Social Media

At last weekend’s Eighth Day Symposium in Wichita, Ken Myers‘ second plenary address was nominally about “Social Media and the Commodification of Friendship.”

I find that at my fairly advanced age, and perhaps with a little tone-deafness to social cues, I’ve seemingly avoided the worst crippling effects of media that Ken described, which presumably makes me a social media misfit where social media brings

a thousand bits of banal but cheerfully good news. Speed, radical transparency, confessionalism, exhibitionism, prideful consumerism and, above all, a relentless positivity — these are the values and practices of today’s social media. They are enforced by tribalist pressures — that is, the need to fit in, the example set by friends and the famous — as much as by the programmers and moderators who manage these networks.

It’s more like me to be the Debbie Downer of my Facebook timeline, and I don’t, unlike the average person, spend more time on social media than anything else online. Nowhere close.

So I, and much of the audience there, were thinking more about our children or grandchildren than about ourselves — though I’m not exempting myself.

Discernment is key … Navigating cultural life generally is a matter of wisdom, not of law.

In some circles that I speak to, it’s impossible to have a conversation about the use of media or technology because people are afraid of being “legalistic.” Because there’s no Bible verse that says something about Facebook or smartphones, people say that they should be free to do what they want to.

I think the fear of legalism is itself a form of legalism. It’s to assume that law is the only relevant category guiding our lives. That places much more emphasis on law than the Bible does. In I Corinthians 10, for instance, St. Paul is quite clear in saying some things are lawful, but it doesn’t mean that they’re helpful or will build us up. So that the lawfulness of something is not a sufficient excuse or rationale for endorsing it.

Wisdom is the Biblical framework for making decisions about how we might navigate and live well. Wisdom transcends the stark categories of lawful and unlawful. Many things that are lawful are still foolish, and unfortunately the fear of legalism often cuts off the conversation about wisdom and folly.

(Ken Myers)

This is, in a way, “deja vu all over again.” In my Evangelical childhood and adolescence, we had a lot of extrabiblical rules. I won’t digress into listing them or critiquing whether those who made the rules had come anywhere close to prohibiting those things that most risked spiritual harm to us. At the time, I thought not, and I was in the “there’s no Bible verse that says that” camp much of the time.

The adult response vacillated between putting scripture on the rack and torturing it to make it say “that,” on the one hand, and frank confession that they, our elders, were forbidding things they thought “inexpedient” (to use the King James term for St. Paul’s discouragement of dumb lawful stuff) on the other hand.

I now think that they were trying to do a good thing, however clumsily and unpersuasively they did it, and however undiscerning they may have been in identifying salient threats. It’s more obvious now than then, but the recent observation of Kenda Creasy Dean (author of Almost Christian) in her interview by Ken Myers was probably true even then:

One of the things that’s really tricky to convey to parents is that if you’re trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. It’s a lot easier to raise kids who are Christianish — who are capable of affirming a few central beliefs but who have little of consequence in their lives that’ shaped decisively by that belief.

Form Christians anyway. This anti-culture, such as it is hasn’t got very long before big changes come anyway.

Suggested resources:

* * * * *

We develop heart and mind in parallel, that the mind will protect us from the wolfs, and the heart will keep us from becoming wolves ourselves. (Attributed to Serbian Patriarch Pavle)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

WWAT?

From a religious-freedom bill to a proposed English-only constitutional amendment, Georgia politicians and advocates are invoking Amazon’s name.

The prospect of luring the retailer here is being used as political ammunition, notwithstanding that Amazon.com Inc. is months away from picking among Atlanta and 19 other finalists for the location of its second headquarters.

Jeff Graham, who runs the state’s leading gay-rights organization, Georgia Equality, said he mentions the prospect of losing the online-shopping giant to rally opposition to a religious-freedom bill he considers discriminatory.

…

It is difficult to divine how state legislation will influence Amazon’s decision. A person familiar with the matter said Amazon will measure metro areas’ inclusiveness, and the consideration or passage of such legislation will be a factor in its decision-making.

Amazon, which has closely guarded its site-selection process, declined to comment on how heavily such legislation might weigh on its choice.

In its pitch in September to cities seeking to draw its promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion of investment, Amazon said it sought “the presence and support of a diverse population, excellent institutes of higher education, local government structure and elected officials eager and willing to work with the company.”

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been a supporter of gay rights, and Amazon has said any city it picks must be a “compatible cultural and community environment.”

(Wall Street Journal)

* * * * *

We develop heart and mind in parallel, that the mind will protect us from the wolfs, and the heart will keep us from becoming wolves ourselves. (Attributed to Serbian Patriarch Pavle)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

An injustice to people’s full humanity

More thoughts from the Eighth Day Symposium Friday and Saturday, and again from Ken Myers.

