A Canticle for Leibowitz and the Benedict Option
I have been reading and enjoying A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. The novel outlines a grim future where a global nuclear holocaust has sent man back to primitive times and an order of Catholic monks preserve any knowledge of our age that they can get their hands on. They laboriously copy and re-copy blueprints, scraps of textbooks and so on.
The book describes how in the wake of the nuclear war, the people who survived turned on anyone of learning and killed them because they blamed the intellectuals for creating nuclear weapons and allowing or causing the massive death and suffering across the globe. In their fury the mobs kill anyone with knowledge and burn every book they can get their hands on. Vast stores of learning are wiped out of existence by these mobs. Add to this the nuclear war which has turned cities into lakes of glass and you have almost erased our civilization overnight.
Reading this scenario in 2009 conjures up a Cold War feelings and the whole thing at first seems a bit quaint: mutually assured destruction and all of that. But when I step back and think about it, how absurd is it really? There is no real cause for the United states and Russia, China, or another nuclear power to start a war right now, but will it always be that way? India and Pakistan could certainly nuke one another which would not be a global conflagaration, but could produce horrors. And the future possibility of the USA and Russia nuking each other cannot be ruled out totally because we don't know what the future will look like and one thing is certain: man's evil nature has not changed.
I highly doubt that there will be a "Flame Deluge" such as the one portrayed in Leibowitz, but the book does illustrate the fragility of our cultural heritage. With the increasing reliance on electronic storage for our texts, this heritage becomes even more fragile.
Beyond the possibility of worldwide destruction, there is a more potent threat of the simple vanishing of knowledge due to self-imposed ignorance and the loss of habits of virtue. What I mean is that if texts are not studied by people living in community and then lived out in real life, they also can cease to exist in some sense. If the Bible is just a book that gets studied and no one lives what it teaches, it has lost all cultural value, at least for a time. If texts on electronics exist but no electronics are manufactured, the texts have no impact on the world.
This again leads me to reflect on an Anglican Benedict Option. I see the preservation of texts by a community in an intentional way as part of that option. This would involve buying books, re-binding old books, printing books and perhaps acquiring the ability to hand-copy books for the unlikely eventuality that our society would experience a catastrophic reversion to a pre-Guttenberg age.
Most important however is for us to re-invent ways of living the good life together that can be sustained in the modern world. The fragmented suburban life is not conducive to living out the Gospel, period. The suburbs could be made to sustain such a life, but it would still involve moving to the same subdivisions, working near them and having a parish near them. This is hard to do. Politics are harder to influence in communities of 30,000 versus communities of 3,000. My theory is that it would be better to attempt a reconstruction of a vibrant parish life that preserves the past as well as influences the future in a smaller town somewhere on the fringes of our empire. Making it our ambition to lead a quiet life and work with our hands, we could foster communities that might last for several centuries or longer, on into the future when the Church again holds sway over the West.
The book describes how in the wake of the nuclear war, the people who survived turned on anyone of learning and killed them because they blamed the intellectuals for creating nuclear weapons and allowing or causing the massive death and suffering across the globe. In their fury the mobs kill anyone with knowledge and burn every book they can get their hands on. Vast stores of learning are wiped out of existence by these mobs. Add to this the nuclear war which has turned cities into lakes of glass and you have almost erased our civilization overnight.
Reading this scenario in 2009 conjures up a Cold War feelings and the whole thing at first seems a bit quaint: mutually assured destruction and all of that. But when I step back and think about it, how absurd is it really? There is no real cause for the United states and Russia, China, or another nuclear power to start a war right now, but will it always be that way? India and Pakistan could certainly nuke one another which would not be a global conflagaration, but could produce horrors. And the future possibility of the USA and Russia nuking each other cannot be ruled out totally because we don't know what the future will look like and one thing is certain: man's evil nature has not changed.
I highly doubt that there will be a "Flame Deluge" such as the one portrayed in Leibowitz, but the book does illustrate the fragility of our cultural heritage. With the increasing reliance on electronic storage for our texts, this heritage becomes even more fragile.
Beyond the possibility of worldwide destruction, there is a more potent threat of the simple vanishing of knowledge due to self-imposed ignorance and the loss of habits of virtue. What I mean is that if texts are not studied by people living in community and then lived out in real life, they also can cease to exist in some sense. If the Bible is just a book that gets studied and no one lives what it teaches, it has lost all cultural value, at least for a time. If texts on electronics exist but no electronics are manufactured, the texts have no impact on the world.
This again leads me to reflect on an Anglican Benedict Option. I see the preservation of texts by a community in an intentional way as part of that option. This would involve buying books, re-binding old books, printing books and perhaps acquiring the ability to hand-copy books for the unlikely eventuality that our society would experience a catastrophic reversion to a pre-Guttenberg age.
Most important however is for us to re-invent ways of living the good life together that can be sustained in the modern world. The fragmented suburban life is not conducive to living out the Gospel, period. The suburbs could be made to sustain such a life, but it would still involve moving to the same subdivisions, working near them and having a parish near them. This is hard to do. Politics are harder to influence in communities of 30,000 versus communities of 3,000. My theory is that it would be better to attempt a reconstruction of a vibrant parish life that preserves the past as well as influences the future in a smaller town somewhere on the fringes of our empire. Making it our ambition to lead a quiet life and work with our hands, we could foster communities that might last for several centuries or longer, on into the future when the Church again holds sway over the West.
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