Past & Present

      Last Sunday evening I watched the movie Pride & Prejudice, a new film version of Jane Austen’s novel by that name.  Set it 18^th century England, the movie – and especially the book – is a study in manners, rich etiquette, and high culture.   From witty conversation (occasionally combative) to ballroom dancing, romance and home life, whether of the wealthy elites (some of whom use their wealth to become snobs) or of the rustic country folk – all of it together portrays a society ordered and managed by norms, hierarchy and rituals.  The male deference toward the female, high expectations of behavior befitting ladies and gentlemen, and social graces that help to check the passions work together to manage and, yes, even enhance human relationships.

      Much of it, I’m afraid, we would today find stilted and “artificial.”  Moderns, I imagine, would complain of all the “constraints” that are involved in such a society (and I grant that such conventions can and do, sometimes, run over the individual, but in the movie you’ll notice how such close-knit people will often come to one another’s rescue in such an event).  Contemporary culture has reacted, especially since the 1960s, against social conventions in what it claims is for the sake of the enhancement of the individual.  I notice it among young people I sometimes deal with as a priest, when I gently suggest that something they did or said could have been done or said more acceptably, and they respond, “Well, I just gotta be myself.”  In such instances, I am sorely tempted to say, “Please, do be at least so kind as to spare us all such maudlin displays of your ‘self-hood’; it’s rather embarrassing.”

      For most young people haven’t a clue who they are.  That’s why they insist on dressing alike, using the same slang, and even, many of them, developing a noticeably uniform accent, distinctly Californian in origin, via Hollywood.  That is, they come up with their own social conventions in order to relate as best they can.  But without guidance above and beyond themselves, they generally gravitate toward “norms” of the lowest common denominator.  Thus the prevalence among the young of teenage pregnancy, STDs, drug and alcohol abuse, a general lowering of academic and intellectual effort and a “celebration of life” – parties, music and conversation, etc. – that reminds me of historians’ descriptions of barbarian tribes hyping themselves up for war and pillage.

      The young have been largely left without social and cultural guidance that elevates.   On the contrary, our culture adulates youth, traditionally considered the most precarious time of life, and yet it has, for all its shortness, become the standard to be striven for by all.  People want to be young, to look young, to stay young.  This explains a lot of behavior by adults that in the past would have been deemed embarrassingly juvenile and inappropriate – people seemingly frozen in adolescence. 

      Peggy Noonan relates a recent event that serves as a prime example of what I am saying (from “Embarrassing the Angels” in the Opinion Journal of the Wall Street Journal, March 2).  She was invited to appear at a prestigious Catholic university on a panel discussion about faith and politics:  “This, to me,” Ms. Noonan wrote, “is a very big and complicated subject, and a worthy one.  But quickly – I mean within 15 seconds – the talk was only of matters related to sexuality.  Soon a person on the panel was yelling, ‘Raise your hands if you think [here a graphic reference to sexual deviancy] is a sin!’,” which was soon followed by other prurient, eagerly put forward, questions and exclamations.  “At one point,” Ms. Noonan continued, “I put my head in my hands.  I thought, Have we gone crazy?  There are thousands of people in the audience, from children to aged nuns, and this is how we talk, this is the imagery we use, this is our only subject matter?”  This could have been a conversation from some sordid alleyway in a morally blighted section of a big city or, perhaps, a high school boys’ locker room.

      People – adults – trapped in adolescence without proper conventions, norms, and elevating social and cultural expectations:  and we wonder why our young people very often seem adrift, why they tend to become sullen and petulant at the challenge to grow up into adult life – when they have so little to guide them and provide a model for them!  Youth is, as traditional cultures have always deemed it, a trying time, a span of time in a human life that is fraught with difficulties.  And so, the young need to be formed, taught that this is their time for being shaped into responsible adults.  To idolize the teenage and college years, as if this is the height of human experience, is to plummet society into a circus of the ridiculous.  It is cruelty to ourselves, because these years come and go so quickly, and they are not the era of human life known for its wisdom, moderation and spiritual, intellectual maturity; these come with time, after the youth has been prepared to learn them and grow into them. 

      We cannot go back to 18^th century England, but we can learn from the past; and our present predicament should urge us to do so.  We need, well, constraints, manners, guiding principles of behavior that have no room for the adolescent whine, “I just gotta be myself.”  If you were to watch the movie Pride and Prejudice – or even better, read Austen’s novels – you would encounter a host of characters, formed by seemingly constraining etiquette, who are spectacularly individual (most of them good, but not all), men and women with developed personalities; they are characters deeply embedded in different forms of community life – family, friendships, romances, social and recreational occasions – where they learn, not first and foremost just to be themselves, but rather how to properly relate to others.  And it is out of that experience of sound and sane relationships that the young grow up to begin to see who they are and how to be really and truly happy.