If anything unites our often bitterly divided world of today, it is love of technology. Alright, maybe not love, but at least wonder and trust and awe. And these at times almost bordering on worship. Now how's that for a modern religion to unite our most religiously combative globe - the worship of the brilliance and inventiveness of our own brains, and of the eventually still greater intelligence of the works of our hands?
But then I look at the unholy whirlwind of confusion our post-Cold War technophilia has made of our world and us. And the more I look, the more certain I am of One Thing concerning man and all his works. And strangely enough, this one thing I'm sure of has nothing whatever to do with some innate or incorrigible human depravity. As if the mere depravation of any thing God made could ever completely suppress - much less exhaust - that creature's meaning, its goodness, its wonder.
No, I'm not trying to play the Calvinist, or otherwise depreciate that strange, fascinating creature whom God self-admittedly made a little lower than the angels. It is simply that our vaunted "wonders" of technology don't begin to scratch the surface of who we humans are, and of what we can do. More inexhaustible, more wondrous even than the things we do is the place where they come from. I have no doubt that if we humans were one day able to plot mathematically every movement in the visible universe, and with such accuracy that every planet and star and floating object in it could be anchored to some new technology, and harnessed to some new productive purpose, it would be a dull thing compared with the knowing of ourselves.
Just think, for a moment, what it would be like to know the incalculable universe which has been planted in each one of us, with all its storied memories and even fragments of Eden (not to mention all its treasures from every other time and place). What would it be to know that, if not a superhuman - indeed a supernatural - feat? Should we be surprised then to find that none but our Maker was quite up to it? Only God can know the goodness - however marred and disfigured - of what He has made. Only Love - with that strange candle at His elbow which is our spirit at its most poor, lowly and receptive - has the power and wisdom to search each page of that endlessly absorbing book which is you or me. And only One (Revelation 5:5) has been found worthy to open it.
27 May 2010
15 April 2010
What Makes the World Go Round (or at least forward)
As an earlier generation of Chinese might have put it,
"Interesting times, no?"
Certainly the Great World, the world of our great global movers and shakers, does seem to have made some rather interesting twists and turns since 9-15-08. And yet - for all our lingering doubts about capitalism in some quarters (and mounting fears of socialism in others) - somehow I don't think the world has changed all that much since the eve of 9-11. At least not in spirit. Which is to say, our hyper-American Faith in Progress may be down: it is by no means out.
Even now I imagine most of us know a large or small number of people who are self-consciously modern-minded, forward-looking, full of robust confidence in the human future. The sort of folks - perhaps your typical subscriber to The Economist? - whose favorite adage might be "No matter how bad our new things may get - or how good the old ways may seem - out with the old and in with the new." Or even
"If it ain't broke, fix it anyway. And if it gets more difficult or complicated to use, or breaks down more often, why, so much the better! Life should always be a learning experience. And nothing can be learned - and, more importantly, nobody improved - apart from the stimulus of constant, hectoring challenge."
Maybe, too, we all are a bit like that nowadays, in one or another situation. Yet there is one thing I've noticed about the people in whom this mindset is most deeply entrenched - and even about myself, when I get on my particular high horse of progress and so-called improvement. Whether they mean to or not, ultramodern-minded people often have a way of priding themselves on how sure and firm a grip they have on things going on around them. And in particular on certain fast-moving things which may have escaped the grip of their less well-focused, and hence less efficiently grasping, ancestors. Not, of course, that these ultramoderns haven't got heartaches and frustrations of their own. Surely no one is is more pained at the thought of something important she may have overlooked than one who tries to be hyper-efficient - who tries, in a word, to be on top of everything. And even the slowest-paced among us don't exactly like feeling out of the loop.
Nor have recent events made things any easier for the conscientiously busy. The recent decade was one that placed a high premium on round-the-globe, round-the-clock efficiency. Indeed, it may well have been as savagely modernizing - as worshipful of Progress at any (human) Cost - as any decade the West has known in our lifetimes. And yet somehow our Western "grip on things" seems more tenuous today than at any time since 1979. Certainly the world is at least as volatile and combustible a place as it was on the eve of Khomeini, and Thatcher, and the Soviet Afghan invasion.
And so I wonder, in light of certain epic-scale events of the past decade, if it isn't high time we ultramoderns took a closer look at a Certain Quiet Something perhaps easier to miss than ever in these loud and busy days. Something whose value we do not just take for granted, but the mere thought of which may make our ultramodern eyes roll, or mist, or even glaze, over. And yet something conceivably far more practical - could we but see it for Itself - maybe even more hard-headed, and nuts-and-bolts, than all our most globally seamless movements of capital and labor. And even perhaps, in its Way, more visionary, and hopeful, than our most far-seeing, globe-straddling marketing plans.
I mean, of course, that exquisitely balanced vision, that preternaturally attentive, uncannily proportionate enjoyment and enhancement of, well, most any creature, that we call - for want of a more generous word - love. My question is simply this: Whatever it may be, this "love" thing, which softly beckons us to appreciate, and makes us extremely hesitant to despise or coddle, anyone or anything - what if it's all so much more "hands-on" and "get-things-done" than we think? Love may not exactly be what makes the human world go round. But can we be excused for thinking there are times - perhaps especially lately? - when it's all that keeps life from jumping track completely? Suppose that, in our anxiousness to get down to the rudiments, the brass tacks, the profit-and-loss of things, we've been ignoring the real rudiments? And those almost right, as it were, from Genesis - from the Beginning?
