Everyday life is becoming ever more at odds with the Catholic vision of what it should be

Collaboration with Secularists Undermines Catholic Social Goals

By James Kalb


To all appearances, everyday life is becoming ever more at odds with the Catholic vision of what it should be. It’s becoming less like life as traditionally conceived, a network of relationships, loyalties, and purposes, many of which are natural or transcendent and therefore enduring. Instead, it’s becoming more like eBay, Facebook, a government office, or an industrial process, a setting in which nothing concrete stays the same and nothing that matters much ever changes.

The transformation is progressive, and applies more and more to each succeeding generation. Young people are brought up and made ready for the resulting social setting by formal education, institutional childcare, commercial pop culture, and computer networks. They are taught in a thousand ways to consider the bureaucratic and commercial world the serious part of life, so everyone has to have a career, and progress in it is considered the thing that gives life meaning and weight.

The struggle for career success or survival mostly goes forward in service to enterprises with hundreds or thousands of employees, often under temporary or part-time arrangements that are easily reshuffled or broken off. Slogans like “equal opportunity” make the interchangeability of human resources with similar technical qualifications into a basic social and moral principle. To that end natural distinctions and connections, like those related to sex, and inherited and traditional ones, like those related to cultural and religious community, are debunked and deprived of effect as a matter of fundamental public policy.

The result is that transcendent commitments and basic human connections become divorced from concerns thought serious. In the absence of natural, traditional, or transcendent connections that are thought to matter, public life fragments. Among professionals it devolves into battles among propagandists, policy entrepreneurs, and competing political teams and brands. Among the public at large it dissolves, except at the most local level, into sporadic participation in shifting electronic networks that present fragmentary images assembled into evanescent storylines by Internet memes.

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