Woke — wreaking harm on the oppressed

Noelle Mering...wokeism is a thin ideology that harms rather than heals. Photo: Source

"Wokeness is a movement for justice but when you really understand what the internal logic of the movement is, I find it to be alarming," says author and Washington D.C. think tank member Noelle Mering. "It is fundamentally something that weakens people far more than it helps, and particularly the people it claims to want to help."

Mering lays bare the intellectual structure of the movement in her book out last year Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. In a video on the topic, she says that while the term "woke" refers to being alert and attuned to the layers of oppression in society surrounding the hot issues of today—race, sex, and gender—the underlying idea has a long history.

 "It is really a reformulation of old ideas and old roads that various countries have gone down," nodding to the various experiments in Communist countries based on the materialist and coercive stance of Marxism.

It's more than just a political movement, it's actually a spiritual movement before anything else. So the history of the movement is really important to understand.

You can [find] it in the Garden of Eden with a snake cajoling the first woman to be that she wants - you can be as gods. But if we want [...] a starting point in more modern times most people point to Karl Marx. [However], it's important also to understand who Marx was influenced by, and this is a philosopher named Hegel.

Hegel is important to understand because he started the engine of the modern progressive movement which he called the dialectic. [This ...] was just this idea that history is a movement of progression towards a utopian end and that progress through history comes through the engine of revolution, which is built around an idea manifesting itself in the [...] political state in particular.

"Then that [moment of progress] will have contradictions and those contradictions have to be worked out and worked through. You get a new state and then that state has its own contradictions. You keep cycling and synthesizing in history until you reach utopia. Marx was captivated by this new thing in philosophy called the dialectic. 

But he was a strict materialist whereas Hegel was thinking that this is a rational movement. Marx said no, there is nothing beyond the material, the material world is all that is. So there is this dialectic, this engine throughout time reaching a utopia but it's a utopia built purely on economic terms with every person being defined as either an oppressor or an oppressed, working class proletariat or ruling class, and that this is where the revolution would happen and that the revolution was inevitable. 

Then came post-modernism, which basically identified language as being an avenue for power and, therefore, we [are] able to manipulate words. In manipulating our language we can manipulate the interior life of a community because once we no longer can communicate clearly and understand that our words are connected to reality, then they become tools that we can wound each other with or that we can just destabilize our community with them.

Then intersectionality came and further [turned] attention on 'oppressive identity'. With this, we really had the birth of identity politics. [This] was late 80s early 90s and it crystallized [as a] movement. 

The presuppositions are all built on Hegel, Marx, Freudianism and the Frankfurt School [of philosophers]."

For Freud, reality lies off stage or out of consciousness and that each person was on a continuum of sanity and madness.  As for the Frankfurt School, Britannica.com states:

The members of the Frankfurt School tried to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy but which also utilized the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. They used basic Marxist concepts to analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems. This approach, which became known as “critical theory,” yielded influential critiques of large corporations and monopolies, the role of technology, the industrialization of culture, and the decline of the individual within capitalist society.

Mering continues: 

This is what we see now. This is Marx's march through history, the progression into a future utopia that is constantly supposed to be working itself out in time with rejection of everything that came before. It is the culmination of all of those presuppositions until now.

Marx said that the greatest obstacles to revolution are the faith [in God] and the family. Why this is, I think, is because the faith gives people a context for their suffering rather than marinate in the inequality or the cross of our life.

We're actually told to embrace that cross, that we can find real meaning and real nobility in suffering. No revolution is born out of people suffering well in dire circumstances. A revolution is born out of people who are enraged by their circumstances and feel inadequate and helpless to transcend them.

So once you are weakened to the point where you feel that you have no power, no possibility, then the only answer left logically is to fight the system, destroy the system, [...] and hope that some new utopia will come from that.

I think the average student at a college, university, or even your nice woke Aunt Susan or your neighbor, they are not steeped in Hegel; they don't consider themselves Marxists, and this is part of where the confusion lies.

[Wokeism] is ostensibly a movement just for justice, and who doesn't want justice? It's a movement to fight racism... Every person of good will, every normal reasonable person wants to fight racism.

All of these are deeply Christian claims. Christians are supposed to be people of justice, supposed to be people fighting against injustice. The fact, the reality that most people would not consider themselves Marxist but have adopted so many of the conclusions of this movement is just a sign of how pervasive and how ubiquitous the movement has become.

It's the water in which we swim, it's the air that we breathe, it's in our movies, it's in the way we frame narratives, it's in media, it's in politics, it's in the academy - rampantly so - and so all of these things coalesce to create a default way of thinking, a filter upon which we see the world without even realizing that we're necessarily looking through a filter at it all.

In some ways it's a sort of spinoff the C.S. Lewis book, The Screwtape Letters,  where [there is] that famous line that the greatest power of the devil is that he can convince you he doesn't exist and, therefore, you're at his mercy, beholden to his power in a way that you might not have been had you been able to identify what was happening.

The woke movement is similar to that with regard to its presuppositions, and that the greatest power this ideological filter has over us is that we don't realize that we're looking through a filter at all. We just think that this is the way that you see reality.

A lot of Catholics and Christians feel that Christ would have fought side by side with people for racial justice or he would have fought against lecherous men, and for women who want to feel that they have true dignity and aren't instruments of someone else's pleasure.

Those are true Christian precepts and Christ would have been on the side of justice in those matters, but the thing that this ideology does is... it's a truly deformed ideology in that it takes partial truths and totalizes them and in that totalization it presents something that is a lie because it creates the [view that] the only way to look at the world is through this lens of power and domination.

It defines a human person differently than what the Christian vision of what a human person is. The Christian vision of the human person is that we're defined on universals. We're rational animals just based on Aristotelian logic, but also through revelation we know that we are called to be sons and daughters of a loving Father; that we are defined in relationship to God; we're defined by love itself, love himself.

Defined by the hatred of man and society 

The woke could define a person very differently and incompatibly, so for the woke, the person is not defined by the love of God but by the hatred of man or hatred of society.

