The Truth About Success is Harder, Darker

One of CS Lewis’s markers for whether something is real or true is if it has a twist to it. He applied my suspicion of anything that was too simple, too perfect, not just to controversial political events, but to theology and science.  Real things turn out to be not quite as predicted, which leads us to the next real thing, at greater depth.  I don’t know if it was original to Asimov, but he passed along the idea that science does not progress by scientists saying “Eureka!” but by murmuring “Now that’s strange…” 

A religion or entire scripture that was too simple could be rejected on that ground alone.  Jesus came among a people who argued, at a time they were arguing more than usual, and emphatically did not make it simple. God did not just leave a one-page document at the Temple telling us what to do, with a footnote at the bottom saying “I’m going to be sacrificed tomorrow to pay the price of sins. It’s all good.” Right from the beginning he started teaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and we still only sorta know what that means. You can only get there by discussing it with other believers – where two or three are gathered, you see.  So also with the idea that we are forgiven only as we forgive, are judged by the measure we use to judge, and - hang with me here - to be grateful we were given the grace to work really hard for the salvation we receive by grace. If we try and explain it, we screw it up and mislead others, but if we try and live those out we see that they are true.

Lewis was essentially more normal of mood than I am, less cynical and harsh. I don’t think the truth is merely quirky, difficult, and unexpected.  I think the truth is hard, and truths that are not hard are likely to be hoaxes. What growth I have had has been bought with pain, so I have a natural inclination to pass that on. I am told even by sympathetic observers that this is not often persuasive. True.  

There are moments, even seasons, of sunlight, joy, and humor, but this is against a background of a fallen world. We are enacting God’s will when we bring joy out of sorrow, not when we pretend sorrow isn’t really there.

Insert: This got long and unwieldy. Let me give an overview for structure.
1. Groups or individuals who give themselves entire credit for success are wrong, perhaps dangerously.
2. Some confessions are just accusations. 
3. Not everyone will succeed.  Because I don't know what we should do collectively, I ask "What will we do about that individually?"

With that in mind, Point 1. I would like to examine how something common about our motives gets darker at every step. It is a comfortable thing to give oneself credit for success. If we are talented, or hardworking, or able to delay gratification, or devoted to our cause or customers, we received that from somewhere.  It comes to us because of genes, or parents; because of good teachers or hard lessons; of freedom in Christ or the many smaller freedoms of Western Civ in general or America in specific. We stand on the shoulders of giants. (Obama’s statement was unhealthy because it was half-true, on two counts. Even those who are supported by others do in fact build things; secondly, he was trying to transfer credit not to Founding Fathers, cultural legacies, and the institutions we enjoy, but to government, to encourage us to have more of that.  So half-true twice means one-quarter true, I guess.)

It is really angering when people don’t get that and are arrogant. That self-satisfied air, the implied contempt for those others who didn’t get so far is infuriating.  It makes you want to smack ‘em. Ronald Reagan observed that if you let other people take the credit, you can get a lot accomplished. That is true, but the deeper truth is harder. You aren't just letting others take the credit.  There are a thousand people out there who deserve it.

 

The next truth is harder, darker. Point 2.

Preaching antimaterialism has been going on as long as I can remember. Deploring the American obsession with things and displays of wealth used to be such a Christmas tradition that I wondered whether it should be added to the lectionary.  Third Sunday of Advent: The Condemnation of the Presents. It was preached not merely as a tactic, the preachers and the laity  softening  the blow by confessing to their own materialism, their own getting caught up in the whirl of presents. I, too, am guilty of this.  I am not putting myself above the rest of you, I am trying to journey as a fellow-soldier with you. Is this heartfelt? I have become suspicious. Public confession of sins can be sleight-of-hand, whether copping a plea or distracting from more serious issues.

There was a Doonesbury series decades ago in which Mark and someone were doing a retrospective on Vietnam on a radio station. One of the last strips in the series was a radio-style “contest,” in which listeners were encouraged to call in to answer who was at fault: the military, the congress, corporations, presidents? A call came in saying “All of us?” which triggered the announcers to play a typical We’ve got a winner! recording while saying “’All of us’ is correct!”

We see this frequently now “We all as people contribute to rape culture whether we realize it or not.”  Common Dreams.   Also, Pharyngula's I am a racist, too.

Here’s the thing.  None of these are real confessions.  They are all merely disguised accusations.  How sweet it feels to say “The people around me are very evil, but I only have a little of this.” Does that seem harsh?  I don’t claim it is people’s only motivation. No doubt people have genuine concerns about materialism, or racism.  There is a whole upbeat personality style that says “Come on gang!  We can do it! Yes we can.  If we all buckle down we can make a little progress, and then a little more on the way to treating everyone with justice.”  Nice people, usually.  They don’t seem mean.  Surely I am not suggesting that even those have this dark undercurrent of a more subtle, but more deadly pride?