The problem, it seems to me, with our modern placement of love in the scheme of things is that we've got both its genesis and its exodus backwards. For the most part we see Life as emerging out of non-living things; and then Love in its turn as emerging - however fitfully (and often by starts that seem to go nowhere) - out of things that are alive. And all under the mildly amused gaze of some cosmic watchmaker who has since gone on to become the World's most fawned-upon absentee landlord. No wonder we feel - even we Jews and Christians - like we're more or less on our own. And that love meanwhile is this frail candle-flame we've lit, that any minor gust of wind might all of a sudden extinguish a la Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana. But what if it all really happened in reverse? What if it was Love, and Love alone, that made and makes even non-loving creatures to live at all? That sober-minded, no-nonsense fellow on his BlackBerry over there, who sees neither use nor point to love in any form be it gas liquid or solid, who shudders at the thought of extending himself for any one or thing other than, perhaps, some global system or other brilliant human creation. Suppose it were to be revealed that his very life, his very health and soundness of body and mind, had all depended - in some immeasurable, untraceable Way - on love all along? Maybe even on the patience and prayers of "little people" to whom he seldom gave more than an occasional, and that a usually disparaging, thought? Again, what if it's Life, and only Life, that makes even non-living creatures to exist at all? Suppose, I mean, that both these things - this "Love" and this "Life" - should exist imbeddedly and inseparably from one Being, one Consciousness, one Life? And that it's precisely this One Life, and this One only, who gives to living things not only a heart of love but the very breath of life? What might this Life be like, if by chance we were to run into him along some quiet woodland-path? Would he be, with respect to the things he's made, Someone more in the nature of a watchmaker, or an engineer, or a software innovator? Or even a personal trainer? Or would he be Somebody more after the manner of a gardener? (Albeit one whose plants exhibit the very strangest powers, both of mobility and of resistance to nurturance.)
Yes, I know, we do have these Scriptures - we Jews, Christians, etc - on whose guidance through these denser hedges we could rely more often. But they, read closely, offer small comfort to worshipers of the personal-coach god, or the god-who's-left-us-to-our-own-devices. They seem not only quite firmly to assert the truth of the main points I've outlined, but no less firmly to deny the truth of the opposite cosmic model. But then we don't really much open our Bibles on these matters, do we? At least not in the matter of how things - and people - really work. Or where, as they say, rubber meets road.
Then again Man knows we've been wrong before. Suppose all this time we've been watching the entire Progress of Things - both existent and living - in reverse; in sort of a mirror, as it were. How might that have come about? If much of what we're seeing is but the reflection, or reverse-image, of evolution, is it because we've haven't yet traveled far enough from our point of origin? Or is it that we keep "sliding back" into some primeval slime of ignorance and beastliness from which, however far we may seem to range or roam, we have no hope of permanent exit? Or, rather, is it because of our steadily, progressively growing distance from our real Origin? And not just distance physical, but moral, intellectual, spiritual?
But now further suppose that, despite appearances to the contrary, we have been all the while growing away from, rather than growing towards, the One who made us. How do we - you and I - reverse direction? How do we turn away from the mirror so as to face the world at our backs? How do we get and maintain a sufficient handle on things, so that we may stay focused on the world as it is - the world as Love has made it, and not we ourselves? And what part do you suppose Love may yet play, in helping us to regain both the firmness and the efficiency of our grip?
"Interesting times, no?"
Certainly the Great World, the world of our great global movers and shakers, does seem to have made some rather interesting twists and turns since 9-15-08. And yet - for all our lingering doubts about capitalism in some quarters (and mounting fears of socialism in others) - somehow I don't think the world has changed all that much since the eve of 9-11. At least not in spirit. Which is to say, our hyper-American Faith in Progress may be down: it is by no means out.
Even now I imagine most of us know a large or small number of people who are self-consciously modern-minded, forward-looking, full of robust confidence in the human future. The sort of folks - perhaps your typical subscriber to The Economist? - whose favorite adage might be "No matter how bad our new things may get - or how good the old ways may seem - out with the old and in with the new." Or even
"If it ain't broke, fix it anyway. And if it gets more difficult or complicated to use, or breaks down more often, why, so much the better! Life should always be a learning experience. And nothing can be learned - and, more importantly, nobody improved - apart from the stimulus of constant, hectoring challenge."
Maybe, too, we all are a bit like that nowadays, in one or another situation. Yet there is one thing I've noticed about the people in whom this mindset is most deeply entrenched - and even about myself, when I get on my particular high horse of progress and so-called improvement. Whether they mean to or not, ultramodern-minded people often have a way of priding themselves on how sure and firm a grip they have on things going on around them. And in particular on certain fast-moving things which may have escaped the grip of their less well-focused, and hence less efficiently grasping, ancestors. Not, of course, that these ultramoderns haven't got heartaches and frustrations of their own. Surely no one is is more pained at the thought of something important she may have overlooked than one who tries to be hyper-efficient - who tries, in a word, to be on top of everything. And even the slowest-paced among us don't exactly like feeling out of the loop.
