The View from the Basement: Living in a Subhuman Society

Transcript (edited for readability).

I ended the first talk by saying that we have to do what the apostles and missionaries did. Our job is like trying to preach about Jesus in a pagan brothel, but that is, in fact, the kind of thing that the first missionaries did, the apostles did. To do that, we have to know about people who live and work there. And I don't mean that we know superficial things about them, that they live on such a street, they have such an income, and they watch such television. I mean, what is the existential state of man in our time?

So, to provide a contrast, I'd like to turn to an example of a man who knew quite well that he was living during an age of cultural decline. This man's name is Boethius. Now, if I uttered that name, I know some people immediately smiled. If I uttered that name to 200 college professors, I might get nods of recognition from five or six. Boethius was the greatest scholar of his time. We're now talking about the early 6th century. In the West, the Roman state had passed into the hands of the German warlords. We are not really even talking about Rome anymore. Rome is a backwater. The action is in the northern cities of Italy, such as Milan and Ravenna. He was the greatest scholar of his time, is Boethius. He is in jail, awaiting a gruesome execution at the hands of the Goths. They had assumed lordship over the Roman state. They were not pagans, by the way. They were Arian Christians. Boethius was an orthodox Christian. So it provided some excuse for the more unscrupulous Goths to hate his guts. First, because he was Roman and not German, and second, because he was an orthodox Christian rather than an Arian.

Now, to Boethius, we owe much of what the Middle Ages knew about Greek philosophy. Because you see, when the empire was cut in half, the Greek-speaking peoples mainly remained in the East, and lots of Greek texts never made their way to the West, not until the late Middle Ages. Boethius translated a lot of these works into Latin, and thus preserved knowledge. Whatever knowledge the people of the Middle Ages had of Plato came from Boethius. He was himself, in his own right, an original thinker, and he was also a preserver. The crown of his life's work, which he did not live to achieve, was to show that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were in harmony. It would have been a tremendous achievement. He did achieve a great deal, though, even though he died relatively young because he was executed. He kept alive in his place and time those very philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

The only reason why he was in prison at all was that he was an old-fashioned Roman. And that meant this: what you would like is one thing. Your duty to your country is another. And when that's on the line, what you would like goes by the boards. I don't want to hear about your feelings. They don't matter. Your country needs you. That's it. He knew that his duty to his country was more important than his desire to live the fairly well-to-do life of a retired scholar and writer. Somebody had to involve himself in the affairs of the state because the Goths were not entirely trustworthy. So he took what we might call the Boethius option. He worked in the political arena against his inclinations. He would have much preferred not to do that. Somebody had to do it. He knew he lived in bad times. But he was not alienated, and that's the main subject of my second talk here today: alienation.

We see that he's not alienated in his great work called the Consolation of Philosophy. Now, I should say, for those who have not read it, the Consolation of Philosophy is maybe the greatest piece of prison literature ever written. He was in prison awaiting execution. And Theodoric, the somewhat enlightened warlord in charge of the state in the West, gave him opportunity to write. So Boethius did write. And he wrote about why apparently good things happen to bad people, why apparently it is that evil people prosper. I can give you the answer to that, not in my talk here, but the fact is that evil people do not prosper even in this life. They do not, in fact, prosper.

But in any case, he describes in the early part of the Consolation what was the proudest day of his life. It was when his two young sons, about 20 years old, were elected to be consul on the same day and were led before the crowds erupting into cheers. Consul: that was in the old days the highest office in the Roman state, the most powerful. Under Augustus Caesar, it had been stripped of much of its power and authority, but it meant so much to the Roman people even 500-plus years after Augustus Caesar that Boethius could consider it the proudest day of his life when his two boys were elected consul, and when they led them in a great parade through Rome. Boethius surely must have known that consul was now little more than an honorary position. But he could still think of consuls going back 1,000 years to the days of the first Brutus, Brutus the Liberator, not the assassin of Caesar. Brutus the Liberator, who freed the Roman people from domination by the more sophisticated Etruscans and their kings.

