Minders Keepers

Those hired to mind the "shop" have kept the "shop"

Thought experiment:

What if the people who were hired to mind the shop were not interested in the business? What if you owned a shop with a collection wide and deep, containing priceless works and you hired people to mind it, study it, protect it, and promote it? What would your expectations be?

Would you expect these minders to mock it? Would you expect them to trash it in both private and public settings? Would you expect them to steal the shop, by chopping it up and selling it for parts? Would you expect them to bury the collection, so that not only would it become difficult for anyone to access it, but that most people wouldn’t even want to see it?

This is where we find ourselves.

The great treasure is the Tradition. We are fortunate in that we come into being after much ink has been spilled, much conversation had, much vision captured. Not only do we come relatively late in this story, but our access to the story has never been better. We walk around with a portal to the whole thing in our pockets. Smart phones, as many have noted, grant us access to information and learner greater than the famed Library of Alexandria.

Access is not the problem. Inclination is.

Inclination—the desire to avail ourselves of what is at our fingertips—is wanting. I order to want to want, we humans need prompting; some more than others. It is not as immediate as the hierarchy of needs, but we are creatures in search of wisdom—Homo Sapiens. We have made a world by wisdom for a world of wisdom. And we’ve made a world with access to wisdom at an instant, from even the remote corners of the world.

And yet, we ignore wisdom and spend our time on almost any other pursuit—we are homo voluptas, pleasure-seeking man. Or, better yet, homo distrait, distracted and distraught man. What are we distracted from, and what are we distracted by?

Of course, I am merely a footnote to the footnotes to the footnotes on commentators on the human condition. Many wise men and women have commented on our propensity for distraction. Pascal riffs on this sad aspect of our human condition quite a bit in his Pensees. But I think T. S. Eliot gets at it best when he wryly observes that without heroic counterforce and intention, we are merely “distracted from distraction by distraction”.¹

And he made this observation was made more than a decade before televisions became a household reality! What would he say about our own smart-phone dependent world?

To borrow an image from television, the transmission has been interrupted. The transmission here is not the latest broadcast of an episode of “I Love Lucy” or the latest binge-able series on Netflix. The transmission interrupted has been that of the Tradition upon which all of this ultimately rests.

Old Books.

This disruption had been in the works for quite some time. Read C.S. Lewis’s profoundly insightful and prophetic The Abolition of Man² to see that educational currents were well underway to soften our attachments to all these dusty-musty old things. His seemingly odd attack on a textbook must’ve struck his audience as absurd and even a bit much—an overheated imagined giant which is actually a “windmill”. But Lewis’s attack on the Debunkers was right. The textbooks were part of a battery of attacks on the foundations of the Tradition, ultimately severing the ties to Old Books. The progressive educational theorists really did subvert classical and Christian learning in exchange for “what works.” What works has become dystopian: kids do not know history or stories, only that these histories and stories are narratives of deception and coded mental chains to keep the powerless confounded. These Cultural Minders, teachers and intellectuals charged with educating, were more interested in blowing up our connections to the past, with each new progressive generation of teachers creating new “Year Zeros.” They taught a gospel of liberation, or so they claimed.

But what if “liberation” itself has been re-coded to mean its hermetic opposite?

An honest engagement with the Tradition reveals that no such dark hegemony exists in the collection of “Great Books”, or even those adjacent to the Great Books. These “cynical theories” are designed to destroy and disconnect us from the reservoir—our “reserve” or our “keep”. Notice that these truths are embedded in the very language we use!

The walls of our keep have been destroyed and looted by the keepers hired to keep the keep. The minders have not done their job. The Minders became Keepers.

Professors, commentators, cultural critics, teachers, parents—all have participated in the greatest theft. We are in an extremely well lit new dark ages, the glowing screens confounding us from wisdom and into distraction, by distraction. And this condition is buried in the word itself. But how would we even know to look at that? How would we even pay attention to our being pulled apart and dislocated and disbanded and decoupled?

So why this happened is a book I am not (yet) ready to write. But we must at least face this cultural murder-suicide. Those hired to transmit the World’s Body have not only not done this crucial work, but have rendered the World’s Body infertile and unregenerate. No one even knows that wisdom has become optional…and those things that are optional become ignored and finally proscribed.³

So to counteract this iconoclasm, we can read Old Books. Or, in order to reclaim our cultural heritage and benefit from wisdom and tradition— “experiments that worked” we should mine the Tradition. We must ignore that Minders that destroyed the shop. The keepers of the flame “kept” it, but we can get it back.

1. see “Burnt Norton” in his Four Quartets.

2. The Abolition of Man was first a three part series of talks given during the war. He begins by talking about “The Little Green Book” and the downstream effects of such a world view smuggled in by a kind of “values neutral” ethos.

3. See “Neuhaus’s Law”, which states, “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”