anarchy and occupational hazards

I have sorely neglected this blog over the past four or five months, and I apologize to my faithful follower! I could no longer stay away, however; I need to get some thoughts online. Besides, I love to hear myself type.

So I have been doing quite a bit of thinking over the past several weeks about the Occupy Wall Street (And Any Other Street That Takes Your Fancy) movement, and what it all means. I confess to an overarching mistrust of the "movement". While I think there are certain Occupiers that honestly hold a moral outrage against the turns the Western Capitalist system has taken, I believe that much of the movement is being instigated, supported and funded by people who have made their nut on the back of Capitalism and are now simply seeking to foment disorder, playing on the genuine angst of the 'rank-and-file' of the movement.

Setting this aside for the moment, I have been trying to assess the moral and spiritual underpinnings of the times and it comes down to a single word: anarchy, or to use the more theological word, antinomianism, i.e., lawlessness. The Occupiers are engaged in an act of lawlessness in response to a perceived—and in some fashion, at least, real—lawlessness in the financial/banking/investment capital industry. And I believe the cause is, at its core, a failure of the Church. Allow me to explain.

Capitalism has worked as a financial—not to say political—system for centuries because it is the only such system that takes into account the reality of human greed. The free market of Capitalism has historically allowed for the checks and balances necessary to contain the human sins of greed, avarice and gluttony.

Over the past 80 or so years we have watched the moral degradation of our culture, and it has pervaded every aspect thereof. There was a day when the every institution in the West was imbued, to say nothing of run on, Judeo-Christian moral law. Most of these institutions, but specifically the financial industry, began in the middle part of the last century to become amoral. This turned out to be a slippery slope down which we have slid over the past half-century; we now find ourselves in a land of our own making that is void of all morality. Some would see this as the liberation of our society, but it is quite the opposite; it is the enslavement thereof.

Anyone who has spent any time at all around children knows that one of the most fundamental things a parent or authority figure can give a child is a healthy sense of boundaries. A child without rules is terrified; that fear will often express itself as rage, and the child will act out in an effort to garner some response—any response—that will say, "This far you may go and no further".

Our culture (and here is where I fault the Church) has been allowed to systematically dismantle the moral code of society, the very things that hold us together and that keep us safe. The sanctity of marriage, the institution of the family, the "Golden Rule", the Ten Commandments—all have been marginalized, negated, ridiculed and removed until we are left with one law: the law of self-indulgence, i.e., if I want to do it, it is allowed. In the case of the financial industry, the caricature of Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas' nefarious character in the iconic 1987 filmWall Street, has come to ascendancy; "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good!" And in our current culture, so is adultery, sex outside of marriage, gluttony, public nudity, trespassing, slander, usury and a nearly endless litany of what used to be called 'sins'. Sin is the occupational hazard of being a human. And it will have its way with us unless we bend the knee to a higher power.

And so we have thousands of people without boundaries, funded and supported by people without morals, crying out against an institution which is simply exhibiting the fruit of lawlessness. And I wonder how long it will take before this lawlessness, this anarchy, explodes into class warfare that will take out the final shaky underpinnings of the Republic in which we are blessed to live. And I wonder if we, the Church, have what it takes to wade into the anarchy with the Law of the One True King, and rescue this nation, perhaps even the world, from the dash to destruction. More on that in a coming post.