Category: Culture

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The Meaning of Meanings

Infrastructure

/ ˈɪn frəˌstrʌk tʃər /

The Biden Infrastructure bill is getting a lot of criticism for what it isn’t—an infrastructure bill. That is, it’s only tangentially about infrastructure. Anywhere from 5-20% of the roughly $2 trillion goes to roads, bridges, and utilities—what we generally consider infrastructure. And not just us, but the dictionary too: “The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems.” Concrete, asphalt, steel, and wire, and the maintenance thereof—that’s what most people consider to be infrastructure. Or do they?

The Biden administration is thinking more creatively. I’m not going to argue on the virtues or venalities of the bill or why Congress should allocate $2 tril for it; I’m more interested in the terminology. To road-and-bridge maintenance, the administration adds

  • “Care infrastructure”: money for elder and child care
  • “Educational infrastructure”: money for building new schools
  • “Human infrastructure”: money for job-training and union organizing,
  • “Research infrastructure”: money for universities and think tanks (to come up with conclusions the government likes, says my cynical side)
  • “Environmental infrastructure”: money for incentivizing electric cars and phasing out gasoline engines

We can argue about each item on the list—and there are a lot of items—and whether government bureaucracy is the best way to facilitate them, but (being a language person), I’m most interested in the way the administration is finding so many applications of the world “infrastructure.” They’ve stretched it to embrace anything the administration wants to do, thereby making it practically meaningless. This shapeless blob of a word now covers broad consensus (roads and the power grid should be adequately maintained) as well as ideological fringes.

Such terminology is perilous, in that it

  1. Blurs distinctions and definitions. This is a feature, not a bug, of postmodernism, which pretty much denies objective meaning. As an academic theory po-mo only harms students; as a governing philosophy it harms everybody.
  2. Tends to make humans into a commodity: buying units to purchase desired products, workers to be trained, young minds to be conditioned, old people to be sidelined. American citizens become part of American “infrastructure.” And what does that mean?

“Infrastructure,” then, isn’t about asphalt and wire; it’s about forcing American society into a model favored by one end of the political spectrum. If everything is infrastructure, everything is subject to restructuring.

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Every Good Thing

A picture book published last September is scoring stars in all the children’s-book review journals: I Am Every Good Thing. The book celebrates boyhood—particularly black boyhood—as a radiance of joy and exuberance and possibility.

Words and phrases like “good to the core,” “star-filled sky of solutions,” and “perfect” overstate the case. Other thoughts, like “I am the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound” are more puzzling than clarifying. But the truly disturbing page, near the end, shows our hero with an unmistakable halo. “I am what I say I am” is the facing text.

I Am, or I Am Who I Am—Does that remind you of anyone?

I can understand the need for a book like this. Boys have been medicated and castigated and exhorted to act like girls for the last twenty years or so; about time they are appreciated for the rambunctious risk-takers they are. Black boys, especially, need inspiration to grow into strong and capable men.

But I’m not sure that the self-affirmation expressed in the title is the best way to go about it.

In fact, I’m sure it’s not.

You don’t have to be convicted of original sin to see the problem here. The title is patently untrue. Boys are not every good thing: while lively and funny, they can also be self-centered, aggressive, reckless, impetuous, and thoughtless. (My five-year-old grandson is a lot of good things, but I could tell you some stories . . .) Both boys and girls lack plenty of good things, like maturity and good judgment. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature, the very definition of a child.

Now, wait a minute, the author and illustrator might object: we don’t mean it literally. Or maybe they do. I don’t know, and the casual reader or first-grader who finds this book thrust at him by his reading specialist won’t know either. If the intention is the build his confidence, this reminds me of the self-esteem movement that began in the 1980s. I call it sticker-sheet confidence, because it seemed to consist of handing out accolades like exclamatory stickers (Awesome Work! You Rock!!)

The Self-esteem Movement, as a conscious Movement, was gradually buried under a pile of evidence that self-esteem is not endemic to good character. In fact, it may actually be inimical to good character. Building confidence is not a matter of telling kids they’re awesome, but helping them along the road to becoming awesome. That’s a lifelong process.

And they’ll never be as awesome as a halo-crowned figure identifying himself as I Am. Assuming godlike status is not the key to success. We have it on good authority that that’s the road to destruction.

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Ravi’s Postmortem Fall

How deep must your perversion be to think that you can get away with this stuff forever? The only way I can explain it is that you must be psychotically double-minded, or you must not really believe in God.   

