But at least Liberals are looking for the answers. Because Liberalism is a learning process, not a system.
Conservatives will often point out the ways in which Liberalism has failed.
It all boils down to this: Liberal science does not have the answers. Because the answers are spiritual.
But there is nothing remotely spiritual about what Donald Trump's Republicans are doing in the 2020's.
What, scream and yell in order to win elections? That's supposed to be spiritual?
The Republicans fail even more, in the same place that Liberal America does.
All they do is stress us all out.
They do not have a spiritual answer.
But a spiritual answer exists.
And at least the Liberals are looking for it.
Maybe they are looking in the wrong place.
Because they are looking for the answer in the western European tradition.
And the answer does not lie in post-Roman Western Europe.
Plato did not live in Western Europe.
The heirs to Marcus Aurelius are in Athens and Cairo, not in Texas and London.
This is what's wrong with the Liberal side.
We are a learning process. We're trying to learn and make the world better.
But we have exhausted the problems that reason and science alone can fix.
The environment.
There is no way around it.
We need to stop consuming so much.
The science does not have the answer.
Technology will not fix this.
We need wisdom.
We need philosophy.
We need a spiritual answer.
In the case of the environment, we need to stop consuming so much.
We need to be like Buddhist monks and learn to enjoy a simpler life.
We would be a whole lot happier doing it.
What about America's racial problems?
60 years ago, in the early 1960's, it was simple. End segregation.
Now the problem is different.
We've redefined racism as anything bad any 'white' person does to a 'black' person.
Look, life just does not work that way.
The government has no magic wand to turn all 'whites' into perfect people.
We need a spiritual answer.
We need philosophy.
First, to focus on teaching who we can teach
And second on learning that we simply cannot make everyone behave all the time, and that if we get angry about it, people will get stressed and misbehave more.
And third, we need to learn that this does not make life hopeless. We can still be happy and live good lives.
Liberal America has reached the limit of what science and politics can fix without philosophy.
And that is where the answer is.
In philosophy.
Not in the European Christian philosophy of Donald Trump's Republicans.
Because that false, angry-church Conservatism is becoming a complete psychological meltdown.
We need to look beyond post-Roman Western Europe.
To The Buddha.
To Bulgaria's understanding of Christianity.
To Plato and Marcus Aurelius.
To the whole of African, Asian, ancient Mediterranean, and Native American civilization.
Including the Romans and the Greeks, for post-Roman Western Europe only learned part of what they had to teach, and very little of the wisdom.
And that's the answer.
With spiritual wisdom.
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. Thomas Aquinas represented a Christian counterculture. He understood the Christianity that Bulgaria knows. So did Tolkien. They knew deep wisdom. But most of western Europe never did learn most of what they knew, and most of them gave up on it in the Black Plague.