As I move forward on my project to make sense of human being as both individual and community, I’m reading in certain areas of mathematics (topology and differential geometry and abstract algebra and others) and also trying to keep up my readings in history and literature. The project threatens to swallow me at times, but I’m finding a sense of peace and even of wholeness as I seem to be recovering, as I approach the age of 61!, from some of the damage done to me by my failure to pursue my own interests and talents, by my failure and the failure of the adults in my life to help me develop both mind and moral character. Sadly enough, I can say only partly tongue-in-cheek that I’m recovering from being a modern American and a modern Christian—as I partly recover my mind and moral character.
Even by the mid-1960s—I was born in 1955, American culture—including most certainly the educational systems—was degraded so that it failed to nurture intelligence and moral character; it seems in retrospect that parents and educators were advancing the interests of a shallow sort of pop culture—television shows of the caliber of The Monkees and Laugh-in and rock-and-roll music and obsession with pro sports and all that—as if deliberating disrupting a healthy maturing process. The minds and moral characters of an increasing share of the American youth were being increasingly deformed and stunted; it’s hard to see how the process could advance much further than it already has in 2016, but evil has often surprised those who tried to play the role of prophet or seer. In any case, even truly loving parents, other relatives, teachers, clergymen, and so on played a willing role in deforming and stunting minds and moral characters under some strange ideas about childhood and young adulthood and how it was good to simply delay entry into full adulthood rather than to gently guide the maturing process, trying to keep it at a pace natural to the particular children or young adults.
This glorification of youth, this effort to see children as the true Adam and Eve—pre-fallen human beings, has served the interests of some corrupt and unwise members of the power-elite (or whatever you wish to call them) but the bulk of Americans, as if following Tocqueville’s script, had started the process in some ground-up manner as if we were a chaotic mass with a tendency to self-organize into some state of perpetual youth, as if we wished to be a country of Peter Pans. Tocqueville had noted, in a book published in 1828—Democracy in America, that Americans were capable of overlooking even the most obvious of facts if those facts were in conflict with our own favored view of things and it would seem that our favored view is centered around some sort of Eden populated by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. As some have recently written, Tocqueville—in the midst of saying many good things about Americans as they were and as they might be—feared we would develop into a self-brainwashing, self-censoring people living gladly under a gentle sort of totalitarianism.
As I approach my 61st birthday, I look into the mirror and see a gray-bearded fellow who matured enough to marry and form a family at about the age of 35 but had fallen into a state of poverty. I had been, from the age of about 12 to 35, a terrible under-achiever, first in failing to persist in pursuing my true interests of physics and mathematics once it had proven to be a difficult task for someone with a weak secondary education, and then had failed to put in an honest effort in pursuing—quite reluctantly—a career in actuarial science and then…? Am I succeeding in what I think to be a true calling of reviving first my own mind and then providing some encouragement and maybe substantial ideas for the reviving and nurturing of other minds? Can such a revival occur and perhaps bring about a revival of Western Civilization? Can it at least help in the formation of a Christian civilization in some other region? Is it merely the meaningless flounderings of a man who has wasted his life?
It was a weak or immature moral character that kept me from digging in and doing my duty as a student and then as a well-paid insurance professional. I had good reason to feel cheated in life, but there is only a small percentage of even highly talented human beings who have gotten a good chance to develop their talents. For all we know, some of the illiterate slaves of Plato or his friends might have been far smarter than any of the famous Athenians. There might have been an unschooled farmer born in 1770 who was potentially a better mathematician that was Gauss. Most certainly, there are men and women in the United States who are far better qualified to be President or Secretary of State or CEO of JP Morgan/Citibank/General Motors than those who have held those offices in recent decades; it is quite possible that some of those better men and women might have been kept out of power just because they had moral character.
What was was? Does it do any good to dwell upon these issues? Does it do any good to give up some chance of prosperity to recover a mind or a moral character? Will it help future generations in any way?
Can I even claim to have a firmer and more mature moral character as I live in poverty, surviving on the kindness of my sister and other relatives and friends?
If so, what does that say about a country and a (decaying) civilization which fails to support serious efforts in literature and philosophy and theology and the unification of knowledge (all of the preceding plus empirical science) yet throws millions a year to felons in the NBA and to those who make movies based on kiddie sci-fi shows (Flesh Gordon –> Star Wars and Star Trek) and kiddie cartoons (Superman, Spiderman, Flintstones –> the obvious) and to those who write books or make adult movies that make the 1950s with its middlebrow novels and history books and gorgeously filmed distortions of history look like a revival of the Elizabethan Age or one of the other ages of artistic and philosophical and literary giants?
Arguably, Dorian Gray has stepped out of his picture to discover the world is in a far greater state of moral decay than he was and maybe still is. And there are signs that Ferris Bueller’s Ferrari is choking and grinding to a halt; what will such a people do when they have to fix all the broken and non-maintained stuff around them?