Rod Dreher, The American Conservative Feb. 12, 2021

Dreher is being typically emotional. Reporting on Christianity Today‘s reporting on Ravi Zacharias, he recoils in horror at this “vile man.” I don’t disagree, though given what we know now, it would have been better for Zacharias if all the vileness had come out while he was still alive and could see what his sin had done. That would have been an opportunity to repent.

But really, he had many opportunities , especially in the last few months when he must have known his time was short. He could have confessed. Or he could have destroyed all his phones and emails. The fact that he did neither of those tings indicates that he was living on an unreal plane.

Every conscious, deliberate sin, from adultery to tax cheating, requires a certain double-mindedness.

“Psychotically double-minded” seems the more likely of Dreher’s alternatives, but double-mindedness may be more common than he thinks. In fact, it may be the default position of all of us, including Christians. Every conscious, deliberate sin, from adultery to tax cheating, requires a certain double-mindedness. A Christian man who berates his wife, an elder who makes nasty comments about troublesome church members, a pastor who develops a gambling habit, a Sunday school teacher who constantly talks down her husband. And me, who wastes an hour and a half on Netflix when I should be checking up on my neighbors.

We all know what we should do, or shouldn’t do. The scripture we swear by is very clear. But on the way to action, knowledge gets sidelined. We shuttle it into a storage room called “Holy to the Lord,” where we make our sacrifices and holy acts. And then we claim our “free time” to do what we want.

Ravi Zacharias traveled the world, spoke at conferences, wrote dozens of books that sold millions of copies, counseled celebrities and world leaders. In that role, in that room, he may have (probably did) believe every word he was saying as the head of RZIM: the name, the legend. Once outside that persona he was a slight, elderly man with chronic back pain. Perhaps one justified the other. RZ spoke a blessing over Ravi. When he prayed with women he was preying on, when he told a partner she was his “reward” for godly service, he might have been sincere, in an all-too-human, double-minded way.

All idols replace Christ. Idolatry is the primary temptation.

“The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jer. 9:17), and the first person my heart deceives is me. Could Ravi have made an idol out of RZ? (Naming a ministry after himself, or consenting to it, seems unwise in the first place.) Given the convoluted reasoning we tend to indulge in, he may have indulged himself with a clear conscience. He may have atonement for himself as his own high priest in his holy capacity, crowding out the Christ he claimed to serve.

All idols replace Christ. Idolatry is the primary temptation. This sad saga should, if nothing else, serve as a warning to the rest of us: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (I Jn 5:13).

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Is this a Great Country . . . or What?

All through my public K-12 education I learned popular anthems like “The House I Live In,” “This Is a Great Country,” and “God Bless America,” along with the old standards (“America the Beautiful,” ‘My Country, ‘tis of Thee”). By 1967, though (my junior year), such guileless flag-waving wasn’t cool. I gave a speech against patriotism to the Rotary Club—not too smart, but truth to power and all that.

Patriotism was an outmoded idea, anyway, the cause of unending wars when we had so many problems to solve at home. Racism, the Feminine Mystique, poverty, the military-industrial complex—what was not to complain about? Shortly after came Nixon and Watergate and general “malaise.”

But you know what? Life wasn’t too bad. Most of us had enough food (even though prices were zooming in the 70s), a place to live (with double-digit interest rates, if you chose to buy), the freedom to move around and find another job if you didn’t like the one you had (we did that a lot). My husband had acquired a B.A. degree at tuition rates we could pay off within ten years. That degree that allowed him access to a white-color job once he got the wanderlust out of his system. Our black friends were no longer segregated—that’s why we could have black friends—no more moving to the back of the bus or “colored days” at the State Fair.

Also, I started reading history, and decided this country was actually pretty great after all. A complicated past, to be sure, but with a form of government that allowed for self-correcting over time. There was plenty of ugliness, but also plenty of hope and upward mobility: more than any other nation in history, anywhere on the globe. I grew up in what would now be considered poverty, yet we always had enough to eat and a roof over our heads and free education that actually educated us a little.

But ever since high school, the only time a certain subset of people—which at one time included me—can speak well of the United States is when they are running for office. Then, it’s the land we love, even though it may have lost its way or forgotten its ideals or listened to the wrong people too long. All this great country needed was the right people to get it back on track. That was the vibe from Barak Obama and Bill & Hilary Clinton, though it didn’t always sound like it was coming from the heart.

