On Trumpists And Zeal: A Minor Musing

Last summer events conspired to cause me to realize that I needed to settle myself down a bit, so I began reading entries from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals every morning and entries from A Year with G. K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit, and Wonder every evening. 

I picked the Chesterton book because I like Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries and the title seemed timely. If the Trump era has revealed anything about America, it's illustrated that Americans as a whole exhibit a profound lack of both wisdom and wit. That lack likely exists because of a collective inability to experience or express wonder in either its common or spiritual definition.

I'm not but sure why I picked the Merton book, but I have found many of the entries beneficial. It is the December 22 entry of the Merton devotional, however, that expresses the root of the problem and the error of believers who have sold their political soul to Trumpism:

Yesterday, day of recollection, realized again above all my need for profound and total humility--especially in any work I may do for peace. Humility is more important than zeal. Descent into nothingness and dependence on God. Otherwise I am just fighting the world with its own weapons and there the world is unbeatable. Indeed it does not even have to fight back, for I will exhaust myself and that will be the end of my stupid efforts. [Emphasis mine]

I am more than willing to accept that many of the country's current problems began because wealthy, well-educated elites developed a sense of hubris that rivals that of every tragic hero in literature. Answering that hubris with the populist zeal that Trump fans possess will correct none of those errors. It will, as Merton correctly observes, burn itself out and accomplish nothing permanent.

I suspect that the populists who use Christianity to further their efforts to avenge perceived slights from those they view as out-of-touch elites will not take advice from a Trappist monk or a British Catholic, so they will continue to privilege zeal over humility and the exhaust themselves and the rest of us in the process.

 

The Year In Review: Adolescent Literature 226 Edition

On January 1, 2019, I resolved to start a commonplace book wherein I would write quotations from my reading. These quotations must meet the simple criterion of striking my fancy at the moment I am reading them. They need not be inspirational, profound, or examples of great writing.

Shortly, thereafter people who should know better asked me to teach an adolescent literature course. Were I a person who followed through on my resolutions, I would have filled two or three notebooks with quotations from the books I used in class or the supplemental materials I read to prepare to teach, but I frequently fail at following through on my New Year's resolutions.

Looking through the quotations I copied in the commonplace book, three stick out as valuable reminders for the last days of 2019.

First, Wendell Berry's essay "In Defense of Literacy" contains a line that needs no context or explanation. Berry reminds readers, "Short-term practicality is long-term idiocy." This fact is ignored constantly, most dangerously by our political and corporate leaders.

The other two quotations require a bit of context. The first comes from Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in his Chaos Walking trilogy. A central conceit of the series is that men and animals project their thoughts audibly for all to hear; women do not. The book was first published in 2008, so Ness must be given credit for presciently creating an extended metaphor to illustrate the effects of 24/7 news cycles and social media. The fact that he calls phenomenon "Noise" throughout the series earns him extra prescience points.

Early in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd Hewitt, the novel's protagonist and narrator, says, "Noise ain't truth. Noise is what men want to be true, and there's a difference 'twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if don't watch out." Listening to and reading about the impeachment debate makes it clear that "Noise ain't truth" and individual Americans are hearing what they want to be true based on the "Noise" that reaches them but there's a wide, dangerous divide between what people want to be true and the truth.

Finally, news that a United States government website listed the fictional nation of Wakanda as a free- trade partner brings to mind a statement made by Changamire, who in the first four issues of the "A Nation Under Our Feet" arc is a scholar guilty of little more than a few radical ideas about the proper role of government. When he speaks to Wakanda's Queen Mother, Changamire says, "Wakanda is science and wonder, all of it achieved by ensuring your subjects do not ask too many questions. Wakanda has all the intelligence any advanced society would want and none of the wisdom any free society needs."

In 2019, political leaders in South Dakota and the nation as a whole doubled down on their emphasis on short-term practicality, amplified their idiocy through the Noise of social media echo chambers, worked diligently to prevent citizens from asking hard questions, and, thereby, ensured that country will continue to lack wisdom free societies need.