all right so in chapter two what meritan is going to do now after having summarized these centuries between the end of the Middle Ages around the 1400s to now uh he's gonna hone in on our modern moment which let's say would start around the early mid 1800s and has continued to our own time but uh ends up it's it's kind of a spiral downward so that's what's called postmodern Now is really this kind of hyper modern thinking where we're in this this death spiral of subjectivity and the loss of meaning so that's where we are
now and the question is well how do we get out of this Whirlpool now we've already talked a bit about what he says regarding Marxist humanism so you can read a little bit more about that in depth in this chapter um if that's not if that's something that you're not as familiar with that's something that you should hone in on here uh I don't think that there's much more that I need to say about that as far as just just summarizing this um but uh I would like to point out that uh basically what the
Marxist promise is and what maritan criticizes is that with with Marxism and with totalitarianism at Large you have this sense of let's say uh it's it's a warped version of Christian values they're not Christian but let's say it's it's like a kind of uh especially in Marx's case um this sent this Jewish sense of the Messiah that's to come so it's it's not Christian then in the sense that uh it's it's more Jewish in the post-christian sense in that it's it's still awaiting for this end time awaiting for this Messiah to come uh but it's
this materialist twist it's this materialist form of that kind of post-christian Judaism where uh not only is Christ rejected but uh the Messiah really is more like this abstract figure for a material state of Salvation and so that's essentially what communism is is promising that um it's sensing and this this starts with Hegel it has this Gnostic sense that they figured out not through faith not through Revelation but by human Ingenuity we we have figured out the movement of history in this necessary way and the way that Hegel frames it um Hegel places God as
the author of this history so all history is moving back into expressing the ultimate truth of God but for Marx who's a materialist and an atheist he will interpret this more as history moving toward a material end where the material good will once and for all be fully reached and realized for all of humanity and so this is like the perfect communist state um and he thinks that we're we're in like a penultimate stage getting to that point um but you need Revolution to start changing that because he recognizes that in order for us to
get there you need human nature to change uh to essentially remove from our Christian standpoint remove the effects of original sin but from his standpoint to remove our attachments to material things and greed and to be able to be at peace and live together in this kind of Harmony without private property and with having everything in common and um but in order to do that he recognizes that we need to be uh molded into that form uh either through education or through Force so either you see the light and conform yourself to it or if
you don't then you have to be made to conform by it and that's that's what the Communist totalitarian state is meant to do it's it's a revolutionary State it's supposed to be a temporary measure that will then uh subside once it is no longer needed and it's no longer needed once all of humanity has essentially internalized the commands of its oppressors of course for him they're well they're not oppressors but he does Grant for him okay he's not gonna call them uh oppressors but he does recognize that they will be oppressive in the state as
a means to this further end um but we know as Christians that this isn't man's Destiny this isn't God's plan and this isn't even within our power to do so from our standpoint then we understand that that kind of project will never get to that end stage it will only ever exist if it's granted in that Perpetual state of revolution but it will only be this inhuman regime that will never reach its fulfillment because its fulfillment is something that the the object that it seeks is one that just doesn't exist and that can't exist because
it's not a true vision of the human person so um that that in summary is uh the problem at root with both Marxism and and really all of totalitarian ideology that all has that in common uh but there's something else that that maritan brings up here as well so another thing that we've seen in this modern moment is this bent toward materialism as well uh through um darwinian thought and Freudian thought uh darwinian thought essentially renders us biologically and distinct from brood animals so there's nothing special about the human being anymore in that sense and
uh Freudian thought essentially does the Same by reducing human thought and subjectivity to this kind of cause and effect rationale that ties Back To Human pleasures and that is conditioned or determined in a particular way that essentially renders us not free anymore so for maritin these two these two forces um Coming alongside uh totalitarianism Marxism and so on uh have essentially place this dead end wall at the end of modernity that we're not going to be able to move past within that schema and again so the only the only thing that we can really do
is to exit that entirely and propose something completely new but returning to um classical and medieval truths all right so that um that's the the current state of affairs um outside of the Christian world so to speak the problem is that within the Christian world because we live in this sort of society because we live under the umbrella of this culture um we still have to play our role in breaking out and the church has to address this problem and I'll talk about this in a little bit with uh that short jp2 reading on human
dignity because he addresses his point as far as the church's role is concerned American thinks that this is basically what we have to do through tomism through philosophy um through the actions of the laity um we have reached a point with modern thought that uh it's openly hostile to the gospel and we need um a transgression of modern culture entirely and we need it to be a kind of he says like a new Middle Ages not a return to the Middle Ages but kind of like a new medieval moment where Christian culture takes root and
