The Arrogance That Awes; or, Ferris Bueller's Day On

As we all know from brutal experience, the person who has the most nerve  - or gall, or guts, or gumption or whatever - isn't always the one we most reliably depend on. Yes, there are some bold souls among us who do deliver exactly what they promise, and much more. And then there are those who boldly promise more than anyone else, and yet, somehow, deliver that much less. And yet for some reason - and seemingly against all odds - we may find ourselves giving these latter souls still more credence than anyone else. Sometimes even more responsibility. And authority. And even power. Why is not always clear. It may be that the bravado, the sheer audacity of their irresponsibility makes the areas in which they fail us seem that much less important. As in "Gosh, here I was thinking this was a pretty critical deadline; but could it be - given the sublime confidence and panache with which he's just blown it off - that it really wasn't so vital after all?"

That is why, more and more, it seems to me that the more a society commends and rewards arrogance - however undependable - the less patience, the less latitude and extenuation it's likely for have for those who are the opposite of arrogant, be they never so reliable. And even as it comes to rely on them more and more. Imagine a political, business and organizational culture that admires above all presumption, effrontery, chutzpah. I.e., a culture that, despite the, let us say?, repeated inferiority of your actions and your choices, consistently ratifies your sense of your own superiority (your intrinsic rightness or misunderstoodness or persecutedness or whatever). Such a social climate can hardly help but disrespect the opposite kind of person. And that no matter how much lip service it may pay to a sidelined and compartmentalized humility. In such a world there can be, in practice, no one more disliked and dismissed, no one more condescended to and despised than one who is modest and unpresuming; who is patient and prudent; who sees not just the ingeniousness but the problem in the solution, the impermanence in the victory, the question in the answer. Even as he consistently comes through for us, or "delivers the goods." And all, or mostly, because he lacks the imperturbable self-confidence of our arrogant hero.

God save us, then, from a state of affairs in which "reality" is, or is not, more or less exactly what the most arrogant among us, the most audacious and blithely dismissive think it is. And say it is. With the rest of us somehow going along with it, or even getting on board. Because after all, if their position wasn't "realistic," how could they have ever succeeded in convincing us? Or even conning us? And thereby "making it all happen"?

When War Becomes Peace (or so we hope;)

Russia and Ukraine. Israel and Iran. India and Pakistan. Is it just my (once again) overly sensitive historical imagination? Or is it always the height of idiocy to underestimate anyone whom you happen to find inconvenient, and want out of the way? I.e., is it always a danger to minimize, and dismiss, the pluck, determination, resilience, etc, of any country so-called (however otherwise inferior, regressive or fascist) that, more than it wants anything else, simply does not want to be You? Or any part of You? No matter how magnificent You may otherwise be - and thus fully entitled to shrink, destabilize, hegemonize every lesser country on Your periphery? Or else wipe it off the map?

Not that we haven't all been there. And I do mean that. Nothing is easier for most of us than to overestimate the fragility of some entity we've already determined has no right to exist (e.g., Israel, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, etc*). Still in all - and that being granted: Did these miserable pseudo-countries really have to string us along to the extent they did? Did they really have to pretend so convincingly? And, worst of all, to pretend to be so superfluous, or paper-tigerish, or wicked-yet-vulnerable-and-hence-SO-easy-to-push-over, that we their trusting foes had almost no choice but to seek that ever-righteous chimera, Total Victory?

*I haven't included the third pair of countries - India and Pakistan - in this analogy/indictment, despite what seems an equally stupid contempt each one has for the other's nationhood and prospects of survival. That is partly because they don't seem as yet prepared to go down either Russo-Ukrainean or Israelo-Iranian paths of glory. And also for fear of a legitimate worry becoming a fulfilled prophecy.

Again, have there ever been pairs of mutual antagonists whose claims to any figment of Nationhood, of national integrity and coherence and perdurance, seemed* not just more paper-thin, but more liable to perforation and shredding? And not just by the relative myriad of other geopolitical actors who wish them both ill (more on them presently) - but by each other? As if each of our contenders saw in his respective enemy a kind of Chinese paper-dragon kept alive and in motion by its handlers. None of whom, surely, would lift a serious finger in its defense, so long as (oh, if only) the right amount of scientifically calculated disintegrative pressure was applied, and (of course) in all the right places. Because as any serious technocrat knows (in this age of artificially-inflated intelligence), war is an exact science. Or at least it should be, for crying out loud?? I.e., provided the right calculations/logistics/ technologies, etc, are accompanied by the right degree of confidence in one's own indomitability, and in the incompetence, inferiority and utter wickedness of one's opponent? As evidenced, remember - if you'll permit me the cheap shot - by Napoleon's scientifically enlightened France invading backward obscurantist Russia. Or by Hitler's ubermensch Germany against that same (worthless, and thus push-over) country.

