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.

Saturday, 12/23/23

Smelling the Roses

I’ll turn too soon to less edifying thoughts, but let’s start with two observations, the first of which I practice while I mostly aspire to the second.

A little humanity

When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me — and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med — because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital.

Tyler Austin Harper via Frank Bruni

The French difference

“The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly. “The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.””

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Segue

In the popular piety of the formerly-Christian West, Monday’s Feast is the equal of Easter, and it’s first runner-up to Pascha (Easter) in the Eastern Church.

So if you want don’t want it to be your “miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about ‘anti-democratic’ attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot” and similar things, you might want to stop reading now.

Politics and law

Of Rudy’s $175 million judgment and bankruptcy

I genuinely am curious who Trump could even staff a cabinet with. Literally everyone who comes near him is either publicly humiliated or impoverished through lawsuits and then also. . . publicly humiliated.

Nellie Bowles.

Suffice that they would not be our best people.

Regarding Colorado

Insurrection

January 6 qualifies as an “insurrection” even under a fairly narrow definition of the term that is limited to the use of force to take over the powers of government. We don’t need to rely on much broader definitions advocated by some legal scholars.

…

As our detailed recitation of the evidence shows, President Trump did not merely incite the insurrection. Even when the siege on the Capitol was fully under way, he continued to support it by repeatedly demanding that Vice President Pence refuse to perform his constitutional duty and by calling Senators to persuade them to stop the counting of electoral votes. These actions constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection.

…

As I pointed out in a recent Bulwark article about the case, this goes beyond encouraging violence (as Trump did before the attack) or failing to try to stop it. It amounts to using the attack as leverage to try to force Congress to keep him in power. Using a violent insurrection in this way surely qualifies as “engaging in it,” even if Trump’s other actions fell short of doing so. Even if this somehow still falls short of “engagement,” this and Trump’s other actions surely at least gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of the United States.

Ilya Somin, quoting the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling.

Don’t take the bait

You’ll find no shortage of arguments against the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that Donald Trump is barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving as President, and therefore will be barred from Colorado ballots.

I’ll not rehearse them here except to beg you: Don’t fall for the simplistic line that the decision is bad because it’s “anti-democratic.”

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was intended to be anti-democratic. It assumes that voters might elect an insurrectionist and says, in effect, “We don’t care. Insurrectionists can’t serve. Period. Full stop.”

Oh, yes: One more thing. It may be politically embarrassing that all seven Colorado Justices were appointed by Democrat Governors, but courts shouldn’t let political appearances sway them.

  • Somebody filed a lawsuit.
  • A lower court decided it and one side appealed.
  • From what I hear, the opinions and dissents in 213 pages of Colorado show great effort to get things right, not to carry partisan water or reject the cup handed them.

I wonder how SCOTUS will reverse? I strongly suspect it will. But the rationale will matter.

Our miserable fate

It’s our miserable fate to spend the holidays this year listening to people complain about “anti-democratic” attempts to strike a presidential frontrunner from the ballot who were adamant about disqualifying Barack Obama in 2008 absent proof of his status as a natural-born citizen.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

Meritorious or not, challenging Trump on 14th Amendment grounds wasn’t tenable politically once he had reestablished himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Nick Catoggio

On the other hand

I bristle at criticism of the Colorado Supreme Court for having the temerity actually to decide a case presented to it without fear or favor.

But Nellie Bowles levels a different criticism, aimed at the people who brought the suit:

The only way to protect democracy is to end democracy: The Colorado Supreme Court decided this week that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency and so cannot appear on the Republican primary ballot in the state. Meanwhile, California’s lieutenant governor ordered the state Supreme Court to “explore every legal option” to remove Trump from the ballot. In doing so, she said that the rules for the presidency are simple: “The constitution is clear: You must be 40 years old and not an insurrectionist.” Yet even there she is wrong: you only have to be 35. [Tipsy: You also have to be a natural-born citizen, Nellie.]

Anyway, for a long time the standard liberal take has been that Democracy Is Under Threat from Republicans. And Trump certainly tried schemes in Georgia and whatnot, like, the man gave it a shot. But I would say that banning the opposition party’s leading candidate. . . is pretty much the biggest threat to democracy you can do. It’s a classic one, really. Timeless. Oldie but Goodie. The American left was so committed to protecting democracy that they had to ban voting. 

All I’ll say is that once you ban the opposition party’s top candidate, you can no longer, in fact, say you’re for democracy at all. You can say you like other things: power, control, the end of voting, choosing the president you want, rule by technocratic elites chosen by SAT score, all of which I personally agree with. But you can’t say you like democracy per se.

So Colorado, listen, I dream every day of being a dictator. I would seize the local golf course and turn it into a park on day one; day two, expand Austin breakfast taco territory to the whole country; day three, invade Canada. Day four, we ban zoos. My fellow fascists, we’re on the same page. Let’s just drop the democracy stuff and call it what it is.

I’ve become persuaded that somebody ideally should have brought this sort of lawsuit years ago, when Trump wasn’t the GOP POTUS favorite by a commanding margin. But then most of us thought he was politically dead after January 6, so why would anyone bother?

“Eugenicons”

If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence.

Michael Lind

I spent a lot of time wading through Lind’s exposé of conservatives with eugenic sympathies, waiting for him to reveal the smoking gun. He never did.

I’m far from infallible on what’s going down in the world. I’m interested in what I’m interested in and within recent memory began consciously trying to forsake the fool’s errand of understanding everything.

That said, I’m not convinced that “eugenicons” (Lind’s failed attempt at coining a major concept) “have a large and apparently growing influence.” This felt like an article wherein the author got so invested in a theory that he couldn’t face up to its failure at his own hands.

Rank hypocrisy watch

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana was once perfectly content to use the courts to overrule a democratic process, spearheading an effort in late 2020 to collect lawmakers’ signatures in support of a lawsuit in Texas challenging the results of the that year’s election—which, if successful, would have voided millions of votes in four other states. Tuesday, though, Johnson—who formally endorsed Trump’s reelection campaign last month—was impugning the decision in Colorado that, in his view, would short-circuit the democratic process. “Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack,” he said. “Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. We trust the U.S. Supreme Court will set aside this reckless decision and let the American people decide the next President of the United States.”

TMD

Blood

It’s true; they’re destroying the blood of our country …

Donald J. Trump

All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.

Adolph Hitler

Assuming arguendo …

Let us assume for the sake of argument that there is an absolutely massive conspiracy of Democrats against Donald Trump.

Does that assumed fact make him fit for the Presidency? Are we going to elect a manifestly unfit candidate — one who either is ignorant of holocaust history or who consciously is mimicking Adolph Hitler — to punish the Democrats for some underhanded opposition to him?

I’m sorry that Americans are so well-conditioned that they won’t consider voting for third-party candidates, and that a vote against Trump effectively becomes a vote for Biden*, but I can’t vote for him and will probably vote for the American Solidarity Party slate.

(* A reminder that this common trope is sometimes false. We do not elect Presidents by national popular vote. I have several times now voted for third-party candidates when it was apparent from polling that, for instance, my state was going to deliver its electors to Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden, and my vote wasn’t going to change that.)

Culture

Real men, good men, violent men

Pearcey noted first that there is a sharp dissonance culturally between how we think of “real men” vs “good men.” The former are often moral abysses but they display a certain kind of chest-thumping bravado that many associate with masculinity. The latter is honorable, devoted, and principled, but often despised culturally for precisely those reasons, and this applies as much within many churches as it does the culture.

