Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it. This suggests that the old who lose themselves in the quotidian round may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.
Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.
I wrote him off at an early age but then never wrote him back on again.
Unjust! But then it is hard to be just even to oneself. And sometimes justice to self requires injustice towards others. Such is our predicament in this dimly-lit slot canyon with unscalable walls and a flash flood coming, but you know not when.
Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is. A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen. He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'
How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore! How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about. And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none.
If you say that it could be like that, I won't disagree. There is presumably and prima vista no presumption in favor of point, purpose, intelligibility and sense. But if you find nothing strange about this putative state of affairs, then I will view you and your spiritual vacancy with a mixture of pity and contempt.
Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?" a parent may say to a child drifting in the horse latitudes of teenage alienation, aimlessness, and cognitive dissonance. With their passing our burden of their misunderstanding was lifted. And they too were lifted — beyond the reach of our critical judgments.
Childlessness has this advantage: there is no one left to judge us. We are free. I am not an anti-natalist. I am merely pointing out an advantage to having reached a temporal 'space' in which some of us are safe from being boxed-in by the judgments of well-meaning but uncomprehending kith and kin.
You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.
A quotation and a question:
Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.
A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order. But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us. Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be.
Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those they are supposed to serve. The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle. So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.
A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check. For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.
A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism.
Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.
Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity. Reserve has a preservative effect. Saying less more often accrues to our benefit than saying more. How often have you brought trouble upon your head by simply keeping your mouth shut?
So much for good relations. Deep relations are another story. In them we court danger. We go deep, we probe, we 'let it all hang out' after midnight of the work-a-day round. You should run the risk from time to time. Risk rejection and worse. Otherwise, when it comes time to die, you won't be able to say that you really squeezed the fruit of the lemon tree.
What makes for happiness?
Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large.
Gratitude is another ingredient in happiness: one cultivates gratitude for and appreciation of what one has here and now without comparisons to an idealized past, a feared future, or to the lots of others. No regret, resentment, worry, or comparison. Comparison breeds envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Be your incomparable self. If you are not yet incomparable, take up self-individuation as a life project. Realize yourself. Your life is more a task than a given, a task of transmuting givens into accomplishments. It is the task of becoming actually the unique person you are potentially. But no hankering for what is out of reach. No false ideals. No consorting with the utopian. No Lennon-esque imagining of the impossible. No dreaming impossible dreams.
You were born somewhere in the natural hierarchy of physical endowment, moral and affective and aesthetic sensitivity, mental power, spiritual capacity, and strength of will. But your place in the hierarchy allows for development. Know your place but press against its upper limits.
But of course happiness is not just a matter of attitude and exertion but also rests on contingency and luck. We need, but cannot command, the world's cooperation. Happenstance holds happiness hostage. You were dealt a bad hand? Suck it up and play it the best you can for as long as you can.
Conservatives emphasize attitude and exertion, leftists happenstance. Both have a point. "The harder I work, the luckier I become" is a conservative exaggeration, but a life-enhancing one. It is however the foolish conservative who thinks he is self-made and not the beneficiary of a myriad of forces and factors far beyond his control. There is truth in Phil Ochs' lament, "There but for fortune go you or I," but not such truth as to trump the conservative's exaggeration. Weathering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) he will slog on, per aspera ad astra.
David Horowitz, Radical Son:
Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)
The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine. He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:
- Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
- Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
- The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
- Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.
He who knows himself know someone who inevitably in many a particular is not worth knowing. And he who knows this knows something worth knowing and someone who in at least one particular is worth knowing.
I bemoan my faults and limitations, both intellectual and moral, but my bemoaning them shows that I am aware of them, which in turn shows that I possess self-knowledge, which is nothing to bemoan!
It is a mistake to think that we can resolve in this life the questions pertaining to it and the question of what, if anything, is beyond it. It is a passing scene, a moving image, a chiaroscuro of light and dark, a land of shadows and seemings, a twilit scene of confusion in which the ground shifts and oblivion consumes memory.
Any dogmatic resolution will share in the insubstantiality of this world of shadows and adumbrations. There is no security hereabouts, doxastic or otherwise. Get used to it.
I am petty; nothing petty is foreign to me. Or to my journal.
Richard Weaver, "Life Without Prejudice" in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965, p. 11:
Upon one occasion when Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man.