The loss of Depravation (I NO LONGER HOLD MANY OF THE THINGS SAID HERE)

The sense of depravation is an experience that every decade after another has been lost in our current culture. What first started as a war against the corrupted and tyrannical Catholic clergy in Europe, turned into a war against the principles of its faith. Trying to be more rational we end up becoming nihilistic. No longer the war was against the bishops, but it was against God. By the turn of the 20th century we inherited two thousand years of Christian morality and tradition, but no longer with the hopeful belief in Christ. Curiously enough this loss of our moral standards came with the final triumph of democracy, and the first thing that comes to my mind is what Plato wrote in Book VIII of The Republic. However, let us remain in our monotheistic times.

Our loss was not only in the field of morality. No longer able to distinguish clearly between good and evil, we also lost our capacity to distinguish between the beauty and the ugly. Our sense of aesthetics was also gone. In a culture that gave birth to Rembrandt, we now enlighten ourselves with "conceptual art". In a society that gave birth to Beethoven, we now enjoy the talent of Britney Spears and Daddy Yankee. In a civilization that gave birth to Shakespeare, we now sit and watch the Jersey Shore. For me the difference is anything but problematical, if not self-evident. However not everyone sees it that way. What once was the line between the genius, the mediocre and the vulgar, today is a matter of taste. Is it because we are now more enlightened, because progress has made us better men, more tolerant and free-minded? Or is it because the state of our current culture is so wasted, so broken, that no longer can we recognize ourselves and we have given license to our most depraved senses?

I started this comment with the word depravation. I would like to return to the original meaning of this post by pointing out the squalid, if not crippled, state of our contemporary culture, the Western civilization. To remind us the loss of our aesthetical values is nothing but a way of remembering the loss of our moral values. As this goes on, our actions and practices as a society and the individuals living in it grow more depraved. We cannot stop it because we are handicapped of our sense to perceive and experience depravation as what it is in itself. Again, today is only a matter of taste. The peak, or the crown of this phenomenon is our stance regarding homosexuality.

Beware of what I'm about to say: our human soul is morally base, we incline toward corruption very easily, and I advance that almost all individuals, excepting perhaps the Saints, have and withhold a kind of depravation. To state a very usual example, pornography. A person that has lost the sense that pornography is a depraved cultural phenomenon has lost any sense of moral conduct whatsoever. He cannot even think morally. Morality as such is seen incomprehensibly. But still, pornography is widely watched even by persons with moral understanding. The difference is, while some admit their depravity with humility and probably guilt, others deny the notion of depravity itself, and engage in it without any experience of remorse at all. What I want to stress here is the inevitable depravation of our base instincts and our impossibility to eradicate them from our spirit. What we do, instead, is behave in society, we try to conceal it or to moderate it somehow not to insult or offend others around us, as a matter of education and respect.

Now I make my stance on homosexuality. Only a person that has lost a sense of morality would deny the experience of depravation. This has happened to a vast portion of the Western population. Because of this, homosexuality, which beyond personal opinion is a moral depravation wherever it is placed in any fragment of our Christian inheritance, is today seen by many as something completely casual and even legitimate. What a person does and thinks in his private sphere is not of my business. As I have stated previously, we all share a kind of depravation. Homosexuals have theirs; in this case the condition of homosexuality itself. I find that normal.

What I don't find normal, nor legitimate, is that motto that runs "Gay Pride". However something is true about it. Pride is one of the capital sins in Christian theology. It's precisely the moral baseness that prevents us from acting with humility and admitting that we might be wrong. Pride is equal to arrogance and haughtiness. I'm twisting the real meaning of "Gay Pride" on purpose for the sake of the argument. I'm not against individuals' depravations. That's up to everyone individually and their relation to God enjoyed in their private spheres. I'm talking about this pride of showing off to the world their depravation, and trying to force us to admit it as something casual and natural in the public sphere. The loss of our sense of depravation has made one of the most depraved behaviors, only surpassed because pederasty exists, a thing of common speech. Homosexuality, and what they call gay rights, is make public what should be private. Forcing everyone to bare the depravations of others in public, in the squares, in the parks, on the streets, in the supermarket, and even inside the churches.

I don't deny that depravation might be natural within our souls. It can't be purged. Such pretension can even be monstrous. But I think that our depravations should be keep up to ourselves. "Gay rights" and homosexuality has turned into an issue in which living a respectful, moral and conscious public life is impossible if not even a motive of derision. The cause of liberty, by being wrongly used against morality, is turning virtuous republicanism into a depraved ochlocracy; especially in the last country of the Western civilization that preserves barely what we once used to be as a culture: the United States.