Nor have recent events made things any easier for the conscientiously busy. The recent decade was one that placed a high premium on round-the-globe, round-the-clock efficiency. Indeed, it may well have been as savagely modernizing - as worshipful of Progress at any (human) Cost - as any decade the West has known in our lifetimes. And yet somehow our Western "grip on things" seems more tenuous today than at any time since 1979. Certainly the world is at least as volatile and combustible a place as it was on the eve of Khomeini, and Thatcher, and the Soviet Afghan invasion.
And so I wonder, in light of certain epic-scale events of the past decade, if it isn't high time we ultramoderns took a closer look at a Certain Quiet Something perhaps easier to miss than ever in these loud and busy days. Something whose value we do not just take for granted, but the mere thought of which may make our ultramodern eyes roll, or mist, or even glaze, over. And yet something conceivably far more practical - could we but see it for Itself - maybe even more hard-headed, and nuts-and-bolts, than all our most globally seamless movements of capital and labor. And even perhaps, in its Way, more visionary, and hopeful, than our most far-seeing, globe-straddling marketing plans.
I mean, of course, that exquisitely balanced vision, that preternaturally attentive, uncannily proportionate enjoyment and enhancement of, well, most any creature, that we call - for want of a more generous word - love. My question is simply this: Whatever it may be, this "love" thing, which softly beckons us to appreciate, and makes us extremely hesitant to despise or coddle, anyone or anything - what if it's all so much more "hands-on" and "get-things-done" than we think? Love may not exactly be what makes the human world go round. But can we be excused for thinking there are times - perhaps especially lately? - when it's all that keeps life from jumping track completely? Suppose that, in our anxiousness to get down to the rudiments, the brass tacks, the profit-and-loss of things, we've been ignoring the real rudiments? And those almost right, as it were, from Genesis - from the Beginning?
The problem, it seems to me, with our modern placement of love in the scheme of things is that we've got both its genesis and its exodus backwards. For the most part we see Life as emerging out of non-living things; and then Love in its turn as emerging - however fitfully (and often by starts that seem to go nowhere) - out of things that are alive. And all under the mildly amused gaze of some cosmic watchmaker who has since gone on to become the World's most fawned-upon absentee landlord. No wonder we feel - even we Jews and Christians - like we're more or less on our own. And that love meanwhile is this frail candle-flame we've lit, that any minor gust of wind might all of a sudden extinguish a la Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana. But what if it all really happened in reverse? What if it was Love, and Love alone, that made and makes even non-loving creatures to live at all? That sober-minded, no-nonsense fellow on his BlackBerry over there, who sees neither use nor point to love in any form be it gas liquid or solid, who shudders at the thought of extending himself for any one or thing other than, perhaps, some global system or other brilliant human creation. Suppose it were to be revealed that his very life, his very health and soundness of body and mind, had all depended - in some immeasurable, untraceable Way - on love all along? Maybe even on the patience and prayers of "little people" to whom he seldom gave more than an occasional, and that a usually disparaging, thought? Again, what if it's Life, and only Life, that makes even non-living creatures to exist at all? Suppose, I mean, that both these things - this "Love" and this "Life" - should exist imbeddedly and inseparably from one Being, one Consciousness, one Life? And that it's precisely this One Life, and this One only, who gives to living things not only a heart of love but the very breath of life? What might this Life be like, if by chance we were to run into him along some quiet woodland-path? Would he be, with respect to the things he's made, Someone more in the nature of a watchmaker, or an engineer, or a software innovator? Or even a personal trainer? Or would he be Somebody more after the manner of a gardener? (Albeit one whose plants exhibit the very strangest powers, both of mobility and of resistance to nurturance.)
Yes, I know, we do have these Scriptures - we Jews, Christians, etc - on whose guidance through these denser hedges we could rely more often. But they, read closely, offer small comfort to worshipers of the personal-coach god, or the god-who's-left-us-to-our-own-devices. They seem not only quite firmly to assert the truth of the main points I've outlined, but no less firmly to deny the truth of the opposite cosmic model. But then we don't really much open our Bibles on these matters, do we? At least not in the matter of how things - and people - really work. Or where, as they say, rubber meets road.
Then again Man knows we've been wrong before. Suppose all this time we've been watching the entire Progress of Things - both existent and living - in reverse; in sort of a mirror, as it were. How might that have come about? If much of what we're seeing is but the reflection, or reverse-image, of evolution, is it because we've haven't yet traveled far enough from our point of origin? Or is it that we keep "sliding back" into some primeval slime of ignorance and beastliness from which, however far we may seem to range or roam, we have no hope of permanent exit? Or, rather, is it because of our steadily, progressively growing distance from our real Origin? And not just distance physical, but moral, intellectual, spiritual?
But now further suppose that, despite appearances to the contrary, we have been all the while growing away from, rather than growing towards, the One who made us. How do we - you and I - reverse direction? How do we turn away from the mirror so as to face the world at our backs? How do we get and maintain a sufficient handle on things, so that we may stay focused on the world as it is - the world as Love has made it, and not we ourselves? And what part do you suppose Love may yet play, in helping us to regain both the firmness and the efficiency of our grip?
