Veneration of the Cross, 3/19/23

The sacking of Troy

A scene from Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, narrated by the titular character, in which a man gets angry about the then-current protests against the Vietnam War:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, the subject was started and Troy said — it was about the third thing said — “They ought to round up every one of them sons of bitches and put them right in front of the damned communists, and then whoever killed who, it would be all to the good.” […]

It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

And Troy said, “Oh.”

It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

Via Alan Jacobs

Not a bad reminder during Lent. It almost certainly has salience in the political realm of American 2023 as well.

I’ve heard several real-life variations on this anecdote. American Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Desperate Christians?

My antennae were up at the headline: Five charts that explain the desperate turn to MAGA among conservative white Christians. Any variation on “desperate Christians” tells me I’m reading something sensational or that the “Christians” are adherents of some Christianish ideology rather than sound Christian faith.

… [U]nless I’ve been gravely misinformed, if it throws in for nothing else, surely Christianity is bullish on hope. Americans should take note. Stateside, hope is in short supply.

Liel Leibovitz

Reading the Five Charts article, I was inclined to think the headline was sensationalist more than substantive — a religious variation on “The GOP is all White Christian Nationalists now.”

Rigor, whether you like it or not

Rod Dreher watched The Paper Chase and was smitten by The Majesty Of Professor Kingsfield, whose approach to matters once was spiritually helpful for Rod:

Back in the summer of 1991, when at age 24 I had made a decision to enter the Catholic Church, I went to the university Catholic chapel, thinking — oh, sweet summer child that I was — that a college ministry would offer a more intellectually serious approach to Catholicism. After months of therapeutic, sentimental navel-gazing in which I had been invited over and over to get in touch with my okayness, I left in disgust.

I was sent to an inner-city parish, and there met with old Father Dermot Moloney, an Irishman who dyed his hair shoe-polish black, and who had a Kingsfieldian crust to him. He heard my story, and agreed to instruct me in the faith. He said, in his porridge-thick accent, “By da time I get troo with ye, ye might not want to be a Catlick, but ye’ll know what a Catlick is.” I was so grateful that Father Moloney, gruff though he was, respected the faith, the tradition, and me enough to present it that way.

German Catholicism

Germany already has a Protestant church [and] we don’t need two.

Pope Francis’ remark to Bishop George Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference, via George Weigel, Apostasy in Germany’s Catholic Church. More from Weigel:

As the Synodal Way, which some in Rome call the “Suicidal Way,” drew the attention of Catholics world-wide, many said that German Catholicism was heading into “schism”—an institutional rupture with Rome. That isn’t quite right. Schisms typically are caused by issues of church order. Thus the Catholic Church believes the Orthodox churches of the Christian East are “schismatic” because they don’t accept the pope’s primacy and universal authority. What is unfolding in Germany is different—akin to the 16th-century Lutheran Reformation: apostasy.

Rome jumps the shark on war and killing

Bernard [of Clairveaux] did not stop with the [Knights] Templar Rule. He went as far as writing a treatise entitled In Praise of the New Knighthood. In it he declared without hesitation that “the knights of Christ may safely do battle in the battles of their Lord, fearing neither the sin of smiting the enemy nor the danger of their own downfall, inasmuch as death for Christ, inflicted or endured, bears no taint of sin, but deserves abundant glory.” Perfectly aligned with the new papal doctrine of indulgences, such a claim encouraged Christians to do what traditional Christianity had always taught them never to do: to kill their enemies, with an assurance that doing so would open to them the kingdom of heaven.

Fr. John Strickland, The Age of Division

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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.

St. Patrick’s Day 2023

I have nothing to say about St. Patrick beyond (a) he lived and ministered before Rome went into schism, and is therefore recognized by the Orthodox; (b) though Ireland is rich with spirituality that echoes the pre-schism church, we Orthodox don’t view him as a very major Saint, nor do we get drunk and rowdy on green beer to honor him.

Prissy Dissenter

I have long known that it’s important to guard my imagination. I have, for slightly less long, actually guarded my imagination — most of the time and more or less.

It’s not my place to boss others around, but some of the recommendations I get from fellow Christians for movies or (more importantly) TV shows and streaming clearly have not been run through a very fine “guard your imagination” filter.

For instance, David French raved about Ted Lasso, but I didn’t finish the first season because of all the f-bombs and sexual themes. I’m not opposed to sexual themes — or any other themes I can think of — in the abstract. That’s why I was never even tempted, let alone persuaded, by the earlyish evangelical and fundamentalist objections that Harry Potter books were “about witchcraft.”

But when non-marital sex is portrayed as perfectly wholesome, and when f-bombs are so ordinary that a major character keeps dropping them as a sports commentator, my prissy conscience says “no!” I could give more detailed examples of what was objectionable in Ted Lasso, but it wouldn’t be good for either of us.

I’m even beginning to wonder about British Mysteries. We subscribe to BritBox and watch on average nearly one British mystery per day. But I’ve noticed that not a single admirable character (other than Brother Cadfael) professes any form of Christian faith (and Cadfael is, probably realistically, surrounded by monastic brothers who fall far short of exemplary). Indeed, when religion comes up, the good guys basically say “Well, I was raised religious but I don’t believe it any more.”

The Overton Window, to put it differently, is open only from indifference to hostility.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of losing my faith over British Mysteries, but there may be subtler effects. I’m on guard.

UPDATE: I failed to mention Father Brown — probably because, as portrayed in the longest-running series of Father Brown mysteries — he was basically a detective who told the guilty party that they should repent — only this and nothing more.

Culture

Wandering as the birds of the air, then snared

[T]he key driver of Machine modernity, and the chief enemy of human freedom, has always been the state. It follows from this that escaping the reach of the state, and attempting to rebuild a moral economy, is the work – or the beginning of the work – of the reactionary radical.

