Mitt Romney: It’s not one thing. So I’m gonna give you a longer answer.
One: I believe in God…
In believing in God, I believe therefore we are all his children. I believe that God loves all of us, and I believe that He loves us as you would love your children; some are doing naughty things, some are doing nice things, but you love them all. And I believe that I will be measured and you will be measured based upon what you have done for your fellow children of God…
The person I care for most in life is my wife.
We met in high school. I love her passionately. She is the most important person in my life. If I could do anything, on any day, it would be to be with her. That’s what I enjoy most in life.
Close thereafter is to be with my kids.
My boys and their wives and now 23 grandkids. The greatest joy I have in life is being with them, sitting around in the backyard or at the beach — that’s my greatest source of happiness and the most important thing to me.
Coming beyond that is a circle which includes my church and my sense of service to them… I happen to believe that the currency in life is the people that you love and care for you. The friends you have.
Most of what you’ve learned here, you’ll forget. The people you’ve met here, you’ll remember for the rest of your life – and will form a big part of your wealth. That’s your balance sheet when life is over. Who loves you and who you love and who are your friends.
So what’s the most important thing to me? My God, my wife, my kids, and my fellow human beings.
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From the end of Mitt Romney’s “View from the Top” interview on leadership and values, which he gave to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business last year.
Keep it simple. Notice what things this star in business and politics didn’t talk about in his answer.
The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant, and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.
Clive James: You know, I believe he was a great man, but I think exactly the opposite. As death approaches, I think more and more of the next generation and their importance. And I just — I just don’t think in the way that he thought.
But that was his limitation. He was a bit of a misogynist, and I’m not. I’m continually astonished by the creativity of human beings and their bravery, especially women. I’ve always been impressed by women’s bravery. They’re on the whole tougher than men… They seem anchored in a way that men aren’t; men are quite often fantasists and idealists. I know I am. It’s my bad tendency, which I have to try and control.
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The closing exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.
“Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (Now that is the role of mystics and comedians.) In the absence of a special kind of religious faith, or a special kind of genius, it is difficult to find enough product value in our brief and inconsequential lives to suppose that human lives have meaning through their impact — that is, in virtue of the difference it makes to the rest of the universe that these lives have been lived. […]
Living a good human life, a life one can look back on with pride, is rarely valuable because that life, abstracted from the process of creating it, has any great value in itself. It is valuable because the process of creating it is valuable…
Aristotle thought that a good life was a life spent in contemplation, exercising reason and acquiring knowledge. Plato thought that it was a harmonious life achieved through order and balance. Neither of these ancient ideas require that a wonderful life have any impact at all: any way in which the world is better or even different after someone has lived because of the way he has lived. Most people’s opinions, so far as these are self-conscious and articulate, ignore impact in the same way. A great many people think that a life devoted to the love of God is the finest life to lead, and a great many, including many who do not share that opinion, think the same of a life lived in inherited traditions and steeped in the satisfactions of conviviality, friendship and family. All these lives have, for most people who want them, subjective value: they bring satisfaction. But so far as we think them objectively good – so far as it would make sense to want to find satisfaction in such lives or to think one had any kind of responsibility to pursue them — it is the performance value of living in a certain way rather than the impact of having lived that way that counts.”
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Pulled from Ronald Dworkin’s remarkable, accessible book on life and philosophies of meaning Justice for Hedgehogs.
“I definitely think that I’m my own critic, for sure, and not society. Although it does affect me, how society views what I do. I won’t deny that; I think that anyone who says it doesn’t is lying.
I do think about my own insignificance, sure. I can be interviewed or have somebody write an article that mentions me or whatever. And for a moment you think, ‘Wow, I’ve done something good.’… But then at the end of the day, I know it doesn’t matter. I’m not that significant. Even if I were famous, even if I were better known — either as a writer or as a celebrity — I still wouldn’t be that significant at the end of the day.
But mortality, yeah, you can’t help but think about it from time to time. You certainly think about it in terms of your family. As you get older and you start losing either friends in some cases, to unnatural deaths or disease, or family to old age; it makes you understand you’re getting closer… And it’s a little depressing, sure. It’s depressing.
