The Galli Report: 08.06.2021

The aspirational class. Prime time to get creative things done. The need for symbol and substance in fighting COVID. Far, far away in our galaxy.

Aspiring to What?
The typical Galli Report reader might imagine that “The Endless Pursuit of Better: How the aspirational class lost its way” is about other people, especially the nation’s elite class. But I found myself shifting uncomfortably as I read.  

For all of the well-intentioned idealism of today’s aspirational elite—their politically sensitive wokeness, their belief in hard work and education over birthright, their environmental awareness, their earnest suspicion of the excesses and injustices of capitalism—there is a dark side of meritocracy that is never fully concealed in the strivers’ displays and proclamations of goodwill. The simple fact is that most people—if we consider 90 percent of the country’s population “most”—do not learn piano from the age of five, do not attend private school, do not have SAT tutors (even if standardized tests are falling by the wayside), do not attend a “top twenty-five” school, or earn PhDs or MFAs. Laudable as these activities and achievements may be, they are underpinned by both wealth and cultural capital.

The author describes a major league aspirational class. But there is also a triple-A league, of which I have clearly been a part.  You don’t have to be in the Northeastern U.S. elite to aspire to many of the same things, albeit in attenuated form. What we’re aspiring to is success as defined by 21st-century elite culture. And to be fair, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting success for yourself and your family.

I now realize, however, that one aspiration was not much in play as I raised a family and managed a career—to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Loving God was not as significant on a day-to-day basis as the cultural aspirations of my class. To be sure, faith in God was a part of that aspiration—I live in Wheaton, after all, and worked in a Christian organization for 30+ years. But if I’m honest, it didn’t significantly shape the cultural aspirations in play most of the time. I look back and think how difficult it was to give much attention to God as God.

Perhaps the following is an excuse, but it may be a season-of-life thing. That is, when you get married, start raising kids, start a career, and so forth—well, that’s pretty much a full-time job with lots of overtime (but no overtime pay!). Given the culture we live in, there simply isn’t a whole lot of time left for figuring out how to love God, other than to obey his commands, which are summed up in “love your neighbor as yourself.” So the focus of this season is almost completely horizontal. When we do make time for daily prayer, God gets maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and we start tapping our foot if weekly worship lasts longer than an hour.  We’ve got things to do, plans to make, people to see

Very often these are godly things and plans, and they are neighbors to love. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that they thwart our ability to think steadily about God, let alone figure out how to love him—which as I recall is “the first and greatest commandment.”

Here’s where I’m going: Perhaps it is in the current order of things (a 21st-century, advanced capitalist, highly technical society, where most people enjoy long lives) that retirement is the season when we can put away aspirational things and start figuring out what it means to love God. In retirement, you don’t have to always be somewhere, with an unending to-do list. There is space, in one’s schedule and in one’s heart and mind, to peer into that empty space in our souls that God seeks to fill.

I may be merely describing my own journey, but I suspect I’m not alone. Nor can I brag that I’ve figured out what exactly it looks like to love God for himself, in himself, to obey not his commands but to know him. The longer I’ve been retired, the more I’m convinced that’s what I’m supposed to be about in this season. I want to be able to say with the Psalmist that I long for God as a thirsty deer pants after water. The best I can say on most days is that I want to want God.

Do I hear any amens?

Prime Time
Those aspiring to cultural or spiritual success might find this helpful: “The Three-or-Four Hour Rule for Getting Creative Work Done.”

There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasize general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.

Symbol and Substance
We’re seeing another round of pandemic measures as infections spike again. (I just ordered another set of masks--sigh!) So we might take another look at how we have been handling the initial phase, as does “Dance Till We Die: Why Covid Security Theater Failed.”

Even as the war against Covid draws to an uneasy close, its skirmishes continue all around us. One of them is the ongoing irritant of Covid security theater.

Covid security theater is when we claim our actions are aimed at fighting Covid, but actually part of our motivation is just to give the impression that we’re fighting Covid. Genuinely fighting Covid may or may not be one of our goals too, but what makes theater theater is that performance is one of our goals.

Author Ari Schulman is not against “theater.” By theater I think he means symbolic actions. Like some of our recycling efforts. I recently read how a great deal of the paper we recycle gets tossed but that plastics fare better in the recycling cycle. I’ve read other persuasive critiques of recycling that seem to undermine its value. But I’m going to continue to recycle faithfully, because it sends a signal to myself and my family and friends about waste and the need to respect our environments. Regarding COVID, Schulman helps me understand why there has been unnecessary politicization—and unnecessary fear and rebellion—regarding so many of our attempts to control the pandemic. As well as how to combine symbol and substance in a way that wins people over.

‘The New Frontier’
Let’s let our minds drift to other places, far, far away, and watch NASA’s Juno spacecraft fly past the Moon Ganymede and Jupiter. Despite my reservations about some of our culture’s penultimate aspirations, I’ve always appreciated the men and women who have made space in their lives to help us explore the light-years of space and the millions of planets and stars “out there.”

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli

markgalli.com