Boethius wrote, as I've said, in a tradition of learning that also went back 1,000 years. He's writing in the 500s AD. His death is 524 AD, I believe. He's writing about Plato and Aristotle. The death of Socrates is 399 BC. Plato is a young man in the late 5th century BC. He's writing about things that have been passed on to him from 1,000 years. And yet they are present to him. They are a part of his being. They're part of the being he assumes they're part of the being of any scholar of his time, if there were any scholars left. He studied Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, not as an antiquarian or an archaeologist. They were present to him, just as I've said, when Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer went to look at the cathedrals of Europe and write about them for the Century magazine. They were immediately present to her, they had a powerful influence upon her, far more than will your local church made out of sticks and stones these days. The churches that look like nuclear power plants or flying saucers, Catholic architecture in the last 50 years, absolutely dreadful. Those churches are not present in any deep way to the people who go there. They're just a place.

Anyway, these authors were present to him. The Consolation is written in alternating prose and poetry, and the poetry that he uses, Latin poetry, employs meters, in stanzaic forms, that also go back more than 1,000 years. One of the meters that he uses goes all the way back to Homer, and that would be 1,300 years. And above it all stands his Christian faith. His debts to Augustine, who is 100 years old to him, and to other Christian theologians, Athanasius, even older than Augustine. And his confidence that his life and the lives of all men were in the hands of a just, all-wise, almighty providence, eternal, the self-same, never failing. How can you be alienated when you have that?

Now think of the young man in our time in his cave. Think about that, that these places are described as caves, not studies. Not libraries, but caves. He is not exercising what has been called the Benedict option. He's not part of a community of prayer. He is not exercising the Boethius option. He can hardly conceive of the virtue of piety and the demands that it makes upon a good man and a good citizen. I have to explain what piety means to my college freshmen. Now, the Catholic college where I teach now is a wonderful place, Magdalen College in New Hampshire. Students will come in, if they have not studied Latin or ancient Rome, thinking that piety means the service of God, the duty that you owe to God. That's true. But piety encompasses much more. It also includes the duty that you owe to your mother and father. Hence the commandment that bridges those that deal with God and those that deal with neighbor: right in the middle there is honor your father and your mother. By extension, it encompasses the duty that you owe to your fatherland, to the country that bore you.

The man in the cave can hardly conceive of any of that. He is a mass man. That's not my term, that's a term from Gabriel Marcel, from 70 years ago, 80 years ago. His options have been exercised for him. Not by masterminds, not by overlords. It would be easier to deal with if he were being ordered about by tyrants, despots. His options have been exercised for him by the immense weight of a system of social manipulation, what he watches all the time. He believes in choice. It's almost the only thing he does believe in. But he has nothing of any very great moment to choose. It's like a smorgasbord, and you get to choose among 50 items. And they're all chocolate cupcakes. Or it's like my vision of hell. You want to know my vision of hell? My vision of hell is a room that you can't get out of, and there's a television set on. The television set has an on-off button, but it's stuck on. And it has 800 channels. And you switch the channels, but they're all playing the same thing. They're playing the intro and the song to that dumb old show, The Brady Bunch. And when the tic-tac-toe pattern fills in with the maid in the center, it begins all over again. As they used to say in the army videos warning young recruits about certain kinds of diseases that they might pick up, don't let this happen to you.

What's to choose? Unlike Boethius, he is alienated. And this we really do need to pay attention to, because we have to minister to him. Let's consider the ways in which this is so. He is alienated. I often receive letters from young people. I just received one two days ago. These are strangers mostly. More often I get the letters from men than from women. Maybe the women are a little bit embarrassed and they don't write to me. I don't know. They are angry for having been cheated of their heritage of arts and letters. So they may be 30 years old. They realize that though they have had 16 years of formal education or more, they're ignoramuses. And they now feel cheated. They sense somehow, and these are not always Christian, they sense that it is not natural for man to be cut off from his past. Man is not a dog or a cat that God has made to live in the present moment without history. My dog, Jasper, remembers. You ought to see him when I get home on Saturday, he's going to go nuts. He remembers, but he has no history. They're not meant to have history. Well, man is not like that. Man, without the great taproot of piety that drinks from the springs of what we've been given from our forebears long ago, we are not supposed to be like a dog or a cat in that regard.

