Halloween Ghosts in St. Augustiine

Halloween Ghosts in St. Augustiine

Christian individuality

In the Catholic Church today we witness two tendencies. First the hierarchy in Rome seeks to dictate all the goings on of Bishops and faithful, plus how they think and feel about these activities. Conservative Catholics subordinate themselves to this disciplinary principle, at least in public, whatever their secret life might entail. On the other hand the critics of this situation have, in the name of "freedom from constraints" and "liberty to", joined hands with secular modernity. While they properly criticize the slavish status of conservative Catholics who are afraid to think for themselves, they, as individuals within the church have embraced a slavish subordination to the latest trends in liberal social circles. The conservatives engage with their world on a few moral issues, seeking to impose these on the entire population through the ultimate lawgiver in modernity, the state. The liberals engage with a limited number of issues, and in an effort to achieve equality, they too engage with the new ultimate lawgiver, the State. Their thinking about what they are doing and supporting does not originate from any form of a Catholic perspective, indeed thinking does not seem to have much to do with their life conduct at all. In both cases true individuality is lost, on the one hand crushed by the Roman Curia, and on the other seduced by the need to conform, to be embraced by the secular world, and hence, they too are other-directed. True Christian individuality based on the fact that each person must face death, eternity, their God, all alone, has disappeared from sight.

generation X

The individuals of generation X experience the world in a manner akin to Kantian thought. There is a split between the individual's experience of himself/herself and the world. This differentiation was originally generated by the uprooting of individuals from traditional communities in which the individual experiences no split between itself and nature or society. In the modern world, the individual experiences the self as empirical, but also as unstable, imperfect, possibly subjected to "sinful" emotional desires. The world on the other hand is objective. This material observable reality is experienced through imperfect senses, and can be subjected to the critical activity of the more perfect rational mind. That is, rational scientific research, which is stable, perfect in the long run, like math, can grasp this objective reality.
Kant opposed a moral freedom which is purely internal to a world that is determined by inexorable laws. Consequently the self when viewed from within appears to be unique, the product of an absolutely free unique consciousness, but which from the outside seems subject to universal laws. The individual is objectified in daily life, and hence experiences a loss of self.
But this depersonalization of the world, when conceived in any deistic perspective leads to the privatization of the self, one that is open to experience, sensing and feeling, but one that is also totally unstable. The individual experiences a condition of absolute uncertainty, and from the standpoint of self-control, there emerges a feeling of absolute failure. Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" comes alive in an individual seeking self expression, even as the social order demands perfect conformity if one is to survive.
Hence generation X is subjected to increased self-awareness. Some narcissistically withdraw into themselves, others plunge into the world to become other directed through consumerist propaganda, while conforming to the laws of the marketplace, and yet others give in to the "irresponsible" behaviors of the era, also resulting in a loss of self. Consequently the general population experiences life as meaningless and empty. "I can't go on, I must go on", Samuel Beckett wrote. But unlike that writer, who stands prophetically above the taken-for-granted world about him, the masses long for a meaning to be, a purpose for their existence. Religion can help. It may generate a non-rational believer immersed in a Halleluiah ritual, or on the other hand, it can offer a mystical withdrawal from the world. Unfortunately, a LEADER can also solve the individual's problem. In both cases, there is a loss of self. The underlying argument here comes from an essay written by a good friend, now dead, and can be found in "Thinking, Feeling, and Doing", Emil Oestereicher