In a guide where the other chapters average six or seven pages, Holiday spends 27 pages on Elon Musk. He first touts Musk’s accomplishments and intellectual genius, but then he knocks the legs from beneath this table of compliments by writing of Musk’s “epic, tragic flaw—a narcissism as profound as his brilliance, a destructive, delusional impulse that has often made this very smart man look very, very foolish.”
While that assessment may be accurate, this was only the beginning of the assault on Musk. Among other things, Holiday labels him a bigot, an attention-seeker, an anti-vaxxer, a fool for buying Twitter, and more. Holiday might have stopped with that chapter, but instead he threads Musk back into the book several more times.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump appears a time or two as well, under fire for the number of posts he makes, for ignoring “the best intelligence on earth” and feeding instead on “a diet of cable news hacks and clickbait blogs and social media posts instead of direct briefings from intelligence agencies and experts.”
At the end of “Wisdom Takes Work,” seemingly to justify his lengthy assault on Musk, Holiday writes: “I’m sure a significant portion of my readers will disagree with my take entirely. But this is what we’re talking about, isn’t it? You gotta do what you think is right. You speak the truth as you see it.”
Here, Holiday is dead wrong. Truth is not “as you see it.” That’s the same as saying “Your truth isn’t my truth,” which is that post-modern relativism that makes nonsense of the meaning of truth.
But what proved most disappointing was the intrusion of clear political prejudice into an otherwise good book.
Over the past 50 years, or perhaps longer, the political—I mean the word in its broadest sense—has polluted every corner of American society. Movie scripts and novels more frequently than not contain a politically correct slant. Schools and universities are propagators and bastions of left-wing thinking. Sports have become gender-issue battlegrounds. Corporate hiring practices aim more for diversity than for competence. Whether one chooses to marry or have children becomes an issue rather than a personal decision. Ditto for the religious beliefs we hold, our views of male and female, our relationships with family and friends, even the food we eat and the thermostat settings in our homes.
An old battle cry of the left from 50 years ago, “The personal is political,” is now the norm and poisons the societal climate in which we live.
This philosophy has eaten through our culture and our general emotional wellness like a cancer. Combined with 21st-century screens and technology, it has replaced optimism with pessimism, joy with sadness, and courage with fear. What other transition might we expect? After all, teach climate change; sex and gender; and diversity, equity, and inclusion to elementary school students as we have now for many years in one form or another, and the result is the destruction of a youthful innocence and idealism once tempered by experience rather than ideology.
In his afterword to “Wisdom Takes Work,” Holiday writes, “We are the accumulation of lessons we’ve learned.” Here, irrefutable truth and commonplace wisdom join hands. If those lessons and their teachers emphasize virtues, as does Holiday, and a nobility of the spirit, then the students who graduate those classes are more likely to embrace their futures. If the lessons and their teachers are wrongheaded or worse, deceptive, thereby teaching vice, then the students who put those teachings into practice will end up miserable.
If we wish to forge lives of joy, love, and dignity for ourselves and our children, we must junk much of current culture with its umbilical cord to politics and ideology and see the world with our eyes wide open, rather than glazed by academic dogma or agenda-driven influencers. This shift means compartmentalizing the political and building a truly private life, a life all our own, centered on interests like family, work, love of country, and, if we are so inclined, religious faith. By pulling the ideological weeds from the garden of our interior self, which some call the soul, we can create lives of freedom and joy.
