"And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, 'FOLLOW ME, AND I WILL MAKE YOU FISHERS OF MEN.' And they straightway left their nets, and followed him." (Matthew 4: 18-20)
". . . for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." (Matthew 7: 2)
". . . but speaking the truth in love, [we] may grow up into him in all things . . ." (Ephesians 4: 15 - all KJV)
One often hears talk of how hard it is to reach people with an urgent message. Of how difficult it can be to "get through." You can hear this complaint from people with every sort of message, from all walks of life, at every level of success and endeavor. Sometimes even, amazingly, from some very grumpy, disagreeably-mannered individuals. Folks whose whole presence, tone and demeanor are enough to make you wonder how they ever manage to stomach the people they're trying to reach - much less ever get round to reaching them. Misanthropes are always despising the human creature and then wondering why he doesn't take their advice. As if the fellow who is perennially disgusted with me is sure to have the best idea of what will give me real joy, real fulfilment, real wholeness and peace. Indeed, it's rather a fair bet that, however good or necessary his message may be, I'll always find a way - conscious or unconscious - of fortifying myself against it.
No, whatever the reason may be, disdain of ordinary people, and virulent disgust at all their pathetic little vices and failings, remains a sorely ineffective way of convincing them that you either know or want their best interest. And here you'd think the great god Contempt, with his singleness and ferocity of purpose, could easily batter down any human defense but the most implacably hardened and wicked.
And yet - again and again - I find that, no matter how wicked or well-fortified a given heart may be (my own included), somehow Love always finds a way in past the sentries. Even when it winds up being utterly expelled - ridden out on a rail, as they used to say - Love always manages to secure a foothold of some duration, large or small. And not just any foothold, but as often as not, I'm told, one reaching all the way into the citadel of our most august, resolute, indomitable ambitions and life-strategies.
I mean here, of course, not just any old clumsy, overbearing, obnoxious love, but the very oldest kind - otherwise known as the kind that gets results. I mean that wise, patient, watchful, stand-ready-and-waiting-to-act-when-bidden sort of love, which most of the time is so quiet you barely know it's there. The kind that knows you better than you know yourself, and doesn't despise you for it. Indeed, from what I hear, it actually enjoys the knowledge - at least after a fashion, and no doubt, again, a very old fashion. After all, what is the love that works, if not the power to see past the glorious mess you and I have made of ourselves, to the exquisite blueprint the Knower had in mind in the first place? It works, again, because it's got something to work with - in this case, the very same work from which God rested on the seventh day. You remember, that work of which He said (and apparently meant it) that it was "very good."
Now from what I gather, that includes even you and me even now - or at least until we get our grubby fingers in the pie. For some reason it almost never occurs to us children of Adam, that the One who made us very good might also know how to make us even better.
And so He does. Though exactly how Love gets past our noses, and sometimes all the way into the heart of the camp, remains a mystery. Indeed, it's likely just as well we sapient humans are not able to get His particular method down to a scientifically repeatable formula - as in lather, rinse, repeat. In no time at all our Scientific Love would become, like almost everything we do, a matter of mere power, technique and manipulation, eventually coming to resemble something much more like - well, hate - in our ever-so-industrious hands. As it is, our most sophisticated precision instruments remain very poor tools for following, much less charting, Love's movements.
And so, partly because He moves so quietly, and not only seems but is so useful, Love maneuvers past all our best sharpshooters, extends to the proud watchman the countersign, and slips in. And unless our command centers move quickly to intercept Him (as we usually do at this point), we'll find He has changed - quite beyond recognition - not only the plan and point of attack, but lookout points, supply lines, battlefield, indeed the enemy himself. After all, the very worst enemy - of anyone or anything human - is that one who, however good he may be at massaging our self-importance, is even better at (to use Mick Jagger's immortal phrase) laying our souls to waste. Love knows that. Love understands our real enemy. He knows it is something, and someone, far bigger than those familiar, annoying weaknesses of ours that stand in the way of our most cherished self-images and self-projects. Love remembers, and not just the outward impressiveness but the inward hatefulness of Satan - and particularly in those busy, world-depends-on-us moments when we're most apt to forget.
