A busy few days, no?

American Caesar

Once we face the low level of Caesarism and how unchoiceworthy it is, we can begin to understand the danger that follows from normalizing public discussion of it as a possibility and option. Doing so “means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule” (emphasis added). In other words, ambitious political actors will seek to create by their actions the very chaotic conditions that justify their own seizure of postconstitutional rule. This is a form of right-wing accelerationism.

Damon Linker, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and the “Red Caesar” Concept.

I’m always looking for explanations for why 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump even after January 6. (Sometimes, I hallucinate a reason, but when the fever breaks it goes away and the bafflement returns.)

I don’t think that the desirability of a “red Caesar” motivated voters consciously. I see it more as a way for MAGA intellectuals (e.g., Michael Anton, John Eastman and other Claremonsters), to try, try again to justify their support. It reminds me of how progressive intellectuals kept trying (and invariably failing), for almost five decades, to re-write Roe v. Wade so as to make it coherent.

As a disciple of Leo Strauss, the muse of Claremont, Damon Linker takes personal offense.

History Rhymes

They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.

…

Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over.

David A. Graham, The Film That Explains Contemporary America.

I’ve certainly made my opposition to Trump obvious in my writings, but I think it’s time to drop my purity tests and attend the next “No Kings” event in town.

Piling up hoards of money

I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker—we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

A backstory

No longer was it uncommon, as in the time of James Fenimore Cooper, to see a husband and wife come aboard with three or four young children, as well as a servant or two. Among the earliest of such couples were Robert and Katherine Cassatt of Pennsylvania, who in the summer of 1851 embarked on an extended sojourn abroad, stopping first in London before moving on to Paris with their three young children, Alexander, Lydia, and Mary. In Paris they settled in for an extended stay at the Hôtel Continental, and seven-year-old Mary was to remember the day of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état the rest of her life. It would also be said that her interest in painting began then, which would appear to make her the youngest American thus far to have come under the spell of the arts in Paris.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Pizzagate Redux?

Pizzagate lost relevance over time, usurped by marginally less insane conspiracy theories about rigged elections and the “deep state.” So it felt newsy when J.D. Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd last Tuesday that mentions of pizza and grape soda in some of the Jeffrey Epstein files had piqued his interest. “I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory,” he marveled at the language. “We should absolutely investigate.”

That was interesting for two reasons.

First, at a moment when swing voters and even certain “America First” postliberals are experiencing buyer’s remorse, it was useful of the VP to remind the country that Donald Trump’s movement has always been powered by febrile cranks and grifting sociopaths keen to monetize their paranoia.

Nick Catoggio, The Hidden Hand

Second, Turning Point USA is becoming the Zelig of febrile crankery and grifting sociopathy in the 2020s. (And no, that was not Catoggio’s second reason.)

He has put down the mighty and exalted the humble

10. The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. will enhance human work not replace it — is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees. All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients. (Source: nytimes.com)

11. Bhaskar Chakravorti:

Digital Planet, my research center at Tufts University, recently released the American AI Jobs Risk Index, assessing vulnerabilities across 784 occupations. The economics are striking: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5 million jobs and $1.5 trillion if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable. (Sources: ft.com, digitalplanet.tufts.edu, fletcher.tufts.edu)

Both items from John Ellis News Items

My latest AI adventure

Tuesday, I groped for a half-remembered poem, and finally consulted the oracle, Claude AI:

I’m trying to recall a poem, with a woman author, that counsels against the party of certainty and for the party of awe. Can you help.

Claude went through iterative searches, fixated on my “party of certainty” and “party of awe” phrasings.

It came up dry but offered this:

…

A few other possibilities worth considering:

Mary Oliver, who consistently urges readers toward wonder over certainty in the natural world
Lisel Mueller, whose poem “Alive Together” meditates on contingency and astonishment
Naomi Shihab Nye, who writes about wonder and humility

Mary Oliver rang a bell for me, and I told Claude so.

” Mysteries, Yes” seems like a very strong candidate — it’s directly about marveling at mystery rather than demanding answers. Let me fetch the full text.

(Me:) I believe this is the one

(Claude) — “Mysteries, Yes” by Mary Oliver. It maps perfectly onto what you described. The poem opens by declaring that we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood, and closes with this counsel:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Those were exactly the lines I half-remembered. I told Claude so.

Okay. This is why I don’t shun AI. But then Claude gave me strokes:

[Y]our summary of it — “the party of certainty versus the party of awe” — is honestly a more memorable distillation of its argument than most critical descriptions I’ve seen. It captures exactly what Oliver is doing in those final two stanzas.

I think Claude likes me! Is it any wonder that people anthropomorphize, and some even have AI girlfriends or boyfriends?

And, by the way, those lines I half remembered come at the end of a poem I don’t think I’d ever read in full.

Beware “the colon movies”

I liked “Project Hail Mary” until I didn’t, couldn’t, wanted to get on with my life, wanted to hit the men’s room, wanted to hit whoever had edited (or, rather, failed to edit) this needlessly epic adventure …

It’s as if Hollywood is punking us. How else to explain stretching a Tom Cruise stunt-a-thon to two hours and 43 minutes and then calling it “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”? The italics are mine; read them as a primal scream. “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” lasts two hours and 49 minutes. It’s supposedly the end of impossible missions, but nothing ends anymore. By the current illogic of interminable narratives, there will surely be a “Mission: Impossible — One More Reckoning for the Road,” and it will be longer than the audiobook of “Middlemarch.” Cruise’s first “Mission: Impossible,” from 1996, is one hour and 50 minutes.

…

Explanations vary. Many Hollywood executives and moviemakers apparently believe that if you’re going to lure people out of their homes and away from their smaller screens to the communal experience of the multiplex — and if you’re also going to ask them to fork over roughly $30 for a ticket, popcorn and a soft drink — you better promise them a real event, even a spectacle, something with a sense of amplitude. That means three hours and one minute of “Avengers: Endgame,” three hours and 12 minutes of “Avatar: The Way of Water” and three hours and 17 minutes of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” (Beware the colon movies — or at least make sure you haven’t planned anything else that day.)

