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Old Leftists - Proof Against Wisdom With Age

8/31/2019

That people inevitably grow wiser as they age is a cliché and a misconception. More often than not, my life experience has revealed the opposite to be the case. Most people I know from the older generations have not accrued an ounce of wisdom as they have aged. In fact, a considerable number have gone in the opposite direction and have become increasingly foolish and stupid as they entered or waded deeper into their senior years.

It goes without saying that I am not referring to those suffering from some form of age-related mental decline or those battling dementia or Alzheimer’s, but to men and women in their sixties, seventies, and beyond who still possess all their mental faculties yet seem utterly incapable or ruthlessly uninterested in re-examining their assumptions or re-assessing the core of their beliefs against the backdrop of their experiences.

The case against wisdom accumulation with age is most glaring in old leftists. Of course, nearly every Westerner in their golden years is a leftist, even those who staunchly tout themselves as classic liberals and conservatives, but the most obviously unwise are old uber-leftists. I tend to forgive the young when they gravitate toward radical leftism, but I remain bewildered by septuagenarians who are just as transfixed and obsessed by leftism as they were in their youth, in some cases even more so. Old leftists fly in the face of common sense and give credence to the term “true believer”. It perplexes me to know people who, despite six, seven, or even eight years of life in this world, have been unable to or completely unwilling to recognize the lie leftism is built upon.

I was drawn to leftism in my teens, and it dominated much of my twenties, but by my late twenties I had more or less recognized leftism for what it was. I spent the bulk of my thirties weening myself away from the leftist/liberal narrative and began to embrace a higher understanding of what life truly involves. Much of this turning away was based on the evidence against leftism I encountered as I went about my everyday life. The rest came from deep reading, contemplation, and a reimmersion into Christianity. As might be expected, this was a long, drawn out process that included many fits and starts and uncertainties and long nights of the soul, but as I reflect upon it now, I tend to regard it all as development and growth based on learning. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I believe the process helped me become wiser.

Needless to say, the journey I have briefly outlined above is not unique to me, nor am I holding myself up as some specimen of sagacity. What I am pointing out is that leftist beliefs (and other errant beliefs) can and do degenerate and fade over time if the effort to challenge and work through flawed assumptions and motivations is made. The process can also be accelerated through a sincere assessment of life experience and intuitive knowledge.

Acquiring wisdom is ongoing process and even the wisest are at risk of misjudging or falling prey to folly (I am prone to a great deal of stupid, flawed thinking myself, but it is generally not the same level of stupid, flawed thinking I possessed when I was twenty-two). The age/wisdom cliché is based on the sensible notion that people will accrue good qualities of knowledge and judgement as they age simply through the life experience they have accumulated. Sadly, for most people, nothing could be farther from the truth because it seems most people do not learn from experience

Case in point, there’s this gentleman I know, a septuagenarian, whose biggest concern in life is climate change. The gentleman in question is a bit of a wingnut, but he is not a malicious fellow and is generally friendly and polite. From what I have been able to gather in my interactions with him, he is an unapologetic lifelong leftist, one who has morphed from an old school Marxist/anti-capitalist leftist into a full-blown contemporary leftist obsessed by diversity, inclusivity, and equality. Above all else, he is a rabid environmentalist, and he sends me at least five or six articles via email a week all screeching about the inevitable death of the planet due to anthropogenic climate change. The following thoughts come to mind every time I receive one of these emails. I admit, some of these thoughts are a bit callous:

1. At his age, what does he care?

2. Doesn’t he remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s? I do, and I was a kid.

3. Even if all of the articles are true, doesn’t he see what governments and the elite are using this hysteria for?

4. He goes to church on Sundays. Why doesn’t he focus his thoughts on more important things, especially at his age?

Anyway, I don’t want to harp on about this particular gentleman. I merely wanted to illustrate my point of age not leading to wisdom, and to emphasize that I generally do not know what to make of people like him. It baffles me to think a person can live in what I would equate with a state of perpetual denial for seven or eight decades. It must be exhausting, especially after retirement when the many hours work used to fill are suddenly freed up for reflection and introspection. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of comfort – of sticking with the devil you know. Perhaps it’s a matter of stubborn pride. Or perhaps it’s a conscious, active choice against the Good. Whatever the case, it’s mind-boggling all the same.

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Too Negative To Be Profound

8/29/2019

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Evil exists. No denying it. And, yes, recognizing Evil and informing others of the traps it lays is immensely useful, but to see Evil everywhere while being utterly blind to the Good is a sign that we have been led astray – that we have fallen into the most subtle trap Evil employs. Fighting monsters is a noble endeavor, but we must remember Nietzsche’s warning and avoid becoming monsters ourselves when we engage in battle. Without doubt, bad news is ubiquitous, but what do we accomplish if report only bad news at the expense of the Good News?

