The defining conflict of the Culture War in our Church and society over the last 60 years can be understood as the clash between the conservative and the progressive.
The conservative contemplates the past, in a posture of childlike and filial trust, receptivity, docility, gratitude, reverence, tenderness and loyalty. It looks to an authoritative event, a Person and persons, a drama, a history, a body of writings, a living tradition, a constant yet innovative community, a legacy of practices, beliefs, and allegiances. Catholicism is an organic, living, creative, ever-fresh conservatism which lives in newness out of a permanent, stable, vivacious memory.
The progressive looks to the past with disdain and condescension, as something to be renounced and overcome; as ignorance and superstition; as prejudice, tribalism, hatred, oppression. The locus of faith and hope for the progressive is the future, always as a rejection of the past. The progressive is a secular humanist who sees that the human race has its destiny in its own hands and so is author and engineer of the future. There is no authority, no transcendence, no obedience, no memory, no loyalty, no humility, no gratitude, no receptivity but all activity.
Four distinct but interacting streams define contemporary, modern and postmodern progressivism:
1. Evolution: (Darwin) Belief in random chance and survival of the fittest as the ontological foundation of reality and the engine of time and history. This aligns with unlimited trust in science, technology and education as the hope of the future. It involves a "Whig" interpretation of history as moving inevitably forward into greater enlightenment, technological control, individualistic freedom, and human happiness. The future is promising, detached from the past, which is blank, void of meaning.
2. History as Oppression: (Marx) Oppression of the poor by the powerful is the defining reality of human reality and history. The past is a litany of such violence against the weak. Hope is placed in the war of liberation by which the underling group defeats the powerful.
3. Sexual Liberation: (Freud) Human happiness lies in the liberation of the libido from the guilt, shame, inhibitions and restrains of the traditional sexual ethos of chastity/ fidelity/marriage/fertility.
4. Individualism: (Nietszche) The absolute sovereignty of the Self, isolated from others, detached from community and any moral order or transcendent spiritual realm; the triumph of the therapeutic and of the narcissistic Self. Libertarianism: financially on the Right; sexually/culturally on the Left.
These four forces are not entirely compatible with each other, but ally themselves in hostility to conservatism. They are "the axis of evil."
The word "traditional" is largely synonymous with "conservative," but within Catholic circles after 1965 usually suggests loyalty to Tridentine Catholicism in all its expressions and rejection of the Council itself, the new mass, and the last six pontificates. "Conservative" largely refers to the interpretation of the Council of John Paul and Benedict. Nevertheless, "trad" and "conservative" overlap and interact in alliance against progressives.
Considered together or separately, the four "cousins" of progressivism are sterile, vacuous, despairing, violent, isolating. They posit a detached, autonomous Self, lonely and despairing. They manifest in declining fertility, deaths of despair, surges in mental illness, breakdown of family and community, evisceration of the inner forms of sexuality and gender.
Progressivism is without foundation, roots, memory and interior form. It is like a dessert: dry, sand-filled, scorching hot, void of fertility, organic life, order, rich earth, cooling springs and breezes.
Conservatism is a rich garden: dark earth, deep roots, springs and currents, fertility, promise, memory, synergy, and openness to the Transcendent.
Such a legacy we have been given! May we ever receive, cherish, defend, elaborate and share it!
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