Footnotes 19'1 Spring 2011
by
Udo W. Middelmann
The Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation
Chalet Les Montaux, CH 1882 Gryon, Switzerland #41 24 498 1656
Dear friends and other readers,
It is a pleasure to send you this first issue of Footnotes in 2011. I will bring you into our lives and help you catch up on our activities and reflections.
Since our return from NY in early December, Deborah and I are living in Gryon again. We arrived in time to hold and elebrate the tradidonal candlelight & Christmas Eve service in Champery for English-speakers. I have done this for the past 35 years for groups of
different sizes, always with mutch delight.
Last fall, we had a fruitul semester both of teaching at the college and lecturing outside that formal setting. We encouraged a number of people who attended our evenings, joined us at Madison Avenue Presbyterian and a series of cantatas in a Lutheran church across the park. We corresponded with a good number of people who wrote with concerns and asked for advice. One young man contacted us in deep despair over the shallow level of his ollege classes and over what he heard about Christianity in the churches he attended. He came faithfully to our open evenings and has now returned to a better college experience and challenging classes.
In February, I was very surprised to hear that my time at King's College has ended. The many letters of support from former and future students to retain me made no difference. I had been told last fall to assume that I would return in 2011. Changes I was not comfortable with in the direction of the new administration may have ontributed to that decision.
On a more welcome note, my manuscript for "Neither Necessary nor Inevitable: History is a Record of Things That Did Not Need to Happen" was accepted for publication later this year. I am of course very pleased about that and shall let you know as soon as I hear a more precise release date.
In this book I develop the seemingly obvious proposition that history in hindsight is always fixed; the stream of events that brought about the present is largely known and gives the appearance that the present was determined by prior events, that it had to happen the way it did. Yet such links to the past do not let us assume something for the future that looks like historic determinism.
Each choice leading into the next phase is ours to make and will give history a chosen, not a predetermined direction. No one, not even God, will take away our responsibility and significance. We cannot not indulge "in the sirens of retrospecive determinism" (Postwar, p 627.) As Tony Judt says so well, "There is no deterministic infallibility from past events, as if Fate, God, or History acted alone to bring them about.
I include in my book numerous illustrations from the Bible to support this view. First, there are many conditional promises that will only come true if the right choice is made. Then, there are many warnings against false choices. Thirdly, there are the passages which show God’s deep disappointment over choices made by men and women. Individual choices in history have changed its course in the past . . . and always will in the future; the future does not have its own agenda. It is created by choices within the framework originally set in creation by God. The only certainty rests in God having created a definite and lawful universe on one hand, and the confidence that God’s choices are always good, compassionate and just.
I thought much about the subject and looked at Scripture, general history and some of what I believe are awful things written in the name of God, which often tie God’s will and work to horrendous things done by people. God pleads with us to be wise, to choose life against death,
to practice the discipline of His character as God’s disciples, and yet we do not. I also develop further some of my comments in my earlier book, The Innocence of God. I want to clearly oppose the view linking God’s character and purposes, for example, to the accidental death of 5- year-old Marie Chapman that declares her death inevitable! Anyone who sees a tragic accident as a revelation from God about the length of life intended by God for the deceased makes God out to be the author of all that is wrong with a fallen world.
“Because it happened, it must have been meant to happen,” paints a mentality of fatalism in the name of a God -- the Interventionist. I want to provide a more Biblical perspective and a foundation that does not end up destroying God’s moral reliability and His grief over human carelessness and stupidity.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Coen Brothers’ film remake, True Grit, relates to
this issue! They address the subject of justice when no
one would serve it as the law required, in the senseless,
yet deliberate, murder of a young girl’s father. Since no
officer or deputy is willing to pursue the criminal, the girl
sets out on her own with the help of an unlikely character
-- an old drunkard. The story contrasts a "spiritual”
Christian perspective to the moral and factual demands
for justice in a heinous crime. The indifference to the
demands of justice by simple "leaning on the everlasting
arms of Jesus" with the Jewish understanding that justice
needs to be pursued in real history now. It is overcome
with courage, sacrifice, and guts. Life does not turn out
pretty, but more just than before, when there was no one
willing to invest in it. The symbolism of cross and snakes,
of "he shall bite your heel and you will crush his head", of
a pieta image and the loss of an arm, the signs of the
battle with the now grown woman.... A very Christian
statement by two Jewish producers, who carry out what
Jews often rightly complain about to Christians, that for
us everything is internal, personal and spiritual (Jesus in
the heart), when according to Scripture there should be a
willingness to do battle physically with moral justice by
simply "leaning on the everlastng arms of Jesus" (The old
hymn, repeated in numerous variations, is the main
musical accompaniment.) is countered by the more
Biblical and Jewish understanding that a crime calls for
justice to be served now by human beings in real history.