The other point she made: There is a sharp gap in behavior between self-identified evangelical men who don’t go to church (they are statistically the most likely group in most studies to engage in domestic abuse) and evangelical men who do attend church (statistically the least likely to be abusive). At a time when many in the young Christian right are making their peace with manosphere internet Nazis, those two facts fill me with dread. But we owe Pearcey a debt for helping to document not only these two points, but many others.

Jake Meador, * 23 Books for 2023*, recommending Nancy Pearcey’s * Toxic War on Masculinity*.

Dechurching

Meador also recommends The Great Dechurching by Michael Graham and Jim Davis.

There are many, many wrong ideas out there right now about the place of religion in American life: The dominant driver of dechurching is abusive churches. The most common intellectual shift in people who dechurch is toward progressivism. American churches are basically doing fine and the noise about dechurching is largely just a digital artifact, not something tied to life on the ground in local churches.

All of those things are wrong.

The reality is that the biggest drivers of dechurching right now are changes of life, above all moving to a new place. More people dechurch into a secular right wing ideology than progressivism. And the current dechurching wave is the single biggest shift in churchgoing practice in American history.

Graham and Davis will walk you through the data from the study they did with Ryan Burge and then offer application to help call people back to church. And that’s another misconception, by the way: Most people who have stopped attending church are actually willing to come back.

The persistence of religion

A common critical fallacy among liberals of most stripes is the affirmation that reasoned debate is the currency of politics. We want to believe that one simple Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart video will convince people that Pizzagate isn’t real or that Hilary Clinton doesn’t drink the blood of infants. The problem is pretending that logic, evidence, or reason have anything to do with such beliefs. The situation is much more dire, what we’re up against far more insidious; don’t expect to use logic when you’re at a Black Mass. “Everything may be religion,” I said, “but not all religions are good.” Irrationality, superstition, the numinous, and the transcendent—for both good and bad—can never be definitively pruned from our garden. You may as well pretend that language could be abolished as imagine the taming of the religious impulse, even when the aromatic censers of the church have been replaced by some weirdo’s keyboard.

Ed Simon

Simon also referred to Chris Rufo as a “Svengali opportunist.” I liked that very much. I distrust Rufo and have distrusted him since I first encountered him waging dishonest war on critical race theory. (Honest war on CRT is fine, but Rufo once boasted something like:

We’re going to render this brand toxic. Essentially what we’re going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory.

(Paraphrased from here.)

What’s even better than emission reduction?

Following up on this item, it occurs to me that mass disenthrallment with the automobile and a return to walking and cycling would be far better that reducing emissions from tailpipes or building overweight EVs that require a lot of mining of rare earths.

Exasperation speaking

“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions,” said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”

“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”

Harvard Finds More Instances of ‘Duplicative Language’ in Claudine Gay’s Work – The New York Times

I assume Prof. Fried understands that truth is true regardless of who bears it, so I can only attribute this logical lapse to exasperation at Svengali opportunist Christopher Rufo.

When did foul language become invisible?

I occasionally see glowing reviews of some streaming series or another and wonder “why am I not watching that?” Then I go to the appointed streaming service and recall “Oh, yeah. I watched the first episode. It was so full of foul language that I couldn’t bear it.”

This is not a way of claiming that my own vocabulary is free of expletives, scatology, and occasional profanity. I adopted some of that stuff in my late teens and early twenties to shock my elders into recognition of their folly. Fifty-plus years later, that proto-trolling has proven one of my own lifetime follies.

My point is that foul language is invisible to most critics. There is a prominent Evangelical pundit, generally sound, who I’m nevertheless unable fully to trust because of how he raved about Ted Lasso without noting that its landscape was blanketed with F-bombs.

Saints and Sinners

[O]ne of the first things they teach you is that in the act of reporting, you will inevitably have to depend on information acquired from dodgy people. Saints, being saintly, often don’t know what’s going on; you have to talk to the people who are great sinners.

Rod Dreher

To salvage what’s left of the right’s faith in elections and the judiciary, and frankly to prevent civil unrest encouraged by Trump, the justices will need to reach a certain outcome in this matter regardless of whether they sincerely believe the law supports it. The Colorado Supreme Court accordingly may have viewed its own ruling as an opportunity to rebuke Trump constitutionally in a way that the U.S. Supreme Court won’t be able to, even if it’s privately inclined to do so.

…

I am confident that this would have been a different conversation on January 6, 2021. On that day, right-wingers who now scoff at the left for using the word “insurrection” for political purposes were using the word “insurrection” themselves. An earnest effort in court at the time to disqualify Trump from any future candidacy would have been received enthusiastically on the left and probably not much worse than ambivalence on the right. He was done in politics anyway at that point, right? Who would care if some court made it official?

We didn’t have that conversation on January 6, though. Or during the rest of 2021. Or 2022. Only this year did it become a live issue, and by then it was too late.

… Why, then, did his opponents wait so long to pursue this legal avenue against him?

Ironically, I think the answer is that they gave Republican voters more credit than those voters deserve.

…

As I explained previously, those voters have argued at varying times that it’s improper to impeach and remove him from office over January 6 because the criminal courts would punish him; that it’s improper for the criminal courts to punish him because voters would punish him; and that it’s improper if voters punish him because in that case the election must have been “rigged.” That’s the accountability vacuum. Many critics of the new 14th Amendment challenge to Trump’s candidacy have added another facet to it, that it’s improper to use the Constitution itself to punish him because to do so would be “anti-democratic.”

Nick Catoggio

I don’t know if Nick’s a great sinner and I’m a saint, but I’d like to think that SCOTUS doesn’t think that way, because it would mean, in practical effect, that the 14th Amendment Section 3 becomes unenforceable precisely when it’s needed — on the rationale that an electorate poised to elect an insurrectionist is capable of civil unrest at a level that trumps the law.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Tuesday, 12/19/23

Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences. 

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

  • Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
  • Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
  • Culture is more important than politics and economics.
  • A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
  • Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
  • Beauty is more important than efficiency.
  • The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
  • The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

More:

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’s Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Sunday, 12/17/23

As we close in on the Feast, artifacts of Western Christendom loom larger. I’ll spend this morning singing in my Orthodox Church, this afternoon singing two more-or-less traditional Lessons & Carols. (I’ll spend this evening and tomorrow resting my voice.)

Too obvious

Two young fish are swimming along when they are passed by an older fish. He says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” And one of the younger fishes asks the other, “What’s water?”

Most famously attributed to David Foster Wallace

Exceedingly sad is the blindness of the sons of men, who do not see the power and glory of the Lord. A bird lives in the forest, and does not see the forest. A fish swims in the water, and does not see the water. A mole lives in the earth, and does not see the earth. In truth, the similarity of man to birds, fish, and moles is exceedingly sad.

People, like animals, do not pay attention to what exists in excessive abundance, but only open their eyes before what is rare or exceptional.

There is too much of You, O Lord, my breath, therefore people do not see You. You are too obvious, O Lord, my sighing, therefore the attention of people is diverted from You and directed toward polar bears, toward rarities in the distance.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake

Endless doctrinal controversies and formidable erudition

Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church. Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Why do people go to Church?

If there’s one thing I learned in all my research on religious enchantment, it’s that mankind’s religions emerge from a primal experience of awe; everything else is commentary. A highly intellectualized religion diminishes the experience of awe, and turns it into a moral and ethical system. Don’t misunderstand: morality and ethics are important, and should not be set in opposition to primal religious experience. But the point of religion is the encounter with God; anything less than that is a diminution of true religion. The way we in the West approach religion since the Enlightenment is an outlier on human experience — and, as we now see everywhere around us, a dead end.