For example, to be a woman is not just to be a woman in any sort of  traditional sense. There's a bodily meaning there, and there's certain spiritual symbolism.

But to be a woman for the woke is to be fundamentally fighting the oppression that's at the core of your being. For example, in 2017 there was the first women's march and there was a group of pro-life feminists who were co-sponsoring the march. But when the organizers got wind that they were pro-life they said, "Oh, well, you can march with us but you cannot have any official affiliation with us."[The pro-life women] were confused and they said, "But we support the dignity of women. We want to fight for similar goals. We overlap in certain areas, and this is not just a pro-abortion march, it's a pro-women's march..."

But the thing we have to understand about the ideology is that it's not about supporting the person in the oppressed group, it's about supporting the person in the pressure group who supports the ideology. So it's really empowering the ideology not empowering the human being. So it's not enough to be a woman, you have to be an ideological woman, you have to be a politicized woman.

We hear the same thing echoed with Nicole Hannah Jones, the author of the [New York Times'] "1619 project" who famously said, "We all know there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black". That [means] it's simply not enough to be a black person you have to be supporting our agenda in order to be considered.

So it's not actually about diversity it's about uniformity of thought, but with different people, representatives of different groups, embracing and affirming that uniformity.

One important thing we need to pay attention to is the way in which words can sound innocuous to our ears because most people translate them into something reasonable, but for the movement it's far more radical.

A good example of that is the word "equity", which sounds like something that's oriented around justice and equality. But equity for the movement means equity of outcome, that all outcomes should be equal, despite effort, despite merit, despite any other factor that might weigh in on disparate outcomes.

So, according to the ideology, if you see that there is an inequitable outcome you can attribute it to only one thing, either racism or sexism or some other type of social oppression.

What this does is it eliminates the possibility of any sort of measure, any sort of metric. So, for example, [in] the new woke math, they'll say two plus two can equal five if it equals five in someone's lived experience. 

It seems like it can't be a serious proposition but the ideological reason for that is that all standards have to be eradicated, even the ones that are as undeniable as a simple mathematic equation that every person understands.

The reason is because we have to attribute all outcomes, all of our successes, all of our failures to systemic forces outside of ourselves. Our failures are not ours to own and learn from, our successes are not ours to claim and grow with.

There's a truth to that because people do have disadvantages and people do have advantages over others. But there's no state power or force that can equalize all those things. This is the human situation.

Our successes do not originate completely in us. Obviously anything good that comes out of us is first and foremost attributable to God, and it's just our cooperation with him that brings any good in the world from us.

So there's a truth that they're speaking to, but rather than using it to point to the love of God and the power of God, rather it is only an indication of the evil of society.

The fact that some people might merit something that others don't is attributed to the systemic forces and the systemic forces have to be eradicated.

Other people have spoken on this, notably Jordan Peterson, [on this view that] all of humankind, in any society, is going to end up with some sort of hierarchical structure.

Every Marxist country that has tried to establish a society based on those principles ends up becoming tyrannical and that's inevitable based on the presuppositions.

But if you're going to end up in some sort of hierarchical system no matter what, the most fair way to establish that is through merit. I know it's easy to make merit into a cartoon where people say "Oh just pull your yourselves up by the bootstraps", without any recognition that people do start life in situations that they need help.

They're vulnerable, they're at risk, there are incredible hardships, and we can't just give them a good pep talk and say get on your way.

We really need to have solidarity [with people] as Catholics. But the problem is that if you read any biography of any person who was born into incredibly difficult circumstances and somehow was able to transcend those circumstances, what it was it that made the difference, it was someone in their life telling them to control what was within their control, to take responsibility, to not marinate in the injustices that they're born into but rather to see what they can do that can pull themselves out.

You see this in the biography of Ben Carson [eminent surgeon, presidential candidate, Afro-American]. His grandmother used to recite a poem to him called "Mr Nobody", and it was something along the lines of—when something's gone wrong and you've got no one to blame, you can blame Mr Nobody.

The point of this lesson was just that blame is going to get you nowhere [when] you've been dealt a hard hand. But that mindset [of blame] is going to exacerbate your circumstances and we would never tell someone that in any type of other situation. 

Mering points out that in leadership, if you're mentoring someone,  you would never tell someone to point their finger at everyone else in when something goes wrong.

You want the person who's going to say, "The buck stops with me. I'm going to take some initiative and I'm going to grow and I'm going to change. I'm going to see what I can do to make things better and be positive."

But for some reason we've decided that we can tell a whole generation that the way they move through life is the exact opposite way to that which is going to lead to their actual flourishing in life.

Is dialogue possible? 

Knowing how to engage with someone who is woke can be challenging because in some ways the movement is not oriented around dialogue. It's sort of oriented around intimidation.

There's a lot of manipulation that happens with language and I think it's important to know when it's not going to be a fruitful conversation and you want to just say, "I love you. Let's not go down this road."

So there's a certain amount of prudence that comes into the equation: Is this a person that I can actually have a dialogue with, and if it's not then it can only create more division and more tension to try to do something that this combination of people are up for.

But there will be other people who are more open to having a real conversation with whom we might feel that this is something worthwhile to talk about.

I talk to parents a lot who are saying, "My kids came home and they are woke now, and they're challenging me".

It's important to know that this is, in some ways, a phase. It might not be something they adopt lifelong.

There are real woke ideologues out there who have fully embraced the movement but there's also a lot of people who are just parroting a script they've been handed. It hasn't really penetrated into their soul and that's when we have to realize that there is a deeper human longing that people have.

It's a longing that won't be satisfied by a thin ideology that has to be propped up by coercion, by silencing, by fear and by manipulation. It's a longing that can only be fulfilled by the fullness of truth, a willingness to embrace the truth no matter where it leads you: scientific truth, philosophical truth, theological truth, and most of all, the truth of who we are in relationship to a loving God and loving Father.

What the human heart longs for, and it's something that cannot be fulfilled by ideology... and we have to feel confidence in the fact that every human person is longing for the exact same thing.

Every revolutionary wants to target the father, and there's something deeply spiritual happening, because when we think of authority now, right authority or or even fatherhood, the role of the father our minds immediately go to is tyrannical domination.

