You can change your opinions, even your most deeply held beliefs, but you can't change your basic personality. I was thinking about that the other day as I read one of Rod Dreher's columns. As you know if you read him much, he has a tendency to view current events as leading in a sort of apocalyptic direction, social and cultural if not cosmological. I have the same tendency, and I don't think it's healthy for me to indulge it, which was part of the reason I went for a long time without reading him at all, or only rarely. But this country does seem to be rushing toward some sort of catastrophe, and so Dreher's attempts to understand what's happening seem more interesting, and I've been reading him more often.
I have to admit that, as Dreher says of himself, I'm "attracted to narratives of decline." The funny thing, the thing I was getting at in the first sentence, is that I have tended that way while residing on opposite sides of the culture war split. As a hippie in the late '60s counterculture I was very much inclined, as were many of my compatriots, to see some sort of cataclysm on the near horizon: nuclear war, environmental collapse, and, more feverishly, a Nazi-like roundup and imprisonment of hippies, blacks, and anyone else deemed anti-American. Some people were entirely convinced that Nixon had prepared such camps and that at any moment the arrests and massacres might start. Kent State naturally was seen as the beginning of the crackdown.
Well, maybe not "entirely convinced"–it was probably closer to people scaring each other with ghost stories, while knowing in their hearts that there is no real danger. Anyway, I was very much attuned to all this, very ready to see, for instance, Nixon's drug policies as something like the darkness of Sauron descending on Middle Earth.
And now here I am on the conservative side, seeing: the sexual mania that's been building since those very same days making people more, not less, unhappy; women more enraged after forty or fifty years of feminism than they were before; hard-core pornography available to anyone, including children, at the click of a mouse; the most powerful elements of society, up to and including the government until last January, attempting to enforce an emperor's-new-clothes sort of mentality where certain fashionable sexual ideologies are concerned; the words "religious liberty" commonly put in scare quotes by the media, etc. etc.–and thinking that this is all surely going to end up in some Very Bad Place.
Obviously what these two portraits have in common is…me. I've changed some of my principles and a lot of my opinions, and am considerably older, but I'm still the same person. I do recognize this tendency in myself, and I recognize that it causes me to see current events in a negative light. And that it's not good for me to dwell too much on the things that provoke this reaction.
Nevertheless: I think we are in actual objective fact heading for some Very Bad Place as a society, and I think Rod Dreher, for all his alarmist tendencies, is right in drawing our attention to it. At this point I see the greatest danger as lying not so much in the specific questions that divide us as in the division itself. The Trump presidency is an important instance. It was the deep division, which I contend is religious, that helped to elect Trump. And now the fact that he is president is deepening the division, which is obviously partly Trump's fault. Most of the media now have abandoned any plausible pretense of neutrality and seem bent on driving Trump out of office. This in turn makes it easy for his supporters to dismiss anything the big media say as "fake news," as liberals have been doing with Fox News for a long time. The result is getting pretty close to a point where there are almost two co-existing and opposing "realities," and very little interest in closing the gap.
One contributor to this division is the tendency of many on the left to slander anyone who disagrees with them as a bigot, a racist, blah blah blah, completely shutting down any attempt at rational discussion. Dreher has often been the recipient of this, and has had several columns in recent weeks sharply and accurately describing and analyzing the practice. Here's one, "Bigot! They Cried, Yet Again". There are people on the right who are no better, of course. But few of them have the sort of range and influence–in the media, entertainment, and education–that liberalism does.
"Liberalism" is not really a good word for it, of course. It used to be that when I used that word I only felt that I had to note the difference between classical liberalism and contemporary political liberalism. Now it often seems that I should note the difference between the latter and the current thing which is often a species of bigotry. Mark Shea used to rant about "the thing that used to be conservatism." Maybe he still does. "The thing that used to be liberalism" is also an apt phrase. The two things, as in The Thing, often now seem like two very stupid and half-blind giants trying to kill each other. Sometimes it's hard for me to look away.
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In my reading of The Lord of the Rings I'm now at the point where the Ents are about to attack Isengard. The Ents are among my favorite things in the book. I would have liked to be a treeherd. I've never understood why "tree-hugger" is supposed to be an insult. I don't think I've ever hugged a tree but I can certainly understand the impulse.
It occurs to me that Tolkien in one important way resembles an author who is in most every other respect his opposite: James Joyce. Both wrote monumental and extremely complex books which are considered classics of their type, but their type is almost sui generis: I looked up that term to see if I was using it correctly, and in biology it means a species which is the only one of its genus. Both have had their imitators, I suppose–I know Tolkien has–but imitations are still essentially the same thing as the original. It seems to me that their works are, in a sense, and not in a negative sense, a dead end. By that I mean that neither left a legacy suitable for further building; each both invented and exhausted a particular approach to fiction. In each case the thing attempted is so distinctive and at the same time so nearly perfect as to leave little room for further work in the same vein.
Yes, there are many fantasy writers, and I don't know much about them, so I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong. But I doubt that any of them has created a world so vast, so detailed, and so convincing as Tolkien's, much less used it in a work of such power as The Lord of the Rings. More to the point, I doubt very many people really want to, as it requires a lifetime of work. Something similar might be said of Joyce's work. Others have used the stream-of-consciousness approach, but I don't know of any major novelists who have used it to the extent that Joyce did, or achieved something comparable to Ulysses. (As for Finnegans Wake, well, considering that very few people want to read it, there must be even fewer who would want to imitate it, and none capable of doing so.)
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One of the good things about being in the Ordinariate is that it retains (or restores) a number of good things that have been streamlined out of the standard Latin Rite liturgy and liturgical year. And one of these is the pre-Lenten season which begins with Septuagesima Sunday, the second Sunday before Lent. That was last Sunday. Today was Sexagesima. Last week I ran across this excellent piece by Amy Welborn in which she explains it. As our priest said today, it, and other lesser-known phases of the church calendar, impart a sense of flow to liturgical time that is often missing. If you pay at least some attention to this pre-Lenten time–and I admit I haven't paid very much, but more than I might otherwise have–you don't go rolling along more or less oblivious, or, if you live around here and in certain other places, going to Mardi Gras parades, only to slam into Ash Wednesday as if you've hit a wall. Or at least you're less likely to; certainly plenty of people have their own personal pre-Lent preparations.
I had never heard of the custom of burying the alleluias till I read Amy Welborn's piece, but someone at Mass mentioned it, and we may actually do it next year.
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Light On Dark Water 
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