Post #109: Gifts of Fortune (Wisdom)

1 May 2024

“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play: I turn the ever-spinning wheel. I delight in seeing the high come down and the low ascend. So rise up on my wheel if you like, but only on condition that you will not count it an injury when you must fall, as the rules of my game require.”

—Fortune addressing Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, section II

     It’s an illuminating exercise (and a staple of edifying books on the millennial spirituality counter) to pause for a moment in the stream of life’s turbulences, trials, and troubles, and draw up a list of good things you’ve received at Lady Fortuna’s hands, making a note of how much you would give for them if you were not already enjoying their possession. The tally can be surprising, even astonishing.

     I remember only too vividly how acute were my fears, at 13 or 14, about what it would mean to go through life a shortie, with cause enough, alas. A year then felt as long as a decade now, so I cannot say that it was, after all, only a relatively brief interlude. In felt time it was a considerable part of my life, even if it turned out a false alarm in the end, owed mostly to being relatively young for my class. I outgrew it, by the luck of my genes and circumstances reasonably favorable to physical development; but I will never forget the scare it gave me, and the burning experience of what a disadvantage it really is, whatever pious denials we may issue to reassure the modestly endowed. It can be compensated for, no doubt, but the need for doing so is painfully real. Size matters, and let no one tell you otherwise, unless you cannot bear to hear the bitter truth.

     I still shudder too at the memory of how I once felt that I would never master certain complications of German grammar, or learn to swim properly, or cut a more impressive figure than I did then when I looked in the mirror and saw mostly pimples. All this passed me by in due course, and I am not saying that it was any graver than the indignities that adolescence is always bound to entail, one way or another; I would just say that it gave me some harsh lessons along the way about what it would be like not to be so lucky as to see the poisoned chalices pass eventually. It doesn’t always. Kyrie eleison.

     (Now that I am thinking over what I wrote, another delightful recollection occurs to me. I am reminded that before I even turned twelve, I had already fallen quite badly in love, for a full year no less, and gone on a kind of date at the end—the upshot of which turned out to be that I had to listen to a supposed friend gloating to me over the phone that she had told him I was boring and had taken up with him instead. I am not crying trauma, nor bewailing the injustice of the world. I was nervous and shy, and I didn’t know what to do; she was past that point already and had her reasons for expecting more. Nor is it likely that she meant for her comment to get back to me. It was not eternal Eve who betrayed me; she was only playing her part. The snake was my false friend, and there were some valuable lessons in having to face that so early, though I was reluctant to learn them. In any case it was a cruel and no very auspicious way to get started upon the treacherous trails of teenagerdom. I don’t know how much wisdom these infelicitous beginnings taught me; but they gave me some sense what to expect from life and my fellow man, and what happens to the laggards in the race. They get taken down by the wolves, and finished off by the rats.)

     On a happier note, and more in keeping with the announced theme, gifts of fortune not lashes (though I shall have to return to the latter), a few years later, at 15, I went on a class trip to London, and added a side-excursion of my own to Oxford, with a buddy. As we were sitting on a park bench beside the Isis, surveying the medieval charms before us, I was overwhelmed by a sense of how incredibly fortunate one would have to be to get a chance to study in such a magnificent setting—quite unlike anything I had seen anywhere else. Never would I have imagined that only a handful years later, I would be among the lucky ones.

     Even at the end of high school, when I had largely recovered my bearings from the worst miseries of adolescence, the height of my aspirations was to find a way of escaping the German educational system (#105) and study at an impressive university in England. It would have boggled my mind if a crystal ball had revealed to me then that I would get a chance to go on to graduate school in Los Angeles and New York and Toronto, and spend the next twenty years on an Odyssey through the globalized world of education. That journey had its downs (real defeats, not just detours) as well as its ups, and it’s not a question of singing my own praises; what I am trying to say is that what unfolded for me, though of course I contributed intentions and effort aplenty, amounted to nothing less than the boldest of dreams coming true for me, and perhaps more, since much that ensued I could not have anticipated even by the wildest leaps of imagination.

