By Francis X. Maier
Most of us live at least part of our lives on autopilot. Most of us also, sooner or later, stumble upon Albert Einstein’s famous warning: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.” Most of us then ignore the warning, because few of us listen the first time. As it turns out, Einstein’s words are apocryphal; in real life, he never said them. Still, that doesn’t make them any less true. And more importantly, they give us the chance to consider some key nuggets of wisdom, illustrated by Toonces, the cat who could drive a car.
Who was Toonces? For those too young to know, or too old to remember, Toonces was a frequent guest on Saturday Night Live between 1989 and 1993. A feline with a singular talent, Toonces was the beloved pet of an ordinary human family that had unshakable faith in his abilities. The place that usually led is perfectly captured in the brief sketch from SNL “Martians,” archived here.
Toonces was a creation of the writer Jack Handey, a comedy genius. We can laugh about Toonces and his antics because they capture something real about ourselves. We all have some unthinking habits; a pattern of stupidly repeated mistakes hidden in some corner of our lives. Each of us is an imperfect creature. And our imperfections, in a wonderfully ironic yet all-too-often stubborn way, unite us in a common humanity. We complete each other in more than one sense. It turns out that God has a keen sense of humor.
The problem is this: our small personal weaknesses, if given the right climate and numbers, tend to metastasize into larger and less amusing tumors.
Remember that other writer, not so funny, who suggested “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”? That particular grand idea—tried again and again, ever more forcefully throughout the last century with the same unpleasant results—cost about 100 million lives. Millions more were thrown into forced-labor systems. Some 65 million died as a result of the communist revolution in China, the “Great Leap Forward,” and the turmoil of the Red Guards. Pol Pot’s modest attempt at social reform buried two million Cambodians. That’s in a population of seven million. And that same optimistic grand idea is now gestating, like the creature from Alien, in some of our loudest and most annoyingly “progressive” political figures.
Fortunately, Americans don’t believe in utopias. Some of us seem to believe in nothing but ourselves. If “we” means our secularized ruling classes, we are pragmatic in our convictions. We believe that happiness is the product of maximum personal freedom, maximum self-realization, and maximum material abundance.
We believe that more of anything we want, or think we need, is always good. That’s why more money for larger budgets is always the answer to clearly poorly structured and conceptually flawed public-school systems that produce semi-literate adults. Looking back, this also explains our actions in Vietnam. The solution was always more troops, more bombing, more aid programs. In effect, more of the same. More quantity would give us victory. Until it didn’t.
“We” also believe that political and religious principles are usually flexible. They are often only postures that mask the appetite for a higher moral position or a better agreement. But we believe, especially and unmovably, in the saving power of technology.
As the late media scholar argued Neil Postman:
Television commercials [in America] are a form of religious literature. Commenting on them seriously is to practice hermeneutics, the branch of theology that deals with interpreting and explaining the Scriptures. […] In the parables of television commercials, the fundamental cause of evil is technological innocence, the ignorance of the details of the beneficial achievements of industrial progress. This is the main source of unhappiness, humiliation, and discord in life. And the [dire] consequences of technological innocence can strike at any moment, without warning, and with all the force of its disintegrating action.
When it comes to technology, we would do well to read St. Paul about the nature of idolatry. But when it comes to national blind spots and a chronic lack of wisdom, we are not alone. Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times, “solving” the problem in each case with, essentially, the same failed policies. Under Chávez and Maduro, Venezuela faced the decline of its oil revenues by simply printing more money and changing the name of the currency, several times. It’s no surprise, then, that inflation reached a million percent.
Similar examples are legion because reality is relentless. At all levels of life, from the personal to the macro, foolish thinking and lack of thinking carry a price and compound interest.
So, what am I aiming at with this? Just here:
Peter Drucker, the late and great business guru, pointed out long ago that every failure contains the seeds of success if we learn the right lessons from experience. The opposite is also true. Every success carries the seeds of failure if we ignore them and don’t address them.
As a nation, we possess astonishing wealth and power. We have had them for three or four generations already. It’s just the time to forget where they came from and how. We assume that we deserve them. We imagine their permanence. And these delusions have been the vestibule, again and again, for the decline of every great people.
Nations rise and fall. Such is the nature of things. Christians knew before that our mission in the world was to convert it; to be “something different” from the furniture in a culture’s showroom; to have passion in bearing witness to Jesus Christ. But that was before. This is now. Too often, too many of us have chosen a kind of moral narcolepsy instead of zeal.
And Toonces—who remembers Toonces?—is pleased to show us, through his canine friend Flippy the chihuahua, exactly where an unconscious spirit can lead. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can be true disciples again. But it requires a new conversion of heart in each of us. And then, we must act accordingly.
About the author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow for Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.