The Couger Report

Written by T. Elliot Gaiser.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe their nation is heading the wrong direction. One thing is interesting about this statistic: even with the democrats in power in nearly every corner of government, statistically almost half of the democrats are dissatisfied with the way things are going politically. I mean to take a stab as to why.

As I was reading several of the books that I had planned on having finished by this late in the summer (the false promises of endless free time over summer break hits yet another ignorant victim!), I came upon two sentences of a quote by an economist named Wilhelm Roepke. It particularly struck me, staying in my mind for over a week after I read it. He said:

“Men, having to a great extent lost the use of their innate sense of proportion, thus stagger from one extreme to the other, now trying out this, now that, now following this fashionable belief, now that, responding now to this external attraction, now to the other, but listening least of all to the voice of their own heart. It is particularly characteristic of the general loss of a natural sense of direction – a loss which is jeopardizing the wisdom gained through countless centuries – that the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation.”
– Wilhelm Roepke, The Social Crisis of Our Time

That’s a lot to chew on, but I think I may have unraveled the main idea. Specifically, the idea of a “sense of proportion” in all men that this economist declares “lost” in our modern lives led to a conversation with my dad. Through our discussion we tried to define this word “proportion” in a way that made sense in the quote’s context. We concluded that proportion means having “a right relationship between the part and the whole.”

Consider the quote again with this definition inserted: men having “lost . . . their innate sense of ‘a right relationship between the part and the whole’, thus stagger from one extreme to the other . . .”

Roepke is saying that all of the component parts of post-modern life – work, school, church, social events, entertainment – our careers, friendships, and hobbies – our online networking, our televisions, and our music – have somehow stopped having a “right” relationship with the whole.

But what even is this “whole”? I think the way many of us think about our life may hold the answer; most of us think of our work, the various things we do, our hobbies, perhaps our relationships. We think of our life as just a list of the different parts making up the daily grind. It’s like there is no unified “whole” for most Americans. There is no driving purpose or overarching goal to glue life together. There can be no “proportion,” no “right relationship,” between the parts and the whole when there is no whole!

At freeway speeds we skid from event to event, website to website, cable channel to channel, phone call to phone call. Busyness leads us into a tyranny of the urgent. Whatever area of our lives demands the loudest pushes to the front of our task list. These urgent tasks are emphasized. Some traditional parts of life, such as time in nature, time in reflection, or time to simply “be still, and know,” have been excluded almost entirely.

I think of T.S. Eliot’s poetic declaration: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

As many of us scuttle between the parts that make up of our lives, snipping into ever smaller fragments the details of living, the noise of our traffic and our white iPod earbuds can grow deafening. And a sea of deaf ears brings a lonely, lonely silence. This is Roepke’s “social crisis.”

The lonely silence holds part of the answer to our political problems. Political issues are only reflections of the culture that prevails among the people, the consenting “governed” who give all political authorities their power. How politics reflect culture is shown in Barack Obama trouncing John McCain in 2008. What Roepke describes as the “age of . . . youth” made the elderly status of McCain a negative, a piece of corroborating evidence that he was “out of touch” with the changing times. So politics is only a test of a culture. But as Eliot asserts, “No culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion,” and Russell Kirk reminds us that even the word “culture” is derived from “cult,” a term which once simply meant religious faith.

I think this is the reason for our dissatisfying political state. Our culture has fragmented as we’ve lost what Roepke calls our “natural sense of direction.” This natural direction, I think, is to follow wherever the Declaration of Independence’s “laws of nature and of nature’s God” may go – a pursuit that leads ultimately into the worship of the Creator. Faith naturally becomes the unifying “glue” between the parts. Faith becomes the whole. Only by putting daily life under the “natural” direction of faith in God can we own “a right relationship between the part and the whole.”

Unfortunately, that’s not where we are. Thus do our elected political leaders, acting only as representation for our unglued culture, act contrary to “the wisdom gained through countless centuries,” rushing ahead toward tax increases higher than our European counterparts and passing thousands of pages of legislation without any time for prudent deliberation. Thus can our vice-president say things so preposterous as “we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.” What happened to for Ben Franklin’s “a penny saved is better than a penny earned,” or Thomas Jefferson’s “wise and frugal government”?

It’s not that we’re moving too quickly, or that we have many parts to our lives that’s the problem. It’s not that we listen to too much music or have too much technology. It is not that we have “extremes,” but that “we stagger from one extreme to the other,” that causes of our cultural ills. It’s that we’re aimless in our busyness, that our parts are unglued, that our technology is purposeless, and that we bounce between extremes instead of being anchored to a single, solid belief.

Its like Jean-Paul Sartre said: “No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.” We have lost our faith in an infinite God that is our reference point. Without it, each of the finite points we bounce between in our daily life is absurd. But with a restoration of this faith, a right relationships between our point can be found again.

If we hope to get our nation heading the right direction, if we wish to recover the “wisdom gained through countless centuries,” if we hope to reestablish our “innate sense of proportion,” I would urge that we once again return to faith — a faith that alone can define “the whole” of our lives.

T. Elliot Gaiser is a political and cultural commentator and a student of Political Economics at Hillsdale College. He enjoys writing fiction, engaging in vigorous debate, and playing the cello. He also operates his own website, www.researchandthinkbeforeyouvote.com.