Everybody is talking about religion. Or not. But whatever they are talking about we are all still concerned about Douglas Adams' recurring theme in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
On the one hand, as I wrote last week, we have our lefty friends with their Original Sin of "systemic racism" and their Apocalypse that global warming that will mean the End of the World unless we act now.
On the other, we have the experience of a young woman acquaintance who found, after her traumatic brain injury, that she couldn't experience God and the divine any more. But slowly, that sensitive part of her brain is coming back.
On the other we have another acquaintance who notes that "The words superstition and religion are synonyms. Yet everyone claims one and not the other." Whatever I believe it is the truth, and what the other guys believe is a lie.
Then we have the Zman today writing about the "aridity of the intellectual landscape."
Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.
But what comes next?
[Conservatism] should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.
While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.
Yes, but what? Well, here is Austin Schue, "a 26-year-old American, working-class college dropout who owns and operates a small business" in northern California. Who has read a book. Who has actually had an original thought. Who can actually write an article. And he is writing about his life journey -- on several levels.
He is writing about the necessity of earning a living. And he is talking of the necessity of a meaningful life. And this young man has actually read Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning.
In my private reading, I noticed that the heroes of my favorite books acted on the truth in accordance with their belief systems—as in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein protagonist R.P. McMurphy is lobotomized after he attempts to liberate his fellow insane-asylum inmates from the tyrannical regime of Nurse Ratched. I heard echoes of Christianity, my past faith, in his sacrifice.
He observed the contradictions in the left wing message.
On one hand, they pushed a feminized and pacifistic ideal of society. Yet at the same time, they glorified any kind of violent resistance that presented itself as progressive—a pattern we’ve seen play out in spades over recent months.
How come I didn't think of writing that?
So what did he do? He learned to become a farrier, shoeing horses! And "ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle." But what about the meaning of life?
As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas. What I really wanted to do was forge a coherent centrist viewpoint—one that can accommodate personal responsibility, the search for truth, sincere compassion for the less fortunate, and a sensible commitment to preserving the Earth’s ecosystems.
Remember, this guy is 26. Then he began listening to Joe Rogan's podcast. And his lefty girl-friend found out about Jordan B. Peterson.
I was particularly blown away by the depth of Dr. Peterson’s knowledge, and the way he coherently tied together ideas from psychology, history, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy, and myth.
Exactly. Peterson is trying to construct a new "meaning of life" from all our knowledge, ancient and modern.
I started exploring his writing. This is the way children feel when they first hear a kind of music that resonates deeply. It was my intellectual Led Zeppelin. Like many of Peterson’s other fans, I implemented his lessons in my own life, and became a more responsible and assertive entrepreneur as a result.
Yes, the world is falling apart like a toxic marriage.
[Yet] most people I meet in the world just smile and say hello, even with a mask on. They seem to find life tolerable and even enjoyable. I see people going out to fish or mountain bike. I see tradesmen hustling. The healthiest people are the ones who picked a real tangible goal in their own life, and are working toward it.
Engaging in that process saves lives. It certainly saved my life. And while it may be too late for my relative, it’s not too late for members of my own generation. Clean your room. Build a house. Shoe a horse. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you aspire to something other than burning down somebody else’s prosperity and happiness.
May I suggest that if there are young men like Austin Shue in the world, then we may concur with George Eliot in Middlemarch, that
the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
As everybody understands, we need to conjure up a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the face of an old order that stumbles along, using its power and its domination to keep the old order going, just one more cycle.
It is good to know that good people are working on it.
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