Dear C.,
You asked if I could "give any advice, knowledge, or guidance as to what we should do, how we should prepare, and how we might see hope at the end of this tunnel." The "tunnel" is everything that's come with the pandemic and social unrest.
I don't know what things look like to you. Since mid-March I've thought that we should have directed our energies toward protecting the truly endangered rather than putting the entire country on a course of slow-motion suicide. The profound economic, social, psychological and educational costs of the overreaction to the virus will be with us for years.
And then there's the ideological rage destroying a number of our cities and also at work, more subtlety, even in places like Siloam Springs.
Your view may be different. My own sense is that we've been given the rare historical opportunity, and also the burden, of being able to watch a society come unglued in real time.
The roots of this unraveling are deep. After years of cautioning British leaders about the dangers that would explode into the Second World War, Winston Churchill said something like, "We have passed the era of warnings and entered the era of consequences." He was a political outsider then, and many hated his drum beating about the need to prepare for conflict. But, of course, he was right, and in 1940 he became the world's most crucial person. We need a Churchill now. Unfortunately, there isn't one in sight.
When I think of warnings and consequences my mind turns, first, to our education system and to high school graduates who can't name the U.S. president during the Civil War, who don't know why there's more daylight in June than December, and who are unable to track minimally complicated texts or discussions. American students have long ranked behind about 25 other nations in reading, writing and math, and parents bear the greatest responsibility.
Then there's the university world. When people look back on this epoch in American history, they won't say it spun into derangement despite the fact that more Americans had college degrees than ever, but because of it. Staying in school 16 or more years may bestow on some a certain dose of cleverness but it obviously doesn't bestow wisdom. How is it possible that we have so many college graduates and also so much social imbalance?
The era of warnings is past. The consequences of multiple generations of poorly educated Americans--and of decades of ideological poison emitted from too many university departments from coast to coast--are here.
Other things could be said -- about the soul-destroying cancer of social media, or the mindlessness of popular culture. The poet Yeats spoke of times when "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That rings a bell.
I do believe in a light at the end of a tunnel beyond this world. As for the present, it looks like a mixed replay of the slow unraveling of the western Roman Empire in the late 300s and China's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
In both cases, people retreated into their inner lives. They saw how little they could control, so they focused on themselves and their immediate environments. In Rome, some turned to Stoic philosophy, such as we read in Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Christians turned to Scripture and the work of Plato. In China, they might have turned to the words of Confucius or the I Ching.
My advice to you is captured in a line from a poem by T.S. Eliot, a snippet of a prayer: "Teach us to care and not to care." We want to be engaged in the world, but not get too wrapped up in it. We're in the world, but shouldn't be of it. We want to do what we can in this world, while also holding it at arm's length. We want successful careers, yet we notice the damage that's been done by morally empty career-climbers.
After reading in Scripture each morning, I always consider something from what we might call "soul classics." These days, it's the I Ching. Previously it's been the Dhammapada, Epictetus, Thomas à Kempis and Julian of Norwich, among others. I recommend this to you.
More practically: liberate yourself from social media, the psychological and spiritual destruction of which is beyond accounting.
Ignore most TV and Internet news.
Never hand your mind to an ideology or movement.
Never, ever do anything with the goal of pleasing the mob.
You are a social creature and also an individual. Tend to both.
Your mind and your soul are uniquely yours. Protect and nourish them.
-- Preston Jones is a Siloam Springs resident and history professor. The opinions expressed are those of the author.