Why my Enthusiasm for Star Wars has Waned

There's a new Star Wars movie coming soon to a movie theater near you and me.  Episode VII.  The Force Awakens in a personified fashion.  I'm sure I'll go see it.  Probably even opening weekend. And, hopefully, I'll really, really, enjoy it.  There's no way my inner 10 year old would ever let me miss it. I was, after all, utterly devoted to the Star Wars movies and the Star Wars universe from the time the first movie came out, in the summer of 77, right before 5th grade, until the day Eddie Brascia and I ditched the rest of our classes after Mrs. Holmes Sophomore English honors class to go watch Return of the Jedi at the Cinedome Theaters, one fine day in May 1983. 

I still remember seeing the first movie for the first time, at the movie theater in the University Mall in Provo Utah, while visiting one of my older siblings at BYU.  When I got back to Vegas, I immediately told all my friends that it was the greatest thing that ever happened, and we all needed to go see it together.  In those pre-multiplex days, it was only playing on one screen in town, at the Maryland Parkway Theater on Maryland Parkway and Flamingo, on the largest of its three screens.

After that, it became the mission of our lives to go see that movie as often as we could over the course of that summer.  This was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away, before the existence of VHS, let alone DVD or Netflix.  If you loved a movie and wanted to see it more than once, you needed to see it while it was still in theaters. Otherwise, the assumption was you might never see it again unless you happened to be free the night it was shown, a few years later, on network TV, once. "It'll be out on pristine blu ray video in a few months and you can watch it in surround sound on your wide screen at home?"  No, not our world.

Nevertheless, none of our parents understood the concept of wanting to go back and see a movie again.  "You already know what happens and how it ends." They didn't get it.  This wasn't about how it ends.  It was the ride!  You don't only get on a rollercoaster once because you already know how it ends.  This was a movie that was just fun to experience.  Also, the Maryland Parkway was considered to be "way across town" and not an easy place to convince our moms they should drive us to. So we had to be sneaky.  If any other movie was playing at the Maryland Parkway theater's other two screens, which any of us might have the slightest credible interest in going to see (a Charlie Brown movie maybe?  Um, sure.), we'd get one of our parents to take us, and then we'd all go see Star Wars instead. And if our own parent didn't realize what we'd done yesterday afternoon, and thought we'd been at someone else's house swimming, so we could pull that same stunt again a few days later with a different mom, so much the better.  (We were a diverse group affiliated primarily by neighborhood proximity, whereas our parents had their own friends from outside the neighborhood, and didn't talk to each other much).  Also, if a relative hadn't seen it yet, that was good for another viewing. Grandma wants to do something with me for my birthday?  I know just the thing.  Yes, I even got Ella Carruth, probably approaching 80 at the time, to go see Star Wars, which just might be one of my proudest achievements.  She even brought a friend.  I think I managed to see it more than 12 times that Summer.

And then there was the ancillary merchandise.  We all had the Star Wars double LP (records weren't vintage yet so we didn't know we were supposed to call it vinyl), with the great photos from the movies inside the foldout, and we all became John Williams fans, even before we knew he had done the music to Jaws, let alone that he would be the Meister of soundtracks for every pop culture EVENT movie to be released over the course of the rest of our lives, from Superman through Indy and all the way to Harry Potter.  

We all read the paperback novel, listing George Lucas as the author, but ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, with its mysterious byline ("from the adventures of Luke Skywalker") which suggested more to come, and then, a year or so after that, the sequel novel "Splinter of the Minds Eye."  There was some kind of read-along story one of us bought because it had photographs of a deleted scene, with Biggs on Tatooine.  And the sketch-book, which included Tie Fighter designs not seen in the movie. Then there was the Marvel Comic Book version of the film, which we used as a script to create our own audioplay with a cassette recorder.  It was a great summer.  

And then?  Empire Strikes Back.  Even cooler, in many ways, than the first movie (the opening scrawl, with its "Episode V" title, taught us to start calling the movies episodes, and hinted intriguingly at prequels and sequels galore).  So yes, I'll be going to see Star Wars Episode VII, and hoping for the best.

But my enthusiasm will be tempered.  My hope for a great evening at the movies more cautious than convinced.  A lot has happened since Empire Strikes Back hit the Silver Screen, and much of it has dampened my enthusiasm for the series.  Maybe if Lucas had died, like Robert Jordan, so somebody else had to finish his oeuvre, things would have worked out better.  But alas, he lived to make more movies.  And as he did so, over the years, this, that, or the other, has weakened my love for the series. These quibbles include the following, in no particular order: 

Seven Problems with Star Wars after the Empire Strikes Back.

1.  The Ewoks.  I mostly loved Return of the Jedi, when it first came out, and the chemistry between Luke and Leia and Han was as great as ever.  But then, for the first time in three movies, there were parts of this movie that I really, really didn't like.  Among those parts: the Ewoks.  What a stupid move.  George Lucas's biggest fans were 8 to 12 years old when the first Star Wars movie came out.  We were 14 to 18 now.  This was going to be the last installment for, what, . . . decades? So there was no need to recruit new young fans.  The established fans were teenagers now and we didn't want Teddy Bears in our most beloved sci-fi franchise. And why such fake looking Teddy Bears?  They weren't wearing any loinclothes, yet they didn't seem to need any. Gee, either these creatures have no ability to digest their food, and they reproduce asexually, or they are really just little kids in dumb-looking costumes. And how do they see when they so clearly have fake  taxidermist glass eyes?  The only thing worse was the styro-foamy elephant at the beginning of the movie in Jabba the Hutt's palace.  But only barely.  

2.  Darth Vader's cheap redemption.  I can't remember where I first came across the following analogy, but I'm fairly certain it was in something written by Orson Scott Card: Hitler is about to kill Himmler's son.  To stop him, Himmler kills Hitler.  Now, despite participating in mass genocide, Himmler gets to go to heaven?  For saving his son's life?  Wouldn't pretty much anyone save their own son's life, such that doing so doesn't really make you particularly special?  What is this, warmed-over Calvinism?  Some people are just better than others and will be saved in the end no matter what? If Darth Vader is to be redeemed, surely it could have been done with some plotting that made more logical sense than, just, . . . this.  Giving his life to help the rebels destroy the empire maybe?  I dunno.  I mean, it's nice that he saves his son's life and all, but, really? In interviews Lucas gave when he was prepping the Prequels, he went back on his earlier promise to create 9 Star Wars, and said that there would only be 6, and that, ultimately, these weren't really movies about Luke and Leia et al. This was Darth Vader's story, the tale of his fall and redemption. Well, then, that makes it even worse: These six movies have all been about Darth Vader's fall and redemption, AND THIS HIMMLER SAVES HIS SON FROM HITLER moment is the ending and ultimate climax of THAT overarching story?  Really?  Wow.  That just makes the entire series so much . . . less than it could have been.  And learning in Episode III that Anakin was a child-killer didn't help.  Pretty sure you don't get a free pass to heaven for saving your own child's life, if you have previously murdered other people's innocent children in cold blood.   

3.  George Lucas's Anti-Americanism.  As if the Ewoks weren't bad enough, on their own and in and of themselves, I had the misfortune to come across a documentary about the making of the original trilogy in which Lucas explained that the Ewoks' use of primitive technology, via guerilla attacks, to overcome the greater military capability of the Empire, was meant as an analogy for the Vietcong's defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam.  Lucas admired the Northern Vietnamese, and wanted to highlight that admiration in the third film.  So, there's that.  Basically, Episode 6 wasn't a movie for people like me. It was a movie for people like Jane Fonda.  Sigh.

