Christianity imposes on believers two impossible duties. First, one is required to accept doctrine which cannot be justified logically or empirically, such as the various doctrines about Christ's nature. Even if one attempts to devise one's own Christianity from reading the Bible one is still forced to accept doctrine for insufficient reasons. Why should one not covet? Well, God says so. So why should we do what God says? Well, read the Bible. Why should we believe the Bible? Because it's God's word. Oh.
The second impossible duty is you've got to be good. You've got to give your goods to the poor, man. Well, really. Now we all know that that would be better but, hey,...I'm not gonna. What have the poor ever done for me, anyway, besides let me be rich?
A popular contemporary belief is that the world may be mastered by hard work and planning. To be successful, the story goes, all you have to do is plan to be successful and then persevere till you are. The enormous body of popular writing about success identifies it with money and possessions. Many success gurus describe money as a scorecard that lets you know you're successful.
Hard work and sound planning may help substantially in becoming successful, but they are neither sufficient for the achievement of success nor necessary. Luck is sufficient, and opportunity is necessary, but the success gurus never mention opportunity except as something which may be unerringly tracked down by the astute believer, and mention luck as infrequently as possible, and then only as something which can be easily overcome. The existence of luck is to the religion of success what the existence of evil is to Christianity – a phenomenon which preachers find most convenient when kept as far as possible from the layperson's consciousness.
One of the political implications of these ideas is that the poor and the failed are the authors of their own misfortunes. In fact, the more one is successful, the less opportunity others have to become successful themselves, but that fact is clearly heretical, just as the idea that the earth revolves around the sun used to be.
What is surprising, though, is that in a society so extensively educated, beliefs so patently irrational and futile as those of the success zealots should be so widely held.
But then our system of education is principally the creature of the religion of success. One goes to school not to improve one's understanding of the world, but to make "something" of oneself. Something. Anything.
Most people seem to think that the schools should be preparing students for jobs. Supposedly the high schools should be able to assign students to appropriate courses of training, even though the jobs at which the students will eventually work may not exist yet. I entered high school in 1961. No one could have advised me in grade 9 to train to be a systems analyst. Thank God.
4. MONEY AND POWER
Orwell observed that the political ideas of the bourgeois of his day (they called them bourgeois back then) were the ideas of a class which had never held power. Today's popular ideas about success are similarly the ideas of people who have been trained to ignore or deny the existence of power. The devotee of the religion of success will vehemently argue that we all have equal opportunity – equal opportunity, that is, to think success is the ability to buy even more of the products that our masters want to sell us. An ability which one person's success must deny to others, regardless of how much the successful person thinks they should be able to make something of themselves, too.
In theory any American woman can become president, but in practice none of them do.
Mr. FitzGerald is available to address your church or school group. His Topics include:
- Dodgeball as a Model of Society
- Become Successful While You Sleep!
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Sex with Lots of Models in the Back of my Escalade!
Four Short Pieces © John FitzGerald, 2006
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment