Why are our people killing themselves in droves? Why are they rending their own bodies in barbaric surgical procedures? Why do they despair of life? The most apparent answer is because modern life is built on a philosophy that leads people to believe their lives are meaningless.
A recent YouGov poll suggests people who hold liberal views (views rooted in enlightenment principles) are about 15% less likely to be happy than people who hold views less rooted in the enlightenment. Inherent in liberalism is gender theory, radical individualism, ignorance of history, and dogmatic belief in progress and material prosperity.
The absurdities of modern gender theory constitute a false anthropology where mind and body have natures independent of one another. It says men and women are basically the same while simultaneously arguing they are so radically different that a man who believes himself a woman must change his body to match. (Woe to he who asks why if a body can be changed to match a mind, a mind cannot be changed to match a body.) This ideology divorces body from soul and is the result of following the ascendant western philosophy to its natural end. While deeply engrained in us, liberalism clashes with reality when man’s yearnings extend beyond the physical and political. Man will not be satisfied by material changes to his body or state because he is not simply a material being.
Just as the man who thinks himself a woman does not know himself; a society does not know itself when it is ignorant of its history. Americans today graduate college having learned a few vague references to antiquity, civilization collapsed when the Christians took over, and racist colonialists emerged from the darkness to conquer and enslave the world for the profit of a few white men in now-prosperous European nations. They think once the enlightenment began, history started its progressive march to a perfect future. Just about this entire narrative is false, produces rampant self-doubt, self-contradiction, and a society that sees itself as the villain because it has created a narrative in which it is despicable. One is taught, for example, that in 1492 Columbus, sailing for Spain, landed in the Americas, beginning a bloody conquest of the new world. One is never taught that in 1492, Spain freed itself of the Muslim conquerors whose 700-year reign on the peninsula reduced the native Catholic kingdoms to small territories in the shadow of the Pyrenees. One never learns of the gruesome contests of the peoples who inhabited the new world and their brutality towards their neighbors. If western man imposed a yoke on the world, it is a lighter one than was previously borne. Western man, however, has taken to rejecting the light yoke and grown depressed (8.6% of the American population was depressed as of 2019).
Over the last decade, we have hated our past and put stock in the philosophy that is depressing us. To use Edmund Burke’s words from Reflections on the Revolution in France, when we “compute [our] gains: [we] see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught [our] leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves until the moment in which they became truly despicable.” The west has rejected its traditions, faith, history, and dignity. In return, it has gained anxiety, depression, gender dysphoria, and enough cash to facilitate its self-destructive impulses. Many well-meaning Americans are left with lives that feel meaningless in world that seems bereft of reason, yet we are surprised when people who have imbibed the meaninglessness of life act like life is meaningless. When the young man who has been taught from an early age that he is a systemic oppressor, has been led to think that Christianity bars the way to progress, hears science proclaim him little more than an arrangement of cells and neurons owing existence to the spontaneous manifestation of monocellular life billions of years ago, and trained himself, through his addiction to pornography, to use other people’s bodies for his own satisfaction; ought we be surprised when he shows utter disregard for human life? Is it unfathomable that he commits heinous acts? Are we surprised when a young woman, raised in the same culture, values her life and her body so little that she sells it to innumerable strangers on the internet to abuse? This is what our worldview has delivered—technologically advanced ways of destroying ourselves.
We are experiencing the atmosphere of disorder and meaninglessness natural to democracy. Under democracy, Plato argued in The Republic, a man’s life deteriorates into “[living] from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour… His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.” This sort of listless behavior is a frighteningly good description of men and women in 21st Century democracies. It encapsulates men living only for themselves and being dictated to by their base desires. Lacking the identity imbued by the history of his civilization or by his religion, a man has only himself to identify him. In this, he enslaves himself to his own selfish desires. The self-centered life is the miserable life. It is the self-obsession that constrains the mind and make a personal attack of every evil. It centers goodness on the self and in doing so strips the outer world of all goodness. The antidote then, is to be like the saint: keeping our eyes open and looking outward.
In Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton, demonstrates this extraverted characteristic of the saint by contrasting paintings of him with those of his Buddhist counterpart. “The Buddhist saint,” Chesterton observes, “has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive.” We are not made to be the calm and collected monk of the far east who seeks to live pain-free within himself. We are made to be the wilily and widely awake. As long as we have a worldview centered on ourselves, we will be miserable. If we hope to overcome this plague of modern misery, we must embrace a philosophy of gratitude. We must count ourselves blessed for the history we have inherited. Instead of despising everything that belongs to us because of its imperfection, we should seek to be worthy of what we were given by building upon it for the sake of posterity. We should have our eyes open to the world as it is so we have a firm footing when things go wrong. We must set Christ as our master instead of ourselves, lest we find ourselves bound in anguished servitude under our own cruel tyranny.
Frank J. Connor is the author of The Ridiculous Man and The Progressive Reports. He is a former Fox News journalist and worked as an analyst at a prominent bond rating agency. After years of discernment, he responded to a call to the Catholic priesthood and is currently in religious formation.