Loving God with Only Half of Ourselves (at most)

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: 

These are intensely, even savagely purposeful times. Which is to say, most of us tend to take our "higher" purposes - moral, political, theological - very seriously. And in particular those on which we've duly and morally deliberated. The apparent assumption being that we, as a Radically Enlightened Aggregate Globe,* are finally getting on the Right Track, or Right Side, or whatever. Which can further mean that, depending on how enlightened and virtuous we deem our Purpose to be, most of us don't take any too kindly to things not turning out the way we intend. Especially when we've already pre-determined what the proper course of events and outcomes should be - like, again, say, a Right Side of History. Not to mention how our own actions - and yours too, for that matter - should ideally reflect and reinforce that right pattern. With no exceptions or deviations. 

*Whatever the grosser deficiencies/sins/errors of individual nations and states: Hungary, Florida, etc.

And yet, as much as most of us would like to do exactly what we intend to - with not so much as the slightest deviation arising from impulse, perplexity or circumstance - the fact is that our actions don't always conform perfectly to our intentions. Being human and fallen, we often fail to live by the things we profess. Or else certain other things get in the way - often despite our own best efforts - leaving us frustrated, or discouraged, or chastened. Sometimes even humbled. 

Yet even then, I think, far too often (but especially in these Russo-Ukrainean times?), the solution for far too many of us is simply to double down on the Original Aim. As if conforming our actions perfectly to Its requirements was a mere matter of greater discipline and tenacity. Of putting all our mind and will to it, and thus getting exactly what we intend. To the point, indeed, where not just our own Best Selves, but whatever god, superior being, higher power or larger purpose we esteem ourselves to be serving, is presumed to be in fullest agreement with our tenacity. And even with our "stubbornness," if you will. And self-frustration. And self-disgust. Almost as if this Higher Power or Purpose were not just requiring nothing more of us, by way of command, but could offer nothing more to us, by way of grace, and help. Other than maybe "That's right, do it again! But this time DO IT RIGHT!" 

And seriously, what's the use of any god that's unable to be gracious? or even illuminating? What's the good of any supreme being, power, purpose, plan, etc, that merely rubberstamps all our most self-obsessive moralistic compulsions?

So, again, I find this to be an Age that fervently believes in and swears by discipline - indeed the all-but-limitless power of disciplined self-invention and self-command - to open just about every door, and to remove practically every obstacle. Including those involving what some would call - or used to call - nature, or gender, or national identity. Or even, sometimes, the barest semblance of national, regional or local autonomy, and self-determination. After all, if truth is Truth - and how much more our hard-won truths of self-creation and self-discipline? - and if our Truth be such that it must be expounded not just economically but militarily throughout the globe - then why should it be constrained by borders of any kind, whether geographic or biological? 

An older generation - one, say, more conscious of its debt to German moral philosophy - might somehow feel like it's been here before. Might even recall lots of stirring talk about the Power (or even the triumph) of the Human Will. And by no means only among those German belligerents, along with their many admirers, of the Second World War. But however we like to phrase it nowadays, I find this generation to be one that believes in the power - the almost boundless power for good - of choice, decision, resolution, DISCIPLINE. 

At the same time, again, we all know how even the best-laid and most disciplined resolutions can fail us. What we often fail, I think, to realize is how sometimes even our best decisions can have outcomes worse than failure. How not just the worthiest, but the most successfully-carried-out resolves can warp, distort and denature our actions. To the point where, even with some of our apparently most successful executions of aim, the result becomes something different - indeed disturbingly different  - either from what we intended, or from what those most affected by our actions might have wished we'd intended.* But either way, the result is revealed to be something deeply disappointing. If not downright brutal and ugly.

*Just think of all the civilian populations of Libya, Syria and Yemen who during these past twelve years were terrorized, oppressed and dislocated, either by ISIS, or by what were very likely ISIS- or al Qaeda-fellow travelers or competitors. And who now have every reason to wish that the intentions of US policy-makers had been either very different, or very differently executed.

But, again, this is nothing if not an Age of fierce, even implacable resolution and determination. And so nowadays we have all sorts of people, professing a wide gamut of religious and quasi-religious beliefs, who are firmly resolved upon loving (what they take to be) God and neighbor, as if the matter depended entirely on their mere strength of resolution. And determination. And DISCIPLINE. 

My question is, How's it all really working? And working out? To what extent is it making us more effectually charitable, and compassionate? And in a Way that actually changes us for the better? And not just for the more staunch and resolute? And up-in-arms? And confrontational?