It is sought with courage, sacrifce, and guts. But it also
has a price: as a consequence of the pursuit to find and
execute the murderer, the lives of the protagonists do
not turn out to be pretty and resolved to normal. They
each pay a price, but real justice has been honored; the
human situation is now resolved.
A “spiritual” reading of events, whether the accidental
death of one’s sister by negligence in the Chapman case,
or the senseless murder of a man, leaves everything in
“the arms of Jesus.” But those arms never appear, do
not interfere, leave wrong unresolved and can therefore
be assumed to accept absurdity and injustice. True Grit
makes a more Biblical statement: Until the battle has
been won and God’s kingdom is established, God uses
human agents to accomplish things, whether justice for
murder or safety through effort, food from farmers,
health from medicine, justice from servants of the law,
etc.
Jesus did not offer His “everlasting arms” in order to
free people from obligations to minister to others, or to
neglect life and its demands in the real world of sin,
sweat, accidents or the need to maintain the rule of law.
Therefore, the symbolism of a snake bite and the cross
cut to draw the poison are clear references to the
promise of God that one will “bite your heel and you will
crush his head." Snakes in the film brought about death,
cruelty and horror, and now do it again. Though she was
rushed away in the old man’s arms, like Jesus in a Pieta
sculpture, a lasting consequence remains. The girl, now a
woman a generation later, has lost her arm to the snake
bite and never married. The signs of the battle against
evil remain, parallel to the wound marks of the
crucifixion which were visible after the resurrection.
Evil must not be spiritualized away, but fought against tooth
and claw! That fight brings with it its own wounds.
To me this is a very Christian view presented by two
Jewish producers, who portray what some Jews rightly
complain about: That for Christisans spirituality is internal
and personal, a feeling supported by an opinion, i.e.
Jesus in the heart, easy forgiveness, etc. According to
Scripture there should also be a willingness to do battle
with evil physically, legally or wherever it raises its ugly
head in real history, even though we often pay a heavy
price for doing this.
If this is not so, everything in history can be concluded to
have been necessarily and inevitably the right thing, the
will of God . . . forgeting that God’s will is revealed not by
the accidents and foolish choices of men in history, but in
His Word and the person of Jesus. He, it turns out, was
quite upset with what people were doing, saying and
neglecting to do.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In addition to teaching two courses and writing the
manuscript for the new book, Deborah and I also prepared
and shipped off the complete collection of Schaeffer
materials to be scanned, preserved and made available
for study to the Bush Center for Faith and Culture in Wake
Forest, NC. I mentioned this briefly in the previous
Footnotes . In a formal ceremony, Deborah and I
handed over Dr. Schaeffer’s Bible to Dr. Bruce Little, who is
overseeing the work. By now, a large portion of the papers,
books and articles have been scanned. We are eager to see
the Bible transferred into readable format, as it contains
reams of notes in the margins, cross references and
annotations revealing a clear picture of Schaeffer’s work
during years of careful study. The background of his
sermons, books and lectures is found there. We look
forward to having all the material in digital format soon
and ready to be studied both there and with us in Gryon,
as well as with The Hill House in Austin, TX.
From New York we visited friends in St. Louis, a former
member of our Board and his wife in Toledo, OH and led a
discussion on The Innocence of God in upstate New York.
We spent time with Jeremy and Lucinda Jackson in
Syracuse and prepared Rachel, a member of their church,
for her time in Gryon to take care of Edith for us for three
months. I also preached in a church in Ossining, which
always invites me to serve there and responds with great
interest to what I work out from the text they assign me
for the Sunday service.