A new Protestant friend here in Hungary asked to go with me to the Orthodox liturgy recently … He told me that after a lifetime in Protestantism, he has grown weary of church-as-academic-lecture. He explained that he appreciates the intelligence and the teaching of the kind of sermons he has become used to, but as he gets older, his soul craves “enchantment” (the word he used) in faith. A learned discussion of theology and morality leave him thirsting for more — which is why he approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy.

Rod Dreher, Why Do People Go to Church?

How do we measure what’s good?

In medieval England, just prior to the Reformation, there were between 40 and 50 days of the calendar (apart from Sundays) that were feasts of the Church on which little to no work was done … By the end of the Reformation period, such days had largely disappeared, with Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost (Whitsunday), alone remaining – with only Christmas being a possible weekday celebration …

It is possible to think about this shift in Christian thought in economic terms. Fifty days in the year on which work is interrupted can have an enormous impact on productivity and efficiency … The shift itself can be seen in the very use of economics to measure what is good and salutary in a society. … Strictly speaking, the modern world has not been disenchanted. Rather, it is now enchanted with money and the “invisible hand” of the market.

Fr. Stephen Freeman (emphasis added)

Conservation of energy

Religious energy once so animated cultures that massive wars were fought over interpretations of holy writ. Where did this energy go? I might get annoyed with excesses of other faiths, but I’m mostly in the “you do you” camp. Perhaps the energy has been sublimated into other areas, other arenas of focused attention. Its apparent dissipation must be accounted for.  

This energy has found a home in sports and politics 

These are the arenas in which we wage holy war. The war has jumped out of the arena and entered the stands. We are caught in our symbols, our totems, our liturgies. Can these energies be tamed and contained?

Kale Zelden

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Saturday, 12/16/23

The Ivies

The Homer Simpson theory of censorship

By the time I post this, America’s chattering class probably will have moved on to new clickbait [Note: I was wrong about that; they’re still writing about it.], but I thought David French was solid on the Ivy League Presidents’ notorious testimony to Congress:

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage? To quote the presidents back to themselves, context matters. For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students …

[E]ach of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (I served as the group’s president in 2004 and 2005.) So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask: Where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

…

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents. With all due apology to Homer Simpson and his legendary theory of alcohol, it’s as if many campus critics view censorship as the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives, too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups that hold offensive views ….

The Right and Wrong Ways to Deal with Campus Antisemitism

Claudine Gay

[W]hen journalists discovered that [Harvard President Claudine Gay] had plagiarized heavily (even as she published very little before getting the job), Harvard hired a high-powered lawyer to bully those reporters. Several of the academics she plagiarized are not happy about it. And it does bring up questions of her actual credentials here—her biggest success before her appointment as president of Harvard seems to be as part of the mob that tried to smear Roland Fryer, a black professor there who poked some holes in common police racism narratives.

Nellie Bowles

Rhetorical flights of fancy

…

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that a representative survey at Harvard University would show that 51 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 24 found that the attacks by Hamas can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.

…

Mathias Döpfner, The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7.

This is but one of a list of Döpfner’s “I didn’t want to believes,” but its fallacy smacked me in the face. Isn’t “a representative survey at Harvard University” an oxymoron? Isn’t any survey at Harvard incapable of showing what Americans generally between ages 18 and 24 believe?

I think the author knows that:

And, more than anything else, I didn’t want to believe it was possible that some of the most renowned and influential elite universities in the world would capitulate to the cultural struggle carried out in the name of a woke agenda pushed by students that are increasingly demonstrating a blatantly antisemitic mindset ….

The ongoing treason of the intellectuals

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism. 

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

Niall Ferguson, The Treason of the Intellectuals

Elites not fit for purpose

Rod Dreher, who went to LSU instead of an Ivy League school, has a more “meta” view of the débâcle:

What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose.

Dispossession

Stewardship as affront

Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack of stewardship that is the ethical core of a throwaway society, the visible presence of old cars represents quite the opposite. Yet these are easily conflated under the environmentalist aesthetic, and the result has been to impart a heightened moral status to Americans’ prejudice against the old, now dignified as an expression of civic responsibility.

…

Among the sacrifices demanded by the new gods may be your ten year old car that gets 35 MPG, requires zero new manufacturing (with its associated environmental costs), and may be good for another ten years. As Rene Girard points out, ritual violence is usually directed against a scapegoat who is in fact innocent, onto whom the sins of the community are transferred. In our pagan society of progress, it seems anything old and serviceable can serve this role.

Matthew B. Crawford.

I find it affirming that between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, Alan Jacobs posted the exact same selections from Crawford’s essay.

Chastity as atavism

Even many places that are inclined to be chill about private acts between adults balk at how far America is taking things. In America, tens of thousands of people cut off their breasts or genitals every year trying to change their sex. Judges tell parents they will lose custody if they don’t let their children be castrated. Rising STD rates among gay men have led the CDC to approve the continuous use of antibiotics as a prophylactic (DoxyPEP), even though this will surely result in antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Our birthrates are collapsing, and almost half of the children we do have are out of wedlock. There are lots of reasons other countries might look at us and think maybe we don’t have our sexual norms exactly right.

Helen Andrews via Rod Dreher

But leave a scrap

You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Miscellany

The New York Times

[T]he Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

James Bennet, former New York Times Opinion Editor, in the Economist. This is a 16,000-word essay on what has gone wrong at the Times — and how it went wrong.

A big factor is the intrinsic incentives of modern narrowcasting. The New York Times is prospering immensely, after a near-death experience, but it is prospering by telling liberals and progressives what they want to hear while pretending that it’s still an honest, unbiased source. So profitable is the new scam that the Times is unlikely to repent and go back to the old ways.

My decision to skip the Times “news” coverage and go straight to the Opinion pages — where I know I’m getting opinion and am unseduced by it — is vindicated.

Sundry madness

  • Barbara Furlow-Smiles, the woman whose title was Lead Strategist, Global Head of Employee Resource Groups and Diversity Engagement (i.e., head of DEI) at Facebook, pleaded guilty this week to defrauding the company of $4 million. A perfect symbol of these programs that literally the leader of it was very, very busy coming up with ways to steal millions from Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes it was just simple: she had Facebook pay $18,000 to a preschool for tuition, which, I love that, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. Other times, her scams were more elaborate. She hired friends for fake jobs and had them pay her kickbacks (dream of dreams). She submitted fake expense reports and such (oldie but goody). The kickbacks often came in cash, sometimes wrapped in t-shirts, according to the Feds (secure).
  • The Biden administration has decided to go after a random moving company for the crime of hiring too many muscular young men. Yes, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Meathead Movers, alleging age discrimination. There was no complaint that kicked this off, no elderly man who was turned out. The EEOC just decided to bankrupt this random company. The investigation started in 2017, but September 2023 was the moment to strike. Six years of investigating Meathead Movers. Maybe the CEO didn’t tweet enough nice things about Kamala Harris. Who knows. But moving companies beware: Are you hiring strong young men to carry things? Illegal! Go to a retirement home, find the tiniest elderly lady, and force her to haul a piano. That’s justice. That’s the EEOC. No one tell them about the NBA. 

Nellie Bowles

School as Industry

Only if school is understood as an industry can revolutionary strategy be planned realistically.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Counterculture

Lately to be countercultural is to be apophatic: untattooed, unbranded, unvideoed, unwebbed, uncontroversial, no takes, and genuinely nice to people.

