Letter #176: Dumb Luck

We are all Matt Ramos.

Pops!

Over the Christmas vacation, while I was supposed to be basking in the joys of family togetherness, you may have noticed that instead I was mucking around on Twitter. It’s not my fault—there was a debate going on about Homer. You expect me to just not get involved??

It all started because some kid called Matt Ramos got his mind blown when he found out that Christopher Nolan’s new movie, an adaptation of the Odyssey, will be based on a poem that’s over two thousand years old. Basically this YouTube star—a zoomer, by the looks of it—had never heard of the Greek epics that serve as cornerstones to all of Western literature.

I raise this because my first reaction to your invigorating essay was this: in the revival that’s underway, we are all Matt Ramos. We are products of an intensely stupid and intentionally degraded culture that has produced a generations-deep ignorance about everything that matters, as it was designed to do.

Even those of us who think we know the basic propositions of the Gospel are slow to believe it as actual fact. We’re steeped in centuries of materialist assumptions, blind and halt when it comes to the things of the spirit. We have been trained not to see them, or to explain them away.

There’s a deep melancholy to this. Yes, we’ve just achieved an enormous triumph in blasting to bits the corrupted husk of our old media vanguard. Our victory over them has been total, deserved, and sweet. They are toast, kablammo, donezo, old news—and good riddance.

But in their wake they leave a sparse wilderness of ruin and wreckage. Basic knowledge that would have been obvious to the peasantry of ages past is thin on the ground. Even a smattering of rudimentary Latin these days makes you a sage, where once it would have made you a schoolboy.

So the high culture of the past is over. Everything ends. It’s very sad. But: there’s another way to look at it, too. What touched me about Ramos was that, having never heard of the Odyssey, he seemed to think it was awesome in a way that he probably wouldn’t if it had been rolled out to him in school with pomp and circumstance as a capital-G Great Work. And it is awesome. We just forgot how to feel that way. We got too used to the good stuff.

So if our resources for thinking and talking about the spiritual life have been criminally depleted, maybe returning the subjects you’re talking about—the inner and outer life, the reality of things unseen—will mean rediscovering them from the ground up. And maybe in our ignorance we will find them newly magnificent, newly wonderful and strange.

That would make us both the dumbest and the luckiest nation in history. Because if we can clear away the carapace of our pieties and talk about the world as it actually is now, we might find that the ancient truths we lost are becoming freshly meaningful and startlingly real. Which would be awesome.

Love,
Spencer