WikiLeaks. Ah, the joys of self-righteous indignation. Right now it may be the one chief sentiment shared by both exposers and the exposed. For my part I'm not sure of anything else our makers and our critics of foreign policy share. I mean, other than the belief that the right conduct of foreign affairs is a Jeffersonianly self-evident truth - the whistleblowers in this case being both Divinely and naturally certain how foreign policy ought to be conducted, the whistleblown perhaps equally sure how it must be conducted. As usual, what we end up with is two columns of rigid, military-formation dogmatists shouting past each other. What both critics and criticized seem to have forgotten is the whole point of any foreign policy: namely, the safety of human beings - and not just of the ingenious, brilliant, awesome, but ultimately unpredictable things human beings invent or create. And that can sometimes mean the safety of what we call labor no less than that of capital.
These are hard times, I'll admit, for those who value also the dignity of the human creature, and not just the power of human systems and other inventions. Nowadays we tend to love best those entities that claim the sole power and the exclusive right to create jobs, regardless of whether the actual jobs are forthcoming or not. And this love has some interesting consequences for our nations' foreign policies. Unless I completely misread its spirit, our Age is one in which what passes for "foreign affairs" means largely catering to the wants, or appeasing the wrath, of superhuman global monstrosities: corporations, charities, international crisis groups, world-environment purifiers, divine-wrath-and-vengeance inflictors, "antiterror" private armies and contractors, etc. The list is practically endless, the only requirement to get on it apparently being that you become the sort of agency that has no long-term human* investment in, or commitment to, the good of the geographic place in which your highly mobile staff find themselves working.
* As distinct from short-term operations of specialists: medical, peace-keeping, famine or disaster relief, infrastructural, etc.
Small wonder that, in busy times like ours, we find ourselves forgetting a point which may have been easier to remember in other, more humanly-paced and -proportioned eras. The point, namely, that any sensible - i.e., humane - foreign policy has but one chief aim: to secure the well-being of real people, in real physical spaces - localities, regions, countries, even continents. Good diplomacy, in other words, must strive humbly to understand the good of specific peoples, in a specific place or contiguity of places, who often have a long history of living or neighboring together. Like, for instance, Mexico and the United States. Or Pakistan and India. A history that may often seem obscure and perplexing to outsiders interested primarily in corporate investment, or in hit-and-run kinds of humanitarian intervention. Obviously, then, the people "on the ground" who share this long history may have needs very different from those of foreign investors, or natural-resource extractors, or even humanitarian relief workers. These "on the ground" folks, unlike their more mobile benefactors, are in constant need of finding ways to get along peaceably with each other, not just in the hit-and-run, but in the long run. And especially right after the well-intentioned mobile benefactors have all gone home. That holds true, I might add, regardless of how much the "on-the-grounders" may secretly despise even their oldest or closest neighbors' beliefs, ambitions, agendas, or other idiosyncrasies. As the saying goes, No, you can't choose your neighbors. But you'd be wise in choosing not to antagonize them unnecessarily.
Now as you can imagine, this "getting-along" can be a very complex, painstaking, time-needing, trial-and-error kind of thing. It's not the sort of political wisdom one can apprehend in an instant, like a mathematical or economic axiom; nor is it the kind of truth that glows self-evidently from the pages of some constitutional document however sacred. It may also require a good deal of what some of our more ideologically-charged souls today would denounce as compromise. Or, worse, hypocrisy. In other words, it's not the sort of truth likely to go down well with some of our more angry or ideologically consistent US politicians today. And here I mean the likes of a Ron Paul, or a Dennis Kucinich, no less than the likes of a Sarah Palin.
One or two further points may need to be clarified before we go on. When I speak of a sensible, humane foreign policy as one which seeks the good of real physical spaces, I mean mostly those entities we know as countries - territorial states with more or less defined and recognizable political borders. Notice, on the other hand, how little I said about certain other things, which seem to have acquired a great deal of prestige in today's globally enlightened world. I said very little - and that little mostly negative - about global organizations, and religions, and ideologies, and civilizations (ORIC). My reason is that these are profoundly different entities from any mere place, or the inhabiting of any mere place. What I collectively term ORIC are things that can overlap and intermingle, and whose aims and agendas often overlap and intermingle - and yes, even clash - within a single or contiguous geographic space. And as we all re-learned, for example, from the Balkans in the 1990s, clashes between religious or other ideological fanatics within the same country can get very ugly. The worst scenario is when the partisans and adherents of any one of these religions, civilizations, etc, become angrily and militantly over-aligned with each other across a wide region, or even across the globe, at the expense of any sense of kinship with physical neighbors whose allegiances are different. When that happens, even the smallest or most peaceably composed territories can be pulled apart - even, sometimes, to the extent of engulfing whole continents in the most savagely intimate wars imaginable. The moral lesson here, I believe, is that at one level or another all war is civil war. And especially at the level of those less freely mobile elements, in any population, who tend to suffer from war's losses far more than they profit from its "gains."
Not, of course, that we should expect this sort of thing to unduly alarm our modern ORIC. After all, they can move about pretty much anywhere they choose round the globe. Just look at that essentially global, politically and corporately organized civilization we call China. For some reason I find it hard to imagine official Chinese hearts bleeding for Africa in quite the same copious measure as Chinese investments currently flow towards Africa. In any case, it really is asking quite a lot, don't you think?, to expect such lofty creatures as our modern ORIC to care all that much about what happens to some slovenly backwater of a people whom, up until now, nobody important has ever even heard of. And least of all a people who happen to be mired, through nobody's fault but their own, in some remote, corporately irrelevant hole-in-the-globe.
(But please note: I'm not trying to suggest that organizations, etc, are bad things as such. In themselves they are good, necessary, and at all events inescapable parts of any fabric of human existence. It is only when we take them too seriously - too politically - that serious problems arise. It is only when we treat and reverence them as overarching, sovereign political entities in their own right - and as having the further right to dispose of the affairs and resources of territorial states and populations as they see fit - that they become the bloated, monstrous, ultimately subhuman things we know and loathe* today.)
* At least in our inmost souls?
Now as I've said, our modern ORIC may be able to view with a considerable degree of calm the outbreak of civil war in many or most of the world's poorer countries. But the same is not true of our makers and critics of foreign policy. These latter must make at least some pretense of concern for what happens to real places and the people in them. My point is that more and more these days I wonder if that concern is anything other than a pretense. In other words, the more our experts and critics feign concern for the people on the ground, the more I fear they may be actually bringing into play a certain other factor. For this is where I believe something commonly called nationalism really comes in handy.
Nationalism is one of those strange human passions that looks and behaves very differently when it is manipulated rationally than when it is believed in passionately. On the one hand, when your constituents believe in it passionately, it can be a very persuasive means of convincing them that you really care what happens to them, and to the place where they live. It works especially well with that vulnerable category of citizens (end of par. 3) who can't relocate all that smoothly when there's a crisis, and who, at least in poorer countries, tend to be more victimized than victorious in the event of war. On the other hand, nationalism can also be used rationally as a bogey or bugbear - as I believe many of our makers and critics of US foreign policy have gotten used to using it. In that case it can be most useful in weakening territiorial loyalties, by making ordinary citizens ashamed to avow even the most basic and sensible devotion to the good of the territorial place in which they reside. Once that happens, then nationalism - both the "rude" passion itself and the "progressive" fear and horror of it - can become a marvelous device for converting the globe into the feeding- and stomping-grounds of ORIC. And the way nationalism does that is by making a certain distant relative, most commonly known as patriotism, look utterly ridiculous.
Nationalism can make ordinary patriotism look very stupid, by alleging that love of one's country will inevitably spill over into the desire to invade other countries - as a certain Hitler-appeasing but otherwise extremely globally-minded Lord Lothian argued in 1930s Britain. It can also make ordinary patriotism look very spineless, by alleging that a simple love of country is mean-spirited and ineffectual unless it issue in the desire to invade other countries - as Hitler himself better-than-argued in 1930s Europe. And meanwhile, right now, nationalism may be the best pretext ever devised, by those who worship spatial mobility and long to punish or otherwise marginalize the spatially immobile, for shaming and discrediting all patriotism as pure trash. And rude, ignorant trash at that. And it is precisely this suspicion I have - that at bottom both WikiLeakers and Leaked share our modern ORIC's rather snobbish disdain for patriotism - that makes me wonder if all this gasping, sputtering outrage isn't just a lot of finespun hooey.
But before I close, it occurs to me that some definition of what I mean by patriotism and nationalism might be in order.
Patriotism is when you love your country - or even a particular region or locale within it - enough to want it to be itself, and nothing but itself. The inescapable corollary of which is that other countries, both near and far, must also be free to be themselves. Free, I mean, without their having to worry about others invading or occupying or otherwise remolding them in the image of some other, allegedly superior country. Like, say, Germany with respect to Poland or Russia. Or even Iraq with respect to, say, Kurdistan or Kuwait.
Nationalism is when you're so swollen with pride in your locality or region that you want it to become the whole country. Or so swollen with pride in your country that you want it to become the whole continent, or even the whole earth. And remember, no country has ever tried to do either of those things without bursting its seams. Just ask France or Germany. Or Russia. China may also be in a very good position to answer that question not too may decades from now.
By the way, has anyone seen any of America's seams lately?
20 February 2011
12 February 2011
Techno-Democracy: and After?
At last - let us pray and hope - freedom for Egypt, after 30 years of Saudi oil-induced paralysis. (Yes, oil-induced. Call me naive, or worse, prejudiced; but somehow I don't think Israeli security concerns were by any means the biggest factor behind our US complicity in Cairo's political deep-freeze. If anything, arguably the Saudis got the best of the bargain with Mubarak's Egypt: a neighboring regime, situated at the beating heart of the Arab world, that combined rigid political stasis with a considerable tolerance - verging [for all the torture] occasionally on appeasement? - of some of the region's most radically dynamic religious elements. Or at least radically Wahhabi religious elements. And in this regard I believe Egypt was exceptional if not unique among secular Arab regimes. Certainly I'm aware of no comparable Zawahiris - much less Muhammad Attas - having come out of either Assad's Syria or Hussein's Iraq.)