What I think we've been learning, but especially today - and that from the hardest of teachers - is what a miserable thing  it is to try to love God with only a part of oneself: what an angry, barren, recriminatory thing it is to resolve, and strive, and strain to love God with all one's mind and strength, before we have first yielded to Him our heart.

Now of course no moral act is ever a matter of mere emotion - as this Righteous Age never tires of reminding us. But that doesn't mean our emotions cannot be allies, and even conduits and instruments - imagine it! even of the God who made them. And of course there is more to us than our hearts, nor are they all of us that matters. But personally I know of no better portal to the soul than the affections - at least when we have allowed them to settle, so that our oldest, most secret desires are at last visible from the pond's surface: no clearer sounding into that Depth of us which hungers most desperately and ravenously, as it were, for God. In any case, and whatever the passing deceptions and superficialities of our hearts, they reveal a very different - if I may say, a far more childlike? - face, as we allow God to be their molder and sculptor. And lover. They may even point the Way to a soul we hardly knew was there, much less realized that it, too, has a voice, and a longing, and a wisdom. "Oh, but who could have imagined it? I mean, just what exactly does the soul DO?"

Well, I can hardly claim to be anything like an expert on the soul's actions. But if nothing else, I suspect it knows a far gentler and surer path to love, whether of God or of neighbor, than even our most staunchly convictioned vehemence of intellect and will. Not to mention - provided we let God be its searchlight - it tends to know and search us. And far more thoroughly, I believe, than all our most brilliant combinations of heart, mind and strength could know the life of a mouse. Much less that of any man or woman. And maybe least of all a child's?

Pray for the peace of Kyiv.

God heal America.

Why Klaus Schwab is My Favorite Modern Poet

I

Unhappy First - and please God last? - Anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainean Mutual Madness. 

And pardon, again, my disgracefully long hiatus.

It's not that I didn't write anything. But even those scribblings of mine that attempted a holiday (much less a holy season) mood were pretty much desiccated by what I'd like to think of as my driest, deadeningest, most desperate-for-a-glimmer-of-hope Christmastide in memory. It was, in short, exactly the sort of "Antichristmas" all too appropriate for a world skating merrily on the brink of - but wait for it - potentially thermonuclear escalation. (Can't get too much of a righteous thing, you know.) And that, of the most epically wicked, apocalyptically insane war ever instigated by two equally mad  - and I suspect more or less evenly wrong - "great" powers. 

Then again, I've heard it said that every global generation gets the kind of Russia it's worked hardest for, and so most deserves. Plus, the renewed threat of an expectedly odious Moscow usually means some rise in the political stock of Washington. Making it all the more likely the same globe will end up with the kind of America it's worked hardest to appease and mollify - to say nothing of idolize? With the overall result being one any fool could predict: the whole world gets exactly the sort of omniconfident Hyper-america, and criminally paranoid Russia, everyone else most dreads. 

(Meanwhile a benignly[?] futuristic Beijing - much like the Walrus in the Lewis Carroll poem - sheds a bitter tear for us both. And then proceeds to sort out for itself the oysters - both Russian and American - of the largest size.)

But now recall how I described my latest Christmas: "driest, deadeningest, most desperate for a glimmer of hope." I'm not perfectly sure why. But I believe it has something to do with - and may even be a near-perfect description (if not indictment) of - our language today. And in particular that language we use to explore, and advocate, and celebrate those things dearest to us. Or that we profess to care most about. Or even such as we might have been tempted, once upon a time, to "wax poetic" about, as we used to say. Tempted, in other words, to try and find the most concise, musical, evocative words, and those "in the best order,"* with which to express our joys, and to "bring to life" those things we most delight in. Things, you know, like Christmas. Or, on a much more comprehensive scale, like the Future Peace, Progress and Prosperity of the World. 

*To paraphrase Coleridge's definition of poetry.

II

Which brings me to the subject of my title. Because if Mr Klaus Schwab, founder and presiding genius of the World Economic Forum, hasn't devoted the better part of a lifetime to caring about what he understands to be those latter things - Peace, Prosperity, a Global Progress seemingly defiant of all human limits and constraints - I'd like to know who has.

Still, the question has been raised as to why - in that case - he hasn't chosen livelier, more compelling, more humanly-accessible words to exhort us towards these goals. In a Guardian review of his 2017 prognosis The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Stephen Poole writes: "It is composed in the deadening language of executive jargon, addressing 'leaders' who want to know how to navigate an era of 'exponentially disruptive change'." 