Some of those sermons, as well as a good number of
lectures by both Deborah and me are available on our web
site. They can be freely downloaded and can serve as a
discussion starter.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I want to draw your attention to the BBC/Harvard
University lectures by Prof. Michael Sandel on various
issues of Justice. (You may not be able to watch them
directly, as I cannot either, except when they are actually
broadcast. But I found them on YouTube as well, to which,
I hope, you will have access. The lectures are well worth
your interest.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SP30C13C91C
FFEFEA6)
Sandel teaches Political Philosophy and presents
questions about the moral decisions we face in everyday
life. Is it just to steal medicine for a needy person? Is it
right to torture for the sake of finding the truth? Should a
handicapped person receive an advantage in a sport
requiring expertise? Sandel suggests throughout his 12-
part series that questions of justice for individuals cannot
be separated from questions about “the good” for
everybody. Questions of rights must include a decision
concerning the abstract value of what is good. Only
when that is settled do “rights” have a defined content
and orientation. For the modern insistence on “my
rights” has a built-in problem when one fails to recognize
that until “what is good” is defined, so-called “rights”
separate people into competing interest groups,
expressing a concern of self- centered people. This
Utilitarian outlook cannot be carried through for every
human being, because it focuses on a small solidarity
group (e.g. guys, blacks, women, or a religious
community).
The Voluntarist perception, when a particular
community decides what justice is, works against the
unity of a nation and the objectivity of what justice and
“The Good” are. Justice should treat people without
respect for their looks, wealth, education or
accomplishments, but when it is tied to “my rights,”
justice becomes tribal and loses its universal content.
True justice treats people without prejudice, giving a
stranger the same respect as a friend. The Bible teaches
this by insisting on the same law for “aliens” as well.
Therefore, questions about “my rights” need to take
second place to those of justice.
Justice, and laws codifying its direction and intent, must
not become a creation of convention nor related to only
certain values alone. Justice has as its goal a non-relative,
not only tribal, “good.”
That is the foundation of a society where Christianity
has been understood to present the truth for everyone,
rather than gathering people around a certain way of
believing. It insists on the correspondence of fact and
faith, as well as the rule of law for everyone. Things are
true and believable, because the facts demand the
response of faith and acceptance.
These lectures are fascinating and well worth your
careful consideration. It is so satisfying that the BBC raises
such questions of justice in a culture of increasing
“tribalization” in reaction to globalization across the
world. In our countries as well, people tend to look out for
themselves and their friends without being aware of the
one mankind God created. Their competing “rights” and
claims stand in confrontation against those of others,
without much consideration of what the implementation
of “my right” will do to others.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As I write this shortly after the awful earthquake and
tsunami catastrophe in Japan, I cannot resist comparing
the massive tectonic plate movements with all their power
to destroy, their ability to create havoc, with the political
earthquakes and tsunamis currently creating huge
upheavals in the formerly obedient (by religious sentiment
and authoritarian rule!) populations across the Arab world.
Besides the large loss of life, the survivors’ families are
torn apart; neighborhoods, places of work and familiar
objects are gone forever in Japan, washed away by a
mighty wave. In Arab countries a tsunami-like wave is also
tearing apart what seemed once to be a collectivity of
culture and faith, of close families and lasting traditions,
which were exploited and enforced by autocratic dictators
and royal courts. There was little awareness of our Magna
Carta event.
Whatever the outcome there, the world will not remain
the same. In this “W” was correct, when he said that the
appreciation of freedom is a human, not just a Western,
phenomenon. Of course, it does not give the present
movements for freedom and greater participation a
direction, or a clear content, once the common harness of
Arabic autocracy is thrown away. Is the desire for freedom
enough to define what a good society will look like?
Freedom without form has no limit, no definition. Already
voices arise and votes are being cast to favor old over
young, men over women, the crowd over the wise, speedy
change over considerations of “The Good”.
It takes much more effort to clarify possible ideas first
and then to pass the laws to implement and protect them
by practical political measures.
Now that the release, finally, from the pressure cooker
of Arab social and economic patterns is happening, will
the mass of courageous, eager and yet desperately
inexperienced people who have no public tradition of
open debate restrain their expectations, work with
people always far from perfect and be able to delay the
fulfillment of their most extreme hopes? Will they
recognize the continuing presence of autocratic patterns
on lower levels of life, such as in families, schools,
employment and religion, which also need evaluation and
greater freedom in order to have a more civil way of
relating to each person in the family and on the street?
Will they be able to create the political and moral
framework enabling them to put food on the table,
create safety into the street and abolish the massive
corruption so common everywhere?
The problem is that all groups are now at heart only
minorities, whether in the Near East or increasingly also
in our countries. What common deffinition of “The Good”
do we have, when there is little that reminds us of the
common bonds other than flag, cause and language?
