Where Did We Go Wrong?

[Gilbert_Keith]

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Last night I was talking with a few Catholic men and we were trying to figure out why the world has changed so much since the 50’s, the last decade in which there was an evident hold of morality on Western Culture.

I’m not interested in pointing fingers … just trying to understand if there was a handful or a hundred reasons why our culture seems to have gone into deep spiritual decline and respect for the Gospels.

Will someone please weigh in?

 

[Eden_of_Mind]

Gilbert Keith:

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Last night I was talking with a few Catholic men and we were trying to figure out why the world has changed so much since the 50’s, the last decade in which there was an evident hold of morality on Western Culture.

I’m not interested in pointing fingers … just trying to understand if there was a handful or a hundred reasons why our culture seems to have gone into deep spiritual decline and respect for the Gospels.

Will someone please weigh in?

Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.

• Ecclesiastes 7:10

 

[steve99]

Wow! That’s a big question and I expect everyone will have their own, and probably contradictory theories. I suspect there are many different strands to this, but I’ll lob in a few thoughts.

Firstly I think the Church in the fifties and before (at least here in England) was very rigid and stultifying, and defensive. I think this was partly a result of the Reformation and the suppression of Catholicism here. But I suspect the problem was world wide. The Church was very clericalised, and the role of the laity was seen as to turn up, to shut up and to pay up. The Church was unprepared for the massive changes in society that were already happening, but accelerated rapidly in the sixties and onwards.

I think this is what Vatican II was trying to address. The Bishops recognised that the Church needed to adapt to the modern world and to engage more with it. Unfortunately I don’t think it has managed this well enough. The world has changed so fast. I guess there will be some who will say that if the Church had not changed all would have been well, but personally I doubt it.

I think faith was probably not well rooted, and although there were a lot going to church, it was more of a folk thing – something we just did.

Ireland has always been seen as solidly catholic and strong in the faith, but the drop in church attendance and vocations there has been massive over recent years. That seems to me to show a lack of depth in the faith that was there.

Jesus gave the parable of the sower, and we can easily see two of the conditions he mentioned there. The seed that fell on rock – the people who have no root to their faith; and the seed that fell among thorns - the people who are choked by the worries and riches of the world. And in the west we have become hugely richer than we ever were before. Even children now have mega buying power.

 

[Mickey]

Gilbert Keith:

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Last night I was talking with a few Catholic men and we were trying to figure out why the world has changed so much since the 50’s, the last decade in which there was an evident hold of morality on Western Culture.

I’m not interested in pointing fingers … just trying to understand if there was a handful or a hundred reasons why our culture seems to have gone into deep spiritual decline and respect for the Gospels.

Will someone please weigh in?

Many reasons–and the father of lies is behind them all. Consumerism may be the root of all spiritual blindness. Our children are targeted and brain-washed from an early age by commercialism. “Mommy I want this… Daddy I need this…” And the parents relent without thinking of the resulting harm. There is not much wholesome television anymore. Everything is bordeline pornography, violence, and cursing. Even some of our television commercials would have been classified as x-rated 50 years ago. And it’s not just our media–it’s the general attitude of our society. What happened to our conscience?
Some of the Church Fathers speak of a term called, “remembrance of death”. We should take this to heart. We should stop acting like we will never die from this worldly existence. One thing that is 100% for certain, is that we are going to die! If society could keep this at the forefront of their brains, perhaps there would be more accountability, moral responsibility, and awareness of who we are and where we are going. We need to stop and look around–embrace one another–love one another. Christ is the only way. This lifetime is but a speck of sand in a vast ocean–eternity is forever! Get to know and love your Savior. He already knows and loves you!

Sorry for the lecture.

 

[Contarini]

Gilbert Keith:

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Last night I was talking with a few Catholic men and we were trying to figure out why the world has changed so much since the 50’s, the last decade in which there was an evident hold of morality on Western Culture.

I’m not interested in pointing fingers … just trying to understand if there was a handful or a hundred reasons why our culture seems to have gone into deep spiritual decline and respect for the Gospels.

Will someone please weigh in?

I think that nostalgia for the 50s is a mistake. In my opinion the mid-20th century was perhaps the darkest period in human history, and things have actually gotten better since then. But in the 50s more traditional ways of living and thinking still hung on in small towns and rural communities, so people mistakenly think that the zeitgeist of that decade was traditional and moral. The intelligentsia, though, were fundamentally atheistic, and beyond that were cynical, materialistic, and amoral. What happened in the 60s was that the children of this soulless technocracy revolted against the materialism of their parents, but in the process swept away the veneer of traditionalism behind which the demonic forces of midcentury had sheltered. This was tragic, but in a sense it cleared the slate. The thing is not to try to go back to the 40s or 50s, but rather to go forward by living out the Gospel and challenging the idols of our own age while learning to work with its more idealistic elements.

