On the Problem of Futility

Mikael Rose Good

Acertain world-weariness pervades some conservative thought. Conservatives have put away the incandescent dreams of youth—no one can deceive them now. They know that power corrupts, institutions crumble, and utopian dreams fail. They see goodness in the world, to be sure, but they see its inherent precariousness just as clearly. They also know that the best intentions to bring heaven to earth often end in disaster. With the hard lessons of history in mind, conservatives content themselves with a humble political vision: that of rescuing at least some good things from the ravages of decay and corruption. This is a worthy goal, but one that warrants further probing into the heart of things. Why do loftier and more idealistic visions of politics seem destined to fail? What is it about our world that makes this so?

A key culprit is time, which subjects all human achievements to decay. It seems, then, that any human pursuit must be characterized by a condition of futility. The problem of futility is one that we must encounter—both intellectually and emotionally—in the quest for political wisdom. Perhaps one of the only ways we can transcend the futility of the temporal is through love. Love of the other enables us to discern something of eternity, of infinite worth, and of imperishable goodness in another immortal soul. Love is inescapably practical and particular in its manifestation and, as such, is one absolute that conservatives can afford to hang their hats on.

Temporal experience, considered in itself, is unmoored from anything to

anchor the events of our lives and give them meaning. It is thus a condition of unceasing loss. Most of us (whether consciously or unconsciously) believe that there is something absolute that transcends time. This helps to mitigate the inherent anxiety of being subject to it. But there are some who have rejected eternity altogether, and they have peculiar insight into the tragedy of temporal existence. Momentarily immersing ourselves in that insight will help us understand the difficulty of the conservative task.

Take an example from literature. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello explores the frustration of temporality through the character of the Father. The Father observes that each person presents himself to the world as though he were one. But in reality, his existence is fragmented into a multiplicity of false fronts. This is because, according to the Father, man possesses no underlying essence that persists through the flux of time. You can never really trust “this reality you breathe and touch in yourself today,” because tomorrow it will appear to be an illusion. 1 After all, this is how the whole duration of our lives has proceeded: illusion replacing illusion with rapid succession. Realizing this, we lose all footing:

Well, sir, thinking of all those illusions long gone, of all the things that no longer seem to you the way they were then, don’t you feel not just these stage boards, but the ground itself giving way under your feet, realizing that in the same way everything you feel is here and now, everything that’s real for you today, is bound to reveal itself an illusion tomorrow? 2

The Father thinks we cannot be sure of the truth or goodness of anything. Reality as a whole evades our grasp because whatever seems true and permanent is soon invalidated by time’s succession and whatever new perception of reality that succession brings along. Day after day, time rips the illusion of solid ground out from under our feet. The Father’s analysis calls into question all of our efforts in this life: how can we know that what seems good to us today truly reflects reality, given that we have been disillusioned of our perceptions many times before?

An even more pessimistic variation of these themes is found in an essay by Schopenhauer titled “On the Vanity of Existence.” For Schopenhauer, the very condition of human existence is one of complete futility because we are subject to time. He explains:

1. Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, trans. Alice Gladstone Mariani and Umberto Mariani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), EBSCOhost eBook, accessed April 15, 2020, 158-9. 2. Ibid., 158.

Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live—the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable—has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess. 3

Since “the ever-passing present moment” is the only true mode of existence, everything that is in the past loses all of its reality, along with any significance it once had. 4 The only thing that persists through time is our own will to live, and even this is futile—it leads nowhere. Our life consists of “continual Becoming without ever Being,” relentless motion without the hope of rest, and an unhappy striving for happiness that is ultimately “vain and empty.” 5 Then death comes and extinguishes us forever. Considered as a whole, the life of humanity consists of “generations of men” who “live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession.” 6 This is how life must be in a world where “all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once into the hurrying whirlpool of change.” 7 Ultimately, neither Schopenhauer nor Pirandello offers us much hope for redemption in this unhappy state of affairs.

