I was just thinking. Not that it really matters, but does it bother anyone else that over the last few decades some holidays (like Darwin Day, Kwanzaa, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) have gotten a whole lot more specific and popular while others (like Independence Day, Christmas, and Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthday) have gotten a whole lot more generic?

What do Darwin, Kwanzaa and MLK, Jr. have in common? Not much, it would seem, except that they all fit the waxing secular-leftist multi-culti narrative. The holidays being shoved into the background do not.

That Darwin is being celebrated at all ought to send a chill through any self-respecting student of 20th century history. Ideas have consequences and Darwin birthed a very big one (evolution) that, while demonstrably valid as a process acting in many circumstances (something die-hard creationists fail to admit at their peril), has been wildly over-applied as a blanket explanation for just about everything — including many things which can never be proven definitively (something die-hard secularists fail to admit at their peril).

One thing neither group seems to talk about much is that Darwin explicitly anticipated that his ideas would inform morality-free tooth-and-claw social policies such as eugenics and end up killing tens of millions. It is tragically ironic (though perhaps providentially so) that he and Lincoln share the same birthday.

The second (Kwanzaa) has been spun almost entirely out of whole cloth based on two specious myths: 1) that self-esteem is the root of all character, (as if [name your favorite narcissist-tyrant] didn’t have enough of it and, 2) that all cultural norms and social, philosophical and economic achievements in history are relative to whomever happens to be doing the evaluating. The fact that these underlying tenets are wholly at odds with those of Darwin doesn’t matter because, in a relativistic worldview, contradictory ideas do not need to be reconciled. (And they call Christians illogical…)

The third, MLK, Jr. Day is arguably not a bad thing at all. Those coming from radically different political viewpoints in the present who look with intellectual honesty at what the man really stood for can agree he was great and did a lot of good. Those who fail to recognize how his legacy has been cynically co-opted and distorted fun-house mirror-like, however, are in for a big, nasty surprise. The MLK celebrated today bears little resemblance to the Christian pastor who urged quiet, peaceful protest and non-superficial judgment, based on character alone, not taking race into account.

Which brings me to the holidays now in sharp decline. I am old enough to remember when, each year, we would learn something useful and interesting in school about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on their respective birthdays. I’m old enough to remember when, later, those two got lumped together and then, later still, genericized into “Presidents’ Day”.

As if we were celebrating Jimmy Carter, Millard Filmore and Howard Taft made just as much sense. Which wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing — learning more about history. Except that’s not what happens. A generation from now, I doubt that more then 50% of the population will even be able to say which presidents gave rise to this day in February becoming a ‘holiday’. That may be wildly optimistic.

When a culture begins celebrating the office and forgetting that it has been inhabited by both great men and fools, liars and Boy Scouts, visionaries and micro-managers, competent and grossly inept, it begins to absolve itself of making any distinctions at all.

We can argue about how far along we are in the process, but one thing is clear: when the particular history of particular men (and women) gets blurred into ‘whatever’, know-nothing genericism, the same begins to happen to our thinking about the future – about what change is good and what is bad, what kinds of choices expand our horizons and which choices ought to be off-limits in a civilized society. It leads to a kind of deep gullibility in which its not quite as pressingly important to more, better questions or digging any deeper.

It’s all of a piece with Independence Day becoming just “The Fourth” in popular parlance, and the celebration of the birth of the Lord of life, the universe and everything, the one and only Savior of all mankind becoming merely “the holidays” instead of CHRISTmas. I know that’s a meme that’s been flogged into senescence, but only because it’s been isolated as being just about Christmas. I believe it is part of a much larger trend.

Questions such as which day or days, exactly? and, how and why are they holy? (not to mention what ‘holy’ means in the first place) never seem to get asked in the culture where dead white males are regarded as deeply suspect and the live ones not that much better. Never mind systematic, anti-intellectual attempts to obscure the fact that the one of those historical males didn’t stay dead.

All of which brings me around to understanding, with greater clarity, why holy days such as Passover, that incorporate what might seem to be rote ritual and Q&A (why is this night different from all other nights?) and similar ritualistic traditions in the church manage to persist across millenia as unchanged as the God who gave rise to them. Without such formality, they are prone to being eroded by a culture with a very specific idea of what must go and what must be brought to the forefront for their false agenda to triumph.