The Witness Of The Intellectual Dark Web

Over at the Catholic traditionalist site One Peter Five, Kale Zelden laments with particular grief the condition of the Catholic Church. Excerpts:

A deep and painful problem is that Catholicism in its current form does not speak in any meaningful way to us, nor especially to our children. Just look at the numbers here. And this tweet here captures the reality. Sadly, the church does not seem to be operating in any meaningful way for me, a middle-aged Gen X’er with a wife, a few kids, and a receding hairline. We are in a strange pattern of pretending, a kind of collective lie agreed upon.

He says that when he returned to the Catholic faith as an adult, he thought that the problem with the Church was one of orthodoxy: get rid of the clown masses, heretical sermons, and liturgical abuses, and the problem would be fixed. But this model didn’t account for the bishops who were outwardly orthodox, but who cared more about preserving the outward façade than dealing with inner corruption. More:

We are at an existential crisis in both formal and lay Catholicism. We can go into the threads that weave a genealogy of decline and decay, plenty of time to sort out and apportion blame, but in essence, the Church as we experience it is totally broken. It doesn’t make sense, nor does it help us make sense of the world.

We can’t talk about any of this because of all the various forces that govern speech. Twitter sock-puppets (sorry Grover), commbox heroes, pearl-clutching purity police, guardians of access, the bottleneck of resources, and the ever-present threat of being labeled a “grifter” preclude our ability to have a real discussion.

We need to talk.

We need to go outside our normie-world mechanisms of sense-making. Catholic education is largely in shambles, committed to orthodoxies far afield of anything recognizably faithful.

Zelden, who is writing for a trad audience, goes on to say:

Mind you, I’m not a Modernist, nor am I retro-traditionalist. Those that would prescribe poring over the Summa (again) are not serious about the crisis we find ourselves in. What worked in the 17th century, say, is not likely up to the task in the 21st. Being steeped in the tradition is certainly important, and our heritage is certainly rich, but it will not suffice for our purposes.

In a recent 1P5 piece Brendan Buckley argues that we needed to seek out tradition in our current crisis. I am sympathetic, but only to a point. Merely seeking out tradition is not a method. Though I agree that we must cleave to our tradition, in order for us to develop a successful strategy to weather the coming storms and raise our families and not lose them, we will need to be more creative.

He suggests paying more attention to the intellectuals of the Intellectual Dark Web, most of whom aren’t Catholic, or even Christian, but who, in Zelden’s view, may have insights that faithful orthodox Catholics can use to make the faith more alive in the postmodern world. Read the whole thing. 

I get what he’s talking about. I’ve never been a big reader of Jordan Peterson, but I have found it amazing how that man, who is not a religious believer, has the ability to speak deeply into the crisis of millions of people today, and give them hope. Why can’t the churches do that? I’m not saying, nor do I read Zelden as saying, that the church should mimic Peterson, or any other member of the IDW. But there must be things that these people know that the Church’s leaders have forgotten, or maybe haven’t learned. You don’t have to baptize Jordan Peterson’s philosophy to listen to his long lecture series on the Book of Genesis, and learn a lot from it. Personally, I was amazed by how Peterson had the ability to bring a compelling sense of wonder to the explication of this familiar text.

Why can’t we learn from Peterson’s answer to the question, “Why aren’t there more men in church?”We can.

Why can’t we learn from this short discussion Peterson had about Christianity with Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, and Dave Rubin, an agnostic gay libertarian? We can.

Take a look at Zelden’s whole argument, and tell me what you think. I read it as the cry of a middle-aged orthodox Catholic family man who is trying to figure out how to pass the faith on to his kids in a culture that is, in his phrase, sprinting towards Gomorrah, and has lost patience with the same old stale formulas. It’s the same spirit in which I wrote The Benedict Option. This is the kind of creative-minority thinking I was hoping to inspire.

By the way, the comments under Zelden’s essay are interesting. Some people are like, “How dare you suggest that we have anything to learn outside the Church?!” But others are like this one from someone named Stewart Davies:

This is a most perceptive and, I would opine, brilliant article, because for me, it ‘articulates’ so much of my own inherent, or more accurately, acquired disposition. For much of my life, I would disregard those who, regardless of the substance of what they say, were, (are) not ‘Catholic’. The Catholic Church is invested with he fullness of revealed Truth. Why would anyone with a glimmer of understanding feel the need of an ‘outside input’. But the implosion of the institutional Catholic Church over the last two decades has made me more appreciative of those ‘outside the fold’ who, in these peculiar times, bring to us a view of things that is, inherently, ‘catholic’.

And in all of this, I see the Holy Spirit very much at work. We are embarking upon the the most turbulent, and in fact, decisive times in all of human history. After the unprecedented traumas of the current era, the Church, the Body of Christ, having been betrayed by innumerable Judases, having suffered her own bitter passion, having ascended her own Calvary and been put to death, will, in imitation of Christ, be gloriously resurrected and perfected as the spotless Bride of Christ in readiness for the Bridegroom’s return. Those who are currently ‘outside the sheepfold’ yet now articulate profound insights into humanity’s present spiritual malaise are surely being ‘primed’ by the Holy Spirit to receive the fullness of revealed Truth of which the Catholic Church is the divinely ordained custodian.

Of course as an Orthodox Christian, I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church is what Stewart Davies believes it is, but I do share his view — and Zelden’s view, which is a patristic view — that when authentic truth manifests itself outside the Church, it is still God’s truth, and a wise and discerning Christian can profit from it.

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