Time to Philosophize

NOTE: Several people have asked about this column that I used to run in Belton. Wes asked if I'd run them here and I'm more than happy to oblidge. And like many quotes on my blog, they don't necessarily represent my ideas or opinions. But either way I like Wes, he's a great guy and don't mind sharing his columns with my readers. Let me know what you think.
Wes Riddle’s Horse Sense
Time to Philosophize
Eugene McCarthy passed away late last year. Surprising to some, this 1968 vintage peace candidate and long-time liberal Senator from Minnesota, was quite respected on the right and so fittingly eulogized by many conservatives. McCarthy had long spoken and written about the vital importance of controlling our borders. He also had something of a philosophic bent on life. McCarthy evinced the “thinking man’s” liberalism, which has virtually no expression in liberal politicians of today. It may be worthwhile for conservatives to consider also, whether their values and the intellectual honesty that gave rise to the conservative movement in the first place, are upheld by the politicians they now elect. Anyway, as late as the winter of 2000, McCarthy was saying something that gets to an issue that knows no “left” or “right” bounds. Indeed, one wonders to what extent political polarization in Washington isn’t manufactured to sidestep things that really matter, or at least to avoid the embarrassment of trying to come to grips with more important, though more intractable problems. McCarthy said that a political candidate somewhere, ought to begin to address “the issue of time.” By that he meant the way people are overscheduled in the modern world and don’t have time to savor life’s experiences.
The issue has far-reaching implications if you admit there is a problem. The way for instance we are no longer educated, but rather trained to be functionaries in an all-encompassing world of work, caught now in the “tractor beam” of globalizing macroeconomics. The fact that we are frequently trained incompetently merely compounds the farce conducted in most schools and even universities. The point I raise is that education concerns the whole man, and an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. The worker’s world, as Ernst Jünger puts it, is a denial of free scholarship and enquiry by definition. In the planned government economy that leaves no child left behind and in which curricula are increasingly dictated by Washington, there’s no room for philosophy and no room left to serve ends other than so-called “useful” knowledge. This is partly what has driven anything faith-based out of the classrooms, and why transmission of culture has been deliberately discontinued. So pick up your cog and start working! The GDP needs you. Time is a-wasting if you aren’t spending money and/or working to spend, to work and to spend. Don’t sit there thinking. Reflecting is an unproductive activity, whether or not it makes you feel more fully human. The modern/post-modern world simply doesn’t thrive on a happy and cheerful affirmation of your own being!
Contrary to what this may sound like, I’m not saying ‘Stop the world and let me get off’ (I may feel like it, but that’s not what I’m saying). According to the first chapter of Genesis, God ended His work and beheld it; He found that it was very good. In the same way, man ought to celebrate and gratefully accept the reality of God’s creation in leisure. That is how we come into full possession of our faculties, including our innate relation to Spirit, and come face to face with being as a whole. Through leisure the gate to freedom is opened, and man escapes his otherwise closed circle of labor and anxiety. The world of work, however, has taken shape with such dynamic force and velocity, that Josef Pieper describes it as something akin to a demonic force in history. The reason is that it belies the spiritual knowledge that is truth, and the search for truth that has been a part of the philosophical tradition of the West, even predating Christianity. For this reason, we must begin to withstand the intrusions into our essential humanity, by carving out sufficient time to philosophize—to go on “wondering,” as it were, as a lover and a seeker after wisdom. To wonder at the mystery that surrounds us; at the gift of life and of beating hearts; at the beauty of a rose; and at the divine essence, which suffuses every concrete and commonplace thing.
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Email: wes@wesriddle.com