What matters at this late hour?

Rethinking what's important in light of new reminders of my mortality

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Something about choosing one aspect of the present moment to make the subject of an essay has just seemed inadequate lately. On the other hand, an attempt to draw a unified-field-theory-type conclusion about our current juncture seems ambitious to the point of absurdity, indulgence and presumption. The world doesn’t need one more voice declaring that it alone is a source of sanity in a world enamored of meaninglessness.

Of course, I can always dive in at the level of ideological degradation. That’s a little tricky these days, though. A conservative - classical liberal? - traditionalist? - fusionist? - such as myself risks glaring misidentification if he confines himself to pointing out the continued metastasis of the progressive agenda of societal transformation. One had best be careful about even employing the term “the Left” in order to get into it. Nowadays, it’s associated with Townhall columns and “Dear Patriot” fundraising emails.

Yes, gender ideology is firmly entrenched in pretty much any and all institutions. You can ruin your career by opting out of the tacit pronoun-choice agreement. Yes, race hustlers are being disingenuous when they try to confine the definition of critical race theory to that formulated by law-field writers of the 1970s. They know damn good and well that school districts around the country are inserting Ibram X. Kendi, Robin diAngelo and the 1619 Project into curricula at every opportunity. Yes, climate alarmism is imposing unnecessary, economically hobbling costs on the world, peddling junk science and providing fertile terrain for grifters and hypocrites. Yes, the Build Back Better monstrosity currently pending in Congress would advance all of these agendas, at a ballooning of government’s debt-and-deficit problem to an even more perilous degree.

But most of the Right has rendered itself completely inadequate to the task of addressing what progressivism seeks to impose. Its natural political repository, the Republican Party, has become dominated by nuts, cowards and sycophants. It’s a party that ostracizes Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger while treating Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar with kid gloves. Congresspersons Thomas Massie and Boebert both post Christmas-greeting tweets with photographs of their families in front of their respective Christmas trees with everybody cradling rifles in their arms. The immediate past Republican president, and almost certainly the party’s 2024 candidate, continues to insist that the 2020 election was rigged. He’s also backing as a Georgia gubernatorial candidate a sitting Senator who failed to win reelection, ensuring that Republicans would lose control of the upper legislative body.

This is not a crowd equipped to take on the stars and heavy hitters among the Democrats. That, in turn, confers a veneer of normalcy to the pronouncements and positions of those stars and heavy hitters. You seriously expect the post-American public to buy a characterization of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as extremist from these cartoonish blowhards?

Or I could begin on the level of art and, more broadly, culture.

I’ve said before that at one point I was kind of sheepish about letting on that I taught rock and roll history at our local community college. I’ve come to see, though, that it offers me a great opportunity to invite young minds to consider a broad context for that musical phenomenon, one they’re not likely to get if they don’t take any courses in the actual history department. The mainstreaming of the flatted seventh in the otherwise major scale, the birth of the recording and radio industries, the effect on those industries of developments such as World War II shellac rationing and the formation of BMI, the development of the electric guitar, the emergence of the teenager as a demographic ripe for targeting by marketers, the turbulent-youth movies of the 1950s, and economic and social conditions in post-war Britain are some of the aspects of the subject I prioritize.

But my larger-sweep-of-history approach isn’t going to move the needle much. People now rarely think beyond the last fifty years at the outset when thinking about music history. Social-media what-are-your-top-five-favorite-bands conversations, acts advertising their live shows in terms of which decades’ hit records they cover (80s metal! 70s soft rock! 90s grunge!) and playlist algorithms are dismaying to come across. Music is so completely commodified that there is no unifying frame of reference. “Taste in music” is a shorthand way of getting a handle on how one is going to relate to others. The question “what do you want to hear?” is processed in much the same way as “what kind of fast food do you want Door Dash to deliver?”

In my earlier post here at Precipice today, I alluded to the impact of recent personal circumstances on my sense of what I ought to deem important:

My own [volatile health] situation is occurring as I’m seeing a lot of death - among peers, and even in my family - and serious illness, also in my family, and it has me thinking afresh about the question of how to determine what is ephemeral and what is lasting.

With regard to music history, the question of whether rock and roll has, on balance, been good or bad for Western civilization is starting to interest me less than what we have done to music, and artistic expression in general, by jettisoning any sense of the transcendent - and, in turn, what art has done to us as a result.

When you expand your scope thusly, you’re led to see what the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Blake and Shelly, did to the course of our civilization by badmouthing centuries-old conventions, norms and mores (think marriage and sexual fidelity) and venerating moods and passions as worthy guides to a well-lived life. You’re led to examine the effects of our general acceptance of the Freudian notion that sexual impulses dictate everything about the human condition. You’re led to confront the erosion of the common understanding of what intellectual inquiry was for into what Julien Benda called “glorified particularisms and moral relativism.”

What’s happened to our society over the course of my lifetime, or even over the last 150 years, can’t be considered in a vacuum. I become more convinced every day that a knowledge of history is essential to making sense of one’s existence.

This post is essentially a continuation of the one that precedes it, so I feel free to refer to that one in summing up my thoughts on this subject.

In addition to the physical-health challenges to my stamina and ability to focus, I’ve had to step back and think anew about what purpose my writing ought to serve. “Non-Trumpist conservatives ought to network and brainstorm” or “Artists ought to elevate their work above the coarse and nihilistic” or even “This country needs to, en masse, humbly turn back to God” are intellectually lazy ways of grappling with our present juncture. That seems like a wholly unsatisfying use of my time and energy.

A lifetime really isn’t much more than the blink of an eye. What, then, is it important to devote our attention to during its brief unfolding? What about our earthly existence is going to last? What is the most effective way of being about whatever that is? What are the eternal implications of our choices?

It’s not that the events of the day are unimportant. It’s that they can only be properly regarded in terms of the evidence of what has worked for us and what has turned out to be time-wasting folly.