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The Language of the Night: A purposeful life [1]
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Date: 2025-03-03
Tonight’s diary is occasioned by something that’s been bothering me about politics in general and the Republican/Trumpist movement in particular — well, there are many things that bother me to distraction, but let’s focus on just one. It has mastered the tools of existential warfare without considering the question of existentialism itself. Or more plainly put: beyond “We own the libs!” there doesn’t seem to be much of an endgame. A larger purpose — I mean, beyond grabbing all the toys and destroying the playground to demonstrate dominance, there doesn’t appear to be much at work behind all the strategery, and zero interest in consequences.
We, on the other hand, are painfully aware of consequences. We know the world will still exist when we’re gone (I suspect they haven’t figured that out, or if they have, they shrug it off with a ‘doesn’t matter’). Whether deliberately or not, we’ve already grappled with the questions of Existentialism 101 and come out the other side. Beyond a reflexive grabbing of the Cross and flag, and brandishing of a Bible that’s never been opened, Trump’s followers don’t appear to be able to conceive of a purpose greater than their own grievance gratification.
Okay, ‘nuff said about that. When I was a new grad student and teaching assistant, I and my cohort were given the job of teaching Composition and Rhetoric (most of us couldn’t have defined ‘rhetoric’ if you dropped a dictionary on us) to freshmen. Yes, the department unleashed us, without training or oversight, on classes of 35 unsuspecting 18-year-olds each. We were free to teach whatever material we wanted, in whatever style we wanted, and all that was required of us was that we turned in a fixed number of student essays in different styles: descriptive, argumentative, persuasive, comparison/contrast, etc., with grades and obligatory red pen marks. I don’t think I scarred any of my students or did them lasting damage, but the whole experience gave me a profound appreciation for mentors. And training.
One of my colleagues turned his classes into Existentialism 101 experiments. (Remember, we could teach whatever we wanted, and this dude was a wanna-be philosopher who didn’t want to learn classical philosophy and therefore skipped directly to Kierkegaard and Sartre.)
It was an unhappy experience: students who could dropped the course, and those who couldn’t finished their semester unhappy. The evaluations were blistering. It wasn’t the teacher; when he acquired some oversight and direction in the following semesters he did a lot better. I think it was because throwing questions about the ultimate meaning of existence and the subjective limitations of experience at 18-year-olds whose brains haven’t yet developed the capacity for that level of abstract thought is basically abuse. 1) It tells them they’re officially expected to understand this stuff and if they don’t, they’re stupid; 2) freshman year is destabilizing enough, and pondering questions of existence and eternity is junior-level late-night bull-session material, at best; 3) kids coming straight from their parents’ supervision tend to hold their parents’ teachings and opinions, and blunt-forcing them to critically examine their parents’ wisdom, assumptions, and values, is a recipe for riot at the Thanksgiving table when granddad asks, “So, Emily, what are you learning in college?” [Side note: there’s a time for that kind of values- and beliefs-examination, but it should be a more nuanced, more protracted and less traumatic process.] [Another side note: I expect pushback from some quarters, but I knows what I knows, and this I knows.]
I also know that the kind of liberal education I received and passed on to others was a dinosaur wheezing its last gasps, and Project 2025 would gleefully kill it off. I don’t think they’ll ultimately be successful in their aims. I mean, yes, they’ve done a great job destroying the university system, but if people get a college education only as a kind of job training, they’ve already severed themselves from the purpose of the university: a university exists to teach people how to think.
And how to do research, but that’s for another time.
The ability to think critically, to hold two ideas in your head at one time and be able to articulate them, to grapple with the big questions of existence — this is what education is for. Or at least this is what education was for, before certain monied sectors started mucking around with it and remolding it to fit a paradigm that benefited them instead of the public.
I think people, young and old, will still manage to educate themselves, whatever violence is and has been done to classical education. I say this because we’re an inquisitive species and there’s more than one way to reach wisdom. People who are curious and motivated will get themselves there.
Well, I’ve strayed rather far from what I had in mind when I started, so let’s see if I can bring this leviathan back on track. I think all of this is important, which is why I’m not editing it out. We should be aware of where our fellow citizens’ priorities lie, they who would label us the enemy, the opposition, or whatever other insulting moniker J.D. Vance can conjure. We have to account for the way we see them: their limited perspective, their self-centeredness, their pettiness and grievance-borne hostility, their inability to plan beyond their own lifetimes, their lack of purpose beyond their own gratification. We need to know what distinguishes us from them, if only for our own safety.
For the most part, a critical difference I’ve seen between progressive (and moderate) Democrats and Trumpists is that we read.
We value libraries, and use them; we listen to e-books and we tend to delight in a variety of subjects. We know that not everyone agrees with us and we know that they shouldn’t. We can be wrong and admit it, and we can see from perspectives other than our own. The great existential questions of life don’t send us reeling — we’ve already considered and incorporated them. More than that, they’ve given us direction, and a sense of purpose.
I’ve been thinking about purpose and how innately personal it is, for some time now. For some of us, the purpose of life is religious: not an ignorant “if I don’t I’ll burn in hell forever” recoiling from the secular but rather a considered embrace of religious vision and a commitment to living by its precepts. For others, religious vision is too far removed from our subjective reality, and so we find purpose in this world: that’s humanism.
How we integrate that existential sense of purpose is a question that interests me. We don’t get it by reading philosophy (at least, I don’t think so) and we don’t get it by religious instruction: both are methods of teaching life lessons didactically, and I think purpose forms organically, generated from within the person. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not big on obedience.
But it does seem to me that serving the self, the basic precept of Libertarianism and a giant chunk of Trumpism, is a hollow sense of purpose; investing in the self is pretty damned limited and small. It’s largely tied up in the acquisition of power and possessions. Power is ephemeral, and possessions? They’re illusionary: you cannot own something that will continue to exist after you’re gone. Therefore, ownership is illusion.
If we can think ourselves past self-interest, we’re back to purpose. We have to envision for ourselves what the work of our lives will be. We could live only for ourselves (and certainly some people do) but if you’ve read this far, you’re the kind of person who already surveyed the range of existence and rejected the selfish end.
Science fiction and fantasy lie on the far edge of that range. Its writers are what Ursula Le Guin called “realists of a larger reality,”* able not only to imagine other lives and life forms, but to empathize with them, to crawl into their skins and look back at what it means to be human. Whether it’s Becky Chambers’ quiet search for purpose in the Wayfarer’s Series or the meaning found in friendship in Monk and Robot on one end, to John Scalzi’s explicit but whimsical purposefulness that threads through all his books, from the profound to the silly, they give us a wider vision of what it means to be alive. A less-reflexive reaction to new ideas. An embrace of learning something new. An invitation to consider, not just what it is to be human, but what purpose do you serve in your one wild and precious life?
* You really should click on the link and reread Le Guin’s National Book Award acceptance speech. It’ll give you cold chills to recognize just how prescient she was.
Next week Desiderata Detritus is up. Personally, I can’t wait!
The week after that, I hope I’m less scattered and in a better mood. If you want to prep, think along the lines of Scalzi’s Starter Villain.
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