Recovering our sanity.
The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church
James Kalb
Angelico Press, £17, 228 pages
I am sitting outside a coffee shop on the main street of Lander, Wyoming. A brown sparrow alights near my table, joining the already various pedestrian traffic: tanned climbers emerge from their bumper-stickered Subaru; a couple stroll out of the local college chapel down the street; overweight grandparents are walking their dogs; a bow-kneed old cowboy creaks out of his pick-up truck; a tattooed youngster with dyed hair flies past on his skateboard. For each, an entirely different identity of which Lander somehow forms a common part.
I am sick of hearing about the general “identity crisis” of Western culture today. I am even more tired of hearing about the transgender disaster. What I am not tired of hearing about, because it is so infrequent, is a thorough explanation of these various calamities and what to do about them. James Kalb’s new book
will, I believe, be among the most important books of 2023 because it identifies the sources and solutions to these problems.
That the world has gone mad is easier to see than how it got there. That we urgently need to do something – despite the fact that, in some ways, it is already too late – is manifestly evident. “No one seems to know what they are, where they come from, what they are for, or what difference they should make,” Kalb writes. The novelty of this situation is astonishing. Previously, identity was the framework in which life was lived and self was understood. Even though there were variations from country to country, or race to race, on identity and roles for understanding things like “humanity, blood relationship, marriage, sexual distinctions and roles, and our place with regard to ultimate reality”, Kalb notes that these variations have much in common and are basic to the constitution of human life.
Such commonalities of identity and meanings between cultures reflect “natural realities like the distinction between male and female and the relation between parents and children”. While semi-subjective differences as exist between Chinese or British, Hindi or Mexican cultures shape how we deal with such natural realities, they do not “make or unmake” them.
Kalb’s table of contents shows his line of thought: the novelty of the situation of “Identity as a Problem” is explored via “Traditional Understandings” of identity and “How they Worked” before exploring the link with human and cultural identities respectively (primarily in the realms of sexual and western Christian contexts). Kalb notes that today egalitarian consumeristic ends define human beings: whether you are a man or woman doesn’t matter – shouldn’t matter – so much as your ability to manipulate a computer for marketing purposes. The problem is that humans are more than genderless consumers: “Human beings cannot be stripped of all qualities other than those relevant to their status as components of a global economic machine.”
Of course, this is exactly what many parts of society seem to be trying to do: paradoxically presenting diversity and variation as an ultimate good in the name of an utter equality which is impossible between diverse components. This is done in the name of misconstrued goods: for every falsity contains at least a half-truth. Thus injustices regarding fair wages or racism, for example, are good things to reform: the meaning they have been given, however, is a mixture of more falsity than truth. “The question,” Kalb writes, “is not whether social arrangements distinguish, discriminate, exclude, and compel – they always do, sometimes unfairly – but whether they promote a way of life worth living.”
The more power an authority has to redefine our identity on the grounds of “equality”, the less freedom we have to resist the inequalities caused by the imposed equality. For example, in the case of transgender males, the self-appointed authorities never clarify “how the compulsion to deny that womanhood means anything at all in the case of ordinary women is to be reconciled with the compulsion to accept its reality and importance”. The current war against bigotry, says Kalb, has “led not to unity but to the increasing alienation of half the population and a tendency among influential people to treat that half as outside the bounds of legitimate civic participation”. A recent example involved a man who identified as a woman telling a British interviewer that rising water costs were “tough if you’re a mum like me, already struggling to get the things that my kid needs”.
One of Kalb’s central theses is that as false “identities” are removed further from basic natural realities, there will be an implosion of such synthetically manufactured identities back to basic units of meaning such as “sex, kinship, ethnicity, religion, and culture”. Abolishing reality cannot be done by halves, he explains. “Proponents recognise on some level that a shared system of stable identities similar to the inherited one is basic to human life.” This is the hope irrationality holds out: that the current irrational attempt to remake man in an arbitrary image (or even no image at all) will fail because the image of God is an indelible part of our nature.
On the one hand, it is inevitable that a majority of people will realise that “money cannot buy everything, even when supplemented by smartphones, sensitivity training, and a health club membership”. On the other hand, real identity and meaning – which traditional cultural and civilisational identities often contain in significant quantities—will “enable us to live a rewarding life with others”. Without such understandings, our personal self-worth, meaning and reason to exist become flat, “idiosyncratic or one-dimensional”, and therefore “incapable of serving as the basis of a coherent and satisfying way of life”. “Can a satisfactory life,” asks Kalb of non-binary people, “be built on something that is hard to distinguish from fantasy role-playing?”
Kalb writes clearly, presenting general patterns and ideas rather than specific examples. After considering how our world has not only been politically paralysed, but faces a dissolution of human ties and even the possibility of thinking, he devotes the latter half of the book to discussing what “a new foundation” might look like. His comments – firmly and logically influenced by his traditional Catholicism – are insightful and see off numerous sacred cows of the current establishment. If “pre-modern and non-liberal views are more reasonable because they include more of reality”, we should not be afraid to make a case for them to anyone willing to listen.
Although we can’t fix every problem – let alone agree on each and every one – Kalb says we can begin with simple things such as “educating ourselves, clearing our minds of cant, avoiding trashy pop culture, broadening our practical competencies, and learning how to earn a living without lying or servility”. Although religious and moral reasons can and must have a place in our identity and therefore approach to the world, following some form of what has been traditionally called “natural law” already promises much in the way of a restoration to sanity.
“Traditional social identities,” Kalb proposes, “and the arrangements they support give a place in social life to considerations – human nature, love and loyalty, the psychological security of children, the Good, Beautiful and True – that cannot be translated into commercial or bureaucratic terms or made a matter of individual consumer or lifestyle choice. That is enough to justify them.”
Julian Kwasniewski is a musician, artist and writer based in Wyoming.
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