Past Issues

We talk incessantly now about identities. But built as they are upon the ruins of our actual selves, the ones embedded in given natural (and supernatural) bonds, we have ceased to have any identity at all. Living in the tiny crawl spaces of our own wills, shut off from anything outside their artificial boundaries, our individuality is wiped out. But if we are still alive and kicking it is because we subsist on the remnant vapors of Tradition with a capital “T,” that heritage of truth that originates in God’s creative Word. It is also because that same Word, mercifully handed over to us in the flesh of the Church, invites us back to our very selves.

We used to know ourselves by looking to what was most familiar—to our bodies, families, customs, and traditions. Who we were was tied to place, a community of relations whose bearings remained fixed and stable. Today, such embeddedness is intolerable. Identity is something we create, something we express while compelling the recognition of others. Yet, our new “fluid” selves have yielded only homelessness, an existence without roots in either place or person. We live under the specter of there being nothing our own. From where does our permanence derive? Surprisingly, it might be accepting ourselves as beholden to others—as ineluctably given—by which we regain our sense of who we really are.

Poiesis delights and entertains us. A novel, a play, a myth retold, even a song: true art is never mere entertainment. In wonder, the poet receives the world for what it is: a theophany—and then, with wit and imagination, “fashions a world in the word,” inviting the reader to see with new eyes. Thus, literature becomes an education in humanity; myth a call to conversion; theatre the embodied expression of a people’s voice; and poetry an invitation to see past the mundane. And it is not only what we say that evokes the greatest wonder; the fact of language itself is the mystery, the very condition of our receiving the world.

A society no longer bound by an underlying universal logos is bound only by an irrational rebellion against reality, by anti-logos. It lives by lies, inspired by the Author of Lies, and propagated by powerful engines of “social” media, and all of us, who repeat them “freely.” The architects of Newspeak banish “ungood” words (as per Orwell) exchanging them for “good” ones. Thus “liberty” and “patriotism”—now “fascist”—are exchanged for “democracy” which now means “equality” and “diversity.” Words like “fidelity,” “procreation,” “killing,” and “sex” cede to “consent” “reproduction,” “termination,” and “gender identity.” This is a collective anti-social media campaign against our common grasp of objective reality.

In the beginning was the Word. Human beings, made in the image of God, share in this utterance, this Logos. Language, then, is foundational to our humanity. How we reference reality, how we translate from one language to another, how we communicate with one another—notably in an era where social media amplify our every passing thought—matters. Everything, from scientific discourse to the sacred liturgy, hangs on the way we use or abuse language. This issue of Humanum examines the freight that words carry, with particular reference to the "misology" and "cancel culture" that afflict contemporary discourse.