Frank Bruni

Having just finished reading Middlemarch a few weeks ago, that line about Middlemarch busted me up.

Prequel

From today’s by Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. (S.D. Tex.) in Patel v. Figliuzzi, which stemmed from his exchange on MSNC’s Morning Joe with defendant Cesare Frank Figliuzzi, Jr., “the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI”:

Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”

Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”

Patel claimed the “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building” was actionable defamation, but the court found that it was nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole instead:

“Rhetorical hyperbole” is a subset of opinion, which Texas courts have “defined as extravagant exaggeration that is employed for rhetorical effect.” “Statements that would be perceived by the audience as ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ do not constitute defamation.” In this way, Texas law protects “statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual.” “Whether an utterance is … rhetorical hyperbole turns not on what the speaker intended but what a reasonable person would believe and presents as a question of law for the court to decide.”

Eugene Volokh, FBI Director Kash Patel Loses Defamation Lawsuit Over Morning Joe Statements

This decision came down Tuesday, the day after Patel sued the Atlantic for reporting that he’s a lush.

N.B.

Some words about the arc of my writing over the past ten years or so.

I didn’t take Donald Trump seriously when he came down the (golden?) escalator in 2015.

  • He never held any fascination for me.
  • I didn’t buy his (ghost-written?) book.
  • I didn’t watch any of the beauty pageants he bought so he could talk to cute girls and they’d have to listen (and could walk through dressing rooms when they were half-naked).
  • I didn’t watch any of his reality TV or gladiator spectacles.

Because I hadn’t followed him at all, I didn’t know he was a sexual predator (serial adulterer, yes) or a chronic liar (I’m not going to soften it by calling it “bullshitting”). I was sort of aware that he was incompetent enough to have bankrupted a casino (!) and other businesses.

I was alarmed when my former major party gave him the nomination. (I wish we could go back to smoke-filled rooms instead of rage-filled primary voters.) I opposed him as soon as he started dehumanizing people on the campaign trail. I was incredulous when he won the 2016 general election. I was not reassured when he assumed office by forcing his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to begin the gaslighting immediately. I was mildly reassured when he surrounded himself with pros who became the grownups in his room. I was pleasantly surprised when he honored his pledge about SCOTUS nominees.

This narrative is getting tedious, so I’ll cut to the chase: I ream out Trump and the GOP because I once was a Republican, and I feel their betrayal even though I repudiated the party in 2005. I wish I could ignore Trump, a toxic narcissist, but he very deliberately commits daily outrages to keep attention on himself, and fool though he be, as POTUS he is a very consequential fool.

I rarely ream out the Democrats because I have no stake in them, present or historic.

I have never even been able to consider Trump the lesser evil candidate because the Democrats aren’t actually demons and with them I’d at least be confident that there would still be elections in four years. Nevertheless, I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972.

My state is very red, and my half-hearted blue vote won’t change that. So I vote for the Christian Democrats.

Trump’s damage to the nation (and to the GOP) will not be repaired in my lifetime, nor (probably) in my son’s lifetime. Maybe during my grandchildren’s lives.

I was a conscientious objector and I’m close to pacifist. I won’t take up arms. But I will protest in the ways my conscience allows, and this blog has been one of those ways.

Shorts

  • [T]he nuclear question had been resolved peacefully by the JCPOA before Trump tore it up, and any remaining serious nuclear threat had been “obliterated” last year …. (Andrew Sullivan)
  • We see the victims of bad drug approvals, but victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials are practically invisible. (The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman)
  • President Trump has been rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral creature. Who could stand up to him? (Maureen Dowd. The answer is “Pope Bob.”)
  • Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
  • For a variety of reasons, in recent decades the rate of profit to be made by producing goods has fallen below the rate of profit to be made through finance. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)
  • Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. (Mark Twain)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Belated Sunday post

Somehow, Thomas Sunday got away from me.

Headstrong and mis-shapen

It seems odd to open a Sunday post with a quote from a neuroscientist philosopher who has not yet found himself able to profess forthrightly any active Christian faith. If and when he does, it almost certainly will be Orthodox, as I believe he himself once acknowledged.

I open with it nonetheless because it … well, I hope you’ll see:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist in a YouTube video with Freddy Sayers of Unherd.

I expect to chew on this for a long while, hoping to digest it and build some new intellectual tissue with it, so that I think by it rather than about it.

If you’re unfamiliar with Iain McGilchrist, this book blurb for one of his smallest books may help:

Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.

Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see.

The extent to which Protestantism neglects to “attend” to the Christian Gospel with the right hemisphere not only makes it “headstrong,” as McGilchrist has it, but oblivious to much that is precious and edifying.

Reductionism

Weber clearly thought that modern people are disenchanted because they believe that, in principle, a scientific explanation can be given for natural phenomena, with no need for recourse to magical means to invoke spirits or gods. As an explanation of the natural world, Weber thought that science was replacing religion, and empirical fact was replacing belief.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.

(Note that “scientific explanation” is fundamentally a left-hemisphere explanation.)

Anti-Institutional

The American evangelical tradition may not be as “liberal,” in the nineteenth-century or classical meaning of the term, as it sounds, but the focus on individual action — sans church, sans family, sans social structures of whatever sort — has predominated since the days of Whitefield. The enduring contribution to evangelicalism of the republicanism of the Revolutionary era was the undermining of hereditary trust in institutions. The enduring contribution of the Great Awakenings in the colonial and early national periods was to substitute the voluntary society for the church.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Many Americans would read this and say “Damn right! Institutions just get between me-and-Jesus!”

I intend it as an indictment. One might define the offense as Headstrongness.

Institutional failures in my mind are outweighed by personal failures. An institutional Church (at least one of them, anyway) is a near-infinitely safer guide to spiritual health than oneself is.

Barmen Declaration

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

Karl Barth, The Barmen Declaration (Germany, 1934), quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens.

