Embarrassment, Entitlement

It was with embarrassment I looked around at our first real home as a married couple.  We had at the beginning what my parents had worked their whole lives for - from modern appliances to cars in the driveway to clothes in the closet and so much more.  It was hard for me to accept this while knowing how much my grandparents and parents suffered in their early married lives.  This is not simply about things but about expectations and desires.  I wanted more than they wanted or so it seemed.

Now that my kids are grown and on their own, they are in my position in some ways and in some ways not.  They are not wealthy and have an abundance of techno toys and indulgences but they are hard workers and have put in sweat and tears to have the things they call their own.  They are like me just as I am like my parents.  We have together labored long and hard to enjoy a few things of this mortal life.

When I hear people complain about how bad they have it, however, I am easily embittered.  Even the needy folks who stand begging at the junctions of the roads I travel have a smart phone.  I well recall a fellow who was hungry and calling my parish from his cell phone while camping out in the woods.  He did not want a bag of food.  He wanted me to order him take out from Dominos and have it delivered to his tent.  He did not have all the stuff I have but he had something I do not think I have -- he had hubris.

So when I hear young folks complain that they cannot afford to marry or have children, I am tempted either to laugh or to cry or both.  It is laughable because I do not know of anyone who can actually afford to marry or have children or who has used this as a legitimate indicator to time when any of these happened.  Sure, some folks say they waited until these things were affordable or within their financial reach but the joke is that while they were saving for either of these, they continued to indulge their appetites for Uber Eats and the best technology money can buy.  They had selective tastes which they were unwilling to abandon or compromise in order to get something else they wanted.  Was it a problem of resources or was the problem competing desires and an unwillingness to compromise?

In my vast old age, I wonder if we have become an entitled society of individuals who feel entitled to have what we want, when we want it and who are not willing to adjust our desires even to achieve other wants.  It sure seems so.  Marriage is less popular today not because people do not want or need this kind of relationship but because so many have decided that it costs them too much of their wants and desires to be married and simply cannot convince themselves it is worth it.  The same is true of having children.  And I am supposed to be supportive of them in their whining?

Entitlement does not necessarily look like designer labels or people who are brand whores.  It can look like sleep pants at Walmart and folks who don't have a car but who have the cost of vehicle tattooed on their skin or pierced in their flesh.  And then those same people insist that I am the conspicuous consumer because I have grandma's china that I refuse to get rid of or a collection of anything.  Really?  It occurs to me that just about anyone under the age of 40 has more digital photos of themselves than all the members of my family had over the span of many generations.  

Entitlement does not necessarily look like an abundance of stuff (at least the kind of things I call stuff).  It can look like food delivered to your door regularly -- cooked and ready to eat.  It can look like paying for the latest iPhone because the previous model simply will not do.  It can look like choosing to be lonely because the cost of companionship is too great.  It can look like insisting that a university shield you from opinions you find distasteful lest you have to tolerate something besides your own opinion.  It can look like a great many things.  

I do not at all suggest that I am immune from it.  I used an outhouse as a child and got water from a pump.  I remember all of it and I certainly also recall telling myself I wanted more.  It is not simply the desire for more than makes you entitled.  It is primarily the idea that the things you want are owed you and that you have a right to whine about it when you do not get all you want.  Again, I am not saying I have not done my share of complaining.  My phone is many generations old.  My electronics are serviceable but not new.  The bulk of the furniture we have had for many, many years.  We have lived in the same house for 33 years.  We have several newer vehicles.  As a culture, it seems that values are shifting and fewer folks want to purchase a house and more are content living in an apartment.  That is fine.  But don't insist you cannot afford to purchase a house.  Maybe you can't or maybe you have simply made other choices.  And maybe you think you are owed something more than should work for it by sacrificing other desires.  My point is not to judge you or for you to judge me -- only that we as a culture could do with a little embarrassment over the riches that we have all come to enjoy and refuse to go without.  More than this, we need to stop placing the problem at the cost of the things we want and start putting it at the things we want--period.  We have got to stop complaining about the high cost of living high and learn a bit more gratitude, humility, and appreciation.  When our embarrassment of riches no longer embarrasses us, we have become an entitled people who love to complain more than we love to give thanks. 

Implications. . .

A couple of generations or so ago, how a couple parented their children was not always an accurate indicator of how they saw things in the public square or how they voted alone in the polling booth.  Then there was much more in common between liberal and progressive thinkers and religious and conservative ones in terms of how they raised their children.  Of course, there were permissive parents and strict ones, those who were very involved in their kids lives and those who were less intimately involved in their kids everyday lives.  But that did not always equate to a clear indicator of their political or social or moral views.  Parenting was parenting and so parents had a lot in common despite other differences.  At least that was how it was in Nebraska and watching as a young parent in New York and a parent finally of teenagers in Tennessee.  Their were card-carrying liberals who were strict and card-carrying conservatives who were permissive.  But that has changed.

