We've seen how Friedrich von Schlegel, the German Romantic and horn-dog, as well as Sir Kenneth Clark, of Television, Civilization and other lordly spectacles both turned into super conservative and extremely irritating puddle-ducks in their later years. One way to look at it, they both felt an emptiness, an existential gap they needed to fill.
We've asked the question "why" hundreds of thousands of times, shrugged a bit before having low down and cynical thoughts about the character and guilt ridden nature, the spoilt brattiness of the better off and advantaged who suddenly decide they need a life after death. We've bravely tried to understand approaches to the workings of the mind that sees it as a neurotic bundle of unfulfilled passions. We've looked for answers in a number of other places and have essentially decided that Hunter Gatherers loved the moments of life too much to ever get bored.
What we haven't done is turn any kind of corner that leads us down the path toward a visit to the priest, followed by an engagement to a triadic religious compromise, an embrace of conservative cultural norms. Tomorrow, if my sums are right, I'm 74 years old and I'm a person who has felt empty for at least 69 of those years and I still have an allergic reaction to the phrase conservative cultural norms .
The theory of an inevitable surrender to these norms would probably have better traction if we could find an alternative way of saying "conservative cultural norms." Currently the definition of conservative cultural norms is a tad inadequate, it includes, "The protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state" and the idea of culture "not defined by state boundaries" such as Welsh. What it needs to include is an idea of surrender exemplified by Schlegel, Clark and billions of others. If we do that it allows for the question "Is that the best you got?"
My own favorite answer to this problem at the moment is: "I have a sensitive amygdala."
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