Parochialism of Time

     A few days ago I heard a superb talk by Andrew Kern, president of the Circe Institute -- an organization devoted to rediscovering what it means to give children a classical education, and in particular a Christian classical education.  Kern said that progressivists since Dewey had been mired in what he called a "parochialism of time."  They have gotten themselves stuck in that bog of the present, he said, once Dewey, cribbing from Herbert Spencer (for Dewey was a lazy and slipshod thinker) had drawn a fallacious connection between Darwinian natural selection in the origin of species and the progress of ideas in human history.  Darwin's revelation, as Dewey saw it, that species as such do not even exist, was but an instance of the general truth that all kinds of things do not exist.  Thus Gorgias defeats his enemy Plato, and all metaphysics since Aristotle is dismissed as irrelevant.  That was convenient for Dewey, who shows in his writings very little understanding of, say, medieval philosophy, or Christian culture generally.

     With the past consigned to irrelevance, we are left with an educational "philosophy" that is pseudo-empirical, at first concentrating on the understanding of hard facts, after the utilitarianism of the Gradgrind school, and now collapsing into the adoption of certain attitudes deemed socially responsible.  In other words, the New and Improved schools are the educational equivalent of mass marketing, which avoids all questions of what really is good, and seeks instead to manipulate behavior on a grand scale.  Despite the pious blather about our children being our Future, neither mass marketing nor the mass education we suffer can offer a future, for the simple reason that those who are encouraged to forget their fathers instruct their children in forgetfulness likewise.  The reverse of New and Improved is Obsolete.

     And in this heady swirl of the moment -- or rather in this scatter of electrical impulses of will, divorced from tradition, from the transcendent, from any goal towards which human beings by their nature aspire -- this spree of individual dots of static on a television screen -- man requires distraction upon distraction to prevent him from considering that his life already has been cut short, whether or not he lives to be ninety.  For the progressive secularists are misnamed.  They cannot possibly progress, since they have ruled out the notion that there is any end towards which we are to proceed; the admission of an end would bring back the dreaded transcendent; it would revive the sleeping metaphysical giant.  They are also not secular, in the old sense of the word; they know nothing of the saecula saeculorum.  They may at times invest a calendrical turn with a quaint halo.  "How can you say that!" they cry, their cowy eyes growing large.  "It's the twenty-first century!"  Which makes as much sense as to say, "How can you possibly believe that contraception is evil?  It's eleven o'clock!"  Or "How can you believe that divorce is evil?  Megan and Jody and Kevin believe it's all right, and they're young!"  But as far as any real sense of the turning centuries is concerned, they're not secular at all.  That would involve them in too broad a view of time.  The narrow and parochial present is much nicer.  After all, it's New!  It's Improved!

     It strikes me that our temporal parochialists have things exactly backwards.  Man is an embodied soul, and his soul is immortal.  That is what Christians (and not only Christians) believe; but even if you deny immortality, you have to admit that man can only come to know and love and fully live by dwelling in time, a vast sweep of time, extending by tradition and memory far into the past, and proceeding by the passing on of tradition, and by hope, and by children, into the future.  In that sense, a man who lives only ninety years is an ephemeron, the flea of a day.  Yet his body is not like that; it cannot be in more than one place at once.  It is limited, defined; and so are the objects of his natural love.  It is good for me to live in my Shire, and plant potatoes, and marry one girl, and drink with my friends, and obey the natural exigencies of embodied existence.  That kind of parochialism may open for us a veritable world of mystery: the neighbor next door, if I really got to know him instead of passing him off as Generic Brand Proximate Human, might be as strange and frightening as a pirate.  The child born to my wife, if we bothered to see him as something other than Generic Brand Male Offspring, would be an invader, wild in the eyes and seeking to burn down the garage.

     But we instead scorn the limitations of the body; we won't belong to any parish, no sir.  We will flit all over the world rather than love this place, this woman, this child, as well as they deserve to be loved.  Meanwhile we are slaves of the passing fad, bobbing up and down at the marketer's whim.  We go everywhere, and dwell nowhere; we revere no past, and have no future.  We educate our children accordingly.  I hear that they make tombstones better than they used to, too.