Somehow the Barmen Declaration seemed especially timely when I stumbled across it again. If I’m not careful, I’ll become “WEAK on Crime and terrible on foreign policy.”

Great Schism

The centuries succeeding that day in 1054 have yielded two very different visions of what it means to be truly Christian, what it means to be the Church. These differences are not only in terms of mindset and vision, but also in core doctrines that are regarded as central to salvation itself.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, (“that day in 1054” being the conventional dating of the Great Schism, the separation of the Patriarch of Rome (i.e., now the modern Pope) from the rest of the Church).

Step in the right direction?

I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

Alan Jacobs

Angry and vengeful

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Everybody’s got their schtick

Today’s leading Christian personalities podcast, YouTube, Tweet/X, TikTok, Instagram and exert their presence through every form of social media. The audience is less national. There may never be another Billy Graham about whom everybody knows. Today’s influencers may have millions following them but are typically unknown outside their niche.

Everybody, Christian or not, is increasingly siloed. We self-collate, listen to and watch those who entertain us and typically tell us what we want to hear. Of course, the most popular influencers are usually provocative, outrageous, extremist, often hateful. The cerebral, thoughtful, reflective and courteous are less captivating.

[Megan] Basham, like all successful influencers, has her schtick. Her Shepherds for Sale targets evangelicals who supposedly have betrayed conservative Christianity in favor of leftist dollars or secular approval. Her tweets continue this theme and offer a robust MAGA Christian perspective, hammering non-MAGA Christians as weak sisters or worse. Every day is a new cosmic drama. In this regard, she is very talented.

Mark Tooley, America’s Most Influential Baptists?.

Basham has obsessively targeted so many evangelicals for literally selling out, mostly implausibly, that I suspect projection of her own financial motivations.

Nominalism, Realism, Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Preliminary research suggests that the absoluteness of Holland’s indictment is unwarranted — that things are a little more complicated than “humans [do] not have rights.” There’s also more than a grain of truth to it.

There are, sadly, sectarian Christianities who come close to this. You can get to that position from Christianish premises filtered through philosophical nominalism.

An hypothesis

I quoted a few days ago: Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Hypothesis: the works in the spiritual realm, too. Thus I, a Calvinist, was more open to Orthodoxy than some “spiritual-but-not-religious” addlepate.

IVF

One of my unpopular opinions is that there’s something dodgy about IVF. Thoughtful Protestant Matthew Lee Anderson makes The Biblical Case Against IVF.

I’m not going to try to anticipate and rebut any reaction that my position is cruel. I just wanted to drive a stake in the ground as a memorial against the Technological Imperative. Not all of us have decided that if something is inevitable, we should relax and enjoy it.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Whole lotta AI goin’ on

This oughta go in Frank Bruni’s “Love of Sentences”

“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”

Front Porch Republic

It’s not so much that I’m obsessed with AI as it is that the people I read with pleasure currently are obsessed with it.

How very, very ABA

The Wall Street Journal reveals/reminds that the American Bar Association has a DEI requirement for accreditation (and that ABA Accreditation is all but mandatory for a law school’s success).

It wasn’t this issue that caused me to drop ABA membership early in my law practice, but another where the bien pensants “think” one way, I another. The power levers in the ABA are, and long have been, controlled by people who feel like space aliens to me, and who probably think I’m a troglodyte.

Populist lessons

The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.

Bret Stephens

Pope versus an illiterate degenerate

Pope Leo is not likely to have the honor of going the way of my patron saint, Thomas Becket, that “turbulent priest” …

No, these are not those kinds of times. Pope Leo only has the American president, an illiterate and a degenerate, to snipe at him on social media. Trump is what you’d get if you’d given Benito Mussolini a frontal lobotomy and a double orchiectomy. He will order and exult in the mass murder of seagoing South Americans whose names nobody knows, but whatever else he may have in common with late-life King Henry VIII, the American president is not likely to make any martyrs in the classical sense.

…

One here recalls the famous words of Francis Cardinal George:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Prophetic? I think so–properly understood. 

The role of the prophet is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christianity. A prophet may or may not foretell future events, but making predictions is not the prophet’s main business—his business very often is the here and now. The prophet is a kind of public prosecutor, speaking in an inspired way to the shortcomings of the people, of the state, and, especially, of government and religious leaders ….

Kevin D. Williamson, The Pope Against the Idolators

“Shorts” on AI as Christian Heresy

I stumbled onto a piece by L.M. Sacasas (I think his intimates call him Michael; I’m not his intimate) that warrants many “shorts” of its own:

  • [T]he narrative of technological inevitability … frames the development of technology as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt, and to do so on the terms dictated by the emerging technological apparatus.
  • [T]he victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological “paths not taken” are often suppressed or ignored.
  • The narrative is useful precisely to the degree that it is the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands in the face of events you have the power to sway but would rather not.
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.
  • We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
  • AI in its present mode can be understood as a fundamentally conservative rather than radically disruptive force to the degree that its function is to preserve modernity’s core commitments to scale, efficiency, rationality, control, and prediction.
  • [W]e continue to reap the consequences of a failure to address the problems of growth and complexity in a manner that would serve the human person and human communities.
  • We are discovering … that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (That last, bolded, sentence was a pull-quote and very apt.)
  • [W]e are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
  • Without suggesting that this is an exhaustive and definitive account of the human person, I would invite us to consider the possibility that what is distinctive about the human should be sought in the quality of our capacity to respond to our Creator, the Alpha and Omega of our existence.
  • [O]ur flourishing is conditioned not so much on the accomplishment of certain feats or tasks, many of which, in any case, exclude the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable among us. Rather, it is conditioned on our capacity to respond to the call of God on us as unique individuals made in his image and thus made to resonate with his presence as it is manifest to us throughout creation.
  • “[S]tillness … is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real … has not yet descended into words.” (Quoting Josef Pieper, Leisure As the Basis of Culture)

L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy.

This is one to return to periodically until I’ve modified my DNA with it or found a fallacy and dumped it. I want to make sure I’m not acting like a machine.