It's been such an effective demonization of the image of a father ,but if you talk to someone they know what a good father should be, they know, even if they didn't experience it, that a good father is not there to control them but actually to empower them to lead their lives independently.

They know a good father is gentle, but also strong. We have so corrupted the image of the father in a way to corrupt our understanding of who God is because God is the father, and he's not a father because he's like a human father. Human fathers are more fatherly in so far as they're more like him.

Women become vulnerable 

Fatherhood really is a window into who God is, so the revolutionaries were correct in that by targeting the father you really dismantle society from the inside out.

They wrote about men needing to become licentious, to become slaves to their desires. That was part of our "liberation". However, our true liberation is through combating groups outside of ourselves, but our liberation is also through combating our own internal desire or instinct, to repress our desires.

[For revolutionaries] our liberation was in part of our embracing every desire, particularly ones that were transgressive [of moral boundaries], and this was a real target with regards men.

What happens once a man's moral authority is eroded is that women become vulnerable because there is a way in which men are called to be providers and protectors, and once women become vulnerable they tend to become calloused. The sexual revolution targeted them and it encouraged them to engage in all sorts of relationships and in activities that women really have to callous themselves to engage in.

It's hardened a lot of women because they have felt used and have felt they weren't cared for. The deeper part of what's happening is that the revolution manipulated this societal pathology.

It encouraged men to become licentious, to become weak,  and then it pointed to the abuse, the inevitable abuse, and disruption that happened between men and women, and said, "You see, this is further evidence that we need to smash the patriarchy. Men are bad, so let's condemn men as a whole as being bad." 

It's suggesting that the cure is the exact thing that caused the problem, that [going further in] rejecting true masculinity is the way that we're going to get out of this whole thing of having eradicated what real masculinity is.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says that to be emasculated is to be a slave to pleasure to the point where you're no longer willing to suffer to be a real man. There is some connection between suffering and the true masculinity that society needs and families need.

We're going to have to fight this movement on multiple levels and it's already happening far more than we often realize. There are people building up new institutions, there are more and more parents seeing through this, and we see on our school boards there's a resistance happening that's very grassroots and hopeful.

There's a thinness to the ideology that is becoming transparent now people are seeing it affect their kids in such bad ways.

It seems fundamentally like a justice movement that's actually more unjust than it is just.

But we have to fundamentally see this as a spiritual battle and and fight it on that level. This is a spiritual battle and we have to be arming ourselves for that fight.

The first thing I usually suggest to people is to [...] get some clarity about what is happening because there's a shape-shifting of how the movement presents itself, and there's a manipulation of language that happens that can be really confusing.

The movement really tries to operate on that sort of confusion and capitalize on it and exploit it with those good Christian precepts [of justice, care for the weak and minorities] and then supplanting them with a bunch of ideology that you have to accept.

So the more clarity that we have then the more we will feel confident in resisting it and not falling for these types of tricks.

Fundamentally, we have to have courage. It's a movement that can't be resisted on the fringes. One person resisting or two people or a handful of people —that's a fringe group. But galvanizing whole coalitions of people to resist it, that's something to contend with and that's the way we find it within companies and within counties and even within our country as a whole.

That type of clarity can imbue us with a sort of courage that can really give us the confidence to simply and plainly call out a lie. The greatest threat to a lie is some people, someone, simply and plainly saying the truth.

It feels like it's Goliath at the moment, but Goliath can be brought to his knees far more easily than we might think, and that thought can give us a lot of hope in this fight.

Ω Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of the book,  Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (2021)  She is an editor for the website Theology of Home and a coauthor of the books Theology of Home and Theology of Home II .  She writes on culture, politics, and religion. Mering has an MA in philosophy and is a wife and mother of six children in Southern California. 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

Why Lia Thomas can't re-invent reality

Lia Thomas, who wants a place in the Olympic women's team

A few days ago the New York Times published an article by Michael Powell, "a national reporter covering issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate", on the impact on women's sports of Lia Thomas, a swimmer who identifies as a woman, and who been allowed to compete against biological females.  

Powell has done us a valuable service by bringing together voices who are largely ignored by the mainstream media, including the NY Times, on how men who have transitioned can affect the lives, including the sporting lives, of women. However, credit where it is due, as in Powell's article. 

The issue is contentious because of the different perspectives — the scientific reality of biology versus the wish to fulfil what has come to be taken as a  personal right based on hopes and dreams, largely by men who identify as women. The Times article reports the opposing stances:

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of World Athletics, which governs international track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

The ACLU has had an illustrious history of activism in pursuit of human rights, but it has become just one more example of an organisation being captured by proponents of the transgender ideology that ignores scientific evidence and, in doing so, thrusts women's rights into the background. It has become so extreme in its stance that it has had to declare that it still upholds free speech. See this article by David Cole, ACLU national legal director. And see this NY Times article on its attempts to limit free speech

The British equivalent, the Stonewall organisation, once much respected as being in the vanguard of gay rights activism, has likewise been captured by trans ideologists, and has been disowned by one of its founders after it was mocked after statements by one of its principal officers that there is no such thing as a woman.

The key matter that points to the danger of taking an absolute view of self-invention that Lia Thomas embraces, as seen in the interview with ABC News earlier this month, is what she told Sports Illustrated: “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.” She wants to compete in the Olympics on the women's team.

Credit...

This where the NY Times article is valuable—it highlights the views of  others affected by the transgender absolutism. We come to understand why Thomas should not expect other people to comply with her wish to identify as a woman when it is a male body, and a male's achievement's, that they see.

For example, "Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes [...] Navratilova argues that transgender female athletes possess insurmountable biological advantages." The Times quotes her as saying:

“I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have had no shot. And I would have been livid.”

As to the reasons why males who transition to a woman's identity should not expect to be accepted in girls' or women's sport without complaint, the Times reports: 

Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., studies the physiology of male and female athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is a century old, and the sexes follow similar practice and nutrition regimens.

Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”

The records for elite adult male swimmers are on average 10 percent to 12 percent faster than the records of elite female swimmers, an advantage that has held for decades.

