Like a Broken Record
Another book showed up today. I’ve lost track of how many I’ve purchased in the last months, although I have a list in one of my journals. When a book arrives in the mail, I grab that journal to add the title and author to the list. Once I finish a book on it, I check it off and note the date I read the final word on the last page. The system generally works well, but there are times when I feel pressured to get my money’s worth. That’s when the books-in-progress pile grows and threatens to overwhelm everything that gets too close.
I’m okay when I can continue in my patient plodding, but what happens when the words of one book spark the desire to dive into another? I know I should not have started again on The Beginner’s Guide to Aquinas by Edward Feser, but when I learned about the effect of Aquinas on John Senior’s conversion from nihilism (essentially) to Catholicism, I just had to finally(!) start really studying Aquinas. Of course, that was about a week ago, and the book has sat, untouched, in my reading basket since I finished chapter one.
Nihilism, existentialism, relativism, modernism, postmodernism: what do they all mean? Where did these bad ideas come from? How did they get any traction? What role did they play in bringing us to our knees here and now?
In the early pages of Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson writes:
What we accept as true and how we act are no longer commensurate. We carry on as if our experience has meaning—as if our activities have transcendent value—but we are unable to justify this belief intellectually. We have become trapped by our own capacity for abstraction: it provides us with accurate descriptive information but also undermines our belief in the utility and meaning of existence. This problem has frequently been regarded as tragic (it seems to me, at least, ridiculous)—and has been thoroughly explored in existential philosophy and literature.
In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want our lives to be meaningful, but we’ve kicked God to the curb—the only real, intrinsic source of meaning—and have worked long and hard to find an adequate substitute. The problem is that none exists.
The other problem is that ideas have consequences and well publicized ideas affect more than just the one who thought them up. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead and a little later, he went insane. Was the latter a consequence of the former? René Girard thinks so, at least in an indirect way. It was not Nietzsche’s insanity, however, that people like Adolph Hitler took as the lesson to be learned. It was the notion that mankind might be better off if we stop believing in God. Nothing could be further from the truth, but we humans have a hard time learning from mistakes: our own and others’. We hate failure, so we glom on to something and think it should work for us right from the start. When it doesn’t, what do we do? We double down. Take the “War on Cancer,” declared by President Nixon in 1971, for instance. When researchers failed to find the promised cure within five years, what happened? Just more of the same. The National Institutes of Health has a 2020 budget of about $40 billion. The money that doesn’t go to China for gain of function research on bat viruses, gets spread around here and there, with about $6.44 billion going to cancer research, but has much changed since 1971? Apparently, 9.5 million people die of cancer each year.
I digress. Where was I hoping to go with all this? I guess with the thought that, until we stop pretending that we humans can come up with the ultimate answer,* we’ll never stop asking the bad questions that lead to little more than the same old, same old misery.
*God already provided the ultimate answer a little more than 2,000 years ago.
Little Wins
