Good Bad Things

Dear Eugene,

A friend reminded me of a passage my hero Wendell Berry wrote in his essay "Discipline and Hope":

The entire social vision, as I understand it, goes something like this: man is born into a fallen world, doomed to eat bread in the sweat of his face. But there is an economic redemption. He should go to college and get an education—that is, he should acquire the "right" certificates and meet the "right" people. An education of this sort should enable him to get a "good" job—that is, short hours of work that is either easy or prestigious for a lot of money. Thus he is saved from the damnation of drudgery, and is presumably well on the way to proving the accuracy of his early suspicion that he is really a superior person.

Or, in a different version of the same story, the farmer at his plow or the housewife at her stove dreams of the neat outlines and the carefree boundaries of a factory worker's eight-hour day and forty-hour week, and his fat, unworried paycheck. They will leave their present drudgery to take the bait, in this case, of leisure, time, and money to enjoy the "good things of life."

What are the "good things of life"?

And what is good, vs bad, anyway?  Maybe what a man, a woman, really wants, is to retire to the mall, the next vacation, the next superhero movie, the next playoff game, the next new product on display at Costco, or the two McDonald's coffee refills that would fill long stretches of many a retiring, easy afternoon?  Who knows?  Who's to judge?

My thinking is, "good things" tend to create more good things.

A "fat, unworried paycheck" could keep exuberantly priced summer beverages coming down our thirsty pipe in perpetuity as far as our budget suggests, but the waste our habit creates is not part of our accounting.  Which is to say we don't hold ourselves accountable for the bads created by our goods.

Having fun with friends over bubble-tea is not a waste of time, but what are the underlying assumptions of our merrymaking?  Only ourselves can dig them up and examine them.  A "fat, unworried paycheck" tend to render such reflection unnecessary, especially when we are on our winning way, in the winning team, when youth and resources are on our side.

"Are there enough grace and resilience to last us a lifetime?"  That, I think, is one of the most important human questions.

Grace and resilience are not given inventories.  There are predispositions or prior conditions (such as being born in a well-adjusted family) that are conducive to their growth, but these might just as well set us up to fall from grace, to lose our tenacity for lack of stretching.

We live to grow in grace and resilience.  We'll find ourselves ever more in need of their growing as we grow old and tired and wronged and threatened and being accosted by our own unexamined assumptions about how we've been living as a way to justify how we've indeed lived well.  Are the "good things" in our life generative, creating more and more good things, grace upon grace?

The twin question would be: What does it take for us to lose ourselves?

Sadly to many of us who are earning our way to "good living," the answer is: Not that much.

Yours, Alex