4. The CGI heavy reissues.  Full kudos to George Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic for introducing CGI to film and remaining a pioneer in special effects technology decades after the first movie came out.  Compared to say, the Last Starfighter, the CGI in the special editions of the original trilogy was really impressive at the time they were made.  But it was still an emerging technology, and it wouldn't really be put to amazingly effective use until we were introduced to Peter Jackson's Gollum.  So, now, ironically, the parts of the original trilogy which have aged the worst are the new CGI scenes. And it's pretty clear why some of the reinserted scenes were cut the first time around. Han Solo was allowed to leave by Jabba?  Well that doesn't build much tension.  Even when the CGI looked good and not dated, the only film that really benefited was Empire Strikes Back (and the final scene in Return, which reduced the amount of Ewoks). Yet Lucas won't bring back the originals, and apparently Disney is sticking to that position.  Maybe when George is dead . . . .  

5.  The problem with Prequels.  I don't actually hate the prequels, and actually enjoyed them all when I first saw them.  Although they are not nearly as rewatchable as the original films.  And Jar Jar?  Well, Lucas was a risk-taker. People might have hated Chewbacca, but he turned out fine. And Yoda the muppet Jedi Master, on paper, had to have sounded like an incredibly misguided idea, which might have gone very, very, badly, instead of becoming perhaps the coolest movie character of all time.  Lucas was bound to get it wrong eventually.  So cut him a break.  The main issue I have with the prequels is the same issue that affects all prequels generally.  When you are reading a well-done fantasy or science fiction novel, and the author helps you understand that you are being told a story which exists within the context of a much larger universe, including lots of places on the map you never actually get to see, and a backstory you only hear about second hand, the effect is intriguing and powerful and mysterious.  But when you actually go into the backstory, and see it first hand, you can lose the magic, like learning about Santa Claus.  It just can't be as cool as you had hoped it would be.  I think that's one of the reasons Back to the Future worked so well.  All of us, at one time or another, have wanted to know what our parents were like at our age, and, when they are at the right age, children love to hear the story of how their parents met: it's the ultimate backstory, how I came to exist.  And Back to the Story helped us understand why maybe it's for the best that we never actually get to learn more about that.  I loved the scene in the first prequel when Obi Wan tells Anakin he'll be training him as a Jedi.  But it was still cooler in my imagination. Ditto the final fiery battle between the same two characters at the end of Episode 3.  A good prequel, that works well, will be set in the same universe, but involve ancillary characters, keeping the original story's own back story steeped in mystery and intrigue.     

6.  The Problem with Lucas's Prequels.  Lucas's prequels made this inherent and intrinsic problem even worse. One of the many things that J.K. Rowling got right in the Harry Potter novels was creating a lengthy story that was almost seamlessly integrated. As you read later books in the series, the earlier books made more sense, and what happened in those earlier books added to the enjoyment of the later volumes, as when the full meaning of Tom Riddle's diary in book 2 is revealed in book 6, and its destruction becomes a key plot point in book 7.  Lucas tried to create a similar sense of his story's integration, but it was so forced and awkward that it not only didn't work, it undercut the whole narrative.  Plot points that were meant to be big reveals of what we had never realized before just demonstrated that Lucas hadn't really thought his story through before. One example will suffice: Anyone who ever saw the original Star Wars (except George Lucas apparently) knows that a person living in "an environment such as" Tatooine would have "no use of a protocol droid." Why, then, does a young Tatooine slave boy create one?  Why would any young boy create a "protocol droid" when they could create a robot that does something cool?  No possible reason whatsoever except a lame attempt to try to shoehorn some artificial relationship between the two movie that we are apparently supposed to find cool.  "Ooooh, Vader created C-3PO. Wow." This makes the original Star Wars worse. Now, instead of finding it clever when C-3P0 says "Thank the maker" because Robots would thank their manufacturer in the way humans thank their divine creator, we are reminded that C-3P0's maker was supposedly someone who had no reason whatsoever to make him. Lame.    

7.  The worst movie line of all time.  No one expects a Star Wars movie to have deep, clever, or meaningful dialogue.  Still, does it have to include lines of dialogue so awful they ought to be in Guinness?  Here it is:  

Anakin: "If you are not with me, you're my enemy."  
Obi-wan: "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes." 

For my money, absolutely the stupidest lines of dialogue in the history of cinema.  Probably in the history of English.  What makes this snippet of dialogue so horrendously awful?  How much time do you have? First of all, it was intended as a political rebuke against a contemporary politician. But making contemporary political points is not the purpose of Star Wars.  These stories are supposed to be timeless fables.  And contemporary political points jar you away from all that, whether you agree or disagree with them. As Tolkien once said, a good story will be full of applicability, which the reader can choose, not analogy, which forces the reader into a specific meaning. Give us applicability, not analogy, let us choose our applications as we will, don't force them upon us, like a Sith.  Secondly, the statement "if you are not with me you are against me" was first spoken by Christ, not a modern politician. Matthew 12:30. So Obi-wan's criticism of Anakin's statement is not ultimately a criticism of George Bush, as was intended, but is a criticism of Christ, characterizing Christ as a Sith. And that's just evil.  Third: "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes" is of course in and of itself an absolute statement, meaning that Obi-wan makes himself a Sith for saying it, and that Lucas flunks basic kindergarten logic for writing it.  Finally, the critique Obi-wan is making is just incredibly stupid in context. It's like criticizing Hitler because he lacked nuance. Anakin is not engaged in some righteous crusade, which he has taken too far by being overly zealous towards anyone who disagrees with his means or his methods. The proper response to Anakin's statement isn't to instruct him that he needs to be a little more inclusive in his thinking, and be more open to ambiguity and other points of view. The proper response is to say: "Of course I'm you're enemy. Any decent person in the universe should be your enemy. You are evil." 

                                                                        * * * * * * * *

So there you have it. How I learned to stop loving Star Wars as much as I once did, in the years after the Empire struck back.  But wait, there's more. What about the new movie? The latest international trailer really did get me excited, and awaken my inner nerdy child.  But nevertheless, there's a few things that keep me from being as excited to go see this as I once was to go see Episode 1 (probably a good thing, considering how that turned out).   Here they are, in no particular order:

Three Reasons to Temper the Hype over the New Movie: 

8. It's basically fan fiction.  Ironically, one of the driving forces behind fan enthusiasm for the upcoming movie is that it's not a George Lucas film.  I get that, really I do.  See points 1 through 7 above. Still, for good or ill, Star Wars is George Lucas's baby, and a Star Wars movie not based on his ideas or story or outline, is a little bit like those James Bond novels that were written after Ian Fleming had died, or someone other than J.K. Rowling penning a new Harry Potter book.  That's not to say that it won't be great.  Most of the recent Marvel movies have been excellent, even though the original creators of those characters and story-lines had nothing to do with them.  But still, we are in new territory now.  The Star Wars of George Lucas, who created it, is over now.  Other than a possible Stan Lee-esque cameo or two, he has nothing to do with it. Hopefully it gets back on course and stays there.  But even if it does, it's not really canon.  

9. J.J. Abrams Wrote and Directed It.  This means that it will almost certainly include the set-up for some deep and intriguing mystery, or mysteries, which we will learn, in Episode 9, no one knew how to resolve beforehand. "OH, the stormtroopers of Alderaan were all in Limbo!!! Well, that's just stupid."  The Mystery Writers Guild of America really needs to take JJ Abrams to the woodshed and explain some things to him about the basic rules of storytelling.  Before you write a mystery, you determine the truth.  Then you arbitrarily withhold the truth while dropping hints of it all along the way, amidst various red herrings.  Then you reward your reader's patient impatience by finally giving him the truth at the end, causing him to see everything that came before in a new light.  This moment of resolution is deeply satisfying, like the turn that comes in the last two lines of every good sonnet. If it doesn't happen, someone has been robbed. If you are just pretending to be withholding the truth, when in fact there is no truth and you have no idea where you are going with anything in your story, but you are just really good at the set up and the spooky music, you are committing a fraud. If this happens in the new Star Wars trilogy, they could be even worse than the prequels. 

