Engaging Modernity

Kudos to MoJ-er Elizabeth Kirk and her colleagues at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture for the great conference on modernity last week.  Three highlights: Steve Smith deconstructing the modern case for law's authority, Paul Griffiths insisting that Christians should reject modern conceptions of intellectual property (and provocatively, suggesting that plagiarism may not be immoral under a Christian worldview), and Alasdair MacIntyre exploring the similar predicaments of Islam and western Christianity. 

MacIntyre argued that Muslims are split between those who have rejected modernity (the fundamentalists) and those who have accommodated themselves to it (the secularists), and that a similar split has occurred among Christians.  So in both traditions, the challenge is to cultivate a dialogue among groups who are able to transcend both fundamentalism and secularism.  (When pressed, he offered Dorothy Day as an example of a Christian who avoided both extremes.) 

I thought of MacIntyre's thesis when I read this post from Rod Dreher in which he discusses an article by David Mills (not available on-line) about instilling a Christian imagination in children.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

By "imagination," I mean the faculty that controls what we, and especially children, think the world is like. It give us the map by which we plot our course. It gives us our vision of the world about which our mind thinks and on which our will works. It tells us what feels normal, average, to be expected, what feelings should go with what actions.

To the extent a child has learned it in childhood, it changes his whole life, even when he thinks he has left his childhood behind. Even if he insists on losing his faith, it limits the sort of faith he will adopt instead. If he insists on sinning, it limits the sorts of sins he can commit with (so to speak) a clear conscience. It will determine how he rationalizes his sins.

. . . . Revulsion is a much better protection from the force of the passions than an intellectual understanding by itself. To feel "This is yucky" is not a final protection from sin, but it is better than thinking "This is wrong" but feeling "This is okay." Lust offers the paradigmatic case (examples come quickly to mind), but this is true of pride, gluttony, envy, and all the rest, even sloth.

[We have an obligation to] try and form [children's] imaginations, to give them an alternative to the worldly lessons even the sheltered child absorbs as if from the air, by immersing them in books that express the Christian understanding of the world. . . . A good story will not make him good, but it should help him understand goodness a little better and make doing good a little easier by making it feel more normal. It will teach him that the world is this kind of place and not that kind.

This is why traditions -- as championed by MacIntyre and by David Mills -- can be so threatening to modern liberalism's fixation on individual autonomy.  Christianity is not reducible to a set of propositions to be introduced to a person at an age when they are capable of critical reflection.  Charting a course between fundamentalism and secularism requires, at a minimum, a recognition that Christianity shapes our minds, but not just our minds, and that while Christianity stands in tension with modern culture, it is not closed off to it.  In the words of Gaudium et spes, "nothing genuinely human does not raise an echo in [our] hearts."