Joseph R. Biden is different. When he talks about this great country, I think he means it, as someone who started from a humble beginning and achieved the nation’s highest office—“Only in America.” He’s an old-time glad-handing political animal who knows how to work a room but his Inaugural Address came from a genuine core, however deeply buried.

So I don’t get why he’s promoting Critical Race Theory, unless he doesn’t really understand it. The basic premise of CRT is that the United States is founded on racism (not a bug but a feature) and owes its wealth to slavery, all the way up to the present day. Biden has mandated “racial sensitivity training” (a euphemism for CRT) in all federal agencies and disbanded the 1776 Commission established by President Trump, calling it inaccurate and harmful. The 1776 Commission was intended to counteract the negativity embodied by CRT and the 1619 project, etc.—to restore some balance or to whitewash, depending on who’s talking about it.

I haven’t read the 1776 Report and can’t judge the whitewashing content. But I’ve read parts of the 1619 project and I think it’s both inaccurate and harmful. Has President Biden read either? Because if he has, and still buys into CRT, he can’t believe this is a great country. If the United States was founded on racism, what could possibly be great about it? The only solution is to dismantle our constitutional government and rebuild it from the ground up—which is just what some Critical Race theorists would like to do.

I assume that’s not what Joe Biden wants to do, or other patriotic Democrats. But it suggests that the deep division he wants to unify goes through his own heart (to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn). And through the Democratic party’s heart, and through the heart of America as well. If the USA is as bad as the critical theorists say, it’s not worth saving.

Just make up your mind.  

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Is Everybody Beautiful?

Back in the eighties, we attended a large Presbyterian church with a television ministry. Television ministry isn’t my style, but this was Presbyterian. No strobe lights or smoke machines or healing services: it was music and preaching. The preaching was both edifying and compelling, and the music was directed by a dynamic choir director with impeccable taste in both classical and contemporary Christian choral works. My husband and I ended up in the choir (they didn’t even vet us!) and loved it.

The annual Christmas concert was a big deal that included singers from the local university (where our director headed the vocal music department). They were almost all youngsters, pert and eager. One of the young ladies, we heard, had been a finalist in that year’s Miss America pageant—a celebrity!

During dress rehearsal an overhead mic needed adjustment, and our Miss America finalist, who was sitting nearest to it, popped up out of her seat to do some tweaking. I was sitting a few rows back and toward the center, so I had a good view of the popping up and tweaking. And I clearly remember thinking, “What a pretty girl. What a beautiful, trim body. You did some good work there, God.”

I’m not accustomed to thinking this way about beautiful women—not that I’m especially envious (or not since high school, when one of my classmates was an actual model, with cool clothes).  I do notice beauty, as most of us do, but that was the first time I recall giving praise to the One who designed bodies to be beautiful. It wasn’t the last.

What brought this random memory come to mind is this article in Quillette: The Attack on Beauty. The body-positive movement, according to the writer, is teaching girls that there’s no objective standard of beauty, that the cover-girl ideal is a conspiracy to keep them down, and that everyone—or every girl—is beautiful just the way they are. The article was inspired by “Scars to Your Beautiful,” an Alessa Cara song with this telling refrain:

And you don’t have to change a thing,
The world could change its heart,
No scars to your beautiful,
We’re stars and we’re beautiful.

Got that? If the world doesn’t turn its head when you walk by, it’s because the world is screwed up, baby. You’re a star, and don’t you forget it.

If messages like this taught young girls to stand up straighter and face the world with confidence, in spite of bad hair or teeth, that’s one thing. But there’s no evidence they do. Instead, plenty of evidence that many girls substitute whininess, defiance, and/or destructive behavior for confidence, because they have been assured the world should respond to them in a way it’s not going to.

The writer of the article concludes that pretending objective standards of beauty don’t exist, and that everyone is a “star,” encourages a narcissistic state of mind, “the condition of being enamored with one’s idealized projection of oneself to the exclusion of reality and of one’s real self.” One’s real self could eventually turn into a decent person if it’s not obsessed with imaginary stardom. But if everyone is a star, no one is. If everyone is physically beautiful, then beauty doesn’t mean much. And we know that’s not true. Even the oversize models I see in poster displays at Penney’s have flawless skin and sparkling hair.