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, at least attempts to give us guidance on how to live in such unstable conditions. We all have a nostalgia for unity and for the absolute. This tempts us to try to transcend time and reach eternity. But in reality, we are totally limited to the temporal perspective. Our reason is incapable of transcending time to “add up” discrete events and experiences into a unified whole. And we cannot pretend that there is anything beyond human reason. 8 Instead of trying to vault ourselves into an imaginary eternity, we should recognize that our existence is but a momentary flame and embrace the futility and absurdity of it all. Hope must be eschewed, since it presumes something about a future that is not in our possession. So must transcendent meaning and value, since these are not accessible to us within the confines of time:

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Vanity of Existence,” in Studies on Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Sonnenschein, 1891), accessed April 16, 2020, http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/schopenhauer_vanity.pdf, 1. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 1-2. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Ibid., 1. 8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 35.

now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand…What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition? 9 Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life. 10

Camus holds up the solitary conqueror as an example of the “absurd man.” The conqueror cannot expect that anything he does will last or that he will metaphorically live on as an example to others. He knows nothing about any sort of life after death and he refuses to pretend as though he does. Like the universe he lives in, he is “inseparable from time” and “without future.” 11 And so he simply lives, defying the absurd by embracing it, accepting his own limits and doing “nothing for the eternal.” 12

One might say this is all quite melodramatic. How many people actually lie paralyzed with angst, convinced that they cannot know reality and that their whole life will be eradicated by the merciless onslaught of time? Hopefully not many. Yet these thinkers are valuable, because they see something that is true about time considered in itself. Erazim Kohák, in his theologically-rooted reflection on time and eternity, says that time in itself cannot be the locus of meaning or value. Without eternity, “even an infinite prolongation of time cannot redeem its futility.” 13 Temporalistic philosophies try to disguise this fact by postponing the fulfillment of human life to society’s distant future, as in Marxist ideology, or by vapidly insisting that “progress” creates meaning. But there is no such thing as real “progress” without an eternal reference point, for that means that value is purely instrumental, “defined by a horizontal reference to a before and after” and not to any absolute value. 14 According to Kohák, the existentialists saw past the sham of purely relative value—they were “agonizingly aware of the vast absurdity of a life whose meaningfulness is predicated on ‘progress.’” 15 In this respect, Sartre was not wrong to say that death turns all human lives into failures. 16

In keeping with Kohák, we can say that Pirandello, Schopenhauer, and

9. Camus, 51. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Ibid., 92. 12. Ibid., 66. 13. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 171. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Ibid., 101. 16. Ibid., 171.

Camus rightly understand the crisis of meaning and value that occurs when we limit human existence to the temporal dimension. If human life is not rooted in something absolute, something that transcends the constant motion of time, it can have no fixed meaning. This has dramatic implications, not just for individual life, but for social and political life as well.

Chantal Delsol, in her analysis of twenty-first-century man, claims that every era adopts a “specific vision of measureless time”—be it eternity or merely the extension of time as we know it. 17 This vision is “an expression of permanence.” 18 Man relies on it because he is aware of the inevitability of his death and the fundamental precariousness of his existence. He finds this precariousness “repulsive,” and he seeks some means of mitigating it. 19 This is normally done in one of three primary ways. One way is through religious belief, which promises eternal life after death in the world to come. A second way is through ideology, which requires the devotion of one’s life to transcendent values that are promised to someday reach full social and political manifestation in this world—not in the world to come. According to Delsol, all the ideologies that dominated the twentieth century “substituted immortality for eternity”: they thought their political systems could overcome transience by bringing heaven down to earth. 20 This desire to force eternity into time, which requires that eternity be relegated to the distant future, is precisely what Kohák criticizes in his discussion of historicist philosophies.

A third, less extreme way that man seeks measureless time is through the maintenance of strong social institutions that outlast the individual. Unlike the previous option, this is not the dream of a future utopia: it is a weaker form of permanence that can be obtained in the here and now. It is based on the conviction that social institutions, which embody values deemed “worthy of immortality,” can obtain “stability and duration” through man’s hard work. 21 The individual’s wholehearted dedication to maintaining these institutions makes him feel that part of himself will outlive death. For such a reward, he is willing to make great sacrifices. His own individual life becomes secondary to the maintenance of “certain immortal undertakings—the nation or the tribe or any valued insti

17. Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World, trans. Robin Dick (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013), 171. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 173. 21. Ibid., 172.

tution.” 22 In light of these social undertakings, biological death loses its sting.