And even the latter is increasingly neglected and its social
and economic benefit in doubt.
The common good was once defined in our culture by
Christianity. You could tick off the mandate to love one’s
neighbor, the value of individual persons, the nobility of
work and personal property, the tools of reason and the
rule of law and contracts, which guaranteed both
protection under and access to courts of law.
That was a framework for our society.
That wholeness is shattered, when our concerns
become primarily particular: Christian, Conservative vs.
Liberal, women vs. men, home vs. public schoolers, the
poor vs. the middle class, and Baby-Boomers vs.
Generation Xers, the recent and the distant immigrants.
Add to this the “weird” phenomenon that we think
nothing of having social networks linking people by wire
and electronically without any lasting commitment and
mostly at a distance. My neighbor may belong to another
group, and I can drop my Facebook neighbor and forget
about him or her any time with a simple “delete” on my
key board. Religion also is decided by personal interest.
All this is no more than a shadow of a formerly vital
commonwealth under shared cultural assumptions.
Instead of formerly large expressions to bind us
together, we have severely damaged pillars of meaning.
What was once held in common in religion and in
deffinitions of work, wages, marriage, education, or truth
can no longer be assumed to be shared.
“Cut loose from their moorings, individuals fall back on
their own resources, which are like jetsam in the oceanic
drift: broken myths, rejected ideologies, disproven faiths,
and untrusted authorities” writes James Carroll, (IHT
03/15/2011). We do not yet see how the common
longing for freedom will produce the required voluntary
order in the new society yet to be born.
In our own cultural context I raise the question how an
increasingly particularist orientation can prevent isolation
and keep in mind the need for unity? How can self-
interest be kept from destroying the concern for a
common good? Do we have among us any more of a
common consensus than those who in Arabian capitol
sand villages clamor for individual freedom?
We will do well to remember that the Biblical command
to love one’s neighbor as oneself lays out the balance
between selfishness and restraint for the sake of the
common good.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Finally, I would like to introduce you to the late Prof.
Tony Judt, who valiantly fought against a debilitating
disease that made it ever so much more difficult for him
to speak. And yet he did -- all the way to his death in
August 2010. Deborah and I had the privilege of hearing
him moderate a gathering of scholars honoring Amos
Oz, the excellent Jewish writer at NY University.
It is one of the benefits of life in NY to have easy
access to many very interesting lectures. One can meet
fascinating persons, as well as some who are just
“different” (Minnesotans define oddities that way, I am
told!). Prof Judt, who is Brittish, was a Marxist-Zionist in
his youth and became a historian. For many years he
taught at NY University and directed the Remarque
Institute. Among the numerous books he wrote I just
finished Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 after
reading Ill fares the Land. I look forward to reading The
Memory Chalet, which is a record of his effort to furnish
an imaginary chalet in his mind with ideas, observations,
reflections, when he could no longer express himself in
speech.
As a historian, Judt lays out in great detail with what
effort our countries of the West set up a network of
social relations and obligations with practical benefits
after 1945, when war’s destruction and a wounded
continent was tempted again by rival totalitarian
temptations of two equally utopian visions of society:
Soviet-style Marxism-socialism and Western European-
style Fascism-socialism. Bismarck in the late 19th
century and Roosevelt in the 1930s countered the
“capitalist totalitarians”, who favored capitalism’s
pursuit of self-interest as the exclusive way to benefit
the larger public, but which had failed in the Great
Depression. The only moral or ethical restraints were
those retained in private values and commitments. To
this were added certain social obligations for
unemployment, health and disability insurance by both
leaders. Both politicians understood that short of
depending on perfect people (who can never be found
in this life), imperfect people need a legal obligation to
respect the real world and to address unfair
conditions, unequal opportunities, illness and no-fault
disability.
Bismarck and Roosevelt took their stands, fifty years
apart and on two continents, against a growing
utopian temptation among a number of new visions
for society. For Bismarck it concerned The Socialist
International (1864/76) influenced by Marx and Engels,
as well as the Secular Zionist movement aligned with
Theodore Herzl (1896). Roosevelt confronted the
fascination in the US of the 1930s during the
Depression with Marxism’s vision of a new humanity.
Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were both attracted
to such utopianisms, the former to Stalin, and the
latter to Hitler. Advocacy of eugenics around the
world, including in the US, is also a utopian search for
purer genetics in people!
