 Time to serve the soul, George F. Will tells audience By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Online Sunday, June 10, 2001
"It's a wonderful time to be alive in terms of medicine," Will said. "Do you realize that it wasn't until 1914 that the average visit to the doctor did more good than harm? "We valued doctors at that time for what? For their bedside manners. That's all they had. Doctors could make you comfortable and nature healed you or killed you. It was about that time that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, said that if you took all the medicine in the world and threw it into the ocean, it would be better for the people and worse for the fish. "To be serious, 100 years ago one in four American children died before age 14. If your child got diabetes, you watched your child go blind and die. It's a good time to be alive. We have done much to preserve the body. All I'm saying is that it is now time for us to do as much to serve the soul." The ABC News commentator, Newsweek contributing editor, syndicated newspaper columnist and author of Statecraft As Soulcraft and other books spoke at a June 8 program sponsored by the Presbyterian Lay Committee. Parker T. Williamson, chief executive officer of the Presbyterian Lay Committee and editor in chief of its publications, introduced Will by inviting the audience "to reflect through the words of our speaker on what it means to be a 21st century Christian in the 21st century culture. Now, there are those among us who would have you think of other things. There are pressure groups that are busing in, descending on this assembly, determined to reduce your conversation to one, three-letter word. They would have you know about their sex lives and they would insist that you bless it." "But what we have before us, dear friends, is not confined to any mere group. We have been besieged by a cultural phenomenon -- the imperious cult of the autonomous self. And how did this happen? What has spawned a culture so alien to what the historic Christian Church has always believed? "In our quest for answers to such questions, we have turned to one of this country's most insightful analysts of American culture," Williamson said. "In an environment of poll taking and image making and appeals to emotion, our speaker reminds us that the life of the mind is the service of God and that thinking remains a noble task." Will didn't waste any time identifying with the audience, telling them, "I know I come to you at a time when you have conflicts and arguments and a bit of stress, and some of you are anxious about the future. Let me begin by telling you that I come before you as a fan of the first-place Chicago Cubs. Together we stand while hope remains." By turns professorial and humorous, Will mixed his comments on a variety of topics -- the soul of the country, good citizenship, politics -- with more stories about baseball. "You are asking yourselves what every serious political philosopher asks -- what politics at the end of the day is about, which is the great question of how we should live. And you are concerned, as we in Washington increasingly are, because we are concerned about the condition of the culture and how that complicates the business of being a good American citizen. We are worried today, as we have been for more than two centuries, about the soul of our country. That's frankly religious language that is woven into our history," he said. On the pervasive growth of the modern age, Will said "none of (Karl Marx's) predictions have come true yet. One of his predictions was that in the modern and industrial age all pre-industrial phenomena, all the forces that shaped the world before the Industrial Revolution, would disappear. Under the bright light of the white heat of science, religion itself would disappear." "Well, we in the United States are (A) the most modern of nations and (B) the most observant, the most devout, the most religious of all modern nations. That tells you something: that there is no incompatibility at all between being a modern nation and being as faithful as we were when we were launched as the first new nation of the great modern age. "But Marx did say one thing. It was more or less true. He said that politics is necessarily an epi-phenomena. What he meant, and he was right, was that politics is sometimes like a cork on a stream -- and the stream is culture. But the real fight for the good society is the fight to control culture, to shape it, and there is no force more shaping of culture, particularly in this country, than religious belief." Later, while discussing two theories about practical politics and their effect on culture, Will said "there is a great conservative insight and there is a great liberal insight. The great conservative insight is that the culture of a society -- more than the politics of a society - determines the success of that society. The great liberal insight is that the politics of a society can have a shaping influence, for good or ill, on the society. "Michael Barone, the editor of the Almanac of American Politics and nobody in America knows more about our politics, has looked at the numbers from our last election and said, 'The way we vote is the way we pray or don't pray.' The country, it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, has two groups, each of them 42 percent of the population. Exactly 42 percent. One 42 percent is composed of Americans who go to religious observances one or more times a week. That group voted 20 percent for George Bush. A landslide, a 20 percent landslide. Those who go to religious observances rarely or never, that 42 percent voted a 17 percent margin for Mr. Gore. Will said that, as our country has evolved since Independence, one touchstone has remained constant -- a better future. "Today, if you go into any bookstore and you look on the New York Times bestseller list, you can see there's a biography of one of our most thoughtful and most neglected founders, John Adams," he said. "And John Adams said something wonderful when he was writing one of his tremendous letters to Abigail. He said the following. He said, 'I must study politics and the world that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.' He expressed the great American hope that every generation would get better -- not just materially, but morally." Will painted two revealing concepts acting at the same time within today's culture. "Since the Enlightenment," he said, "since the 18th century when America was born, we have tended to define human well-being in terms of independence. Independence. Well, it's never too late to ask the question, Independent from what? We have tended to say that self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency, is the condition we should aspire to. But sufficient for what? Independence, self-sufficiency are recipes for a radical autonomy that postulates human beings as responsible to no power higher than their own wills, wills or appetites. "And against that conception of man's stance, an old exception -- 2,000 years old -- that involves a loving surrender to a pure kind of freedom of faith to God. Now, that offends a great many people in the modern age. Self-sufficiency, they say, independence, breaking all bounds of nature. "One of the things we do and traditionally have done in our society is to make sure that our political system deals with the strong, slow, steady passions of interestedness in our economic life, the commercial and the public. But there is more to society than politics. And dealing with the most important work of society is not done by politics. That, paradoxically, is why the separation of church and state is important. The principle of separating church and state is to say that politics and the state are not omnipotent and that the most important sphere of life is left to more important institutions. One of which, of course, is what has brought you to the banks of the Ohio River tonight. The separation of church and state simply denies that the state has rightful authority over all of life -- but, every society must be concerned about the moral and religious upbringing of its young, all of them." In closing, Will brought the audience full circle by returning to the theme of the soul. "Now, what Abraham Lincoln called the silent artillery of time has destroyed many ideas in the last 2,000 years, but you are here, drawn here by an idea 2,000 years old and going strong, impervious to the silent artillery of time," he said, adding: "You are here because you believe, as I do, that the soul of the country is in constant jeopardy, that there are aspects to modern life, aspects of the American political assumptions, aspects of the American economic system, that can -- unless combatted -- become perilous to the soul of the country." |
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