     And all this, I am convinced, not as a result of my own doings alone—what hubris it would be to think so!—but by whatever mysterious powers turn our wishes into realities, if we are fortunate enough. To think of these forces as somehow partial to one’s cause would be the worst hubris, and not at all what I am trying to express; I have no idea what they are, or how they work, only that without help, none of what turned out so well would have happened. Call it an article of faith, if you want, but I must insist on it, not out of pride, heaven forbid, but out of due humility before mysteries that I do not understand.*

     If I perform the exercise I mentioned at the outset, drawing up a ledger of gifts I have received in my lifetime, the riches confronting me, as I would assess them, are breathtaking, no matter how anyone else might tally them, or whether they might turn out to be denominated in a fashionable currency or perhaps in non-convertible Athenian obols, Roman sesterces, or cancelled Confederate dollars. In my younger and more exuberant days, I may have suffered my share of foolish moments when I thought of these treasures as mine, though in a sense I always knew better, as I’ve been trying to convey above. I wish I could say that I ever was, or that I am now, fully immune to the madness of conceit; I am not, sad to say; such silly and misplaced points of pride still arise here and there, but not without my recognizing, before long, how crazy it is to claim possession of things that we owe to lucky constellations at least as much as to our efforts, and that can be taken away at any time, from one moment to the next.

     One of the most touching and memorable meditations on the perennially transient and uncontrollable aspect of life was penned in the sixth century AD by Boethius, a Roman senator awaiting the hangman for alleged crimes of which he was almost certainly innocent. Until very recently, as he reflected in his prison notebook,  The Consolation of Philosophy, life had bestowed upon him every boon he could have asked for, and more (learning, prestige, and great favor from the emperor, even two young sons made consuls together, an unprecedented honor)—and then, from one year to the next, it was all taken away (or perhaps better, taken back), as he was imprisoned on false charges and ignominiously put to death.** (Epictetus suggests, very wisely it seems to me, never to say of anything that you have lost it, but instead that you have given it back, because it was only ever yours on loan in the first place—like someone inhabiting the world as if he were a pilgrim staying at an inn along the road, not the owner of the place, or any place (Enchiridion 11).)

     To complicate matters, we can never be sure, as Boethius’s example teaches so vividly, of what will ultimately prove beneficial to us, and what detrimental or even calamitous. Boethius must have imagined, when he enjoyed his moment of triumphant glory, that he was the most fortunate man alive; but the very greatness of his distinctions, by arousing envy, contributed to the rapidity and violence of his downfall. On the other hand, quite a few of those lashed most mercilessly by the Fates and Furies, sometimes as innocent as Boethius, have been known to praise even prison and devastating illnesses for the soul-saving changes of perspective they induced. (“Bless you prison,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, “bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”)

     It would be foolish to go to the other extreme and make a point of distrusting blessings or perversely cherishing afflictions; the common boons and banes of mankind carry their respective meanings for good reasons, and they are not to be trifled with. All the same, it would be advisable to wait and see. A therapist once told me a Jewish wisdom story about an elderly father in old shtetl-land whose strapping young son gets injured while plowing their fields. “Woe unto me!” he goes complaining to the rabbi. “Wait and see,” the rabbi tells him. A few days later, while the son is still recuperating, the Tsar’s soldiers descended upon the town to press its young men into military service. “Bless the Lord!” the old father tells the rabbi, who replies, you guessed it, “Wait and see.” And so on.

     Viktor Frankl mentions in the German version of his famous book (p. 85 in the 2009 Kösel-Penguin edition, see #86) how he used to tell his patients that one could normally only tell five to ten years later what something in life had really been good for. (At the camps it looked different to him, and he thought he could often tell within minutes already. The same may be true of other extreme situations, but as a rule of thumb for ordinary life, Frankl’s notion still has much to recommend it.) Of course blessings and curses do not necessarily bring great surprises in their wake; but if the obvious were all there is to be said, we would hardly understand so readily what is meant by a blessing or a curse in disguise. No one ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him, Emerson writes in his remarkable essay on “Compensation,” nor a defect that was never made useful to him. We should thank our faults and weaknesses, at least sometimes, and the hindrances that life puts in our way. For strength grows out of weakness, and like wounded oysters we can mend our sores by making pearls.