One thing at any rate seems obvious to me. Egyptians from all walks of life would be best-advised to proceed into the Future with the utmost caution. And not just for the next couple of years either. Something tells me our present era of global high-speed change may not, even in the greater long run, prove quite as favorable to participatory democracy as some of our WikiLeakers and others might hope. For one thing, a speeding tour bus is scarcely the kind most likely to afford much freedom to passengers wishing to discuss alternate travel routes. Besides placing prodigious - if not terrifying - amounts of discretion in the hands of the bus driver. And the fact that revolutions, in any age, have always been difficult vehicles to adjust to a safe speed does not exactly bode well for "democratic" revolution in the Internet Era.
Think about it. Why should we expect our present age - in which new forms of virtual reality are being conceived (if not birthed) every few minutes - to be any kinder to revolutions than, say, the French 1790s, or the Russian 1910s? Might not such an age as ours merely accelerate the pace of revolution, to say nothing of intensifying the anger and vehemence of accompanying political polarization? And mostly because, unlike in earlier periods of upheaval, the great majority of us need never have to face off in the street. Imagine a world in which an exploding number of virtual interactions leaves participants - much like today's drone pilots - more and more detached from, more and more cushioned against what would otherwise be the "direct" physical and emotional repercussions of their acts. In a political atmosphere already well-heated, are we likely to become "virtually" more polite and considerate with each other in these circumstances, or "virtually" more derisive and insulting and even belligerent? Remember, there's nothing like combat from a safe distance - even when the safety is mutual - to make a fellow wild and extravagant in his choice of weapons. But now suppose things were to get really unpleasant. Picture a world full of arguments erupting out of nowhere from within the safety of our electronic cocoons, and people hurting and being hurt as never before, simply because now we can wound with relative impunity. And then imagine that same acrimony's residue spilling back into our physical spaces. After all, we may not be able to "strike back" at a virtual opponent in all the ways we'd like, but what about the unfortunate slobs we live with? In a world virtually interactive "on all levels," as it were, does anyone imagine we'll have lost the fine art of "taking things out" on our nearest and dearest? And in such a highly-charged atmosphere, is it reasonable to expect that a Virtual Age revolution will be any less devouring of its children than others we've known? That is to say, any less cruel to each one of us?
Those, however, are merely the extremes of incivility and rancor I can imagine engulfing our lives outside organizations - i.e., our lives within and between our so-called private or domestic spaces. Meanwhile, inside our organizations, I fear the sheer headlong pace of the age is most likely to make us all either dogmatists or sycophants. If not some highly unpleasant mixture of both. And not least in our conference rooms, where the worst terror may be that of not seeming to be a team player. Or of standing in the way of Change. For my part I can't imagine a comparable period - in the lives of any of us Westerners - when people of every credential and qualification were more afraid to ask questions, more reluctant to voice concerns over the direction, route and speed of the bus, more anxious to "get on board" any way they can, more terrified of being left behind the frantic pace of global transformation.
And again, that sort of pressure - even in a seasoned democracy like our own - hardly makes for an atmosphere of free, relaxed and lively discussion of alternative options and possibilities for the Future. If anything I would think it tends to produce precisely the opposite effect. My own best hunch is that the more furious the speed of change, and the greater the number of people of whom adjustment is - do you hear me? - immediately required, the harder it will become, and the more irrelevant and impertinent it will appear, even to dream of questioning a prescribed change's direction. After all, why rock the boat? Why dispute the superhuman wisdom of our busy globe-enriching, globe-transforming organizations? Haven't their cumulative efforts already produced enough sheer momentum for economic success - 2008 was just a blip, you know - to satisfy six generations' worth of demands for Unbroken Progress? And isn't economic success the key to any freedom-loving, human dignity-respecting democracy? Just ask Beijing. Meanwhile, should every other disincentive to dissent fail, remember, it could be nothing less than your job that's on the line. So if you plan to keep it, in future kindly refrain from comment, and be sure to resume at once your missing cheese search.
And the result, I think, will be exactly the kind of techno-political climate most favorable to the growth of a certain kind of freedom. Maybe not more freedom for us everyday peons, but surely greater license and leverage than ever before for the "people" who matter most in today's world - i.e., for our most pushy, sharp-elbowed, get-what-I-need-anyway-I-can global organizations. In sum, just the sort of hyper-urgent, "progressive" techno-authoritarianism best able to cut short the life, not only of a fledgeling Egyptian democracy, but of God knows how many Western varieties as well.
One thing at any rate seems obvious to me. Egyptians from all walks of life would be best-advised to proceed into the Future with the utmost caution. And not just for the next couple of years either. Something tells me our present era of global high-speed change may not, even in the greater long run, prove quite as favorable to participatory democracy as some of our WikiLeakers and others might hope. For one thing, a speeding tour bus is scarcely the kind most likely to afford much freedom to passengers wishing to discuss alternate travel routes. Besides placing prodigious - if not terrifying - amounts of discretion in the hands of the bus driver. And the fact that revolutions, in any age, have always been difficult vehicles to adjust to a safe speed does not exactly bode well for "democratic" revolution in the Internet Era.
Think about it. Why should we expect our present age - in which new forms of virtual reality are being conceived (if not birthed) every few minutes - to be any kinder to revolutions than, say, the French 1790s, or the Russian 1910s? Might not such an age as ours merely accelerate the pace of revolution, to say nothing of intensifying the anger and vehemence of accompanying political polarization? And mostly because, unlike in earlier periods of upheaval, the great majority of us need never have to face off in the street. Imagine a world in which an exploding number of virtual interactions leaves participants - much like today's drone pilots - more and more detached from, more and more cushioned against what would otherwise be the "direct" physical and emotional repercussions of their acts. In a political atmosphere already well-heated, are we likely to become "virtually" more polite and considerate with each other in these circumstances, or "virtually" more derisive and insulting and even belligerent? Remember, there's nothing like combat from a safe distance - even when the safety is mutual - to make a fellow wild and extravagant in his choice of weapons. But now suppose things were to get really unpleasant. Picture a world full of arguments erupting out of nowhere from within the safety of our electronic cocoons, and people hurting and being hurt as never before, simply because now we can wound with relative impunity. And then imagine that same acrimony's residue spilling back into our physical spaces. After all, we may not be able to "strike back" at a virtual opponent in all the ways we'd like, but what about the unfortunate slobs we live with? In a world virtually interactive "on all levels," as it were, does anyone imagine we'll have lost the fine art of "taking things out" on our nearest and dearest? And in such a highly-charged atmosphere, is it reasonable to expect that a Virtual Age revolution will be any less devouring of its children than others we've known? That is to say, any less cruel to each one of us?
Those, however, are merely the extremes of incivility and rancor I can imagine engulfing our lives outside organizations - i.e., our lives within and between our so-called private or domestic spaces. Meanwhile, inside our organizations, I fear the sheer headlong pace of the age is most likely to make us all either dogmatists or sycophants. If not some highly unpleasant mixture of both. And not least in our conference rooms, where the worst terror may be that of not seeming to be a team player. Or of standing in the way of Change. For my part I can't imagine a comparable period - in the lives of any of us Westerners - when people of every credential and qualification were more afraid to ask questions, more reluctant to voice concerns over the direction, route and speed of the bus, more anxious to "get on board" any way they can, more terrified of being left behind the frantic pace of global transformation.
And again, that sort of pressure - even in a seasoned democracy like our own - hardly makes for an atmosphere of free, relaxed and lively discussion of alternative options and possibilities for the Future. If anything I would think it tends to produce precisely the opposite effect. My own best hunch is that the more furious the speed of change, and the greater the number of people of whom adjustment is - do you hear me? - immediately required, the harder it will become, and the more irrelevant and impertinent it will appear, even to dream of questioning a prescribed change's direction. After all, why rock the boat? Why dispute the superhuman wisdom of our busy globe-enriching, globe-transforming organizations? Haven't their cumulative efforts already produced enough sheer momentum for economic success - 2008 was just a blip, you know - to satisfy six generations' worth of demands for Unbroken Progress? And isn't economic success the key to any freedom-loving, human dignity-respecting democracy? Just ask Beijing. Meanwhile, should every other disincentive to dissent fail, remember, it could be nothing less than your job that's on the line. So if you plan to keep it, in future kindly refrain from comment, and be sure to resume at once your missing cheese search.
And the result, I think, will be exactly the kind of techno-political climate most favorable to the growth of a certain kind of freedom. Maybe not more freedom for us everyday peons, but surely greater license and leverage than ever before for the "people" who matter most in today's world - i.e., for our most pushy, sharp-elbowed, get-what-I-need-anyway-I-can global organizations. In sum, just the sort of hyper-urgent, "progressive" techno-authoritarianism best able to cut short the life, not only of a fledgeling Egyptian democracy, but of God knows how many Western varieties as well.
22 January 2011
A Disclaimer (and then some)
As such readers as I've got must surely have gleaned by now, I'm no literary critic. Indeed, I shouldn't be surprised if I turned out to be every modern literary critic's horror. Not to mention every literary historian's. I never could get the hang of all those early-to-mid-20th-century Modernist writers, composers, painters, etc, with their nagging sense - correct me if I'm wrong - of the obsolescence of beauty? Somehow they've always struck me as operating under the conviction that, the universe being a mostly ugly, pointless and misbegotten place, it was the Artist's solemn duty to mimic that same hideous cosmos in all the most human-mocking, human-despising ways a good atheist soul could devise.
(Now that's not quite fair. Certainly T S Eliot, for one, believed in more or less the Judaeo-Christian God. Though I do get the distinctly Eliotic impression, in more than a few places, that his God got us all started for the primary purpose of showing us how Nature - human or otherwise - is not done. If I may paraphrase one of G K Chesterton's more decidedly sinister and conspiratorial characters, Lord Ivywood of The Flying Inn:
"The world was made badly, and we [humans] must make it over again."
