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How things can turn around
(Note: Further down in this entry a reader quotes Chesterton on the roots of optimism.) The other day a commenter from England said he saw nothing in England worth caring about any more. I replied that one should never say anything like that, that there are always good things, though they may be under the surface and we don’t see them at the moment. The exchange reminded me of a troubling and despairing e-mail that a long-time VFR reader sent to me on May 17, three days after the Comprehensive Black Death Act had been announced, in which he very uncharacteristically expressed despair about immigration and about America and bade me farewell:
Lawrence,I wrote back to him:
Come on, ____.Either Kipling’s poem or a good night’s sleep did the trick because by the next day my correspondent had his spirits back up and was busy calling senators.
And look where we ended up. The shocking and frightening situation in mid-May, when the entire leadership of the country seemed bent on ramming through the horrible immigration bill without a debate, had been reversed. What was despair for our country on May 17 had turned into a historic victory for our country over the open-borders forces by June 28. Bill W. writes:
As I read ___”s letter to you expressing despair at the overwhelming degree to which liberalism’s nihilistic essence is overtaking American politics, I felt a kind of kinship with him, because I have often felt this way myself. During my time as an Army cadet, we were taught “General Powell’s Rules,” 12 concise statements of common sense that any leader would benefit from knowing. Number 12 is “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” Now, this sounds wonderful, but the question of optimism remained in the back of my mind, unstated, for several years. It was simply this: Fundamentally, why should we be optimistic at all? I found the question drawn out of me more formally, but answered, in Chesterton’s description of St. Thomas Aquinas:Now there is something that lies all over the work of St. Thomas Aquinas like a great light: which is something quite primary and perhaps unconscious with him, which he would perhaps have passed over as an irrelevant personal quality; and which can now only be expressed by a rather cheap journalistic term, which he would probably have thought quite senseless…. … Nevertheless, the only working word for that atmosphere is Optimism. He did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life: and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life. It breathes somehow in his very first phrases about the reality of Being. If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, “To be or not to be—that is the question,” then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, “To be—that is the answer.” The point is important; many not unnaturally talk of the Renaissance as the time when certain men began to believe in Life. The truth is that it was the time when a few men, for the first time, began to disbelieve in Life. It’s a great book—Chesterton’s description of St. Thomas, but I think that this passage hints at how Chesterton so magnificently explained the roots of what is now called “conservative” thought. He didn’t believe, as we mustn’t, that this struggle with liberalism is somehow the primary purpose of life. We fight against these things precisely because there is a goodness and a wonder to life intrinsically, rooted ultimately in the goodness of God’s blessing and God himself. The core doctrine of liberal thought is that nothing about ultimate goodness can really be ascertained, so all of the liberals’ efforts instead aim at statistical models of how to obtain some endpoint that they think desirable, be it the amelioration of poverty or a reduction of HIV transmission rates in Africa. The question that’s not asked, and certainly not answered, is this: if nothing at all is really, truly good, then why bother with all of these efforts at all? The only time I’ve ever seen a liberal person even begin to turn from liberalism is when this question is asked, when he really considers what the Aristotelian ends are—what he’s really shooting for in the long run. For Christians, the answer is simple, the only acceptable “end” is the knowledge of God and living a life anchored in discovery his purpose for each of us. From this starting point we derive everything that’s truly good and true in our unique American culture. And that is exactly the kind of thought that infuriates a true liberal, and exactly the kind of thought that they will try to stop. LA replies: This is very fine, and it does get at the root experience. As I was reading your e-mail I at first was concerned that you were going to offer the usual conservative hymn to optimism for the sake of optimism. In fact, I’m opposed to the very idea of optimism as it’s normally expressed. Instead you brought out the deeper realization that underlies optimism—the the goodness of existence, which comes from God’s existence. In this connection I’m reminded of a statement by John Witherspoon (president of what became Princeton University, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, and a leading thinker among the Founders), who in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy wrote:
[V]irtue consists in the love of being as such.(Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, Louisiana State University Press, 1990, p. 181.)
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