In That Hideous Strength, the last volume of C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, four of the female characters are trying on dresses for a celebratory banquet (after the bad guys have been defeated). Rather than each picking out her own gown, they collaborate in choosing the others, and somehow the colors and styles complement each woman’s personality. The dressing room has no mirror; they are not to rejoice in themselves, but in each other.

We can appreciate beauty in landscapes, buildings, and flower arrangements; likewise in Miss America contestants. All the more, perhaps, because it’s fleeting: “the grass withers, and the flowers fade.” Sophia Loren was a work of art; her efforts to preserve her looks have hardened them instead. All transient beauty points to the timeless, original Beauty who made our eyes to observe it and hearts to respond to it. And I think rejoicing in beauty, without envy, makes us all a little more beautiful.

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Nine Reasons to Read the Bible–Even If You Don’t Believe It

1. It’s unique.  The Bible Creation story is not like any other creation story.  The Bible God is not like any other God.  He’s the only ancient deity to link worship (temples, sacrifices, etc.) to a moral code.  He is absolutely central; a person beyond personality, not a representative of window or fire, not an idea, not a philosophy.  He escapes easy generalities, and so does his book.

2. It’s eerily familiar.  We’re always hearing echoes of it, not only in everyday conversation (broken heart, labor of love, thorn in the flesh, eye for an eye), but in values we take for granted.  Whatever our political persuasion, we agree that the hungry should be fed, the injured cared for, the helpless attended to.  None of these principles were widely accepted in the ancient world.  We believe—or at least we say—that love is the greatest power in the world.  Rameses, Nebuchadnezzar, and Julius Caesar would have laughed at that.  “Love conquers all” is the story told in the Bible’s thousand-odd pages.

3. It’s historically relevant.  Even if you’re skeptical about archaeology finds that support what it says about ancient times, the Bible’s influence on history is well documented.  Those who are certain it inspired oppression, crusades, and pogroms should turn over a few more rocks.  Though it has been misused as a weapon, the Bible is also (and much more logically) the inspiration for revivals, reforms, and rethinking. It directly inspired the greatest surge in literacy, enterprise, and empowerment the world has ever seen (i.e. the Protestant Reformation).  The Enlightenment usually takes credit for those achievements, but without the Reformation there would be no Enlightenment (and after the Enlightenment gleefully kicked away the Scriptural platform it was built on, it collapsed in something called the Reign of Terror).

4.  It’s a treasury of ancient literary forms.  Poetry, Historical Narrative, Allegory, Practical Instruction, Romance, Apocalyptic Imagery—every style and genre known to the ancient world is easily accessible between these covers, and in a multitude of translations, too.

5. It explains the origins of two of the most consequential people groups in the history of the world: Jews and Christians.  You may not like them.  Often enough, they haven’t liked each other. One was a relatively small group bound by blood and tradition, which had a wildly outsized influence on world history and a proportionate amount of suffering. (The honor of being a chosen people cuts both ways).  The second group is, by design, much more numerous and diverse, bound by faith and a conviction that God loves the world enough to die for it.

6. It tells one Story.  A rambling tale, to be sure–any tale would ramble if it took about 1500 years and at least 39 authors to tell it.  But the general outline of the story is the model for all stories in all cultures.  There’s a setting, a protagonist, an antagonist, a problem, a development of the problem, a climax, and a resolution.  Why do we tell stories this way?  Whether or not the Bible is the origin for the model, it’s a classic example of the model.  And the type of story it tells, of desolation and redemption, still haunts us.

7.  It provides the only objective reason for treating human beings as anything other than random accidents, disposable trash, or interchangeable parts to be manipulated.  The reason is this: the Bible is very clear that human beings are shaped by God to bear his image.  For that very reason, they are not to be willfully murdered (Genesis 9:6) or even carelessly insulted (James 3:9-10).  If the value of humans is set by other humans it can shift at any time.  If that value is set by God, no one can alter it.

8.  It’s the most banned book in history.  It’s too reactionary, too subversive, too authoritarian, too libertarian.  Tyrants fear its revelation of a rival power; anarchists, modernists, post-modernists, communists, utopians, and well-intentioned progressives hate it for the same reason. The book is a scandal and a trouble—aren’t you curious as to why?

9.  It’s still around. And still a best-seller. What explains its remarkable staying power?  Unless you are willing to at least become familiar with it, you’ll never know.

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Growing up with Little Britches

Ralph Moody isn’t as well known as Laura Ingalls Wilder, and didn’t occupy quite the same time period, but he accomplished something similar. My husband and I have been reading through his series of memoirs, which he began writing at the age of 50.