     Once again, to become aware of how unobvious the consequences of our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and setbacks, can often be is not to spurn such evident human goods as youth and health, or looks and charms, or riches and talents, or status of any significant kind. Imagining sour grapes everywhere because we cannot reach them is not wisdom, it is denial, while telling those less favored that they do not in fact face great disadvantages, even if we mean to spare their feelings, does not help them, but only adds insult to their intelligence to the injury of their condition. (Not injustice, mind you, a vital distinction: life is not and cannot be fair, as every schoolboy used to know. Apparently that age-old insight is in some danger of being forgotten.)

     While we should honor, then, the gifts of fortune that come our way—cause for thanksgiving indeed—it would be equally denial to imagine that such favors could last forever, or that we do ourselves any favors when we reach for, grasp at, and cling to them so desperately when they prove beyond us, or when they recede before us. Let the good things come to you as in a banquet, Epictetus counseled, and enjoy them in your turn (Enchiridion 15); only be sure to cultivate equanimity while waiting, and do not feel aggrieved when they pass you by, since they are not for you to commandeer, nor for others to guarantee.

     The element of luck has another, darker dimension—what Bernard Williams called moral luck in a collection of his essays by the same name. Good fortune not only brings us things, deserved or not, it also protects us from the full consequences of our own errors and omissions. Getting so caught up in one’s routines that one might forget small children waiting in the car on an irregular day is not, by itself, terribly culpable; in almost all such cases, the negligence, deplorable as it may be, will not be punished too severely. But almost all leaves room for a very few, very terrible cases in which, as I remember reading in the Toronto newspaper years ago, parents who return to their car may find a child dead for one utterly unlikely reason or another. Moral bad luck in the extreme. And who of us has not committed stupidities enough, whether merely negligent or more willful, to tremble at such possibilities, however improbable, and to thank his or her lucky stars for usually shielding us from the full force of our mistakes, our missteps, and our follies? “There but for the grace of God go I” is no mere sanctimonious trope, but the voice of chastened human frailty.

     The state of an entire society at any given time may turn your moral luck, often adversely. Consider what might become of you under the burdens of extreme poverty, in times of war, before the tentacles of a totalitarian society, or under the influence of a thousand other malign circumstances besides. It is not to exonerate anyone to recognize that if you, or anyone else, were starving, you cannot be sure what beastliness you might be capable of in clawing your way to survival. (Frankl, among much that is heartening in his work, painted no very flattering picture of human nature’s dark side as it revealed itself among the prisoners too, not just their guards.) Imagine being drafted into the Wehrmacht or made to do the bidding of the Stasi or some equivalent organization. Consider too what it would mean to be living in times when getting your date pregnant might mean a substantial risk of death in childbirth; think how lucky we are that smallpox has been eradicated, that syphilis and leprosy and the black plague are treatable with a few cheap pills, that lice and fleas are no longer the intimate acquaintances they used to be not so very long ago, or that you may keep your teeth (or reasonable replacements at least) all the way to senescence. We often think back in horror to all the back-breaking labor that has been done by so many generations of toiling and suffering mankind. But we are all of us the beneficiaries, since the fruits of these labors do not remain limited to any one place, but spread, as they have, around the human world; should we not be grateful for the sacrifice, instead of using it to feed our resentments and get high on the rush of righteous indignation?

     I am not saying that your life, or mine, or anyone else’s, can ever be made easy, even by the greatest and most evident good fortune. When one problem is resolved, the human mind moves on to the next—a better problem to have, let us hope, but one that is likely more complex and intractable precisely because it takes you to a higher level (see #14).*** It is not only possible but probable that a human world demonstrably and dramatically improved by any measurable standard, such as ours, may feel that much more daunting to many, on account of the formidable nature of the difficulties that remain, and that can never be eliminated, only shifted to superior ground, so to speak. The pitiful feebleness of our snowflakes and strawberries may not be any great ornament to the species, but it is hardly their fault that they have been born into circumstances too favorable in some respects, and perhaps not favorable enough in others.† Such is life, such the First Noble Truth of perennial dissatisfaction along the avenues where we commonly seek our happiness. We are hardly wrong to do so; but we are too prone to overlooking the supplementary strategies without which all our striving, no matter how fruitful, cannot do us much lasting good. To be blessed with much is not the same as being happy; not even close.