28 February 2010
A Flat Earth Story
Global Economy threw down each wall;
But Global Economy's was the Great Fall.
And all our electronified Who, What, Where, When
Haven't yet put Global Economy back together again.
But Global Economy's was the Great Fall.
And all our electronified Who, What, Where, When
Haven't yet put Global Economy back together again.
19 February 2010
Right Where They Want Me
Peggy Noonan, a writer for whom normally I have the deepest respect (and at times something approaching awe), wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703382904575059723179331384.html):
" . . . the president had a stunning and revealing exchange with Sen Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat likely to lose her 2010 re-election campaign. He was meeting with Senate Democrats to urge them to continue with his legislative agenda. Mrs Lincoln took the opportunity to beseech him to change it. She urged him to distance his administration from 'people who want extremes,' and to find 'common ground' with Republicans in producing legislation that would give those in business the 'certainty' they need to create jobs . . .
"While answering, Mr Obama raised his voice slightly and quickened his cadence. 'If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place.' He continued: 'If our response ends up being, you know . . . we don't want to stir things up here,' then 'I don't know why people would say, "Boy, we really want to make sure those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us." '
" . . . The Washington Post's Charles Lane, one of the few journalists to note the exchange, said he found it revealing in two ways: First, the president equates becoming more centrist with becoming more like George W Bush, and second, he apparently sees movement to the center as a political loser.
". . . The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It's how they defeated Hillary Clinton—by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W Bush.
"But now it is 2010, and Mr Bush is gone. Mr Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life." [Emphasis mine]
By the time I got to the end of Ms Noonan's article, I figured I was broadly in agreement with at least one of her main points. That is, the deep throes of massive recession may not have been the best time for any president to start obsessing about the Nation's health care. And yet the two passages I've italicized keep coming back on me. Is "centering" oneself really all that simple these days? Ferociously far Left as he may be under all the fine grooming, suppose Mr Obama really were to lurch quickly, and decisively, to the Center. Suppose, indeed, he should radically re-Center his whole agenda - only to find that meanwhile that same Centerline had been moving all but unstoppably further to the Right? So far, in fact, that one morning that same Center was found to be all but indistinguishable from what today we consider - well, pretty far Right of Center?
And that's another thing. We all talk about "Right" as if it meant just one thing, and as if that meaning were fixed for all times - or even for our own lifetimes. But what if it isn't? Would Robert Taft have instantly recognized "Right" exactly as it is defined by our current Arbiters of Rightness? Would Barry Goldwater? Would even Ronald Reagan - or Bill Clinton?
But suppose it got to the point where the only folks fully at peace with our 21st-century definition of Right - the only ones who found it as snug and comfortable as a second skin - were the likes of a Dick Cheney? or a Mitt Romney? or a Steve Forbes? Just how easily would the rest of us fit into that increasingly tight skin? And for how long, I wonder, would we - and here I mean not just corporations of one kind or another, but individual human beings of every kind - how long would we continue to recognize, in that ever gradually more close-fitting skin, anything resembling what we today call Liberty?
That is the problem with anticipating political and economic oppression: one can never be sure from which direction it's going to come - up or down; North or South; East or West; even - at times, I'm told - Right or Left! Because, after all, there really are just two things required for oppression to work with unrelenting efficiency: A remorseless fixity of purpose, and an implacable sense of being right. Or, in a phrase, "Hold fast to your hard-and-fast ideas, and to hell with nuance!" (Which, in the final count, is the same thing as saying to hell with reality - including real people and other such creatures.)
My point is that all of us are capable, not only of mouthing that phrase, but of meaning it. Regardless of one's political complexion, we are all capable of being seduced, as it were - of becoming idolatrously attached to a mere idea, a precept, a principle. So attached, indeed, that we may be prepared to sacrifice not just our own common human decencies, but others' basic human freedoms. And even, sometimes, the purest, most primordial freedom of all - the freedom of every creature to be what God made it to be, to be the fullness of itself, and in that particular Way most satisfying both to its own soul and to its Maker. All this we humans may do - or try to do - in order to ensure that creature's uttermost conformity to our Idea. And as for those other things it may need or crave from the depths of its soul - as to whether, for instance, the human creature really needs seven or eight hours of sleep for optimal performance and well-being - really, who should care? Generations from now what difference will it make how well-rested or insomniac, how happy or miserable we prototypes were, when our descendants are all proudly exulting in Economic Utopia? (I can only hope Stalin is listening.) Meanwhile, if it's a moral you're looking for, here is my best attempt: Ask not for whom the Beast tolls - he tolls for thee.
Not that we Americans haven't got some good reasons for feeling ideologically dizzy. In some ways, I'll admit, the whole Nation has been on a head-spinning, mind-numbing carnival ride since 9-15-08. Down and down and farther down the rabbit-hole with Alice; the tea-parties getting curiouser and curiouser - to say nothing of (at least in some instances) madder and madder. But even amidst our most fiercely Bravehearted insurrections, are we any closer to the borders of Freedom than when we began?
And what a mad and curious journey even our post-Bush Quest for Liberty has been. A sort of whirling, frenzied flight, ostensibly farther and farther away from something we call the Abuse of Power. Only to find the most unexpectedly familiar faces - Mr Cheney's in particular seems to be growing more visible by the day - awaiting us at journey's end. Or, perhaps more accurately, cutting the journey short right at the point of real departure?
