Learning Curves

At first I just chuckled.  I posted it to Facebook and waited for people to like it.  Then I started to think about it, and it just gets less funny.  I read the Bible a bit, and I am often struck by the way in which the people in those ancient stories, from vastly different cultures and worldviews, are going through some pretty familiar sounding trials and tribulations.  They are afflicted by greed, jealousy, lust, anger, pride and are more or less always on the verge of some idolatry or another.

It's troubling how little we have actually learned in thousands of years of recorded history.  We're just barely breaking out of the shell of tribalism, which has recently put on some big boy pants and called itself nationalism.  We have "grown" technologically very quickly, but we are still very much like teenagers behind the wheel of this thing called a world.  We often try to drive a bit too fast and end up crashing into each other or into natural boundaries.

One would think we would have learned to reflect and think of the overall wisdom of our actions by this point, but we have not.  Our technological ability outstrips our moral sense, and our moral sense outstrips our cultural actions.  In other words, we have the ability to do a thing before we question it's righteousness, and we are aware of a danger before we have the sense to avoid it.  Our history with Nuclear physics is a perfect example, we were able to make a bomb and use a bomb before we were able to use our knowledge for power generation and all sorts of constructive scientific applications.  We had to live through Hiroshima, Nagasaki and later Chernobyl, before we truly understood that we had unleashed a terror on the world, and it was a tense half century before we could finally sort of trust that some hothead wasn't going to trigger Armageddon.  Nuclear disarmament is still just a pipe dream, but there is a real sense that we have tiptoed back from the brink of that abyss.  However, we are certainly not out of the woods and we're still not really asking the right questions about our technological advances, let alone our political behavior.

The dualisms of liberal/conservative, dove/hawk, secular/religious, continue to trouble us.  Furthermore, the arrogance that tells us that one side or the other of a dualism is actually going to solve the problem just digs our pit deeper.  We are not able to see around our ideology and consider whether or not the solution we tacitly accept is the right one.

And too often, far too often, we operate from a place of fear, uncertainty, with an attitude of scarcity, where we constantly worry that there will not be enough, which takes me all the way back to Bible, where God was repeatedly demonstrating to people that there could be enough, and further that they could be enough.

How long until we learn that lesson?  That's another question the Bible asks quite a bit: How Long?