@Jonah

Bill Bryson describes cricket.

Politics

Trump II

The warning Cheney issues is clear and persuasive: A second presidential term for Donald Trump would pose great risks to the nation’s democratic practices and identity. A retribution-minded, Constitution-terminating leader buttressed by unscrupulous advisers and ethically impaired lawyers could, she argues, “dismantle our republic.” As both a witness and a target of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and as a leader of the House committee that investigated the attack, Cheney recognizes the power of the mob that Trump commands. She also understands the cowardice of his enablers in the Republican Party, the same kind of loyalists who would populate — or at least seek to justify — a second Trump administration.

Carlos Lozado

Vivek!

I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.

Frank Bruni. Bruni also gives a shout-out to Sarah Isgur:

  • [I]n The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’”

The funny thing is, Isgur did not say that. What she said was “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘asshole.’” The Times censored it.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

The Sacred Veil

I was listening this afternoon to a choral composition by Eric Whitacre, who probably came onto my radar with this a few years ago.

The unfamiliar composition was playing softly, and I was multi-tasking, paying little heed to the words (though a few caught my attention a bit).

Then suddenly I heard something that jolted me. I’d never heard a chorus do anything like that before, and no wonder: it sounded unbelievably difficult.

It was in a setting of this short poem:

Listening to your labored breath,
Your struggle ends as mine begins.
You rise; I fall.

Fading, yet already gone;
What calls you I cannot provide.
You rise; I fall.

Broken, with a heavy hand
I reach to you, and close your eyes.
You rise; I fall.

The piece is titled You Rise, I Fall, and it’s part of the larger piece The Sacred Veil, Whitacre’s setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri. The poet describes it:

This work features a series of poems written about my relationship with my late wife Julie, her battle with ovarian cancer, and the grief I experienced as a result of her passing in 2005. This is the most intensely personal poetry I have ever written, and it evoked exquisite and heart-breaking music from composer Eric Whitacre.

If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favor and ferret it out somewhere, somehow. I heard it recorded by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

But keep the Kleenex handy.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Sunday, 12/10/23

Prelude

This item follows on my enigmatic first item on December 3.

I’ve very frequently been quite harsh toward Evangelical Christians — “Why can’t you stupid people see that you need to be Orthodox!!!” has been the gist. So to anyone who has felt hectored, I apologize. If you’re still here, forgive me — and thanks for bearing with me in my chronic (26 year) convertitis.

I should know from my own experience that it’s not illegitimate to settle into a religious tradition and not be looking for the location of the exits immediately; that was my demeanor toward Calvinism for 20 years or so, and toward Evangelicalism for nearly 30 years before that. Both times, I was sort of blind-sided into recognizing the need to change.

Further, phenomenology and theology sometimes co-exist awkwardly. For instance, I now thoroughly believe that Baptism is not just a symbol, but is one’s initiation in the Church — a very important matter (theology). But I can’t help but feel that my Christian life began, in a non-trivial sense, 12 or so years before my Baptism when I realized (after being caught in flagrante delicto) that beating up on my brother to take away a toy was disappointing to Jesus and I needed Him to forgive me — and to “come into my heart,” as my then-tribe put it (phenomenology).

Bereft though they were of sacrament, Liturgy, incense, Church Fathers, icons, beauty and so forth, that realization and my response were important. But I’ve concluded that Evangelical Is Not Enough.

But I’ve tried to hector others into recognizing that it’s not enough. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.

I could say more about why I felt driven to hectoring people, but for reasons I need not share, I won’t.

Anyway: I need to reconcile myself to the reality of divided Christianity — that not all sincere Christians have entered the Ark, the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the Nicene Creed, and almost certainly some never will. The most I can do under my own power is to produce discontent with where they are — unholy discontent, which could lead them out of Christianity entirely. I don’t intend that.

But if you ever do feel any holy discontent, be sure to give Orthodoxy a look.

And I’ll probably be unable to completely eliminate critiques because Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism differ in important regards (more about that below), and where they do differ, I believe Orthodoxly.

The Main Act

Two kinds of believers

I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.

…

It’s a mistake to treat [the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner] as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.

Christopher Beha, Jon Fosse and the Power of Faith at 1 a.m.

I’m with Beha: “I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.” I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle for many decades now, and I probably see more open questions than when I started.

So I now plan, after some fear that it was being over-hyped, to read Jon Fosse’s Septology.

This is not unrelated to the preceding item.

Why intellectuals don’t convert to Evangelical Christianity

My social medium friend Kyle Essary engages Brad East’s speculation about why intellectuals who become Christian tend to become Roman Catholic or Orthodox rather than Evangelical:

But there’s one area that Brad doesn’t mention. And I think this reason keeps many intellectuals away from many Protestant traditions. Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t have crazies. There may be a few here or there, but when you hear about a Christian group making fools of themselves publicly, you can be fairly certain that they are Protestant—and probably evangelical. Our low-church, anti-institutional biases breed these types. If you are an intellectual considering Christianity, you will not naturally move toward Christian groups that oppose science or higher education. But evangelical Protestants have groups that oppose both.

Kyle has distilled this aspect better than I ever had.

Certainty, Ferocity and Solidarity

[T]he true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.”

…

I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.

Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement …

That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”

…

Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity … I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”

Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.

David French, Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

I appreciate this dissection of what makes “fundamentalism” fundamentalist, and it rings true to my 75 years’ experience. That’s even more interesting to me than why fundamentalists love Florida Man.

Note three things, though:

  1. So described, fundamentalism is not merely distinct from “mainstream” beliefs, if by mainstream one means the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, but also distinguishes it from non-fundamentalist evangelicalism. Indeed, there’s no major difference between Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists in theology (see J.I. Packer, ”Fundamentalism” and the Word of God), but there are evangelicals who are blessedly low on certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
  2. So described, it becomes clearer how there can be Islamic as well as Christian fundamentalists — even Orthodox Christian fundamentalists (though I strongly believe that such Orthodox fundamentalism is not very good Orthodoxy).
  3. [Fundamentalists] “can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity” (French again).

Not a Freudian slip

Victor I. Masters, the head of Home Missions from 1909 to 1921, reflected and influenced denominational thinking when he argued that the North had lost its religion to Romanism and rationalism, and that the SBC’s divine mission was to spread “the Anglo-Saxon evangelical faith.”

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals

Interlude

Quanta

Quantum physics: Electrons moving, but photographing them affects path and speed. Why? How? Quantum theology: God’s mind doesn’t change, but he tells us to pray, and somehow our prayers affect the outcome.

Marvin Olasky, The Wonder of the Universe’s Weirdness

Theology

The classic Orthodox definition of a theologian is well known and frequently repeated in Orthodox circles: “A true theologian is one who prays,” or “One who prays is a true theologian.” This legendary saying reflects the Orthodox phronema and stands in stark contrast to the Western Christian phronema, which strongly emphasizes use of the mind for comprehension of theological truths and rational deduction as a theological method.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Gratitude

I am a millionaire.
My bedroom is full of gold
light, of the sun’s jewellery.
What shall I do with this wealth?
Buy happiness, buy gladness,
the wisdom that grows with the giving of thanks?

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

Postlude

Orthodox Teaching does not merely differ from Western Christianity in content, but the reason for the difference is equally important. After reading this book, Western Christians still may not understand our mentality, but perhaps they will begin to realize that the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is significant and more far-reaching than a few doctrines, ancient rituals, and a refusal to submit to the pope. The variance is deeper than appears on the surface, extending to how theology is conceived, conceptualized, taught, and approached. To complicate matters, often the same terminology is used in East and West, but basic terms or concepts do not have the same meaning at all. What is sin? What is salvation? What is forgiveness?