10.  "Chewie, we're home."  I have a bad feeling about this line, from one of the first teaser trailers, spoken by Han, apparently when he revisits the interior of the Millenium Falcon after some period of vacancy. It's not the kind of thing that human beings say in real life.  It's not the kind of thing that characters in good movies say in good movies.  It's the kind of thing someone from the marketing department wants someone to say in a movie, so it can be put in the trailer for the movie, even when it's completely out of character for the person saying it (Han Sole, sentimental nostalgic?) The first new Star Wars movie hasn't even opened yet, but Disney is already working on the new Star Wars portion of Disneyland, so marketing matters. That's all fine and good if it doesn't affect the product being marketed. But if it does affect the product, then it will infect it as well. There was no valid artistic reason to stretch the Hobbit movies into three overly bloated movies, where two tightly plotted movies with narrative thrust and dispatch would have been just the thing.  But I'm sure it made sense to the Warner Brothers Marketing Department.  

Nevertheless, I'll see you on opening night, holding my popcorn and hoping for the best. And despite all of the above, I'll be as excited as it's possible for a middle aged person trying to recapture their childhood to be. That's the power of the original trilogy, and especially the first two movies, pure and perfect entertainment that they were.    

UPDATE: So, what did I think of that movie once it did come out after all: 

I loved the new characters and the charismatic actors who played them.  I am excited to see our new Jedi heroine and her ex-stormtrooper love interest in action in future installments; and I loved that the new X-Wing fighter is much more likable, and given much more to do, than Wedge Antilles.  I loved the music and the visuals.  I find as I get older that I am increasingly willing to give a movie some slack if I find it visually interesting.  This is odd, as I've always cared much more deeply about the story than the visuals.  Perhaps I'm developing a new interest in aesthetics.  Must be my newfound interest in photography.  Or maybe that came second.

I hated that Han Solo was still a not very good smuggler.  When last we saw Han, he had put off the smuggler, and was a rising military and political leader, whose role in the battle of Endor and imminent marriage to Princess Leia seemed likely to earn him a prominent role in the new and restored Republic.  I would have liked to have seen that Han Solo: an Elder Statesman who had guided the Republic through various political upheavals and had grown to be so much more than he once was.  Instead, it's as if, 30 years after the events of the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton is still hanging out with college kids at the local tavern next to Columbia college arguing politics, having experienced no growth or increase in status after the key role he played in the events of the Revolution.  Pathetic.  Han Solo's final years actually make me not all that interested in the solo upcoming Han Solo movie. 

I hated that the political situation of the galaxy was never explained, and who exactly the New Order was and the backstory as to why they are allowed to exist and war against the New Republic was never presented.

These two hates arise out of the same fundamental flaw in the whole story: an attempt to give the viewer the same experience he already had with the first trilogy.  We miss Han Solo the smuggler, the thinking must have gone, so let's bring him back.  We need good guys and bad guys, who look and dress just like the good guys and bad guys from the original trilogy, so let's rename the rebels the republic and rename the empire the new order, and then we can all know who is good and who is bad when we visit the new Star Wars attractions at Disneyland.  Thus, the saga is no longer a saga (which implies a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end) but an ongoing cash cow which, like a 1980s era tv-show, must leave the heroes exactly in the same place at the end of every episode as they were before, so we can tune in at any time and know the basics of what is going on.  Why even have a 9 movie arc though if the whole thing is just a tv series?

I also hated the stupid little things that didn't make sense and no one but JJ Abrams would be stupid enough to include in a move: like Han Solo skipping past the barriers of the starkiller base by flying in at light speed, and dropping out of light speed at just that kabilliasecond when he needed to, on the basis of an oral command.  Cause yeah, that would work.  

Caesar and Christ, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325 (The Story of Civilization Volume III) by Will Durant (1944)

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we're only an after-glow of them."  J.G. Farrell, as quoted by Robert Harris as an introduction to his historical novel, Conspirita.

The Black Holes in my Knowledge, or, Why I Read this Book.    

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."  Will Durant

In recent years, my readings on various historical subjects of personal interest have, again and again, led me back to Rome.  I have come to realize that, in the West, the men and women who peopled most historical eras since 300 AD were, themselves, studiously interested in the classical world, and so, to understand the viewpoints of prior generations it is imperative to know at least some of the basics of Greek philosophy and Roman history, together with Biblical religion, which influenced so much of the worldview of all those who came after.  The medieval Christians, for example, in addition to their reliance on the Biblical revelations of Jerusalem, plumbed (albeit selectively) the philosophy of Athens and the literature of Rome for their moral, ethical, and legal precepts.  The nation builders of the same era constantly sought to revive the dream of a new, but holier, Roman Empire. Later, the architects of the Renaissance saw their chief mission as bringing a "new birth" of Hellenized Rome's scientific and artistic achievements to a benighted world.

In the 18th Century, the English-speaking world was intensely interested in Roman history, knowledge of which was considered by our nation's founders to be essential as a guide to informed self-government.  A young John Adams practiced for future rhetorical glory by reciting Cicero's Catalinian Orations in front of a mirror and Thomas Jefferson used Cicero's "The Case Against Verres" as a model and template for his own case against King George in the Declaration of Independence.  It is impossible to understand the founders or the Revolution without understanding, among other things, the history of Rome and the lessons the founders derived for the future, right or wrong, from that history. Jefferson's life-long distrust of standing armies was grounded in the many examples afforded by Roman history of such armies, from Julius Caesar to the Praetorian Guard, seizing control of the civil government. And Adam's lifelong belief that an aristocracy would inevitably develop in America, whose interests would need to be checked and balanced, was similarly based on his knowledge of Rome, and of what came after.  [Endnote 1]

As historian Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, "Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education, and references to them and their works abound in the literature" of the revolution. [2]   The founders of our Nation were especially enthralled by that period of classical history in which the Roman Republic made its last valiant stand before falling into libertine anarchy and civil war, which ended via the imperial dictatorships of the Roman Empire [3] established by Julius and then Octavius Caesar, fulfilling one of the Platonian patterns of history. The revolutionary colonists saw their own struggle against British tyranny as akin to that of the Roman generation which had unsuccessfully attempted to forestall the overthrow of the Republic and its replacement with a military dictatorship.  [4]  Thus, when a beleaguered Washington wanted to improve the morale of the troops at Valley Forge, he arranged for a showing of his favorite play, Joseph Addison's popular drama, Cato, about the Roman Senator's principled stand against the tyranny of Julius Caesar.  (It had been from this play, earlier in the war, that captured colonial spy Nathan Hale had drawn his famous last words, before being hung by the British: "My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country").  And when a victorious Washington, at the end of the war, returned his commission to the Continental Congress, both he and the world were keenly aware that he was acting in the role of an American Cincinnatus, the General of Republican Rome who had taken up the sword and the mantle of leadership to save his people from peril, and then relinquished that power and returned to his farm. [5]

But in our own time, any description of the fall of a republic and the rise of an empire is far more likely to be understood as an allusion to Star Wars, than as a reference to Rome. After decades of relentlessly and ruthlessly utilitarian educational "reforms," of which the common core is only the most recent example, most Americans no longer know anything about Rome.  Why this came to be, and how modern Americans were cut off from vast swathes of a historical heritage which earlier generations considered their intellectual commons, is a story for another day. For present purposes, it suffices to say that I count myself one of the victims of this imposed ignorance and deliberate policy of abetting historical illiteracy.  My religious upbringing has given me some grounding in one leg of what has been called the three legged stool of Western Civilization: the biblical theology of Jerusalem.  But as for the other two legs of the stool, the philosophy, art, and science of Athens; and the legal principles of Rome and the lessons of Roman history, I must learn of those on my own, having been exposed, instead, to hours of mindless fluff in the formal education of my youth.  Hence my interest in this book. [6]

The Third Book in the Durants' Series.

