Some very smart people I listen to wondered aloud in the past year why Rush Limbaugh did not care about his legacy? Why did he keep on lying for Trump with his dying breath. Hannah Arendt has an answer.
Most of what is good in public life in our world we inherited from the the Ancient Greece and Rome. In both of those cultures, reputation and legacy and honor were what elevated people. We think of character as something within ourselves. The Greeks saw character as the imprint of the culture on a person. Courage imprinted Heracles--as if Heracles were the coin and courage was the stamp that identified it.
The Greeks and Romans lived in worlds where exile was a punishment as bad as death because true existence was in community. It is from Rome we get the compliment that someone is "A man among men."
In an age of faith, a scoundrel might repent when he knew death was near. That repentance could be true and sincere because the spiritual world was real to everyone in the culture--even those who mostly ignored it.
But we live in an age of the Will. We do not live for reputation, but live to control the future, to impose our desires on the future. In an age such as ours, Hannah Arendt writing about the Will in her book Life of the Mind says:
"...old age consists in a shrinkage of the future dimension, and man's death signifies less his disappearance from the world of appearances than his final loss of a future."
Limbaugh saw his future shrinking and became more desperate to control what time he had left. He wanted to remain relevant to the end. I have known other rich old men who used what time and strength they had left in their 80s or 90s to remain relevant in the places they once had power.
People who live for reputation and contemplation put their lives in order, to use an old phrase, when they know the end is near. Those who lived with a will to power go to death grasping and ignoring every form of goodness.
If C.S. Lewis is right and the doors of Hell lock from the inside, Rush Limbaugh slammed and bolted that door--as an act of Will.
No comments:
Post a Comment