…

British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, which is also the mind of the Machine, when he wrote:**

Here [Sumatra] I am the advocate of despotism. The strong arm of power is necessary to bring men together, and to concentrate them into societies … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.

To read [James C.] Scott’s book is to be made to think hard about the conditions that a state needs to thrive, and thus the conditions that its cultural refuseniks might need to create in return. Based on Scott’s studies of Southeast Asia, we can begin to compile a basic list of necessities for state flourishing:

A reliable staple crop (in Asia, wet rice; in Europe, wheat; in South America, maize, etc)
An effective transportation system for people and goods
A settled population
Enforcement of law and order
An effective central government
A system of taxation and classification of population
A system of communication/propaganda
Slavery or forced labour

All of this applies today to the state in which I live, including the last one. The slavery and forced labour now takes place far from the core of modern Western states, in places like central Africa or China, where the poor mine our smartphone components or sew our cheap clothes in regimented workhouses, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary for the system to function.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Jellyfish Tribe, another of his essays that I’ve marked to revisit. It’s excellent. He’s a Substacker I’ll unequivocally recommend.

Kingsnorth’s very valuable essay also has a list of attributes that help make a people ungovernable. They’ll probably appear another day because I can’t get this essay off my mind.

Not the usual bllsht about wokeness

Nick Cattogio almost instantly became a favorite pundit after he moved to the Dispatch and I began reaing him. He recently turned his critical eye on “wokeness”:

Trying to define “wokeness” is like trying to define “hardcore pornography.” You can do it, more or less, but you’re mostly just trying to articulate a gut feeling of transgression.

…

Damon Linker, a centrist, has written often lately about “wokeness” and offers another definition.

…

This is what I mean when I use the term “woke”: the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture.

That’s how I think of “wokeness.” It’s not just a belief system, it’s a tactic.

Progressives have some very particular and controversial ideas about race, gender, oppression, and victimization that aren’t shared by much of the country, including members of the Democratic Party. But rather than concede that those subjects are matters of public controversy, in some cases they resort to social and professional sanctions to try to compel dissenters to accept their orthodoxy. (Adult dissenters, I mean. Schoolchildren can and will be indoctrinated into that orthodoxy.) Thomas Chatterton Williams cut to the heart of it when he made this point recently about the enforcement arm of “wokeness”: “Cancel culture is really about when someone is called out by a mob for transgressing a not-yet-agreed upon norm.”

…

The further you go toward the right-wing fringe, the more likely you are to find people who’ll insist … that lots of norms most of us take for granted haven’t truly been “agreed upon.”

I don’t think that’s fundamentally the game being played here, though. (Maybe a few people are playing it.) New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is closer to the mark in believing that anti-wokeness has simply become a placeholder ideology for a party that can’t agree on what it believes.

Not only is Michelle Goldberg close to the truth, but such manias as anti-CRT and anti-Woke are consciously manufactured placeholder ideologies for a party that has, literally, no platform:

It should elicit some sighs that I’m even bringing this up. [Christopher] Rufo has been open about his plan to play intentionally fast and loose with this term. Last year he gloated to James Lindsay: “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” It seems pretty clear that Rufo doesn’t care what is and isn’t critical race theory. He sees it as a usefully “toxic” brand under which he can lump “various cultural insanities,” whether or not they have anything to do with CRT per se.

Jesse Singal

Counter-anticulture

The building up of practices of care, patience, humility, reverence, respect, and modesty is also evident among people of no particular religious belief, homesteaders and “radical homemakers” who—like their religious counterparts—are seeking within households and local communities and marketplaces to rediscover old practices, and create new ones, that foster new forms of culture that liberalism otherwise seeks to eviscerate. Often called a counterculture, such efforts should better understand themselves as a counter-anticulture.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Prescient

Close but more tenuous relations exist between Russia and Georgia (overwhelmingly Orthodox) and Ukraine (in large part Orthodox); but both of which also have strong senses of national identity and past independence.

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

Politics

New class war

The influence of big donors in both parties further skews politics from the pragmatic concerns of America’s working-class majority. Wealthy donors, like primary voters, tend to be socially liberal and support free trade, immigration and cuts in government social spending more than the average voter. It’s not hyperbole to conclude that the United States is a nation of communitarians ruled by an oligarchy of libertarians.

Michael Lind, America’s new class war

Poor Mike Pence

Mike Pence has really been letting loose on Trump and January 6. Here’s Pence speaking to the white-tie Gridiron Dinner attendees this week: “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Poor Mike Pence. He’s really in a bind. All he wanted was to be a good, happy evangelical conservative, closing down drag brunches and getting upset about Disney princesses showing their shoulders. But he had to ride to power on Trump, who never saw a Disney princess he didn’t want to see a little more shoulder from. So maybe Pence could find comfort on the left, along with the other Trump defectors? Maybe he can please the Gridiron Club folks? The trouble is, Mike Pence is a true believer. He can never pretend that, actually, he wants transgender turtles in the next Pixar movie. Now he’s teasing a presidential run, and we must all watch him suffer more. God, can you just take him to wherever you are storing Tim Kaine?

Nellie Bowles

Viva la difference!

The French battle against transgender activism has created some strange bedfellows:

Such is the extremity of transactivism, however, almost everyone who isn’t chronically underinformed or under 25 ends up on the other side of it eventually.

Kathleen Stock, Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

Cant

Diversity

“My kingdom for a moratorium on describing single individuals as ‘diverse,’” – Jill Filipovic, via Andrew Sullivan

Thinking outside the box

Sometimes I just love the irony that “think outside the box” has become a cliche.

ChrisJWilson on micro.blog

Silence

“Silence is golden.” (Tradition)
“Silence is violence.” (Today’s progressives)

Other wordplay

The secret of life

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well. (Hugh Walpole)

Via The Economist, The world in brief, 3/13/23

The Past

Except in the area of dental care, the Past is almost always better.

