What happens when you give a distractible autodidact a blog to play with?
Author: readerjohn
I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West.
There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.
Matt and I are both fond of quoting Oliver O’Donovan here who once said that sometimes the sternest form of political judgment imaginable is to simply talk about something else.
There will be many, many attempts made this year to colonize your imagination. Cable news and political podcasts and morning radio and social media reactionaries will all be there, demanding your attention. Indeed, they will at times suggest that if you fail to attend to them then you will yourself somehow become complicit in the evils they are decrying.
Ignore them.
I am not saying to ignore politics, ignore public life, or adopt an above-it-all indifferentism to any of these things. We have already talked about how politics matter and how they provide one arena through which we can love our neighbors. Rather, I am telling you to refuse to participate in the sensationalizing spectacle of political discourse in an election year.
Instead, recall the advice of St Paul, who tells us to rejoice in all things and to pray without ceasing.
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If you find that your heart is cold to the things of God but agitated and aggressive in response to political or cultural events, then it is probably a very good time for you to begin judging politics not by listening to news and forming opinions (which you then share loudly on social media) but rather by tuning out much of that news and spending time with God in prayer.
Indeed, we should remember that there are times where extreme action is required for the sake of our own soul: If Christ could tell his followers that there are menaces so great that plucking out your own eye is not to extreme a reaction, then I dare suggest that deleting social media apps from your phone or simply tossing your phone in the trash is, likewise, not too extreme an act.
And for many of us, myself included, this is terribly difficult advice to follow. I had to delete four items from this post to comply; I’m not sure how they got there since I keep reminding myself not to read about this stuff.
Stating the obvious
“In clinical diagnoses of gender dysphoria, on the other hand, psychosomatic complexity is acknowledged and followed by the recognition, initially upsetting though it may be, that someone who has a “deeply held sense” of alienation from their sexual biology is likely afflicted by a treatable form of mental illness.
To presume that the act of affirming forms of mental illness as normal is a legitimate form of treatment is not only incoherent; it also does more harm than good. Yet such normalization is how the ideology of progressivism, for better or ill, responds to social pathologies—it embraces them as expressions of individual volition, and pretends there is no harm done.
Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity (italics added)
Paideia
As Plato, Thucydides, and [] Toquerville have all observed, democracies prefer to look for material solutions to their spiritual problems. They never despair of making up the difference between the citizens desires and personal fulfillment with greater production or with a more equitable distribution of goods. Indeed, this is the reason for democracy’s basic optimism. But by the mid-1950s, it became clear that plenty was not solving the problem of inequality … Again, U.S. society turned to its schools … But because equal opportunity was viewed in terms of getting ahead or getting a job or “getting mine“ and not in terms of giving every person his due to an education that would enable him to reach his fullest human potential, the result was the lowering of academic standards to accommodate the week, indolent, or unmotivated students and the dismantling of the remaining paideia in favor of training for “marketable“ skills …
Putting aside our misgivings asked of the sagacity of imposing political objectives on the school, are we not still entitled to ask whether modern education has accomplished its utilitarian goals? Has it significantly added to American plenty and equality? I would argue at the secondary school level: no. Whatever gross additions it has made, they are neither significant in achieving the political objectives nor are they worth the infinite cost of depriving future generations of their rightful and necessary paideia. Our plenty — perhaps because we cannot imagine life without it — means nothing to us, while hiding from us the lavishly wasteful and destructive consequences of its production.
There are more evil things going on in the world than any one person can respond to. You could spend all day every day on social media just declaring that you denounce X or Y or Z and never get to the end of what deserves to be denounced. If my silence about Gaza is complicit in the violence being done there, what about my silence regarding the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs? Or the government of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Or what Boko Haram has done in Nigeria? Or what multinational corporations do to destroy our environment? Or dogfighting rings? Or racism in the workplace? Or sexism in the workplace?
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[P]ick your spots and pick them unapologetically. It’s perfectly fine for people to have their own causes, the causes that for whatever reason touch their hearts. We all have them, we are all moved more by some injustices than by others; not one of us is consistently concerned with all injustices, all acts of violence, nor do we have a clear system of weighting the various sufferings of the world on a scale and portioning out our attention and concern in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.
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The silence-is-violence crowd, to their credit, don’t think that money is the only commodity we have to spend: they think we can and must spend our words also. And they always believe they know what, in a given moment, we must spend our words on. What they never seen to realize, though, is that some words are a debased currency. As the Lord says to Job, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” To speak “words without knowledge” is to “darken counsel,” that is, confuse the issue, mislead or confuse one’s hearers. The purpose of counsel is to illuminate a situation; one does not illuminate anything by speaking out of ignorance or mere rage.
As Jon Askonas has recently argued in his essay “Why Conservatism Failed” (in Compact), the right has tended to embrace the forward march of technology, even while lamenting its solvent effects on everything one might wish to conserve. Conservatives have decried such phenomena as egalitarianism, feminism, or mass politics as though they were the wellsprings of social change, while downplaying the dependence of such ideologies on certain technological developments.
By the time Maistre wrote his polemics against science, democracy, and egalitarianism, the material transformations that enabled those moral shifts were well under way. Manufacturing was weakening feudal aristocracies in favor of a mercantile bourgeoisie with far more tenuous allegiances to land and tradition. Innovation replaced peasant workers with machines, undermining ancient powerbases in the process, and impelled millions to abandon rural life for the emerging industrial hubs. And this trajectory continued over the century that followed, notwithstanding Maistre’s tirades.
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The right—by which I mean the constantly renewed rearguard action against the solvent effects of modernity—habitually defends large-scale political values whose moral force the technological revolution has already rendered insubstantial and abstract.
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The directional quality of this endless revolution explains why it is so difficult to define the “far right.” A view is denoted as “far-right” relative to a revolutionary vanguard that is in constant forward motion, meaning that what is common sense today may read as right-wing extremism tomorrow. Thus do left-leaning feminists who defend embodied sex differences now find themselves accused of being “Nazis.” From the perspective of the technological revolutionary, any defense of immutable difference may be dismissed as, in Leidig’s phrasing, a “far-right narrative regarding essentialist gender roles.”
Harvard Extension School disavowed by its own professors: There’s a big problem. The conservative activist Chris Rufo went to night classes at Harvard’s Extension School, where he earned himself a master’s degree. And now he says he has a master’s degree from Harvard. Yikes. The New Republic writers—a group of Ivy League students with family money and also rage (I salute you, comrades!)—are upset.
The Bat Signal was up. No stolen Harvard valor allowed at TNR. In order to jab Chris Rufo, Harvard Extension School professor Jennifer Hochschild decided to call her students idiots and say the school where she teaches is fake. She wrote: “Those students are great—I teach them—but they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students.” Tom Nichols, a Resistance celebrity who also teaches at Harvard’s Extension School, added simply: “Amen.”
Indeed, the extension school is designed for nontraditional students; Columbia has a similar program, and it brought military veterans and older students into my college classes, which was wonderful. Anyway, Harvard Extension professor Hochschild has written books with titles like Facing Up to the American Dream and Bringing Outsiders In. What she really meant is that Bringing Outsiders In is bad and that “the hot chocolate bar is only for undergrads who pay full tuition.” I guess you didn’t read the book.
