November/December 1999

Millennium Man


Poised on the edge. Like a 10-year-old boy about to be pushed into the deep end of a pool on a chilly day, our world is already sucking in its collective breath and bracing for the shock of cold contact.

Whatever happened to that "brave new world" we imagined earlier this century? Even as this decade began we proclaimed the end of Communism and the more-than-symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall, and it seemed that freedom and prosperity were ours forever.

Maybe it was the disquieting dissonance created by the simultaneous NATO bombing of Belgrade and genocide in Kosovo. The good guys were harder to see than usual, and bad seemed to have broken out all over.

Here within the United States dismay has turned to outright fear. The continuing spate of bombings, saturation of news reports of school shootings, attacks on Jewish day-care centers, and workplace madness have created a larger paranoia.

It would not be difficult to characterize our national mind-set as somewhat manic-depressive. With the worsening bad news we swing down toward the depths of social despair and lash out with radical ad hoc proscriptions. Then, when the stock market rebounds 100 points or so above last week's low or a political savior appears in the media wilderness, we exult that times are looking good. But in reality we have become like a patient subjected to shock therapy: there is much resulting confusion and memory loss.

Not too long ago a much-touted best-selling book carried the title The End of History. Superficially it was a mistake in judgment. History marches on and certainly will not end till "the last trump" of Scripture. But the real point of the book was the premise that perhaps the trends and developing tendencies of modern society have reached their culmination in our time; and that they will either end cataclysmically or be replaced in a dramatic paradigm shift.

Perhaps more appropriately we might express the book's premise
by saying "This is the end of the world as we knew it."

Philosophical worldviews can take us only so far, and it is legitimate to question whether the philosophy of the day creates the larger view or is merely a formalized expression of general thought. Was the philosophy of Nietzsche, expressed and popularized in his presentation of the superman, somehow responsible for the development of a vicious, self-centered totalitarian world? Or was it tending that way anyhow? And a similar question may be asked about the existentialism that pervades our increasingly amoral, live-for-the-moment world.

In the countdown months of 1999 we seemed destined to relive the past, even as we searched for the future. When John F. Kennedy, Jr., vanished from the radar screen, to be found at great ocean depth, together with his wife and her sister, the recovery of his body dredged up far more than mortal remains. It was a reminder of other dreams cut short, of what might have been. For many it carried, perhaps, a premonition of a lifeless, hopeless millennium ahead.

And so we have arrived at the subject of this editorial, and another theory of history. I call it the "great man" theory. When I was back in high school most history teachers tended to see history as a procession of events and dates. By the time I had finished college and university they had refined it to an analysis of trends and movements. But anyone knows that great men and women define history, and by their greatness spur nations and individuals on to deeds that are either great or dastardly.

Imagine a post-World War France rejuvenated without De Gaulle. Imagine a Chinese cultural revolution begun without the agitation of Chairman Mao. Imagine a Europe convulsed in a paroxysm of destruction without a Hitler. Imagine these United States, complete with all the freedoms and unique constitutional privileges, without Jefferson, Madison, and Washington--our first president and not our first king, as some would have proclaimed him. (And how different history might have been if he or anyone had accepted such a course!)

I'm open to the proposition that without the particular men of history that we know and admire or hate, some of the those same events might still have taken place. But only, I am sure, if a similarly minded great man had moved into the breach.

Which brings us back to our predicament on the cusp of a new millennium, in search of a great man to take us through.

With such a need, an expectation, and without a broad-based training for greatness, we lay ourselves open to the downside of the great man theory.

The great despots and evildoers of history seem to have sprung fully formed from an enabling populace. The great leaders who have made a positive difference in society often distinguish themselves among a number of similarly great peers, who might just as easily have taken the lead themselves.

This is inherent in an analysis of the early American republic, which was fed by Christian self-reliance and an Enlightenment logic. This in contrast to China, where an almost total breakdown in society prepared the way for an ideological warlord by the name of Mao, who would kill as many millions of the unthinking masses as he deemed necessary.

This issue of Liberty is taking special note of how a responsible society cares for the education of its children--the great men and women of tomorrow. Make no mistake about it, those leaders are there, no matter how many shootings and killings we have in our high schools. We can allow a deterioration of society to breed the sort of greatness that will chill humankind in the next millennium. Or we can work through every avenue available to family and society to inculcate values, principles and aspirations that will prepare a broad base of potential leaders--millennial men and women!

I read recently the old maxim that each one of us is actually three: what we think we are, what others say we are, and what we are. Many of us would find that a shocking judgment. But the reality is a fourth beyond the maxim: what each of us can be!

Too many of us are living in the state of dismay epitomized by the inactivity of T. S. Eliot's "The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,. . .and in short, I was afraid. . . .I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two."

This is a time for uncommon personal heroism. The challenge of the new millennium is not just a quirk of the calendar, a sort of human Y2K crisis. It is deep-seated, and, contrary to many views that we are not in control of our own destiny, a great deal of the answer to the challenge lies within us and how we relate to it.

We have allowed that "sea of faith," to use an expression coined by Matthew Arnold, to recede from our lives and national consciousness.

In the introduction to "The Christ We Forget," penned near the end of World War I, author Philip Wilson described the public mood leading up to that event. "Many of us were making money, others were busily earning it. Our children were getting on nicely at school. Certainly there were grave evils, like drink, and bitter social inequalities, and rancorous political quarrels, and reckless extravagances, which gave us uneasy twinges of conscience. But we drifted.... Then--suddenly--we were brought face to-face with facts which we had forgotten.... We learned that life is not a game, but a grim, heroic combat between good and evil."

For that type of contest, for the coming millennium, we need more than celluloid heroes. Video game superficiality will not cut it. The moral vacuum in individual lives must be replaced by a sense of purpose and selflessness. To do otherwise is to risk every liberty, including religious liberty, at the hands of whatever antihero we allow to rise from our indifference.

"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom'" (Samuel Adams, 1771).

Lincoln E. Steed

Liberty Valued

At the Christian Coalition's Road to Victory Conference during the last presidential campaign season, evangelical activist Star Parker opened her remarks with the following line: "Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now."[1]

Recent reports of school violence have given new life to the efforts of concerned parents, administrators, politicians, and special interest groups. Some of these efforts are motivated by nothing more than the perceived political necessity to appear to be doing something. Other efforts are attempts to capitalize on tragedy to accomplish long-failed political agendas. Still others flow from the sorrow of knowing our culture is sick and in need of help.

Nation building and the home-school movement

Warm parental affection, discreet approval, and sound adult example are the nearest to master teaching your child will ever know. This may seem sharply limiting to many dads today, unused as they are to old-fashioned family ties, but preferring the sports page or nightly TV to family talk around the table or the fireplace; or to mothers who haven't time for a weekly peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich picnic at the local park or on an old rug back in their own backyard.

My mother was not the obvious criminal type. She was conscientious, responsible, and kindly--an ideal housewife, mother, and citizen. But she held firm views when it came to raising her children, and she was not going to let just anyone push her around when it came to their welfare. Even if that anyone was the state educational department, which said that her children must be in school when they reached the age of six. From an application of Christian principles she was convinced, and my father agreed, that this was too young. My parents believed that I would be benefited emotionally and spiritually by another year of instruction and teaching at home.

By design, church schools provide a viable education alternative.

Calls for a return to legislated Christian values, while well-intentioned, may actually be undermining the values and the government they presume to uphold.