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<\/a>Greg Forster<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nWhen you work in the world of ideas, you can easily make the mistake detaching your ideas from the realities of daily life. You can get caught up in theoretical details, jargon, and the nuanced squabbles of subject matter experts. All of that can be important! Yet all the while, the world keeps spinning and people struggle with its brokenness. Other times, our work in the world of ideas brings beautiful clarity to the bigger picture; it expands our horizons, gives us hope, and drives home the point that ideas matter. The following piece, written when my family faced a medical crisis in December, gives a glimpse of the hope I found in the intersection of faith, work, and daily life. The surgery went perfectly and my daughter was fully recovered within days. \u2013 Greg Forster<\/em><\/p>\n As I write this, I am sitting in the waiting room as my daughter has major surgery. She is, of course, in the Lord\u2019s hands, and it is at times like this I am most grateful for\u00a0the joy of Calvinism<\/a>. But the Lord uses means to accomplish his ends, so I have much more to be grateful for, and more tangibly, than just his immediate, unknowable work in my heart\u2013or his equally unknowable, superintendent providence of all events.<\/p>\n Many of God\u2019s means for accomplishing his ends, probably most of them, involve the mediation of human culture. Two of these means particularly stand out to me with new clarity as I sit here awaiting news that will be life-changing, either for better or worse.<\/p>\n The waiting room is teaching me that the reserves of American character are surprisingly deep. I am sitting in a crowded room full of people who all have every reason in the world, right now, to think of no one but themselves. (The woman next to me just heard that her daughter\u2019s heart is stopped.) Moreover, in this place, selection biases of race, class, political party, etc. are mostly removed. If anything, the neighbors with whom I am now confined in close quarters, all of us waiting together for our life-changing news, are disproportionately different from myself and from one another.<\/p>\n And I am\u00a0really\u00a0surprised \u2013 perhaps it doesn\u2019t speak well of me \u2013 that everyone here is so manifestly good. It is not simply that people who don\u2019t even know each other and are not superficially like one another and have problems of their own to think about are looking out for one another, it is that they do so with such casual frankness and unselfconsciousness. To be good to one another seems to be the most natural thing in the world. Just now someone sitting across from me said to someone else, \u201cThank you for helping, I couldn\u2019t do this without you.\u201d<\/p>\n That does not happen by accident; it is not the natural state of humanity. To train people to be (humanly speaking) good requires a certain kind of culture, one that is difficult to build and just as difficult to maintain. And it is well known among us professional character-mongers that America\u2019s sources of character are declining. More than most people in this line of work, I have assimilated all the worst diagnoses from the most pessimistic sources. There is no argument for despair that I have not heard \u2013 indeed, examined at some length.<\/p>\n But American culture has a way of defying pessimistic expectations. We social scientists can never quite stop \u201cselecting on the dependent variable\u201d \u2013 we look for signs of hope or decline in places where signs of decline are more visible than signs of hope. We expect the sources of tomorrow\u2019s strength to be the same as yesterday\u2019s sources. But yesterday\u2019s sources are always in decline \u2013 that\u2019s just how it is in the fallen world. Meanwhile, in places where we\u2019re not looking,\u00a0entrepreneurs are inventing new sources of cultural strength and vitality<\/a>. The signs of decline are always right where you expect to find them; the signs of hope\u00a0spring up in the last places you expect<\/a>.<\/p>\n The subject of entrepreneurship brings me to the other cultural means of God\u2019s providence that I\u2019m grateful for. Before we sent our daughter into surgery, I signed a piece of paper that effectively gives the doctors permission to do whatever they want to her. Yes, there are laws about malpractice, but if you know anything about hospitals you know that they know how to protect themselves from liability. Sure, there are plenty of big jackpot malpractice verdicts, but how much are those verdicts really related to the merits of the cases? As important as civil justice is \u2013 and you will not find any more ardent advocates of it than myself \u2013 only a fool would trust his daughter\u2019s life to it.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m trusting my daughter\u2019s life to is the professional ethic of the medical staff. This morning, in a short space of time, I met pretty much everyone who\u2019s going to be working on my daughter today. I was really amazed \u2013 again, it may not speak well of me \u2013 at how obviously these people care about getting everything exactly right and taking the best possible care of my daughter. I feel not the slightest doubt in trusting my daughter\u2019s life to these people.<\/p>\n But my daughter\u2019s life is not just in the hands of the American work ethic as she goes into surgery. As we drove here this morning, her life was in the hands of the work ethic of assembly line workers in car factories \u2013 not just the people who made our<\/em> car but the people who made every car on the road. When we slept in the hotel last night, her life was in the hands of the work ethic of the housekeeping staff, whose diligent labor alone stands between us and whatever germs were brought into that room by all its previous occupants. My daughter\u2019s life is in the hands of the American work ethic every day, and so is mine and so is yours.<\/p>\n Once again, this is not the normal, natural state of humanity. It is difficult to build and sustain a culture in which people feel a sense of moral responsibility when they put bolts into car parts or change bedsheets. It requires an institutional environment in which people are allowed to be stewards of their own lives, so that they are able to understand themselves as responsible moral agents. More fundamentally, it requires an entire cultural environment that makes the concept of stewardship and its responsibilities plausible. Without all this, you can\u2019t build civilization above subsistence level \u2013 which is why scraping by at subsistence level is the normal, natural state of civilization.<\/p>\n And once again, all the obvious signs \u2013 the signs we social scientists are likely to read \u2013 are of a decline in the work ethic. Yet sources of hope are springing up all around us in places we don\u2019t know to look.<\/p>\n Charles Murray ended his recent bookComing Apart\u00a0with four reasons to expect the American experiment in responsible freedom to end in the coming generation\u2013and four reasons to think it might not. One of his reasons for hope was simply that time and again in its history, America has inexplicably bounced back from existential catastrophe. \u201cInexplicably,\u201d that is, to social scientists. To those who understand the entrepreneurial spirit, America\u2019s persistent refusal to accept our invitations for it to expire is less inexplicable.<\/p>\n It is even less inexplicable for those who understand the work of the Holy Spirit, who has been the deepest source of the culture of responsible stewardship and entrepreneurial creativity.<\/p>\n The Lord does not owe us success, and perhaps what I\u2019m seeing in the waiting room today is the last delicate fruit of a tree whose roots have already died. But \u201chope does not put us to shame,\u201d and hope is not just for the eschaton. Hope means God is at work now, today, and thus we can be (rationally, realistically) hopeful about our temporal fortunes. Despair is a sin \u2013 it denies that God is in control. And as Scott McCloud once said, if there\u2019s a 99% chance of total disaster, the only rational response is to focus all our attention on the remaining 1%.<\/p>\n This post first appeared on Greg Forster\u2019s blog,\u00a0<\/em>Hang Together<\/a>, and on the Kern Pastors Network<\/a>. Image:\u00a0Job Adriaensz\u00a0Berckheyde, \u201cThe Doctor\u2019s Visit.\u201d\u00a0Courtesy of the\u00a0Grohmann Museum<\/a>\u00a0at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n “Many of God\u2019s means for accomplishing his ends, probably most of them, involve the mediation of human culture. Two of these means particularly stand out to me with new clarity as I sit here awaiting news that will be life-changing, either for better or worse.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2103,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[253,267,231,76,242,7,10,154],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurship-2","tag-altruism","tag-american-culture","tag-common-good-2","tag-creativity","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-kern-pastors-network","tag-missionwork","tag-work-ethic"],"yoast_head":"\n