Long as I
remember
The rain
been comin' down
Clouds of
mystery pourin'
Confusion
on the ground
Good men
through the ages
Tryin' to
find the sun
And I
wonder
Still, I
wonder
Who'll
stop the rain
--Creedence
Clearwater Revival
The
disillusioned conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez recently gave voice to the
despair that is crushing the souls of so many today like a massive spiritual
boulder. He writes,
Eliza is a young
girl with icy blue eyes and light blonde hair. She says she lives paycheck to
paycheck and only has a little money left over at the end of the month, mainly
for bills. What free time she has on weekends goes to errands for which there
is no time in the week.
Eliza disclosed
these details about her life in a teary TikTok video. “I’m
not made for this,” she said. “I don’t have the money, time, or energy to enjoy
my life outside of work, and I don’t know what to do about it anymore.”
She’s right about
not being “made for this” because humans aren’t. What Eliza described is not a
life in the true sense but living and dying as an automaton. And that,
unfortunately, is the reality shouldered by most people today. . . .
Those facts are
important because they show that what Eliza described is not something that
exclusively or even primarily applies to young people who are “starting out”
and have not yet acclimated to adulthood. Eliza is not the point; the point is
millions of people feel this way and live Damoclean lives of financial
precarity. But the fact Eliza is young and, based on her social media,
typically liberal, did help to drop some masks. See Phillip Buchanan, who goes
by “Catturd” online.
Buchanan has
amassed a Twitter following of 2.3 million. I’m sorry to say he is a fixture of
the new right commentariat. Newsweek dubbed
him the “King of MAGA Twitter.”
Buchanan retweeted Eliza’s
video with a seven-word caption: “Stop whining and make me a sandwich.”
. . . The left wants you deprived of property
as a permanently plugged-in and soulless widget, interchangeable with border
crossers who beat cops in New York City and flip the bird at America
after the fact. And the new right, well, I don’t know what it wants anymore. I
don’t think it knows better than a dog chasing a car does. Neither has any real
notion of eudaimonia, a Greek word generally translated as “happiness,” but it
carries a profoundly richer meaning than the English suggests.
The late Daniel
N. Robinson, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University, drew a
connection between the “pursuit of happiness” clause in the Declaration of
Independence and eudaimonia. The authors, after all, were classically informed
and did not have in mind the pursuit
of pleasure with that line, in which case living in an
entertainment pod with an AI robot girlfriend would be ideal.
“It’s much better
translated as a kind of ‘flourishing,’” Robinson said in a lecture. Drawing on
Aristotle's account of eudaimonia, he continued:
In modern
parlance, you’d say it’s very akin to being in the flow; it’s a full form of
life that’s being lived in a certain way. The concert pianist from the point at
which the pianist begins to play scales to the point at which the seasoned
pianist serves up a perfect rendering of “Moonlight” Sonata. Do you see? This
activity . . . of a lifetime, it’s a flourishing kind of lifetime, many, many
bumps in the road, many things that have to be overcome. But it’s the attempted
realization of a perfectionist ideal. That’s what the “pursuit of happiness”
should be understood as referring to.
Not everyone is
cut out to be a concert pianist or an astronaut or you name it. That’s not what
Robinson meant. It’s not what I mean.
Humans are the
only creatures on earth capable of this kind of flourishing, but flourishing is
hard under economic conditions designed to keep people working and ultimately
living like animals, cattle incapable even of starting families or owning
homes.
The left thinks
the solution is treating slightly better-off Americans like kulaks. The right
seems to just want to sh*tpost. Whoever can figure out how to address this in a
compelling way could hold power for a hundred years.
Mr Gonzalex
places the problem mainly in the economic sphere, but by his raising the issue
of eudaimonia/happiness, he has shown that is actually the spiritual dimension where
the problem mainly lies.
To give an
adequate answer to the issues he raises, we must begin by trying to understand
the world in which we live. We do not
live in Paradise. We do not live in
utopia. We do not live in fantasy fairie
land. We do not live in the political
philosophers’ state of nature. We do not
live in a rationalistic, scientistic, non-theistic neutral ground called the
saeculum (the secular).
We live in
Babylon.
The renowned
priest-monk Father Athanasius Mitilianaios, commenting on Revelation 14:8,
defines Babylon for us thusly (via this
video by Fr Peter Heers):
. . .
The rest is
at https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-answer-to-the-riddle-of-modern-despair-we-live-in-babylon/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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