Love and Loathing in 2024

Classical philosophical thought has always considered love to be a quasi-deterministic force. Love, both in the human world, and the natural world which contains it, is something which seems to apply its own energy to the will of all creatures. By way of analogy, this was applied to all sorts of ‘lower’ creatures, whether it be the ‘love’ of the sunflower for the sun, or the bee for the flower. Arguably my favorite explanation of love’s power is that of Saint Augustine when discussing the “consolation of the Holy Spirit”, and the power of grace. Grace is a notoriously difficult ‘thing’ to define, precisely because it may not be a ‘thing’ at all. Remarking on how the Holy Spirit attempts to ‘woo’ the human soul, he makes use of the Latin verb ‘persuadere’, which is composed of the root word ‘suadeo’, which is taken from ‘suavis’, or ‘sweet’, or ‘to make sweet’. In other words, when we persuade another, we do so by trying to sweeten the mind and the will of someone else. Augustine’s experience as a lawyer, as much as he would have liked to speak ill of it, taught him that so much of human communication, let alone divine communication with humanity, involves engaging human love.

Today we are facing a profound derangement of this natural human capacity to love. Mystical Theologians have identified many of these challenges for centuries, because human nature has changed very little. First, human nature made in the image of God is oriented to the infinite: therefore, the fallen will and intellect is easily distracted in pursuit of a quasi-infinite array of lesser goods. What has changed, however, in a relatively short amount of time, is the availability of so many goods, first to human acquisition, and second, to human curiosity. The Industrial Revolution enabled us to mass produce goods on a scale never before imagined in our history, and labor saving devices has given us greater ability hopefully to enjoy leisure and culture. It has also allowed us time to seek out and to acquire these goods. This is the problem of consumerism: we can never produce enough or consume enough to satisfy what we think we need. The Digital/Information Revolution has enabled us to mass produce information on a scale far beyond the Guttenberg Press, and at the same time, has relatively democratized that process. This has not led necessarily to the techno-informational utopia some were proclaiming circa-2011, when the Arab Spring was sweeping North Africa. The belief had been that if a cattle farmer in Cameroon had access to as much information as a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, the world could in theory become more equitable. The cattle farmer perhaps could learn more efficient ways to manage his livestock, and maybe the young rebels who made up the provocateurs of the Arab Spring could read up on ideas of popular representation, human rights and democracy. At least, so it was said.

What we have learned, or in fact have relearned, and forgot again, is that Original Sin is the aboriginal fact of human existence, and for every utopian hope of human perfection, there is the possibility of creating a fresh hell. Like ill-fated Icarus, the higher we climb toward the heavens, the more likely it becomes that we will burn our own wings, and plummet to the ground. As the old adage goes, fools boldly go where angels fear to trod.

This Information Revolution is now reaching its maturity as we reach the nascent excitement, approaching religious fervor, surrounding Artificial Intelligence, especially AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. While this is a subject and an article for another day, this movement which poses as a ‘singularity’ is in fact a ‘nihilarity’, a neologism I like to use, a true “Abolition of Man” (to borrow from C.S. Lewis), which seeks to erase the human in favor of something beyond the merely technocratic.

Returning to the theme of love and loathing, the crucial problem of the Information Revolution in 2024 is the problem of persuasion as it is currently employed, and AI is a part of this. With AI, and with advanced psyops and disinformation, it is possible to influence massive amounts of the public with false and misleading ‘facts’ which can create disastrous social upheaval. These have true and real world consequences, from World Wars, murder, stock market crashes, character assassination, riots, and more.

As usual, I want to turn my attention to the Church and how she is affected by this. First, it is important to recognize that the Church, especially the Holy See, has long been the subject of advanced psyops and disinformation campaigns by many interested parties for centuries. This can be seen from the emissaries from East Roman courts to the poisoners which lurked in the Avignonese kitchens. Truth be told, the Church has never been particularly good at ‘tech’. Our best defense against technologically advanced opponents has not go toe-to-toe with them, but either to under them, or around them. Occasionally, it has also happened that by a singular grace of God, we have gone ‘over’ them, but that is the exception, not the rule.

