I am aware that the post-modernist has thrown out the hope formerly attached to what was called ‘Grand Ideas'. The end of the Age of Ideology has brought with it the notion that there is no objective truth, no more grand idea that would tie together the totality of existence and give it direction, meaning or purpose. There is no more coherent worldview, truth or in any sense an objectivity. Christianity, progress, science and even rationality were such grand ideas to explain and to hold all of life together. They are dead, we are told. Long live the existential effort to feel good and even to justify oneself without a coherent worldview!

Our contemporaries like this notion, for it frees us from any responsibility, any real discourse, any need to give an explanation beyond personal preferences and narrative experiences. Yet I propose that grand ideas are not abolished at all. They continue to exert an attraction. For we like to be able to shelve all problems, to line them up for a fitting solution. In this sense what is called post-modern is itself one of these grand ideas. With it the advocates wish to remove all confrontation, resolve all discourse, abolish all responsibility and free themselves from the need to explain, to be rational, to deal with a world of data or facts or history.

In fact any proposition about anything is in some way an idea first, which can then evolve to include all of life and become ‘grand'. The discomfort of living in a real world that requires explanations when we perhaps do not have them pushes us towards intellectual and political constructions. We are always in search of solutions after all. A Grand Idea is any solution set forth to remove the discomfort, to explain - away – the problems, to offer salvation to a broken human race. "If only one could proceed in this way all problems would be solved" is the hope, mindset and what quickly becomes a program from the people with Grand Ideas.

When the disciples of Jesus in the Book of Acts chapter 1 asked the Lord moments before his last ascension into heaven whether he would establish the kingdom to Israel at the time of his return, they asked a perennial and therefore also a very modern question. The search for the kingdom, for that perfect rule and solution to all problems, has been with us ever since Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden. The desire for the presence of God or some divine perfection looks back to the loss of the garden. At other times it longs for a heavenly city ahead. Two of the disciples had earlier on proposed such a kingdom on the Mount of Transfiguration. They were in the presence of the Lord in glory and two Old Testament witnesses. They recognized a perfect setting. They wanted to stay under their booths and not face the announced persecution waiting for Christ in Jerusalem.

We long for a time when the swords will be turned into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. We expect a time when the lion and the lamb will lie down together. On a smaller scale every politician in the modern democracy will try to suggest ways in which he will be able to eliminate the problems we encounter on a daily base. In the most recent US election the core of the proposals from one side was that the state is bad and the people ought to be trusted more. The opponent suggested that the people are bad and the state needs to step in to create justice and distribute the goods.

The effort to establish a Holy Roman Empire of German Nations was born out of a similar desire to establish the perfect reign. Pagan Rome had fallen. The Popes and Charlemagne now tried to set up a Holy Empire on Roman Catholic roots. That attempt lasted until 1806, when Napoleon crowned himself a Roman-style emperor without the church. After that the dream of ‘Christen-dom', Christ's Kingdom on earth, was abolished. Nationalism became the Grand Idea and driving force. God now took sides with nations; nationalism took over Germany, Russia, France, England and the USA.

A wonderful exhibit in the New York Public Library on 42nd street at the end of last year presented numerous documents and pictures over a wide range of subjects to illustrate this longing for Utopia, this "search for the Ideal Society". They are images of visions and dreams of a better world than the real one we now inhabit.

The word Utopia comes from Thomas Morus' "Utopia", published in 1516. It is a search for a "good" (Greek ‘eu') place (topos), but in a play on words, the prefix ‘eu' can also mean ‘no'. Morus describes an island somewhere else as either a good place or as a place that exists nowhere. He never explains quite what he had in mind. We are left even with the possibility that no place is ever perfectly good.

Such longing for a good place is peculiar to a Jewish/Christian view of things. Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden. We wait for a heavenly Jerusalem on earth, in which righteousness will exist and shalom will be realized. But the human mind is not only capable of holding to that hope for something better in history as promised in the Bible. We also invent programs to bring about such ideals, even without God and within our own lifetime according to our own schedule and by our efforts.

Centuries of uncertainties and war gave rise to the dream of radical peace being possible in new communities. The move to America, a new continent for the Europeans, was often a pursuit of such an ideal setting. The Grand Idea was that new people would be able to live there without the patterns of European traditions, free from the inherited problems. Emigrants turned their backs on the past and saw heaven on earth ahead of them. Towns with names like Harmony, New Hope, Canaan, Ephrata witness to this dream.

