Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bound To Not Succeed

"But since then [The French Revolution] the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe (and since the 1960's the West in general) has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn 'revolutionise' (sic) from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin (French revolutionary) could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but what was more important, the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus...(a)s a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist (by which he refers to Anton Chekhov, I think) will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself...A man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts (a reference to Darwinism). In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for the purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost the right to rebel against anything."

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

What I find most remarkable about this passage is that nothing has changed in the 103 years since it was written. For fear of being found offensive to somebody or to provide justification for increasingly immoral behavior, the West has only been in a bigger hurry to rid itself of any guiding moral structure since the turn of the last century. What we are seeing now may be, and hopefully is, the last display of a terminally myopic view of reality. More and more people are coming to understand that in the absence of an ideal, change can only be destructive. But to hold an ideal, to cling to something dear not yet real, one must make a choice not to hold to some other ideal. These protesters who hold nothing dear are merely apparitions and will quickly enough evaporate away in the face of a strongly held conviction based upon a clear ideal. What will not fade so readily will be those hiding among this mass who do hold a clear conviction whose ideal depends upon support from the anarchists. Can these people possibly have in mind the best interests of anybody but themselves?

Note To Self - October 21, 2011

(Conversation relating to "Did Jesus Really Die For Our Sins?" - Piatt - Huffington Post October 18, 2011)

Me:

Quoted in the article is, "...the notion of Jesus dying for our sins did not gain traction in the Christian imagination until at least a dozen centuries after Christ's death." The article conflates the idea that somehow Christians' understanding that Christ died for our sin changed because historical Christianity held a moral influence view of atonement, which was supplanted by Anselm's satisfaction theory of atonement in the Middle Ages. Yes Jesus' death on the cross is necessary to the idea of satisfaction, but it's equally essential to moral influence which would be impossible without it. What he's trying to say is that the Bishop of Canterbury "discovered" the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice in the eleventh century! We've understood that Jesus died for our sins from the beginning (1 Corinthians was written 20-ish years after the resurrection).

Chis:

...the Bishop of Canterbury "discovering" things really just fits into the history of the church. Now, before I go any further, let me say that I am no bible history buff or anything like that, so I may be talking out I the side of my mouth here. I have a bit of an issue with the bible itself. Not that it isn't the word of God as told to men, but that the church decided what books/letters/stories we were to be given. What is in the rest of the letters? What is in the Apocrypha? (I could find that out pretty easily). What about all the Pagan customs & traditions that were "adopted" to bring in the unwashed masses?

I think I may have lost the plot for what I was trying to get at to begin with here, but you might be able to find a point in there somewhere.

Me:

As far as the compilation of the Bible is concerned, I don't think people are ever going to be convinced that the result is all of God's word to man as well as His only word to man. Yes there are the Apocrypha and the unincorporated Gospels, but you must consider the quandry facing the men who assembled the Bible. It's very obvious that not all documents and ideas the are attributed to God are genuine. Jeremiah made a living out of contradicting "God's" prophets. And then there's the Gnostic gospels...some truly weird stuff there.

The pagan thing makes me chuckle every time I get to talk about it! I had a conversation with a lady last Christmas who was critical of the white Jesus depiction, and I think my point opened her eyes a little. Imagine that it's just four hours past noon and the sun is already setting because your Gaelic homeland is so far north when you see the men of you village (about 10...maybe) surrounding a travelling stranger. This stranger has come to tell you the story of the Savior of man. If he used a picture to do so, which is not out of the question being a foreign missionary, how do you think his message would be received if he depicted a Middle Eastern Jesus? These people have never, and will never see a person of color! On the Mongolian steppe, would it be out of bounds to depict an Asian Jesus? How about a black Jesus in the Congo? What's interesting about Christianity in this regard is that it is the only religious system that conforms to the cultures in which it finds itself so that the face of Christianity is myriad. You can't say that about Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism. You might say it about Buddhism, but Buddhism really isn't a "religion" per se so much as it's a philosophical worldview.

