Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Again, there is the issue of respect for reality. It is odd to treat the country, by which I and commentators in general mean its population, as grasping capitalists on the basis of the fact that 1 percent or fewer control 40 percent of the national wealth. Which is to say that 99 percent, or more, control, per capita, a very small share of it. Why do the 1 percent, rather than the 99 percent, seem to critics and moralists to characterize the culture? Most people don’t participate in the economy of manipulation and financial gimmickry that seems to have produced our dubious elite. Most people know nothing about it. It is an excrescence of computer-assisted globalization whose existence we learned of when it went into crisis and took us all with it. The 99 percent were swept into the capitalist schema by the phrase “class envy”—these people had what all the rest of us wanted, supposedly. Most of us want a reasonable degree of control over the life of the country — that old democratic expectation that the lives of most of us should not be vulnerable to the whims of a self-interested elite. The ethic, for want of a better word, by which this elite has flourished is ethically repulsive by the lights of the population in general. In the ordinary course of life, there are few occasions when one is simply cheated, and I have never heard anyone praised for being a systematic cheat. The whole notion of class is deeply problematic, but insofar as it has any normative value, I think the consensus among the public would be that cheating shows a lack of class, and that this emphatically is no less true when the cheating is done for money. Of course there are candy bar magnates and party favor magnates, and there are fortunes that come with creating things that are useful or beneficial, fortunes that have themselves been put to good use. This has always been true. But the rather abrupt change in the wealth structure of the United States reflects perverse innovation that has had the effect of making most of us poorer. We know what has happened to the wage.

How is this relevant to my subject, to grace? Grace would give the country back to the people by acknowledging the reality of lives lived patiently and honorably. We insist on the word “capitalist,” a word Marx did not apply to us, urging it on ourselves as our defining quality and at the same time deploring it, more on the left, less on the right. It is characteristic of certain terms — capitalist, materialist, consumerist — that their speaker is exempting himself, at least in the sense that any vacancy he feels in his life, any shallowness she feels in her motives, are induced by cultural influences, economic determinism first of all. In this capitalist environment, we can only marvel that we are not quite as grasping as everyone else. Well, not the people we know, really, but those hordes out beyond somewhere who collectively exude this toxic atmosphere. Those nameless wage-fallen others who somehow make Wall Street Wall Street and are overweight besides. Truly, I am sick to death of presumptive contempt of the only human souls most of us will ever have any meaningful relationship with, who offer the only experience of life in the world that most of us will ever have occasion to ponder seriously, that is, respectfully and compassionately, that is, with grace. It is very easy for me to imagine that my life might have gone another way, and that I might be one among those great multitudes about whose inward life nothing is known, upon whom social pathologies can be projected. It really is rather miraculous that someone as ill-suited to the demands of life as I am should have found a niche to flourish in. I have lived long enough to chalk up to age inadequacies that have been with me the whole of my conscious life.

All this is on my mind because we have just come through Christmas. The clichés about Christmas are so utterly weary and worn that it is difficult to mention them even to attempt to be rid of them. Still. The reality of the phenomenon is this — people mob the stores looking for gifts to give to other people. All this is swept into the broad category of consumption so that we can speak of it as if it were greed and self-indulgence in an artificially heightened state. It is really inflamed generosity. All those people are thinking about what someone else might want, need, look good in, be amused by. This by itself must be a valuable discipline. That Martian, and any competent anthropologist, ought to find this great national potlatch extremely interesting. I call it a potlatch because the economics of it are so perverse, from the point of view of the great public on whom it all depends. Every one of them knows that if they chose to celebrate Epiphany, January 6, the day when the Magi actually, traditionally speaking, brought their gifts, or any day after December 25, which most of them know is a date chosen arbitrarily by the early church, they would save a tremendous amount of money. So the investment they are making is only secondarily in stuff, and primarily in a particular evening or morning that is set apart by this singular ritual of giving and receiving. A Martian might conclude that these evenings and mornings focus benevolent feelings that would otherwise be unexpressed, unacknowledged, or merely routine. Families tend to provide, but Christmas reminds everyone that there is joy in it. A small gift to or from an acquaintance is expressive, a kind of courteous language. If we wanted to, we could find a considerable loveliness in all this, but that is prohibited by the conventions of social critique. We would rather think darkly about those materialists who have emptied the shelves of things we had on our lists, who stand with their carts full of loot between ourselves and the cash register.

Since I have mentioned economics — if we abolished December 25 and the de facto sumptuary tax on ritual giving, everything would simply cost more during the rest of the year, since businesses and corporations will have their profits. And the impact on all sorts of countries who manufacture the strange, decorative excesses that are aesthetically comprehensible only at Christmas would be severe. I suspect that in a year or two the phenomenon would simply shift to the Fourth of July. What economic rationalism cannot justify it also cannot destroy — and again, it is the economic perspective of the overwhelming majority that is the issue here.

I began by speaking about grace and alleviation, and now I have suggested that our refusal to interpret graciously a significant aspect of national culture puts a kind of curse on something that is, in itself, far too interesting to fall into the limbo of facile disparagement, though in fact that void yawns for most of what we do. “We” in this context means “you,” and “they.” It means students who have learned that they are intellectually disabled by the fact of their birth and acculturation and cannot aspire to work of the first order. It means the store clerk who told me in the solemn tone usual when these words are spoken that Americans don’t read books — with the implication that we could respect them more if they did. This is a great psychic burden, much in need of alleviation. The Bible pairs the words “grace” and “truth.” Truth in this case would be felt as grace — the model of cultural determinism is sloppy Marxism, or worse. Much of the language about society and culture derives from European “thought,” so called, in the period leading to Europe’s great disasters, from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth and after. This “thought” was taken up with authenticity, rootedness, ethnic purity, all of which made people profound, as they could not be if they were transplanted, ethnically mixed, speakers of an adopted language. These notions spoke ferociously against all Europeans of whom these things were true, and made a nightmare image of dystopia of this country, from Chateaubriand and Baudelaire forward. I will die never understanding why this should be true, but it is true, that Americans enjoy this kind of thing when it is directed against them, or, perhaps, against everybody else on the continent. No, in fact they, we, persist in thinking that profundity only occurs elsewhere.