Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

After WWII, if America became a beacon, what we did we could somewhat justify to ourselves because our way of life represented freedom. When we defended others, as a superpower, we intended to be on the side of right.

However, that short historical era came to an end starting in the early to late 1960’s when assassinations rocked our country. After that, postmodernism, with its relativism, secularization, deliberate irrationality defying Enlightenment thought, and subjective emotionalism tore our culture from its rudders, and we began to sink into the totalitarian mire of progressivism.

This is where Anthony Esolen finds us in his new book: Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture.

Esolen begins by telling the story of an old rectory he is involved in renovating. He and the other renovators took up the old carpet and tile, expecting to find the sub-floors. Instead, they found plywood. They took up the plywood and found beautiful oak and maple flooring laid in artistic and intricate patterns that illustrated the craftsmanship of the original builders. The plywood is the sign of our decline and we see it, drab, even in our churches, and hear it in some homilies.

Education is big for Esolen. We have grammar schools that teach very little grammar and teachers that teach only toward a myopic, standardized test. We have high schools, where the first seeds of entitlement are sown and traditional American values come under attack. And then we have institutions of higher education making the news almost daily with constant stories of protest, fueled by entitlement, mixed with deliberate irrationality, yielding full-blown chaos.

The Safe Place utopian imaginary reality at this level has led students to believe that the world is their silly putty, malleable to their whims. I don’t think the North Koreans, the Iranians, or Russia see it that way.

Esolen was personally involved in an incident that illustrated problems with higher education. Providence College, a Catholic institution in Rhode Island, run by – dare I say it, Dominicans – began to establish policies on diversity, which Esolen called the “Totalitarian Diversity Cult”. Students signed petitions against him, and the President, Fr. Brian Shanley, O.P., supported the students, essentially isolating Esolen. As a Dominican myself, I want to point out that we are Domini Canis, which means “Dogs of God,” or watchdogs of orthodoxy, not purveyors of secular postmodern progressive multiculturalism.

Thus, Esolen was out by the very reason that American education has always sought – academic freedom. These attitudes form the basis of our cultural decline and need to be addressed and adjusted to begin the process of rebuilding.

Esolen has the audacity to also want to return to clear gender boundaries, essential to the understanding of the basic unit of all society – the family. No where does this clarity seek or even suggest a return to gender dominance, even though, for whatever reason, patriarchy works more efficiently than matriarchy. I’m sure this will get the postmodern progressives up in proverbial arms.

His next issue is with human work. We’ve become slaves to the consumerist culture and lost the sanctity of work. Esolen writes: “The free man obeys God. The slave is animated by lust, ambition, covetousness, servile cowardice, and envy.” Human work is brought down to the level of slavery by these things, and we lose the value of our work and its place in creation. Craftsmanship is lost in the consumerist culture, and ours was a nation of great craftsmen. To regain the beauty of work, we need to emphasize its qualities.

This leads us into play and the crushing weight of technological advancement that keeps us away from it. In poor scenarios, Esolen noted, we see children at play, without smartphones and tablets. They play simple games or sports in which the rules must be tailored and understood. Children learn to connect with one another and become social, which is necessary for a properly-functioning culture. No one ever learned this staring into a smartphone.

Finally, Esolen provides us with the image of the polis, the Greek social form of immediate government, something defined as one of the principles of Church Social Doctrine – subsidiarity. In the polis, all free citizens were involved in some way or another; politics was a central issue of their lives. Now, we hand things over to a centralizing government and look at law and structure in that way, forgetting completely the notion of government “for the people and by the people. With this forgetting, our culture collapses.

This is a book that tells it like it is, I’m sure to the chagrin of any postmodern progressive who might accidentally read it.

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, By Anthony Esolen, Publisher: Regnery Publishing, Length: 256 pages

Release Date: January 30, 2017, ISBN: 978-1621575146, Order from: Regnery Publishing