These young people know, they may know it kind of abstractly. But they also know it inside as a feeling, an uneasy feeling of not being settled. They know that they're missing something. They try by somewhat artificial means to recover it, so they ask me for reading lists. That should never have to be done. They watch some classic movies, by the way. I recommend this as a starter for ministering to these people. They watch some classic movies. A majority of your college students will never have seen a movie, or perhaps more than two or three movies, made before 1960. They may have seen The Wizard of Oz, and It's a Wonderful Life, and that's about it. A lot of the students will not recognize the name of John Wayne. I wouldn't say, have you ever seen a John Wayne movie? No, I've never seen. They don't even recognize the name.

These people are often unchurched. They hardly know where to begin to heal that wound, if they begin at all. They're like people who have been shut up indoors all their lives. They are pallid, weakly, stunted, half-smothered in the imagination. And then they step outside, and they see the sun. And they try a little bit every day to take a walk, or turn a spade, or sit on a rock somewhere. And it's not easy to do if you've led your entire life indoors. But it's a lot better than nothing. Most people will not be like that. They will not know what they do not know. And the less they know, the more certain they will be about it all.

Now, here somebody may say that most people in the past had no great education either, and therefore no strong connection to culture. And that, for me, is as if you just tossed a baseball in the direction of Mike Trout with a bat. All right? You're going to get it slammed right back in your face. It is not true. All human beings have had poetry, song, worship, and immemorial traditions. All human beings. Human beings without reading and writing have had these things. They are universal to human cultures. We are the outliers.

So I turn here to a moment from a novel, a pretty good novel, actually a better movie by John Ford. The novel is by a Welshman named Richard Llewellyn. The movie is by John Ford, called How Green Was My Valley. It won the best picture of the year over Citizen Kane that year, and it won it deservedly, in my opinion. So there are two boys in the Morgan family. They're young men. They are exasperated by the bad treatment that the coal miners of Cwm Rhondda, the village, have been receiving from the mine owners. They're leaving their home and their village forever. They are going to emigrate to South America. Father, they say, may we have a chapter. And the father, Gwilym Morgan, reaches for the family Bible. These are coal miners. They don't have any other book in the house, they have the Bible. And he chooses the 23rd Psalm, which he reads slowly, with deep sorrow and resignation.

Think of that moment. Think of the meaning of it. I think John Ford makes this into a movie and he figures everybody in my audience will understand what is going on here. Everyone in that little thatched cottage knew that they lived in a world of profound significance. They could think of their exile from Wales, from their village, the village that they loved, as like the exile of the Jews after Jerusalem had been razed to the ground by the Babylonian armies. They could yet trust, though, that wherever they went, the God of their fathers would go with them. In point of fact, the Welsh in those days remained Welshmen wherever they went. Some of them did go to a Welsh colony of émigrés deep in the interior of Argentina, where they kept their language. And to this day, there's a village in the interior of Argentina where Welsh is spoken. Or they went to the coal mining towns of Pennsylvania where I grew up. They spoke and sang and prayed in yr hen iaith, the old tongue. That was the same with Swedish and German Lutherans. It was the same with French and Italian Catholics. Even when they lost the old language, it remained the same so long as they kept their faith. They had cultural homes thousands of miles away from where they had been born, away from places that they, in all likelihood, would never see again. They yet had homes. They had these cultural homes, though most of them had hardly gone to school at all.

But the modern man in his cave, the mass man, the man who was formed by mass media, mass entertainment, mass politics, and mass education, mass schooling, has no such home. Even if he has graduated from college and still lives in the basement of his parents' house, he has no home. How can we expect he will be rooted in culture? He doesn't even feel himself to be rooted in his own body. Think of what alienation must already have occurred for people to believe that their bodies, or somebody else's body for that matter, are wrong. My colleague at Touchstone magazine, the political philosopher Robert George, calls this philosophical decision self-body dualism. It's as if the self is floating in the air someplace, floating in the air and rather frail, always threatened because it's floating in the air of your imagination. The soul considers the body as something alien to it. It's an accident. It's a thing to be used or to be transmogrified in order to attain the self's desires. The very possibility of saying, I have the wrong body, would not have occurred to anybody before our time and place. Madness.

