Back to the Caves

Dr Esolen points out that Western Civilisation is dead. What is the  Church supposed to do amidst the ruins? "I can say what she should not do. She should not hug a corpse. That is what the world is."

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

The world has become a hollowed-out set of institutions wearing the skinsuit of the now-dead body of Western Civilization. What ought we do as Catholics living in the ruins?

Attendance at Mass has plummeted since that New Springtime for the Church, heralded by the Second Vatican Council. There has been no springtime. Indeed, in no area of human culture has there been any such—not in the fine arts, film, literature, education, social institutions, civic life, folkways; not in the ordinary interchanges of human beings outside of their homes; not even in life within the home.

People have not turned from the Church to the mosque, or to the Order of Raccoons, or to some weekly meeting of armchair philosophers. They have turned to nothing at all; or to worse than nothing, the antisocial life of social media, where all is rancor, pride, and spite, and no one need look anyone in the eye and say, “I think you’re wrong,” and begin a fruitful or at least a human discussion. The glory of God is man fully alive; the boast of Satan is to reduce man to less than man, to deaden him within, to get him to prance with pride while he becomes pettier, more predictable; to replace him with automatism, as if he were aspiring with all his tiny heart to become a machine.

I’ve visited my hometown after seven years, and I am struck by how busy the streets are with traffic and how empty the sidewalks are of persons. It is a death-in-life. A few hundred feet from my mother’s house is a small playground with a sign dedicating it to one of our old neighbors. It is empty, always. It is as if someone has mummified and decorated a corpse.

The town had promised the children in my neighborhood a playground. That was almost 60 years ago, when I was a boy. For we had had one, shabby enough, but full of life. On it stood the ruins of a tiny schoolhouse. It had no roof. The walls were scrawled with graffiti. Nails and jagged wood stuck out here and there. Of course we loved it. 

One summer, the town sent a couple of teenagers there to oversee it and to do some projects with the inevitable swarm of children climbing the monkey bars, or playing wiffle ball, or hanging around. One project was to make plaster-of-Paris “statues” from rubber molds and then to paint them when they had hardened. One I recall was a bust of John F. Kennedy; another was of the Ten Commandments.

But an old lady next door couldn’t stand the noise, so she badgered the town council till they let her buy the patch of land the playground was on. They promised us a new one nearby, but by the time they got to it, times had changed, and we who had known the old playground were too big for the new one. There were fewer children, too. There it sits, unused, a monument to a feature of human life fallen away.

It is the same with the baseball fields. When I was a boy, we had only one, a sandlot that the men also used for softball and baseball, so there was no fence in the outfield. It was inadequate, but that didn’t matter. 

Our small town fielded six Little League teams, with 15 boys on a team. My brother and I and seven of our cousins and three next-door neighbors played on a team that my uncle and then my father managed. But now my brother tells me that the town has only one team. When we had six teams, we played a 20-game schedule, 10 games in each half, which meant there were 60 games all told, so for 12 weeks in the late spring and summer, there were five games a week. People would wander over to the sandlot to check out what was going on. Now, nothing.

I drove past the church, and I saw that parish offices now occupy the house where the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters used to live, when they taught in the three-story building that one of the parish’s old pastors had built. When I attended there, we had between 45 and 51 pupils in my class, all in the same room. Nobody thought that was odd. The school is no more. The parish sold the building to the town, which now uses it for its offices. 

The town’s own high school stood across the street, but that was rendered obsolete after the town consolidated its school district with those of two adjacent towns. The new institution was built outside of where anybody lived. A memorial marks the place where the high school used to be. It used also to swarm with young people, most of whom would walk to and from the place, as we did at our Catholic school, so that, twice a day during the school year, there would be some 500 children on the streets, and many of these might not go straight home but rather stop for a snack at the drug store or one of the small groceries, or get a haircut, or lean over the rail of the bridge to spit in the river, or anything—anything human.

People used to do such things. Teenagers went to dances where a local band was playing—and there were innumerable such bands, everywhere in the country. In my town, they used to tack up their advertisements on telephone poles. The fire department, a five-minute walk from my house, often rented space to a band for a small fee; admission might cost a couple of dollars. Such bands acquired a local or regional reputation. One of them in our area, The Poets, played their last gig in 2019. The point is not that they have been superseded by other bands. They have been superseded by nothing.

When I went to the fire department to hear them play, I walked down a very steep road that in snowy weather you would never dare to drive on—so the man who lived at the bottom of the hill, the father of one of my classmates, set up sawhorses in the middle of the street below to keep people away. I like to think that he did so also to allow us children to sled down that hill, which ended in a 90-degree blind turn, so that we did rely on there being no cars to run us over. 

On the other side of town there was a hill almost as steep but much longer. It was interrupted by a bed for railroad tracks, which under snow became a ramp for sleds to strike at great speed and sail into the air. This hill could not be cordoned off against cars, but boys would sled down it anyway, as their field of vision there was clear. I wonder how long it has been since anyone has sledded down either hill.

The small family-owned grocery store was a personal place. I picked up my bag of afternoon newspapers at one of them. If I was thirsty, I went inside and got a carton of orange drink. I knew the Mom and Pop and Grandpa who ran the store and lived upstairs from it. 

I knew Woody, the butcher. The place is no more; the supermarkets, impersonal and far from where anyone might drop in, have taken over. Nick the Tailor is long gone. So are the barber shops, where men would lounge about and talk, in person—real talk, as I experienced many times. But then, all organizations, formal and informal, have been collapsing. The Boy Scouts, now no longer for boys alone and no longer serving what had been their main task, is a ghost of its former self. 

Bowling leagues? We had one, organized by Fr. McDowell, when I attended that Catholic grade school. We bowled on Saturday morning, three games, every school week for a couple of months in the fall and a couple of months in the spring, with scores kept, and averages, and wins and losses, with the winners of each half playing for the championship. Fr. McDowell gave out Bowler of the Week trophies, too—for the highest scorer (including handicap), one for the boys and one for the girls, stipulating that you could win it only once a year, so he could spread the accolades around. We had five bowlers on each team—and at least a dozen teams. Hard to imagine now.

What shall the Church do about it? I can say what she should not do. She should not hug a corpse. That is what the world is. What happiness, even in an earthly sense, does the world now offer? Dive into social media and ask whether the people there are happy.
The world does not kneel. So let us kneel; and we may find, we will find, that our fellows kneeling beside us are closer to us than are the people in the checkout line at the fast-food joint. The world does not sing. So let us sing; and let the songs be timeless. Let us recover all kinds of innocent music that was once popular, and sophisticated, and delightful. 

The world acknowledges no difference between male and female. Let us celebrate that fundamental difference. And if the world does not know what marriage is, let us preach it and live it. The world has no use for children, except as consumers and soul-corrupted adults in training. Let us have children, let us teach them ourselves, and let us send them outdoors to leaven a very large and inert lump.

Let us not keep bringing fire extinguishers to a flood. The loneliest people in our time are not those clamoring for approval from the Church while they enjoy good press and celebration and sparkles and icing everywhere else. The loneliest people now are quite ordinary, and the more they try to follow the moral order, the lonelier they are. Let us then set about, in small and slow but determined ways, to restore the ordinary and the human.

Else it is back to the caves for mankind, with a kind of savagery that savages themselves never knew.