But now suppose instead we're on "God's side," to put the matter very loosely. Suppose we're on the other side of the line, and trying our darndest to get in to somebody's heart. Not all the way in, which might actually move us to greater kindness than we'd planned on, or greater mercy than we'd made provision for. But just enough to make our chosen target seriously uneasy, without inflicting much of any real discomfort on ourselves. Suppose, in short, our plan is merely to "use" love to "get at" or "get through to" somebody - to make our indelible point, to drop our verbal bomb, and then move on. It may even be someone with whom we have a standing "issue": perhaps somebody we still find, after all these years, very hard to forgive, or haven't found the time to ask forgiveness of. Remember, there's nothing like the double-pointed arrow of Truth spiced with offended grievance for driving home one's point - besides making it doubly painful. Nor is there anything like the cudgel of blunt, heavy-handed Truth for covering over the offenses we've caused, or papering over the wounds we're much too busy too heal.
In either case we do well to keep one thing in mind. Love never goes anywhere - not even deep inside the most landmine-enclosed, barbed-wire-barricaded heart - without taking us with. Once inside, of course, and under His direct orders, we'll also be under the very strictest directions as to where we go, and for how long in each place. But once in, we're in it for the long haul. And that's true regardless of how weak or strong our own native capacity to love may be. Even the feeblest, most primitive love doesn't mix well with "hit-and-run," and then going off in search of new, more exciting war-fronts. Though it remains a formidably effective recipe for keeping communication and supply lines open. Besides being the worst of all bacterial cultures for nursing the war-germs of unforgiveness.
In sum, if your aim is to cut to the chase, get in and get out, etc, etc, by all means do not add love to the mix of your various motives for speaking the Truth. Especially if you have some difficult or painful truth to impart, be sure to convey it in the bluntest, most in-your-face, right-between-the-eyes, "it's-all-the-same-to-me-if-you-accept-it-or-you-don't" manner you can. Also be sure to choose all the most door-slamming, lay-down-the-law, "now-listen-that's-just-the-way-it-is" words you can think of for the occasion. Above all, do your level best not to understand what's it's like to be that individual: what she's afraid of, has to contend with, etc. I mean, that's God's department, right? Besides, really savage bluntness not only vastly improves the odds of that door's being slammed in your face, but actually helps to ensure that it stays slammed. In addition to making it that much harder to reopen from either side. And of course the greater the lapse of time, the harder it will be to reopen. Nobody waits forever. And then, before you can say "Prodigal Son's Elder Brother," one of you will be safely dead, and the other of you will be - dare we hope? - off the Hook.
Oh, to be sure, the other way - the Way in which we choose to convey an urgent message - must have some measure of importance, however hard to determine. But then again, really - in this fast and furious Age of not-a-second-to-lose deadlines, and life-or-death profit margins, how important can that measure be?
15 June 2010
Out of Control
I'm not a complete pessimist when it comes to Man's earthly prospects - any more than I'd worry over the future harmfulness of an intelligent, resourceful, and comprehensively nasty pit-bull in the hands of the right trainer and owner. I believe most things we do are good - or would be good - within the bounds of their proper times and circumstances. "He maketh every thing beautiful in its time," says the King James Version of Ecclesiastes. He in this case being our Maker. The converse point of which, it seems to me, is that we make every thing ugly when we take it out of its time. That is, we humans manage even our best-laid plans badly when we fail to wait upon - or run rough-shod over - the proper times, and manners of unfolding, of those persons and things who have been appointed to our care. Indeed, one of the last points we may learn before the final Scroll gets rolled up, is that while the Lord Man may have succeeded in making most things efficient, it yet remains for the Lord God to make all things well.
But, again, that doesn't mean most things we do are not good - or even beautiful - within their rightful places and times. It is the occasions when they step, or slip, or spill out of those boundaries that make for either slow-leaking or sudden-erupting disaster. Somewhere, in other words, there may be a place where even the most boldly aggressive and presumptuous good we intend to do has no disastrous issue. Where even our most odds-defyingly courageous attempts at cost- and personnel-cutting result in no casualties, and no leaking rigs. I have little doubt, for instance, that even our most unbridled technological growth would be an unmitigated blessing in the hands of saints and angels of some future heaven. It is what that same unbridled growth can do, and has done, in the hands of human beings of this present earth that leaves me more than a bit worried. And yet, concerned as I am over the effects of our so-called Progress on the things around us, I'm even more uneasy about its effects upon the things inside us. Let's face it: hardy and strong as we may be when exposed to other viruses, we humans on the whole have shown the very poorest resistance to most strains of sin, both new and old. The result is that, in our present delicate condition, we continue to learn much more from failure than from success, much more from defeat than from victory. Certainly it is the former things that have taught us most of the little we know about love, and patience, and mercy. It would be nice, of course, to think that one day success, wealth and power shall have the same consistent - and even humbling - effect upon Man that they continue to have upon the Son of Man. But so far it seems to be the one result that even the hardest of work, and the most frenzied multi-tasking, cannot accomplish.