" . . . the president had a stunning and revealing exchange with Sen Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat likely to lose her 2010 re-election campaign. He was meeting with Senate Democrats to urge them to continue with his legislative agenda. Mrs Lincoln took the opportunity to beseech him to change it. She urged him to distance his administration from 'people who want extremes,' and to find 'common ground' with Republicans in producing legislation that would give those in business the 'certainty' they need to create jobs . . .
"While answering, Mr Obama raised his voice slightly and quickened his cadence. 'If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place.' He continued: 'If our response ends up being, you know . . . we don't want to stir things up here,' then 'I don't know why people would say, "Boy, we really want to make sure those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us." '
" . . . The Washington Post's Charles Lane, one of the few journalists to note the exchange, said he found it revealing in two ways: First, the president equates becoming more centrist with becoming more like George W Bush, and second, he apparently sees movement to the center as a political loser.
". . . The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It's how they defeated Hillary Clinton—by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W Bush.
"But now it is 2010, and Mr Bush is gone. Mr Obama is left with America, and he does not, really, understand it. That is why he thinks moving to the center would be political death, when moving to the center and triangulating, as Bill Clinton did, might give him a new lease on life." [Emphasis mine]
By the time I got to the end of Ms Noonan's article, I figured I was broadly in agreement with at least one of her main points. That is, the deep throes of massive recession may not have been the best time for any president to start obsessing about the Nation's health care. And yet the two passages I've italicized keep coming back on me. Is "centering" oneself really all that simple these days? Ferociously far Left as he may be under all the fine grooming, suppose Mr Obama really were to lurch quickly, and decisively, to the Center. Suppose, indeed, he should radically re-Center his whole agenda - only to find that meanwhile that same Centerline had been moving all but unstoppably further to the Right? So far, in fact, that one morning that same Center was found to be all but indistinguishable from what today we consider - well, pretty far Right of Center?
And that's another thing. We all talk about "Right" as if it meant just one thing, and as if that meaning were fixed for all times - or even for our own lifetimes. But what if it isn't? Would Robert Taft have instantly recognized "Right" exactly as it is defined by our current Arbiters of Rightness? Would Barry Goldwater? Would even Ronald Reagan - or Bill Clinton?
But suppose it got to the point where the only folks fully at peace with our 21st-century definition of Right - the only ones who found it as snug and comfortable as a second skin - were the likes of a Dick Cheney? or a Mitt Romney? or a Steve Forbes? Just how easily would the rest of us fit into that increasingly tight skin? And for how long, I wonder, would we - and here I mean not just corporations of one kind or another, but individual human beings of every kind - how long would we continue to recognize, in that ever gradually more close-fitting skin, anything resembling what we today call Liberty?
That is the problem with anticipating political and economic oppression: one can never be sure from which direction it's going to come - up or down; North or South; East or West; even - at times, I'm told - Right or Left! Because, after all, there really are just two things required for oppression to work with unrelenting efficiency: A remorseless fixity of purpose, and an implacable sense of being right. Or, in a phrase, "Hold fast to your hard-and-fast ideas, and to hell with nuance!" (Which, in the final count, is the same thing as saying to hell with reality - including real people and other such creatures.)
My point is that all of us are capable, not only of mouthing that phrase, but of meaning it. Regardless of one's political complexion, we are all capable of being seduced, as it were - of becoming idolatrously attached to a mere idea, a precept, a principle. So attached, indeed, that we may be prepared to sacrifice not just our own common human decencies, but others' basic human freedoms. And even, sometimes, the purest, most primordial freedom of all - the freedom of every creature to be what God made it to be, to be the fullness of itself, and in that particular Way most satisfying both to its own soul and to its Maker. All this we humans may do - or try to do - in order to ensure that creature's uttermost conformity to our Idea. And as for those other things it may need or crave from the depths of its soul - as to whether, for instance, the human creature really needs seven or eight hours of sleep for optimal performance and well-being - really, who should care? Generations from now what difference will it make how well-rested or insomniac, how happy or miserable we prototypes were, when our descendants are all proudly exulting in Economic Utopia? (I can only hope Stalin is listening.) Meanwhile, if it's a moral you're looking for, here is my best attempt: Ask not for whom the Beast tolls - he tolls for thee.
Not that we Americans haven't got some good reasons for feeling ideologically dizzy. In some ways, I'll admit, the whole Nation has been on a head-spinning, mind-numbing carnival ride since 9-15-08. Down and down and farther down the rabbit-hole with Alice; the tea-parties getting curiouser and curiouser - to say nothing of (at least in some instances) madder and madder. But even amidst our most fiercely Bravehearted insurrections, are we any closer to the borders of Freedom than when we began?
And what a mad and curious journey even our post-Bush Quest for Liberty has been. A sort of whirling, frenzied flight, ostensibly farther and farther away from something we call the Abuse of Power. Only to find the most unexpectedly familiar faces - Mr Cheney's in particular seems to be growing more visible by the day - awaiting us at journey's end. Or, perhaps more accurately, cutting the journey short right at the point of real departure?