Born in 1898 in Rochester, NY, Ralph’s formative childhood was shaped in Colorado, where the family moved when he was eight years old. There the boy learned to rope and ride, acquiring the nickname “Little Britches” from the local cowboys. After failing at ranching, the Moodys settled in nearby Littleton, where Ralph’s father died as a result of a horse/auto accident. As the eleven-year-old Man of the Family, Ralph took odd jobs and organized the local boys into work teams, and even spent a summer working for a neighbor at The Home Ranch, receiving a man’s wages.

In 1912, for reasons too complicated to detail here, Ralph’s mother abruptly moved the family to her home state of Massachusetts. Starting over with almost nothing, Mary Emma and Company” established a laundry business while Ralph worked a number of side-hustles. All perfectly legitimate, but somehow he got the reputation of a troublemaker and at the age of fourteen he went to New Hampshire to work with his crotchety old grandfather in The Fields of Home. He didn’t get along with Grandfather, but that wasn’t entirely his fault; the old man didn’t get along with anybody.

When America entered World War I, Ralph worked in a munitions plant because the army judged he was too sickly to fight. His puniness was later diagnosed as diabetes, and the family doctor held out one hope for susvival: go west young man, get as much sun as possible, eat lots of green leafy vegetables, and don’t do anything crazy. He obeyed every rule except the last.

Not entirely his fault; the only job he could get upon his arrival in Arizona was performing “horse falls” for the movies. The hard-earned stake he gained from that brief venture began disappearing when he met Lonnie, an overgrown hyperactive kid who talked him into buying a Model T they nicknamed “Shiftless”—a total lemon. Nevertheless, the two young men tore across the Southwest, Shaking the Nickel Bush between breakdowns.

They were flat broke when Ralph hit upon his most productive money-making scheme yet: selling plaster busts to bankers and lawyers in small towns between Phoenix and Santa Fe. (He’d picked up that skill from an engineer at the munitions plant who sold sculpture on the side.) He converted the proceeds to fifty-dollar bills, which he carefully rolled up in the cuffs of his extra-long Levis. It amounted to almost $1000, with which Ralph intended to buy a little ranch and do what he liked best. Unfortunately, when he and Lonnie parted ways the latter absconded with the jeans. Ralph was sure (pretty sure) it wasn’t theft; Lonnie just snuck out in the dark with the wrong pants. And no forwarding address.

We’ve just started reading The Dry Divide, in which our hero hops a freight to Nebraska with one dime in his pocket. The back-jacket copy reveals he will end up with “eight horse teams and the rigs to go with them.” In the next and final volume, Horse of a Different Color, he will court his boyhood sweetheart and settle on a career.

All this, mind you, packed into 25 years: quite a ride, and yet probably not too unusual for the time. Ralph Moody’s America was an open society that allowed for amazing mobility, both up and down. For all his natural gifts, including ingenuity, creativity, and a cheerful disposition, he never made a lot of money and the lean times didn’t end with his marriage. But I doubt he regretted any of it, especially those early years which he recalled much later in loving, meticulous detail. He lived with eyes wide open, observing, remembering, and appreciating.

Though he carried a Bible with him, the family religion relied more on can-doism than Amazing Grace. “God helps those who help themselves” might have been the family motto (although it’s not in the Bible), and one senses more than a little pride in his mother’s determination to accept no help beyond what she absolutely had to. That might not be fair to Mary Emma, who endured severe hardship with amazing resilience and positivity, but she could be stubborn too. As could Ralph’s sister Grace, who could figure and dicker like a man but dropped out of school early because, as Mother said, she wouldn’t need any more education to make a home.

Unlike the Little House books, there’s no overt racism or hostility. “Coloreds” are not particularly numerous out west, and the only Indians Ralph meets are falling off horses for the movie cameras. (As rough as it was for them, it was a lot worse for the horses).

For good and ill, that America is gone: rough-and-tumble, snooze-you-loose, unpredictable, perilous, exhausting, and exhilarating. Racism, favoritism, cops and politicians on the take—nothing new about that. A generally honest, straightforward, enterprising, and upwardly-mobile populace—that was, if not new, then certainly rare. Will we ever see the like again? I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Cynical Theories: a Review

Have you read White Fragility or How to Be an Anti-Racist? Even if you haven’t read them, you’ve probably heard of them. I’ve heard from WORLD readers who are making a good-faith effort to examine their own biases by exposing themselves to challenging points of view from the Times best-seller list. I applaud the motivation, but some of those books should come with warning labels: Ideas produced in the hothouse atmosphere of the modern university may not be profitable for the real world.

