This Grocery Cart Seems Permantly to Live Here. I pass it every morning on my walk.
Well, my holiday is over and I didn’t accomplish the single task I most devoutly hoped I would. I didn’t thoroughly deep clean and declutter my house—not totally. Is this a failure?
Or should I chalk it up as a win because I traveled a fair distance? It is now a theoretical reality that one might hunch over and observe the mores and traditions of the laptop class without being thrown into emotional and psychological confusion by the prevalence of dust and cat hair. Heretofore it’s been impossible to concentrate on anything because whenever I stand still, even for a moment, I am overcome by the sense of decay and corruption.
Yesterday, while I was, yet still, filling the car with more bags of stuff to get rid of, I managed to listen to half of an interesting interview with Auron MacIntyre by Chase Davis of the Full Proof Theology Podcast. I’ve only made it through half so far, because of all the interruptions. If you want to give it a listen, I’ve embedded it at the bottom.
Basically, MacIntyre unpacks Robert Conquest’s Laws about how organizations, societies, and political bodies function but ultimately de-function and the two discuss how it plays out both in church and in the corporate world. It’s as discouraging as one might expect. Want yet more explanations for why the way things are, these laws do shed helpful light on our trials. I found an old blog post where they are written out if you haven’t heard of them, though I expect you have:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
These, it seems to me, are both intuitively true, and eye-popping. Really? A cabal of its enemies? That is a terrifying thought. But the others must surely describe how everything works, including housekeeping: a house that isn’t being cleaned all the time will fall into ruin. And about the preaching task: a congregation that isn’t being actively shaped by orthodox doctrine will become heterodox before you can say Jack Robinson (whoever that is). About those purveyors of groceries: even Aldi will put in a self-checkout so that you have to struggle to travail over the work yourself and yet still pay for the privilege of doing it. These aren’t, I suppose, exactly “left-wing” but they are indicative of the decay and chaos that necessarily arrive when one doesn’t persistently and painfully keep to the message, doing the task in principle with its first creation.
These three laws articulate, for me, the strange human dance of desiring, on one hand, to alter other people to suite my own desires with, on the other hand, the spiritual inclination towards self-protection—the phenomenon of not wanting to accept change manifested in the chaotic cosmic principle that if you put something down thoughtlessly it will live in that location forever, be it a piece of paper or a pair of shoes.
Many such kinds of chaos are growing in the fertile soil of progressivism. Matt tried to make me watch this and I couldn’t get through it. Here’s a little clip:
I wouldn’t have called this a left-wing activity, so much as, to quote MacIntyer, people hollowing out the body of your favorite belief and wearing its carcass as a trophy. What is this? It’s certainly not Christian. And yet, many dying embers of Christianity in America think that this is the tradition handed down from God or someone. We did it last year, and the year before, and the year before that, so basically forever. The traditions have to be preserved. And so, the whole thing slides ever forward upon that, well, I guess not a slippery slope because tradition says we can’t talk about that either.
I love the little clown in the corner of the video. It’s an easily recognizable meme that says far more than I can here. So anyway, have a nice day! Oh, and here’s the podcast:
"And about the preaching task: a congregation that isn’t being actively shaped by orthodox doctrine will become heterodox before you can say Gene Robinson ..."
There, I fixed it for you!