By Stephen W. Hiemstra
The hallmark of a de-centered life is the lost opportunity. When one takes one’s eye off of the image of God, it’s like taking your eye off the ball in a basketball game—the momentary opportunity to score is lost and it cannot be recovered. Timing is everything in life. Likewise, the mark of a de-centered culture is the accumulation of lost opportunities.
Understanding Urban Society
Three characteristics of urban society unsettle most of us: layering, downward mobility, and outmigration.
Layering is the idea that cities grow at the edges, from center out, yielding a picture like rings on an archery target. For the first twenty years, each layer is multigenerational with young families. After twenty years, the younger generation moves out leaving empty nesters. After forty years, that layer begins to die off, leaving seniors and urban blight. Churches tend to thrive during the first twenty years, stabilize in the second, and decline in the third.
Downward mobility is a description of the problem facing the younger generation in the midst of layering. The best educated and most ambitious kids in each generation can afford to live anywhere, including layers that their parents inhabit—the upwardly mobile. In previous generations, upward mobility characterized most kids, but since about 1980 the majority of kids (about eighty percent) can be described as downwardly mobile. Downward mobility implies that one cannot afford to live in neighborhood where their parents live and must move elsewhere just to get by as the standard of living falls.
Outmigration can occur in two ways. The first pattern of outmigration is the product of downward mobility where affluent families loose day-to-day touch with their kids because they cannot afford to live nearby. The second pattern of outmigration occurs when layers suffering urban blight lose their upwardly mobile kids and only retain their downwardly mobile kids. The same mechanism affects areas of rural blight. In both the urban and rural blight scenarios, the economic base of the community has collapsed and outmigration has left the community stripped of its most talented kids creating a poverty ghetto.
Poverty and Ethnicity
Poverty ghettos are often ethnically uniform, but outmigration, not ethnic discrimination, is the primary cause of their poverty. Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other Great Society programs, discrimination created ethnic ghettos that appeared as self-contained, autonomous communities where ethnic businesses thrived. Talented and less talented youth both remained in the community and drove its cultural and economic development.
The move to integrate society has facilitated the outmigration of talented youth from all communities to affluent, multi-ethnic communities where job opportunities prosper their growth. Because of outmigration, society today is a tale of two cities. Ethnically uniform, poverty ghettos have formed as the flip side of the ethnically diverse, affluent ghettos. Attributing this dichotomy to discrimination may be politically expedient, but it mischaracterizes the cause and effect of outmigration.
Economic Pressure
Downward mobility pressures most kids coming of age today. When standards of living fall, most people delay marriage and have fewer kids. My parents married (1952) when my dad was twenty-one. I married (1984) when I was thirty, long after most of my peers. My dad and I both earned doctorates in economics. Today, thirty-something is a typical age for marriage.
In 2017, fertility rates for blacks (1.8 %) and whites (1.7 %) have fallen under the two-point-one percent required to reproduce the population in the United States. For Hispanics (2.0%), fertility rates are higher, but even Hispanics are having fewer children (Mathews and others 2019).
The average life-expectancy in the United States recently fell for three years in a row before stabilizing (e.g. Case and Deaton 2020, 194). The increase in deaths before COVID was due primarily to drug overdoses and suicide (e.g. Tavernise). The theme in rising death rates has been increases in preventable deaths. It is unclear at this point how many of the over nine hundred thousand COVID death since 2020 could be classified as preventable, but clearly many since 2021 were preventable through vaccination and wearing masks.
Layering, downward mobility, and outmigration conspire to pressure standards of living and to stratify the population both by age group, and by economic class. No one expects a lot of old people in college towns or urban areas outside the areas of blight; no one expects a lot of young people retirement destinations or in rural blight areas.
Cultural De-centering
External pressure is painful, but among centered individuals it is not necessarily fatal. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the younger brother strays, wastes his inheritance, and becomes destitute, but he learns from his experience (a hint of centering) and returns to his father (Luke 15). What would have happened to him had he not returned to his father?
What if the Prodigal Son blamed his father for his predicament declaring himself to be a victim and his father a villain and refused to see him any further? Victim, villain, and helpless stories are generally counter-productive because they preclude taking responsibility for solving the problem (PGMS 2012, 116-119), but today we hear them all the time.
What if the Prodigal Son took offense at something his father had said? There is actually a word for this fragile-ego syndrome: Micro-aggression. A micro-aggression is subtle, indirect, or unintentional slight, like not paying enough attention to all members of a group. When it is hard to hear information inconsistent with someone’s self-image or preconceptions of an issue, dialogue dies.
What if the Prodigal Son refused to recognize his father’s authority? One prominent social critique, citing Feud, blames repression (that is, sexual frustration) and social domination specifically on the father’s role in the family (Mancuse 1974, 15).
The point of these what if scenarios is to highlight powerful forces in our society that frustrate centering our lives on God and work to de-center both our faith and relationships.
Importance of Centering
Our secular society generally dismisses the value of religious instruction, even when it comes to teaching simple patience. Four-year olds, given a choice between having one marshmallow now or two later, who choose to wait for two are much more likely to graduate from college than their peers, a stunning result (Mischel 2014, 4-5). In today’s economy in the United States, where downward mobility has replaced upward mobility for about eighty percent of the population, offering godly guidance on personal discipline is a practical concern.
References
Case, Anne and Angus Deaton. 2020. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1974. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Orig Pub 1955). Boston: Beacon Press.
Mathews, T.J. M.S., and Brady E. Hamilton. 2019. Total Fertility Rates by State and Race and Hispanic Origin: United States, 2017. National Vital
Statistics Reports, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vol. 68, No. 1. January 10. Online: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf, Accessed: 14 February 2022.
Mischel, Walter. 2014. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Patterson, Kerry Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler (PGMS). 2012. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Tavernise, Sabrina. 2016. “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.” New York Times. April 22. Online: https://nyti.ms/2k9vzFZ, Accessed: 13 March 2017.
Lost Opportunities
Also see:
The Who Question
Preface to a Life in Tension
Other ways to engage online:
Author site: http://www.StephenWHiemstra.net
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