Little mystery attends to this. Beginning in the womb, men are bathed in testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.

“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”

When a male athlete transitions to female, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male.

Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.

But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.

For example, Thomas ranked 65th in the men’s 500-yard freestyle but when performing as a woman, Thomas won the title.

“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist who consults on world athletics. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”

It's worth noting his corroboration of Dr Joyner's findings. Elsewhere, he says it's a "travesty" that women are expected to bow to the demands of  athletes who, after treatment, retain enough of the male physiology to outperform women. 

"But I'm now a woman!" won't hack it. The Times continues:

Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable. The Israeli physicist Ira S. Hammerman in 2010 examined 82 events across six sports and found women’s world record times were 10 percent slower than those of men’s records.

“Activists conflate sex and gender in a way that is really confusing,” noted Dr. Carole Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She wrote the book T: The Story of Testosterone. “There is a large performance gap between healthy normal populations of males and females, and that is driven by testosterone.”

The sprinter Allyson Felix won the most world championship medals in history. Her lifetime best in the 400 meters was 49.26 seconds; in 2018, 275 high school boys ran faster.

Renée Richards was a pioneer among transgender athletes. An ophthalmologist and accomplished amateur tennis player — she played in the U.S. Open and ranked 13th in the men’s 35-and-over division — she transitioned in 1975 at age 41. She joined the women’s pro tennis tour at age 43, ancient in athletic terms. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47.

Ms. Richards has said she no longer believes it is fair for transgender women to compete at the elite level.

“I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” 

Joanna Harper, a competitive transgender female runner and Ph.D. student studying elite transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in Britain, agreed that testosterone gives transgender female athletes some advantage.

But she spoke of inexorable emotional and psychological pressures on transgender athletes.

“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”

Reka Gyorgy, a 2016 Olympian and a swimmer at Virginia Tech, offered a response of sort. She placed 17th in the preliminaries for the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic.

She was less forgiving of the N.C.A.A.

“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”

That decision prevented her from qualifying for All-America honors.

Powell talked to families of female swimmers. They emphasised "that transgender people should have the same right to housing, jobs, marriage and happiness as any American".

But they talked of the thousands of hours the young women put into their sport. From early childhood, they swam hundreds of laps daily, nursing injuries and watching nutrition. Why, having reached the pinnacle, should they race against a swimmer who retains many biological advantages of a male athlete?

It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.” 

Of course, some who have absorbed transgender ideology advocate for no sex segregation in sport, saying athletes should learn to live with the "discomfort” such a change would prompt. The Times continues:

This strikes some feminists and scientists as a walk into strange territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is often grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, has carved out positions on transgender rights that have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

In all, a valuable piece of reporting from Michael Powell. 

To close, I want to offer a powerful statement from Rod Dreher, a writer who is a saddened observer of the cultural strife the Western world finds itself in because of the misguided directions committed to by the social, intellectual and political elites, continuing into the present. He writes:   

The metaphysical aspect of all this, though — the trans stuff, I mean — is that the culture in which we swim is teaching us to despise the givenness of our bodies, and to think that we can change Nature with a sufficient application of technology, law, and cultural command (including persecuting dissenters). You think this stuff is only about happy-clappy affirmation? Think about what you are affirming: the erasure of masculinity and femininity as biological facts. And we wonder why so many young people in our culture are so psychologically distressed. They are born into an unreal world, and told by the gatekeepers of this culture that they must deny among the most fundamental truths that we can know: the facts of our maleness and femaleness.

💢 The battle over trans ideology in schools

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Pursuit of happiness clouded by unreality

Clouded reality of modern times. Graphic by Zaksheuskaya

Author and social commentator Rod Dreher is prepping his next book by studying the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Dreher points out that "in McGilchrist's 2009 book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [we see] in modern times [...] a sharp increase in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, borderline personality disorder, and other diseases associated with under-function of the brain’s right hemisphere, and over-function of the left hemisphere". 

This over-reliance on the left hemisphere is important in understanding why there is so much distress in technologically advanced societies. Dreher highlights the following section of McGilchrist's book ("hypo" means "under", "beneath", "down"), saying that McGilchrist writes that we find modern people are increasingly distressed by... 

   
Philosopher Mary Midgeley wrote an admiring review of McGilchrist's book in the Guardian in 2010. She said of it:

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.

McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. 

[...] it is always Right’s business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence. 

Further:

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. 

 Dreher notes:

The book goes on to talk about how we have created a culture that conditions us to accept alienation, decontextualization, disembodiment, and fragmentation, because that is how the left hemisphere construes the world.

That this is causing distress generally is apparent from the statements of practitioners in mental health care, such as David Rettew, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director of Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon. He writes:

A number of mental health clinics across the country, including ours, have recently seen an influx of adolescents who are presenting with self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder and claiming that within themselves there are a number of different personalities that emerge at different times. Much of this seems to be driven by a small number of influential people on TikTok who have posted very popular videos in which they describe their DID in great detail.

Rettew says it's appropriate to "worry that simple dismissals of these adolescents as simply [my stress - BS] acting out the latest 'fad' miss an opportunity to work with significant mental health challenges, even if their expression is being shaped through social media".

Here, from TikTok, is one such adolescent who says her other personality wants the pronouns of paint/paintself.

Dreher:

It seems to me that this would be an example of the kind of thing one would expect in a culture that rewards this kind of insanity. Similarly with the transgender fad, it is impossible to believe that gender dysphoria, a real psychological condition that was observed in a vanishingly small number of people until a short time ago, is in the current moment not a symptom of advanced cultural breakdown along the lines Dr. McGilchrist discusses in The Master and His Emissary. 

This thread of discovery continues in greater detail in McGilchrist's 2021 book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

A reviewer of this text - two volumes long - states that McGilchrist is leading a "revolution" in regaining an understanding of who we are as human beings because we have "become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us".   

To add to the awareness of our precarious situation under the waves of scientism, for the wont of a better term, that have been sweeping over us, I want to provide McGilchrist's own words, by means of screenshots of the Kindle version of The Matter With Things as provided in Dreher's blog here.

