That is because he stands firm while the world whips by him, foolishly following trends, only to abandon them for the next trend and the next fad. The orthodox man has “based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction.”

               Truth, by necessity, must be stranger than fiction. For fiction, lies, deceit are made by the hands of men, but truth is divine. Man always knows his own ways better than he knows the way of the Divine. As Aquinas wrote, “God is an infinitely knowable.”

               In this age, men say that another man’s philosophy does not matter. It does not matter if he is an Aristotelian or a Hegelian or a Nietzschean. But is this how we live? A man’s philosophy may state that “Life is not worth living.” But we take this statement in the same way we would react to him saying he prefers coffee to tea. “And yet if that utterance were believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poison would be used as medicine; doctors would be called in when people were well…” One might profess to be a Nihilist, but their every action bellies their espoused belief.

               George Bernard Shaw described this condition by saying, “That the golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” Besides the fact that such a statement is pragmatically unrealistic (as shown above) it is devastating to the artistic and cultural progress of humanity. When nothing can be believed for certain, anything goes. And when ANYTHING goes NOTHING is shocking.

               For something to be shocking it must violate a rule or a standard that one holds to be true. When nothing is true, art can no longer be shocking. We have tried to make it shocking. We have placed toilets in museums and called it art, but does that carry nearly the same thunder as the shockwaves felt when we contemplate the hand of God reaching out to touch that of mans? Can we find in Andy Warhol or Picasso anything more shocking or defiant than Satan’s rejection of God? Or Peter’s denial of Christ? Or the grandure of the incarnation and resurrection? Modern art has the seemingly unlimited freedom because of its nihilism, but this freedom has also defanged the artist. The artist is left with no bite. Defiance is pathetic and lonely when there is no one to defy.

               This nihilistic generation is like Alice, forever trapped in wonderland. We speak a language that was designed to convey truth but now blathers out pure nonsense. The modern, progressive man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” This is logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” (Chesterton) He says, “Neither in religion or morality my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”

                                         I give in. They are correct. Pink is a running hammer.