The Elusive Goal of Mastery

Wilfred M. McClay

The Shadow Side of Technological Control

According to Plato’s account of him, Socrates was at his best when he held a single important word up to the light, and forced his conversation partners to think very hard about what that word really meant. Often the result was to disclose many layers of complexity in what had, at the outset, seemed obvious and simple. The Republic, for example, was at bottom an extended examination of the word “justice,” a fundamental concept we all employ, but whose definition proves far more elusive than we tend to imagine when we constantly and unthinkingly speak of it.

Indeed, our own language contains many such unexamined keywords, each of them packed with unexamined assumptions. In what follows, I would like to give some attention to one of those words: “mastery.” I will not do quite the full job on “mastery” as Socrates would have done it. But I do want to inquire into its pros and cons and suggest reasons why we should regard it as—at best—a highly ambiguous and ambivalent ideal for us, particularly in the modern or postmodern world in which we find ourselves—a world in which mastery seems to be less and less a wistful fantasy and more and more a real possibility.

Drift and Mastery

A good place to begin thinking about these matters is to consider the title and contents of American journalist Walter Lippmann’s influential book Drift and Mastery, a signal work of the Progressive era, published in 1914—the same year that saw the founding, by Lippmann and Herbert Croly, of a magazine called The New Republic, then as now a flagship of liberal and progressive thought. Clearly Lippmann, who was then still very young and optimistic, intended his book as an expression of the self-confident Progressive ideal: the belief that the infirmities of the human condition were no longer a permanent given, but something within the ability of human agency to alter; that the march of scientific knowledge, including social-scientific knowledge about the optimal ordering of human society, had completely superseded and absorbed the traditional religious understanding of human nature; and that this scientific knowledge was in the process of granting human beings an ever-expanding power to control their circumstances. The alternative to this optimistic and responsible vision of human progress guided by social intelligence was not liberty, or spontaneous order, but . . . drift. And who could be in favor of something as amorphous and passive as drift?

Such ideas were not entirely new. Indeed, they echo a longer American tradition. For example, one finds in the Federalist, the articles penned by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to promote ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a similar theme. At the very outset of Federalist #1, indeed, in the very first paragraph, Hamilton put forward the view that it had been “reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

This was, in one sense, merely a variation on an already well-established missionary theme, traceable back to Puritan John Winthrop’s great lay sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” which proclaimed (echoing Matthew 5:14–16) that the Massachusetts Bay colony should think of itself as a “city upon a hill” with the eyes “of all people” upon it. It is true that Winthrop’s sermon spoke of the colony’s founding as a “special commission” from God, a religious conceptualization that was missing from the language of the Federalist. Still, the latter’s emphasis upon “reflection and choice” did not come at the expense of a robustly Calvinist understanding of human nature and of the dangers inherent in vesting any human beings with too much power. “Reflection and choice” were not yet quite the same thing as “mastery.”

All of that had changed by the time Lippmann was writing at the triumphant climax of a long century of growing optimism. But by the end of 1914 that high point was already in the process of passing forever. With the onset of the First World War, Europe plunged into a bloody and self-destructive cataclysm from which it has never entirely recovered. To Europeans and Americans alike, the First World War stood as a decisive rebuke to any and all doctrines of inevitable progress, and indeed, to the very idea of progress itself. The mastery of which Lippmann had spoken so breezily had proven far more elusive than he could have suspected.

Indeed, after the senseless butchery of the First World War, one might have been tempted to propose that mastery’s shadow side grew in direct proportion to the illusion of mastery itself. To many observers, it was as if every form of mastery, every advance in human capability and power, contained the seeds of its precise opposite, with the power to do good shadowed by an equal and opposite power to do evil. At best, the advance toward ever-greater mastery was like an ascent upon an ever-narrowing ladder—the higher the altitude, the greater the vulnerability to catastrophic fall.

