The intractability of our limits
War, and the horizons of our agency
One day Israel is bombing Iran; the next day the US is bombing Iran; the next day Trump is proclaiming a ceasefire that no-one else knows about yet, including Iran. I don't have any expertise on Iran, and why would you think that I do? There are commentators by the hundreds writing analyses and think pieces on the situation, and you'd be far better off reading (some of) those than anything I could tell you about the geo-political situation we are now entering.
Which is exactly what I find myself thinking more and more about. Instead I find myself thinking about a line from Ephraim Radner's Mortal Goods, via my friend Charles' review of it. Radner writers:
our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths.
Beyond the fact that no-one actually cares what I think about the US-Iran conflict, is the fact that I can do virtually nothing about it. I can certainly have opinions about it, and I could loudly voice those opinions, but the effect of such speech is mostly 'signalling' - it's proclaiming to other people who do listen to me which side of an issue I line up on, which mostly functions as code for which team I'm on in polarised political discourse.
The boundaries of my actual influence are greatly circumscribed. So, too, then is my general calling. The things I am supposed to concern myself the most with, and the people whom I am called to love, are just that limited set of people that I interact with daily and weekly.
This is not to say that I have no concerns or obligations to a wider circle of people. Those entanglements, though, are constrained by simple factors of reality: time, ability, location. There is little I can do for people in Tehran, Ukraine, Gaza, etc., and yet what I can do, I ought. The reality of the global era means that actually, it is possible for me to do things, even if those things are 'click and make a donation', and 'send emails to people of actual political power'. Those are not nothings, they are love from a distance in an age of the instant. The opportunities to love are constrained by the boundaries of my existence.
The bulk of my life, however, is to be concerned with a much more limited horizon. How can I love the people in my church, my building, my school, my gym, my circles of friendship and acquaintance? How can I develop deep roots, and deeper relationships, to know people well and love them towards the Good? These are things that require local horizons. Indeed, for much of my life and efforts, local horizons are all I can have.
And this very limitedness is itself a good thing, a good gift from God. We are finite creatures bound to finite goods. And those finite goods include finite horizons to do good.
