My personal struggle with contempt

Eradicating it from my heart would be my most important contribution to ratcheting down our societal polarization

In my inital round of online reads this morning, I came across an essay at Law & Liberty by John O. McGinnis entitled “Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?” It really doesn’t cover any ground that hasn’t been covered before. It notes the three main components of our present crisis: decline of education, decline of civic associations, and the transmutation of the religious impulse. McGinnis even shares my inclination toward pessimism about our prospects for any kind of civic restoration.

Let’s be clear that the remedy, at this late date, does not lie in each of us mustering the resolve to, by golly, see more in our fellow citizens than the ideological - indeed, epistemological - chasms between us. The plain fact is that there are a lot of worldviews out there that strip us of our humanity. Living with them - tolerating them, if you will - is something anyone who strives to cultivate a moral compass can’t accept.

As McGinnis points out, climate alarmism, which demands a halt to human advancement regarding such modern blessings as safety, comfort and convenience, is something that we ought not to abide by. He also notes the normalization of the Howard Zinn’s and Nicole Hannah-Jones’s view of America’s essence, and this likewise falls outside the parameters of “just one of many viewpoints we ought to consider in our nation’s classrooms.”

I would add to his enumerations the mainstreaming of historically unprecedented notions of human sexuality, such as the expansion of the definition of marriage to include unions of two people of the same sex, and the legitimization of self-identification with the sex opposite one’s DNA and genitals. Carl Trueman is exactly right in asserting that, of all the bizarre novelties we’re living with, this one takes us into realms devoid of reference points. In combination with artificial intelligence, it has the capacity to completely untether us from assumptions we as members of the species Homo sapiens have held since our arrival among the planet’s life forms.

Conversely, the fact that well over half of those who identify with one of the nation’s two major political parties intend to vote for the most unfit, vulgar and infantile person to ever enter US politics, even after two impeachments, four indictments, and the increasingly unhinged nature of his social-media blurtings cannot be permitted to be seen as a new normal.

Along those lines, New Right abandonment of the free-market component of conventional conservatism’s vision erodes the overall centrality of human freedom on which that vision rests. Some very smart people have gone in for this. It seems they have lost sight of what Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt had to say about how an individual’s freedom of choice about what to own, buy, sell, invent and market is a divinely granted gift. This one really does boil down to a binary choice. One is either free to come to an agreement with one’s fellow human being about the value of a good or service being considered for exchange, or we’re talking about central planning. Prattle about “settling for imperfect arrangements” that compromise this freedom of choice, this personal sovereignty, stinks of rudderlessness.

This is what I mean by inhabiting an ever-narrower sliver of terrain. There is no space in our public square for a healthy prescription for peaceable co-existence.

That said, all the destructive devotions I’ve discussed here are embraced by my actual various fellow human beings, and I have to figure out how to hold them in some kind of basic regard. I pass them on the sidewalk. I host them for Thanksgiving dinner. They’re colleagues at the university where I teach. I have them as social-media friends.

If I hold them in contempt, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn,” I cage myself in a kind of isolation in which productive existence becomes impossible.

More fundamentally, in so doing, I sin. No matter what they have proclaimed or done, they were created by the same God who fashioned me, and have the same right to breathe and pursue happiness that I have.

From what I can tell, and chime in if you see another alternative, the only way to deal with this is the one I put forth in the post last month entitled “Despair and Faith”:

And that is where the conclusion - as in the last seven seconds of his twenty-four-minutes-and-fourteen-seconds talk - of Paul Kingsnorth’s video presentation for UnHerd entitled “What Is There Left To Conserve?” is helpful.

I relate, to a significant degree, to Kingsnorth. He’s a recent Christian, and his path to the faith included immersions in atheism, Buddhism, and even witchcraft. His feet are firmly planted behind his plow now, and his faith is visceral and no-nonsense. He doesn’t trade in platitudes, pep talks or devotional balm. He asserts that the West, as a sweeping project that humankind has undertaken, and which, for several centuries, imparted nobility to the life of our species, is a spent force and putting hope in its revitalization is a fool’s errand.

His UnHerd talk covers this territory. He has coined a term, The Machine, which he uses a lot in his writings and talks, and here he says that The Machine has swallowed up our ability to understand what we were actually made for.

I’m going to flat-out give your the spoiler. He concludes with this: “What can you do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer is pray.”

That’s it. There’s no systematic walk-through of some method for effectively praying. That’s for us to go forth and grapple with.

But prayer is indeed all that’s left to us. In a sense, it’s all we ever had.

I’ll never surmount my morass if I don’t get myself out of the way and invite God to take over my entire being. It’s the breastplate, helmet and armor of any soul that’s going to spend eternity as it was designed to.

I had to revisit this terrain today because the stakes are the highest possible regarding which power -the dark or the light - is going to rule my heart. I’m not proud of my flirtation with contempt, but if I don’t write about it honestly, I’ve done a disservice to you. I’ve invited you to be part of a conversation here at Precipice, and I’d better be honest in holding up my end of it.

This is tough, and, since this site seems to resonate with you, you may experience something similar.

So I pray. From that, I hope some kind of healthy insight for how to outwardly proceed as an inhabitant of America, Western civilization and humankind generally will occur to me.

But first things first.

Heavenly Father, cleanse my heart.