Like many of you I hear the new year’s resolutions at every new year’s eve party. Very few people end up keeping those resolutions. Our resolve to lose weight, to work out more, to save more money, to do so many things we feel we need to do, falls victim to our lack of discipline and an easy retreat into settled habits.
It’s just pathetic.
In the January 1, 1863, edition of the Territorial Enterprise, the Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper that Mark Twain worked for, he wrote the following about the useless institution of new year’s eve resolutions:
Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.
“…though embattled…we are [called] to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” — John F. Kennedy
The 130 people killed in Paris on November 13th and the 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino on December 2nd, are a malevolent reminder that we’re at war with Islamic militants. And while the attacks and senseless murder of these people was terrible, it wasn’t something any of us can honestly say we never thought would happen. We’ve been hearing from experts in the media for years that it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” attacks like this will take place inside Western nations. Of course this is not something experts had to tell us, we’ve always known this as a fact of life.
It’s not surprising that militants operating covertly in our open societies, on a mission to kill Westerners and willing to die in the process, will eventually succeed in pulling off high causality attacks. The critical question now is about how we respond. We can do many things, but what we cannot do is overreact. This is exactly what the forces of reaction across the West, especially in the U.S., will cause us to do if we’re not collectively determine to combat it. This leads to costly mistakes and it’s exactly what our enemy wants us to do. Like a good fighter, our foe prods his bigger and stronger opponent, hoping we will lash out and overextend ourselves–tactically, morally and financially–and make the foolish and costly mistakes that we’ve proved so willing to make. They’re playing the long game, and so must we.
For responsible, and I dare say sensible people, we cannot let fear and anger dictate our response. There is a lot of fear stoking going on, especially by certain cable news channels and politicians who spread mindless outrage and fear for shameless political gain. Just as we resist our enemy, we should resist these sirens luring us toward the rocks.
Out best weapon is our ability to keep our presence of mind.
In the aftermath of these tragedies, America and her Western allies will examine security policies and make some reasonable adjustments. European nations, specifically within NATO, need to come together and formulate a more comprehensive, active, and long term strategy for thwarting and defeating these militants. For the Europeans it will require, and America should demand, a much greater commitment in manpower, money, and materials abroad. The U.S. needs equal partners in this long war. This is a generational conflict and all Western nations should be actively committed–beyond mere rhetoric–to waging this long war.
With that said, President Obama is absolutely correct: “There is no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” A crisis, again, I remind you, that we Americans are partly to blame for creating by invading Iraq in 2003. Our invasion of Iraq destabilized the region. Let’s not add more fuel to the fire. Winning this long war will ultimately be about diplomacy, alliances, politics, and economics…not blood and iron. In the short term we must fight and defeat our enemy, but we must realize that the war of today is fought to win the peace of tomorrow.
Going forward our war against these terrorists should be a steady and ruthless counterterrorism campaign waged by air power, special forces, and intelligence operatives across the middle east. Along with that, we must have sensible policies at home that allow us to deal with enemies amongst us, plotting to kill innocent people. This is critical. This will include supporting laws like the Patriot Act, which are in-fact important in keeping us safe.
It’s my hope that Americans will be actively resistant to any large scale boots-on-the-ground action in the middle east. Another ground invasion will only create more terrorists, while needlessly killing and maiming more American soldiers and costing the American tax payer hundreds of billions of dollars we don’t have on another large scale misguided military venture we can’t afford. We need to focus our fiscal resources on rebuilding a stable American middle-class, not on invading and rebuilding Iraq or any other part of the middle east.
We need to fight a smart war, not one that exhausts us morally and fiscally.
Some may find it easy, but many, I’ve found, have not. When we’re young it’s a faint question in the background; it’s a passing thought that’s constantly being put off until later, until we’re older and supposedly wiser. And then “later” comes and we’re older, in grad school or working a full time job, in a career and all grown up, maybe even married with a family, many years have passed, but still we have not answered that question. It’s still there, asking of us: What do you desire?
I know some people who seem to have answered that question. Some were very young and found their “itch” quickly and have pursued it all their life. But many, I think, are still trying to answer that question.
Illustration by Ann Ronan pictures, print collector/Getty
One of the common themes in ancient Greek art and philosophy is proportionality. For the Greeks, proportionality was the idea that there was an optimal mix of qualities or virtues that, properly harmonized, promoted human flourishing. We see and experience this idea in the beautiful statues and architecture that have survived in Ancient Greece. The idea of proportionality is a theme throughout Plato’s dialogues, especially The Republic, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics is constructed around the idea of a golden mean or “middle state” between two extremes.
Meden Agan (“Nothing in excess”)is one of the surviving inscriptions on the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi. One of my favorite quotes in the ancient texts is from Tacitus. As a Roman patrician, Tacitus’s education consisted primarily of ancient Greek art, literature and philosophy. In writing about his father-in-law, Agricola, Tacitus says “he took from philosophy the greatest lesson of all: a sense of proportion.”
