The Difference Between Seems, ‘Tis, and ‘Tisn’t

              The Difference Between Seems, ‘Tis, and ‘Tisn’t

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/29/18

We know what Thomas Jefferson meant, so let’s not quibble too much.  But he actually was wrong when he implied that truth is “self-evident.”  In classical 18^th century prose, Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” then went on to name five truths in his famous Declaration of Independence.

            Some 1800 years before Jefferson’s day, Cicero declared, “If truth were self-evident, there would be no need for eloquence.”  Or for debate of any stripe, we might add.  Historically, people have attended debates because they wish to discern the truth about a matter and hope that debate will somehow help them hammer it out.  Some, of course, attend debates simply because they enjoy a verbal contest.

            Our current culture is proof enough that truth can be elusive, not in and of its own nature, but because so many are now trying to alter it, cloud it, or even deny it exists. 

            There are certain indisputable truths that no one can deny.  One is that everybody has a mother and a father.   Does this fact not imply that we all need a mother and father?  Do the image and the reality of a mother, a father, and a child not provide a societal nucleus, a fitting little unit of government?  Did the tribe not pre-date the state?  And did the family not pre-date the tribe?

            “Nay, not so,” says the LGBTQ lobby and its sympathizers.  A family is merely a “social construct,” a tradition.   For those who believe that, country singer George Strait has “some oceanfront property in Arizona.”

            Family-to-tribe-to-state is something that family-deniers just don’t like.  Family being mere sociology, we can re-construct or re-define it any way we wish.  Two mommies, two daddies, no mommies, no daddies - what’s the problem?

            The problem is biology, chromosomes, anatomy and physiology, and the human heart.   Those who are so bent on normalizing homosexuality, same-sex marriage, bisexuality and other such formerly unthinkable aberrations are trying to cram their aberrations down our throats.  We could say they are engaging in social constructs themselves, denying true science.  Little does it matter that for millennia, civilization has been well served by the model of a mother, a father, and a place called home.  But why does this matter?  This is the 21^st century.  Let’s try arrangements beside family, the argument goes.

            But the human heart resists.  It wants a mom and a dad and a pillow.  Consider what is happening now, all because of fatherlessness.  Today in almost every major city young men gravitate to gangs because gangs provide them a family.  Countless former gang members have so testified.  Fatherless, with single, unmarried mothers who are away at two jobs, many 14-year-old boys have sought family – not just money or drugs – in gangs.  Gangs satisfy their emotional needs.  They can become “men” fast.

            In his article, “Wanting More in an Age of Plenty,” psychologist David G. Meyers states that if one had fallen asleep in 1960 and woke up in 2000, he would be awakening to a tripled teen suicide rate, a quintupled prison population, sextupled percent of babies born to unmarried parents, sevenfold increase in cohabitation, and a soaring rate of depression ten times the pre-World War II level.  It was during that 40-year period that the sexual revolution took root, sprouted, and bore its fruit.

             Prince Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous character, argued with his mother, despairing over her quick marriage after the murder of his father.  His mother, the Queen, says to him, “All lives must die.  Why seems it so particular with thee?”

            Hamlet replies, “Seems, madam? I know not ‘seems.’ ‘Tis!”

            Unlike the brooding Hamlet who knew the difference between “seems” and “tis,” truth-deniers hold to no absolutes.  Gender is a myth, marriage is out of style, and sexuality is a mere physical characteristic, and a fluid one at that.

            G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”  As more fences fall, I wouldn’t be surprised if the grandchildren of the sixties eventually rebel against the emptiness their grandparents and parents bequeathed them and look for meaning that “free love” didn’t provide.  Offspring of a self-centered generation, they could well re-establish the loving family, one that again has fences.

 “‘Tisn’t beyond belief,” Chesterton would say.  Seeing there are no pearls in the hog pen, they might search elsewhere.

I pray for the day that a generation of youth will see exactly what their parents’ culture has led them into.  Only then will the yearning hearts of children and the confused, angry minds of teenagers be assuaged.

Roger Hines

4/25/18

Reason Fails and Enlightenment Fades

                      Reason Fails and Enlightenment Fades

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/22/18

                 Growing up without running water has tremendous instructional value.  It can teach you to appreciate water for the rest of your life.  It can also train you to conserve and never waste water or anything else.

                 Imagine what it’s like to be sparing with water, even drinking water.  Think “Little House on the Prairie” and you’ll get the picture, but don’t just think 19^th century.  For many rural Americans the absence of running water continued well into the 1960’s.

                        Let’s just say that the Industrial Revolution had not yet reached where I lived.  And I’m talking about as late as 1966 when the last chore I performed before leaving home was to haul water.  I might add that the Age of Reason and the concurrent Enlightenment sidestepped much of rural America as well, though not totally.

                 Each of these important historical periods improved the living conditions of the human race, particularly the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840).  Yes, the Industrial Revolution brought child labor, pollution, and other evils and ills, but its undergirding effect was to lighten the load of laborers.  The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment of the 18^th century freed Europeans and Americans from the superstition of the dark Middle Ages.  Their emphasis on science became the new dogma.

                 But on our way to perfecting the human race, making life easier, and elevating reason over religion, we have hit a snag.  It appears that man is not perfectible after all, and that machines, scientific theories, and ever-increasing knowledge have not helped us to love our neighbor or to control violence.

                 Our teachers and professors have told us that the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment gave us the modern world.  These two movements, however, were not just about scientific knowledge.  They encompassed philosophy and belief systems.  They denigrated faith and deified reason.  Yes, human reasoning as in the reasoning of Rousseau who elevated “the child” to angelic status, thereby influencing the field of education to this very day and rendering young 21^st century parents fearful of spanking or of any other form of much needed shock and awe discipline.

                 Yes, human reasoning such as that of the brilliant Napoleon who, seeking to destroy and then “rebuild” continental Europe, carried millions to their deaths.  Would that “the Little Corporal” had heeded the words of Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, who opined, “Never, being mortal, ought we cast our thoughts too high.”

                 Actually we moderns are casting our thoughts too low as we edge into dismissal of all things transcendent while our movers and shakers, as well as most intellectuals, editorialists, media stars, and movie makers lead the way.

                 As for elected officials, do they not see the huge, full parking lots of the mega churches, the schools, universities, hospitals, and orphanages built by people of transcendent faith, or the continuing proliferation of pregnancy centers and homeless shelters built by faith organizations?  Why don’t elected officials speak up more and louder for people of faith?   Have they been convinced that we are all secularists now?  Have they accepted secularism as the new wave just because that’s what secularists wish us to believe?

                 The Age of Reason and its modern day proponents ridicule people of simple faith as being believers in blind faith, yet theirs is a blind faith in reason, the faith that Rousseau, Napoleon, Marx, Freud, and Voltaire advanced.

                 Today’s “reason,” which is the fruit of the Enlightenment, declares war against nature (same-sex marriage, transgenderism) and declares itself “free of religion.”  But all beliefs are religion.  Secularists say, “I can declare my beliefs because they are not religious, but you can’t declare yours because they are religious.”

                 Good try, but in a way the secularists are right.  Many a local government has forbidden “religious expression” in the public square while allowing secularists free rein.

                 Where is enlightenment, where reason, where freedom, when bakers and florists are being fined for not bending to same-sex marriage?  Or when contraceptive mandates are hurled at Catholic colleges?

                 When the great Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, found refuge in America in 1974, we assumed he would turn his pen to praising American culture.  Instead, he argued that America could no longer be emulated.  In a Harvard address he asserted that Enlightenment thought had transformed Americans into materialists who saw man’s accomplishments as the measure of all things.  “Reason,” he claimed, “gave Americans control over nature and possession of riches, but shrouded her with moral poverty.”

                 No running water? No problem.  Such needs are the least of our problems.  I was rich, because the man who helped me fill the water jugs, my father, had taught his 17 children what riches really are and are not.

Roger Hines

4/18/18

American Culture: What is Its Center and Will it Hold?

         American Culture: What is Its Center and Will it Hold?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/8/18

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

             Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote these disturbing words in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I.  Yeats was rightly disturbed.  The war was over, but what was the peace like?  Countries were in shambles.  The victors were redrawing national lines.  The world was unsteady.

            At the time, America was not exactly a world power, but was rising fast.  Freedom tends to lead individuals and nations to great heights.  Industrially, America was on the move.  Culturally, the nation was no longer British-America.  A frontier people hardly over one hundred years old, we could now aptly speak of “American culture.”

            I was 20 years old before I correctly understood what “culture” means.  I thought culture was the collective term for such high-tone things as classical music, art, ballroom dancing, and elaborate architecture.  My world of Southern Gospel, cornfields, protestant Christianity, country and western music, livestock shows, and dinners on the ground surely wasn’t “culture.”  But of course it was.

            America has always been multi-cultural.  It’s more precise to say we are a nation of subcultures that are marked by interests, tastes, and geographical distinctions such as dialects.  Our regional differences, unlike so many divisive ones across Europe, have been a source of fun and jokes.  Southerners know that Yankees talk funny; Yankees know that Southerners can’t read, but they sure can write, even though they go barefooted.

            Today our nation is beset by a cultural shakiness that is both striking and dangerous.  One must ask, as did Yeats, what is our center?  What customs, values, and principles do we hold that are decidedly American and are the glue that binds us?

            Political differences are not America’s chief problem.  Who but political wonks watches all of the food fights on cable TV?  Some of us are still at work.  Television newsyness is now theater and we are not as politically divided as that theater tries to reflect.  Nor are we so racially divided.  I see good race relations several times a week.  Our common pop culture, particularly sports, unites us far more than we realize.

            There is no great divide between Americans.  In fact, what we are doing together poses a greater problem.  Together, we are surrendering all sense of cultural norms.  For instance, how many definitions are there of the word family?  How many genders are there?  How are we defining achievement?  Why does dress no longer matter?  Why have parents ceased to be self-confident authorities over their children, yielding to the view that children should be treated tenderly and youth are to be consulted?   

            No one would have asked these questions 50 years ago.  Everyone knew what a family was and why families were needed.  We knew that dress was far more about respect than it was style.  We knew that language is the dress of our thoughts and that if we talk ugly, we reveal an ugly thought world.  As for parenting, we knew that the pot does not inform the potter.

            All of these matters transcend race and socio-economic class.  In these matters we are quite unified.  Unified downward.  The majority of us are dressing down, no matter the occasion, not realizing that casualness is the enemy of excellence. Ours is a culture of narcissism, one in which the “I’s” have it.  We demand enjoyment.     

            Many preachers are leading the way with sloppy dress, in effect arguing we must become like those we wish to influence.  We’re calling graffiti “urban art;” perversion, an alternative lifestyle.  On Mondays, elementary teachers must fight Dave and Buster’s sensory overload.  High school teachers fight the mind-warping, mushy effects of television, smart phones and mall culture. 

Robert Bork says we are “slouching toward Gomorrah.”  Georgia’s Phil Kent describes current conditions as “the marks of a decadent culture.”

            Dark thoughts, I know. But we don’t dispel intellectual or cultural darkness by embracing it.  Rather, we reclaim old landmarks, resurrect sturdy values, think neighborhoods, and become good Samaritans again.  We start teaching our children well again and stop catering to them. 

            Finally, we must overcome what C.S.Lewis called “our fear of the Same Old Thing” and accept the fact that verities are verities.  “Cultural norms” may be an old-fashioned expression, but without them we travel not in a wilderness where there is some delight, but in a cultural cul-de-sac that spins us into numbness and eventual meaninglessness.

Roger Hines

4/5/18

           

Stormy Days for Evangelicals, or Not?

                     Stormy Days for Evangelicals, or Not?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Marietta Journal, 4/1/18

            Recently a friend remarked that because of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Revolution, most Americans hardly realized that the Sexual Revolution was taking place.