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Saturday, 12/9/23

I hope I’ll have enough voice to sing this evening’s Lafayette Chamber Singers concert, Pastyme With Good Companye. I’ve been fighting a cold since Tuesday.

Culture

Pizzagate is nothing new

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married.

Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great

The inquisitive spirit

I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.

…

If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.

Agnes Callard. These are but a few snippets from a rich article defending the humanities, though the author cannot tell you the “value” of them.

Seeing obscurely

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears.

Maria Popova, introducing a review of In the Dark

The Apostle Paul said substantially the same thing, of course.

Science and intuition

Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order—the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality—has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word ‘intellectuality’ the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the ‘rationalist’ error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World

Terror Profiteers

We’re had war profiteers for a very long time. Now we have terrorism profiteers:

Money from terror: Is it possible that Hamas terrorists made a profit on the October 7 massacre? It is. On Monday, two law professors, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of NYU and Joshua Mitts of Columbia, released the draft of a paper that makes the case. There was “a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company EFT [exchange traded fund] days before the October 7 Hamas attack. . . . Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv,” they write. Translation? There were people who, knowing the attack was coming, bet that the stocks of Israeli companies would fall. (H/T Joe Nocera for this guest item.)

Nellie Bowles

Politics

Apocalypse

In The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 special issue, 24 writers imagine what a second Trump term would look like.

After noticing that the top X articles on the Atlantic webpage Monday were about how horrible a second Trump term would be, I noted they were all from a January/February 2024 “special issue, and that the block-quote was the banner at the top of the page.

How do we deal with Trump? Indictments boost him. An Atlantic special issue full of warnings (probably ranging from sober to highly speculative) may add as much support as it peels off. Yet how dare we remain mute?

I said when Trump won in 2016 that it marked a major political realignment. I think I underestimated it.

The extent of support for Donald Trump strikes me as an apocalypse:

“Apocalypse” has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation.

(Wikipedia) You could also say “unveiling.” That’s why I say that support for him is an apocalypse, not (just) that a second term would be a catastrophe.

What that apocalypse reveals, I’m starting to think, is that roughly half of Americans are finished with liberal democracy and want a populist strong man. And I suspect that half would say, in essence, “Why shouldn’t we be finished with it? That procedural fetish has not done well for me and mine.”

It might be prudent to “shut up and keep your head down,” but that’s never been advice I was inclined to take.

Reform the Insurrection Act!

The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.

…

When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.

Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford.

David French

Novelty Cons

George Santos was, for now at least, the ultimate Novelty Con:

I’m a college-educated white woman/black man/gay man/Latina/[some combination of the previous] under 40, and I am ready to repeat today’s GOP talking points!” That is the entire value proposition, but it works.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Williamson continues:

Republicans have long been starved for novelty. From its founding in the Little White Schoolhouse in 1854 until 2016, the Republican Party was fundamentally the same thing the whole time: the party of heartland businessmen’s conservatism. …

There is a kind of devolutionary force at work among the Novelty Cons. Ann Coulter may play a crazy person on television, but she is smart and did real work as a real lawyer before she started doing … whatever it is she does now. Ben Carson is a brain surgeon. Michael Steele didn’t just wander in off the street and get made head of the Republican National Committee. 

George Santos, on the other hand, is pretty much a guy who wandered in off the street into the House of Representatives, saying, “Let’s put on a show!” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon kook who wandered in off Facebook. Lauren Boebert is a general-purpose incompetent who wandered in after accidentally poisoning people with bad pork sliders at a county fair in Colorado. Matt Gaetz’s grandfather died of a heart attack at the North Dakota GOP convention, being at that time a minor public official and, apparently, a clairvoyant. This gang represents what you might call the immaculate grift: grift liberated from the burden of trying to carry forward a real political program or philosophy, grift for grift’s sake, ars (of a sort) gratia pecuniae. Putting these people into Congress is like mashing up Carmina Burana with the Ghostbusters theme—yeah, you can do that, there’s no law against it as far as I know, but … why_?_ 

Santos was—is?—whatever anybody needed him to be, the ultimate Novelty Con: Gay! Jewish! (or “Jew-ish.”) Latino! Whatever! He is the epitome of what the Republican Party stands for (“stands for”) in 2023: the willingness to say anything, however transparently dishonest, absurd, or self-abasing, in the hope of winning an election. He mustered some half-formed talk-radio grunts about inflation and crime and the like, but Santos was a pretty straightforward product: a gay Latino willing to put an “R” next to his name, the political version of whatever the opposite of a beard is. That Rep. Santos finally embarrassed the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert enough to get him expelled from the House is his only actual achievement in life.

I can’t say I’m proud of the GOP, but that enough Republicans joined Democrats to expel Santos makes me despise it a hair less.

Bespoke realities

There is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, someone who lives in the real world but also has questions about the moon landing, and on the other, a person who believes the Covid vaccine is responsible for a vast number of American deaths and Jan. 6 was an inside job and the American elite is trying to replace the electorate with new immigrant voters and the 2020 election was rigged and Donald Trump is God’s divine choice to save America.

Such individuals don’t simply believe in a conspiracy theory, or theories. They live in a “bespoke reality.” That brilliant term comes from my friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and it refers to the effects of what DiResta calls a “Cambrian explosion of bubble realities,” communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”

…

Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth. The terms “voluntarily” and “cooperatively” are key. We don’t live in North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China. We’re drunk on freedom by comparison. We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.

David French

Progressives

The Westboro Baptist Church of the left

Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to scream at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral this week. They also showed up to scream during New York’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, which is up there alongside blocking highways at rush hour when it comes to winning over normal people. As the writer Josh Kraushaar put it: these guys are becoming the Westboro Baptist Church of the left.

Nellie Bowles

Ivy League besliming itself

In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”

…

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country.

Andrew Sullivan.

Jordan Peterson made the same point, in a different context, that Sullivan makes in the penultimate paragraph: “It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.” Oppressed are higher status than oppressors; Jews are definitionally oppressors because they are coded “white.”

This is called “progressive.” I don’t care to protect the reputation of progressivism, so I’m not going to concern-troll on its behalf. Fly your freaky flags, progressive America! Let your offensiveness be stand in stark relief to sanity!

It’s times like this when I understand (not to say “agree with”) the rightwing insistence that every presidential election is existential, and that the Ds are far worse than the Rs.

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.

Sunday, 12/3/23

Personal Status Report

I’ve recently been challenged to think again through how the raw reality of divided Christianity should cash out in my life. I don’t think I’ve been getting that right, and I’m working on it (without for one second doubting the claims of Orthodox Christianity).

For one thing, viewed from the 30,000-foot level, my convictions combined with a propensity for polemics, may have led me to sin against Christian charity. I’ll leave it enigmatically there for now.

As I work through this, the tone of my posts may change.

Crypto-casuistry

Ken Myers: … Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic moral theology and pastoral guidance were dominated by a series of moral manuals, which approached ethical decisions casuistically, lists of rules and authoritative citations. One of the mid-twentieth century critics of these manuals, a French Jesuit, judged that they were “far too negative and concerned chiefly with minimal obligations. Virtues were passed over in favor of commandments and law.” When I talk with Matthew Levering about his book. I asked whether he agreed with the judgment that the approach of these manuals was too minimalistic.