Don’t be surprised if Harvard Extension School suddenly changes its website. Right now it saysWe Are Harvard and that you become a Harvard alum like any other. But with a little Chris Rufo Derangement Syndrome in the bloodstream, soon it will read: We are trash, and our alums are freaks. Georgetown University, where Rufo was an undergraduate, will soon announce that it is lighting its dorms on fire. It’s horrible what Chris Rufo makes us do.
Recommended, on Substack Nazis and other diversions: Shalom Auslander, The Jewish N-Word (Tablet Magazine).
Many naughty words. Tiny sample:
[M]y two ultra-Orthodox brothers-in-law have, between them, three times as many children as Substack has Nazis. It’s not even a [*******] minyan.
Miscellany
Nations have their ego, just like individuals (James Joyce via The Economist)
Polls are the reality TV of journalism. Drama draws eyeballs. Never trust them. Do the math. (Patrick Rhone, one of my most interesting social medium acquaintances.)
Hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave. (@verybadllama via Dense Discovery)
The joke is on you. I had a stroke. I can’t fully understand what you are saying. (Democratic Sen. John Fetterman responding to anti-Israel protester)
Pro-life is the ‘defund the police’ of the GOP. (Ann Coulter via Nellie Bowles)
Misogynoir: woke-speak for the double-whammy intersectional plight of black women.
This was their chance not only to burn a witch but to torch a coven … Conservatives would be the sun to Gay’s Icarus, demonstrating just how hot they could make things for her. (Charles Blow, in an otherwise predictably tone-deaf column about “the persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay.” My ideological adversaries can write very well on occasion.)
Sarah Palin was like John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s orange Jesus. (Carlos Lozado)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
What do [these actors in these two anecdotes] have in common? The belief that one can achieve virtue through omission and excision. This is the belief shared by all forms of purity culture — and purity culture always leads to katharsis culture, that is, the practice of cleansing yourself, restoring your purity, by casting out the unclean thing.
But what if that’s not how virtue works? What if after having cast out every unclean thing you can find you just end up in the foul rag and bone shop of your own heart? What then?
That’s why these periods of desperate and manic katharsis always burn themselves out — why Robespierre ends by executing the executioner. And when they’ve done all they can do, they are succeeded by a bacchanal, an era of pseudo-festive delight in transgression. Our culture oscillates between “cast out the unclean thing” and “let us sin the more that grace may abound” — that is, between legalism and antinomianism, the very pairing that St. Paul in his letters is always trying to subvert.
Paul is the greatest of psychologists: he knows that human beings perfectly well understand legalism, which they rename “justice,” and perfectly well understand antinomianism, which they rename “freedom.” What we can’t understand is the grace of God.
Alan is an Anglican, teaching at a baptist university (Baylor), but he’s awfully sharp. You could do worse than reading a few of his books.
Mutual incomprehension
It is easier for Protestants and Catholics to understand each other, even if they fundamentally disagree on their conclusions, than for Orthodox and Catholics to understand each other, even though they share many similar outward characteristics—liturgy, priesthood, hierarchy, sacraments, and so forth.
Not only the content but the approach to theology differs. The Orthodox Church has almost no “official” teachings or statements, and it purposely avoids making them. So how do we explain ourselves to Western Christians, who are accustomed to exact definitions and official statements?
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Wesley was an odd bird
Wesley found inspiration in the writings of Makarios of Egypt, whose early practice of monasticism was directed toward the experience of deification. This set Wesley apart from earlier Protestant fathers, who inherited a forensic understanding of salvation from their Roman Catholic predecessors.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
That’s not how I used to understand Methodism; rather, it was shoved in the “yes, one can lose one’s salvation” pigeonhole (versus the “once saved, always saved” Calvinist pigeonhole; I was a Calvinist). Although Dr. Constantinou in the preceding item is correct, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Orthodox Christianity rejects the “forensic understanding of salvation,” and finds its origins in Western Christendom after Rome went into schism from the Christian East.
Tocqueville on American popular piety
The notebooks de Tocqueville kept during his travels contain decidedly pessimistic observations about the quality of popular piety. As a Roman Catholic with Jansenist tendencies, he looked aghast at untamed evangelicalism.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
Two confessions
(1) I have been insufficiently appreciative of the benefits of living in the place that used to be Christendom, partly because I’m so aware of where Western Christianity has gone wrong in so many ways.
My denseness has come to my attention as people are becoming Christians (or at least turning favorable towards Christianity) because of its social benefits (see Holland, Tom, Dominion).
(2) I also have insufficiently appreciated how mere cultural Christians, who can’t recite the Creed without lying, nevertheless contribute to a better civilization for all of us. They may be living on the whiff of (as they imagine) an empty bottle, but for the sake of all the rest of us, they could do much worse.
Cringemaxxing
There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying. Here’s the thing though: data consistently show that the happiest people – those who feel that their lives are most filled with purpose and fulfilment – are not necessarily those with kids – it’s those who go to church. Those, in other words, who are not just to be indifferent to cool, but actively anti-cool. The first step to a happy and fulfilled life, it appears, is cringemaxxing.
There are, no doubt, a great many reasons for this. But I am convinced that whatever your relationship to religious worship, a central reason why religious attendance is associated with happiness is that in order to make that commitment you need already to have abandoned the pursuit of cool.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
A question at the back of my mind for a week or two has been “how serious was Claudine Gay’s plagiarism?” I brought it to front of mind within the past day or two, and I now have, serendipitously, a partial answer, which I now hasten to share.
My question arose from how her plagiarism was identified in the media, typically “verbatim copying” or “missing citations.” Someone even picked on her for “plagiarizing” acknowledgments.
Well, I’m no academic, so I won’t contest the consensus that what she did fits the academic concept of plagiarism. But what I did not read was any accusation that Gay was stealing other scholars’ ideas (not mere words, peripheral to the plagiarized articles’ scholarly thrust) and passing them off as her own.
Let’s be frank: some academics are reluctant to call her a plagiarist because of tribalism, the firestorm of accusations having come from a hostile and deplorable tribe (I’m still delighting in the insight — not my own — that education is the Right’s bugaboo as guns are the Left’s).
D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, acknowledges that tribalism, but is quite chill about Gay’s appropriation of some of his own academic words:
Was what Claudine Gay did plagiarism?
… yes, that’s technically plagiarism.
Why do you append “technically” to the front of “plagiarism”?
I use the analogy of speeding. If you’re driving fifty-seven miles per hour on a fifty-five-mile-per-hour highway, that’s technically speeding. But we don’t expect law enforcement to crack down any time behavior crosses over the line. The plagiarism in question here did not take an idea of any significance from my work. It didn’t steal my thunder. It didn’t stop me from publishing. And the bit she used from us was not in any way a major component of what made her research important or valuable.
So how serious a violation of academic integrity was this?
From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential. That’s the reason I’ve so actively tried to defend her.
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When I first was told that Claudine may have committed academic dishonesty at my expense, I took it seriously. I’ve had my work stolen before. So I didn’t rule it out. I immediately investigated what she used.
