The Power of Change

Maybe I'm haunted. But somehow I can't seem to shake this haunting sense I have - this sense of an extraordinary fear walking abroad in America today. A virulent, agitating, frenzying fear of tyranny. And not just any tyranny either, but specifically one that is exercised over normal, healthy, strong people by the weak and mediocre.

Indeed I find it to be much the same fear, whether it's of a tyranny exercised by the weak and mediocre directly, or by a certain sinister and ominous Somebody Else on their behalf. Hence this gnawing sense I get - mostly from a lot of things I read, sometimes from what I hear - of a widespread, and possibly growing, perception. A perception that weak and mediocre people, if left to flourish and proliferate unduly, can easily become a positive danger to civil liberties and a free society. That they need either:

1) to die out of their own accord gracefully and unobstrusively; or else (to be less eugenic and more egalitarian about it)

2) to have their weakness and mediocrity more or less squeezed, or scared, out of them, lest that same unfitness to rule and manage themselves - or even, say, to manage a business - should become an opportunity and a foothold for would-be despots, or aspiring demagogues.

As if tyrants wanted nothing more challenging in life than to rule over weak people. As if most really serious, all-or-nothing dictators - the kind most worth worrying about - were looking for nothing better than a secure, easy, predictable life.

I don't think it's that simple. What this scenario keeps forgetting is that your truly self-made, state-of-the-art dictator is about the last one to want to suffer fools easily or willingly. He's apt to have far less patience for weakness and mediocrity than do most to-the-manner-born kings and queens. After all, he's earned his way up; why should he have time for cretins who in all probability have never really earned anything? Any tyrant who's worth his salt, and is on top of his game, is not looking for mostly cringing, sniveling wretches to rule over. He likes and welcomes a challenge. Not only is he at least as good at tyrannizing over the strong and exceptional as over those whom they habitually despise. He's even better at making both strong and weak, rich and poor, slave and free, feel obliged to become yet stronger, and more exceptional. And yet also to feel that, somehow, they can never be quite strong and exceptional enough - either to meet his (always escalating) expectations, or even to earn a small modicum of his respect.

All of this may seem hard to imagine or envision. But I'm quite an optimist when it comes to the Future of Tyranny. I'm convinced that the top-of-his-game tyrant both has been, and will continue to be, able to pull this off. And he will do so with polish and ease, because he understands that even the utmost non-violent mutual animosity among his subjects is a smart despot's best friend. He knows that a State in which every citizen feels desperate to be strong - and equally desperate to prove it - is far the best way to make all citizens most distrustful of and at enmity with each other, and so least able and fit to govern themselves. It is also the best, or at least the most continually tested, way of assuring himself that he continues to be stronger than all of them. Besides further securing and buttressing his own moral high ground ("Look at this pack of hungry wolves I rule over"). And as any honest woman who's ever been seduced and discarded by a rake can tell you: How do you know you're strong, until you've succeeded in exercising your power over someone or something truly powerful? Granted there are risks involved. But what's bitterness and a broken heart compared to a chance at that kind of victory?

In any case, the really skilled adept at tyranny has little if anything to fear from those particular quarters. He's long since buried irretrievably - or so he hopes? - any lingering, pestering memories of either bitter- or broken-heartedness. He alone, in contrast to the various grades of swine grunting round his feet, is authentically master of himself. And so by rights equally free, both to make his herd into whatever he wants them to be, and to make them think they're doing it freely to themselves. Nor am I sure he has any other choice but to mold and manipulate them in this fashion, if he's really serious in his pursuit of power. That is, power as we humans conventionally think of it. Power not in the Divine sense, which of itself is an exquisitely humble, attentive, supportive thing, but in the human sense of a constant vindication of one's pride of independence of anyone and anything, and of one's ability endlessly to remake oneself and others. In this latter sense, please understand, our tyrant has no hope of ever discovering the full extent of his power over his herd - the full depth of what they are prepared to think and do and become in order to please him - so long as he makes few or no demands on his swine. On the contrary, his demands must be constant and relentless and always changing, even to the point of requiring the utter denaturing and dehumanizing of his subjects. After all, how can you truly become anyone's god, except by working incessantly to undo the work of the previous?

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"

I can't help thinking either that Orwell was essentially wrong in the answer he puts into Winston's mouth, or that he was grossly oversimplifying his whole argument in the interests of narrative flow. You don't assert your power over another merely by making him suffer. Any unthinking, unfeeling brute can do that. It is rather - as any honest woman knows - by making him change.