Matthew Levering: In terms of today’s morality, you wouldn’t call the moral manuals minimalist, but what you would do though is you would say they sort of encourage a minimalist perspective because because the idea was to exercise your… freedom up to the very limit of what was permissible and then allow law to have its place. So in other words, you could be constantly trying to figure out, you know, what’s the limit that I can get away with? Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. Like, what can I get away with while still acting as a Christian? And so you would be then always going up to the line and testing the line and trying to find different authorities that would give you permission to exceed the line. The moral life then becomes not this glorious thing of being in Christ and of charity and sort of this expansive sense of charity and then all the other virtues. But instead what happens is the more life becomes about trying to identify the minimum and trying to make sure you’re not crossing the line You know, but still getting it’s having as much freedom as you you can possibly get without crossing the line You know these type of these type of things you can see how in practice it led to a certain minimalism.

Matthew Levering on the role of conscience in moral life, Mars Hill Audio Journal volume 158, track 7.

My Evangelical boarding school experience was casuistic in this sense, including bright lines to be pushed against and neglect of positive virtues. The term we used was “legalism,” but it was not easy to entirely escape that mind-set. It left its mark on me. I particularly wish there had been an emphasis on chastity and not just on abstention from sex, which is a pale imitation of chastity.

Calvinball Christianity

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the [biblicist] objection to [catholic] Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down.

Brad East, The great Christian divide

Community

… a concrete human community-not merely a de facto “society” of autonomous individuals who kept their private views to themselves and lived as they pleased within the state’s laws-was not only the social product but also the social producer of embodied Christian faith. It always had been. Without it, beyond the micro-social context of one’s family, it is unclear how one might learn to live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning what to believe and how one should spend an hour or two each Sunday.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

To restore and preserve the faith in robust form, there must be community. I think even the biblicists understand this in practice, if not in theory.

Televangelists

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

John Ames, the protagonist pastor/narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Losing savor

Liberal Christians no longer need theology to make their case. They can couch their argument entirely in terms of secular political rights … In fact, arguments based on rights were probably more convincing than theological arguments even to them. The mainline remains as committed as ever to the social causes of our day—to gay rights, immigration reform, and a stronger social safety net. They still decry racism and economic exploitation, too. They’ve hardly remained silent, but there’s a reason you can’t hear them anymore. They sound just like everybody else.

…

I suspect the twin movements of anti-intellectualism and anti-populism in the United States cannot adequately be told without reflecting on the split of mainline Protestantism into, on the one hand, de-institutionalized fundamentalist and evangelical movements and, on the other, a culturally elite yet increasingly faithless institutionalism.

…

Evangelicalism is a populist movement in that it was founded on patterns of mass consumption; it’s a movement within which a person like Joel Osteen thrives, yet a publication like Books & Culture perishes.

Great art, culture, and learning has generally depended on the support of elite patrons and institutions, not least the church and the state (perhaps especially monarchies). In mass, populist, or highly democratic movements, such excellence receives much less support. The existence of a thriving “high culture” or academic elite requires non-democratic structures that are harder to develop in a mass society. Where mass culture prevails, there’s often a pressure to cater to less cultivated tastes or, alternatively, to rebel against them in dysfunctional ways that signal an elite status.

…

All this is one of the underlying reasons, seldom mentioned, why so many formerly conservative Protestant scholars and writers have gone in the direction of Rome. Conservative Protestantism has an impoverished elite, an unimpressive scholarly culture, and is poorly networked. With the rank apostasy of mainline Protestantism and the exodus of conservatives from such institutions, conservative Christian thinkers feel as though they have no intellectual home. What’s more, they operate in a culture that is more populist in orientation, which can stifle excellence rather than empower it.

Evangelicalism doesn’t produce intellectual and cultural elites like Rome and the mainline traditionally have. Nor do we have strong academic and higher cultural networks. Granting this, it’s no surprise Rome attracts some conservative scholars and writers who wish to make an difference.

Paul Gleason, quoted by Alastair Roberts

Remarriage in Orthodoxy

Q: I’ve heard that the Orthodox Church permits remarriage. Isn’t this a departure from the Lord’s teaching in scripture?

We should start by countering a common misconception that remarriage is allowed. It would be logical to ask the same question with a small variation: Why does the Orthodox Church allow robbery, rape, or murder? Each of these sins, with repentance and a period of separation from the sacraments, can be forgiven and the person restored to full Communion. That does not imply that the Church winks at these sins; rather it acknowledges that a person who makes harmful choices is not a lost cause; he is capable of restoration, and our goal is his repentance and healing, not his exclusion in order to maintain our imagined purity ….

Fr. Silouan Thompson

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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.

Saturday, 12/2/23

A comment about my less-frequent blogging.

I’ve resumed, for several months now, use of my (digital) Journal and Common Place Book to collect many of the items I find amusing or that confirm my biases. A relative few of them I also still blog, along with items I judge are of more general interest than what gets logged only privately. That’s why I’m posting less total volume of material.

As this blog’s free for the taking, I don’t apologize, but wanted to explain.

Politics

The people

Character is destiny

Trump will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the “quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the beginning of all this, character is destiny.

Jonah Goldberg, Something Short of Tragic

Chuck Schumer’s Sister Souljah moment

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish official, gave a roughly 40-minute speech on the Senate floor Wednesday condemning the antisemitism that has exploded across the United States following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, calling it “a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.” The address, aimed largely at those on the political left, called out progressives who celebrated Hamas’ brutal attack and repeatedly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. “Many Jewish Americans fear what the future may bring, based on the repeated lessons of history,” he said. Meanwhile, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were called to appear before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5 to give testimony regarding antisemitism at their respective institutions.

TMD

The parties

Tone-deaf lefties

Voters want to hear how problems can be solved—not told they’re doomed unless obviously impractical steps are taken. And it doesn’t help that the Left’s version of the steps that must be taken includes a raft of unrelated social programs that would be nice to have but don’t do anything about climate change (see, for instance, the Green New Deal proposed in Congress). Nor does it help that obviously necessary components of a clean energy program like nuclear power are ruled out because, well, people on the Left don’t like nuclear power.

Ruy Teixeira, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

The dynamics of Left and Right

[W]e’re just really confused how people are not acknowledging that the democrats are just as in bed with corporate and pharmaceutical interests as republicans … I don’t know enough about psychology to say for sure why this has happened. Why when finally, finally, the Republicans are saying, “Woah, looks like the police are sometimes racist. We do need police reform!” the left had to then go, “Reform? Who said anything about reform? We need to defund the police!”… The truth is that neither party represents working class Americans. And these supposed “socialists” – what are they running on? Free college and banning fracking. It’s maddening.

Highly Qualified: What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?.

This is from some Readwise highlights. I have no memory of who linked to the original enticingly enough to get me there. I swear I’m not a regular at The Dandy, which appears to be for upstate New York elitist pot-heads.

Epigraph or epitaph?

When the history of this era is written, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about” should be its epigraph.

Nick Cattogio, quoting equivocally Anti-Trump Chris Sununu.

How reticent Republicans will come around to Trump

One of the shining lessons of the past eight years is that however low your expectations might be for Republican voters, they’re not low enough. Most of those on the right who should know better but have stuck it out this far will get to “yes” on Trump 2.0, I suspect. Some might do so after determined efforts at self-persuasion, but most will back Trump without much strain.

