Living a Good Life in a Real City Requires Thinking

Living a Good Life in a Real City Requires Thinking September 30, 2016

The_Sky_Line,_Houston,_Texas_optRecently a nice fellow on social media suggested my advice on some practical question proved I should move to the Shire and write books for children and on Plato. I would if I could. The Shire would be an excellent place to live, Thorin and Company always welcome, while the chance to write books for a living in the Shire sounds like Heaven. Sadly, this was a great idea that just is not practicable. The Shire is mentally accessible, but physically out of reach while my books for children and on Plato have not sold well enough to get ale at the Green Dragon, let alone support a family.

There is another possibility, however. He might have been suggesting that people with ideas like mine cannot live in the real world, instead we should live in a fantasy world where we can write on topics of interest only to children or philosophers (children without parents or other means of support). My ideas will only work in no place, for nobody, doing nothing of value.

Maybe. Plato spends most of Republic with a similar worry. Those who “love wisdom” (philosophers) can be giant goofs, unable to live in the actual city while deciding how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Or perhaps the problem is that those who look at Heaven rarely live on Earth and those who look to Earth never see Heaven.

The trouble with a classical education is that we can get lost looking at Wisdom, Virtue, and feeling the Joy of the Lord and forget how to talk to people. Since we are folks, no better than anybody else, this is obnoxious. Socrates and company discuss a hypothetical city in words in Republic books I-IV and then are dragged back down to reality. How? The young men in the room want to know about “women . . . in common.”

Young men overwhelmed by curiosity and desire are not uncommon in any society. In fact, it is so common, we think (if we are “intellectuals”) we can  ignore it. Let’s live in Heaven and not Earth. Yet humans are not creatures of Heaven, God lives in Heaven, and we are born to live on Earth. “Intellectuals” can assume superiority, because they think only of higher things and intellectuals are correct: they are thinking of higher things. The problem is that we are not beings born merely of the higher: we have eternity in our hearts, but clay in our bodies. To be human, something God chose to do at Christmas, is to become earthy.

This is hard to recollect. The better a discussion, the more intense, the harder it is to remember time passing. If I don’t set an alarm for class, then we would never end on time. Once I forgot and we went an hour over and the college students nearly missed their next class!

This was “unreal” and being “unreal” is bad. We see Virtue or Wisdom and feel Joy, but in order to bring all three to the city where we live. Houston is the city of the 21st century and it is the city where we live. We cannot ignore the “low” problems of our city, because if we do, then we pretending to be something we are not.  We must think, but we must also live. We think so we can live in the city of Houston. We live in the city of Houston (we hope) as thoughtful citizens and as thoughtful citizens, we must fight for justice.

Nobody who is just can make us stop contemplating the “higher things,” but nobody who sees the higher things correctly can ignore the City.

Perhaps this is an odd problem. Many Americans spend more time watching screens than talking to people. Few there be that want to study or think all the time. As a result, those few think themselves a happy few, superior to most people. This is a horrid lie. The evils of anti-intellectualism do not justify the evils of intellectualism any more than the wicked practices of the miser justify the spendthrift.

We must see God and serve our brothers and sisters. Our treasure must be in God, but spent on Earth. This week I have thought deeply with students from our college program . . . students willing to think hard in a great city. They do not allow me to stay impractical, but coming to our college program was not practical! They are impractical, but real or real and willing to dream.

Thank God.

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First thoughts based on a discussion at The Saint Constantine School college program. Thank you to the students for helping me. 


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