FROM THE ARCHIVES
[ home | archives | e-mail ]
Does anything matter?
[Caleb Stegall 03/15 02:23 PM]Rod wrote: Is what really a very important question? God? Family? Architecture? Liturgy? Birkenstocks? Organic chickens (which I understand to mean "the kind of food we eat")? No, Maggie, footwear is not an important question, and people who actually read my book know that I don't make an issue of it, except as an example of how I let a silly cultural prejudice against a brand of shoes keep me from trying out a product that has given me good service. So okay, footwear is not important. But all the rest of it, yeah, it's important. He is right, and this is really at the heart of the disagreement. Does anything matter? Really matter? I asked yesterday the Augustinian ethical question: What do we love? Lying behind that question may be the question: Is there anything out there worth loving? Too many conservatives simply give in to the tide of cultural nihilism as Gallagher does at the end of her review. If the choice is between a careful reevaluation of what is really worth pursuing with our “moral imagination” as Kirk called it, even at the risk of being called a narcissist, a romantic, pretentious, intellectually immodest, sentimental, a puritan, a jerk, or even quirky, on the one hand, and adopting the false sophistication of the cultural nihilists on the other, it seems clear which road, bumpy as it might be, provides a possibility of recovery.
|
