What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

It is shocking how defenseless the protections of the environment, of the poor, and even of the rights of voters have been shown to be in recent years. No one defends these things as American, because the Left no more than the Right thinks of them as among our core values. The great engine of capitalism can mow them down, since they were derivative at best and in any case are proved to be inessential by the very fact that they are vulnerable and exceptional.

This would be one use of history. And here’s another. We might stop persuading ourselves of the truth of notions that are flatly implausible in light of all we know, or could know if we cared to. Then we would be less confident in imposing our assumptions on behavior, including our own, that they cannot help us interpret.

In other words, these lovers of country, these patriots, are wildly unhappy with the country they claim to love and are bent on remaking it to suit their own preferences, which they feel no need to justify or even fully articulate. Neither do they feel any need to answer the objections of those who see their shaping and their disciplining as mutilation.

And is there any particular reason to debase human life in order to produce more, faster, without reference to the worth of the product or to the value of the things sacrificed to its manufacture? Wouldn’t most people, given an hour or two to reflect, consider this an intolerably trivial use to be put to, for them and their children? Life is brief and fragile, after all.

Error could be thought of as an extravagance parsimonious nature denies to migratory butterflies but lavishes on us unstintingly.

Our ways of understanding the world now, our systems and ideologies, have an authority for us that leads us to think of them as exhaustive accounts of reality rather than, at best, as instruments of understanding suited to particular uses.

In the beginning, it was a very remarkable atom that blossomed into a cosmos and is blossoming now in every thought anyone will think tomorrow, in the accelerating rush of space toward what no one knows.

The prestige of science derives from the assumption that it deals in truth, fact. This is its purpose and tendency, but at no point is the purpose assumed to be fully and finally achieved.

There are always self-professed Christians who can be roused to panic at anything remotely like an opportunity, who act as if the eternal body of Christ were under mortal threat because of some notion they find unlikable.

The errors of the long modern period might seem subtler to our eye than those of earlier centuries, but there is no reason to assume that they are less consequential.

Traditional centers of influence—churches, unions, relevant professionals—have lost their place in public life, or they have merged their influence with the moneyed interests, speaking here of those churches that do maintain a public presence.

There has been a fundamental shift in American consciousness. The Citizen has become the Taxpayer. In consequence of this shift, public assets are now public burdens.

The Citizen had a country, a community, children and grandchildren, even—a word we no longer hear—posterity. The Taxpayer has a 401(k). It is no mystery that one could be glad to endow monumental libraries, excellent laboratories, concert halls, arboretums, baseball fields, and the other simply can’t see the profit in it for himself.

The freedom of the individual seems to have been reduced to a right to belligerent ignorance coupled with devotion to a particular reading of the Second Amendment.

I avoid the more familiar term redistributive, since it implies a real, prior ownership of wealth from which a general wealth is subtracted. This notion is not supportable, philosophically or economically, though at the moment it is very powerful indeed.

mutual liberality Winthrop calls for, using just this word. He was the governor of the colony, and might have been expected to mention the usual texts about how authority is to be honored as an instance of God’s providence. Instead, he sees the bonds of society in mutual care and service.

A glimpse of incomparable beauty has all the authority of a vision of it.

To quote Flavel, “The soul of the poorest child is of equal dignity with the soul of Adam.” All men are created equal. Nothing about these statements is self-evident. Yet they can shape and create institutions, and they can testify against them when they fail. They have only their own beauty and the beauty of their influence to affirm them.

The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people.

People live and die stifled by fears of hostility or ridicule, the elves and ogres of contemporary consciousness.

Doctrine and practice can shore up belief, even stand in the place of it, when the deeper leanings of the soul tend not to sustain it. This must mean that there is also a deeper faith behind a seeming lack or loss of faith.

We should probably stop denying that we are exceptional among the creatures, now that most of us can make a list of ways we might well put an end to it all.

The hopes that moved Christ, that a child or a friend or a brother might live and be well, are disappointed day after day, because we stand between grave need and gracious heaven. We are dishonest stewards.

Ideology has been a terrible mistake, theory another one.

This is, of course, the age of the weird intrusion. We have voices in our heads that can neutralize experience and displace the world we observe with a much more urgent and dramatic reality, a reality with a plotline and strongly identified characters, with villains bent on enormity and all that is sacred in desperate need of rescue.

Those who feel they have crossed a line into assured salvation look back on the rest of us as essentially deficient in the things the Lord requires—not lacking in justice and mercy, perhaps, but lacking in that special assurance that makes justice and mercy optional and humility a possible sign of weak faith.