Material Cause

I can only imagine how lonely it is being a materialist.

There is no plan to the universe. There is no god above you, only sky. There is no one who really knows you, all the way down. There is just you. Every day this “you” goes out into a world where most things are trying to hurt, exploit, and manipulate all the other things; worse, they’re supposed to be that way, as Darwin so helpfully informed us. And if you want to make any progress through this war zone toward your goals, no one is really going to help get you there—except, again, you.

The resulting pressure of being a consciously self-conscious materialist must be unbearable. How can someone as limited as the “you” knows itself to be deal with an infinite number of outcomes and an infinite number of possible obstacles (most of them the people closest to you)? No wonder Nietzsche went insane. But there are workarounds. That pressure can be dulled by routines; smothered by the anodyne embrace of sex, drugs, and alcohol; ignored by the mass of flesh-colored emoticons that pass for people in our logic-free society. But I believe most often it is channeled into the Cause.

The Cause can be anything. Better schools for the kids. A new car. The top of the career ladder. Conservative politics. Progressive politics. A famous Instagram account. Freedom. Safety. A Hollywood career. Global warming. The perfect body. One more dollar. One more cat.

All that really matters in the long run is that the Cause inevitably becomes part of the Self. It has to, really—the Self is the only cause-er we know from the inside out, and therefore the only force in the world that is personal. Nobody knows what is really making that other Joe do anything, the same way nobody knows what makes gravity do anything. Some folks with funny Greek names (psychiatrists and physicists, respectively) have pretty good guesses, but they still don’t know. All they know is what the stuff is made of and some of what it’s doing. But we know the Cause—no matter who you are, for you it is the obvious, normal thing to do. Often it is also the thing most noticeable about you, betrayed by social media posts, bumper stickers, clothing, attitude. You give it life, and in return it becomes part of what you are. How many people have you met that one of the first things they uttered was “I am (whatever Cause they are currently chasing)”? The Cause, no matter how trivial, becomes part and parcel of the person. When it succeeds, they do, and when it doesn’t…

Well, that is not to be contemplated, for no man ever hated his own Cause. It must be the fault of all those other Causes out there, competing for the same limited resources, time, applause, and support. In this world there are only those who support the Cause, and those who hinder it. And since the Cause is part of the Self, there are only those who help you, and those who hurt. Failure is personal: it is other people. And the vast majority of them are out to get you.

Materialism wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Instead of turning the universe against you, it was supposed to bring freedom from the Great Enslaver, Religion. After all, hadn’t it given us the Industrial Revolution? Was not Utopia in sight at the turn of the last century? Finally, we could feed and clothe the world, travel around it at lightning speeds, and explain virtually every natural phenomenon (not to mention the supernatural) we saw along the way. Man’s labor could accomplish anything. We bored through mountains, bridged oceans, harnessed the lightning bolt, caught and rode the very winds. There was a price, of course—work became mostly boring, stifling, repetitive, and soul-killing. But we didn’t believe in souls anymore, and until we figured out how to fix that (and of course we would) there were escape hatches. Sex has always been a popular choice, but now there was “reaching the top of the ladder” and “vacation” and “recreation” and most importantly “progress” to help it out. Every machine needs a little oiling now and then, and materialism’s two major oils were sex and science. Each could save you from the perils of the other—sex made the Self feel real in a sterile scientific world, and science made the ugly biproducts of a sexual liberty less and less of a problem.

Enter Roe v. Wade.

Now Roe v. Wade is dead, and the response is showing just how much of a Cause it is for so many people out there. When those judges struck it down, they struck down all those Selves, too. No wonder the Christians are being exhorted to “be sensitive” or “watch our tones”—they are strolling through the middle of a mass grave, and a cheery whistle just seems like the final unwitting insult to the Apocalypse. “Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of selves, heaps of Causes, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies!”

Long ago, a reluctant African academic also lived through an Apocalypse. He was exhorted to be sensitive, to watch his tone, to cautiously mourn with those who mourn, to love these Selves as they loved themSelves and their own threatened bodies. Instead he glanced at the shattered Cause around him, and he gave the following exhortation to those around him:

“There is no need to be instructed to love oneself and one’s body; we always love what we are and what is inferior to us but belongs to us, according to an immovable unvarying natural law, one which was also made for animals, because even animals love themselves and their bodies. It therefore remains for us to receive instruction about what is above us, and what is close to us. Scripture says, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. The aim of the commandment is love, a twofold love of God and of one’s neighbor. No class of things to be loved is missing from these two commandments…The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally. No sinner, qua sinner, should be loved; every human self, qua human self, should be loved on God’s account; but God should be loved for Himself.”—Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christina Bk. I

Love God, love His Cause, and love all those selves out there like they were your Self, in that order. That includes the million-plus helpless kids who now have a better chance to see the light of day. 

Be thankful, and rejoice, for Material and Cause is not all there is. We know it, because Roe is dead, and the fight is just starting.

The Normal World

Black. White. Cops. Snipers. Muslims. Gays. Innocents. Guilty. Dallas. Orlando. Ferguson. Paris. Boston. New Town. Virginia Tech…

They roll by in soundbite ribbons at the bottom of screens. They pop up in newsfeeds as we see what our friends are up to. The next day, they glare crookedly out of glass-fronted boxes, daring us to spend a few hard-earned quarters on an actual newspaper.

