“Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness.” –Job 30:26
Maybe it’s just me, but last Friday’s news cycle seemed particularly harrowing and foreboding. I kept looking for light to celebrate the end of another work week, yet all I found was a slowly rising darkness in the headlines.
A Kentucky sheriff kills a judge, his decade-long friend, just after having lunch together. A young woman with a million followers on TikTok soft-peddles pedophilia as just another sexual orientation. Israel conducts more strikes in Beirut, Lebanon, as fears grow of wider war – this is but a small sample of last Friday’s news.
Yet last Friday was hardly unique.
Anyone with a keen eye can see the immense treachery, hatred, violence and absurdity of the average human being on display on any given day. Indeed, it’s enough to make any man grope for a worthy response to this tragic state of affairs.
“Love God, your family and your friends while ignoring those of the world and their follies” may be the most accessible and worthwhile response.
But for those caught up in the times, for those who cannot look away from the shadow, here are three possible responses – ways of living with an inner light – amidst the rising darkness.
1. Live in the Joke, the Cynic’s Detached Hope
In 2007, George Carlin gave a response to the world’s absurdities, particularly America’s.
Carlin arguably remains the forefather of the ongoing stand-up comedy boom. The more creeping darkness in their everyday lives, the more the average man and woman seem to seek laughter as a shield.
Here’s what Carlin had to say:
You know what, I say it this way: When you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the freakshow; and when you're born in America you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks … and I watch the freakshow, and I cut my notes, and I make up stuff about it, and I talk about the freaks, and the freaks are all human and they're like me, and they're all the same.
We're all the same. I'm not better. I'm not different. I'm just apart now. I'm separate. I'm over here because I put myself out of the mix. I don't have a stake in the outcome. I'm not a cheerleader for a given outcome now.
Oh, they say ‘if you scratch a cynic you'll find a disappointed idealist,’ and I would admit that somewhere underneath all of this there's a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would love to see it all change but it can't happen that way.
2. Live in the Question, the Religion of Curiosity
Last July, Elon Musk sat down for an interview with Jordan Peterson, wherein the rocketeering richest man on earth revealed the meaning of life disguised as a joke:
When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis, because there just didn’t seem to be any meaning in the world, like no meaning to life. And so I actually read probably all the religious texts … and then I started getting into the philosophy books … and none of them really seemed to have, to me, answers that resonated – at least to me – but then I read Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor … the point that Adams tries to make there is that we don’t actually know all the answers, obviously. In fact, we don’t even know what the right questions are to ask … that was the fundamental turning point.
…
I was a lot happier after that because now it’s like okay, well, I’ve just got to accept that we are ignorant of a great many things and we wish to be less ignorant and anything we can do that will improve our understanding of the universe and makes us less ignorant … and even what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe, which I think is Adam’s central point, is good…. Is it a sort of religion? I don’t know, maybe it is. But I think it’s a good one. I call it the religion of curiosity.
3. Live in the Faith, the Harsh Wisdom of Surviving Where There is No Why
Hanging over the gate at Auschwitz was a sick, twisted joke – humor mangled to evil ends – the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work sets you free.”
Curiosity, too, would be maimed in that place.
Recall Primo Levi – a survivor and prisoner of Auschwitz – who told his experiences in his book, “If This Is a Man.” In one of his accounts, “he breaks off an icicle to soothe his thirst,” The Guardian recounts. “The guard snatches it from his hand. When Levi asks why, the guard answers: “There is no why here.”
Despite the disfigurement, humor and curiosity helped many prisoners find an inner light in the camps. Yet sometimes, not even those devices sufficed.
Sometimes only an ineffable belief in the face of all evidence to the contrary was all that was left.
As Robert McAfee Brown writes in his introduction to Elie Wiesel’s play “The Trial of God”:
By the time he was fifteen, Elie Wiesel was in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. A teacher of Talmud befriended him by insisting that whenever they were together they would study Talmud—Talmud without pens or pencils, Talmud without paper, Talmud without books. It would be their act of religious defiance.
“[One] night the teacher took Wiesel back to his own barracks, and there, with the young boy as the only witness, three great Jewish scholars—masters of Talmud, Halakhah, and Jewish jurisprudence—put God on trial, creating, in that eerie place, ‘a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty.’ The trial lasted several nights. Witnesses were heard, evidence was gathered, conclusions were drawn, all of which issued finally in a unanimous verdict: the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind. And then, after what Wiesel describes as an ‘infinity of silence,’ the Talmudic scholar looked at the sky and said ‘It’s time for evening prayers’....
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback, please email joeyclarklive@gmail.com. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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