Field Note: The Richest Nation in History

On the 250th anniversary of the American republic, Robert reflects on gratitude, wealth, and our tendency to focus on what we lack instead of what we have.

Drawing on Ecclesiastes, the American experience, and observations from his own life, this dispatch (a new feature) dwells on what it means to be content in an age of abundance, and why counting our blessings may be the beginning of wisdom.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Hebraica. I am uh in upstate New York this morning. It is uh a beautiful sunny morning. You can hear the birds uh chirping in the background. It's a perfect setting for what it is that I wanted to share with you at the beginning of this week, which marks the 250th anniversary of this great constitutional republic, uh, the United States of America. I've uh often wondered how to impress upon myself and my fellow Americans how good we have it. Because we have it very, very good. And the older I get, the more convinced I am of two things. One that we have it very good, and two that less and less we realize that we have it very good. And uh, if I was to try to explain the basis on which I make that second point, I would point out the thousand ways on a given day, Americans on both sides of the political aisle are convinced that in some way or another we, the American people, are being screwed by by the world. That we have given and given and given, and that the world has taken and taken from us, and is very reluctant to give back. And I think visitors to the United States are among the first to recognize that we are, in fact, a very giving people. I always find it interesting that American tax law carves out this enormous space for tax-exempt donations to charitable nonprofit organizations. It's something I took for a given for a very long time, only to discover that very few countries around the world have constructed a system that incentivizes philanthropy to the extent that we have in the United States. An extent that has created an entire economic ecosystem of nonprofit institutions, people who are employed by those institutions, a whole philanthropic economy. We do we like to give. We are a giving people. I think it's part of our biblical founding that we work hard and make money, but feel very obligated to give some portion of that money back to the common good, especially to those who are in need. And around the world, that impulse has translated into American foreign policy. But what all of that has created inside large portions of the American people is a kind of bitterness that we give and we give, and people take and take, and they never give back. And I'm not going to dispute the fact that the world and and its and its nations are trying to get as much out of the United States as possible. I could give many, many stories from my own life, traveling across the Near East, across Europe, and being pitched on how the United States can do more, should do more. And sometimes it's framed as we we must do more, right? It is immoral for the United States to do or not to do such and such. And it all becomes very exhausting. So I am the last person to push back on the idea that people do want to take advantage of American kindness. But the bitterness comes only when one forgets how rich and how powerful and how comfortable we are here in the United States of America. I explained it to someone recently. The idea that the United States, that the American people are constantly lamenting and moaning and complaining that everyone else in the world isn't pulling its weight, and that the rest of the world needs to do its fair share, that everyone needs to step up, etc., etc. We we hear this all the time. And again, there is truth to it in a in a kind of an international political sense, and there are ways in which the United States can, through a combination of carrots and sticks, get its allies and partners to do more. I think that's a perfectly reasonable exercise. The problem for me is when that bitterness settles in American hearts, so that individuals, individual Americans, become become deeply vengeful and angry at the outside world for the ways in which that world is raking us over the coals, as it were. And so I said it's kind of like uh bumping into Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire, in an airport somewhere and uh striking up a conversation with him, only to discover that Elon Musk is very angry. Well, Elon, uh what are you what are you angry about? I can't stand, he says, the way in which all the people around me are trying to take advantage of me, are trying to ride my coattails and get a piece of my wealth for their own for their own good. And of course, you or I would would stand there and be a bit taken aback to hear the world's richest man, a man who could not possibly spend his fortune within the years still allotted to him, and yet is angry that people who are far less wealthy than he is, would dare to try to get a piece of that wealth. Right? Someone who shifts from a posture of immense philanthropy to immense miserliness and bitterness at anyone who would try to pry those dollars out of his out of his cold, cold hands. That is the way America looks from the outside to people who are far less powerful, far less wealthy, far less comfortable than we are when they hear us, the American people, complain that we are not getting our fair share. It is strange, to say the least, in the eyes of people outside, even when they understand that there is a kernel of truth in what we were saying. And my point here is not a political one or a geopolitical one, it's a cultural one. It's a point about we as the American people not fully grasping how we appear to the outside world, which is to say not fully grasping what we actually have. It is characteristic of the human person to measure human happiness against the things which it doesn't have as opposed to the things it does have. It's not entirely clear why we are this way, but it is no doubt somehow a function of sin and our uh tendency to to crave more, and and usually to crave more in proportion to how much more we are able to acquire. It's uh a key theme in one of my favorite books of the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes or or Kohelet as it's called. And uh there's there's a great line in Kohelet about the eye never being being uh tired of seeing. It's this theme of gain of wealth, of abundance without contentment. And the the lesson that's that's imparted several times in in the book of Ecclesiastes is that it is better to be poor and content than to be rich and unsatisfied. And we are on this 250th anniversary extremely rich. We are living lives, even the poorest of us, that our ancestors even a few hundred years ago couldn't possibly fathom. I don't just mean actual uh dollar amounts in our bank accounts. I mean the kinds of lives we lead, the comforts we have, the ability we have to do things that previous generations could only dream of. And unfortunately, it is very possible that we will only grasp how good we have it when it's all taken away from us, whether at the individual level or at the national level. And so my own challenge to myself in this semi-quincentennial is to stop complaining, is to be content, is to be grateful, grateful to those who came before us, grateful to those who are doing their best to lead this great country today, grateful to the God who empowers them all and who has blessed this nation, no doubt for the sake of its founders, and for those who came here initially with a very holy purpose. However flawed they were, however, flawed the execution of that purpose, those people were indeed responding to a call of God and doing the thing that they believed that that God, that Providence, as many of them put it, had appointed them to do. And I believe that God has blessed us because of them. Uh may we, their their descendants, give give him new reasons to bless us. It would be a tragedy if this nation was to live only on the fumes of those who came before. Those are the things I'm thinking about on this big anniversary week. Thankful to all of you who've been listening to Hebraica. Uh really would love for you to uh rate and review us on your your favorite podcast platform. Share us with uh with those you think uh are of like mind, and also uh uh subscribe on on Substack, Hebraica.substack.com. Really just getting that up off the ground. One thing at a time. La at la at one step, slowly, slowly at a time. And uh very glad I have have all of you with me on this journey. Many blessings.