Insight From Oct. 21

(Commentary from "Shadow Elite: Has The Obama Organized Machine Staged A Party Takeover?" - Wedel, Keenan - Huffington Post July 8, 2010)

Any of the various -kratia exist to serve the interests of those allowed to direct them. Money-dire­cted (plutocrac­y) will serve money; excellence­-directed (aristocra­cy) will serve those deemed excellent, etc. Only when personal liberty is a sacred ideal of those chosen to direct, will it be potentiall­y protected, and then only by dint of broad agreement by the choosers that this ideal is indeed sacred.

The post-modern view of the world lends itself to the politics of division; politics based upon personal identity characteristics (sexual orientatio­n, tribal affiliatio­n, age, religion..­.), class, race, etc. This view effectively seeks to cultivate unique worldviews within small segments of the electorate­. These unique views impede our ability to share ideals with each other to present some coherent understand­ing of what we can all believe in. Consequent­ly the whole composed of discordant cells is easier to manipulate for the plutocrats­, aristocrat­s, and any one else willing to take advantage of the system.

Gaius Julius Caesar intentiona­lly played the Celtic tribes of Gaul off of one another prior to his moving in for the kill, and so too may it be in our own political arena.

Insight From Oct. 18

(A snippet of conversation from Oct. 18, 2011)

...My fundamental assumptions about what this country is supposed to be are indeed exactly what I'm talking about. The fact is that our society's own assumption of who we are and what our purpose is has become unhinged from its door post and increasingly fragmented.

Once upon a time there was a prevailing narrative that was taught to children that the US was good, was a force for good, and though flawed, was best place man had yet contrived. It was left to the tincture of time and experience of adulthood to temper this ideal into a pragmatic view of who we had become, from the standpoint of whence we came, in order that the American mantel could be aptly and responsibly taken up by a mature generation. This understanding of how we are to form our assumptions as well as how and when we are to exert our influence on society based upon those assumptions has been and is being undermined on at least two fronts. First, we no longer indoctrinate our children into that prevailing narrative of goodness. Two examples, one each from opposing political perspectives, are Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson used to be the nearly beatified narrator of our core ideal, The Declaration of Independence. Now, through the efforts of academics like Annette Gordon-Reed, Jefferson is a racist, adulterous slave owner, and this impression is presented with a gravity and to an age of student that was formerly thought wholly inappropriate. Lincoln was likewise nearly beatified as The Great Emancipator, but now, through an increasingly more accepted argument (for which I apologize for the lack of citation), Lincoln is practically the destroyer of states' rights and by extension our entire republican federation. Second, we no longer pass the mantel to the next mature generation. People in American over the age of 40 are the first people in history to learn their society's survival skills from the younger generation. The youth of America increasingly drive our national conversation at exactly the time when they are the least qualified to do so!

I empathize with the sentiment of OWS, I really do, but I believe that their aim is misguided, their goals incoherent, their understanding of the issue misinformed, and I believe they are willingly lending their enthusiasm to groups representing political ideals whose implementation would literally be a horror to most of the country including, likely, themselves. I may take up other aspects of this conversation later as time allows, but for now understand that my fear is that our country's educators have been doing a gross disservice to our nation's youth for a host of reasons; none of which are even in our nation conversation right now for the most part.

A Question Of Motive

“’I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know how earnestly, in the past months of the last year, I labored to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others…[But as] I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect…at the very moment of that vain-glorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most dreadful shuddering…I looked down…I was once more Edward Hyde.’

This is a deadly turn of events. For the first time Jekyll becomes Hyde involuntarily, without the potion, and this is the beginning of the end. Unable to control his transformations any longer, Jekyll kills himself. Stevenson’s insight here is, I think, profound. Why would Jekyll become Hyde without the potion? Like so many people, Jekyll knows he’s a sinner, so he tries desperately to cover his sin with great piles of good works. Yet his efforts do not actually shrivel his pride and self-righteousness, they only aggrevate it. They lead him to superiority, self-righteousness, pride and suddenly---look! Jekyll becomes Hyde, not in spite of his goodness, but because of his goodness.”1