Every Catholic Christian on earth has been trained to love God and love their neighbor. By extension, they have been trained to love and reverence those who represent legitimate authority: parents, the government, and the Church and her ministers. This is obedience to the Fourth Commandment, and the essence of Piety. One of the most beautiful features of the gift of Piety is that it carries with it a loving sweetness, a tenderness and a devotion to the one loved. This is why many times when it is translated from Latin, it is often translated as an adjective “good” or “faithful”.

Part of the transition from childhood into adulthood involves the evolution away from the perception of perfection in certain authority figures, toward the acceptance of imperfection in the same. We come to understand that our parents are imperfect, and so is the government, and the Church. In the case of God, we come to understand, paradoxically, that he is beyond our understanding, and so as we come to face the mystery of evil and human suffering, we hopefully arrive at the acceptance of the Providence of God in all things.

However, what can happen, and unfortunately often does happen, is that if the authority figure is exposed as so worthy of contempt, or if their behavior or essence is so morally or spiritually vacuous so as to be loathsome, the response is, understandably, hatred. Sometimes this is the result of misunderstanding, and a child may come around with the benefit of age and experience. Other times, their reaction is completely understandable.

The institution of the family, the state, and of the Church are under attack. In many cases, it is understandable that they should be questioned, examined, and reformed. We will of course not address the former two today, but now we will focus on the latter.

The Church after the sex abuse crisis worldwide has gone through the crisis of modernity, albeit late in time. In a way, it was the perfect crisis of modernity: an authoritarian, monarchical episcopate which thought itself in many cases detached from the civil law, acting in ways more in line with protecting its own institutional best interests. By that I do not mean the Church at large, but the aristocracy of the Church, the Bishops. This is analogous to the crisis of modern governance, as seen in all the West, as the crowned heads of Europe, and the aristocracy at large, fell, one by one. Some monarchs tried popular reforms and constitutional governance, and some doubled down on absolutism. Most were swept away, because most of the monarchs were largely inept in their response, both to the legitimate requests of their subjects, and their interpretation of the signs of the times.

While the Pope has been reduced to a temporal microstate, the Bishops still function as the quasi-monarchs of their own principalities, as essentially landowning aristocrats. Of course I do not deny their spiritual role, but if we look at them from a merely socioeconomic point of view, they are little removed from their feudal predecessors: they are the custodians of the spiritual and temporal goods of their local Churches. Taken together, they form a type of landed gentry, not handed down by blood, but by divine right and spiritual authority. The heart of this form of governance may be called medieval, but that would not be entirely correct, because feudalistic societies contained checks and balances between subjects and peers to maintain their relationships and obligations. This is one reason why medieval European kingdoms were not absolutist, and were quite decentralized. We can see elements of modernity in the current episcopate, because they do have absolutist tendencies, which arguably have been in place since Ignatius of Antioch. However, the most recent head to spring forth on the hydra is the post-modern addition of the administrative state. Virtually all but the poorest missionary Bishops have had ‘curiae’ or courts to aid them in their ministries. Yet if one glances at an administrative flowchart of the average Diocese, there are a plethora of positions which can only be categorized as administrative additions at best, and bureaucratic bloat at worst.

Why do I mention this? Because in response to the quintessential ecclesiastical crisis of modernity, analogous to the one virtually all Western governments experienced in their history, the Catholic episcopate largely did not return to apostolicity, but instead metastasized into post-modernity. This is extremely dangerous for the piety of the faithful, and for the Priests as well. The American Revolution and the introduction of conceptions of Constitutional Liberty into the mainstream of legal and political thought I consider an almost unequivocal good for the human race. Although we Catholics may have legitimate questions regarding the definition of freedom of conscience and the like, the protections afforded to human dignity as made in the image and likeness of God is a huge victory for humanity, and has secured the well-being of countless men and women around the world. However, we know that the ideals of Constitutional Democracy are under attack, and not from the places that the Fifth Estate breathlessly say they are. As usual, typical disinformation campaigns thrive on accusing your opponent of what you yourself are guilty, to make your opponent waste precious time and energy defending themselves. Human psychology is easily hijacked in this way.

