Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else.
There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.
~ Wendell Berry
Paul Kingsnorth says we are living in a spiritual void. I think that's probably correct.
Freya India says ours is the age abandonment. That sounds right to me also.
If they are correct, then the world many people now live in and the only world our young have ever known is one marked both by a profound sense of powerlessness tied to a certain fear that there's nothing worth pursuing anyway.
If that's the world you've known, then I think I can see how a certain close attention to status hierarchies and ladder climbing might make sense: Membership in elite hierarchies offers the allure of wealth, power, and influence.
I almost wonder, though, if there isn't an even more basic appeal of such hierarchies. Belonging to an elite scene or network offers not only a sense of membership and identity, but also the sense that one is part of something that's going somewhere and that one has some part to play in it. It offers you community, work, and a destination, in other words. The wealth and status is almost more like icing on the cake at that point.
What you're really after, as a friend put it in conversation recently, is the sense that you have a family, place, and heritage that is worthy of love, affection, and service. And since we live in the void, in the age of abandonment, anything that even faintly smells of that is intoxicating.
There's a problem, though: Let's shift the metaphor. I'm listening right now to a book on the economic history of Africa. One of the themes that runs through the book is that Europeans tended to turn Africa into something exotic and beyond the realm of one's normal experience of the world. There's some reason for that—the wealthiest man ever to live before industrialism was probably a west African emperor named Mansa Musa. While traveling to Mecca on Hajj in 14th century Cairo this great king gave away so much gold that the price of gold in Egypt was artificially low for nearly a decade. When that's the reality, you can perhaps understand how legends would develop.
One particular story held that there was a river of gold in Africa flowing from the interior out toward the ocean. So when Portuguese explorers sailing along the west African coast in the mid 15th century found a small inlet suggestive of a river, they named it Rio do Ouro—River of Gold. In reality, it wasn't much of a river, today the inlet is completely dry. Not only that, but they were on the edge of the territory now known as the Western Sahara. It wasn't remotely the River of Gold. But, propelled by a mixture of ignorance and desire, they thought it was.
The analogy now becomes rather obvious, I think: Lusting after the belonging offered by many elite hierarchies in America today strikes me as being rather like the explorers who found a desert inlet and thought it was a river of gold they'd heard about but never actually seen.
The gold that I think all of us desire are forms of communal life and work that seem worthwhile. Worthy work is work done amongst a community defined by care, knowledge, and affection and done with the goal of accomplishing something worthwhile. That is what we want.
It is, I'm fairly confident, not what one will find at McKinsey. A life at McKinsey is not a path toward belonging and significance, but a path toward becoming, as the same friend said, a vanishingly small cog in a terribly boring machine. You will obtain wealth, certainly, but that wealth will be the proverbial golden handcuffs, permanently yoking you to that tedium.
To be sure, there isn't anything intrinsically sinful about belonging to elite circles. However, the people who fare best in such environments are the ones who need it least. The person who finds themselves an elite without necessarily desiring to be so and without having spent years lusting after it might actually be fit for such status. But those are rare birds. For most of us such prestige is more likely to be a poison than a blessing—recall Jesus's words of warning about camels and rich men.
But we can push the point further. It's not simply an activity we're after or simply friendship. There is a quality we ought to cultivate over the course of our lives, a sense of devotion first and foremost to the good, but then secondarily to what Tolkien refers to as "lord and land and league of friendship" in Return of the King. The old term for this filial devotion is "piety."
Lingering behind the lust for belonging in elite hierarchies is the sense that one owes piety to something and an almost total inability in our age of abandonment to identify the people to whom piety is owed. The best many can do is to identify people who have in some way aided them materially, even if only as an employer. Perhaps piety can be offered to them. (The more intensified form of this, of course, is the veneration one can find in pockets of American society for highly successful entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or, before him, Steve Jobs.)
But this is a confusion of categories, an act of misidentification every bit as egregious as that of the Portuguese explorers, and not unlike it in nature actually: confusing desert sands for flowing rivers of gold. Worse still, giving your piety to such things will twist and deform your piety over time, which is to say it will deform you. And at that point our Lord's warnings in the Gospel spring to mind: If you gain the world and lose your soul, what does it profit you?
To whom is piety owed, then?
If you are Christian, the answer should be clear. For the far more common use we now have for that word has less to do with the duties of devotion owed to a father, as in the classical world, but with the duties of devotion owed to God. For Christians, we do owe piety to our parents (and to others who are above us in society, in fact) but these duties are derived from the fact that we are created by God in the world that God made. Piety to others follows first from piety to God.
And how does one practice one's devotion to God?
I began this reflection by quoting from Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter. Another quote might suffice in answer to that question:
“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
If you are a Christian, then you do not need another outlet for your piety, another community to give you a sense of belonging and purpose; you have all things through Christ.
And Christ calls you into a further mystery: He calls you to the ordinary life that every Christian believer is called to—a life of rejoicing, gratitude, and prayer as you pour yourself out for the people God has given to you, all while belonging to a community bound together by water, body, and blood. Speaking of such a life, I think Tolkien spoke best: "And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on."