How parents view politics, religion, society, and morality has become a fairly accurate predictor of how they parent.  Those on the left are more likely to be permissive and those on the right more likely to be conservative.  Both sides can and are authoritarian about their views.  It is not quite a rule but it is an indicator no less of the more profound connection between the views of the parent and their parenting style.  The same is true of religion.  Those who claimed religious affiliation a couple of generations ago were probably split among the more liberal and progressive churches and the conservative ones but they were equally religious.  That is not quite the case today.  Those on the left are not simply more likely to be non-religious but to be actively secular in their views and in their parenting.  Those on the right are more likely to be religious and to seek out more doctrinal and doctrinaire religious communities and it shows in their parenting as well.

You see it in the schools.  Again, that was not always the case.  Sure, there were good schools and bad schools but they existed in neighborhoods and communities across the spectrum of liberal and conservative.  Within those schools there were good kids and not so good ones, compliant and defiant, responsible and not so responsible.  Today the distance between liberal and conservative in schools and in the teachers is more pronounced.  It is not hard to predict the political affiliation of the parents or of the teachers in most public and private schools.  Even the vocabulary is different as well as what it taught and how it is taught.  The left and right identities tend to spill over into more aspects of the people's lives and into the institutions in their communities.  That was not always the care or even ordinarily so but it surely is the case today.

The great divide between suburban and urban, between city and rural, and between married with children and not has become not simply more evident across the board but also seems to be incorporated into our kids and into the institutions where they are raised.  In short, we are attempting to raise clones of ourselves.  There was a time when we all assumed that it was better for our children to know both sides of the question or issue before them but we are more likely today to raise them to be unthinking and to respond instinctively, according to our own views on things before us.  And it is showing.  

Is this a good thing?  Some might think so.  Some might even suggest that this is the job of parents -- to incorporate into their children their own political, religious, cultural, and social viewpoints.  The problem, it seems to me, is that we have not raised them to know and hold our views but to not know the opposing views or sides.  In the end this will not help us raise children to be thinking adults capable of defending and reasoning their way into our points of view but just the opposite.  It leaves them vulnerable and unable to defend or reason why they hold to certain beliefs or values.  Insulating children from a real debate and putting them into cocoons in which they do not encounter challenges to their beliefs will not help them to retain these views and beliefs but just the opposite.  Unless our kids know why we think what we think or believe what we believe or value what we value, they will shed our clothes like yesterday's style and become adults without a real anchor to their faith, identities, values, and opinions.  I fear less those who disagree with me than those who hold no real and firm beliefs.  Chaos is the greater problem.  We just might be raising a generation of children who not only do not know why they hold to some view or belief, they are more likely to choose the tyranny of feelings over the concrete of facts and truth.  That is bad all the way around.  

I know it when I hear it. . .

The phrase "I know it when I see it" was first used in legal description in1964 when United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was describing his own threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.  He famously explained why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and fit the definition of protected speech that could not be censored. 

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

The expression became not only one of the best-known phrases in the history of the Supreme Court but an example of the extreme subjectivity of things for which a proper definition could not be offered.  "I know it when I see it" was his attempt to define "hard-core pornography".  Some thought Stewart's "I know it when I see it" standard "realistic and gallant" an example of judicial candor. Others said it was ridiculous, fallacious and subject to individualistic arbitrariness.

The same could be said of "hate speech."  The very promise of “hate speech” laws is that there exists a boundary between permitted speech and criminal speech but the actual definition of where that boundary sits is not only subject to individual decision but judges have disagreed.  As much as some would like to cling to such a distinction, it has become a tool of the WOKE to remove not only speech but the very speech that was almost universally believed and accepted as normal a few generations ago.  In Finland in the case of Päivi Räsänen, a doctor, grandmother, and long-serving member of the Finnish parliament, no less than eleven judges across three levels of the Finnish judiciary spent over six years trying to locate the line between speech permitted and criminal speech and they could not agree.  By the narrowest majority the highest court of Finland found what they considered a boundary line.  

Hate speech laws are the very definition of abusive power either by intimidation or by judgment. In any other case, the writer would have simply deleted what was deemed offensive and retreated but in the case of Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola, they refused to delete and fought the charge.  Even with an international team of jurists to help in their defense, how do you defend yourself against a moving line which no one seems to know where it is located except by that vague old pornographic line from Justice Potter Steward -- "I know it what I see [hear] it."  In a world in which those who testify before Congress insist they do not know how to define who a woman is and when the standard of truth itself has become subject to the whims of the individual, hate speech is one more example of a bad idea that cannot be rescued by fine tuning the hate speech laws or getting better judges.  These are the bad kinds of laws that simply need to go. 

 

 

So dangerous. . .

I wrote long ago that the most dangerous thing on earth is a theologically orthodox person -- both those inside the Church and those outside cannot abide such orthodoxy.  Politically, it would seem that anyone who remotely resembles a traditional view of marriage and family is at least that kind of dangerous person.  Frankly, I do not hear the Church universally promoting that traditional view of marriage and family as urgently and passionately as it should.