That’s my read anyway. The 60s didn’t destroy an idyllic society. The revolts of the 60s were justified, but the rebels had nothing to put in the place of what they destroyed, precisely because they were steeped in the anti-traditionalism of their parents and teachers.

Catholicism is poised to play a unique role in our society, because Catholics (together with Orthodox, and to a lesser extent traditional Protestants such as myself) preserve the memory of real tradition. Traditional Christians have a basis on which to challenge materialistic technocracy on the one hand and self-indulgent neopagan spirituality on the other. We are in a position to defend reason against the postmodernists and to defend mystery and myth against the technocrats. We just need to have the courage of our convictions, and to be willing to be independent of all social fads, even those that might seem to work in our favor.

Edwin

 

[buffalo]

The answer is here - Liberalism is a Sin - Read this book you will be amazed.

Liberalism is the root of heresy, the tree of evil in whose branches all the harpies of infidelity find ample shelter; it is today the evil of all evils. (Ch. 4). “The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Ch. 26).

Liberalism “is, therefore, the radical and universal denial of all divine truth and Christian dogma, the primal type of all heresy, and the supreme rebellion against the authority of God and His Church. As with Lucifer, its maxim is, ‘I will not serve.’” (Ch. 3).

“Liberalism, whether in the doctrinal or practical order, is a sin. In the doctrinal order, it is heresy, and consequently a mortal sin against faith. In the practical order, it is a sin against the commandments of God and of the Church, for it virtually transgresses all commandments. To be more precise: in the doctrinal order, Liberalism strikes at the very foundations of faith; it is heresy radical and universal, because within it are comprehended all heresies. In the practical order it is a radical and universal infraction of the divine law, since it sanctions and authorizes all infractions of that law.” (Ch. 3).

 

[steve99]

I agree with much of the above.

A few more thoughts:

 Why do we go to Mass? There are external drives and internal drives.

External drives would include being physically taken (e.g. small children); being ordered/ persuaded/cajoled/bribed (teenagers and young adults); social pressure (what everyone does).

Internal drives would include fear of committing mortal sin; habit and the proper reason – because we desire to go to worship God, receive Jesus in Holy Communion and express our love for God.

In the past the external drives and negative internal ones probably put large numbers of bums on pews. But once these faded away as society changed the numbers dropped dramatically. The internal desire for God was not there.

By the sixties the Church had grown complacent and had been building on sand, relying on the inertia and social drives. And when the deluge came the house crumbled; the deluge of secularism, of materialism, of wealth, of challenge to authority. There were in many cases no good internal drives to keep people going. Faith was shallow. Many mature adults continued to go through old habits and the old fear of mortal sin by not going. But there was little understanding of the Mass and no strong internal desire to pass on to their children.

So the children inherited neither the old negative external/ internal drives (or rejected them) not the good internal drive. As the external pressure from parents weakened, particularly as they left home, they found no reason left to go.

So many of us parents have failed our children. But we could not pass on what we did not have. It is said that faith is caught not taught. But we had nothing for them to catch.

I know this applies to me. By the time I left school I was a practicing agnostic, and though I would go to church on Sunday, firstly because my parents expected me to, and later to take my wife as she doesn’t drive, I had no faith. It is only in more recently years that I have found faith again (through the Charismatic Renewal) and am trying to deepen my relationship with God.

I think the bigger question is where do we go from here? How do we responmd to the changes in technology, social mores, the effects of drugs, alcohol, pornography etc on our society. But I don’t want to divert this thread into that.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

*The answer is here - Liberalism is a Sin - Read this book you will be amazed.
*
I’ve had this book in my garage for years … got it at a yard sale. I’ll find it and give it another look.

Thanks,
Gilbert

 

[JimG]

Contarini:

What happened in the 60s was that the children of this soulless technocracy revolted against the materialism of their parents, but in the process swept away the veneer of traditionalism behind which the demonic forces of midcentury had sheltered. This was tragic, but in a sense it cleared the slate.

Well, some of the 60’s flower children went out and started communes in the mountains, but they didn’t seem to become less materialistic or less narcissistic.