He goes on to write: "As usual, this high-management style contains much fashionable vacuity (we should avoid 'linear thinking', it says, which is meaningless however you interpret it), and also a weird kind of imagistic brutality – the 'gig economy' companies such as Uber or Taskrabbit are 'human cloud platforms', as though the serfs who work for them are euphoric angels playing harps on a bed of cumulonimbus. To complete the style, just add a heavy dose of tech-utopian boilerplate, such as the claim that 'digital technology knows no borders', which of course it does: witness Facebook’s recent decision to comply with China’s censorship laws so it can operate there."

Poole qualifies this criticism by adding: "To be fair, Schwab shows in an appendix that he does know that the idea that 'digital technology knows no borders' is simply false, and throughout he is careful to be even-handed about the upsides and downsides of every technology he discusses. Artificial intelligence might be super-useful, or it might constitute 'an existential threat to humanity'. Biotechnology might cure all diseases, or it might create a schism of bio-inequality."

In keeping with that more qualified assessment, I'd like to submit the following direct quotes, as further evidence that Mr Schwab is no dry and brutal technocrat. Rather do we find him able to bring to his favorite topics not just nuance and sensitivity, but a very balanced concern for the possible human downsides of an exhilarating, yet also conceivably terrifying Age, and pace, of change.  

"The Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to empower individuals and communities, as it creates new opportunities for economic, social, and personal development. But it also could lead to the marginalization of some groups, exacerbate inequality, create new security risks, and undermine human relationships."

"As the novelty of wearable tech gives way to necessity - and, later, as wearable tech becomes embedded tech - will we be deprived of the chance to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful, substantive conversations? How will our inner lives and ties to those around us change?"

Now call me a blithering literary ignoramus. But the more I study the matter, the more I find Mr Schwab, even as a prose-writer, to be one of our finest contemporary poets. Or at least to the extent that nuggets of real and excellent poetry, as a writer wiser than myself has suggested, can be found lodged in even the stubbornest, most calcified prose. None of which latter terms, I think, fairly describe the bulk of Mr Schwab's writing. Just consider for a moment what he has succeeded in doing, and how it puts him leagues ahead of the pack of some of our most serious living poets:

     1) he is more or less intelligible and straightforward; 

     2) he has something to share with the general public, and not just with some enlightened coterie of chosen colleagues and fans; 

     3) the things that he says are heartfelt - they concern those matters he most unabashedly cares about and hopes for (as opposed to finger-wagging and sneering at); 

     4) he manages to write, on topics and prospects that might otherwise be either hideously dull or horrifically alarming, with not just a certain elegant conciseness, but with a measured enthusiasm,  caution, even a kind of compassion.

So why, some have asked, hasn't he chosen better words for the job? If these are the things he cares most about - indeed is most viscerally passionate for - why can't he convey their urgency in words that are more visceral and vital: that go, so to speak, to the very roots of our being? Which is to say, those roots that suggest we humans might even have a life beyond this present one?

Not, of course, that he's by any means impervious to the religious dimension of human progress. Poole himself admits: "Indeed, the book climaxes with a rather lovely plea for everyone to work together in a 'new cultural renaissance' that apparently will depend on some kind of cosmic spirituality. The fourth industrial revolution might lead to a dehumanising dystopia, Schwab allows soberly. On the other hand, we could use it 'to lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny'." 

My question is, Do all these possible outcomes - even the happiest - have to depend solely on our unaided human efforts? And in the unsettling event that they don't, could he not be more specific, or at least suggestive, about some of the possible alternatives? And in particular, on What - or Whom - else we might be depending? Suppose, let's say, that there really is an intelligent pre-established End as well as Beginning to the history of this vast universe. A blessedly unmovable Omega as well as Alpha, such as even we ever-dynamic human can't alter or derail. Or deter. And yet One who also has a kind of plan or goal or consummation, even for us. Could not he - Mr Schwab - then, have tried to give us a more vivid and compelling sense of our human place and mission within that spiritual journey, and that promise of fulfilment? And if not, what is it that prevents him? Is it primarily the limitations of the man himself at work here? Or more those of the time and intellectual climate he lives in? (Allowing, let's not forget, that Mr Schwab may have played as large a role in the shaping and sculpting of our Age - at least of its distinctness and peculiarities - as any single human being living.)

III   

But before I go on, an apology. My point is not to hold up poor Mr Schwab for either excessive admiration or undue belittlement. Whatever else, he is above all a man of his time - an Age which some would argue has never been more verbally limited, if not downright impoverished or straitjacketed. Certainly, whatever else this glorious Era may excel in, it is no Golden Age of Poetry. Or at least no poetry that's readily accessible, or encouraging  - or even approachable? - to the moderately literate reader. I mean, after all, there's only so much verbal challenge/stridency/cacophany/agony even a modernistic ear can tolerate, much less the rest of us. And granted, we all may still on occasion experience the need for lilt, flow, grace in our written and other words. But unless we are gluttons for disappointment, we don't as a general rule go hunting for it in the jungles of today's verse. 