17 February 2010
A Future Even We Can't Contain
The older I get, and the more I see how little I know even of myself, the harder it is for me to believe in the shallowness of anything. Including people. Of course people try to make themselves shallow, but it really is very hard work; there is always so much more to us than either we or any one else could ever quite get a handle on. And what could be more difficult than to pretend one has no past, and no future, other than those which can be remembered and shaped, and manipulated, at will? Nor is it evident that any Grand Human Future we create, however immense and commanding, could ever contain all that we lost children of Adam need. Much less the all that we are.
But the hardest and most dangerous work of all may be the pretense that we humans are only what we make of ourselves, and nothing more: that there are in us no hidden reserves - or reservoirs? - which even we are unable to enter and pollute, because they are accessible only to the grace of God and the prayers of others. And those, even as we sleep.
Nor is it just human beings I'm thinking of here. More and more it seems to me there are hidden depths - hidden meanings and resonances - in everything that makes up our world: in all that we call natural, as well as in the things we think and make and do. Much of what we call "bland" may even be a kind of shallowness. We say, for example, that a food has no taste when perhaps what we mean is that its taste lacks depth. "Memory" might be a still better word. In what, after all, does the richness of food lie, if not in its power to remind us of other tastes, and even of the experiences and countless other associations that surrounded them? And what bland creatures even we humans become, when we are cut off from the depths of our own selves: - depths that lie beyond, and often threaten to overwhelm, the shores of the worlds we typically live in - the carefully projected futures, and reconstructed pasts, that make up our most customized images of ourselves and each other. As if there were not in each one of us another kind of Soil, that is best irrigated by the waters of an unknown past, and most expectant of the rains of an unimaginable future. Just think of the blandness - the "sterility", as we often call it - of the things we make and build, when we presume to create with only our conscious minds, and in particular with our planning, calculating, executing minds. It is as if we were separating ourselves from something. But what?
It may be that what lends savor, and sweetness, and fire to our lives is precisely this strange, deeply flowing current of memory and association: this haunting of a Past, and longing for a Future, that are expressly not of our own making. Or perhaps even of our own understanding. That hardly means that they haven't been made, and understood, long beforehand. Nor does it necessarily mean this Past and this Future are such things as lie permanently beyond our human knowing. Indeed, perfect as the natural bent of our brains may be for all the ambitious things we plan yet to do, isn't it written somewhere that our very minds shall need straightening, or (to use the Pauline phrase) renewal?
Yet I believe there is nothing more exasperating to our present "Cainite," let's-get-on-with-it minds than this imbeddedness in our lives - one might almost say in our blood - of something for which we can scarcely find words that make sense, much less rational uses and purposes. Embarrassed by we know not what, we chafe and rebel. Cain-like, we say "Once and for all let us have done with the 'sins' and false starts of the past, and go on to make ourselves a future we can be proud of." And who could blame us? Who doesn't love a second or third chance after a bad start? Search the Scriptures from now till Judgement: I doubt that you'll find a more heavyweight example of an American-style Comeback Kid - and all by his own bootstraps! - than Adam's firstborn son.
And yet how easily does one generation's lightning comeback become the next generation's lengthening shadow. And sometimes exceedingly violent shadow - at least if we are to believe the ensuing chapters of Genesis. We never mean it that way, but somehow it happens. Could it be simply that we're not free enough yet? or not yet powerful or commanding enough? But for some reason, the more we try to command and contain the future, the more we create oppressive pasts from which we - or at least our children, or theirs - are continually trying to escape. Indeed any human future "liberated" from its past is always an oppressive one, because it is cut off from the very means by which it can know itself. Just as you or I would be, cut off from our own depths. That is why no revolution ever really works in the ways we'd like, because it is rooted in that same dictatorial impulse against which our humanness itself is in perennial revolt: the impulse to "quarantine" the past so that it won't infect the present; and then to contain what's left of the future within conscious human boundaries and parameters. Our difficulty is that the future, like the past, is an ocean; and we try to make it a pond or lagoon which we can drain and refill whenever we choose. And then we wonder how the occasional leviathan or other monster still manages to slip into our pipes.
Funny, too, how these conformable futures we make have a way of making us conform, sometimes even at the price (as we're discovering nowadays) of our own humanity. But even if we humans could somehow become "perfectly" adapted to systems wholly of our own devising, the fact that we can "create" proves nothing about the durability of our works. Again I repeat: The biggest challenge of any humanly-contained future is not how to create it, but rather how to enclose and secure it against outside interference. Even if only in our dreams and hauntings, there remains the risk of one coming in from Somewhere outside all our wisest calculations, to reveal our self-made paradises for the perditions they are. Or to bring forth out of our self-made miseries an Eden beyond what the purest innocents among us could dream. The truth is, though we try our damnedest to be god-like, we have yet to invent any future that is effectively God-proof. And, again, one never can be sure who else might slip in in the meantime.
But the hardest and most dangerous work of all may be the pretense that we humans are only what we make of ourselves, and nothing more: that there are in us no hidden reserves - or reservoirs? - which even we are unable to enter and pollute, because they are accessible only to the grace of God and the prayers of others. And those, even as we sleep.
