In my last posted essay, “Leisure, the Basis of Culture”: Ends and Means., I tried to distinguish between ends of shorter- or longer-term. I came to a humbling conclusion that we can’t shape the future but only “intend towards the goals of a good human life and also good communal lives, morally well-ordered lives with the proper sorts of material and cultural goods, and we can move forward towards these goals one step at a time. But those goals are actually a huge expanse of twisting and turning settings for the stories which are our lives and the stories which are those of our particular communities and even the story which is the universe seen in light of God’s purposes for it. The goal, the end towards which we target ourselves is open-ended until it’s past and we see what we have accomplished in response to, in interaction with, our environments. We understand the ways in which we truly met the `common good’ and the ways in which we failed by looking in the rear-view mirror, but we should quickly turn our eyes back to the direction in which we move.”
This truly is humbling according to our current conceits, our current faith that we can know what the world is supposed to be now and at some spacetime ahead of us. Far too often we seek to shape the world to match those vague dreams we have which are shown even in some mindless movies, to be nightmares. We can’t really build the world of the Terminator but we can build one where robots of various sorts roam about surveilling children or nudists or maybe child-like nude terrorists in their backyards. And sometimes shooting missiles or other projectiles at them. Shoot first and find out later if you shot a gathering of terrorists or a wedding party; likely enough, you’ll find out from some alternative news site on the Internet.
We take risks we don’t understand when we force the world or the things in it to correspond to some vague image in our minds without understanding the consequences. We lay asphalt to make accessible wilderness regions — surely one of the silliest ideas of modern men — even as we forbid ranchers to protect their herds from wild animals. Grizzly bears and wolves can’t be shot because we’re busy turning them into characters in some grotesque movie about the sheer cuteness of wilderness. We destroy communities by forcing peoples to live together in blocks of concrete buildings where neighbors can’t speak each other’s languages or respond to each other’s rules of behavior and we fund strange political groups which push out of power the more natural leaders and institutions such as the traditional ministers of African-American communities. When we act in such a way, we aren’t intending the good but rather seeking to feel good about ourselves at the expense of others. For goods, communal or individual, are what prove to be good when we live our communal or individual lives in morally well-ordered ways.
The possible goods are constrained, greatly in the near-term and less so in the far-term, by our physical stuff and our cultures. Who knows what possible goods can be obtained in the long-term future? A Christian should believe that in the very long-term, not to be actually reached on this side of the grave, we will achieve a state of individual and communal perfection. The form of that perfection is certainly a matter of faith though I believe many men of various faiths can look in wonder upon all that has been achieved towards the goal of a god-like man and a human community encompassing all who are of good-will.
Clever, apish creature have gathered together into various sorts of communities which have built cities holding tens of millions and possessing huge sewer and fresh water systems. They have developed technology which would seem no less than magic to men of even a few centuries ago. They fly through the air at speeds far beyond those of hawk and eagle. They move thousands for thousands of miles in aircraft carriers built of concrete and steel and powered by nuclear fission processes based upon scientific principles unknown to even Einstein when he proposed his theory of Special Relativity and that of General Relativity. They have included the likes of Virgil and Mozart and Monet. They have brought deserts to bloom and can even, to some limited extent, live on the Antarctic ice masses. They have flown to the Moon and will likely one day reach Mars and maybe beyond.
And they have done much to damage the earth and the seas and to litter even space miles above the earth’s surface with now useless hunks of metal and plastic. They have waged horrible wars and have engaged, and still engage, in the immoral exploitation of other men and various sorts of nonhuman creatures. They have not always had the proper moral intentions, that is, the proper sort of active moral growth and development, nor have they always done what they should have done to develop proper relationships in their various communities and with other communities.
Progress is for real, but not automatic nor is it guaranteed to prevent any given war or ecological abuses or exploitation of other human beings. But we do move forward, purposefully but not according to the plans of any mortal creature. We move ahead according to the plans and purposes of our Maker. To me, this means we move forward as the Body of Christ matures, being completed and perfected, neither of which is to be a done deed before this world ends. At the same time, we should realistically evaluate what has been accomplished over man’s time on earth. From creatures who made tools from flint and wooden shaft, we have become creatures capable of shooting rockets into space or nuclear-armed missiles at our enemies. We can feed billions and show some signs of raising the standard of living of many of those billions — if we can control our warmongers and other scoundrels. We have conquered many of the old diseases and parasites and have developed skills which might allow us to minimize the damage of any new diseases and parasites before they cause too much suffering or death.