The modern medical orthodoxy

One might consider whether this paradox does not hold in other realms, such as our progress in medical science. Whatever chastenings it has received as a result of wars and other violence, the modern world continues to pride itself on its material progress in other areas, and its freedom from the past’s unreflective orthodoxies. But of course it has accumulated quite an impressive stock of its own dogmas. And none is more settled than our unquestioned belief in the rightness and efficacy of using modern science and medicine to prolong human life—so long, of course, as the life in question is deemed to be of the requisite “quality.”

One could hear the machinery of this sturdy piece of orthodoxy clicking into place during the recent U.S. debates over federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. Only let an accredited research scientist stand before us and float the proposition that any scientific procedure, however morally troubling, might hold some promise for the cure of diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, herpes, or the common cold, and the matter is settled. The American public wants it. They are only too happy to roll over and give the man in the lab coat whatever he wants, especially if it is no skin off their own blastocysts. The thought that such scientists, like other humans, might have a limited perspective on the matter, and might occasionally be motivated by unvarnished self-interest, seems never to occur to our famously skeptical journalists.

There is, of course, real force behind the scientists’ appeals. No one who suffers from an incurable condition, or has seen a loved one suffer and die from one, can be immune to them. It is in our nature to cherish life. Even those of us who are convinced that a better existence awaits us beyond the grave are nevertheless naturally inclined to cling to our earthly existence. Such an inclination is sure to be all the more intense in those who hold no such belief, or hold it only tenuously.

And it is an undeniable fact that remarkable medical breakthroughs occur all the time, so the hope for cures cannot be dismissed as a vain one. Nor does it help matters that we live in an era in which shameless appeals to sentimentality and emotionalism have become the principal means by which public opinion is molded. One feels constantly manipulated. Yet it would be cruel, even inhuman, not to be at least slightly moved by the pleas of celebrity sufferers such as Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox. There go I—so we think to ourselves—or someone I know, or might have known. Who could be so heartless as to deny them hope?

Let it be stipulated, then, that modern medicine’s achievements have been remarkable and promise to become even more so in the years to come. Yet it takes no prophetic genius to see that medicine can have no cure for the unintended consequences that its progress will surely engender. I am here referring to something different from the fierce recent debates over the morality of using embryonic stem cells for research, which have given rise to much careful thought about the moral trade-offs between the promise of medical progress and the multifaceted cannibalization and degradation of existing life. With the dramatic discovery of a method by which ordinary skin cells can be transformed into pluripotent stem cells, this debate has suddenly fallen silent, and the moral trade-offs seem manageable for the time being.

The ironic shadow of medical mastery

But I have something else in mind. Consider for a moment a different concern, one that even the most implacable opponents of embryonic stem-cell research did not express. Let us suppose that even the cannibalization issues can be resolved in a way that achieves near-universal consensus, and that all other similar issues can be resolved just as satisfactorily.

Would it follow that the progress of modern medicine be thereby rendered entirely unproblematic? Might it not rather be the case that that the very meaning of suffering and death, and their place in the economy of the human soul, are in the process of being cancelled in ways that may be hugely consequential to us?

Let me be clear that this is not a question that proceeds from an antagonism to science. Nor am I endorsing some kind of moral masochism, or suggesting that we should all seek to embrace suffering and rush back to a world without anesthesia. I have no idea what it would mean to be an “enemy of the future,” as one critic refers to bioengineering skeptics, unless one first posits that the future is foreordained. Nor am I trying to invoke the misty memory of biblical interdictions or conjure some primal fear that the Great Foot will stomp us for our effrontery if we cross some invisible line. No, I am pointing to an inescapable irony at work in the progress of modern medicine and to the fact that the high cost of medical care may be the least of the prices we are going to be paying for it.

What recently presented the issue to me in especially compelling form was an old friend’s death from cancer. He was a very intelligent and convinced atheist, who had over the years been coming, little by little, to take the claims of Christianity more and more seriously, and to entertain the thought that all the things he valued in life might well be meaningless without the support of some transcendental ground. He had watched my own development as a Christian with wary curiosity, and notwithstanding his deep-seated aversion to “Christers,” our friendship seemed to deepen with passing years. I thought it likely that someday we would have a serious conversation about it all. I believed he would listen to me, and I wanted to be ready for his questions when the time came. When he was diagnosed with the cancer, and it was clear that he might not have long to live, I thought “the conversation” would be coming soon and so consciously began to prepare for it. I traveled across the country to visit him repeatedly in his last days, each time hoping that this would turn out to be the moment when “the conversation” would occur. But it never did. I gently sought openings, was gently rebuffed, and that was that.

