The Necessity of Acceptance

“What place does acceptance have in this wasteland of a year? My view, informed and influenced by living with a severe inherited disability, a fragile skin condition, is that it has a central, vital place.”

It has been a hellish year since March of 2020: the kind of year that is difficult to even recognize as having happened, let alone treat with any degree of acquiescence. Things have happened that we thought never would, things meant to be banished to another time. We feel conscripted into a drama played by ghosts in the ruins of yesterday. But the plague year came and is still with us. We can remember a time before, but it is painful to recall the sharing of life’s joys and griefs close at hand with those we love and care for.

What place does acceptance have in this wasteland of a year? My view, informed and influenced by living with a severe inherited disability, a fragile skin condition, is that it has a central, vital place. Acceptance makes it possible not only to cope with what Michael Oakeshott calls the “predicament” of life but to appreciate the gift of life itself, even in darker times than we had hoped to live through. There is only so much one can change or effect in this fallen world of ours, our broken nature radically insufficient to shape reality to our ever-changing whims. The hard edges of our existence in this implacable world have made themselves felt these last months.

This is part of acceptance, Peter King argues in The Antimodern Condition: An Argument Against Progress. Acceptance recognizes and reduces the inevitable implacability of the world and our existence in relation to it. Through an acceptance of our place, as embodied souls in a community-in-spirit that comprises G.K. Chesterton’s democracy of the dead, we bring the world nearer to us. This enables an appreciation of its wholeness and our relationship to it. We are in the world, and it is in us, the interpenetration encouraging a sense of rooted balance.

King’s antimodernism entails repudiating the need for ever-increasing progress built on change that uproots us from our grounding in the world. For Anthony Esolen the future “is a pallid and frail mimic of that longing for an eternal home. It does not lay the foundation. It does not build the spire.” Liberalism is the opposite of acceptance. Liberalism is an ideology rooted in a placeless, timeless view of man, unattached to people or place in a state of nature. Liberalism liberates people from all ties—family, community and country—into an existence mediated by the all-consuming market-state. Covenant becomes contract, trust becomes transaction, liberty-as-excellence becomes license-as-mediocrity.