Modern Men

Woods Cathedral, Detroit

War Games installation displaying
"Surrealist, Conceptualist and Minimalist works by 12 artists,
including Anders Ruhwald, Hannah Perry, Simon Denny and Yngve Holden." [source]

I've said for a long time that modern men are doubters. They will acknowledge in some civilizational manner the presence of God, or at least the tradition of God, but waiver around their committment to God.

Here is an article at VDare, where James Kirkpatrick discusses Lawrence Auster's recently published book Our Boarders, Our selves.

Of course, it starts with the requisite "Auster was prickly" introduction. Why bother with that? And, in reality, who isn't prickly, some more so than others?

But the crunch of the article is here:

Auster counters that without a “publicly authoritative moral understanding,” individuals have no way to understand their social role. Nations are unable to define, defend, or preserve themselves. Thus, he makes the startling claim that “the grounding of rights in nothing beyond the whim of the individual leads directly to open borders and multiculturalism.”

And a little later on:

Auster argues that, while there may be conceivable “non-Christian ways of rebuilding a normal sense of peoplehood and racial identity among whites,” it can only really happen through the “rediscovery of the classical and Christian understanding that we Westerners have lost.” He argues that a Western worldview, which he attempts to define, gives us a way to “see reality whole,” placing values into their “natural rank and order” instead of destroying ourselves by trying to make “human values into gods.”

In other words, Auster says that without the underlying morality of God, a cohesive Western worldview is not possible.

But James Kirkpatrick, the author of the VDare article, subtly disclaims this by adding other doubters in the mix:

Of course, others like Oswald Spengler have argued Christianity itself inevitably led to the kind of liberalism Auster decries. Tom Holland’s recent book Dominion makes the same case from a more positive perspective. Auster doesn’t really confront this possibility.

No, because Auster has recognized the inherent difficulties Christians have when following the words of Christ, having critiqued the two major bodies of Christianity, Catholicism and Protestanism, as Kirkpatrick himself writes in his article:

Besides attacking liberal Protestantism, Auster accuses the Roman Catholic Church (to which he nevertheless converted shortly before his death) of adopting “the very heresy of modernism” it had once condemned, putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. Instead of recognizing man’s basic sinfulness, it celebrates the “cult of man,” symbolized by the post-Vatican II practice of the priest facing the congregation than the altar when he consecrates the host.

I wrote this as one of my many proposals (and still going) from my book project Reclaiming Beauty: Saving Our Western Civilization

Reclaiming Beauty will be the first book on beauty to make a comprehensive, historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. It will describe the moment (or moments) when beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.

When nations practice true Christianity, they are not at war with God, and will not let the horrors of ugliness fill their world, as I write later in the article, by

...putting “man’s well-being” and the “dignity of man” at the center of the Faith. [Auster]

Without God, there is no dignity, and the "dignity of man" crumbles into dust, sooner or later. Man's well-being becomes the be-all of existence. And what does this mean? Gourmet dinners? Vacations to Paris? Extra large popcorn at the movies? Churches converted into museums?

Here is a post I wrote in Larry Auster's VFR, commenting on a discussion on beauty and ugliness:

There is something holy about beauty. We react to it in a reverential manner. We attribute it, at our best, to God. We realize when we see someone beautiful, it is not necessarily what the person did, but some preferred state he is in. A truly beautiful person, or thing, is a little frightening, a little other-worldly. Beautiful works of art are also hard to achieve. It takes time, training, skill, talent and some mysterious spirit to create a beautiful work of art. Not any ordinary person can create something beautiful. An ugly painting is immediately recognized for its slovenly quality. Also artists can create beautifully ugly pieces, but the beauty is a channel to alleviate the ugly story, incident, or place. That is why people have such a hard time with beautifully made horror films, for example. A beautifully made horror film is like the work of the devil (i.e. it is evil), as though the devil is using the tools of beauty to lure us into his world.