Precipice

I'm too tired to do much writing these days, but if I could I would focus my attention on the necessity of building and strengthening our capacity for collective moral and spiritual care for each other. We live in an era where the very concept of such care is under assault. "If masses of people live and die without basic necessities such as food, healthcare, or housing - then so be it. God has willed it to be so and charity for the undeserving is the best we should expect." - or so the thinking goes at its most base level.

This thinking is so wrong on so many levels it is perplexing even to know where to begin. How does one fight such a wave of misanthropy when at institutions like Calvin Theological Seminary (my alma mater) the professor of social ethics (when I attended) spent the better part of an entire semester teaching that greed is the only virtue that can hold society together? (Don't ask me, ask Dr. Van Reken).

But here's what I want to consider. In a matter of one or two generations technology will have increased to a level where we will be able to create superhumans. The elite class will be able to custom design their children's DNA. Are we willing to take a libertarian gospel of Ayn Rand view of such a world? Already we've shown that we simply don't care at all about the children of Flint, Michigan or East Chicago or of countless places like that where the children of the poor are subjected to environmental degradation that will profoundly damage the IQ and life potential of the children who grow up there. We simply don't care, not at a collective level. What happens when the capacities of technology and wealth are so great that simply not having designer DNA will mean your children can't get into college or university? I will not have to face this reality, but my children will.

Currently we live in a nation that struggles with and is on the edge of rejecting basic notions of care such as that a child born with a medical condition has a right to access care. No one wants children to die, but collectively we're deciding to shrug our shoulders if we build a society where that happens with regularity. Our collective moral and spiritual capacity fails on basic norms such as caring for the sick, housing the homeless, and providing water that doesn't poison our children. How will we ever find the the moral or spiritual capacities to answer questions such as who is allowed to access designer DNA? Which people should be allowed to live a mere 75-90 years and which people should be allowed to access life extension to live 150 or more years? What do we do with the record breaking excess wealth that technology and super-corporations create while the class of permanently unemployed reaches 30, 40, 50% or higher? Or are we genuinely so spiritually bankrupt that we think the market should decide such questions? Do we truly believe the 'market' is somehow more real and less demanding of human sacrifice than Moloch or Baal?

Our technical and wealth elites show little or no capacity for moral or spiritual thought and appear to be entirely comfortable with a world dominated by non-democratic norms in which equality of any kind is a curse, restraint an abomination. Add to this the toxicity of our current President's open admiration of so-called genetically superior people (of which he considers himself foremost) and the boost of energy this has given to global white supremacy and we rest, I fear, on the edge of a precipice.

Sandcastles

Watching Trump irreparably harm the NATO alliance this past week was entirely predictable, in fact I predicted it last spring. (I stand by my prediction that eventually much of the world will have to impose sanctions against the US in order to reign in Trump's malfeasance and idiocy).
But just because it was entirely predictable doesn't mean it was easy to watch. I got nauseous thinking of all the bloodshed that led us to understand the necessity of building this alliance, the generations of intelligence and good will that went into constructing it, and Trump smashed it like a 6 year old stomping the sandcastle his older sisters lovingly built. And to what end, to what purpose? To make the world substantially less safe and less stable? To spit in the eyes of our allies and the democracies they have carefully constructed and instead to embrace individual dictators - most particularly, Putin? Trump has a deep longing for a return to an aristocratic and despotic age, rule by fiat and personality rather than law. Trump has always shown disdain for the structures built by the unwashed masses with their messy democracies and constraints of courts, rules, alliances and the like. In short, Trump despises restraint. He sees himself as a great man whose destiny is to be unbound by restraint. It is the most obvious and essential component to his personality. Restraint also just so happens to be the thing that keeps humanity from destroying itself in this nuclear age as well as in the face of global warming.

I think what nauseates me most is how thoroughly so many who ought to know better embrace this idiocy or tolerate it grudgingly simply because they reflexively hate the reality that America has developed a more tolerant and less rigid culture. I have been told numerous times that God will somehow shepherd us through our own idiocy and protect us so that we need not worry about blithely tearing down what has been painstakingly built. John Calvin had a word for this type of magical thinking that posed as an imposter for genuine faith - superstition. We live in an era awash with religious superstition - with malice masked as righteousness and superstition masked as faith. If history teaches us anything about a generation like this it is this: buckle up for safety, this won't end well.