     Perhaps instead of focusing so much on happiness, we would be better off thinking more in terms of wisdom, which (unlike happiness) can be won even from life’s setbacks, perhaps predominantly from them. Greek tragedy culminates, as I’ve mentioned before (#32), in the idea that to learn is to suffer and that wisdom is attained, against our will, by the awful lashings of fortune (to paraphrase a passage from Aeschylus that Robert Kennedy was fond of quoting). Knowledge is only part of the story, and perhaps not the most important part: one can know a great deal and remain very much a fool; the knowledge taken by itself and applied poorly, or put in the wrong context, aggravates the folly rather than abating it. Or to put it the other way around, if one would be wise, it is not enough to be rich in knowledge, one also needs to know what to do with one’s wealth of insight, and to frame it all with an understanding of how scanty one’s wit must ever be in relation to all there is to know. A mind unaware of its inadequacies is a very limited mind indeed—the gist of Socrates’ interactions with his contemporaries who took themselves to be especially clever (the politicos, the artists, the professionals, to put it in contemporary terms), but who turned out to be only conceited and quite unable to give an adequate account of what they vaunted themselves on.

     There appears to be something inherently qualitative about wisdom that need not be present in knowledge, and an element of faith too, though not necessarily religious, as in Thoreau’s definition of philosophy in Walden: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” Wisdom requires, it seems, an appreciation of what life is about, and our limitations in relation to it—thus a good measure of “negative capability,” as Keats put it in an 1817 letter, that is, the ability to tolerate uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

     Wisdom concerns the big questions presented to us by our sentient existence; all the uncertainties that surround our human place in the world; the search for meaning; all the arts that set apart the life well-lived from one that is not. There is no mystery, incidentally, to why wisdom cannot have much room in settings deeply committed to relativism: the very possibility of wisdom implies both that cleverness and expertise are overrated (never a comfortable suggestion for those who pride themselves on their intellectual acumen) and that, despite all that needs to be said about our limitations, some really do know better than others, partly because they are aware (like Socrates) of how little they really understand of the big picture, but also partly because some ways of life just are better than others, quite independently of whether someone recognizes it or not—an idea that seems to have become well-nigh taboo in our day.

     One becomes knowledgeable by studying, and that is not to be spurned. Hence there can be pundits and other professional knowers at thirty, and “young expert” or even “young genius” need not be altogether a contradiction in terms. But wisdom is quite different, and the very words young and sage, when put together, have a decidedly false and hollow ring to them. Wisdom cannot by acquired through book-learning alone, nor by knowledge in the usual sense, and it does not thrive on confidence; quite the contrary, it is learned more by making mistakes than by getting things right, and more by failure than success, because it is, more than anything, insight into our human shortcomings, and an intimation of what lies beyond our grasp because it is so much greater than we are.

     In Plato’s chapter about the Cave and the upward journey, it is somewhat dogmatically asserted that philosophy is not for the young at all, with no serious training (in the dialectic) to be given before thirty, and no one eligible for being considered a finished philosopher before fifty—that is, before not only having completed thirty-five years of continual education from birth, but also fifteen years of practical experience with the various petty responsibility that ordinary life confers. When Plato is (not undeservedly) presented as a relentless champion of abstraction (as against a more sensory and sensual mode of finding one’s way in the world), this ditch-digging dimension to the philosopher kings’ training ought perhaps to be given a little more play, without misreading it, as Pol Pot and others of his ilk have done, as a justification for sending anyone wearing glasses to the killing fields.

     As Michael Novak put it in a talk towards the end of his life (on his then-latest book, Writing from Left to Right, in August 2013), to get wise about life requires sufficiently rich experience of things going wrong; you need time enough to make your ten thousand mistakes (and that’s only counting the bigger ones). When wisdom comes at last, if it ever does, it has been known to sound as if it were almost disavowing itself, as in the familiar formula of “knowing that you don’t know” to which the Socrates of Plato’s Apology has often been reduced, and which would be merely a hackneyed commonplace if it were not so true and so vitally important. Even words get in our way in the end: the Tao can be talked about, but not the real Tao, and it may be the mark of a wise intellectual, if such a creature can be imagined, that he would give reasons for not being governed by reasoning alone.††

     (Whether the first year of my blog, which this post is hereby rounding off, has been a gift of fortune to the reader is not for the writer to pronounce on. All I can say is that it has been a gift to me to watch the words flowing, and not getting stuck and drying up, which I’ve seen happen often enough as well. Such things no longer look quite personal to me—as if they were just happening rather than anyone making them happen, let alone anyone who might qualify as the kind of  mysterious self that we imagine abiding somewhere beyond change and time. Fortunately one does not need to consider oneself a self in that sense to be grateful. Thank you.)

