This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. -- Joshua 1:8
We are watching a great and terrible error being worked out
on the world stage these days. I blame
it to some extent on technology – though I love technology. Good technology, good engineering, and good
software play by the rules. There are
things you can do, and things you can’t do.
If you go to the edge of the Mississippi River, you will see that it won’t
do to try to drive across it. That’s
something you can’t do – unless you play by the rules and find a bridge. But the bridge itself has to be built
according to the rules, the laws of mechanics, the law of gravity, and the laws
of hydraulics. If it isn’t, it may end
up dumping you and your car into the water.
Some of us have come to the conclusion that reality can be
controlled, even altered by technology. Some look at the amazing achievements in architecture, in
communications, in travel, in electronics and computers and the internet and
erroneously conclude that man has conquered Nature. I think that’s a little optimistic, but even
worse is the leap to think that we can somehow conquer reality – that instead
of “the way things are”, we can have it the way we think it “ought to be”.
That’s not going to happen. You can pour enough energy into a closed or
contained system to make all kinds of strange things take place – as long as
the energy continues to flow into it.
But you are still bound by the law.
It’s just that the input creates a different and temporary balance. Once the influx stops, the system will settle
back into a stable state that is normal for it.
Energy takes many forms, but it often ends as heat dissipated, the
excited movement of molecules rippling out in decreasing amplitude.
A big enough store of energy will let us get away with a lot
of what appears to run counter to the law.
We may get so enamored of our power that we start to think the old laws
were wrong, but they are not. The world
system, especially what we call Western Civilization, had built a reserve of moral,
intellectual, and economic power contained and channeled by the weir of
Judeo-Christian culture. As the various
stones of that weir have been rejected and removed, the stream is slowly losing
its impetus. It is once again becoming a
low and quiet pool. Those who have
dismantled the “obstacles” are ignorant, perhaps willfully, of the laws which
governed the order of that construction.
The world will lose not only the benefit of the power generated
by the weir but it’s protecting containment as well. Nature’s floods will sweep unchecked,
catastrophically.
Someone has said that real virtue consists in keeping in
harmony with the law – or trying to. I’m
sure that is true. Our culture at its
beginnings drank deep of such virtue. The
effort at harmony, for many of us, was implicit. We never had to think about it much. It just was.
We understood that to be blessed, prosperous, and victorious meant being
in alignment with the traditions handed to us by our fathers and mothers.
Now even mothers and fathers are no longer considered
essential. The waters are noticeably
lower and more languid than when I was young, and on the distant slopes of the
high country, the storms do rage, and if it keeps on raining ...
