The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy. — Thomas Sowell
There's an amusing song by Father John Misty that sums up the acedia and ennui of our times. But it seems much of this disenchantment of one's spirit gets channeled into politics these days. It's a bad form of idolatry that is really masked as pseudo-righteousness. I recently had someone tell me that to really get to know someone these days, you just need to know their political leanings. Really? Sounds like we're judging the book by how the author votes.
Douglas Murray offers this pointer in his recent book:
“One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder.”I could not agree more. And whatever interest we have in politics should go beyond politics itself. Politics is always downstream from culture which is downstream from metaphysics. What is grounding all of this? should be the essential question we ask. In other words, there is a correlation to our interest in how we govern and what we believe to be True.
In his essay Democracy, Ethics, Religion: An Intrinsic Connection, W. Norris Clarke makes the key point that democracy requires more than just political leadership and institutions:
“Our central claim is that democracy is not a form of government that can maintain itself effectively over the long term through its political resources alone. It needs rather to be inserted in a larger supporting web of human culture within which a normative code of ethics is accepted and practiced (for the most part) by a significant majority of its citizens, and within which some form of religious belief that transcends the human order supports this normative code with its own ultimate moral authority.”But today we have splintered ourselves between hyper-individualism and tribal identity politics, therefore losing a civic, moral, and spiritual center. This has led to a discontent that politics could never cure.
It is much like how David Foster Wallace noticed a subtle suffering in many of his friends: “Something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. ... This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”
Today's moral and spiritual values are incomplete and incoherent, partly running on the fumes of a fading tradition as the secular left rises. The emphasis tends to lean on sentimental activism for tolerance of non-western values, “open-mindedness”, social justice, and political correctness. But that can't be the source for meaning, because it undermines ultimate meaning. It creates a world we where we are playing God and standing in judgement of others without any belief of God or an order to existence. Kevin Williamson notes, “That is one of the great ironies of our time: that the tribe least interested in traditional religious observance should have made its politics those of seeking the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in the present—to immanentize the eschaton.”
The subtle point the left forgets is our traditional faith was never to bring the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through policies from the top-down, but first and foremost, through opening our hearts to God and our fellow man from the bottom-up!