Human beings are often recalcitrant, which is a nagging form of opposition, perhaps resistance so not to be lowered in the pecking order of human beings. Children resist parents, often simply because the parents are over them. They reveal themselves in their private diaries, sometimes discovered by the parents and creating a distressing period for both parent and child. The concept may be carried over to teachers, or bosses, or any authority figure if the attitude persists. (Many authority figures do communicate in styles that invite resistance from those who might benefit from what has been communicated.) We may like humility and deference in others, but don’t want more than the minimal expectation of it in ourselves. I have never forgotten from my early years in school reading the remark of a lad who had just heard an order to duty from his mother: When she tells me to do something, I feel won’t all over. The feeling is basic in us. Perhaps we feel it challenges our freedom, that priceless gift that we play upon, even distort so to keep our sense of it as our right – to be free and/or self-determining. Many of our habits that are negative are entered into because we don’t want anyone to tell us to do it, or not to do it. We press on and for some adults, life is much taken up by trying to correct wrong choices when we were young caused by our own recalcitrance. It is a type of inner rebellion, a childish trait that may hang on through the years often resulting in unhappy experience. Recalcitrance affects our competence both as leaders and followers in the course of personal and social life. Our reactions to others are often of our own making, not made of what those persons are.
That trait causes considerable tension for life in families, in friendships, in the workaday world, in the models offered by some celebrities, in nearly any context that relates one person to another, even extending to group responses. There is an overbearing pride in it for adults. We resist because we are not given due respect, or because someone else thought of the solution first, and so the stories proceed. Reluctance offers time to consider this or that, but recalcitrance may lead to closing the mind and lead to rebellion. It makes the news, especially in the recalcitrance of some generations related to other generations. Each generation takes a stance for self-preferences, and finds some degree of fault in any negative response or alternative to what they or their group have outlined for themselves. At this writing generational differences trouble us.
The modern world has been greatly speeded up, perhaps beyond normal tolerance for personal and social experience. Further, in the tendency to identify with mechanization, media preoccupation, and the overpowering forces of change we may become frenetic, secretly distracted from some of the basics of life so we build defenses against both persons and the world. We are distracted from gaining that information we need to know – ourselves. We seek education, not to become better persons, but to get better jobs earning more money. Contexts, like church identity, lose force in our perceptions, when the churches adopt the methodologies of presentation that have skewed our interests and values. The literature is repeating the statement: The people of the world are becoming more and more secular. If this is a true statement it means that we have turned not to the spiritual vision for mankind, but semi-refined animals of mankind. At the time of this writing the tensions for the human population are beyond our competence to do well for affirmations. Terrorism, climate change, uncertain leaders and followers, escalating costs and too few well-paying jobs, culture clashes including murder from mentally deranged persons, inability or unwillingness to solve some basic needs of citizens, intemperance in the daily lives of masses of persons placing undue pressure on the treasuries of society – and the story continues, especially with the break-up of families. Our defenses, as we seek our sense of worth in relationship with each other are partly formed through recalcitrance about our beliefs and conduct. It doesn’t work, either for the individual or society. We were meant to function with some unity motivated in love so to work together, to serve one another, to respect even the least among us, and sometimes to lead, sometimes to follow, so to solve problems making life good. God’s grace is the model for the common grace of mankind. God finds ways of accepting in love even persons who violate his values. The cruel accidents of our lives are meant to help us develop as private, family and social persons. Can we make it so? What may I do to make your life better? *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020