The road map to the life of the mind

“I gotta tell you, the life of the mind...there's no road map for that territory. And exploring it can be painful. The kind of pain most people don't know anything about.” Barton Fink [In which we discover Our Hero to be an insufferable prat.]

"But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

The life of the mind — there is a road map for that territory, actually, but it is wildly unreliable.

Still, I've been thinking a great deal about why I think the way I do — why I yam what I yam. I cogitate thus because I am on the other side of the age divide.

Kids These Days think about things differently than I do, but not so differently than I once did. How the heck did that happen?

I've had the “young liberal/old conservative” canard thrown at me, but I protest. Given the resources and consciousness-warping wealth of this country, I believe supplying a roof for every head and basic nutrition for every household table ought to be a given — everything after that is just detail work. That makes me a Lefty, no?

On Paul's urging, I asked the family: “Who is it that you say I am?”

“Oh, he's way-out-there Left,” said my wife.

“Nah, he's conservative,” said my daughter.

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hope to meander through some recollections of people and words that brought me to where I am, currently. But first, some longer reads that have prompted this particular direction of meditation.

“Liberalism and empiricism have parted company, and nothing has been learnt” — so says John Gray, in The Problem of Hyper-Liberalism.

Terry Eagleton — that godless, Commie Christ-nik — surveys Gray's Seven Types of Atheism with a mixture of admiration and disappointment.

“Liberalism has failed, because Liberalism has succeeded” — John Médaille suggests the obvious — Liberalism is mercantilism's vanguard stooge, knee-capping traditional ideologies to gain hegemonic control over the masses and their means — then wonders, “Why does anti-Liberalism fail, and fail always and everywhere?”

The Barton Fink illustration comes from A Tourist With A Typewriter, by Stephen Sparks.