Shorts (more generally)

  • Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
  • It was once the useful role of conservatives to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling “Stop”. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump. (Bret Stephens)
  • She says she has critiqued Trump for ten years so she should be trusted when she “defends” him thus: He is too stupid to realize that the même was sacrilegious.
  • The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un. (J Budziszewski)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Tax Day

Last Branch Standing

When you go see an argument, you’ve been on the opposite side, you know that this court is an extremely well-prepared court, that the justices have read the briefs, that the justices know the case. And I think our conversation in conference reflects that. It’s substantive. It’s a conversation that only people who have really done the reading and done the thinking could have. And again, I think if you were a fly on the wall, you would be pretty proud of the institution.

Justice Elena Kagan (2019), via SCOTUSblog.

Yesterday was the release date of Sarah Isgur’s first book, Last Branch Standing.

Abandoning the modern altars

When Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston in 1989, damaging 80% of the city’s homes and businesses, local leaders discovered that there were not enough traditional artisans in the nation, let alone the state, to make necessary repairs to historic properties. Industrialization, combined with a cultural shift toward white-collar work, had almost entirely erased the craft of building. As a result, efforts to reconstruct the city were delayed. Desperate homeowners commissioned tradesmen from outside the United States or otherwise relied on contractors who used modern construction methods that undermined the historic integrity of the buildings.

Farahn Morgan, Inside Charleston’s craft renaissance, about Charleston’s American College of Building Arts, which grew out of this 1989 wake-up call.

I’m handy (or at least used to be) at fixing things, but not “artistic,” so I don’t know what a young me would have made of the ACBA, which seems to require artistry in many or most of the crafts it teaches. Old me can hardly get enough of it. Maybe we’re repenting after a long haul of worshipping at the altars of growth and efficiency.

It’s over

Damon Linker, “raised as a secular Jew deeply attached to the state of Israel,” thinks that the “days when a unification of American and Israeli interests was even partially convincing are over and done”:

On Twitter/X, I’ve taken to calling events over the past five weeks Israel’s fantasy war. What I mean is that Israel appears to have concluded that the best (or only) way for it to protect itself (“re-establish deterrence”) is to “settle all family business” in the manner of Michael Corleone knocking off the heads of the competing mafia crime families in a series of bloody assassinations, even if those actions kill a bunch of innocent bystanders as collateral damage. So they spent roughly two years flattening much of Gaza, killing untold tens of thousands of civilians in the process, with the goal of ending Hamas’ control of the territory. (Measured by that standard, the operation has been a failure, since a greatly weakened Hamas continues to govern those parts of the strip Israel does not directly occupy.) It pulled off an impressive operation in September 2024, simultaneously blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah across Lebanon. (Twelve people died and thousands were injured, but since then missiles have continued to bombard the north of Israel.) In the so-called 12-Day War between Israel and Iran last June, the U.S. contributed to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. (This was so unsuccessful, or insufficient, that the current, longer, and vastly more ruinous war apparently became necessary just eight months later. Or so the Netanyahu government insisted.)

This war—or this succession of wars—is a fantasy because it seeks to enact the longstanding dream of securing the conditions for Jewish safety and security through brute force and the infliction of suffering alone …

…

Israel today is a country lashing out in multiple directions in often murderous rage at its enemies.

That even includes the largely powerless Palestinians of the West Bank, who increasingly endure pogroms at the hands of settlers apparently intent on enacting a barbaric policy of slow-motion ethnic cleansing that will eventually make it possible to establish Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea. (Yes, that’s the slogan advocates for a Palestinian state recite when they want to express a desire to wipe Israel off the map. When Israeli settlers direct it at Palestinians, the intent is no less genocidal.)

I have no particular horse in this race — yet, but I’m not sure my “having an opinion” matters much — but when someone like Linker counsels “divorce,” it carries some weight as an sort of declaration against interest.

The true scholar

Greek and Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Abandoned (not banned) Books

Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic writes about Why We Abandon Books. It may be worth your while, but my abandonment tends these days to involve just one decision:

You are 77 years old, sir, with no guarantee of hitting even 78 let alone getting through hundreds of backlogged books. Forget sunk costs. Is this book really worth the X days it looks as if it will take, or should you cut your losses and move on?

  • I slogged through Middlemarch for 22 days because of the voice of the narrator (though I did like Dorothea and eventually decided that Will and Fred were okay; I never did figure out the Doctor).
  • I abandoned A Box of Matches, even though it was 2-3 days tops.
  • If I still have an unread David Bentley Hart, I’ll give it to the library “used” book sale without cracking it. Fool me once (The Beauty of the Infinite), shame on you. Fool me twice, nah.
  • I may get back to The Matter With Things, of which I’ve finished one major section, but I kinda feel like I’ve either gotten McGilchrist’s gist or else I need more time to digest what I’ve gotten.

Introducing the Gentlemanosphere

As noted, I’m a geezer, feeling the cold breath on my neck all too often. I tend to reject some new things, especially if they remind me somehow of fads in my lifetime, like, for a non-random instance, “servant leadership.”

And the Gentlemanosphere is new to me. And it did evoke a sigh of “oh, servant leadership again!” But I guess there probably is a need in every generation to counter idjits Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes with something more wholesome. So here’s a table and a link if you’re interested. I’m probably too old for this.

