Trying to Understand the Meaning of It All

December 30, 2024 by Christopher Chantrill

It’s the end of the year -- a remarkable year -- and all the experts and philosophizers are trying to understand what is going on. Their takes range from the religious to the ideological to the sociological to the scientific.

The question: is the new era that is dawning upon us a new religious awakening, as reported by Peter Savodnik at the Free Press, or a return to the sensible ideologies of Tocqueville and Burke, as suggested by Mark Lewis? Or is the future Forever Woke as proposed by Werner A. Zagrebbi on Curtis Yarvin’s Substack?

Or, there’s the belief of academic Jeff Bloodworth that every leftward lurch by our liberal friends merely provokes a pushback by the center, whether it’s from Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority or Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Then there is Curtis Yarvin, whose latest piece is analyzing the immigration issue and the H1B fracas. Says he:

The nation is the people. The state is the owner of the nation -- the land, structures, and people -- which are its sovereign property.

And therefore the state, like any corporation, should be concentrating on appreciating the value of its human assets, and not on H1Bs which are assets “captured” from other states.

Here’s another take: wondering about the meaning of climate change fanatics like Die Grünen in Germany. Is their vision of a simpler life practical or just fantasy? Craig DeLancey thinks it’s fantasy, rehearsing the faith of the Romantics in the simple life. Says he:

It is time to take environmentalism away from the environmentalists. They can pursue the Arcadian vision, and seek to live a less energy-intensive, less acquisitive life… But the business of life is life.

But what is life?

Life begins with a creation myth. It could be the seven-day creation of the Bible, or the Chinese myth of ten suns in a mulberry tree. Or it could be the current creation myth that we call the Big Bang.

The fact is that we humans don’t know how the world began. But we want to know; we need to know. So we make it up.

Whatever the state of human knowledge, we want to look Beyond. Why? Because we humans don’t know what is coming next; we don’t know what works long term, and we don’t know what is going to kill us. But we really, really want to know. That’s what religion is all about, and that’s what our modern ideologies from Rousseau to Marx to Marcuse are all about. It’s also the question about “life, the universe, everything” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the finding of the computer Deep Thought that the answer is 42, and the non-negotiable demand of the physicists' union for “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”

If you are one of the New Yorkers described by Peter Savodnik and currently returning to Christianity, then you are experiencing the woke mind virus as a sickness. If you are reciting the wisdom of Tocqueville and Burke like Mark Lewis you are trying to revive the wisdom of our Founders. If you are Zagrebbi you think that nothing can be done; the wokies are going to win anyway, because they are the ruling class and the high-status elite, and that’s all.

For me, none of these ideologies is good enough to guide us into the unknown future. They are all attempts -- and pretty crude attempts -- to look beyond the limits of our human knowledge and imagine what lies in the Beyond. The notion of God, of creation myths, of Heaven and Hell, of Hope and Change, are all part of the endless human attempt to see beyond the horizon of today’s knowledge.

So what do we do?

First, we must face the last century’s monstrosities, from murderous socialism, to murderous world wars, to the crudities of big government, to endless ruling-class cults -- not to mention the dangers of government-directed and funded science that President Eisenhower warned us against.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Hey, Fauci! How yer doin’ pal?

Then there is the need for an honest review of What Worked. In between the stupid wars and stupid government programs and ruling-class crazes from free health care to climate change, there have been ideas and science and technology that have delivered astonishing human welfare. And our new knowledge has profoundly deepened our understanding of what we know and what we can only guess at.

It seems to me -- and to all the ponderers I have mentioned above -- that the time is right for all of us to conjure up a new understanding of God and the Divine -- Life, the Universe, Everything.

We humans know a heck of a lot.

And yet we Know Nothing.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.