*At the onset of these lunacies, anyways.

Mind you, I could almost understand the temptation to escalate, if in fact it further solidified the long-term sovereignty or self-direction of any of the combatants. Picture a miracle, if you can. Imagine if ever-widening and -deepening War actually did something to cement one's real, independent economic strength and viability (as war is always supposed to do and almost never does, especially if you're the aggressor). As opposed to driving you ever deeper into the loving arms - excuse me, fetters and coils - of supposed benefactors and allies. And in particular of certain - as I like to call them - Most Aggressively Homogenizing Behemoths (MAHBs). Like one, very prominent in the news these days, that quite proudly and indignantly calls itself Europe. Or another, that presumes to call itself China; or still another - most outrageously of all - (Sunni) Islam.

And yes, I'm aware that even the most besieged, fighting-for-its-life country is no monolith. Even the most "homogeneous" nation consists of elements that often have some brutally narrow, if not mutually exclusive, notions of their country's best interests. Or even of what an ideal version of their country should look like (at its worst - cf. Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Cambodia - one that bears as-little-as-possible relation to its historical reality). And of course one should never broad-brush any one political element as if it were the whole country. 

And yet, somehow, I find these days I can't always help it. When I think of certain - let us say, decisive? elements within Russia and Israel, and Ukraine and Iran, it's hard for me not to conclude that what one might call Righteous War-Expediters (RWEs) are practically the face, if not the heart of their respective countries. But then I also have to look at those of us more or less on the sidelines, cheering or denouncing or hand-wringing. And I wonder: How much calm rationality might be injected into our familiar diatribes against our favorite enemies, if we simply made it a habit to change our pejoratives? If we for a change made them less moralistic, and more snide and cynical? Imagine if every time we thought of our most loathed Iranians, or Israelis, or Russians or Ukraineans, we prefaced each name with the word - not "evil" - but "stupid," or "clueless." As in, having no clue as to how much they're shooting their own feet, or slitting their own throats. 

And now imagine another set of much "smarter," and quieter, geopolitical actors, and how we might name them. What if, whenever we considered the Fatuous Four's supposed mediators and other guilty bystanders, we always talked of those clever Chinese, or clever Qataris, or Azerbaijanis, or Turks.

(Not, mind you, that even we bold righteous Yanks should disdain to work with these benevolent "mediators" as often as necessary. Beggars can't be choosers.)

In any case, one thing I keep feeling, almost within my bones: If our four Happy Warriors could (fore)see, not just the full extent of the horror, the disgrace, the crippling dependency they're inflicting, and above all on themselves* - but who it is that's most benefiting from their ongoing self-perdition - they'd retreat, cowering, into their respective Halls of Shame faster than any tail-between-legged dog ever slunk into some den of oblivion.

*Not to mention the rest of us. 

Meanwhile, you'll notice we Yanks continue adding more and more combustible ingredients to this witch's stew. Which, if nothing else, ought to lay one myth to rest once and for all: We Americans may indeed be the Exceptional Nation; we're surely not the Indispensable One.

All the more reason, it seems to me, why Today more than ever before you should want to:

Pray (with all your hearts) for the peace of Kyiv. And Moscow. And Tehran. And Jerusalem. But maybe most of all - while we're yet capable of it? - of Washington?

Random Late Eastertide Thoughts

So why does the World (continue to) crucify Love? Not because it doesn't know, from the very pit of its self-inflated misery, that it needs salvation. And not because it doesn't understand that salvation can be difficult, and costly, and even painfully sacrificial. Notice how our Great World today does not in the least shrink from ordeal, from the gauntlet, from tribulation, from the constant testing of its own mettle. As if there was nothing it desired more to flaunt, more to put on display than its own toughness, its "I-can-take-it-and-then-some," its own omnicompetent resilience and resourcefulness. Rather, what this particular world finds most offensive, what drags all its pretension, pride and dignity through the very mud, as it were, from which Adam was shaped, is the notion that it can't be the savior of itself, and in every minutest detail: that it cannot be in control of the entire process from start to finish. Imagine it: that God could so love the world as to redeem, to cleanse, to dignify and glorify it from the dregs of its worst insufficiency, from the pit of its most abject weakness and helplessness - in short, that He should save it with so little help from itself - that is something for which the Great World can never forgive God. Any more than Satan can.