What is it, then, about the human nature prevailing in this present world, that so often the "better" we make our conditions, the worse we make ourselves? What is it about modern man today, that the "better" we get at straining the gnats of racism, sexism and homophobia, the worse we gorge ourselves on whole camels - head, hooves, tail and all - of the most shameless conceit, and arrogance, and vindictiveness? Try thinking, for a moment, of all those features of this past decade which even now make it most distinctively Today, as opposed to the yesterday of the 1980's, or the day before yesterday of the 1960's. Regardless of whether we call ourselves Right or Left, isn't this the Age in which we've exalted our favorite political righteousness into a kind of sanctimonious, hounding, even persecuting religion? While meantime world-class religions have become debauched into militaristic ideologies sanctioning mass slaughter. Certainly, I hope, at least with hindsight it will become clear that our McVeighs and their bin Ladens were not cut from so different a cloth. Observe for instance, in both cases, how righteous indignation at the direction in which the world was going became the pretext not only for murder, but for mass butchery of the most fiendishly indiscriminate kind. And the sheer wonder of it all is that these acts of purifying righteousness - and others - took place not in the godless, socialistic Sixties and Seventies, but in those gloriously God-fearing, free-marketeering decades on either side of AD 2000.
What is it about us, then, that through all our many phases of self-reinvention, the more intent we are on controlling, manipulating, and altering our material circumstances, the more inept we become (or half-hearted?) at restraining our own worst impulses? And in particular those urges that secrete the most subtle, insidious and infectious kinds of evil? So that even today - whatever the success of our massive ad campaigns against those age-old vices, anger, bigotry, sloth - we're becoming ever so quietly indulgent of, and ever so adept at disguising and dressing up, those other, more industrious and forward-looking sins - like pride, greed and envy? (With our latest fashions in lust and gluttony meanwhile taking increasingly bizarre - to say nothing of perverse - turns and twists.)
It was H G Wells, I believe, who once wrote that mankind's best immediate hope of surviving the 20th century lay in the outcome of a race between education and disaster. Personally I think it's still much too early to pronounce education the winner. But even if we could, I'm not nearly as sure as Wells that man's survival prospects lie wholly within his present grasp - or even within the compass of his own future wisdom and ingenuity. And so for me the big question is not how far man can make it on his own; it is how bad the earth and its inhabitants will manage to get, under the benevolent lordship of Old Adam, before the New Adam finally steps in. And that is a question, for me anyway, which can only be decided by the outcome of a very different sort of race than Wells had in mind. I mean a race between knowledge and control. And more specifically, a race between
(1) the most unflinching, unsparing knowledge of ourselves - including all our most ambitious and seemingly productive vices; and
(2) our urge to control everything else - including those parts of us that may not be the most ambitious or productive, but which are definitely the least vicious and controlling.
After all, what does it matter how productively and efficiently the brilliant but spoiled child runs the entire household, when all the while he's becoming ever more dangerously out of control himself? What difference does it make how fast he gets stuff out the door when the entire warehouse is in daily, imminent danger of burning down or blowing up?
Today, more thoroughly than ever, I suspect, Man is become that brilliant spoiled child, and sadly this time around there seem to be few if any adults left in the house. Certainly none among his own kith and kin, and meanwhile God help the dogs and cats, the hamsters and goldfish. So what do you suppose, then, are the chances of our child-prodigy-sociopath at last bringing under manageable control, not those sins of which he's always been more or less ashamed, but those sins he has always tended - at least in his rare moments of self-honesty - to be most proud of? Those sins that, say what you will against them - well (dammit), they sure do get results.
For my part, I'm pretty confident of our species' eventual success in beating, more or less brutally into submission, our most lower-animal-like vices and sins. Maybe not enough to make us happier and wiser, but certainly enough to make the vast majority of us fairly confused and miserable, if not in many cases largely dehumanized to boot. But, again, what difference will it finally make if Wrath and Sloth end their natural human careers as the most irretrievably shamed and disgraced of fallen women, while Pride, Envy and Greed (PEG) go on to become the most ostentatiously gilded, honored, above all respectable dowagers and society matrons?