The crisis of politics in modernity may be termed a crisis of legitimacy, because people felt a disconnect between their needs and living conditions, and what their social superiors legislated and mandated. Whenever this disconnect is widespread, revolution is not far behind. Democracy has a far more robust ‘pressure valve’ in place when free and open elections are in place, because people feel they can influence their government and the outcome of events in their favor. Monarchy does not have any such pressure valve. The Monarch either reforms, resigns, or dies in the face of widespread discontent.

I do not think readers of these pages will dispute that Bishops, especially in the West, are notoriously tone-deaf and inept in their governance and communication style. They seem to have now reached the apogee of their enrollment in the Marie Antoinette school of leadership. Having been humbled by the abuse crisis, and having beat their breasts in public acts of contrition, the past has largely been considered over. Now, in some respects, they are correct: sex abuse is largely a problem of the past. As a result of more rigorous screening, training and cooperation with law enforcement, the horrors of the past decades are unlikely to be repeated anytime soon, thank God. Most outstanding cases in most American jurisdictions have been and are being processed via settlement, since in many cases, the alleged Priest perpetrators are now long-dead.

Yet, as I wrote five years ago in The Ongoing Clerical Abuse Crisis, we once employed sharp instruments on the body of the Church to cut out severely diseased tissue, in order to save the rest. However, via the Dallas Charter and other quasi-institutions, we have essentially turned the Church’s Law and Administrative Apparatus against itself, like a sort of cancer, which is consuming her from within, targeting now healthy tissue. Most Dioceses, especially large ones, spend millions of dollars on risk mitigation lawyers, prosecutors with extensive experience in advanced interrogation techniques, third party contractors with mandates to electronically bug clergy, private investigators, behavioral psychologists, and more.¹ What is their purpose? It is the same as it was in the thick of the 2000s: to avoid ‘scandal’, which is not the same as the definition as found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. By that they mean anything that may embarrass the institution, or worse, the Bishop himself. We know that this extends beyond mere moral impropriety, or even the insinuation of the same: it even extends to what displeases the mitered one. It could be concern about a certain vaccine, or whether one prefers a lace alb, or now, whether a cleric refuses to bless the union of a same-sex couple.

Love and piety are fundamental to live a happy life, both naturally and supernaturally. Coming to grips with the imperfection of imperfect people, while remaining loving and pious is one of the challenges of life. But what do we say to the person who experiences a parent who was and is physically and emotionally abusive? Does piety and love oblige them to continue in a relationship with them? In the same vein, does piety to the state, which we call patriotism, oblige citizens to suffer tyranny indefinitely, according to Catholic teaching? The answer is no. There have always been bad and abusive Bishops and Popes, to be sure. But I struggle to think of a time in our history when our elites, both secular and religious, have considered themselves so untouchable, so removed from the law and from the reach of the effects of their own decisions. I know some of them may say that people are more and more unhinged today, that they need more security, not less. Maybe that is true. However, this is still 2024. There are more ways to provide safe ways to access to someone than ever before. In fact, there are so many, it can be overwhelming, if not managed prudently. But perhaps it is not the lack of access which is so irksome, but the arrogance which defines them; not just that they are untouchable, but that they simply cannot be bothered by our concerns. This is especially difficult to share with good lay people, especially lay people who are otherwise wealthy and influential, and used to having their voices heard in the world.

