Social democracy & a little church in France

My friend Chris is worried about the future. He goes on long rants about the government--the waste, the secrecy etc.--and talks of conspiracy. He's one of those people who has a really good heart and would do anything for you, but who reads books about cabals and actually believes the world is controlled by 7 or 8 bankers in black suits.

He sent me an email yesterday about religion. It was really sweet. He thinks religion has a real place in our lives as a counterbalance to materialism and greed. "The Presbyterian Church in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where my great-grandfather preached, was modest and humble. No vaulted ceilings or golden chalices, just wood with green and white paint and Dixie cups for the punch afterward."

Chris's words made me think of the little churches in rural France and how I'd come to love them when I was there. Almost every village has its own church. I was walking alot then, from village to village, and I'd often stop at a church on a hot afternoon to rest and meditate. All I had to do was push a little and the door would open. I'd come inside and sit on one of the wooden benches and imagine what it must have been like when the churches were filled with believers, singing hymns, taking communion. Hardly anyone goes to church in France anymore, often Sunday mass is rotated from church to church in a region because there are so few faithful.

I saw John McCain on tv the other day. For a Republican, he sometimes has something interesting to say. The interviewer asked him if he thought dysfunction in Congress is at an all-time high. Yes, it's pretty bad, he said. He'd never seen it worse. Then he said that he'd never seen the American public so polarized, so fractured, so confused. I think he was making the point that Congress is nothing more or less than a reflection of the people it's been elected to represent.

Maybe we're all just getting tired. Maybe Christianity and capitalism--the two great dynamics of the age we call modern--have run their course.  Marx thought capitalism would consume itself; he also thought that it was a person's and a culture's responsibility to make its own history. That's a very powerful notion, but presumes real energy.

I'm reading Tony Judt's last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2012). He was almost dead of Lou Gehrig disease and could no longer write; the book is comprised of a series of conversations he had with the historian Timothy Snyder. It's so beautiful. Here's a man in his late 50's who knows he's dying, writing what is really a paean to human spirit and possibility. Judt believed in social democracy, that social democracy 'enables a decent life,' as Isaiah Berlin put it.

I remember having dinner with a couple in Italy two or three years ago. They were from Belgium; he'd been a school administrator, she'd been a seamstress. We were staying together on a farm near Orvieto. The conversation turned to government and taxes. The Belgian said, yes, we pay a lot of taxes but we have a very nice life.

Last year, around Thanksgiving, distressed about the political situation, saddened by Obama's performance, the idea came to me that maybe we're doing the best we can.