Now, the land they bought and the houses they built in the mountain communes have quintupled in price and they are all rich. When the Vietnam war ended, they felt safe to rejoin society. Now they’ve built new houses, and gone back to school and become lawyers, and have all the latest gadgets.

I don’t see less materialism among them, but more.

(If you don’t mind adding a bit to their newfound wealth, this book makes an interesting read.

 

[Contarini]

Jim,

I think these are very good points. Unquestionably the idealistic goals of the “flower children” largely withered. My point is simply that our ills go a lot farther back than the 60s. I don’t know if there is a single point at which we can say the decline began (the Depression? The Civil War/Gilded Age–for the U.S. at least? The Industrial Revolution? The Enlightenment? The Reformation? Or perhaps even older developments?). Or is there even a decline? Is it simply that each generation is immoral in a different way than its predecessors?

I would still maintain that on the whole there is less cynicism and naked admiration of power and wealth today than I see in the literature of, say, 50 years ago. I was just reading C. S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms (for a book group I’m part of). And while in some ways (as my wife pointed out) his writings reflect a calmer and less pagan world, in other ways it’s the reverse. In one passage he tells his readers that in conversation with worldly people they can expect to hear cruelty praised as a lack of sentimentality, and so on and so forth. I’ve hung out with some fairly godless academics, and I haven’t encountered quite the kind of attitude he describes. I don’t think hardness and materialism are glorified quite as they were in his day. At least not among the liberal intelligentsia (I won’t vouch for the corporate world). But then that was his milieu as it is to some degree mine.

Edwin

 

[JimG]

Well, it may be that each generation has its own immoralities. But I feel constrained to put in a few good words for the ‘50’s since, growing up during that era, I didn’t particularly note that “hardness and materialism” were being glorified. Now, perhaps among the elite or the great Gatsby’s of the time, that was the case, but I didn’t see it in my own world. (The elite of our own time are strikingly and unapologetically materialistic.)

The 50’s (and 40’s and earlier) did have its own particular immoralities: Discrimination was rampant. Blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and weren’t allowed in white restaurants. Jim Crow, and housing and job discrimination had real and deleterious effects. At the same time, black families were largely intact; and that is no longer the case. Somehow, in saving the black family, we have managed to destroy it.

But we’re working on the white family as well. Among my classmates in elementary and high school, there were no pregnancies, no STD’s. Actually, there was no sex. But then, there isn’t supposed to be any among school children, is there? It wasn’t that some boys didn’t try. It was mainly that girls uniformly and universally said no. Second base, if not first, was their limit. Parents simply did not worry about their kids having sex, because it didn’t happen. Now, it seems, parents expect their children to have sex, and make sure that they have protection.

Divorce was a rarity. Nobody I knew or any of their friends had parents who were divorced. Ronald Reagan divorced Jane Wyman and it nearly killed his career.

If anybody wanted pornography, it took a lot of work to find it. You’d have to ask some sleazy guy in the back corner of a bookstore located in remote part of town. It’s kind of hard to be constantly tempted by lust in that sort of environment.

We played Sorry or Monopoly instead of Grand Theft Auto, and watched Doris Day movies.

(But maybe that Monopoly was an ominous sign of the corporate culture.)

And we spent a lot of time outside, because there were only three TV channels, with not much on. Before 6am and after midnight you could only get the test pattern. Lucille Ball was about as racy as the programming got.

Our parents let us walk or take our bikes anywhere in the city without supervision, and without knowing where we were at all times. Because no matter where we went, there were adults who would make sure we didn’t get into trouble. And the city was pretty much safe anywhere.

But there’s no doubt—things were beginning to go bad. With contraception came promiscuity, divorce, abortion, and family breakups. Hugh Hefner found that naked women could be successfully marketed, and everybody else including advertisers got on that bandwagon.

Porn producers found big profits in video, internet, and pay-per-view.

Cable channels found that kids could be profitably marketed.

Sex educators found that increasing sexual promiscuity could create a big demand for their services.

On the other hand, we are more compassionate now. Aren’t we?

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Not to mention that in the 50’s there was no such things as kids killing other kids, drugs being sold in the schoolyard, abortions by the million each year, gays demanding the right to marry each other, Anglican women made bishops, an Anglican gay priest, living openly in sin, consecrated a bishop. many mainline Protestant churches now empty, many Catholics no longer believing in the True Presence, Catholics rarely if ever going to confession, the horror show of pedophile priests, the Catholic Church openly mocked and satirized in public forums (this latter well deserved, I’m afraid!)

