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quiet desperation." My hunch is that "quiet" will hardly do in a culture
that grows ever-noisier about its complaints.
However, subsequent ponderings about our age's dirty little secret–
or lack thereof-took me in a rather surprising direction.
If
the litmus
test of a dirty little secret is that one is afraid to give public voice to pri–
vate feeling, then it just may be that the dirty little secret of our time is
that we miss God .
The Death of Satan
(1995),
Andrew Delbanco's
estimable study of how Evil no longer packs the power it once did,
chronicles the decline and fall of Satan as a potent emblem of sinfulness.
I would argue the other side of his coin by suggesting that missing God
is a by-product of a culture that prefers to explain evil away rather than
to confront it directly. For example, there are enough scholarly "expla–
nations" of Hitler for journalist Ron Rosenbaum to write a thick book
on the subject. Evidently, to know about Hitler's (abused) childhood is
enough to excuse his adult behavior. Nor does the drift toward rela–
tivism end there: at the end of the day many trendy intellectuals are no
longer able to distinguish good from evil, the noble from the base, or
truth from falsehood . What matters much more, indeed, what will place
you nicely on the cutting edge, is a conviction that authority of any sort
must be deconstructed-including, of course, God's.
The dirty little secret, then, is that many intellectuals and writers
know better, but are afraid to come clean-and small wonder because
to speak about missing God is not only to risk being lumped with reli–
gious fundamentalists on the far right but also to earn the censure, if not
the contempt, of those who roll their eyeballs whenever public intellec–
tuals speak too glibly about God. After all, missing God implies that
people once had a defining relationship with the Deity, and that the sec–
ular rhythms of the twentieth century have whittled it away. No one,
including me, can "prove" that this is the case, but one has intimations,
hunches, if you will, that much in our culture lacks a spiritual anchor.
Such inchoate feelings fly in the face of those much longer certainties.
They will tell you, for example, that our real problem has nothing to do
with God and everything to do with replacing the old, bad social con–
structions with new and improved ones. The result is that those in the
spiritually ambivalent middle learn to keep their silence in the face of
everything that coarsens the cultural atmosphere and drastically lowers
the human bar.
It
would be easy, indeed, too easy, to end this piece, as Adams did his,
on a sour note. Granted, prophets of doom have a way of being right
while those who see a rosy future are usually wrong. But this is an occa–
sion when the words of my grandfather seem particularly appropriate.