Men descended from Celtic tribesmen who migrated to northwestern Europe from somewhere near modern-day Russia/Ukraine have learned of the existence of the native tribes of Australia and the Amazon River basin and have learned to speak with them and to somewhat understand their ways of thought and feeling. Men descended from Semitic desert warriors and now living in many lands have explored this universe back to the beginning of this stage of expansion, some 13 billion years or more, and have learned truths and have made plausible speculations about the nature of spacetime and of matter which wouldn’t even register on the minds of Plato and Aristotle and would amaze Newton and Laplace and even Planck.
All this has been accomplished not by the grand planners of our race, for only God can truly remember and understand human history and can conceive of the possible pathways we’ll travel in the future. We are his children and his apprentices and He has blessed us with the sorts of minds capable of remembering and understanding but even ignoring the weakness and smallness of those minds, we have to recognize that freedom, including our own moral freedom, lies at the instant where our future is being shaped. We have not the total freedom of God Himself — not, that is, until we share His life in the world of the resurrected. The future we would need to foresee is being shaped now as each entity in this world moves forward as it will, sometimes with little freedom and sometimes with none. There are precious and dangerous times when we human beings have a great deal of freedom to choose our future. We should be prepared for those times, but even then our ability to shape the future is limited, however great it is by the standards of mortal men.
The Founding Fathers of the United States acted courageously and won some substantial forms of liberty for themselves and the other citizens of the rebellious colonies. A seer might have forecast a glorious future and some of that glory was realized but the American citizenry proved itself unready to handle the responsibilities of political and economic freedom and problems built up slowly by the standards of one human life but rapidly by historical standards. Those Founding Fathers didn’t design a country nor did they even structure a government as such. From the administration of George Washington right up to that of Barack Obama, Presidents and cabinet officials and bureaucrats have been busy constructing more or less plausible structures costing increasing amounts of money and placing more constraints upon the activities of Americans and other residents of the United States.
The initial ideas were good and the Founding Fathers, as a group battling each other as much as the British and the French revolutionaries and the native Americans and anyone else standing nearby, stepped forward into a vast and open region, not necessarily restricting the particular directions or the developmental activities of future generations. One of the problems with history, particularly in the Modern Age, is that we have no reverse gear and only weak brakes on our communities as they move into those vast and open regions, moving more as a herd and less as an intellectual community of intelligent and morally self-aware creatures.
No brakes and no reverse gear and we are heading toward tough ground, probably not a cliff but toward a region so rough that it’s breaking the herd into smaller groups. Many individuals, many groups, might not make it through the rough times ahead.
We shouldn’t be pretending any longer that we are in control and shouldn’t be assuming our leaders have so much as a clue what they are really doing though they have what passes for a vision of reality which is nothing short of insane and perverse. We are being forced into ad-hoc improvisations and don’t realize we’re being dragged and driven as part of a herd being led into the worst of the regions ahead.
One point to remember is that we’re still moving forward. We might act so badly as to drive ourselves back to a state of primitivism and might even act so badly as to pretty much wipe out the human race. Both of those situations seem unlikely. It seems to me more likely that we’ll lose much of our prosperity and the so-called advanced nations will lose a lot of their power though they might still remain the dominant nations in a world reduced in ways that will force one and all to concentrate on more local matters. Consider that likelihood to be a rebalancing act built into the workings of this world.
God’s story moves forward. Each of us plays a role in this story, as does each and every living creatures and, indeed, each and every nonliving creature in this world. Some human beings have humble roles, whether that of running a family farm and household or studying and writing about the history of human thought. Others have roles which are more like those humble roles than not, but they are, in a manner of speaking, highly leveraged in future effects so that there is an air of greatness about them, such as finding the way of sustainable and humane living in a world of greater population and greater mobility than we’ve yet learned to handle or developing a way to understand the world so that the efforts of concrete reformers can be brought together into a coherent whole, a new civilization or perhaps a new phase of Western Civilization.
It’s God and only God who can know what the long-term effects of our actions will be, our wise and unwise actions alike. Only God knew at the ratification of the Constitution of the United States that it would prove to be a fruitful failure, a certain sort of dead-end in the evolutionary processes driving toward a political organ suited for the Body of Christ. To be sure, I suspect the underlying project will yet move on and might result in something like a federation of republics living in liberty might grow up from the ruins we’re about to leave over much of North America, but it’s far easier to see failure, especially in its late stages, than it is to see what good or bad might come of that failure.
