Generally, claims of a current or coming dystopia are exaggerated and overwrought.  There are indeed forces that would lead us in that direction, but throughout history those forces have met counterforces, and the net result has been a world where life is cyclical, waxing and waning in its levels of civility and decency, flirting with dystopia, but never quite falling off the cliff.  Our literature has imagined dystopic futures almost as long as we have been creating it and while deeply insightful, we never seem to reach the depths imagined.  To borrow from the hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less 0than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.”  But there are days, and this is one of them, where that is the only hope I can reach for.

In a week where a huge bridge collapsed, we learn of “equity-based algebra.”  The PJ Media piece is mostly exposing an education huckster that has managed to bamboozle education officials in California.  It is bad enough that said officials could be so bamboozled, but I am far more worried about what it represents.  Consider,

Lessons will foreground “equity” at the expense of teaching math basics like addition and subtraction. “Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,” the CMF continues. It adds that “learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about growth and identity development.”

Math is entirely objective, you either get the right answer or you do not and when you do not, bad things happen.  I know, most people think they never use algebra after the class, but they sure as heck rely upon it.  Bridges only work if the algebra is done right.  Computers and devices work because someone does the algebra right in designing and manufacturing the chips.  I use algebra every day of my professional life – I had to teach it as recently as a week ago showing a client how to prepare an environmental report.  If they did not do it right, in the event of a fire, the fire department might respond to an emergency at their facility wrong and turn a problem into a life-taking disaster.  A world that subjugates math to equity is a world where bridges fall, computers don’t work, and buildings burn down.  Sounds dystopic to me.

This headline:

The Lonely Crowd: 40% Of Adults Go Days Without Face-To-Face Interaction

And now you know why hope is hard to come by.  Here we see one of the actual dystopic visions of the future come to reality.  There are endless sci-fi stories out there imagining a future where people live in pods and operate through avatars, whether virtual or robotic.  I have always thought it purely fictional as the urge for simple human connection is basic and almost overwhelming, but somehow, we have learned to overcome this basic part of our humanity.  It’s not actually somehow, it was engineered during the pandemic.  Which makes stories about the World Health Organization trying to increase its power truly frightening.  The tilted up a fear, the fear of death, that motivates more than the fear of isolation for the sake of increasing their power but in the effort, they have destroyed a basic human characteristic.  That certainly seems like a step towards dystopia.

And in Europe we see what happens when hope disappears altogether.  This is the story of a 28-year-old sufferer of depression that is electing physician-assisted suicide.  She is not dying mind you, just really sad and the doctors have told here there is nothing they can do, completely failing to advise her that there might be some things that she can do.  It’s the ultimate dystopia.  Did you see Soylent Green?  If you haven’t you should – it’s a story about how assisted suicide is urged by government and used to reduce over population and feed the masses.

It could be argued that Dante’s Inferno is one of the earlier, and certainly more influential, pieces of dystopic literature – certainly in light of modern theological trends that argue that hell is not God’s creation, but our own.  That the life we make if we ignore God is hell.  When I consider these stories, I certainly begin to wonder.

This all raises a question to me about who is “the lost and the least.”  We focus our efforts on the third world, the obviously impoverished and hungry, the homeless, but what we see here is that there are those among the most affluent of us that suffer from a poverty of hope and a homelessness of loneliness.  We clearly see a need for Christ and outreach among the seemingly most fortunate of us as well as those we traditionally deem unfortunate.  Christ is clearly the only genuine possible hope for this kind of dystopic hopelessness.  The church needs to strategize how to reach into this need just as much as how to reach in the need of the people living on the streets, or going hungry.