And so, lacking pleasurable - or even intelligible - alternatives, it's no wonder we Global Moderns have made a kind of god-of-all-work of the prosaic. Or of the Wisely Practical, as some might prefer to call it. I.e., of all the busy things we think, do and use, in short, which are best accessed by types of language that are - what? 

Most practical, to be sure. And workaday. And relevant (that sacred modern word). But anything else - in effect, if not intention?

I don't know - most clunky? flat-footed? ham-fisted? Or else, at the other extreme, most rigidly "fashionable," and present-normative? Or even Present-worshiping - and by implication past-despising? And so, in a word, least like poetry, whose own memory, and uses for memory, are far, far different things from any present-bound speech. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if a good poem can ever garner enough memory: can ever reach back far enough into the Past: can ever be more than restless until it rests, as it were, in that Presence which is the beginning of all things, and all words. Or so, I think, do our most resonantly-timed and -measured words - whether of verse or prose - lead and draw us on inexorably, even to our own farthest origins, if you will. And that regardless of our own religious beliefs or non-beliefs.

So what do I mean by Modern Prose? I mean all those realms of language whose sheer ironclad utility demands that they be almost the express opposite of any good poem: i.e., least dependent on music, and memory, and resonance, on loss and exile, on imagination and yearning. Modern prose is precisely that speech most required by the surface frictions of our lives, and by the Selves in each of us most occasioned by those surface conflicts and tensions. Those Selves, that is, which tell us that we humans really haven't got much of  - well, anything to remember. And really nothing much to hope for. Whether of Alpha or Omega. But somehow, everything to do. And that done yesterday, if not last week, or last month. Modern prose belongs most to those selves we "have to be" - or need to become - in order to thrive and prosper in, and progress beyond, the stresses of this mad world we mutually create. As distinct from those other Selves for which we (secretly) yearn, and which our restoration, and the creatures of its Garden, most eagerly awaits. 

Now of the two, our prosaic self is of course the most outward, and so easiest to recognize, in both ourselves and others; and thus we see and collide, confront and compete with it all the time. The other is most inward, and so we see most seldom if at all; indeed the great majority of us would hardly know what to do with it if we did see it. Our first reaction would be to dismiss it as utterly useless. Or worse, as irredeemably primitive: something our human evolution in its wisdom should have canceled ages ago. 

And so I suspect we largely do, most of the time. Except, of course, in the measure that our modern language - even our most desertified everyday, workaday speech - still thirsts for some forgotten rivulet of verbal music from old Adam's oldest wellsprings. But that's just it: even if we did so thirst, and all the time, how would we know it? And especially Today, of all practical ages? The most tin-eared, leadenly-unmusical prose is so much simpler and ready-for-use, for everything we do (except of course for those moments when, in its often brutal zeal to over-simplify, it complicates everything). 

But even allowing for its occasional mis-steps and barbarities, where would we be without our Modern Prose? It explains, it functionalizes, it creates whole agendas and projects for the almighty frictions and future-drivenness of our lives. So what if it doesn't understand the periodic need of those same lives for peace, and recollection? We've gotten along just fine, using it as our maid-(if not god-)of-all-work these past 50-odd years, thank you very much. Yes, even as our "poetry" has grown more ponderously esoteric and dark, violent and dissonant. Which makes sense too, I suppose, when you (merely) think about it. I mean, what's the use of any modern poetry that can't compete point for point - or even tooth and nail? - with our best Modern Prose? Hence, again, our Global Modern intoxication with the utility and power of the prosaic, and our incapacity to find any use, or even beauty, in anything remotely poetic, whether in prose or verse. 

Right. And this is the sturdy "practical" language with which we're supposed to find the tender, exquisitely compassionate words to encompass every conceivable human condition and confusion, and (gender-)reconfiguration. We don't even care to know how, or why, this or that soul has been made the way it is. Or even if it has a maker. And we're the ones who are going to pontificate - wisely - on how its body both needs to, and must, be remade?

Meanwhile, pray - and fast - for the peace and sanity of Kyiv. And the return to sanity of Moscow (and the rest of us).

God heal and deliver America. 

A Brief Plea for Sanity

Talk about the most transparently obvious advice ever offered regarding a US election (and this one in particular):

VOTE FOR CHANGE:  Stop the Madness (at home and abroad). 

