The Quest

Our path to American moral and spiritual recovery begins with simple curiosity.

I've long said that the progressives will never reason themselves to a logical endpoint, that they only get to a level where they are emotionally satisfied.

I've noticed that in their criticisms of the right, and especially this past week in their condemnations of TPUSA and Charlie Kirk, this is also the way they consume information. They will read a sentence or two - or listen to short clips of what he said - and as long as that satisfies their bias or it is said by someone they take as an authority, they have no more curiosity about what preceded or what followed or the context in which the words were spoken.

It is also evident in Kirk's "Prove Me Wrong" debates when college aged people stepped up to the mic and spoke about CRT, fascism or just about any subject but knew little to nothing about how to define the terms or the basis for them. I remember one I saw where a liberal student engaged Charlie about some economic issue and had zero awareness of any Austrian School economists - the only economist he knew was Keynes, calling him the greatest economist in history.

That extreme lack of intellectual curiosity is what Immanuel Kant called "nonage", the self imposed immaturity of willful ignorance.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident, said:

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."

In other words, they don't know what they don't know and they don’t care.

A defining characteristic of most of the difficult interactions I have had with our friends on the left is that they will fight tooth and nail to maintain that nonage, that willful ignorance, which tells me they are paralyzed with fear that the truth will destroy the false world they have carefully constructed so they can always be right and justified.

They are just not curious about the world, any sources of evidence that might nullify their positions, or even about God - and an uncurious people are easily tempted and seduced by dark forces to seek to silence challenges rather than legitimately consider them.

I've noticed that we on the right are different - we tend to do our homework. It is not unusual to be engaged in a discussion in which you know things your progressive opponent does not. I think it might be because we and our positions are used to being challenged, lied about, and even threatened by our opponents, but in general, we follow the old newspaper reporter idiom of if our mom says she loves us, we go get another source.

The most influential people in my life are people who are not afraid to be wrong. People who honestly seek truth never are afraid to be wrong because just being temporarily "right" is never the objective, truth is.

There is no doubt in my mind that spiritual and moral decline plays a significant challenge in recovering America's heart and soul - but I believe the change begins with simple curiosity about ourselves, our world, and our God.

I'm no powerful intellect, I've never pretended to be. I don't have a wall full of degrees from ivy covered institutions. The wisest man I have ever known, my maternal grandfather, had the equivalent of a eighth grade formal education but in the things that matter in life, he held multiple doctorate degrees. My curiosity about everything came from him.

I can only say that as it applies to my ongoing intellectual and spiritual journey, in seeking God, I found myself, my family, my world, and my peace.