So don’t read those without reading this: Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.  Cynical Theories, by two academics who have been there, tracks antiracism to its source. Also radical feminism, post-colonialism, toxic masculinity, trans identity, genderqueerness, body positivity, fat shaming, and intersectionality. Even if you’re not aware of those things, they are aware of you, especially if you’re white, straight, and male. Or if you disagree with any proposition from the toxic well of Theory.

“Theory” is the broadest term for all the academic disciplines examining power and privilege. It’s rapidly expanding to embrace all the academic disciplines, including the hard sciences and mathematics. How did this happen?

It goes back to a sickly academic trend called postmodernism. Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida were major advocates of postmodernism, with its prevailing view that truth is socially constructed. What you might understand as a “fact” is actually a composite of points of view, inferences, and assumptions from your social strata. In fact, there’s no such thing as a fact. Truth is not just relative, it’s meaningless. The only thing that matters is power: who has it, and how they exercise it.

Postmodernism killed literature by divorcing it from any meaning the author might have had in mind and “deconstructing” it to uncover the underlying power plays. The disease soon spread to the arts and social sciences. When I first learned about postmodernism in the early nineties, it seemed a dead-end philosophy. That turned out to be true, but I didn’t suspect what might revive its gasping, expiring body. The salvation of postmodernism was Theory, which clarified its precepts, expanded its reach, and made it, not an academic discipline, but a Dogma and  a righteous Cause.

The precepts are these:

  • All knowledge is socially constructed, with language (“discourse”) as the creative agent. This includes the hard sciences and mathematics.
  • All knowledge works to privilege the identity group to which it belongs by race, sex, gender, nationality, or physical characteristics.
  • The identity group with the highest privilege are straight white males, who have successfully structured society to maintain their dominant position.
  • All other groups (and intersectional combinations of groups) are thereby oppressed.
  • The only remedy for oppression is to deconstruct white male privilege by making it stand down while other identities and “ways of knowing” achieve an equal place at the table.
  • If this set of propositions seems to lack empirical evidence, well, empiricism itself is a white male invention and thereby suspect.

Do you see anything that might need to be deconstructed here?

Like most social analysis, Cynical Theories probably overstates its case, but I found it helpful and illuminating. If leftist agnostics are blowing the whistle, we’d better listen.

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Emerging on a New World, Part Five: What Remains

When I was a kid we used to play a game called “Spin the Statue.” Whoever was It would take each participant by both hands, spin her around and let her go, at which time she was supposed to freeze in position. Once everyone was frozen, It would survey the group and assign each person a part in a scene or tableau (“You be the car, you’re the driver, you’re the road, and . . . uh . . . you be the stop sign”). Then turn around and count slowly to 10 while everyone assembled themselves, and when It turned back the scene should be in place. (Though not for long, especially for the person who ended up being the road.)

When I first started on this series, the whole world was in the middle of an economic freeze, with no one as It to tell us how we were supposed to reassemble ourselves. Most of us agreed some changes would be permanent—big cities would begin to hollow out, more workers would be working at home, and possibly (on the downside) economic depression and suicide would deepend.  Some predicted explosions of excess when the lockdowns were lifted. I don’t recall anyone predicting literal explosions, but here we are.

Given the pressures of being cooped up for almost three months, any strong emotional trigger could set off a whole nation. One reason George Floyd’s death became the trigger is that it was so iconic. A black man crushed into the gravel with a white man’s knee on his neck—what better picture of the whole tragic history of race? The tinder was already there: the well-publicized 1619 Project, a dozen best-sellers from the recent past all on the same theme, widespread discontent at a supposed racist in the White House. All it needed was a spark.

When the center does not hold, things fall apart. The political center, guided by what we might loosely label “western values,” has been crumbling for decades. It’s impossible at this point to tell how many Americans even understand their country, or think it’s worth defending. There will be no savior from D.C., now or perhaps ever. Our culture, post-Christian, is quickly becoming post-American.

The one time in history God claimed a nation as his own, it wasn’t for national pride. “It was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your fathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery” (Deut. 7:8). The story of Israel’s roots, told in Genesis 12-50, is not the typical heroic narrative. Our own history is a complex narrative of lofty ideals and shameful deeds, heroic self-sacrifice and hypocritical greed. The potential for nobility creates a corresponding potential for venality. Freedom to achieve means freedom to deceive, and the United States is the story of both.

