Pints With Aquinas - Seven Tips for Surviving Election Season | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Father Pine talks about how we can maintain our peace, stay grounded, participate, and still be informed during election season. Support The Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines with Aquinas. As you know, it's election season here in the United States of America. And the season has already proven plenty exciting, but there is more excitement in store. So as we think and prepare for conversations and maybe confrontations, we want to cultivate the habits of mind and heart and involve ourselves in the relationships, which help us to be good social and political actors, rather than just getting tossed this way

and that by whatever's thrown at us. So I have a little list for you of seven small things that you can think about and put into practice in preparing for and making your way through this election season. So here we go. Okay, so seven things. The first one is take stock of your emotions. Obviously we get bound up with the election season because our society attributes a great deal of importance to it and it's important and we feel acutely how the future of our country and the future of our families and

municipalities and whatever else are affected by that. So yeah, there's, there's just a lot of emotional and psychological turmoil that can result. So I think that on the one hand we have to have modest expectations. It's like, are people going to lie? Yes. Are people going to steal? Yes. Are people going to cheat?

Yes. We're dealing with fallen human beings, ourselves included. And so there's bound to be a little bit of kind of human confusion and yeah, human malfeasance involved. So yeah, we shouldn't be surprised or scandalized when it arises. Just know that we're being kind of chewed up and spit out by the media cycle and the political process to a certain degree or extent. And a lot of that is going to prey upon our human capacity for, on the one hand,

fear or outrage, on the other hand, hope or excitement. But we shouldn't attribute too much importance to those things because we recognize we've done this before. Our lives have maybe gotten better, our lives have maybe gotten worse as a result of these elections. But here we are, you know, it's still possible to know and to love the Lord, regardless of the political regime. It's still possible to raise a family, albeit with greater difficulty, with lesser difficulty, regardless of the political regime.

So I'd say just just take stock of your emotions and seek to guard your peace. So when you feel like you're being manipulated or controlled, either in the, you know, kind of register of fear and outrage or in the register of hope and excitement, just be conscious of that. So that way you can be more recollected as a social and political actor. The next thing, so number two, is take stock of your attention. So one thing about social and political matters is that they can absorb an incredible amount of our attention. So you might have work to do and leisure to engage in and whatever relationships

to contribute to, but you might find that a lot of your time and attention is being sucked up by this whole thing because you want to stay informed and you want to read the latest like news briefs or you want to whatever. Um, so just, again, just be conscious of that fact and there are little things that we can do As a way by which to guard our attention so that way we can channel it towards those things which are most important in our lives Or more important in our lives So like a little thing is you know know this about yourself like when are you more inclined to doom scroll? When are you more inclined to get absorbed by the news cycle?

In my case, it's at the end of the day because it's kind of like sometimes part of my wind down process. So here at the Dominican House of Cities we have Compline at 9 p.m. and I just try to turn my phone off before Compline and not turn it on again until after mass the next day. So that's like a nice 11 hour period where it's not possible or it's not available. Another thing is regulate the content that you read. Uh, I don't know that there are many media outlets or news sources, which are unbiased or unbalanced. I just don't think that human beings are unbiased or whatever balanced. And so I just say in so far as you can regulate the content you read and maybe

move a little off the fringe or a little off the periphery, if you know that you're inclined to get sucked into a kind of turbo death cycle, uh, I made those terms up, I don't actually know if that corresponds to reality and I would say, like, if you know that you're inclined to consume a lot of news or to get really involved in the whole social and political machinations of the thing, try to substitute, right? Substitute with comparable goods. So it's like you could just tell yourself, no, I'm can kind of put in the place of what might otherwise become a death spiral Or you might just kind of hard cap I'm only gonna look at it for this many minutes a day and there are

Extensions or like kind of filtering software things that you can put in place So as to ensure that at the very least it's harder to go beyond those bounds or it's harder to go beyond those limits. And let's say that you have a good week where you don't read that much political news, maybe reward yourself. This sounds silly, like it sounds almost poor. There's a cool word, infantile, childish. But let's say that you meet your benchmark of not consuming more than an hour of political commentary this week. Cool. Go to Chick-fil-A, get yourself a spicy chicken sandwich, some sweet waffle fries, and a cookies and cream milkshake. Unless you're a peach milkshake person, and then go for that.

For my part, the peach chunks are too big and they get stuck in the straw, so I'm not just... I'm just not going to spend my time there. Okay. So the first is take stock of your emotions. The second is take stock of your attention And then the third is take stock of your agency You are a political actor. You are a social and political actor and you contribute to the political good of this great nation But a lot of that's good It's gonna take place in in modest ways right in conversations with family and with friends And you don't want to alienate the and with friends. And you don't want to

alienate those people. You don't want to offend those people. You don't want to push those people out of your life just because it's that time of the year. It's that time of the four-year election cycle. So you're trying to build bridges. You're trying to come to agreements, like make compromises is probably the wrong description, but you want to be able to have sensible conversations with people and get down to the issues so that you can discuss them, so that you can be more informed as a political actor, rather than just saying like non-practical bombastic things and losing relationships or imperiling relationships at an unnecessary cost. And maybe it's time for you to be more involved politically. You know, you might kind of join your forces with a particular campaign or get

more involved with your school board or PTO or with your municipality or whatever it is, because I think a lot of people, they struggle with feeling helpless or they feel, um, like at a great distance from the whole political process. Like they're just a pawn on the chessboard or a cog in the wheel where when you take stock of your agency, then you're probably better disposed to use your agency, to deploy your agency. So get involved politically where you can, where you can make a difference and where you can actually be part of it rather than just be an outsider

or on the outside looking in. So take stock of your emotions, take stock of your attention, take stock of your agency. And then, uh then here's a little list of three things to check. One is check what I call contrariety. I think a lot of times we just define ourselves by contrariety. That sounds fancy shmancy, but what I mean is this. It's like you hear people that you ordinarily don't agree with say this thing and so you just say the opposite thing. They say X, so you say not X. Or they say Y, and so you say not Y.

