The wheat-from-chaff question looks different from this vantage point

Thoughts on what's essential, what's important, what's fleetingly interesting, and what should be jettisoned

In a couple of months, Precipice will be three years old. My blog, Late in the Day, turned 11 in August. Both are products of my attempt to strike a balance between humaneness and standing firm in a time when norms, conventions and understandings, some of which had been with humankind for thousands of years, have been eroded - in some cases obliterated - throughout Western civilization and indeed the world.

It’s been a decade-plus in which most voices participating in the societal conversation melee, whether on “my side” (the right of center, broadly speaking) or the other, have committed themselves to extolling combativeness as a virtue. (Just this morning, I read a piece by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie that remarked on how we went from an Internet that was, in the 1990s, and “information utopia” to its current status as an “intellectual Thunderdome.”)

If you look back at early LITD pieces, and probably even some early Precipice essays, you can undeniably detect moments in which I’ve succumbed to gratuitous scrappiness. I’d like to think that I get better at checking that impulse before I hit “publish,” but you, dear reader, ultimately decide that.

I also presently have reasons to look back at the arc of my entire earthly existence to date. The past three years have impressed upon me the ephemeral nature of this realm, starting with the pandemic/lockdown, a slew of personal health issues including two joint-replacement surgeries and the deaths of a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, and my sister.

For myriad reasons, I won’t rehash my entire life story here - plenty of Precipice posts are at least somewhat biographical nature as it is - but it can be seen as the search for an antidote to relentless cognitive dissonance.

My father was equal parts entrepreneur (he started a small manufacturing company at age 27), intellectual (I daresay that I learned about Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek at an earlier age than most who become enthusiasts), and passionate hobbyist (sailing, flying, golf), but most significantly, he devoted himself to shaping the character of young men (scoutmaster, sailing instructor, champion of the Exchange Club’s Boy of the Month program).

So when I came along, he had a blank slate on which he could impress the values and virtues he’d come to see as essential to forming an exemplary boy.

Except that he ran into cultural headwinds he couldn’t have foreseen. I was 8 when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. I started playing rock professionally as a teen. Tried my first marijuana at 15. Found a girlfriend who was as eager as I was to interact without restraint. Went off to college and immediately fell in with the readers of the Beats and Romantics and the jazz enthusiasts.

My track record as a productive member of the American economy after that is, shall we say, unremarkable. I did this and that without much direction until I started to sell some magazine pieces in the early 1990s. I’d finally established a career.

Let me back up about a decade, though. I had a conversion experience that made me a conservative. My father’s influence was peripheral at best. I just took a good long look at the essence of leftism and the way it was playing out in areas of life in which it’s still wreaking its ruin today: identity politics, climate alarmism, collectivist economics, and a scoffing at the idea that America and the West had any redeeming qualities.

I pursued and earned a master’s degree in history. I became something of a conference junkie. I wrote about the most memorable experience in that regard in a LITD post in May of this year on the occasion of Midge Decter’s passing:

 In 1987, I attended a conference her Committee for the Free World put on at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was just a thirty-something guy from flyover country, working in the family business and hating it. I'd had my conversion experience about two years prior, which had led me to subscribing to National Review, The American Spectator, Commentary and a slew of other journals, as well as embarking on a pursuit of a master's 'degree in history. I happened upon an announcement about the conference and signed up. I drove out to DC by myself and stayed with friends in suburban Maryland.

It was quite the immersion experience, rubbing shoulders with the giants of neoconservatism: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Bennett (behind whom I stood in the beer line at the opening-night reception), Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik (next to whom I sat at lunch one day and had a great conversation about the Marxist-Leninist threat in Central America), and, of course, Midge Decter. 

I got married in 1990, which brought step-type family members and a slew of in-laws into my life, but I’ve never had children of my own. I don’t have the experience of marking rites of passage in my own offspring that has characterized that of the preponderance of my peers. I’ve never had the kind of stake in a young life that parents know intimately.

And, of course, the ideological squaring-off of our society has continued apace over the last three decades leading to - well, what we’re all facing today.

In the past ten years, I have become serious about a faith walk. That’s been by fits and starts, and at times I wonder if I’m not a phony for even characterizing it as such. How “serious” can I be when my lapses are still so glaring?

But, as I say, people who had been in my life for decades (in my sister’s case, all my life) have been dying off, and my connection to an at least seemingly stable past grows ever dimmer.

What is there to hold on to?

I wish off-the-shelf references to God and Scripture did the trick. It’s not that I doubt. I’m now more immersed than ever in cultivating a serious relationship with my creator. I recently joined a Bible study at the church I’ve been attending. Still, the cacophonous nature of our times, when economic uncertainty, a prospect of superpower nuclear conflagration, unprecedented brittleness in relations between the sexes, and, of course, mainstreaming of the idea that gender is merely a construct, make for a level of noise that is hard to tune out.

As another year of my maneuvering through this earthly realm draws to a close, so many of the old remedies clearly don’t work anymore. I can now see that I’ve spent inordinate amounts of my life entertaining myself in various ways, some truly enriching and some not so noble.

I just plain don’t have the energy to get ensnarled in social-media brawls anymore. They accomplish nothing but raising my blood pressure. They were, in the final analysis, yet another form of entertainment, one that came at the expense of my dignity.

I almost used the word “serenity” to conclude that last paragraph, but decided against it. I’m really not after serenity. Something in me says that I can’t afford any form of escapism at this late date. I have no interest in being “happy” as such.

No big conclusions here. I certainly have no course of action to recommend to you. Maybe a happiness focus suits you just fine.

I just wanted to share a bit of what’s on my mind as a number of things come to a close. I want some standard for discerning what’s important.

More than ever, I want to know how to tell the gold from the dross.