It is the long-fostered ambition of mankind to find the ultimate principle by which he may bring the right order to the world, the principle by which he may order reality to his own benefit. This is the essence of alchemy: to find that process by which all may be unified into a single system and made within man’s compass to decide. In economics no less than anywhere else is this true. Man has devised clever principles, division and reunions of Hegel, philosophical contemplation of Plato, anthropological propositions of Locke, all for the purpose of ordering his world, how his society and its economy and its relations should work. They have, to a one, been disasters, where applied; they have, to a one, been harmful to man. The result is the mess we have at present.

Looking for Part Two?

Our world is a mess (though that’s standard, historically). I don’t refer merely to the rampant sin, to abortion, to homosexual and other perversions of lust, to government tyranny over child and inheritance and every other part of life, to secularism and all its follies, though certainly these are grave symptoms of brokenness. No, I refer to the fullness of society’s impacts, even on those who abhor its sins.

The modern world is hostile to healthy relationship. Its hatred of the family is evident, for it assails marriage at every turn. Men are called to be butchered caricatures of women; women are demanded to be mockeries of men. Both are told to destroy each other and to destroy themselves, and which comes first hardly matters. In the melee, then, the parents and the children are wedged apart, not just by government education but by the dysfunction of the family, by the mistakes and sins of parents who have only faint clues, left to them by half-clueless parents and the grace of God in their consciences, as to what to do.

The dysfunction does not stop at the family, though, and it would be absurd to think it could, the family being so basic. It extends through the church and through society. Men and women and families grope vaguely for connection that matters, that lasts, for relationships that grow to maturity despite sin and towards God. In all this, the very structure of our society militates against them.

How so? Consider the life which was that of the farmer or the local smith for the past millennia. He worked his field or his shop; he knew his neighbor. He worked alongside his neighbor, whether in collaboration or commerce, whether aiding in his field or shoeing his horse, and in this he came to know those around him, whether they lived directly by him or a little ways off. When work was done, then, his amusements, when they were not within the family, fell in the same places and the same occupations as his neighbors. Thus relationship grew. For his wife and his children, too, this held true; they worked in relationship with the same people day-in and day-out. Then, on the Sabbath, they met these same persons in worship of God, if that blessing was theirs. Relationship grows through interaction, through cooperation and commonality, through differences interacting in harmony, and this societal structure, in its imperfection, helped to foster that, to the blessing of those men.

Contrast that to today. Today, the structure of society places men differently. We work and we live and we worship and we play all in a thousand different spots spread across a vast area, facilitated by technology, with each place growing a different cast of persons, persons liable to alter in a moment by relocation or a change in their life- a new job, a new church, a new hobby. This does not make relationship impossible by any means, but it makes it much harder, renders its natural incidence much lower. Add the theological chaos of modern man, how so many barely know what they believe, how falsehoods once reserved for the very educated and the very stupid (especially their overlap) have become defining of society (i.e. postmodern ‘reality is what we make it’ thought), consciously or unconsciously, and the depth of the problem becomes only greater.

I have generalized in both descriptions, but can any really doubt that society is more fractured, less sturdy, more hostile to relationship, than it was in the West in the past? In America, at least, it is not so bad as it got in Soviet Russia, as it no doubt is in communist (arguably, fascist) China, as we see in the prognostications of F. 451, the reflections of 1984. Man is atomized and (don’t call me a communist) alienated from his fellow man- but man was made to love his fellow (Matt. 22:36-40; Rom. 12:10). So this lack of relationship hurts and hurts and hurts, and men who hurt turn to the opiates of false religion, of ideology, of solutions that don’t involve repentance. Even Christians try false solutions, at least for a time, such as the ever-popular ‘retreat and turtle up’ stereotypical of American Fundamentalism. And that’s not really worked out- because eventually the world will break through the turtle’s shell- or it’ll just let the poison dribble in while the turtle sits and dies.

How can this be fixed? The problem is wide, possessed of more facets than man can account for. Each person is a facet, in a sense; each person is a myriad of facets. Even in generalization, the problem is beyond complex. Technology has brought a million changes, and it portends a million changes, whether it stalls tonight or progresses at lightning pace. The impact of any one development here ripples out across the economy, across the society, through how a hundred and then a thousand and then a billion people act, and then the ripples rebound against themselves. The same is true of the rest of the world, the numinous things less susceptible to numbers than science, to ideas and ideologies and theologies and philosophies, to prophets and preachers and listeners and proselytes and grumps, to hair styles and dresses, to books and movies and pencils and teacups.

In the shortest definition, society is a ‘chaos system.’ By this I do not indicate that it has no order; that is not what the mathematical idea of a ‘chaos system’ refers to. A ‘chaos system’ is something in which the smallest alteration of inputs produces wildly and unintuitively varying outputs. It is in theory a thing of complete and perfect order, an equation or a process of physics, and in my use entirely deterministic. What makes a ‘chaos system’ chaotic is our ignorance. When it comes to society, we don’t know how it starts, except in the broadest strokes (consider how limited a vantage point we have, of past or present); we have only the barest sight of how it changes once it has started; we cannot tell where it will end.

Society has some susceptibility to prediction, as many a successful forecasting witnesses, but not as a whole. As a whole, society in a decade never looks exactly how it was expected to look by the beginning of that decade. Trends have continued; wise or intelligent men (they are not entirely the same) have foreseen certain parts of what will come. They have recognized that slaughtering children helps degrade a country’s morals, that incentivizing the economy to move out results in de-industrialization, that one sexual perversity is the opener to another. They have seen, perhaps, what was hidden at the beginning of the decade and nearly open at the end, as when Chesterton described certain of the foibles of representative democracy, foibles still operating on us today. How to solve this?

I’ve laid out the problem, generally but, I hope, compellingly. Modern western society is hostile to Biblical relationship, to growing to maturity towards one another. It is a system which tends to spread man across too many places to grow a full part of any of them, which (though I barely touched this) works also to rend him from the places he does grow into, if he is not careful. It at once longs for connection and abhors all the prerequisites thereof, particularly loathing the repentance and faith in Him which alone is the seedbed of eternal fidelity of relationship. Next week, I’ll be looking at the other half of the question: What’s the solution?

God bless.