McGilchrist writes in The Matter of Things about the lost path to personal peace:

 

We have the cultural elite to thank for much of this mess through its acceptance of styles of thought that make each person the sovereign of what they accept as reality, and its rigid adherence to ideologies that are based more on what is fashionable than on what is logically compelling. These elements, and the moral weakness at the heart of each person, combine to exclude a greater reality, which extends from human experience, to the nature of the world that we inhabit, and ultimately, to the God who created us with the purpose of developing communion not conflict, and from that, deriving a meaning that enables us to live our life to the fullest.

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Suffering: Why does God allow it?

As I am writing this I am also observing an online conversation between two women about their health problems. One talks about coping with a gastric complaint which involves "poop" difficulties; the other about the arthritis that she has suffered from since a teenager, at one time in her early twenties causing her to be bedridden for a whole year, but now that she is in her fifties, preventing her from doing the craft work that she takes delight in when she is able.

Pain and embarrassment, poverty and disability, often multiple burdens at once, are the lot of many people, while others escape relatively scot-free. Why does God seem to impose suffering on people when he is supposed to be a loving creator?

The two women above have come to terms with their predicament, placing their lives in God's hands, accepting that God has a plan for them that takes them along the rough terrain that is a life worth living.

A copy of Francis of Assisi's crucifix icon

A man, Robert Spitzer, who long battled fading eyesight and who went completely blind aged 57, shares his personal explanation of why God allows suffering:

For many years, when my eyes would take another turn for the worse, I would go through yet another bout of frustration and anxiety—frustration, because I made the fatal error of comparing my diminished abilities with what I was once able to do—and anxiety, because I was not certain whether the new level of disability would end my productivity or people’s respect for my capacity to “deliver.” 

Let me say for the moment, that this initial negative reaction to suffering was really about perspective (how I viewed suffering and challenge), and not so much the suffering or the challenge itself. I was not able to help myself: when the next level of disability came, I looked at it from a self-centric point of view. It seemed that the shocking development of “one more dreaded decrease in eyesight” caused me, despite my faith, to turn into myself. 

Spitzer, with a typical American zero sum mindset, says he could not accept on a human level that there were benefits to what was happening to himself:

I am not a stoic. That is, I am not prone to seeing suffering as a way of cultivating strength, courage, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and autonomy.

Some of this supposed value in suffering mentioned above runs contrary to my empathetic and interpersonal nature. Therefore I view them as negatives and not benefits. 

The other stoic characteristics—strength, self-discipline, and courage—can be positive, but they are not ends in themselves. They are only means to greater ends, such as contribution to others and the common good.

 However, suffering can have supernatural benefits:

[...] It taught me that the sooner I get over it by putting myself into the hands of God (i.e. looking for the opportunity in suffering that will come through His guidance), the better off I am.  

If I did not have faith in a loving God, and hope in eternal life with him, I don’t think I would have this positive outlook on suffering—and I certainly would not be able to view it as an opportunity. 

He expands on that point:

I can see positive value in suffering through the lens of love which may be initially defined as a “recognition of the unique goodness of individuals, inducing a sense of empathy and unity with them, and making it just as easy, if not easier, to do the good for them as to do the good for myself.”

Inasmuch as suffering can lead to greater humility, compassion, and empathy, it can also free us to contribute to others and the common good without counting the cost, advancing the purpose of love.

[See also Spitzer's article Why would a loving God allow suffering? ]

In an interview, Spitzer clarifies what he means by the opportunities that arise through suffering: 

“First, it taught me humility. I’m not an arrogant type but I can definitely think I’m smart. But when you bash into a few pillars in an airport, that’s a lesson in humility,” he said.

“Nobody is self-sufficient. For a long time, I was a very independent thinker. I thought, ‘I can do this myself.’ Now I can’t do it myself. Blindness helps form a communion of people around you to help get things done. It’s a labor of love and that was a blindness discovery.”

And finally, “The best thing about blindness is that you’re just going to have to trust God. He’s going to help you and take care of you in tough situations.”

For many of us, trusting God requires a new mentality. We could say that it's fine for Spitzer who is a Jesuit priest, a holder of a PhD, and a former president of Gonzaga University in Washington State, but it's hard for ordinary people.

A young woman, Sonja Corbitt, takes up the matter of the difficulty of grasping the meaning of suffering:

When God first began teaching me about suffering, I was a young non-Catholic, and found the whole subject completely depressing. As a rule, most non-Catholics have no theology of suffering. I, personally, had no handle on the glory of suffering, and using those two words in the same sentence seemed, well, stupid, honestly. I wanted the Gospel to be health and wealth and prosperity.

My analytical mind works at extremes, and I began frantically planning for the worst case scenario, imagining the innumerable excruciating ways one could be “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).

Since I was a Bible geek, it was Revelation 2:8-10 that God used to confront me with my fear, as the church in Smyrna [in modern-day Turkey] was also in danger of the fear of suffering. Jesus personally encourages them in the midst of severe persecution and poverty.

Their works had made them spiritually rich, he said, yet they were about to suffer additional testing by Satan as a result. He adds, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” In other words, “You’re doing great! Now do it until it kills you and I’ll reward you!”

These remarks seemed very flippant to me, and were the cause of my fear. Jesus appeared completely oblivious to, or at least unaffected by, their total humiliation and degradation, and I secretly felt I shared Smyrna’s experience. 

An unexpected outcome when suffering is appreciated with the eyes of faith:

It seemed to me as though God did not really care that we suffer; rather, it was simply expected, and that hurt me, as I experienced some things in my childhood that were still very painful. I expressed this hurt to the Lord, and he answered me with an extraordinary thought. 

The thought is that anointing with oil had significance in the Hebrews' civic and religious life, with myrrh being the most prominent kind of oil, even being linked with the name "Smyrna". However:

Myrrh was expensive, fragrant, and bitter, as it was a symbol of suffering and death[...]

Jesus, too, would be particularly set aside and anointed with this oil, as prophetically designated by the title “The Christ” or “The Anointed One.”