But the difference between plagiarism among academics and plagiarism in journalism or undergraduate papers is that what matters is less a few words or phrases and more the bigger scholarly ideas. Somebody could steal good ideas I had, write them up differently, and they’d have done serious damage to me. Whereas, if Claudine had borrowed three times as many words, but it was all in an unimportant part of the paper, that would have done me no harm. I’ve been stolen from in serious ways. What Claudine did was not it.
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I’ve seen a number of academics trying to describe what Gay did as something other than plagiarism. A few weeks ago, for example, before Gay resigned, Harvard itself described her actions as using “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.” Why is it controversial to call what she did plagiarism?
It shouldn’t be controversial to call what Claudine did plagiarism. We teach students that it’s plagiarism all the time. But the problem with using language that’s customary within academic institutions in a public setting is that outsiders will warp what we say. The one phrase I’ve intentionally avoided using is “academic dishonesty.” Within an academic setting, plagiarism is an example of academic dishonesty. But if I’d said she committed academic dishonesty, that would have been warped and manipulated quite deceptively. So I avoided the term.
But why do you think that people don’t want to say the P-word? Why don’t they want to say “plagiarism”?
What happened to me in this controversy is the perfect illustration of why others have been avoiding the word “plagiarism.” My initial response was entirely supportive of Claudine. Yes, it was technically plagiarism, but this is no big deal. And then the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo plucks out the beginning of that sentence and says, Another scholar accuses Claudine Gay of plagiarism. Now, he didn’t lie. I did call it “plagiarism.” I hadn’t framed it as an accusation, but I guess the verb sort of fits. But he was able to get leverage out of something I said, taken out of context, that I then spent two days on Twitter rebutting. So, yeah, in retrospect, do I regret using the word “plagiarism,” given how it was exploited? Maybe.
Really? So you wouldn’t still call it “plagiarism”?
I’m calling it “plagiarism.” That doesn’t mean I didn’t regret it.
I’ve seen a lot of academics resisting the use of the word “plagiarism” because they say that the people who surfaced the allegations against Gay are part of a right-wing machine that wants nothing more than to take her down—allegedly because of her race or because they hate academia or because they want to undermine liberal institutions. What do you make of the argument that it’s worth resisting the frames that someone like Christopher Rufo comes up with to talk about what she did?
If the only way academia can fend off the Christopher Rufos of the world is by shifting their standards in an ad-hominem fashion based on who’s offering the attack, then academia has already lost the cultural battle. The clearer our standards, the more sure we are in what we believe in, the less it matters where a complaint or an attack is originating from. I reject the idea that an accusation that otherwise would have been taken seriously ought to be fended off because the bad guys are using it.
(Underlining added) Kudos to Emma Green for addressing my question rather than lazily focusing on Rufo’s chum along with the other sharks.
(Now, even more than before, I’m going to put an asterisk next to any accusation from Christopher Rufo, the asterisk signifying that it’s probably not an outright lie, but it’s highly likely to be tendentiously twisted.)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Paradox
The quest for unity that drove people to discard formal theology for the Scriptures drove them further asunder.
“Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.”
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, quoting Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, who in turn is quoting a mainstream Protestant pastor’s lament about the new sects.
Conversion
“There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already –without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.”
Rod Dreher, Schmemann and Social Justice (quoting Fr. Alexander Schmemann)
Listening to that other voice
[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.
In Orthodoxy, you won’t commit mortal sin for missing liturgy. There is no concept of “mortal sin”. That’s just not how the Orthodox “model” works. You are supposed to be at liturgy, not because you fear punishment, but because being present at liturgy is an aid to theosis. It draws you closer and closer to unity with God. On the occasion I miss liturgy, I regret it, and if I don’t have a good reason (traveling, or sick), I confess it when I next go to confession. But I don’t lie there fearing for my everlasting soul.
The demons are still with us, but they have lost. They and their chief, the devil, are still trying to draw us into damnation with them, but they will never again wield the power they once did. All they have left to them is deception. Against their deceptions we have humility in repentance, and the reason that weapon is so powerful is because by humbling ourselves we join ourselves to Jesus Christ, who in His humility threw down that great dragon and banished him forever at the point of the swords of the archangels, angels, and all the saints.
Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young, The Lord of Spirits (book, not podcast)
Without comment
It’s dangerous to try analyzing a Christian tradition that’s not, and never has been, one’s own — though I’ve probably done so repeatedly. This time, I’ll leave Catholic commentary to a card-carrying Catholic, author of the authorized biography of John Paul II:
To make matters worse from a journalistic standpoint, the only witnesses cited in defense of today’s papal autocracy were such acolytes of the pontificate as Austen Ivereigh, David Gibson, and Massimo Faggioli—the functional equivalent of Tucker Carlson writing a piece entitled, “Donald Trump takes on unprecedented attacks from his opponents” and sourcing it with quotes from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert. This isn’t journalism; it’s blatant advocacy. And it should be named as such.
Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
There’s a tremendous amount distilled there. You can’t read Augustine’s Confessions and easily deny that he was a saint. But he was peerless in the West and was not in serious dialog with the many Greek-speaking Fathers in the East, so he went awry in ways that have ramified mightily in the West and that accordingly lead us in the East to keep him at arm’s length.
Seems about right
The collapse of U.S. Mainline Protestantism also included a collapse in Protestant confidence, intellectual life, and public influence. Modern Evangelicalism lacked the institutions and traditions of centuries-old Mainline groups. They typically could not compete directly with vigorous Catholic intellectual life. And so rising Evangelicalism often relied on Catholic intellectual resources to make needed public arguments.
Looking for a news hook? Duke’s latest report in 2021 (.pdf here) showed evangelicals to be the nation’s least politicized Christian grouping. Only 43% of local evangelical congregations participated in even one of the 12 types of political involvements that were surveyed, compared with the more liberal “mainline” Protestants (at 52%), Catholics (81%) and Black Protestants (82%) or (not part of this study) the well-known activism at Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.
The Guy takes the savvy author to task on one detail, the tic of applying words like “Christian” or “church” while referring only to white evangelicals. We’re told that these past few years the radicals “seemed poised to capture the controls inside of the American Church.” True for Catholicism? For Black Protestantism? How about for mainstream evangelical denominations and parachurch groups?
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I start here because I really think the author had distilled a major temperamental difference between MAGA populists and wokesters on the one hand, traditional conservatives (and classical liberals generally) on the other. I plan to revisit this to see how well it stands up to repeated critical engagement.
Populism thrives on a zero-sum mind-set. The central story that populists tell is: They are out to destroy us. Populist leaders invariably inflame ethnic bigotry to mobilize their own supporters.
America’s populist in chief, Donald Trump, exemplifies this mentality. Trump grew up in a zero-sum world. In the world of New York real estate, there’s a fixed amount of land. Trump didn’t have to invent a new concept, just screw the other side. In 2017, the Vox writer Dylan Matthews and his colleagues read all of Trump’s books on business and politics, and concluded that zero-sum thinking is the core of his mind-set. “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” Trump and his co-author wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass.” “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”
MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.
Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups — oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized.
This thinking is rising across the globe …
We all have complaints about the age of go-go globalization, but what’s followed is far worse — global economic competition being replaced by political and military confrontation. And the thugs are winning. Russia now has the momentum in Ukraine. China is growing increasingly aggressive in the waters around Taiwan. Trump is leading in many polls.