With rising industrialization the longing for wilderness grew. God and the divine were thought to reside in nature rather than in the city. The move across the Hudson, then the Ohio and the Mississippi, was not only a move in search of space, but also an escape from civilization.

Even architecture was at times seen as a tool for social change. Pierre Charles de L'Enfant designed Washington DC in consultation with Thomas Jefferson along mathematical forms with the grand idea that straight roads and, in New York after 1800, right angles would make people think and live more rationally. Later it would also help them to shoot in a straight line more easily.

The French philosopher Voltaire was the first to study racial differences by measuring the size of the human skull. Later such racial labeling would be used to pursue programs of racial purification. Parallel efforts developed in response to economic class structures, when ideologies were developed to bring about a new economic man, a socialist man without the problems seen in private property and personal greed. Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier suggested means of social engineering by defining personality types, who, when matched, would effect behavior patterns for a better society.

More recently the single focus of people on personal peace and affluence, where progress is described as material advancement, nurtured in reaction the dream of communities of love, the world of Woodstock. The counterculture to the modern world was the love-in, the return to Nature and the embrace of other, more "natural" cultures in other parts of the world.

Common to such dreams is the desire for a more perfect world, a place without death and hunger, without neighbors and laws that constrain the inner feeling of people. There is a search for natural spirituality, not informed understanding and wisdom. Good intentions are plentiful. Images of a better world grow whenever the limits of the real world, of real people, of real circumstances are denied and Grand Ideas for quasi-"final" solutions are embraced.

Robert Conquest points out the curse of such Grand Ideas of a better world. For they appear at first sight to be grand in their promises. However they produce great horror whenever they are put in place, i.e., when reality is crushed by the imposition of the grand solutions. Because they are held up to free us from all problems once and for all they do not in fact fit over a world that is at best a mixed experiment of good and bad, of life and death, of success and failure.

In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (Norton) Conquest warns us that the human being is easily driven by what are to him certain grand, abstract and all-encompassing thoughts about how utopia can be constructed on earth. There is a charm and attraction here, for who would not long for a good place? However, such thoughts are less practical guides to action and more ideals to be imposed on reality as the solution. Their attraction lies in the image of a perfect setting and is so strong, that one overlooks the impracticality, the immorality and the irrationality of the utopian vision. For in the limits of a fallen world, with people such as us, we face what in engineering terms is a fundamental incompatibility between vision and reality. Rahel Isaac's Coercive Utopians discusses a number of such utopian visions. The ecologists who want to squeeze human life into the model of an impersonal nature; the economic egalitarians who see any inequality as injustice; the street protests for direct rather than representative democracy: they all ‘see' their ideal as perfect and insist that its grandeur and impeccable wholeness needs to be enforced and imposed for the advantage of the human race. Questions of justice to the individual person are neglected, though his or her benefit is purported to be the energy that drives the dreams; but in fact he or she has been reduced to a mere quantity in the abstract concept of an ideal "humanity".

Such Grand Ideas spring from the matrix of society as a seamless cloth, a machine, in which all problems require only engineering solutions. They express a belief that human engineering would abolish the evils in society. They have a vision of The Good and want to remove all ambiguity and compromise in one sweep, by means of one technique.

In the biography of Isaiah Berlin by Michael Ignatieff we meet a man who in no uncertain terms states his horror of Grand Ideas. He lived through the desert created by several of them in his lifetime. A native of Latvia he knew firsthand both Bolshevism and Nazism. Consequently he warns us of any comprehensive vision that ultimately denies freedom to the person to choose between good and evil, ill or well by forcing him to become conformed by force. Social justice is crated at the expense of human freedom by control freaks or addicts, who impose their form, their solution, on an unfinished and broken human race. Such Grand Schemes for the Improvement of the people has always produced immeasurable inhumanity, whether the schemes try to take their cue from Nature or from Science. Civilization is always a human reality of mixed priorities. We find a description of this only in the form and freedom tension of the Bible and then again in the democratic experience of societies that have their view of life shaped by the Bible.

