Hopeyness: The Conceit of Attainable Felicity

It's been a painful week for prognosticators like me. How do we prepare for a future we can't divine?

Is the economy picking up will there be jobs will conservatives step up to govern will they devote the next two years to hamstringing and disabling the president all is lost but he struck such a canny deal he knows exactly what he's doing they will bring the country to its knees in their rush to wield power maybe the corporatists are satisfied money will flow again you can't continue to grow an economy forever is it possible we'll never feel like one nation again what's going to happen to us?!

I keep trying, but I'm just not smart enough to read these chicken bones or decipher these entrails and I'm frankly distrustful of anyone who says they can. Punditry, be damned tonight.

Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for intellect,

because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

(Anne Sexton from Admonitions To A Special Person, Hat Tip to RAMH )

This is a tough spot for a worrywart eyeing a new year. I'm left to say I don't know. For this little minute, before the next inevitability, I am free to choose how to feel. I'm free to be wrong about what comes next. And so are you.

Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of possibility.  Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived.  The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings.  They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events.  But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped.  Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration. (Sean D. Kelly, "Navigating Past Nihilism")

For tonight...oh, let's be rash!...for the whole of the next week, let's wallow in the conceit of attainable felicity.