David Brooks over at The New York Times has a new colum about some Dodgers controversy with the LBGTIA community that I totally had missed, and while that part is boring and tedious and indicative of many news stories over the past 10 years, there’s better stuff later in the column.
Here’s what I mean:
In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing. You can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?
The “variety of spheres” thing is where I think a lot of people roll their eyes and groan about the current U.S. trajectory. Why am I getting emails from a shampoo company about how they are allies? What does that have to do with shampoo? Or why are YouTubers storming School Board meetings? “Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing.” So why are all the spheres now crossing over each other?
Continued:
Society grows unhealthy, Kuyper argued, when one sphere tries to take over another sphere. In our country, the business sphere has sometimes tried to take over the education sphere — to run schools like a business. But if you run a school or university on the profit-maximization mentality, you will trample over the mission of what a school is for — the cultivation of the student, the mission of pure research.
And, the stinger:
Some days it seems every sphere has been subsumed into one giant culture war, producing what Yuval Levin described in Comment magazine as “a vast sociopolitical psychosis.”
Last night I had a book club at my house; we talked about Heart of Darkness across maybe eight people. It was pretty interesting. At one point, somehow, we talked about the potential of World War III, and one of the arguments made — I’ve heard this before — was that maybe a World War wouldn’t be so bad, because it would give men some degree of purpose again, which seems to have been stripped by outsourcing and economic shifts and various other things.
Just to be clear, I am not advocating for World War so that Tony in Akron can feel whole again. I’m just saying it’s an argument people make.
I personally think the only antidote to “culture war” is “more meaning or purpose in our lives.” People will default to screaming online about things or getting worked up about Bud Light and transgender activists if they have no other purpose in their lives.
I like this “spheres” discussion, but the problem is that everyone — brands and individuals alike — seem to think they have a platform now, and as such, spheres are naturally going to cross (and repeatedly) due to those platforms and the availability of information (+ ease of posting that information).
You also have natural declines in commonly-held sources of purpose, i.e. religion (in decline for 20+ years), family (size is lower, less marriages, happening later), work (which I think most people realized was a transactional joke during COVID, if not sooner), etc.
If purpose is in decline, we’re going to be drawn to the cultural wars — because it gives us passion, a chance to voice opinions, a chance to be seen and feel like we belong to something, and all these things are incredibly notable things humans want from life.
In the quest for this purpose through screaming about something that some brand did, we do create all these mind-melds and overlays so that it does feel like vast sociopolitical psychosis.
It feels we may have gone too far to get out of it, but maybe the crucial element is to turn inward and focus on the things you can reasonably “control” — your own family, your own neighborhood, your own work, your own sense of self.
What’s your take?