In Sin and Error, Pining
Long lay the world, in sin and
error pining.*
I've always loved that lyric, for how succinctly it equates
beliefs with facts. It reminds us that the point of western
civilization has always been to increase our collective store of
knowledge and to diminish ignorance.
Sin and error are co-conspirators against the world that our
children and grandchildren deserve. Sin, of course, is what we call our
actions and inactions that are contrary to the common good: against our
neighbors, spouses and community, and against the people we fear or
hate.
Error is our name for what we might call sins of our
imagination: beliefs and judgments we hold even though we should know
better. Children and idiots - the innocent among us - are not held
responsible for their mistakes, for this sin and error business is for
adults. If you want to sit at the grownups' table, you don't get to
claim that you just didn't know any better. Error is a
failure of curiosity and followup. Sin is the willful denial of the
obligations that you know you have and would rather not.
The problem with being an adult is that you're given grownup
obligations without explicitly accepting them. Perhaps this is why my
Jewish friends seem to accomplish more, on average, than goyim
like me. They undergo a rite of passage where they explicitly leave
their childhood behind. As I look around at our politics and pop
culture (and the mirror), I don't see many people who have left the
self-indulgence of childhood behind.
The Children Do
Lead Us
Jesus reportedly said that the children shall lead us and that
would be a Good Thing. Surely, such innocence would be a better ethical
model than the kinds of leaders we've got now. However, I feel that
most of the people who fill the top slots and act entitled to pee in
the well behave more like a motorcycle gang of juvenile delinquents
than adult leaders. This was dramatized by Cheney's recent insistence
that the charge on his iPod took
precedence over reporters' laptops on Air Force Two.
My conditioning convinced me that the purpose of an adult is
to design and build improvements for the world that our children and
grandchildren will live in. That's why it's so disturbing to me that
the American crescendo of opportunity seems to have peaked for my
generation.
3:00:04 PM 
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