NEW IDEOLOGIES ARE LIKE NEW CARS.

I am a serial monogamist when it comes to cars. I buy a car and run it until it is no longer reliable. Then I get another. I do not identify my car with my virility or socio-economic prowess. It's just a vehicle to get me from here to there, and hopefully back. 

I maintain my car carefully. I read up on maintenance. I take it back to the dealer usually for routine maintenance. My current Toyota subcompact is 18+ years old. Thanks to Peter, its polycoat finish is like new. Its interior is vacuumed regularly. The vinyl dashboard has some unsightly scratches from my lugging long pieces of lumber inside the car. 8-foot planks can just fit from trunk to windshield if I fold down the front and back seats. 

My current car was new when I bought it in 2000. It's been a gem. But I have to say I realized something recently about new cars and ideology. 

When my car was new in 2000, it was the fitted with the standard conveniences of the time. Compared to my previous vehicle, a 1989 Toyota Tercel, it seemed luxurious. I mean it had electric door locks and a digital odometer. The automatic transmission was effortless. The air conditioning and heat worked well. It even had a CD player. I cruised around town to sitar music and Cossack choirs in surround sound.

I felt quite posh. I was very satisfied with all aspects of my car. I felt my commitment to this new car was well made.

But then I took three friends to Montreal for a long weekend  We went up through Vermont, a trip I had done several times over the years in lesser vehicles. The complaints began somewhere near Montpelier. It was warm for late Spring in New England that year. "The AC isn't reaching us back here. Turn it up," my friend Michael is never one to beat around the bush. 

The car performed well enough, but I felt the strain of the four-cylinder engine as we rolled over The Green Mountains. Whenever we made a rest stop, the back seat passengers groaned as they stretched their legs. The trunk barely held the luggage of four gay men. The digital tuner on the radio had trouble scanning for quality FM stations. But I guess that was because we were in Vermont.

The Montreal trip had its impact. I no longer crowed about my new car. I kept my continued appreciation of it quiet. The first time I picked Peter up for a date in 2003, his eyes went wide as he looked at the car. "You have a fancy new car!" I chuckled and said, "No. It's a three-year-old subcompact." I felt a surge of forgotten pride in my car, though. Then I felt silly.

I have been watching young people embrace new ideologies. I once thought socialism was the answer, even though I now realize had no idea what the real question was. I threw myself into reading everything about socialism and communism. I worked in public health facilities with the very poor. Some of my coworkers were products of welfare parents. 

I have always liked talking about ideas with people. I gradually felt about socialism the way I felt about my new car after that road trip to Montreal. I was less enthusiastic, though I retained the ideas of socialism's merits from the perspective of Christian charity and The Beatitudes of the New Testament. Making it work has proven more than tricky. 

This process of moderation has continued throughout my life. I am not shy about embracing the new with intellectual vigor. I renewed my collegiate romance with Eastern Thought in my thirties. I joined a Japanese Buddhist sect. I reread books on Indian, Chinese and Japanese philosophy. I learned to chant sutra in medieval Japanese. 

Gradually schisms in that organization between an ancient clergy and laity put dents in my enthusiasm. I began reading criticisms of the practice. I had difficult conversations with friends who had disapproved of my enthusiasm for the ideology. I gained more perspective.

The lay leadership offered me a promotion to a leadership position in the Greenwich Village group which I attended. I declined. While I respect and enjoy aspects of that practice to this day, the idealistic glow of finding "the answer" in its ideology is an amusing memory.

Seeing the public fervor which has sprung up around Dr. Jordan B. Peterson feels like watching others driving a shiny new ideology. And, in my opinion, there are many worse. I wonder if they will age into the same measured appreciation of their own enthusiasm as I have with my own ideological journeys. Will the good professor's science prevent him from being remembered as a trendy ideologue by many? I would hope so. 

Life is a series of scratches and dings as we age. They have unavoidable effects on our minds, our bodies and our ideas. It doesn't mean depriving ourselves of something new and exciting, like a new vehicle or a new ideology. The wisdom of age comes with accepting that the new will inevitably become older. Only the test of time and mileage separates the useful ideas from the useless ones.