It would not have occurred to young Huw Morgan in the novel, in the movie that I've just mentioned. He's the youngest of the Morgan family. The fact that he's a boy, played by the boy at that time, boy actor Roddy McDowall, by the way. The fact that he's a boy was affirmed at every pass, every hour of the day was affirmed by his father and his big brothers, all of them coal miners. Also by his mother and his sister, who needed him to grow up to be a man and who saw to it that he did so. How do you know that you were a boy? I mean, inside in your heart. You're chopping wood alongside your father, and your muscles are growing as strong as cables, even before the miracle of puberty. How do you know you're a girl? You're baking bread alongside your mother. You will have memories in your arms and hands and fingers of what it means to feed hungry people, from the toddler who's tugging at your skirt to the great big exhausted man come in from the field. How do you know that boys and girls are meant for one another? Because every single social thing that you're a part of affirms that fact. You know it as you know that fresh air is good and the sky is blue. It's something that doesn't even rise to the level of theoretical consciousness. You simply know it.

The author Walker Percy has described us as being lost in the cosmos. It's the name of a book of essays that he wrote. I think it's his best work. I am actually not fond of his novels. But that book is a very powerful book. It's as if we ourselves were the aliens that so many scientists without hope long to meet. Sometimes I think that some scientists have this great aspiration to eventually become a creature from outer space. Think of what it means to be lost in a cosmos. Look, if I said that you were lost in a chaos, well, you'd say, what else are you going to be in a chaos except for lost? In a chaos, there's no stable place to dwell in. In a chaos, nothing even endures from moment to moment. There's no law in a chaos except for lawlessness. There's no personality in a chaos. But how lost do you have to be to be lost in a cosmos? Anyone know what cosmos means in Greek? All things together, but in what character? Cosmos suggests a beautiful and harmonious order. Hence our English word cosmetic, which has to do with arranging your hair and other features of your face, your grooming, et cetera, so that you will be most attractive. A cosmos is not just the stuff outside, but it is a harmonious and beautiful whole in order.

We dwell in a cosmos of astonishing beauty, but we don't see it. We must not see it. If we did see it, we would be eager to reflect it in our art. But we don't, because our art celebrates the ugly, the, this is their word, not mine, it's a stupid word, the transgressive, the willful, the lawless. How do you know you're a great artist in the last 70 or 80 years? You paint things that disgust people, that perplex them, baffle them, or leave them cold, then you know that you're really great. We must not see it, because we don't even see the cosmos, the beautiful order that is as near to us as our flesh and blood. We don't see it in our bodies. Has there ever been a time in the history of the human race or culture, supposing that we do have a culture, when human beings have groomed and dressed themselves with as much carelessness and ugliness as we do now? Would you paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa? But that's what young people do to their bodies all the time. I needn't tell you how. It's everywhere, you see it, and girls as often as boys now. If you are lost in a cosmos, it can only mean that you yourself are out of kilter. You are disordered. You are chaotic.

Consider the vast intergalactic loneliness of our time. It's been mentioned earlier today. Pastor Senkbeil talked about loneliness at Matins. I've called our shift in sexual mores the lonely revolution. It was supposed to bring us harmony and understanding; it has brought us alienation. And you didn't even have to wait until our time to notice it because, as I pointed out last night, already in the early 70s, there are rock and roll songs about despair and loneliness, which five or six years before would not have been composed. It could have done no other, this revolution. It must necessarily have ended in loneliness and alienation.

Think about what the actions do. Think about the act of fornication. It has no end beyond the pleasure of the act. And sometimes, watch students, watch these people at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and other places, sometimes it doesn't even deliver genuine pleasure, but a reprieve from loneliness, or a chance to sweat off your anxieties. That is, in its very essence, alienating. The man and woman do not unite fully as man and as woman. They have to suppress the full knowledge of the very act they're engaging in, what they're doing. You have to remind them, and they don't like to be reminded, that it's the child-making thing that they're doing. They actually speak nowadays as if children happen by accident. You can get pregnant by accident. I have told them, and I never get a response to this, I said, listen, you can be walking down an alley beside a 12-story building and be hit on the head by a piano falling from a great height and get a big bump. That is not likely. I dare say it might not happen to you in 10 years. It is still conceivable. It is possible. It's an accident that might happen. It is not possible to become pregnant by accident. There are certain preliminaries that must be engaged in. You are pregnant only by means of somebody's voluntary action, in the case of rape, the action of the rapist, but in most cases, the overwhelming majority of cases, the voluntary action of the two people involved.