What service have we offered if we have done nothing but paint it all black? When we leave those we seek to help submerged in open water without a shred of hope and encouragement to which they might be able to cling? Yes, I understand this is reality and about calling a spade a spade. To be sure, this no time for rainbows and soap bubbles. The rose-colored glasses most certainly must come off. And yes, I understand we simply can’t sugarcoat most of what we see. I also understand that reporting anything too positive would strip our messages of any profundity, but have we considered the reverse? That what we communicate to others is often too negative to be profound?

In our yearning to provide hope, may we actually be sparking fear and despair? To return to Nietzsche – we write of the things we see as we stare into the abyss, but are we aware of the abyss staring back at us? And if we are, do we believe that it has eclipsed the Good entirely - that nothing else exists?

No, let us be done with undiluted doom and gloom. Let us be done with courage that discourages and moralizing that demoralizes. Our perpetual pessimism peddling places us in unpremeditated partnerships with the pernicious. Let us abandon temptation of being too negative to be profound and focus instead on being too profound to be negative.

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Berdyaev's Reading Process

8/28/2019

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"I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly."

Sounds similar to the way I read with the exception of a terrible habit I have recently allowed to form - dozing off after twenty or thirty minutes of reading.

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József Koszta - Field Work Paintings

8/27/2019

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József Koszta (1861 - 1949) is one of my favorite Hungarian painters mostly because of the subject matter of his paintings. Born is what is today Brasov, Romania, Koszta spent a great deal of time in the Hungarian Great Plain - a flat expanse of fields and meadows that covers much of the eastern part of the country - and consequently fell in love with the people and the landscape that typified the region during his time.

Koszta's style is relatively simple and somewhat impressionistic, but his mastery of backlighting and shadow is second to none. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his paintings depicting rural folk engaged in agricultural field work in the Great Hungarian Plain. Koszta's magnificent sense of color perfectly reflects the flat expanses of land under vast, looming skies. Through his painstaking effort to place shadows exactly where they should be, Koszta expertly shrouds his field workers so that their identifying features become one with the landscape, thereby blurring the line separating the land from the people. In Koszta's eyes, the people seemed to be as much a part of the landscape as the natural and agricultural features in the background - there was no notable distinction between the two. In Koszta's mind, the one belonged to the other and vice-versa, which is why he probably depicting the figures in his field work paintings the way he did.

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Childlessness as the Ultimate Virtue

8/25/2019

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Modern Western people have been actively choosing sub-replacement fertility for decades. This choice is often attributed to factors such as career demands, increased urbanization, easy access to contraception, and the changing social and economic roles of women. There is no doubt these factors play a role, but in the end they are merely symptoms of a much deeper factor influencing sub-replacement fertility – spiritual malaise. Naturally, the metaphysical and spiritual factors behind low fertility are rarely considered and almost never discussed in the post-Christian West. And why would they be? To do so would be to play against the positivism, reductionism, materialism, and secularism the post-Christian West has so eagerly and self-destructively embraced. In the contemporary West, it is better to ignore and deny the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of any problem and attempt to find solutions in the same positivism, reductionism, materialism, and secularism that caused the problem in the first place.

On the surface, sub-replacement fertility is the most obvious and blatant example of just how utterly insane and anti-life the post-Christian West has become. In the past few decades, people have claimed things like education, careers, and urbanization are the sole causes of low fertility. Other factors such hedonism, selfishness, value-inversion, and the avoidance of responsibility are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Having and raising children requires a significant amount of self-sacrifice and responsibility. Despite arguments to the contrary, it is readily apparent that avoiding self-sacrifice and responsibility is a major driver behind the decisions of the ever increasing number of Westerners who choose not to have children. Let's be honest; kids are a drag. They get in the way of climbing the corporate ladder, weekend parties, and exotic sex-urlaub adventures in Thailand.

Choosing not to have children may have been stigmatized in previous decades, but childless adults have increasingly become the norm in the contemporary West. So much so that adults with children – especially adults with many children – are often regarded as quaint and old-fashioned. Still, I imagine some childless adults question the choices they have made, especially as they age. They must have moments when they feel they have missed on something significant by not having kids – that their choice to forgo children may have been based on essentially shallow and selfish reasons.

