“In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now, God knows, anything goes. Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter word writing prose. Anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today, and day’s night today, and that gent today you gave a cent today once had several chateaus”.
One wonders if in his day the inestimable Cole Porter was considered prescient or if he ever used the word ‘fluidity’ in his numerous works. Certainly, this verse from his musical “Anything Goes” which premiered 90 years ago, captures the concept of the moral, artistic, and social ‘fluidity’ that has gained such currency (no pun intended) these past several years. Think of all the hyphenated constructs where some noun or adjective is coupled with ‘-fluidity’.
Is anyone concerned about the ease with which many of us today so readily succumb to the enticement of change and so insouciantly shed our personal identities? Have we no qualms about disowning our history – our past as individuals, as a nation, as a civilization? Is the accelerating pace of ‘prosperity’ so dizzying that those once inviolable tendons of identity that linked us to previous generations and, indeed, to each other are extenuated? Are we so taken by the lines from the poem ‘Invictus’ which crown us as masters of our fate and captains of our soul that we consider ourselves totally independent of the reality outside ourselves?
Doesn’t this type of fluidity exhaust us? Isn’t it draining our morality of significance, our art of beauty, and our relationships of purpose? Are we not disturbed that, in a world where everything is constantly ‘fluid’ and nothing has fixed distinction, we will end up with a universal pool of homogenized sameness?
Millennia before Mr. Porter’s genius delighted the world, the writer of Matthew’s Gospel recorded two of Jesus’ admonitions pertinent to this ‘anything goes’ mindset. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything more comes from the evil one” (Mt. 5:35); and later: “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash” (Mt 7:26). We who, for better or for worse, abandon the stability of our foundational roots are building our houses on a very fluid bed of sand. Will our fate be a sea of indistinction?
One could claim that philanthropy is fluid. Resources flow from one person to another. The donor gives up or lets go of something of himself. But, with philanthropy, especially philanthropy rooted in religious conviction, this flow does not diminish or exhaust the identity of the donor. In fact, paradoxically, it reinforces and edifies it. It strengthens the common bond of humanity shared by the donor and the recipient, and in doing so the flow of philanthropy fosters the distinct human dignity of each.
So it is with the members of the NCCF community.