Perhaps Delsol overstates the extent to which the commitment to social institutions is a spiritual quest for immortality. Nevertheless, she is drawing an important connection between the basic condition of temporality we have discussed and the spirit that underlies a large segment of intellectual conservatism. The conservative thinks that the values embodied in our tradition are worth conserving—that is, they are “worthy of immortality.” He thinks that meaningful human life is possible in the context of communities supported by stable, enduring institutions. At the same time, he knows that even our best institutions are threatened by the inherent precariousness of our condition. He sees that political conservatism is hard work, because conserving anything through time is hard work. He feels the weight of the challenge that Delsol so poignantly describes:

Existence lived out as the fashioning of a work of art tells the tale of a battle against chaos. The infant experiences no more than a series of scattered sensations and feelings, the adolescent, a series of scattered meanings, while the adult is one who names and gives structure to existence. But this structure always remains uncertain and precarious. At every instant some elements are being added while others are being lost. We spend our lives sifting the known from the unknown, trying to gather bits and pieces into a cohesive whole…Our plans, ventures, loves—the monuments of our lives— must be constantly rebuilt or they will fall from neglect. 23

In this particular context, Delsol is focused on the individual’s search for meaning. But we can easily apply these insights to the political realm. Roger Scruton describes something like the “battle against chaos” in his attempt to outline a conservative politics. Conservatism, he says, is in some sense merely “an attempt to escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” 24 Entropy is a relentless force of disorder that leaves no order or system untouched; conservatism is “the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.” 25 In Delsol’s terms, this requires that we constantly rebuild our social monuments lest they fall into disrepair. Scruton thinks our most important social monuments are “the long-term associations over time that form the traditions and institutions of a self-governing

22. Delsol, 176. 23. Ibid., 181-2. 24. Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), EBSCOhost eBook, accessed April 16, 2020, 10. 25. Ibid.

society.” 26 The modest goal of conservatism, then, is to maintain our inherited institutions in the face of entropy. Scruton elaborates,

The purpose of politics is not to rearrange society in the interests of some over-arching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and meanwhile to maintain and enhance, the order of which we are the temporary trustees. 27

Scruton reassures us that although we cannot actually halt entropy, “that does not make conservatism futile as a political practice, any more than medicine is futile, simply because ‘in the long run we are all dead.’” 28 We must shrug off the critics who say we are “doomed to failure.” 29 Given entropy, we must content ourselves with an achievable political goal: preserving what we have for a while. Our political achievements, like our biological lives, will at least be good while they last. This may not be the most compelling motive for dedicating oneself to the good work of conservatism, but Scruton thinks it is good enough. We are left to wonder whether a sufficient number of people will agree.

Michael Oakeshott adopts a similar approach to political activity. For Oakeshott, politics takes place strictly within the confines of a tradition of behavior that has persisted through time. The spring of politics is not abstract ideas or eternal values but rather “the existing traditions of behaviour themselves” that we continually explore and revise. 30 A society’s tradition

is neither fixed nor finished; it has no changeless centre to which understanding can anchor itself; there is no sovereign purpose to be perceived or invariable direction to be detected; there is no model to be copied, idea to be realized, or rule to be followed. Some parts of it may change more slowly than others, but none is immune from change. Everything is temporary. 31

Neither is there anything outside this tradition-in-flux that can ground us. Oakeshott envisions politics as a ship on “a boundless and bottomless sea” with 26. Scruton, 11. 27. Ibid., 9-10. 28. Ibid., 10. 29. Ibid. 30. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in politics, and other essays (New York: Basic Books Pub. Co., 1962), accessed April 17, 2020, https://archive.org/details/rationalisminpol00oake/page/n11/ mode/thumb, 123. 31. Ibid., 128.

“neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.” 32 The whole enterprise of politics is “to keep afloat on an even keel.” 33 We do this by preserving the continuity of our tradition through time and constant change. This is possible because “all its parts do not change at the same time and…the changes it undergoes are potential within it.” 34

Oakeshott knows that some find this “a depressing doctrine.” 35 After all, who wants to be stranded at sea without hope of the shore? But we are depressed because we believed the illusion that there was some safe harbor, either behind us or ahead of us. We must face the facts and put our minds to the task at hand. In Delsol’s terms, our tradition of behavior is an “expression of permanence” that can keep our ship afloat. It has no specific goal—not even a driving ideal—but at least it extends indefinitely into past and future. This very continuity protects it from being rendered entirely meaningless by time.