Some will tell me the answer is a world run, dominated and permeated by Christians. And not the merely professing kind either, but (one can almost hear the snarl in their voices) reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal Chris-ti-ans! But frankly I can't imagine even the most intensively Christianized world ever getting a proper handle on PEG. Indeed, given the historical success rate of most well-meaning theocracies, I'm inclined to think such a world would be as likely, if anything, to make us still more Pharisaic - which is to say, more proud, envious and greedy. All speculation of course. What I'm really wondering is this: Given the furious rate at which today's world is improving, in a generation or two shall any of us have even the presence of mind to recognize our three deadliest as sins at all, and not virtues?
Not, mind you, that we haven't managed to step back from that brink before - though we Christians, I'm sad to say, have not always been at the forefront of those who saw the approaching cliff most clearly or most early on. Churchill was no sort of Christian that I am aware of, yet at the critical moment he seems to have been as handy and flexible a mere human instrument as ever God took in hand. At all events he backed us off from the edge quite as well as any contemporary bishop or preacher.
And yet there's something about our particular Now which makes me feel that that's not going to work this time. Something which makes me wonder if we, both Christians and non-Christians, are not faced with a rather different kind of urgency than that which confronted Churchill's generation. Maybe now the critical question, for all of us, is not whether we shall or even can step back again, but rather, as we stand once again on the brink, and muster the courage to look all the way down inside, how widely open our eyes shall be, or how tightly shut. Shall we have the grace to reinvent ourselves just this once more, simply in order to see more clearly? And not just one more time, but just in time? That is, before what, in any other Age, would have been recognized as the uttermost monstrosity of human Pride becomes so well-dressed, and so impressively groomed and polished, as to be unrecognizable? Before an Arrogance against which Hitler would have seemed meek and mild gets spun to look and sound like Mahatma Gandhi? Or worst of all, becomes transmuted into some apocalyptically urgent and virtuous necessity for the Survival of Humankind?
And what if even we Christians don't quite pull it off? What if those eyes and ears, on whom the whole world depends to keep watch and guard through the night, themselves begin to drift off? What sort of world will begin to disclose itself, to emerge and take shape, through the drooping lids? What will that world feel like, when the last of the watchers have all but gone to sleep, and the whole of mankind has finally succeeded in controlling just about everything - except, of course, the very worst of itself? What will that world taste and smell like, when every thing in it that presently seems least manageable is at last brought under the proud, hard dominion of Man - everything, that is, except those very things in us which have always been most proudly obdurate to the dominion of God?
And long afterwards, I wonder - in the days that follow upon the End of History as We Know It - how will the very last, the millennial earth, remember us lately-departed Christians? Will it remember us gratefully, as having been its salt - or its solvent? As having been honest, decent, clear-sighted folk who did our best, as the old world stood teetering on the edge, to keep its eyes wide open? Or as essentially pious-but-blind guides, who unwittingly did our worst to fasten those eyes wide shut?
But, again, that doesn't mean most things we do are not good - or even beautiful - within their rightful places and times. It is the occasions when they step, or slip, or spill out of those boundaries that make for either slow-leaking or sudden-erupting disaster. Somewhere, in other words, there may be a place where even the most boldly aggressive and presumptuous good we intend to do has no disastrous issue. Where even our most odds-defyingly courageous attempts at cost- and personnel-cutting result in no casualties, and no leaking rigs. I have little doubt, for instance, that even our most unbridled technological growth would be an unmitigated blessing in the hands of saints and angels of some future heaven. It is what that same unbridled growth can do, and has done, in the hands of human beings of this present earth that leaves me more than a bit worried. And yet, concerned as I am over the effects of our so-called Progress on the things around us, I'm even more uneasy about its effects upon the things inside us. Let's face it: hardy and strong as we may be when exposed to other viruses, we humans on the whole have shown the very poorest resistance to most strains of sin, both new and old. The result is that, in our present delicate condition, we continue to learn much more from failure than from success, much more from defeat than from victory. Certainly it is the former things that have taught us most of the little we know about love, and patience, and mercy. It would be nice, of course, to think that one day success, wealth and power shall have the same consistent - and even humbling - effect upon Man that they continue to have upon the Son of Man. But so far it seems to be the one result that even the hardest of work, and the most frenzied multi-tasking, cannot accomplish.