Nor is it just human beings I'm thinking of here. More and more it seems to me there are hidden depths - hidden meanings and resonances - in everything that makes up our world: in all that we call natural, as well as in the things we think and make and do. Much of what we call "bland" may even be a kind of shallowness. We say, for example, that a food has no taste when perhaps what we mean is that its taste lacks depth. "Memory" might be a still better word. In what, after all, does the richness of food lie, if not in its power to remind us of other tastes, and even of the experiences and countless other associations that surrounded them? And what bland creatures even we humans become, when we are cut off from the depths of our own selves: - depths that lie beyond, and often threaten to overwhelm, the shores of the worlds we typically live in - the carefully projected futures, and reconstructed pasts, that make up our most customized images of ourselves and each other. As if there were not in each one of us another kind of Soil, that is best irrigated by the waters of an unknown past, and most expectant of the rains of an unimaginable future. Just think of the blandness - the "sterility", as we often call it - of the things we make and build, when we presume to create with only our conscious minds, and in particular with our planning, calculating, executing minds. It is as if we were separating ourselves from something. But what?
It may be that what lends savor, and sweetness, and fire to our lives is precisely this strange, deeply flowing current of memory and association: this haunting of a Past, and longing for a Future, that are expressly not of our own making. Or perhaps even of our own understanding. That hardly means that they haven't been made, and understood, long beforehand. Nor does it necessarily mean this Past and this Future are such things as lie permanently beyond our human knowing. Indeed, perfect as the natural bent of our brains may be for all the ambitious things we plan yet to do, isn't it written somewhere that our very minds shall need straightening, or (to use the Pauline phrase) renewal?
Yet I believe there is nothing more exasperating to our present "Cainite," let's-get-on-with-it minds than this imbeddedness in our lives - one might almost say in our blood - of something for which we can scarcely find words that make sense, much less rational uses and purposes. Embarrassed by we know not what, we chafe and rebel. Cain-like, we say "Once and for all let us have done with the 'sins' and false starts of the past, and go on to make ourselves a future we can be proud of." And who could blame us? Who doesn't love a second or third chance after a bad start? Search the Scriptures from now till Judgement: I doubt that you'll find a more heavyweight example of an American-style Comeback Kid - and all by his own bootstraps! - than Adam's firstborn son.
And yet how easily does one generation's lightning comeback become the next generation's lengthening shadow. And sometimes exceedingly violent shadow - at least if we are to believe the ensuing chapters of Genesis. We never mean it that way, but somehow it happens. Could it be simply that we're not free enough yet? or not yet powerful or commanding enough? But for some reason, the more we try to command and contain the future, the more we create oppressive pasts from which we - or at least our children, or theirs - are continually trying to escape. Indeed any human future "liberated" from its past is always an oppressive one, because it is cut off from the very means by which it can know itself. Just as you or I would be, cut off from our own depths. That is why no revolution ever really works in the ways we'd like, because it is rooted in that same dictatorial impulse against which our humanness itself is in perennial revolt: the impulse to "quarantine" the past so that it won't infect the present; and then to contain what's left of the future within conscious human boundaries and parameters. Our difficulty is that the future, like the past, is an ocean; and we try to make it a pond or lagoon which we can drain and refill whenever we choose. And then we wonder how the occasional leviathan or other monster still manages to slip into our pipes.
Funny, too, how these conformable futures we make have a way of making us conform, sometimes even at the price (as we're discovering nowadays) of our own humanity. But even if we humans could somehow become "perfectly" adapted to systems wholly of our own devising, the fact that we can "create" proves nothing about the durability of our works. Again I repeat: The biggest challenge of any humanly-contained future is not how to create it, but rather how to enclose and secure it against outside interference. Even if only in our dreams and hauntings, there remains the risk of one coming in from Somewhere outside all our wisest calculations, to reveal our self-made paradises for the perditions they are. Or to bring forth out of our self-made miseries an Eden beyond what the purest innocents among us could dream. The truth is, though we try our damnedest to be god-like, we have yet to invent any future that is effectively God-proof. And, again, one never can be sure who else might slip in in the meantime.
13 February 2010
Power's More Acceptable Abusers
I don't know what degree of anguish (or relief?) may have accompanied the deliberations of the four judges who voted the majority ruling in Citizens United vs FEC. I do know there's been a good deal of anxiety, in some circles, over the potential powerlessness of private corporations - the danger of their political voice being drowned out in the public arena. All I can hope is that, among the judges themselves, such worry was accompanied by a similar degree of concern over the very real power of corporations, and not least in the public arena. And that no judge's decision - not even Sam Alito's - was made easily.
Nowadays, of course, mainstream American society tends to be most vigilant against governmental abuses of power. And with what good reason God knows. Elected officials' accountability to voters has never been much of an insurance against contempt of those same voters, and collusion with others - even (but who could have imagined it?) with private corporations! - at the expense of voters' stated wishes and interests. In the same way, neither does accountability to customers always insure against contempt for one's clientele - else there would be very little of what we know in the world as fraud, poor service, shoddy workmanship, and grossly risky and irresponsible management of clients' funds and investments. Let's face it: Even good honest success in business is no guarantee of respect or consideration for those who, in one way or another, have come to depend on your success. Like those who work for you, for instance - or those who buy from you. In short, much like politicians, even merchants and manufacturers are not perfect - or even, sometimes, all that patient, kind, or humble a group of people, as proverbial wisdom and Adam Smith both attest. Even businesspeople can get swollen heads, and begin to lust not just for riches well within their own sphere, but for power well beyond it. Or just as likely, start believing their honest success and productivity entitle them to a proportionately greater share of political influence than other members of society, whose own work however useful may be less measurably productive. Hence, again, the need for competition - and even among those (hopefully various) interests who control our news and political media.
