Monday, August 18, 2025

Diabolical modernity

Satan tempted Christ to avoid the cross, and offer us instead the satisfaction of our appetites, marvels or wonders, and political salvation – exactly what modern market economies, science, and liberal democracy promise us.  In my latest essay at Postliberal Order, I discuss Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s analysis of the diabolical, and the light it sheds on the character of the modern world.

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12 comments:

  1. Vini TadeoAugust 18, 2025 at 12:30 PM

    Judging by the title, I can already expect this to be good! Can't wait to get home after work and read it through and through!

    Thanks, Ed!

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  2. MaolsheachlannAugust 18, 2025 at 3:14 PM

    I think the liberal would argue that liberalism doesn't propose values but is purely procedural. Democracy is there to in fact discover what people want; science to achieve it most efficiently; the market because people are willing to pay for what they actually want.

    I don't believe this is an honest characterization, but it's hard to argue against.

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    1. English CatholicAugust 19, 2025 at 1:47 PM

      Liberalism is actually very easy to argue against.

      It's impossible for a government to avoid imposing values. Either burglary is wrong and worth punishing, or it isn't. Either pornography is destructive to a society and worth prohibiting, or it isn't. Either stopping employers from forcing their staff to work Sundays is a way of giving glory to God and strengthening family life and friendships and ought to be done, or it isn't.

      Liberals tend to be right about burglary, but wrong about the other two. But in either case, *someone* is imposing his "values".

      Similarly in individual judgements. If I fail to pay for work when I contracted to do so, and the judge forces me to do so, that's the imposition of a "value". If I want to put away my wife and marry a younger model, and the judge allows me to do so, that's the imposition of a "value". And so on.

      (Actually, values don't exist in some subjective realm separate from facts -- that's a false view of reality, hence the square quotes. One of the many errors of liberalism is the fact-value distinction. In reality, the values are hardwired into the facts.)

      There is no such thing as political neutrality, because politics just is the imposition of force to resolve controversial questions in a community. Liberalism's diabolical con-job is to pretend that it's neutral, and not a vision of what a society ought to be like that can be imposed by force.

      See the blogger Zippy Catholic on liberalism.

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  3. AnonymousAugust 18, 2025 at 4:01 PM

    The government should absolutely provide for those let down by the free market economic order. The U.S. is the ONLY first world capitalist country where many people don’t have a government run healthcare option available, thus leading them to have to choice between going bankrupt or getting medical care. The average American is one serious injury or illness away from total poverty.

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    1. MPAugust 19, 2025 at 3:28 PM

      No.

      That's your job (often in cooperation with others, of course), not government's.

      The Church condemns the "Social Assistance State" (see the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" and encyclical "Centesimus Annus" that it cites).

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  4. AnonymousAugust 18, 2025 at 4:56 PM

    When you say”Western Civilization” what is the criteria to be part of Western Civilization? What characteristics exclude a country or People from being part of “The West”?

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  5. AnonymousAugust 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM

    Neither revelation , natural law nor the magisterium requires we live in a democracy.
    Why not a benevolent dictatorship? Isn't virtue more important than freedom?

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    1. AnonymousAugust 19, 2025 at 6:47 AM

      Seriously? Good Lord. Virtue presupposes freedom, for starters. And the Catholic Tradition, from Aquinas on, is opposed to concentrated state power and supports democratic institutions.

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    2. ficino4mlAugust 19, 2025 at 12:55 PM

      Why not a benevolent dictatorship? Well, for starters, who will dictate to the dictator when the dictator's benevolence flags?
      Remember that Plato describes the enormous force of temptations that can turn even philosophical natures to political injustice. Aristotle teaches that, although democracy is the system that effects the least justice and good, it is also the system that effects the least injustice and evil. It's not because he drank too much that Churchill reminded the House of Commons that "Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
      I suspect that people who promote dictatorship of any kind imagine that they will be tight with the regime rather than on its enemies list. But you have no guarantee of that.