Whereas very rarely does that get us involved with the principles and the arguments and then the actual goods which are at stake. So I think that to be really involved in politics has to be really involved with the things, with the realities themselves. So to actually engage and then make judgments, discuss those judgments and refine them, and then kind of test them in your conversations.

Whereas if it's just a mere matter of X then not X or Y then not Y, then we're not really thinking, we're just reacting. And usually we're reacting out of fear or sadness or anger or outrage and that just gets us further stirred up physically emotionally you know psychologically so i'd say just check contrariety the second thing is well this is number five but my second of three this list is getting complicated okay so first is take stock of your emotions second is take stock of your attention third is take stock of your agency fourth check contrariety fifth checkwashing. I think sometimes we want to like vote for a candidate who's perfect. We want our candidate to be utterly above her approach. We want him or her to be infallible, unimpeachable, et cetera. But that's just never the case because like I said,

we're dealing with human affairs. We're dealing with human persons and yeah, it's just, it's always going to be a bit of a mixed bag. So I think that you increase your authority, you increase your reliability when you're able to acknowledge the weaknesses, the woundedness is of your candidate, be able to say, yeah, these things aren't good, but then these things are good and I'm able to see what's good and what's bad in my candidate, in the other candidate, and then make a judgment on the basis of a kind of serene sober judgment. But when we just end up beating the breast and banging the drum and saying this person's awesome and anybody

who says otherwise is stupid or evil, then we are effectively kind of discrediting ourselves. We're effectively making ourselves sound a bit silly. Now that's not to say like all takes have to be hyper nuanced or super subtle takes. I think there's a place for like a little bit of what would you call it boosterism or there's you know for just being a proponent being a supporter but I think part of that is being aware of and sensitive to limitations in both candidates. And then the next one, so number six, is check apocalyptic thinking. I think a lot of times we have it in our minds that if it doesn't go this way or if it doesn't

go that way, then things are going to be utterly beyond repair or totally terrible or whatever else. It's going to precipitate the end of the world. Maybe but maybe not. So you can base your judgments off history, you can see that things have gotten better or things have gotten worse. It seems like the general trajectory of an old regime is to the worse, so we might be in a cultural decline which entails a kind of social and political decline and that's lamentable. But I don't know that thinking about golden ages and repining after

golden ages is actually fruitful because I don't know that there are good times and bad times so much as dangerous times, and the present is a dangerous time. So we have to do what we can in order to contribute and make of it something better than it might otherwise have been. So I'd say just check apocalyptic thinking. We don't know when Jesus is going to come back. We hope that he comes back soon because we hope that we're ready at his coming. But I think that we should just be cautious if our thinking tends in an apocalyptic kind of trajectory. So just, yeah, check contrivity, check whitewashing, and check apocalyptic thinking. And then the last one is just to be cognizant or recollected in what politics is.

And oftentimes you'll hear politics described as the art of the possible. Right? So it requires of us a kind of engagement with the issues, a kind of commitment to a certain advocacy, a kind of involvement as citizens. And that might be more or less depending upon our state of life, depending upon how well positioned we are socially and politically to contribute. But be aware of the fact that we're just dealing with the art of the possible. So things might get better, they might get worse, but they're probably going to look a lot like they do now in a year or two or four or eight or 16. You see where this is going. So I think that this last one is just to kind of

be recollected in politics. So politics, hopefully it's a common conversation and a common pursuit which is focused on the common good and that we can begin as friends, as family, as a society to meditate upon that, to kind of contemplate that and to host a conversation and a project which will better that or which will build that up. Now for many of you, you're like, fat chance. And perhaps that's true, but I think that where this cash is out for us is at the level of the virtue of prudence, right? Because we are capable as, you know, reasoners of being prudent, right? We can do what we can with what we have given the current circumstances or given our current limitations.

And that invests us with a real sense of purpose. Right, we can do what we can with what we have given the current circumstances or given our current limitations and that Invests us with a real sense of purpose and you know politics isn't going to be our highest calling because our highest calling is a Supernatural calling it's to be attitude for ourselves and for those whom we love or for those over whom we have care or charge So just to be recollected in what politics is and how we're meant to engage, how we're meant to contribute. Okay, so in review, take stock of your emotions, take stock of your attention, take stock of your agency, check contrariety, check whitewashing, check apocalyptic thinking, and be recollected in politics as politics is in fact. All right. I hope that some of those things are helpful for you as you think your way and work your way through the coming months. When it comes

to prudence, you might profit from the book that I wrote. It's called Prudence. Choose confidently. Live boldly. And a lot of it is about just these things on the level of your own personal life, your own communal life. So yeah, that's what I hope to share. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and then push the bell and get sweet email updates when other things come out. And if you haven't yet, also check out God's Blending, a podcast that I contribute to with

other Dominican friars where we have conversations a lot like this often enough and we've had conversations about politics and about elections and about voting and about other related issues. So yeah, no my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.