But you just try to be logical about it, and say, ‘Well, do the best you can while you’re alive. (laughs) And try to enjoy it. Do the things that you enjoy, do the things that you want to do.’…
I’m not so sanguine about the nature of human beings. I’m not sure we’re an animal that’s particularly good… I’m not an anthropologist, but you see things — after so many thousands of years of advancement in culture, in technology, in thought, in theory — and you see people acting the same way they acted ten thousand years ago, before civilization. And you think maybe humans aren’t meant to live in harmony. I hate to say that. I would like to think that we could progress, that our brains could get to a point where we understand that we have to save our planet and we have to figure out how to live together without killing each other…”
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Hooman Majd, speaking at his home in Brooklyn in an interview with Paradigm Magazine.
Interviewer: You’re definitely looked at as a very cool older guy that younger guys like myself would like to eventually grow up to emulate in terms of your looks and style — what tips can you give guys like me for aging gracefully and staying cool in the process?
Hooman: You’re very kind. That’s very flattering and I don’t want to sound like I accept all that praise, but if I were to accept that praise, I think I’d say be honest to yourself about what you’re comfortable with. There’s nothing worse than forcing yourself into anything — whether it’s an opinion or a political position or clothing — because you feel like that’s what you’re supposed to do. Be comfortable in your own skin. Sometimes you’ll see a guy in sweatpants and a New York Jets sweatshirt and the way he carries himself makes that cool. If I did that, it would be totally uncool because that’s not what I’m comfortable in. That’s not saying all slobs can look cool even if they’re comfortable, but there’s something about the way you carry yourself and the honesty with which you present your image to the world, and clothes and style are just a part of that.
Read on:
Dworkin dissects what we mean when we talk about living ‘a life of value’
Chomsky delves into the question ‘Is there a universal human nature?’
Cornel West preaches: “There must be some standard for human life that gets beyond… fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.”
“Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.'”
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A surprising pronouncement from the end of the fifth chapter (“Action”) in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.
It’s striking how frequently Jesus and Socrates are compared or counterposed, especially in works of philosophy. Perhaps this trend stems from the fact that each figure works as a respective stand-in for Tertullian’s Jerusalem-Athens paradigm, though there’s probably more to it. One of the more worthwhile recent musings on this matter came from Cornell West, who when presenting his testimony spoke of a historico-philosophical question which he found particularly interesting: “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this…
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
IV Chorus
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
My aunt, the artist Mary McCleary, inscribed the above chorus on the letter she gave me the day I graduated from college. That card is now the centerpiece of the bulletin board above my desk. (Given how little time there is now for poetry, I can’t be too surprised that guests are yet to identify much less ask about the card. But then again, I wasn’t aware of the reference ’til I received the card from MM.)
The entirety of“For the Time Being”stretches over 1,400 lines. (For perspective: a few of Shakespeare’s plays are less than 2,000 lines.) I can’t find the full text online, but if anyone knows where I can, please send a link to my email or drop it in the comments area.*
From a technical standpoint, the above section is a sterling example of what postmodernism can do so long as it has a substantive core and also wears itself lightly. That may sound simple in principle; in practice, it’s not. Like much of Auden’s work, the subversion of classical form here does not signal a disregard for traditional ideas. The free verse is flecked with obvious nods to scripture (“lead us into temptation”) — nods which, like a photographer’s macrographic study, expose otherwise unseen parts of a whole we had gotten used to identifying by rote. Moreover, with the chorus — especially that fantastic phrase “Kingdom of Anxiety” — there is a redressing of old ideas which cloaks them in modern clothes. After all, who had anxiety in the first century?
As the verses clearly indicate, “For the Time Being” is a poem about the holidays. These words, and in particular the line I misremembered as “the time being redeemed of insignificance,” were rattling around my head throughout quieter moments at my family’s Thanksgiving. And although they work especially well as a panacea for post-holiday melancholy, they may get more mental mileage if you are reminded of them before the official Christmas week kicks off.
The pictures are of Auden, a man who once said that his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
*Again the brilliant Ted Rey has come through and found an archived full text of “For the Time Being”. As always, thank you, Ted.
“Nothing is, for example, popularly held to be better than a dry martini but worse than sand in the bedsheets. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further. Nothing is impossible for God yet a breeze for the rankest incompetent. In fact, no matter what pair of contradictory properties you choose, nothing seems capable of embodying them. From this it might be concluded that nothing is mysterious. But that would simply mean that everything is obvious–including, presumably, nothing. That, perhaps, is why the world abounds with people who know, understand, and believe in nothing. But beware of speaking blasphemously of nothing, for there are also many bumptious types about–call them nullophiles–who are fond of declaring that, to them, nothing is sacred.
