Don't get your hopes up
2022 is going to see continued civilizational decline on every imaginable front
I’m not going to deny the possibility that my outlook is clouded by a year that’s been personally marked by
a diagnosis of polycystic kidney disease which means those organs’ 50 percent functioning capacity must not dip further, no easy task when the various combinations of medicines I’m on for it cause complications (the latest: soreness in both breasts from spironolactone, which I’ve been off of for two months now)
a hip replacement surgery gone awry, necessitating a second surgery to clean out an infection, which turned out to be MRSA
an allergic reaction to the first antibiotic for MRSA I was prescribed
my brother-in-law’s death by heart attack behind the wheel of his truck - an end that was only discovered after he’d gone missing for six days
my sister-in-law’s death on the operating table from an ovaries-removal procedure gone awry
my sister’s stage-four cancer diagnosis; she continues to live at home, but her challenges steadily mount
my wife and I finishing the year quarantining and reeling from COVID symptoms
So, yes, granted, my ability to bounce out of bed and greet the world with pep and goodwill has faced occasional dampenings.
But I’m presently more concerned with the world we all inhabit, the lay of the land as we - citizens of our towns, states and nations, inhabitants of something still quaintly referred to as Western civilization - collectively transition from one spent year into one that is a tabula rasa, but which, experience tells us, is going to present fresh forms of deep-seated problems we’ve lived with for a long time.
Let’s start with the state of what until recently had been the conventional notion of what a family is. The marriage rate in post-America is the lowest since the US government began keeping records in 1867. In the early 1950s, 80 percent of households were headed by married couples; it’s fallen to 49.
There is a considerable swath of people who, having become so ate up with the fierce defiance of nature’s architecture and determination to invent themselves, even to the point of declaring themselves “non-binary,” would respond with “so what’s the big deal? People will be into what they will be into.”
Well, the big deal is that, as with so many collective cultural decisions we’ve made over the past 500 years, we’re stepping onto entirely unprecedented terrain, embarking on ways of being for which there is no lodestar. There are no rules, and, within this context, no reason for having any rules. Then there is the matter of where an individual turns to find loyalty, guidance, esprit de corps, goodwilled humor, compassion and a listening ear. The family used to fill that role.
The reaction to this assertion from embittered quarters is going to be “Tell it to the millions of beaten wives and children throughout history who were ostensibly in family environments where one was supposed to be able to find safety, loyalty, compassion, humor and all that fun stuff.”
Which leads us to the next indicator of our present state. Christianity as a cultural influence is in free fall. A third of post-Americans consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or among those for whom metaphysical questions are of negligible importance. The percentage of self-identifying Christians (and, for purposes of the study from which this data is drawn, that term includes Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Christians) has declined from 75 to 63 in the space of a decade.
Again, a certain type of cynic / nihilist / ideological militant will respond, “What does one expect when the most visible figures and institutions within Christianity have given themselves over to cult worship of the most ridiculous, harmful, narcissistic, cruel and shallow president in the country’s history?”
Fair point. There’s a very strong argument that institutional Christianity has done this to itself. In much the same fashion as, on a political level, the Republican Party has served notice to the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger that they are not welcome in its ranks, even though the party’s most cartoonishly Trumpist elected officials are shoo-ins for reelection in their Congressional districts, the likes of Russell Moore and Beth Moore have been driven out of the Southern Baptist Conference.
So was granting the White House and House and Senate majorities to the party that embodies our nation’s turn toward secularization, identity-politics militancy, climate alarmism, government pervasiveness and disregard of America’s world-stage obligations a good idea?
The record would indicate otherwise. US retreat from Afghanistan was a humiliation that still reverberates. Twelve of the nation’s largest cities are experiencing record homicide rates. The head of the Los Angeles police union advises would-be visitors to stay away. Inflation didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of Democrat antipathy toward human advancement (or, as the antipathy’s most forthright spokespersons call it, “Appropriative Man [seeking] to dominate nature.") Within months after taking office, Biden nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline and gave his imprimatur to the Nordstream Pipeline from Russia to Germany. Energy prices went up, to no one’s surprise, and modern life doesn’t happen without reliable, inexpensive energy.
Trust in news media has fallen to 36 percent. This is a long-simmering set of circumstances. Models are changing and traditional media forms find it more challenging to get advertisers. Cable news outlets of both the right-and-left-leaning variety know that their audiences are getting older and more hardened in their confirmation biases, so they book guests and structure shows accordingly. But, although I haven’t come across any studies dealing with this, I daresay that the sybaritic atmosphere in news operations of all stripes is a factor in this disillusionment. Again, this state of affairs (pun quite possibly intended) has been developing for some time, through the firings of Charlie Rose, Les Moonves, Ed Henry, Matt Lauer, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Chris Cuomo to the fresh revelations about two CNN producers attempting to lure teenage girls into sexual activity. There’s a growing sense among post-Americans that we’re getting our information about key developments affecting daily life from Plato’s Retreat.
And what such developments merit our attention on the cusp of 2022?
May I present for consideration the likelihood that Russia is going to present the West with, at least, hard choices, and possibly a grim done deal regarding Ukraine, or that China is going to do likewise regarding Taiwan? We don’t get to set the timetable for facing these situations.
So what are some of the ways by which we can deal with our present juncture?
Well, there are sports and porn. Some pair of NFL teams is going to go to the Super Bowl. Emotionally investing in one will consume some mental energy that otherwise might go to anxiety. There is also an endless stream of photos and videos of attractive nude people on the Internet, posing solo or engaging in any kind of sexual activity you can imagine. Consuming some of that can easily eat up several hours of a day.
How about movies and music? People don’t seem to be getting too excited about the film industry’s 2021 output. The West Side Story remake that garnered such critical acclaim collapsed out of the box-office starting gate. The one movie that did break ticket-sales records was yet another sequel-of-a-sequel about yet another comic-book character. That seems to be about the best we can do - preoccupying ourselves with a pop-culture art form that was invented with the understanding that the demographic consuming it was going to outgrow it. And music? This one really dismays me. People whose views I otherwise respect have been chiming in recently on social media about how much they liked albums released this year by Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey and Kanye West. Are you kidding me? These people are so obviously terminally bored, burnt out on the excess and aimlessness of their dismal lives, that it strikes me as toxic to engage with their “music” one second longer than is needed to get its essence.
A lot of people are finding “meaning” in picking an ideological side and pouring themselves into the crusade to defend it. They’ll take any person or phenomenon on the societal radar - Anthony Fauci, the local school board, election results, tornado outbreaks - and make it a rallying cry. The most ate-up of this type make occupations out of it, starting fundraising organizations that send out emails with cranked-to-eleven urgency-inducing headers appealing to the recipient’s desire to be an agent of rescue for America.
There is one very different option available to us.
My sister is after me to find a new church home. She’s not wrong that finding somewhere to find a pew and worship collectively as part of the bride of Christ is very important. And I do visit various churches when I’m able. (It’s an irregular thing; see above litany of health issues.) But even after checking out the most compelling of them, I’m left with the sense that it’s a place that cannot resist the tide.
Quite obviously, the Lord and the truth of His word are not going anywhere. Not everyone views it in those terms (see above Christianity stats), but I find a common theme among those who came to Christian faith on their own as adults: It got to a point at which there was no escaping it. All possible refutations of the centrality of Christ to everything had been dealt with, and the only remaining thing to do was say yes.
Right now, I’m not going anywhere, of course. I’m quarantining until early January. But I find that, all in all, for all the aspects of this world herein discussed, I do have a core confidence. That maybe surprises me a little. I’m traditionally inclined to get bent out of shape over circumstantial snapshots of my present moment. But 2021 was, like it surely was for many of you, a crucible that had me find the source of my true strength. Eternity is a real and serious thing, people. It matters far more than most of this ephemeral folly we preoccupy ourselves with.
If I have a wish for 2022, it’s that we might take eternity more seriously.
Did you watch "Don't Look Up"?
Wishing us all a healthy and happy 2022 and clearer discernment, especially on spiritual matters which are what matter in the end.