LITTLE TRIGGERS: So I’ve been thinking, as I mentioned a few days ago, about Unqualified Offering’s thought-provoking post on the equally thought-provoking poem “Thinking for Berky.”

I talked w/UO very briefly about the poem over the weekend. I agree with him that it isn’t quietist, though it may at first come off that way. It’s cautionary. It’s a poem that urges us to turn down the volume in our heads, to be wary of ultimatums, obvious heroics, and politics as opera. It’s conservative in the deepest sense–I don’t know that the poet would translate his thoughts into these terms, but I thought the line, “there are things time passing can never make come true,” captured the wounded nature of the world, the almost unbearable pressure of being neither good nor bad but Fallen, and the tragedy inherent in our capacity to commit irrevocable acts. It’s a poem against politics as Christ.

It’s really good. And I hope the above paragraph makes obvious that I think the poem supplies some of the most essential mental framework for people who are (and especially people who feel they must be) politically active.

But I have two cautions with which to condition this caution.

The first is the predictable response: Sometimes the big action is what’s needed. A March on Washington; a great speech; an assassination attempt; a revolution; a war. Conservatism and caution can become complacency and quietism, even though they don’t start that way. This is a predictable consequence of the human capacity to twist all our best impulses and desires into sin. (Augustine writes somewhere–can’t remember where–something to the effect that all sins are twisted malformations of virtues. And vice versa; Chesterton–in a sentence that was crucial to my conversion, actually–wrote, “The man who enters the whorehouse is seeking God.” Anyway….) I hinted at this in my post, “Religion is the amphetamine of the people.”

The second caution is that one man’s grand gesture is another man’s mosaic of intricate moves. As I’m sure UO intended, I read his post through several different prisms, two of which were most striking to me: my work at the pregnancy center, and the war in Iraq.

The center’s work is a perfect example, I think, of the kind of thing UO and Stafford are talking about. We go day to day, one woman at a time, trying to piece together a marriage culture in a world where marriage often seems as lovely but unattainable as Narnia or Never-Never Land. The center is Powerpuff Girls comic books and pamphlets on confession; pregnancy tests and presenting the Gospel; helping a homeless teen find housing and helping a woman assess her boyfriend. It often feels like it’s held together by duct tape, hope, and the Holy Spirit.

But to a lot of people, our project is utopian. People will always have sex! How can you ask women to sacrifice their dreams for their babies? Helen Alvare said (in an interview in Tikkun that was a big influence in my becoming pro-life) that the pro-life movement asks women to be heroes. I agree with that. And that is a big, big deal. It is a grand gesture as much as it is a small, one-life-at-a-time project. We are trying to effect major cultural change. I see the center as part of an incremental series of intricate moves toward justice; those who disagree with my premises see it as an attempt to propagandize women into a utopian, unrealistic mindset. (I, of course, think few worldviews are as unrealistic as the current dissociation of sex, marriage, and babies.)

The war in Iraq is, on the surface, exactly the kind of grand gesture that the Stafford poem is cautioning against. And I think that might be right. I’ve posted so little about Iraq here on the blog–after becoming a late and reluctant supporter of the war–because I have absolutely no idea what I think of it now. I often fear that any overall assessment of the war so far (and each week brings glowing reports, pitch-black ones, and optimistic-critical ones…) is so premature as to be irresponsible.

But the thing that strikes me about the war is that it, too, can appear as a series of intricate moves. Chief Wiggles’s blog makes that evident. Here’s a post that gives you a strong sense of a slow, idealistic-but-realistic, anti-utopian psychological campaign in the desert. CW is like the anti-Michael Ledeen in the way he talks about his work.

From the inside, many huge projects look like complex networks of day-by-day actions; from the outside, many complex networks look like grand sweeping juggernauts. You can see this in historical narratives, too: Do you slice-and-dice the Civil War into this Confederate general’s bad battle decision, that lucky break for the Union army, or this failure to enlist foreign forces on the CSA side? Or do you talk about Lincolnian insights, fundamentally flawed Confederate understandings of commerce and agriculture/industry balance, the rhetorical impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and the defeat of the proposal to enlist slaves for the Confederate armies?

There’s no conclusion to be drawn from this. As I hope I’ve made clear, I think the Stafford poem is both starkly-written and philosophically acute. Consider this a response, not a rebuttal. A warning inside a warning, maybe.