Terry Cowan, Spare Me

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Ides of March 2023

Culture

Obituary — Traute Lafrenz

As the German Army faced crushing losses at Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943, the White Rose sensed mistakenly that military reverses would turn Germans against Hitler. The group’s fliers, quoting from Goethe, Schiller, Aristotle, Lao Tzu and the Bible, urged passive resistance and sabotage of the Nazi project.

“Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days?” the first leaflet asked. “Who among us can imagine the degree of shame that will come upon us and upon our children when the veils fall from our faces and the awful crimes that infinitely exceed any human measure are exposed to the light of day?”

From the New York Times obituary for Traute Lafrenz, the last survivor of the German Resistance group White Rose.

Note particularly the first sentence, which strikes me as relevant to the current political popularity of certain creeps and losers.

Picking the lesser evil

As much as I object to the sloppy practices of some gender clinics and to their widely-reported unseemly haste to “transition” (i.e., mutilate) adolescents, there is a case for balancing harms, and for giving great weight to the question “who decides?”

That comes forcefully to mind as I watch ham-handed limelight-seekers in legislatures trying to solve the trans social contagion with something close to outright bans on any approach to adolescent gender dysphoria other than “watchful waiting.” I think doctors should do a lot more watchful waiting than they have been, but when I saw the legislative response, I realized it may be best for legislators to stay out of it if they can’t do any better than that — and it may be that they legitimately cannot.

If “patient, parents and physician decide” prevails, it will mean (in the current, white-hot mania) many lives ruined with the only recourse being a malpractice action, not restoration of full health. But that imperfect outcome may just be the best we can do.

(I wrote this before reading Andrew Sullivan’s Substack, which made an analogous point.)

How to treat critics of democracy

It would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy—even if they are enemies of democracy—provided they are thinking men (and especially great thinkers) and not blustering fools.

Leo Strauss via Michael Millerman at First Things

Go thou and do likewise, HRC

When the Berlin Wall fell, the Committee for the Free World, a neoconservative think tank, closed its doors. Its director, Midge Decter, concluded that it had served its purpose and so should dissolve. Gay-rights organizations [e.g., Human Rights Campaign] chose a different path after Obergefell. Rather than declare victory and go home, they moved on to the “next frontier”: transgender rights. Religious conservatives had already been largely eliminated from important American institutions, and so posed no internal obstacle to the pursuit of this goal. Feminists, who remained, mostly went along with the idea that men could become women. Those who chose to speak were labeled “TERFs” and targeted with the same arsenal of social, professional, and financial threats that had once been deployed against opponents of same-sex marriage.

Matthew Schmitz, How Gay Marriage Changed America by Matthew Schmitz

Ginger Prince welcomes “dialog”

The ginger Prince is “open” to talking with the family, “to help them understand their unconscious bias.” We all know what this type of “dialogue” means coming from one who feels victimized. It means that you talk and talk until you agree with them. It is pointless to disagree with those who carefully nurture their sense of victimhood, the perpetually aggrieved, whether it be your crazy cousin or the former President.

Terry Cowan, Spare Me

Learning from Armenians

I asked every person I met if they felt any hate—toward the Turks, or the Azeris, or anyone else who imperiled Armenia or turned a blind eye to their fate. The question struck them all as strange. “Why would I feel hate?” a former senior government official responded over espressos and biscotti. “There are so many other, more productive things to feel and do.”

… [U]nless I’ve been gravely misinformed, if it throws in for nothing else, surely Christianity is bullish on hope. Americans should take note. Stateside, hope is in short supply.

Liel Leibovitz

Journalism

Bothsidesism failure

Here I would remind you that Chris Cuomo had his entire media career destroyed because he gave a politician (his brother) back-channel advice concerning a specific incident without disclosing it.

Which is proper: What Cuomo did was 100 percent out of bounds. CNN was right to fire him. It’s good that no other mainstream outlet has hired him.

My point is that in the “liberal mainstream media,” Chris Cuomo got the professional equivalent of the death penalty for an offense that was a tiny fraction of the size of what happens up and down the line at Fox every forking day. And the Fox people will face zero consequences for their infinitely greater sins.

But, hey, the liberal mainstream media got the Covington kids story wrong for 24 hours, so, what are you gonna do, right? Both sides?

Jonathan V. Last, Spoiler: Fox Wins

I almost added emphasis, but surely you can read or re-read four short paragraphs and get the point.

With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged

I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of [Bill O’Reilly’s] schtick. The schtick is built on this perception that he is the character he plays. He is Everyman … fighting for you against the powers that be. And that’s great as a schtick. But the moment that it’s revealed not to be true, it’s over.

Tucker Carlson in 2003, via Andrew Sullivan.

Politics

What is “woke”?

This is what I mean when I use the term “woke”: the effort by progressives to take ideological control of institutions within civil society and use those positions to mandate that their moral outlook (and accompanying empirical claims about race, American history, and human sexuality and gender) be adopted throughout the broader culture. Note that for the most part this is about society and not politics as normally defined. Democrats (at least outside of the very bluest districts) aren’t running for office on a woke agenda. Plenty of people tried to in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but the least woke candidate among them (Joe Biden) prevailed, showing that America’s left-leaning party keeps one foot firmly planted in the unwoke liberal center-left, where I make my ideological home.

Yet Republicans haven’t responded at the level of civil society. Instead, prodded by rabblerousing right-wing digital activists like Christopher Rufo, they have sought to combat wokeness using the blunt force of government power—by banning books, curtailing what can be taught in schools, imposing penalties on private companies for taking progressive stands on social and cultural issues, and seizing control of public universities to prevent them from teaching the “wrong” things and following DEI mandates in their hiring decisions.

Republicans justify these aggressive moves by claiming that wokeness isn’t just a problem but a huge problem, a massive problem, maybe even the biggest problem facing the country. In this respect, wokeness has become a successor in their minds to communism—a totalitarian ideology of the left that threatens to destroy all that’s good and great about America and that therefore needs to be rooted out by any means necessary. (Some on the right make the connection to communism explicit by describing wokeness as a form of “cultural Marxism.” Since I see the phenomenon primarily as a form of post-Protestant Christianity, I avoid using the term.)

