Sunday, December 31, 2006
Opinion
Waiting and wanting
Last week, I discussed the case of a South Carolina woman...
By Mark Douglas
Last week, I discussed the case of a South Carolina woman who had her 12-year-old son arrested for opening a Christmas present early, arguing that impatience has become a troubling marker of American society. But that case wasn’t just about a refusal to wait; it was about how he (and his mother) wanted. He wanted his gift unreasonably; she wanted him punished improperly.
The ancients called this kind of inappropriate wanting “disordered desire.” And there is certainly lots of evidence of disordered desires in contemporary society. One need think only of all the petty and tragic addictions redounding through society (drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, celebrity news, foreign oil, half-caf/skim milk cappuccino, etc.) to see such evidence.
But addictions are only the most obvious examples of disordered desire. Sometimes—though rarely, actually—we want bad things. More frequently, we want good things in bad ways—mostly wanting them too much (as is the case of most addictions) or too little. We want them in ways that preclude us from pursuing other good wants (as, for example, preoccupations with health, safety, security or liberty can do) or in ways that lead us to misunderstand the processes by which we achieve them (how’s the whole “democracy in the Middle East” thing going?). And, hardest of all, sometimes we have wants that can’t be satisfied (a different past, different genes) that we have to figure out how to live with—without surrendering to stoicism or to the addictions we stuff into the hole that such wants leave.
Learning to understand, evaluate and deal with our desires takes patience. We wait in order to give ourselves time to ask questions like, “Is this really what I want?” and “Is this really what I should want?” and “How might wanting this shape my understanding of other wants I have?” And we have patience because we regularly surrender to the sharp jabs of wanting only to learn that what we thought we wanted turns out to be unsatisfactory (how many Christmas presents got returned this week?). Waiting, in other words, creates time for us to try to reorder our desires. And as we turn our backs on Christmas wanting and our faces toward New Year’s resolutions (which are, after all, just different kinds of wanting), we’re going to have to give ourselves time for the process of getting our desires reordered.
I have, thus far, been speaking rather existentially and homiletically (it’s the last day of the year: What else do you expect from editorials right now?). So let me move from preaching to meddling and speak politically for a moment. Because while learning to wait and want may be important virtues in individual lives, they are foundational ones to the life of a liberal democratic states like the United States.
Liberal democratic states (which are the only kind of democratic states with any staying power) exist as one answer to a wager about how people should live with each other. The bet is whether a healthy and stable society is more likely to be composed of people working together to achieve a common goal or of people who put up with each other’s different goals even when those goals conflict. The liberal democratic state puts its money—and its citizens’ lives—on the latter position. Such a state prefers procedures to focus on results, reform to revolution, and tolerance for disagreement to insistence on achieving agreement. It accepts the consequences of giving people the freedom to do bad under the assumption that this same freedom also makes it more possible for them to pursue what is good. And, as a result, it moves slowly and in ways that never fully satisfy any of its members—all of which mandates that those members learn to be patient and to order their desires. Everyone waits and wants; democracies ask their citizens to learn to wait and want in better ways.
As we peer over the edge of 2006 into a fraught new year, waiting and wanting may be hard things to do well—and the fact that we didn’t do them very well over the past 12 months makes them that much harder—but perhaps actually attending to them may help. So be patient with each other and take the time to think about what you want and how you want it. The quality of our futures together may depend on it. SP
Mark Douglas is an ethicist at the Columbia Theological Seminary.