What is it, then, about the human nature prevailing in this present world, that so often the "better" we make our conditions, the worse we make ourselves? What is it about modern man today, that the "better" we get at straining the gnats of racism, sexism and homophobia, the worse we gorge ourselves on whole camels - head, hooves, tail and all - of the most shameless conceit, and arrogance, and vindictiveness? Try thinking, for a moment, of all those features of this past decade which even now make it most distinctively Today, as opposed to the yesterday of the 1980's, or the day before yesterday of the 1960's. Regardless of whether we call ourselves Right or Left, isn't this the Age in which we've exalted our favorite political righteousness into a kind of sanctimonious, hounding, even persecuting religion? While meantime world-class religions have become debauched into militaristic ideologies sanctioning mass slaughter. Certainly, I hope, at least with hindsight it will become clear that our McVeighs and their bin Ladens were not cut from so different a cloth. Observe for instance, in both cases, how righteous indignation at the direction in which the world was going became the pretext not only for murder, but for mass butchery of the most fiendishly indiscriminate kind. And the sheer wonder of it all is that these acts of purifying righteousness - and others - took place not in the godless, socialistic Sixties and Seventies, but in those gloriously God-fearing, free-marketeering decades on either side of AD 2000.
What is it about us, then, that through all our many phases of self-reinvention, the more intent we are on controlling, manipulating, and altering our material circumstances, the more inept we become (or half-hearted?) at restraining our own worst impulses? And in particular those urges that secrete the most subtle, insidious and infectious kinds of evil? So that even today - whatever the success of our massive ad campaigns against those age-old vices, anger, bigotry, sloth - we're becoming ever so quietly indulgent of, and ever so adept at disguising and dressing up, those other, more industrious and forward-looking sins - like pride, greed and envy? (With our latest fashions in lust and gluttony meanwhile taking increasingly bizarre - to say nothing of perverse - turns and twists.)
It was H G Wells, I believe, who once wrote that mankind's best immediate hope of surviving the 20th century lay in the outcome of a race between education and disaster. Personally I think it's still much too early to pronounce education the winner. But even if we could, I'm not nearly as sure as Wells that man's survival prospects lie wholly within his present grasp - or even within the compass of his own future wisdom and ingenuity. And so for me the big question is not how far man can make it on his own; it is how bad the earth and its inhabitants will manage to get, under the benevolent lordship of Old Adam, before the New Adam finally steps in. And that is a question, for me anyway, which can only be decided by the outcome of a very different sort of race than Wells had in mind. I mean a race between knowledge and control. And more specifically, a race between
(1) the most unflinching, unsparing knowledge of ourselves - including all our most ambitious and seemingly productive vices; and
(2) our urge to control everything else - including those parts of us that may not be the most ambitious or productive, but which are definitely the least vicious and controlling.
After all, what does it matter how productively and efficiently the brilliant but spoiled child runs the entire household, when all the while he's becoming ever more dangerously out of control himself? What difference does it make how fast he gets stuff out the door when the entire warehouse is in daily, imminent danger of burning down or blowing up?
Today, more thoroughly than ever, I suspect, Man is become that brilliant spoiled child, and sadly this time around there seem to be few if any adults left in the house. Certainly none among his own kith and kin, and meanwhile God help the dogs and cats, the hamsters and goldfish. So what do you suppose, then, are the chances of our child-prodigy-sociopath at last bringing under manageable control, not those sins of which he's always been more or less ashamed, but those sins he has always tended - at least in his rare moments of self-honesty - to be most proud of? Those sins that, say what you will against them - well (dammit), they sure do get results.
For my part, I'm pretty confident of our species' eventual success in beating, more or less brutally into submission, our most lower-animal-like vices and sins. Maybe not enough to make us happier and wiser, but certainly enough to make the vast majority of us fairly confused and miserable, if not in many cases largely dehumanized to boot. But, again, what difference will it finally make if Wrath and Sloth end their natural human careers as the most irretrievably shamed and disgraced of fallen women, while Pride, Envy and Greed (PEG) go on to become the most ostentatiously gilded, honored, above all respectable dowagers and society matrons?