Given our initial exploration of the angst of temporal existence, the aforementioned political strategies leave something to be desired. First of all, a society’s values, traditions, and institutions cannot be ultimately meaningful—and cannot reliably provide individuals with a sense of meaning—if they are restricted to a purely temporal frame of reference. Because everything in time is subject to change, nothing endures that can serve as a fixed standard of value. But we can only carry out a prudential effort to conserve societal good against the forces of entropy if we know what is good in the first place. We must be able to perceive what is absolutely valuable and not just relatively valuable. It seems, then, that the prospect of preserving social “goods” through time does not in itself protect us from the collapse into futility. For the futility of temporality is not merely the inability to achieve some good. It is the lack of any absolute good whatsoever that can anchor our pursuits and imbue our temporal experience with meaning. Such good can only come to us from outside of time. As Kohák puts it, “the pure good cannot be transient.” 36

The second trouble is more of a practical one. If we realize that we will soon die and that not even our best efforts can ensure the permanence of our institutions, it is all too easy to succumb to the despair of futility. According to the philosophies of Scruton and Oakeshott, constant political vigilance is neces

32. Oakeshotte, 127. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 128. 35. Ibid., 127. 36. Kohák, 166.

sary for the seafarers to protect their ship and navigate the stormy seas. And for what? Why try when we seem destined to fail? This, says Delsol, is the prevailing attitude of the contemporary mind: we are disinterested in doing the hard work required to conserve societal structures. In fact, we have given up on attaining measureless time altogether. We have watched the religious man, the ideological man, and the socially conservative man sacrifice their individual existences for an elusive immortality, and “we acutely feel the futility of all these sacrifices.” 37 For our part, “we cannot bear the thought of sacrificing ourselves to a theoretical God, an imaginary radiant future, or institutions that the future will prove futile.” 38 This line of thinking naturally manifests itself in an anti-conservative impulse. We refuse the responsibility of stewarding “the institutions, projects, or traditions of [our] predecessors,” 39 because we suspect “that institutions transmit ideas that lead nowhere, that they are but empty suits of armor.” 40 Like Camus, we think that if there is joy and meaning to be found, it is solely located in the here and now—in the brief span of our biological lives. The quest for eternity and immortality become irrelevant. Each individual lives in the moment.

And so, committing himself to live fully in time, contemporary man is ruined by it. Delsol says that man’s experience of temporality, when it is deprived of the hope of measureless time, “is not simply a shortened duration; it is time shattered into many fragments.” 41 Man’s life now consists of “moments or scattered slices of life without connections to each other.” 42 This is precisely due to “the inability of biological time to be sufficient when the idea of a personal future beyond death is absent.” 43 Man refuses to think about his life as a whole because in light of death, the whole does not make sense, and this is unbearable to him. 44 He does have a natural desire to accomplish a meaningful life-work that will provide some continuity and wholeness to his life. But life-work is always fragile—the risk of failure is too high. And so “he lets entire swaths of his life slip away, out of neglect. Meanings pile up without hierarchy, thrown one on top of the other. Man seems to come undone, scattered about himself in pieces…The entropy of it all overwhelms him and drives him to despair.” 45 In all this chaos, the fragmentation of individual reality is mirrored by the fragmentation of social and political reality, since “we do not know what kind of society we want to

37. Delsol, 173. 38. Ibid., 175. 39. Ibid., 184. 40. Ibid., 174. 41. Ibid., 175. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 184. 44. Ibid., 177. 45. Ibid., 183.

build.” 46 We have given up on any human project that transcends the immediate.

Delsol thinks the answer to our fragmented existence is for people to toughen up and pursue a life-work. One individual’s life-work can become a sort of social inheritance of meaning upon which future generations can build. By it, the individual himself will manage to “dominate the passing of time” and “shape scattered bits and pieces into a meaningful whole.” 47 Perhaps this is the best solution we can arrive at, given our circumstances. But it does not really seem to solve the problem. Time and entropy still work against us, undermining every foundation and threatening every achievement. We still have no hope of arriving at a goodness or a meaning that transcends the contingencies of time. We are still tempted to say, with Schopenhauer, that time turns everything into nothing and erases all value. The angst of temporal existence runs deeper than these political philosophies are capable of addressing.