Well yeah, actually, I am. Luke 18 "To some who trusted in their own righteousness and viewed others with contempt, He also told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like the other men—swindlers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector."

Proverbs 30:11-14 and Matthew 6:1-7 are just the beginning of what else the Bible says on the subject. Jesus seems to care much more about this false attitude toward sin than to sins themselves. He treats materialism as a danger. We conclude an antiracism from his welcome of people outside the Jewish circle, but he doesn't mention it much.

The current discussion of privilege has become one more example of a reasonable concept taken over for purpose of virtue-positioning. It is ideal for the purpose because it is never seldom in a context of other eras, other places, offsetting virtues, or actual causes. It's not just moving the goal posts, it's Calvinball. I probably shouldn't have made light of it like that.Scripture seems to treat it as dangerous unto damnation, which makes it especially upsetting to me when I hear Christians doing it.  They do not know their danger.

The next step in discussing success is darker.  Point 3. Not everyone is going to succeed, so what are we going to do about that? In fact, a whole lot of people are going to screw up, and this may keep increasing. Conservatives try to convince themselves that if everyone just tried harder it would all come around right. Because accountability is a good thing for lots of people lots of the time, we pretend it's going to do much more than we think.  Well, in the old days we didn't rescue girls who got pregnant without a husband, so we had a lot less illegitimacy. So if we just stopped rescuing them now, it would go back to the old days. Well, no it wouldn't. In the old days we were less individualistic - how we did reflected on our family, our town, our groups. There were punishments for doing badly, but there were also rewards for doing well, because one felt an important part of the group. That world is long gone, and it's not coming back. Plus, that new culture isn't the fault of the girls/women, or the boys/men who impregnated them.  They didn't build that.  I think incentives and accountability are good things, helping people avoid drugs, general laziness, and poor impulse control in general.  But it's not going to do everything.  Worse, the usual way to do accountability well is to have the consequences be real. Which means some people won't make it. Whether by genetics or environment, they can't control impulses well enough in the culture that is actually here. (Not the one we think should exist instead.) Or they just aren't smart enough, never gonna be. They might improve some, but...they might not.  If we let them fall, our descendants will thank us, because the gene pool will be better.  I don't recall Jesus saying anything about gene pools.

Liberals may have the opposite problem, of believing that nearly everyone would succeed if conservatives didn't keep preventing it.  If we just let them have culture their own way.  Come on gang, let's all just try a little harder...I'm not sure I want to even discuss it. See Point 2 again.

Hmm.  I came back and decided I do have to discuss it. If one takes that attitude, that creating a few cultural changes will make it so those who aren't succeeding will begin to - which I, at least, know is not going to be true - what then happens when changes come, yet the unsuccessful remain so? Many will blame others even more.  They have to.  It's human nature. That's the situation we are in now. We have increasingly blamed the racist, sexist, trans-hating teachers and police - no matter how well they actually do, it must not be enough.

Okay, back to the conservatives, who are my real audience here. So if we know that some are not going to do better, and we are determined not to rub it in, what is there to do?  How do we have accountability, but secretly not?  We have to confront lies, sure, but there are truths better not to say. I have n o way around this*. Something that got overlooked in the subprime mortgage crisis is that a lot of people did actually succeed in keeping up with those mortgages.  Lending institutions make their money by figuring out what percentage of people will keep up, plus the return they get from those who partly keep up, minus those who do not pay.  Let's say the break-even number is around 90%.  When keeping up drops to 85%, their whole company is in danger of collapse, and if everyone is making the same bad calculations, the whole industry starts to totter. Yet that does mean that 85% of those people were succeeding, which is actually a good number.

There are charitable organisations which accept lower success rates.  They structure it differently, but in terms of housing, that what Habitat does. (They found it is even harder in other cultures, where volunteering for the good of others is uncommon, but that's another story.) There is a false kindness in some groups.  I know one which brings in refugees and supports them well to launch them - for six months, after which they drop services and hope they survive. They have decided they can bring in more refugees that way, because it's more efficient use of resources. Having watched this happens to mentally ill people they have brought to America and then tried very hard to abandon, I don't have a lot of respect for that. (Hmm, that was a distraction, a rant about a slightly different topic.  Should I edit that out? Nah, I really wanted to get that off my chest.)

When Scripture tells us to lend without hope of return, we should not just think in terms of hyperbole.  What if only 50% can pay you back? We can imagine a Christian billionaire, who says, I am not going to just give money to people on the street, but I am going to set up a loan program that I expect will lose money. That's one way to go. It is not the lending without hope of return that the New Testament talks about, but it's more than I do with my money, so I couldn't fault the idea. I think that general principle applies to the other forms of not-succeeding, not just mortgages. I also think it mostly works small-scale.  On a national scale, forgiving failure will lead to catastrophic lack of accountability.  They must give justice, but we are then freed to show mercy.

I have gone long. I should find some way to break this up. A video or two will occur to me, I'm sure.