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Seeking Transcendentals
Why Did I Order a Two-Volume History of Economic Thought?
Fun, improvement, and volunteerism. That’s how we might use current catchwords to answer the primordial question, “How ought we to live our lives?”
That question hit me hard a few summers ago when I opened up a mail package that contained Murray Rothbard’s two-volume set, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. “Am I really going to read these 1,000 pages?” I asked myself. “Why? How much time will it take?”
Every pursuit has an opportunity cost. That’s one reason wise men don’t become obsessed with things like golf, gardening, and fantasy football. “If I obsess on D, I forego A, B, C.”
And if A, B, and C consist of fun things, self-improvement, and volunteerism, D takes on qualities of sin because D starts to hinder what philosophers and theologians refer to as the three “transcendantals”: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. “Fun” is our contemporary way of pursuing beauty, “self-improvement” the contemporary counterpart of truth, and “volunteerism” today’s goodness.
I’m aware that defining Beauty, Truth, and Goodness as “fun,” “self-improvement,” and “volunteerism” is imperfect, imprecise, a bit immature, and maybe even irreverent.
