What happened to our minds?
Here’s one way of thinking about yourself: you are a big bag of ideas.
You carry around billions of them, of every sort, from spiritual to dietary to political to artistic. You have an idea about coffee, about Thai food, about the best time to get up in the morning, about people who fall asleep in theaters or travel with their pet snakes. You hold the idea that you aren’t looking for a romantic partner right now, or you are, or the whole thought of that leaves you a little melancholy. The vast, baroque array of ideas out there in the universe makes all of us a little different. Listen to theologians or politicians debate. Ideas can be held so passionately that things get very nasty very quickly.
When I was a youngster I fell in love with an idea imparted by my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Robertson: “You kids can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough.” Since I was a skinny, tall, near-sighted kid, (what the 18th century would have called a “bean rake”), I absolutely loved this idea. It prompted me down several paths — weight lifting, applying to Ivy League schools, stock market schemes. “Trying hard” didn’t always work for me. I’m still not very good at the stock market, but I know more about it than I would had I not tried. In the pantheon of “ideas,” you could do worse than setting impossible goals.
On the other hand, some folks do find great peace in accepting their limitations. They don’t mind being in the audience, rather than on stage. They realize, if someone were to insist they go skydiving, they would poop their pants and get the instructor killed. They are so at home with their limitations they can even be at ease with disappointing their more adventurous friends.
The sea of ideas with which we contend is so complex, in other words, that we learn to balance good ideas that seem to be at odds with each other. My primary point, though, in all of this, is that as these ideas take hold, and generate personal habits, they might be far more important than even our basic biology. (Think about it: when we get the “idea” of going on a diet, we are actually commanding the physical universe, our bodies, to behave in a different way, to make different physical chemistries.) We wind up fat, skinny, radiant, dull, optimistic, pessimistic on the basis of the ideas we regularly purchase and consume. It shouldn’t be surprising, by way of illustration, that people addicted to horror movies have problems sleeping alone, nor should it be surprising that someone who spent a lifetime confessing their sins to a merciful God might face death with something like tranquility.
There’s a beautiful, whip-smart she-theologian on YouTube, Melissa Dougherty, who recently did a show on the Enneagram. It’s worth the watch if, like me, you never knew much about it. Apparently, some folks use it as a method for understanding themselves, and others, and Melissa’s warning, on this score, speaks to assumptions we don’t always articulate: which of our ideas do we really trust? Which do we invest in? Should we, like the wise man, contemplate God’s law “day and night,” or will the Enneagram tells us about our original, uncorrupted self? Are we fallen from birth, or do we rely on Freud to let us know how badly our parents destroyed us? It seems a vitally important question to answer because it potentially creates two kinds of people, and then two kinds of societies: we can spend our lives really annoyed that parents, and circumstances, turned our originally pristine self into a wreck, or we can accept our original wreckage and be surprised by redemption, and beauty. We can be annoyed ingrates or self-aware wretches. It’s either Portland or Bedford Falls.
I should make a distinction here between human “ideas” and iron-hard “truth,” because they are often in conflict. The predictable laws of the universe–the force that keeps electrons in orbit and water boiling at the same temperature–form the foundation of our reveries, our ideas, and the closer we bring our ideas into conformity with the truth, the better off we’ll be. The realm of “truth,” moreover, proceeds further than the mere physical laws of the universe and extend to the complexities of moral law: you will feel bad if you shoot a pigeon with your new .22 just for target practice. You will feel bad if you speak slander about someone who has showered you with kindness. You will feel miserable taking your girlfriend to the abortion clinic. You will feel disgust, and perhaps pity, when you register the site of a flamboyant drag queen, mocking womanhood by reading stories to children. If your moral self is dead on this front, some very poisonous human “ideas” have taken over. You might have embraced those ideas yourself, by way of rationalizing a callous conscience, or you might be the product of a culture devoid of informed conscience itself. (There are parts of the world, and chapters in world history, where human sacrifice was so common there could be no “common sense” on the matter.)
Speaking of Bad Ideas
When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, I don’t recall gender confusion at all, and certainly no celebration of indeterminate sexuality. The “idea” at the time was that fragile boys should “man up,” and tom-boys should consider a sundress and mascara. Some version of this consensus was the central gender identity “idea” of the time. Boys had their own restrooms and locker rooms, and so did girls.
And it was beautiful. “Beach baby, beach baby, give me your hand, give me something that I can remember.” The electricity of romantic attraction, the male/female spark, was commonly felt as a kind of delayed, but anticipated, paradise. Trespassing on that paradise was still a bit scandalous. In a high school of more than 3,000 kids, I can only remember one unwed mother. The powerful divide between young bucks building muscle and song girls with long eyelashes was so deliriously magic that love songs actually worked back then. The mystery of the thing could leave you feeling electrons dancing on your shoulders all the way home from Friday night football.
Today? Can it get any more grotesque than teenage girls having their breasts surgically removed? (If any idea qualifies as “demonic,” that seems to be in the running.) When teenage boys mix adolescent sideburns with bra-straps and bustiers we know the sea of “ideas” has been polluted. Somebody put something very bad in the water. These kids are running around with trash assumptions and they are living trashed lives as a result — hooked up, worn out, demystified, sterile — a generation incapable of love songs. In truth, they are a generation incapable of any longing at all.
And that takes me back to my thesis. We live or die by the minds we cultivate, and we have allowed bad ideas to go uncontested. We allow the most warped, neurotic minds in the academy and the media and the government to share their viral mental disease without a fight. Several years ago, my alma mater, Stanford University, celebrated the gender transition of a biology professor. There he was in the alumni magazine, a dude in a dress, not making for a particularly attractive woman. It’s the story that should be a Corporal Klinger style joke, but it happened to be the ugly reality. Everyone, clearly, was being asked to bless this bad idea. Reasonable people were being asked to applaud a grotesque farce, and — more dangerously — they were being asked to populate their minds with yet another bad, controlling idea.
Playing the New Game
I like to believe this new Golden Era promised by President Trump–along with the popular rejection of DEI, trans-gender sports, and social media censorship—will bring along with it a necessary feistiness. We keep trash out of our lakes and forests. It’s time to start keeping the trash out of our minds.