The Maddest Holiness

These past few years have found me complaining, more than once, about what I like to call the growing religiosity of our global politics (pars. 4-6). Meaning that nowadays many of us - but in particular many of our most credentialed and powerful global interests - seem to be approaching age-old political questions in a rather dramatically final way. Almost as if we had Just Today discovered - as never before - the means of firmly resolving various ancient-yet-key political issues. Like, say, the Most Progressive and Enlightened Meaning of Compassion. Or Equality. Or Sovereignty. Or Freedom. 

Again, firmly resolving them. And not just pragmatically, and, say, for the next few years or decades, but ideologically, and for all time (or even all of eternity). Almost as if we all - but we Westerners in particular - had at last got hold of the fool-proof method for not just finding, but staying on, the Right Side of History. And that the better part of keeping to the Right Side consisted of knowing definitively - irrevocably, as it were - its moral weights and balances. But above all, that at the heart of this unprecedented enlightenment lay a discovery unimaginable to previous generations: namely, that the overwhelming share of human history's villainy, injustice, cruelty and oppression lies with the Christian West. As distinct from certain non-Western, and even more so non-Christian, religions and civilizations. 

So let me be clear on this point: It's not that we Global Westerners are against - or even dismissively skeptical of - religion as such.* Indeed I notice how many seem to have an especial tenderheartedness for certain rather militant, activist, and even anti-Christian forms of Confucianism and Islam (Part II, pars. 4-5)  - but more on that presently. In fact so much, it seems to me, has a spirit of religion infected even the methodology of the way we do world politics, that I'm moved to say, with very little exaggeration, that we're starting to "religi-ossify" socio-political questions - and causes - such as were never meant to be religious at all. Much less settled once for all time - in Heaven even as they are on earth, so to speak. Indeed, I notice a "sacralizing" of our answers to such an extent that today, many are prepared to censor or even anathematize all dissenting views on certain broad topics, whether past or present. 

*Although, to be fair, many of our more globally-minded seem have a burning contention with not just the Christian West, but Christianity itself, at least in its more or less orthodox modes.

So whence comes, do you think, this hunger for final, definitive, irreversible answers? And these on previously tentative subjects like not just politics and economics, but everything from global disease control to global gender studies? 

For me, it's as if we were craving a new kind of sanctity, or holiness, or consecration. One that is in fact striking in its novelty: that has its roots in, and draws its strength from, not a world beyond this one, or a life to come, or a God beyond ourselves, but rather in having found the right answers - for all time and everywhere - to various "here and now" questions. Including some that have hitherto been approached with a certain provisionality, a measured caution and suspense of mind. Questions like the final moral status of the historical records of Christianity, and Islam, and even Russia. Almost as if we Global Westerners were in the process of submitting all three entities to some kind of final judgment at the bar of history. A judgment which, so far as we believed ourselves entitled to make it, would be presuming a great deal about our own Western holiness, virtue, righteousness, etc. 

Indeed I wonder if there isn't a kind of, as it were, craving for holiness that somehow unhinges the craver: a yearning for absolute moral clarity even in politics - i.e., for  holding the moral high ground, for being the good guys for all time - that slowly, inexorably makes one mad. And in particular when one doesn't know where to begin to look for holiness, and how to recognize it. 

In any case, I'd like to make a suggestion.

This present globe will understand the point of true religion only when it grasps what it means for any human being to be holy, or set apart, or consecrated: what holiness consists of, and what makes it desirable. The point is that we mere humans cannot consecrate ourselves. We can never, by mere force or act of self-will, make ourselves better than, or better-suited than others to transform or purify, the great mass of unholy mankind. We may succeed, after a fashion, in making ourselves better than others according to our own estimates, and for our own purposes. But never for the purposes of God. Only God can consecrate us; only our Maker can remake us, and lift us up; and if He does so, it will always be for His designs, never ours.

Now this latter point - this business of knowing and doing God's designs - may seem like a straightforward enough proposition, until there comes a time when it isn't. Because no matter how well we think we may be able to know or learn the purposes of God, there is nearly always something about them that's sure to surprise us, that's bound to catch us up short. I may (think I) know a given Divine plan inside out, and yet be surprised, or even alarmed or dismayed, by the person He chooses to implement it, or to be its chief instrument (par. 7). Or even the way He chooses to go about this project, which may seem to show scant regard for the priorities closest to my heart. In short, our capacity to be made holy often involves our willingness to laugh certain things off: including a good many things that we in our wisdom were most rigidly, and in our view rightly, expecting. Or at least expecting to go a certain way. And what is true for each one of us is at least as much true for this busy, ambitious, hungry-for-encompassing-answers modern globe. 

