The zealots among us are passionate believers in something. We imagine that if only the infidels and hold-outs among us would conceded then there would be freedom and happiness. The downfall of most of us who are zealots is that we don’t understand culture and that we are all operating within systems that contain within themselves economies of checks and balances. Life is a complex of interweavings that defy our clumsy tinkerings. Innumerable revolutions and good doings in human history bear tales of supposed liberation and subsequent disaster.

Union troops freed the slaves. At first there was obviously jubilation. Not long after slaves would begin to wonder if they were freed to starve. Jim Crow and share cropping took its place after a dozen years of reconstruction. Slavery is never as easily undone as letting go of a chain. We are slaves to many masters, the worst of which are seldom the most obvious.

US troops liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Let freedom ring. You’re now free to enter into your own cycles of bloody reprisals.

Missionaries (religious, technological and otherwise) bound like Tigger into the lives of those “less fortunate” lovingly wanting to do good. Good is seldom that easily done. Tinkering with cultural systems nearly always leads to unintended consequences.

None of this is to say that any given intervention was not important, good or helpful in the long run. What I am saying is that we seldom fully understand exactly what we’re doing, even with the best intentions, and that should hopefully motivate us to add wisdom to our zeal. pvk