A Prayer

That real freedom of thought and worship may come soon to the people of mainland China.

And not just freedom of enterprise.

A Cry for Rain

The ardent notes of what I'm told was either a cardinal or a robin (and variously interpreted as either a mating-call or - and I love this one - a cry for rain) came "pleading" through the church windows just this morning. And right in the middle of Mass.

"Lord defend us!" I can imagine some (genuinely!) pious soul intoning. "You see how, even here, Satan uses even the tiny things of the world to impinge upon the sacred things You've given us."

On the other hand, might not that little bird's have been a voice from a certain other corner of "the world?" A realm of which Satan knows little, and understands less? A realm in which - unlike certain places in the human heart - he's always had the most devilish time securing even the tiniest foothold?

Tory (as opposed to Whig) Interventionism

History waits for no one. And neither, apparently, do the good people of Syria. Talk about sweet reversals. About the Great Destabilizer at last suffering some serious instability. (Though God help us all when/if it starts to boil over.) Anyhow - and regardless of how it ends up - there's a certain delicious irony in the fact that it's happening at all. Really, it's enough of a novelty to leave even us Yanks perplexed, and short-winded.

Not that it should, necessarily. America has always prided itself on the ease and enthusiasm with which it embraces the new. At least our OSAC (Officially Sponsored American Culture) always has. Nor am I suggesting that that pride is unjustified, or that our love of novelty has always been ill-judged. Personally I can't imagine a time in our history when there's been more urgent need to embrace the new. Indeed, I find today's America to be about as ripe as it shall ever be for a new tradition in foreign policy. A foreign policy not merely revolutionary - we've had quite enough of that already - but really new. I mean one that is conservative, in the broadest, deepest, and probably oldest sense of the word. Much older than the legacies of Barry Goldwater, or even Robert A Taft. And drawn from places at once more ancient and more permanent than either Ohio or Arizona. Places like Jerusalem, and Athens. Perhaps even occasionally Rome and Constantinople. And lastly, a foreign policy that is - some might even say - more genuinely nationalistic than anything we've ever known. I don't much care for the latter phrase, as I've indicated elsewhere. But I think I have an idea of what they might mean.

But in order for you to understand more clearly what I'm getting at, I need to ask you to exercise (as I always do) a little imagination.

Imagine a United States that understands - understands willingly and gratefully - a certain corollary of what is for Christians an indisputable fact. For it is a fact that America has absolutely no power within itself to be the earth's salt (which is the job of Christians everywhere). But that doesn't mean America has either the right or the duty to appoint itself to be the earth's solvent. Or even to be its own solvent. Today, indeed, we Americans may lack even the power to form among ourselves a more perfect union. But that doesn't mean we have the duty to enforce among ourselves a more thorough separation.

Let me see if I can explain a bit further. It is a fact that you can't compel widely disparate human individuals to recognize and value each other's common humanity - and hence each other's common need for salvation (and that quite regardless of how contemptibly idle you are, or how commendably industrious I happen to be). But that doesn't mean you're morally obliged to do the opposite: to create those conditions under which recognition of that commonality becomes increasingly difficult, if not all but humanly impossible. Those precise conditions are, in fact, what creates the breeding-grounds of sin, which in itself is nothing to mess with. Indeed, it is precisely this failure or refusal - on my part or yours - to acknowledge our common humanity that makes it easiest for us to sin in really big ways (to give each other the royal shaft, so to speak): this strange sense I have that, however lowly I may be relative to the God, why, I'm practically a god myself compared to you. And the fact that you or I can never be God does not give either of us the right to play Satan, whether as despot or as tempter. It is no more right to encourage a system that brings out the aggressive worst in each of us - a system of rigid class based on wealth, intelligence, productivity or accomplishment - than it is to acquiesce in a system that's always brought forth our passive human worst - a system of rigid caste based on race, birth, parentage or connections. And there are times, I believe, when encouraging a hierarchy of merit can be every bit as dangerous to a place's military preparedness - to its people's capacity to defend and care for and even cultivate themselves - as accepting a hierarchy of birth can be to that place's civilian productivity.

