The landscaping crew gets a four-day weekend this weekend, and after a particularly grueling four days – we planted a tremendous number of plants – I stopped off at the supermarket on my way home. I wanted to buy some beer. Of course, I was asked for I.D. Being thirty-five and sporting the gray hairs to prove it not being enough, and no I.D. being in my pocket, I attempted to get by with exaggerated, inconvenient compliance: I offered to go to my car and check (I did remember emptying my pockets in my car because we were getting poured on during a job, so maybe my license was there). The cashier said fine. So I walked out to my car, with everyone behind me on line grumbling, of course, and found no I.D. When I came back the cashier pulled the beer and I did without it. I figured I could get it at the next store and spend my money elsewhere. I fund stupidity enough in other ways and in other places, I figure.
I went to the next store, a smaller place where I was known by name. I bought the beer with no difficulty. The cashier put the beer into a plastic bag. I attempted to prevent her from doing so – I did not need the bag – but she informed me that by law I had to have the bag, or the (unopened) beers in my car could be construed as an “open container.” I don’t know if this is true or not, but in both cases, what intrigued me so was that both people were willing to obey an outside source of authority despite the fact that in both instances they felt they knew better themselves.
I consider this bad in every way, and in a certain way considering it bad is very nearly my religion – I consider this an aspect of the Gospel vs. the Law problem which at the outset so defined Christianity that it had to become a new religion. Of course Christianity now has the same problem, as Christianity itself now becomes the Law which separates people from themselves.
The great problem is how to keep the old wineskins functional. In Catholicism the problem is most egregious in the Sacraments, in which a Sacramental life is treated as a substitute for an interior life. The entire professional world now poses the same problem, in which credentials are a substitute for knowledge and skill.
It was only a hundred years ago that the West marveled at the Chinese Mandarin system, by which elites were subject to a perfectly useless but very rigorous set of examinations in order to secure high positions in the society. The problem recurs in any society which begins to choke on its own tradition, and Law is set up to replace Mind.
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