By Jackson Posey | Sports Editor
Suppose, for a moment, that Mick Jagger was right.
Suppose we take his philosophy at face value. Every red door really should be painted black; every seaside lighthouse and ancient lantern should lose its sheen. “The Starry Night” and Yankee pinstripes have a bit too much color. Gothic cathedrals are, paradoxically, too bright.
One may debate the merits of painting it all black because another hue would better suit the occasion. Another may protest at the sort of brush or tones of pigment. But whatever the means, all must agree that the world needs a good painting.
In America’s semiquincentennial, the house needs repairs. The attic is leaking, the stairs are creaking and the faucet never quite turns off. The decor is a strange mishmash of clashing eras and styles vying for attention between postmodern shelving and impressionist wallpaper.
We have collected relics of ages past like a veteran shopper sniffing fruit; whatever suits our fancy, by whatever obscure standards we choose that day, we put in the cart. Everything else can sit around and rot.
Before the moldy floorboards can be ripped up and replaced, we must determine a clear path forward. After all, where there is no vision, the people perish. Clarity brings safety and strength — yet in the postmodern milieu, there is no coherent philosophy beyond the whims of the day. We inject vapid content into our vapid lives and complain of the difficulty of “finding meaning.” It is not lost; only obscured by our own hubris.
America has long benefited from a plurality of voices, but always confident voices, tested and well-rounded. Nothing counters polarization quite like a circle, which easily glides away from fatal attractions and myopic solutions.
A well-rounded philosophy is forged in humility — and must remain anchored to weather life’s storms. A free-flowing buoy is worthless to the anxious sailor. The apostle Paul compared those who hold such unfastened positions to “children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”
Without a defined tether to deeper truth claims, there is no way to interpret the world accurately. Every position has some compromise. Bias is unavoidable. Drift is inevitable.
The late English essayist G.K. Chesterton, who affirmed my deep-seated hunch that “silly examples are always simpler,” proposed a stark parable to this effect. Suppose a man wanted a certain sort of world, say a blue world, and toiled tirelessly to achieve his vision. He would have no complaint about the rate of his work, for the task itself was meaningful. Every day he lived, he made the world a little bluer.
His adventures may be heroic, like touching up the stripes on a blue tiger, or as dreamlike as the dawn of a blue moon. His work may be rapid or crawling, exhilarating or mind-numbing, but it would never be meaningless — assuming, of course, he continued to paint the same shade of blue.
“If he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it,” Chesterton wrote. “If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner.”
Nothing is so taboo to the postmodern mind than claims of absolute truth. Calls to “live your truth” and “go with the flow” imagine that modern technology has rendered ancient truths obsolete. Perhaps, on some topics, it has. But there is no hope of parsing the ethical implications of AGI or constructing rural data centers without an ancient dataset. Something must go beyond us. Something must call us to account.
“As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same,” Chesterton wrote. “No ideal will remain long enough to be realised, or even partly realised. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.”
For a sufficiently fierce debate of competing visions for a better future, there must be enough substance to dispute. The postmodern insistence on relativity misses the fundamental, unchanging reality that grounds all of existence. Sometimes humility looks like strength; sometimes hubris means never choosing a side.
So perhaps Mick Jagger was right, and we should paint it all black. Maybe an optimist would go for yellow or pink or green. But if the optimist should scuttle between opinions, haphazardly painting it all yellow and pink and green, a sherbet-flavored nightmare would arise. Beautiful shades would overlap into an intricate mosaic — and, elsewhere, into a dull gray sludge.
Paint the world blue. Paint it green, mauve, fuchsia or chrome. Spend all you have to love others and change the world, but don’t pretend your hesitation at the palette is a result of humility if it really comes from a fear of picking wrong. Take a deep breath, look at the easel and start again. We may finally change our environment if we could only stop changing our minds.