My point is there are times when we Yanks need to ignore, or set aside, those caste barriers that are apparently so conducive to a robust global economy, and yet potentially so inimical to both national and global security. Times when even a people as proudly individualistic, and as upwardly aspiring, as Americans need to close ranks with those beneath them. And even to regard their supposed inferiors, in the words of Scrooge's immortal nephew Fred, more nearly "as fellow-passengers to the grave, and not as a race of creatures bound on other journeys." Times, in short, when Americans of every description have both a right and a need to act together as a nation, in addition to doing what they already do so well: acting separately and oppositely, as cross-sections of transnational economic, professional, religious and ideological interests.

And to me that means again - and today more than ever - that America needs a new tradition of foreign policy. One that is both patriotic - in the sense of loving unashamedly both the American place, and the American people, for no other reason than because they belong to us - and interventionist, not because the rest of the world also belongs to us, but because other countries have a no less compelling need to belong to themselves. That is, we need to become more interventionist, not nearly as much by interfering in other countries' internal affairs (though that may sometimes be necessary), as by interfering in certain things we're already doing in those countries' internal affairs. Things we're doing, in an effort to make certain countries "more like us," that are based on the rather bizarre assumption that these countries are already like us. Things we've done, like more or less extortionately liberalizing the economies of Egypt and Russia, while making almost no effort to foster in those countries what are surely the institutional foundations of any decent capitalism: rule of law, property rights, a fraternal sense of being one nation, and - last but never least - representative democracy. Finally, things we've been doing that, without anyone in the least intending them to,* are making all sorts of countries an instability and a danger, perhaps even a tinderbox. And not just to themselves or to their immediate neighbors, but sometimes even to us.

* Most of the time we're only trying to make a humble profit, by engaging with like-minded individuals everywhere irrespective of their national origins (I mean they're all Americans at heart, aren't they?).

Above all, I believe we Americans need to be more patiently and delicately interventionist, not so much because of our already keen sense of moral exceptionality - our sense of superiority and immunity to the problems afflicting "lesser" countries and peoples - as because of an even sharper sense of our moral responsibility. Because after all, no mess that a country finds itself in is ever entirely its own fault. At least not in the extremely interdependent world America has succeeded in networking. In a few cases it may even be a fault in which Americans have had a considerable share. And letting a country stew in "its own" juices - particularly when not a few of the ingredients suggest US as well as local chefs - is no insurance that the pot won't boil over.

An Expired Pretext?

I don’t think I’m one who’s normally enthusiastic about killing, even when it comes to be brutally necessary (as it often does). But if ever there was a time when we needed to be grateful for a dead villain rather than a live martyr, it is surely now. Osama dead is worth far more to the peace and sanity of the world – and to the dis-enchantment of jihadism – than he’d ever have been alive in even the securest of confinements. This way, not only is the Myth of Invincibility laid to rest, but we’re spared the spectacle of a pseudo-messiah going joyfully to his crucifixion. Better his twisted little world should end with a military whimper than a civilian bang.

On the other hand, we may have foreclosed – and this is a far more serious matter – the possibility of his repentance. Heaven forbid anyone (least of all me) should be flippant about that. And yet I have been told - again and again - of the amazing things the Maker can accomplish in what seems to us the merest hair’s-breadth of seconds. And why not? If God can pour the fullness of His Deity into a fully human vessel, why can't He stretch a millisecond to encompass the remorse equalling half-a-lifetime? What is time to the Time Lord? But if I’m being, again, a royal ass, I sincerely welcome your correction. Or chastisement, as the need may be.

What astounds me is how much earth-time it took us – almost ten years. I just can’t believe we weren’t smart enough to pull it off much sooner. Especially considering how whipsaw and rapid-fire smarter we've been getting – year by year, month by month, day by day – in just about every other field of human endeavor. Including all our ingenious ways of making our economies overperform – and with repeated injections of what was evidently little more than hot air. And then how we made them survive perhaps the worst single period of underperformance since the Great Depression. What’s a manhunt compared to miracles of that scale? Although, in my quieter moments, it does make me pause to wonder what even our keenest analytical and technical intelligence is worth – or even how well it works, period – minus the input of that strange, slow, almost animally patient thing we used to call wisdom.

Anyhow, regardless of whether or how far we “let bin Laden escape” in late 2001, I’m sad that I can’t be happier at the death of a most influentially evil man. On the one hand (if my sense of history serves me), we Yanks were by no means the wisest - or the most patient - good guys ever to confront a nearly absolute political evil. But we were certainly both clever and fast enough to have finished that guy off sooner. Assuming, of course, we really wanted to.

