Living with Ambiguity
By Ralph Lynn
I must be a compulsive optimist. To most of the news of our mad world, my reaction is, “I give up!” Yet, I continue to try to sow beneficial seed, even though it is quite clear that much of the most useful seeds of wisdom sown by all the sages of all the ages have fallen upon inhospitable soil. My current seed is the suggestion that our world is, on the whole, inescapably ambiguous. Few choices are unequivocally clear; to the thoughtful, most choices must be made among undesirable options. The seed in this column is being broadcast in the improbable hope that, in the stony ground of anti-government, anti-abortion, and anti-public education activism, it may bear a bit of fruit.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of inescapable ambiguity in life is in the field of economic philosophy.
An economic philosophy based upon the practice of the Golden Rule is undoubtedly the ideal.
This would mean cooperation rather than competition. It would also entail a significant and voluntary sharing of all of the good things of life. In economics, this seems to be the ideal according to our Judeo-Christian heritage.
The problem, quite clearly, is that few — even of the most devout believers — take the Golden Rule seriously save as a relatively meaningless memory verse.
Unhappily, one must admit that this Judeo-Christian economic philosophy is ethically so exalted as to be essentially irrelevant.
“We can call ours a Christians nation if we like. We can — and have and do — respond positively and enthusiastically when some Reaganesque demagogue refers to the United States as the “city on the hill” or the “last ˆ best hope of mankind.” But this is pulpit and Fourth of July oratory; it has nothing to do with reality.
Clearly, the Judeo-Christian economic ideal is not a viable option. But we have, I think, chosen the best possible approach to economics. We have chosen laissez-faire; we have chosen the market economy. Too few of us realize, however, that our chosen economic system, which too many of us regard as beyond criticism, is based upon greed.
Fewer, still, understand that greed is the diametric opposite of the unselfish ideal which we, in our religious mood, exalt.
But we have chosen a system which works. It works because it is based upon the firm foundation of almost universal selfishness. It works also because we — even though subconsciously — are sufficiently stricken in Judeo-Christian conscience to civilize our free market system by providing a “safety net” of social services approved by every president, every congress, and every political party since the New Deal.
Without the safety net, the dog-eat-dog-and-the-devil-take-the-hindmost market system would inflict horrors compared with which any extreme of the abortion controversy would be minor.
If this line of reasoning is valid, the anti-abortion activitists and the antigovernment activists and the anti-public education activists, if they were wiser, would come to terms with the inescapable ambiguity of these problems just as they, and all of us, have come to terms with the ambiguity of our economic problem.
Given the unchanging and unchangeable character of human beings, the ideal course we all might choose is never an option. We can choose only among options less than the ideal.