*The question of one’s relationship to these more-than-human powers, whatever they may be, takes on a different hue when one begins to question, as the Buddhist teaching would have us do, whether the self really is what we intuitively take it to be—a separate, distinctive, somehow persisting thing—as opposed to an ever-changing process, a flow not a thing, so deeply enmeshed in surrounding conditions that it cannot be properly singled out from them, with edges and borders that our minds define, but that even a good part of our brain (namely the right half) seems to repudiate.

     I am in no position to take up with any authority what Jill Bolte Taylor has to say in her Stroke of Insight (Hodder 2009) about what the world looks like to someone whose left brain has been incapacitated by a stroke. What I notice though, and what also seems to be a characteristic feature of many near-death experiences, is how much these descriptions seem to overlap with the no-self perspective that the Buddhists have tried to put into words for 2500 years. (The issue is discussed at a very high level of erudition indeed by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and his Emissary, Yale 2009.) What it looks like to me, though I am far from having resolved the matter for myself, is that we are indeed living in two realities at once, as McGilchrist proposes: on the one hand (the right hand, as it were, because of the cross-wiring) we have the narrow, self-centered survivor’s perspective that we take to be the human default condition, originating in the left hemisphere—the world of self; on the other, we have a much more comprehensive outlook in which boundaries blur, and time and space and even causation become indeterminate at least to some extent—the world of no-self, perhaps even a glimpse of things-in-themselves, so far as we can approach them at all.

     But these are merely speculations on my part, about what seems plausible to me, no more. As I’ve said repeatedly, I find the Buddhist account of no-self eminently creditable, so it’s a matter of putting my trust in the Teaching even though I have trouble making full sense of it. I hope that I am able to understand at least approximately what the Buddhists are getting at, but what to make of it exactly remains a big challenge, and I struggle not only with the implications, but also with my sense that this is not a good point on which to be half-right at the expense of common sense and everyday experience. To call the self seriously into question, and not be a fool, one would truly need to know what one is talking about, and I am not sure I do.

**As Gibbon wrote of Boethius in the 39th book of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (pp. 158–60 in volume IV of the Everyman edition): “The senator Boethius was the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman… His dignity was adorned with the titles of consul and patrician, and his talents were usefully employed in the important station of master of the offices. His two sons were created, in their tender youth, the consuls of the same year. On the memorable day of their inauguration, they proceeded in solemn pomp from their palace to the forum amidst the applause of the senate and people; and their joyful father, the true consul of Rome, distributed a triumphal largess in the games of the circus. Prosperous in his fame and fortunes, in his public honours and private alliances, in the cultivation of science and the consciousness of virtue, Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.” And of his end: “While Boethius, oppressed with fetters, expected each moment the sentence or the stroke of death, he composed, in the tower of Pavia, the Consolation of Philosophy, a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author. The celestial guide, whom he had so long invoked at Rome and Athens, now condescended to illumine his dungeon, to revive his courage, and to pour into his wounds her salutary balm. She taught him to compare his long prosperity and his recent distress, and to conceive new hopes from the inconstancy of fortune. Reason had informed him of the precarious condition of her gifts; experience had satisfied him of their real value; he had enjoyed them without guilt; he might resign them without a sigh, and calmly disdain the impotent malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness, since they had left him virtue.”

***Recent rumors notwithstanding, Mark Manson is neither the reincarnation of Socrates nor of the Buddha, but he makes this particular point well in his Subtle Art, as I’ve already acknowledged in the post I cite. By way of objection, one might invoke Thomas Sowell and insist that, strictly speaking, there are no solutions, only trade-offs (see the section on “Trade-Offs and Solution” in chapter 2 of A Conflict of Visions). A crucial point to bear in mind, no question, especially with a view to our biggest and most intractable difficulties, which involve the most painful tradeoffs by definition (or they would not seem so big and feel so intractable to us). That said, there are surely instances enough of trade-offs so favorable overall that they come near to solutions, loosely speaking. Still we would do well to remember that even so formidable an achievements as producing and distributing an abundance of food world-wide such that we could finally end the long history of human hunger for good, would not, in the strict sense, qualify as a solution, because the resources required could be spent to benefit mankind in other, perhaps no less beneficial ways. What looks like a solution on one level may also, on another, be the cause of myriad unintended consequence like more waste, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and so on.