Well, childless adults who feel such pangs of remorse need fret no longer because climate change hysteria and environmental fanaticism has made childlessness one of the highest virtues to which a contemporary Westerner can aspire. Choosing not to reproduce in an effort to save the planet has become the ultimate act of self-abnegation and social responsibility. Hence, Modern Westerners who consciously chose not to have children in order to preserve hedonistic lifestyles need no longer fret over the possibility of being stigmatized or judged. On the contrary, their choice to remain childless will be regarded as an admirable act of self-abnegation and altruism.

A conversation that surely occurred at a recent cocktail party somewhere in the West:

“Naturally I wanted to have kids, but when I considered climate change and the state of the global environment, I knew having children would be the wrong thing to do. It would just be so . . . irresponsible.”

“Oh, I couldn’t agree more. Only selfish and ignorant brutes consider having kids these days. I mean, do you know how big a carbon footprint a child accrues over a lifetime?”

“To say nothing of disposable diapers in landfills!”

“Yuck!”

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Western Cities - Don't Hold Your Breath

8/24/2019

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I find blog posts about how bleak and untenable life in Western cities has become extremely interesting. Having spent the better part of my adult life working in two major urban centers in the West - Toronto and New York - I can easily relate to and have personally experienced many of the problems and plights bloggers bring to our attention in their criticism of Western cities, problems that include replacement migration, high taxes, road congestion, perpetual traffic, increased crime, failing schools, social disintegration, the high cost of living, low wages, astronomical real estate prices, diminishing employment prospects, and so forth. As much as these problems plaguing Western cities interest me, I have come to understand that they will never be solved, and that it is essentially pointless to hold out any hope that they ever will be solved.

Though the problems mentioned above are materialistic in nature - social, economic, demographic - they are all firmly rooted in the West's spiritual malaise; hence, these problems cannot and will not be solved unless the root of the problem is acknowledged first. Of course it goes without saying that there is zero motivation to acknowledge the spiritual underpinnings of the many quandaries infecting Western cities. On the contrary, Western cities have been purposefully engineered to become massive spirit-denying and soul-crushing mechanisms whose primary aims include inciting hedonism, inducing despair, and, consequently, damning souls. In my more cheerful moments, I tend to think of cities like New York and London as enormous open-air concentration camps that slowly, but surely, suck the life and sanity (and soul) out of each and every one of its inhabitants.

I understand that living in cities is a necessity (or a conscious choice) for many. Unfortunately, I can offer no advice about how to go about making life in a Western city more tenable and palatable. I tried to make urban living more tenable and palatable myself for over two decades. In the end, I threw in the towel, abandoned cities, and moved to a small rural village instead. Naturally, this option is not open to all, nor would it be a good or viable choice for all. Living in the countryside provides some distance from the epicenters of despair, but it offers no immunity to the spiritual death spiral the West is currently locked into.

In the end, people will have to figure out how they can confront and survive the many challenges modern Western cities thrust upon them. Solutions and coping mechanisms will vary from individual to individual, especially among the religious. The first step in dealing effectively with anything is to understand it for what it truly is. Christians living in Western cities must abandon any delusions they may harbor about living in them and begin to see them for what they have become. A big part of this delusion-abandonment is the understanding that life in Western cities will not improve in any meaningful way in the foreseeable future. The cause of our cities' ills, which is the same cause behind the suicide of our entire civilization, has not and will likely never be acknowledged or addressed. Becoming aware of and discussing the problems found in Western cities is prudent, but holding out hope for improvement when the people running our cities (and countries) actively work against the spiritual seems misguided.

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Bumper Berry Crop This Year

8/22/2019

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Our raspberry and blackberry bushes provide good yields every year, but the quantity and quality of both has been exceptionally high this summer. The wetter than normal May and June we experienced this spring probably has much to do with it. The extra precipitation appears to have been a blessing for all fruits in this region of the world. For example, the branches of my wild plum trees are so laden they are on the verge of snapping. My neighbor's apricot tree appeared more yellow than green this year. The only fruit that did not seem to do well this summer were watermelons, which have been smaller and less sweet than they normally are. In any case, the abundance of fruit this season guarantees ample jams and preserves, which brighten even the darkest winter days with the scents and flavors of summer.

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Beauty is an Invitation - How We Respond Makes All the Difference

8/21/2019

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At its core, Beauty is an invitation extended by the Divine. Beauty beckons us to recognize and appreciate the Divine by connecting it with the Divine within ourselves. Beauty reveals the Truth and Goodness of Creation and propels us to align ourselves with this Truth and Goodness through love. Beauty calls upon us to actively join Creation; to become co-creators inspired by Truth and Goodness. If the invitation Beauty extends is accepted in this manner, then Beauty can indeed save the world.