AspectManosphereGentlemanosphere
Core BeliefsMen should dominate socially and control women; traditional gender roles enforced strictly.Men should protect, provide, procreate with kindness and strength; masculinity is positive and diverse.
View on WomenWomen belong in traditional roles (e.g., kitchen); often hostile or dismissive toward women’s advancement.Women’s advancement and men’s well-being are mutually reinforcing; equality supported alongside healthy masculinity.
Ideological ToneOften aggressive, hostile, sometimes racist, antisemitic, and exclusionary.Empathetic, inclusive, encourages emotional expression and community building.
Political AlignmentFar-right, reactionary, anti-feminist.Centrist or mainstream; bipartisan engagement, policy-driven advocacy.
Prominent FiguresAndrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron GainesScott Galloway, Richard Reeves, David French, Arthur Brooks, Chris Williamson, Jocko Willink
Approach to MasculinityDefined by dominance signals: physical strength, control, aggression.Defined by responsibility, emotional openness, personal growth, and legacy-building.
Communication StyleProvocative, confrontational, uses social media to spread ideology rapidly.Thoughtful, gentle messaging; uses podcasts, books, mainstream media for nuanced discussion.
Target AudienceYoung men attracted to clear dominance narratives and rebellion against modern social norms.Boys and men seeking practical advice, emotional support, and sustainable self-improvement.
View on Male StrugglesOften blames external forces (feminism, society) but offers simplistic “take back control” solutions.Recognizes complex causes of male struggles; advocates for empathy, new solutions beyond blame or pathologizing masculinity.
Gender PoliticsZero-sum: men’s gain seen as women’s loss; often opposes feminist progress.Non-zero-sum: advancing men’s well-being promotes stronger families and societies benefiting all genders.
Cultural ImpactPolarizing; often results in backlash and social division.Gaining mainstream attention; influencing policymakers and public discourse constructively.
Criticism FacedAccused of promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, extremism.Criticized for being vague or “soft,” sometimes accused unfairly of aligning with far-right views.
Mental and Emotional HealthOften dismissive of emotional vulnerability; promotes toughness at all costs.Encourages emotional expression and seeking help; supports mental health awareness for men.
Economic and Social AdviceFocuses on reclaiming traditional male roles; sometimes promotes controversial or harmful behavior (e.g., pickup artistry).Emphasizes economic security, community building, responsible fatherhood, and healthy relationships.

Shorts

  • Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
  • [I]t’s just not true that destroying a lot of Iranian bridges and power plants would kill Iranian civilization. It would do enormous economic and physical damage, to be sure. But it takes a real estate guy to think a civilization is no more than a collection of bridges and buildings. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • “I don’t know about you,” he wrote earlier this week, “but I think that if one of our war aims is to literally erase a civilization from the face of planet Earth, it probably qualifies as a ‘war,’ and that Congress, which has already signaled its willingness to spend lots of money on this, should have the decency to call it such, and give that dignity to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The people dying in this are dying in a war.” (Michael Brendan Dougherty via Jonah Goldberg)
  • I don’t play with betting markets, but if I did, I’d bet a tidy sum that Trump (with the help of J.D. Vance’s negotiating acumen) will deliver us a souped-up version of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal by a different name. Sort of like how Trump basically kept NAFTA in his first term but gave it a new name, we might get the JCPOA but rebranded as the MIRGA (Make Iran Great Again) deal. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • Damn, it’s expensive to steal oil. (P.J. O’Rourke via Kevin D. Williamson

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Pascha 2026

Christ is Risen!

This post is kinda late because I was feasting until 7 hours ago and slept until after 8 am.

What do we know about God?

I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

I love prayer books

No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.

Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.

When, as a Reformed Elder, I occasionally had to lead worship in the Pastor’s absence, I unfailingly went to the Book of Common Prayer to structure the “Pastoral Prayer” for the morning. I did so because I didn’t want to lapse into “Father we just” (this) and “Father we just” (that), the faux fervency I heard too often.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to use prayer books in my private prayers, but as I approached Orthodoxy, the Church’s prayers, in its Prayer Books, indeed taught me how to pray.

Gnosticism is insidious

Abigail Rine Favale echoed Mohler when she published an article in First Things in 2018 titled “Evangelical Gnosticism.” I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or home-schooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use). Upon reading Favale’s article, a Grove City professor said on Twitter, “I did not believe this was true of my students,” so he decided to poll them during class. He then announced, “I was floored (and dismayed) to discover the vast majority don’t believe in the bodily resurrection.”

Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Good of Creation

Young, restless and …

Interesting observation from Julia Yost in the Washington Post: the blogosphere gave a relative edge to discursive Protestantism; TikTok and Instagram to liturgical Christianity. “Young, Restless and Reformed” giving way to “Young, Restless and Roman.”

Via the grapevine, I understand the Parish associated with the Roman Catholic chaplaincy at University of Illinois received 130 at Easter. My little Orthodox parish baptized five and chrismated three more. We have added the Paschal Troparion (Hymn) in Spanish as a result.

These dogs don’t hunt

Other influential myths also invite reevaluation: the memory of medieval Christendom as the “Dark Ages,” the decline narrative of the church’s “Constantinian fall,” or the dismissal of Christian orthodoxy as “Hellenized” by alien Greek philosophy.7 More work can and should be done on the legacy of these flawed narratives—notably, all reflecting anti-Catholic and antimedieval biases—in American history.

Paul Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation (Epilogue)

Conundrum

Many evangelicals knew the Christian right had become deeply unpopular with most Americans and that evangelicals had become thoroughly identified with the Christian right.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Tuesday April 7

Rapacity

Just another widget

“You want to leave a place better than you found it,” he told me. And for a long time, he felt like he had.

But that was before LifePoint Health, one of the biggest rural-hospital chains in the country, saw his hospital as a distressed asset in need of saving through a ruthless search for efficiencies, and before executives at Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm whose headquarters looms above the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began calling the shots. That was before Gose realized that, in the private-equity world, hospitals were just another widget, a tool to make money and nothing more.

Megan Greenwell, The Wyoming Hospital Upending the Logic of Private Equity

Digital robber barons

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before. Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Legalia

The hills worth dying on

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

…

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see.

Kevin D. Williamson (bold added).

The ramifications of the boldface observation above seems lost on the nihilists who want to tear down the courts as no more than political hacks in robes.

But I’m starting to think that “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win” misses something. Unless Trump has no competent legal advisers, I’m inclined to modify that to “the cases it thinks it is most likely to win or the hills it’s willing to die on.”