Caesar and Christ, subtitled, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325, is the third volume in Will (and eventually Ariel) Durant's famous 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, written between 1935  and 1975, and introduced into thousands of middle class American homes as the bonus for joining the Book of the Month Club.  This volume, published in 1944, is the first and only book in the series I have ever read cover to cover.

Will Durant's Wisdom

The author, Will Durant, is as congenial a guide through this history as anyone is likely to find, and he knows just where to pause for asides and personal commentary and observation that overcome the dustiness one usually finds in chronological summaries of history.  Indeed, it is his authorial asides which make the book most worth reading, raising its value as a storehouse of not just knowledge, but also of wisdom, and demonstrating why bland, committee-written, textbook history, has done so much to kill off historical interest in our public schools.  A few examples of Durant's asides, which are what really make the book worth reading:


-On the inherent conflict between security and freedom:

"The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other."

"Caesar returned to the task of persuading the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom."

"We must reconcile ourselves to the probability that whatever power establishes security and order will send taxgatherers to collect something more than the cost."

-On Cicero:

"Not since Plato has wisdom worn such prose."

"Next to Cicero, [Seneca] was the most lovable hypocrite in history."

-On human nature:

"The constitution of man always rewrites the constitutions of states."

"[I]t is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured."

"Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane."

"[O]nly youth knows better than twenty centuries."

- On the patterns of history:

"Democracy had fallen by Plato's formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.  . . .  Dictatorship was unavoidable."

"The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people.  No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war.  Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die."

"When great men stoop to sentiment, the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy, empires totter."

"In every epoch something is decaying and something is growing."

"History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day."

"Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature."

Balance

Durant's writing reveals him to be a man of great Aristotelian medians.  Balance seems to be the governing principle of his writing, which goes to some length to avoid extremist positions.  Even in describing the worst and most notorious of Rome's post Augustan despots, for example, Durant gives them credit, where it is due, for their administrative achievements:  "There was something good in the worst of these rulers -- devoted statemanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stern competence in Domitian.  Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government."  Durant suggests that the the most salacious details from accounts of the more tyrannical leaders' lives, as written by ancient Roman historians with political axes to grind, should be taken with some grains of salt; and argues that the circumstances of the despots' lives, explains their behavior as almost rational:  "The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. . . . Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home.  They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death.  They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods."  Still, he rejoices when a sensible emperor now and again comes along, in the middle of a series of arbitrary and capricious despots, beginning his account of Vespasian's reign with the remark: "What a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor!"

The book's final chapters are a description of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the founding of Christianity, in a Hellenized world which was bound to influence its doctrine.  (Tad R. Callister's The Inevitable Apostasy,  quotes frequently from this volume, in support of the Mormon sense that Christianity soon became unmoored from revelation and too influenced by the philosophies of men. Durant takes that idea even further than most Latter-day Saints would be willing to do, arguing for example that the Gospel of John is an essentially Platonic, rather then Hebraic, document, suggesting that the influence of Greece arose even while the canonical scriptures of Christianity were being transcribed.)  When writing on the life of Christ, the missions of Paul, and the founding of the Christian faith, Durant writes as a non-believing scholar, but not as a scoffing skeptic.  He offers, for example, a psychosomatic explanation for Jesus's miracles.  However, he rejects the claim of Higher Criticism that Jesus never even lived, noting that this theory would require the early Christians to have created the Jesus personality in one generation, which he finds absurd; and agreeing with another historian's suggestion that, if the tests against Christ's historicity were applied with equal fervor to other historical figures, they would erase from the record many of history's most prominent persons.  He accepts the likely accuracy of most of the Gospels on the grounds that writers of inspirational fiction would have kept out the squabbling among Christ's apostles, and Christ's agonized query from the Cross as to why he had been forsaken. The religious reader, like myself, will not be strengthened in their testimony by this book.  But they will also not be weakened, nor offended. Indeed, I came away from my reading grateful for the much deeper understanding the book provided me of the historical context of Paul's epistles, and the rift between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians which was occurring while they were written, which I find helpful to understanding the doctrinal points Paul was asserting.

The Fall of Rome

Political observers have, for centuries, looked to Rome's fall as a source for prescient observations about their own society's shortcomings.  Durant makes no such attempts at modern political application, but he does describe various causes of Roman decline, leaving the future reader of some declining world to draw his own parallels.  Rome actually went through two falls: the fall of the Roman Republic into class strife and civil war, leading to the restoration of stability and order via the establishment of an Empire led by autocratic military dictators; and the subsequent fall of that Empire itself, a fall which Durant notes lasted three centuries, longer than many nations' entire history, from their rise to their decline.

Here are some passages on the decline of the Roman Republic, implicating all of the usual suspects: easy money, luxury, immorality, corruption.  Certainly glad nothing like this is happening anywhere near me:

"As currency multiplied . . . the owners of realty in the capital tripled their fortunes without stirring a muscle . . . .  Industry lagged while commerce flourished. . . .  Rome was becoming not the industrial or commercial, but the financial and political, center of the white man's world. . . .
[T]he Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; . . . .   Houses became larger as families became smaller; . . . .  [T]he old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals . . . .  Exotic foods were indispensable to social position or pretense. . . . Drinking increased; goblets had to be large and preferably of gold; wine was less diluted, sometimes not at all.  . . . .

The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man. . . .  Prostitution flourished.  Homosexualism was stimulated by contact with Greece and Asia;  . . . .  Women . . . divorced their husbands or occasionally poisoned them . . . .  Cato and Polybius . . . noted a decline of population and the inability of the state to raise such armies as had risen to meet Hannibal.  The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it. . . . [T]he Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome. Men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games.  . . .

In the upper classes manners became more refined as morals were relaxed. . . .  Everyone longed for money, everyone judged or was judged in terms of money.  Contractors cheated on such a scale that many government properties . . . had to be abandoned because the lessees exploited the workers and mulcted the state . . . .  [The] aristocracy . . . accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men or states, . . . .  It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted.
Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid."

And here are some passages on the decline of the Empire.  Once again, any similarities to times being lived in by the reader are likely purely coincidental:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.  The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. . . .  The holocausts of war and revolution, and . . . the operation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide had [their] effect. . . . The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich; . . . .  [Immigration occurred too quickly to allow] time [for] a leisurely assimilation [in which the immigrants] might have reinvigorated the classic culture . . . .  [Instead], the rapidly breeding [immigrants] could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; . . . were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility.  Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication within.  Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.

The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact--that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen's civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless [politically] the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation.  Patriotism and . . . religion had been bound together, and now together decayed."

Surely none of that sounds familiar to modern ears.

Still, there is room for hope in Durant's writing, even on Rome's decline and fall, perhaps explaining why that fall took so long: "Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane."

And perhaps, in any event, it is not the fall of Rome that we should fear most.  But, rather, its new rise.  The fact of the matter is that, for all of their contributions to science, art, literature, and the theory of law and jurisprudence, and for all of the graceful prose, poetry, and philosophy offered up by their most noble citizens, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, and for all of the best traits which marked the best of Roman society, as outlined in the final pages of this book, the Romans were a brutal and in many ways a despicable people.  Maybe everyone else was back then as well, and maybe the order they imposed upon their time allowed the growth of a stable society which would shun their excesses, and embrace the beauties of Christianity. But even still, their excesses were notably horrifying.  The Romans were politically corrupt; practiced the horrors of slavery and infanticide and pederasty without any apparent moral qualm; entertained themselves with bloodthirsty spectacles which were even worse than our most violent horror films, because they were real; and engaged in war with a relish and callousness difficult for us to fathom. This rottenness in the Roman soul was true even in the days of the Republic, or the years in which they were ruled by benevolent monarchs (Durant quotes Gibbon on the pinnacle of society reached before the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius: "If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius.  Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.").  The story of the Roman Republic's dealings with Carthage immediately before and during the utter destruction of that City by Roman troops is, simply, horrifying.  And in the most prosperous and peaceful years of the Empire, the Colosseum continued to be a place of vileness and violence.  Thus, as much as I loved this book, and consider it one of the most intriguing and fascinating volumes I will ever read, I must disagree with the author's final, elegiac statement, in which he wishes that Rome may rise again.

