Broadly considered, the fact that bulks biggest in the modern industrial world is this: that its moral movements are much more utterly and ruthlessly repressive than the past forms of mysticism or fanaticism that commonly affected only the few. Medieval men endured frightful fasts; but none of them would have dreamed of seriously proposing that nobody anywhere should ever have wine any more. And Prohibition, which was accepted by a huge modern industrial civilisation, did seriously propose that nobody should ever have wine any more. Cranks who dislike tobacco would utterly destroy all tobacco; I doubt whether they would even allow it medically as a sedative. Some Pagan sages and some Christian saints have been vegetarians, but nobody in the ancient world would ever have prophesied that flocks and herds would utterly vanish from the earth. But in the Utopia of the true vegetarian, I suppose they would utterly vanish from the earth. The more pedantic Pacifist has the same view of fighting, even for justice, and disarmament is as universal as conscription. For both conscription and disarmament are very modern notions. And modern notions of the sort are not only negative but nihilist; they always demand the absolute annihilation or “total prohibition” of something.
G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows
I get funny looks from time to time when I talk about what I call ‘worldly asceticism.’ Chesterton nails it down (in some of its forms) pretty well here.
The idea of the ‘ascetic’ is one who is rigorously disciplined. At some point this idea became tied together with monks and hermits – someone who cuts himself off from the world for a life of solitude and spiritual discipline. Chesterton’s point is that the modern non-religious (worldly) ascetic wouldn’t just cut himself off from the world, but would cut the world off from itself. Physical things become bad. Of course, this would never apply to sex. It would apply to things like meat or gluten or fat or carbs, tobacco or alcohol or soda. I’ve read someone mention that our culture’s oddness is typified supremely in the fact that we are okay with abortion but want to lock up a pregnant woman who smokes.
The cloister of worldly asceticism these days is the modern living room, in which we can live with other people and remained isolated through technology, following our own devotional routines. The monastery of worldly asceticism is the teenager in front of his screen cut off from all physical contact. Red Bull is the blood of this covenant.
It takes a thousand forms and they’re not necessarily all bad. But it’s a term that gets people’s attention and is worth using (for that reason alone).
This is not to say that everyone has to eat meat or gluten. It’s not to say that everyone has to smoke or drink alcohol. It’s not to say that no one should play video games. I hope that’s obvious. It’s to say that we should at least consider whether we are asking others to cut themselves off from the world in unhealthy ways.
Well, you got me thinking:
I suppose a big part of this problem is our commitment to shy away from absolute Truth in the postmodern world. At first glance, one might believe the problem to be an overcommitment to asserting one’s belief in absolute truth that is to blame for such absolutizing actions and attitudes. However, upon closer inspection, I believe we see that it is precisely our modern inability to contextualize that causes us to label things with such stone-set polarities.
One might ask “are video games good or bad?” as though there was some static quality to be ascertained, at that level of questioning. Yet we ought to ask about the context/nature of its use, in order to understand how to use it. We cannot ask these questions, because we cannot understand “context”, which is to say we cannot understand “circumstance”, which, finally, is to say we cannot understand the basic facts of life, because such things are Absolute. Returning to the example at hand then, a modern person cannot answer the nuanced question of “whether a video game is good or bad” in a PARTICULAR CONTEXT, because such a question requires answering such Absolute questions as “who am I?”, “what am I made for?”, and “where am I going?”. We are thus forced to ask questions at the shallow end of the “question-gene pool”, where our answers cannot leave room for variation.
I am not implying that absolute truth can, or should be understood absolutely in order for us to take correct action. These are deep wells from which we draw. But I am implying that if one denies the well’s existence entirely, one cannot drink even a single glass… and dehydrated thinking always comes out roughly…
Chesterton of course was dealing with modernists, who were more apt to believe, rather differently from our own times, that all truth could be contained in a box that we can control and carry around. This had its tyrannical repercussions, as he spoke of in the text you quoted. What I believe is interesting to note is that modernists attempted to cram too much into their “box” of understanding/control and the box broke, which is perhaps why postmodernists now attempt to limit the size of the truths which they allow in their box, for what they believe will be a more functional way of boxing truth. At the end of the day, they both operate out of the highly-controllable boxed-model of truth. And “control” is perhaps at the heart of all of this philosophical junking about…
The way of Grace, allows us to trust that God, through Christ, will provide us what truth we need to understand, when we need to understand it, how we need to understand it, and how much we need to understand it. It is the way of patience and humility. It is the way of leaving our “box of understanding” open, trusting God to graciously fill it (or empty it) as needed. Christians strive to believe and submit to the reality that Absolute Truth exists, but that God is the rightful holder and gracious distributor of All Truth. Modernists and postmodernists try to supplant this Way, and receive the dry, small, tyrannical Desert of Lies as their reward.
Another example of what you wrote about in your post: Orthorexia
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/health/orthorexia/
Good stuff. I will have to add orthorexia to my vocabulary.