Letter #261: Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground

It's a dangerous business, looking at the stars.

4edges, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dad,

“Bad times! Times of trouble! That’s what people are saying. But let us live good lives, and then the times will be good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the times.”

That quote floated across my Substack feed yesterday as you were proposing that the solution to mass hysteria is personal virtue, proving that God exists and a fellow called Jared Stacy is his messenger. The speaker is St. Augustine, and the occasion is the fall of the Roman Empire (ca. 410 A.D.–ongoing).

Sometimes the barbarians go full Mad Max, at which point I guess times stay pretty bad even if you do share a weekly pot roast in your fallout bunker. Even so, the times are unlikely to get any better if you conform yourself to them. It was Oscar Wilde who wrote the line, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

On this point, though, here’s what bothers me. A theme of ours lately has been that we should spend less time with our heads among the stars and more with our hands tilling the soil—“We don’t really need to waste our time theorizing about signs and signifiers,” you wrote last week. “We should instead be re-learning how to know God.”

I quite agree. “So much of philosophy,” another Substack poster wrote, “is just ‘we took some words, did some math with them in the spirit realm, and then descended back to earth bearing an idea that is obviously insane’.” Lots of smart people on this app! Spend enough time reading obscure arcana, and you’ll experience the jarring shock of discovering how little of it survives contact with the wisdom of the average cashier.

And yet, like the White Queen, I still try to believe an impossible thing or two before breakfast just to see where it takes me. In other words, I do think there’s a point to entertaining fanciful speculations in philosophy. It’s this: in a deluded culture, some of the most counterintuitive and discreditable ideas often turn out to have some truth to them.

That was Socrates’ problem: he couldn’t embrace the whole truth and conform to the average person’s idea of right and wrong. He had to pick one. This is why that famous allegory of the cave is so important, and so tragic. The seeker of ultimate realities can’t just float about in disembodied abstractions forever. He has to come back down and subject his nice theories to an encounter with the embodied world, come what may. Sometimes when you do that, as Socrates literally says, they crucify you.

So when you and our lovely readers talk about breaking bread together, building families, weathering the stormy times, they’re not shrugging off philosophy so much as living it out, in human-sized and practical ways. I think this is probably the only thing, ever, anywhere, to do. But it’s a dangerous business, Mr. Frodo. You never know what might happen.

Love,
Spencer

Correction: it was the White Queen, not the Red as I initially claimed, who believed impossible things! Thanks to reader John Reddick for the reminder.