I wonder what our great-grandfathers would have thought about that?

The headlines, not the newspapers. A world where fifty people can die in a day—that’s nothing. In 1911, 126 people died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. 130 died in 1944 Chicago as a result of a natural gas explosion that leveled a square mile of the city. Over six thousand died in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. And that doesn’t include the wars. But a world where individuals can kill others just for being different—en masse and at random—what kind of a world does that look like?

The normal one, actually. Those who lament about such crimes, such unheard-of atrocities, really betray their ignorance, or perhaps more charitably, their innocence. The fear of the unknown, of the different, of the outsider—these drove most of human civilization. For in most places and times, the guiding motive in relationships with outsiders was one of suspicion and hostile distrust. Love your enemy? Please. Be realistic. Protect the tribe! Defend the clan! Guard the city! The foreigner, the barbarian, the infidel, the gypsy—it was safer to be rid of them. Banish them. Kill them. In the city square or the battlefield if you can, in the dead of night or the alley if you can’t. And the guns? Please. That’s a pretty merciful way to go. They used to use swords. Nooses. Or bonfires. Hitler is famous, not because his goals were a new idea, but because he figured out how to accomplish them in the scientific-industrial manner—cleanly, efficiently, and wholesale. Before that you had to do messy genocide like the Assyrians.

When faced with those who are different from you, the natural result is to assume that something is wrong with the other guy. I’m a white middle-class Harvard businesswoman from the suburbs, so it must be the black boy’s fault. I’m a fatherless, abandoned kid whose mother won’t stay off drugs, just trying to survive in a hostile world, so it must be the cop’s fault. I’m a teenager who after a lifetime of ennui and purposelessness finally finds something that demands total commitment and promises total reward, so, as the Prophet said, it must be infidel America’s fault. All three of these can grow up in the same city, root for the same ball team, even go to the same supermarket—and in a very real sense speak totally different languages. Try the word America out for starters. What does that mean for each of them? Opportunity? Oppression? The Great Satan?

And lo, secularism claimed that it could reach past that language barrier, that through education, or societal improvement, or some other fifty billion dollar program it could remake brutal man into a naturally loving cooperative, where being different was appreciated, not feared. The lion could lie down with the lamb, Muhammadan with lesbian, police chief with junkie. All those differences really didn’t matter (unless you were trying for a scholarship or government position.) The Federation of Star Trek in real life.

Fifty years (perhaps more) later, here we are. Kill the pigs. Deep six the sodomites. Allahu akbar.

If you suppress the differences, they pop out eventually. If you magnify them, you can’t get anything done. Catch-22, secularism. So much for the brotherhood of man. You can’t even figure out how to define one of those anymore, anyway.

People don’t ever naturally love what is different. That’s a Hollywood myth, reinforced by cute pictures of ‘innocent’ children playing on the same playground. The pictures that don’t ever show you the playground bully or the name-calling. Rogers and Hammerstein were wrong: you don’t “have to be carefully taught.” We just like to love... what’s just like us.

And then a man came into the world. He was like us in every way except one: his love went where it wasn’t supposed to go. Gentiles. Tax collectors. Rich fat cats with education. Poor prostitutes with none. Warmongers. Bottom-class laborers. Outsiders—and insiders. Dark men from Ethiopia. Light men from Rome. He loved them all so much that it threatened the very existence of order, and so they killed him outside their city as a troubler of the peace. Someone had to pay, and it was his fault.

And then he kept coming back. Greeks started eating with Jews. Rich men sat with poor men on the first day of the week. The woman who could give tuppence was valued as much as the man who gave talents of gold. He was the countryman, he was the urban nobleman. He was everywhere. So they killed him again. And again. And again. It was his fault the city fell, that the plague came, that the harvest was poor. Justice was done. His fault.

Finally they gave in through sheer exhaustion. They watched as the lion laid down with the lamb, as unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind became commonplace. Oh, there were hiccups, flare-ups, occasional imbalances. But eventually everyone got so accustomed to this state of affairs that after a millennium, they assumed it was normal, the base state of mankind.

But it’s not. That kind of unity only comes when we can look not at but through our differences to something beyond. But what? An abstract “brotherhood of man” will only cut it for the mushy, imaginative, often gullible ones. A lofty government that can force you to love at the point of a bayonet will only appeal to the greedy ones who love power. Even the other religions won’t love everybody the same, not if they want to remain unchanged and consistent. Women, heathen, the unenlightened, the unborn, the old, the unfit—somebody has to pay. It’s their fault.

But it’s our fault. We did it. The Triangle Trade. Auschwitz. Boston. Orlando. Dallas.  But that man who loved in the wrong places took the blame. Justice was done. We’re not guilty. And so we have nothing left to protect, and nothing left to hate in the others. Here is unity. We speak the same language, with the same Word, behold, we are one people, and we have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what we can do. And nothing that we are commanded to do will now be impossible for us.

Change the “normal” world. Love God. Love your neighbor.