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    3. AnonymousAugust 19, 2025 at 2:01 PM

      Good Lord, indeed. Do you think democratic governments existed in the Middle Ages? In Vol 3 of The History of Christendom, Warren G. Carroll called the Middle Ages "The Glory of Christendom."
      https://sophiainstitute.com/product/the-glory-of-christendom-1100-1517/?srsltid=AfmBOool0W1EvD2efwlkLYIu5G4yj5gIAMSw3ehXOVmQ8RIz1p0FlSfz

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  6. Vini TadeoAugust 18, 2025 at 9:03 PM

    "Not that Boulter’s or Geuss’s characterizations of modernity are terribly novel or idiosyncratic. The features they identify are widely acknowledged, even if not always described in exactly the way these two writers do. But it is striking that the three features they take to be definitive of the modern world correlate exactly with the three temptations by which, on Sheen’s analysis, the Devil attempted to draw Christ away from the cross, away from redeeming us by way of suffering. In the light of Sheen’s analysis, modernity can be seen as appealing to us in precisely the diabolical way Satan urged Christ to appeal to us."

    Not only to plausibly link Fulton Sheen's analysis on the demonic activity -- and even to find parallels of the same problem not only in modern writers -- but also on a deeper analysis with the false goods that tempted Jesus... Ed, you're an intellectual treasure for this world. Period. But wait, there is more, as Ron Popeil would say:

    "Moreover, while modern people may occasionally speak sentimentally of the cross, its substance is anathema to them. As Sheen emphasizes, even in the Church today, mortification, asceticism, self-denial, and the “spirit of discipline” in general have been set aside. The remaining imperfections and disappointments of modern life are not endured patiently or acknowledged as inevitable in a fallen world, nor are they accepted as a penance, but instead are endlessly complained about and attributed to persisting injustice.

    "The modern world does not want a suffering Christ who commands us to take up our own crosses. It wants the satisfaction of every desire. It wants bold and wondrous actions. It wants political power to secure these other wants, and to dominate and neutralize any who would deny them to us. It wants what Sheen characterizes as diabolical “short cuts” around the cross."

    For some reason, these last passages kindly reminds me of TLS (even though the seriousness of the essay you wrote is very different from the tone on the book, in some parts) because the courage to say what must be said remains exactly the same as it was back then.

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  7. Vini TadeoAugust 19, 2025 at 1:48 PM

    This important discussion in the essay gave me the idea of bringing this to discussion, and I hope that's okay.

    In the essay, Ed gave very important insights about vices and disorder in the human psyche. But there is one aspect or behavior that puzzles me today. I don't know how to properly call it, but let's just call it apathy.

    When I ask people who have more experience in life than I do, they usually don't know too much about this specific phenomenon that I have in mind, but I think it is something that is relevant to say, even if my perspective is from a Gen-Zer that don't know much about life.

    The specific thing I have in mind manifests itself in these kinds of behavior: 1) indifference towards friendships or people in their lives; 2) a strange, bloodless kinda feeling towards things or people (like they don't matter sentimentally speaking); 3) and, lastly, a very overwhelming sense of indifference or dead feelings when you talk to them about deeper topics (like love, a good live or even a friendly and woried admoestation about something) -- it seems that it doesn't matter how you put your heart out (your feelings, attention, and so on), you are literally talking to a cold thing that could leave at any time.

    I saw this kind of behaviour not just in men but also in a considerable number of young women/young adult women. I think this behaviour or "disposition" is very, very bad; it seems like a total incapacity for feelings or, better yet, feeling the right things. It also feels like the folks in Dante Alighieri's poem that neither hell nor heaven wants because they seem lukewarm when it comes to things in life.

    But, the most astounding behavior of these people is that they seem unaffected and remain "happy" or comfortable regardless of having other people in their lives or not. The only thing I can know for real is that people like that cannot be really happy, as master Aristotle taught, because they cannot have true friends in their lifes, they don't know how to reciprocate, and it even seems that the possible virtues that may move their feelings is cloged into a sheer amount of nothingness and indiference.

    I would love to know more about the causes of this, like what causes this pathology in these people? Are they able to cure themselves, or is that just a vice of character that will remain throughout life? There is something we can do to help, or should we just leave? I think it is relevant to bring out this kind of behavior, because it's also part of modernity's problem (IMO).

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