Your Neck Problem, “Solved”

4 minutes

This is a follow up to the previous post. By the neck, I meant the healthy relation of goods. To find it, we need, as a human race, to let go of the modern habit of trench warfare. Right now, most of us reason as follows: here is a good thing; my favorite good thing, my little piece of ground. Over there are some things that are in apparent tension with this good thing. Since they are in tension, they must be in total opposition [error!] Over there are also some people who favor things at tension with this good thing. (My precious!) Those people are also bad (or, perhaps just stupid, if I’m being nice.) I must oppose them, and everything they favor. I must see the insidious meaning behind every word they utter. I must not take any good thing at face value, lest it be a poisoned pawn, a Trojan horse. And I don’t want to look foolish. True, there are times I know that my attitude is irrational, which is why my advocacy has a certain quality of cruelty and mania, and a total lack of sportsmanship. But THERE IS TOO MUCH AT STAKE for half-measures!

So, that was the disease; what is the cure? First, we must replace the habit of seeing everything in relation to one good, with a habit of collecting all the goods we can. The wholesome post-postmodern man will approach the world like a small child who, whenever he comes across a good thing, picks it up, and tastes it, and smells it, and admires it, and stores it away “for later.” Like Darwin in the Galapagos, we should be constantly collecting little bits of good, lest we forget that we saw them. At this stage, the goodness inherent in things is sufficient reason for loving them, provided that we refuse to fixate on one species to the exclusion of all others. And even if we never go further than this habit of constant wonder, happy perplexity, at every new, good thing, without ever dismissing the goodness of the old new things, then we’ll still be far in advance of our modern and post-modern progenitors.

The next step is to place those goods before us all at once. We must develop the habit of surveying them, noting apparent connections, pondering apparent tensions. Since truth cannot contradict truth, we will constantly remind ourselves that goods cannot contradict goods. At best, they are in tension, like the movements in a symphony. This both-and approach must be our jumping off point, if we post-postmoderns are to find any wisdom. Of course, that will mean admitting to a better a kind of ignorance than either moderns or post-moderns are willing to admit. The former, in general, knows no greater insult than not being counted among those “in the know,” while the latter, in general, knows no greater evil than presuming to know anything. We wise men and women of the future must be able to know what we know, and, just as happily, not know. This is what someone, maybe Chesterton, called “the higher agnosticism,” and we are presently quite bad at it.

This approach, besides being sane, is also quite practical. It can help a scientific man to at least appreciate — and to that extent, empathize — with his cousin’s attraction to herbal remedies. He can see the good, not of the scientific error in which his cousin believes, but of the man’s reasonable desire for accessible and practicable health. And he will be less dogmatically irate when one of those herbal remedies actually works. This approach can help a young athlete to admire a scholarly classmate, or the latter to recognize the virtues of physical courage, which the athlete has, and which he ought to develop in himself. It can cause a rugged individualist to consider that even the exercise of his strengths and talents requires a network of interdependencies, just as it can move a communal-minded nurturer to to appreciate the community’s need for strong, capable individuals. Examples like this could be multiplied ad infinitum; the point is that goods must first be recognized, and then consciously put in relation to each other.

I am not advocating relativism. I am advocating juggling. The relativist has no practical reference point for all the goods people value, so he leaves them on the floor, or picks them up as the mood takes him. The juggler has a reference point: he keeps the balls in the air, as many as he can manage. He leaves it to others to handle those he cannot handle. His limitations do not lead to doubts about reality, about the goodness of the many colored balls, but to the right kind of doubts about himself. Far from making him narrow-minded or skeptical, his limitations reinforce the vastness of things, while keeping him attentive to the goods it his particular task to keep aloft.

Now this habit of acknowledging goods, and doing our best to see them in relation, is not a panacea. It will only make men more wise, more humble, and less rancorous. It will not solve the problem of who is juggling all the balls, who is looking after the total good, when an honest man or woman can only do so much. In the absence of sound philosophy, and of true religion, someone will try to fill the cosmic void with an all encompassing ideology, or a omniscient state.

Then there is the problem of “points of view” that are beyond the pale. I can give a charitable hearing to my neighbor, the monarchist, because I see that he values order, and honor, and the society seen as a family. I cannot “give a hearing” to the man arguing the merits of smothering grandmother with a pillow, or of normalizing pederasty. What falls within the bounds of reasonable discussion, the halo of normality, is another topic for another post. All I wish to insist on here is that people who are attracted to decency and goodness — and such people are always in the majority — should take the holistic approach I’ve sketched above. Be a collector and ponderer of goods. Whenever possible, assume good will in your enemy. Find the natal good he is defending, the one precious thing he has made an absolute, and start with that.

It is, after all, a burden to constantly assume bad will, or worse, incurable ignorance. And further we go in this direction, the more polarized we become, the more deeply we sever the head from the heart. We decapitate ourselves.

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