Or at least make ourselves all over again. Anyhow, that's the best I can make of Eliot's Theology of Man. Again and again I find, particularly in the "middle Eliot" of the '20s and '30s, this restless sense of the decadence and rottenness, and even horribleness, of created things, and not least our own creaturely selves. The mood is especially palpable in several of his Ariel Poems - e.g., "Animula" and "Marina" - in Sweeney Agonistes, and in the Chorus speeches of Murder in the Cathedral. It's as if we humans were deliberately misbegotten for one main reason: namely that, through diligent application of the right measures of self-abasement and self-loathing, we might transcend our primeval slime, and so give back to our Creator the sort of improved final product able to meet His most exacting demands. Indeed, Eliot almost seems to me to be suggesting that, by despising ourselves enough, we could become our own creators - though we could never, of course, escape the taint and stigma of our original creaturehood. Or is he rather saying it's not by any works of ours but only by Divine grace that we're empowered to hate ourselves rightly? I have no idea. But Christian Eliot-lovers who disagree either way are welcome to enlighten me.)
And now, having got that off my chest, here's what I really want to say:
Thank God for 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism - and particularly the kind inveighed against and ridiculed by Wildean aesthetes and 20th-century Modernists. Thank God for the "conventional" Romantics - Wordsworth, Keats, etc - with their intimations of immortality: their haunted sense that our human aesthetic yearnings (the best of Bloomsbury to the contrary notwithstanding) are not self-referential, autonomous, "art for art's sake" things, but rather symbols, significations, symptoms of what may be our very oldest hunger - the aching for a "lost" wholeness and innocence and peace. Thank God for their recognition - however poorly or feebly defended - that something even as humble as beauty can have not only reality but meaning. And lastly, a special thanks for the English Romantic sense that no loveliness is too small, or ever wasted: that the beauties of even the simplest and lowliest, most neglected and discarded creatures - both God's and (I daresay) even a few of our own - have yet their part to play in the unfolding of the Divine magnificence.
(Now that's not quite fair. Certainly T S Eliot, for one, believed in more or less the Judaeo-Christian God. Though I do get the distinctly Eliotic impression, in more than a few places, that his God got us all started for the primary purpose of showing us how Nature - human or otherwise - is not done. If I may paraphrase one of G K Chesterton's more decidedly sinister and conspiratorial characters, Lord Ivywood of The Flying Inn:
"The world was made badly, and we [humans] must make it over again."
Or at least make ourselves all over again. Anyhow, that's the best I can make of Eliot's Theology of Man. Again and again I find, particularly in the "middle Eliot" of the '20s and '30s, this restless sense of the decadence and rottenness, and even horribleness, of created things, and not least our own creaturely selves. The mood is especially palpable in several of his Ariel Poems - e.g., "Animula" and "Marina" - in Sweeney Agonistes, and in the Chorus speeches of Murder in the Cathedral. It's as if we humans were deliberately misbegotten for one main reason: namely that, through diligent application of the right measures of self-abasement and self-loathing, we might transcend our primeval slime, and so give back to our Creator the sort of improved final product able to meet His most exacting demands. Indeed, Eliot almost seems to me to be suggesting that, by despising ourselves enough, we could become our own creators - though we could never, of course, escape the taint and stigma of our original creaturehood. Or is he rather saying it's not by any works of ours but only by Divine grace that we're empowered to hate ourselves rightly? I have no idea. But Christian Eliot-lovers who disagree either way are welcome to enlighten me.)
And now, having got that off my chest, here's what I really want to say:
Thank God for 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism - and particularly the kind inveighed against and ridiculed by Wildean aesthetes and 20th-century Modernists. Thank God for the "conventional" Romantics - Wordsworth, Keats, etc - with their intimations of immortality: their haunted sense that our human aesthetic yearnings (the best of Bloomsbury to the contrary notwithstanding) are not self-referential, autonomous, "art for art's sake" things, but rather symbols, significations, symptoms of what may be our very oldest hunger - the aching for a "lost" wholeness and innocence and peace. Thank God for their recognition - however poorly or feebly defended - that something even as humble as beauty can have not only reality but meaning. And lastly, a special thanks for the English Romantic sense that no loveliness is too small, or ever wasted: that the beauties of even the simplest and lowliest, most neglected and discarded creatures - both God's and (I daresay) even a few of our own - have yet their part to play in the unfolding of the Divine magnificence.
16 January 2011
Mere Grousing
Beauty is unquestionably in the eye of the beholder. But can we be sure it isn't also found elsewhere?
One observer gets misty-eyed at the sight of a grouse, shrouded in mist, lighting on the edge of some nameless pond which, if not exactly desolate, certainly appears to have been abandoned. Or at least by any such god as our hero could honestly imagine ever leading him in vengeful battle. So much the better too, one feels, for everyone concerned: pond, grouse and hero. And yet another's eyes are dry as the dust whence she came.
There is a reason sometimes - and it's a good reason - why our imaginations are alive to precisely those features of another living thing to which a more matter-of-"fact," prosaic, unimaginative eye is blind. We aren't necessarily "just imagining" the grace-fullness, say, of a swallow in flight. Certainly, in any case, we have no right to presume the Grace is not "really there" - either in swallow or in flight. But just as like responds to like, and deep calls unto deep, and spiritual things are no less spiritually discerned, sometimes it takes nothing more than the fancy 0f one order of being - even one as dead-alive, muddled and presumptuous as the human - to discern what is playfully, whimsically, delightingly present in Another's.
One observer gets misty-eyed at the sight of a grouse, shrouded in mist, lighting on the edge of some nameless pond which, if not exactly desolate, certainly appears to have been abandoned. Or at least by any such god as our hero could honestly imagine ever leading him in vengeful battle. So much the better too, one feels, for everyone concerned: pond, grouse and hero. And yet another's eyes are dry as the dust whence she came.
There is a reason sometimes - and it's a good reason - why our imaginations are alive to precisely those features of another living thing to which a more matter-of-"fact," prosaic, unimaginative eye is blind. We aren't necessarily "just imagining" the grace-fullness, say, of a swallow in flight. Certainly, in any case, we have no right to presume the Grace is not "really there" - either in swallow or in flight. But just as like responds to like, and deep calls unto deep, and spiritual things are no less spiritually discerned, sometimes it takes nothing more than the fancy 0f one order of being - even one as dead-alive, muddled and presumptuous as the human - to discern what is playfully, whimsically, delightingly present in Another's.
13 January 2011
A Sizable Down-Payment on Dictatorship
Tucson, AZ - Yes, I know that in every society, in every age, there have always been folks who are maladjusted, morbidly depressed, violently deranged, psychotic, even psychopathic. What I'm not so sure of is whether the majority of them have always acted upon their torments in quite this modern manner - in these formulaic, imitative, repetitive ways. Though I will tell you what impresses me most about our recent US innovations on the age-old theme of violent madness: It's the degree of planning and organization that goes into it all - days, months, in a few cases perhaps even years. And think of the choreography involved, the flair for showmanship, the penchant for self-dramatization. Clearly these are no ordinary, village-idiot-style lunatics who've been clamoring for society's attention in recent decades. And what's with the Rambo impersonations, the increasingly weird sense of calling and mission, the enacted fantasies of being some sort of avenging (or delivering) angel? Whatever happened to old-fashioned, get-it-out-of-your-system running amok? And then having no clear recollection of the time in between?
And speaking of time, why on earth is all this organized carnage happening now, of all the world's Great Ages? or here, of all great places? It's as if rampage killers had some sort of nasty, grossly unfair prejudice against late-20th- and early 21st-century America. Really, I shouldn't be surprised if it was all part of some jealous, decadent European conspiracy. Why else, in these Two Most Glorious and Enlightened Decades in All of Human History, and in this Most Christian of All Possible Countries, would so many unhappy people choose not just to explode but to arrange a pre-timed detonation? Not just to vent but to militarize their madness, their pain and rage - and all so deliberately, systematically, mass-murderously? And why, with such a growing wealth of clinical experience in these matters to draw on, do our ways of managing mental disorders - all rooted, mind you, in the World's Very Best Health-Care System - seem so unprepared, so makeshift and disjointed, and the cracks and gaps wider than ever?
"You know something? Do yourself a favor. Yourself and everyone else who has to listen to your rot. Deal with it. Crawl out from whatever rock it is you live under and just DEAL WITH IT. Or better yet, go to Sweden, or wherever it is losers like you go to in order to hide from real life. Because in case it's escaped your attention, Robinson Crusoe, this isn't some Scandinavian-style kindergarten economy you're dealing with. This is adult-version REAL LIFE: full of risk and uncertainty and insecurity. And as far as escalating, random, indiscriminate violence is concerned, you'd better get used that too, buddy. Because it's the price we pay - yes, the price genuine Americans are proud to pay - for real freedom, real dynamism, real innovativeness."
Yes, maybe. But cannot even the freest, most innovative societies reach such levels of violence that it ceases to be merely a price paid for present freedoms, and becomes something more like a down-payment on future dictatorship? Are we quite sure history has nothing to teach us on these matters - the history, say, of pre-Napoleonic France, or pre-Hitler Germany? Peer closely into those dynamic times and places. When the ensuing dictators in each case took the reins, didn't there arise an audible sigh of relief from precisely those whom today we regard as freedom's most stalwart defenders: the wealthy and powerful - yes, even the privately rich and powerful?
