“Beware cheaply gained wisdom” is an axiom, I’m told, from the 20th century psychological bard Karl Jung, counterpart to the more well-known Freud. Ends have their appropriate means and we bypass those means at peril to ourselves. This is often seen, for example, when someone wins the lottery and winds up broke in a year.
The bombshell book of a generation ago, Closing of the American Mind, brought this out to me as a college student. The author, Allan Bloom, pointed out the ills of a society given easy pleasures through on-demand sex, drug highs, and music that, at the press of a button by-passes for the listener even the most rudimentary means. In those same years this came home to me when I found myself repeatedly listening to an extraordinary musical selection. It was its own cheap hit in my living room and I soon felt ridiculous rewinding the cassette tape over and over. I knew in my soul it was wrong to extract pleasure so cheaply.
This temptation is ever with us, finding special enabling with the explosion of technology. Quick easy food pleases the pallet and we forget entirely the value of land and farmers, kitchens and, yes, heart-of-home mothers who are only artificially removed from the equation. The food is not wrong for that but it certainly is not as good as real food gained by real means, if only because we forget what is required to bring it to the table, or to the paper box from the driver dashing to our door.
We presume on the means, love the gift, forget the giver. It is as old as the ancient poulter tempted with killing the goose that lays the eggs. Pleasure must have its proper means, Bloom said, no doubt echoing Plato of whom he was a scholar. Forget the means and you are left, in his apt analogy, with the modern student who has worn the headphones so long he can no longer hear the real world where all that sound is made. It is unnatural and unsustainable. “Beware cheaply gained pleasure.”
This truth is interwoven in life. I thought of it this morning as I pondered the words of America’s Hymn from the recent inauguration ceremony. A proper yearning rises when such words, matched to the right tune, are shared together. “O beautiful for spacious skies…God mend thine every flaw…O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years…may God thy gold refine…and crown thy good with brotherhood!” It is a prayer, and it calls us forth to the greatest good.
From whence does such good come? Freedom isn’t free. There are patriots in our past of whom we are not worthy. So it ever is. We spend the treasures they won for us with little thought of the cost or whether we can assure the same for our own progeny. This is one of many reasons why family makes the world go ’round. When you give yourself away for another and dare to bring another life into the world you suddenly have skin in the game — something to live and die for. This is why easy sex — an oxymoron if there ever was one — damns us. Sex belongs somewhere and that somewhere is the home between mother and father. We lose the essential end if we neglect – and wantonly spend — the means.
Of course we scorn such talk because we are not wise. We are unexamined. And yet I see some who came before who were wise, who saw beyond the years, who gave us something worth keeping. I feel puny in their shadow but I am grateful for it all the same and want to live worthy of it. Every generation must face this. We easily imagine we know better. We live off the good of our forbears and fail to give back.
Times like this remind us. Washington is full of flaws that echo our own neighborhood, our own home, our own heart. It is no good to say, “Well, I would never.” Self-righteousness is its own cheap hit, caring more about looking devout than the real thing. Signaling our virtue is as old as time and we must all beg for grace to avoid it. Our task, more than pointing out the bad, is to overcome it with good. And good never comes easy. There is no cheaply got goodness. In fact, as Chesterton put it, “The grand purpose of the person is to become beautiful; and there is often a considerable interval of ugliness along the way.”
Means and ends. We need the means of hard work, faithfulness to friends, willingness to give all, daring to surrender our best for an unknown future. There are children we owe our lives as the right return to those who did the same for us. And there is the indispensable reckoning with God we all must do, for all have a highest good and all worship whatever that is. The way we live reveals what we worship and, in turn, what we think will lead to a good end.
The soundness – or lack of — in that equation is the clue to everything in every individual life. Worship lesser things and you end up with very bad ends. Learn to worship God in spirit and in truth and you are walking a path that can only end in the highest good. Of course this requires giving all and that is not cheap. It is everything. Most of us are poor at this, but do it we must. It is the only way.
There are no lasting good results without appropriate means. No pain no gain.
“May God our gold refine.”
Randy Huff and his wife lived for 5 years in Roanoke (Hollins) where they raised 2 sons. Randy served as Dean of Students at a Christian school and then worked in construction. For the last 9 years he has served as pastor of a church in North Pole, Alaska.