Jesus does not diminish, in any way, what we endure. Our suffering is so precious, he collects and preserves our tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). He is steeped in suffering and identifies with it as the ultimate Suffering Servant*.

I have been set apart and called to service by virtue of my anointing at confirmation. What I was invited to accept, and ultimately to embrace, is that, like the Holy Trinity I worship, I must also be awash in the anointing oil of suffering.

The Church in Smyrna knew that there is often no earthly glory in obedience. It is only for the poor in spirit. But victory, peace, and reward await, in Christ: “I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). 

Spitzer has a message for us all, as we struggle with the reality of suffering made present most graphically in the aftermath of the latest massacre of children in the United States:

[T]here can be no suffering that is completely tragic. Tragedy may exist for a while, but in the hands of God, it will eventually be turned into love, and that love will last for all eternity. Even incredible tragedies, like the death of a child, are not ultimately and completely tragic, they are only partially and temporally tragic, for the temporary loss and grief that parents would feel in such circumstances is already compensated in the life of the child by God bestowing unconditional love upon him or her in His heavenly kingdom.

Yes, God feels the grief of the loving parents who miss their beloved, and He will feel that grief for as long as the parents experience it; but God simultaneously bestows unconditional and eternal love and fulfillment on the child whose loss is the cause of that grief.

Therefore, in the Christian view, suffering is complex. It includes the genuine experience of deep grief at premature loss. It also includes an experience of faith or hope that God is already bestowing unconditional love upon this child. It also includes an experience of trust that one will be reunited with that child in the eternity of God’s unconditional love; and it also includes an experience of “peace beyond all understanding” (from the Holy Spirit) intimating that everything is going to be all right.

We carry this mixture of thoughts and emotions forward day by day, with the knowledge that God has a plan to make our suffering fruitful—if we allow ourselves to comply with what God is directing us to become. It is hard to suffer and to hope and trust at the same time, "yet it is a path to the transformation of suffering into love", as Spitzer puts it. He also cites Paul's bold words from his Letter to the Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:18-27)

I hope this helps you, if in a time of need. Leave a comment, where you can challenge these ideas or ask for a prayer. Ultimately, our understanding of suffering will not be complete until we are with God in heaven and can look back at our life on earth and see the truth about events that caused us physical or emotional pain. All will be made clear when our eyes are unclouded.

* See Isaiah's Servant poems: 42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12.

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They gave up celebrity status for God

Dolores Hart with her then fiancé Don Paterson, and in a still from a 2011 documentary on her life

Dolores Hart won over Hollywood studio executives and angered teenage girls when she gave Elvis Presley his first screen kiss in 1957 in the Paramount Studios film Loving you.  Two years later she did King Creole with Presley. She went on to act alongside George Hamilton in the 1960 MGM hit Where the boys are. 

She followed up those achievements with a Tony Award and Golden Globe nominations for her work on stage and screen. She qualified to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and continues to vote for Oscar-nominated films. But in 1963, at the age of 24, she left the glamour of Hollywood to follow God's casting call for her to live as a cloistered Benedictine nun in Connecticut.

At the time she decided to become a nun Hart was engaged to Don Robinson, a tall, handsome Los Angeles architect and businessman. Because he loved Hart, he vowed to stay true to her all his life. He never married and stayed a faithful friend.

Hart has said that becoming a nun was her answer to a personal call of love, a call that is at the centre of the person, demanding a response.

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Olalla Oliveros ... from billboards to a convent. Photo Source

Olalla Oliveros was a successful Spanish model and actress, starring in movies and advertisements throughout the country and world. It was when she visited Fatima, Portugal, the site of the famous appearances in 1917 of Mary to three farm children, that she had what she later described as an "earthquake experience". She said she received in her mind the image of herself dressed as a nun, something she said she initially found absurd. 

She eventually concluded that Jesus was calling her to give up her glamorous life and devote herself to prayer and community in the religious life. She became a nun in 2010 at the age of 36.

"The Lord is never wrong" she said. "He asked if I will follow him, and I could not refuse." She is now a member of the semi-cloistered Order of Saint Michael.

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Gutierrez, actress and environmentalist— and nun. Photo Source

Maria "Chin Chin" Gutierrez wanted to be an investigative journalist in the Philippines but moved into showbiz, becoming a multi-award-winning actress but also an environmentalist. She is now a Carmelite nun, a life focused on prayer for the world and closeness to God.

A news report notes that in 2006, "she suddenly went off the nosy show business radar and took on a more low profile persona". The report explains:

At the height of her career starring in television soap operas and her environmental advocacy, she lost her mother as fire gutted their house at Loyola Heights district in Quezon City. She suffered injuries from that incident.

Four years after, in 2010, another fire broke out in the same house.

Chin Chin said the tragedies that befell her made her more circumspect on what to do with her life. 

“By the time I reached my college years … I had to confront the question of the existence of God in our philosophy class. Believe it or not, it actually touched a core in my being. While my mind is trying to convince myself and find proof that God does not exist, does not God hear me?" 

 In 1996, she was given the Best Actress title in the first Asian Television award in 1996 and 1998 the Best Supporting Actress prize. She was also a model who graced the covers of magazines.

Even as her star shone brighter in acting, she took on advocacies such as protecting the environment.

According to a Facebook page put up by her friends, she had become a sought-after resource speaker and lecturer for environmental education, “lending her expertise to a broad range of issues related to ecology and conservation, like Ecological Waste Management, Sustainable Development, Ecology and Spirituality, The Integrity of Creation, Sustainable Consumer Lifestyles, Women and the Environment, among others.”

In 2003, she was named one of Time Magazine’s “Asian Heroes”, appearing on its cover and in 2004 she was awarded The Outstanding Women in Nation’s Service Award for environmental advocacy.

 In an article, Gutierrez said that in her heart she had received the message: “You are entering something very interesting and beautiful."

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Joseph Brom, who has a PHD in Materials Science and Engineering from Penn State University has been ordained to the priesthood for Canons Regular on May 21 at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. pic.twitter.com/rMheaSl7hS

— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) May 22, 2022

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 A person's life changes when they believe that God exists, that our destiny involves a life after death in the company of the creator of the universe, and that God loves us so much that he gave us his co-equal in the divine nature to act by suffering in our place in order to restore justice to the relationship between God and humankind.

