Over the last few days, I have been chatting online with a friend who is presently invested in a liberal arts education like myself; I focus in politics and philosophy, while she is interested in art history. We were discussing the fear around the recently (and still currently) spreading coronavirus and COVID-19. Her biggest fear was that this pandemic will render our knowledge and education from the arts meaningless. Who cares about someone knowing the history of Philosophic Idealism or the developments of Expressionism in early 20th century France when the economy and basic social structures we’re so accustomed to are falling apart?
At first, I could not help but agree with her. My friend and I have no skills that will aid in the rebuilding of infrastructure or contributing to a boost in the economy. We then discussed the possibility of needing to rethink our educations from here on out; if this pandemic should eventually subside, we could need to reorient ourselves toward different, more ‘practically’ oriented skill sets.
As one would expect, however, I also began to think about these issues from the perspective of my liberal arts background. The first thing this discussion with my friend brought to mind was a lecture delivered by Michael Oakeshott in 1929 entitled “Religion and the World.” Despite this lecture being given nearly a century ago, I believe Oakeshott’s message can enlighten us now, perhaps more than ever, about what ought to be the focus of our lives.
Oakeshott begins his lecture by rebutting the commonly held notion of a religious worldview that should remain “unspotted from the world.” This is more common of a puritanical religious worldview, which tends to see religious experience as a dismissal of ‘worldly’ thing. Most of us would likely think of ‘worldly’ things as ‘material goods,’ like our money, our homes, our technology, etc. Those that desire to live ‘religiously,’ within this framework, reject many of these ‘worldly’ items to achieve some alternate experience of life. Oakeshott rejects this understanding of what religion is on the grounds that it could never exist for us, since we are evidently in the world. Instead, he posits that the true difference between a “religious man” and a “worldly man” is a difference in self-understanding. Oakeshott’s framework thus takes on a bi-focal structure: to distinguish what he believes to be the true difference between the religious man and the worldly man. It cannot be merely that the former is committed to some heavenly world apart from this one and which has never been known, while the latter simply wants to live on this earth as we have it before us. Instead, Oakeshott posits that the religious man and the worldly man have fundamentally opposed notions of how they view themselves in relation to the earth.
The worldly man is defined as a he who sees the world beyond himself as static, while he, himself, is in a state of existential flux: “The earth we tread, the species to which we belong, the history we make, the communities seem to him permanent; permanent, at all events, when compared with those unstable things we call our selves.” In this framework, the worldly man is like putty, waiting to be molded by the situation that history and civilization demand of him. He has no will, no inherent meaning, nothing outside of the culture from which he emerged. All value he may set on himself thus becomes something that can appear measured, typically by others; that may take the form of wealth, status, or achievements, which all require constant recognition of others. He lives for the future, for that is the only place in which he can procure more of what he believes will make his life fulfilling.
The religious man, on the other hand, has a radically different sensibility. He sees the worldly man as having no discernable reason to love life and want to be a part of it. Everything for the worldly man is contingent on the recognition of others, and the religious man dismisses this as being a way one may happily live his life. He would rather that “the ideal of success and accomplishment would be rejected for one in which the achievement striven for was the realization of the self.” The religious man is not concerned with anything but the present, making it delightful, and finding himself in that perpetual moment. The religious man can be summarized as he who recognizes that “if we set value upon external achievement alone, death or disease will rob us of our harvest, and we shall have lived in vain.” Instead of seeking recognition from his civilization, he pursues that which he believes to be good, even if he is forever ignorant and can only ever have a glimmer of what is truly good. If one does not pursue what is good today, is he doing anything at all? To live for tomorrow is an empty plan, for there will always be a tomorrow until it is too late to realize that you will never truly arrive there.
Now, of course, if we wish to read this uncharitably, one may argue that Oakeshott is giving merit to a kind of carefree stupidity—a way of living that is hedonistic and completely incautious. I believe, however, that Oakeshott’s notion of the religious man is nothing of the sort; the religious man does not live as if he is going to die today, but rather living for today with the knowledge that tomorrow will nevertheless come, though when it does he will once more call it the present. The religious man, in focusing on the present, seeks to stabilize his soul, not his culture; he seeks to be happy in his heart, not have those around him think he is happy; he desires a life that will end happily, regardless of when it may come to that end.
Now, we must come full circle: what on earth does this have to do with the pandemic that we are facing today? I believe that much of our culture (as was Oakeshott’s observation nearly one hundred years ago) is far more worldly than religious; we so often believe that we, as human beings, can be reshaped to fit whatever circumstances demand of us. There is no concept of what it means to live a fulfilling life, for a ‘human life’ has no inherent meaning. Yet, the coronavirus and COVID-19 present us with the possibility that the ‘world’ that we knew only a few days ago may be radically altered. We do not know how the economy will react or if it will bounce back; we do not know if we will continue to live in perpetual fear of illness; we do not know if the liberal, global political formations that have been evolving over the last seventy years can be maintained. We are being presented with a crisis, one which truly follows its original meaning from the ancient Greek medical term κρίσις, which was the point at which a decision must be made that would result in either life or death. We are at a point where we will make a decision about what makes life worth living.
Perhaps this is the moment at which we must return to a religious way of engaging with life. Who are we? What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to live this life well? I have no answers here; these are the fundamental questions that mankind has been asking since, at least, the beginning of written History. To engage with such questions, however, we cannot be of the mindset of the purely ‘worldly’ man. His focus on achievement and externality will provide us nothing in understanding ourselves. If the arts are understood as the very engagement with humanity through philosophy, history, and artistic representation, there is never a better time to consider them deeply than in such a moment of crisis. If we seek a solution in the way the worldly man would, we run the risk of failure in achieving our ends or in dying off too soon; if we follow the religious man, however, we will never run the risk of losing what we are aiming to understand, which is simply ourselves.
“Firm in the possession of himself, he lacks nothing.”
Hoping for Clarity 