In his books, The True and Only Heaven and The Revolt of the Elites, historian Christopher Lasch celebrated what he called “the spiritual discipline against resentment.” Despite the fact that “the world was not made for our convenience” and that there is plenty of pain and suffering, there is also what Lasch calls “the goodness of being.” We are mortal, we are limited, and we suffer. Yet it is good, miraculous even, that we are alive. Life is worth living.
Lasch was inspired by the great civil rights leaders of the 20th century, people such as Martin Luther King Jr., who rejected resentment in favor of hope and love.
King is nowhere to be found in the modern Left. He was absent in former first lady Michelle Obama’s recent campaign speech in Michigan, during which she expressed resentment that Americans are just too stupid to love Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said. “I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously.”
She then issued a warning to men: “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.”
Resentment is the enemy of healthy spiritual limits. The modern Left, unlike civil rights leaders such as King, cannot abide by any limits.
Liberals demand that people must be emotionally fulfilled and well paid at all times, that there ought to be no restrictions on abortions, that all guns should have been banned yesterday, and that men posing as women can invade female spaces and sports. However, no matter how angry a liberal gets, a biological man will never be a woman. That’s a healthy limit.
“For vast numbers of Americans,” Christopher Lasch wrote, “limits are a necessary and even desirable facet of life — limits on human freedom, on human capacities, on the power of reason to eradicate everything that is mysterious in the universe.”
Lasch also contrasted those who live with limits, who spend their lives working, raising children, going to church, and living their lives “a long way from the centers of metropolitan culture,” with a “new class of elites” that pursues a “heady vision of unlimited possibilities.” These elites “view life as an experiment.”
Lasch believed that the people who accepted the reality of limits paradoxically ended up living more hopeful lives.
This is not to say that people should not fight for righteous political causes. There was no more righteous cause than the civil rights battle of the 20th century. Today, activists are trying to advance causes from environmentalism on the Left to anti-censorship on the Right. Yet, as King knew, if you argue with love and reason rather than bitterness and resentment, you tend to win over a lot more people.
As today’s generation of self-styled feminist women, such as Obama, suggests, limitless freedom has not brought the happiness they assumed it would. Obama’s talk included graphic, grisly warnings about women’s health in case former President Donald Trump is elected. It is impossible to imagine King or Rosa Parks using such bitter language.
A few years ago, actress Casey Wilson wrote about her anger problems for Lenny Letter, an online magazine. Wilson reflected on her many years of rage. She’s “thrown a Mountain Dew pager out the window of my boyfriend’s car on the highway en route to Rehoboth Beach,” she’s “smashed my beloved bedazzled Sidekick into my dressing-room mirror at SNL and left a trail of crushed BlackBerrys in every shitty apartment complex in LA,” she’s “thrown my iPhone only once, in a tequila-fueled moment (but between us, I knew I had an upgrade coming).”
In the midst of one of these meltdowns, Wilson had a revelation.
“My mom was the president of the National Women’s Political Caucus (an organization devoted to getting women elected) for the first several years of my life. I wonder if growing up with a mother who was so angry at the state of things she wore a pro-choice sticker while eight months pregnant with me played a role. She raised me to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. Which was liberating and wonderful. But perhaps this combination had me feeling a little too free to be me. I had become a subway ad: if I saw something, I said something. It wasn’t a good look, but no amount of therapy or meditation (my mantra made me EVEN. ANGRIER.) or astrology retreats (I’m a Scorpio) seemed to help with this particular issue. I couldn’t get a handle on it,” said Wilson.
Neither can Obama and the Left.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
