The Wonder of the Ordinary, Ignoring the Invisible, and Gratitude as an Antidote to Ideology
The Wonder of the Ordinary, Ignoring the Invisible, and Gratitude as an Antidote to Ideology
We are embedded in deep layers of complexity - social, cultural, political, theological-often invisible structures that make our world go around. We forget them at our peril.
We are embedded in deep layers of complexity and surrounded by invisible foundations - traditions, processes, institutions, and ideas that that make life go on and that undergird our economic, political, and social life. Because these things don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them or even worse, think they don’t matter and that life will go on as normal even if we get rid of them. This is an error that has terrible consequences.
Look around the room you are in and think about all the things that are making your reading this essay possible. The computer or phone; a table and chair if you are sitting at a desk. Electricity and the electric grid, plus all the people, businesses, and materials required to maintain it. Think about the house or building you are in and the architect, builders, bricks, wood, rebar, concrete, and of course the mathematics that make it sturdy.
Go further and reflect on all the things that make our security and safety possible. If you live in the United States or Western Europe, you most likely are not wearing a sidearm (apologies to those in Texas). Why? Because generally we have stable political and social institutions grounded in justice and rule of law that enable us to go about our daily lives and do our business without worrying for our safety. Rule of law also enables us to buy and sell our homes, start a business, and get our court case heard if someone cheats or doesn’t fulfill a contract. And we can’t forget the cultural artifact that we inherited that makes our communication possible - the English language.
Even apparently simple things require great complexity. If you are drinking a cup of coffee or you’ve visited a coffee shop lately, consider all the people, processes, and tools it took to get a simple cup of espresso: coffee beans, roasters, grinders, espresso machines, steel, plastic, petroleum, plastic and burlap bags, shipping containers, the networks of relationships and contracts (that means lawyers) between farmers, transporters, suppliers, roasters, shop owners, and baristas - and don’t forget the currency and banking and the cultural trust that the coffee wouldn’t make you sick. Here’s the full version of a video on the global supply chain of a cup of espresso that I directed as part of the Acton Institute’s Good Society Series that highlights how embedded in complexity we really are.
Invisible Institutions
If there is a lot going on in a single cup of coffee, it’s hard to imagine all the complexity going around us. One of the characteristics of invisible structures that support us, is that they are, well invisible. This is especially true for those of us who live in advanced industrial societies, but it applies to everyone. No single person could hold all the details that make our daily lives possible. In fact it would be impossible to do so even if we wanted. Spending all our time thinking about everything that makes our daily life possible would paralyze us and drive us mad. However, the danger occurs when we forget, or fail to realize their importance; and in our failure to recognize the complexity, we find ourselves in profound trouble.
In the realm of economics and politics, there are foundational institutions of justice that we discuss in Poverty, Inc. These enable economic development, a commercial society, and civil society. These are things like
property rights and clear title to land
access to justice and courts of law
the right of free association
ability to register a business in the formal economy
ability to engage in free exchange without unreasonable burden
Without these things entrepreneurship is stifled. But many entrepreneurs don’t even think about these things until they are gone. At the Acton Institute we did a very informal survey of business leaders and entrepreneurs asking them what issues they thought were the most important for people to understand about business and entrepreneurship. These “invisible” conditions came in at the bottom. I doubt it would be much different among students and professors of business and entrepreneurship.
Intellectual Rebar
The institutions of justice only scratch the surface. Think of all the deeper invisible concepts that we take for granted and rarely articulate: ideas like freedom, honor, justice, and equality. We simply assume them as part of the fabric of our thought.
But what is justice? Where does the concept of justice that dominates Western thought and institutions come from? And why do we think that justice better than injustice? It surely doesn’t come from biology. It is not a materialist, empirical concept that can be measured. Yet certain ideas of justice, right and wrong, sacred and profane permeate our thinking and view of the world. In the West they come from a number of sources including Greek, Roman, and most important Jewish and Christian ideas. They are such a part of our lives that we even use them when we critique religion or Western civilization.
Sam Harris, the well known materialist and critic of faith argues that “there is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.” But what does Sam Harris mean by “sacred” and why is it a “high purpose?” Is high better than low, and what in fact is “purpose” in a purely material universe? Even Harris is relying on a host of “invisible” concepts and ideas to even make his so-called materialist argument.
