Beyond providing safety, what is the appeal of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain?

A joyous conversation among those interested in ultimate truths

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Eventually, any realm touted as a safe haven has to offer some kind of positive reason to defend its existence.

I’ve been inviting folks to come stand on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain throughout the nearly six years I’ve been posting to Precipice. This site had its birth four years after Trumpism’s marginalization of actual conservatism had altered the landscape. And I’ve hammered out tens of thousands of keystrokes in service of the message that Trumpism is an incoherent movement, in thrall to vulgarity and meanness, entirely transactional (and devoid of loyalty), and a threat to national security.

But it’s fair to ask what it is that folks on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain do other than rail against Trumpsim? After all, no one seriously looks to it to form a political movement or party, for reasons of practicality (such as money and the Herculean task of mounting the needed organizational effort), as well as the fact that discussing the NST on an “ideological” level immediately makes it fertile ground for fissures and factions. I’ve seen the snits to which social media threads among young conservatives conferring about how to bring back Reaganism lead. They start out on the same page, but someone inevitably makes a remark that causes a dustup.

How is that different from the tenor of previous periods in modern conservatism? The original editors of National Review got into squabbles. William Buckley spent much energy in the 1950s on letting the Ayn Rand crowd and the John Birch Society know they had no place in the movement. (Whittaker Chambers’s 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged in NR’s pages remains an important document of actual conservatism.)

So it’s always been necessary to guard against the more fevered reactions to the undeniable collectivist and materialist infection of the West that’s been underway since at least Rousseau.

What’s different about the present moment is that the fevered reactions have assumed the status of the only viable alternative to the leftward drift of the last five centuries.

Let’s use a very recent development to illustrate what that means.

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education has just overseen the axing of a slew of humanities majors at all the state’s public universities - IU, ISU, Purdue, Ball State, Ivy Tech and the University of Southern Indiana. The move is the hands-on result of “Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Braun [calling] for more ‘practical’ degrees with direct applications to the workforce.”

And there’s no denying that the Left’s poisoning of the humanities has made it easy for advocates of ham-handed moves like this to argue that, in their poisoned state, these departments and degree programs are useless and indeed harmful. Since that pivotal year, 1968, when the Columbia University administration coddled the student radicals taking over of its offices, the Left’s long march through the institutions has transformed academe. The towering figures of canonical literature, philosophy and historical inquiry were denigrated as dead white males, useless to the increasing variety of demographic groups coming on campus. Hate speech codes, sex weeks and tent cities erected specifically as communities of Jew-hatred became commonplace. You can get an English degree from Yale without ever taking a Shakespeare course.

But what’s happening in Indiana is a baby-out-with-the-bathwater undertaking. Not that I have any ready answers for how we restore literature, history, philosophy, the study of languages, and the arts to the way they were taught 150 years ago. The recently launched University of Austin in the Texas capital city may offer an insight into what effective effort along those lines looks like.

But let’s face it, the nation’s higher-education aspirants aren’t going to be flocking there in needle-moving numbers.

An obvious reason for that is that today’s college student sees what humanities programs have been turned into, and, with the cost of attending a school having become a very serious consideration, they want some career-type bang for their buck, and so go into fields that prepare them for a future of material security, or at least opportunity.

But the essential question that the humanities exist to address - the “why” of human existence - looms whether we pay attention to it or not.

We ought to ask why about all kinds of things that are going on in the world, and they ought to be seen as layers we peel back to get to the ultimate “why” question. Why is Trump so inconsistent on the Ukraine question? Why does Alexandria Ocasio Cortez want to make Americans eschew dense, readily available and relatively inexpensive energy forms in favor of play-like forms that can’t hold their own in the marketplace? Why is OnlyFans the biggest money-maker on the Internet?

There are some “what” and “how” questions attendant to this peeling-back-the”whys” process. What is beauty? What is wisdom? What is integrity? What is dignity? How are they cultivated in a society?

As we approach the ultimate question, the hows, whats and whys converge.

What are we to do, how do we do it, and why should we do it? Most modern people in America, the West, and I daresay the world generally don’t have the time or willingness to stop exactly where they are and ask this. They - we - are so invested in a path for building a cocoon safe from entropy that such questions seem without point.

But I submit that they are the point. Some people are making a lot of money in fields like artificial intelligence, real estate development, medical advancement, investment banking and distraction entertainment, but are their lives any less disjointed and in need of constant shoring up than anyone else’s?

On the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, the main activity is, let us hope, a rich discussion of why we are here, who created us, and what makes for a rewarding life for a human being. It’s where the yearning for transcendence and justification is the main topic of conversation.

And out on the teeny-tiny point of the NST, the conversation turns to an acknowledgment that we really don’t have to yearn, as the transcendent realm is a reality that is only obscured when we ignore it or rebel against it, and justification for our lives is found in a grace that is always pursuing us.

So, it’s a precarious place to stand, but also a joyous one. Which has always been the case, actually.