…

[N]othing would do more to empower wokeness as a grassroots phenomenon than sending DeSantis to the White House, where he would fight moral illiberalism with political illiberalism, in the process turning left-wing activists into martyrs for freedom and democracy.

We can’t fight wokeness by smashing it politically. We can only fight it by convincing liberal-minded people in powerful positions within private and public institutions that they should stand up to and resist it. Which may be just another way of saying that the key to stopping wokeism is a reaffirmation of liberalism.

Damon Linker

Making your adversaries second-class citizens

I think David French succeeded today in identifying why I find our polarized politics so worrisome:

The Constitution of the United States, properly interpreted, provides a marvelous method for handling social conflict. It empowers an elected government to enact even contentious new rules while protecting the most fundamental human rights of dissenting citizens. Political defeat is never total defeat. Losers of a given election still possess their basic civil liberties, and the combination of the right to speak and the right to vote provides them concrete hope for their preferred political outcomes.

But if a government both enacts contentious policies and diminishes the civil liberties of its current ideological opponents, then it sharply increases the stakes of political conflict. It breaks the social compact by rendering political losers, in effect, second-class citizens. A culture war waged against the civil liberties of your political opponents inflicts a double injury on dissenters: They don’t merely lose a vote; they also lose a share of their freedom.

That’s exactly what’s happening now. The culture war is coming for American liberty — in red states and blue alike. The examples are legion ….

I think the link will get you through the NYT paywall.

The kinds of laws French identifies offend me in another way: they reflect the contempt of legislators and governors for their oaths to uphold the Constitution, inasmuch as many of these laws are unconstitutional substantively or because they’re so vague that a reasonable person cannot discern where the lien is between lawful and unlawful. And it’s a black mark against Ron DeSantis that he supports several of them.

And don’t get me started on the smarmy governor of California, who … no, I don’t want to get started.

Heuristics to counteract gaslighting

In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth — and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment view or the consensus position, you’re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.

Ross Douthat, A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies This bubbled up among Readwise clips recently.

It seems to me that as we enter the age of AI-generated fake news, the heuristics Douthat commends for conspiracy theories will be doing double-duty.

Election 2024 storm clouds

Ross Douthat, Trump Knows How to Make Promises. Do His Rivals? is well worth reading if you don’t mind the gist: that Trump will win the GOP nomination.

Smart takes, dumb takes

There will be two populist right-wing critiques of SVB, I suspect, more complementary than contradictory.

The smart one, laid out by Ramaswamy in his detailed analysis of SVB’s mismanagement, is that a bailout will create more problems for the country long-term than would letting the bank fail and leaving its depositors in temporary financial limbo. Customers with millions or billions of dollars in assets suddenly have no great incentive to ensure that they’re banking with a responsible institution now that the feds have agreed to backstop irresponsible ones. Better to let SVB’s clients suffer and thereby incentivize other American businesses to do greater diligence in deciding where to park their money. The best-run banks will get the lion’s share of the deposits. Free-market competition, in all its glory.

That’s impressively logical but too pat, I think, at a moment of panic. Panic is the enemy of logic; once bank runs begin, even banks that did things the right way might be overrun and broken as customers rush to move their money. And that money won’t be moved to better-run midsize banks, it’ll be moved to Wall Street giants for maximum safety.

Still, Ramaswamy’s basic point, that markets will reward and punish the right people more fairly and efficiently than the government can, is well taken. Smart critique.

Then there’s the not-so-smart one.

They were one of the most woke banks

(Republican Congressman James Comer, via Aaron Rupar on Twitter via Nick Cattogio)

To borrow Joe Biden’s line about Rudy Giuliani, many Trump-era Republicans are so invested in culture war that they can’t get through a sentence without a noun, a verb, and “woke,” or some variation thereof.

Close encounters

Duck!

For the first time ever, I set aside my annual vehicle registration papers and forgot to send them in. So I appeared at the BMV in person to remedy the problem.

O felix culpa! I got my first up close look at 7’4″ 305 pound Zach Edey, likely NCAA Men’s player of the year. (Eventually, my number was called and I was seated to his immediate left.)

Yes, he has to duck for every doorway. Duck quite a lot, actually.

Another close encounter

As long as we’re doing photos and stories of close encounters (well, I am anyway), I’ll reminisce about a choral experience.

Singing under the late William Jon Gray, our serious amateur chorus usually hired soloists for our major works, generally sacred classics like masses and oratorios. One Spring as we were warming up for the concert, Mr. Gray introduced us to our tenor soloist, brought in from the Jacobs School at Indiana University, mingled in with the tenor section for warmups, but who had not even joined us in dress rehearsal (unusual).

Ladies and gentleman, I’d like to introduce you to our tenor soloist today, Lawrence Brownlee. Enjoy him, because we’ll never be able to afford him again: he won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions this week.

I promised a picture, but it’s not of our concert. You may recognize the famous lady Lawrence accompanied in this Met production:

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Gregory Palamas Sunday 2023

Losing Passion

As I age, I find I’m ever slightly improving in my ability to, as my internal dialog has it,

Let it go. You can’t change it, either because you don’t know how or because your superannuated and faith-informed voice is inaudible to the powers that be. If it’s to be changed, someone else, someone younger, someone more fluent in the desacralized argot of the day, must take the initiative.

To some extent, this is just an appropriate response to my stage of life. I said four years ago, as I passed threescore and ten, that I’d passed my “Sell By” date. Eternal matters feel even more urgent.

But there’s a sense in which anyone who wants truly to follow Christ needs the same attitude. So teaches my tradition, pretty consistently.

It’s a hard admonition to heed.

