As a boy I was a World War II buff. I read histories, watched “The World at War”, was fascinated by all things WWII.
I knew George Marshall’s name, knew he was central to the US war effort, but knew very little about the man. If you had asked me who the most important generals for the US were in the war I would have quickly named Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur and Bradley. If you had mentioned Marshall I’d have thought of “The Marshall Plan” for the reconstruction of war torn Europe. Beyond that I knew nothing.
This is part of why I’m enjoying Brook’s book. I like history and biography and this gives you a sample. In a different forum discussing this book I likened it to a box of chocolates. Brooks gives us a sampler of biographies with an eye to character and in this box Marshall is “the institutional man”.
In conflict we become afraid and fear makes us defensive. Sometimes we are afraid for our safety, often we are afraid for our reputation or our self-image. We immediately look for the faults of those across whatever line has been drawn. The flaws of our adversary, the person or group who is causing us pain, real or imagined is completely obvious.
We adopt a posture of superiority, of one who knows and either in anger or some sort of imagined love decide the other does not so we will inform them.
Of course the situation looks the same, but opposite to the other and the do the same thing. The ordinary and expected then ensues. The fault lies with the other. I have less blame, less responsibility for the conflict or calamity and the burden of fixing the problem is on the other. This of course makes me helpless and indulges in me comfort of self pity and the self-righteousness of playing the victim.
Now in writing this I have of course in a backwards way violated what I am trying to avoid. This should demonstrate how helpless I am against this relational habit. So forgive me. Be gentle and patient with me. I will again, try to stick to the first person, and not the second, and realize all of the ways that I fail to love you well and treat you as the image bearer of God that I profess you to be.
If you start with this question you are starting from below.
To me the results of Christian Smith’s survey of American youth continues to hold true. If Americans have a religion then it is shaped along the lines of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
1. A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Dean, Kenda Creasy (2010-06-12). Almost Christian : What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church (Kindle Locations 271-277). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
God is a therapeutic, divine butler to help make this happen for those who are weak enough or unfortunate enough to need some help, and in the eyes of many foolish enough to think it will actually work.
Why God is Unnecessary
As the Baltimore riots caught the news this week the regular political and social actors took their assigned seats and interpreted the events through their filters.
The riots are the bitter fruit of a history or racism in America
The riots are the result of years of bad policing
The riots are the result of years of Democratic control over the city and the state
The riots are the result of economic calamity: globalization, high taxes, poor education, fill in the blank with the factor that you think is most important.
What is beneath all of this is the belief that if the systems: civil, social, political and economic, were all functioning property then there would be order, peace, happiness and well-being. Did you ever wonder where this assumption came from? This assumption is so deep, and so implicit that while all the voices loudly disagree over why the system has failed, none of them doubt that a system, a social order can in fact produce flourishing.
I could place a very large, probably unreadable book for many of you in your hands written by a Canadian philosopher named Charles Taylor tries to trace out how we went from the situation 500 years ago where almost everyone in Western Civilization assumed that God ran the world to today where many in Western Civilization can easily believe that the world gets on just fine without the old man.
While many individuals still look to God to solve their problems or help them feel better about themselves, when it comes to our public world our debates are about systems and we believe that if we can create, control or maintain the rights systems we can achieve within our societies the blessings we desire and even come to expect. How do we know this? Because haven’t we, in American for example, achieved this beyond what many other peoples of the world have? Don’t we often see how these things work for us but don’t work for others?
I can’t go into Taylor’s whole argument. The book is almost 900 pages. I will note a few points that go into the argument.
It came to be believed that if certain practices could be promoted and adopted by large population that a good moral order could be established that would promote human flourishing. We assume that the order we create, with the cooperation of the masses, will achieve for us happiness, prosperity and a sense of purpose.
Originally God was seen as the creator of this moral order, but in time (the development of Deism), it was imagined that this order was set in place by God and in fact worked well without him. In time the order itself was seen as primary and God, as a personal being who might intrude in history in the form or miracles or even answered prayer. Such interventions were seen as potentially upsetting the larger systems that God had established.
Increasingly God, or the order in place that provided for us, was understood as being devoted to human flourishing, and this flourishing exclusively understood to mean within the real time and history that we experience today. What develops is what Taylor calls “exclusive humanism”.
I didn’t know much about Dorothy Day before reading this chapter. I knew she was involved in the Roman Catholic workers movement and that Brooks in the past as often mentioned her as one of his heroes. I can’t evaluate his telling of her story because his is the only telling I know.
Day seems to be one of these outliers that whose turn to Christianity seems to defy the myth of progress and liberation. As a young woman she lived a wild and dissolute life eventually converting to Catholicism and becoming something of a modern monastic. She would become an important revolutionary in the early 20th century sense of the word. She was counter-cultural before that became fashionable turning to criticize the 1960s expressions that might have aspired to claim her mantle.
The word “counterculture” was used a lot in the late 1960s, but Day was living according to a true counterculture, a culture that stood athwart not only the values of the mainstream culture of the day— the commercialism, the worship of success— but also against the values of the Woodstock counterculture the media was prone to celebrate— the antinomianism, the intense focus on the liberated individual and “doing your own thing.” The Woodstock counterculture seemed, superficially, to rebel against mainstream values, but as the ensuing decades have demonstrated, it was just a flipside version of the culture of the Big Me. Both capitalism and Woodstock were about the liberation of self, the expression of self. In commercial society you expressed self by shopping and building a “lifestyle.” In Woodstock culture you expressed self by casting off restraint and celebrating yourself. The bourgeois culture of commerce could merge with the bohemian culture of the 1960s precisely because both favored individual liberation, both encouraged people to measure their lives by how they were able to achieve self-gratification.
Day’s life, by contrast, was about the surrender of self and ultimately the transcendence of self. Toward the end of her life she would occasionally appear on television talk shows. There is a simplicity and directness to her presence on these shows, and great self-possession. Through The Long Loneliness and her other writings she practiced a sort of public confession, which has attracted people ever since. She was open about her interior life, as Frances Perkins and Dwight Eisenhower never were. She was the opposite of reticent.
Brooks, David (2015-04-14). The Road to Character (pp. 102-103). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