Notice how hard it is - in a world where even what we call charity can somehow be competitive - notice how hard it is to love any being who loves us, first and foundationally, simply for who we are, and for all that we are. Which is to say, who loves us for the sake of our utmost joy and fulfillment, long before it loves us for any other reason. How hard it is to love a being who insists on enveloping us in his own nurturance, his own sustenance, his own substance, quite apart from, quite above and beyond any improvement he seeks from us, or any demands he will make upon us. How hard it is love a Being who seems to us so contemptibly weak, in a world so obsessed with our being strong.

In the Gospels we are warned all over the place that every disciple, no matter how diligent, is liable to stumble. And yet I wonder: Would we stumble so often, if we weren't looking SO far ahead, and moving through life with such overweening confidence, and at such aggressive all-consuming speed, that just about the last thing worthy of our attention was where we were putting our feet?

I suppose it's possible to demonstrate the Truth of Christ purely by way of argument and contention: by not only proving all your contenders wrong, but by exposing their foolishness, and even rubbing their noses in it. But to reveal how Christ loves, and why He loves, surely that is something altogether different? There is, it seems to me, one surest, simplest, humblest way of disclosing the Nature of Christ to anyone, be they proud or despondent, pentitent or indifferent: it is ourselves to emit the kind of light that makes any created thing - even one that's human - more alive and interesting and priceless by its glow. You know, as if it had been actually made by a God.

A strange yet possibly sensible prayer: 

Lord, give us such a poverty of reason and confidence, of intellect and will and resolution, as will leave us with nothing to offer, nothing to sacrifice but ourselves: nothing, in short, other than our own naked and helpless, yet altogether fertile, and immeasurably resourceful souls.

Between Two Ages? (let's hope not;)

Have you ever had the sense - say, in a dream - of a place long familiar to you that was somehow slipping away from your mental grasp? A place so slowly, subtly, insidiously changing, and to such an imperceptible degree, that any day now you expected to wake up and find that, whatever surface likenesses remained, its mood and spirit had altered almost beyond recognition? So that, regardless of its previous moral norms and expectations, the ones it now presented to you seem all but diametrically opposite? Except that, of course, no matter how jarring the seeming abruptness of change, it was understood that you needed to "get with the [new] program" as soon as possible.

I don't pretend to know how far this image might serve as a parable of our times - say, of the past 60 years. But this much I know for sure. I had for much of my life a rather comfortable stereotype of the world I grew up in (roughly 1960 to 1990). Everywhere I looked, the tacit assumption seemed to be that advanced industrial societies consisted of a certain very predictable, indeed natural majority of people. They consisted largely of people who, whatever their level of talent, ambition or achievement, were mostly content to help others, or even to help themselves, in ways that entailed reasonably light levels of suffering, hardship or challenge. At all events, the general run of people were not seen as likely to go out of their way to "knock themselves out" - either for themselves or for others. 

Whereas in contrast, for some reason I seem to see no shortage of busy, important, results-driven people, in this Great Global World today, who are willing, or even proud, to suffer. And not just on account of some gross, sordid vice to which they're either stubbornly or hopelessly addicted. The fact is: Not all self-harming people are compulsive gamblers, drinkers or drug addicts. Nor are they necessarily harming themselves, or risking real harm, chiefly for the sake of mere pleasure or self-indulgence. My point is that most of us want moral assurance, in one degree or another; most of us want some positive sense that we are, in fact, doing good, or doing the right thing. Often, too, the greater the good we think we're doing, the greater the (re)assurance we can easily come to believe we need. And have a right to demand. Indeed, we may at times be willing to go to immense, even world-unsettling lengths in order to get that assurance. Sometimes even just to prove our sincerity and altruism. Or the depth and authenticity of our love for even one person or family. (Whether the often narcissistic individuals who seem to demand such proofs are ever convinced by our efforts, much less softened and humanized by them, is another story; more on that below.) 

But now consider this further point: if bright, ultra-motivated people are willing to go to often wrenchingly sacrificial lengths for a mere handful of individuals, why, think what can be accomplished -  what can be stirred up - when they do so for an entire city or country, or corporation, or continent. Or global economy. And all for the sake of some incommensurably greater good. One not perhaps to be attained in our lifetimes. But surely decades, or even centuries, down the road?

