We Are Becoming Barbarians

Bad art the loss of reason

Parish and diocesan obligations have kept me from writing. I hope to return to doing so on a regular basis in the next few weeks. I did, however, want to offer my admitted brief and preliminary thoughts about a recently posted (and since removed) picture on President Trump’s Truth Social site:

In contemporary, Christian devotional art, Jesus is often portrayed in clothing similar to that being worn by the POTUS.

At the very least the AI generated image of the President draws a close parallel between him and Jesus Christ. Whether the image is of Jesus or Trump, it is bad, heavy handed art.

It is sad that POTUS or someone on his staff thought it appropriate to depict the president in this way. While the image may not (strictly speaking) be blasphemous (since one must actually believe to commit blasphemy), it is in bad taste. And this both artistically and politically.

More worryingly, it shows an amazing--mind numbingly really--lack of prudence and cultural literacy. I would characterize it rather as the work of a barbarian who recognizes no standard other than the will of the “warlord” to whom one is expected to show loyalty.

The Catholic theologian and political philosophy argues that

Barbarism is not, I repeat, the forest primeval with all its relatively simple savageries. Barbarism has long had its definition, resumed by St. Thomas (Aquinas) after Aristotle. It is the lack of reasonable conversation according to reasonable laws. Here the word “conversation” has its twofold Latin sense. It means living together and talking together.

Barbarism emerges when we “cease to live together according to reason, embodied in law and custom, and incorporated in a web of institutions that sufficiently reveal rational influences, even though they are not, and cannot be, wholly rational.”

In place of reason, the barbarous Society is ruled by

…force and fear; when economic interests assume the primacy over higher values; when material standards of mass and quantity crush out the values of quality and excellence; when technology assumes an autonomous existence and embarks on a course of unlimited self-exploitation without purposeful guidance from the higher disciplines of politics and morals.

The AI generated image of the President as Jesus, I think, fits comfortably within Murray’s description of barbarism. It also suggests that we are reaching (or have reached) the point in which the State (in the person of President Trump) can assert a proprietary claim over Christian iconography. This claim is made all the worse because the iconography is artistically bad and beholden to sentimentality rather than dogma.

Ironically, when “the state reaches the paradoxical point of being everywhere intrusive” it is also revealing that it is “impotent: and while “possessed of immense power” is “powerless to achieve rational ends.” And so this AI generated image that seeks to “sway” the citizenry not by reason but an appeal to “the instinctual, the impulsive, the compulsive” or what Orthodoxy calls the passions. “[W]hatever the surface impressions of urbanity,” the barbarian or the vicious, passion ridden man, has “ceased to live … according to reasonable laws” but something darker, more vicious and destructive of human dignity.¹

1. John Courtney Murray, SJ (1960) We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, p. 25.