No, I think something did happen in the 50’s that had not happened before in our culture … a shock wave of sorts that ripples through our own time. I’m not sure exactly what. The spirit of liberalism, as one poster noted, did definitely rise and eclipse many largely conservative principles. But why was that possible? Was it the rise of wealth and general prosperity? Does materialism of necessity produce a decline in morals and spirituality? As one poster pined, how do we get back, if ever, to basic principles? Or is the culture war we are in likely to last well beyond our own time?

 

[Mickey]

JimG:

Well, it may be that each generation has its own immoralities. But I feel constrained to put in a few good words for the ‘50’s since, growing up during that era, I didn’t particularly note that “hardness and materialism” were being glorified. Now, perhaps among the elite or the great Gatsby’s of the time, that was the case, but I didn’t see it in my own world. (The elite of our own time are strikingly and unapologetically materialistic.)

The 50’s (and 40’s and earlier) did have its own particular immoralities: Discrimination was rampant. Blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and weren’t allowed in white restaurants. Jim Crow, and housing and job discrimination had real and deleterious effects. At the same time, black families were largely intact; and that is no longer the case. Somehow, in saving the black family, we have managed to destroy it.

But we’re working on the white family as well. Among my classmates in elementary and high school, there were no pregnancies, no STD’s. Actually, there was no sex. But then, there isn’t supposed to be any among school children, is there? It wasn’t that some boys didn’t try. It was mainly that girls uniformly and universally said no. Second base, if not first, was their limit. Parents simply did not worry about their kids having sex, because it didn’t happen. Now, it seems, parents expect their children to have sex, and make sure that they have protection.

Divorce was a rarity. Nobody I knew or any of their friends had parents who were divorced. Ronald Reagan divorced Jane Wyman and it nearly killed his career.

If anybody wanted pornography, it took a lot of work to find it. You’d have to ask some sleazy guy in the back corner of a bookstore located in remote part of town. It’s kind of hard to be constantly tempted by lust in that sort of environment.

We played Sorry or Monopoly instead of Grand Theft Auto, and watched Doris Day movies.

(But maybe that Monopoly was an ominous sign of the corporate culture.)

And we spent a lot of time outside, because there were only three TV channels, with not much on. Before 6am and after midnight you could only get the test pattern. Lucille Ball was about as racy as the programming got.

Our parents let us walk or take our bikes anywhere in the city without supervision, and without knowing where we were at all times. Because no matter where we went, there were adults who would make sure we didn’t get into trouble. And the city was pretty much safe anywhere.

But there’s no doubt—things were beginning to go bad. With contraception came promiscuity, divorce, abortion, and family breakups. Hugh Hefner found that naked women could be successfully marketed, and everybody else including advertisers got on that bandwagon.

Porn producers found big profits in video, internet, and pay-per-view.

Cable channels found that kids could be profitably marketed.

Sex educators found that increasing sexual promiscuity could create a big demand for their services.

On the other hand, we are more compassionate now. Aren’t we?

Great post Jim. What a wake up call!!!

 

[1tabledotcom]

Interestingly enough, this was brought up to me two days ago. This is what someone told me, which I thought was interesting…

If you look at the “conservative right” politically and weight it with what was considered “moderate” in the fifties, you will see that they are the same. In fact, moderates from the fifties basically held true to their course.

So what does this mean?

It means the left moved farther left, pushing the moderate of the fifties to the right. I see this everywhere I go, in conversations, in bookstores, on television where people like Bill Maher think its appropriate to say that if you believe in God you are an idiot.

It seriously is making me sick.

 

[LSK]

There was an honest need to look at how traditional roles might have been co-opted to use as means to keep people from growing. But, and I know this will seem simplistic, I think we ‘threw the baby out with the bath water’.

Women who were abused and neglected were told they didn’t need men at all, rather than helped to stand up and say “I am a reflection of God’s creation, a daughter of Christ ( or a daughter of the One God) and I am worthy of respect and love”.

Children who were abused and neglected were told to defend themselves at all costs rather than regarded as precious gifts from God to be nurtured and loved and provided for by adults.

Men who were good, solid, loving men were somehow handed the ‘sins of their fathers’ in that they were held responsible for the horrors, neglect and abuse done by the minority. Instead of “these actions done by men are wrong” they heard “men are bad and irrelevant”.

