America Is Actively Dying

Some days I tend to think there remains a glimmer of hope that an older and more sane America will make an epic comeback. Today is not one of those days. When a country reaches a point where it commonly believes in the power and will of politicians and civic leaders to turn things around, to make things better again, then the rubicon has already been crossed. Reagan put it rather well when he said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Shelby Foote once said that the Civil War transformed the nation from the United States “are” to the Unites States “is.” I think we are reaching the point where we will have to say the United States was. We may be at that point already. A kind of tyranny is killing the country, and no one is stopping it.

Lincoln famously said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation is not a house, however. It is made up of families and a myriad of houses. Since my conversion to the Catholic faith, I’ve traveled across the country delivering talks at various universities and parishes, mostly speaking to young men. What I find most shocking about the places and people I visit are the vast numbers of Americans who now come from broken homes and divided families. Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism dealt with this problem. Lasch correctly observed that American culture had become intensely self-absorbed, leading to marriages falling apart, children being taught school by the state, and materialism as the measure of happiness. As such, the nation gradually lost sight of those virtues and ethics that once made it respectable, having learned to ignore the eternal by focusing entirely on the temporal. I think most people who remember 1979 would agree that Americans have not created the utopia that the progressives imagined would happen if we could only increase technology and loosen our dependence on faith, family, and community. Over the past 50 years, this country, in the words of Robert H. Bork, has been slouching towards Gomorra. Culturally, America is now a lost soul. Politically, Americans no longer have rights, only privileges. Mentally, the nation has forgotten what it once was, and I doubt there are many chances left to rediscover our first principles.

There remains a small diaspora of well-meaning people scattered across the country. For those of us who still want to live a quiet and meaningful life, away from the seemingly ubiquitous rot and decay of modern America, we learn to live life in the ruins. We do not need an “alternative” right political answer to the nation’s ills: we must seek an alternative way of living, one that can ignore the cultural decay as much as possible. I don’t think the decay can be arrested at this point. I don’t think things are going to get better, at least not in my lifetime. This does not mean that one must seek out a commune to live in, or waste your life away becoming a doomsday prepper. It means that I have the power to say no to the mainstream cultural paradigm. Divorce, cities, slothfulness, indifference, historical illiteracy, rudeness, consumerism, industrialism, public education, trends, fads, glyphosate, and modern country music: these are some of the things I can say no to. I built my life through choices, some good, some bad. Overall, it’s turned out pretty well so far. I don’t have to deal with the rot, decay, and nonsense that is 21st century America. Just say no. I can’t change much about the world around me, but with the help of Almighty God, I can shield my home and family from it to a large extent. I have the power to tell my children when they observe rude and uncouth behavior among others, we don’t do that here. You’re better than that. It’s often been said, and its true, that one should not dwell on things you can’t change, but focus on things you actually can change.

One of the many reasons I often read Southern literature is because it almost always highlights the reality of human limitations. We can’t perfect the world, and we are not supposed to. We can only, as North Carolina writer Fred Chappell once wrote, “brighten the corner where you are.” Andrew Lytle put it like this, “In our search for well-being and a settled place to abide our fallen condition always thwarts our quest.” Southern writers have generally known that they write and work amidst the ruins of a once great civilization, a civilization built on the realization that man is a fallen creature and that anything good, true, and beautiful is a reflection of God, not us. After Walker Percy finished the final volume of Shelby Foote’s Civil War narrative, he wrote the Memphis writer in July 1974, “Yes, it’s as good as you think. It has a fine understated epic quality, a slow measured period, and a sustained noncommittal, almost laconic, tone of the narrator. I’ve no doubt it will survive; might even be read in the ruins.”

Come to think of it, I’m overdue for another reading of Mr. Foote myself. I’ll let him take me back to that older South, where the sun seemed to shine a little brighter, even in the midst of war. So while Rome burns down around me, with my tobacco pipe in hand, a warm fire in the wood-stove, and the beauty of my forested acres out the window, Mr. Foote can once again remind me of how it was in the old days.