We Are all Collaborators

I read tthe story that accompanied the photo, about Zuckerberg's turning over to the French goverment  information about folks who  post 'hate speech' on Facebook, and I was ready to ditch Facebook. Thern I began to think about what other actions I might take that would be commensure with that one.  Itseemed that I had two choices. I could become a hermit in a cave somewhere, with as little econnection as possible with the sinful world, spending my days confessing my sins and singing psalms, or watching birds and sunrises. Or, I could engage as much as possible with the world and try to understand it and its inhabitants.

At different times in my life, I have pretty much made both choices. The advantage of the hermetic option is its simplicity, it's completeness. Hermeticism  is pretty much a kind of monadism, complete unto itself. It aspires to be a pearl, a pure gem. Monks of course like to claim that their austerities and prayers benefit the whole world in some ways and there are enough people convinced of that to keep them in contributions or to buy their over-priced but holy fruit cakes and liquors. But I have noticed that taxes are never collected in thoughts and prayers.

The advantage of engagement is that it is dynamic. There is something new evry minute,  It is a fabric of many colours, not a pearl. There are always new materials to consider, new threads that may make the frabric stronger or that may make it tear. The difficulty in choosing materials is that very few of them have all the properties one might desire. One thread might be very strong but rather ugly. One might be beautiful but weak. It's hard to know what threads to include.

Of course there monastic communities that try to incorporate a variety of gifts into their community, but they get to choose their members. The body politic is more difficult. There are almost always some members, some threads in the political fabric, whom other members would rather exclude. A society that starts pure, like the early settlers of New England, the Puritans, have children who don't seem quite so pure as might be expected. A half-way covenant is needed. Or there are some groups whom a majority of a democracy deem completely unacceptable. A concentration camp is needed.

Few human inventions are more fragile than political power, so the powerful are fearful. They collaborate with one another to try to preserve the unpreservable. And those of us who would hold ourselves unstained from the world like to think we can avoid collaboration..  So, I look at the photograph of Zuckerberg and Macron and think that I will leave Facebook. Ha. Who am I in the parable of the wheat and the tares?  I think that I had beter remain engaged lest I find myself thrown into the furnace.