A Response to Lisa Schiffren’s April 16 Post

A Lisa Schiffren post introduction that inspires a response:

These days David Brooks' very personal, Trump-obsessed politics seem ridiculous to me. But he is dead right here, about the 'lies our culture tells' about the keys to happiness.  Careers are important, for a host of reasons, but for the majority of human beings they are not the key to personal happiness. Meritocratic acheivement -- nice, but not ultimately fulfilling. The core necessities of a happy life are: family, attachments, a place in a community in which you have earned respect. All of these are among the most traditional aspirations and values you will find. For the most part you can have them with almost any 'identity,' though not if that includes embracing cultural Marxism, as it so often does.

Elsewhere Brooks advocates for economic policies that break up such communities, and for social policies that disrupt family life. But we take our wisdom where we find it.

This response is not concerned with Brooks’s column (don’t read him anymore) but with Lisa’s own characterization of what matters most. She’s missing a key element, one which is commonly invisible to those who came of age in her era and after. By lumping everything that is not family, attachments, a place in the community into a single lesser category of “careers” and “meritocratic achievements,” she shines a bright beam on her blind spot. She simply does not see what operates above the level of career and the need for approval that so often drives it. This she probably calls ambition (mislabeled in her intro as “aspiration,” which it is not) and mistakes everything that might be said to transcend a career ambition as a hobby, a cause, or a potentially destructive obsession.

What she’s missing is something that ‘s been amputated by cynical post-modern materialism, namely the persona of the Hero and the Quest his life represents and embodies. The truly great ones who bequeath civilization the greatest gifts do not have careers and aren’t pursuing fame, riches, obeisance, or the physical pleasures that are so lavishly available to money and power. They are committed to a vision that is in reality the most essential stuff of which they are made. They are themselves forces of nature and, so, always potentially catastrophic to “family, attachments, and a place in the community,” the only values Lisa seems to regard as more equal than any others. They are Socrates, Homer, Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Dante, Mozart, Newton, Galileo, the Constitutional Founders (as a group), Pascal, Blake, Poe, Jung, Darwin, Henry Ford, Einstein, Turing, Wolfram, and countless others in every kind of discipline, united by the fact that their callings always transcended individual disciplines and helped light the way in many different spheres, even when and if they were wrong about matters in particular.

They aren’t even the famous “One Percent.” Much fewer of them than that. But the world we have inherited is a product of their minds, imaginations, and senses, which must certainly total more than five. They are not outside of natural law, but they do reside and arise from outside the box.

We don’t believe in the concept of the hero anymore. He has been reduced to a shadow, a figment, a fallacy, a fiction, a fool’s fantasy, a cartoon. And as a culture we are dying of our disbelief, unable to recognize what truly transcends worldly acclaim and quite unable to identify and nurture and learn from the larval heroes who may be waiting in the wings unseen.

I don’t want to live in Lisa Schiffren’s coffee klatch. She shouldn’t either.