On the surface, Beauty appears to be entirely positive, yet in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri refers to Beauty as a “terrible and awful thing” and goes on to state that “God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” What does this mean? How can the Divine’s invitation to grace, awe, and reverence be a “terrible and awful thing” and how can the Devil utilize Beauty as a battlefield in the heart of man? Much depends on how the invitation the Divine extends through Beauty is approached. In other words, Beauty’s potential to save the world depends entirely on how the invitation is accepted. Many simply ignore the invitation through sheer apathy. Others react to the invitation with hostility. Others interpret Beauty’s invitation as an incitement to selfishness, lust, and evil.

The invitation Divine extends through Beauty is often repudiated and rejected. Not all who perceive Beauty appreciate the Truth and Goodness it contains. On the contrary, some vehemently reject and scorn Beauty, Truth, and Goodness altogether because they contradict the central beliefs of the modern world - determinism, materialism, atheism, relativism, and hedonism. People of this type have rejected any notion of God and exist in a world where “everything is permitted.”

In this regard, the Divine’s invitation to Beauty becomes an affront, something to be mocked and spurned. Rather than inspire love in the Divine Self, Beauty’s invitation provokes only selfish lust. Instead of motivating the Divine Self, Beauty inadvertently activates the Demonic Self, which rejects the recognition of Divine Creation and the call for co-creation in favor of nihilism and the call for destruction.

Those who approach Beauty with lust only see opportunities for pleasure and power. Divine Creation is reduced to a world of predators and prey. Beings are regarded as Things. Subjects become objects. Beauty, a means for selfish gratification. Pleasure is derived from the dismantling of the Sacred and the promulgation of the Profane. Nihilism is equated with ultimate freedom – meaninglessness becomes life’s only meaning. The abyss opens, and the desire to have it consume everything takes control.

Whether Beauty saves the world or destroys it hinges on how we respond to the invitation Beauty extends. Beauty is indeed a battlefield in the hearts of men. Whether God or the Devil prevails on this battlefield depends entirely on us. The connection between in the Divine and Divine Self is only possible if Beauty is accepted with love, for only love can perceive the essence of Divine Creation and understand the Heaven it offers. Love recognizes the Resurrection after the Crucifixion without denying the necessity of the Crucifixion.

Conversely, the connection between the Divine and Divine Self becomes impossible if Beauty is interpreted as to incitement to lust – as an open invitation to evil – because lust rejects the essence of Divine Creation and the Heaven it offers. Lust openly scorns and denies the reality of the Resurrection. When lust perceives Beauty, it sees only the Crucifixion and the profane pleasure it can derive from cruelty, suffering, destruction, and death.

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Taking Note of Beauty

8/19/2019

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We expend far too much energy focusing on evil in the world, and by the world I mean this, dare I say it, fallen world we inhabit during our mortal lives. Of course, we must take stock of evil – recognize it; comprehend it; condemn it – but all too often we end up doing this at the expense of Goodness, that is at the expense of seeing, understanding, and praising the Good in the world. Focusing exclusively on evil in the world – on what is bad, negative, destructive, and inverted – is a deadening activity, one that can lead to spiritual poisoning and atrophy, which in turn leads to alienation, a sense of detachment and disenchantment, passivity and apathy, and, ultimately, meaningless and nihilism.

Alienation is the modern world’s disease, and the only cure is involvement and re-enchantment, activity and enthusiasm, and, ultimately, meaningfulness and belief. One of the best ways to become re-enchanted with the world is through Beauty. Through identifying, recognizing, understanding, and appreciating Beauty, one immediately comes into contact with the other transcendentals, Truth and Goodness. Beauty is a glimpse of and a gateway to Heaven and the Divine. In this sense, Dostoevsky’s assertion that Beauty can save the world begins to fall into place because it aligns us with Truth and Goodness and, thereby, offers illumination, hope, faith, redemption, and salvation. Beauty allows us to appreciate Creation and utilize the potential of our own creativity.

The assertion that beauty will save the world is a monumental, sweeping declaration. When one encounters it, one feels overwhelmed. What does it mean? On the surface, the statement seems overly optimistic and grandiose. One cannot help but think that if Beauty was all it took to save the world, then the world, in its entirety, would already be saved. As such, it is best to approach Beauty from the perspective of one’s own individual life. Consider Beauty from the perspective of your microcosm, rather than from the perspective of the macrocosm. The idea of Beauty saving the macrocosm is overwhelming indeed, but the notion of Beauty saving the microcosm of your own individual life is far more approachable and tenable.