The stupid ideas that Trump is willing to defend all the way to SCOTUS probably have some kind of coherent common impulse behind them. If you connected the dots, I don’t think the picture would look much like the American I grew up in. We owe more to SCOTUS than the nihilists are willing to acknowledge.

An Aha! moment

I just learned, in the Advisory Opinions podcast’s discussion about the Supreme Court’s Chiles v. Salazar decision, that the legislative and other advocates of banning “conversion therapy” do not really have categorical “mounting evidence that conversion therapy is associated with increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts.” Rather, “the lawyer for the state had to acknowledge that all of the studies that they were basing this on were aversive therapy, you know, electroshock therapy or other types of behavioral therapy, um, that were quite different.”

There was no evidence that mere counseling (“talk therapy”) about sexual orientation was harmful, and it likely contributed to Ms. Chiles’ SCOTUS victory that talk therapy was all she did.

As the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to admit to SCOTUS in an earlier case, the narrative that denying “gender-affirming care” leads to suicidality in adolescents is not supported by evidence. Now another progressive narrative about adolescent gender dysphoria bites the dust.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone with an agenda is just making this stuff up.

Legal abuse

Though vexing in this situation, it probably is for the best that we do not have a law under which the prosecution of Pam Bondi would be convenient—if Bondi’s career as attorney general shows us anything at all, it is that in our current debased political environment the DOJ could not be entrusted with a statute containing provisions flexible enough to treat as a criminal matter such abuses of power as Bondi’s. A law meant to curtail such abuses of power would, ironically, almost certainly facilitate new ones.

Kevin D. Williamson

Politics

Losing trust

Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”

And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.

Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

Ross Douthat

No Kings

I’m all for protests, it’s our right as Americans. But nailing down the reason for No Kings is more like spinning the Wheel of Defeatists Complaints. Signs noted fascism, wars, school funding, billionaires, LGBT issues, allowing illegal immigration, even the Epstein files. And really, the rallies are mostly about Donald Trump’s winning the election. Forget protests, they’re more of a massive primal scream therapy session.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal

This jumped out as a bit of sanity amid a column that otherwise made me want to cancel my WSJ subscription.

I haven’t gone to a No Kings March for this reason. The soup lacks a worthy theme.

Miscellany

Gay versus Queer

I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.

The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.

Ben Apel, I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’ (gift link).

(Andrew Sullivan has often made the same point, with less emphasis on the “critical theory” aspect.)

So what’s the new “learn to program”?

I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.

That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.

For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.

Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.

But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that.

Frank Bruni, Teaching in an American University Feels Very Strange Right Now

Don’t forget: luxury beliefs

There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.

Yasha Mounk

Regular features

Shorts

  • I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth uses language the way an adolescent boy uses Axe body spray — subtlety’s for wimps. (John McWhorter)
  • If four out of ten Americans cannot see how truly awful this is, how vast and long-lasting the domestic and global damage this president is inflicting on this country is, our 250 years really are up. (Andrew Sullivan).
  • In The Times, Yonatan Touval stressed the limits of the spycraft and technology behind Israel’s development of strike coordinates in Iran: “That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting. Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation.” (via Frank Bruni)
  • The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito? (Cal Newport; H/T Frank Bruni)
  • Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. (Isaac Asimov via the Economist)

Elsewhere is Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Easter/Palm Sunday

A blessed Easter to readers in Western Christian traditions like the wife sitting four feet from me as I type (who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t read this blog). Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord to readers in Eastern Christian traditions.

Mystical pilgrimage

There is a deeper pilgrimage that the Church encourages and is available to all. It has no commercialism, nor is it fraught with temptation. It is quite simple:

The whole world is Passover in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. Everywhere we go, we are there. In the liturgical life of the Church, the details of that city, at that time, are drawn out in careful detail in the services of Holy Week. Every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is a making-present of that time and that place.

…

This pilgrimage is not an act of imagination. That which is truly “mystical” is not imaginary – it is real and true.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The Orthodox Church is entering Holy Week, and I feared that this post was too oblivious to that. Then Fr. Stephen came through for me. If you read nothing else, click the link to read his thoughts on pilgrimage.

On the construct of “religion”

To ask a census-taker how many Chinese are Buddhist is rather like asking one how many Westerners are Aristotelian or pragmatist.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Why might a doctrinal conservative be an Episcopalian?

The reader will reasonably ask why I became an Episcopalian when I don’t like progressive theology. One reason is, of course, family. Another is my longstanding love of Anglican choral music and of the cadences in the Book of Common Prayer (even in most post-1662 versions), neither of which can, in my view, be matched by any other Christian tradition in English.

Joshua T. Katz.

I, self-confessed homo adorans, cannot despise that position. I wonder how many Episcopalians quietly reject the progressive theology, staying for the worship. I have even seen retired conservative protestant pastor who moved to the Episcopal Church.

Religion and Politics

Q: So how would you respond to one of those editors responsible for hiring and firing who says “Look: the big story here is obviously the big decline of Christianity in terms of participation. Why do I spend money on a Religion Beat desk when it’s a subject that’s declining in relevance?

A: Well, see, the problem is that relevance then is defined primarily in terms of politics. “Name me some big headlines out of this.” Well, by definition a big headline is something related to Donald Trump. Politics. The mid-term elections. “Will Latino Evangelicals help Republicans again?” If your religion is politics, you’re not going to be able to justify a reporter spending six months digging deep, diving into, the statistics on confession, marriages, baptisms … what congregations are producing priests, nuns, pastors, clergy, etc. …?” That’s not going to get you big headline about American politics.

Todd Wilkins and Terry Mattingly, The story that will not die: REVIVAL in America! (GetReligion podcast)

This touches a recurring theme of their podcast series (named after the admission by a New York Times editor that his paper “just doesn’t get religion”): religion is a guise for politics according to essentially every newsroom in America. Politics is real, religion not so much.

But I have a complementary theory: religion is a guise for politics according to the revealed preferences of hundreds of thousands of churches, too. This feels like one of those things I just can’t un-see, having seen it once.

The Orthodox Church has people with strong political preferences — but not remotely homogenous, in my limited experience, and their obsessions are not the Church’s devotions.