Some will tell me the answer is a world run, dominated and permeated by Christians. And not the merely professing kind either, but (one can almost hear the snarl in their voices) reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal Chris-ti-ans! But frankly I can't imagine even the most intensively Christianized world ever getting a proper handle on PEG. Indeed, given the historical success rate of most well-meaning theocracies, I'm inclined to think such a world would be as likely, if anything, to make us still more Pharisaic - which is to say, more proud, envious and greedy. All speculation of course. What I'm really wondering is this: Given the furious rate at which today's world is improving, in a generation or two shall any of us have even the presence of mind to recognize our three deadliest as sins at all, and not virtues?
Not, mind you, that we haven't managed to step back from that brink before - though we Christians, I'm sad to say, have not always been at the forefront of those who saw the approaching cliff most clearly or most early on. Churchill was no sort of Christian that I am aware of, yet at the critical moment he seems to have been as handy and flexible a mere human instrument as ever God took in hand. At all events he backed us off from the edge quite as well as any contemporary bishop or preacher.
And yet there's something about our particular Now which makes me feel that that's not going to work this time. Something which makes me wonder if we, both Christians and non-Christians, are not faced with a rather different kind of urgency than that which confronted Churchill's generation. Maybe now the critical question, for all of us, is not whether we shall or even can step back again, but rather, as we stand once again on the brink, and muster the courage to look all the way down inside, how widely open our eyes shall be, or how tightly shut. Shall we have the grace to reinvent ourselves just this once more, simply in order to see more clearly? And not just one more time, but just in time? That is, before what, in any other Age, would have been recognized as the uttermost monstrosity of human Pride becomes so well-dressed, and so impressively groomed and polished, as to be unrecognizable? Before an Arrogance against which Hitler would have seemed meek and mild gets spun to look and sound like Mahatma Gandhi? Or worst of all, becomes transmuted into some apocalyptically urgent and virtuous necessity for the Survival of Humankind?
And what if even we Christians don't quite pull it off? What if those eyes and ears, on whom the whole world depends to keep watch and guard through the night, themselves begin to drift off? What sort of world will begin to disclose itself, to emerge and take shape, through the drooping lids? What will that world feel like, when the last of the watchers have all but gone to sleep, and the whole of mankind has finally succeeded in controlling just about everything - except, of course, the very worst of itself? What will that world taste and smell like, when every thing in it that presently seems least manageable is at last brought under the proud, hard dominion of Man - everything, that is, except those very things in us which have always been most proudly obdurate to the dominion of God?
And long afterwards, I wonder - in the days that follow upon the End of History as We Know It - how will the very last, the millennial earth, remember us lately-departed Christians? Will it remember us gratefully, as having been its salt - or its solvent? As having been honest, decent, clear-sighted folk who did our best, as the old world stood teetering on the edge, to keep its eyes wide open? Or as essentially pious-but-blind guides, who unwittingly did our worst to fasten those eyes wide shut?
09 June 2010
"It's Him"
When was the last time you said to anybody (or, for that matter, heard anybody say to you):
"That's just fine. No need to rush. Take your time." ?
I know, so what? Why am I bothering to bring up an issue so patently irrelevant not only to the way we live today, but to the way we all kno-ow-owwwww we must live, if we are to go on being productive and wealth-creating?
I bring it up, because it's suddenly occurred to me that time is one of the most precious, if not the single most valuable gift, we humans can give anybody. After all, there is nothing we can do without it, and there is nothing we can do well unless we have enough of it. Most of us realize, for example (however much we may try to hustle and hype people into doing what's good for them/us), that there is no real love apart from patience. And of course there can be no real patience apart from time. And we don't enable anyone to do anything well, or to be or feel better in the doing of it, by hurrying them up.
That may seem an obvious enough point, at least once we step outside a corporate, government, or other modern organizational setting. But I do wonder how long it's going to take - I wonder how many lives will have to be used up, wrung out, wasted or otherwise incapacitated - before the folks with the requisite degrees in economics and public policy wake up and realize its obviousness. Instead, it would seem, they'd much rather chase after some exalted standard of efficiency and time-compression supposedly set by those veritable human gods, the [drum rolls and hushed tones] mainland Chinese. What our economists, policy-makers, managers, etc, don't seem to understand, is that while any and all of us can be born again in a way that makes us more or less Christian, not one of us who is not already thus gifted shall ever be born again in a way that makes her even remotely Chinese.
