US Conservatives Pursue a ‘Ben Option’ of Global Ramification
Are we ‘Rome’? The question has weighed heavily on the minds of American conservatives, libertarians and Catholics at their various conferences. Is America headed the way of the Roman empire? Bureaucratic decay, massive public debt, an overstretched military, a political system seemingly incapable of responding to challenges – “the late Roman empire suffered these maladies, and so, some fear, does contemporary America”, notes The American Conservative, a journal which has been pursuing this ‘line’ diligently, and with a growing constituency, over a number of years. (Note that this is not the constituency of Vice-President Pence who represents an Evangelical, fundamentalist, literal insistence on imminent Redemption, with its ‘Rapture’ politics).
The American Conservative rather warns:
“If libertarians on the Right worry about structural collapse – cultural and religious conservatives add a moral and spiritual dimension to the debate. Rising hedonism, waning religious observance, ongoing break-up of the family, and a general loss of cultural coherence — to traditionalists, these are signs of a possible Dark Age ahead”.
And this is their narrative in response to these fears: Around the year 500 (CE), a generation after the Franks deposed the last Roman Emperor, a young Umbrian man (i.e. hailing from a rural province in Italy), was sent to Rome by his wealthy parents to complete his education. However, disgusted at ‘Rome’s decadence, he fled to the forest, to pray as a hermit.
His name was Benedict. And he went on to found a dozen monastic communities, and wrote his famous ‘rules’ which are credited with having helped an earlier culture and its values survive in needy times. Professor Russell Hittinger summed up Benedict’s lesson to the Dark Ages like this: “How to live life as a whole. Not a life of worldly success, so much as one of human success”.
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