And that reminds me. What do you suppose is the real point of this (to the best of my knowledge) unprecedented civilianization of military-scale weaponry? Or at least of its celebration, in our media, journalism, and political imaginations? Here we are, immersed in a whole entertainment culture that - what shall we say, romanticizes? - civilian access to some pretty impressive firepower: the sort of arsenals I imagine might still be the envy of a few rebel militias round the globe. So tell me: When Antichrist does come, will that be enough to make us ready with our rebel militia? Will it all be as simple as grabbing our high-powered weapons, jumping into our rugged-terrain vehicles (all the while linked by our real-time, up-to-the-minute-dispatch communication technologies), and heading for the hills? Mind you, from where I stand, we do appear to be on the threshold of a new era: the age of a radically new, defiant-of-history, beholden-to-no-one-and-nothing American civilization. Assuming we're not already a decade or two well into it. But who could have predicted, at the height of the Cold War, that this glorious post-Cold War peace would also prove to be such a, well, militarization? And not just of time and telephones - but of women, and religion, and even retail ("I'm on my way to the PX - er, Costco") . . .
"Since you obviously have difficulty comprehending what you read, I'LL SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU: "When you see the Abomination that makes desolate standing in the holy place, let those who are in Judaea flee to the hills . . . "
Yes, but note that our Lord speaks of Judaea. Can we be equally sure He was also referring to Boise, Idaho? And certainly nothing from the context of these passages suggests a backdrop of paramiltaries or private militias, or even of the beating of humble plowshares into swords. In any case, is all this stockpiling of weapons - whether of the real or the wished-and-hoped-for kind - really going to prevent the emergence of an American police state? Or rather, is our paramilitary hysteria merely working to ensure that, when dictatorship finally does come, it will not only be unprecedentedly brutal and thorough, but seem both inevitable and overwhelmingly justified?
And speaking of time, why on earth is all this organized carnage happening now, of all the world's Great Ages? or here, of all great places? It's as if rampage killers had some sort of nasty, grossly unfair prejudice against late-20th- and early 21st-century America. Really, I shouldn't be surprised if it was all part of some jealous, decadent European conspiracy. Why else, in these Two Most Glorious and Enlightened Decades in All of Human History, and in this Most Christian of All Possible Countries, would so many unhappy people choose not just to explode but to arrange a pre-timed detonation? Not just to vent but to militarize their madness, their pain and rage - and all so deliberately, systematically, mass-murderously? And why, with such a growing wealth of clinical experience in these matters to draw on, do our ways of managing mental disorders - all rooted, mind you, in the World's Very Best Health-Care System - seem so unprepared, so makeshift and disjointed, and the cracks and gaps wider than ever?
"You know something? Do yourself a favor. Yourself and everyone else who has to listen to your rot. Deal with it. Crawl out from whatever rock it is you live under and just DEAL WITH IT. Or better yet, go to Sweden, or wherever it is losers like you go to in order to hide from real life. Because in case it's escaped your attention, Robinson Crusoe, this isn't some Scandinavian-style kindergarten economy you're dealing with. This is adult-version REAL LIFE: full of risk and uncertainty and insecurity. And as far as escalating, random, indiscriminate violence is concerned, you'd better get used that too, buddy. Because it's the price we pay - yes, the price genuine Americans are proud to pay - for real freedom, real dynamism, real innovativeness."
Yes, maybe. But cannot even the freest, most innovative societies reach such levels of violence that it ceases to be merely a price paid for present freedoms, and becomes something more like a down-payment on future dictatorship? Are we quite sure history has nothing to teach us on these matters - the history, say, of pre-Napoleonic France, or pre-Hitler Germany? Peer closely into those dynamic times and places. When the ensuing dictators in each case took the reins, didn't there arise an audible sigh of relief from precisely those whom today we regard as freedom's most stalwart defenders: the wealthy and powerful - yes, even the privately rich and powerful?
And that reminds me. What do you suppose is the real point of this (to the best of my knowledge) unprecedented civilianization of military-scale weaponry? Or at least of its celebration, in our media, journalism, and political imaginations? Here we are, immersed in a whole entertainment culture that - what shall we say, romanticizes? - civilian access to some pretty impressive firepower: the sort of arsenals I imagine might still be the envy of a few rebel militias round the globe. So tell me: When Antichrist does come, will that be enough to make us ready with our rebel militia? Will it all be as simple as grabbing our high-powered weapons, jumping into our rugged-terrain vehicles (all the while linked by our real-time, up-to-the-minute-dispatch communication technologies), and heading for the hills? Mind you, from where I stand, we do appear to be on the threshold of a new era: the age of a radically new, defiant-of-history, beholden-to-no-one-and-nothing American civilization. Assuming we're not already a decade or two well into it. But who could have predicted, at the height of the Cold War, that this glorious post-Cold War peace would also prove to be such a, well, militarization? And not just of time and telephones - but of women, and religion, and even retail ("I'm on my way to the PX - er, Costco") . . .
"Since you obviously have difficulty comprehending what you read, I'LL SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU: "When you see the Abomination that makes desolate standing in the holy place, let those who are in Judaea flee to the hills . . . "
Yes, but note that our Lord speaks of Judaea. Can we be equally sure He was also referring to Boise, Idaho? And certainly nothing from the context of these passages suggests a backdrop of paramiltaries or private militias, or even of the beating of humble plowshares into swords. In any case, is all this stockpiling of weapons - whether of the real or the wished-and-hoped-for kind - really going to prevent the emergence of an American police state? Or rather, is our paramilitary hysteria merely working to ensure that, when dictatorship finally does come, it will not only be unprecedentedly brutal and thorough, but seem both inevitable and overwhelmingly justified?
06 January 2011
Epiphany: A Point of Punctuation
Words aren't everything, but they might well be somewhere near 80% of it. Isn't it amazing, the unlikely, unpalatable, patently offensive things we can get away with saying, provided we say them in the right way? A Way shaped by recognition of the fact that our listener is never just a Democrat, or a Republican, but more importantly - at least for Love's purposes - a creature like ourselves? And thus a creature more or less accessible (at least on occasion) to some of the same appeals, entreaties, overtures? So that our conversation may have at last some hope of becoming more than just a tense, transient parleying-ground between Light and Darkness?
And of course the right way most often means choosing the right words, and between them the right pauses, silences, music, etc, etc. It means the sort of musical words that know intimately, not just what makes us political, or awesomely smart, or irredeemably stupid, but what makes us human. Imagine, for instance, how Shakespeare might have written, well, just about anything he wrote - had he been solemnly convinced that those who disagreed with him politically and economically were idiots, or monsters. Or devils. What effect do you suppose his staunch convictions would have had upon his language? Would they have made his words more undulant, more cadenced, more a-dance with imagery that evokes nameless and haunting things - or drier, more stiff, less playful, less pulsing with real life? What about his characters, and his insights into human nature as a whole: would they be fuller, more balanced, more real and convicting and identifiable with ourselves? Or would his fierce, uncompromising stance have made his creatures more stock and wooden, his observations more starched, his insights more stuffed with maxims and platitudes? And supposing those same characters could be made to come alive in front of him, what then? Do you think his stern convictions would make it easier for him to talk to them, reason with them, listen to their stories? Or easier to interrupt them?
And so I characterize the right words as musical words, that seem to know us intimately - almost as if our human nature itself were a kind of music, a sort of composition. Or else they seem to follow the thread, or to enter into the warp and woof, of what makes us human - almost as if they had been there when it happened. Almost as if they'd somehow pierced to the heart of what makes us who and what we are, long before there could be any question of self-seriousness or self-importance, or pride in self-accomplishment. And also, as if they'd dredged the depths of what unmakes us. Or more accurately, who - in both cases. The Lord God in the case of our making; mostly ourselves (with a little judicious input from Old Scratch) in the case of our unmaking. Ah, now there's a real difference of Light and Darkness for you, besides being the one from which all the others derive. But notice how everything ultimately comes down to God and Man, and how to make perfect the Life between them. And as for all the rest (Satan, demons, powers and principalities, etc), why, what else should we expect - other than the outermost darkness and stumbling - when we try to be conformed to some unnatural, hideous image of ourselves, promulgated by one who hates us?
That is why I keep saying that our God-making, even at its dilapidated worst, is always better than our self-unmaking at its most rational, streamlined, state-of-the-art best. Any making always bears some imprint, some stamp - however badly effaced - of the God who made and walked in Eden; whereas the sharpest, most industrial-strength, most indelible imprint of Man only shows how far from Eden we've wandered, and how efficiently the debasing of the coinage has progressed. And at some level of consciousness however primitive, our quietly-discerned, heedfully-chosen words can know and reflect - and celebrate - that difference. Even as (I believe on more than a few occasions) Shakespeare's did.
In the same way, the worst real creatures are better than the best ideas. The problem with ideas and other reconstructive surgery is that they are always limited by what we make of them, whereas real things are as limitless as only God can make them. Including - dare I suggest it? - even the Maker Himself. Think about it. God being God, do you really suppose it was beyond Him, had He wanted to, to "incarnate" Himself among us as an idea, an agenda, even an organization? To be the kind of superarching, overawing achievement, or program, or system, as would make any mere individual human being quake in her military-corporate boots? Why, then, do you think He enters among us as something, if you will, so much tinier, and so much less impressive? As something that organizations and agendas, and occasionally even ideas, have been known to become very impatient and exasperated with - if not to despise outright, and dismiss out-of-hand? Why does our God become, in short, a real creature? But that's nothing compared to the strangeness of what follows. Because then, instead of inspiring and consoling, challenging and disturbing us with new thoughts, or new motivational points, or new performance levels, He goes on to use this same New Creature to make us, in our turn, into new creatures. Or stranger yet, He makes Himself to be both the seed, and the seedbed, of - but what's this you say now? not a new philosophy or ideology, or set of self-evident constitutional principles, or infallible economic axioms - but a new Creation?
At least that's what I think He told us. But if so - if God did indeed so love the creatures He made - then all the more reason why our best words should want to mold and fashion themselves according to the pattern of real things, and not just our ideas of things. After all, if God thought enough of His own creation to want to make it new, should our words respect it any less? Hence also the reason why the best words never fall into the trap of taking even good ideas too seriously. They understand an idea's weakness - surely at least 60% of any idea - no less than its strength. And of course concepts, agendas, blueprints all have their place. They are a time-honored shorthand method of classifying, deconstructing, utilizing, even measuring just about everything we humans do, and practically everything we are - except, of course, our Selves.