An imperfect world requiring laws to mandate
behavior is the only world we know. A good civil
society makes laws that transfer Biblical insight to
social and moral dilemmas to reverse what has
become “normal” in the “abnormality” of a fallen
world. We should seek justice, because it is not readily
found by itself. Paul writes: “If it had not been for the
law, I would not have known sin. I would not have
known what it is to covet, if the law had not said: ‘“You
shall not covet’ (Romans 7:7).
Judt reminds us that the social model in the West is
in no way utopian and does not pretend to solve all
problems. But it does disarm the attractiveness of both
fascism and communism, to which people are drawn
from real pain and naive utopianism.
I remember from my childhood that this was a part
of the argument my father used to convince the allied
victors to encourage a shared effort between
conquered and conquerors to dilute the lure of Stalin’s
“earthly paradise of socialism” on one side and regret
over the loss of German “national socialism” on the
other. Both continued after 1945 to be utopian, i.e.
totalitarian, attractions that distort the reality of
people’s lives. For at least a decade after WW2,
widespread poverty and shame in the widely
destroyed continent with a broken history, a
humiliated ideology and a barely functioning economy
kept alive the lure of a return to one socialist
alternative or another.
Most Western countries successfully countered the
attraction of nationalism and socialism following 1945
with a network of public services in a social-market
economy. The reason for this is reality, not an ideology.
That reality has at least two components. First, we
live within a social network of families, neighbors,
citizens. As God’s law does not create a new world, but
clarifies the existing one against wishful thinking, make-
believe and pipe-dreams, so laws concerning social
obligations try to affrm less of the ideal than of the real:
real needs, real unfairness of life, real obligations in the
bond of being neighbors. Reality is unfair, unequal,
uncaring and unconcerned. Our calling as neighbors is to
refuse to accept reality as final until Christ reigns. Until
then, we must diminish the “un”-things mentioned in the
preceding sentence as much as possible.
Only utopian social totalitarians wish to impose their
vision of perfection on an imperfect world and thereby do
more harm than good. Their failure is no excuse for us to
fail in what must and can be done without squeezing out
life and love and leisure until there is none left.
Real, too, is that little, if any, wealth is created by
individuals in isolation. In reality every explorer,
entrepreneur, and researcher draws on the investment of
those who raised him. There is no genuine self-made man.
Conditions of poverty and wealth affect the lives of
everyone. We rightly strive for a surplus, but none is
gained without the work of some who do not always get to
share it justly or in relation to the degree of their
contribution.
As realists in this world, we also acknowledge that
opportunities are not equally available. From birth, they
differ through no immediate fault of any person. Birth,
geography, political and religious context have in effect
their own invisible laws for some and not for others. There
are too many undeserved and uncaused variables in life,
such as the decade and geographic location of one’s birth,
genetic influences and school districts, nutrition and even
language.
The evolutionist sees life as what it has come to be.
Christians acknowledge that life is already unfair and
unequal by itself through no fault of the individual in the
immediate situation. Adam messed things up, and we
inherited a fallen world which we did not earn for
ourselves.
This unfairness in social, biological and educational ills
cannot be alleviated, as is often assumed, by sufficient
economic growth. While prosperity and privilege will
contribute to an increase in the size of the pie for
everyone, that is by far not an accurate picture. The
opposite is also observed: In times of hardship we share;
in times of affluence, the few are privileged to the
relative disadvantage of the many. An increase in
aggregate wealth camouflages distributive disparities.
We know such growing distance between the rich and
the poor from many backwards economies and societies
across Africa, the Arab world, in Russia and in our own
past 130 years since the trust-busting Theodore
Roosevelt served as president. What is new is how much
we approve of this “natural” system of distribution
without shame or embarrassment. Have we forgotten
that Adam Smith wrote that the admiration for the
wealthy and powerful is the most universal cause of the
corruption of moral sentiment? (The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Section III, chapter III, pp. 55ff) Is that not
also what occurred in the story of the widow’s farthing, in
which Jesus contrasted her gift? with those of the rich?
The current argument in market economies is that
growth will contribute to overall prosperity. That is true
in terms of numbers. But we must not overlook that
when we center our concerns on market possibilities, we
focus on personal interest, not those of our community. It
legitimizes the view that people could and should be
prepared to work at any age or go to the poorhouse.
Tony Judt suggests with some justification that “Ill Fares
the Land” simply because we increasingly find that the
social consensus is weakening when we split up into
groups with separate values due to cognitive dissonance.