It’s God and only God who can shape landscapes so that our efforts as pioneers and settlers work toward the purposes He has set for this world, the purposes for which He created the raw stuff of created being and then shaped it by some complex processes to make it into this world. From our position in Creation, we see local processes naturally and have not yet figured out how evolution can produce such complex entities by way of processes which are blind to the future. True it is, that we can see hints about a part of the entire process, possibly a very small part, when we try to consider the world into which evolutionary processes select for survival — to consider the most important but certainly not the only process of biological evolution.
We have the sorts of minds which can understand what God has done and is doing in this world, but even at that we see the concrete manifestations of God’s work and can’t penetrate to His power as the God who can create from nothingness. That power is at work even as I write and is part of the mystery of His story-telling. I think that even there we can learn to speak as if we understood God’s powers as a true Creator. Speaking in such a way, we will shape our minds so that something akin to true understanding will grow over time. We can do this, more humbly — we can play our individual roles, if and only if we work without ceasing but work toward goals which we can truly see without deluding ourselves that we can see far into the future, without puffing ourselves up to believe we can know and work toward the truly and absolutely and permanently good human society, without thinking to take over the telling of God’s story.
It is sufficient and noble enough that we learn to properly live the stories of our own selves and of our well-formed communities without thinking we are the ones chosen from all time to settle the form of the communities yet in early stages of evolution and development. We are certainly not the ones to form the Body of Christ. That Body is forming as a result of progressive forces which seem at times to be as lacking in purpose and in moral order as the processes we observe in biological evolution and human history. Moral order, as well as other sorts of advanced order, have come into being but not in any way that allows us to set down in textbook fashion how it is that a sometimes brutal struggle for survival has resulted in the moral order of a wolf-pack or that of a Buddhist monastery. As surprising as it might seem at first, it’s easier to see the struggle for power of Soviet functionaries or American bankers and politicians as part of that bloody struggle for survival which produced velociraptors and rattlesnakes.
We can perhaps see a little bit better if we consider those violent events known as volcanic eruptions. They cover forests and living creatures with melted rock or smash them with walls of terribly hot gases and ashes. They reshape the earth’s surface. They have built the Hawaiian Islands and many of the islands off the coast of southeast Asia. They have reshaped some regions of the west coast of the Americas into beautiful homes for creatures much like the ones which were buried under molten rock. Some of those regions have proven to be useful to man as harbors and recreational areas. In these natural events, we can see hints of a Creator who works toward His goals by methods often violent and often locally destructive — until other natural forces start the processes of healing and making a region of the earth’s surface still better than it would have been otherwise.
I wouldn’t enjoy being a victim of those violent forces and I don’t look forward to spending the rest of my life in a world which will likely be relatively impoverished and subject to the violent forces of war and mass immigrations of desperate peoples and — likely enough — famines and epidemics of historically short-term but devastating sorts.
Do I pretend to be a seer? No, but I know enough of history to know what will happen when dramatic changes need to be made and established power-elites, or other human or non-human entities, struggle to block the building pressures. I live in a neighborhood with a very thin layer of loam over dunes of sand and gravel which were built up during ice ages when the Chicopee River flooded the local valley and formed a lake. There was at least one period when the entire Connecticut River was blocked by a huge ice dam near modern-day Hartford down in the state of Connecticut. Near the end of that ice age, that dam gave way and the rush of water is said to have sliced a wide and deep canal right through Long Island.
To the extent I can see even shadows of the future, I don’t see any events so violent in our near-term future, but we have tried to block and continue to block the forward movement of God’s story and we do so primarily by not moving forward in our own lives and in the lives of our better-formed and local communities. We have ceased to move toward the state of civilized beings, human beings in formation as members or at least as-if members of the Body of Christ. We sit on our fat behinds and wait for others to entertain us or perhaps we become so active as to head down to a resort on a Caribbean island or — the horror of it all! — to DisneyWorld. Or maybe to the Superbowl where we can live the dissolute week gloriously parodied by Hunter Thompson. We no longer truly get our own jokes, perverse as they are — we now think it funny that we distort our own beings for the sake of enjoying pleasures which aren’t always despicable but they always are so when we engage in them as if deliberately blocking our own moral maturing processes and, more generally, our own proper acts of moving forward as God tells His story.