I have started to think of Beauty as a meeting point between two aspects of the Divine. Beauty marks a connection between the Divine Within and Divine Without. In this sense, recognizing and appreciating Beauty is an active rather than passive process. Perceiving Beauty in the world is more than mere passive observation. Perceiving Beauty requires engagement and activity. When we encounter Beauty, we do not merely absorb and consume, we also project and produce. As such, perceiving and understanding Beauty is a creative act of the imagination, one inspired by love.

So how does one go about saving the world through Beauty? One way might be to begin taking note of Beauty. I have never been good at maintaining journals or diaries, but I recently began what I would call, for lack of a better term, a Beauty Notebook in which I record my perceptions of Beauty in the world. My perceptions of Beauty mainly encompass landscapes, nature, architecture, art, poetry, people, Scripture, music, and the night sky. At the end of the day, I take some time to reflect upon the beauty I experienced. For example, if I perceived Beauty in a landscape earlier in the day, I briefly describe the landscape in my notebook. Once I have described the landscape as best as I can, I ask myself what was beautiful about it and explore what moved me about the experience – what caused me to engage with it in an imaginative way.

My notes thus far have revealed that perceiving Beauty is an experience, more specifically, an active, creative experience. Initially, Beauty transfixes me with wonder and awe. It impacts me, floods over me, and saturates me. It captivates me, in the true sense of the word. For a time, I am literally its captive, but after a few moments, it loosens its grip, beckons me forth, and invites me to seize and captivate it. As Beauty reveals its power to move me, it demands I reveal my power to move it. Perceiving something beautiful also entails Beauty perceiving something beautiful within me. Whenever I perceive Beauty, I catch a glimpse of the Divine, and I feel as if the Divine yearns to find Beauty within me. This moment harmonizes Beauty with Truth and Goodness, and draws attention to the unity that is always there and always must be there. At that moment, the world becomes with rich with meaning and purpose.

Once I have experienced Beauty, I feel compelled to share the experience with others. This sharing of Beauty strikes me as an act of evangelization. I want to convey the hows and whats and whys of the beauty that moved me in the hope that others might be moved, that others might perceive the meaning and purpose I have glimpsed. Beauty draws me out of myself, inspires me to transform the world by offering my experiences to others.

My notes on Beauty have also revealed that Beauty, though uplifting, is not a feel-good panacea. Beauty offers a solution to alienation and disengagement, but this solution is not based on pleasure-seeking distraction and amusement. Though Beauty offers contentment and delight, it can only do so if it is unified with Truth and Goodness. Being unified with Truth and Goodness necessitates an acceptance and understanding of Reality. Accepting and understanding Reality involves accepting and understanding our mortality in this world – and the suffering mortality ultimately contains.

Beauty does not sugarcoat. Beauty offers a glimpse at perfection, verifies the existence of perfection, and inspires us toward perfection, but Beauty also reveals that we cannot be perfect in this world, that pain and suffering prevent perfection in this world. Beauty offers a glimpse of Heaven, but warns against misguided notions of establishing Heaven on Earth. Beauty also reveals that denial is no solution to pain and suffering. I once read somewhere that Beauty is not confined solely to the Resurrection, but also includes the Crucifixion. This sheds light on the enigmatic nature of Beauty, but it also helps draw me closer to understanding how Beauty can indeed save the world.

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Can Beauty Save the World?

8/18/2019

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I have been thinking a great deal about Dostoevsky's The Idiot, more specifically, Prince Myskin's uplifting but ultimately enigmatic claim that "beauty can save the world." This quote popped into my mind after I began thinking about how utterly necessary Beauty - as one of the transcendentals, with a capital 'B' - is for us to appreciate, comprehend, and aspire toward the Divine in this mortal world.

In another of his novels, Demons (also translated as Devils or The Possessed), Dostoevsky has a character proclaim that beauty is the one thing humans could not live without. Of course, Dostoevsky would include God under the banner of Beauty, which implies that Beauty is an impossibility without God. This draws forth an intriguing connection - the connection between the Divine and Beauty. It also suggests that the recognition and celebration of Beauty in this world can, to some extent, help to save it.

Now, I do not believe this can applied to the world in general (at least not yet), but I do believe that we can save the world through Beauty at the individual level - that we can redeem the world from evil in our own individual lives through Beauty. I plan to explore this idea in more detail in future posts. In the meantime, I have included an excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture in which he addresses the enigma and latent possibilities in Dostoevsky's conviction that 'beauty can save the world."

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.
And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

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