FROM THE ARCHIVES
[ home | archives | e-mail ]
Maclin Horton
[Rod Dreher 03/23 12:17 PM]One of the most interesting people I interviewed for Crunchy Cons was Maclin Horton (who blogs here), a Catholic convert who went from 1960s counterculturalist to faithful orthodox Catholic without ever losing his sense that something was seriously wrong with mainstream American society. He thinks that we’ve gone so far into “Brave New World”-dom that contemporary Americans wouldn’t understand why the comfort-mad dystopia Aldous Huxley portrayed is a bad thing. “They might balk at the stratification of the population by intelligence level, but otherwise would not see anything wrong with this vision of a scientifically controlled hedonistic paradise. I’ll die fighting that in whatever way I can,” he tells me in the book.
Mac added that he loves America, and sees nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to ease suffering. The problem comes in when maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain become ends in themselves, he said, and a society that places those things as its ultimate ends will justify anything to achieve those ends. Mac tells me in the Religion chapter that Woodstock was the epitome of the meeting of amoral capitalism and Baby Boomer hedonism: you had masses of people willing to do anything to satisfy their desires, and businessmen willing to give them what they wanted: “It was the very acme of consumerism. You had several hundred thousand people willingly reducing themselves to a condition of infantile dependence and passivity in the expectation that competent adults would take care of their physical needs. It was that, more than the doping and fornicating, that was really most disgusting and even frightening about it.” Yet he emerged from the counterculture convinced that the misguided hippies had really been on a search for God all along, and had substituted sex and drugs for what can only be satisfied in religious faith. I suggested to him that in our day and age, the real cultural radicals are the faithful Catholic families showing up with their six or seven kids in tow to the Latin Mass at some inner-city parish forgotten by the bishop, or perhaps grudgingly tolerated by him as a sop to the right-wing nuts (as he might see them). Mac said this is not surprising, because those who are most serious about defending the primacy of the spiritual against our materialistic, hedonistic consumer culture are those most willing to commit themselves to a serious spiritual life.
We talked about the disappointments of Catholic life in America today. Mac says that he knew when he came into the Catholic Church years ago that it would be hard, that he was coming in at a bad time. He has held on to his convictions to sustain him through the Amchurch liberal deconstructionists. Yet as his kids grew older and began to drift away from Catholicism, he grew bitter that the church did not offer more to hold them. “I can remember any number of Sundays when we would come back from mass and the children would pile out of the car and Karen and I would jus sti there morosely for fifteen minutes, trying to articulate exactly what it was about the liturgy that left us feeling this way afterward. I should add that I was and am equally bitter toward the surrounding culture that makes it so very, very hard to raise children these days.” So why do you hold on? I asked him. “It’s really quite simple: there isn’t anything else,” he said. ‘It’s Catholicism or nihilism for me.”
We ended our conversation on a crucial point. Mac said that crunchy conservatism can’t be practiced without a serious religious commitment, which means submission to a real power greater than the individual. If you merely choose something because it sounds nice, it won’t have any power to bind the will. “I think one of the underlying psychological shifts that eventually lefdme to the Church was the realization that I could not simply be ‘spiritual’ in any serious way by browsing various religions and selecting what pleased me. It would be necessary to submit on some fundamental level.”
|
