THE REIGN OF BOOMER JUSTICE:
BOOMER JUSTICE & MANKIND’S POST TRAUMATIC RESPONSE TO WWII
In the past few generations, the virtue of justice has gone missing from the earth. The minds of individual people have not been able to form the virtue well at all. What’s stood in its place has been a deformed Boomer justice…
Justice is the virtue that guides and regulates our social interactions. It holds in balance the principles of punishment, retribution, peace, tolerance, and compassion, among others. In its application it ethically frames social spheres of interaction like sexual ethics, economics, politics, geo-politics, and theology/ecclesiology, among others. Justice is one of the four natural cardinal virtues—the others being prudence, temperance, and courage—and it is the highest cardinal virtue at that…
In the highest order of angels there are three choirs: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. Each choir contemplates a different aspect of the Godhead as it is in itself. The Seraphs contemplate the love of God; the Cherubs contemplate the knowledge of God; the Thrones contemplate the justice of God…
What a society makes of justice is central to its health and operation. It cannot be overstated how devastating a wound to the virtue of justice is to the common reality, communion, function, and operation of mankind. A society that has lost its sense of justice has lost its greatest asset.
Our world has lost its justice.
Three Hypotheses
How is it that the understanding of justice has fallen so far in our modern time? It was not so in the past. Virtues are always rare, but they are typically recognized and esteemed by people lacking- but striving for- them. In recent generations even those possessing justice have been spurned; those inverting justice have been championed; and everything in between has been confounded.
What has happened to justice? Is this something unique to our time or something that has always been missing? Is the inversion of justice we see today unique to today or a perennial problem in mankind? Can we suspect it to be a sign of the end times, or can we assign a more natural explanation to the phenomena? And what about the reality that so many people born in the millennial generation-&-later see justice entirely contrary to the way Boomers-&-Xers saw justice? Why are the intuitions of so many people toward justice so lifeless and defunct? These are questions guiding this inquiry.
The most common hypotheses proposed in our society to answer what has happened to justice are the following:
1) From the Boomer’s perspective (and the one propounded most ardently in our modern culture today): We’ve gone through a moral awakening. We’ve evolved and elevated our understanding of justice. That is why the dominant narrative around justice is so different today than it was throughout human history.
Where this hypothesis succeeds: It explains the differences between the dominant & enshrined conceptions of justice prevailing today from those of every time before.
Where this hypothesis fails: It does not explain why there is such a break between Millennials-Zers and Boomers-Xers. It does not explain why the instinct for justice is so torpid in so many people.
2) From the Boomer/Xer Trad Catholic perspective: Sin has affected our ability to intuit sound conceptions of justice. Chaos reigns in our modern world accordingly. We are nearing the end times / end of the world is on the horizon.
Where this hypothesis succeeds: It accounts for distortion to understanding of justice & its break with history; it recognizes the chaos this distortion has wrought.
Where this hypothesis fails: It doesn’t account for break in intuition toward justice between Boomers-Xers & Millennials-Zers. It goes to the furthest extreme possible in their worldview (it is the end times) and disregards very plausible natural explanations.
Both of these common hypotheses have ways of navigating their weak points—denying the counterfactuals, or further explaining them according to their narrative—but what we are doing in this article today is proposing a third hypothesis, one I haven’t heard put forward before. I call it the WWII Post-Traumatic Response Hypothesis. I will lay out the hypothesis here and see if I can’t convince some portion of you that it is a much more sound and elegant explanation of what is going on. The intended ultimate consequence of adopting this hypothesis is stated clearly at the end of this article: so that you may endure this present distortion in justice with peace and clarity, clinging to what is good and true in all patience and humility.