The only satisfying solution to the problem of futility is the one rejected from the start: the reality of eternity. Kohák provides a beautiful defense of this reality that is rooted in Christian theology and philosophy. For Kohák, “eternity” is not merely the eternal life of religious hope that Delsol talks about, which she thinks of as an infinite extension of temporal existence after death. Rather, eternity is an order of being altogether different from the order of time. It is the locus of absolute being and absolute value, so it provides the standard for good and evil—a standard that time itself can never produce. Furthermore, eternity is accessible in every moment of temporal existence. Kohák pictures the intersection of two axes: the axis of value, which is outside of time; and the axis of temporal progression, which (in itself) is valueless. 48 It is only because eternity ingresses in time that every temporal moment can be judged according to an eternal standard of good and evil rather than “in terms of its relation to what preceded and followed it.” 49 Eternity makes judgments and bestows meanings on temporal realities, “making being meaningful and meaning actual.” 50 Without this constant ingression of value, “temporality becomes absurd.” 51

According to Christian theology, the temporal dimension as we now know it will one day pass away. Eternal life with God will not be an extension of

46. Delsol, 175. 47. Ibid., 181. 48. Kohák, 166. 49. Ibid., 167. 50. Ibid., 197. 51. Ibid., 202.

earthly time but a different kind of life altogether. Then the incorruptible life of God himself will flow through us, untouched by death or decay. Yet even in our present lives we have access to the realm of eternity. For this reason, we can experience visions of absolute being now. According to Kohák, whenever we see that something is good, make an objective judgment of value, or perceive the intrinsic meaning of our lives and experiences, we do so with reference to the eternal. The ingression of the eternal is also “the ingression of the Idea of the Good, of beauty, truth, goodness, of holiness, justice, tenderness, love.” 52 These eternal ideals are perceivable aspects of corruptible earthly realities. We see eternity in time, in things that are bound to pass away in their present form. This is the deepest solution to futility:

In a hundred daily actions, what redeems us from the sense of ultimate futility of the order of time with its knowledge that the house I build will decay and fall, the love I cherish will pass in time, is the vitalist recognition that in spite of its absolute futility it is all still relatively good, intensely good in its season. 53

The specific activities that we accomplish in our lives have profound relative goodness because they participate in what is absolutely good. Our earthly homes may collapse in time, but goodness in itself—the pure aspect of eternity—is imperishable.

Reclaiming eternity goes a long way to redeem our lives from futility. But now we arrive at another question: how do we begin to take hold of eternity in our day-to-day experience, much less in the political affairs of a whole society? Perhaps we can refer to eternal ideals in our political discourse. We can recognize the instantiation of these ideals in our traditions and institutions and work to conserve them. But talking about concepts like “justice” and “peace” and “goodness” is, to some extent, mental abstraction away from the messy particulars of actual political life. We cannot get past the fact that any concrete action we take in the political realm is fragile and temporary. Eternal goods do not perish, but the forms they take on this earth certainly do.

As a final response to the sense that politics cannot escape futility, I want to discuss a particularly tangible and concrete instance of eternity ingressing in time. This is the human person, discerned by love. Insofar as we are temporal 52. Kohák, 197. 53. Ibid., 100.

beings, everything we are and do is precarious. We change all the time—our beliefs, values, opinions, dreams, and pursuits are rarely static. But there is another dimension of our being that transcends time. Jacques Maritain calls it our “personality,” juxtaposing it against our material individuality, which is rooted in matter and tends to “dispersion” and “disintegration.” 54 Space, time, and matter lend us only “a precarious unity, which tends to be scattered in a multiplicity.” 55 But insofar as we are persons, each of us is a genuine whole, “a reality which, subsisting spiritually, constitutes a universe unto itself.” 56 Personality is the locus of our interaction with the eternal and transcendent because it is rooted in “the deepest and highest dimensions of being.” 57 As persons we are “directly related to the absolute” and to “those indefectible goods which are as the pathways to the absolute Whole which transcends the world.” 58 It is easy to see that under Maritain’s conception, the person is subject to none of the difficulties of temporal existence that we have discussed. The person has “a destiny beyond time,” and for this reason transcends temporal society. 59 According to Maritain, a good political society must seek the good of the human person, which requires that it recognize the “supra-temporal aspirations” of personality. “With respect to the eternal destiny of the soul, society exists for each person and is subordinated to it.” 60

Insofar as political society serves the good of the person, its task and mission transcends time and futility. A society has as many points of contact with the eternal and transcendent as it has persons. But there is one last crucial piece to the puzzle: love. Love is the mode of seeing by which we perceive a human being not in his material individuality, but in his personality. Love, in the pure sense that Maritain is concerned with, “is not concerned with qualities or natures or essences but with persons.” 61 He continues:

We love the deepest, most substantial and hidden, the most existing reality of the beloved being. This is a metaphysical center deeper than all the qualities and essences which we can find to enumerate in the beloved. The expressions of lovers are unending because their object is ineffable. Love seeks out this center, not, to be sure, as separated from its qualities, but

54. Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 44, 38. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 40. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 42. 59. Ibid., 61. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 39.

as one with them. This is a center inexhaustible, so to speak, of existence, bounty and action; capable of giving and of giving itself; capable of receiving not only this or that gift bestowed by another, but even another self as a gift, another self which bestows itself. 62

Of course, the full expression of this self-giving love is relatively rare. It does not characterize all human relationships—probably almost never those in the political realm. Nevertheless, insofar as we view others through the lens of love, we are able to discern something of this “metaphysical center” in them. And, by seeing it in some people, we begin to think of all people differently. Oliver O’Donovan describes the effect of this type of seeing:

We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is irreplaceable. Perhaps we only discover this, in the fullest sense, of a few human beings in the course of our lives, though we would have inklings of it with many more. 63

To see another person and know that they are irreplaceable: this is a foundation for action that transcends the contingencies of time. Both Love itself and the object of Love—the ineffable, irreplaceable human person—bring eternity into time. It is here, in the words of T.S. Eliot, that we encounter “the still point of the turning world.” 64

To love is to catch a glimpse of eternal beauty and goodness that transcends this earth. Even if we could find no lasting meaning in our political endeavors, we would still have love, which is more foundational than politics. Indeed, God is Love in its purest form—the triune Fount of being, eternally self-giving. Our purpose is to love and be loved by this God and to love his image in other human beings. It is true, then, that “to love another person is to see the face of God.” 65 A meaningful life is perhaps as simple as knowing one is loved by God and extending that same love to “the least of these.” Christ modeled this for us in his earthly ministry, revealing that a fully human existence—a life of love in obedience to God—is possible even in undesirable social and political conditions. None of this, however, is meant to downplay the importance of attending faithfully to the good of our political society. If anything, love ought to transform the way we think about the political order by anchoring it to the eternal worth of the human

62. Maritain, 39. 63. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 59. 64. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Coker, line 62. 65. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13661.Victor_ Hugo. Accessed May 6, 2020.

person created by God.

The best conservative politics would be one that fully understands its relationship to time and eternity. It would understand the human person to be of absolute and eternal value, and therefore the earthly reality most worthy of care and conservation. Conservatives themselves would be motivated by love, which must begin in the personal realm, not in the political realm. They would do the hard work of preserving our traditions and institutions because they know they are working for the good of the human person, who will outlast every earthly achievement.

There may be structural implications as well. A more local form of politics would seem to serve the human person most effectively. It would allow politicians to see the people they govern—not only their “metaphysical centers,” but also the qualities that differentiate them from other groups of people. This would prevent “love” from being a purely abstract concern for an abstract populace. It would allow leaders to observe how their practices and policies affect real people. It would bring together affection and practical understanding so that love and concern could be accompanied by concrete, meaningful action.

Lastly, we can see now that humanity is not doomed to a futile enterprise, sailing aimlessly through stormy seas until death makes an end of us. Love of the person gives politics a mooring. Conservatives like Scruton and Oakeshott are afraid of lofty ideals; they do not want to disguise the inherent instability of time by embracing abstractions. But love has to do with persons, not abstractions. Conservatism can find a resting-place here, in something that is both eternally worthy and inescapably concrete.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Delsol, Chantal. Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. Translated by Robin Dick. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013.

Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971.

Goodreads. “Victor Hugo Quotes.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/ quotes/13661.Victor_Hugo, accessed May 6, 2020.

Kohák, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Maritain, Jacques. The Person and the Common Good. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.

Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in politics, and other essays. New York: Basic Books Pub. Co., 1962. Accessed April 17, 2020. https://archive.org/details/ rationalisminpol00oake/page/n11/mode/thumb.

O’Donovan, Oliver. Begotten or Made? Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. In Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, 119-167. Translated by Alice Gladstone Mariani and Umberto Mariani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. EBSCOhost eBook. Accessed April 15, 2020.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On the Vanity of Existence.” In Studies on Pessimism. Translated by T. Bailey Saunders. London: Sonnenschein, 1891. Accessed April 16, 2020. http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/ schopenhauer_vanity.pdf.

Scruton, Roger. How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. EBSCOhost eBook. Accessed April 16, 2020.