There are various rationalizations to which they’ll turn to resolve the tension between their nagging fear that Trump is a poisonous threat to America’s civic heritage and their partisan duty to believe that government by the far right is preferable to government by the far left—and that every Democrat is supposedly a member, or a puppet, of the far left. Those rationalizations are a strange brew of magical thinking and hard-nosed “binary choice” partisan logic.

…

[A] Republican-controlled Congress would either tolerate or actively enable Trump’s power grabs in a second term, the same way that congressional Republicans tolerated or actively enabled his aggressive deficit spending during his first term. We are very late in the game for anyone to still pretend that the GOP cares about restraining the federal government whenever they’re in charge of it, but that’s the sort of silliness in which one must indulge to imagine reelecting Trump as some sort of civic good.

Nick Cattogio

Mis-judging what “real Americans” want

Follow me for what is going to long like a sudden left turn: Do you know why the Republicans’ bad reputation on racial questions is a problem for the GOP politically? It isn’t because it costs them among black voters—it is because it costs them among white voters, of whom there are a whole lot more, many of whom do not wish to associate themselves with a party that is known (not without reason) for harboring politicians and activists with ugly and atavistic racial attitudes. These same voters—many of whom would be more or less on board with traditional Republican economic policies—are put off by other characteristics of the GOP coalition: its anti-intellectualism, its rural orientation, etc. That isn’t to say that everybody in the Republican Party is a rube on a turnip truck—but if you see a bunch of rubes piled into a turnip truck, you can bet that the turnip truck is going to have a “Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President!” bumper sticker on it. It isn’t going to say “Biden-Harris 2024.”

The Democrats have wisely offered themselves up as the natural political home of those upwardly mobile urban-suburban professionals the Republican Party doesn’t want. The Martin Center’s main man George Leef can sneer at the elite universities three times a week in the pages of National Review, but there is a great many young Americans who very much would like to attend one of those universities, and a great many middle-aged Americans who would like their children to attend such a school and who care a great deal about who gets in and why. But, even among people for whom Harvard’s admissions standards are not an immediate and urgent issue, the question remains: Do you want to associate yourself with the Ivy League crowd and the upwardly mobile strivers, or with the sneerers and scoffers who (though college-educated themselves, of course!) want you to believe that there’s a bright future in bumpkinism?

…

Republicans have spent the past 15 years or so micturating from a great height upon the aspirations of people who might want (for themselves or for their children) an Ivy League education, a high-paying job in technology or finance, a nice home in Silicon Valley or New York City or another big metropolitan area—in cities and suburbs that may not comport exactly with their politics on the whole but which offer (to everyone who is not a political monomaniac) many other important benefits, from economic opportunity to cultural interests to superior health care facilities. “Real Americans,” Republicans insist, do not aspire to such things—all Real Americans want to be farmers in Muleshoe, Texas, and diesel mechanics in Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Kevin D. Williamson

(Williamson suggests that the Democrats, too, are following policies apt to alienate strivers, but the Republican transmogrification is easier to caricature.)

So glad he solved that

How about it doesn’t matter whether progressives are liberals? We must move beyond the old labels. We are separated by rationalists and irrationalists.

What was once liberal is simply (as it mostly always has been) common sense, common decency, and management of inevitable change for the benefit of the general welfare and liberty and justice for all. Basically, what any reasonable and broad view of society would see as doing the right thing.

Almost anyone’s reading of social and political history would agree that we live in a better, more decent and fair nation because of the right things that rationalists did: abolish slavery, rein in the robber barons, establish labor laws, and approve women’s suffrage, civil rights, voting rights, Social Security and Medicare. The right things to do, which the irrationalists opposed.

In this new century social attitudes have changed, geopolitical power has changed, technology has exploded, the climate has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need and desire to do the right and decent thing. And there is only one side that continues that fight.

When we finally pull our heads above the surface of the water we’re swimming in, we might see that there is no longer a divide of right and left, red and blue, liberal and conservative; it’s one simply of right and wrong. Rationality vs. irrationality.

Mansplaining Texan’s letter to the New York Times

I read this as “Let’s do away with an imperfectly nuanced political spectrum in favor of this useless but self-flattering binary.”

Foreign follies

“Many sober voices warned that an expansion of NATO to Russia’s border would poke the Bear, leading to an inevitable war. As long ago as 1998, following the U.S. decision to expand NATO eastwards, George Kennan said the following to Thomas Friedman:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.

Patrick J. Deneen, Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism

Culture

A brutalizing and stupid idea

The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a ‘practical’ point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

A Matter of Principle

Less than a decade ago, I had high regard for “conservative” Hillsdale College. Its hiring of Michael (“Flight 93 Election”) Anton, who is at it again, together with the populist, rabble-rousing tone of its mailings, have brought that high regard to an bitter end.

Nevertheless, I’m in Hillsdale’s corner on this pernicious lawsuit. Hillsdale accepts no federal aid, but left activists, acting in the name of two co-eds who allegedly were acquaintance-raped by two Hillsdale men, are trying to impose Title IX processes on Hillsdale or else strip it of tax exemption.

SCOTUS sowed bad seed when it let the IRS strip Bob Jones University of tax exemption because of its odious policies on race. This is going to be a battlefront in the Left/Right wars for some time to come (and I have little doubt that the Right will try a tit-for-tat attack on some leftish nonprofits).

EA

Defined in these broad terms, effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?

…

This is why EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals. (This would seem to require a belief that prey animals dying of disease and starvation is superior to dying from predation, but ah well.) … [T]hose examples are essential because they demonstrate the problem with hitching a moral program to a social and intellectual culture that will inevitably reward the more extreme expressions of that culture. It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.

Freddie deBoer, The Effective Altruism Shell Game

Fox Porn

From my point of view, the case against Fox News isn’t that it is dangerous or that Tucker Carlson’s work is likely to incite anybody to violence. (Maybe it will, but I doubt it. This country may generate a few school-shooters every year, but I don’t think it has the energy for a sustained intifada.) The case against Fox News is that it is tedious, repetitive, and lurid. Aesthetically and emotionally, it more often resembles pornography than it does, say, the commentary of Paul Harvey.

Kevin D. Williamson (paywall)

They voted their lying eyes

We disagreed—and still do—with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism. 

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration. 

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they—the public—had not been adequately consulted.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus, The Death of the Old Europe—and the Rise of the Right

The horseshoe theory of politics

[Marx and Engels] write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical …

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter.

Alan Jacobs, Conceptual Marxism

The expiration of small-c conservatism

London has become its own country in a way, leaving the hinterlands further behind, its elites still gnashing their teeth about Boris and Brexit, while picking at their octopus starters. The prime minister is Hindu, the mayor of London is Muslim, and the first minister of Scotland is Muslim. The abandoned husks of churches contrast with the bustle of new mosques. This is a Britain unlike anything before.

And some of it clearly works: close your eyes and listen to young non-white Brits on the buses or trains, and all the accents and slang are instantly recognizable from my youth. The humor is still rich. Civility is fraying but still there. Crime is nowhere near American levels. The new Elizabeth underground line is marvelous. A city with the cultural cohesion of the Heathrow departure lounge somehow hangs together. The Brits are still a nation of high-functioning alcoholics and retain their strange, hysterical aversion to cannabis. It’s a miracle of multicultural harmony, but you can feel its internal tensions rising.

…

And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

Andrew Sullivan

Another new category for this blog

I once fancied that racism in the classic “dark people are inferior to light people” sense had largely vanished from the U.S. I conceded that racial stereotypes remained, but thought that even those fled in the face of a nicely-dressed darker person who spoke standard English — someone like, say, Thomas Sowell, Condoleeza Rice, or Barack Obama.