And I suppose from another standpoint, what was the hurry? There’s no telling for what length of time he may have been worth more to us living than dead. Just long enough, perhaps, for the jihadist infection to incubate, and spread, and mutate into new, more manageable (and yet more resilient) strains? It takes for time for just the right threat - the right pretext - to take root, and flourish, and acquire the right aura and atmosphere of Total Emergency. And if that's your aim - to orchestrate the right problem in order to create the right solution - then here, surely, is where even the smartest unwise guys can afford to be patient. Especially when you figure you've got an entire global culture of surveillance and information-gathering to revolutionize.

I may be as wrong as any fool who’s ever ventured an opinion on the subject. But there’s something in the circumstances of the Unspeakable One’s departure – or the buildup preceding it? – that suggests to me more than a hint of a certain fictionally popular sentiment. A thought, found not infrequently in the minds, if not the mouths, of certain movie and other storybook villains:

“When he ceases to be of use to us, we’ll kill him.”

Graceful Work

"Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first."

"Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works."

When are we Christians ever going to stop forgetting?

The Grace, the graciousness, hospitality, generosity, mercy - the sheer profligate abundance - of God: these things aren't substitutes of an outwardly virtuous life, or compensations for its absence. The grace of God doesn't let us "off the hook" of being virtuous. If anything (if I may be allowed to stretch a metaphor) it fastens the hooks on which we're hanging all the more securely to the Fisherman's line.

Grace is not what makes a good life unnecessary and redundant. Rather it is what makes such goodness as we have more graceful than grim; able to listen as well as speak; attentive rather than merely attention-seeking; forgiving and not just forgetting. Grace is what makes humane virtue not just a possibility, but an impregnability. And the way Grace makes our virtues impregnable is by planting itself beneath us, so to speak, and rooting us in the joy of God. As opposed to mounting itself high above us - as our own graceless, joyless virtue is so often apt to do - and then sneering and scowling at us.

Indeed it often helps for me to think of Divine grace as being the express opposite of anything "proud." And here I use the word as I believe it's most commonly used by the Hebrew poets and proverb-collectors: - to denote something boastful, vaunting, "high"-minded, and above all conscious of its greatness and exaltation. Whereas, far from being like those high-and-dry clouds which the "tree-tops" of our virtue can never reach, the graciousness of God is the one thing both lowly enough to be the soil of our good works, and fertile enough to push them upwards, to ever-greater, more inconceivable heights. Besides being the one ground secure enough to anchor that most unexpected of all trees, the Cross.

I'm not saying God's grace is the only soil of our human virtue. It is merely the one soil that isn't just so much dust, clay and ashes: the one ground, rain-sweet, alive with mist, and swarming with all manner of living things, that actually leaves us better on account of our virtue than we were before, and not worse. And I believe that's something far more than any mere human virtue has ever managed to do.

Speaking Redemption to Power (assuming any of us will listen)

Very few of us like to be told we’re power-hungry.

And yet I think most of us would agree that the application of something we call Power – whether in restraint of human beings, or in control of the non-human world – is “necessary.” In other words, the exercise of material power, in this material world of ours, is vital to the constitution of the visible human order as we know it. We simply couldn’t exist without it. And recent horrific events in Japan, and elsewhere, may have convinced some of us of a yet more radical imperative: namely, that we humans won’t continue to exist with dignity – to grow and prosper in this anything-but-human-friendly universe – without one unholy hell of a lot more material power. The implication of which seems to be that, if our long-term aim is to survive and prosper as a species, then the more power-hungry we get the better.

Even those of us, too, who believe that God created man, and that He created us for a purpose to which He holds us accountable, would most emphatically agree that God has allotted – or at least allowed – the human species a most impressive range and depth of material power. At least compared with the rest of the visible creation. Indeed, I think not a few of us modern Westerners, both theists and non-theists, might go even further. A few of us might argue that much or most of this power came to us humans by way of diligent self-application, with little or no interference, or perhaps even input, from God. And that therefore it might also be safe to assume that the great bulk of this material power, which we’ve acquired more or less through our own efforts, has also been left to our own discretion, to use or not use how and as we see fit.

I’m not saying our Age is utterly unique in this confidence. In every human era there have been people like the wilder optimists above-mentioned. People who believed that the power we’d acquired on our own was our own business, and that we should do as we liked with what was ours. And who were convinced that, so long as we were smart and decisive and “kickass” enough in our use of it, there was nothing to fear. Nothing major could conceivably go wrong.
 

