Hopeless and Helpless

Urban Tragedy

The implicit promise of Unbelief's humanism is that all human problems are solvable, by man. There is nothing that Unbelieving man, applying his power and glory to our human problems, cannot achieve. The future looks unbelievably bright. Except that it isn't.

It needs to be said repeatedly that messianic idealism led directly to World War I. Then the vengeance exacted by the Allies facilitated not a little the rise of Fascism in Germany. Idolatrous humanism has lurched from one deadly disaster to another.

But sometimes humanism takes a more honest look at what is happening on the ground. Bill Moyers in a piece entitled The Straight Dope interviews David Simon, the creator/author of The Wire. The gritty HBO series takes realistic look at life amongst the underclasses in Baltimore.

What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Simon’s meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wire held up a mirror to an America most of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.

Simon's exposure to the underclasses in Baltimore, and the way the system malfunctions amidst them, has enabled him to understand and portray the complexity of mess--a complexity that does not tolerate easy, facile solutions.  There are no top-down, Big Society solutions any more.  The only hope is bottom-up, soul-by-soul, family-by-family.  But, despite its pretensions to deity, humanism cannot redeem the sin-enslaved, human heart.

Simon himself appears to cling to the hope that Marx or neo-Marxism is closer to the truth: that a man's fate is determined by the economic structures that surround him. 

Bill Moyers: I was struck by something that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. You talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel-jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they’d come face-to-face with the question—which is…?
David Simon: “What am I doing here?” You know, a guy coming out of addiction at thirty, thirty-five, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them—we don’t need 10 or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones who are undereducated, who have been ill-served by the inner-city school system, who have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy, we pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it. They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multibillion-dollar drug trade.

The implication is that if society were to change its economic structures, the ghetto would cease to exist. The only viable "free" market operating amongst the underclass is the illicit drug market--and that has been artificially created by prohibitionist public policy.

Bill Moyers: I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
David Simon: Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.

It is the unintended consequences which rack secular humanism.  You either do it God's way or not.  If not, the consequences of the solutions will end up far worse than the original problems.  Simon claims that the war on drugs is lost--it's just that no-one will admit it.  He also pines for an economic system that would deliver more jobs--hoping that if there were just more jobs around, the underclass would not need the drug trade to survive. Really.  Humanism cannot but cling to its superficial verities and hopes--even when it knows the complexities and has seen the systemic evils.  Somehow, these are not seen as the fruit of what is in the heart of man.  There remains some other, external cause.  Change the system.  It will be different this time.

Bill Moyers: After all these years do you have the answer?
David Simon: Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it as fast as I could into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the urban equivalent of FDR’s CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps—if it was New Deal–type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome. The drug war is war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.
Bill Moyers: There’s very little the police can do.
David Simon: You talk honestly with some of the veteran and smarter detectives in Baltimore, the guys who have given their career to the drug war, including, for example, Ed Burns, who was a drug warrior for twenty years, and they’ll tell you, this war’s lost. This is all over but the shouting and the tragedy and the waste. And yet there isn’t a political leader with the stomach to really assess it for what it is.
Bill Moyers: So whose lives are less and less necessary in America today?
David Simon: Certainly the underclass. There’s a reason they are the underclass. We’re in an era when you don’t need as much mass labor; we are not a manufacturing base. People who built stuff, their lives had some meaning and value because the factories were open. You don’t need them anymore. Unions and working people are completely abandoned by this economic culture, and, you know, that’s heartbreaking to me.

The last great white hope: education.  If we just poured all that money into education of the underclass, we would begin to claw ourselves out.  Question:  education requires a fundamental aspect of mind on the part of the student or trainee--a willingness to forego satiation and consumption now for some future (probably long time ahead) benefit.  It requires hope and faith.  What makes the humanist so sure that folk in the underclasses actually have such hope, faith, and willingness to self-sacrifice and self-deny?  

Without a supernatural, divinely wrought fundamental change of heart such willingness to sacrifice is unlikely.  Simon is far more realistic than most.  But not nearly realistic enough.

The story is told  that Charles Spurgeon, the eminent nineteenth-century London preacher was interviewing a lady--a maid--who wanted to profess her faith and join the Church. Spurgeon pressed the household serving woman for evidence that Christ had changed her.  She blushed and said, "Well, now I sweep under the mats."  A little thing perhaps--but it contains the very world of Christ's redeeming work.  Or the needed perspective is illustrated by the account of the lad near Sandfields (Dr Lloyd-Jones's first pastorate) who was telling his teacher about the fine meal he had just enjoyed at home--gravy, potatoes, meat, cabbage, even rice pudding.  How come, the teacher wanted to know?  The boy's father had recently been converted--and whereas he had previously spent his wages on drink in the local pub, he was now bringing them home for his family. Small things, but a world of difference.(Iain Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), p.220f.

Simon's focus has been on the systemic nature of vice and evil in underclass society, the malfunction of civil authorities, the education system, the politicians, and the police.  It is not any one person's fault.  It is the system.  Most people in the system mean well, but the system corrupts them all. He is looking for systemic change, from the top down.  He gives us his profession of faith: "I am very cynical about institutions and their willingness to address themselves to reform. I am not cynical when it comes to individuals and people."  He lacks the perspicacity, or perhaps courage, to face up to the reality that systemic change will merely result in replacing one malfunctioning system with another.  As Jeremiah declaims: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.  Who can know it."  (Jeremiah 17:10)  Evil lies in the heart of man, and the system is but an extension of sinfulness.  Change man, one soul at a time, and in time systemic evils wane.  This is the rock that breaks the idolatry of humanism into a thousand shards.

But Simon, the modern humanist, sees things in the exact reverse.  Folk are fundamentally good; the system is corrupt and perverts them.  If we could only change the system, the basic goodness and decency in human beings would emerge from underground, blinking in the light.  This is his false religion talking.  But in the end, from his perspective, he knows there is no hope of the system ever changing.  Not really. 

Bill Moyers: But I don’t think these good individuals you talk about—the individual who stands up and says, “I’m not going to lie anymore”—I don’t think individuals know how to crack that system, how to change that system. Because, as you say, the system is self-perpetuating.
David Simon: And beautifully moneyed. I don’t think we can. And so I don’t think it’s going to get better. Listen, I don’t like talking this way. I would be happy to find out that The Wire was hyperbolic and ridiculous, and that the “American Century” is still to come. I don’t believe it, but I’d love to believe it, because I live in Baltimore and I’m an American. I want to sit in my house and see the game on Saturday along with everybody else. But I just don’t see a lot of evidence of it.

His false religion ignores universal human depravity.  Evil is deflected away from where it truly belongs--from man, the sinner to the corrupt "system"--leaving him without hope.  He has seen enough of the system to know close up and first hand that it is too pervasive, too powerful, too smothering. But the Truth remains: "if any man is in Christ he is a new creation: the old has passed away; behold, all things have become new"  (II Corinthians 5:17).    But as long as Simon clings to his naive humanism, he will never have ears to hear this--which is his, and our only real hope.

When humanists are sufficiently naive, superficial, and blindly stupid to attempt to wreak changes in "the system" to "make things right", then the damage is likely to become ingloriously monumental.  Think the Somme--lest we forget.