HOW THE ARGUMENT WILL PROCEED:
§ Boomer Justice
§ PTR
§ WW’s [Causing PTR]
o [Consider] “Justice-Fatigue”
§ Millennials-Zers [Return to Justice Proper]
§ The Devil’s Plan in This All
§ [Final Exhortation]
“Boomer Justice”
Boomer justice is the justice that has reigned more or less worldwide since WWII. It is a concept of justice in which all the relevant aspects of justice—punishment, peace, tolerance, compassion—have been lost or disordered, and all the applications of justice—sexual ethics, economics, geo-politics, theology—have been scrambled and made incoherent. Punishment became incomprehensible and irreconcilable to the modern mind; peace became detached from order and consequently affirmed chaos; tolerance became radical enablement; compassion became sentimentalism that quickly became drug use. As a result of that disequilibrium, justice’ application to social domains were disordered accordingly: sexual ethics became subjectivized and hedonistic; economics became consumerist and greedy; geo-politics became quasi-imperialistic and wrathful; theological catechesis became neutered and slothful. These notions of justice and their applications have infiltrated all of our dominant institutions today: America, the Church, Academia, Politics, Economics, Sports… The reign of Boomer justice is trying to hold on today, and possessing all the levers of capital and institutional positions of power available, they’re able to for the time.
The Post Traumatic Response (PTR)
A post traumatic response is an unconsciously operated psychological / psycho-somatic response that occurs in some people in the wake of experiencing a trauma. It’s a psychological mechanism that functions to buffer the psyche from a direct encounter with a trauma and its implications. The deepest explanation given for why this occurs is that certain traumas evoke realizations of irreconcilable contradictions, or gaps, in one’s worldview and the psyche seeks to preserve its capacity to function with a [albeit week] worldview rather than risk losing its worldview capacity altogether. It's no guarantee that a lost worldview will be replaced by another one. The human mind without a guiding worldview is inoperable. A broken psyche is far more destructive to how one lives than the experience of PTR is miserable—even when that experience is a terror in a persons life.
So it goes that the psyche will select to preserve its sanity, and corresponding ability to function in a preliminary way, rather than give up its sanity and risk an inability to function. The Post-Traumatic Response is an adaptive response to trauma in ones psyche working to preserve its functioning and operation.
The World Wars
The hypothesis of this article hinges on the proposition that the trauma of the World Wars caused a post-traumatic response in the social consciousness of mankind. Every individual has a social concept of human community and interaction, and what I’m proposing is that the World Wars traumatized the data set of what would be considered in the social concepts of people worldwide.
The Second World War opened the eyes of humanity to a possibility of destruction that was previously unfathomable in the imagination of man. Nuclear bombs; biological warfare; mobilization of masses of people to a scale that eclipsed many previous generations population totals altogether. With WWII the recognition of the destruction that technological advancement could bring rose into the consciousness of mankind. For the first times in history war was caught on film and camera as well, memorializing and bringing to life the horrors of the war and its destruction to the universal masses. Even ancillary groups of people that were not in the direct conflict were affected by what occurred in WWII.
Justice-Fatigue
In the wake of every war there is a period of justice-fatigue that follows after it for those who participated in the war. The societies afflicted insist that whatever they can identify as the most proximate cause of the war is the reason that all wars occur, and they seek to flee from the tensions and stresses of the demands of justice. In short: they want simple answers, and their capacity for justice is put on pause. In the wake of the protestant religious wars in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people insisted that religion was the problem; in the wake of the sack of Rome people insisted that uncivilized barbarian society was the problem; in the wake of the Vietnam War people insisted that American imperialism was the problem; in the wake of the Wars on Terror people insisted that material greed was the problem; in the wake of WWI people insisted that nationalism was the problem; in the wake of WWII people insisted that racism and technological power was the problem. It’s normal for any society that incurs the traumas of war to reflexively swing back in the other direction and adopt in their worldview the conviction that the most recent cause of war is the most dangerous threat to peace that exists. Along the way the understanding of the relationship between order and peace is almost always lost—“peace” becomes a consequence of appeasement and pacifism, which only enables chaos.
What was different about WWII and the Boomer Justice fatigue reflex that commenced was that it seemed to grip far more people far more deeply than any of the localized wars ever did or do. In unison the whole world adopted the same brand of justice-fatigue and for those proceeding generations all across the world a consensus around justice formed accordingly. All of the institutions of the world grew infused with their fatigued-justice & its applications. People’s socially oriented intuitions universally pointed toward the same formal structure of fatigued-justice with the same disordered conceptions of peace, tolerance, compassion; and with the same objects identified as the worst things possible: nationalism, antisemitism, military technology.
