Hope

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

1 Corinthians 13:13 refers of course to the theological virtues, but the hope I want to talk about here is not the theological virtue, but what I might call its shadow on the secular plane.  This hope is not the same thing as optimism.  Suppose, for example, a man sees a plane crash.  Pessimism might keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume the worst; pessimism is the projection of the vice of despair on the secular plane.  Optimism might also keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume everybody is OK; optimism is the projection of the vice of presumption on the secular plane.  Hope sends a man running to crash site knowing that it might be bad, but hoping it is not so bad as to be beyond all help.  Hope is not ignorance nor a refusal to face reality; it is the determination to do one's best even though it may take circumstances beyond our knowledge or control to achieve the desired result.

Hope has sent countless immigrants to America, each wanting a better future for himself and his children.  Hope sent settlers to the west, knowing that the farm or ranch  would never achieve its full potential in their lifetimes but that with enough time and effort, it might support many generations in the future.  Hope sent men in debt or in trouble with the law to the frontier where the sought to escape their past mistakes and re-invent themselves.

Democracy is bound up in hope -- the hope that the best solutions for problems will emerge and be accepted by the majority of the population if free and open debate is allowed, the hope that the majority of citizens will put the common good above their narrow, personal interests, the hope that the divisions of the past do not condemn us to endless conflict against each other.

The USA is so closely tied to the virtue of hope that it is arguably the special vocation of America to exemplify hope; yet today America has given up on hope.  We no longer believe in free speech or democracy.  We no longer love the prospective children of our prospective children enough to sacrifice for them.  Sin increases not because we are more strongly tempted than previous generations, but because we no longer hope to resist sin.  We still feel guilty, of course, which is why we are so anxious to slander all our ancestors; it is the only way left to feel we have accomplished something, or at least that no one remains who has the right to disapprove of our choices.

The USA was never held together by a common ethnicity or a common religion; it was only held together by this common vocation.  Now that that has been definitively rejected, the USA as we have known it is in its death throes.  Oh, the names and titles may be recycled, but they will no longer mean the same things.

Religion in General

For a long time I have been seriously annoyed by people who think religious believers should defend religion in general, or religion in the abstract.  Often this is initiated by atheists, and from their perspective this makes sense, both because they believe all religion is false and because it works as a tactic to make their debate opponents defend absurd positions.  It is much less excusable, though, for believers to internalize this way of thinking.  It is much less excusable, yet it is commonly encountered.

In most areas of life, this kind of confusion is not tolerated.  We do not, for instance, expect the makers of a serious anti-cancer drug to defend "cancer treatments" in general -- and by "in general", I mean everything marketed as a cancer treatment on the Internet.  If you think major drug companies are (at least sort of) honest, this can be because the Internet is full not only of "treatments" that are useless, but of "treatments" that are directly harmful; if you think they are not even marginally honest, this can be because they have no incentive to defend their competitors; but either way, no one expects pharmaceutical companies to defend every purported treatment.  Nor should we expect those who claim to have the cure for spiritual sickness to defend every purported spiritual cure.

And yet we do.  Why?

Certainly one reason is the Scandal of Particularity.  Our culture and our time is particularly offended by this scandal.  The cultural impact comes largely from developments in science.  Copernicus (and his immediate successors) showed that the solar system can be greatly simplified if we consider the sun its center rather than the earth.  (Note:  In the ancient and medieval interpretation, the earth was better described as being at the BOTTOM of the universe than at its CENTER, so its unique status was not exactly a compliment.)  Darwin argued convincingly that there is no sharp BIOLOGICAL distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Einstein authored a compelling theory that nature does not favor any one frame of reference.  All these ideas -- which are supported by reams of observational and experimental data -- seemed to reinforce the idea that no place or species is really better or more important than any other (but it is extremely important to understand that that is reading a deeper meaning into the science than science itself can bear).  History seems to back this up, as it becomes clear that there never really was a golden age, our childhood heroes were more flawed than we had imagined them, and people just like us have committed shocking atrocities.  Consequently, a rejection of the particular in favor of the general is an inescapable part of the Zeitgeist.

But then, the Zeitgeist is by definition a feature von unserer Zeit -- of our time.  It is also largely confined to what has usually been called Western civilization.  There is a degree of irony in passionately asserting that we live in a very special time and place, otherwise we would not realize there is no such thing as a special time or place.  Even setting that aside, the Scandal of Particularity is an example of a logical fallacy:  the rash generalization.

And the fact is, we need particularity.  What is real is a particular case of what might have been, and, contrary to what the Walt Disney Corporation would have us believe, reality is better than fantasy.  The West is dying because it has rejected this truth.

Monuments

We have known for millennia that there is power even in a mere list of names.  There are, after all, lessons to be learned from the genealogies of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon are all prominent for their virtues -- and for their flaws.  Even King Manasseh, who is probably best known as the idolater who (likely) had the Prophet Isaiah sawed in two, converted after he was carried off to Babylon, and a penitential prayer attributed to him is a part of the Church's liturgy to this day.  What is more, even Queen Jezebel, about whom little good can be said, was in the ancestry of Jesus, since her daughter Athaliah married King Jehoram of Judah and was the mother of King Ahaziah.  One moral of all these stories is, perhaps, that there is some good and some bad in each of our histories; this is the condition of the human race that Christ came to save.  This lesson only exists, though, because so many names and stories have been remembered, rather than being conveniently hidden and forgotten.

More recently, lists of names have been used to commemorate the victims of crimes and tragedies.  It is easy to find readings of the names of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in the 9/11 terror attacks, in the Vegas shooting spree, in the Boston Marathon bombing, in the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in the Dayton mass shooting, in the Charleston church shooting, etc.  Perhaps the most famous such list of names is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, its name not withstanding, primarily honors those who died in that controversial and divisive war, not those who returned to live as veterans.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not literally a gravestone, but it is something similar to the Cenotaph World War I memorial in London -- something like a tombstone much farther than normal six feet from the actual mortal remains.  And it still seems to be understood -- or at least it was understood not long ago -- that only a real creep desecrates graves; thus when Jewish graves were vandalized in 2017 in Philadelphia and St. Louis, it was rightly expected that everyone would be outraged -- whether or not one agrees with their religion or shares their ethnicity.  If we owe the benefit of the doubt to those who are still alive and able to defend their reputations, we all the more owe it to the dead.

It is within this context that you should be able to understand my reaction to the decision of the current administration of the University of Alabama to remove the monuments shown below.

A university is a kind of family, so this is something like seeing that your first cousin's son, whom you barely know, has kicked over your grandmother's tombstone to win the approval of his bratty friends, that he has posted a video of it online, and that the video shows him doing it in a smug, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory way.  The familial relationship remains, but it makes the offense all the greater.  No matter what happens afterwards, the offense will be remembered, and there will be AT LEAST a scar remaining on the relationship.  At the bare minimum, you would not be cheering the kid on at his upcoming football games.  That grave marker he made such a show of kicking over would mean more to you than all his sports trophies put together.