On ‘Surrendering’ Without Giving Up

 

A Response to Susan Quinn on Her Post “If They Try Harder, Do We Roll Over?”

My title sounds oxymoronic, I know. But perhaps my favorite Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton, was entranced by the seeming paradoxes of the faith that turn out to be simultaneously true — Christ is fully God and fully man (the hypostatic union). God is one in three persons (the holy trinity as a communion of love). My little paradox isn’t anything as profound, but I contend it is possible to both “surrender” and to not give up.

Here’s the comment that Susan asked to be clarified:

Western Chauvinist 

@WesternChauvinist

David Foster (View Comment):
Few would have been willing to bet on Britain’s survival

Did it survive, though? Britain is our family’s favorite overseas travel destination. But, it has a museum quality to it. Very pleasant to visit, lots of interesting history, charming villages and pastoral scenes. But, the people are not what they were, I’m fairly certain. And I think the same can be said about Americans. We’re an exhausted civilization. Prosperity, acedia, and godlessness have altered the American character.

I don’t think I’ve “given up.” I prefer to call it acceptance — or even surrender to the will of God. I will continue to tell the truth about the life issues, about the impossibility of same-sex marriage, about the psychosis of gender and race ideology, about the beneficence of the American founding based very much on Judeo-Christian principles and the necessity of a religious people to uphold them. And I expect someday I may end up in the gulag for speaking the truth, but I won’t stop. I can’t. That would be giving up. But, I also think I’m pretty powerless to have much of an effect on the national trajectory. I certainly don’t see same-sex “marriage” being undone even though it is immensely destructive to the family and feeds the gender insanity.

I also can’t waste my life worrying about tomorrow. We’ve learned that through intense trials — take it a little bit at a time. And as Prager says in one of his jingles, if nothing’s horrific, life is terrific. We have it so good. We should appreciate it while it lasts.

I’ve repeated the story of our traumas and trials with our daughters’ past and ongoing serious and potentially life-threatening health conditions often enough that you don’t need to hear them again. But the lessons we’ve taken away might be worth reviewing:

  1. You are not in control. Control is a delusion we practice to make ourselves feel better about our mortality.
  2. Your life is not about you. It’s about the ripples affecting other people’s lives by the choices you make.
  3. Faith is trust in God. Trust that his will is always for the good, even when you’re suffering and can’t explain it or see the ends he intends. Think Job.

In answer to Susan’s question in her post, I refer you to the latest Imprimis article by Larry Arnn, Ph.D., president of Hillsdale College, titled “The Way Out.” The whole read is worth your time, but I will attempt to briefly summarize.

Arnn reviews how it is we’ve gotten to the precipice of tyranny:

  1. Build a massive, complex, unaccountable rule-making bureaucracy with powers over most of the national resources.
  2. Capture the media composed of people educated by the same universities that promoted the creation of No. 1 who will advance the preferred narrative (lies).
  3. Enlist the aid of “big” business, whose executives were also educated as in No. 1 and No. 2 and who benefit by playing along with the regulators and contributing to the campaigns of the “right” people.
  4. Find any excuse (COVID) for the executive within crucial swing states to change the voting rules and practices (contra the Constitution, which requires the state legislatures to do so) during a contentious election cycle to put a thumb on the scales for your preferred ideology candidate.
  5. Nationalize public education such that credentialing and content comes from committees of ideologically approved “experts.”

And on that last point about “experts,” Arnn turns again to his own area of expertise, Winston Churchill:

Any elaborate system of government must have a justification, and the justification of this one cannot simply be that those in the ruling class are entitled on the basis of their superiority. That argument went away with the divine right of kings. No, for the current ruling class, the justification is science. The claim of bureaucratic rule is a claim of expertise—of technical or scientific knowledge about everything. Listen to Fauci on Face the Nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries. When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901. Churchill wrote:

Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse? . . . If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible.

Churchill goes on to argue that practical judgment is the capacity necessary to making decisions. And practical judgment, he writes in many places, is something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees. Everyone, then, is equipped to guide his own life in the things that concern mainly himself.

In the second half of his article, Arnn addresses how to defeat a rising despotism by telling the story of a multigeneration family-owned restaurant in Jonesville, just north of Hillsdale, and owner Mitch Spangler’s struggles to keep it running during Michigan’s draconian lockdowns. He also discusses the parents of Loudon County, Virginia, who have a conflict with the school board over critical race theory and transgender lunacy leading to the rape of one of their daughters in the high school bathroom by a “gender fluid” repeat offender. And this is where Arnn’s piece and my post overlap.

Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta was once purported to have said (paraphrasing): You can’t save the world, but you can do what’s in front of you. My comment about surrendering to God’s will but not giving up goes directly to this point. No, you can’t always know God’s will or why he allows you to suffer (persecution for your religious, moral, and/or political beliefs in a failing former republic, for example), but you can trust that he has a plan and that you fit into it in the time and place and circumstances you find yourself in. And while you can’t save the republic, you can take care of what’s in front of you, whether it’s your family business, your children’s education, or contributing to your friends’ and neighbors’ well-being. Those are causes we should never give up on, no matter how crazy and upside down the world gets. If we trust God, tell the truth, and do what’s in front of us, we’re doing the best anyone not in the ruling class can do.

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  1. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Keith Lowery (View Comment):

    @ westernchauvinist

    I have lately had the unexpected good fortune of having had a couple of essays published by Touchstone Magazine. Below I’ve inserted a snippet from one coming out in March, which overlaps a great deal with your thoughts here. It speaks to the question of why, when much seems lost, we should “not grow weary in doing good”.

    (The context for the following is about why we should not throw in the towel. My overarching point is that perhaps we do what we do, not in the expectation that it will fix things now, but as an act of love toward those who come after us.)

    It was T.S. Eliot who said:

    “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory…We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation it will triumph.”

    In his memoir, Fear No Evil, Natan Sharansky tells of his imprisonment and unspeakable torture at the hands of the Soviet KGB. Their mode of operation was to torture prisoners in order to extract “confessions” to entirely fictitious crimes against the state. In one dramatic moment, recounted by Sharansky, he was at the breaking point, on the verge of confessing to the KGB’s made-up charges against him, just to make the torture stop. But in that excruciating moment, he was able to recall how the strength and courage of those who came before him had enabled him to keep his commitment to the truth – up until that point. And he was able to recognize that, if he broke down and confessed to a lie, it might in some small way undermine the determination of those who came after him. It was his memory of the courage and faithfulness of his predecessors which, in that moment, gave him the strength and courage to endure the horrific torture and subsequent years-long separation from his wife.

    So it may be that there is much more at stake in our own cultural engagement than just the response of our contemporary culture. Perhaps growing weary in doing good actually betrays a lack of love for those who come after us. A lack of gritty determination on our part, now, may very well have the effect of undermining the commitment and determination of those who come into the world long after we’re gone.

    And along these lines, for those of us who are fortunate to have children in our lives to love, I find these remarks from Russell Kirk instructive and useful. It is something I make a practice of with my grandchildren.

    “In a violent time, it is prudent to rear children on tales of peril — and of heroism. If enough of the rising generation take the heroes of fantasy for their exemplars, the wolf will find sustenance less readily. ‘What sharp teeth you have!’ ‘The better to eat you with my dear.’ Give us more woodcutters, in the nick of time.”

     

    Amen.

    • #61
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