Now this stirring-up is, I think, well under way. And has been for some time. By my reckoning, for at least the past 30 years or so. In short, the demands for often excruciating public sacrifice that were once most typical of the more idealistic and illiberal forms of communism, socialism, fascism, etc, now seem to have pretty thoroughly infected just about every strain of neoliberal capitalism. More and more I see talented people of every sort who are to willing to incur, and even to inflict on themselves and others, huge, painful sacrifices for the sake of an idea or ideology, a career or company, some model of productivity or progress or self-transcendence. Or even some vision of global progress, or holiness, or righteousness (however defined). Almost as if the entire planet were poised uneasily on a threshold Between Two Ages. And of course, the sooner we all passed over that threshold into the Glory Beyond, the better for all concerned. (Or most, in any case?)

I won't presume to guess as to what are all the upshots of this trend. But so far, the best I can tell, it has succeeded in creating - or at least accelerating? - a world of breath-taking, heart-pounding excitement. And hammering, if not harrowing, change. For me anyway, it's as if all sorts of otherwise responsible high-achieving people wanted nothing better than that the world should become, as nearly as possible, like some high-intensity video game, or blockbuster action film, or sci-fi/horror/apocalypse saga. 

Nor am I insisting that this is obviously a bad thing. We all know how boring life would be without lots of the kinds of attitudes - and people - that get things riled up. Without, e.g., bold dynamic sentiments like impatience and exasperation, and indignation (especially over what one KNOWS is a righteous grievance). Yes, even if those emotions sometimes lead to what might otherwise be described as violence. Indeed - one might ask - how would this world ever move forward, without the challenge and uncertainty of near-constant excitement? Or if not near-constant, surely always seething and rumbling on the rim, like a (supposedly) dormant volcano?

Most urgently, how else but by these challenges would we be able to test the mettle of anyone, and so find out what anyone is REALLY MADE OF (that sacred American question). How else can strong be separated from weak, so that at last we can determine who is most worthy of authority and power? Of prosperity and success? Or even of mere survival? 

And yes, I'll admit, the above arguments may quite likely succeed in creating a far more socially Darwinian world than anything we've hitherto known: a global social order in which only the most evolutionarily fit will shepherd (what's left of)  humankind into a gloriously indefinite future throughout the galaxy and beyond. And really, who can argue with a path - however "cruel" or harsh - that all but ensures the limitless prolongation and expansion of the human race?

But now recall what I said earlier about the place of love in all this. And in particular about the extreme lengths to which people may go in demonstrating love to those who in a sense despise it; who not only take far more than they give, but are only the more confirmed in their narcissism, the more vehemently we try to love them. And then consider the difference between two kinds of love. Between when we love vehemently - or even "aggressively" - and when we love patiently. Between strenuousness on the one hand, and gentleness, and hospitality, on the other. Between pleading with people who disdain us - even to the point of appeasing and accommodating them! - because, after all, we know we have the right answers; vs listening to and observing these same people, and asking the right questions. And then consider how often it is, that the more we knock ourselves out - and then brood on the nobility and sacrifice of our good actions - the more of a burden we become, both to ourselves and to those we're trying to help. Not to mention to our fellow-helpers.

Most of us know what it's like to love others in those forceful, definitive, decisive ways that give us both - lover and beloved - almost in equal measure, a foretaste of purgatory. And therewith, perhaps, no small amount of suffering on both sides. But now imagine that more Busy Important People were as willing to love as they are to suffer. And not just to love in some self-proving purgatorial way. As if the Father in the parable were to go not only chasing after his Prodigal Son into the far country, but immersing himself in his lifestyle - maybe even getting robbed or beaten by the son's companions! - just to prove himself sacrificial. But rather let's concede, for sake of argument, that these same BIPs were at last willing to love more nearly as God loves, and indeed longs to love us. Imagine if most of us were able to love, not just zealously, but appropriately. You know, as if the Way in which our loved one was originally created actually mattered. Or even secreted within its lowly depths some residual wisdom, and grace, and beauty of its own, apart from our micromanagement. Some primal giftedness that even We Globally Enlightened, with all our august learning, experience, expertise and holiness, might learn from: if only we could hear. As distinct from the way our beloved - not to mention most everyone else - must needs be recreated, reconfigured, etc, to conform to our modern operational or other global necessities. Imagine, in short, loving any human creature in such a Way as to give even our prodigals - nay, even our most hardened enemies! - the kind of foretaste of heaven as would make them actually want to go there. 

As opposed to, you know, their merely wanting to stay out of hell. Or even purgatory.

The  resultant world might not be nearly as exciting, turbulent or change-obsessed as the one we've come to enjoy these past c. two-and-a-half centuries. The devotees of real-life video games, for one, would most certainly have to seek their entertainment elsewhere. But I suspect the emerging human globe will be one far more capable of Real Progress - i.e., far more nearly a colony of Heaven than of any earthly empire - than any historic earth we've ever known.