Posted by
Rob on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:49:53 PM
In a
previous post we talked about PTSD, "post-traumatic stress disorder" experienced by veterans returning from war. What seemed to go unsaid, was that this applies to men 99% of the time. But what about women? Are they somehow immune to the stress of living with their killer instinct?
No, I think the question is phrased too narrowly. Women also suffer from stress, but it is from a different source, and expressed differently. That is to say, in PoMo, the absolutes that compete, the gods that are at war in a women's soul are not Jupiter and Mars, but Juno and Vesta, Venus and Minerva and Diana. In less comfortable times, when life was hard and survival difficult, the struggle lay between Juno and Vesta, between a husband and a father, between marriage and virginity. But but in our more decadent age, when no one fears for their provision or health, the battle to define one's worth lies somewhere between sex and brains and talents. And make no mistake, the female PTSD casualties are there.
NRO carried this story of the sex-ed indoctrination at
college campusesDr. Grossman, a campus psychologist at UCLA, ...has been
tending to the casualties of casual sex on campus her whole career, and
sees the lines of women (and men) coming into her office for
appointments about depression, anxiety, sleep loss — all caused by an
inability to live up to the unrealistic picture of “healthy sexuality”
they had been taught all of their lives. Condoms, birth control, and
frequent testing have not saved them from the emotional aftershock of
sex.
Despite the ravaged landscape, the panel still had a
positive outlook. Far from being a nest of clucking prudes deriding the
indiscretions of “kids these days,” these women were concerned about
the waves of depression and sexually transmitted disease that are
sweeping over our young women.
Do you notice who is parenthetically present in Dr. Grossman's couch? Men.
For whatever reason, college men don't suffer much PTSD from casual sex, but women do. Women don't suffer often from bloodlust, but men do. And in this little example, we begin to see the utility, nay, the
necessity of the pantheon. When there is no overarching theme, when
there is no code of ethics, when there is no monotheist rule-giver,
then human culture lies at the whim of the gods. Understanding our modern pantheon, and the PTSD of PoMo is the first step toward recovery.
Is this to say that men don't suffer PTSD from sex? On the contrary, there is another sexual battleground filled with men, but it isn't found on college campuses. It's found in churches.
With the Catholic Clergy sex scandals exploding into public view in 2002, amplified in part by the transformation of American seminaries since Vatican II, came a rather
rigid policy of the American Bishops in June 2002. The
communique was quite enlightening, considering that the Bishops knew a whole lot more about the root problem and its causes than revealed in their "response".
How did such policy work out in practice? Slowly. By 2006, they were finally getting
fewer accusations of abuse (738) than the year before (1092), perhaps indicating that the Church is on the mend. Even now, however, they are not reporting the breakdown of boys/girls that are suffering from the abuse, though this anecdote from the press release is telling:
The survey said 87 percent of the new accusations involved abuse
that occurred before 1990, some of it as early as 1950. Only nine
accusations concerned abuse last year... And earlier this year, after a priest in
Chicago was arrested on charges of molesting boys, the archdiocese
there came under fire when it was disclosed that the police had shared
accusations of abuse with church officials as early as last August. The
archdiocese did not remove the priest until January.
The unmentioned elephant in the living room is that over 90% of the recent child abuse is of boys by men.
The
Linacre Institute reports (excerpting from their
book),
Four
years have passed since the full extent of the crisis became public and
the settled opinion is that two leading factors resulted in the
eruption of sexual misconduct among the clergy. First, most surmise
that a group of psychologically disturbed men wormed their way into the
seminaries, and, as priests, were given ready access to an unsuspecting
group of victims. Second, when the problem was brought to their
attention, the bishops in charge failed to manage appropriately these
sexually errant clergymen. Some critics further explain that the power
structures in the Church that maintained secrecy at all costs concealed
the inherent weakness of the Church’s disciplinary requirements of
celibacy, fueling serial abuses and cover-ups.
So yes, men do suffer PTSD from sex, usually expressed as power.