Groups, including faith communities, easily withdraw
from the broader culture, making absolute distinctions
between “we” and “they,” what is pure and what is
profane, who works and deserves, and who is idle and
therefore -- tough luck! Such positions are disconnected
from the larger reality. Isolated convictions without any
bond to the larger dynamic cultural tradition are another
expression of increasing fanaticism, because they are
unmediated, unstructured and unconnected.
Judt rightly worries whether the center of our society
will still hold together, when everyone pursues primarily
individualist, particular political interests. In the solitude
of being right or left, Christian or anti-, male or female,
we abandon a commitment to solidarity and a willingness
to make do with compromise rather than perfect
situations. A society is not a church, and even in church
so many eccentric views are represented that one must
always deal with something less than perfection. What
threatened people after WW2 was political absolutism. It
was disarmed by social legislation precisely to prevent
the extreme and fanatical pursuits of socialism and
“marketarianism”. Today, the threat is similar with the
enormous income differentials which may well create an
eventual collapse of our social contract. Do look for
Michael Sandel’s lecture series on “Justice”, as he will
make you think through similar issues.
The size of country, the increasing cultural
differences without the glue of the One Nation to hold
it together, and the growing suspicion of central
government all work in favor of individual
protectionism. When we add here the curious wording
of the Bill of Rights to say that, unless expressly stated,
government should be kept out of our lives, we
understand perhaps why there is increasing suspicion
towards public authority. Taxes become
“uncompensated income loss” instead of contribution
to the common good when what “The Good” is no longer
has a common content.
The Bible alone, to my knowledge, gives human
beings a framework for the value of the individual
and the respect for the community, a reality of form
and freedom, of the one and the many
simultaneously. The base is a common reality under
God where the life of believers and unbelievers takes
place. They benefit equally from Creation. Cause and
effect are equally real, as is the fact of making moral
distinctions, regardless of specifics, or the grammatical
nature of language, etc.
Being concerned about unity and thankful for the
work of labor unions to call factory owners to account,
as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where one hundred
years ago this year is not a call for Socialism!!
For socialism is about transformative change, the
replacement of capitalism by selecting an entirely
different system of production and ownership. What
Bismarck, FDR and most responsible statesmen and -
women desire is capitalism and democracy as a
framework within which the hitherto neglected
interests of large sections of the general population
would be addressed, from education to pension plans.
It requires a continuous public debate about what kind
of society we want and need, what arrangements are
honorable to each person, and how we will pay for
them. These are larger questions than those of just
finance, taxation and investments, and safeguarding
individual rights, though these are all part of it. It is
more a question of ethics, of unity and of what we
need to think, do and put in place to leave a good
situation for the next generation.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The last issue of Footnotes brought back to me a
number of interesting comments from many readers
like you. For some, what I wrote was encouraging;
others were slightly surprised and a few possibly also
troubled.
My concern all along is to keep in mind our social
context, in which social obligations are part of living
in society with neighbors rather than each person in
isolation, as if in the old “West of the Hudson” of the
17th century. We cannot return to that isolation. We
are living as wheat among the tares until the angels
sort things out. We are told by Christ to pay taxes to
Caesar, whose image is on every coin; but owe what
and who we are to God, Whose image we bear. It is to
our greater benefit when everyone benefits from our
good ideas, work and life efforts. A nation becomes
more civil, economically prosperous, and respecful of
neighbors, aliens, law and life when instead of
separating ourselves, we invest in social benefits for
everyone. Good ideas, Education, Politics, the Arts and
better and more available products result from a more
accurate understanding by everyone about how reality
functions.
David Brooks, in an editorial in the NY Times (The
Modesty Manifesto, NYT, March 10,2011), writes,
“Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we
are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a
common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by
the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if
Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that
will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part
because they are less conscious of themselves as
components of a national project.
“Perhaps the enlargement of the (separated) self has
also attenuated the links between the generations.
Every generation has an incentive to push costs of
current spending onto future generations. But no
generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe
people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves
as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries.
As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the
current generation over the future ones, in a way it no
longer does."
“It’s possible, in other words, that some of the current
political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts
in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we
appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a
more comprehensive shift in values.”
Let me close with the words of two of Ralph Vaughan
Williams’ Easter songs:
“Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.
Sing his praise without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may’st rise;
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, Just”.
“Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them:
Let my shame go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love; who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat”.