Nationalism, Fascism and Communism were the easily recognized Grand Ideas from hindsight over the last two centuries. They were not simple ideas among others, but utopian visions of how to improve a society by the elimination of those who did not share the vision, who remained individual persons. Any idea that is seen as special, national, tied to land and blood descent or a calling from history assumes that ‘one-shoe-fits-all' superiority. It claims to be above any further evaluation, such as whether it is good, true and just. The idea (or ideology) set before our eyes and into our imagination (from ‘image') is so beautiful, complete with all pieces in their place, and so attractive that nothing in the present and more real world should stand in the way of its realization. In other words, reality will be reshaped by forceful imposition to make reality fit our dreams.

The pursuit of goodness, beauty and justice takes place within two perimeters. There always exists a relationship between ability and morality. What we can do must be controlled by what we should or should not do. Even good things, such as books, money, or freedoms can be exploited to produce evil effects. Books can misinform, money can corrupt people, freedoms can lead to demands of selfish rights and negate any sense of commitment to others or even to the reality of the defined world around us.

When inability is the only limitation to thoughts and actions we tend to see all problems only as engineering problems. A clever technique assumes to be a certain method towards a predictable result. The price to be paid is overlooked in light of the demands of the desired utopian light at the end of the tunnel. A manipulation of human beings in their economic and social context is expected to change the basic functioning of people and to remove evil once and for all from society.

Christianity talks about the need of redemption, the need for a new heart and the mind of Christ in the individual. Change is operative through repentance and a work of God. It always focuses first on the individual and an "inner" effort. By contrast the utopian vision sees change as a totalitarian, because imposed, transformation of the mechanics of society, which must do away with the very notion of individuality. It agrees with the picture of society as a machine, the seamless cloth, or the crew on a ship. The vision of what is good does not allow for the ambiguous reality and necessary compromise in real life of people. With one sweep the imagined solution is imposed, disregarding the particular human beings, their real choices and the limited possibilities in a world in which death is always still there and where, at the end of the day, though not of time, there is no peace or justice, yet.

The Enlightenment period furthered such radical solutions to complicated realities by rejecting the real world in pursuit of an ideal or image. Civilization with its awareness of complex human realities was seen as the cause of unnatural problems, while nature was held up as a mother, a good model and the mold for each person to find his true and inner self. Science was held up as uniquely informative about human beings, while religion could no longer claim to relate to truth. Instead each person discovers meaning, morals and his own mannishness in himself. By means of science a better society could be constructed. Christianity and other civilizing efforts to limit individual greed, cruelty and immorality were deemed too full of prohibitions, especially with the Christian teaching about sin and judgment.

In the twentieth century we have seen the rise of fascism, communism and other ideologies that marry nationalist interests with an ideological plan to create a new human being. A class structure gave way to the dream of a classless society. Racial differences called for the purification of the Nordic race. American economic success gave rise to the idea that a new man had been born on a new continent without the hindrances of the old. In Europe man was sinner and saint, lived in social cohesion in families and neighborhoods and grappled with ideas about a moral world. The newness of America could replace such real limitations with views of the independent, basically good and free self-made individual.

While fascism and communism are perhaps defeated, the belief in ideals in contrast to working to improve ideas about life has not been undermined. We face today other, similarly utopian visions, which are heralded as solutions for all the remaining problems of man around the globe. We have inherited this search for grand ideas to explain and to solve all complex human realities. Isaiah Berlin saw in modern efforts to impose egalitarian justice in the name of social equality the work of utopian control freaks, who with an addiction to their vision impose their imaginary solution on real human flesh. They would rather destroy individual effort, differentiated results and all individuality in order to create a socialist system instead of a voluntary community. Equality of outcome became the grand idea. It had to be created, even if it meant doing away with all fairness that contributes to and results from human uniqueness.

These attractive Grand Ideas are not only a thing of the past. We have not matured beyond the lust for final solutions ourselves. Let me suggest a few, and you will easily recognize a continuing totalitarian temptation.

A) Democracy becomes a Grand Idea with destructive effects when it is no longer seen as a tool to pool wisdom from various sources. Increasingly it has the tendency to become a tool for power struggles and to guarantee entitlements. When it is not the distillate of an open society it is increasingly used to determinately impose the vision of the largest party, even if it is not the majority. The mandate then no longer has come from truth and wisdom, but from numbers as the source of power. It gives us the dictatorship of plurality, which is accountable only to numbers and mathematics until the next election.

