Perspective 70
What to Fix? Who is Getting Played?
As another election approaches, I’d like to ponder two questions: (1) “What are we trying to fix: people or society?” (2) “Who is getting played in this dramatic moment in American history?” As foundational ideas and the aging rules-based world order continue to deteriorate, we should consider these questions.
1. Fix Society: Unlike Christianity all ideologies focus on fixing society. Timothy Keller quotes Beatrice Webb, a remarkable and foundational British social activist, who, starting in the late 1800s, gave her life to establishing the British social welfare system. She said that she based her ideas about how to fix society on the foundational idea that man was good. In 1925 she lamented that mankind had ‘a bad impulse, an impulse that made every good and worthy social system (almost) useless. This is a sad, but tame example. Others who tried to fix society are the legendary and mostly socialist extremists who caused over 150 million deaths in the 20th century trying to get rid of the ‘bad people’ who stood in the way of their ideal society.
Fix the Person: Christianity and centuries of western culture have focused on fixing the person. We all rebel at a God who is right and who insists we fall far short as sinners, but the diagnosis of universal sin allows the resurrected Jesus to fix any person on earth. The opposite focus, the focus on the social rights and entitlements of mankind, cannot and has not fixed, or even really ‘unleashed the potential’ of the person.
Solutions Offered: One solution is to shame, cancel, and remove those bad people. Then, they imagine, society could finally provide the equity of outcomes that Beatrice Webb sought. Ms. Webb’s solutions were tame but removing the bad people when all the American people, society and government are systemically problematic is a ferocious path. Who will accomplish all this purging? The assumed answer is that good government institutions will do it. The message is: tear it down, defund it, disestablish the legal/justice system, remove all (the bad) bigoted and religious influence. How? Violently if it proves is impossible to establish justice by voting. Then, some imply, we can rebuild a just society. Where has that ever worked?
2. “Who’s Getting Played?” Who will be the losers? Who will be abandoned along the side of the road? I see four losers. First, African Americans. If society really is no better in the 2020s than it was in 1950s, the African Americans, who were played by LBJ and other elites in the 1960s, would be played again. If true, what makes anyone think that this time will be different? Last year we added Jews. This is sad beyond endurance.
Second, Christians along with Christian pastors and leaders. Some are so all-in on social justice that we imagine that it is actually biblical justice on offer. It is not. Or we play our religious political card, but it is one we play badly. How? We put our moralist foot forward, judge people and society and often use social media in ways that build walls. Our task should be much more oriented to serving people as people than to setting the rules for our secular society. Plus, we are realizing that we have been played by politicians. Stay calm.
Third, ordinary Americans including immigrants who are just trying to avoid stirring anything up or getting noticed by the system. Such hiding is, of course, the mindset of people burdened by a bureaucracy or in an occupied nation. Do not think; do not act or react; do not feel; just keep your head down. What is wrong with that? It is not life, liberty, or the pursuit of anything worthwhile. It is despair, substance abuse, and worse.
Finally, our young adults are being played. WR Mead just wrote, “Their alienated rage reflects awakening to the shock that their elders have fundamentally misjudged the nature of the times and that they are going to have to make their own way through a world for which they have been neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared.” What happened? Mead continues, “(O)ur elites forgot that the rules-based world order was never more than a consequence of American and allied power without…which…the world will revert to something more like the Law of the Jungle than the Sermon on the Mount.” (Walter Russell Mead. WSJ 10/8/24). (END)