The philosophers of antiquity were inclined to agree. Ex nihilo nihil, they unanimously declared: ‘Nothing comes from nothing.’ Not only does this maxim attribute to nothing the divine quality of being self-generating; it also impiously denies God the power to prevail against nothingness, to bring about a world ex nihilo…
To say God created the world ‘out of nothing’ is not to elevate nothingness into an entity, on par with the divine. It merely means that God didn’t create the world out of anything. So insisted Saint Thomas Aquinas, among other Christian theologians. Still, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo appeared to sanction the idea of nothingness as a genuine ontological possibility. It made it conceptually possible to ask why there is a world rather than nothing at all.
And a few centuries later, someone finally did—a foppish and conniving German courtier who also ranks among the greatest intellects of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The year was 1714. Leibniz, then sixty-eight, was nearing the end of a long and absurdly productive career. He had, at the same time as Newton and quite independently, invented the calculus. He had single-handedly revolutionized the science of logic. He had created a fantastic metaphysics based on an infinity of soul-like units called “monads,” and on the axiom—later cruelly mocked by Voltaire in Candide—that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ Despite his fame as a philosopher-scientist, Leibniz was left behind in Hanover when his royal employer, the elector Georg Ludwig, went to Britain to become the newly crowned King George I…
It was in these gloomy circumstances that Leibniz produced his final philosophical writings, among them an essay titled ‘Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason.’ In this essay, he put forth what he called the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason,’ which says, in essence, that there is an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. ‘This principle having been stated,’ Leibniz wrote, ‘the first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’
For Leibniz, the ostensible answer was easy. For reasons of career advancement, he had always pretended to hew to religious orthodoxy. The reason for the world’s existence, he accordingly claimed, was God, who created it through his own free choice, motivated by his infinite goodness.
But what was the explanation for God’s own existence? Leibniz had an answer to this question too. Unlike the universe, which exists contingently, God is a necessary being. He contains within Himself the reason for His own existence. His nonexistence is logically impossible.
Thus, no sooner was the question Why is there something rather than nothing? raised than it was dispatched. The universe exists because of God. And God exists because of God. The Godhead alone, Leibniz declared, can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery of existence.
But the Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence did not prevail for long. In the eighteenth century, both David Hume and Immanuel Kant—philosophers who were at loggerheads on most issues—attacked the notion of ‘necessary being’ as an ontological cheat. There are, to be sure, entities whose existence is logically impossible—a square circle, for instance. But no entity’s existence, Hume and Kant agreed, is guaranteed as a matter of pure logic. ‘Whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent,’ Hume wrote. ‘There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction’—including God.”
“My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: ‘A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.’ Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole…
I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world’s great religions or one of the world’s great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase “a life well-lived” has meaning. That’s the phrase I’ll use from now on.
And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I’ll use from now on is ‘deep satisfactions.’ I’m talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.
To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché ‘nothing worth having comes easily’). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.
There aren’t many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something — good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Two clarifications: ‘Community’ can embrace people who are scattered geographically. ‘Vocation’ can include avocations or causes.
It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life — the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships — coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness — occurs within those four institutions.
Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them…
Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their ‘child-friendly’ policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.
What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase ‘a life well-lived’ did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize ‘spreading.’ I’m not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that’s the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that’s the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble — and, after all, what good are they, really? If that’s the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors?”
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From Charles Murray’s speech “The Happiness of the People,” given as the Irving Kristol Memorial Speech at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner in 2009.
One note for the above speech: The governments of Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia, like France, do have generous pro-natal policies in place, and their birthrates are below replacement level. Yet they’re nowhere near as low as that of Germany or the “formerly Catholic” states (Spain, Greece, Italy), nor are they falling as fast as Britain’s. I touch on that fact — and the relative success of Sweden’s state-sponsored day care centers and maternal allowances — in my thesis.
The other day I was at the American Enterprise Institute and got to sit in on a small talk and film session with Charles Murray. Watch a video from that session — where he summarizes his answer to Is America Still Exceptional? — below:
