BLOG #7, SERIES 4
WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
THE DECLINE AND THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN HERO
February 13, 2013
Two weeks ago, I discussed the implosion of erstwhile superhero, Lance Armstrong. At its conclusion, I promised to return to the subject.
Heroes – we all have them. Boys especially. It is healthy to have in your mind a shining image, an idealized prototype one can grow towards. But it is not healthy when that ideal is shattered like The Picture of Dorian Gray. During the last couple of years, two of the world’s superheroes – Tiger Woods and now Lance Armstrong, have been toppled from their high pedestals, in the dust of the dramatic collapse of their reputations, leaving behind widespread disillusion and feelings of betrayal – not only in the young but in the older as well.
Heroism has always been with us, but the obsessive attempts to destroy heroes once they are perceived to have arrived at such status is relatively new.
This phenomenon has a long fuse, and was born (in a literary sense), in a French movement of prose fiction scholars label Naturalism, that flowered in the last third of the nineteenth century. Zola was its principal spokesman in Europe, and writers such as Dreiser in America. The novels that spread this philosophy were characterized by flawed heroes who, sooner or later, were destroyed by inner weaknesses and inherited tendencies. Generally, all their supposed heroes end up floundering in the muck in the midst of their shattered pedestals. God and spiritual values worth living by are noticeably absent in Naturalistic fiction.
All through the twentieth century, the moral slide continued, nudged down by Jacques Derrida’s deeply erosive movement (also begun in France) called Deconstruction; the net effect across the western world has been to undermine the foundations of all heroes and debunk anyone who is perceived to be noble or great in any way. Though the movement in America reached its “peak” in the 1960s and 1970s, it remains very much with us today. Its critics apparently have no life outside of character assassination – even of each other. No one, no matter how high, is safe from these intellectual harpies.
Parallel to Deconstructionism is the so-called Theatre of the Absurd movement, especially as portrayed in the dramas of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco (all of which have been widely celebrated and performed in America). In essence, these plays exemplify the illogical and purposeless nature of contemporary existence. They are directly related to the DADA and Surrealistic movements in art.
None of these literary practitioners have much of a place in their works for religion or values worth living by. The net result of generations of debunkers is today’s widespread sense of disillusion, immersion into virtual reality rather than the real world, addiction to substance abuse of all kinds (liquor, drugs, pornography, sexuality, etc.), and an almost terrifying rise in suicide. Not to mention the fallout on the moral front (the nonstop assaults on the institution of marriage, Christianity, and traditional values). Half of all marriages ending in divorce, live-in relationships are becoming the norm, and half of all children are being born out of wedlock, 75-80% in African-American households.
The same is true for our national heroes. For over a century and a half, these preachers of negativity have done their utmost to strip Abraham Lincoln of his spirituality and all the ethical and moral qualities that made him a worldwide icon in the first place.
Even Great Books classics have become an endangered species. In a world where there are no absolutes, no right or wrong, no goodness, no bravery, no courage, no greatness of any kind, neither in the arts nor in real life, there can be no great anything!
Instead, no subject is permitted to rise above all others: spiritual values are removed from life, the Decalogue is trashed, and God is replaced by Relativism.
Nathan Harden, author of Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad, has this to say: “And the fact that Yale [a symbol for American higher education here] as an institution no longer understands the substantive meaning of academic freedom—which requires the ability to distinguish art from pornography, not to mention right from wrong—is a sign of its enslavement to the ideology of moral relativism, which denies any objective truth (except, of course, for the truth that there is no truth).
Under the dictates of moral relativism, no view is more valid than any other view, and no book is any greater or more worth reading than any other book. Thus the old idea of a liberal education—that each student would study the greatest books, books organized into a canon based on objective criteria that identify them as valuable, has given way to a hodgepodge of new disciplines—African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies—based on the assumption that there is no single way to describe the world that all serious and open-minded students can comprehend. . . .
Unfortunately, what’s happening at Yale is indicative of what is occurring at colleges and universities across the country. Sex Week, for example, is being replicated at Harvard, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin. . . . Our universities have lost touch with the purpose of liberal arts education, the pursuit of truth.”
–Man, Sex, God, and Yale, by Nathan Harden (Hillsdale, Michigan: Imprints, January 2013).
Truly, America is at the crossroads!
Wednesdays with Dr. Joe 