Another fine example of this idea is embedded in the ancient Olympic games. One of the competitions, know as the Lampadedromia, involved a relay race of runners carrying torches. The challenge was to win the race without extinguishing the torch. This meant it usually wasn’t the fastest runners that won, but those adept at running just fast enough (the right proportion) not to extinguish the torch in the wind while getting to the finish line first, before the torch oil ran out.
The idea handed down through the ages suggest that success, beauty, happiness and good judgment are very much the results of a wise proportionality.
One early winter’s morning, before anyone was awake, I went for a walk in the snow. For me, the wintery wonderland provides a unique chance to be alone with my thoughts and to do some deep reflecting and communing with nature. It’s a good time to just be. Henry David Thoreau would surely have approved.
I quietly put on my cold weather clothes, slipped on my snow boots, and gently opened the front door. My face was immediately flushed by the icy air and the prickly like chilly tingle of blowing snow. As I stepped off the porch into the snow, the sun was just starting to peer over the horizon. Its gentle caressing light pierced the air and shimmered the pale blue dawn with shades of soft amber. I could hear the wind gusts roaring through the tree tops. As I turned toward the woods, I could hear each of my footsteps as I tramped through the virgin white powdery snow. The air was sharp and crisp with the faint smell of wood from fireplaces.
I walked into the woods and made way toward the stream. The snow was deep enough to keep my pace slow and deliberate. It was at this time, along this path to the stream, that I slipped into a semi-meditative state. My mind cleared. I began paying precise, nonjudgmental attention to the steady stream of impressions coming from all around me. It was calming and peaceful. I had drifted into a state of heightened self-awareness and total absorption in the present moment.
I briefly lingered at the stream and listened to the gentle flow of the water over the rocks. I then began walking toward the road. My mind was quiet, relaxed, and clear; yet focused and engaged. I began to think about life and the meaning of it all. A philosophical mind like mine can wander across a vast landscape of ideas trying to find some kind of coherent and satisfying answer. But sometimes the best answers come from just being in the moment, from just letting go. After reaching the unplowed road I stood and took a deep breath of the cool moist air and looked up at the morning sky through the mists of my exhale.
Thoughts and ideas flashed across my mind. The environment invoked awe and a sense of amazement and wonder. I thought of how many millions of other people over the centuries must have had similar thoughts while out on a quiet morning walk in the snow. Looking up at the millions of fading stars in the morning light made me think of just how mysterious it all is. I thought of just how impossible it seems that we (Man) will ever truly understand it all.
An old philosophical argument sprung into my mind. How can a finite mind understand the infinite? The very concept of something being infinite in nature, always existing, never having a beginning, whether you believe it’s God or the universe or just matter, is almost impossible to conceptualize or understand for a finite, limited being who resides on a tiny little planet, amongst a sea of planets, in one universe amongst thousands of other universes. Man’s presence on this planet has so far been a mere blip in time. Vast infinite time existed before us and vast infinite time lies ahead when we’re all gone. Are we, as Conrad Aiken said, “Cosmic Mariners, destination unknown?” Or is this short journey of ours somehow the plan of some divine providence?
Of course the simple truth is we don’t know with certainty either way. We know many small “t” truths about life and things. These can be answered mostly by science and reason. But we don’t have any sure answers for the big “T” truths about existence and the universe. Exactly how did conscious beings come to exist in a universe of lifeless atoms in the void? Having a scientific turn of mind, I can hypothesize and attempt to scientifically explain how this could have happened based on our current scientific understanding. But each possible answer I could give would only generate a number of philosophical and scientific questions that would cast some doubt on my scientific explanation.
And so it is with every big “T” truth in life, we live and believe by faith, religious or otherwise. The secular-materialist may shudder at the idea, but they’re as much a faith community as religious believers are when it comes to the big “T” truths about existence. The great question of existence asked by Gottfried Leibniz still remains unanswered: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Which brings me to an important understanding about faith. Genuine faith is always based on doubt. One commits oneself to an idea after having processed it, after having raised and analyzed doubts about it, after having applied it in the front trenches of life and found that the idea still lives and breaths. One rightfully has faith in such ideas. It has worked. It may not be “proven” true. More evidence may be needed to determine its truth. But despite these hesitations and doubts, one continues to live by the idea. That, my dear reader, is faith. “If doubt appears,” said Paul Tillich, “it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith.” In the general sense, faith is that courage that allows us to live by possibilities rather than certainties.
My thoughts were broken by the sound of a snowplow off in the distance. It was time to head back to the house. My wife and children would be getting up soon. I had enjoyed these brief moments of meditation and reflection and the chance to commune, Waldenesque like, with nature and the mystery. I cherish moments like these. We all need time to clear our heads and momentarily cast ourselves adrift in the flow of our thoughts.
Jeff Wills 