True. Nothing butters like a piece of toast in the morning. But I’m thinking of a state of mind.
I once encountered this condition as an undergraduate in the nineteen-fifties when I took a philosophy course. In those days, self-styled “empiricists” dominated the Harvard philosophy department. For them, there was nothing but the world of sense experience, nothing but what you can see or touch or hear or smell: no transcendental beauty or truth or goodness, no transcending God. For them, nothing but matter really mattered.
And more – or less. A little later, during the nineteen-sixties, I encountered the same state of mind in the popular ideas of so-called Movement People, social activists of various ilks. For many of them, nothing but oppressive economic forces had to be identified, in order then to be overcome. Woe to those who weren’t ready to “fight the Establishment!” For many such activists, then, nothing but the revolutionary struggle for social justice mattered.
Likewise, at that time, some campus Protestant student groups enthusiastically believed that, as far as orienting your life is concerned, nothing but the truths of the Bible really mattered. More generally, many students in those days also passionately believed that nothing really matters but working for good grades and then getting into graduate school or getting a good job so that you could keep getting ahead.
That was then. Do you see where I’m going with all this? Today, while many, if not all, of the aforementioned trends may well be in evidence in our world, more than a few around the country are convinced that nothing but the will of the Leader, Donald Trump, really matters. For Trumpists who think about these things, there’s nothing but putting America first and nothing but the need for standing up for all those real Americans, whom, they so believe, have been snobbishly put down in recent decades by “femi-Nazis” (Rush Limbaugh) or by all manner of haughty liberals.
Those haughty liberals, in turn, people like me it might appear, often seem to believe that the good life means nothing but progressive politics and that even thoughtful conservatives such David Brooks have sold out to the forces of oppression. To coin a phrase, for more than a few liberals today, it’s nothing but my way or the highway.
Then there are the Protestant fundamentalists, still very much a presence in American life today, even on some college campuses. For them, typically, there’s nothing but the truth they find in the Bible. They know without a doubt, for example, that, domestically, males have been created by God to supervise, even to “rule over,” females and to head up families, too. They also know that, internationally, there’s nothing but God’s alleged plan to restore the fortunes of a greater Israel, even if it takes nuclear war to do that.
Call all these nothing butters true believers.
To be sure, the nothing butters aren’t the only true believers whom we can encounter these days. Consider the anything goers: a variety of tin-horn dictators, mobsters, street gangs, a select group of Wall Street bankers, some male adolescents, and a few sophomore philosophy majors. This is their rule of life: do whatever you please.
Note well, however, that this rule of life probably is in fact a rule of death, should its adherents ever really try to practice what they preach. Anything-goers typically go nowhere. Witness those whom in my high school years we used to call the hot-shots racing along the Interstates in what we also then used to call their hot-rods, but all-too-often ending up in deep ditches, sometimes stoned to death.
Sure, most people today – most people I know, anyway – don’t need to discover that the ways of the true believers, those nothing butters or anything goers, are flat wrong, sometimes even deadly. That’s all too obvious, right? So maybe we don’t even need to think about it. Still, I wonder. What really matters?
(To be continued.)
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