Many of us greet 2024 with a sense of foreboding. We need Joe Biden to be as big as this year demands. We need a leader who shows that he grasps the scope of global crisis and has a vision for how to return to a positive-sum world of growth, innovation and peace.
“Plagiarism” is just another weapon for the deplorables
→ Who came up with this plagiarism idea?The Associated Press set the tone for how this would be covered. Plagiarism being bad is a monstrous and deceitful new concept, developed in a lab by right-wing activists and unleashed on unsuspecting academics.
As my favorite, Nate Silver, put it: “Pretty worried about this new chronoweapon that can force you to go back as many as 27 years in time and commit plagiarism.”
If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS. When you look at these cold, hard stats — which Harvard, of course, did all it could to conceal — there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.
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The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count. The fact that a male, white university president also recently stepped down for academic misconduct, also doesn’t count. The fact that the president of Harvard violated rules that a Harvard undergraduate would be disciplined for doesn’t count. Nothing counts, in the end, except her race and sex and ideology. The defenses of her make this explicit. Which is why they have been salutary.
Significantly, the Court has not limited the questions presented. That means the justices could potentially consider the full range of issues raised by the case, including whether the January 6 attack on the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” whether Trump’s actions amount to “engaging” in insurrection, whether the president is an “officer of the United States” covered by Section 3, whether Section 3 is “self-executing,” whether it is a “political question,” and whether Trump got adequate due process in the state court.
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I think many are underrating the likelihood that the justices will affirm the Colorado ruling. The latter is based on strong reasoning, including from an originalist point of view. And to the extent the justices may be motivated by reputational considerations, disqualifying Trump is the perfect opportunity for them to show once and for all that they are not adjuncts of the GOP and especially not the “MAGA Court.” In my view, much of the left-wing criticism of the Court is wrong or over overblown; but my opinion is not what’s decisive for the Court’s public and elite standing.
French’s flawed but evocative case against Trump ballot access
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
The counterpart to “but the consequences” is “we’ll show them we can’t be intimidated.” Both reactive approaches can color our interpretation of the law.
It’s dangerous to read minds, but I think David is so fed up with “but the consequences” that he’s fallen into the opposite error.
I’m convinced by the history of the 14th Amendment’s drafting that the framers didn’t intend for the President to be covered. Given that history, the Supreme Court can easily and legitimately reverse the Colorado decision.
But there has been a tendency on the court to follow the “plain meaning” of legislative texts without worrying about what legislators intended. That’s how, for example, homosexuals and transgendered people gained coverage, under a broad reading of “on account of sex” in some of our 20th century civil rights laws, even though everyone was thinking “male and female” at the time.
If SCOTUS looks to legislative history, it will be abandoning its recent more textualist approach. I think there are enough conundrums presented by the textualist approach — above all, why would the 14th Amendment’s framers hide the presidential elephant in the “any office” mouse-hole, after enumerating Senators, Representatives and electors — that looking beyond the text, all the way back to legislative history, is well warranted.
Damon Linker spends more time eviscerating French’s uncharacteristically flawed argument just from a logic standpoint.
Other legalia
Unlawful discrimination
Some civil libertarians have attempted to finesse the issue by redefining civil liberties to include protection from the discriminatory behavior of private parties. Under this view, conflicts between freedom of expression and antidiscrimination laws could be construed as clashes between competing civil liberties. For purposes of this book, however, civil liberties retains its traditional definition, referring to constitutional rights protected by the First Amendment and related constitutional provisions.”
David Bernstein, You Can’t Say That!
Asylum
Western Europe and the U.S. are still largely governed by a 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was expanded in 1967 to cover anyone living in what can be considered a “dangerous” place. That definition allows potentially hundreds of millions of people worldwide to qualify as refugees. The U.N, High Commission on Refugees estimates that there were 26 million likely candidates for resettlement at the end of 2019. All that is needed is to arrive in a hospitable country and claim asylum.
… Hybris comes to an ugly finish, Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
When men landed on the moon, I was too young and too techy to have developed full-blown case of faux Ludditism, but I don’t recall being swept up in elation at the accomplishment, either.
These days, I love the whole poem (a few obscure words or allusions aside).
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life. For at least ten years, and probably longer, it is likely that the state paid for you to be taught various subjects (like history, chemistry, literature, and so on) that are of no vocational value to the vast majority of its citizens. The state saw education as a public good in itself, a basic privilege that we expect all children to receive. So did your teachers. So do you. You might believe that state-funded education should become entirely skills-based at age sixteen. You might believe that taxpayers should fund doctoral studies for arts graduates. But you almost certainly believe that some measure of vocational irrelevance—learning things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons—is important to our intellectual and personal development and that we should all pay taxes in order to fund it.
This point is made powerfully in Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated. Born into a family of Mormon survivalists, she develops plenty of technical skills in her father’s junkyard but receives no formal schooling no formal schooling and arrives at university aged seventeen knowing nothing of Western art, and without having heard of the Holocaust. Her classmates, and we as readers, regard her as both inexplicable and tragically impoverished for her ignorance, and root for her to become educated, which she eventually does. In the process, we come to realize just how important we think education is, and how far we see learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing.
Issues of academic misconduct aside, I’d question the judgment of any university president who answers an invitation to argue with the likes of Stefanik. But Stefanik and Rufo did not write Gay’s dissertation, and they did not co-author her scholarly articles. Feel free to deplore the messengers, their vulturine creepiness, and their gleeful opportunism. Their own failings still do not make what they found any less true. In the real world, truth sometimes comes from terrible people with dishonorable motives; if we were to purity-test the motives of every defector who handed us documents during the Cold War, we’d have had to shred incredibly valuable information on the silly grounds that the people who gave it to us weren’t very nice.
…
Gay is not the first person whose scholarly work got another look because of sudden political notoriety. Back in 2001, for example, a professor at the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill wrote some ghastly things about the people who died in 9/11, including comparing the victims in the World Trade Center to the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. After this bravura jerkitude came to light, Churchill’s critics pushed for investigation into his published works, and in 2006, the university found that he had engaged in misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication. It dismissed him the next year.
When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu fell, everyone wanted to claim credit. It may be a mark of our decline that the poseurs are now claiming credit for the Gay resignation from Harvard.
Yes, that bad people make an argument from bad motives doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But this kind of posturing and preening turns my stomach anyway:
Rep. Elise Stefanik, taking a victory lap after the announcement of the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, boasted that this is “just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.” That is true if by “any college or university” you mean the 20 most famous institutions in the United States and if by “in history” you mean the past six months—if not, then surely Martin Heidegger’s Sieg-heil!-ing his way to the top at Freiburg University in the 1930s limbos right under the admittedly low bar set by Claudine Gay and her enablers at Harvard. But that is how Republicans talk—and think, if I may abuse the word—these days, “the fierce urgency of now” as seen from whatever is three flights of stairs down from the lowest gutter in Palm Beach.
Rep. Stefaniak’s trolling question to the Ivy Presidents may have started the ball rolling, but that’s all the credit she gets. Christopher Rufo and Aaron Sibarium get far more — and like him, loathe him, or somewhere in between, Rufo’s a man with some plans.
Discernment needed
This entire saga may establish a new incentive structure for university decision-makers going forward. If you hire someone who does not meet the highest standards of academic rigor or who applies double standards on things like free speech and DEI, you know that they will be under tremendous scrutiny. You know that if the dirt exists, it will surface. So you have an incentive to be a little more discerning about who you elevate.
And if you are a university president, you certainly have an incentive to be more careful about political bias. Do you really want half the country rooting for your downfall? Do you really want that target on your back? In the shadow of Claudine Gay’s resignation, institutional neutrality may come to be seen as a safe harbor.
Aaron Sibarium, Free Beacon reporter who broke some of the news that broke Claudine Gay’s Harvard Presidency.
The Wicked Witch spins her demise
As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.
Say whatever else you will about recently-resigned Claudine Gay, but don’t say she doesn’t read (and twist) Christopher Rufo.
Rufo would, indeed does , characterize his project at breaking up the Left’s hegemony in so very many of the nation’s cultural and educational institutions — decolonizing them, if you will — in order to restore public faith in them, not to “unravel” it.
Why Harvard did what it did
From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.
…
It’s to forestall that potential future [when elites will no longer see the Ivies as the default for their kids], not to reward the muckraking of conservatives, that Harvard presumably decided to sacrifice its plagiarist president. The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence. And Harvard’s critics can probably force more change the more that centuries-old power seems to be at risk.
The way to get ahead in economics, Robert Solow quipped, is to provide a “brilliant argument in favor of an absurd conclusion.” Has anything changed?… more »
Arts & Letters Daily, ~ 1/2/24
Yawn! That’s the way to get a PhD in almost any field any more. My personal experience with this was writing a law journal “Note,” which was to be an original contribution to legal thought, rather like a doctoral thesis. I glommed onto a church-state issue that was particularly on my mind in those days and, based on a dubious and thinly-supported premise, concluded … well, something I now think was foolish.
I frequently think that people with earned doctorates, over-invested in defending their indefensible theses, are a source of much evil in the world — particularly when those doctorates are in “theology.”
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I have come to care very little about a writer’s politics. I only care whether the writer appears to be sane and a truth-teller. There are many truth-tellers on the Left and there are many deranged and vile liars on the Right (where my reflexive sympathies lie).
You could call that my epigram today.
Rejecting bitterness
Why is a bitter “I told you so” so much more gratifying than finding agreement? Abigail Shrier’s Three New Year’s Resolutions for Americans is a challenging start to the year:
Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM. They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.
…
The transparently reckless progressive policy vision should have been a nonstarter with centrists and liberals. It didn’t take a PhD to know that cutting the breasts off teen girls in mental distress was a disastrous failure of psychology and medicine.
…
Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.
(Emphasis added). I plan to re-read this at least once after it rests a while.
Chastity belts of ideology
Rather than dwelling in their own thoughts, being a human being, living and experiencing things and gaining wisdom, people restrain all of their wisdom faculties with these chastity belts of ideology. If ideology becomes one’s identity, having impure thoughts is not thinking, it is a blow to your sense of self and therefore dangerous.
A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Bari Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times. (Source)
The scourge that dare not speak its name
The brief annual preoccupation of Western societies with the so-called homeless (more accurately described as the family-less) is a good deal better than nothing … But why are there destitute people at all in our great 21st-century cities? The consequences of a society that has simultaneously licensed the dismantling of lifelong marriage and the widespread use of mind-altering drugs might have something to do with that. But who will put this right? Nobody, so far as I can see. These are causes so lost as to be almost unmentionable among the polite.
Even when Fundamentalists set out to defend the truth, their temptation was to rally large constituencies to the cause rather than to prepare for scholarly exchange.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
A cyber-friend asked If you could wave a magic wand and have Christians in the USA instantly and deeply understand a concept, mental model, biblical theme, theological topic, etc. etc., what would it be?
My reply: That the Church did not begin at Azusa Street, in a Second Great Awakening tent revival, during the First Great Awakening, or with Henry VIII, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Augustine of Hippo or even the first New Testament codex.
Pragmatic Xianity
Bryan assumed the truth of Christianity, but his defense of it was essentially pragmatic. Rather than arguing for its factuality, as Machen did, he argued the good it did for humankind. “There has not been a great reform in a thousand years that was not built about [Christ’s] teachings,” he proclaimed, and “there will not be in all the ages to come.”
I doubt that Bryan’s faith, as described, is “saving faith.” On the other hand, Christendom can always use allies.
The American Sense of Scripture
When Vice President Mike Pence delivered his speech at the Republican National Convention, it was like witnessing a Walker Percy satire. Pence remixed Hebrews 12:1-2 and 2 Corinthians 3:17, by replacing “Jesus” with “Old Glory,” the “saints” with “this land of heroes,” and even interjected his own biblical gloss—“that means freedom always wins.”
People rightly recoiled from Pence’s failed attempt at civic religion. How could the Vice President replace Jesus “the author and perfecter of our faith” with the American flag? Why would he substitute American heroes for the saints? And, what definition of freedom could Pence be using to conclude that “freedom always wins”? After all, the American sense of Scripture is not one of the classic senses of Scripture. Those would be the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.
If you have read Percy’s Love in the Ruins, which is about—as the subtitle tells you—“The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World,” then Pence’s speech would sound strangely familiar ….
I never understood the hatred of Hoosier liberals for Governor Mike Pence. But I cringed when he agreed to run as Trump’s Vice President, and I’ve never found his Christianish faith a great reassurance.
It’s harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle
L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers’ fortune passed $100 billion this year. But here’s what I found intriguing (besides her black hair at age 70 — after all, she’s worth it):
Ms Bettencourt Meyers is said to favour privacy over attending social events frequented by many of the world’s wealthy.
She is known to play the piano for several hours a day and has written two books – a five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods.
“She really lives inside her own cocoon. She lives mainly within the confines of her own family,” said Tom Sancton, who authored the book The Bettencourt Affair.
“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . .” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
My sorta kinda “life verse”
In my Evangelical boarding school, there was a little bit of pressure to identify your “life verse” — one snippet of Scripture that was your very own guiding light.
That’s asking a lot of immature kids, and I don’t recommend it.
But as a matter of fact, one verse did kind of grab me, and looking back 56+ years, I could even see it as my unexpected guiding light:
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
That’s my other New Year’s Wish for my readers, though it’s more closely related to the first than you might think.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Not that the replacement of our 2023 calendars with 2024 will necessarily make a difference, but a guy can hope, can’t he?
Legalia
New York Times vs. OpenAI
The New York Timesfiled a lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement, claiming that the companies exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or authorization to train their AI systems—including the chatbot ChatGPT—and “wrongfully benefited from” the Times’ journalism. “This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works,” the paper argued in the filing.
Non-lawyers may find puzzling the thought that the main job of law schools is to teach people to think like lawyers. What the heck does that mean?
Among other things, it means that I cannot read an item like this without thinking this is how the common law develops: gripes and competing analogies.
True example: Early in the days of petroleum, Defendant, seeing Plaintiff getting rich off oil wells, slant-drills and taps the same pool of crude oil under Plaintiff’s property. Plaintiff sues, saying he owns everything within his borders from the infernal depths to the furthest skies. Defendant says the crude oil is like a highly mobile animal (a “wild, fugacious mineral-animal” was my property law prof’s description) which is rightfully owned by whoever captures it.
Eventually, a body of law develops from the resolutions of multiple cases, each with some different nuances.
So, is OpenAI like a slant-driller? How did those slant-drilling cases resolve? If the answer were obvious, there’d be no lawsuits or they would quickly settle.
The way generative AI works by training on existing data and generating new creative content and text is something that intellectual property as a legal framework has not had to deal with. We’re going to have to litigate and get the ruling from the court.
So this is a very important case that I wouldn’t be surprised that if it doesn’t go all the way to the United States Supreme Court because this has to be settled for us to know what the framework is for generative AI.
That first paragraph describes classic common law development.
The second paragraph is dubious: the Supreme Court doesn’t take cases just because they’re important, and an important case filed in state court would likely not get SCOTUS to review it. But this is probably in Federal Court, since it’s under (federal) copyright law, so SCOTUS might take it if it doesn’t like the decision of the Court of Appeals that eventually reviews the District Court decision.
On whether Trump is disqualified
I detest Donald Trump. It would be a great relief to me, though I cannot bring myself to pray for it, were he (and Joe Biden too, for that matter) to drop dead, soon. Some of his followers would spin conspiracy theories, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
At this stage of our absurdly-long pre-election run-up, it would be terribly, terribly, terribly divisive to exclude Trump from the ballot. What could serve more deeply to delegitimize the whole Presidential election next year?
The legal arguments about the applicability of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment are nuanced, and it’s not just about “insurrection.” The intent of the section was mostly to keep the former Confederate States from sending bomb-throwing racists to the House or Senate, with little worry about a bomb-throwing President, The language of the section arguably sweeps more broadly; but it dances all around naming the Presidency. Did the Reconstruction Congress hide an elephant (the Presidency) in a mouse-hole?
Credible legal scholars deny that the Presidency is a “civil office” of the United States. For instance, Kurt Lash: “According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase ‘civil office under the United States’ did not include the office of president of the United States. As Joseph Story explained in his influential ‘Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,’ the congressional precedent known as ‘Blount’s Case’ established that the offices of president, senator and representative were not civil offices under the government of the United States — they were the government of the United States. The phrase ‘civil office under the United States” referred to appointed offices.’“
SCOTUS has tended to go with textual arguments rather than intent. I hope they either revert to intent or find a really persuasive textual reason to allow him on the ballot, and Joseph Story may be just the ticket. Some of Trump’s enemies would spin conspiracy theories or shit-talk SCOTUS, but nothing any of us can do will stop that whatever happens.
Then, if Trump is still disappointingly alive and kicking on Election Day, I hope we collectively kick him to the curb by a really convincing margin. (This would be more realistic if the Democrats would turn their attention away from knee-capping Trump and toward a compelling centrist or center-left vision for 2025-2029.)
Culture
Racism
Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.
Subrena E. Smith, a person of color as such things are styled, proposes that since we invented race for nefarious reasons, it’s time to banish it.
If terrorists win, it will be the transphobes’ fault
Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level … That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.
I’m reasonably confident that General Burt is highly educated, because only someone highly educated could believe such drivel:
You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.
Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes. I call “Bullshit” and “Shame on you for trying to shame us, General.”
This is a quote that has stuck with me. Yes, it’s a variation on a populist theme, but there’s enough truth to that theme that The Emperor’s New Clothes has become beloved.
Jung versus Freud
Having felt his own seething unconscious erupt into the midst of normal daylight reality served Jung well in his treatment of schizophrenic patients, who in Freud’s judgment were too far gone to reach, but whose bizarre hallucinations and delusions Jung attempted to comprehend with respect and tenderness. Unlike Freud, who maintained a studied distance from his patients, sitting aloof and serene out of the supine sufferer’s sight, Jung would sit face to face with his charges, bumping knees, exhorting with vehement gestures.
In Jung’s estimation, what healed was not disinterested mind alone following a dogmatic trail through the vast wastes of one’s sexual history, but making contact, demonstrating sympathy, aiming at a comprehensive understanding, allowing the free play of humanity at its best. Jung could see that for patients above the age of thirty-five — life’s halfway mark, or what Dante callednel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita — their principal concern was not undoing childhood psychosexual knots that persisted into adulthood, but rather finding the authoritative spiritual truth that one could found a serious life upon.
That kind of explains Jungian Jordan Peterson’s style, doesn’t it?
Adult movies — and literature
I used to say that an adult movie was one where they kiss and then the lights go out (because the adults know what comes next).
I’ve now read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, truly adult novels. What child could understand? A rare treat, too rich to binge-read. I can’t even face wading into Lila or Jack immediately.
Journalists are so predictable
After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting.
[B]ook critic Ron Charles … noted the publication of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” by Senator Josh Hawley: “The book’s final cover contains just text, including the title so oversized that the word ‘Manhood’ can’t even fit on one line — like a dude whose shoulders are so broad that he has to turn sideways to flee through the doors of the Capitol.”
In The Los Angeles Times, Jessica Roy explained the stubborn refusal of plastic bags to stay put: “Because they’re so light, they defy proper waste management, floating off trash cans and sanitation trucks like they’re being raptured by a garbage god.”
Of Kevin McCarthy’s toppling as House speaker by Matt Gaetz and his fellow right-wing rebels: “It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.” (Peggy Noonan)
Ron DeSantis, gives off the vibe “that he might unplug your life support to recharge his cellphone.” (Peggy Noonan)
Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024. (Mort Rosenblum)
While I don’t systematically gather, grade, and keep records on such things, I rather liked two sentences from Daniel Henninger:
The most fraudulent word in higher education is “dialogue.” Real dialogue died years ago, replaced by a soft-pillow politics that envelops anything disagreeable and then smothers it.
Speaking of higher education:
Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.
Greg Conti, The Rise of the Sectarian University (Compact Mag) I’m seeing enough good stuff from Compact (which registered with me at its founding) to consider paying its pricey subscription price.
After all the hype, it turns out that “Trump without the crazy” is just an awkward, aggrieved, opportunistic, anti-charismatic, aspiring autocrat with a mile-wide cruel streak and the people skills of Mark Zuckerberg crossed with Richard Nixon.
Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like this one, there’s not much of it left above-ground now. But there’s an odd sort of romance to holding down a public WordPress-based fortress in the grimdark bleakness, even as almost everything (including the bulk of what I do) retreats to various substacks, discords, and such.
I think you probably know who posted that on TruthSocial.
“Christians tend not to hope other people rot in hell on Christmas Day,” radio host Erick Erickson sniffed afterward, which read like a non sequitur in context. Why would Trump care whether people think he’s a good Christian? And how confident should we be at this point about which sentiments are and aren’t condoned by politically engaged members of the faith? Erickson’s grasp of what’s normal and what isn’t for American Christians may not be as firm as he, and I, might wish.
If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination for the third straight time and then prevails in the general election, he will have sealed the transformation of his party, given new energy to right-wing populism around the world, and called into question the principles that have shaped America’s security policy since World War II.
Voters will have ratified the outlook that Mr. Trump has advocated since the 1980s: opposition to immigration, multilateral trade treaties and globalization. They would give him the opportunity to enact more extreme proposals in his second term—including an all-out attack on the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and the use of the military to fight crime, immigration and domestic dissent. They would embrace his view of the press as the enemy of the people and agree to an all-out culture war led from the White House. After hearing Mr. Trump declare across the country that “for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” they will have replied, in effect, “Retribution is exactly what we want. Use the government to punish our enemies.”
Adults have a particular responsibility to model and set a template for the young. It is a primary job of the adults in the room, wherever the room is, to show every day, in dress, speech and comportment, what being adult looks like. At least two generations have come up with no idea. Our national style has grown crude and vulgar; this entered Washington some years back, and that only made it worse. It’s a little sad. Washington used to be so old-fashioned, it was one of its charms, it was a throwback. Decades ago you smiled because female members of Congress, in their suits and high-button blouses, dressed like aspiring librarians. Now some dress like aspiring whores. Can I get in trouble for saying that? Let’s find out.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
On this eve of the The Nativity According to the Flesh of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ (that’s the official name in Orthodox Churches), I deviate somewhat both from my usual tone (because, as you may have noted, there was some fairly big religious news over the past week) and from much particular nativity piety.
What’s wrong with this plan?
The neighborhood will do the luminaries (sic) again this year on Christmas eve. Board member [name/phone omitted] will take point this year distributing the luminaries on Christmas Eve. Distribution will be from my house at [address omitted] beginning at 9:30am. If you would like to volunteer to help with the distribution, be at my house promptly at 9:30 Sunday morning.
Email from my HOA President. I could add emphasis, but I’ll let you ferret out the solecism on the grammar of Christian piety on your own.
Contemporary Pharisaism
The Pharisees of Christ’s time thought that Jews had lost God’s favor through transgressions of His law. To regain God’s favor, they were punctilious about keeping His law — and tried to force other Jews (Jesus, for instance) to do so as well.
I regret that Pharisaism in common parlance has come to connote hypocrisy, censoriousness and self-righteousness, because that sounds prissy and self-satisfied, whereas the real Pharisees were more like theocrats, more like our myths about grim-faced Puritans.
In my preferred sense, I would apply “Pharisaical” to Michael Cassidy, Ron DeSantis and Charlie Kirk:
On Dec. 14, a Christian veteran named Michael Cassidy walked into the Iowa State Capitol and destroyed a display erected by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. The display was an idol of Baphomet, a robed figure with a goat head. Cassidy told Fox News host Jesse Watters that he had destroyed the statue in an act of “Christian civil disobedience.”
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But the right-wing response to the Baphomet vandalism was notable … Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, tweeted, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. I’ll chip in to contribute to this veteran’s legal defense fund. Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.” The Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk said, “A Christian veteran just beheaded a monument to Satan in Iowa’s State Capitol. If this is Christian Nationalism, we need more of it. Hero.”
David French, who goes on to describe in his words the spirit that makes me (not him) want to call them “Pharisaical”:
To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” …
This claim is a Christianized cousin of the secular idea that defending the free-speech rights of those with whom you vehemently disagree is, in essence, providing aid and comfort to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. In this view, your role as a citizen is first to determine whether any given speech meets with your moral approval, and then — and only then — to rally to its defense.
I would add that at least some religious activists believe not just that we decline morally as a virtual synonym for acting badly, but that America’s plight is a direct judgment (i.e., not just a natural consequence) from a god who’s angry at us because of our collective sins.
Those are the clearest case of modern American Pharisaism.
Fiducia supplicans
Black holes (Rorschach proclamations)
In a by now familiar sequence of events, the Vatican released a document on Monday which caused instant confusion. “Pope says Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples,” the headlines announced. Optimistic Catholic apologists said the media had misunderstood the document, which permitted no such thing. Pessimistic Catholic apologists said the headlines were, alas, correct, and that the pope had erred. Part-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read in a conservative manner and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. Full-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read as a “development of doctrine” and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. The liberals rejoiced, with a slight undertone of impatience. The world took a brief interest, concluded that the Church was at least making some slow progress, then yawned a little and moved on to the next headline.
I have spent what feels like years parsing these much-debated Vatican documents, checking the exact translation of Italian words, badgering learned canonists and theologians for comments, comparing one sentence with another. And to be honest, I am thinking of retiring from the game. Because in the era of Pope Francis, such “controversial” statements are generally less statements than black holes.
A black hole, according to NASA, is “a great amount of matter packed into a very small area—think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.” That slightly exaggerates the density of Fiducia supplicans’ five-thousand-word text, but the point is the result—which, as NASA explains, “is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.”
This seems the perfect frame. I’m less experienced and less connected than Dan Hitchens when it comes to the Roman Church. If he can’t figure it out, I can’t.
But it seems fair to say that Pope Francis has, by Fiducia supplicans, at least given cover to those who have been clamoring for recognition of same-sex couples (and to a lesser extent, divorced and civilly remarried couples).
Fr. James Martin conveniently photographed and posted on social media his “spontaneous” blessing of one couple. (Yes, there is something oxymoronic about a social media photograph of a supposedly spontaneous encounter.)
Untenable tension
Of Monday’s extraordinary action by Pope Francis:
What does it mean to bless a couple without blessing that couple’s relationship? Millions of words will be expended in the coming months to try to explain this, but I can guarantee that none of them will make sense. … It’s hard to see how historic Catholic teaching on marriage and historic Catholic teaching on papal authority can emerge unscathed from this.
There has been speculations that Fiducia supplicans will produce a schism in Catholicism and/or drive orthodox Catholics to Orthodoxy.
The late Jaroslav Pelikan was a Church Historian at Yale. Somewhere in the 20-25 year-ago range, he left Lutheranism to embrace Orthodox Christianity, where his heart had been for some time already.
I emailed the news a Protestant friend who’d studied at Yale. He responded that the development would create a real buzz at Yale.
I followed up with the puzzled question about whether Yale was really so religious that this would be scandalous. “Au contraire,” he replied. “The scandal is that anyone at Yale should take religion seriously enough to change affiliations like that.”
In this situation, Catholics who take religion seriously enough to object to things like Fiducia supplicans probably have been those who in the past attended carefully to the words of Popes and defended the most lavish claims about the authority of the Pope. This is going to be a tough call for them.
… and not just them
[I]t is not a sufficient reason to come to the Orthodox Church if someone is dissatisfied with his own Church community, be it a Catholic Church or a Protestant community. There is something more in the Orthodox Church … and it is simply not enough to be a protester or to this like something happening in your own community in order to become Orthodox.
Metropolitan Hilarion. It will be tempting for some Orthodox priests to treat dissatisfaction with Catholicism over this shift of position as a sufficient basis for receiving them into Orthodoxy. Who doesn’t like “church growth”?
On greener grass
It is important that before any of you choose to abandon your declining church for a different communion, that you not have any false hope. This is true of Orthodoxy as well. It is not the case that all churches are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you belong to. Nor is it the case that because all churches are dealing with corruption of one kind or another, you might as well stay put. I’m simply saying that one should try to be as realistic as possible, and not allow oneself to be swayed by one’s understandable hope that the grass is greener Over There, With Those People.
It might be greener than where you are, but I assure you there will be problems. As a Catholic priest once put it to me, discussing the decadence within all the churches today, “Churches are made of people, including the clergy. Whatever sins the people of a time and place have, they will bring them into the church.” His point was not that we should reconcile ourselves to sin, much less engage in woke mumbo-jumbo to declare sin to be a blessing. His point, rather, was that we should not allow our idealism to get the better of us, such that we become scandalized by the failures within ecclesial bodies.
I have loved this story before and I love it still:
I am reminded of leaving the RCIA (catechesis) program I had enrolled in at the LSU Catholic Student Center in 1991, under the naive assumption that though I was two years out of college, I would find a more intellectually challenging catechesis there. In fact, it was a liberal priest and a liberal nun leading us all on guided meditations. Zero teaching of what we would be required to believe as Catholics. When I realized at last that this wasn’t going to get any better, and that we were all going to end up being received into the Catholic Church without knowing anything about the Catholic faith, I left.
I found my way to Father Dermot Moloney, an elderly Irishman who pastored the Latin mass parish downtown. He took me on as a catechumen. He said to me on that first day, in his thick brogue, “Lad, by the time I get t’roo with ye, ye might not want to be a Catlick, but you’ll know what a Catlick is.” God bless that priest’s memory. I so respected him for that. The problem today is that a Catholic can be just about anything he or she wants to be, and the administrative class of the Church doesn’t care. If you care, the Pope considers you to be “rigid,” and part of the problem.
Your purpose in life, in all likelihood, is quotidian
I live in Phoenix, the home of Grand Canyon University that has become a fairly major player in the Christian college scene. They have billboards all along the I-17 freeway through town that market their programs as “finding your purpose”. And that in a nutshell, I think, is the “spirit of the age” of our cultural Christian spirituality. The concept that you are potentially a “Bible character level” servant of God is foundational to evangelical Christianity. … [I]t all boils down to this: You exist to be something and do something specific (and great) in the universe and apart from fulfilling that utility you are a failure (or sinner…).
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I don’t know exactly when “God has a plan for your life” stopped making sense, or more like it stopped making sense to put any energy or investment into trying to make it make sense. I think it was around the time (almost 20 years ago) when I faced the reality I was never going to be ordained to the priesthood, something I “KNEW” was my calling and purpose since first grade. That thought drove my life and I had spent decades in churches, ministries, cultivating relationships, and making preparations of one form or another to prepare for its inevitable, providential fulfillment. It never happened. I’ve ended up being a construction worker for the past 40 years instead. But even so, I found ways to spiritualize my life as a common laborer and make it “significant”.
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At 71, … [a]s simplistic and tritely “zen” as it sounds, there is some peace accepting the reality that if I hadn’t done what I did, I wouldn’t be where I am (for better or worse) and I just have to deal with my present moment.
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There was a woman who asked God, “What do you want me to do, what is your will for my life?” His answer? She said, “He told me, do your dishes. What a let down!” But that’s really the answer for all of us. “Do what is in front of you, and then the next right thing.” Yes, even doing the dishes is spiritual warfare sometimes.
The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.
Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force …
Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writinghere as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.
… Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Soon enough, Africa will be sending Christian missionaries to darkest America.
Orthodoxy
Anglophone Christians appropriating Orthodoxy
Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s podcast bible studies have brought me one revelation after another. Those on Galatians (from almost three years ago; I came to these podcasts late and have been listening in chronological order) have been particularly helpful for my understanding of how little I understand — and by extension a challenge before all who come to Orthodoxy from a Protestant millieu.
This exchange between Fr. Stephen and a parishioner “went meta” on the challenge:
C1: I have a question that may be a distraction, but… You read this in English, in this English translation.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: First of all, it makes almost no sense.
Fr. Stephen: Yeah.
C1: Second, if you live in the Western culture that we live in, and you try to make sense of it, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusion.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: What do we do about that?
C2: Well, we have a Fr. Stephen.
Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We need… Honestly, we need an Orthodox translation of the New Testament in the English language. And we as English-speaking Orthodox Christians have not fully appropriated the Orthodox tradition and faith yet. We just haven’t. We’re still doing that. We’re still working on that.
C1: Our language is actually a barrier.
Fr. Stephen: Right, because the English language that we’re using, terms like “justification” and things, it’s the vocabulary of Protestant theology. So it’s not just a question of how do we express the Orthodox faith in English; it’s [that] we’re trying to express the Orthodox faith in Protestant terminology, and that’s kind of not going to work. So we have to continue—mostly we’re doing that just by using borrowed Greek words like apophatic theology and cataphatic theology and theosis. We’re just taking the Greek words and using them instead of the Latin ones like justification, to try and help with that, but that’s something we’re just going to have to continue to do.
But, yeah, any New Testament you’re going to pick up, including the New King James Version that you find in the Orthodox Study Bible is translated by a Protestant committee. So, number one, they’re coming at it from a Protestant perspective, but, number two, it’s a committee, so they’re also trying not to take sides, usually, in any internecine Protestant debates. So it’s not [just] that it’s Protestant; it’s that it’s vaguely Protestant, which is what makes it even harder to understand. Because if they just let a Calvinist translate it themselves, it would be skewed, toward Calvinism, obviously, but it would at least make sense. [Laughter] But because they’re trying not to do that, you end up with translating participles with a gerund, just “-ing,” going because we don’t want to interpret beyond that; or just putting “of”—“of faith,” “the hearing of faith.”
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Fr. Stephen: We’ve got a lot of work to do. And you folks are just as responsible for doing your piece of it as I am for doing my piece of it. So that’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s hard is that there’s this cyclical [Sic. I think he probably meant more like “recursive”] thing, where Protestantism has read these passages a certain way, and so the English translations all reflect that reading. So you could either go back and read the Greek— but even then, who put together the lexicon you’re using that tells you what the words mean? Yeah, some 19th-century German Protestant liberal. [Laughter] So that’s going to be skewed another way, too.
And again, I’m not saying any of this to bash Protestantism. It’s just we as Orthodox Christians are reading New Testaments that reflect the Protestant tradition of the people who translated it. Just like, if I translate something, it’s going to reflect my Orthodox Christian understanding of it. As humans, none of us is a robot, none of us is completely objective—there’s no way to do a completely objective translation anyway, because words in one language do not equal words in another language, so you can’t mathematically do a translation. You can’t have a computer do a… If you want to see how a computer does a translation, go use Google Translate and see how that works for you! [Laughter] I don’t want a Google translated Bible! That’s going to make a whole lot less sense than this, right? [Laughter]
C1: It also means that we have to struggle within our own minds to deal with thoughts that have been skewed in advance. I mean, you say “justification,” and my mind immediately says, “by faith,” and I know what that means. I’ve heard that in church; wait a minute.
Fr. Stephen: Right, or the word “faith.”
C1: Yeah, the word “faith” itself.
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C1: So it’s a constant mental struggle.
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Fr. Stephen: … But to a certain extent, that’s always been true. That’s why we have homilies and sermons. That’s why we don’t just stand up and read a text from the Bible and sit back down. It’s always required teaching and explanation and that kind of thing.