Popular sovereignty is a statement against the inherited or assumed rule of the powerful and few, but it has never before been a view that assumes freedom from judgment by and accountability to God, reason or reality. Mathematics, which deals with what I can do, is not the same as justice, which is a concern for what I should do.

B) To fund or not to fund, that is often the decisive question for a project in public life. It becomes a Grand Idea, when you assume that more money itself would create better schools, provide for better education or deliver better art. But funds are only one among many factors here. More money spent on students may just buy them more gadgets, more administration, and more distractions. There is only an accidental relationship between money and the content and nature of an education. Other factors play a much larger part. The content of the courses, the training and personality of the teachers, the worldview presented and discussed from texts, history and language will contribute to an education and shape behavior and attitudes much more than just a larger budget. Yet these more intellectual and moral-cultural issues are bypassed in the search for funding, which largely deals with material quantities.

Much money is wasted unless the purpose and goals of education are laid out clearly ahead of time. Without these money alone has very little control over quality. No amount of money by itself will help children become educated. They may enjoy themselves more in school, play more games, get a better lunch and create their sub-culture away from home. But they will not in this manner know more of what is true and valuable about the larger world they inhabit or about the human race they are a part of. They may know more about themselves and their feelings, but little about the different parts of the world, where ideas and religions in the human race have brought blessings or curses to tribes and nations.

c) Proposals of tax cuts or increased spending can become a Grand Idea to solve most or all problems in an economy. They put more money into circulation through private spending. Yet in itself the increase does not indicate what the money is spent on, whether by individuals or by the state. Money in hand does not lead to a better quality of life. Purchasing power does not of necessity lead to wise investments or consumption. To put greater trust in the people than in government is, either way, a blind trust, especially when there is a close relationship between them, since the people elect our governments.

D) Tolerance, relativism and postmodernism all have a positive element of openness to personal and unique existence. But they also have become grand ideas to absolve everyone from accountability. Often multiculturalism has in fact become the rational for moral relativism. That covers, but does not redeem, a multitude of evil.

My lament in each case is the neglect of the moral-cultural element in any human context. Yet nothing exists in the human context without a link to the moral-cultural values of the people. One's view of the world determines the choice of actions. Nature is impersonal and largely a given, while culture is a chosen effort to express whatever values, priorities and human presence we embrace in practice. This is so from ethics to economics, from character to community, from resignation to responsibility. Yet any discussion of such links between a person's world of thought and his practice in real life is increasingly avoided. The means matter more than the end, which is assumed to be in the hands of good people.

Yet what is the good, just and beautiful end has no common definition in a public that is so proud of its pluralistic interests. Historic lessons are dismissed and an almost blind optimism is nurtured from the ideas of human progress, the cultural beauty of religions and the assumption of human goodness. The grand idea is that economic growth will give content and limits to any residual evil in society or the individual. Yet without moral consideration the means (e.g. the funding) have often been grossly misused in the recent past around the globe.

Grand ideas deny in fact that we always have to face the freedom of people to do good and evil, to choose ill or well. They pretend to incorporate an idea of human good, which however in its essence denies that we are individuals. In the real world things and people are unfinished, situations largely unresolved, history not yet ended. Grand ideas replace Biblical realism in a fallen world, because they assume that the perfect is within reach by forcefully imposing it on the present.

Isaiah Berlin and others suggest that we need a little less messianic fervor in our pursuit of grand ideas. We must resist the totalitarian temptation, in which man always tries to play God and to offer salvation from the fallen world. All the Grand Ideas of the past and present, from Christendom to Buddhism, from the revolutionary cry for the contrasting values of liberty and equality to Marxist-Leninism, from belief in progress to the relief of postmodernism, are grand schemes and operative structures which express an idolatry of human reason. They are ingenious justifications of someone's abomination. There is in fact no master plan to solve all problems in a fallen world and with damaged and sinful man.

The prayer of the Christian is that God's kingdom would come, not man's. We desire that the will of God be done on earth as well as in heaven, where it is already being done. Here it is not yet done. Our world is a mixture of wheat and chaff. We are like sheep and goats. We should look for solutions (pl.) to recognized problems, but the final solution will have to be God's. It will not come from finite and sinful Man. The last proponents of a Final Solution produced indescribable horror.