Imagine that.  In the space of a few generations in which it was nearly a universal assumption that the goal was to have a world where as many people as possible can get married, have stable marriages, and raise children, this has become anathema to the modern mind.  Indeed, the liberal and progressives are not only not choosing marriage for themselves but insisting that anything close to a traditional view of marriage and the family is the worst kind of bondage and unreasonable in this day and age.  How quickly the time has passed.

A world where as many people as possible marry a member of the opposite sex ought to be normal.  It is surely the expectation of government.  Where is the government going to find the money to take care of people who do not have a spouse to take care of them -- whether in illness or in old age?  Not all the tax money in the world could provide for the people to replace where spouses do for each other and to replace the caregivers who enable perhaps 80% of those over 65 to live on their own.  Yet somehow this is deemed more dangerous than the idea that marriage is patriarchal and unreasonable.

Stable marriages should be a practical value as well.  Though divorce, and particularly no-fault divorce, has created an industry of people trading in their spouses for a different model or abandoning them for a life without marriage, stable marriages are the bedrock of society.  Every child of divorced parents and every child who grows up without one parent or the other knows the blessing of growing up in home with a stable marriage.  Our culture so filled with constant and urgent change would benefit from good and stable homes in which marriages work out their problems and remain stable amid the chaos that too often passes for everyday life today.

Children raised not by daycare or government program or other institutional settings is not some sort of gold standard but the most basic norm of all.  Strangely enough, we live at a time in which people too often presume that parents are not well equipped to care for their children and so-called experts must intervene.  That usually happens among those who did not know a stable home with both parents and so have no idea that this is not only the norm overall but the least a child should be able to expect.  Yet this has also become a radical idea as well.

These are not American goals but universal standards for all nations and peoples and are generally espoused by all religions as well.  Well, at least they used to be.  Man for woman and woman for man, marriage until death parts you, and parents raising their children and imparting values and faith while also providing good examples to them.  But, I am sad to say, this has become a racial thought in America today and in the world overall.  It is no wonder we are in trouble. 

Everyone has a voice -- even God!

The value attached to diversity requires that everyone has a say or at least an opinion -- except, of course, where that opinion violates public standards or is deemed offensive.  Modern societies define themselves on the basis of how well diversity is practiced and how broad the diversity within the parameters of what is deemed the public good.  Even churches have come to define diversity as an element of the Gospel and almost a mark of authenticity.  Why else would their be the constant scrutiny given to how white or how diverse the membership is or how broad the latitude given to dissent or doctrinal disagreement?  We present ourselves as Christians as models of toleration and abhor the hierarchies that would rein in any disagreement or dissent from the doctrine confessed and the practice sanctioned.  Even in a church body like Missouri there is push back against too much uniformity and there is an inherent stripe of rebellion against the idea that we march in lock step the walk of the Synod.

Everywhere everyone has a voice. We give the same honor to personal experiences and individual preference as we would fact or universal truth.  That voice is a mixture of feelings and facts that makes it hard to forge the unity once the hallmark of the Church's identity.  Those who favor such insist that this is evidence of the pastoral character of the Church, not dogmatic (bad word) community but a pastoral one.  We even speak of pastoral liturgy as if worship were more about the worshiper than the One worshiped.  We do not give much more than a momentary nod to the faith and practice of those who went before us except, of course, to prooftext our own deviation from the norms of doctrine and life.  We act as if we were the first Christians, the ones still forming from the fluid diversity of the moment any norms for the future and too often fail to acknowledge that we are those lately come who have inherited a massive witness of faith and practice from those who went before us.

It seems that even God has one voice in this conversation but not a final voice or even a definitive one.  We seem to be perfectly comfortable with the contradiction of view and practice that violates not simply tradition but even the clear word of Scripture.  We find it rather easy to suggest that what others have said uniformly about the Scriptures and what they mean does not apply today and we are free to suggest new and novel interpretations of the Bible which do not conflict with modern norms and values and morals.  Indeed, because God's voice is only one voice among the many voices heard, His voice has almost no authority at all anymore.  That is the consequence of a diversity in which no voice is given priority over others and all voices are equal.  The function of tradition is to preserve the voice of God and the voices of those in the past who have given witness to the unchanging testimony of His voice.  When the present takes priority over the past and God's voice is but one of the many voices heard, every age reinvents itself and every Christianity is reinvented to fit that self.  It ends up being a state of all things being new but with a newness that no longer holds the promise of eternity.  It is for this reason that diversity and everyone a voice cannot is not a mark of the Church nor a sign of its catholicity and apostolicity.  Yet this is what liberal and progressive Christianity has left us -- God must vie for our attention as one of many voices and without any deference given to those who went before us, we end up deciding if God's voice fits us and our times and so will be heard or if God's voice will be dismissed without fear.  So tell that to a room that finds any hierarchy of voices suspect or wrong.