The Death of a Grand Mythos

The Limits of Creation

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the present
And let our illusions die
W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

I am a boomer. I have been formed out of the optimism of technology’s bosom. I have grown up in and through the cultural mythos of progress and growth. I have been fed and nurtured on the fantasy that fuels and animates contemporary culture. That is the deeply embedded caprice of limitless power and potential wealth. (See Bill Moyer interview with author Andrew Bacevich)

In recent weeks we all have been privy to a disettling picture of the present and our future in the so called bailout crisis. For many of us this prospect represents the end of a lifelong pursuit of personal independence. We boomers were weaned on the breast of self determination, autonomy, and a lack of restrictions. Choice, unfettered choice was our birth right and our non-conformity was rewarded through our inventiveness, creativity, and an ever expanding national and world economy. We were constantly told by politicians, pastors, and the gurus of personal space that the world was our oyster. We could throw our dreams into the cosmos with abandon for we were meant to enjoy this world of our making with unconfined desire.

I am an optimist. However, I am being forced by my own swampland visits to come to the powerful realizations that indeed there are limits to all things. Not only my personal mythos but the ones that fashion and shape the larger world into which my own resides. We are in unique times. For the first time in my life the chicken has truly come home to roost. The world I have constructed for myself and those I love is quickly proving to be much like a home off the coast of Galveston. It can take certain gale winds but these hurricane forces are not your garden variety wind storm. They are powerful forces that only nature and creation can muster.

Are we in spiritual and existential times of the same order? Are we now realizing that our leaders have given us what we want? And what have we wanted? It appears that what we have wanted is an endless opportunity to consume, purchase, and expand our personal space beyond its limits. We are coming to the realization that the world may indeed have an edge to it. We may fall off. There are constraints to desire. Even the actual frontiers that were so much a part of America’s mythos are now being auctioned off for the fuel we need to run this gargantuan machine of craving we have mistaken for longing.

I have had a longing. I still do. This longing is represented by my desire to be a part of true community. What I am witnessing in this nearly Kafkaesque scene being acted out in national politics and the financial worlds is a collapsing dream that years ago became a trance. This trance was fueled by unbridled desire, ambition and American exceptionalism. We have been told since I was a child that we were the saviors of the world and our form of government and ways of life (Christian and capitalistic) were not merely better but destined to take over the world. The manifest destiny that brought us to the shores of the Americas is a testament to that broad and powerful mythos. It has remained as a part of our grand narrative for centuries.

What we are witnessing is the end of a way of thinking about the world and ourselves. Because we have seen life and creation as commodities that could be exchanged and profited from, we have continued to value those entities to suit our own personal avarice. Whether it is our homes or businesses, we purposed to profit no matter the cost to others and now we are beginning to realize that others were doing the same thing. We are not as clever as we thought. The Chinese have already found us out. American has its Achilles heal-it loves to consume and it is willing to do it all on credit (borrowed time and money)

Now this mythos of limitless craving and profiteering off the needs and desires of others has become a global amusement. In recent years I have sensed from some of my friends at how pleased they were that Russia collapsed along with Marxism due in part to the US sending over our ideology of personal consumption. I too was equally glad the regime came to and end. However, I saw and see much more disturbing reasons for all this collapse. Glasnost, as welcomed as it was throughout the world, was really a moratorium on the cold war so Russians could finally go to the mall like everyone else in the “advanced” first world countries. Now the Chinese as well are being formed by this consumptive narcissism and their need for resources for expansion is enormous. So enormous that their fever could kill us in the States.

How many of us are aware of the money we borrow from China on a consistent basis? How many understand our place in the buying chain between producers and consumers? Everything in the world goes round when credit flows and America can consume. A few weeks or months of no consumption and the entire world economy gets frightened and should as we Americans hold up the house of cards. Our ability to buy more and more allows for our imperial global expansion to continue. Just like our capitalistic ventures into the former Soviet Russian, it is as much contingent on credit as it is on stealth bombers. In fact, war has always proven to put a drain on the entire process but our fears and lack of learning from history lean our expansionistic inclinations towards aggression.

We have offered up and exported this myth of limitless access to power and wealth and now our dream is quickly revealing itself as a fantasy filled with glaring holes and cosmic restrictions that here to fore we have ignored. This culturally shared story is now reaching its maximum threshold as it becomes a global ambition. It has proven to be not merely plagiarized but a fiction. The universe is not complicit with us on this one. There are limits to all of life and those realizations are returning like a tide that has been out to sea for centuries. Creation was meant to be stewarded not plundered.

The emerging threshold is a day of reckoning for many of us. Personally I am having to sit in years of decisions I made about my finances, my career, my personal goals, and finally discern the boundaries of my own humanity. On some days I am overwhelmed with my own personal sense of shame and responsibility. I am morally liable and accountable for my decisions. Ask the bank. Ask my credit card company. Ask my closest friends.I can blame no one. Yet, I must have some grace on my self. There are powers outside myself that impacted those decisions. There is a cultural trance that we mutually agree to induce in one another. Yet my own naiveté and desire has overtly and covertly colluded to push my humanness to its limits and now the confines of those checks and balances are meted out with great pain and stress. I come to community with a lot of baggage. My own personal story of unchecked and uninhibited dreams has a weighty reality to it at this point in my life. I am beginning to see just how much my own aspirations can inhibit the true bounty of this world to be accessible to others. My own consumptive habits purposely kept me unaware of the deepest needs of others. I have wanted primarily for me. Now I must learn to long for "us."

More than ever we need community. However, the communities we are going to need to deal with these impending tides are not yet in place. They will only come as we are forced to identify our real families. I am always amazed when I watch the TV program that gives away a house at how many in great need stick together for all they have are each other. Until all we have is each other, we will continue to ask the politicians and banks to create a larger credit line, an ever expanding economy, a limitless access to cheap fuel, and the ability to stay mobile so our profiteering does not finally come to an end in love for one another. I encourage all who are on the threshold of collapse be it personally, in business, or in your ability to navigate your own small world; there is a deeper net about to appear. It only manifests when the free fall begins. Greater love has no man than he lay down his life for his brother. Some of us are having our world weary hands full of stuff yanked from our clutching only to discover the embrace of our true family. I cannot reach out nor receive when I hold onto what was never mine to own. To the limits of desire in this world and the limitless love of God in the ever restoring Kingdom of the now and forever! May our Lord's name be praised.