I was talking to some friends the other day, one of whom happens to work at a local veterinary clinic. In the course of conversation she mentioned they’d recently hired a doctor and were pleasantly surprised to discover he would be willing to do surgeries. I asked if she could repeat that last statement. To me, that would be like hiring a baker and being surprised to find out he bakes bread. Sure enough, it turns out you can receive the rights, privileges, and salary of a veterinarian and simply … refuse to do surgery. What do veterinarians do when they’re not doing surgery? Great question. Delouse the lobby furniture? Massage the zebra finches? Ensure the post-anesthetic cats aren’t cussing out the front desk staff?
We shouldn’t just single out the squeamish vets, although I really do think they need to find another job title: Domestic Animal Ally? Air Wick Executive? Master of Mammalian Relations?
A few days later (if you don’t like anecdotes you may as well get off at the next stop) I had another conversation with someone who’d just had a guy from the city over to adjust a gas main running into their house. At one point during the procedure, the fitter had to stop and explain that he couldn’t do any more until he could get someone over to help. The problem? The tiniest corner of a patio stone was infringing onto the jurisdiction of the pipe path. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t move it. It was that he was prohibited from moving it, no doubt by some tremulant ghoul in a pink hard hat from the CUPE. His hands were tied until the appropriate expert arrived to move a fifteen pound patio stone over four inches.
At this point my friend asked, “Could - could I just move it myself?” Thankfully he was allowed, no doubt sparing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Mr. Director of Patio Stone’s wages.
You can’t? Or you won’t.
I bring all of this up to illustrate the increasingly crippling presence of what I’ve taken to calling “I Can’t” culture. Or perhaps, “I Won’t” culture.
No doubt you’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand. There you were, trying to wrest a piece of vital information from some “telecommunications operator” who apparently started their job forty-eight seconds before you called. And then, just when you thought you were getting somewhere, you heard those fateful words: “Sir, I understand your frustration but I can’t answer your question. Here’s a number you can call.” As you stare at the many eights and zeroes it will take you to reach Mr. Abdul Kalamazad, you can already feel the blisters forming on your ears. All to eventually be told you’ve got the wrong department and to call another number.
“I Can’t” culture has also invaded our relationships and responsibilities. Toxic people, needy people, exhausting people, sick people, small people (children — not dwarves, although I’ve heard the latter can be a handful) can no longer be “evened.” Which is slightly-expired millennial slang for “I am fundamentally unable to cope with entertaining even the prospect of helping so-and-so with such-and-such a thing.”
The problem we’re dealing with is a blend of fairly terrible things which combine to produce a truly awful thing. Kind of like a matcha green tea frappuccino. Sure we could talk about the general incompetence of those graduating from “Everybody’s A Shining Star” university. Or our collective phobia of responsibility and risk. Or the doomed collaboration of dysfunctional cultures. Or the rise of catatonic cashiers who, apparently, are physically unable to converse.
But I’m not going to talk about any of that. I can’t. In fact, I won’t.
What I am going to talk about is the impossibility of a society ever being able to surpass its religious principles. The Middle East, for example, will never outgrow its lust for subjugation and monoformity because that is how Islam has instructed it. The Indian subcontinent will never outgrow its poverty and caste structures because Hinduism has doomed its people to endless cycles of death and rebirth. I mean — could you be passionate about sanitation if your best hope was to shovel enough feces so you can come back as an electric eel? China will never outgrow its self-sabotaging paranoia as long as the only god it recognizes is the state.
The West, and especially Canada, increasingly has nothing to boast about. At least Muslims have paradise to look forward to. Correction, at least the men do. At least Hindus can look forward to someday being able to administer 860-volt shocks to hapless swimmers. What do those of us in the West have? The hope that if we make enough money, we’ll be able to afford enough stuff, or at least enough opiates, to counterbalance seventy or eighty years of labour and sorrow.
And the knowledge that if life gets too hard, we can always conscript a “health professional” to help us to kill ourselves.
No wonder nobody can even.
Breaking the Faustian bargain
The phenomenon of the West — her universities, her hospitals, her churches, her law and order — didn’t come from nowhere. It grew up from the soil of Christian faith, which presented a view of the cosmos that was ordered around sacrifice. The nucleus of Christian faith isn’t actually love for one’s neighbor — that is the result; that is the effect. The nucleus, very simply, is this: “That while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Rightly understood, this is not the kind of statement you engrave on a plaque next to a soulful-looking sheep and forget about. It’s the kind of thing you stake your life on. It’s the kind of thing you build a nation on.
And so we did.
It would be hard to overstate how growing up in schools and churches, immersed in a civic liturgy that confessed even the fading echoes of the Gospel, has shaped the history of our nation. But it has. To the extent that such truth seeps into the bones of a people, so that their lives are surrounded by grace, it can’t help but shape a nation.
Materialism has never produced pioneers for the simple fact that it isn’t possible for innovation and sacrifice to breathe in a stifling environment of self-preservation. They are contradictory aims; one points outward, and one turns inward. Materialists don’t volunteer to hop on a ship for a 66-day cruise across the mid-Atlantic the with only the dim hope of not dying from disease or cold long enough to build a log cabin. Materialists don’t start a cathedral they’ll never live to see finished. This being said, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that vets don’t want to do surgery; that gas fitters refuse to lift patio stones; or that couples reject marriage and children in a materialist age. A prevailing sterility is, and always has been, the inevitable end of such a worldview.
As Christians in the midst of such a culture, we must not grow weary of doing good. We will avoid such weariness not through forced optimism, stoic resolve, or various means and modes of escapism, but only insofar as we “consider him, who endured such hostility from sinners.”
Hey, someone should put that on a plaque.