Letter #177: Klavaning the Claverings

A Lost Age of Cohesion Can be Regained

Spencerissimus,

To rediscover Homer — what a thought. I especially like that episode where he becomes obese so he can work from home, far from the prying eyes of Mr. Burns. Maybe that’s a different Homer. But still — to rebuild the old knowledge as if from scratch might indeed make it “newly magnificent, newly wonderful and strange.”

And while we have fallen away, it seems, impossibly far, recovery is not at all impossible.

I recently read for the first time an 1864 novel called The Claverings by Anthony Trollope. Trollope is one of the greats of the novel’s great age, up there, really, with Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, though he doesn’t always get the same press. The Claverings is a quietly realistic depiction of middle class life in Victorian England. It made my heart ache for an age that was before even my time.

The story centers on a single dilemma. Shall the hero marry the good girl to whom he’s engaged, or run off with the wealthy and beautiful firebrand who jilted him in youth?

What made me so nostalgic was the completeness of the culture. Its rules of morality are clear; violations bring shame upon the rebel; the roles of men and women are set; the outcomes of life are dependent on individual actions within a powerful framework of shared understanding. The women are dependent on men and have little practical power, but their moral power is irresistible to anyone who cherishes his own happiness. Maidens, wives and mothers must obey fathers and husbands, yet the entire society is built to protect and honor them. A wise husband “was master of himself and of his own actions… but the instances in which he declined to follow his wife’s advice were not many.”

Compare that to today. We have given away any sense of social cohesion in the name of freedom — but only in freedom’s name, not the fact of it. Instead of our moral structures arising naturally from human nature, they’re imposed by a censorious cabal of elites manipulating institutions to enforce a bizarre and wholly incorrect theory of our condition. Women and men are “equal,” and as a result women have no moral power at all and are abused at will. Fewer marriages. Fewer children. We are dying away.

While it seems that can’t be reversed, it can. The Victorian period — one of the greatest in Western history — came after an age of revolution in which all the norms of politics, religion and sex were not just questioned but destroyed. Yet social cohesion closed over the madness like flesh reknitting over a wound. A century of growth, reform and empire ensued. Not to mention a revival of Christianity like the one I believe is beginning now.

Such cultural outcomes are with God, his to decide. But as individuals, we can think and talk and walk in his service, and hope to find the good, the great and the masses walking along beside us.

Yer lovin, Dad