Trading a Vocation for a Vacation

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
− Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
− William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Recently I was listening to an interview with author Theodore Dalrymple on the Dennis Prager show. Dalrymple is a psychiatrist who worked with convicts and has insights into what causes people to remain in the underclass. His current book, “The New Vichy Syndrome,” is subtitled, “Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism.”

The author discussed how the socialized, secularized Europeans have lost whatever minimal ability they had to oppose Nazism in the past, and now seem to have no ability whatsoever to resist extremist Islam today. I thought about what, specifically, Europeans have lost.

● I thought about how Europe is filled with beautiful cathedrals, but they are almost empty. The mosques are filled, however. In supposedly Catholic France, more people go to the mosque every Friday than go to church every Sunday.

● I thought about European nations that have birth rates far below replacement levels, while immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans tend to have more children.

● I thought about how Europeans riot because of suggestions that their early retirements be delayed or their extended vacations be shortened.

● I thought about how some European nations now consider psychological depression, or merely being bored with life, as reasons for assisted suicide.

And it occurred to me that these facts are related. After all, what gives people hope for the future? For example, why do people have children? Children used to be economic assets. Boys, and sometimes girls, could be put to work in the family business or farm. Girls, and sometimes boys, could marry into wealthy families. And children could take care of elderly parents. But no more.

Now children are economic liabilities. Consider the frightening cost of the “best” pre-schools, schools, math coaches, soccer coaches, high schools, universities, and graduate schools. Even public-school students need expensive computers, supplies, clothes, and shoes. And often, adult children move away and may play little role in caring for elderly parents. Or they may move back home and in effect want their parents to take care of them.

But economics is not the only reason people tend to have fewer children. People who are egotists want to spend their time, money, and energy on themselves. And people who are secular have less reason to have children for the purpose of transmitting their ethical values. People may have children in order to teach them to become devout Catholics, or Evangelicals, or Jews. But hardly anyone has children for the purpose of teaching them to become liberals.

Where do people find a purpose − a reason to get up in the morning, to go to school, to go to work, to look for a lifetime partner and get married, to have children, to avoid life-destroying alcoholism or drug addiction, to find a useful occupation, to do more than watch TV and play video games, and to go on living until the end of their natural lifespans?

As Dalrymple points out, people find purpose in religion or work, and preferably in both. But what has already happened in Europe, and is now happening in America? Religion is becoming weaker, and work is becoming less meaningful. Europeans remain apathetic while extremist Muslims become more aggressive. But Europeans demonstrate in the streets when cash-strapped governments propose delaying retirement or curtailing generous vacations. In doing so, Europeans reveal what they believe is really important.

Ask the typical high-school or university student the meaning of “vocation.” You will hear “job,” or “occupation,” or perhaps “profession.” But very few will know that the meaning is related to the words “vocal” or “vocalize,” and is equivalent to “calling” − that is, something we are called to do. Of course, if you ask the meaning of “calling,” you will probably hear, “What you do on a phone.” But an online dictionary could tell them:

Vocation:
1. A regular occupation, especially one for which a person is particularly suited or qualified.
2. An inclination, as if in response to a summons, to undertake a certain kind of work, especially a religious career; a calling.

These ideas would seem odd, even foreign, to young people who were not raised in religious homes. To increasing numbers of young people, a job is something they do for money, hopefully for 40 hours a week, with at least two weeks paid vacation, generous sick leave and medical benefits, and retirement on a good pension after − at most − 25 years, regardless of their age.

That is, many young people plan to spend one-third of their lives in school, one-third at productive work, and one-third retired. Can civilization survive if people spend only one-third of their lives advancing it, or even supporting it? As Europe is discovering, the answer is no.

They plan to make a living, but even if they do, is this really living? Without religion to teach that living a good life will give us hope for the Next World, and without work that is meaningful, what remains? Working for money to pay for a vacation and a flat-screen TV is motivation, but it is not inspiration.

Benedictine monks teach that “Laborare est orare,” to work is to pray. But today, people aspire to do as little of the first as possible, and still less of the second. We are taking life and washing it in the hot water of socialism and the bleach of secularism. We are washing out all the vivid colors and leaving only pale, faded pastels. No wonder many people find life uninspiring, even boring.

Without a distant goal to aim for, people tend to lose their way. I learned this in the Boy Scouts, but it is true for all life, not just for hiking. This is a problem. But a greater problem is that it is not occurring in a vacuum. Radical leftists are seeking to control our lives on one side, and extremist Muslims are seeking to control our lives on the other.

Leftism is a powerful force, but it is not self-sustaining. We saw this in the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and we are seeing it in the slower collapse of socialist Europe − and in its low birth rates. Yes, leftism still can cause trouble, as witness the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. But leftism is on a down-slope. Radical Islam, on the other hand, is self-sustaining, and it is on an up-slope.

If we lose our way, there are others waiting impatiently to take over. Trading a vocation for a vacation is a very bad deal, and ultimately a fatal one. As our current economic problems demonstrate, if we are not careful, we are likely to lose both.

Dr. Stolinsky writes on political and social issues. Contact: dstol@prodigy.net. You are welcome to publish or post these articles, provided that you cite the author and website.

Thanks, I love reading your essays. Even when I disagree (rarely), you always make me think.

And what occurred to me while reading this is that socialism is just as deadly as communism to the human spirit. Communism, however, will hunt people down, barcode them, work them and outright kill them in a manic, fevered obsession with control and domination. But socialism kills through neglect. It’s not what socialism does to people - it’s what it forbids them to pursue, to think, and to dream. For example, the imposition of politically correct speech is communistic, but its continued peer-to-peer manifestation is socialism.

In the same way, the vacation that has replaced the vocation in your model is similiar, in that it is a communist imposition full of ideas which, in reality, turns out to be the creation of an environment of aimlessness that sucks the very air out of life. And from that, the abandonment of the spiritual quest is virtually accomplished even before it is labelled as such.

I wonder if the apparent European death urge through accomodating Islam isn’t, in actuality, the most passive possible invocation of a mechanism to overturn the soul-rotting socialism that has encased them all like flies in a web. Granted, it is a solution that will encase them all in fire and war before it is through, but perhaps even that is now seen as a viable option by millions trapped in sterile, empty lives of their endless vacations from meaning.

If you leave people with a hollow core, some will go through life that way, but others will fill the emptiness with whatever toxic material they can find. For example, take “Taliban” John Walker Lindh and “Al Qaeda” Adam Gadahn.

In poker, sometimes you can bluff with no cards. But in real life, you can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t beat people who parade with the Mexican flag on Cinco de Mayo with people afraid to display the American flag. You can’t beat religious fanatics with people who insist on a “holiday tree” and “winter break” instead of Christmas vacation.

They say don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. And don’t bring bumper-sticker slogans to a culture war, either.

If you leave people with a hollow core, some will go through life that way, but others will fill the emptiness with whatever toxic material they can find.

Excellent point, which would make socialism inevitably transitional, as its void would be either filled with communist/religiofascist totalitarianism, or (far more rarely, unfortunately) a rebellion for freedom.

They say don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. And don’t bring bumper-sticker slogans to a culture war, either.

Classic.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.