New and Improved

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.  -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

I’ve got nothing today.  I’m still recovering from the weekend.  I took the bike out Saturday and bombarded the back roads.  The Enterprise is surprisingly “nimble” for something that weighs 900 pounds – 1100 with me in the saddle.  The last big wreck I had on my old street bike back in the ‘80s was because the bike went off the edge of the road on a left-hand turn.  I can take hard, fast right-hand turns all day while even a sweeping left makes me tense up.  I’m getting better, but it’s still a fight. 

My wife did not go along.  She’s not feeling all that great.  She had another episode that put her in the hospital again that last week of June, and she re-started a steroid regime -- which seems to help, apart from some of the adverse effects.  I locked up all the guns.  The current course will be finished up next Monday, and we are trying to schedule a clinic visit at an academic hospital where there are more diverse specialists and additional testing possibilities.  We’ll see how it goes. 

So instead of having a big family gathering for the 4^th, we stayed home and did yard work.  I did manage to finish A Canticle for Leibowitz, and it certainly struck me differently from when I read it back in the ‘70s.  The verse above is related.  Humanity keeps making the same mistakes, despite our advances.  Of course, we didn’t start a big atomic war – at least we haven’t yet.  Currently, financial disaster seems a more imminent threat than an all-out nuclear devastation.  Still, I would not entirely dismiss the possibility of an EMP attack or an American city going up in a “flame deluge” like Sodom and Gomorrah. 

In the last section of the book, there is an exchange about utopian thinking that is close to something we have been kicking around at OC.  The idea of a “better” world can be unifying and constructive when everything is a mess and people are struggling just to get by.  For the person living in very primitive conditions, any technological improvement or advancement is a boon to the quality of life and productivity.  However, as we get more advanced and things really do get much better, the utopian ideal becomes more divisive and destructive. 

When much of the common goal becomes a present reality rather than a vague future promise, we realize that we were not at all in agreement about what we meant by “better”.  That’s more or less the problem we are facing in 21^st Century America.  We have achieved so much and moved so far into our future dream that some of us have decided it is not what we had in mind at all.  We sometimes find that technology now hampers and shackles about as much as it frees and empowers.  As “Hotel California” says, perhaps prophetically:  “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”

Technology isn’t going to make us better people.  We can be barbarians with iPhones.  We could compare technology to Pandora’s Box.  Perhaps it is like those nested Russian dolls, boxes within boxes within boxes where each one opens the next whether we are ready for it or not.  Each one unleashes new challenges and raises new questions we may not yet be equipped to answer. 

Without giving away the ending for those who might not have read or recall it, I would say Canticle concludes in some hope.  Though we seem destined to wreck nation and kingdom and empire because it is not Eden, Miller, perhaps intentionally, echoes that quote from St. Francis of Assisi that we ought to give up trying to change the world and change worlds instead. 

Land of the Forgotten

Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?  -- Psalms 88:12

Sometimes I get the blues for no particular reason, and it tinges, discolors everything that I see.  It’s hard to notice.  After I had the cataract on my left eye fixed, the next day all seen through the new lens was bright and clear and sharp.   Through my deteriorating right eye, the colors remained yellowed and dark and blurry.  I could change my worldview by closing one eye.  A bad lens gives bad sight no matter how well everything else might work.

Psalm 88 is a song of the low-down blues.  You can almost hear the B.B. King version: 

My soul is full of troubles. 

I’m way down in the pit. 

My friends have all forsook me,

And that ain’t the half of it.

Despite feeling alone and hopeless, the psalmist is talking to God.  Really, that’s how we know we have a right relationship with God, or with anyone.  If you can tell a person how you feel, if you can complain to him about how he has treated or mistreated you and expect him to listen, you are talking to a friend.  You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep.  Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.   (vv. 6,7)  He knows where he is, and he knows God has put him there; he just doesn’t know why or what to do about it. 

