All effects have causes. All actions have consequences. To understand these self-evident truths leads to an understanding of reality, the nature of things. In the realm of fantasy, however, these primary truths encounter denial or rejection—as if the laws of nature suddenly suspend themselves, do not apply, and make extraordinary exceptions for some individuals. This loss of contact with reality, logic, and science provokes all of the moral conflicts and culture wars that affect the sanctity of life, the battle for the family, and the status of marriage in the twenty-first century. Modern thinking presumes to render asunder the intrinsic relationship between causes and effects and between actions and consequences.
First, on the physical level alone, despite all the data, statistics, research, and evidence of failure, the U.S. government continues to promote sex education and approve funds for Planned Parenthood, never deducing that the encouragement of promiscuity and high-risk behavior among youth naturally leads to an increase of diseases, unplanned pregnancies, unwed mothers, and economic and educational impoverishment. Despite the proliferation of divorce coinciding with the easy availability “no-fault” divorce laws and the contraceptive mentality sanctioned by the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision, no authoritative body outside of the Catholic Church identifies the logical relationship between defiance of God’s laws and social pathologies. Adolescent youth do not need indoctrination, instruction, and encouragement in the sexual immorality of fornication and lust, but require an understanding of the ideals of purity and sacred matrimony. The crisis of unwed mothers, the high percentage of children born out of wedlock, unwanted children, and sexually transmitted diseases all originate in government-sponsored sex education and Planned Parenthood ideology subsidized by American taxpayers.
Milton’s Satan: “Evil, be thou my good.”
A secular culture that instructs the young in birth control methods in public education and requires contraceptive services in its health insurance policies never grasps the logical relationship between contraception and divorce, the distinction between simulated lovemaking and the gift of self. To make love and deliberately frustrate or prevent the possibility of children is to pretend to love and lie with the body. Again only the Catholic Church sees the logical chain of reasoning between causes and effects. In Pope Paul VI’s from Humane Vitae, “It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” Bad educational policies and bad laws produce moral chaos that causes dysfunctional societies.
The same mentality that ignores the relationship between contraception and divorce also denies the correlation between divorce and the suffering of children. Divided households and broken homes afflict the young with great emotional and psychological harm that deprives them of the peace and harmony of a stable home—the unnamed, unmentionable cause of poor academic performance for many students. For the sake of the happiness of the children and the ultimate moral integrity of parents, the Catholic Church teaches the indissolubility of marriage. Children who have suffered the ravages of divorce, called “the poorest of the poor,” often regard marriage as an inevitable source of conflict and turn to cohabitation as an alternative in their adulthood, or they themselves continue the cycle of marrying and then divorcing because of the precedent in their lives. The curse of divorce, then, brings further consequences. Many young men and women in their marriage years see no attraction or ideal in the vocation of marriage. Thus, the number of couples who marry declines as marriages lose their aura as a permanent source of life’s greatest blessings and appear as fatalities about the occur because of the soaring rates of divorce. Divorces, then, bring the additional burden of alimony, disillusionment, and depression—a life without loving and being loved.
The inevitable result of this chain of causes and effects is low population growth, even below replacement levels— the affluent societies of the West and Europe suffering what Patrick Buchanan alludes to as “The Death of the West” in his book by that title. Without normal population growth, societies and cultures do not transmit the heritage of the past or the venerable traditions that have formed their civilization. The continuity between the generations loses its natural links. When traditions die, their manners, morals, and ideals also decay, and the perennial wisdom of older generations loses its moral authority and influence upon the next generation. What Edmund Burke calls the partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” is severed. A society, then, becomes prey to ideological revolutions that presume to reinvent morality, redefine marriage, deny the sexual identity of maleness and femaleness, abort children, and euthanize the elderly. Once the family, the cell and center of civilization, collapses, chaos descends. In William Butler Yeats’ famous line from “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Shakespeare presented a similar vision in Troilus and Cressida: “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows.” By “degree” he means natural order, natural law, the normative meanings of right and wrong.
Nothing captures the horrific image of moral anarchy more than the culture of death, an image of the devastation of world wars by its millions of deaths. The anarchy “loosed upon the world” not only subverts natural and eternal law and the highest ideals of human civilization but also unleashes death in all its destructive forms to do damage to all that is sacred, beautiful, good, and true. The sheer numbers of these victims and the violent means of this slaughter shock every human sensibility: The child (the picture of innocence), youth (the springtime of life), the elderly (the image of the venerable), marriage (the reflection of the holy), the family (the mirror of love), procreation (the gift of self), and truth (the splendor of light) all suffer brutal onslaught by barbarians who feel no attraction or admiration for heavenly realities.
They suffer vicious attack because man does not think. In his perversity he uses the mind in a way that Mother Nature and God never intended—to make the weaker argument the stronger like the ancient Sophists. He does not call disease by its name of sickness but announces like Milton’s Satan, “Evil, be thou my good.” If he acknowledges the sickness, he does not identify the cause of the disease. If he admits to the problem, he seeks a therapeutic cure, not a moral solution. He administers a temporary palliative, not a lasting healing. He does not follow any logical chain of reasoning to deduce that the solution is as evil or worse than the problem and that the cure is poison rather than medicine. Secular man does not recognize the real cures to problems, the time-honored, morally tested virtues that have served human needs throughout the ages. He only prescribes more pills, more drugs, more sex education, more divorce, more birth control, more abortion, more euthanasia, and more same-sex marriage when human experience, Mother Nature, and God have already said in a thousand ways one cannot do evil to achieve good.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Fisher More College and Fisher More Academy.
