Recently I stumbled a cross this passage from Archbishop Chaput from a talk he delivered recently entitled Life in the Kingdom of Whatever. The full text is worth reading but I’m only going to quote the first few sentences:

In the United States, our political tensions flow from our cultural problems. Exceptions clearly exist, but today our culture routinely places rights over duties, individual fulfillment over community, and doubt over belief. In effect, the glue that now holds us together is our right to go mall-crawling and buy more junk. It’s hard to live a life of virtue when all around us, in the mass media and even in the lives of colleagues and neighbors, discipline, restraint, and self-sacrifice seem irrelevant.

The Archbishop recognizes the heart of the American problem. In his book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Ross Douthat writes that Americans have become a “nation of narcissists.” Deeply ingrained in the modern American psyche is individualism. Americans are desperately alone as can be seen by the large amount of people claiming to be depressed and the drug prescriptions handed out to help these people. And certainly the amount of time and money and energy spent on therapy, self-help, exercise, etc. is in the millions. Douthat explained his line when he wrote that we have become a “nation of gamblers and speculators, gluttons and gym obsessives, pornographers and Ponzi schemers, in which household debt rises alongside public debt, and bankers and pensioners and automakers and unions all compete to empty the public trough.” Basically there is an overdose of entitlement.

Now going back to the Archbishop’s remarks. Can society really work if everyone lives their lives as if it’s “only about me”? Can a sense of law and order last without a sense of duty? Just driving down the Interstate here in Denver shows a concerning sign. People drive like mad-men at all speeds, slowing down and obeying the traffic laws only when law enforcement is nearby and it might cost them. There is a false sense of freedom at stake here. This is understood in the classical distinction of “freedom from” and “freedom for.”

“Freedom from” is license. It means I can do whatever I want and you can’t stop me. “Freedom for” means freedom for excellence, for virtue: to choose the good.

Of course the American crisis, while being alarming, really isn’t alarming. Ultimately it’s the sign of humanity’s disease: original sin. Original sin lends itself towards individualism and entitlement. It lends itself to narcissism. The sin of Adam and Eve was to act in disobedience to God and to sever themselves from Him and from each other. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. And of course the whole story is prompted by the sense of entitlement that the devil puts in their head: “You will be like God.”

The solution is simple and yet difficult given the severity of the epidemic: Asceticism. Only by training ourselves to deny our personal preferences and doing what is in the best interest of another, that is being virtuous , can we combat what is weakened in our nature by sin and what  threatens to end the American Experiment. This is what Jesus meant when he said  “love your neighbor as yourself.” Of course in order for this to happen we have to cultivate the virtuous-self-love that Bernard of Clairvoux speaks of in his writings. This begins by receiving deeply in our beings that God loved us first, even while we were yet sinners. (cf. Romans 5:8) When we mirror the self-gift of Jesus Christ by emptying ourselves in service of our neighbor, we are transformed into the image and likeness of God we were created in. Then we find happiness, for to flourish is to imitate the God-Man, Jesus Christ. If America does that, then it surely shall be saved!

Published by Richard.