Aim Low. This would serve very well as our national motto. Worse yet, it could be the motto of most Christians today. Perhaps it is even my personal goal. In so many aspects of life, we choose to reach for the lowest common denominator; we do the shoddiest job with the least amount of effort; we choose inaction over involvement. Excellence has become subservient to convenience.
The most obvious reason for the decline of excellence is the increase of cultural laziness. If you value doing nothing over doing things to the best of your ability, it’s no wonder that the quality and quantity of your achievements will plummet. Apathy is an easy alternative to caring. Passion is a noble goal, to be sure, but it takes effort (which is often a synonym for giving up free time, sleep, and comfort). Nine times out of ten, most of us will choose to shirk involvement simply because of the effort it takes to enter the game.
Walker Percy in his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, nailed this problem before it was nearly as widespread as it is today. “Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal.”
Is that all there is to it, though? Do we underachieve simply because it is the easy option?
If we sharpen the focus a bit, we might notice that laziness isn’t the core of the issue. If lethargy is our collective goal, what principles in our culture back it up? Peeling back the layers of our indifference forces us to confront things we’d rather not. Laziness may not be admirable, but it’s an acceptable excuse for apathy. What if we were to discover, however, that we are lazy because we fear losing what we love?
Doubtless, our cultural pursuit of the mediocre is tied to our national attitude of risk aversion. We will step up to the plate occasionally, provided that we can be totally assured of not losing a thing. If caring involves risk (which drawing near to people and/or putting all your effort toward a goal often does), we’d rather sit it out.
So self-protection becomes the pedestal of apathy. We can stand by this because it is the natural goal of man to manipulate his environment for his preservation and comfort. We still haven’t reached the bottom of the matter, though. We value comfort because our possession of it means that we are in control of our lives. If we step outside of our private fortresses to do what we need to in any given situation, we open ourselves up for the realization that something outside of our control could bring us down. Our pride is the ultimate foundation of our indifference. We don’t care because we don’t want to realize the truth that we are not in ourselves the only thing that matters in this life.
Where do we go from here? The accusation has been levied, the editorial finger points back at me with more fervor than I care to tolerate but tomorrow is another day that will require of me things that I would rather not do (or at least not do well).
I find it hard to believe that the lack of concern about issues, the lack of concern for others, the lack of concern for excellence and the desire to avoid tough issues is indicative of the hearts of Christians. At our core, don’t we really care deeply about most things? Our selfish pride allows us to persevere in our intentional indifference.
There is a Navajo proverb that says “You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
Addressing a problem that all of us have and precious few of us acknowledge is not easy. I’m not suggesting that we throw caution to the wind and put our whole selves into everything we can get our hands on. We would then be just as uncaring because we couldn’t give any one person or thing the attention they merit. I merely want to care enough to keep us from becoming, as Percy prophesied, “the most sincere Laodiceans who ever got flushed down the sinkhole of history.”