I therefore take it that Orthodox politicians, varying from to Justin Amash to Barbara Mukulski, are rather like soldiers, doing what needs to be done but risking or incurring a lot of soul-harm in the process.

Is that why we’re admonished to pray for those in authority?

Priorities

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.

Proverbs 4:7

Making a virtue of one of the great vices

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Myth and Tradition

In Japan, the old myths broke down after the war, and people needed a new way to understand our place in the universe. So because it is impossible to go back to the old myths, we will have to make new ones.

Quoted by Andy Couterier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

This reminds me of when my high school Headmaster announced that we were starting “a new tradition.”

That I didn’t have great regard for tradition at the time may have what made it sound weird to me; that I have much respect for tradition now makes it sound no less weird.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

Raquel Welch, to my surprise, died a traditional Presbyterian Church lady in a small church outside Beverly Hills:

Outside Beverly Hills, the starlet found a small church “on the way to Pasadena, where the pastor and congregation were very devout and really knew their scripture. I had come there because I’d heard the pastor speak on the radio, and it sounded like he might be a good source of information. That turned out to be true. Apparently, even inept, awkward prayers are answered.”

Welch described the congregation as modest, unassuming, and friendly. “The people in this church weren’t Hollywood types,” she reported. “Even so, when I entered the chapel on that first day, I felt quite tentative. Maybe I didn’t belong among these people who actually practiced their faith. I didn’t look like them, sound like them, or act like them. I stood out like a sore thumb.” She sat in the back of the chapel.

“By the time the sermon was over, I felt remarkably comfortable sitting among these parishioners; not one of them gave me a second look,” recalled Welch. She found the members refreshing. “Not a superficial bone in their body.”

Without divulging the name of the congregation, Welch had found a spiritual home. “This is my church now. I have become a member of this parish and its people are my brothers and sisters in faith,” she wrote. “Together we form a fellowship where I can reaffirm my beliefs and worship every Sunday. When I’m in their midst, I’m just Raquel, not anybody special.”

This may have been the only location in Southern California where Raquel Welch was “not anybody special.” Counterintuitively, that must have been sweet liberation for a woman who had spent a lifetime under intense scrutiny and critique.

Steve Beard, Not Just Another Pretty Face: Raquel Welch, RIP (H/T Terry Mattingly)

If she had joined a megachurch, we surely we have known about it.

Ravi Zacharias

The Ravi Zacharias scandal and corporate complicity have bothered me a great deal, if only because Zacharias seemed even to skeptical Orthodox me like a serious and devout guy.

Oddly, a court decision in a lawsuit against Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Inc. has helped me get my facts a little straighter, to lessen my impression of a pervasive coverup, and to appreciate how damaging it would have been to allow the class action lawsuit to proceed. (Don’t be intimidated: this link is to a blog summary of the decision.)

Who can theologize?

[T]he overintellectualization of religion has contributed to the belief that anyone can theologize. Our Western culture, which itself is a by-product of the Renaissance, Reformation, and so-called Age of Enlightenment, influences us to focus on the intellectual aspect of Orthodoxy.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

The Gospel of Progress

In these latter days, the masters of machines and money have imagined themselves to be “building the Kingdom” (Blake’s Jerusalem) with plans, intentions, goals, and utopias. [Such language was the bread and butter of public speech in my time among the Episcopalians]. The plans generally seemed to involve the rich helping the humble and meek so they would no longer need to be humble and meek. With every success they became even greater strangers to God. Their Churches stand empty, their children having forgotten God and looked towards other dreams.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Gospel of Progress – and the New Jerusalem

Attempted aphorism

A Christian who Pastors himself has a fool for a parish.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Saturday, 3/11/23

Culture

What is it about “bad” they don’t understand?

Plato spoke of morality being eternally oriented toward the idea of the Good. Theologians and philosophers who followed in the Platonic tradition have typically insisted that evil has no positive power of its own and is merely the absence of goodness in a person, thing, or act. Many Christians have affirmed a version of this view, speaking instead of God’s infinite and intrinsic goodness anchoring the moral order underlying the world. But others have insisted that evil is its own independent force, tempting human beings to acts of sinful defiance, doing battle with God, challenging him, and even seeking his ruin and defeat.

In the Christian tradition, this force has many names: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, and others.

In the largely post-Christian public world of the United States, this force has come to be called fascism, Nazism, or Hitler. (At least among liberals and progressives. Among conservatives and others on the right, Communism plays an analogous role.)

Fascism, Nazism, Hitler—these may be our (only?) fixed moral absolutes, with our publicly affirmed positive standards of justice and progress often defined largely by negation of the totalitarian cruelty, prejudice, anti-Semitism, racism, and generalized bigotry that characterized the regime of Nazi Germany.

Damon Linker, When Bad Isn’t Good Enough

Gender news

In chaotic gender news: On the left this week: USA Powerlifting will allow trans women to compete in the women’s division. On the right: Daily Wire host Michael Knowles says at CPAC that “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

If you are someone empathetic and kind and reality-based, you have nowhere to go. Your two options are bleak. On one side is the argument that biological males who went through male puberty should be able to compete against biological females in the sport of . . . powerlifting. On the other side is the sort of panicked and vicious talk of “eradicating” whatever “transgenderism” might be to Michael Knowles, which, for all I know, might include me wearing pants. Basically, for the moderate, things remain bad.

Nellie Bowles

Monkey Business

HelloFresh, a German firm that delivers meal ingredients, said it would stop sourcing its coconut milk from Thailand, over fears that farmers there are using monkeys as forced labour. The firm has come under pressure from PETA, an animal-rights group, which says monkeys are often chained to trees and whipped, and forced to spend long hours picking the drupes.

The Economist, The world in brief for 11:00 or so, 3/8/23

Shorts

Erasure

Hackneyed phrase of the decade: “trying to erase our/my existence.”

This would be awkward locution even as applied to genocide; it’s incoherent as a complaint about policy differences.

