A few weeks back, Michael S. Greve published a discussion of one of our fundamental problems in these troubled times, as opposed to the secondary problems discussed by the better technical experts in financing, investment, etc. Greve’s essay, in three parts, can be found at:
The first essay begins with Greve’s statement of the problem he is addressing:
We live under a Constitution of Affluence. Obviously, I don’t mean a constitution that produces affluence. (Prosperity may be right around the corner, but it’s the corner behind us.) I mean a Constitution whose basic institutions presuppose and depend on high levels of affluence and, equally important, public expectations that life will get better and richer.
The United States Constitution—the formal Constitution and its nineteenth-century arrangements—is (or was) not a Constitution of Affluence in the sense just explained. It sought to create conditions that would be conducive to rising prosperity—principally, by way of ensuring political stability, meaning institutional arrangements that would let citizens go about their business without constant fear that somebody, someplace might confiscate the proceeds. But it was supposed to work, and it did work, even in times of prolonged economic stress—in one of those “varying crises of human affairs,” as John Marshall might have said and in fact did say.
We don’t want the conditions of prosperity. We don’t want to work to understand and to do. We just want prosperity and now we assume prosperity is ever coming our way. Americans remain an assembly of mostly hardworking peoples but we think prosperity, a recent-model car and an annual vacation to some tropical paradise, are our right and not the result of luck in ancestors and in date of birth as much as a result of our hard work as individuals. In many ages, men and women have worked still harder than we just to avoid too many weeks of empty stomachs and too many children buried at a young age. We learned what the world is really like during our years of prosperity and so did our leaders who seem to be dull of wit and empty of knowledge as much as they are overly ambitious and excessively respectful of their own talents which typically don’t even reach the level of modest. We willingly hand over power to those leaders who make promises corresponding to our false beliefs about the nature of reality — which are theirs as well. We turn away from any politician or other leaders or thinkers who might remind us, as did Rudyard Kipling in his poem, Gods of the Copybook Headings, that payment will be made when those gods, the moral rules which govern human life, catch up to us. Peter cannot ever be robbed to pay Paul. I would add that Peter shouldn’t even assume he’ll ever be able to make enough to support just himself and his family. He should take steps to ensure his prosperity rather than just knowing he can always count on his corporate employer and his insurance company and his mutual fund and the Social Security system.
We can address a multitude of secondary problems in the American citizenry but the primary problems remain as Greve states above. The primary problem, that is, if we assume we inhabit yet a Western Civilization which is intact, that is, if we assume we’re standing upon some foundation which supports us as we go about living and making our livings, raising our children and worshiping as we see fit. Under this assumption, the primary problem might not be solvable until some disaster brings down the rickety superstructures built upon the foundation, but the foundation remains as do the building materials.
If we stay with that assumption, that there is a good slab of concrete beneath our feet, we could deal with a variety of serious and true problems which are secondary. Many intelligent and insightful analysts, including a number of amateurs blogging on the Internet, are addressing such problems as inadequate or wrongly-targeted regulation, malfunctioning educational systems, and so on. Greve says there are no solutions because we’ve built a political system that operates as if the money will continue to flow even if the politicians and general citizenry begin to realize the flow is diminishing in real terms. That is, we are strongly encouraged by the system we’ve built and by our own inclinations to continue acting as if the fiscal problems are a mere aberration that will disappear at any second. Moreover, we’ll soon be at each other’s throats.
As general prosperity dwindles for at least a while, those who know school budgets can’t be cut will be at war with those who know police department and fire department budgets can’t be cut. There are pensions and health benefits for the elderly and the disabled and the impoverished. There are wars which some think need fighting and, in any case, expensive but often ineffective military systems to buy. There is a huge and growing national security bureaucracy and industry. There are roads to be maintained. We know, in our heart of hearts, that there is money to do all of this for all of this is necessary to help us maintain the living standard which is our right. Mostly, we just know the world is truly what it seemed to be for the sixty years or so of never-ending American prosperity and power. Surely, such an important aspect of reality can’t change.
I wrote about this human weakness a few years back in an essay responding to an article which “is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and growing.” My essay, Individuals and Herds, provides more discussion as well as a link to that article which started from the discovery that the leaders and citizenry of a phase or local manifestation of Mayan civilization destroyed by ecological problems were aware of those problems as they developed and did nothing in response.
We may be in worse shape than those Mayans and others studied by anthropologists and historians trying to deal with this lack of response by peoples aware their civilization was being destroyed. If there was a loss of faith in the Mayan understanding of reality because of their problems, that understanding would have, in some strong sense, remained intact if a bit battered. We don’t have an corresponding understanding of reality. We’ve lost it as modern empirical evidence has piled up telling us the specific understandings of Western civilization, understandings of space and time and matter and human nature, are wrong. I would say those understandings aren’t rich enough or complex enough to cover reality as we now know it, but nearly all modern human beings, including most scholars and rabbis and learned poets, won’t be able to dig in and see the situation for what it is. They will see strong hints of utter wrongness. As Walker Percy told us: we’re lost in the cosmos. But we’re lost just because we developed the knowledge and skills to launch ourselves out into that cosmos, leaving behind a world falsely understood. And we haven’t developed a proper understanding of that cosmos even though we’re penetrating it in a high-speed rocket. We no longer see a true world, the universe seen in light of God’s moral purposes. But we see the universe with greater clarity and in greater detail than even Einstein could have thought possible a century ago. We simply need to develop a moral understanding, that is, we need to find a moral narrative that provides an understanding of human individual and communal lives, of stars and rattlesnakes, of modern theories of gravity and quantum mechanics, of a man who was the incarnate Son of God — true creature and true Creator.
I recently published an essay dealing with our problems at that bedrock level: Hints of Unity, Coherence, and Completeness. In that essay, I somewhat developed the idea that we need to rebuild our civilization, and — equivalently, our minds — at a fundamental level. Efforts to fix our banking or political or industrial systems, efforts to set priorities in a world of large but finite resources, will fail if we don’t first develop an understanding of our world, if we don’t find a meaning for our individual and communal lives.