The older I get, the more I start to think that a big part of wisdom is giving up trying to make sense out of all that happens.  Instead of wearing ourselves out trying to reach a solution or even an understanding, the best thing may be to sing the blues.  I know that doesn’t sound like the American Way, but then I’m not Superman.  And even if I were Superman, has he ever fixed anything permanently?  You would think that in the universe where Superman exists, there would be some kind of utopia; instead, there are ever more dangerous, potent, and destructive enemies.  The better Superman tries to make things, the worse they actually get.  Great Scott!  Superman is a Democrat!

Why would God throw us down into a pit?  Is it because He is vengeful and petty?  Is it because He hates us?  Or could it be because He wants to limit our options, confine us so that the only way out is up?  Maybe I have tried to play the two-dimensional Superman a little too much, and I need to realize that I’m interfering with what God is doing.  It could be that I have become too reliant on human relationships or been too much of savior for one or more of my friends. 

In the pit – the grave, everyone around me is dead.   I see the limits of human power and ability, the hopelessness of man’s attempt to create his own salvation.  Death, the great darkness, the land of forgetfulness – to forget, and to be forgotten – there is a kind of comfort to it despite the terror.  I would not mind forgetting some of my life, committing it to the fires of oblivion.  Yet fire doesn’t obliterate completely.  It breaks things down, oxidizes and recombines, transmutes and purifies while giving off heat and light.  Perhaps God does know what He is doing.  

Though we may be in darkness and feel forgotten, God still hears us when we tell Him our troubles.  He listens to our complaints when no one else can or will.  Though we are set aside for a time, our cries rise to the Lord to whom the darkness is light.  There is no forgetfulness with God, and when He calls, the dead come forth.

Imagining Utopias And Other Gehennas

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

repeat chorus

“Imagine” – John Lennon

It doesn’t take much study of John Lennon to realize that he was gifted with wit and intelligence while at the same time troubled and confused. From his earliest childhood Lennon was a person without moorings, a situation to which he adapted and a style he adopted until coming under the even more negative influence of Yoko Ono about 1968. Until his death twelve years later, Lennon’s talents were under the destructive dictates of Ono.

“Imagine” is the leftist utopian anthem. It reflects the disdain of the regressive, pathologically stuck adolescent for all that has gone before, all that, ironically, makes his life possible. It uproots and tears down, but does nothing to plant or rebuild. It merely glories in rootlessness and trusts that the elimination of the boundaries of civilization will free humans to be the meaningless but somehow angelic beings he envisions. The advocates of “Imagine” never seem to wonder how the traditional pillars of civilization came into being or what purposes they might serve. If they consider it at all, they will blame the greedy oppressors, forgetting -- it seems, that those oppressors are members of the same flawed race as themselves.

Indeed, if men and women were perfect, there would be no need of governments, national boundaries, rules or regulations. We could all live in a garden and get along. The reality is that we were kicked out of the Garden for being self-willed and rebellious, and when a perfect Man did show up, we crucified Him.

As far as Lennon’s offhand remarks about the decline of Christianity and the popularity of the Beatles relative to Jesus, I thought, even forty years ago, that the reactions were excessive. What he said was nothing more than the effusions of a typical pop culture icon enamored of his own success. In that, he was no different than a Sean Penn, a Matt Damon or a George Clooney misperceiving fame for worth and substance. In fact, it is no different than the support for Obama – notoriety over substance. Many politicians, from Arnold to Jesse Ventura, Clinton to Obama think that popular appeal equals worth. This is little more than the high school mentality that the popular kids must be the best, that consensus is the same as wisdom and understanding.

The fool says in his heart, “God does not exist.” Even as the fool says it, he glorifies God, once again proving Him right. The fool’s blindness and arrogance in rejecting meaning and purpose leave him free to create meaning based on his own self-centered desires and interests. That one fool’s utopia is another fool’s concentration camp never interferes with the visions of the “Imagine” crowd. I would not want to live in John Lennon’s world, and I probably wouldn’t be welcome.

I suppose the Imagine-ers think I am just not highly evolved, but I want my own space and my own property and the right to worship God as I understand Him, to trust in His revelation and find the reason for my existence through His eternal reality. I prefer to imagine a kingdom where the Lord reigns. To put it simply, I don’t trust anyone else.

