Once upon a time, the story has been told, a man was lost in the woods. He turned this way, then that, only to be confronted with more trees. Every direction seemed only denser and more formidable than the prior turns. After days of searching but only finding a deepening sense of panic, the sound of approaching footsteps stilled the lost man. Anxious, but hopeful, he waited and then watched as a bedraggled human shape emerged from the trees.
“Can you show me the path that leads out of the forest?” the lost man implored.
“No,” responded the stranger, “but I can show you a hundred paths that lead further in.”
And so it is. Surely we, as a country, have arrived at a point where we can forthrightly admit that we are lost - culturally, politically, economically, spiritually. Where we are is not where we thought these paths would lead, but we don’t know where else to go. And so we keep playing out the oft-quoted definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
But for the life of us, we can’t bring ourselves to try anything different.
I often reflect on the classic rock show I attended several years ago at the State Fair. Musical performers from my adolescent years replayed the songs that had made them famous. And it was fun. Everyone in the audience knew all the words and tunes and sang along. But there was something disquieting about the experience. When had these talented artists decided to face perennially backwards instead of forwards? When had they stopped writing new songs, contenting themselves – and their audiences – with the old ones? When did they decide to become an “oldies act”?
And when did we?
Now almost 250 years into this social experiment in democracy and capitalism, surely we can acknowledge the flaws inherent in both. Surely we can recognize now with sobering clarity where democracy leads when taken to its logical extreme. It becomes the manipulative, obstructive, predatory, narcissistic power-play we are witnessing today that bears only the thinnest, most superficial resemblance to the common-good give-and-take imagined by the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I can’t help but think they would be embarrassed and ashamed. And angry.
And just as surely we can tally the toll that unfettered capitalism takes on the economic landscape, the people who are both its fuel and its engine, and the enterprises that inevitably become as commodified as their products. In its indominable drive to cut expenses, increase profits, ever more quickly, the vision horizon gets truncated to the nearest quarterly report, and any interest in intrinsic quality gets bludgeoned by the insatiably churning gears of “faster,” “bigger,” “cheaper,” “more”. It is routinely claimed that, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and while that may well be oceanically true, the trope has long since been proven false in the lives of common people. In the real world, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and nothing remains in-between.
And religious communities – at least an increasing number of the Christian ones – just look increasingly cartoonish in their own attempts to translate discipleship into the “biz” of capitalism. Owing more to their political leanings than the kind of community that Jesus actually sought to manifest and engender, progressives and conservatives alike leverage their energies and increase their volume in pursuit of market share. Who knows, maybe a private equity fund will buy them out, carve them up and sell their assets for a profit.
Once, the probing philosophical question was, “Does ‘can’ imply ‘ought’?” Just because we can do something, does it necessarily follow that we ought to do it. But that question has been rendered irrelevant by the fact that ‘can’ now simply implies ‘will’. We have largely abandoned the various moral, social, or forward-seeing considerations that once constrained us. If we can do something, there is very little to inhibit us, no matter how craven, short-sighted or relationally deleterious the choice might be.
“Fine,” someone will say (because someone always says it), “these aren’t perfect systems; they are simply better than any of the alternatives around.” I won’t dispute that. I have no interest in emulating any of the equally failed and depraved systems experimented with throughout history. Fascism and Communism have no alternative appeal. Socialism looks promising on paper, but it, too, is flawed.
My only question is when and why did we collectively become an “oldies band”? When did we decide as a country that we would no longer write anything new, content to just keep playing the favorites that sound increasingly trite and (to employ a very anachronistic metaphor) scratchy? What is to prevent us from speaking the truth, both to ourselves and to the lost ones approaching us in the morass, that no, we don’t know the way out.
The most we can say is that we know a hundred paths that lead further in.
Maybe then we could join forces, explore some innovative thought, and come up with newly creative alternatives.
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