The last several posts on this blog carry a certain background feeling. Everyone, each in our own frame of reference, seems to think the world going to hell, or perhaps a new Flood that will change everything. Various images are evoked: Anti-Christ or savior; horsemen of the apocalypse; humans playing God; Apocalypse or Rapture; God receding into His mystery (or not). Any could arise for real, while entirely unimagined new evils or goods seem already to have been coming into existence. Everything, everywhere, all at once, feels somehow on a cusp of monumental change.
It isn’t just the specters of catastrophic war or a pandemic worse than Covid, or the advent of record-breaking floods and fires. It includes the progress in exploring our cosmic origins, which, for all that we have learned, just might be unknowable. It also includes the possibilities, good or bad according to taste, of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. It’s not the election of Donald Trump. It’s not climate change, or cyber-hacking’s new frontiers, or animals built in a lab.
All that we’ve considered true, all the theories and doctrines, about existence, human nature, truth and falsehood, virtue and sin, feel today like they’re open to question. We stand at an existential ground zero, or clean slate. What happens now, or through a few more turns of fate and human deeds, might be existentially fatal to humanity, or glorious in ways yet undreamed of, or disruptive and deadly, or trivial.
So what is a net-browsing, news-reading, publicly-engaged person – or anyone else – supposed to do?
Who will make the choices and take the actions that shape our destiny? Is it all beyond any control I may muster – can ordinary people be more than pawns to the ambitious and powerful? Are we powerful – but only if we pursue some ends that someone sells us on? Are we all infinitesimal quarks in the universe, making meaning only as we bounce off of each other – or making no sense at all?
How have humans faced these questions, in the X hundred thousand years of our sentience? Can’t it all just snuff out in an instant, whether by our own hand (Nuclear war is the favorite scenario but …), cosmic flash (Black hole? Solar explosion?), or Divine decision?
Amid all the worldly dysfunctions, fears, disorders, conflict and nonsense, why do people carry on?
Some don’t. As societies, churches, hierarchies, ethics and norms that have guided peoples for ages fall apart, nihilism becomes as an option. Today we see outright suicides, but also addictions, murder-suicides, mass shooters, and the like, and all strain social order, particularly in free societies. Is it possible that the work that goes into gaining freedom, and the burdens of finding purpose, are not worth the effort?
If they are worth it, what do I choose? To exist out of curiosity? To further a tenet that I have chosen actively (even divine ordinance is something I embrace by my own will)? To give my children the same option, however they may decide to address it? To further the existence of my society or my country, for reasons that I choose by whatever decision process? Simply to go along and get along, whether in curiosity or apathy? Will I end up renouncing it all?
The different analyses and prescriptions, of scientists, theologians, Realists, and others, all parse actual choices that actual people have made, or might make. All the knowledge and affirmation gathered by all of these observers is, as noted, open to question today. Despite any of the findings, rationales, arguments and wisdom that they have garnered, all of the options are still mine to choose from. My meaning, my future, and ours, are in my hands, and ours.
If, then, I am inclined to live, to see what I see, to try what I try, that is a choice. If I actively want to be able to make my own calls by my own impulses, I value that choice, and the ability to choose further. I would call this value by the name of free will. I will set up and support arrangements that preserve and promote general freedom for that will.
I might say that I hold certain Truths as self evident – that all humans have, equally by their very existence, this right to live by their own lights – to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, if these rights denote ‘value,’ I would value governments for the purpose of protecting those rights for all.
If I value these things, I subscribe to the self-conception of America, undersigned nearly a quarter millennium ago. In this self-conception of a nation, people made an active choice, asserting a core of belief against the universe’s infinity and indefinition. They may not have viewed that infinity and indefinition in the terms perceive today, but in some form it has always limned the human condition. If I hold these truths, and live in that nation, or gain admission by the civic body’s promulgated procedures, I am an American.
If American-ness does not need all this verbiage to explain it, then perhaps we can take it as simply what we believe, implicitly. We can focus instead on the price of eggs. In that case, MAGA or woke, Marxist or capitalist, Realist or idealist, “left” or “right,” should all be able to put those isms into their proper place in this larger context. Our “ismic” divisions are contrivances, by which some of us chase influence, power, wealth, or maybe an odd gratification. All rest on the same bedrock of our faith in human freedom. We may disagree on best means for society to help us live in freedom. But any reason not to live in comity is incoherent, unless I actually renounce the Declaration, and freedom. Even the most anti-social actors exhibit a form of that impulse that underlies free will. We are not wrong in our article of faith. It’s just that the details take up too much of our attention today. If we see, together, that we all do value freedom, and that all the disputes and politics boil down to differences over means to keep this liberty in existence, Americans have a shared purpose. We do not need nihilism. We have a base for facing the great unknown. And we can all love this vessel for it.
Common Conviction 