We were in a work meeting, and someone on the team decided to show a pic from a recent personal trip. The photo in question was set in one of those valleys that John Ford brought to movies and the world, with its properly set horizon line. Oh, the photo! In it, there were two people: an overly educated, childless white woman and an irrelevant estrogen-drunk someone else. Both of them had their backs to us and were sitting in a namaste pose, very properly sheepish and adequate to the stadnrds of today, now this second . Our world in a photo!
As Cardinal Sarah says, “The West has denied its Christian roots. A tree without roots dies.” We live in a society in which emotions and movement are the currency of the day; with constant noise and no time for silence or stillness. At the same time, this modernity that promised truth and time measured in moments feels incomplete. This lack of closure is filled with things, travel, yoga and Gaia. A society without transcendence masks the emptiness of its materialism with noise to kill time and thus better forget eternity. Relativism is the final act of disappearance of God and transcendence in that void of nothingness. But if there is no truth, if everything is relative, where can we drop our anchor?
There is a curious movement among the new generations toward a greater approach to religion in an open way. Our generation, and others after us, has grown up in an empty world full of neon lights and nothingness; transcendence and religion have gone into hiding. Modernity promised a clean, luxurious, exciting future, and for that, work and social engagement (party time) were necessary. Women were told that motherhood was slavery with golden shackles. Boys were told that playing at being grown-up without being one was the modern man, and a whole swarm of working/partying child-men was created. This has produced aging parents, IVF and an only child with the weekend house already in the books.
However, in a recent survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, Zoomer men (generation Zers born between 1997 and 2012) are less likely to identify as feminists than millennial men, while Zoomer women are more likely to be feminists than millennial women. And younger men are more likely than older men to say that men in the United States face some or a lot of discrimination. In this survey, women are becoming more liberal and moving away from religion and motherhood, while men are leaning toward religiosity and conservatism and moving away from feminism.
This is no surprise. Being a man in the government education system is extremely difficult. In elementary education, 89% of teachers are women, 72% in middle school, and 60% in high school. An important fact is that only approximately 48% of public school teachers in the US have children living at home, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
In the US, government education is a laboratory where childless white liberal women indoctrinate girls in their own misery as failed human beings, extolling independence, childlessness, and a litany of arguments against traditional family. Boys are offered nothing, they are guilty just for being boys; they cannot grow, fight, and practice like the young of any species. Especially white boys, who are identified with that evil concept of white patriarchal oppression. The result is that the boys of the new generations are and will continue to be more conservative and closer to religion and traditional values.
But behind all these trends, there is nothing but a simple and recurring truth in humankind: the search for life’s purpose. Humankind, each and every one of us, is a philosopher. Philosophy is a look at life, an exercise in looking at reality, and therefore an exercise in humility. And at the crossroads of our inherited heritage, our honest appreciation of reality and the exercise of our freedom we create our life. Life occurs within time, but life is not time. Our wandering, futurist condition does not confuse us with the ticking of a clock. Life is the past, with the study of tradition and history. Life is the present, seeking to understand our immediate reality through science. Life is future because it is hope; it transcends. When we haggle over the definition of life and omit the past or the future, we give birth… to this modernity on the surface of time, a confused particle in the undulating movement of color. We create a life of clouds embraced in Patek Philippe, roses without date or scent, in forests without clearings. And life is not a commercial!
References
The power of silence by Cardinal Sarah 2017
Claros del bosque by María Zambrano 1977