The Ten Commandments in the Bible demand that we resist evil in all its manifold expressions. They do not talk about bringing in the good. They warn us against wrong, sin and illusions: There are no other gods, things belong to someone, therefore we should not steal. Life is given, therefore we shall not murder, etc. Each of the commandments warns us against chiseling away from what is real, created and valuable. It points out the danger of diminishing the good through neglect, willful action and pursuing an imagined ideal.

Against the pursuit of ‘grand ideas' we should consider perhaps an eleventh command, which at the end of centuries of pursuing the good from human engineering would be: "Thou shalt not bring in the Kingdom, the Good, the Grand Idea! Thou shalt not be the solution to the larger problem of existence".

Of course such a proposed eleventh command is already contained in the first. If we have no other God besides the God of the Bible, of history and of the covenant we shall look to him for the restoration of creation after the fall. We believe he is not finished with his work, nor satisfied with the present. He will give gifts to the children of Man to deal with all kind of situations now, from hunger to injustice. But he will also deal with the final need for a solution, which we expect will to certainly come in history when death itself is swallowed up and when there shall come Shalom under the rule of Jesus Christ.

Looking into the Glass Lightly

Our connection with the world outside our four walls is elaborate and manifold. We are wired, in reach of electronic media, connected, accessible and can tap into the lives and thoughts of people around the world: Amazing, wonderful, tempting and distracting. It is all at our fingertips, over the wire or through the air: Anytime, personal, creative, sometimes amusing and for the most part very informative. I am thankful.

Of course that is one side of the whole thing. Another would be to study what effect this ready access has to the way we perceive the real world, what we expect from it, how it should perform for us. And then we could place a person back in the place of what I have called the "real world". We can gage our response by seeing our frustration level when something does not come through in the form or speed we thought we could expect. At the push of a button….that other person still has a life of her own. I don't control him or her in the same way I control the equipment. Like Buddha you can choose in the end to selfishly detach yourself from your crying child and from the suffering of your neighbor; or you confront the real world like Christ with its demands on your intelligence, moral courage and character. Buddha grinned over Benares, Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

A third side is the rise of interest in alternative sources of meaning, information and closeness. All the connectedness does not finally satisfy genuine human longing. We don't get warmth, attention and love from a real machine that can produce a virtual reality. The chat room partner turns our to be a louse. So the search for interesting alternatives is "on" in the public discussions.

By that I mean that with all the gadgetry of our modern world there is, quasi in reaction to it, a search for information about the deeper things of life, but now in irrational, private and esoteric channels. Since when are dreams so interesting as a source for a religious encounter? I don't mean that God cannot speak in a dream. He did at times, to give specific content, an explanation or knowledge that fit in with what he had said in other places. In Daniel's case and Joseph's he used dreams to surprise kings with the reasonable and fearful interpretation given by men of God.

This is different today. Here now the dream itself is the occasion, not carrier of content. The embrace of the dream as a religious experience is new. It frees the dreamer from having to consider anything outside of that experience. The dream is like a personal slumber narrative, a story in the form of sleepy notions.

The search for knowledge in dreams is a further journey into private, irrational and irresponsible fields. When electronics control the flow of worldwide information, the dream becomes the last vestige of the private, the final arbiter that I am. The "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") of Descartes is out. Welcome to the world in which it can now be said: "I dream, therefore I am". Good night, then. But it would be unwise to cross the street in front of anyone who looks for knowledge in a dream, except in your own dream.

There is a further direction of this turning inward. Through hypnosis many now try to get to a basis for personal meaning. ‘Meaning' in the sense of affirmations then no longer comes from someone by whose choice I exist, who decided that I should be, who loves me and to whom I matter. Hypnosis is a vehicle to turn inward, away from the bigger picture into a private experience of another world, which, however, I must leave when it comes to paying for the experience with my credit card. How desperate a person must be to go down that lane, which creates two contrary worlds by the power of another, the hypnotist, all in search of something so basic as knowing that I really exist.

But of course most people today start with the impersonal everything as only source of your existence. You can tap into it electronically at high speed, but any thrill in it comes from a fast modem, not from a person. Biology, particles, energy

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