💢On YouTube:

     Dolores Hart Oscar-Nominated Documentary

     All or Nothing: Sister Clare Crockett — a movie-length documentary 

    Meet the former NASA engineer who is becoming a nun

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American values? No thanks!

An international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is alert to the wariness of parents over the negatives of  American culture.

Certainly the regular massacres of young people, whether in schools or in inner city neighbourhoods that have become a feature of life in the United States, won't help to make American culture attractive in the rest of the world. The Uvalde, Texas, slaughter of 19 children and two teachers two days ago only adds to the dismay felt by those who used to have a high regard for Americans, but who now view them as obese, psychologically fragile, and hyper-individualistic — the last characteristic underpinning the general inaction in controlling access to guns and in ensuring social safety.

Evil lurks in every society, but successful cultures take action to control the sources of harm. Although Vietnamese young people are enamoured of American creativity and its gadgetry, they know it's wise to hold to traditional values such as solidarity as expressed through a multitude of community-centred activities. Another value they uphold is that of education, along with the self-discipline entailed in attaining a high level of achievement. For that reason, respect for teachers is made manifest on November 20, Teachers' Day, in many touching ways, appealing to the likes of myself, a former teacher.

But let Americans tell it like it is. In response to the Uvalde massacre, Bari Weiss, a former journalist and editor on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, now the writer of social commentary, comes down hard on Americans for the dysfunctional society they have created, both through negligence of the common good, and the pollution of morality by the institutional and corporate imposition of new sets of virtue such as Critical Race Theory and the socially transformative trans ideology.

In a column titled "American madness", Weiss writes:

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just 10 days after 10 people were killed in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket. At least so far, 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

┅┅┅┅ 

There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics.

A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again.

As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

 ┅┅┅┅

The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

Vietnamese parents know such a psychologically poisonous and unsafe society is not a fit model for their children. They want their young ones to be exposed to Western/American customs and manners, but they are wary because the daily news tells them of the trouble at the heart of those societies. They despair when a young person in their extended family goes too far in pursuit of "freedom" and self-invention. They enjoy the cultivation of individual talents, but a lack of restraint is frowned upon in the comment in newspapers because people share a fear for the welfare of the person involved and the risk to social relationships.

In comments made to AP News last week, before the latest massacre in Uvalde, Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and professor at Yale, said:

I think the evidence is unmistakable and quite clear. We will tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering and death in the U.S., because we have over the past two years. We have over our history.

Likewise, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies mortality, is quoted as saying that there are profound racial and class inequalities in the United States, and Americans' tolerance of death is partly based on who is at risk. She continues:

Some people’s deaths matter a lot more than others. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in this really brutal way with this coincidence of timing.

Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University who studies the cultural politics of public health, spoke about the grotesque lack of gun control:

“I don’t think that most Americans feel good about it. I think most Americans would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture about these pervasive issues,” [...] and who adds that there is a similar “political vacuum” around COVID-19.

The AP journalist states:

The high numbers of deaths from COVID-19, guns and other causes are difficult to fathom and can start to feel like background noise, disconnected from the individuals whose lives were lost and the families whose lives were forever altered.

American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from preventable causes.

[...] pediatrician Dr. Mark W. Kline pointed out that more than 1500 children have died from COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the “myth” that it is harmless for children. Kline wrote that there was a time in pediatrics when “children were not supposed to die”.

“There was no acceptable pediatric body count,” he wrote. “At least, not before the first pandemic of the social media age, COVID-19, changed everything.”

This AP roundup of statistics on mass deaths in the US is an eye-opener as to how a society can become morally hardened and politicians abdicate responsibility for leading a challenge to a way of life that tolerates the loss of lives in large numbers:

💢 More than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19.
💢An estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 die.
💢 Nearly 43,000 people died on the US’s roads last year, the highest level in 16 years.
💢 An estimated 24,000 gun suicides year compared with 19,000 homicides.
💢 More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, setting a record.
💢 Let me add that there were about 629,898 abortions in 2019, a typical year.

Dr. Megan Ranney of Brown University’s School of Public Health describes a frustrating “learned helplessness”, adding that:

There’s been almost a sustained narrative created by some that tells people that these things are inevitable.

It divides us when people think that there’s nothing they can do.

It’s not that we put less value on an individual life, but rather we’re coming up against the limits of that approach. Because the truth is, is that any individual’s life, any individual’s death or disability, actually affects the larger community.

The state of personal welfare in the United States is also impacted by working conditions, with the latest attack on employees being to cynically offer unlimited annual leave, with well-endowed managers knowing the fear of losing their job will force employees into an almost nil-leave culture. A second sign of the employer versus employee conflict embedded in the US culture is the difficulty displayed again over recent months when workers try to organise for union protection.

There is much to admire about Americans, but it is clear that American culture, at home, is poisonous through its nihilism, lack of self-awareness, and embrace of toxic individualism; and abroad, it is arrogantly assertive in the typical tone-deaf manner — except for one culturally sensitive school in Ho Chi Minh City.

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Economy of Communion — people before riches

John and Julie Mundell, owners of an Economy
 of Communion business.

For more than 25 years John and Julie Mundell have worked for the protection of the environment. But the business they created to pursue that goal has a special character, being part of the network called the Economy of Communion.

First, we will get a glimpse of their business activity, then we will examine that special character, their role in creating a business that is not just a money-grubbing operation, but an environment for building their employees and contributing to their community by sharing the profits of their work.

In the northern US state of Indiana,  Indianapolis is a  city that has thrived because of its industries, which, however, have also had a negative environmental impact. It's in this context that the Mundells have pioneered environmental recovery so that their company is now active all over the United States and overseas as well.

John and Julie had long been involved in nature and began talking about starting a business that would do things differently so that the community would benefit as well as the owners. Their business, Mundell & Associates, is an earth and environmental consulting company specializing in site investigation and remediation, risk assessment, geophysics, water resource use and more.