Good words, on the other hand, are really nothing like most of our ideas at all. For one thing, they're extremely loath to pronounce on things on which they have no really good handle. Or at least, on which they have no better grasp than, say, the conclusions of some highly superior extraterrestrial visitor regarding his latest captured specimen of that mysterious animal, Man. I'll admit the intergalactic alien may have solid-enough grounds for thinking he knows us inside and out. But at the end of all his most painstaking experiments (assuming she survives them), will he know your friend - or what makes her a friend - one-eighth as well as you do? Or maybe you'd prefer that we consulted our visiting ET for his cutting-edge intergalactic wisdom and insight into - perhaps quite literally into - the human condition, as he ever-so-gently probes us with his latest telepathic instruments. Fine. Call me a sentimental old fool. I shall persist in believing that the right words, rhythms, etc, know an even better way - albeit a very different One - both around, and into us.
What do I mean then by words that both intimately know, and speak intimately to, another human soul? I mean words that are never eager to burst out of their kitchen-doors - much less probe and interrogate - but they're always ready when they do. They are ready because they have first prepared and flavored and seasoned themselves, because they have first been steeped and dyed in the presence of that soul, and of its Maker - and because they are still fresh from the strangeness, the poetry of that encounter, before it can stale, or ossify, into familiarity and prose. The right way, then, means the kinds of musical words that understand - even, or especially, when we don't - both the maddeningly simple innocence, and the unfathomable riches and complexity that make up our common human nature (which also goes some distance, I believe, towards explaining our capacity for evil). To say nothing of the wild, magical, unrepeatable ways in which that nature is individualized in each and every human creature. So individualized, and so vital, in fact, that the absence of contribution from any one of us always leaves a tear in the fabric, and a vacant (and sorely mourned) seat at the Table.
In sum, the right words not only know, but know how to enjoy, those things that make each of us at once both commonly human and uncommonly irreplaceable. They would never dream, for instance, of asking how much of Mary is "nature," and how much "nurture." And not merely because they'd consider the question highly intrusive and impertinent, but because they know there was already something in her, and Someone even deeper within and beyond that, long before either of those would-be tyrants had begun to have their say. Yet neither is it just where Mary "came from," or what has "gone into" her, that interests them. In a sense the right words also know her future, where she is going to, and even more to the point, what will nourish and safe-keep her along the way. They know - better than even the wisest, most probing extraterrestrial! - that it isn't power or knowledge or technology, but rather the God who loved her from Adam's loins, and Eve's womb, who is Mary's life, her food, her substance. And who is no less the key to her individuality, and creativity. Maybe - who knows? - even her productivity. And thus do the right words - which always consist of the right marriage of meaning and sound - speak to Mary, but more importantly listen to her, accordingly. Good words always listen before they speak. Indeed, what better way to say things that are uniquely and individually affecting, to each human soul, than to use words that are literally creative - not in the sense of conjuring magickally or "creating from nothing" - but as if some part of the Creation had rubbed off on them? Almost as if they'd been listening when it happened, because, after all, they'd been there.
Certainly my own prayer is that we may never be satisfied with, or settle for, the familiarity and contemptuousness of mere prosaic words. I mean, haven't we as a species already wandered far enough from Eden - and by that I mean not so much the place as the Presence? My own prayer, then, is that we may never forget how to use living words: words that keep us alive to the strangeness, the freshness, the unexpectedness, of every one of us, and every thing of us - just as surely as if each (man, beast, herb, etc) had emerged newly from the peace of the Garden. And that's why, again, I keep saying we need words that secrete music. Words that not only know their Way inside us, without stumbling or getting lost, but that know also when they've reached their destination - which usually turns out to be some Eden in our souls we may easily enough deny, but can never, ever forget. Best of all, no destination need ever be an impossible one to reach, or one requiring extraordinary feats of poetics or other wordcraft. Sometimes getting there can be as simple as taking a message that burns inside us, longing to come out (God will supply the music) - a word we might have reconstructed into something as weak and stiff as an injunction, a threat, an exhortation - and rephrasing it in the form of a question.
And of course the right way most often means choosing the right words, and between them the right pauses, silences, music, etc, etc. It means the sort of musical words that know intimately, not just what makes us political, or awesomely smart, or irredeemably stupid, but what makes us human. Imagine, for instance, how Shakespeare might have written, well, just about anything he wrote - had he been solemnly convinced that those who disagreed with him politically and economically were idiots, or monsters. Or devils. What effect do you suppose his staunch convictions would have had upon his language? Would they have made his words more undulant, more cadenced, more a-dance with imagery that evokes nameless and haunting things - or drier, more stiff, less playful, less pulsing with real life? What about his characters, and his insights into human nature as a whole: would they be fuller, more balanced, more real and convicting and identifiable with ourselves? Or would his fierce, uncompromising stance have made his creatures more stock and wooden, his observations more starched, his insights more stuffed with maxims and platitudes? And supposing those same characters could be made to come alive in front of him, what then? Do you think his stern convictions would make it easier for him to talk to them, reason with them, listen to their stories? Or easier to interrupt them?
And so I characterize the right words as musical words, that seem to know us intimately - almost as if our human nature itself were a kind of music, a sort of composition. Or else they seem to follow the thread, or to enter into the warp and woof, of what makes us human - almost as if they had been there when it happened. Almost as if they'd somehow pierced to the heart of what makes us who and what we are, long before there could be any question of self-seriousness or self-importance, or pride in self-accomplishment. And also, as if they'd dredged the depths of what unmakes us. Or more accurately, who - in both cases. The Lord God in the case of our making; mostly ourselves (with a little judicious input from Old Scratch) in the case of our unmaking. Ah, now there's a real difference of Light and Darkness for you, besides being the one from which all the others derive. But notice how everything ultimately comes down to God and Man, and how to make perfect the Life between them. And as for all the rest (Satan, demons, powers and principalities, etc), why, what else should we expect - other than the outermost darkness and stumbling - when we try to be conformed to some unnatural, hideous image of ourselves, promulgated by one who hates us?
That is why I keep saying that our God-making, even at its dilapidated worst, is always better than our self-unmaking at its most rational, streamlined, state-of-the-art best. Any making always bears some imprint, some stamp - however badly effaced - of the God who made and walked in Eden; whereas the sharpest, most industrial-strength, most indelible imprint of Man only shows how far from Eden we've wandered, and how efficiently the debasing of the coinage has progressed. And at some level of consciousness however primitive, our quietly-discerned, heedfully-chosen words can know and reflect - and celebrate - that difference. Even as (I believe on more than a few occasions) Shakespeare's did.
In the same way, the worst real creatures are better than the best ideas. The problem with ideas and other reconstructive surgery is that they are always limited by what we make of them, whereas real things are as limitless as only God can make them. Including - dare I suggest it? - even the Maker Himself. Think about it. God being God, do you really suppose it was beyond Him, had He wanted to, to "incarnate" Himself among us as an idea, an agenda, even an organization? To be the kind of superarching, overawing achievement, or program, or system, as would make any mere individual human being quake in her military-corporate boots? Why, then, do you think He enters among us as something, if you will, so much tinier, and so much less impressive? As something that organizations and agendas, and occasionally even ideas, have been known to become very impatient and exasperated with - if not to despise outright, and dismiss out-of-hand? Why does our God become, in short, a real creature? But that's nothing compared to the strangeness of what follows. Because then, instead of inspiring and consoling, challenging and disturbing us with new thoughts, or new motivational points, or new performance levels, He goes on to use this same New Creature to make us, in our turn, into new creatures. Or stranger yet, He makes Himself to be both the seed, and the seedbed, of - but what's this you say now? not a new philosophy or ideology, or set of self-evident constitutional principles, or infallible economic axioms - but a new Creation?
At least that's what I think He told us. But if so - if God did indeed so love the creatures He made - then all the more reason why our best words should want to mold and fashion themselves according to the pattern of real things, and not just our ideas of things. After all, if God thought enough of His own creation to want to make it new, should our words respect it any less? Hence also the reason why the best words never fall into the trap of taking even good ideas too seriously. They understand an idea's weakness - surely at least 60% of any idea - no less than its strength. And of course concepts, agendas, blueprints all have their place. They are a time-honored shorthand method of classifying, deconstructing, utilizing, even measuring just about everything we humans do, and practically everything we are - except, of course, our Selves.
Good words, on the other hand, are really nothing like most of our ideas at all. For one thing, they're extremely loath to pronounce on things on which they have no really good handle. Or at least, on which they have no better grasp than, say, the conclusions of some highly superior extraterrestrial visitor regarding his latest captured specimen of that mysterious animal, Man. I'll admit the intergalactic alien may have solid-enough grounds for thinking he knows us inside and out. But at the end of all his most painstaking experiments (assuming she survives them), will he know your friend - or what makes her a friend - one-eighth as well as you do? Or maybe you'd prefer that we consulted our visiting ET for his cutting-edge intergalactic wisdom and insight into - perhaps quite literally into - the human condition, as he ever-so-gently probes us with his latest telepathic instruments. Fine. Call me a sentimental old fool. I shall persist in believing that the right words, rhythms, etc, know an even better way - albeit a very different One - both around, and into us.
What do I mean then by words that both intimately know, and speak intimately to, another human soul? I mean words that are never eager to burst out of their kitchen-doors - much less probe and interrogate - but they're always ready when they do. They are ready because they have first prepared and flavored and seasoned themselves, because they have first been steeped and dyed in the presence of that soul, and of its Maker - and because they are still fresh from the strangeness, the poetry of that encounter, before it can stale, or ossify, into familiarity and prose. The right way, then, means the kinds of musical words that understand - even, or especially, when we don't - both the maddeningly simple innocence, and the unfathomable riches and complexity that make up our common human nature (which also goes some distance, I believe, towards explaining our capacity for evil). To say nothing of the wild, magical, unrepeatable ways in which that nature is individualized in each and every human creature. So individualized, and so vital, in fact, that the absence of contribution from any one of us always leaves a tear in the fabric, and a vacant (and sorely mourned) seat at the Table.