But the act has no meaning for these people beyond itself. It doesn't even have the innocence of dogs in the natural throes of reproductive urgency. We can't say that they're doing these things like dogs in an alley. Dogs in an alley are doing what God has made them to do. That's what dogs ought to do. Don't slander dogs here, or cats even. Divorce undoes the wisdom of Solomon. Mother and father agree to cut the child in half so that they can pretend that they can leave their marriage as persons whole and entire. Sorry to speak bluntly, but there it is. Pornography. What is that? So often it is the dank and dark hole where lonely men, men who cannot find a woman, and frankly, men who are not worthy of finding a woman in many cases, but they make themselves worse by this, submerge themselves in artificial excitations, like heroin, less and less effective with every dose.

I could go farther. No one is home. Because, in fact, no one is home. The house is at best the family's haven from the outer world. That is a world of mass men. No one knows anyone else. Think of the University of Wisconsin. What have you got? 30, 40,000 students. That's not a college. That's an anthill, except that's a slander to ants. There are more cars on the street than there are children. How do you know you live in a lousy place? When there are more cars on the street than children. Young people grow up without the powerful memory of endless summer days when they played outdoors, without adult supervision, playing until they dropped, with kids they liked, and kids they hated, but in any case, with them. Not alone. Memories almost as strong as the memories we should have from the family table, and the family parlor, and the bedroom shared with a brother or sister, and conversations that could go long into the night.

I could go farther. I could go as far as heaven here. Think about these two verses from Scripture and try to put them together. There are two verses that seem unrelated. I would like us to relate them today. One, it is not good for the man to be alone. Two, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. Put the two together. When the Lord God considers Adam, he sees his beloved creature as incomplete. Even though the man has just exercised a godlike authority, he has named the beasts. It's wonderfully whimsical because God himself submits to allow the beasts to be named according as Adam names them, Adam seeing into their essential nature. Adam, however, even at that, cannot fully bear the image of God unless he too is bound in a relationship with a help who is meet for him. He is made in the image, remember, of the three-person God. Not the lonely God of Omar, as Chesterton called the God of Islam, but the Trinitarian God, the three-person God. God made the light, and he beheld it as an artist beholds his work, and he declared it good. That the man should be alone is the first thing in Scripture that is not good.

Now, suppose we accept what even pagans must have seen. Man and woman belong together. The family is the cradle of all human society. And to some extent, it is also the end, the aim, the end for which we have politicians and laws and armies: that there should be thriving families everywhere. So we don't just say family is the bedrock of our nation, and from families we get politicians and laws and armies. But the very politicians and laws and armies that we have are meant to provide for thriving places where families can increase and multiply. Suppose we say that. Suppose we say what the pagans must have known. Is that all, then? Will man be relieved of his loneliness if he has a family and children? Is there nothing more? Well, there is. We are made in the image of God. We are made for God. We are made for participation in that life of eternal love, which is the Trinity.

Even the pagans have understood something of this, even this. The German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, whom I mentioned last night, rightly said that as a point of fact, there is no such thing as a feast without the gods. He doesn't mean there should be no feasts without the gods. He means it as an anthropological fact. There has not ever existed, nor can there ever exist, a true feast without the gods. No matter how dim the memory may be, a feast to which the gods are not invited, or in which the gods are not invoked or praised, that thing is quite simply an anthropological absurdity. It does not exist. We are united from above. Not from below, and not even from the sides. We are truly united only from above.

Consider how the bonds of family life itself grow frayed and fragile over time without the strength of religious faith. Consider that. It may last for a generation, but then starts to fray. Without the strength of the duty that we acknowledge to God. It's a good thing to remember playing ball with your brother. It's a good altogether of another dimension to remember singing a hymn with your brother, and perhaps unless you remember singing hymns with your brother, you will not eventually have brothers to remember playing ball with. A people who do not in some fashion or other come together and worship, a people who do not come together and worship, will soon not come together at all. When they lose the sense of belonging to God, they lose in turn the sense of belonging to one another. There can be no brotherhood of man without the Fatherhood of God. By the way, that was said by the very conservative actress, devout Catholic, Irene Dunne. And if you don't know who she is, then you too need to see some classic movies, because she was, in my mind, one of the very greatest actresses that Hollywood ever was graced with.