Take, again, our modern globalizing West. It may be passionately "religious" - supremely confident of its ultimate vindication by history - in its ambition to exalt and glorify a "fully sovereign" Ukraine; to punish, destabilize or anathematize a renegade Russia; to understand, condole with, and tenderly conciliate even the most anti-Western, revanchist interpretations of Islam. Or even a revanchist, anti-Christian People's Republic of China (and that for all our perfunctory saber-rattling to the contrary). Our Global West may be no less fervent in its desire for a kind of (secular?) holiness: for a separating, from within its own ranks, of wheat from chaff, righteous from unrighteous, progressive from reactionary, woke from unwoke. But it will never recognize the genuine article except as it understands holiness as something more than just fervor, or zeal, or even righteous anger: until it embraces holiness as a thing inseparable from humility, and humility as something wholly inoperative, indeed a mere dead letter, apart from a certain human capacity for surprise and humor. Yes, even about myself, and my fondest ideals and agendas. And yours.

In other words, this present globe, at the present rate it is going, seems to have very little prospect of acquiring or even understanding real humility. Which means it likely has no hope of ever understanding the point of true, (God-, and not man-) centered religion. Much less true holiness. At least, not any time before the return of Holiness Himself.

A Queen's Legacy (and its enemies)

"My own association with the Commonwealth has taught me that the most important contact between nations is usually contact between its peoples. An organisation dedicated to certain values, the Commonwealth has flourished and grown by successfully promoting and protecting that contact. At home, Prince Philip and I will be visiting towns and cities up and down the land. It is my sincere hope that the Diamond Jubilee will be an opportunity for people to come together in a spirit of neighbourliness and celebration of their own communities. We also hope to celebrate the professional and voluntary service given by millions of people across the country who are working for the public good. They are a source of vital support to the welfare and well-being of others, often unseen or overlooked." [Emphasis mine]

 - Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee Speech, Westminster, March 2012

But before I say anything else:

I know it's been a good while since I've posted anything (assuming - again - anyone really cares). I also  know that, lately, I seldom seem to do much of anything post-wise other than to pose what some may dislike as stupid, nitpicking, impertinent questions. Ones usually directed at, or about, our Globally Enlightened American Establishment. Who, as everyone knows, should rarely if ever be questioned about much of anything, under even the direst circumstances. Conditions like, for instance, our country's current frolicking on the brink of what may be an unprecedented abyss: that of a steadily escalating nuclear exchange between our globe's two indisputably foremost nuclear powers. 

Not, mind you, that any of us need be prematurely alarmed just yet. Especially seeing we're in such capable hands. After all, what's the worst that could happen? Even if we should embrace the risk - or skirt the brink - of permanently enfeebling or eviscerating or dismembering vile old Russia, what's the worst we should expect by way of retaliation? I mean, surely old Vladdy's not mad enough (or else too much of a cowardly scoundrel) to do something really desperate? 

But now - if you can - please try and put up and with me and my questions a bit longer. Because I've got a few more.

First off, notice how different were the late Queen's stated priorities from those of our present rulers. She spoke of contacts between not just nations, but those nations' peoples. Including presumably all sorts of everyday simple ordinary folk from all walks of life. In other words, "contacts" should not be confined to those ultra-sophisticated, influential, hyper-credentialed types - corporate, military-industrial, think-tank, NGO, etc - most eager to establish deep connection, if not outright collusion, with their opposite numbers in other countries. (Almost as if these latter together should constitute a kind of global "super-country" far above and beyond the needs, concerns or even the votes of the mere countries of their fellow-citizens.) 

Indeed, she almost seemed to imply - again, taking her literally - that leaders within a nation exist for the sake of their people, and not the other way around. And that even contacts between nations should be assessed by more or less the same yardstick. 

Whereas today it seems the great bulk of the world's leaders approach the same question - how best to ensure the well-being of every nation's citizens - from a rather different standpoint. Today it is widely believed that the most important contacts between nations are those which most reduce the risk of what is technically known as symmetrical war between the globe's major powers. And that the most reliable mechanism for the prevention of symmetrical war is a kind of solidarity of global leaders whose overwhelming power, wealth, prestige, command of technology, and access to private security tend to make them:

 (1) very little invested in the welfare, security and prosperity of their own nations; even as they steadily become 

(2) very much insulated against the fates, troubles, fears and uncertainties of their nations' peoples. 

And all of it for their respective peoples' own good, of course. All so that they can view their own citizens' concerns with less emotion and prejudice - which is to say, more distantly, rationally, dispassionately. Nowadays what we've discovered is that you cannot view the hardships, fears, anxieties, etc, of your own nation with too much distance and dispassion. Whereas you can very easily become blinded by tribal sentiment and prejudice. But especially in what we've come to recognize as the really elemental, nitty-gritty, rubber-meets-road departments of life. As in, of course, matters of Global Aggregate Economic Growth. Along with its accompanying vital questions of profit-and-loss for the really big, vital players in the game. 

