February 23, 2012
“Four Problems That Are Killing Us as a Community”
Archbishop Charles Chaput was recently named by Pope Benedict XVI as the new archbishop of Philadelphia. Archbishop Chaput has often spoken about the role of faith in building a stronger, more cohesive, and just society. Ten years ago, he gave a talk at Thomas Aquinas College that remains as relevant and insightful today as it did then. The core of the talk was devoted to the problems that arise when “we remove God from our public life.” As Catholics, we often fall prey to the same problems, and awareness of these traps is the first step in avoiding them, living our faith more fully, and helping others to do the same.
Like all of us here tonight, I love my country. I believe that Americans are a great people, a good people. I believe that America remains a great experiment in human dignity. But it’s an experiment that depends on certain assumptions — and first among them is the sanctity of the human person.
“Sanctity” is an idea that makes no sense without God. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb put it this way: America today is “living off the religious capital of a previous generation, and [that] capital is being perilously depleted.” The more we remove God from our public life, the more we remove the moral vocabulary that gives our public institutions meaning. The more secular we become, the more we feed four problems that are killing us as a community.
Here’s the first problem: our inability to think clearly. Reasoning requires time. It needs a reverence for ideas. It involves the testing and comparison of arguments. But the America we have today is a culture built on marketing — and marketing works in exactly the opposite way. Marketing appeals to desire and emotion. It depends on the suppression of critical thought, because thinking can get in the way of buying the product or the message. That explains why marketing is tied so tightly to images. Images operate underneath the radar of critical thought. That’s why car dealers usually put an attractive young woman in front of their latest sports car, instead of a stack of performance statistics.
Here’s the second problem: our inability to remember. Christopher Lasch once observed that Americans have a kind of addiction to the new. We’re a people of the “now.” We enjoy nostalgia, because it’s a kind of entertainment. But we don’t really like history because the past — as it really happened — burdens us with memories and unfinished business. It imposes obligations on the present. Americans like to think that we can invent and reinvent ourselves. But the cost of that illusion is that we tend to have a very poor grasp of history. We learn too little from the lessons of the past.
Here’s problem three: our inability to imagine and hope. Americans have never been ideologues. We’re pragmatists and toolmakers. We believe in results. So it’s really no surprise that we have the strongest economic machine in the world; or that we excel at science and technology; or that these disciplines enjoy such esteem in our culture. But technology always carries with it a “revenge of unintended consequences.” And one of the unintended consequences of our science is that we’ve become its objects and its victims. The price tag for our science has been a decline in our vocabulary of the soul, a rise in the materialist view of the world, and a collapse in our confidence that humanity is somehow unique in creation. Hope and imagination flow out of a belief in a higher purpose to our lives. If all we are is very intelligent carbon — well, then hope and imagination are just quirks of the species. And so is any talk about the sanctity of the human person.
Here’s problem four: our inability to recognize and live real freedom. Freedom is not an endless supply of choices. Choice for its own sake is just another form of idolatry. Freedom is the ability to see — and the courage to do — what is right. But if Americans stop believing that absolute principles of right and wrong exist, then how can we even begin to discuss things like freedom, truth and the dignity of the human person in a common vocabulary? How can we agree on which rights take precedence, or who has responsibility for what?
What we get in place of freedom is a kind of anarchy of conflicting pressure groups and personal agendas held together by just one fragile thing: the economy we all share . . . and that’s not the basis of a community. In fact our economy, more than anything else in American life, teaches us to see almost everything as a commodity to be bought or sold. This is what Jeremy Rifkin means when he describes American culture as increasingly a “paid-for experience” based on the commodification of passion, ideals, relationships and even time. If we want freedom, we buy it by purchasing this car or that computer. If we want romance, we buy it by purchasing this cruise or that hotel package.
The trouble is, the more our advertising misuses the language of our dreams and ideals to sell consumer goods . . . the more mixed up our dreams and ideals become. We confuse ourselves to the point where we no longer recognize what real love, honest work, freedom, family, patriotism — and even life itself — look like. So those are the problems. What do we do about them?
Well, the only thing we can do about them is fix them one heart, one intellect, one potential leader at a time.
The full text of Archbishop Chaput’s remarks can be found at this link.
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Last changed: Aug 17 2011 at 10:21 AM