Catholicism And The Counterculture

[savvy]

I thought this was an insightful article at the Distributist Review. It's based on Christopher Dawson's 1935 article on the same.

 

 

 

The bourgeois is essentially a money maker, at once its servant and its master, and the development of his social ascendancy shows the degree to which civilization and human life are dominated by the money power.”[4] Dawson concludes his essay by explaining that a true Catholic civilization is dominated by a spirit of love, love for God, and expresses that love in vibrant art, music, and various other uneconomic means. Bourgeois civilization, on the other hand, will never rise above essentially worldly motives and maxims, such as “Honesty is the best policy,” etc.

http://distributistreview.com/mag/2012/12/catholics-and-the-bourgeois-mind/#comments

 

 

 

[iheartjp2]

This is a great article. I've had similar thoughts and this article did a great job of articulating them. Thanks for sharing.

[Era Might]

If you're interested in "counterculture" check out Ivan Illich. He was a Catholic priest in the 50's and 60's until he ran into conflict with the Vatican and stopped functioning as a priest (though he lived the rest of his life as a celibate). In the 50's he was stationed at a Puerto Rican parish in New York and a lot of his thought is written from a Latin American perspective (he later founded an organization in Mexico). He was a big critic of "development" in the 60's, which he criticized as a covert operation, under the guise of "charity," to turn Latin America into another bourgeois society. He was a figure in the larger "counterculture" of the 60s and he wrote books like "Deschooling Society" and "Medical Nemesis" criticizing institutions like schools and hospitals. He was not so much interested in how to reform such institutions, but rather why they exist in the first place. Later in his life he focused more on medieval history and the roots of modern institutions. He wrote, for example, about the culture of the book in the middle ages, and how the advent of modern technology is changing our social perceptions. As he got older he became more and more explicit about how he sees the world through the lens of the Incarnation (it was a central theme in his thought), and much of his criticism was based on the idea that the Incarnation made something new and free possible, which institutions try to manage and ensure (thus extinguishing the newness and freedom). He wrote about things such as the centrality of friendship and the art of dying (both of which he thought were disappearing from modern life). The best book to start with is "The Rivers North of the Future" which was an extended interview he gave to his friend (he died in 2002).

Edited January 6, 2013 by Era Might