Ecology of Goodness, also in the Sense of Delectable Happiness

Physicians and epidemiologists look for prior conditions, weakened immune systems, nutritional strengths or deficiencies, terrain that supports life, as determinants of most other phenomena exhibited by an organism or community.

Random Jottings points to George Weigel's essays on where the West stands in those matters not limited to metaphor.

...[Prof. Rémi] Brague, who knows a great deal about Islamic philosophy, knows all about the threat to the West from jihadist Islam. In Vienna, however, he insisted that nihilism – a soured cynicism about the mystery and wonder of being — is the prior enemy-within-the-gates....The very goodness of life, the goodness of being — that is The Issue beneath all the other issues of the 21st century.

It may be expected that Weigel supports Benedict XVI's expressions of the past year, the first of his Papacy. However, to discount either of them on that basis --Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?... -- is, we regret to notice, a symptom of the malady addressed, the reduction of discourse to Gramscian agendas, power, collusion, money. The ultimately amorphous "hegemony." Well, where sits the historic bloc in today's newsrooms, academies, monied & educated coastal suburbs?

Listening, with open ears before the retorts form, could generate the question whether perhaps someone is saying something helpful, even performative, toward entering the very experience of the goodness of life, the goodness of being.

Approaching that goodness, simply being there, at least not contradicting it, is itself an act of immense value, educational, nutritious, perhaps even cosmic. Courageous, at this moment in history, and perhaps always. To doubt that experiencing goodness is superior to experiencing reflex outrage, outrage that can be manipulated, impotent outrage that leads only to more frustration if reality does not agree 100% on a short timetable, is yet another symptom of the dire, debilitating illness that need not kill us. 

Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved.
--St. Seraphim of Sarov

A profoundly ecological act.

Do you say it is not so?