Taking Risks (AGW)
TAKING RISKS
An ancient longing for danger, for challenge, and for sacrifice stirs in us. We have been insulated from having to watch others suffer by putting them where somebody else will do the watching and from guilt by calling any old immorality a “new morality.” We don’t risk involvement if we can help it. We try not to turn around if somebody screams. Responsibility for others we’d rather delegate to institutions, including the government, which are supposed to make it their business to handle it.
I saw a man on television telling us that what America needs is a little more honesty. Because of technology, the man said, people have to be more dependent on each other than they used to be (Oh?) and therefore we need more honesty (Oh). Probably, he allowed, our standards have never been quite what they ought to be and it’s time to hike them up a notch or two.
How do we go about this? Take a deep breath and—all together now—start being honest? Ah, the man had a plan. I waited, tense and eager, to hear what it might be. Popularization was what he proposed. Make honesty the In Thing. If everybody’s doing it, it will be easy. In fact, it would take the risk out of it.
Funny, I always thought righteousness was supposed to be risky. I was taught it wasn’t easy, and I found it hard when I tried it. It’s never likely to be either easy or popular.
I’m for civilization. I’m all for certain kinds of progress and I accept quite gladly most of today’s means of avoiding the risks, but to imagine that we shall whip off the dishonesty that is characteristic of fallen human nature everywhere as painlessly as we whip off one garment and put on another, to imagine that by simply taking a different view we shall come up with a no-risk brand of honesty, is a piece of self-deception and fatuity to make the mind reel.
Plato, three hundred years before Christ, predicted that if ever the truly good man were to appear, the man who would tell the truth, he would have his eyes gouged out and in the end be crucified.
That risk was once taken, in its fullest measure. The man appeared. He told the world the truth about itself and even made the preposterous claim “I am the Truth.” As Plato foresaw, that man was crucified.
He calls us still to follow Him, and the conditions are the same: “Let a man deny himself and take up his cross.”