So when did things really start going to pot?

Some of you Catholics may want to push it back even farther: to a certain German monk in the sixteenth century.

I could see that, easily. But then, why did people pay attention to that German monk instead of writing him off as a crank?

But then, if we reeeeeeeeallllly wanted to get to the root of this mess, perhaps we should look at a certain incident in a garden....

Interesting...I've thought of WWI as a watershed event in ending our "innocence". I'm reading a book by a historian written in the 1930s, and he's convinced that life in the 1890s was far more innocent. Certainly the '20s were pretty decadent so you have to pre-date the trouble to WWII. The French Revolution did unleash great evil.

Ah, the Garden . . .

Then there was Hilaire Belloc, a good and pugnacious Catholic, who pointed toward the era of Cardinal Richelieu in France as the root of our modern problems. Belloc identifies Richelieu as the architect of the modern nation-state, whose achievement, won at the price of alliances with various Protestants, irrevocably fractured the unity of Christendom.

Something to think about.

Ultimately Peony is right. Obviously, it all boils down to original sin. Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, Adam Smith, French Revolution, Richelieu, Marx, German neo-paganism, Jacques Derrida, they are all meaningless outside of the context of sin. That is the problem with an aggressively secular reeading of history: it ignores fallen human nature and tries to attribute solely material causes to history.

Erik:

I don't think we can fairly charge either Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn or Hilaire Belloc with "agressively secular" readings of history. Sin is the root of our world's fallen-ness, but may still prove valuable to consider where sin found its most solid purchase, so to speak, in the affairs of men.

Peony is quite right: mankind, generally speaking, stinks, and always has, since the sin of Adam. There have been innocently-minded people in every age, and perhaps more in the past than now, but no age has been particularly innocent. In the 19th century - to take up the point of TSO's author - in London (a center of civilization at that time), unwanted children were unobtrusively dropped in the Thames (public discomfort with this well-known practice was sublimated into the immense popularity of the Rev. Charles Kingsley's 1863 children's book "The Water-Babies"); servants who contracted infectious diseases were routinely turned out in the street to die; and casual adultery became so common among the haut ton that great care had to be taken to prevent marriages between half-siblings. Then recall Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley (who, like Wilde and Wilde's sometime innamorato Lord Alfred Douglas, died penitent and a fervent Catholic, God bless them), and the weirdly perverted eroticism of some of the Pre-Raphaelite poets; no, the 1890s weren't really very innocent.

Peony, I'm so proud of you for visiting Paul's page. I knew you'd appreciate him. As for Kuehnelt-Leddhin, I'm really sorry he's gone. He was a walking encyclopedia and I used to gobble up everything he wrote for NR.

A professor of mine once said: "Tell me what you think about the French Revolution and I'll tell you what you think about everything else." He may have been quoting someone, but I can't remember whom. Whoever said it, he had a point.