I certainly hope it will not.  Indeed, if the book taught me anything, it is to treasure and be grateful for our current relatively stable and free society, in the knowledge that such societies are the exception not the rule, and that while our society is in obvious decline, there is still some chance its ultimate fall may at least be postponed. Historically, this book caused me to reflect, slavery is more to be expected than freedom; poverty more to be expected than prosperity; greed and stupidity in political leaders more to be expected than wisdom and beneficence; corruption in government and commerce more to be expected than honesty; vice more to be expected than virtue; and war more to be expected than peace.  It would be wonderful if the best of Rome could rise again, and her worst stay in the past. But I'm not holding my breath.  

Endnotes

1. Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 6 "The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams" (The Penguin Press 2006)

2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution p. 23 (Harvard University Press 1967, 1992).

3. Id. pp. 24-26.

4. Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America  Chapter 2 "The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution" (Penguin Books 2011)

5.   Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 1 "The Greatness of George Washington" (The Penguin Press 2006)

6. An attempt to learn more about the classical world could start chronologically, with Greece.  But trying to understand that era by slogging through Greek history, drama, and literature, is a bit like trying to get into Tolkien via the Silmarillion.  There are elements of the Greek mind that are simply . . . alien.  Try for example to read some Greek play, like The Libation Bearers, which might as well have been written by Martians, and you'll see what I mean.  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, or Plutarch's Lives, by contrast, are remarkably accessible to a modern reader.

A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White, Jr.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals remains my favorite Lincoln book.  But the comparison is hardly fair, since Goodwin gave us four biographies for the price of one.   This book, A. Lincoln is my favorite single volume biography of President Lincoln to focus solely on him.  What sets it apart from other works is the author's interest in Lincoln's development over time, and the analysis of Lincoln's skilled use of the English language, in his writings and oratory, to rally political support for policies that saved the Union and freed the slaves.

Lincoln's Journey of Faith

We do weird things with the dead.  We say that a particular founder "was a Deist" or that a particular 20th Century thinker "was a Communist" based on a particular piece of writing at a particular point in their life, as if their entire lives were static, from beginning to end, with no ebb, flow, or development of their opinions, including during those portions of their lives which make them most historically interesting. In Lincoln's regard, some modern historians will claim that he was a non-believer, and not a man of faith. Those who make this claim typically intend it as a compliment (reflecting their own values). However, if true, it would make Lincoln, whose speeches and writings in his final years were infused with Biblical language and theological suppositions, a rank cynic: using the language of faith in his masterfully powerful Second Inaugural to satisfy the common rubes, while holding himself aloof from such nonsense. This would hardly be a complimentary way to view Lincoln's character, whatever one's own personal beliefs. Nor would it be justified.  Lincoln was a shrewd politician, who knew how to balance competing interests.  But nothing in his life suggests he was full of such guile.

Here, we get a narrative that is supported by the evidence and rings much more true.   Like all Americans of his era, Lincoln knew the Bible extremely well.  (Once, upon learning by telegraph of a convention at which 400 Republicans had gathered together to select a new candidate to replace Lincoln on the ballot after his first term, Lincoln asked the telegraph operator to hand him a Bible, and quickly located an obscure passage about a meeting of 400 "discontented" Israelites who gathered together under David's leadership to unseat King Saul. 1 Samuel 22:2)   Nevertheless, a young Lincoln rejected the emotional displays of his parents' Baptist faith, and never joined a church.  What is more, early in his life, fresh from imbibing large quantities of Constantin Volney and Thomas Paine, he gave a speech offering his own similar critiques of revealed religion, which a friend, out of either offense, or to protect the young man, threw in the fire before he could finish reading it.  

Subsequently, however, as we learn from White, Lincoln became interested in the more rational and less emotional approach to religion offered by Springfield Presbyterian minister James Smith, in his book, The Christian Defense. Smith ministered to the Lincolns after the death of their son Eddie, and the Lincolns began attending his congregation, though Lincoln, riding the circuit, did not become a member and attended less frequently than his wife.  When his father's death was imminent, Lincoln wrote to his stepbrother, asking him to convey to his father that he should remember to call upon his merciful Maker, Who would not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him.  In the final years of his Presidency, Lincoln would increasingly invoke the comforts of God to parents of fallen soldiers in letters of consolation, and the designs of God in official pronouncements, such as the Emancipation Proclamation.  At Gettysburg, Lincoln added the words "under God" to his prepared text, speaking the words extemporaneously during the speech's delivery (as all of the contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the address, based on stenographer's notes of the speech as delivered, confirm), and Lincoln included that phrase in all three versions he would write out at later dates. 

In the latter months of his Presidency, Lincoln, as was his custom when trying to work through a logical or philosophical issue, wrote himself a short memorandum, not meant for public view.  These personal notes were kept by Lincoln in his hat, or desk drawer, and, White argues, are the closest thing we have to his intellectual autobiography. This particular personal memo, found some time after Lincoln's death, began with the words, "The will of God prevails."  The memo discussed the phenomenon of both sides in the Civil War claiming that God was on their side, the logical impossibility that they were both right, as God could not be both for and against the same thing at the same time, and the likelihood that neither side was wholly right, but that God had his own purposes, and was using and adapting the will and actions of men to achieve the same. As it was not intended for the public, this writing is the best evidence we have of Lincoln's personal religious beliefs in the final years of his life, as he led the nation through the war.  The writing is theologically sophisticated, addressing one of the core paradoxes of Christianity, the conflict between free will and God's omniscience, as it contemplates a God who manages to work in and influence history, yet does so without impinging on human beings' personal will and choice, which are adapted to God's purposes.  White traces some of the influences which might have led to Lincoln's thoughts in the memorandum, which would later resonate in certain passages of the Second Inaugural.  The man who gave that speech apparently believed in the theological and biblical language which it used, in the God which it invoked, and in the Christian principles of mercy, reconciliation, and service to the widowed and orphaned victims of the war for which it called.

Lincoln's Political Journey

Similarly, with respect to slavery, one will sometimes come across a particular type of libertarian revisionist crank, almost always from the South, who insists that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, which was fought over tariffs or something, and who will support their revisionist history by citing various statements of Lincoln that the war was being fought to save the Union, and any decision to free slaves would be based on whether or not it furthered that cause.  The crank inevitably forgets that the South started the Civil War and did so very much because of its desire to not only retain slavery, but to extend it to new territories, which desire became the chief political conflict of the decade before the war.  (The Confederacy was formed, and Jefferson Davis chosen to lead it, before Lincoln was even inaugurated, and the South fired the first shots of the war, upon federal vessels bringing aid and non-military supplies to Fort Sumter, all of which events occurred on the basis of Southern outrage over the election of an anti-Kansas Nebraska Republican to office.) If we want to know why the Civil War was fought, it is the South's reasons for secession which must be examined, not Lincoln's response.   Moreover, the crank's simplistic analysis also forgets that historical figures are not static, and that political figures are constrained by that which is politically possible.