Take, for instance, today's more or less Amazonized commercial and workplace culture in many of our Western countries. No doubt it's highly reassuring, for many of our globally-minded leaders, to be able to view even some of the most unpleasant (if not downright ugly) Economic Truths of our Time - e.g., truths about workplace regimentation, or worker motivation and morale - with a coolly dispassionate rationality. After all, that's just the way real, productive Life is. 

Anyhow, my first question is: 

Can our leaders' altogether rational and justifiable removal from the mundane concerns, fears, etc, of their ordinary constituents carry with it some unintended - or even disquieting and destabilizing - effects? And those upon pretty much everybody? In their zeal, say, to make the world safe for the freedom of our various (most rational and necessary) Amazonias, do our otherwise rational leaders run the risk of becoming themselves fanatical - i.e., losing all sense of proportion and restraint? And all the more so in the legitimate pursuit of something good? To the point, in fact, where their zeal takes on an almost religious or even apocalyptic coloration? (final paragraph only) 

But in particular in trying to "bring to heel" certain recalcitrant, backward, reactionary or "fascistic" parts of the globe? Or even - dare I say it - certain countries that simply don't care to be Amazonized to the nth degree?

And so I come to my final set of questions for the world, as we enter, in the wake of the Queen's death, what may more and more prove to be a post-Commonwealth (if not an anti-Commonwealth) Age (paragraphs 6-7). And that not just for Britain but for the world at large. 

Will it also be a more fiercely "convictioned" and ideological Age, at ever higher levels of global power, wealth, expertise and influence? Which is to say, even in our otherwise most rational/pragmatic citadels of real power? 

Will it be an Age in which - in the effort to govern more uniformly and "globally" ever more diverse and disparate regions of the globe - there's less and less virtue to be seen in either patience or restraint? Or even nuance? An Age in which the humility, resilience and conciliation of Compromise are steadily replaced by the arrogance, fixity and intransigence of Principle? To the point where, say, even some of our most credentialed, wealthy, powerful and influential elites contemplate an escalating nuclear exchange as just one of several "unfortunate but necessary" calculated risks? Or  policy options? 

And not just elites in - obviously enough - Moscow or Beijing. But possibly (even more so) in Washington, or post-Commonwealth Westminster? Or Warsaw? Or righteous Kyiv?

American Greatness Revisited

Call me a 4th of July Scrooge. 

No doubt it's simply the national occasion, and my (as usual) excessive sensitivity. Or paranoia, as some might say. It's just that I can't quite get over how often, in even some of our most non-political online media - hobby-and-interest-themed websites, etc - the glory of American exceptionalism somehow manages to creep in. Or, as often as not, comes out screaming in one's face. 

How it is that I can't explore, say, even a jazz review  blog these days, without being reminded of how insufficiently exceptionalist I am. Or how lukewarmly "proud of America." Without being immersed, I mean, in some heart-warming litany to all the countless ways in which the United States is not just an indisputably great country (a proposition I can fully understand and accept), but, in true Muhammad Ali form, THE GREATEST. 

The first question that comes to mind: 

Just how do you believe and profess that statement literally, and with all your heart, and not find yourself - without in the least intending to, of course - mentally consigning all sorts of harmless non-Russian, non-Chinese countries to a growing redundance, irrelevance and invisibility. And especially those that aren't quite fully on the same page with US-driven agendas: that are perceived as not fully sharing, or as indifferent to, our Western Establishment consensus of "market-driven" growth, globalization, regime-change interventionism and radical (i.e., post-gender) self-determination.

Imagine you're a person of real clout - perhaps even global-scale geopolitical power and influence - who fully subscribes to this grand consensus. How do you stop from finding yourself - again, perhaps against your better initial judgment - more and more treating even "important" individuals from these countries in ways which to you may appear entirely reasonable, but to their unenlightened non-Western minds may seem cavalier, callous, disrespectful, demeaning? Or even oppressive? Granted, that exact sort of outcome may be hard to imagine in Today's Enlightened Globe, given the careful humility, deference, patience, etc, with which our globalist Best and Brightest normally conduct relations with non-Western states (/sarc). But if we could try to see farther down the road . . . as opposed to just kicking the can . . . ?