For a while, in some people, a loss of religious faith will be compensated by some vigorous social action. But that is ultimately empty. It does not soothe the heart. It's like laying a bandage over the Grand Canyon. When the frustrations and failures come, and they will come, those people without the bedrock of faith, without faith to unite them to God and to one another, those people collapse. They become political actors with a vengeance. No one on earth hates as bitterly as does a philanthropist.

C.S. Lewis, in one of his children's novels, imagined a race of semi-rational creatures. They were monopods. They hopped about on one foot. They could not imagine creatures walking on two feet. They would rather deny the evidence of their senses than admit that it was possible for creatures to walk on two feet. That is our modern man. He is lonely. But he's grown habituated to it. He can't imagine what a real society would look like. The basement is comforting because it is dim. He is faithless, but he has grown habituated to it. He can't imagine what it would be to praise God from a full and joyful heart. Singing is strenuous. He has no hope in this world or the next. He may have ambitions, but he has no hope. And frankly, without hope, he begins to lose even his worldly ambitions. Nor does he understand what the word hope means. Hope is for man on the field of battle, and battle means danger. He has no culture to which we might appeal and from whose nourishing roots we might work. He has been told all his life that beauty, as an objective fact, does not exist. And he seems determined to make that denial a reality. We are incredibly wealthy. And yet we surround ourselves with ugly buildings, ugly roads, ugly fashions. The people of the Middle Ages, we may laugh at them for being dirt-poor peasants, they built the most glorious buildings ever to exist upon the face of the earth. And we, for all our wealth, build, go downtown and see, big glass and steel structures that do not move the heart at all.

This man I'm looking at has no strong connection even to the natural world around him. He doesn't know what birds there are out there. We don't. I mean, we're all part of this, right? We don't know what the birds are. We don't know what the trees are. We don't know if that thing growing on the tree is edible. Well, often it is. We don't know it. But he is still made by God. He is made for God. He is made for the love of God and neighbor, made for genuine love.

Now I've diagnosed him. That is my second talk, and the third talk is, okay, now that we know his disease. And it is a very unusual one. It's not one that Boniface would have faced. It's not the one that Augustine of Canterbury faced. It's not one that David Livingstone going into the interior of Africa faced. This is different now. We have to diagnose, and in my third talk, I will make suggestions as to how to treat this alienated man, what we do with him now.

So, I'm not sure what time it is. We have 15 minutes. So we can either break up now or I can field questions. My suggestion is we allow time for questions. Here we go.

A lot of what you are describing seems like a well-to-do white problem. How would you say that it shows differently in cases of poverty, different races, where some of the things that you're talking about, the alienation isn't always caused by choice, but from outside, the alienation from the rest of society?

That's a good question. I am tentative about the answers here because I don't, in fact, live in places where I would observe the dynamic directly. All right? Let's reel things back to when waves of immigrants came to the United States first. So Italians, for instance, came in large waves shortly before and after World War I. They brought with them the Italian language, though many of them determined not to speak Italian to their kids, because they wanted their kids to be Americans. That happened in my grandparents. They ordered their children not to speak Italian. However, in a lot of places, the Italians came and they set up their own pockets, their own little Italies, and they brought with them their faith. So they built what would be Italian Catholic churches. And the Swedes and the Norwegians and the Germans who were Lutherans did the same kind of thing in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, right? They did that. They brought along with them their music and their songs, which managed to survive the assaults of mass entertainment in the United States for at least a couple of generations. They built, you know, ordinary Italian people had opera houses in Italy, where light opera might be performed. We're not talking about Verdi all the time, but just little opera houses, and they brought those to the United States too. So they had a good deal of cultural flesh and blood. Despite the fact that they were often despised by the people round about them, until they started intermarrying. You know, in my hometown, the Irish boys started to notice that the Italian girls were really good looking, and they married them, and then it happened in reverse that the Irish girls noticed how good looking the Italian boys were and started marrying them. Now everybody makes spaghetti and meatballs and lasagna in my hometown. It doesn't matter if your name is Sebastianelli or O'Hara. They all do.

