America has known the lure of the green light across the bay that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in his 1927 book, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby-like, we too may well end in tragedy rather than fulfillment.
After several centuries of nation-building, marked by almost successful efforts to end war, disease, squalor, and poverty, the end had been in sight. Disappointingly, instead of soaring to great heights of compassion and humanity, we find, concentrated in the West, an impotent mediocrity of biting selfishness and sad decline. Yes, there are pockets of noble service, but that is not the direction we are drifting.
Our greatest days may have been many decades ago when the Gatsby-like party was young, and we were still sober. We lived with our aspirations and enjoyed them as if we had already achieved them.
Now it’s three in the morning, and the few remaining at the party may be well-dressed, but we are going from high top to countertop, sipping the diluted remains of someone’s last drink. Uncomfortable, sweaty, pitiful, and on a kind of mindless autopilot, we try in vain to chase away the loser label.
The end of the Cold War was almost a new beginning for humanity. ▪The near elimination of poverty and improvement of health in the four decades after 1980. ▪ The fabulous riches and the widespread of a better standard of living that followed globalization. All of these somehow misfired.
We thought that we had wisely thrown off the yokes of pointless morality, pointless churches and religions, and pointless social pretense…even liberated ourselves from the need to work to eat. We thought we had transformed the work of the nations away from the military and war to the compassion and peace of the welfare state.
Somehow, we lost our way, and we seem to have wound up alone in some ER waiting room as we slowly bleed out just as so many bled out in the Somme. A beautiful, rolling part of France…until WW1.
In philosophical terms, we have survived the tarnishing of the high ideals of the Enlightenment, the disappointment of the high expectations of the Modern, and yet we are bogged down in the cynical (highly educated and articulate, of course) narratives of the current Postmodern swamp.
▪ We are incapable of stopping the invasion of Ukraine. Some do not even want to.
▪ We are incapable of really helping developing nations. We’d rather control them.
▪ We are incapable of handling a pandemic. Many strengths, but too many mistakes.
▪ We are incapable of providing workers for jobs or jobs for the educated. Yet many jobs are open.
▪ We are mired in purposeless bureaucracies. Services aren’t provided. Roads can’t be built.
▪ Britain’s NHS cannot serve its people. Wait time for non-urgent care is down to ‘only’ 1 year.
Besides the issue of incompetence, there is the issue of trust. A high level of trust, even faith, is needed if governments are to be the cornerstone of society. They cannot live up to that aspiration.
Has Christianity been fully replaced? We have new ideals of individual freedom and rights. A new set of values based on humanity and society rather than God and his word. We have a new ideal of government as the institution of salvation. A new means of salvation as we fight the new original sin of bias and the new damnation of climate change. A new set of institutions to replace the church, led by the bureaucrats as the new priesthood. As it turns out, the brave new world is led by aspiring autocrats with the power of the pen, or just the mindless bureaucracy, to impose its will through the far-reaching Leviathan of immense government that dehumanizes with its cold hand.
We’ve become experts on the faults of the old order with its Christian roots. But how is this new world better? We have serious mental health and identity issues, normalized family dysfunction, drug use, depression, and suicide. We accept these with a mere shrug, not seeing them as flashing red lights.
The harshest critics that I see are not from the right, who are merely morose about having been caught in the progressive ratchet. The harshest critics come from the left, who are in despair: “All that is left of the life of a once noble mankind is a present tense kind of life with neither past nor future; neither memory nor hopes, neither meaning nor purpose; he is neither god nor man” (C. Lasch, 1979. P.4)
“And so, we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (FSF Gatsby)