Shrink the Politics and Nourish Your Heart

According to author Michael Warren Davis, people can live more fully through activities such as learning a musical instrument, reading, or gardening. (SYC PROD/Shutterstock)

The midterm elections are behind us. The victors have raised their glasses in triumph; the losers have waved goodbye, wailed like banshees in the face of defeat, or called fraud on the election. The yard signs and banners are coming down, and commercial television has jettisoned political ads and recommenced selling beer, meds, and cars.

Whatever else the past few years and this election have taught us, one thing is for certain: A lot of Americans these days gobble down politics like a Great Dane devouring a bowl of kibble.

Like many others, I chase down my favorite news and commentary sites every day, as do some of my family members and friends. The way I see it, to be politically awake, or if you prefer, politically “woke,” is a necessity. Given all the shenanigans in federal, state, and local government, we need to keep an eye on the game.

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone,” Thomas Jefferson said. “The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.”

And to be those depositories, we need to know what’s going on, who did what, and—when need be—hold the feet of our politicians and bureaucrats to the fire.

But following politics too avidly, as I have at times, or allowing the political to dominate our moods, thoughts, and conversation can be deadly to the heart and soul.

Getting Some Perspective

My younger grandkids love to take my binoculars and look at objects through the wrong end. Grandpa becomes a leprechaun—if a leprechaun wore khakis and a button-down shirt. The neighbor’s home across the street looks a mile away. Sphinx, the appropriately named yellow cat, shrinks to the size of a mouse.

Reverse the binoculars, and the world grows larger and closer, which is, after all, the purpose of this optical instrument. We see distant objects more clearly: the eyes of the doe by the pines behind the house, the individual branches of those trees, the last dandelion of the season nearly buried in the grass the deer is nibbling.

When we focus too much on politics, we’re looking the wrong way through our binoculars. We restrict our vision, and problems and solutions seem miniaturized and far away, located in the Oval Office or the halls of Congress, which can themselves seem as distant as the moon. Worse, an obsession with elections, a belief that our lives will be merry and bright if so-and-so becomes governor or the idea that if we could just crush our opponents in the voting booth we might drive them forever from the public square, is unbalanced. Such false hopes make our world smaller and more inaccessible.

On the other hand, when we use our metaphorical binoculars correctly, we comprehend that same world up close and personal.

If this extended metaphor doesn’t ring your doorbell, here’s a thought to bear in mind. We all know that old saying, “A dying man doesn’t wish he’d spent more time in the office.” Likewise, I doubt whether a man on his deathbed wishes he’d spent more hours watching television news or visiting political blogs and websites.

How Then Should We Live?

In “The Reactionary Mind: Why ‘Conservative’ Isn’t Enough” (Regnery Gateway, 2021, 256 pages), author Michael Warren Davis agrees that we should fight for justice and the common good, then notes this telling qualification:

“But politics is only supposed to amount to a tiny fraction of our public life. Instead, it has swallowed us completely.”

According to Davis, a reactionary is much more than a political animal. He is “one who rejects the cheapness, the artificiality, of modern life. He demands the right to pursue his own happiness, and he refuses to accept mere comfort instead. He doesn’t want to survive; he wants to live. And he wants to go to heaven.”

With this definition as his guidon, Davis tackles such topics as the shoddiness of modern culture, the manipulations of our opinions and emotions by ads and social media, and the blind acceptance of mantras like “follow the science.”

Unlike so many other books of this type, however, where a crabby writer catalogs the ills of the world without offering an escape route, Davis unlocks the doors of that prison, swings them open, and leads his readers into the sunshine.

Real Life

As a counterpoint to our age of high tech, politics, consumerism, and cultural chaos, Davis offers alternatives. In one chapter, for instance, he describes what he calls the “Patient Arts” as the “true, good, and beautiful things that only people with real powers of concentration can enjoy (that is, basically everyone who was born before the advent of television).” These recommended activities include reading books, writing letters that you actually put in the mail and that are, preferably, composed by hand, keeping a journal, and composing some poetry just for yourself.

Aside from these print projects, Davis also encourages budding reactionaries to learn a musical instrument, do some singing for their own pleasure, or brew up and serve tea with some ritual and finesse. The consummate Patient Art, however, is gardening, which he calls “the most natural—the most human—of all pastimes.” If you’re a gardener, Michael Davis is your man.

In the book’s last chapter, Davis suggests other ways to live more fully, many of which have appeared here in The Epoch Times: build a community, minimize the amount of technology you use, shop local.

“Practice real leisure. Learn to play an instrument. Paint. Whittle. Write poetry. Play chess. Be strenuous, and be useful.”

Things Worth Doing

In “What’s Wrong with the World,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” He isn’t encouraging mediocrity or sloth. Instead, he’s referring to those ordinary actions of life, from working on the yard to writing a love letter, that men and women should perform themselves. These are the things that not only add to our humanity but which may grant us satisfaction and even joy.

In another of his books, “Orthodoxy,” Chesterton wrote that “the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.” Notice that the “laws of the state” are only one of the “most terribly important things.” If we chose to do so, we might add another hundred items to Chesterton’s short inventory.

Like Chesterton, Davis understands that politics is only a part of the lovely, mysterious equation of what it means to be human.

‘To Life, to Life, L’chaim!’

Sometimes we read or hear expressions such as, “The personal is political” or, “Everything is political.” These declarations, which are confining, demeaning to the human spirit, and fundamentally ridiculous, come from people who have their binoculars turned the wrong way. We might just as easily say “Everything is art,” “Everything is science,” or “Everything is of God.”

To live as if everything is political is a sure-fire guarantee of personal misery. Put politics in its proper place, embrace what we love and treasure—and we have a shot at joy.

Maybe this would work: “Everything is a life fully lived!”

It’s a bit awkward, but there’s an adage we might all surely salute.