Ahh, the invisible hand of culture...

One of the basic problems with cultural evolution is that, unless it is heavily guided by some sort of central governing agency or a common standard like a religious text, it will inevitably produce practices which look absurd when displayed next to each other. This is possible because those practices evolve along separate pathways which don’t normally invite comparison to one other. Thus, suddenly juxtaposing them reveals not only the goofiness of those particular features of the culture but also the utter silliness of the broader neglectful habit of letting culture shape itself this way in the first place.

Allow me to exemplify.

For the average American, divorce is a simple legal remedy to a major personal problem: the unhappy marriage. Despite making a promise before God and all your friends to permanently bind yourself to this other person regardless of the future, very few people these days will think much less of you for breaking precisely this unconditional vow. So many people have done so, in fact, that being anti-divorce is beginning to seem a bit like being opposed to antibiotics. There is simply no notion in the broader culture that there is anything fundamentally wrong with this practice. Bad marriages are a kind of illness that happens to befall some unlucky folks and divorce is simply the remedy. Even Christians who might oppose it generally wouldn’t actually break fellowship with a friend for getting one, despite the fact that divorce is meant to symbolize the union of God in the Trinity and glorify Him and His permanent vows to us as His people. So that’s the current American cultural status of divorce.

Now consider the strategic foreclosure. For most Americans, the idea of deliberately choosing to abandon a house because it is worth far less than is owed on it seems profoundly immoral, a major breach of your word. “You promised to pay, after all, and pay you should.” This despite the fact that the contract was deliberately crafted with dozens of provisos in a merely legal setting without any reference to God, family, or community at all. Moreover, this particular contract specifies a precise penalty for infidelity: loss of the asset. That is all. And there are no promises of forever or sickness and health, not to mention richer and poorer. That’s because the contract is extraordinarily conditional. And yet, somehow, the idea of radically unforeseen circumstances justifying the fracture of this merely manmade and not-even-remotely-God-instituted deal presents a crushing moral obstacle to many decent people, precisely because they are decent.

Now, clearly, one can have a vigorous discussion about both the individual merits of divorce and of strategic foreclosure. I mean only to show the surpassing absurdity of a society whose members would be so calmly accepting of divorce and so morally vexed over strategic foreclosure. It either means they worship money and not God (a possibility not to be dismissed too quickly) or else they are the victims of a culture which is in serious need of some principled reform.