Needless to say, our patient, modestly-ambitioned, ever so privacy- and individuality-respecting economist is not remotely amused. "Well," he sniffs, "we Westerners are just going to have to get with the program. We're just going to have to . . . "
Excuse me, but have to - what? Throw what's left of Territorial Representative Democracy out the window with the bath-water? And that reminds me: Just how many times can Westerners reinvent themselves before the sap of reinvention is all dried up? How many times can we reshape ourselves before we run out of shapes? or self-reinventiveness? or energy? or even (there's that confounded word again!) Time?
Meanwhile Fallen Adam's age-old rule of thumb remains: In times of scarcity and uncertainty, be greedy! And so we time-starved and -impoverished souls, instead of giving to our fellow-plants the sweet light and air and water they need, try hoarding as much of it for ourselves as we can. And then we wonder why our overweight, over-spent, over-scheduled lives are more time-compressed - more time-oppressed - than ever before in living memory. Or why we do so many excruciatingly complicated things - like global finance - so badly, and irresponsibly. Why, of course we do. We lack the Time. We lack, in the words of the Very Best Friend Martha, Mary and Lazarus ever had, the "one thing necessary." And remember, nobody was ever more conscious of time-wastage and time-accountability than Bethany's own Local Girl Makes Good, Sister Martha. Of course none of us knows how she made out from there, or how sturdy or feeble a disciple of the Master she went on to become. But wherever she may be right now in the bosom of the Father, I'd like to think that Martha in particular, of all the saints, has come to find a very personal enjoyment in the words of the Hatter's strange boast to Alice:
"If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."
"That's just fine. No need to rush. Take your time." ?
I know, so what? Why am I bothering to bring up an issue so patently irrelevant not only to the way we live today, but to the way we all kno-ow-owwwww we must live, if we are to go on being productive and wealth-creating?
I bring it up, because it's suddenly occurred to me that time is one of the most precious, if not the single most valuable gift, we humans can give anybody. After all, there is nothing we can do without it, and there is nothing we can do well unless we have enough of it. Most of us realize, for example (however much we may try to hustle and hype people into doing what's good for them/us), that there is no real love apart from patience. And of course there can be no real patience apart from time. And we don't enable anyone to do anything well, or to be or feel better in the doing of it, by hurrying them up.
That may seem an obvious enough point, at least once we step outside a corporate, government, or other modern organizational setting. But I do wonder how long it's going to take - I wonder how many lives will have to be used up, wrung out, wasted or otherwise incapacitated - before the folks with the requisite degrees in economics and public policy wake up and realize its obviousness. Instead, it would seem, they'd much rather chase after some exalted standard of efficiency and time-compression supposedly set by those veritable human gods, the [drum rolls and hushed tones] mainland Chinese. What our economists, policy-makers, managers, etc, don't seem to understand, is that while any and all of us can be born again in a way that makes us more or less Christian, not one of us who is not already thus gifted shall ever be born again in a way that makes her even remotely Chinese.
Needless to say, our patient, modestly-ambitioned, ever so privacy- and individuality-respecting economist is not remotely amused. "Well," he sniffs, "we Westerners are just going to have to get with the program. We're just going to have to . . . "
Excuse me, but have to - what? Throw what's left of Territorial Representative Democracy out the window with the bath-water? And that reminds me: Just how many times can Westerners reinvent themselves before the sap of reinvention is all dried up? How many times can we reshape ourselves before we run out of shapes? or self-reinventiveness? or energy? or even (there's that confounded word again!) Time?
Meanwhile Fallen Adam's age-old rule of thumb remains: In times of scarcity and uncertainty, be greedy! And so we time-starved and -impoverished souls, instead of giving to our fellow-plants the sweet light and air and water they need, try hoarding as much of it for ourselves as we can. And then we wonder why our overweight, over-spent, over-scheduled lives are more time-compressed - more time-oppressed - than ever before in living memory. Or why we do so many excruciatingly complicated things - like global finance - so badly, and irresponsibly. Why, of course we do. We lack the Time. We lack, in the words of the Very Best Friend Martha, Mary and Lazarus ever had, the "one thing necessary." And remember, nobody was ever more conscious of time-wastage and time-accountability than Bethany's own Local Girl Makes Good, Sister Martha. Of course none of us knows how she made out from there, or how sturdy or feeble a disciple of the Master she went on to become. But wherever she may be right now in the bosom of the Father, I'd like to think that Martha in particular, of all the saints, has come to find a very personal enjoyment in the words of the Hatter's strange boast to Alice:
"If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."
27 May 2010
The Wonder that We Are
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.
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.
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?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)