Chuck Peek
The trial has begun and, partly because of it, I’ll start with a series of quotes whose common ground will soon be apparent:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. (Alexander Pope)
The old order changeth yielding place to new / And God fulfills himself in many ways / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
Every hour is saved / From that eternal silence, something more, / A bringer of new things (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
America has changed over the years. But these values my grandparents taught me — they haven’t gone anywhere. They’re as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots, is what’s in here. That’s what matters. And that’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does — every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end. (Barack Obama)
***
Some find in their scripture a single verse that blinds them to the rest! Jesus’ teaching, however, is a study in entertaining the challenge to balance one truth with another. Often he chides our dullness by saying “What’s the matter with you? You act like you’ve never heard . . .” One of his stories ends, “No, I won’t send anyone back to talk to your brothers . . . I’ve sent lots of people to talk to them and they never listen.” (Okay, I’m paraphrasing here, all right?)
But just as often he challenges his hearers to give up what they’ve heard and see a truth new to them. “You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .” In one of his briefest parables, Jesus extols the householder who can bring out things both old and new.
I’m guessing that he spoke with lots of people with the kind of itching ears that craved something new all the time—the eternally open mind unable ever to close, even provisionally, on any truth, let alone live for it. And that he equally spoke with lots of people who never got beyond the parent tapes speaking incessantly in their inner ears, who could never receive any new revelation, never see how an old truth might address a new world.
It may be that, as Alfred North Whitehead maintained, all philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato, but the notion is as easily misleading as helpful. Most of the time we are better led by the example of Kant when he felt that David Hume had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. Most dogmatism owes itself to slumbers of the heart and mind, and it is time for another awakening.
I’m old enough now to have lived through several upheavals before the one we are living through now, the pandemic of a pathological search for any way to divide us, with the sad consequence that someone only feels truly alive, truly worthwhile, if they keep whaling away at every supposed (or real) injustice they can’t get beyond. I’m so sick of the “why don’t we ever hear about . . .” crowd when we’ve all heard about whatever it is, ad nauseum.
The consequence of our dogmatic slumbers: One of our political parties is disintegrating before our eyes because they can’t get off their dime (or even decide which dime not to get off of), and the other major party is quite possible not far behind, or at least journalists seem to see the possibility…a sad situation if you don’t want to become Italy!
I don’t think the two parties bear equal blame but they both share some blame for a politics of mindless opposition rather than reasoned compromise. Do we have a governing elite, feathering their own nest at the expense of the “working poor”? Yes, and neither party seems to want to abandon their own privileges. Do we have one party mostly concerned with lining the pockets of their equally privileged constituents and another party dependent on showing some concern for those who don’t enjoy those privileges. I doubt if it is quite that simple, but in the main the sad answer is “yes.”
But the root cause here goes beyond ideological difference to the inability to decide which of our older ideas, ideas with which we were raised, might still be viable ideas and which need to be jettisoned as the “one good custom” that has hung around too long during the many changes in our world.
Apparently, since Jesus faced this in his day (as witnessed in the book in which no white people appear that some white people today want to use to buttress up white privilege!) and since the quotes at the head of this article came from three different centuries, our problem is not new. But it is, for all that, just as destructive in our day as it was in theirs.
For nearly half a century we’ve been swept away by a politics of “lose-lose.” Ask any of those paying $9,000.00 for the worst seat at the Super Bowl! Ask any of the anti-vaccinators who have blocked people from getting their COVID-19 shot! Ask any of the forces that, despite clear and continuous warning, have presided over the dumbing down of the American mind! And let’s not be “American Exceptionalists” here—the dumbing down of the mind of people all over the world! (Dumbing down, as witnessed in an apparent ignorance of how “cause” is determined rationally rather than by whimsy—oh that duo of defense attorneys.)
An intelligent culture strives to find “win-win” solutions to real problems (See Steve Buttress, Junior’s Way). It strives to find in both the old and the new the possible ways to create those “wins”. It rejects both the flags of “it was good enough for daddy” or “the church of what’s happening now.”
It asks of those who see themselves as the avant garde of a new world and belittle the blindness of the past: when you’ve pushed aside all the shoulders on which you stand, what then will you find to stand on? It asks of those way behind the learning curve of our times: when you’ve lost all touch with those who will next bear the torch, how can you expect to them to learn anything from your experience?
And it will be well to be aware that some will try to wear the mask of “unity” just as a screen for continued “obstinance” or, worse, continued obstruction and insurrection. But it excludes no one who sincerely wants to “bury the hatchet” and roll up our sleeves together and get to work.
I’ll close with a quote from one person with the vision to balance roots with dreams:
My point is that, after making it this far in Covidtide, we shouldn’t worry about giving up our favorite snack for six weeks [Lent]. If you made it to 2021, Lent shouldn’t stop you from having chocolate. Instead, this Lent should especially focus us on our place in the world, and how our inactions or actions make the world a less loving place, and we should direct our Lenten disciplines toward identifying those things and changing them, rather than trading the beef for fried fish on Fridays. (Fr. John Adams addressing the coming of Lent in his parish bulletin)
Religious or not, such a Lent would make a good way to transition from building walls to building bridges—connecting among other things the old and the new! The word “Lent” comes from its coincidence in the Northern Hemisphere with the “lengthening” of day light. That goes hand in hand with shortening the darkness.
Kearney, Nebraska
Next blog: March sometime, the month that promises one sort of madness or other!
capeek 