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Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘The Answer to the Riddle of Modern Despair: We Live in Babylon’

 

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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