In some ways, let's say that you are a black person living in a predominantly black neighborhood in one of our cities. In some ways, you are less alienated than the upper-middle-class white person in a suburb would be. That is, you are probably a little bit more likely to know lots of your neighbors. You're probably a little bit more likely to be in other people's apartments, other people's flats, houses. However, you too have largely been cut off from the past. And you too are largely prey to the influences of the mass phenomena, mass media, mass schooling, mass entertainment. You also suffer the very considerable harm of probably not having a father in the home. So the problem of alienation there may take somewhat different forms than the thing that I'm describing here. You may feel yourself wrongly not even to belong to the kind of culture that I'm trying to reintroduce people to here. Because, frankly, you've been told, and now, not so much by white people, but by other black people, that it is not yours to claim. If you are a young black person and somebody has done a dastardly thing in your school and actually introduced you to English poetry, written before 1900, and you love it, you will be shunned, as if that heritage is not yours. That's the heritage of every single human being alive on the face of this earth whose native tongue is English. It all belongs to them. I may have to adjust the diagnosis according to the specifics of which group we're talking about and where and what's going on. I think the diagnosis will still largely hold, mutatis mutandis, as they say. It would still largely hold.

Would it be true, as a follow-up, would it be true to say then that the question is not so much of the influences of the particular subculture within the broader culture, but rather the basic human identity that we're getting at here?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, think, to go back to the business of boys and girls, the sexes, almost nowhere in the country will a boy hear that it is a great thing to be a boy. This fellow from Canada, this agnostic from Canada, who may be tiptoeing toward the Christian faith, Jordan Peterson, he gets letters from young guys in their 20s all the time, letters of gratitude, because he's the first person in their lives who has suggested to them that as men, as males, they have something to offer to society. That, frankly, is child abuse on a grand scale. That that should be the case is a thorough scandal. I know many Catholics who turn up their nose at Jordan Peterson, and I say, listen, you people, if you had been doing what you ought to have been doing in your families, in your parochial schools, in the churches, they wouldn't have to go to Jordan Peterson for this stuff. That they have to go to him for this stuff, that's on you. If one young man has to do it, that may be on him. If all these people are having to do it, that's on you. It's pervasive. It doesn't just afflict these people in pockets or those people in pockets. I might say, as those who have had the history of having the second largest parochial school system in the United States, that's convicting to all of us, I think.

Other questions. Yes.

Dr. Esolen, how would you rate or evaluate the influence of Boethius on the theology of Thomas Aquinas? I seem to remember it's fairly well acknowledged that, like in Aquinas's De Trinitate, the distinctions that Boethius wrote about are there, but do you think it's greater than that? Do you find it in the rest of Aquinas's theological writings also, or just early in his career?

I, who study poetry, am also tentative about answering this question, but the influence of Boethius was pervasive. Everybody considered him to be one of the very greatest doctors of the church. His Augustinian solution to the problems of the compatibility of free will, human free will, and divine providence, I think, were generally accepted in the Middle Ages, and Thomas accepted them, as did Dante. His Augustinian, but then an elaboration of, what it means to say that evil, strictly speaking, does not have existence, is frankly accepted by Thomas Aquinas, and Aquinas builds upon it, is accepted by Dante too, so that in a very real sense, the Inferno is a realm that teeters on the brink of non-being. His kind of interesting psychological analysis of what happens in the interior of the human being who gives himself over to wickedness was also, I think, taken as absolutely correct. And so the poets, not just the theologians and the philosophers, but the poets ran with it too. The necessarily self-evacuating or self-undermining, self-destructive nature of evil, that's taken for granted and then meditated upon, is productive of a lot of great poetry. And it's still there in Milton, when Milton locates hell not as something exterior to Satan. When Satan says, when the other devils are not around to overhear, Satan ceases to be a politician and can once in a while almost be honest. And he says, which way shall I fly? Infinite wrath or infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell. And in the lowest deep, a lower deep, still threatening to devour me, opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. That's Boethius. That is quintessentially Boethius right there. The punishment of wicked men is carried in the very wickedness itself, in the very sin itself, and it's carried in the dreadful form of a collapse toward non-existence. The ultimate evil, so to speak, which is the privation, a deprivation not just of this character or that character, but of being itself. I don't know if I answered entirely, but he was everywhere. The second most frequently translated work for the next 1,000 years, second to the Bible, is the Consolation of Philosophy. It's a life-changing book.