In sum, the right words not only know, but know how to enjoy, those things that make each of us at once both commonly human and uncommonly irreplaceable. They would never dream, for instance, of asking how much of Mary is "nature," and how much "nurture." And not merely because they'd consider the question highly intrusive and impertinent, but because they know there was already something in her, and Someone even deeper within and beyond that, long before either of those would-be tyrants had begun to have their say. Yet neither is it just where Mary "came from," or what has "gone into" her, that interests them. In a sense the right words also know her future, where she is going to, and even more to the point, what will nourish and safe-keep her along the way. They know - better than even the wisest, most probing extraterrestrial! - that it isn't power or knowledge or technology, but rather the God who loved her from Adam's loins, and Eve's womb, who is Mary's life, her food, her substance. And who is no less the key to her individuality, and creativity. Maybe - who knows? - even her productivity. And thus do the right words - which always consist of the right marriage of meaning and sound - speak to Mary, but more importantly listen to her, accordingly. Good words always listen before they speak. Indeed, what better way to say things that are uniquely and individually affecting, to each human soul, than to use words that are literally creative - not in the sense of conjuring magickally or "creating from nothing" - but as if some part of the Creation had rubbed off on them? Almost as if they'd been listening when it happened, because, after all, they'd been there.
Certainly my own prayer is that we may never be satisfied with, or settle for, the familiarity and contemptuousness of mere prosaic words. I mean, haven't we as a species already wandered far enough from Eden - and by that I mean not so much the place as the Presence? My own prayer, then, is that we may never forget how to use living words: words that keep us alive to the strangeness, the freshness, the unexpectedness, of every one of us, and every thing of us - just as surely as if each (man, beast, herb, etc) had emerged newly from the peace of the Garden. And that's why, again, I keep saying we need words that secrete music. Words that not only know their Way inside us, without stumbling or getting lost, but that know also when they've reached their destination - which usually turns out to be some Eden in our souls we may easily enough deny, but can never, ever forget. Best of all, no destination need ever be an impossible one to reach, or one requiring extraordinary feats of poetics or other wordcraft. Sometimes getting there can be as simple as taking a message that burns inside us, longing to come out (God will supply the music) - a word we might have reconstructed into something as weak and stiff as an injunction, a threat, an exhortation - and rephrasing it in the form of a question.
22 December 2010
The Best that We Can Be
We Americans are a God-fearing nation. Or at least so we claim. (At present I think we'd be more exactly described as a God-hat-doffing civilization, or a God-pious-oath-muttering civilization.) And yet - whether one likes us or not, or likes our God or not - one must admit we Yanks have had an intense, far-reaching impact upon the world as a whole. Including those parts of it that most proudly proclaim their secularity. Even the most secular-minded, or the most politically correct, Europeans would be hard-pressed to deny that. Likewise the most up-and-coming Chinese.
At the same time that should hardly satisfy us. Near-perfect as we often seem when compared with the rest of sluggish humanity, even we Yanks can always do better. And so it occurs to me that this largely Yank-driven world would run a lot more considerately, honestly, transparently - in a word, a whole lot better - if certain new things were to happen to us. Or at least to our present way of thinking. Remember, we're Americans. We like the new, sometimes to the point of infatuation.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following suggestion: That, namely, this would be not just a new and a better world, but a literally more God-fearing one, if only we Americans took more seriously a certain curious notion we have. I mean this notion of the Divine origin of things we did not make. Including those creatures - you, me, other living things - that most of us believe did not evolve more or less by themselves, but were rather more directly and purposefully created by God. It would also be a better world if we Yanks lived a lot less seriously this other, often bizarre notion we have - of the Divine inspiration of things we do make. And in particular those purposeful things we call technological, and those things pertaining to what we call procedures, and systems, and organizations. And even ideas.
I understand that, like any clever, hardy and resourceful people, we can all too easily become enraptured with the works of our hands, and the products of our intelligence. But we also have an impressive body of sacred writings, in which most of us profess in some fashion to believe, which testify that there is much more to Life than either of those things. Indeed it's even suggested, in many divers places, that there are times when those two things can become rather marginal - if not positively detrimental - to something else we call Eternal Life. What I don't understand, then, is why we Americans of all people should be the last nation on earth to want to question the value, either of unbridled technological growth, or of the ideas that conduce to it. Still less do I understand why we should be the last country on earth to see the point of cherishing some portion of: (1) the created earth as it was given to us; or even of (2) our own natures as they were given to us.
In the first place, has "nature" in its given state really nothing of value to teach us, that we insist on teaching ourselves "better" by endlessly - and often thoughtlessly - reconstructing and reconfiguring it? It's true we humans are inestimably smarter than any other mode of life that presents itself to our attention here on earth. But hopefully we God-fearing Americans are also aware that our best smartness is as nothing compared to God's wisdom. Or even God's foolishness. And precisely because our best wisdom is as nothing compared to even God's worst foolishness, He is able to surprise us. He can do strange, paradoxical things, like calling forth sons of Abraham from stones, and releasing their pent-up energies in a chorus of praise. And He has been known to conceal, as it were, even in the lowliest things He makes - even in those creatures most brutely and grossly inferior to our august selves - subtle, yet stubborn, complexities, that may elude our best efforts to simplify them. Complexities that indeed may always elude us - or at least for so long as we continue to esteem our human wisdom and power more highly than our human createdness, and lowliness, and receptivity. Which is perhaps another way of saying if we want to become better - i.e., more God-empowered - masters of our earthly dominion, a good place to start might be to try becoming better servants. Or at the very least, more humble in the presence of those lowly strange things, and that strange lowly God, whom no amount of human superiority shall ever equip us to understand.
And that brings me to my second point: The exalted species we've fashioned out of what was once placed in the Garden merely to dress and to keep it. So what of it? What of the splendid job we've done on ourselves? Have we humans really so much to show for our endless self-reconstructions, that we should like nothing better than to "redouble the pace," so to speak, in our relentless overhaul of everything else?
Mind you, I've no doubt we Yanks will continue to love our gadgets and tinkering and systematizing. And no doubt the rest of the world will continue - with one degree or other of shame and hypocrisy - to love us for our love of those things. But haven't at least some of us been known to pride ourselves also on our love of God? My question, then, is how far it is possible to love anybody without taking seriously the things he has to say. And if you're going to take seriously the things he says, how much more those particular creatures - you and me, for instance - for the sake of whom, or perhaps even the salvation of whom, he says them? But if our Maker be such - no, if His words alone be such, that we can only receive them with the utmost seriousness, of what immeasurable value are those other words of His - His creatures - on whose behalf, and for whose blessing and strengthening, those same words were written down?
Suppose, then, that these works of God are also His words, and so also to be heeded. And not nearly so much for what we creatures think and say, as for what we are, and need. Why then do we treat these works as we so often do: as if they were nothing, and needed nothing? Why do we so often treat other human beings - including many of our fellow-Americans - almost as if they were works of our own, to be worked and slaved and lorded over, and then dispensed with, as we deem necessary? And not just the ones we lay off but the ones we keep on.
But please don't misunderstand me. I'm aware that any extensive rearrangement of these matters is likely to involve a certain degree of harm to the feelings of some highly - in a few cases even self-proclaimedly - productive people. People on whose entrepreneurial and managerial gifts we all depend. Nor am I entirely insensitive to the sensitivities of the more self-consciously self-made men and women among us. I can imagine what an abysmally humiliating thing it must be having to depend on other human beings, or having to accept even their paid help. And even worse being expected to acknowledge and appreciate it. Especially when, as in much of our modern organizational culture, you can so easily get away with acting like you don't need anybody - even as you squeeze everybody who's left twice as hard. (So much more dignified - don't you think? - to acknowledge one's dependence on systems and technologies and other things of our illustrious creation.)
Yet here I thought at least some of us modern Americans were trying to be just about the realest, genuinest, sincerest Christians who've ever lived. Why should we of all people fear humiliation, or loss of dignity? With 200+ years of practice, why, you'd think we could have written the book on humility. Or is that - now I'm beginning to get nervous - is that just one more traditional virtue growing steadily more obsolete in the glowing light of that revolutionary New World our Paines and Jeffersons only glimpsed from the far side of the Potomac?
Again, I can understand the atheistic likes of a Richard Dawkins or a Peter Singer fully embracing that proud Jeffersonian vision: - the dream of a fabulous, everything-is-possible new world, that runs dazzling, dizzying circles round the old fallen earth of Scripture. Or rather I believe our Dawkinses and Singers would embrace that vision if they were logically consistent. Indeed I can see the logic of Thomas Huxley's modern heirs waxing poetic about this unbounded New World. I can imagine them composing entire odes to the pride of the naturally superior and enterprising, or whole dirges confessing the sad but necessary expendability of lesser human specimens - to say nothing of other whole species - in the face of the demands of Endless Progress. Or even the endless demands of Beijing. But us Christian Americans? What's all that socially Darwinian posturing got to do with us?
And that returns me to the second part of my original question: Why so often do we treat those other, lesser works of God as we do? Much less, I mean, as our Scriptural dominion, and much more as our own divine creation, to be milked and ravaged and disposed of as we see fit? (Imagine our God treating us like that.) And why, on the other hand, do we so revere the works of our hands and brains - even ideas, and systems, and organizations - so much so that one might suppose we thought they weren't our creations at all, but rather gifts of God? Again, I can understand certain other nations being susceptible to these kinds of idolatry. But us God-fearing Americans?