I’ll try to distinguish direct quotes from my summaries or paraphrases. I consider none of what’s below today my original contribution, and if something appears plagiarized, it must be because I inadvertently omitted a credit that Ken Myers did give, which credits were given lavishly.

Reminder: The topic was “Cultivating Friendship in a Fractured Age.”

* * *

Plato and Aristotle both agreed that stimulating moral virtue primarily takes the form of conversation, of speaking with one another. The aim of politics in Aristotle is “living well in a polity of justice, which justice is practiced by citizens who live in virtue-forming friendships.” Friendship and politics are thus mutually dependent in Aristotle. Life in the larger community requires virtuous citizens whose affections have been trained to love the good within noble friendships. And the polity was committed to protecting the space for such friendships.

* * *

What Poem or novel since Tennyson’s “In Memorium” has celebrated friendship? Eros has innumerable modern literary examples, while David & Jonathan and other historic examples of friendship have few or none. We admit mens’ need for “a few friends” only grudgingly.

* * *

Aristotle deals with justice in in a single book in the Ethics. Friendship fills two books. It fills less than a page in Kant.

* * *

Modern political theory banished friendship to the private realm so it would have no influence on politics. Our anthropology assumes that humans are such that government exists to protect individual rights to live as we please. In this theory, society is not an integrated body, with its own health.

Government exists, in other words, to protect us from one another. We’re interest-seeking, rights-bearing atoms. That atomistic individualism spills into private life, reconfiguring all relationships. We even approach friendship, when we approach it at all, as if we’re trying to get a good bargain.

* * *

Oliver O’Donovan thinks angry political backlash comes from somewhere deeper than loss of inclusion, but from a perception that modern politics is morally unintelligible, because justice is not being done to people’s full humanity. We’re so tutored in individualism that we lack the vocabulary to describe how politics has abandoned seeking the objective good of communities.

* * *

Christians believe that community is good for individuals, but they do not believe that society exists to serve individuals’ private purposes.

* * *

Once society is thought of s an agreement … between competing wills, the cloud of competition never lifts from it.

(Oliver O’Donovan)

* * *

Speech has lost its orientation toward deliberating about the common good. Political speech is about managing and allocating competing claims about the good.

* * *

“Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means” (I think that’s from Alistair Macintyre) Because we’ve abandoned the idea that communities are bound by common objects of love, modern liberalism tells us that our nature and dignity are honored, and that

“we’ll be happy, when we’re completely from from any constriction on the pursuit of our desires. We’ll be happy when we get to define what happiness is on our own terms.”

If we assume this … then if we find we’re not happy, then we assume we’re just not free enough, and we turn to the government to expand our freedom. “Let us define what marriage is,” for instance …

But what if happiness depends on submitting to an understanding of happiness that we didn’t invent? What if we can only be free when we honor an understanding of freedom rooted in certain truths about our nature, an understanding shared by and received from our community?”

I confess my interest in political philosophy is a relatively new thing. It was energized significantly as we lived through the surreal election year of 2016. And I began asking myself “Is what we’re living through a sign of the failure of our political structures or is it the logical outcome of a system with critical design flaws? Is it actually succeeding, and this is what success looks like?”

I’ve come to believe that a more hopeful future requires the radical revision of some basic beliefs about public life — about the relationship between state and society, the purposes of government and about how the ordering of temporal affairs must account for the full reality of what we are as human persons. And those are finally theological questions.

A number of thinkers much more experienced and wiser than I have suggested that we have a really hard time imagining radically different paradigms for political life.

And I think that what we need to jump start our imaginations is a renewed understanding of, and more importantly practice of, friendship … It is to do with a reciprocal sharing of all that is good. Only secondarily is it about organizing the distribution of material goods and designing laws that are always somewhat arbitrary.

(Ken Myers)

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Squashing civil society & culture

Once again, I’m attending the Eighth Day Symposium, this year on the topic of “Cultivating Friendship in a Fractured Age.”

One plenary speaker is Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal. Today from him, one insight, starting with a greeting from “blessed souls depicted by Dante” (presumably Paradiso):

“Here comes one who will augment our loves.” Friendship is an analog of the heavenly community in which the multitude of the Blessed, and I think this is Dante’s term, “increases the fruition each has of God.”

Friendship is an analog of the Church ordered by love and gifted to one another by what Augustine calls a kind of divine lottery. All true human communities are imperfect, incomplete but nonetheless real anticipations of the Church’s life in its fulfillment.

One reason such a claim may sound implausible is that modern politics has undermined the centrality of sharing of common objects of love to define a community by insisting that the point of government is to protect the rights of individuals within the society to love what they want to love. All efforts within communities that attempt to nurture well-ordered loves for what ought to be loved are squashed in modern societies in the name of individual freedom.

So modern states end up enforcing what Pope Benedict call “the dictatorship of relativism.”

(Bold added; underlining emphasized in the original speech pattern.)

So when asked to identify our common objects of love, phrased as “What Unites Us?“, we come up with idiocy like “diversity” unites us!

I would go further than Ken Myers to suggest that by government squashing “efforts within communities that attempt to nurture well-ordered loves for what ought to be loved,” government is squashing community itself, civil society, culture and mediating structures, with the effect (which I suspect is “a feature, not a bug”) that the dictatorship of relativism is manifested in an anti-culture wherein those de jure “free” individuals stand naked and de facto powerless before the state.

UPDATE: I revised the final paragraph, which began with one or two too many snarky asides to be readable.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Detour & Frolic

We interrupt sporadic attempts at serious commentary to laugh scornfully at Jerry Falwell, Jr. (here), and to wonder just what the hell kind of educational institutions (both founded by Jerry Falwell, Sr.) could turn out such a clown.

We now return to our irregularly scheduled blogging.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Real or Fake?

Which of the three following responses to Donald Trump paying a porn start to shut up about his adultery is fake news?

If this behavior were occurring today, right now, as he is president of the United States, I can assure you that my support and the support of evangelicals would be dissipating very rapidly. Yes, evangelicals, conservatives, gave him a mulligan, they let him have a do-over. Evangelicals understand what a second chance means.” (Tony Perkins, Family Research Council)
“It is preposterous to assert that a virtuous believer like Mr. Trump would cheat on his beautiful wife so callously, and while their child was only months old. He was so concerned with the eternal state of Miss Daniels’ soul that he scheduled some alone time with just the two of them, so he could share with her how Jesus Christ had changed his life and how He could also save her from her sins.” (Jim Bakker)
“Not that we give anybody a pass, but we have to look at the time line. And I think the president has changed quite a bit in the last 11 years … and I think there’s a maturing of the president. I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” (Franklin Graham, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

For the answer, follow these links.

Yes, the answer is pretty easy. But it’s harder than it should be.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Any stick will do …

A most strange complaint was channeled through NPR’s All Things Considered Monday.

Although 90% of deportations under Donald Trump have been to Mexico, Guatamala, Honduras and El Salvador, some of the other 10% are up in arms:

“It’s really indiscriminate. ICE, in their aggressive tactics of detention, are going after the Irish as much as they’re going after any other nationality,” says Ronnie Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston.

…

Irish visa overstayers have been swept up in the administration’s nationwide immigration dragnet. Under strict new rules, anyone here illegally is a target — whether they’re convicted of a crime or not. In 2017, ICE deported 34 undocumented Irish, up from 26 the year before. The numbers are tiny compared with the 128,765 Mexicans ejected from the country last year, but in Boston’s closeknit Irish community the wave of arrests is big news.

Tommy O’Connor, a bartender at the Green Briar Irish pub, says his undocumented Irish customers are wary these days.

“It makes everyday life more difficult,” he says. “For a simple traffic stop they can be deported.”

He tells the story of a prominent local Irish immigrant, John Cunningham, who went on camera with an Irish TV crew last year talking about his fear of living illegally in Boston. Weeks later, ICE arrested him and sent him back to Ireland.

“It was a shock because it wasn’t during a traffic stop, he was arrested in his home,” O’Connor says. “It means it could happen to anybody because he was a very well known figure in the Irish community.”

Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston, says that Irish immigrants are “on high alert.”

“They have no confidence that the color of their skin provides any protection for them,” he says.

“[N]o confidence that the color of their skin provides any protection for them ….” “Racist.”

“Discrimination.” “Indiscriminate.”

Any stick will do to beat a dog.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Frank Meyer’s fusionism

I guess I really need to read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. I know the general thesis from a recent article he wrote and from reviews and comments of others, but now I’m noticing that much of what I read could be viewed as haunted by the ghost of Deneen.

For instance, Michael Davis, The Fatally-Flawed Fusionism of Frank Meyer recounts how Meyer’s influential effort to end the cohabitation of libertarianism and traditionalism by marrying them led inadvertently to the ascent of toxic libertarianism. Davis never mentions Deneen, but his thesis is relevant to and inconsistent with Deneen’s.

Frank Meyer was a man looking desperately for faults in the philosophy to which he was most attracted: traditionalism. Finding none, he simply made up another philosophy: fusionism. But instead of coopting the energy and scientific rigor of libertarianism for the traditionalist cause, he simply empowered the former at the latter’s expense…

Why, you ask, did this come to pass? My best guess: libertarianism’s strict “government = bad, liberty = good” dichotomy was easier to market in magazine and stump speeches. And that’s understandable. Both libertarians and traditionalists were horrified by the sheer size and power of the Soviet state; libertarians simply don’t have to bother with “the simulacrum of virtuous acts” or “divine patterns of order.”

Davis also recaps as part of the story an early Meyer error and its correction:

In a 1962 column for National Review, he claimed that traditionalism’s cardinal sin—the fundamental error that necessitated its co-mingling with libertarianism—was that “the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.” In layman’s terms: virtuous acts must be those undertaken freely, not under state coercion.

L. Brent Bozell Jr., in his rejoinder, observed (correctly) that, because Meyer was making a theological claim—that is, about the relationship between free will and virtue—it has to be answered in theological terms. And every school of orthodox theology would accept that an act is virtuous regardless of whether it was made freely or not. “We can agree that the freer the choice—i.e., the more difficult it is—the greater the merit,” he writes; but, “by definition, the virtuous act is one that conforms with man’s nature, with the divine patterns of order.”

It certainly appears that Davis would contest Deneen’s premise that liberalism is fatally flawed, for he cites “an organic tradition of political liberty in the thought of Burke and Adams” (traditionalists) that did not require correction by injecting libertarianism.

He concludes with seven steps to “work backwards toward [the] restoration” of American conservatism which Meyer’s fusionism undermined.

Agree or disagree with him as you will. Davis’s piece strikes me as one of the best yet at The Imaginative Conservative, which is prolific but of spotty interest.

Again, if you’re wondering what this debate within conservatism is about, read A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway. (Tipsy)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

One year

On the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post opinion page featured Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, half of a journalism power couple, announcing that, and why, she now supports him.

That was interesting enough in its own right, but at the bottom of the story, some further links appeared:

That last one links to here and makes a telling observation about why ordinary people and Never Trumpers can articulate what good Trump may have done more effectively than his closest confidants can:

Such individuals have an advantage over the professional class of Trump supporters, in that anyone in Trump’s orbit knows better than to cede any ground, to admit any fault, in defense of Trump. Should they do so, they’ll lose critical Trump-sycophancy points.

Then he gives an example of how the sycophants come off as dissembling geldings.

Yesterday, I called Trump a train wreck of a human being, and I stand by that. What profiteth it a man if he gain the world but lose his soul? I would not trade places with him. Not for $3 billion (if that’s a real assessment of his wealth); not for Melania, Stormy Daniels or all the other women; not for the Presidency of the United States.

(Yes, I know: “Judge not lest ye be judged.” But II Thessalonians 3:13-15 and Ezekiel 33:8 too.)

But his failure at the most important thing doesn’t mean he’s failed at everything. Read and judge for yourself.

UPDATES:

I wonder if Pastor Robert Jeffress, who described himself to The Atlantic on 10/28/17 as the president’s “most vocal and visible evangelical spokesman,” would still stand by this remark he made in that same interview:

“I do think President Trump is a positive role model for children. Specifically, I would be happy for my children (and now, my coming grandchildren) to emulate his work ethic, leadership skills, and patriotism.”

(Rod Dreher) It is hard for me to imagine that the man who considered Trump a positive role model is practicing the same religion I try to practice.

Second change was adding the Ezekiel citation, above — which I wasn’t going to mention by itself.

* * * * *

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.” (John Dewey) Be a saint anyway.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

A day in the land of my sojourn

Again, I’ve lingered too long this morning over very good stuff found in my internet haunts. But I’ve withdrawn some things (see below) scheduled on Hootsuite for later release to Facebook and Twitter, because I’ve found something else that wraps up my feelings poetically.

Much as I’ve thought that every sentient Christian should be moved by Psalm 51 (50 in Orthodox Bibles), so I think they should be moved by Peggy Haslar’s late-Thursday Sparrowfare blog. She’s the poet (even if she borrows from late songster Rich Mullins). Savor it.

“While saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world.”

(John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920) p. 196. H/T Edwin Bensen) Be a saint anyway.

* * *

If you’re curious, here are three things I pulled from Hootsuite:

1. Understanding Conservative Christian Silence on Donald Trump’s Porngate in three perceptive points.
2. Purity and Prejudice is a weak title for “theme and variations on ‘cads and louts won the sexual revolution.'”
3. President Trump is the Freest Man Alive, and you’re worse than an idiot if you want to be like him.

The second and third are particularly good, but Haslar’s Sparrowfare outshone them.

The third, it seems to me (from always-insightful Elizabeth Bruenig), vindicates Patrick Deneen’s premise that liberalism (in the broad sense in which even “conservatives” are liberal) has failed. The “burly sinner” in the White House epitomizes the individualism espoused by liberalism, and he is a train wreck of a human being precisely because of his superlative acquisition of all the liberal anti-virtues. Q.E.D.

* * * * *

“No man hath a velvet cross.” (Samuel Rutherford, 17th century Scotland)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.