What's wrong with our society? An answer... maybe...

In "What motivates mass murderers?", WWW 19/5/18, I said that I didn't understand what's wrong with Western society -- American society in particular -- that we produce a shockingly large number of psychotics who, for some reason or for no reason, go out and kill shockingly large numbers of innocent people. What's wrong with those people, I asked [rather indirectly. Ed.]. What motivates them? I just don't understand...

Thinking about it some more, I remembered an exchange with Agent 9, who educated me on the distinction between antinomianism (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, "law"): any view which rejects laws or legalism and is against moral, religious, or social norms) and anomie: a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.

I don't know if Nikolas Cruz and Dimitrios Pagourtzis are antinomians or not. I rather think not, as having a thought-out and thought-through view of anything implies having given the idea (whatever it is) some thought. But I do think both young men may have been affected by the anomie which has been prevalent in our society ever since the hippy-dippy 60s.

Anomie is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. The concept was described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his 1897 book Suicide. (Early reports from Santa Fe suggest that Mr Pagourtzis wanted to commit suicide, chickening out and surrendering to the cops after he had killed ten people.)

Durkheim describes anomie as "derangement" -- craziness -- and "an insatiable will". Anomie, he wrote, arises from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

Compare those words with this passage from Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 2000), sent to me yesterday by Agent 3:

In 1995 [actually 1994. Ed.] George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery."

In 1996, Robert Bork's bestseller Slouching Towards Gomorrah argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

Aha! Lots of further reading there, and I think we may be close to an answer to my headline question. I have long maintained that the year in which the wheels started to come off our society can be pinpointed, based on empirical evidence, as 1964 -- 1965 at the latest. I'm off to the library to find whatever I can written by George Gilder, once described by Time as "male chauvinist pig of the year". Sounds like my kind of guy!

Paedophilia in the Church - the effect of the Sixties

An article in Chiesa this week analyses the widespread scandal of sexual abuse by priests and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. The scandal of pedophilia has always been there, the article says, but was magnified by the cultural revolution of the half a century ago.

The Hippy-Dippy Sixties was a decade of "liberation" -- political, cultural and sexual -- which changed the world. Fruits of this revolution were the "liberation" of women, the spread of feminist ideology, and the acceptance of divorce, birth control pill, and abortion.

The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) was a product of the turmoil of its times. The Church, which for nearly two millennia stood like a rock for certain principles and revealed truths, started to bend to the winds of fashion. Out of this came the corruption and rot which pervades Her seminaries, rectories and even chanceries today.

The Holy Father, Benedict XVI, makes the claim in his recent letter to the Catholics of Ireland. The Chiesa article provides commentary by two cardinals and a sociologist. Worth repeating here are a couple of paragraphs written by Professor Massimo Introvigne, president of the CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religion, in a commentary that appeared on 22 March in the Italian edition of the Zenit online news.

"There was in the 1960's an authentic revolution – no less important than the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution – that was fast-paced and dealt a tremendous blow to traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values....

"In the Catholic Church, there was not at once a sufficient awareness of the scope of this revolution. On the contrary, it infected – Benedict XVI maintains today – 'also priests and religious', created misunderstandings in the interpretation of [Vatican II], and caused 'insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates'.

"In this climate, certainly not all priests who were insufficiently formed or infected by the climate following the 1960's, and not even a significant percentage of them, became pedophiles. We know from the statistics that the real number of priest pedophiles is much lower than the ones presented by certain media outlets. And yet this number is not equal to zero – as we would all want – and justifies the extremely severe words of the pope.

"But the study of the revolution of the 1960's, and of 1968, is crucial to understanding what happened afterward, including pedophilia. And to finding real remedies.

"If this revolution, unlike those before it, is moral and spiritual and touches the interiority of man, it is only from the restoration of morality, of the spiritual life and of comprehensive truth about the human person that the remedies can ultimately come. But for this reason the sociologists, as always, are not enough: there is a need for fathers and masters, teachers and saints.

"And we all have a great need for the pope: for this pope, who once again – to borrow the title of his latest encyclical – speaks the truth in charity and practices charity in truth."