Millennials & Gen-Zers
As the justice-fatigue affected the whole world in the wake of WWII, it was easy for people to assume that it wasn’t a temporary reflex to the wars but an actual development in the understanding of justice. However, by the time Millennials are born, this justice-fatigue goes away. The post traumatic response to the World Wars did not last indefinitely. For Millennials the world wars were just a story—another event in the long history of the world that they learned about from a distant. They did not grow up in a home of soldiers and civilians that experienced the war as boomers and Gen Xers did. They grew up in homes separated from ground zero of the World Wars and so they didn’t have the same fatigued justice intuition like the Boomers & Gen Xers grew up surrounded by. This meant that millennials would be inclined toward justice in a radically different way than Boomers-Xers were.
…A millennial who adopts the Boomer worldview of justice is inauthentically trying to integrate an outlook that has no intuitive basis in them or their peers. For example, a millennial claiming that nationalism, or antisemitism, is the greatest threat to our world today is almost incomprehensible to people born after 1980. A person that is young and claims as much is a paradox and a prima facie fool. Those concerns don’t register on the Top 20 lists of most pressing threats for almost anyone born 1980 or later.
…A millennial that dismisses or comes to realize the immaturity of Boomer justice quickly realizes that they can earnestly build out their understanding of justice from the ground up. Unlike Gen-Xers that, when they reject Boomer justice, tend to reject only one area of Boomer justice, but keep the rest (i.e. they reject Boomer sexual ethics but hold to Boomer economics or Boomer geo-politics), Millennials quickly run the gamut on all the areas of applied Boomer justice and throw them all out:
· Sexual ethics based on pleasure is absurd and unhelpful in forming any discipline or self-restraint, not to mention joy, in sexual matters. Sex and relationships have been clearly disordered by inordinate use of the reproductive organs toward things that have no relationship toward reproduction whatsoever—this isn’t some “hang up of the Church” or some other nonsense, this is the most naturally and philosophically evident observation there is on sexual matters.
o It’s easily intelligible that Boomer sexual ethics are absurd and a disorder that would be contrary justice—and perennial, universal understandings of sexual ethics based on commitment and the integrity of the reproductive act are clearly just and good.
· Economic practices like usury, and the idolization of money and material wealth above all else, are clearly absurd, destabilizing, and unjust for a society to endorse—even if they seem to produce great wealth as a consequence (a hypothesis that is easily refuted as well).
o Economics are an extension of morality and should be governed internally by restraint, balance, and integrity, and externally by laws that see economics as an extension of moral and social formation.
· Geo-political war gaming, seeking to secure national interests internationally, and globalization more broadly is readily grasped as incoherent and excessive, stepping way outside the scope of a person’s, or community/society’s sphere of responsibility, and they recognize the injustice in trying to impose a global governing apparatus over those far outside their community.
· Theological avoidance of topics like sin and hell are not generous, or pastoral, but harmful itself, ergo unjust, for they fail to provide people with the tools they need to guard themselves against evil and the wiles of the demonic armies.
It’s as if the light of justice is a bright light that blinds a person if their eyes are wounded, but guides a person if their eyes are healthy… The Boomers were unable to look at the light of justice because of the wounds of trauma present in them, choosing for darkness rather than light; but the Millennials can turn to justice without any hindrance within themselves keeping them from experiencing the splendor of its illuminative beauty.
The Great Divorce: The Plan of the Devil
What we see with those born after 1980 is the emergence of a split in the conceptions of justice. No one is holding the anodyne, placid justice of the Boomers—both parties are splitting hard down the middle. There are those taking the Boomer Justice principles to a radical extreme, transforming immature Boomer justice into patent injustice; and there are those rejecting the tepid justice of Boomers across the board and returning to the perennial conceptions of justice that reigned throughout the world’s history.
The plan of the devil in all of this has a remarkable simplicity to it once you see it. In the wake of the worldwide justice-fatigue post-WWII a sort of circumstantial vice commenced—people haphazardly fell into vices out of weakness and an incapacity to properly form their virtue of justice, drawing them into sins and disposing them to hell. What the devil is seeking to do now, however, is to convert that circumstantial vice into deliberate vice. He wants to use the momentum of sin to catalyze more wicked sins that more directly revolt against God.