takes hold once again to carry us further um up toward the true good and a true understanding of the human person which we can there develop and continue to to grow in Okay so uh with that point in mind the end of this chapter talks about that a little bit more with with integral humanism so again I want to emphasize that this is not something that exists yet now he does think and I I think I see this as well I think we are starting to see in our own time seeds of this movement we're
starting to see two things I think we're starting to see uh extreme absurdity that is produced by hyper modernism so we've seen where that train goes where it ends uh we're seeing things in our society now that we wouldn't have been able to imagine even 10 years ago and this kind of absurdity is accelerating and becoming more and more absurd more dystopic more inhuman um so we see that that on the one hand but on the other hand and this is where it seems like it's disintegration is inevitable I'll say for two reasons one because
on the other hand I do think that we're seeing especially among the Young uh those who are more traditionally minded we're seeing this reaction of this this yearning and this recognition that the modern path has not borne fruit and has produced this dead end has produces kind of meaningless existence and so what people naturally want because it is a natural desire of humanity is that sense of transcendence uh really transcendental meaning uh something some good Beyond just what we've been served and knowing that uh things should be better that the human being has dignity but
therefore should act in a dignified manner that we we can be uh we can strive for greatness in this life um Beyond this kind of valueless society that we've been given instead where you can do whatever you want in all things are rendered meaningless so uh that's one thing that I think we're seeing now uh that we're starting to see Rise right in the young the spirit is on the rise it's still a minority so it's not quite yet at a point where they've taken hold but we are seeing it grow um another thing I
think that we're seeing though is that as things get more absurd and we know this through natural law uh that those kind of inhuman regimes in human societies that we see propping up that we see coming up now in the western world uh they can't last when you have a society that degenerates into Vice the problem with Vice is that it's opposed to human flourishing by necessity and that means that if you have a state which as Plato said is a reflection of the individual man just as the individual man would crumble so too will
the state and so at some point if that absurdity continues it can't continue Forever at some point the system will have to crack and crumble and fall under its own weight and I do think that we are already seeing that happen with some aspects of it so for example I think that um because of all the problems of ideology uh I think that the credibility of public schools have has plummeted such that we are starting to see the beginnings of the end for it at least in its current form in this current context uh I
think that what we're going to see by necessity is that the public schools as they exist now that can't really educate students can't really make students better and now I'm talking in an American context um I think that we're going to see more parents have to pull out and resort to private schools and really more like Christian Schools classical schools I think that Christian Schools or Catholic schools will have to be more Catholic really to address these sorts of problems but um given all the absurdities that are being taught and all of the Vice that's
allowed to proliferate within these kind of schools they've lost credibility and have lost parents and that's an example of one kind of institution that's beginning to crumble under this weight uh there are other things that you could point to as well so for example there's traditional media um this is definitely a generational thing but they're not there's no credibility in traditional news media anymore I think for good reasons but um this is another example of an institution that as it gave way to uh to ideologies and as it it stopped really to be concerned with
the truth and with uh journalistic ethics now we're seeing the backlash we're starting to see that form in such a way that I don't think that they'll be able to recover they'll simply be replaced by something else and again I think that's already happened because rather than your traditional news media sources as they existed before on on mainstream television stations now they're being replaced by influencers online and more independent platforms online that that are really taking the numbers from them and uh I think that's only going to continue but anyway I don't want to digress
too much but I'm just my my point with all this is just to um try to bring this more up to date because maritan wrote this in the mid-1930s so we're talking about about a hundred years later we're almost almost 100 years later at this point uh and I I do think that what he said then is even more evident now and I would say the same thing for for jp2 um but uh that that will be I think um a big area for for discussion for us uh dealing with this now uh whether you
see this the same way right do you see this as something that um does uh reflect you know this New Path forward does it accurately describe the problems as we see them now and it should I mean what they were doing then and what maritan was doing is he he saw these problems on the horizon uh because he knew where these philosophical principles would lead and same thing with jp2 and so what we're seeing now that those things have not changed is uh how that downward spiral has progressed since then so we we've seen their
warnings not only come to fruition but continue even beyond that uh so that that's where I think we are now