Poetic Wordplay

Education is the refinement of evil.

R.S. Thomas

One of three

Emotionally incontinent fan-service

Kevin D. Williamson’s coinage for one of three competing needs or values in journalism. His specific reference was to the New York Times, but he clearly had others (Atlantic and Fox news, for specific instances) in mind

Virtue-signaling is alive and well

privileged people flagellating themselves with dental floss.

Garrison Keillor, The worst play I ever saw: a landmark

I miss not being able to miss out

Living in the Internet era means you can never not know what you’re missing out on.

Matt Dreher via his father.

Fox News

Public lies

A question this column has wrestled with more than once: When are the lies of a disreputable and widely discredited figure like Mr. Trump a bigger danger to the republic than lies that receive the near-universal endorsement of the establishment and its institutions?

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Pretense

Carlson will say what the Fox News audience truly doesn’t want to hear — not just that Donald Trump lost, but that he was also a bad president. He was bad for the country. On Jan. 4, 2021, Carlson texted this about Trump’s single term: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

Thank you, Tucker. As Trump runs again, this is the most important truth of all.

…

So why would Carlson say that Trump’s presidency was a “disaster?” We don’t yet know his specific case against Trump, and he seems to have no intention to tell the public what he really thinks. But the word certainly fits. Politically, Trump has hurt the G.O.P. He handed back control of every elected branch of the federal government to the Democratic Party in four short years. He was fiscally irresponsible. The budget deficit grew every year of his presidency. He passed only one truly meaningful piece of legislation in four years, a tax bill that was far more Paul Ryan’s than Donald Trump’s. He undermined America’s vital military alliances.

His corruption, his eagerness to put millions of dollars of taxpayer money into his resorts and properties and his willingness to let his family accept vast sums from foreign entities is profoundly troubling. We’ll likely be discovering further examples of his outright graft for years, if not decades. There’s considerable evidence that suggests he committed felonies in office.

And yet, that is still a somewhat superficial diagnosis. If you dig deeper, you’ll see that, for all the flaws just enumerated, the Trump years were most disastrous for the social and civic health of the United States of America. The increases in suffering and despair have been profound. Donald Trump’s presidency battered the American spirit.

David French

No consistency, hobgoblin or otherwise, at Fox

Tucker has spent just two hours so far unveiling what he’s found in the January 6 video archive but already his program has devolved into arguing in the alternative to encourage viewers to choose their own adventure. On Monday evening he sneered at the idea that the rioters were violent: “They were orderly and meek,” he claimed. “These were not insurrectionists; they were sightseers.” Then, on Tuesday, he complained that the Capitol Police weren’t prepared for what they would face that day.

Faulting D.C. cops for not anticipating the threat from meek sightseers makes no sense, but it doesn’t need to. Carlson isn’t sketching out a narrative of the insurrection, he’s offering viewers different paths to reach the conclusion that whatever happened that day shouldn’t be held against Trump, the Republican Party, or the broader right.

And amazingly, he’s doing so at a moment when America—save for those who watch only Fox News—is learning in gory detail how remote some of his private political views are from his audience’s. Shortly before Tuesday night’s show aired, the latest court documents from Dominion Voting Systems were revealed. From NBC News:

Carlson, one of Fox News’ top hosts, made it clear on Jan. 4, 2021, that he was getting fed up with Trump. In a text exchange with an unknown person, Carlson said: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately. I blew up at Peter Navarro today in frustration,” he added, referring to the former Trump administration official. “I actually like Peter. But I can’t handle much more of this.”

He wrote in another text message: “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

…

Nicholas Grossman … identi[ed] a few other contradictory staples of the Trump era, such as Trump somehow being the ultimate tough guy and the ultimate victim and Trump being a supremely talented executive who’s constantly undermined by the people he chooses to hire. Those positions can’t be reconciled logically but they can be reconciled circumstantially, as political needs require. If you’ve spent years arguing that Trump is hypercompetent but that he’s also forever being blindsided and thwarted by those around him, believing that January 6 was at once justified, overblown, and a sinister ploy by political enemies is no sweat.

Nick Cattogio, Choose Your Own Adventure

Tucker clearly isn’t stupid. There’s no cure for stupid. But liars-for-hire can repent.

Politics

Losers

I endorsed in my last blog post the “theory that many grassroots Republicans don’t want to win elections anymore.”

If Garrison Keillor is right, that attitude is not a Republican exclusive:

An excellent story by William Finnegan in last week’s New Yorker opens a window on the Democratic incompetence and squalid corporate corruption that frustrates all attempts to replace Penn Station. Every Democrat should read it.

This hellhole sits in Midtown making millions of people miserable, and nobody in power holds out any prospect of success, meanwhile the Democratic Party is plagued with progressives out to prove their purity by winning defeat.

(Italics added)

Be it remembered …

But what if Donald Trump wins? I’m referring here to the widely circulated Washington Post essay by Robert Kagan, a neoconservative pundit associated with the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that “we are already in a constitutional crisis” because of the certainty that Mr. Trump and his voters will reject his defeat in the upcoming 2024 election and trigger the worst crisis “since the Civil War.”

The alternative outcome goes unmentioned thanks to a giant lacuna that exists in half of America’s mental landscape, and in the mental landscape of 99% of the media. Mr. Kagan relies on some just-so oversimplification, but we’d be foolish not to see the risk of civil disorder and legal shenanigans as high no matter who loses in 2024. Downtowns were boarded up on the eve of the 2020 race not against angry and aggrieved Trump voters. Rural riots are hardly a thing. It was in deeply blue areas that local officials feared mass violence if the election didn’t turn out the way Democrats wanted.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., If Trump Wins in 2024, Then Who Threatens Democracy? (published in October 2021; emphasis added)

Jenkins engages in some genuinely helpful whataboutism, and engages it at a fairly high level with names and specifics that we’re not supposed to remember. It’s worth a read, and I assume the paywall is down.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Wednesday, 3/8/23

Clear and convincing evidence

I have a theory that many grassroots Republicans don’t want to win elections anymore.