And so I pray at the very least it's highly plausible - both to the US Supreme Court and to all of us - that economic organizations no less than political institutions are susceptible to the temptations of Power. And possibly also much better at defending, and rationalizing, their own succumbing to those temptations. Again, nobody's perfect, right? And whose imperfections ought to be easier to excuse, and overlook, than those of the folks upon whose productivity we all depend? I mean, whatever vices they may have, didn't they work hard to get where they are? If they don't have a right to throw their weight around now and then (and that's just human nature, remember?), who does?
Even now I wonder if the real debate between today's global Right and Left concerns not the intrinsic right of organizations to control and circumscribe the lives of individual citizens, but whether certain organizations - namely, political ones - have properly earned that right. After all, it may be argued, what does any mere political entity do to enhance a society's wealth creation, or to improve its productivity? On the other hand,
"What institution has done more than wealth-creating corporations to earn the right to full participation, coequal with individual citizens, in the political process? And if so, why shouldn't be they be guaranteed the right to vote? And why shouldn't that vote be fully proportionate to the full weight of the contributions of these organizations, upon which everything else in society so obviously depends?"
Does that question seem totally unthinkable even now? And will it seem equally unthinkable twenty years from now?
"Oh yeah, right," jeers the fast-on-the-draw wiseacre, of a sort we might find frequenting some of Alice's madder tea parties out there. "And what of it? What's the worst even the most powerful global corporations could do to abridge or constrain the rights of individual citizens?"
For starters, let me say that even now that is an entirely open question. And, frankly, I think one day we'll all be amazed at what plucky, enterprising global corporations can do - yes, even with political power - with their hands firmly at the reins of the right governments.
Nowadays, of course, mainstream American society tends to be most vigilant against governmental abuses of power. And with what good reason God knows. Elected officials' accountability to voters has never been much of an insurance against contempt of those same voters, and collusion with others - even (but who could have imagined it?) with private corporations! - at the expense of voters' stated wishes and interests. In the same way, neither does accountability to customers always insure against contempt for one's clientele - else there would be very little of what we know in the world as fraud, poor service, shoddy workmanship, and grossly risky and irresponsible management of clients' funds and investments. Let's face it: Even good honest success in business is no guarantee of respect or consideration for those who, in one way or another, have come to depend on your success. Like those who work for you, for instance - or those who buy from you. In short, much like politicians, even merchants and manufacturers are not perfect - or even, sometimes, all that patient, kind, or humble a group of people, as proverbial wisdom and Adam Smith both attest. Even businesspeople can get swollen heads, and begin to lust not just for riches well within their own sphere, but for power well beyond it. Or just as likely, start believing their honest success and productivity entitle them to a proportionately greater share of political influence than other members of society, whose own work however useful may be less measurably productive. Hence, again, the need for competition - and even among those (hopefully various) interests who control our news and political media.
And so I pray at the very least it's highly plausible - both to the US Supreme Court and to all of us - that economic organizations no less than political institutions are susceptible to the temptations of Power. And possibly also much better at defending, and rationalizing, their own succumbing to those temptations. Again, nobody's perfect, right? And whose imperfections ought to be easier to excuse, and overlook, than those of the folks upon whose productivity we all depend? I mean, whatever vices they may have, didn't they work hard to get where they are? If they don't have a right to throw their weight around now and then (and that's just human nature, remember?), who does?
Even now I wonder if the real debate between today's global Right and Left concerns not the intrinsic right of organizations to control and circumscribe the lives of individual citizens, but whether certain organizations - namely, political ones - have properly earned that right. After all, it may be argued, what does any mere political entity do to enhance a society's wealth creation, or to improve its productivity? On the other hand,
"What institution has done more than wealth-creating corporations to earn the right to full participation, coequal with individual citizens, in the political process? And if so, why shouldn't be they be guaranteed the right to vote? And why shouldn't that vote be fully proportionate to the full weight of the contributions of these organizations, upon which everything else in society so obviously depends?"
Does that question seem totally unthinkable even now? And will it seem equally unthinkable twenty years from now?
"Oh yeah, right," jeers the fast-on-the-draw wiseacre, of a sort we might find frequenting some of Alice's madder tea parties out there. "And what of it? What's the worst even the most powerful global corporations could do to abridge or constrain the rights of individual citizens?"
For starters, let me say that even now that is an entirely open question. And, frankly, I think one day we'll all be amazed at what plucky, enterprising global corporations can do - yes, even with political power - with their hands firmly at the reins of the right governments.
Taking it Hard
"Take it easy."
I honestly can't remember when was the last time - 1995? - that I heard that phrase as a part of someone's friendly leave-taking. Certainly not from anyone who was gainfully employed - and who planned to remain that way.
I honestly can't remember when was the last time - 1995? - that I heard that phrase as a part of someone's friendly leave-taking. Certainly not from anyone who was gainfully employed - and who planned to remain that way.
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