My Saturday morning moment of pause to reflect on society, friendship, and the suicide of Anthony Bourdain.
Why is It?
Why is it modern man so superficially judges one another? Based on attractiveness, fitness, and socio-economic status? It has always been so, but never before in such global, epidemic proportions. When Victorian, 19th Century, British elite picked eachother to pieces about who was most fit to marry or invite to their banquet, they now look humble and unprejudiced compared to contemporary Westerners. If Jane Austen were alive today, she could make a killing writing satire about modern social cliques, or she may find today's insanity beyond words.
For me, I never much fitted into social cliques here in Oklahoma. Providence placed me in the awkward position of being a religiously conservative and traditionalist Catholic, in terms of religion and culture, a white European/European-American masculine man, an idealist and introvert by temperament, and of a lower economic background. Just about every personal trait contemporary culture hates as an enemy of progress. Imagine being in those categories, surrounded, in your work place no less, by at-heart pagan liberals, evangelical Protestants in background and disposition, and almost the most uneducated people in the US (Oklahoma is 48th in the nation for education). If you're reading this, odds are you can relate.
Why is It?
Why is it sincere, authentic, sustained, and virtuous friendship, in all its varieties and forms, is today practically dead and obsolete? Poets have always waxed and waned about how good friendship is precious when you find it, but I'm as certain real, natural, genuine friendship today is as uncommon as it was once common just a few decades ago.
For me, I was far more fortunate having good, loyal, sustained friendships throughout my formative years, than in adulthood. And in my observation, that seems to hold true for many men. When CS Lewis wrote about the modern problem of friendship in particular for modern men, in his book The Four Loves, it seemed even more a prognostication of the de-evolution of modern friendship now, than a diagnosis for his own time.
And, Why is It?
Why is it Anthony Bourdain, internationally renowned food critic, two days ago hung himself to death in a Paris hotel room?
And likewise, why is the media response to eulogize a man who just murdered himself? Who was an unashamed, professed hedonist and drug addict?
CNN painted him as an object of admiration, and his suicide as incidental to the fact he is now gone. Meanwhile, the Netflix TV show, "13 Reasons Why," which critics say is actually encouraging suicide, remains at the top of their list of most viewed shows.
I have Netflix, and I've appreciated Bourdaine's food shows, but his marriage, family, friendships, wealth, and status in the end was not enough for him.
My impression is that suicide in all its forms and reasons is becoming increasingly a politically correct topic, because modern man is finding fewer reasons to value human life. Before, we had to tolerate a suicide, and provide a normal, public burial full of eulogy. But now, my sense is we are being pressured to ACCEPT self-termination of one's life as moral. I expect that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide will eventually become a universal, constitutional right.
May Anthony rest in peace, and may God have mercy on his soul.
Conclusion:
Despite the sun still being in the sky, and electrical lighting, we live in a Dark Age. The Christian social order, and even the most basic natural law, common sensical level of human society has been inverted, destroyed, thrown away, and incinerated, but replaced with an artificial, materialist, godless, collectivism, the momentum of which is leading to more world war, totalitarianism, and desolation.
We have only one hope. If you follow this blog, you have discovered what this "one hope" is.
Pax vobiscum, and have a restful weekend. Thus ends my Saturday morning musing.