Well … maybe that’s too far. I think they’re generally indifferent about winning elections, let’s say, and for the same reason Jim DeMint was. Their commitment to their ideology is tribal more so than it is political. You can compromise when you view politics as a means to some policy end that you favor. But when, like faith, politics defines who you are, there can be no compromising on that. It’s an end in itself.

…

Winning elections is nice but not at the price of tolerating heretics.

If you could prove to populists that doubling down on the alleged innocence of January 6 protesters and Trump’s many other grievances and conspiracy theories would certainly cost them the 2024 election, I don’t know that it would rally them against him. The possibility that he’s an electoral drag on the party is relatively uncontroversial postmidterm, after all. He’s leading in primary polling anyway.

You don’t abandon your faith just because it’s unpopular. Better 30 Marco Rubios or Marjorie Taylor Greenes than 60 Arlen Specters or Mitt Romneys.

…

If the populist right believed its own nonsense about “Flight 93 elections,” the 2024 primary would already be decided. Trump and his political baggage would be unceremoniously tossed out of the rear of the plane and a more electable populist like DeSantis would be escorted to the cockpit. Instead, in primary polling thus far, Trump remains at the controls.

I think populists ultimately care less about defeating the libs than about owning them. And no one antagonizes liberals quite like Trump does.

Frankly, they might even quietly prefer minority status in government. The minority in Congress spends its time blaming the majority for all of the country’s woes, with no obligation to produce a policy agenda of its own. That’s populism all over.

Nick Catoggio, Learning From Mistakes

I can think of no theory that explains more 2023 Republican facts than this does. It is so perfect that if I had any sense, I’d stop writing about politics until Trump loses the 2024 primary battle or the general election.

I don’t often solicit feedback, but what evidence, dear readers, can you muster against Catoggio’s theory?

Fox News: A Safe Space for Conservative Snowflakes

If you search for “safe space” on Fox News’ website you’ll get over 46,000 results. Not all of them are about those woke snowflakes who need trigger warnings and cry rooms. But a whole lot of them are.

For instance, in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Tucker Carlson grilled a college professor about a student who came into her classroom crying about the election. “As the adult shouldn’t you say, ‘You know, it was an election, and it was democratic, and nobody got cancer, nobody died, and maybe you should toughen up a little?’”

Would that Carlson and the rest of Fox’s leadership had a similar attitude toward their own audience, the average age of which is 56. > > “A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr.,” the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported, “top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up.”

The primary mess-up was the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m. on Election Night. The call infuriated the Trump campaign and viewers alike.

Save for Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who also served on the “Decision Desk” that made the call, attendees at the meeting believed the Arizona announcement hurt Fox’s “brand” – not because they got it wrong, or even because they got it right. It hurt the brand because it hurt peoples’ feelings.

Jonah Goldberg

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Tuesday, 3/7/23

Culture

Journalism

Following the herd

It also makes sense to assume that Fox’s behavior will change if it ends up losing this [Dominion] lawsuit. I certainly think it will. Specifically, the people who work there will take care not to put it in writing the next time they quietly conspire to smear someone into oblivion.

…

Murdoch’s shop has always followed the herd, a reminder that its core mission was and remains to advocate for its audience’s political priorities, not to provide them with news. Especially when the news happens to contradict those priorities.

…

If you happened to tune into Fox [February 2] you found [Tucker] Carlson still at it more than a year later, promising fans that he’s unearthed video that’ll soon prove the government is “lying” about the insurrection.

Nick Cattogio

Folk wisdom

“The time to decide whether or not you want to kill a deer is before you go hunting.”
“If you don’t want to get a haircut, don’t hang around the barbershop.”

Wisdom via Chris Stirewalt, who preaches a eulogy of sorts for Bill Sammons, late of Fox News, who definitely decided to kill the deer.

Generally

Flipping the script on its head

I ask Oizumi why he is so drawn to this country. “I like to go places where there are people with a real history. In Korea, that same tribe, that same culture has been there for a very long time.” “Well,” I say, “Europe has a long history too.” “No way! That place is frightening.” “Frightening?” “Yes. I went to Italy, Spain, Milan, Florence, and all the buildings were made from stone—the churches, the castle walls, and ramparts. Now, how did they make that? That would take a tremendous amount of energy. In those days there were no bulldozers. Everything was done by hand. A place with that many stone buildings would have needed some kind of slavery system to build them. When I saw that I thought, Wow, Asia was still relatively peaceful back in the olden days.

San Oizumi, profiled by Andy Couterier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan

Boors

We are offended only by those who are boorish in the way that working class people are boorish, not by those who are boorish in the way that our powerful classes are boorish.

J Budziszewski

Destined for obsolescence?

To the extent that a Disney production manifests the sort of obvious and literal-minded progressive messaging that might outrage some Republican official, it is already failing by the Mouse’s own standards and is destined for obsolescence no matter what. What survives to become fixed in the Disney canon has to feel deeply in tune with its vast and bipartisan audience even when there’s some kind of ideological vision underneath. Politics is welcome in the temple but never nakedly or openly, never crudely — only clothed in the robes of princesses and filtered through the lyrics of Howard Ashman or Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Ross Douthat

Teaching in Prison

I expected much less than College Should Be More Like Prison delivered. Excerpts:

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

…

In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

The author gives a lot of credit to the absence of cell phones and internet connections.

Breaking Covenant

I think the truth is that we have been breaking our covenants with students for quite some time. The rise in student debt is a broken covenant. Adjunctification is a broken covenant. The fact that at some research universities a significant portion of student tuition pays faculty to not teach is a broken covenant. According to this study from Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor at Cal Berkeley, 40 percent of student tuition at his institution goes toward funding departmental research.