Birtherism and other bizarre attacks on said Obama persuaded me that I had been mistaken. People weren’t calling him [racial epithet omitted], but something dark and atavistic was afoot. Maybe I need to get out more.

I was less naïve about antisemitism, but it has so shamelessly reared its ugly head since October 7 that I’ve added it as a “category,” appearing today for the first time as such (earlier blogs no doubt had it as a “tag”).

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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.

Sunday, 11/26/23

Prescient if not prophetic

  • Shortly after …, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (hyperlink added)

That feels prescient, doesn’t it? Things feel exactly like that today, and Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich may have shoved us down that slippery slope.

I also sense a parallel between Simon Magus and those who used the name of Christ as if it was a magic incantation, only to be mocked by the demons they were trying to cast out.

There’s always a temptation to try to use some variety of magic to make god(s) do what one wants, and it’s healthy for me to remember that at least two Evangelicals recognized what was happening.

In a similar vein, but with a historic perspective:

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

Undefined

Orthodoxy theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western phronema often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Rebel energy

With this in mind, as a storyteller, I think of Christianity remembering its own myths. Digging into the dark wonder of it all.

Not the stuff of empire and conquest, not the mega-churches and donation box, but the sheer radical eccentricity of its stories, the quiet devastation of love that circles the Beatitudes. The call to adventure. The voluntary abdication of consumer-friendly outcomes. Not building a shopping mall around a Grail. The unfashionable weight of such a thought. The five fathoms depth of it. That’s a rebel energy these days, a whispered thing.

Martin Shaw

Distinctions

On my one-and-only active social medium, I happened upon a religious/antireligious discussion, chimed in with my 2-centsworth, and watched the discussion shift.

The odd thing was that the antireligious side was reacting to evangelicals/fundamentalists, “and by extension all Christians.” That was odd because this medium is chock-full of sane Christians, including some sane evangelicals.

I for one detest the assumption that my cosmology and demeanor toward the world is identical with that of any self-styled Christian who ever offended the one making the assumption about me. There’s more to Christianity than superficially ticking off “yes” to a bunch of checklist affirmations, and anyone who can’t tell the difference between, say, Mother Theresa and Jerry Falwell, Jr., because “both believe a myth,” is an idiot.

(Yes, that makes me guilty of “but I’m not that kind of Christian” — because Christianity in North American is manifest in tens of thousands of clumpings, quite apart from they tens of millions who try to go it solo. I do hope, though, that if a day comes when the idiots decide to actively persecute all Christians without distinction, I’ll not betray my embarrassing brothers and sisters.)

Thanksgiving morning, one participant came up with the mike-drop quote, from Marilynne Robinson, who also “isn’t that kind”:

“Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. There are little jokes about being born again. There are little lectures about religion as a cheap cure for existential anxiety. …

“Am I the last one to get the news that this religion that has so profoundly influenced world civilization over centuries has been ceded to the clods and the obscurantists? Don’t I know that J. S. Bach and Martin Luther King have been entirely eclipsed by Jerry Falwell? The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? I suspect it demonstrates the existence of a human herding instinct. After all, “egregious” means at root “outside the flock.” There are always a great many people who are confident that they recognize deviation from group mores, and so they police the boundaries and round up the strays.”

Yes! This!

My Lord is the One who resurrects. He resurrects the dead from morning until dusk, and from dusk until dawn.”
What the morning buries, the Lord brings to life in the evening; and what the evening buries, the Lord brings to life in the morning.
What work is more fitting for the living God than to resurrect the dead into life?
Let others believe in the God who brings men to trial and judges them.
I shall cling to the God who resurrects the dead.

St. Nikolai of Zhicha, Prayers by the Lake

In a slightly less poetic vein, Fr. Stephen Freeman used to say “God didn’t come to make bad men good. He came to make dead men live.”

Whether to swim the Tiber or the Bosphorus

[T]here seems to be a shift [in the evangelical world] away from the attractiveness of Catholicism toward Orthodoxy, especially for those who don’t have career ambitions within movement conservatism.

Aaron Renn (italics added; H/T Rod Dreher)

That “ambition” distinction between who converts to Catholicism and who to Orthodoxy hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not sure I agree (if only because, in Renn’s context, the alternative to ambitions in “movement conservatism” may be something like involvement in more extreme “dissident conservatism”).

I found the comments to Renn’s posting interesting, especially insofar as they identified the Eastern-ness of Orthodoxy as an impediment. It’s always interesting to see ourselves as other see us.

Mainlining

Bear with me here for two paragraphs of necessary context before the heart of the item:

In terms of political ideology, only 23% of all mainline white American churchgoers identify as liberal, while 55% of their clergy leaders do so. Thirty-two percent of white mainline churchgoers consider themselves moderates and 43% conservative. In contrast, among the clergy who serve these conservative mainliners, 22% consider themselves moderate and only 22% conservative.

Half of mainline clergy identify as Democrats and only 14% as Republican (those who identify as “moderate” make up the rest). Among United Methodists, 60% of laity say they are Republican and 40% Democrat. While UM clergy are far more apt to be Democrat than Republican, among bishops and board and agency staff the percentage may be as high as 80% to 20%.

This, of course, is hardly news to many. I knew a United Methodist ministerial candidate who graduated from one of our premier United Methodist-related universities and then from one of the most highly regarded (liberal) seminaries in the nation. After all of this preparation he received his first appointment, to a circuit in a rural area in a midwestern state. After two months he not only resigned from his church but dropped out of the ministry.

“This has been a terrible mistake,” he explained.

The best ministerial education possible, at least from an institutional perspective, failed to equip him to minister to ordinary people in an ordinary American setting.

…

I became keenly aware that a number of churches were asking for  “conservative” pastors. I do not recall a single instance where a church requested a “more liberal” pastor …

Riley B. Case

Christendom?

I sometimes wonder if Christians claim too much credit for Western culture. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali apparently believes that credit is deserved, as her appreciation of the culture factored prominently into her recently-announced conversion.

And then there’s this:

“The international human rights regime of 1945,” an American human rights supporter remarked, “is no more. American hegemony has eroded. Europe, even with the events of 1992, is little more than a peninsula. The world is now as Arab, Asian, and African, as it is Western. Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants are less relevant to much of the planet than during the immediate post-World War II era.” An Asian critic of the West had similar views: “For the first time since the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions are in the first rank. That unprecedented situation will define the new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply the occasions for conflict.”

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

It seems to me that the waning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights due to the rise of “countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions” testifies, too, that credit is not undue.

The question remains, though, whether the vices of Western culture were baked into the Protestant Reformation, the emergence of a particular kind of Christianity.

Humility

Don’t overdramatize either your sins or your virtues. Frankly, chances are good that neither are spectacular.

Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner

Noted

I have definitely tended for decades toward catastrophism. I hope I haven’t overburdened this blog with that.

But I’m taking heart recently. Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw becoming not just Christians, but Orthodox Christians, bringing some enchantment with them. Ayaan Hirsi Ali becoming a Christian of some sort. Now, within the past 24 hours, I’ve learned that Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Outside Your Head has become Christian (I had no idea he’d been raised by left coast flakes and lived in an Ashram from roughly ages 10 to 15). He declined to expand on that conversion in an Andrew Sullivan podcast, aware that he’s a novice.

Bearing in mind that the plural of anecdote is data, emotionally if not scientifically, I’m growing in confidence that God is up to something good, and I was sure ready for it.

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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.