The Right Question

The two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 brought special programming yesterday in course of which I heard old men, buffs of naval glory, holding forth, in tones of veneration, about old ships and what amounts to the same-old gruesome violence that has been hallowed now by time’s passage.

This got me thinking first (curiously perhaps) about railroad buffs. But such odd segue ways often suggest that more is coming. Sure enough. The thought soon jelled. I was thinking of narrow historical time streams that serve people in place of cosmologies—evidently so because they’re intensely preoccupied. Other such next came to mind—those centered on literature, music, royalty, movies, etc.—identification with each of which then becomes a narrow but serviceable cosmology of sorts. The values each represents become the values of their aficionados. That bit about old ships, I thought, rests ultimately on nationalism, thus identification with a collective—much as there are aspects of literature and music in which youthful rebellion has become a cultural imprint, thus a kind of teen-age stance transmuted into opposition to authority and passionate support of ever growing “rights.” To serve as sufficient orientations for inner life these orientations only really require that a sufficiently large number of people should share them and that channels of communications should exist to form communities of belief.

Next came the thought that there are many arrested cosmologies—on the analogy of Arnold Toynbee’s arrested civilizations. All people in youth ask the right question. That question is “What is it all about?” Arrested cosmologies come into being because many people don’t go far and deep enough to answer that question for themselves. They stop short. They find some answer that seems fitting and don’t look any further. If that question is too easily answered, people don’t advance.

It is too easily answered if the questioner is easily satisfied. A person is easily satisfied if he or she is focused on social adaptation rather than really wanting the truth. In the former case, adopting some prevalent view enables that person to fit in. To be effective, the question should be nagging. Intellectual rigor and curiosity should be present too. The person’s time scale must be very expansive and include at minimum that person’s death—or, in considering broader social questions, like civilizations, it should look back and forward for minimally several millennia.

The way to judge cosmologies is to see the degree to which they conform to observable reality, inner and outer. Do they go far enough? Are they sufficiently inclusive? Do their own views of other such communities accurately describe those they critique? If the effort to answer the question stops in early adulthood, it may nonetheless be correct—but it won’t be that person’s own. It takes a lifetime. The question should still be actively present on one’s death-bed.