Understanding Modernity

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Tom Knighton, writing at Townhall, notes the lack of stigma that exists in today’s culture and how the absence of such stigma has hurt society generally.  The piece is a bit rantish for my taste (All rants are bad except when I write them 😉 ) but the point is well taken.  Behaviors that once sat in a corner by themselves are now mainstream and certainly cannot be “judged.”

Kurt Schlicter, in that same venue, discusses how the legalization of vice (a subject I have previously touched upon) has not produced good results, despite the claims of libertarians.

Which leads me to this piece by Michael Deacon that originally appeared in the Telegraph:

The simplest way to sum up modern progressive activists is this: they’re sociopaths who identify as empaths. Forever lecturing others about compassion, while themselves being brutally cruel.

You see, the problem is people.  We’re jerks, prone to making a hash of everything and anything we do.  At heart we are self-centered and mean.  Whether we are acting sanctimoniously about people that enjoy themselves on vacation differently than us or lying about lying, we just are vicious and cruel in pursuit of what we perceive as our own self interest.  Something in us is broken and unless it is fixed we can take even good things and make them rotten.

We have perverted ideas about good and bad, turning compassion into tyranny and order into chaos.  We did that because it is our wont.  We are not born as good and decent people.  The depiction of the “cute” aliens in this clip is a near perfect depiction of the actual human condition.

Good must be fostered and cultivated in human beings lest we turn on ourselves.  From Crime and Punishment to Lord of the Flies, our literature warns us again and again that we must be trained and tempered in order to be decent – that left to our own devices, isolated, we turn vulgar and violent.  And we live in an age where we can, by virtue of our devices, be isolated in a crowd.

Among the many perversions we have brought on ourselves, particularly by those “empathetic” sociopaths is the idea that church somehow is the source of the problem.  Now, I will be the first to admit that because the church is composed of people it can be prone to wrongheadedness.  But as an institution its intention, it’s reason for existence, is to provide and promote that training and tempering we so desperately need.  We stigmatize it at our peril.

Where we are today is not hard to understand – it’s just people being people. What is hard is being decent.  It requires effort.

Sometimes I wonder if we are willing to put it in anymore.