My fear now, after ten years of Pope Francis, after ten years of screeds about “little monsters” and “Neo-Pelagians”, after Cardinal McCarrick, after cocaine orgies in Vatican Apartments, after profanity-laced conferences with Spanish seminarians, we are a Church in the midst of spiritual and psychological abuse and gaslighting. We have seen the Papal prerogative to remove Bishops used arbitrarily, not in conformity with due process and the rule of law. Every time he does this, he saws away the branch on which the Papacy sits. People may overthrow a Monarch and they may vote out a President, but when it comes to the Papacy, when they feel betrayed so deeply by the “Sweet Vicar of Christ on Earth”, when he is doing the opposite of that aforementioned persuasion which Augustine mentioned as the mark of the Holy Spirit’s grace, the result to me seems to be deep bitterness and the slow turning toward atheism and a profound night of the spirit. Because if the Pope’s authority rests on that of Christ, if he discredits that authority, we have an obvious problem. Even if the Church were an absolutely human construct, it makes no sense to undermine the sources of your own legitimacy.

The power of disinformation, of deflection, and of gaslighting in the current era, and that from the highest corridors, is reaching such a height of ridiculous banality that if it were not coming from our sacred hierarchs, it would be the subject of an award-winning comedy. Perhaps it should, because comedy is a powerful and subversive tool against tyranny and deception. Laughter blows through deceit like wind through smoke. Whether it is the Vatican Communications Office photoshopping books with the autograph of Benedict XVI endorsing Pope Francis’ new works, or the embarrassing backpedaling of Cardinals Roche and Fernández to the documents they themselves approved, insisting they do not mean what they so obviously say, we are the witnesses of so much double-dealing, doublespeak, and doublethink. 1984 is here in 2024. In a Church whose dogmatic claims are based on objective truths, this sort of behavior is a fast-acting solvent to her theological and philosophical integrity and cogency.

The deepest hatreds that exist in the world come from the deepest loves that have been betrayed and perverted. The Church and her leaders are sowing some very bitter seeds right now which, if she is not careful, will reap an even worse harvest within a generation. Love and loathing are very much alive in 2024, and while the leaders of the Church keep telling us we need to be more loving and accepting toward those things which have for time immemorial been foreign to the Gospel of Christ, we feel, somewhere with supernatural vision, that they have a loathing for the Faith as handed down. When Faith is lost, it must have a counterfeit to replace it; but most people know insincerity when they see it.

I don’t like to leave essays on a negative note, so I would like to suggest positive and actionable suggestions for us in times like these. The first is to laugh. I alluded to this earlier. We “orthodox Christians”, by that I mean all Christians who literally believe the classical truths of Christianity, tend to be a pretty serious bunch, and we tend to get pretty sour when times get tough. Yet we also have more reason then most to be joyous, and even more to be hilarious. Reason and nature itself are on our side: our opponents are quite literally allied with the absurd. Perhaps they are okay with that, and perhaps some people may think this is ‘mean’, but there is a time and a place for ideas to be treated with scorn and contempt. Perhaps not always people, but certainly ideas. This includes the ideas of Bishops. Bishops almost never receive criticism that matters. There is an old saying that two things happen when a Bishop is ordained: he will never have a bad meal again, and he will never hear the truth again. And if we think that contemporary people can be tough, you haven’t read Roman graffiti, or medieval plays and songs about their own clergy. I’m not saying it’s always right, but we have a long way to go before we have crossed the line into anticlericalism.

Harden your psychology against typical informational warfare. I would consider this essential for all persons today who use the internet, especially for ‘internet natives’, who do not remember a time before the internet existed. Read Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to understand a basic construct of how leftists attack institutions. It may also be helpful to read up on the psychology of Narcissism and Borderline Personality Disorder, because a disproportionate amount of our leaders possess these traits, and deploy typical defenses and attacks against perceived ego-threats. Understand especially when the opposing party is “wagging the dog”. Traditionalists in particular have a knack for being misled and distracted by minutiae, for this ceremonial rubric or another, when in the meantime, their entire movement was eroded beneath them. Finally, returning to Saint Augustine, although it may seem beneath you, rediscover the value of the charm offensive. This is especially true when an opponent is incredibly vain. Saint Thomas Aquinas states that affability, that is, friendliness to all people, is something which we generally owe to all. Be sweet, have a winsome manner. Be a happy warrior.

Hagan lío.

¹ This is not in any way, shape, or form, an exaggeration. This exists.