A few more questions, addressing the same issue on a more abstract level, and putting to one side peculiarities of our American history: 

When any nation more and more deems itself, not just a great, but THE greatest nation, culture, civilization, etc, ever to have existed, what might be some probable - albeit unintended - consequences down the road? Is that sentiment likely to make it more tolerant and accepting of other countries notably different from itself (including those countries not trying to undermine that glorious nation's strength, or question its prestige, but simply asking to be left alone)? Or is it just as likely to make it less tolerant and accepting? Is such an attitude most apt to make the Superior Nation more respectful and appreciative of the (non-threatening) differences in other countries, and other cultures? Or more impatient and dismissive? And is its sense of its own vast superiority - but particularly if that excellence is based on some universally-wise-and-applicable Idea - liable to make it more inclined to let other countries go their own way, and make their own mistakes, that they might see the error of their ways (and the truth of ours) for themselves? Or might it make this Superior Nation just as easily tempted - say, for certain humanitarian reasons - to apply this universal Idea zealously, and rigorously, to less fortunate regions of the planet? By various subtle and other means of pressure, wherever possible - but even by force, if necessary? 

Finally (and to get specific again): 

Why is it that the more a Superior Nation (like, say, America) boasts, and swaggers, and congratulates itself on having both MORE FREEDOM, and more unique and cutting-edge freedoms than anywhere else on earth - somehow, the less free it seems to become? And how is it that the same "elite" US interests most deeply invested in advertising, marketing, exporting, perhaps even enforcing these unique cutting-edge freedoms abroad, are also the ones most intent on abridging and circumscribing ("ideologizing?" politically correcting?) the exercise of certain much older, more time-honored freedoms here at home?  

Could it simply be that, in the words of Hamlet's immortal Gertrude:  

"[Methinks] the lady doth protest too much?"

Another Day of Life in PU

UVALDE, TX - Right now, just a couple of issues that I was wondering if someone might help me clarify: 

First off: Just how is it that we got here? (Nice, modest start to the discussion.)

How is it that, in a modern US society that vaunts, parades, brandishes, even weaponizes its compassion as never before (at least in my 63-year lifetime?) - a society that boasts a never-more-laborious concern for the seeming infinitude of possible human conditions, predicaments, choices, self-creations, -revisions and -transformations (gender- and otherwise) facing young people - how is it that, in such a fiercely, strenuously loving America, school bullying is not just alive and robust as ever, but seems to be intensifying its multimedia presence and pressure on a growing number of fronts. And even if we comfortably assume, in this post-Cold War world of Pinkerian Utopia (PU)*, that the bullying of today is not only less frequent, but actually far less cruel and more humane than it was, say, a generation ago, a question remains: why does it continue to provoke such horrific extremes of compensatory reaction - whether of rash suicide or, worst of all, of carefully orchestrated suicide/mass homicide?

*I.e., a place where - to use a very broad brush - basically everything is better, because practically everyone is so much richer (or was, until Trump, Putin, Orban, etc, came along). 

In short, if today's bullying is in fact so much "milder," do its repercussions have to be so much uglier and more tragic? And even if we concede that our advanced, omnipresent media technology is the main driver, what about other, more or less buffering means of recourse and refuge for our young people? Again, in this Pinkerian best-of-all-yet-possible-worlds, there seems to be no shortage of concerned adults eager to smooth our children's bumpiest gender and other identity transitions. Do we really, then, have so few other mature grownups both trained and ready to ease the more conventional passages of adolescence?

Second of all: In a Western world never more loud and vehement in its claims of being the force for peace and stability across the globe, how is it that its principal leader - America - continues to lead the world in entertainment products more or less saturated with violence? I mean here not just horror/slasher vehicles, or the more luridly "amoral" kinds of crime/murder/suspense dramas; in particular I'm thinking of stories - often working from a rather brutally stark good-vs-evil premise - that at times seem to celebrate an especially intensive and ugly kind of violence. And even where "celebrate" is too strong a word, how often is large-scale horrendous carnage made not just one of the main problems of the storyline, but far too often (and usually in the form of a spray of firepower) the one most decisive and effective resolution? 

All of which constant barrage of images and themes has - we can safely assume - virtually NO effect on the ways our already-troubled youngsters learn to "resolve" issues of loneliness, insecurity, rejection, media manipulation, harassment and (more and more these days?) even organized persecution. 

Right, so that's settled. But I do have a third question. Is it possible that, in spite of all our state-of-the-art, customized-as-never-before Global Compassion, our children are really no happier than their counterparts of  twenty-five years ago? But if anything, rather more confused, isolated, frustrated, adrift, angry? Or even simply less happy? 

Then again - somebody else might argue - it never really was about happiness, was it?

(Meanwhile, continue to pray for the parents, siblings, schoolmates, teachers and others who are mourning the victims, and in particular for their mutual prayer, support and availability to each other.)