Holier Than Them

I’ve become a fan of A Catholic Thing.  A post there this morning is particularly incisive.  Anthony Esolen notes that we are very good at decrying the sins of other people, particularly in the past, such as slavery in the West and Nazism.

Though Esolen does not directly mention it, I think this part of what C. S. Lewis called the Modern Hubris, the delusion that we today are so much better and more enlightened than those of the past.

But we do not adequately appreciate the pressures put on societies to accept and cooperate with great public evils in the past.  And we downplay said pressures and our own weakness and public evils today.  I often look at today and see too much that resembles times of great evil in the past.  But I am surely a small minority.

Esolen identifies the great public evil today of the West to be the Sexual Revolution.  I’m not sure I agree.  But it cannot be denied that the Sexual Revolution has resulted in mass murder and mass madness, not to mention other forms of mass immorality and persecution of those who oppose these evils.  And how many are willing to lose their business or lose their job or to endure public ridicule and worse by refusing to go along to get along?

As the money paragraph from Esolen states:

…We are not called to oppose, notionally, comfortably, the characteristic evils of other ages, basking in the glow of a righteousness that costs nothing. We are called to suffer in opposing the characteristic evils of our age. And we will not begin even to conceive of how such a thing is possible, if we do not obey an authority that transcends mankind.