Now perhaps we can see more clearly why it is that we don’t let God tell His story. He isn’t telling a story we like. We have taken up with the pleasures preferred by some of the more perverse members of the human race. Too many of us have let those perverse creatures, but not necessarily evil creatures, steer us in our individual lives and in our family and kinship and church and neighborhood lives. Rather than taking in those perverse creatures and trying to teach them the sustainable pleasures of craft hobbies or music performance or serving others in charitable activities, we’ve allowed them to teach us that pleasures are exciting and exotic and always far different from the simpler pleasures our grandparents enjoyed in gatherings in the backyard or on the front porch or at the church or town community center.
The same can be said in the specific realms of politics and economics. Certain perverse men who have come to love the life of political intrigue and international crime of the sort glorified in so-called thriller novels have moved toward the centers of power and have distorted governmental actions in ways that would mystify the most greedy and ambitious of robber barons from the 19th century. By this, I mean that the Rockefellers and Morgans and others interfered in domestic politics or the governments of other countries for the purpose of making money and gathering power into their hands, not for the thrill of engaging in espionage and not to systematically reduce large regions of the world to unprofitable chaos. Various serious thinkers from about 1900 (W.E.H. Lecky, Henry and Brooks Adams in their different ways, Henry James, and so on) saw the American political class as the most corrupt in the world. We’ve gone on to corrupt much of the world. And it’s no longer just the political class which is corrupt, morally disordered in a thoroughly ignoble way.
This is a large part of the reason for the extreme anti-government attitudes of some modern liberals, such as those who call themselves libertarians. They see American forms of government and political activity and those of other `exciting’ periods of history and see government as evil and inherently corrupt — for good reason — and conclude that governments and political activity are always evil and inherently corrupt. This seems akin to labeling sex as evil because it’s misused so often in disordered communities such as many in the modern West or those during the exciting years of the establishment of the Roman Empire. It’s no different from those American muckrakers who labeled all businessmen as greedy and corrupt because of crimes committed by some in the Robber Baron generation. Some generalize unwisely from the crimes committed by politicians, some from the crimes committed by bankers, some from the crimes committed by warmongers in the aerospace industry. All good human activities can be corrupted, the more powerful the potential good, the more powerful also the potential evil. When we misuse our gifts systematically, we fall into, or perhaps rush into, a state of rebellion against the Creator. We refuse to play our proper roles in the story which the Creator is telling, the story which is this world. We try to play God, choosing to shape human societies rather than steering them toward better ordered forms. We choose to rise above morality, committing evil acts for the sake of some long-term and quite imaginary good.
The form of the modern American rebellion against God and His story is that of perverse and morally immature desires for exciting lives of intrigue and conquest and war. We have shaped our understanding of human history according to James Bond movies and science-fiction nightmares and All in the Family and the self-deprecating humor of our stand-up comedians who seem not to realize we have no substantial or morally ordered selves to ridicule gently or harshly. We don’t really know the Bible or its historical setting, nor do we know the contents of the books written by Jaroslav Pelikan or Carroll Quigley or Jacques Barzun or Michael Grant. Nor do we know much about the lives and thoughts of Julius Caesar or the Medieval popes or Amadeus Mozart (though we know some of the historically absurd claims of an otherwise interesting drama about someone named Amadeus) or Thomas Jefferson or the Iron Duke or the great generals of World War II.
We live in a world shaped more by Disney and the strange mixture of lies and often decontextualized facts found in Coppola’s movie Patton. We know about alien races meeting in bars in some far region of the galaxy and we know the distortions of the political activities of FDR and Eisenhower which were, more or less, shaped by our journalists and our movie-makers to the needs of our two major political parties.
The modern American in general has a very strange idea of the nature of history, largely centering around some view of the United States as some sort of morally pure entity which is opposed by other nations only because those others are evil and have not yet seen the God-ordained goodness of the United States and its leaders. Individual leaders of the United States or leaders of allied countries often have more limited goals of more normal sorts of greed and ambition, but the system as a whole is so strange and so rebellious as to invite the claim that the United States have become some sort of corporate anti-Christ knowing what God should have made this world to be and in the process of making it so.
In the end, God will smash all those insane enough to think they can shape the world and design human beings and human communities to meet their own plans. And He will necessarily smash an awful lot of innocent men and women and children as well.