Maybe I should have been more insistent. But more likely, in the end, he just didn’t want to have “the conversation.” Not that he was especially reticent in speaking about death. On the contrary. He practically reveled in it, with an admirably unflinching honesty that was his trademark, and the core of his character. There was not an ounce of sentimentalism in him. But perhaps it would have seemed too much a confession of weakness to him to allow the mere fact that he was dying to be the cause of his reopening a lifetime’s settled opinions. The fear of seeming weak is itself a form of weakness.

In any event, there was another reason why “the conversation” didn’t happen. That was because he was too preoccupied with other matters—in particular, with an exhaustive search for a possible cure for his affliction. Those who have been down this road will know what I am talking about; it is as if one enters a strange new demi-universe. All over the country and the world, there are countless clinical trials going on, drugs being tested, therapies being experimented with, miracle cures being explored and touted. It is a full-time job just to research them all and sort through the conflicting claims to decide which one to try, and then to get oneself admitted for participation. He was understandably preoccupied with this search each time I saw him, and remained so until very near the end. As it was, he died in his bed at a prestigious hospital, of an infection contracted there while awaiting his treatment for the cancer. A particularly hard irony.

Thankfully, he died in the presence of his wonderful family. At the end he spoke to them of an inner serenity, once all the pondering and choosing was past. That thought is some comfort to me. One wants to hope for the best, particularly of one’s friends. God alone knows for sure what transactions take place in a man’s final moments.

Still, I was left wondering whether he had really even had time to come to terms with his death. If he hadn’t, didn’t “the miracle of modern medicine” have something to do with it? Here is an instance in which the very possibility of a cure—a possibility that, to repeat, was entirely reasonable to hope for and that it would have been unthinkable not to pursue—may have robbed his death of its full meaning, and distracted him from a frank consideration of his ultimate condition. How different would it have been had he been faced with the inevitability of his death some days and weeks before, as a terminal barrier looming before him like an insurmountable mountain? Would he have been led to give more serious thought to it all? Might we even have had “the conversation”?

Space evaders

So we return to the paradox with which we began. It’s a problem that has already been with us as a culture for a long time. It is a variation on the theme that Aldous Huxley famously sounded in Brave New World. It is the shadow side of our growing mastery of the physical terms of our existence, a shadow that grows in ominous symbiosis with the mastery. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn limned it memorably in his famous 1978 Harvard Commencement Address (a document whose greatness is even more evident today), when he pointed to the “weakening of human personality in the West.”

One sees the same thing in a more banal, but for that very reason more sobering, phenomenon reported not long ago in an issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Two Vermont psychologists relate therein that “a steadily growing number of students who are struggling with depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other problems visit campus health-care services . . . for the sole purpose of refilling prescriptions . . . [They] tell us they are not interested in working toward an understanding of their lives [but] ask only that their regimens of psychotropic medications—antidepressants, Ritalin, tranquilizers, and others—be continued or adjusted.”

Unfortunately, one cannot help but be disappointed in the psychologists’ less-than-resounding arguments against such behavior (i.e., that the use of such drugs might interfere with “late-adolescent development” and might be mixed inappropriately with alcohol) and their openly self-interested arguments for “greater attention to the intra-psychic world” (which of course means we need to spend more money to hire more people like them). The pill-popping kids may be misguided, but they are not dumb. They are right to sense that there is not much of substance behind the psychotherapeutic curtain. And what other plausible worldview are they ever told about?