Even the Enlightenment rejection of religious “superstition” still relies on key ideas that come from Jewish and Christian civilization: the de-divinization of nature, the de-sacralization of the state, both of which create the secular order, the intelligibility of nature, scientific method, and much more. This was a central part of Edmund Burke’s critique of the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution. Too often Enlightenment thinkers looked at the surface of something, and in their re-articulation they hollowed out traditions, mores, habits, and ideas that made that something possible in the first place. This I think applies to John Locke’s vision of social contract. Social contract in actual practice long preceded Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. It existed throughout medieval and renaissance Europe, and even existed in the America with the Mayflower Compact in 1620 - seventy years before Locke wrote. It didn’t come out of a mythical state of nature, It came out of rich cultural and religious sources about the nature of the person and society. As Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explains
In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin, and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith, whenever Christianity, against its nature, and unfortunately, had become tradition and religion of the state. Notwithstanding the philosophy, in so far as search for rationality — also of our faith – was always a prerogative of Christianity, the voice of reason had been too domesticated. It was and is the merit of the Enlightenment to have again proposed these original values of Christianity and of having given back to reason its own voice. In the pastoral constitution, On the Church in the Modern World, Vatican Council II underlined again this profound correspondence between Christianity and the Enlightenment, seeking to come to a true conciliation between the Church and modernity, which is the great heritage that both sides must defend. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - Subiaco Address
“Who Gives you the Fishing Rod?”
Roger Scruton gives a good example of the problem of ignoring the invisible and taking things for granted in his critique of Marx’s concept of freedom in Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Marx famously argued that in a communist society man would be free to engage in
“hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner.”
The problems with this idea of freedom are many. First, freedom as liberation - as a simply mere act of the will - is a false promise. If at a dinner party I started to bang my head at the edge of the table, and blood spurted over everyone, no one would think “Wow - He’s so Free!” They would think I had lost my mind. As Joseph Ratzinger notes in Truth and Tolerance, “an irrational will is not a free will.” This he says is a “diabolical freedom,” the sort of radical liberation that ends up enslaving us.
A second problem with Marx’s dream of freedom is directly related to complexity and taking things for granted. As Roger Scruton points out, Marx fails to account for how all those things —leisure of fishing, hunting, reading and education — are going to be accomplished if the state (and culture with it) has “withered away.”
Marx is like the young college student sitting in a coffee shop, pounding on his keyboard, railing against global trade while drinking Tanzanian espresso made in an Italian machine. He takes the invisible development of a complex culture for granted and assumes it will remain no matter what we do. He claimed that his socialism, unlike the “utopian socialists” he critiqued was “scientific.” But as Scruton writes:
To say that this is ‘scientific’ rather than utopian is, in retrospect, little more than a joke. Marx’s remark about hunting, fishing, hobby farming and lit. crit. is the only attempt he makes to describe what life will be like without private property – and if you ask who gives you the gun or the fishing rod, who organizes the pack of hounds, who maintains the coverts and the waterways, who disposes of the milk and the calves, and who publishes the lit. crit., - such questions will be dismissed as ‘beside the point’, and as matters to be settled by a future that is none of your business…such questions are too trivial to be noticed.
Or rather, they are too serious to be considered, and therefore go unnoticed. For it requires but the slightest critical address, to recognize that Marx’s ‘full communism’ embodies a contradiction:
it is a state in which all the benefits of legal order are still present, even though there is no law; in which all the products of social cooperation are still in existence, even though nobody enjoys the property rights which hitherto have provided the sole motive for producing them.
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible
Scruton echoes Eric Voegelin who noted that when Marxists were pressed on fundamental questions, the answer was “that’s not a question for socialist man.” Augusto Del Noce too identified one of the hallmarks of ideology as the “suppression of questions.” As Voegelin and others have noted, a closed ideological system that has shut itself from the truth sows the seeds of violence. This is just one reason why relativism always becomes a “dictatorship” as Benedict XVI so aptly described.
The Wonder of the Ordinary: Gratitude as an antidote to ideology.
We are all tempted by ideology. We are tempted to create the world in our image. Tempted to ignore things we don’t understand or find interesting or just don’t like. Tempted to find the one story or one theory that explains the woes of the world. Reflecting on complexity and how we rely on the invisible - and the work and effort of millions of other people including those who have come before us - can help us avoid this type of thinking. Awareness of complexity does not mean we cannot understand anything or that we cannot have theories to help explain reality. But it helps keep us humble in our approach.
We could never pay constant attention to all the ideas, inventions, and actions that maintain the cultural, institutional, and physical infrastructure that surround and uphold us. But what we can do is cultivate the habit of gratitude. Gratitude is a reverence before the wonder of being. Gratitude as a foundational approach to reality keeps us attentive to the innumerable gifts we have including our lives. We did not bring ourselves into existence.
Gratitude opens our eyes to the gift and character of life. It opens us not only to blessings and opportunities, but to possibilities and pathways that we would not be able see without gratitude. When things are going well, gratitude keeps us grounded that we did not succeed on our own; when things are difficult, gratitude protects us from seeing ourselves simply as victims - and from the poison of “ressentiment,” of sour grapes and transvaluation that Max Scheler describes so well. Avoiding resentment and victimhood is not only helpful in our daily lives and relationships. Resentment and victimhood is fertile ground for ideology.
Gratitude helps us remain attentive to all the wonderful complexity and layers of invisible culture that surround us. It helps us avoid the mistakes of the ideologue who identifies his theory with reality. It could also help us become more appreciative o our ancestors and for the wonder of the ordinary, which when we reflect just a bit, isn’t ordinary after all.