The Devout Life

Read this today:

 "After the Eclipse, Western society went mad. It was a society stood on its head. All its values were inverted. The things sane socieies loved, it hated. The things sane societies hated, it loved; the things sane societies tried to do, it tried to avoid; the things sane societies tried to avoid, it did with relish.

It pursued chaos and hated order, it worshipped ugliness and loathed beauty. If sane people wished to dress as neatly and well as they could, these people were persuaded to dress as hideously and grotesquely as possible; if sane people wanted music to be melodious, these people (whether we are speaking of their 'popular' or their 'serious' music) were cozened into believing they liked raucous and tuneless noise. If women had been feminine, if home life had been secure, if children had been innocent, if men had been gallant, if art had been beautiful, if love had been romantic, then all these things must be stood on their heads.

Of course, normal life before the Eclipse was not always like that. Of course things had often fallen short of their ideals, or even of their minimal norms; but at least most people tried to do things properly and at least the surrounding civilisation encouraged them to try. Never before had the deliberate aim been an inverted parody of all that should be. Everywhere after the Eclipse, in every area of life, a single principle reigned: inversion; the worship of chaos; the creed of the madhouse."

And Jeff's manifesto too:

Traditionalists are often caricatured as sentimentalists hankering for a Golden Age that never was...

The old days were better days. We didn’t need William Bennett’s famous Index of Cultural Indicators to tell us this. We know this because we know the character of our grandparents and great-grandparents and their respective generations, we’ve read the old literature, we’ve prayed the old devotions, we’ve worshipped with the old liturgy, we’ve heard the old music, we’ve sung the old songs, we’ve admired the old artistry, we’ve seen the old craftsmanship, and we’ve marveled at the old architecture. In short, a few of us have been blessed with an education beyond what is allowed by today’s official indoctrination.

That education has been scattershot and inadequate, but it has been enough to thoroughly discredit the modernist experiment presently being shoved down our throats. It doesn’t matter what field you choose. Read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and then watch reruns of the Bush-Kerry debates on television. Read the complex sentence structure and advanced vocabulary of an old newspaper article and compare it with the amateurish fourth-grade journalism of today. Read the letters your great-grandfather wrote to your great-grandmother, and compare it with the electronic “IM courtship” of today’s youth. Peruse the plays and music and entertainments of the past and compare them with the unprecedented vulgarity of today’s rock music and reality shows.

Compare Life Magazine of 1945 with People Magazine of 2005. Compare the architecture of the oldest church in your town with the newest church in your town. Compare the oldest photographic portraits in your family with the newest portraits in your family. Compare the garden hoe your grandfather used (which lasted 50 years) with the garden hoe you bought last year and have already replaced.

The old days were better days.