But let's suppose for the sake of argument that all the things God has given to us deserve only our most ruthless and heedless exploitation. Including our own most humanly-unfathomable inner workings, and each other's. Just find an unguarded opening somewhere and drill away, so to speak. How much more worthy of exploitation, then, are the things we not only give but impose on ourselves and each other? And not just our organizations, systems, ideas - but even our ideologies? Why can't we Yanks be as unremorsefully pragmatic, as willing to pry apart and reassemble, manipulate and discard, in our use of the things we think and devise, as in our use of what Somebody Else has devised? Why do we tremble in the presence of these former things - especially we pioneering Americans, who got where we are (so the legend goes) by fearing no one and nothing? What midnight revelation-in-a-dream has all of a sudden made both our handwork and our brainwork quasi-sacred? Worst of all, why do our politicians insist on falling all over themselves, not to mention stepping on and reviling each other, in an effort to vindicate their particular vision of the quasi-sanctity of human innovativeness - whether of gadgetry, of systems, or of ideas?
Take a long, close, even a tender and pitying look (assuming anyone has the time) at our modern Palins and Pelosis. Both these political types are known for espousing a certain bold, often loud, clamorous and morally indignant, and withal not terribly nuanced, vision of the American Future. That, at any rate, is mostly what I get when I look at the two of them politically. What I cannot see, when I look at either of them humanly, is why a Sarah Palin deserves to be stereotyped, caricatured, anathematized, or reduced to something less than human, simply for failing to subscribe to some well-intentioned but possibly misguided politician's peculiar notions of Freedom and Progress. Or why a Nancy Pelosi deserves to be stereotyped, caricatured, dehumanized, etc, simply for failing to subscribe to some well-intentioned but equally misguided politician's peculiar notions of Freedom and Growth. And I'm even less able to see why any of us should waste energy - or even much thought - on either of these good ladies' respective visions either of Progress or of Growth. Especially when there's good reason to believe both ladies' agendas are mere variations on a certain very popular contemporary theme. I mean our obsession with a certain kind of More: More exaltation of what is done at the expense of the doers, of what is made at the expense of the makers, of systems and organizations at the expense of the organized and systematized, of ideals at the expense of those less-than-ideal human creatures - ultimately all of us - who must at all costs measure up to them.
And now take, if you can, an even longer, closer look at each of these two human souls: past what you may see as the present vileness of their respective errors, past even the growing rigidities of their early wrong turns and poorly-guided choices - all the way back to the humanity of each. And perhaps even something of what that humanity might be worth in - or how it once may have delighted - the sight of their Maker. Is either of these good women worth sacrificing, or writing off, or throwing over, or giving up on - even by each other - simply because of some ideology one of them happens to believe in, and the other falls short of? Is what God made them both from the Beginning - and what He may yet remake them - really of so little consequence, when compared to the wonders they've made and mismade of themselves, and each other? And that brings me back to you and me. Is either of us worth sacrificing, or dehumanizing - or demonizing - simply because of my "truth," or your "falsehood"?
It's true that our "truths" have often enabled us Yanks to do some stupendous material things, and that these have sometimes deservedly commanded the world's awe, reverence and - most sincerely - imitation. But can we be sure in every instance that the world's valuations are those of God? Can we be certain God cares more for Microsoft than for a monkey? Or that He is more alive in us when we are upgrading the former than when we are uplifting the latter? At least in the monkey's case it is we who are the trainers. Nor am I in the least suggesting the two kinds of skill are mutually exclusive, or even inversely proportionate. Who's to say the patience required to train a monkey - not to mention the wisdom involved in gaining his trust and respect - will be of no use in running a company? Or that the (dare I print the vile four letters?) love needed to coax and nurse the decidedly tentative gifts of this lower grade of primate will be of no help in shepherding the rather more explosive talents of our own kind?
Just think how much more blessed we Americans might be with the mystery, the beauty, the complexity of God-made things - not just in our zoos or backyards, but in our own brains - if for a change we took our Godly rhetoric seriously. And how we wouldn't get our feet, or our ships and tankers, stuck in those God-made things quite so often. And just think how much less infatuated we'd be with our man-made things - even humble loans, and stocks and bonds! - and how we wouldn't get our hands and brains stuck in them quite so disastrously. Because really, if we have a hard time taking seriously the words the Lord God spoke - and those from the morning of Creation onwards - is it any wonder we have an even harder time reading correctly and clearly the words we speak? And that therefore neither our businesses nor our governments are anywhere near as honest or transparent - or even as humanly (as distinct from corporately) considerate - as we would like them to be?
Anyhow, the older I get, the more it seems to me that every thing God made is a kind of strange literature, begging to be decoded, explored, savored, by the sympathetic reader, as distinct from the critic who is hyper-critical. A sort of livingly unfolding story, if you will, begging to be read humbly, and heedfully, for what that creature is and needs - as distinct from what you and I in our arrogance think it is, or think we may need from it. By sympathetic, then, I mean the sort of reader who respects - indeed delights in - a thing for being what it is, and not just for its merely human usefulness. And yes, any thing: even a small child: and for reasons quite separate from that over-loaded creature's learning-potential, or its purchasing-power, or its future productivity. The kind of reader I envision is one who would no more criticize a lemur for not being a leopard, or a lion, than she would fault Friday for failing to be Robinson Crusoe, or belittle St Peter because he wasn't St Paul. Much less take issue with John Paul II for not choosing to be J P Morgan. She knows it takes all kinds to make a better world. But if we cannot teach ourselves to be more patient with, and loving of, the specific thingness of various things - even the oceans-deep things we ourselves are - then I don't see how we shall ever learn to respect the unique personhood of various people. Including those persons we Americans think, in our inestimable business wisdom, that we have no use, or time, or work for.
In short (if I may put the matter in terms of a classic literature course), we need readers who are skilled at reading and exploring, and not just skimming or Cliff-Noting, the world of God-made things: readers who can "lose themselves" in the various books of Nature for the pleasures of the books themselves, and of their Author - instead of just crimping what they need in order to pass some course in Natural Resource Management. Or Applied Geo-engineering. Readers, in a phrase, who have in them a little more of the author Washington Irving, and a lot less of his character Ichabod Crane. Because no matter how passionately Ichabod may have believed otherwise, the truth is that what we humans make of things, and what we can get out of them, is by no means always the most important thing about them. Or sometimes, by God's grace, even the most useful. A chicken is not always better for having been folded comfortably into a pie. And neither are we always better for having eaten it. Meanwhile, just think of the great many humans - let alone other creatures - we discard, and overlook, and fail to use and employ wisely, in this Crane-like process of focusing solely on our own narrow uses, and ignoring the rather broader, more imaginative, more compassionate uses of, once again, Somebody Else.
On the other hand, if we Americans cannot learn to read more sympathetically this irreplaceable collection of books beneath our feet, that we so patronizingly call Nature, then I fear it won't be long before we lose both our skill and our joy in reading any other scriptures. Including not only, of course, the Book of Books, but those other, Divinely fascinating books we know as our Selves, and each Other. And then how much longer do you suppose we'll remain even a God-deferring civilization? Or even, for that matter, a world-leading economy?
At the same time that should hardly satisfy us. Near-perfect as we often seem when compared with the rest of sluggish humanity, even we Yanks can always do better. And so it occurs to me that this largely Yank-driven world would run a lot more considerately, honestly, transparently - in a word, a whole lot better - if certain new things were to happen to us. Or at least to our present way of thinking. Remember, we're Americans. We like the new, sometimes to the point of infatuation.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following suggestion: That, namely, this would be not just a new and a better world, but a literally more God-fearing one, if only we Americans took more seriously a certain curious notion we have. I mean this notion of the Divine origin of things we did not make. Including those creatures - you, me, other living things - that most of us believe did not evolve more or less by themselves, but were rather more directly and purposefully created by God. It would also be a better world if we Yanks lived a lot less seriously this other, often bizarre notion we have - of the Divine inspiration of things we do make. And in particular those purposeful things we call technological, and those things pertaining to what we call procedures, and systems, and organizations. And even ideas.
I understand that, like any clever, hardy and resourceful people, we can all too easily become enraptured with the works of our hands, and the products of our intelligence. But we also have an impressive body of sacred writings, in which most of us profess in some fashion to believe, which testify that there is much more to Life than either of those things. Indeed it's even suggested, in many divers places, that there are times when those two things can become rather marginal - if not positively detrimental - to something else we call Eternal Life. What I don't understand, then, is why we Americans of all people should be the last nation on earth to want to question the value, either of unbridled technological growth, or of the ideas that conduce to it. Still less do I understand why we should be the last country on earth to see the point of cherishing some portion of: (1) the created earth as it was given to us; or even of (2) our own natures as they were given to us.
In the first place, has "nature" in its given state really nothing of value to teach us, that we insist on teaching ourselves "better" by endlessly - and often thoughtlessly - reconstructing and reconfiguring it? It's true we humans are inestimably smarter than any other mode of life that presents itself to our attention here on earth. But hopefully we God-fearing Americans are also aware that our best smartness is as nothing compared to God's wisdom. Or even God's foolishness. And precisely because our best wisdom is as nothing compared to even God's worst foolishness, He is able to surprise us. He can do strange, paradoxical things, like calling forth sons of Abraham from stones, and releasing their pent-up energies in a chorus of praise. And He has been known to conceal, as it were, even in the lowliest things He makes - even in those creatures most brutely and grossly inferior to our august selves - subtle, yet stubborn, complexities, that may elude our best efforts to simplify them. Complexities that indeed may always elude us - or at least for so long as we continue to esteem our human wisdom and power more highly than our human createdness, and lowliness, and receptivity. Which is perhaps another way of saying if we want to become better - i.e., more God-empowered - masters of our earthly dominion, a good place to start might be to try becoming better servants. Or at the very least, more humble in the presence of those lowly strange things, and that strange lowly God, whom no amount of human superiority shall ever equip us to understand.
And that brings me to my second point: The exalted species we've fashioned out of what was once placed in the Garden merely to dress and to keep it. So what of it? What of the splendid job we've done on ourselves? Have we humans really so much to show for our endless self-reconstructions, that we should like nothing better than to "redouble the pace," so to speak, in our relentless overhaul of everything else?