It may be, too, that our age is no bolder than previous ones. We might even be less power-hungry, and less power-presumptuous. As proof one could cite, first of all, evidence throughout the globe of our ever more highly-strung ecological conscience. If that doesn’t make for scrupulosity in the use of power, what does? Secondly, there is the abundant hand-wringing and eye-gushing going on, in many parts of the US, over the abuses and excesses of human government. And of course we all know, from both hard experience and harsh propaganda, how human governments can be very unscrupulous, cruel and overbearing things.

And yet – to be quite honest – I don’t know. Surely governments aren’t the only human agencies known to manifest this particular degree of urgency in getting what they want? And do we really loathe them as much as we say we do, or wish we did? Observe how government continues to grow from one US administration to the next, for all our ridicule and contempt of politicians, and political process (or lack thereof), and government programs. So why do we nurture the very thing we despise? And then go on despising it? Is it only the arrogance and unresponsiveness of State power that offends us? Or could it be simply that governments, for all their usefulness to us, have never succeeded in properly earning our American respect? That they’ve never been entities productive enough to have earned the right to be cruel and overbearing? If, on the other hand, they learned to turn a profit, and compete for market share . . .

Meanwhile, awaiting that Blessed Day, we very carefully strain the “camel” of governmental abuses of power, even as we swallow gnats – of ever-increasing size – of power-abuse by other, non-governmental social agents. And we marvel at how, as private property becomes ever more complicated and politically-connected – and ever more invasive of, and inquisitive into, the private lives of those who do not own it – we need governments of ever-increasing size and complexity to protect that same property against counter-surveillance, and even sabotage. And thus the dog continues to chase, and occasionally even bites, its tail.
 

So I wonder if – for all our official distrust of government and/or solicitude for the environment – we aren’t in fact living in one of the Great Ages of power worship. And most particularly power in the form of control that can often seem – at least to those on its receiving end – to be cruel, overbearing, and even bullying. In this instance I mean chiefly the kind of control we exercise over creatures, both human and non-human, for the purpose of making them conform to certain pending developments, to which adaptation is deemed by their betters to be urgently necessary. Like for instance the exploding, “unstoppable” pace of automation of work and labor. Or the reversal of environmental ill effects that are often accelerated, or aggravated, by those same processes of automation (among many other factors). Talk about furnishing both problem and solution.
 

Right now, however, my concern is not with the effect of this control upon us lesser creatures, both human and non-human. It is with its effects upon the controllers. After all, they’re creatures with souls too, for all their superiority: and so presumably must also one day render account. My main question is whether the exercise of this sort of control is making its exercisers genuinely better than their human and subhuman inferiors, as opposed to merely making them appear to be better, or feel they are better. Contrary to the wisdom of the Marquis de Sade, you really don’t confirm your spiritual elevation over some more limited creature by bullying or torturing it. Or even, necessarily, by beating it thoughtlessly into submission. When, for example, when Man beats and slabs down, when he concretes and asphalts over, certain things belonging to what he conventionally terms nature, he doesn’t redeem “nature” from its Tennysonian bloodshed, waste and wickedness. Rather, he participates in it, however indirectly or unintentionally; he descends to its level. This participation, and this descent, are sometimes necessary, but there's no need to romanticize them; they are not what makes us human, or even what makes us better than the non-human. What makes Man human is not his ability to control or intimidate or terrorize what is beneath him. There are plenty of creatures “in nature” doing that sort of thing already – though maybe not quite so productively (or eco-disruptively) as dear old Adam. Man transcends nature – or more precisely, he becomes that in himself which was created to be more than nature – not by devouring the physical world, but by using it as God uses us: by loving its creatures, not as we’d all like to be loved (or rather worshiped), but as those creatures both need and ought to be loved. We humans are nursed and carried into the fullness of our human nature, not by “lording it over” the lesser beings of the animal and vegetable worlds, but by seeing them – or such of them as cross our paths – in something of the way our Maker sees both them and us. For our God sees every thing He makes not merely in relation to Himself, but also – mystery of mysteries! – in relation to itself. And that can sometimes mean seeing it not just when it is bustling and brazen and confident, but when it is alone and afraid. Not just when it’s busy gathering nuts, but also when it’s – what shall we say? – ruminative, or seemingly doing nothing? Above all, not only when that creature is rushing headlong down some path of calculated and “certain” future gain, but even when it is pausing to remember other things seemingly lost forever – as if from out of some unknown and irrecollectible Past – things the Loss of which no amount of the most calculated creaturely effort can ever make good.