None of this undermines the truth of the Christian Gospel, but corruptio optima pessima.

Another thing I cannot un-see

Because of the way Reformed and literal interpretations of the Bible had empowered ordinary people and their leaders in creating a Christian civilization, that hermeneutic enjoyed immense implicit authority. An obvious problem by the late 1850s, however, was that this wonderfully energizing use of Scripture had created multiple, conflicting Christian civilizations. … The Reformed, literal hermeneutic had helped build a biblical civilization—actually, two biblical civilizations. But the hermeneutic itself could not reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Friday April 3

Clueless

At my gym, I have spoken to at least a half-dozen young men who 1) are constantly engaged in betting on professional sports and 2) believe that professional sporting matches are rigged. I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would permit this sort of thing to happen where his financial interests are concerned?” The response: “He’s in on it, obviously.” And I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would put at risk billions of dollars of his own wealth and many billions more worth of intellectual property he controls in exchange for whatever paltry sums he might get from entering into a conspiracy—a conspiracy requiring the cooperation and disciplined silence of dozens of hot-tempered, high-testosterone, notoriously talkative 24-year-old men whose financial interests would in fact be much better served by betraying any game-fixing conspiracy they were invited to join—to make a little side money gambling? And do you really think that the people who run the gambling businesses would allow themselves to get taken that way? Because if you do believe that, I can tell you why Jerry Jones is rich and you are not.”

Kevin D. Williamson on conspiratorial thinking

MetaTrump

From here to “Shorts” is all about Donald Trump in one way or another. I’m not clever enough to write zingers, but I can read and curate interesting takes — for those who are interested.

Abberation

At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. … Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.

On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him.

…

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control. Since its inception, America has assured itself it was simply too big, too far away and too richly endowed to suffer any serious consequences for its actions.

Lydia Polgreen (shared link).

I don’t necessarily agree with everything I curate here, but I note (1) my substantial agreement with Polgreen’s overall thrust but (2) disagreement with “what America has always been” and “[s]ince its inception.”

We were not born a superpower; we grew into it pretty slowly. And our superpowerdom wasn’t immediately arrogant, bullying and hegemonic.

Our current hubris may be the flowering of a tragic flaw present since our inception (in my circles, the facile fatal flaw is The Enlightenment), but tragedies would be terribly short if fatal flaws manifested instantly.

Epochal vandal

Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became first consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national commemoration. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.

Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired leaders of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes — for instance, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to a foreign prison without a hearing. His actions — which have included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy” — have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and deserving of “moral reprehension.”

When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits on his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he responded. “I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, has been integral to world-historical individuals — and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.

Jon B. Judis, Trump as Alexander the Great A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)

Don’t you dare dream that this is praise of Trump. It’s resignation that the vandal has well and truly broken priceless things for the foreseeable future. We’re not going back to normal any time in my lifetime.

Immune

I do not think that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed Presidential criminal immunity as some special favor to Donald Trump just because several of them were appointed by him and several others were appointed by other Republican Presidents. I think it would have decreed the same for any other President.

Note, too, that for the Court to make such a decree, it had to have a case before it wherein the President of the United States was facing criminal charges. Presidents numbered 1 through 44 didn’t get criminal immunity because nobody was charging them with crime(s).

I hope you understand that. Courts don’t reach out and decide things willy-nilly. They decide cases.

But what’s done is done. Now surrounded by a combination of cunning, conscienceless men and bootlickers, Trump is emboldened to take vengeance on his enemies and otherwise to take full advantage of Presidential immunity.

Introspection

In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

As you may have heard, a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire investor went on a podcast and said that he aims to have “zero” introspection in his life, or at least “as little as possible.” He added that “I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem.”

This whole introspection thing, Andreessen asserted, is a folly invented in the 20th century by people such as Sigmund Freud: “If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

After the podcast aired, he doubled down on X: “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.”

As you can imagine, the internet erupted. Andreessen had unwittingly stumbled into one of the great cultural rivalries of modern times. On the one side are the business-world paragons who consider themselves decisive manly men of action who don’t waste time on girly things like feelings, self-doubt, and personal reflection. On the other are the humanists who look at Andreessen as just the sort of monster capitalism can create: emotionally impoverished, spiritually inert, arrogant, utilitarian, blind to all knowledge but empirical data, and voraciously materialistic.

David Brooks, Marc Andreessen’s Mistake.

Sunday and Monday, Thomas Chatterton Williams (The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb) and Brooks had very different articles on Andreesen’s comment about introspection in the Atlantic. I’d give Brooks the edge on subtlety, but Williams gets points for taking Andreesen’s philosophy into the White House to see how figures measure up — stopping just short of the President himself (but nailing Steven Miller). The number of very powerful men (no women were indicted) who think “move fast and break things” is veriest truth is scary.

Without even a hint about the President, Brooks equips the reader with the concept of low emotional granularity, where there are, in its purest form, just two poles: I_like and I don’t like. We must by all means avoid thinking that by gaining a name, we gain a solution, but low emotional granularity seems to me to play a major role in decisions coming out of the Oval Office.

I didn’t need Williams or Brooks to know that Andreesen was flat out wrong about the history of introspection, and my list of historic figures overlapped theirs. Beyond that, I commend both articles to you for their respective high merits. They’re not very long.

“Low emotional granularity,” unfortunately, is too opaque for a good epithet.

