The price of our frivolity

A disjointed society that can't determine why anything it encounters should mean anything

At least to start, I’m going to focus on the political level on which our utter dearth of seriousness is playing out.

Let’s start with the biggie. Unless death intervenes, our choices for presidential candidates a year from November are going to be two corrupt octogenarians, one of whom mouths the progressive priorities of climate alarmism, identity politics militancy and redistribution, but who is actually motivated by the self-satisfaction of having finally attained the brass ring as well as setting his family up financially, and the other of whom thinks he’s mouthing conservative priorities, but can’t muster the intellectual clarity to do so coherently - and is only motivated by being on the receiving end of glorification.

Both have legal troubles breathing down their necks.

Joe Biden is strongly implicated in his son Hunter’s morass of tax evasion, strong-arming of a Ukrainian energy company, and kid-glove treatment from the FBI and DoJ. There’s also the abrupt way the Secret Service closed the matter of the White House cocaine, saying it couldn’t determine whose it was.

Donald Trump has already been indicted twice, and more indictments are coming. This country went 240-plus years without a president or former president being indicted.

Okay, say Trump can’t run for some reason next year. His second-place competitor characterizes Russia’s outright invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” and does nothing to help himself when he tries to walk it back. He also characterizes January 6 as “a lot of protesters [whose actions] ended up devolving in ways that were unfortunate of course.”

How about the House of Representatives? It felt compelled to bring to the floor and vote on a resolution stating that Israel, one of the United States’s closest allies, and the only Western nation in the Middle East, is not a racist state, because some vocal House members claimed it was. And nine representatives voted against the resolution.

And speaking of the House floor, that’s where the “little bitch” catfight between Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert occurred over who should sponsor a bill to impeach the president. Now, Biden may well wind up deserving that, but at this time it’s nothing but unserious posturing. Yet, these two clowns take it so seriously they’ll embarrass the nation in order to claim credit for wanting it the most ardently.

Now, on to the cultural level.

I’ve written before about how the fact that so many Hollywood blockbusters are about comic book characters does not speak well for our cultural health.

We’ve now gone to another degree of self-embarrassment. A new Tinseltown offering made $22.3 million in preview-night receipts, and is on track for at least a $100 million opening weekend. And what is the movie about? A damn Mattel doll.

The American Alliance of Museums has issued a “welcoming guide” for people with unorthodox sex lives.

One ought to be able to assume that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine would be focused on the entirely objective realm of inquiry into our physical world, right? Its new report, Advancing Antiracism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations: Broadening Beyond Participation will disabuse you of that.

Jesse Jackson, are you pleased with the momentum you imparted to our cultural decay 36 years ago when you led the crowd in chanting “Hey hey ho ho Western civ has got to go" at a demonstration at Stanford University?

As you know, here at Precipice lately, I’ve been running a quasi-series on big philosophical questions. I’ve written essays about principles, freedom, rights, objectivity, music, character, and beauty this spring and summer.

Like any Substack writer, I constantly look at how to best serve the types of readers I’m attracting. I sometimes wonder how big I’ll be able to grow the Precipice community writing about topics that could be argued to have mere niche appeal.

But somebody had better be grappling with these basic concepts. We now live in a society in which nobody has any idea why he or she does anything.

In March, I wrote a post about how we ought to use Philippians 4:8 as our guideline for what to pay attention to in life. You know, cultivating the discernment to see if a given thing we encounter is right, true, lovely, pure, right, noble and admirable.

What a fine notion. How many are on board?

We’ve forfeited our dignity, our imago dei essence. We have no common understanding of what it means for anything to mean anything.

This occurs within the context of a world stage on which developments of the utmost seriousness appear without relent.

We’ll have no idea what to make of any of them if they become crises we can’t avoid facing.

But by all means, let’s glom onto the next distraction.