In our time, we know more about the universe and ourselves than all who have come before us could even imagine. And the more we’ve learned, the deeper the ultimate mysteries have become. We’re high up enough now on the lofty hill of advanced knowledge and informed speculation that we can see the vast reaches of enduring enigma that are stretched out before us, and perhaps even slightly glimpse a heretofore hidden expanse of possibility beyond conception that roils around us. In this new context, with its astonishing vistas, any willful expression of individual human arrogance or cruelty or pettiness should be an embarrassment of massive proportion. All displays of greedy self-aggrandizement or hints of malicious wickedness in the face of the sheer magnificence of existence surely represent the nadir of stupidity.
Most of us know honorable and morally admirable people, truly good souls who are as imbued with kindness, compassion, and personal humility as they are invigorated by love and a hope of good things to come that this world has not yet experienced in the abundance and universality we should desire. But the decent and honorable take that as a challenge and a calling that suggests some version of their mission on earth, to bring a little more goodness as well as whatever is fine into the lives of others and the immediate future that so needs its healing balm.
So when we see the angry, aggrieved, snarling and yet smugly bloated little egos of people who have risen into positions of public service and intended leadership, and yet have fallen so far from the moral requirements and high expectations of those offices, their sad smallness of spirit and perversion of character glare forth in high contrast with the transcendental qualities of truth, beauty, goodness, and unity to which the better angels of our nature have always aspired. These individuals we watch from afar have become contemporary cautionary lessons of how it can be that what Blaise Pascal called the greatness and wretchedness of our condition can shed half its potential and devolve into something truly squalid that sets us all back and seeks to hold us down from the great flourishing that is our intent and purpose.
We should first grieve the loss of what might have been so many fine minds and souls who instead have meandered into the opposite of what was meant and could have been for their time on earth. We need to have real compassion for their loss, and our own that has come as the consequence of their degradation. And then we should work to see to it that we no longer allow such people into positions of power and responsibility for which they are neither qualified nor deserving. We’re here for more and better and greater things. We have a responsibility whose weight too few of us have felt and discharged with the care and serious gladness it merits. But now we know anew. We have an opportunity, as most generations have had in their own times, to awaken afresh to our duties. We can see the absurdities we have to face when we haven’t cared enough or worked hard enough to secure the common good. But then, that's why tomorrow beckons us forth.
