Bookending capitulation

Maybe it’s the mood I’m in at the moment, but the two online commentaries I’ve just finished reading as a diversion from….writing online commentaries, struck me as enjoyable bookends holding up essentially the same thing. Call that thing ‘the text of modern thought in culture and politics’, or something like that.

First I drifted off to see what Touchstone Magazine has to say currently, and after reading N.T. Wright’s piece on C.S. Lewis, I went to David Mills’ editorial about Christians and politics.

Many of us, of the activist but bookish sort who read and write for magazines like this, know well the feeling that one does not want to be associated with either side of a divisive public debate and the wish that there were some other choice, some third way transcending the polarized positions in which everyone else is entrenched as helplessly and ineffectively as the French and German armies on the Western Front.

So he muses a bit on this Third Way, and how it comes off as a concession.

But the public debate over cultural issues like abortion has developed as it has for a reason. Those in conflict over most divisive matters of public life have settled around two poles because they differ on principles, and principles are often either/or, yes-or-no sorts of things.

Some divisions can never be transcended by any Third Way, because the two poles represent eternally opposed ideas, held (at least by Christians) to be truths incapable of surrender. The unborn child has the right to live or he doesn’t. The embryo is a human being deserving of care and protection or he isn’t. A man and a man can’t be married or they can.

What a Christian might do practically, when faced with the imperfect choices presented by politics in a country as divided as ours on almost every matter, is a different and a difficult question. He might accept a solution offered as a Third Way when that is the closest he can get to a public policy the Christian can endorse, as when he approves a restriction on abortion when a complete ban is impossible. That is why we pray for wisdom and why politics should be taken as a high calling.

Wandering over to First Things for more high-minded rumination, I came upon The Universe and I, a delightful essay fired off, it sounds, as catharsis after Anthony Sacramone’s encounter with incoherence.

So my wife and I were moving and wanted to dispose of some bookcases that were past their use-by date. We had a bite on Craigslist, and the interested party came to our apartment to see if these essentially pine boxes with a remnant of veneer would do the trick. They were, in fact, exactly what she had been looking for. “I just put it out to the universe,” she exclaimed with all the joy of finding the bike she really really wanted under the tree on Christmas morning, “and here they are!”

I immediately turned to my wife, lest my expression strike fear in our guest. My wife gave me her signature “Anthony, don’t go there” smile—an acknowledgement of what I was thinking and an attempt to forestall my blowing the deal by saying something like:

“You put it out to the universe? The universe is concerned that your shelving needs are met? Do Neptune and Pluto fret over your interior design? Does Alpha Centauri pine for our pine? Does some kamikaze comet threaten cosmic doom if a couple of 84″ bookcases do not materialize with relative alacrity?

“Explain to me how this works. When you address the Universe, what title do you use? What salutation is preferred? Dear Sir, Madam, or just Hey U?

“Do you believe in any of the multiverse theories? If so, which one? I prefer the 11-dimensional string theory model, in which case, given the variance in physical laws, is it possible to ask for a bookcase in one dimension and end up with a Buick LeSabre in another?

“Does the Universe ever feel iffy? Does it ever sit on the fence? Ever put a request out there and get a big fat maybe? If so, how would that be expressed? A dull ringing in the ears? A general lethargy?

Comic relief for (or from) the New Age.

And it’s not as if it were the first time I had heard someone “put it out to the universe” like a 1950s housewife leaving her empty milk bottle outside the kitchen door, twirled note stuffed in its neck: “This time no cheese.” The depersonalization of deity, the reduction of God’s own sovereignty to merely “the force,” a field of energy that neither asks embarrassing questions nor makes imperious demands, is in perfect keeping with our escape from contingency and radical dependence to self-deification.

Right on.

So, like bookends that always form a matching pair but sort of face opposite directions, I like how these pieces go together.

Now, back to work…