Anyone who claims to be humble is proud. The more someone insists he is transparent, the more opaque he turns out to be. Anyone who makes a big deal about being for free speech is eager to shut down any expressed view she doesn't like. It really is that simple.
We're so inured to these incongruities that we don't recognize the irony in which we daily swim. If anything characterizes the past 15 years or so, it is utter incoherence. This incoherence is across the board. It is not the exclusive domain of any one side. Ideology is blinding and makes you stupid. Ideologies abound and propagate.
In the words of the Eurythymics song "Sweet Dreams," "everybody is looking for something." Exactly what, many can't say. An endeavor with no objective amounts to wandering in the optimism that you'll stumble onto something. While maybe not all who wander are lost (I can only imagine Tolkien's response to the abuse of this assertion), some certainly are lost. It strikes me as good advice not follow anyone with that bumper sticker.
Saint Benedict responded well to the chaos of his time. At the end of his still magnificent work After Virtue, written more than forty years ago, the late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre contrasted our age with that of Saint Benedict's. Benedict's milieu was what are often called "the Dark Ages." In 1981, MacIntyre wrote that we were entering "a new dark ages."
Contrasting our time with that of 1500 years prior, MacIntyre observed: "This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament." Hence, what we need, he insisted, is "another—doubtless very different—St Benedict." What MacIntyre sought to prescribe is "the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained."
This is what hope, as contrasted with optimism, looks like. It is our lack of consciousness about our predicament that is most worrisome. Beyond that, many remain content to let politics and political ideologies take the lead, which is to get things the wrong way around. Another philosopher worth reading in this regard is Giorgio Agamben, particularly his Homo sacer series of books. There is a convergence between MacIntyre's conclusion and what Agamben asset forth in his book The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Come to think of it, maybe the Saint Benedict we need is not one who is so very so very different.
As you might've guessed, given my usual lack of subtlety, our traditio for this Friday is the Eurthymics "Sweet Dreams." Why? In the immortal words of future senator Bluto Blutarsky, "Why not?"
As Philip Roth observed through the main character of his own favorite novel, Sabbath's Theater, Mickey Sabbath: "whoever thinks himself pure is wicked."
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