When I was 13 or so, my Mom pitched religion in such a way that I nearly became an atheist. It wasn’t the actual religion itself that disturbed me so much as her sales pitch.

Me: Why do you believe in g-d?

Mom: Because I was raised that way and it makes me feel good.

Me: But Socrates says that believing in stuff that isn’t True is evil.

Mom: Well, I was raised that way.

Me: But isn’t that evil because it’s not about Truth?

Mom: I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

To be fair, I was probably more obnoxious and rude than I remember.

At that age, I wanted to be like Martin Luther King or Gandhi but especially Socrates. I wanted to pursue Truth over everything and be murdered by an ignorant and vulgar crowd.

I was in junior high at the time and the environment was nihilistic. Regrettably, I am a human and, therefore, I cannot be objective. My particular variant of humanity has biases towards depression and cynicism. Possibility, most of that horrible school experience was the usual pettiness and vanity that teenagers are prone to. But I beneath all of the typical vulgarity, I see Cain killing his brother because he hated his brother being good.

In junior high, you were permitted to be interested in sports and certain kinds of music, but that was pretty much it. Being interested in books, or philosophy, or history, meant that something was malformed within you.

I remember in a computer class when we were making a website, about half the students couldn’t think of anything to write about.

Student: What should I write about?

Teacher: Write about what interests you or write about yourself.

Student: (utterly blank face)

I also recall a new teacher in his science class. He believed in figuring out what kids were interested in and then focusing the class on that. The poor guy had to learn that the kids weren’t interested in anything. It was a dull existence where the only things of interest were things immediately affecting yourself.

Gratitude and interest were hated in and of themselves. Believing in anything good or noble was for suckers. The ideal that everyone strived for was to be a cynical jerk that resented the world.

For example, let’s say that we had just read Romeo and Juliet and I foolishly thought to discuss it with another student.

Me: I thought the language was pretty but the characters weren’t very interesting. Did you think Romeo and Juliet were interesting characters?

Student: (Shrug) Shakespeare writes a lot.

Me: Well, did you prefer Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth?

Student: (Shrug) I don’t really care.

It wasn’t just Shakespeare. Literature and ideas were all disdained.

Theodore Dalrymple perfectly described this attitude in his conversation with the poor white underclass in his British Hospital.

The young condemned to live in an eternal present, a present which merely exists, without connection to a past which might explain it or to a future which might develop from it. Theirs is truly a life of one damned thing after another. Likewise, they are deprived of any reasonable standards of comparison by which to judge their woes. They believe themselves deprived, because the only people with whom they can compare themselves are those who appear in advertisements or on television…

The gimcrack pedagogical notion that education should be “relevant” to children’s lives gained currency in England in the sixties. The thought that this would confine children to the world that they already knew—and a pretty dismal world it was, too, as anyone with the slightest acquaintance with English workingclass life will testify—apparently never occurred to those educationists who claimed such exceptional sympathy with the relatively disadvantaged. The result was that a route—perhaps the one most frequently traveled—to social advancement was substantially closed to them.

That was the prevailing belief of my junior high. Against such nihilism, sentimentality and unthinking adherence to tradition had no appeal to me. I needed something philosophically and spiritually substantial to withstand the world.

As many of the Ricochetti are aware, churches that become lefty or tone down their fervency are quickly abandoned. Conversely, Christianity has often grown when the world was remarkably hostile and cruel to the faith. This makes perfect sense to me. When the world is corrupt, you want a way to reject the world and attain something better. You want someone who is willing to tell the Truth no matter what. You don’t want to feel peaceful about how vulgar and indecent the world is. You want to be asked to be braver and nobler than you are. When your world becomes dark you want to be the guy that shouts, “Then we will fight in the shade.”

Christ rejected the vast majority of the world (politics, sex, and money) for nobler and more platonic ideals, and he did so in a brave and self-sacrificing way. By associating him with the world, his appeal is diminished. The world is usually not worth venerating. Virtue always is.