White does an excellent job of tracking Lincoln's willingness to apply his own personal beliefs against slavery into more proactive political action, over time. From early in his political career, Lincoln was opposed to slavery, which he felt was a moral evil ("If slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong.") But he was not elected, or even nominated as the candidate of his own party, as a radical abolitionist.  The Republicans chose him, instead of Seward, because the latter was too radical. Lincoln did not believe the Government had the ability under the Constitution to end slavery. His debates with Douglas, and his Presidential campaign, were based on the principle that slavery must not be extended into the territories, but restricted to where it already existed, where he promised it would not be interfered with (a promise he likely would have kept, had the South taken him at his word and not seceded).  Candidate Lincoln firmly believed the Federal Government had the right to restrict any extension of slavery, but he did not call for its abolition where it already existed, while running for President.  

When that position proved insufficiently moderate to a South which seceded in protest of his election, Lincoln was sufficiently astute to know that, in order to retain support for the war among Northern Democrats, and border states, he needed to emphasize that the war was being fought to preserve the Union from which the South had seceded, not to end the institution of slavery which had caused that secession.  This was much to the chagrin of those who filled the more radical abolitionist wing of the Republican party. But White tracks how, over time, Lincoln came to understand the hollowness of any victory which did not end slavery, and his willingness to therefore become more overt about that purpose of the war, over time.  

His developing thinking eventually led Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (freeing the slaves as a military measure, only in locations where the Proclamation could have no practical effect unless the war were to be won). This was followed, upon further developments in Lincoln's thinking, by his orders for the recruitment of black Union soldiers. In turn, this decision, upon its successful implementation, was followed by Lincoln's September 3, 1863 speech, written for James Conkling to read and deliver at a Springfield Illinois pro-Union rally (the largest held during the war), praising the valor of those black soldiers as against their confederate enemies who, "with malignant heart, and deceitful speech" strove to hinder an important historical "consummation" namely the end of slavery.  This passage made clear that ending slavery was indeed now one explicitly hoped for effect of the war, although Lincoln still emphasized that the war remained primarily a war to save the Union, and no soldier was yet being asked to fight solely to end slavery.  The speech noted that Lincoln could only be accused of making such a request upon Northern soldiers if he were to ask them to keep fighting solely for that cause after the Union had been preserved.  Finally, the culmination of Lincoln's evolving thought on these issues led to his advocacy for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  Had he lived to complete his second term, and thereafter take on the status of a successful two-term President and "senior statesman" would his thinking have developed even further, towards complete racial equality?  It is not unlikely. 

Lincoln the Writer and Orator

The author also relishes Lincoln's skills as a writer, a thinker, and an orator.  The passages in which White analyzes Lincoln's more important writings and speeches, and examines the rhetorical tools he utilized, are among the book's best.  And the description of how Lincoln, again and again, rallied political support for his policies when they came under fire, via a well-timed speech, or widely published letter to a newspaper editor or a political caucus, tell an important part of his story which no film (the primary medium through which most Americans have formed an image of Lincoln today) could ever capture. Lincoln's effective employment and deployment of the English language as a political tool reflected the founders, and is one of the reasons I like to think of him as the final founder.  Like Lincoln, almost all of the founders, save Washington, came to prominence and fame, and directed the course of history, on the basis of their way with the written word.

In our own era, screens have replaced newspapers, soundbites have replaced well reasoned writing, and political ideas too complex for an internet meme or a bumper sticker don't get very far.  This, as much as anything, explains why we are unlikely to ever see another Lincoln (or Adams or Jefferson or Hamilton or Madison) in our lifetimes. Whether we can find leaders fit for our times and its challenges, on the basis of whether those politicians come across as well on the screen, as Lincoln and his predecessors did in well-reasoned and passionate writing, remains to be seen.  But the evidence so far is not encouraging.

A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, Jr.  (Random House 2010) Trade Paperback.  4 Stars out of 4.

Back to the Future. Welcome to the Post-Christian West

Pre-Christianity

In the year 65 A.D., the Roman Emperor Nero got in a row with his second wife, Poppea, and viciously kicked her in the stomach.  Poppaea was pregnant and died from her injuries. The Roman historian Cassius Dio records that, grief-stricken by the loss of his murdered beloved, Nero sought a replacement.  He found a youth named Sporus who he felt resembled Poppaea, castrated him, "married" him in a formal and public ceremony, including all of the customary recitations hoping for progeny, and, “used him in every way like a woman.”  This might have been Western civilization’s first same sex marriage, except that Nero, at the time of the wedding, was already married to another man, a former slave named Pythagoras.  As historical precedents go, this doesn't have quite the romantic resonance of Adam and Eve. But I'm sure the decorations were lovely, and that the bakers all knew better than to object. The pre-Christian Romans, like the post-Christian moderns, found the concepts of male, female, and marriage, to be loose, subjective, and fluid.  Or at least, when their rulers told them to think that way, they got on board if they knew what was good for them.

Nero’s views on marriage never really stuck.  Perhaps because they violated the prior understanding of what marriage was, and what marriage was for, as previously held by earlier generations of Greeks and Romans and every other civilization on earth, and perhaps because a new religion, little noticed by Nero until he needed someone to blame for the fire which destroyed much of Rome, was growing in influence, and would, some generations later, become the majority religion of the Western world which emerged from Roman ashes. That new religion, Christianity, would have very strict views about marriage, which would eventually come to be adopted by the West, making marriage between a man and a woman the centerpiece of the Western world's long-held child-centered and family-centered sexual ethic.

But Christianity's integration with and influence upon Western culture has now officially ended, and if we want to know what life is going to be like in the future, in our new non-Christian, but nevertheless Western, world, going back in time to study ancient Rome is one good place to start.  For the pre-Christian Romans resembled today’s post-Christian moderns in other ways as well. They were comfortable with a form of allegedly Republican government in which the Senate, as a polite fiction, still pretended to exercise its former legislative functions, but had in fact, since the time of Julius Caesar, ceded all real authority to the Emperor, whose pronouncements they rubber-stamped into law.  In similar fashion, modern state legislatures, and our federal congress, still like to pretend that Americans live in a democratic republic, but have long since ceded all real power to a judicial oligarchy, over the strenuous objections of earlier American Catos such as Jefferson and Lincoln, and to a President who makes law by executive order.  Other similarities abound.  Like Roman Emperors, who controlled the doctrines of the official State religion, our own Presidential office holders and candidates have recently become quite comfortable in making pronouncements on what churches should teach, with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having recently lectured us on the need for a change in religious beliefs on subjects such as abortion and same-sex marriage.  Also, like Nero, our own judicial oligarchy gets a kick out of putting us in our place from time to time, and reminding us that our pretense to government by the consent of the governed has long since gone out of fashion, and that the judiciary's votes are the only votes which actually matter.    

Post-Christianity

Our judicial overseers most recently reminded us of how things really work in their decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, issued June 26th, 2015.  Obergefell overturned a 1972 decision, Baker v. Nelson, in which even the Court which was otherwise liberal and arrogant enough to give us Roe v. Wade, took all of one sentence to explain that the U.S. Constitution does not mandate same sex marriage, and that claims to the contrary do not even raise a serious federal question. The proverbial toad has been in the increasingly hot water for a long time since then though, and its brain is long since boiled.  

Of course, what happened last week was more than just yet another act of raw political power, exercised by Judges supposedly occupying a non-political branch of government, who insist that their own personal policy preferences are Constitutional mandates, even with respect to subjects on which the Constitution is silent.  It was also the culminating act in the sexual revolution, which began in the 1960s, and has brought our nation such happy statistics as an illegitimacy rate which increased from less than 10% to almost 50% within my lifetime, a youth suicide rate that has increased threefold since 1950, and a welfare state whose non-discretionary expenditures now exceed 100% of the annual GDP.  