Shorts

  • On immigration, the president’s commendable achievements on closing the southern border have been overshadowed by the harsh, questionable, and counterproductive interior deportation strategy. (Michael Warren, Trump Has Brought Nothing But Chaos—And for What?)
  • [C][onversion is a different thing, sociologically and personally, than what you might call the ordinary transmission of an established faith. (Ross Douthat)
  • I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. (John Adams in the 1780s)
  • How to unlock the potential of AI for those in the field of education and the formation of human beings: throw the key into the middle of the ocean. (Fr. Jon Jordan)
  • Expressive activity includes presenting a curated compilation of speech originally created by others. (Justice Elena Kagan)
  • [U]ltimately I would rather go down with my integrity intact than “win” through the vice of incivility. (Jon D. Schaff, We Are Not Enemies: What an Iranian Film Reveals About Vengeance and Civility)
  • It’s a new world; it’s the same Constitution. (Chief Justice John Roberts responding to the Solicitor General’s argument that “we’re in a new world where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen” in the birthright citizenship case on April 1. Via the Advisory Opinions podcast; I think I’ve seen slight variants in the quotes.)
  • “The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf,” Rick says, “is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance. You know what you want to do; you know what’s best for the pack. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect. Point is, alpha males are surprisingly nonaggressive, because they don’t need to be.” (Carl Safina, Beyond Words, which I have not read but was suggested to me by Readwise.)
  • I am a big fan of the law. I like the faint, wheezing sound it makes as I trample on it, and the mountains of litigation that result. (Alexandra Petri satire on Trump’s personal attendance at the birthright citizenship oral arguments Wednesday.)
  • It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences. (The narrator in Middlemarch. That narrator’s pretty sharp.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Fifth Sunday of Great Lent

Christian America

One of the reasons I have long been hostile toward the idea of Christianizing America is that the variety of Christianity that would be in instantiated would be what Ross Douthat has called “Bad Religion” in a book subtitled “How We Became a Nation of Heretics.” I don’t trust power-hungry American heretics to treat Orthodox Christian better than secularist progressives would.

That concern has only grown

  1. the more deeply I am shaped as an Orthodox Christian (and see how that differs from mainstream American Christianities), and
  2. the more particularly sinister figures like Lance Wallnau appear to be leading Christian Nationalism.

These are not C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christians.” They are ideologues with plans for how to get power and how to (mis)use it once they have it.

Of course they’re not alone. Other groups seek power for illiberal ends, too. (To the best of my knowledge, none are Orthodox Christian and I would be surprised if they were.)

I don’t toss and turn in agony over these groups, but it leaves me in the camp of liberal democrats, and if you think “liberal democrats” means I’m a crazy lefty, you’re part of the problem. (Relative to today’s political spectrum, I think I’m positioned center-right because of deal-killer differences with those to my left.)

Alas, the hopes for liberal democracy do seem dim, and I pray daily “If this is the end of liberal democracy in America, guide us into a beneficial different path ….” I also thank God for my “living in a civilization where beliefs, texts, symbols, and ethical standards of Christianity are still woven into our common life.”* All it takes to assure that continues, I think, is for people to live as Christians — no political program required.

* Many, including even notorious atheist Richard Dawkins, looking soberly at the cultural alternatives, now call themselves “cultural Christians.”

Something for rumination

Both Dostoevski and Tolstoi made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.

[Here I typed my pedantic gloss, but then deleted it to let readers ruminate on their own.]

What a well-formed Catholic believes about Jews and Irael

The Catholic position on matters of ‘Zionism,’ to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.

Bishop Robert Barron, admonishing antisemitic “Catholic Mean Girl” Carrie Prejean Boller who was delusionally claiming that her ouster from the White House Religious Liberty Commission was anti-Catholic.

Stirring things up at Yale

A few years after I left Calvinist Protestantism for Eastern Orthodoxy, the great Yale historian of religion, Jaroslav Pelikan, left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy. I mentioned it to a friend who had attended Yale in Grad School.

“Well, that will stir things up,” he opined.

Me: “Why? I had no idea that Yale still had some strong religious tradition to offend.”

Him: “It will stir things up because people won’t understand taking religion seriously enough to change it.”

I thought of that as a read sociologist Ryan Burge’s recent post Inertia Still Rules American Religion.

“Inertia” has bad connotations. I encourage everyone to take a good hard look at Orthodox Christianity, but I also tend to cast at least a little bit of side-eye at people who switch Churches. I cannot entirely reconcile that except for the possibility that I’m a censorious ass. But try as a might, somehow, there seems to me to be something not entirely unhealthy about not looking at the grass on the other side of the fence if you’re being nourished on your side. (Have I equivocated enough?) Anyway, if your teeth are on edge where you are, come take a look at us.

(My experience pre-Orthodoxy clashes a bit with Burge’s definitional “If someone moves from one type of Protestant to another type of Protestant, that’s not a switch.” When I left generic Evangelicalism for Calvinism, it felt like a switch. The change from Calvinist to Orthodox, of course, was orders of magnitude “switchier.”)

The Ark of Salvation

[I]t’s worth thinking about the Church (Orthodox) as an ark of salvation and safety. It is an ancient image of the Church, a place where God gathers those who are being rescued. The ark is not an instrument of flood management, however. It is a raft. Modernity imagines itself as the manager of the world and its historical processes. It is an idea that is itself part of the destructive flood of our time.

…

From onboard the ark, we view things a bit differently. First, we trust that God is the Lord of the tsunami just as surely as He is Lord of the sparrow and the lillies in the field. The mystery of how He works all things for our salvation is summarized in His crucifixion. Most of that mystery is simply opaque. It is a confession of faith that the Cross represents the interpretation of all things. It is what I learned on board the ark.

That being the case, it is for us to give thanks for all things, try to stay dry, and wait for the waters to recede.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Riding the Tsunami of History

Gratuitous

Having adopted a method of investigation which in its nature precludes the perception of spiritual qualities, it is gratuitous, to say the least, to pronounce that the object one investigates is to be explained in non-spiritual categories alone.

Yet it is the conclusions achieved by this kind of [circular] reasoning which for the last 300 years or more have been regarded as constituting knowledge in a virtually exclusive sense and which moreover have been termed scientific.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Absence of Mr. Glass, a Father Brown mystery.

Fleeing the world

As St. Paisios (1924–1994) put it, “The monk flees far from the world, not because he detests the world, but because he loves the world and in this way he is better able to help the world through his prayer, in things that don’t happen humanly but only through divine intervention. In this way God saves the world.”

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Redicovering the Goodness of Creation

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.