I am sure that one of these days the ACLU will get around to ensuring that no government-funded entity can ever play this song again, but until that day comes the singing of the “Navy Hymn” with its stern and moving lyrics over its surging music will remain an inspiring and moving part of our naval tradition. The first verse, reproduced below, is familiar to most Americans; those unfamiliar with the hymn can listen to it here.
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm has bound the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!
For the ancient Hebrews, the sea was not a friendly place. The creation story in Genesis shows God imposing bounds and limits on the deep, forcing the waters into their own place. The Bible story reflects other stories of the day in which the sea and the primal chaos represented a hostile god which had to be defeated; this story line of primeval combat doesn’t work well with Jewish monotheism, but the sense of the great deep as a frightening, hostile power remains.
Even after God ordered the waters to keep to their own place, the deep was not good. Leviathan trolled there; storms rose upon it, You ventured out on short cruises, rarely losing sight of land — and even that much was done at your peril. Traces of this attitude persist into New Testament times. Of all the miracles of Jesus, the ones that impressed his disciples the most seemed to take place on or around the Sea of Galilee. He could fill their nets with fish, walk on water, and quell a violent storm with a word. To rule the deep and order its chaos established his claim to be the Son of the God who brought the primeval chaos into order at the creation of the world. As the Navy Hymn has it,
O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy word,
Who walked’st on the foaming deep,
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
These days, BP, the Gulf coast, and the Obama administration are getting in touch with that Biblical sense of the sea as a place of mighty forces and great risks. President Obama, whose most enthusiastic backers were calling him “The One” back in 2008, may give the impression sometimes of sleeping ‘calm amidst the rage’, but the failure of his Oval Office speech on the blowout shows he cannot hush the raging waves of public opinion with a few well chosen words and, clearly, he is no longer walking on the foaming deep.
The Deepwater Horizon spill is not, of course, the first monster from the Gulf to threaten an American presidency. The failed response to Hurricane Katrina, fairly or unfairly (a bit of both, in my opinion), was the tipping point for George W. Bush’s presidency. His credibility and his popularity never revived after it became clear that his administration was simply unable to cope with this long predicted disaster.
But brutally damaging as Katrina was to Bush, Deepwater Horizon has the potential to be far more deeply destructive for President Obama. Bush was personally discredited by the failed Katrina response; in Obama’s case what is at risk here is not just a personal reputation for competence, but the credibility of a worldview. This isn’t just about him; it’s also about the horse he rode in on. More than any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, President Obama came to office with the message that the Federal government had vast, untapped potential to provide for the common welfare and ensure the common good. Did Americans face massive economic problems? Were their mortgages underwater? Was their health care insecure? Did their public schools underperform? Was college tuition too high? Was credit unavailable on favorable terms? Did they feel adrift in the stormy seas of life? The government could help. Trust the government — and trust the legions of credentialed professionals with their reliance on the peer-reviewed literature — and in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
That idea is looking a little iffy now. Between the failure of the stimulus package to generate jobs growth, the lack of progress on the President’s chosen Afghanistan strategy to date, and the oil blowout in the Gulf, this particular administration isn’t looking particularly competent at the moment. That the failure to prepare for a deep sea oil blowout cannot fairly be laid at the doorstep of this administration doesn’t help. The two Presidents Bush, President Clinton, President Reagan, President Carter and President Ford all presided benignly over a federal government that neglected this eminently foreseeable contingency for more than thirty years. A generation of Democrats, of Republicans and of experts failed here.
The message here is that there are some problems government can’t solve. Deepwater Horizon is not an isolated case; there are plenty of other problems out there with which government seems unable to cope. The biggest is the looming economic and social collapse when our bloated entitlement commitments overload the system. Everyone sees this coming, and sees it coming closer year by year. But there are other, equally intractable and dangerous or even worse problems at home and abroad that our society, our leaders, our experts and our institutions seem unable to handle. The complex interaction of a growing human population and the global environment; the social and economic crises in countries like Pakistan; the inevitable consequences of technological progress which makes weapons of mass destruction cheaper to build and easier to hide; a global financial system that becomes more complex and more dependent every day on the interaction of forces that no regulator and no market participant fully understands; the persistence of ethnic conflict and religious hatred in an era of mass death; the transformation of the international system by the rise and fall of great powers; the demographic shifts taking place within and between countries: these are forces that we see but do not fully understand and cannot control.
We will certainly need strong and effective government to address some of these problems. But government cannot and will not solve them all or solve them well. This doesn’t mean the libertarians have a panacea, either; the free market is also going to fail. In many cases, we are simply going to have to go about our lives as best we can in the absence of solutions to these urgent and real problems. That won’t be pleasant, but that is just the way things are. Technically, living imperfectly in an imperfect world is known as the human condition.
Brought up in a soft and candy colored consumer paradise, most Americans today aren’t psychologically prepared for a world that, in critical respects, doesn’t live up to our standards. This is only a sign of how out of touch we have allowed ourselves to become: we have constructed a bubble of affluence and optimism for ourselves and told ourselves that the bad old days of existential threats, tragic trade offs and agonizing choices were over for good. Like credulous investors plunging into a fizzy and exuberant stock market at the peak, we console ourselves with the mantra that “This time is different.”
Previous generations would laugh us to scorn. Our ancestors lived in a world of mysterious terrors, subject to forces that they did not understand and could not control; so do we. The difference between us is that our ancestors saw this more clearly; in our days, blinded by the extraordinary scientific and technological progress of the last two hundred years, many of us start with the assumption that ‘progress’ has cured history of tragedy and tamed Mother Nature. But that is just where we are wrong: the western enlightenment did not produce a stable world order in which the forces of science and good government could protect us from every ill. It has produced a wild new world filled with unprecedented dangers and extraordinary challenge. The scientific revolution eliminated smallpox and cured polio — and gave us the nuclear bomb.
But let’s not get too gloomy. Deepwater Horizon isn’t a good thing, but it is our teacher: we will learn from this how to manage our affairs better, how to respond to disaster more effectively, how better to regulate and weigh risks. The loss of confidence in our leaders and institutions is also a good thing painful as that sometimes is. Our society is badly in need of top to bottom overhaul and reform, a breakdown like this can serve as a wake up call. The astonishing spectacle of our clueless ineptitude in the face of this entirely predictable hazard is a signal to us all that things need to change before the really big shocks of the new century get here — as they surely will.
In any case, the alternative to living in a world of danger and challenge isn’t the idyllic existence we sometimes imagine. While people sometimes reject and fear change, risk and uncertainty — rude forces that disrupt our routines, challenge our assumptions, and threaten our cherished plans — those are exactly the conditions required to make us grow and to become our fullest selves. We would be dull people, and this would be a dull world, without adventure and change. To venture out on the great seas is in our nature; without this kind of challenge and risk, we become small and petty people.
Neither religion nor the living God Himself is about protecting and sheltering us from danger, disruption and disturbance. God wants us out there on the open seas; faith is the quality that gives us the courage to confront the great storms of life. As Cowper put it, “He plants His footsteps on the seas and rides upon the storm.” That is where we must be, too and in those storms we will need the kind of faith that enables people to feed on tumult, to grow on storms — rather than being overwhelmed and submerged by the tempests and tumult of the wild and woolly times into which we are called.