Again, I know I am being very simplistic and general in my thoughts today. I remember what it was like to be the daughter of a man who walked out on his wife and children and to be horribly teased by the children in my Catholic school because my parents were ‘divorced’. My mother was made to feel that somehow she was to blame for my father’s sinfullness. I know there are men who were left by their wives in the sixties to “find themselves” and I would bet they were handed the same message. It is only recently that the Church has acknowledged these wonderful people - people like my Mom and the man in my neighborhood who was left by his wife to raise five children on his own. Both he, and my mother, ended up divorced (civilly) but never remarried, raised their children in the Church, told us kids to ignore the taunts and offer up our pain to Jesus. Years later, when I had to come to terms with my own sinful life my Mother’s teachings were what brought me back to the Bride of Christ.

I think there was so much upheaval due to the horrors of WWII and Korea, then Vietnam, so much upheaval do to the availability of birth control so women “could be free of responsibility, just like men”, and so much GOOD change (civil rights, voting responsibiities, the Peace Corp, etc) that we are just now starting to find our ways back to a good, solid, life.

 

[space_ghost]

…growing up in the fifties… i was there,… isn’t that when it was ok to lynch black people and not get much more than a slap on the wrist.?

… i appreciate the spirit and intent of your thread, but there were lots of lousy things about the “good-ole-days”…

…we didn’t have CNN to bring us up to snuff on what was happening…

yes, there were a lot of good things about that decade…

Peace:thumbsup:

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

*…growing up in the fifties… i was there,… isn’t that when it was ok to lynch black people and not get much more than a slap on the wrist.?
*
I was there too. You remember something I don’t remember. Sounds more like the 20’s and 30’s when the KKK was on the ramage in the South.

I’m not saying the fifties were a golden age. I’m just saying it seems to me that something snapped in the fifties … and there has been a real downward spiral in public morals and respect for religion ever since.

 

[SnorterLuster]

I was born in 1947, so my childhood was throughout the 50s. The biggest change I can see between then and now is the participation of women in the workplace.

I don’t want to claim that women working is the reason for the decline in morals, but it is maybe a factor. I went to Catholic grade school and I cannot think of one classmate whose mother worked. Likewise, the Protestant mothers in my neighborhood stayed at home. Today, looking at my neighborhood, I don’t think there is a stay at home mom in the block.

Just a thought. My own thought is Social Security killed the family but that is food for another meal.

 

[oldfogey]

There used to be a fellow named Barry Farber on the radio at night, who made a lot of sense. He often said that living in New York in the fifties he sensed a turn, a cultural shift, among the elite of the city. He used to, I think, say he could almost date it to about 1957-1958. Nothing was ever the same after that, and the new outlook (call it secular if you like) then permeated the media including the newspapers, arts, radio, TV, etc. He said if you looked at our society before and after then, that everything had been turned upside down, and you could not deny that something fundamental to our society had been sundered. Farber was a keen observer of that period, knew a lot of the personalities involved, and was very firm that a lot of the changes for the worse that we have seen happen were born and propogated in that mileu. I am not saying that something just happened in a few days in New York in 1958, but it does seem that the modernist outlook blossomed here then.

One thought of my own relates to something Bishop Sheen said on one of his programs. (As an aside, if the fifties were so complacent, why was Sheen so popular? Actually listen to him again, please, and tell me if he makes you feel complacent.) Anyway, he was talking about Capitalism versus Communism, and one point he made was that if we used material comfort to prove our superiority over Communism, then we will have lost. He said our aim should be that our society is better at nuturing the soul and human dignity, but if we equated success with material superiority, then we will have palyed right into the Marxist’s hands.

Which justification did we as a society eventually make, the materialistic or the spiritual? Moral values have less and less influence in the US (but more than Europe), while economic pragmatic considerations are the prime drivers of the society.

I remember it as a much more nurturing time because their were shared values, that is, we were a culture. I had Protestant friends, Jewish friends and my Catholic friends, and knew their families. We all lived together in the neighborhood, repected our differences, but also knew that we shared basic values about the sanctity of life, the family, how everyone should be treated, what was right and what was wrong.

 

[Mickey]

oldfogey:

Anyway, he was talking about Capitalism versus Communism, and one point he made was that if we used material comfort to prove our superiority over Communism, then we will have lost. He said our aim should be that our society is better at nuturing the soul and human dignity, but if we equated success with material superiority, then we will have palyed right into the Marxist’s hands.

This hits the nail directly on the head. Capitalism can be as morally and spiritually corrupt as communism if it is implemented in a purely secular and material form.