Being grateful is a good start.
“Opportunity is built explicitly into the American social contract,” J. D. Vance, author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, writes in his introduction to the “2017 Index on Culture and Opportunity,” released by the Heritage Foundation this month. He highlights the bipartisan and nonpartisan “ubiquity” of the O-word.
“We declared independence by noting a God-given right to pursue happiness,” he writes. “And one of the few philosophical issues that unite both sides of our political spectrum is the idea that we should have some measure of ‘equality of opportunity’ in our society.” It’s “one of the few contemporary pieces of evidence of our shared national identity,” he says.
And yet you don’t even have to look at a newspaper or turn on the TV to know that the day-in and day-out reality of politics typically sounds like a total squandering of opportunity. But on the campus of Villanova University this past week, I saw something else budding. About 70 conservative college-newspaper editors were at a boot camp organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. One student told me that listening to an archbishop from Iraq last summer (at World Youth Day in Krakow) had rerouted his priorities and aspirations. He realized, too, the impact the media can have, depending, for example, on what an editor chooses to cover and highlight.
Another student asked me about how to avoid falling into the trap of “fake news.” The answer lies in telling the truth, of course, which really has to do with refocusing our lens on good stewardship and human dignity and the very opposite of the immiseration so many experience in the constant avalanche of bad news. Good stewardship is what so many of these students want to be about, if their questions and conversations were any indication — clarity in the middle of confusion, rising above noise and lifting people out of anything that keeps them from flourishing.
Some cultural indicators show signs of improvement. Others not so much. One big one Dr. Aaron Kheriaty notes in an article in First Things: “Depression is now the most common serious medical or mental health disorder in the United States.” And “suicide is now the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults, and the tenth leading cause of death overall in the United States.”
“The American Dream” is in “crisis,” on both a spiritual and a cultural level, as Vance commented at an event for the Index, and neither a president nor Congress nor the Supreme Court will remedy it. In his introduction, he writes:
Culture must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as “the least of these.” It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse that speaks often about the vulnerable even as it regularly fails to help them.
In his recent TED talk “How We Can Face the Future without Fear, Together,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks discussed the need to “strengthen the future ‘us’ in three dimensions: the us of relationship, the us of identity and the us of responsibility.” He explained:
When you tell a story and your identity is strong, you can welcome the stranger, but when you stop telling the story, your identity gets weak and you feel threatened by the stranger. And that’s bad.
Next time you’re tempted to turn the phone around toward yourself, turn the eyes of your heart to some other person who might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten.
Sacks advises that the road to rediscovering identity is in overhauling the radical individualism of the day, perhaps best symbolized by the selfie. Next time you’re tempted to turn the phone around toward yourself, turn the eyes of your heart to some other person who might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten.
At ISI’s 35th anniversary dinner, in 1988, William F. Buckley Jr. said:
We are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us. We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live without any sense of obligation to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours, within the frame of the human predicament God imposed on us — without any sense of gratitude to our parents, who suffered to raise us; to our teachers, who labored to teach us; to the scientists, who prolonged the lives of our children when disease struck them down — is spiritually atrophying.
Being grateful for any and all opportunities may be the place to start. And helping others see the same and bask and soar in the possibilities — the opportunities. It will require a few less selfies, though, for sure.
READ MORE:
What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Trump and America
The American Dream Hinges on Family
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review. Sign up for her weekly NRI newsletter here. This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.