Mind you, I've no doubt we Yanks will continue to love our gadgets and tinkering and systematizing. And no doubt the rest of the world will continue - with one degree or other of shame and hypocrisy - to love us for our love of those things. But haven't at least some of us been known to pride ourselves also on our love of God? My question, then, is how far it is possible to love anybody without taking seriously the things he has to say. And if you're going to take seriously the things he says, how much more those particular creatures - you and me, for instance - for the sake of whom, or perhaps even the salvation of whom, he says them? But if our Maker be such - no, if His words alone be such, that we can only receive them with the utmost seriousness, of what immeasurable value are those other words of His - His creatures - on whose behalf, and for whose blessing and strengthening, those same words were written down?
Suppose, then, that these works of God are also His words, and so also to be heeded. And not nearly so much for what we creatures think and say, as for what we are, and need. Why then do we treat these works as we so often do: as if they were nothing, and needed nothing? Why do we so often treat other human beings - including many of our fellow-Americans - almost as if they were works of our own, to be worked and slaved and lorded over, and then dispensed with, as we deem necessary? And not just the ones we lay off but the ones we keep on.
But please don't misunderstand me. I'm aware that any extensive rearrangement of these matters is likely to involve a certain degree of harm to the feelings of some highly - in a few cases even self-proclaimedly - productive people. People on whose entrepreneurial and managerial gifts we all depend. Nor am I entirely insensitive to the sensitivities of the more self-consciously self-made men and women among us. I can imagine what an abysmally
Yet here I thought at least some of us modern Americans were trying to be just about the realest, genuinest, sincerest Christians who've ever lived. Why should we of all people fear humiliation, or loss of dignity? With 200+ years of practice, why, you'd think we could have written the book on humility. Or is that - now I'm beginning to get nervous - is that just one more traditional virtue growing steadily more obsolete in the glowing light of that revolutionary New World our Paines and Jeffersons only glimpsed from the far side of the Potomac?
Again, I can understand the atheistic likes of a Richard Dawkins or a Peter Singer fully embracing that proud Jeffersonian vision: - the dream of a fabulous, everything-is-possible new world, that runs dazzling, dizzying circles round the old fallen earth of Scripture. Or rather I believe our Dawkinses and Singers would embrace that vision if they were logically consistent. Indeed I can see the logic of Thomas Huxley's modern heirs waxing poetic about this unbounded New World. I can imagine them composing entire odes to the pride of the naturally superior and enterprising, or whole dirges confessing the sad but necessary expendability of lesser human specimens - to say nothing of other whole species - in the face of the demands of Endless Progress. Or even the endless demands of Beijing. But us Christian Americans? What's all that socially Darwinian posturing got to do with us?
And that returns me to the second part of my original question: Why so often do we treat those other, lesser works of God as we do? Much less, I mean, as our Scriptural dominion, and much more as our own divine creation, to be milked and ravaged and disposed of as we see fit? (Imagine our God treating us like that.) And why, on the other hand, do we so revere the works of our hands and brains - even ideas, and systems, and organizations - so much so that one might suppose we thought they weren't our creations at all, but rather gifts of God? Again, I can understand certain other nations being susceptible to these kinds of idolatry. But us God-fearing Americans?
But let's suppose for the sake of argument that all the things God has given to us deserve only our most ruthless and heedless exploitation. Including our own most humanly-unfathomable inner workings, and each other's. Just find an unguarded opening somewhere and drill away, so to speak. How much more worthy of exploitation, then, are the things we not only give but impose on ourselves and each other? And not just our organizations, systems, ideas - but even our ideologies? Why can't we Yanks be as unremorsefully pragmatic, as willing to pry apart and reassemble, manipulate and discard, in our use of the things we think and devise, as in our use of what Somebody Else has devised? Why do we tremble in the presence of these former things - especially we pioneering Americans, who got where we are (so the legend goes) by fearing no one and nothing? What midnight revelation-in-a-dream has all of a sudden made both our handwork and our brainwork quasi-sacred? Worst of all, why do our politicians insist on falling all over themselves, not to mention stepping on and reviling each other, in an effort to vindicate their particular vision of the quasi-sanctity of human innovativeness - whether of gadgetry, of systems, or of ideas?
Take a long, close, even a tender and pitying look (assuming anyone has the time) at our modern Palins and Pelosis. Both these political types are known for espousing a certain bold, often loud, clamorous and morally indignant, and withal not terribly nuanced, vision of the American Future. That, at any rate, is mostly what I get when I look at the two of them politically. What I cannot see, when I look at either of them humanly, is why a Sarah Palin deserves to be stereotyped, caricatured, anathematized, or reduced to something less than human, simply for failing to subscribe to some well-intentioned but possibly misguided politician's peculiar notions of Freedom and Progress. Or why a Nancy Pelosi deserves to be stereotyped, caricatured, dehumanized, etc, simply for failing to subscribe to some well-intentioned but equally misguided politician's peculiar notions of Freedom and Growth. And I'm even less able to see why any of us should waste energy - or even much thought - on either of these good ladies' respective visions either of Progress or of Growth. Especially when there's good reason to believe both ladies' agendas are mere variations on a certain very popular contemporary theme. I mean our obsession with a certain kind of More: More exaltation of what is done at the expense of the doers, of what is made at the expense of the makers, of systems and organizations at the expense of the organized and systematized, of ideals at the expense of those less-than-ideal human creatures - ultimately all of us - who must at all costs measure up to them.
And now take, if you can, an even longer, closer look at each of these two human souls: past what you may see as the present vileness of their respective errors, past even the growing rigidities of their early wrong turns and poorly-guided choices - all the way back to the humanity of each. And perhaps even something of what that humanity might be worth in - or how it once may have delighted - the sight of their Maker. Is either of these good women worth sacrificing, or writing off, or throwing over, or giving up on - even by each other - simply because of some ideology one of them happens to believe in, and the other falls short of? Is what God made them both from the Beginning - and what He may yet remake them - really of so little consequence, when compared to the wonders they've made and mismade of themselves, and each other? And that brings me back to you and me. Is either of us worth sacrificing, or dehumanizing - or demonizing - simply because of my "truth," or your "falsehood"?
It's true that our "truths" have often enabled us Yanks to do some stupendous material things, and that these have sometimes deservedly commanded the world's awe, reverence and - most sincerely - imitation. But can we be sure in every instance that the world's valuations are those of God? Can we be certain God cares more for Microsoft than for a monkey? Or that He is more alive in us when we are upgrading the former than when we are uplifting the latter? At least in the monkey's case it is we who are the trainers. Nor am I in the least suggesting the two kinds of skill are mutually exclusive, or even inversely proportionate. Who's to say the patience required to train a monkey - not to mention the wisdom involved in gaining his trust and respect - will be of no use in running a company? Or that the (dare I print the vile four letters?) love needed to coax and nurse the decidedly tentative gifts of this lower grade of primate will be of no help in shepherding the rather more explosive talents of our own kind?
Just think how much more blessed we Americans might be with the mystery, the beauty, the complexity of God-made things - not just in our zoos or backyards, but in our own brains - if for a change we took our Godly rhetoric seriously. And how we wouldn't get our feet, or our ships and tankers, stuck in those God-made things quite so often. And just think how much less infatuated we'd be with our man-made things - even humble loans, and stocks and bonds! - and how we wouldn't get our hands and brains stuck in them quite so disastrously. Because really, if we have a hard time taking seriously the words the Lord God spoke - and those from the morning of Creation onwards - is it any wonder we have an even harder time reading correctly and clearly the words we speak? And that therefore neither our businesses nor our governments are anywhere near as honest or transparent - or even as humanly (as distinct from corporately) considerate - as we would like them to be?
Anyhow, the older I get, the more it seems to me that every thing God made is a kind of strange literature, begging to be decoded, explored, savored, by the sympathetic reader, as distinct from the critic who is hyper-critical. A sort of livingly unfolding story, if you will, begging to be read humbly, and heedfully, for what that creature is and needs - as distinct from what you and I in our arrogance think it is, or think we may need from it. By sympathetic, then, I mean the sort of reader who respects - indeed delights in - a thing for being what it is, and not just for its merely human usefulness. And yes, any thing: even a small child: and for reasons quite separate from that over-loaded creature's learning-potential, or its purchasing-power, or its future productivity. The kind of reader I envision is one who would no more criticize a lemur for not being a leopard, or a lion, than she would fault Friday for failing to be Robinson Crusoe, or belittle St Peter because he wasn't St Paul. Much less take issue with John Paul II for not choosing to be J P Morgan. She knows it takes all kinds to make a better world. But if we cannot teach ourselves to be more patient with, and loving of, the specific thingness of various things - even the oceans-deep things we ourselves are - then I don't see how we shall ever learn to respect the unique personhood of various people. Including those persons we Americans think, in our inestimable business wisdom, that we have no use, or time, or work for.
In short (if I may put the matter in terms of a classic literature course), we need readers who are skilled at reading and exploring, and not just skimming or Cliff-Noting, the world of God-made things: readers who can "lose themselves" in the various books of Nature for the pleasures of the books themselves, and of their Author - instead of just crimping what they need in order to pass some course in Natural Resource Management. Or Applied Geo-engineering. Readers, in a phrase, who have in them a little more of the author Washington Irving, and a lot less of his character Ichabod Crane. Because no matter how passionately Ichabod may have believed otherwise, the truth is that what we humans make of things, and what we can get out of them, is by no means always the most important thing about them. Or sometimes, by God's grace, even the most useful. A chicken is not always better for having been folded comfortably into a pie. And neither are we always better for having eaten it. Meanwhile, just think of the great many humans - let alone other creatures - we discard, and overlook, and fail to use and employ wisely, in this Crane-like process of focusing solely on our own narrow uses, and ignoring the rather broader, more imaginative, more compassionate uses of, once again, Somebody Else.
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