Is there really any difference between the bland, leveled, dead world of “Imagine” and the homogenized socialist society of 1984? How would people act if there were no restrictions, no fear of punishment, no traditions or taboos? Some people would behave decently, and they would be the slaves of the strongmen, the tyrants, and the sociopaths. Would not a Big Brother be required? Who is that going to be? Will it be the scientist, the sociologist, the lawyer, the accountant or the psychiatrist? All of the above? Al Gore? Jeremiah Wright? Bill Ayers?

Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll stick with Jesus.

In reality, Lennon and his like imagine a hateful, restrictive, petty little world where, as the kid in The Incredibles said, calling everybody special really means that no one is. Such a world would have had no place for John Lennon. Imagine.

Science and Serfdom: Thoughts on Hayek

I am thinking along a different track this morning, possibly because of the Obamessiah pulling the equivalent of an all-nighter for foreign affairs creds.

From one of the most important and influential books of the 20th century The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek:

Possibly we have not yet given enough attention to one feature of intellectual development in Germany during the last hundred years which is now in an almost identical form making its appearance in the English-speaking countries: the scientists’ agitating for a “scientific” organization of society. The ideal of a society organized “through and through” from the top has in Germany been considerably furthered by the quite unique influence which her scientific and technological specialists were allowed to exercise on the formation of social and political opinions (p. 208)

Hayek goes on to speak of the “intolerance of reason” which is quite applicable to our nation today.

Have you ever wondered how the culture that produced Luther, Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, and Schiller could have produce Nietzsche and finally Hitler? For one thing, it was not the same culture in the end. Hayek suggests that Germany moved from “humanities” to “realities”, then reminds us in a footnote that Hobbes in Leviathan wanted the study of the classics suppressed because they instilled a “dangerous spirit of liberty”.

Collectivists agree: society needs to be better organized. People, as Bill Clinton once opined, just have too much freedom. Al Gore wants government to control how much energy you and I are allowed to use. (Al, I’m sure, gets an exemption with his carbon-credit scam.) Obama and the current Democrat leadership will not allow more drilling for oil to increase supply, but instead want Americans to surrender their freedom of movement for the greater good of decreased demand.

It makes me sick to even think of this. Civilization struggled up out of the collectivist, tribal mind-set largely through the wisdom and insight of the Judeo-Christian religious perspective. America, the epitome of individual rights and freedom, is the result of that struggle upward. We have been the City on the Hill, the light for the rest of the world for two centuries.

I guess I just don’t understand people who want power and control over the lives and choices of others. I would like for my children and grandchildren to make good choices rather than bad ones, but I recognize that we learn from our errors. Despite my vast wisdom and encyclopedic knowledge, I do not know everything. I am particularly limited when it comes to seeing the positive results that can arise in the long-term from what looks like a bad situation in the short-term. I don’t think I am the only one with this limitation. Thus I feel it is fair to question the concept that government has any right to limit my freedom beyond the basics of requiring me to recognize and respect the rights of other individuals. The f’ning government, i.e., the collective, has no rights whatsoever; rights belong only to individuals.

Just as it causes concern that a lightweight like Obama could potentially be President, so, too, we should be concerned when science is elevated beyond its correct role. Hayek – who was there when it happened – says that when the Nazis came to power, scholars and scientists readily accepted the movement and were supportive of the state in its efforts to limit freedom. The Nazis did purge the universities, but the professors they eliminated were mainly the ones in the social sciences critical of the new state -- except, of course, for those who were Jewish. The non-Jews among the natural sciences, where thinking is supposed to be most rigorous, were the least critical of the Nazi regime.

When I hear people like the current crop of “militant atheists” advocating for a better science curriculum in the schools at the expense of the classics and religion, I wonder what it is that will guide society in the future. I am all for giving children a solid education in math and science. Mathematics, in particular, is a language that as many as possible need to know as well as possible. But mathematics is not a sufficient basis for civilization, not even when combined with physics, biology and chemistry. What and how may be important, but they are useless – no, worse, they are dangerous without why.

Science and technology are useful servants. They should not be allowed to master us.