Indeed, what these kids are doing increasingly mimics the modus operandi of the adult world. We now can comfortably forestall and evade confronting the cosmic questions until the very last moment, and beyond. Evasion, rather than belief or unbelief, is the eschatological watchword of our day. (“I’m not afraid to die,” said postmodernity’s windsock, Woody Allen, “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”)

But this task of evasion will become more complex in the years to come. How will we make sense of death if it comes to be viewed as something with no intrinsic meaning, but chiefly as a piece of bad luck, a matter of bad timing—the misfortune, for example, of contracting the disease before the march of inevitable medical progress had caught up with it? Or worse yet, how can we ever be reconciled to death when it becomes understood as something almost entirely accidental, and largely preventable?

Scapegoats in a world without mortality

One can easily imagine that there will be surprisingly little room for joy or exuberance in such a world. More likely, it will be a tightly wound world, permeated with bitterness and anxiety and mutual suspicion, in which human life will be at one and the same time deeply devalued and fiercely guarded.

With growing mastery comes growing responsibility—and the need to assign accountability. In a world without God and without contingency there will always be someone or something at the bottom of everything bad that happens. The moral economy of a controlled world will demand that a villain be produced. Someone must be to blame. It will always be the twitch of the surgeon’s hand or the slip of the obstetrician’s forceps (or a slip-up by the managers of some future human hatchery), rather than the will of God or the finger of fate, or simply the imperfections of a fallen world, that explains deformity or death. Paranoia and conspiracy theories will flourish and so will the trial lawyers, who may even become for a time the high priests of such a civilization—at least until they themselves become objects of litigious ire.

Not medicine alone, but every facet of modern life is vulnerable to this tyranny of mastery, or the illusion of mastery. Our tendency to look upon every hot day and every violent storm as an indication of “global warming” caused directly by the current President of the United States or some other culprit or band of culprits, is another indicator. We are entering an era in which there is likely to be a more and more brisk market in scapegoats. There will be one, or more, for every social ill, since we are now “too smart” to fall for the idea that anything could truly beyond the reach of human agency and that calling something “God’s will” is anything more than an act of rank mystification.

But notwithstanding the proliferating need for scapegoats, much of the burden of blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will almost certainly find ourselves more and more anxious about, and dissatisfied with, the choices we make. It need hardly be pointed out that the expansion of choice does not always make for the expansion of happiness. Everyone knows the sense of inexplicable relief that comes when a hard decision is taken out of one’s hands by the flow of events. That relief will become rarer. Everyone knows the aching hollowness of “buyer’s regret,” when we were allowed to “make the call,” and we blew it. That ache will become more familiar. The more we claim mastery, the more our unhappiness will all be our own fault.

Grasping at trivialities

The more our lives are prolonged and extended and the more death becomes seen as an avoidable evil whose precise moment should be “chosen,” rather than an inherent feature of human life, the more we will come to look with horror and distrust upon our own children, whose natural filial love will increasingly be complicated and undermined by colossal generational impatience.

The more we seek to take control over all the terms of our existence, the more likely we are to live imprisoned by a compulsive and narcissistic dread of all risk, since the possible consequences of such risk—the gulf between life and death, which will yawn before us as a chasm between eternity and extinction—will be too vast, too horrible, and too fully avoidable, to be contemplated.

Salvation and life-extension will become the same thing. Hence, the price of living a life to the fullest will be deemed too high. The typical man of the medical-miracle future will not be an Ubermensch. He will be more like an obsessive-compulsive hand washer who lives in constant dread of other people’s germs, and ends up living the life of a wealthy hermit, like a latter-day Howard Hughes. He might—and here I am admittedly being fanciful—even choose to wait the next century out in the form of a frozen embryo, in anticipation of the day when the final triumph of science had been secured, and a grand and immortal entrance into life could be assured. (Assuming, of course, that he is foolish enough to believe that his “potential” life would not have long since been cannibalized by the march of progress.)