But it’s also the story of self-correcting over time: how the lofty ideals reassert themselves and remind us how far we’ve wandered. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is our national conscience, particularly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . .” It’s human nature to default to but some are more equal than others (see Jefferson the slave-owner), but the principle is sound and biblical, and sound because it’s biblical.

In the current wild spin, what shape have be spun ourselves into? Could be a spasm, or signal for real and lasting decline. The United States as originally conceived is definitely worth striving for, yet we know for a fact that no nation lasts forever. Sooner or later—and we can definitely pray for later—the United States will disunite.

But we are dual citizens, and What Remains is the Word of God. Truth is stumbling in the streets (Is. 59:14) but it won’t disappear. If we (as a nation) will not have truth for our conscience, we will have it as our consequence, played out in literal and figurative street fights. But we (as a royal priesthood) will always have a place to call home.

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Emerging on a New World, Part Four: Power

What is power?

My first year in high school, I felt unseen. About 2000 students attended that school, and I joined the restless masses that thronged the halls at every bell. I had one friend, a holdover from grade school who felt as insignificant as I. We hatched a plan to get to school early one day and bring screwdrivers, with which to remove as many light-switch covers, and any other removable hardware, as possible. And we did. Because those were the days before surveillance cameras, we got away with it. The only effect was this: for the next few days, every time I passed one of those little acts of vandalism, I thought, I did that.

It was small and silly, but at the time I was small and silly too. Still, I wonder if I was motivated by the same impulse that causes spray-painted slogans and smashed windows.

That’s one form of power: the ability to be heard, be seen, and make changes. Over the last few weeks it has mostly been exercised by people who feel themselves powerless, at least individually. Corporately they march in the streets, hoping to impose change by signs and slogans—or spray paint and Molotov cocktails. Certain kinds of change will almost certainly happen: the law and policy kind. The heart kind of change has already happened, sparked by a 9-minute video. That’s the same way hearts were changed almost 60 years ago. by news footage of police clubbing people on the Edmund Pettis Bridge and setting their dogs against peaceful protesters.

The protests (not the riots) are a result of that heart change, not a cause. Any meaningful change, in policy or attitude, will come from the heart, not from law or policy.

Here’s another definition of power, from Culture Making by Andy Crouch: “the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good.” Notice the verb. Political change must be imposed by law and threat. Cultural change can only be proposed, by persuasion and example. Imposition forces; proposition appeals. One breeds resentment, the other sympathy. To take one example, the legalization of same-sex marriage came about not by vandalizing wedding chapels and boycotting Bed Bath and Beyond, but by persuading enough of the public that marriage was a basic human right, to which many of our fellow humans were unfairly deprived.

Emotional appeals work true and lasting change more than angry demands. Both are forms of power available even to the powerless, but how successfully any group proposes a new “cultural good” (such as meaningful change in race relations) depends on when, where, and especially how the proposal is made. Anger is powerful, but by nature anger doesn’t last in its purest form—it quickly burns off into resentment, vindictiveness, opportunism, radicalism, rationalization, frustration, apathy, and a host of other negatives.

“American race relations” is a huge, complex topic that has already taken up entire library stacks. I can’t address it in a column, except to say this: No one (except perhaps the very old, the very young, or the very sick) is completely powerless. Everyone has a certain degree of power and a platform for using it. Some will have a lot more than others, but all it takes is a voice, a mind, and a will.

The question is, what will you do with it?

The world proposes one way: get in their face and make demands.

Jesus offers another way: He who would be great among you must become your servant—not by groveling, but by hearing, encouraging, and investing.  

Martin Luther King understood this. He could not make America change her biases, but he could persuade her to change her heart by harnessing the influence of the black church, challenging the conscience of the white church, inspiring youth, and reminding his fellow Americans of their founding ideals. He invested his power in service, not violence. As much as some present-day activists would like to deny it, change happened (I was there; I saw it).

They say peaceful power doesn’t work anymore. I say it’s the only thing that works. Destruction squanders power (I did that); investment builds it. Whatever you have in your hand builds your power base, which grows as you share it with someone else: knowledge, skill, connection, even friendship. This kind of power doesn’t spread as rapidly as the other kind, but it’s more durable, and certainly more stable.