†The lamentable lack of hardiness and grit among our millennial flocks (meaning everyone for whom years not beginning with 20 have an air of unreality about them, see #83) is troubling to behold, though perhaps not altogether surprising: as children keep getting scarcer, it is to be expected that they would also grow more precious apace, in every sense. The increasing preponderance of single children alone would be cause for concern. Not for nothing did the Chinese, under the whip of their one-child policies, learn to speak of “little emperors”—and that was in the context of a society anything but permissive or coddling. What might become of the little dears when you add abounding affluence and defensive parenting to the mix, Bill Maher expressed colorfully to Barri Weiss: “They’re so fucking fragile, excuse me, like emotional hemophiliacs!” Is that really a dynamic we should wish to fuel, rather than finding ways, if possible, to mitigate it a little?

     Perhaps it would have been better for some of our enervated little lambs to have gone hungry every now and then in their lives, physically or otherwise; but denying them food or comfort that is readily available, or engineering artificial famines and disasters, or deploying them in the traditional manner on regular springtime campaigns sustained by compulsory military service, are not remedies that recommend themselves on balance to the humanitarian mind. Very well, then, we must by all means seek gentler methods; but as we do so, what good can possibly come from discouraging the nervous young sheep from growing their own protective wool, and instead inculcating in them an ethos of relentless shearing, lest the faintest gust of wind go unnoticed on their over-tender skins, and any passing comment or gesture fail to give them mortal alarm and offense in ways never dreamt of before?

     It’s not a question of casting stones, of deriding or belittling anyone. Our problems expand to fill the whole of our mental space, no matter how big or small they may appear to others (as Viktor Frankl points out on analogy with gases filling a room). The terrible peer pressure that besets the lives of the young is no joke, nor the fierce competition they face for any and all good things in life, to say nothing of today’s frightful confusions and convulsions in the relations of the sexes. But these are not troubles invented yesterday to torment our millennials; anyone a little older will recognize them no less than they, and will have his own tales of woe to tell, should he care to recall them. How much these trials and tribulations have really increased on balance, and how much they are just felt more sharply and seen more vividly, is debatable, and perhaps impossible for anyone to judge who has not walked in all parties’ shoes, which nobody can. But there is no need to resolve the question, because I am not saying that the millennials have it easy; I am insisting that, precisely because nobody ever has it easy in human life, whatever appearances might suggest to the contrary, there is no more urgent need than to do everything we can to brace ourselves and build some muscle, whether it be physically or mentally or emotionally or spiritually. To plead weakness in the face of adversity is only human, but it will draw the attention of the wolves as surely as blood in the water attracts sharks. And I would not recommend the perilous experiment to anyone.

Every generation imagines itself to be something radically new, and is half-right in doing so; but also half-wrong, inasmuch as the fundamental challenge will remain the same so long as human existence persists as we know it. One can only hide from life’s difficulties, not banish them, and the only wise thing to do, today as ever, is to make yourself and others as brave as you can in the very presence of your fears, and not to retreat before menaces and pains even if you have every reason to dread them. Jordan Peterson seems to have put a contemporary trademark on such notions, but it has been a pillar of the Adlerian approach for more than a century that while genuine abuse is no doubt the worst thing you can do to the young, overprotectiveness comes a close second, while a cowardly withdrawal before the pangs and perils of the human condition is a temptation we must all resist with all our powers, paltry as they may often feel, because if we don’t we are lost as surely as shipwrecks who stop swimming. Even if the sharks don’t get you, the waves surely will.

††Roger Scruton, in conversation with Hamza Yusuf, defines the kind of intellectual of whom he could approve as “someone who articulates the real reasons for not having reasons, but just feeling and doing what’s right.” Such an intellectual temperament looks conservative to Scruton, but it should be borne in mind that he (like Michael Oakeshott, most notably) is thinking in terms of a disposition, as respectful of reason as it is wary of rationalism, that may have ample political implications, but that is not primarily about making political friend-enemy distinctions (and that does not map very neatly onto how conservatism is understood elsewhere).