The Bigger Political Issue

This is the situation in which we find ourselves today: as young persons begin to ask critical questions about what flourishing and well-being consist in, about what goods make up an excellent life, about what ways-of-acting and different kinds of structural support are necessary to achieve those goods, they are already, whether they are aware of this or not, largely limited and even determined by modes of thinking and kinds of habit that elucidate a flat perspective of human flourishing, and driven by a dominant social context of media-driven influence, where wealth, sex, and power are the only goods ascertainable. In such a situation, where the influence of the media and the gods of success and pleasure cannot be overestimated, a position of sincere rational inquiry is nearly impossible. If we say that the central task is education, do we really know what the costs in fact are? For education, that is, the beginning of real questioning and wonder, demands not simply a good intention—and indeed, this very intention already presupposes a modicum of reflection and an awareness of the difference between wisdom and opinion, or inquiry and rhetoric, and indeed success and failure. What it demands are the very structures, forms, and practices in which rational inquiry is viable; these structures, forms, and practices are by definition communal in their nature (they are unattainable by an individual alone), and constitute the possibility of a mature young adult being able to rationally inquire at all. Human freedom is ordinarily a matter of statistical probability and psychological continuity[1]—and the extraordinary events and movements that may intervene in this continuity presuppose a healthy context to prove at all lasting and influential, and this context is a nexus of earlier formative and current environmental influence. What this amounts to is the possibility of breaking out of the prison and tyranny of contemporary culture is that much more difficult in the fact that this culture, today, has made the beginning and perseverance in virtue very difficult, and this is so because children are largely formed by non-personal cultural forces, and the parents and teachers of children have conceded to these forces and have themselves been indoctrinated and influenced by these forces to regard the culture as a benign backdrop. Even if good intentions are present, they are usually deflated and made sterile by a casual—if typically unknowing—concession to the determinations of a culture that is virtually inimical to authentic human flourishing. Most people are unable or unwilling to realize how deep this goes, and how far the implications of these questions reach. In the midst of this problem, we are often deceived by the facile analysis and solutions provided by contemporary politics. Having some appreciation of the problem at hand, we are content with the diagnoses given by journalists and politicians, and willing to concede responsibility to their initiatives. If there is anything worse than being terribly sick, it is deception in prognosis.