I have thus far painted a rather bleak portrait of our pursuit, waving a niggling finger at every turn as if to say, No No No Mister Andrew Rohman, here is an impolite world full of deceitful things, and you shall have it for breakfast every morning. But I promise you I have in my fist clasped that one sincere thing in the whole world, or perhaps two. 

In the meantime you argue: Certainly there exist a host of things, which are by their very definition sincere, like Anselm said of God and perfection?

Beauty, for example. To the ancient Greeks, to be beautiful means to be timely, and not in a sense that underscores the fact that we are becoming more decrepit by the minute. Instead, the Greeks understood Beauty as the state of the thing when it behaves as it should for its time. In other words, a filthy pig wallowing in its filth is beautiful because that is what pigs do, they are filthy, and to be filthy for a pig is to be virtuous. 

But that is rather circular, don’t you think? After all, if you were an Olympian goddess and your heavenly consort claimed that his banging every nymph from Tartarus to Elysium was excusable because “hedonism is in his heavenly nature,” wouldn’t you too send deadly vipers to extinguish every one of his bastard children? I know I would. 

More to the point: Need I say anything of Beauty in our contemporary West? I don’t take you for a fool, peaceable good honorable kind Reverend Andrew Rohman, so I won’t. 

Seneca the Younger said it best: Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.