The devil is having a lot of success in this plan. A large portion of people today are swimming in sins that accrue to the seventh, eighth, and ninth layers of hell in Dante’s Inferno. These are not the spheres of accidental, or otherwise understandable, sin, like the first, second, third, fourth, etc.: These are the spheres of sin directed directly against God and the nature He sowed into reality: the sins of Violence (7th sphere), Fraud (8th sphere), and Treachery (9th sphere).
A great animated picture describing the acts comprising the 7th, 8th, and 9th spheres of hell in Dante’s Inferno:
What we see today is that there is not some continuation of Boomer Justice taking place. Even old Boomers are being drawn toward the two extremes without their realizing it. So many of them want to just make it to the end with their hands over their ears and their eyes closed hoping they get to the afterlife without having to confront their shortcomings and failures. It’s not working…
People that do not have the post-WWII PTR are not trying to advance the centrist, milquetoast, bougie principles and propositions of the Boomer Justice world. They are trying to commandeer the Boomer’s weakness and sentiments into an ideological offensive attack for deliberate viciousness. They are happy to press the nerve of a Nancy Pelosi, or a Joe Biden, or a Mitch McConnell, or a Jeb Bush and watch them squirm. They don’t respect them—they want to use them…
The Millennials & Zers do not have the wounds to their intuitions toward justice like the Boomer-Xers do, and so they go toward good or toward evil in a much more pronounced and declarative manner. They are all-in for God or all-in for every manner of wickedness and vice, and they do not mince words about it. What will play out now will be the drama of these two principles—good and evil—clashing in a much more direct way than we’ve seen over the previous 80 years. What we’ll see going forward is a world where the principles of justice will be intuited in such a way as to produce either an affirmation or a rejection—a yes or a no. That is way different than how it was in the wake of WWII…
Dawn of a New World: A Return to the Perennial World of Old
The real purpose of this entire article—and why we ventured to propose this hypothesis at all—is so that we can have a firm confidence that what we understand as justice is actually justice. I wrote this so that you may endure this present distortion in justice with peace and clarity, clinging to what is good and true in all patience and humility. We don’t have to give in to being gaslit into a fake drama surrounding this all. The Church’s teachings don’t need to change—even if dying Boomers with a full grip on the levers of power insist they do. In thirty years our world will no longer have people in charge that were raised with the PTR of WWII. The instinct for justice will return and the sanity of justice will shortly return thereafter. We don’t have to get on board with Boomer Justice or face destruction, no matter how much they insist we do. We don’t have to recognize Boomer Justice as the universal inclination toward justice as they insist it is. Their phase will pass. It is really well explained by the observation of the post-war justice-fatigue effect that went universal post WWII because of particular historical circumstances. What we need to gear up for is the already ongoing battle over good and evil that has always been unfolding in our world. Good always has a real chance to take root—evil can always be resoundingly thwarted. No, it won’t be ultimately thwarted—that will happen at the end of all time—but the neoliberal sensibilities of the past 80 years are not a novel development, they’re a symptom of a tragedy that had to be recovered from with patience and sincere pity, and little more. +
AJ, are you familiar with the works of Blessed Columba Marmion? Many of the themes that interest you are areas of expertise for the future Doctor of Divine Adoption (submission to the Divine Plan as it relates to growth in holiness, overlap of Thomistic realism and the lived reality of the individual, the concept of totality in the voluntary activity of the will, the central role of compunction and the virtue of penance in the spiritual life). If any single theologian can provide a wholly satisfying vision of the Catholic worldview amidst the rubble of a post-Boomer West, it is him. In my opinion, Christ, the Life of the Soul, his magnum opus, is the best place to start.
AJ, are you familiar with the works of Blessed Columba Marmion? Many of the themes that interest you are areas of expertise for the future Doctor of Divine Adoption (submission to the Divine Plan as it relates to growth in holiness, overlap of Thomistic realism and the lived reality of the individual, the concept of totality in the voluntary activity of the will, the central role of compunction and the virtue of penance in the spiritual life). If any single theologian can provide a wholly satisfying vision of the Catholic worldview amidst the rubble of a post-Boomer West, it is him. In my opinion, Christ, the Life of the Soul, his magnum opus, is the best place to start.