What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

The Left cannot account for the civic virtues in theoretical or ideological terms and feels awkward speaking of them in religious terms. This is only truer because the Right has made religious language toxic by putting it to uses that offend generosity and dignity.

The notion of an abiding sameness despite superficial differences can have consequences that are hilarious and awful, as when a roomful of professors, flown in from the corners of the world to share their thoughts, in all seriousness identify as wage slaves because they are dependent on their earnings.

Early American historiography is for the most part a toxic compound of cynicism and cliché, so false that it falsifies by implication the history of the Western world.

A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?

It is a convention of modern literature, and of the going-on of talking heads and public intellectuals, to project what are said to be emerging trends into a future in which cultural, intellectual, moral, and economic decline will have hit bottom, more or less. Somehow this kind of talk always seems brave and deep.

What is being invoked is the notion of a precious and unnameable essence, second nature to some, in the marrow of their bones, in effect. By this view others, whether they will or no, cannot understand or value it, and therefore they are a threat. The definitions of some and others are unclear and shifting. In America, since we are an immigrant country, our “nativists” may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds.

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.

One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture, one that, not coincidentally, runs parallel to the decline of religion. This devaluing of the species in effect puts aside everything interesting about us as irrelevant to the question of our true nature.

I mention all this simply to make the point that much influential thought is fundamentally incoherent, and no less influential for this fact. How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.

So “accident” and “randomness” can only be thought of relative to our expectations.

But the great truth, never taken into account, is that nothing is simple. Absolutely nothing.

The anxiety it inspires in some quarters has yielded a literalism that is brutally disrespectful of the text. Among nonliteralists it has produced an evasiveness that shies away from the text, and from theological tradition as well.

The new atheists, claiming the authority of science, go on about the old man with a white beard seated on a cloud, or they chuckle and scold at the thought of an imaginary friend. The response among the pious has been in some cases to put Adam on a dinosaur, proposing a science of their own. There is little to choose between the two. In both cases there is a radical rejection of the language of the sublime, that is, of the divine. In neither case is there any conception of the beautiful. Say what one will about religion through the millennia, it has yielded a great bounty of art in every kind.

Properly speaking, we are the stuff of myth.

We know these people. In fact we are these people, proudly sufficient to expectations, our own and others, and not much inclined to wonder whether these expectations are not in fact rather low.

There has been a fundamental shift in American consciousness. The Citizen has become the Taxpayer.

While the Citizen can entertain aspirations for the society as a whole and take pride in its achievements, the Taxpayer, as presently imagined, simply does not want to pay taxes. The societal consequences of this aversion—failing infrastructure, for example—are to be preferred to any inroad on his or her monetary fiefdom, large or small. This is as touchy a point as are limits on so-called Second Amendment rights. Both sensitivities, which are treated as if they were protections against centralization and collectivism, are having profound consequences for society as a whole, and this without meaningful public debate, without referendum. Citizenship, which once implied obligation, is now deflated—that is, given an artificial value by use that treats it as primarily a limited good that ought to be limited further.

The talk we hear so often now about “top-tier universities,” about supposed “rankings,” creates an economics of scarcity in the midst of an astonishing abundance.

The Citizen had a country, a community, children and grandchildren, even—a word we no longer hear—posterity. The Taxpayer has a 401(k).

The global reach of the early industrial system made mass poverty a national asset, as it is now.

It is characteristic of Americans that whatever they are or do is what they also ridicule and lament.

Our cult of competition does not seem able to entertain the idea that two or more countries could flourish simultaneously, unless, of course, they are European.

We choose an utterance, a gesture. By these means we identify ourselves and, in the same moment, discover and create ourselves.

I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious processes of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas.

The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the Epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God’s righteousness are one and the same.

What does it matter? Everything always matters.

Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely.

There are surprises in life that refuse to be understood in the simple terms of act and consequence. It seems reasonable to assume they come most frequently to those who throw themselves into the arms of fate, or Providence, rather than to those who proceed by calculation. Human estimates of the possible tend to be conservative. And

We should have learned by now that the whole civilization could drift off its moorings amid much waving of flags, much loud talk of former greatness.

Further, “that no bankrupt may ever after come into any office, or bear any Rule in Church or State.” He says, “One Bankrupt doth more hurt than twenty thieves that are put to death, or sorely punished for it.” I have quite recently acquired a context that allows me to understand what is referred to here.

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

We let an astonishing fertility run to weeds. I realize this statement is meaningful only if it is first granted that some thoughts, our own and others, are relatively worthy of us, or unworthy on grounds of triviality, or flatly destructive. Not much in contemporary life encourages us to make this kind of distinction. Pathology invites medical or legal intervention, of course. Short of this, we are offered strategies for making ourselves more useful to the economy, for coping with stress or warding off dementia. We have no current language for the culture of the mind, which another generation might have called the care of the soul.

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.

Love never ends, the apostle tells us. Projected forward it is hope.

The crimes we suffer and the crimes we do are all assaults on holiness. Knowing this, if we could ever really know it, would make us Christians, respectful of ourselves and reverent toward the world.

Who is my neighbor? We know, two thousand years on, that this question is by no means rhetorical. There are whole political parties ready to tell us how much harm can come from the indiscriminate sharing of loaves and fishes.

First, that one must be consumed in the fullness of one’s humanity by the love of God, and second, that one should extend the fullest possible love to other people—an undefined group larger than the circle of those whom, in best cases, it is simply natural to love. The placement of this commandment, its pairing with the highest and most solemn of all laws, precludes any reading of it that would make it circumscribed or trivial. The questions with which we are left are: What does it mean to love God, and what does it mean to love another human being? John makes it clear when the claim to love is spurious. He says, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” The Samaritan of the parable shows very practical consideration for the needs of the stranger he finds by the road. That is, he very impractically sets no limit to his own generosity. After providing for the stranger’s immediate care, he says he will return to pay any costs that exceed the amount he has left with the innkeeper. Would he know the innkeeper could be trusted? Certainly the parable suggests that prudence, that is to say, considerations of self-interest, should not be brought to bear when demands are made on one’s kindness and generosity. How we have struggled with this! Far more than with the sins we are so much readier to renounce, denounce, dramatize, scorn, conceal, and confess. And this sin, the withholding of kindnes...

Truth itself is dissolving as a concept in an acid bath of idle cynicism.

It has become commonplace to see those who pose as moralists and as exemplary Christians exposed in some particularly squalid act or practice, and to see them driven back, not by conscience but by exposure, upon the mercy of Jesus, who, it would seem, died to neutralize the consequences of scurrilous behavior.

The worst part of it is that they imagine they are coerced by other people when they are in fact trapped in their own fears, and they resent those imaginary others for posing this dreadful threat.

This present brand of Christianism speaks of itself as threatened and embattled, and it approaches the rest of the country cowering and threatening and wagging its finger, then declares it is on account of its exceptional piety that so many people find it unattractive.