So the struggle I’m having, as you discerned from what was not written in my letter, is that I value man’s altruism; our actual instances of really helping each other. However, as a believer, I understand that there is a distinction between man’s acts and God’s acts through men. What Mr. Keller describes in the preceding passage is especially relevant to believers, and particularly to myself, even though secular people either cannot or will not understand the dilemma we face as God’s servants. In the world’s eyes all acts of relief to our fellow men are acts of goodness. Maybe they are. Maybe the good that is accomplished is done for God’s purposes regardless of the motivation. As believers though we are keen to discern the motivation behind our own acts of charity, and assure ourselves that we are acting in God’s will rather than our own. Frankly this fear of self-aggrandizement, I believe, has paralyzed much of American Christianity to the point where secular people of high moral character can justifiably condemn us for our own inaction; our “lazy cruelty”. I also believe that this pervasive ‘laziness’ reveals atrophy in our individual personal relationships with God. There is suffering in the world. Sin has assured that. However, just as sin grieves the Father, suffering must as well being the child of sin. If we were in prayer with God, oneness with His Spirit, I doubt that so many of us would remain idle.

This is where I am today. My relationship with God has grown these last few years to the point where I feel like I am beginning to see His Spirit at work in the world around me. I am beginning to see that there are great opportunities for God’s glory to become manifest in the world around us, and I’m even beginning to feel like He’s inviting me to follow His Spirit to where the work is being done. But I’m not sure. One night this summer while waiting for sleep, I was struck by the fact that Evergreen has fifteen acres of weeds and grass. Then I thought of the subsidized housing project that I pass in Yale every time I go to Stillwater. It occurred to me that there may be a child living there who might not have enough to eat. “Why are we growing weeds and not food?” I asked myself. Then that same week a friend of an internet friend knows a guy at the Food Bank found out that things are looking pretty bleak over there. I immediately thought of fifteen acres. I approached Jerry Voris with the idea, and he told me of his brother’s church in Missouri that does this very same thing. He mentioned that it takes many volunteers, but he did remind me that the Evergreen has a tractor. About this time, I thought that I should broach this topic with Michael and see if it would even be a possibility. Then, to my horror, I realized that maybe I should ask God where He was at on the topic first!

I’ve been praying for two months now for clarity on the issue and each time I’m met with more concerns. “How are you going to find time? What if nobody wants to volunteer? Where will the money for equipment, seed, fertilizer, herbicide, and irrigation come from? How will your wife feel about another commitment? What if nothing grows?” And on and on. Intermingled with this are images of my standing as leader at the head of the people that it would take to make it happen along with the musing of being interviewed by the Tulsa World. These images and questions are at once terrifying and tantalizing and seem to be the creation of my own Mr. Hyde. The Devil first gives me a litany of why I can’t do it then pricks my ego and dares me to push ahead. “You can do it”, he says. “You’ll be great!” no mention of God’s greatness. But when I prayerfully imagine the enterprise as God’s own, He gives me no sense of contradiction. Maybe He’s forcing me to trouble shoot all aspects of the operation in my own mind to ensure that this talent he’s entrusting to me doesn’t get buried. I just don’t know yet.

Steve Jobs’ death culled out of me my desire to be helpful to my fellow man. Jesus practically implores, and maybe even demands me to live this life of service. I’m just really having a hard time getting myself out of the way. You know?

1Timothy Keller, The Reason For God (Dutton, 2008), Chapter 11 “Religion And The Gospel”, p. 176.

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What Steve Job's Passing Revealed To Me

I'm not a Mac fan, have never really been a technologically inspired person, and am in fact somewhat of a neo-Luddite when it comes to the inclusion of technology in my life. Hey, I grew up near an Amish community; they rub off on you. All this is to say that when he passed, I was only vaguely aware of who Steve Jobs was, and I was certainly never an Apple acolyte.

It started as I drove to work and listened to the reporting of his death and related venerations for his life on the radio. What I felt then is hard to describe. While my first reaction, thankfully, was sorrow over the untimely death of a fellow human being, it was tinged with an aura of negativity. By the time I got to work, a place replete with Apple enthusiasts, that negativity had manifested itself in my heart as a sort of resentment. Why? Why did I resent this man? "This man's no different than the rest of us!", I said to myself. "What makes this guy more special than anybody else?"