Well is the Church responding properly to the scandal? No , says the Institute,
Ascetical
discipline was practiced better in the first half of the twentieth
century when the purpose of religion was embraced and misconduct by
priests was rare. What changed between the first and second halves of
the twentieth century were not the management policies on sex abuse and
secrecy at all costs-- these remained a constant throughout—nor do we
have evidence to show that the personality features of seminarians or
priests changed in any fundamental way that would account for the
nature and the magnitude of the crisis-- in its early stages at least.
Rather, the core change over the course of the twentieth century was
one of purpose or allegiance-- leaving behind ascetical discipline,
having disdain for religious tradition, and adopting the therapeutic
mentality, a popular belief that fulfillment of the human person
springs from emotional desire in a quest for self-definition, or
self-actualization, without regard to an objective philosophical,
religious or moral truth. Further, the therapeutic mentality views sin
as a social concern and discourages loyalty to religious authority; it
is profoundly anti-ascetical...It
was the ascetical discipline that in no small measure protected the
early Church from the onslaughts of pagan sexuality, and indeed,
contributed mightily to the development of Christian culture..
What this good Catholic institute is calling "ascetical" is the traditional defense of the Church against polytheism. It is a military analogy, even the word "allegiance" sounds like war, for asceticism is a belligerent discipline rejecting the passions of Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury for the sake of purifying the soul for living, for worship, for obedience to Almighty God. What changed in the 20th century, as the Linacre book recounts, was the "scientific" destruction of traditional defenses, loosing the pagan gods of PoMo.
What is the practical outcome of these church scandals? Inappropriate legal approaches adopted by local dioceses. Here's one layman's
reaction to the heavy-handed dictat from on high.
I attended a workshop called, ambiguously, Protecting God’s Children for Adults, a “Virtus program”
created by the National Catholic Risk Retention Group (a self-insurance
company owned by more than fifty dioceses in the United States). The
group created such programs in the late 1990s to “better control risk”
and “promote rightdoing within religious organizations.” In 2002, when
the bishops in Dallas mandated “safe-environment programs” in every
diocese, these Virtus programs began to be adopted by dioceses and
archdioceses across the country...
The particular problem of sexual abuse in the Church, in other
words, with its special feature of clerical homosexuality, is
generalized in the video into an overwhelming, generic problem, and the
message communicated is: anyone, anywhere.
Indeed, these are the opening words of the film, that zoom toward us
against a black background. The video is a melodrama, in short,
straining for an effect. And the effect is fear and loathing...
In his little book A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart
,
Joseph Pieper distinguishes between true and false prudence: between
the clean, impartial, and upright faculty of the spirit that transforms the knowledge of reality into the accomplishment of the good, and false prudence, or excessive cleverness, that is always in some sense “tactical,” always anxiously concerned with its own survival.
Into which category did the workshop I had just attended fall? Was
it an appropriate, constructive response to a problem, or was it an
evasion, a defensive strategy, or a public-relations maneuver? Put
another way, what was the main motive behind the making of the video?
Was it to protect children, or was it to provide the National Catholic
Risk Retention Group’s shareholders with the “finest, most
cost-efficient and effective risk-control measures available”?
When a woman raised her hand and asked what she should do if she was
alone in a room and a child came to her in tears—“Should I run out of
the room?”—the answer was yes. She should leave the room and look for
another adult. We have to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, the
facilitator said, because “the Church has to protect itself.”
Notice the word "tactical", indicating that the facilitators see it as a war. Yet a war can be lost even with the best of tactics if it has no strategy. Running from the gods of PoMo does not seem a well-thought out strategy.
Perhaps it is time to take a stand. Perhaps it is time to say virginity is protection, defending our children from the sex gods on campus. Perhaps it is time to practice asceticism, as in "abstinence before and faithfulness in marriage". Perhaps it is time to stand up to "diversity" prostration before the pantheon, and be like
David, who while living among the pagan, polytheist Philistines, wrote:
Ps 138:1 I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing your praise; I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted you have exalted your word above all your name.
David's first steps are praise,
obedience, and thanks. We have the cure for the malaise, we have the cure for the PTSD of our PoMo culture. For even above the power of the name by which we are called, we have His words: our military orders in the eternal war with the pantheon.