John Mundell says of his business's specialty:

We assist our clients in cleaning up the earth, such as with hazardous waste, primarily through the groundwater. We have had a role in cleaning up Indianapolis in this way. 

Twenty years ago we started with an environmental project just north of the Indianapolis canal where we found contaminated groundwater from old chemicals that were spilled by industry. So part of our work is a cleanup project using something called air stripping, taking the chemicals out of the water. [...] We've got very clean water now that we are absolutely convinced is safe. That's good for people, good for wildlife, and it helps create this atmosphere around this canal that is one of beauty and safety.

Really the story of Mundell & Associates is all about revitalizing Indianapolis and taking land and refurbishing it, making it useful again and cleaning it up so that the next generation can use the land.

John displays the fire in his belly over protecting the gift of nature:

Things are really bad to be honest with you, and it's a serious thing that not everyone's paying attention, and so to find that vocation to live out — this idea of a united world, that we're all connected, that what I do does matter. Part of the problem that we're trying to solve is this disconnectedness, and so the striving for unity and building bridges between cultures and people who don't have and people who do have is, in my view, the solution to the whole thing.

Julie Mundell adds some context to operating a business that is oriented to a broader vision than just ensuring the principals get richer by minimizing the salaries of employees and multiplying their own incomes:

I would say making these choices added a richness and a fullness to our lives. There's things that you give up in order to dedicate your life to this kind of thing and we don't have regrets. We see where we could have done this, we could have done that, but you make choices and you find that there's good in all of them. But we really feel good about the way we've lived.

John and Julie Mundell have had their own children in mind in seeking to restore and protect nature and the gift of natural resources, but their vision also extends to the welfare of communities. This concept is at the heart of what is called the Economy of Communion, which aims to put into effect the rich vein of Catholic social teaching.

John describes the Economy of Communion

The Mundells' business expresses its "Social Mission" this way:

Mundell & Associates began its operations in 1995 as part of a worldwide economic initiative now known as The Economy of Communion. The Economy of Communion  promotes a commitment by business owners to operate their businesses both for profit and for the benefit of society. This innovative proposal was launched in 1991 by an Italian woman named Chiara Lubich, leader of a worldwide organization called the Focolare Movement.

Those who participate are concerned about the negative effects of the “culture of having” that dominates society and sometimes inadvertently marginalizes people. To promote a “culture of giving” which creates an all-inclusive, healthier, happier society, both profits and needs are shared within the EOC in an atmosphere of mutual support and trust.

The people who benefit from the profits of the businesses (i.e., those who are in need), assume an active role. Receiving takes on the same value as giving. The need is a contribution that is offered in full dignity and fraternity.

In 2014 alone the EOC’s ‘culture of giving’ provided help for about 2,000 families in need, despite tough economic conditions faced in many countries throughout the world.

Additionally, the formation of young entrepreneurs is supported through various initiatives and summer schools around the globe where participants learn about and develop business projects that bring about this new way of economic action.

Today, over 850 businesses in 60 countries participate in the Economy of Communion.

The Economy of Communion is a new paradigm for business practice. It aims to marry rational behaviour in running and protecting the interest of a business with recognition of the obligation to share the social resources generated by the business activity. The sharing is with the community through respecting the needs of the natural environment and, likewise, the needs of the human environment.

Se-Hak Chun, of Seoul National University of Science and Technology, writes in a research paper:

The  Economy  of  Communion  [focuses on]  advocating  and practising  equality  and  redistribution  (Gold,  2003).  The  EoC shares profits to eradicate poverty and reduce social exclusion. In  this  regard,  the  EoC  is  a  new  market  economy  philosophy  between Marxism and Capitalism,. [It] is grounded in a profound respect  for  the  individual  dignity  of  the  human  person  (Linard, 2003). The EoC promotes a commitment of owners (shareholders) to  operate  their  businesses  both  for  profit  and  for  the  benefit  of society (Grochmal, 2016). 

In a market economy, the firm’s goal is known as a profit maximization in an efficient way. Thus, an economic agent acts to pursue personal self-interest. However, the EoC firms [aim] to redistribute wealth according to concept of fairness (Zamagni, 2014). The EoC firms put stress on the relationship between economics and civil or social life.

The core principles guiding this fresh paradigm are  generativity,  reciprocity and gratuitousness — with the ethos of solidarity expressed at every level of commercial activity (Gold, 2004). This can be illustrated by the fact that:

EoC businesses voluntarily allocate their profits in three parts: one part for direct aid to the poor, one part for educational programs to disseminate the culture of giving, and one part to finance investment and further develop the company (Crivelli and Gui, 2014). So, only one-third of the profits would be reinvested in the business in order to develop and create new jobs (Bruni and Uel-men, 2006; Bouckaert and Zsolnai 2012). 

That might be regarded as a business-killer right there. Certainly Se-Hak Chun, without offering any comparison to typical businesses, expresses doubts about the sustainability of EoC businesses if they retain just one-third of the profit for business use.

But, in fact, conventional wisdom concurs with the EoC guideline. For example, one bank gives this advice:

The question is: how much do you reinvest? The answer is different for every business owner. Traditionally, experts recommend that you invest at least 20% to 30% of your profits back into your company. But that percentage may change depending on multiple factors, including your timeline, goals for growth and your personal financial needs.

The "needs" of the EoC business's owners (investors) are sacrificed, as Julie Mundell stated above, an example of the generous mindset necessary for such an undertaking, where redistribution of wealth is elevated above private appropriation. We have to remember that the right to private wealth, private property is not absolute, but always secondary to the needs of the community. 

In all, the Economy of Communion offers a ray of hope for all those who wish to humanize economic activity through use of rational, but at the same time, altruistic business practices, with profit redistribution, too, not just toward employees but toward the wider community as well. In addition, the EoC aims to rid society of its predicament where work is a new form of slavery and is the source of historically outrageous inequality. These areas of the modern market economy are desperate for relief.

Ω See another video featuring John Mundell, this time focusing on his application of the EoC principles to his own business. Go here.

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