That such a world would drain human life of the very possibility of dignity and vigor is not hard to imagine. Just as the treatment of the soul as a mere congeries of manipulatable psychological states renders inner life meaningless, so the infinite extension of life will render life infinitely trivial. “Death is the mother of beauty,” intoned the great post-Christian poet Wallace Stevens; “hence from her,/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires.” Such words must sound strange, even pathological, to the modern secular ear. And yet everyone who has ever read the Iliad knows that the gods of Homer’s epic are rendered less admirable, less noble, and less beautiful than the human warriors, precisely because these gods cannot die, cannot age, cannot suffer, and therefore cannot live lives of consequence. All they can do is meddle in the lives of mortals, who have to play the game of life for keeps.

Beyond our wildest dreams

As Christians, we affirm this order of things in no small part because we believe that God himself participated in it, revealing his deepest nature through the eternally astonishing act of giving his Son over to suffering and death. But for Christians, death is not the end. It is also the indispensable prelude to newness of life, which is why the water of Christian baptism carries both meanings—death to old self, risen life in Christ. Without death, there is no new birth. Death is the profoundest way we know of symbolizing our need not only to put off the old self, but to be constrained and molded by a power greater than ourselves, a power in whose service is found the only enduring joy we can have as humans.

The crass psychological models that dominate our era’s self-conception emphasize autonomy, independence, control, and—of course—choice. But these are illusions to which we cling, no more real in the end than the fantastical women’s bodies one sees in slick skin magazines. They are illusory not only because they represent unachievable goals, but because they represent unworthy goals, ones that will not—and cannot—satisfy.

We will become miserable and hopeless beyond our wildest dreams once we become the masters of our fate and captains of our souls—familiar words first penned by W. E. Henley, a suicide, and most recently given public utterance by Timothy McVeigh, a mass murderer.

The real beauty of human character is something different. It is something like the beauty of weathered wood, a beauty grained and deepened by its graceful and dignified incorporation of the elements within which it exists. Our dignity exists not only in our drive for mastery (and that is surely a part of it) but also in our acceptance of the limits on our will—in how we come to terms with our defeats, our failures, our decay, and our yielded territory, and nevertheless trudge ahead to a destination we could never have chosen at the outset, because we could never have had the wit to imagine it.

That is the deeper meaning of the famed “school of hard knocks,” which is the only real school of the soul there ever was, or ever will be. It is a school in which much is left to chance, and there is much wasted motion and kicking against the goads. But it is also the school in which God operates most powerfully, and surprisingly. It is the arena in which our lives are transformed. We are right to wonder if there is anything that could ever take its place.

In placing such value on brokenness and reversal as the avenues through which God’s grace touches us, in saying, paradoxically, “Blessed are those who mourn,” we are acknowledging that there is much that we cannot, and should not, ever be able to control, if we are to be fully human. This is, as I have said, not a position that requires one to rely upon blind obedience to the limits imposed by the Ten Commandments. Instead, it is a position to which experience itself impels us, and will continue to impel us. Even those who disdain the Commandments will find, in the end, that empirical reality gives the most powerful confirmation of their wisdom.

Nor it is saying that we should utterly renounce all efforts to bring order and form to our world and cease all efforts to channel its chaotic and destructive elements into something more harmonious and fruitful. Never that. That would be just as much of a transgression, amounting to willful rejection of what we are meant to be. After all, even in being called to be stewards of the earth and caretakers of creation, we are also in some sense being called to acts of mastery. But it is mastery of a particular kind: a mastery in service to a greater master. In the years ahead we will have to learn, or relearn, the meaning of that different kind of mastery.

It is a mastery that depends upon our first being mastered, in the form of a commitment that transcends all others. The model of such mastery is the mastery of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose sublime music was offered, always, to the glory of God. We can never serve properly as masters unless we first come to be mastered, as Bach was, and know ourselves as such, heart and soul and spirit.  

Wilfred McClay is SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum. This article is adapted from a presentation he made at a gathering of Senior Fellows in Washington, DC in October 2007, and draws upon his article, “The Shadow of Mastery,” which appears in the March 2002 issue of Touchstone. Illustration: Caspar David Friedrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog, 1818.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Character and Ethics, Meaning and Calling, Science and Technology, Tue 11 Dec 2007