But what happened last week was more even than that.  What happened last week was, also, a final and culminating act in a drama which has unfolded over a much longer period of time: Call it the death of Judeo-Christian America if you will, or call it the official displacement of religiosity with secularism, or call it the creation of an official American Establishment of Religion: the Church of Secular Humanism, whose sermons and homilies are taught in movie theaters (hence the steeples in the architecture of so many Cineplexes) and written on Supreme Court letterhead.  Call it what you will.  What is clear is that Western civilization is now post-Christian, and, in many ways, closer in spirit to the pre-Christian Western civilization of Rome, than to the Christian era which just ended.  That Christian era began in roughly the third Century A.D.; flourished most successfully in an America governed by Madison's vision (as set forth in his Memorial and Remonstrances against Religious Assessments) of a secular government, distinct from and holding no authority over faith, but nevertheless recognizing that the demands and rights of faith were "precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of" that distinct government; and finally ended, and was given its funeral, on June 26th, 2015.

To be sure, just as there were additional battles and skirmishes after Yorktown, there is still some mopping-up to do.  The Obergefell decision will not be the final cultural skirmish in the sexual revolution or the battle of precedence between the secular and the divine, but it is nevertheless the decisive moment. What follows next will be ugly but is largely preordained. Churches must be emptied, either of their adherents or of their doctrines.  This will be easy in a world where the secular left holds all the fortresses: publishing, the news and entertainment media, universities, government, and the governmental and quasi-governmental bureaucracies which license citizens in their professions, accredit colleges, and oversee public education. It will be extremely easy to stomp down on dissenters in a world where, as a very non-Madisonian New Mexico Judicial Oligarch recently explained, the loss of religious freedom is now the “cost of citizenship.” If people of faith fail to resist, the mopping up effort will not take long.  

But there is still some cause for hope, albeit distant, at least for those of us who take a long view of history. Everything the secular left is about to impose upon American Christians --the editorial attacks against reactionary religious forces in the newspapers, the inability of a believer to get into the right college, or be accredited or licensed in her profession if she graduates from the wrong college, the co-opting of private civic organizations, such as the BSA– has been done by secular leftists before, in Eastern Europe between 1947 and 1949. Whether it will get even worse after that, here, as it did after 1950, there, remains to be seen. But if you want to know the broad outlines of what's coming, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s amazing book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, needs to be put on your must-read list.  Cold War Eastern Europe, like ancient Rome, is another helpful subject to review in analyzing what a non-Christian Western society will look like.  But the story of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe brings us some glimmer of hope: the Catholics of Poland refused to give the government and the Party the same legitimacy, in their hearts, that they gave to their Church, and in the end, after whole lifetimes were lived under militantly secular oppression, freedom was restored.  So follow up Applebaum’s book by reading, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, by John O’Sullivan, which tells the end of the story, and may give you hope that totalitarian left-wing secularism can be endured long enough to someday be defeated by faith. Give these books to your grandchildren, to read in secret in the basement. 

What We Have Lost

In the meantime, it might be worthwhile to contemplate what we have lost, as the hope for its restoration may give us the motivation to fight on, if only in secret, in hopes for a better tomorrow. Herewith, a non-exhaustive list of key principles which Post-Christian Western civilization has decided to forego, and the consequences of these losses to ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren: 

Loss 1: The Abandonment of Christian Sexual Morality and the Best Interests of Children which Were Advanced Thereby.  

I have written elsewhere on the history of the decline and fall of the Christian sexual ethic, which displaced and prevented (well, . . . at least postponed) Nero’s vision from becoming that of the entire Western world: 


http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2013/09/is-americas-decline-and-fall-inevitable_9703.html

Suffice it for present purposes to note that the Christian sexual ethic which has governed the outlook of humankind in the West for most of the past 17 centuries could be thought of as an arch which protected the children who were sheltered beneath it.  Christian sexual morality performed this function by ensuring that the bonding right of every child to know and be loved and reared by her own mother and father, would never be intentionally taken away, except when in the best interests of the child, and not merely to gratify the desires of any adult.  The keystone of that child-protecting arch was conjugal marriage between a man and a woman, and with that keystone removed, the arch has fallen, and the children previously sheltered by its protections will be the victims of that calamity, deprived of either their mother or (almost always) their father, and told that they must not only accept and adapt to this loss, but may not mourn it, and must instead celebrate it.  It seems that every generation perpetuates its own new lies about the separate but supposedly equal institutions it establishes for its children, in the name of what the adults want to do.   

Loss 2: The Loss of Respect for Objective Reality   

The West advanced beyond other corners of the globe based on its discovery and implementation of the scientific method: observe those material realities which are capable of observation, hypothesize about those realities, test the hypothesis, determine if the test’s outcome can be recreated and is therefore demonstrative of the true nature of that which is being tested.  Niall Ferguson has called the scientific method one of Western civilization's "Killer Apps", which led to the West's ascendance over the rest of the globe in the past five centuries. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/civilization-west-and-rest/killer-apps/

But science requires working and living in the world of objective reality.  And that is no longer permissible.  

Instead, we now live in a world where words have no objective meaning, and a reader's personal understanding of a text trumps the author's intention, not just in poetry, but also in law. Subjective reality now trumps all sorts of objective facts. A white woman can insist that she is black. An able bodied person can insist that he is disabled.  And Bruce Jenner can insist he is a woman, despite the evidence of his chromosomes, his anatomy, and the children he has sired. Such fantasies would be no cause for any real alarm if they were maintained privately.  But when a United States Governmental Agency, such as OSHA, declares that the nation's private employers must jump through the same looking glass, as they implement restroom policies and assess the diversity, rather than the competence, of their staff, something has gone amiss.  And woe be to the man who fails to prove his virtue by keeping silent, and instead ventures to question whether the new subjective emperor has any clothes.

The mindset can best be understood by studying the history and meaning of the left's fascinating new term: "Cisgendered" which is used to describe a person who “identifies” with the sex she was “assigned” at birth. The word "assigned" is the key to the imagery meant to be invoked.  You are not male or female in any objective sense.  Rather, shortly after your birth, an aging white male member of the patriarchy in a lab coat walked into your nursery, and, while you were innocently sleeping, arbitrarily and capriciously “assigned” you your sex, cackling away as he wrote it on your Birth Certificate.  The Bastard.  

And so we have school districts in North America implementing policies preventing teachers from using words like boys, girls, men, women, or their accompanying gender pronouns. Will there be exemptions for biology teachers, so they can teach the basics of human sexual reproduction?  I wouldn't count on it.  Allowing biology teachers to teach the basics of human sexual reproduction would destroy the whole point of banning gender pronouns in the first place.  Heaven forbid that young biologically informed Patrick, upon meeting Heather and her two mommies, might stumble upon the depraved thought that Heather doesn't really have two mommies, and must have a daddy somewhere, who has been treated as expendable, and of whose presence Heather has been deprived.  

Loss 3: The Loss of Respect for Faith, and of Legal Protections for the Faithful. 

Science is not the only way to learn about truth.  There are also immaterial realities for which we rely upon revelation, rather than observation.  As Dallin H. Oaks, put it, "we believe there are two dimensions of knowledge, material and spiritual.  We seek knowledge in the material dimension by scientific inquiry and in the spiritual dimension by revelation.” 
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/fundamental-premises-of-our-faith-talk-given-by-elder-dallin-h-oaks-at-harvard-law-school

As G.K. Chesterton (another author whose books will be vital reading in our children's secret basements) similarly explained: "The man who cannot believe in his own senses, and the man who cannot believe in anything else, are both insane."  They are both boxed in a cell of their own devising, said Chesterton, on which can be written "He believes in himself."   This is a perfect description of the modern West, which exalts the subjective, and rejects both objective reality and religious faith as legitimate sources of truth, in favor of personal opinion.  Justice Kennedy made the exaltation of subjective opinion official in his notorious magical mystery passage from Planned Parenthood v. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."   Chesterton would recognize this as a long-winded way of saying "he believes in himself."  Where can we turn for truth? To the Bible?  To Aristotle? To science?  To the Declaration of Independence?  To the Constitution?  No, no, no, no, and no. To one's own personal subjective conceptions and opinions.  

