Well, I'm sure you all know that the presidential debate is happening tonight.

We will all, no doubt, be tuning in as penance for our sins as an act of self-harm out of the kind of prurient interest that causes one to

stare at passing train wreck. But here on Young Heretics we are having the only

debate that really matters and that is which is better the

Iliad or the Odyssey. I really do mean that this is the only debate that matters. I know it can seem a little privileged or out of touch to say that this stuff is more

important than politics and that doesn't mean that politics isn't important it

doesn't mean that you shouldn't go out and vote it doesn't mean that you shouldn't go out and vote. It doesn't mean

that you shouldn't be paying attention to its going on in the world and acting to the best of your

ability in a virtuous way as God has given it to you to be able to do in the sphere where you have influence,

all of that remains 110% true.

But if you wait for that stuff to be resolved before you turn your attention to higher things,

you will never get to hire things. That's the secret to the world, you guys. The secret to the life of the mind,

the secret to the Western tradition. If you only turn your attention to first principles to the grand tradition to the big scope of history that you are a part of if you only turn your attention to that once all the other stuff all the practical stuff is out of the way, you'll never do it.

Because the world is always giving you more and more of a mess.

The world is a dumpster fire, and every moment is a particularly new kind of dumpster fire that you just have to be attending to and somewhere in the midst of it,

whether it's for 30 minutes in the morning or for an hour in the afternoon when you would otherwise be watching Netflix,

you have to find the space to reach for higher things.

That's what people have been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years.

It's how we've kept this tradition alive.

You think Boethius didn't have politics to worry about?

You think Homer wasn't trying to put food on the table. You think Thomas Aquinas never had to sort out some annoying bureaucratic issue at the universities he was a part of?

No, of course, of course they dealt with all this stuff it was just as urgent

...