            During the ‘60s and early ‘70s our minds were on Martin Luther King, racial turmoil, Jane Fonda’s endorsement of our enemy, North Vietnam; and Walter Cronkite’s nightly report of our Vietnam dead.  All the while, Hugh Hefner was beginning to turn America’s sexual attitudes upside down.

            “Make love, not war” was the chant of college students around the country.  “Free love” was in the air.

            Troops returning from Vietnam, whether severely wounded or lifeless, were unheralded.  Some were spat on.  Other than Governor Ronald Reagan of California, there were few if any public officials who openly challenged the college protestors.  

             Somehow, the Civil Rights Revolution affected me more than Vietnam, as dreadful and endless as the war had become.  I had seen enough injustice to believe that Martin Luther King was sizing the picture up accurately.  Except for a few of his lieutenants who later became rank racists themselves, King’s agenda, in my estimation, was long overdue.

              In 1967-68, teaching in an all black school deepened my concern about racial injustice.  News that my college roommate had been injured in Vietnam and was on his way home created in my mind a tug of war.  When would we either win or depart this eternal Southeast Asian conflict?  But when, also, would the region I loved and grew up in acknowledge its failings and grant respect to black citizens?

            While Americans were consumed by either the Vietnam War or the civil rights struggle, Chicago’s pajama-clad Hugh Hefner continued his march toward “sexual freedom.”  His work and person received accolades from the media and, of course, from Hollywood.  Hefner was considered a liberator.  His Playboy Magazine and Playboy Mansion brought little embarrassment to a changing culture.

            Hefner’s New Morality, which Billy Graham dubbed the Old Immorality, raised such questions as “What’s wrong with the human body? Why shouldn’t we look at pictures of nude women? 

            As Playboy, Playmates, and Playboy Bunnies proliferated, so did the concerns of conservative, evangelical Christians.  While the Roaring Twenties had produced a significant break in tradition (think “flappers” – women who danced but also smoked and drank), its boldness was eclipsed by the dark clouds of World War II.  The Sizzling Sixties lingered, however, reaching deep into America’s traditional values and toppling long-held beliefs about sexuality and morality.

            Hugh Hefner should have died proud.  His soft porn led to hard porn.  AT&T loves it; movies utilize it; smart phones provide it; fortunately, Hilton Hotels have recently forsworn it.

            Yes, the Sexual Revolution is over and both sides lost.  Marriages have been diluted; homes have lost joy and unity; fifteen year olds have lost their innocence; infidelity has been ramped up.

            Why then is the media astride such a moral high horse?  Why aren’t they happy about the fruit of their friend, The Hef?  It’s true that Donald Trump has lived the Hugh Hefner life, yet his media accusers and finger pointers had no problem with the seed planter, Hefner.  For five decades he was their darling.  Today, their darlings are Hefner’s Bunnies and porn stars.  The bunnies and porn stars are OK; their former consensual partner – a playboy, the president – is not OK.  Why was this standard not held for Kennedy and Clinton who are still adored by the media?

            Evangelicals, according to certain media critics, should disengage from Trump on moral grounds.  Think about that for a moment.  (I can supply media names upon request, as though that’s needed.)

            No, evangelicals had to make a choice in the last presidential election.  Not all of us made the same choice.  Arguing, however, that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice for conservative Christians is odd in the extreme.

            As for who is consistent and who is not, why has the media obsessed over Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, having ignored Bill Clinton’s accusers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broderick?

            I for one will not allow the media or fellow evangelicals to shame me for something which five decades they ignored or gaily endorsed.

            Supporting Trump doesn’t mean that evangelicals are “trusting in princes.”  It means, among other things, that they could not support a candidate or a party that was cavalier about the unborn and who “trusted in princes” (the government) for virtually everything.

            As well as being a communicator, Trump is a clarifier.  Comfortable in his own hedonistic skin, he has laid bare the hypocrisy of his critics and revealed the forgiving spirit of his evangelical supporters.

Roger Hines

3/28/18