And if one's own personal conceptions, enshrined as the heart of Constitutional liberty, are offended by another's religious beliefs, when publicly exercised?  Then of course, the latter must give way to the former.  (The First Amendment speaks of the "free exercise" of religion, but certain politicians and jurists are increasingly uncomfortable with that terminology, and prefer to employ the phrase "freedom of worship" not of "exercise". The majority in Obergefell for example, in claiming that their decision would not unduly impact faith, made no reference to free exercise. Perhaps some words really do have objective meanings after all, and must therefore be ignored and avoided.)  The great analogy repeatedly made and employed by the same-sex marriage movement has been a comparison to the civil rights movement.  It is a false and an evil analogy.  But it has been accepted.  And that means the rest of the story will play out as follows: If you oppose same-sex marriage, or did so before the Supreme Court’s recent diktat, you are deserving of the same kind of scorn which we have heretofore reserved for members of the Ku Klux Klan. Your right to dissent, to speak out, to exercise your own religious beliefs in how you conduct your own personal or business affairs is simply not worth preserving.  You may go to Church, if you must, but what you say and do there must be kept within the walls of your own Church and your own home, and never acted upon any where else.  Contra Madison, the demands of the secular state now take precedence over the demands of faith.  Step into the street, and you must not only tolerate, but celebrate and perpetuate and embrace your neighbor's personal concepts of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of marriage, of gender, and of the mystery of human life (so long as those personal concepts are not based in religion).  Or else.  

Loss 4: The Loss of Checks, Balances, Separation of Powers, and the Rule of Law.  

We now live in a nation which still calls itself a democratic republic, but is in fact only governed as such with and by the leave of the other two branches of government, when they find it convenient.   And when they do not find it convenient? The Executive branch issues Executive Orders, and its vast bureaucracy issues kabillions of pages of annual federal regulations, to override the laws passed through merely democratic processes.  And the Judicial branch no longer even pretends that it must tie itself to the text of the Constitution as understood and intended at the time the provision in question was written or amended, to validate their decision to strike down a law they happen to personally disagree with, as supposedly Unconstitutional.  Instead, they strike down disfavored laws based on how they the Justices determine the words of the Constitution should be read today, in a process of perpetual judicial amendment.  We claim to honor the rule of law, but in fact honor the rule of lawyers, especially lawyers in robes. When Judges act like legislators, real legislators, and the voters who put them there, become obsolete.  And when men are governed by laws written in words which judges and bureaucrats can read as meaning something entirely different than what the words actually say (because words mean whatever, subjectively, a judge or a bureaucrat wants them to mean) then men are not governed by laws at all, nor by the elected legislators who enacted them, but are governed instead by sympathies and emotions and refs with money on the game.  

It has been said that bad laws are among the chief enemies of the rule of law.  So are bad lawyers, especially the ones wearing robes.  I was not and am not a fan of Cliven Bundy and his Jacobin resistance to the rule of law.  But every time the judiciary makes stuff up (which they did not do in Bundy's case, but have done in many others), they encourage more such Jacobin resistance among a populace which cannot fathom why they should be bound by laws if their government is not.    

http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2014/04/what-lance-armstrong-and-cliven-bundy.html

The modern citizen agrees or disagrees with a Supreme Court Decision depending on whether or not he likes the outcome, not based on whether the outcome was in fact compelled by the language and intent of the Constitution.  

Our world no longer employs or understands the analogy of different hats, such as: When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a Judge preside over a trial.  When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a journalist report the news. When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a college professor teach history.  A nation without hats is a nation without separation of powers.  A nation without hats is no longer made up of three governmental branches and a fourth journalistic estate to act as checks and balances upon each other.  The root source of this loss of hats is easily found: the self-anointed's belief that the virtuous cause of social justice (however they are defining it this week) is more important than the ends utilized to obtain it.  The ends they seek are so righteous and so virtuous and so important, that any means justify these noble ends: Gay marriage is more important than the proper role of the judiciary in a constitutional republic.  And so are a lot of other things. Getting a favored Presidential candidate elected is more important than practicing honest and objective journalism about any subject which might discomfit the cause.  And so are a lot of other things.  Telling the next generation what to think, and training them up to be warriors for social justice is more important than teaching University students facts and how to think.  And so are a lot of other things.   Challenging the traditions of the patriarchy is more important than a federal government which is sovereign solely as to its own limited and enumerated powers.  And so are a lot of other things. Shutting people up who do not think the way they are supposed to think, so we can silence them, rather than debate them, is more important than the First Amendment.  And so are a lot of other things.  

We have forgotten some of history's most important lessons: that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions; that no matter how virtuous the ends are which a beneficent dictator may seek, or even realize, relying on dictatorial power to achieve such ends leaves the populace at risk of the evil ends which the next dictator may use his power to achieve. A Marcus Aurelius will inevitably, eventually, be succeeded by a Commodus.  The same judicial power grab which gave us Obergefell previously gave us Dred Scott.  The doctrine of ends which justify procedurally improper means is fit for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  But not for America as its institutions were once understood by anyone who had passed 5th grade civics. The whole point of the clunky procedural safeguards, separation of powers, and checks and balances in our Constitutional system is to differentiate America from nations where the government's most powerful officer or officers, can do whatever they want to, just because they think it's a marvelous idea.  To live in a world where any officer of the government can do whatever it thinks would be a marvelous idea, is to live in pre-Christian Rome or post WWII Eastern Europe. As post-Christian America becomes increasingly similar to such places, it won't just be the elderly believers in our culture's former Judeo-Christian values who find it an unfortunate place to live.  It will be everyone who holds no government office. 

Christianity and Society

Each of the losses described above are, in their own way, based on the loss of a Judeo-Christian frame of reference.  

The Christian not only believes in a Child-centric sexual morality, and a Government which protects his rights to religious liberty.  He also has little use for placing too much power in the hands of too few elites.  It is no mere coincidence that the French Revolution, steeped in anti-Clericalism, rejected a system of separated powers which might have checked and balanced the new regime's leaders, and prevented the bloodshed of the Terror into which that revolution fell as it consumed its own children.  Or that America rejected not only the Anti-Christianity of Thomas Paine, but also his call for a unitary government led by a single assembly.  

The Christian understands that humanity is fallen, and that a Utopian Eden may not be reclaimed by human efforts, but only by divine grace in God's due time. This tragic understanding makes him suspicious of major societal transformations, in an attempt to build a tower to God, or create a new Utopian Eden through the efforts of man. Such societal transformations inevitably come with unintended consequences, far worse than whatever evil is sought to be remedied through their implementation. Knowing that man is not an angel, but is fallen, and prone to corruption, the Christian citizen fears the evil the all-powerful can do, more than he cherishes the hope of the good they might accomplish, and favors dispersed and separated powers.  He doubts the ability of any one fallen man, or few fallen oligarchs, to govern wisely and show the way to a better future, unrestrained by tradition or majority opinion. History has proven the Christian view to be correct.  But a Nation which no longer reads history, and gets its values from cable television rather than Judeo-Christian scripture, has set a new course. 

Again from G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy:  "The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea . . . that the man should rule who feels that he can rule.  Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.  If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this--that the man should rule who does NOT think that he can rule. . . .   [W]e have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule.  Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't."   From this perspective, the most post-Christian characteristic of the modern Supreme Court is not their views on sexual morality, or their ruling on the meaning of marriage, but their lack of judicial restraint in overturning laws they don't like, without any constitutional basis, on questions where the Constitution is silent.  They are not post-Christian merely because their morality is post-Christian. They are post-Christian because of their certainty that they are fit to make these decisions free from democratic restraint, check, or balance.  They are post-Christian because they are far too comfortable in their crowns.