To be sure, everything, and everyone, is meant to be useful; there is nothing that has been made that is not meant to be taken up into some purpose higher than itself. But the precondition of any creature’s Divine usefulness is that the exquisite things most natural to its joy – indeed most peculiar to its nature – should be nurtured and ennobled and made to grow straight, rather than twisted and stunted and suppressed. You’ll never appreciate, for example, somebody’s prospective gifts as a pianist, if your sole determination is that she should become an engineer. Neither will you make it easier to discern the peculiar strengths of a golden retriever when, on a property with large outdoor spaces, you insist on confining him to the house, and training him up to be a lapdog.
 

Nor am I saying that these considerations don’t need to be balanced by others. Above all, I’m not suggesting that our most innocent human-population needs may not sometimes require more asphalt and concrete – and not infrequently a good deal more of it. What I'm saying is that there are times when habits like these – or perhaps more accurately, the momentum following right behind them – can become not only necessary, but evilly so. Times when certain things happen, not because they really needed to happen in the way they did, or to the degree that they did, but mostly because of some big player’s needlessly bad attitudes or bad practices. “Hey, he’s on a POWER TRIP,” as some might excuse, or even exonerate, him. In essence the big player is behaving like a jerk, not because the market demands his jerkiness, but because the market is letting him get away with it. Of course it will eventually make him pay, but that could take decades – decades in which the rest of us must live and plan our lives. And yet unfortunately any attempt to correct the process "too soon" - and especially by government action - would be all but sure to make bad matters worse. And so we acquiesce in it for the time being, and if we are wise, pray and hope to do better next time. Fine. But must we applaud the jerk? or reprieve his debt sentence? or yet further subsidize him?

Finally, and I think worst of all (on account of our modern celebrations of what would otherwise be known as greed and power-lust), sometimes things happen in ways that are more evil than is, well, truly necessary. And so if, and when, certain habits of ours become more-than-necessary evils – as when we buy up good croplands only to build unpurchasable homes on them – we do well to recognize these habits for what they are, and not rhapsodize over them. (“Oh, but how could ANYONE have known? All the indicators pointed . . .”)

Indeed, I’m doubtful we can even afford our present levels of callousness, whether in our mismanagement of land, in our misdirection of customers’ assets and financial reserves, or in our misallocation of workers’ labor and skill and enthusiasm. And again, I’m talking here not just about those who got strung along in the subprime market, but about those who, without any clear plan or even shred of malice aforethought, found themselves doing the stringing. Were all those bright energetic young folks really fit for nothing better than to become bankers, loan officers, realtors? “It was their SOVEREIGN CHOICE!” you thunder. Yes, but surely this Best of All Previous Economies could have offered them better guidance? Or if nothing else, more varied and interesting incentives, and opportunities for self-realization? Who knows how many genuine talents were wasted – what a wealth of gifts and aspirations were stunted and crushed – by all those droves of people rushing headlong into the financial and real-estate sides of the boat? Until at length the entire ship of the economy capsized?
   

What I am suggesting is that there are some things we may need to do necessarily, and yet provisionally and regretfully, until such a time as better, more above-board, more borrower-educating (rather than borrower-weakening and -confusing) ways of turning a profit can be found. And here, sadly enough, is where I fear you may have lost all patience with me. “Look, for the last time: Growth is founded on confidence, NOT PESSIMISM!” Yes, but if we repose our hopes on hollow and deceptive things our growth will be no less hollow and deceptive. And in any case, surely such “pessimism” is a good sight better than pretending Heaven’s just around the corner, and that we’re bringing it nearer with each skyrocketing price of shoddily-built homes on land where once we grew corn and beets?

We all know what it is to be foolishly – and yet arrogantly and dismissively – overconfident. And it may be that some of our most foolish habits, attitudes, expectations are inevitable. But once again, we don’t make them less foolish, or less destructive, by reveling in them – or worse, by celebrating the drive, the bold, ruthless “vision” that made them possible. They belong to that growing list of unfortunate things made necessary – or inevitable – by certain exigencies of our fallen nature (of which greed and its accompanying lust for power are but two). Unfortunate things, I say again. You know, like human government. And human competition.