There was a sort of jealousy pervading my heart; a strange, not-at-all-covetous sort of jealousy. His wealth didn't make me jealous. His creativity and effusion of creations did not make me jealous. I began to think that the public outpouring of emotion was the cause of my dark heart only to find that it was not, but was closely related to what I did find. Steve Jobs mattered. He mattered in a way that I likely never will. Oh, I'm not talking about the, "you matter to your friends and family" or the, "you matter to God" sort of mattered. He impacted other people's lives; people he never met. Life was made better for some people because of what he did. That realization, in comparison to my own insignificance on that stage, in combination with his drive and motivation were what was coloring my emotion. But that's not what I learned.

This jealousy manifested itself in a way that I now recognize as being fairly typical of my behavior, though to discover that it was so came as an uncomfortable shock. I immediately began to react to each instance reminding me of his death from newspaper articles to FB posts with a sort of personal equivalency. "Yes, yes, he was a great man", I would think to myself, "but I'm probably just as savvy and capable as he was." The unspoken coda to this impulse was, "and I will be if only..." A miraculous series of self-motivated events would have to happen for that ellipsis to be not so, and that's only assuming that I am as capable or savvy a man as he. And there's the lesson! In order for me to compare myself favorably with Steve Jobs I must overlook the distance between his accomplishment and my own. I must devalue his contributions in order to find equivalency amongst the catalogue of my achievements. I must destroy his accomplishments in my own mind to do anything other than look up at him. And my heart doesn't want to look up at him. My heart wants to be looked up to! Pride my friends, pride.

This effect has caused me to look at some of the great pillars of my appreciation: Mozart, St. Timothy, James Madison, Aristotle and Socrates, Vermeer, and the list could go on. My understanding of my own contribution to humanity has literally come crashing down to shatter at my feet this week. While that no doubt develops an image of depression in your mind, as it does my own, I can now look up though the unclouded skylight newly broken. And I see stars!

Occupy Wall Street

What's happening on Wall Street is a good thing in that attention is being brought to the need for reigning in the speculative capitalization that is weighing our economy down. I believe this capitalization is inherent and unavoidable when those who have the means to capitalize on a pending disaster freely do so at the expense of the rest of us. However, I also believe that it is merely a symptom of an economy in collapse caused by other problems. What those problems are may be debatable, but at least in the case of the housing market crisis, it is undeniable that direct government intervention was the cause. However, policy is not the point of this essay.

As citizens of an increasingly nominal republic, what is happening on Wall Street should give us cause to gird ourselves for the coming cultural conflict that will greatly resemble that of the 1960's. Nobody wanted war in the 1960's. Politicians engaged in the conflict for strategic reasons, and the 'Greatest Generation' sent their sons off to fulfill their duty. As the Vietnam War drug on, public dissatisfaction with the course of the war was near universal from what I can tell. However, the vast majority of mature, conservative Americans chose not to voice their dissatisfaction publicly feeling that to do so would be an expression of disloyalty. The populist uprising that came to be the face of anti-war expression was composed almost entirely of young people and encouraged by their professors who used their students' enthusiasm and malleability to incarnate their Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist views in American society. The moral high ground attained by these young protestors' anti-war sentiment was used to legitimize these inherently anti-American views which were then allowed to develop in the minds and actions of this generation of people and their protégés until we find ourselves today in a completely divided America.

Listen to the words of this new generation of (again) young protestors. The policy prescriptions that they cite are incorherent and related to a problem that they cannot specifically define but simply refer to as "injustice". Here's the danger! A fight is being drawn up over some issue that nobody can rightly define. What's to stop these people from defining it in any way they want? What's to stop them from focusing in on policy solutions that don't coherently address what is really the problem but rather what they feel is the problem because addressing that thing makes them feel better? Revolutionary history is instructive in this area. Once upon a time there were twin revolutions. One was fought against extremely well-defined policy and was fought for extremely well-defined reasons. The other was an unbridled emotional outburst against "injustice". I ask you, in which of these two revolutions were innocent heads cut off?

We need to be quick to define what this is all about because frankly, in these people's eyes, my neck is vulnerable!