Renewing Higher Education’s Covenants

Legalia

Mind Blown

Pardon me while I briefly geek out on constitutional legalia.

As a threshold matter, I’m not even certain the Establishment Clause can be incorporated. … Akhil Amar has written … that this federalism provision prevents the federal government from interfering with state established churches. ‌But that ship has probably sailed.

Josh Blackman, Ending the Epicycles of the Establishment Clause.

I’m quite certain that the original meaning of the establishment clause was that the federal government could not lawfully interfere with state established churches. Fer cryin’ out loud, people, Massachusetts had an established Congregational Church into the 1830s and nobody thought it was uncontitutional.

Perhaps it also meant that the federal government could not lawfully establish its own national church; that would be nice.

But it never occurred to me that because the Establishment Clause was a federalism provision, it’s illegitimate to use the anti-slavery Civil War Amendments to apply it to the states (the “incorporation doctrine”).

So Indiana could still establish Preacher Boy Billy-Bob’s Landmark Baptist Church as the state religion. That would not be nice.

Politics

Damon Linker: Ron DeSantis Is Not a Fascist

Tens of millions of our fellow citizens don’t like where they think our country is headed, and they’re expressing that dislike at the ballot box. The response to them shouldn’t be you’re not allowed to dislike and attempt to change the country’s direction. The response should be here are reasons why you should be less hostile to recent trends and more fearful that the illiberal reforms you favor will end up making you less free in the long run, too

Damon Linker, Ron DeSantis Is Not a Fascist

One of the most impressive things about Barack Obama was that he could make the conservative case more eloquently than 90% of conservatives. One of the most infuriating things about him was he would then do the progressive thing — invariably in the Senate, oftener than not as President.

Damon Linker had replicated that impressive feat with contemporary right-illiberals, like Ron DeSantis. But he remains a liberal (center-left, I’d say). The linked column (and I think the link will get you to it for free) is one of his best and is food for productive thought both for right-illiberals (or those tempted by it) and liberals of both left and right.

The fashy essence of authoritarian populism

[P]er his keynote speech at CPAC on Saturday, it appears the coming campaign will be Trump Unleashed.

My hat is off to whichever speechwriter came up with the line “I am your retribution.” With remarkable efficiency, it divines the fashy essence of authoritarian populism.

Nick Cattogio

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Sunday, 3/5/23

God the creator

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas. I view Aquinas as a notable landmark on the path of Western Christian decline, but if this comment by Mr. Geach is accurate, and especially if the minstrel versus blacksmith image is Aquinas’ (not Geach’s), then I for once applaud him.

Another misrepresentation is the not-uncommon assertion that any kind of evolutionary theory is completely alien to the patristic understanding. An evolutionary scenario was, admittedly, unavailable to the Fathers on scientific grounds, which is perhaps why few of them suggested it. We should not forget, however, that some of them did hint at the possibility of a gradual unfolding of the potential of what God had created “in the beginning.”

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

Aquinas again

This difference between Aquinas and the voluntarists is related to the reasons for which Aquinas’s position is, as we saw in chapter 3, immune to the famous “Euthyphro objection” to religiously based systems of ethics. The objection, it will be recalled, is in the form of a dilemma: either God wills something because it is good or it is good because he wills it; but if the former is true, then, contrary to theism, there will be something that exists independently of God (namely the standard of goodness he abides by in willing us to do something), and if the latter is true, then if God had willed us to torture babies for fun (say) then that would have been good, which seems obviously absurd. Ockham essentially takes the second horn of the dilemma, but for Aquinas the dilemma is a false one. What is good for us is good because of our nature and not because of some arbitrary divine command, and God only ever wills for us to do what is consistent with our nature.

Edward Feser, Aquinas.

Instrumentalizing Christianity

People who take an instrumental and political view of Christianity, however well-meaning (Dennis Prager is an example of this kind), sometimes argue that only “Judeo-Christian religion”—and there is no Judeo-Christian religion, nor are there “Judeo-Christian values” in any meaningful sense—provides a possible basis for a sound moral life, including the moral basis of national political life. This is, of course, what T. S. Eliot called the “dangerous inversion,” i.e., the argument that we should accept the supernatural claims of Christianity because they are useful for fortifying a moral sensibility when we should, instead, derive our moral sensibility from the truth of Christianity, if we believe it to be true, or from something else that we believe to be true rather than merely convenient. In a sense, the non-believer who sympathizes with Christianity is more of an enemy than is the frank atheist who hates Christianity—because the “cultural Christian” trivializes Christianity. The cultural Christian believes that Christianity is false and that this does not matter, while an evangelical atheist such as the late Christopher Hitchens believes that Christianity is false and that this does matter—that it matters a great deal.

…

Some of you will be stuck on the fact that I wrote that there are no Judeo-Christian values in any meaningful sense. I know that this flies in the face of the conservative catechism, but I think it is true. Christianity and Judaism are very different religions, but they have a great deal in common when it comes to moral prescription—but they have this in common not only with one another but with many other religions and with the moralities of many other cultures. With apologies to my learned Christian friends who sometimes insist that it is otherwise, Christianity is not especially radical as a purely moral position. Those Christians who take a view of life based on “natural law”—which really means only that we can use reason to discover how it is we should live—should not be surprised to find that Christianity is not a moral outlier, inasmuch as the ancient Greek philosophers and Hindu sages and Confucian scholars had fully functioning powers of reason, too. It is not that there is nothing at all distinctive about Christianity, but even its most radical moral demand—that we should love our enemies—would not be alien to a pagan Stoic.

Kevin D. Williamson, Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’?

So what?

[I]f you did convince an unchurched young American to go to services, what would they encounter? Wonder? Enchantment? Or dull bourgeois ceremonial, mixed with greeting-card uplift or political exhortation, either left or right?

Rod Dreher

This invites me to reveal my “heresy”: I’m surprisingly ambivalent about the “revival” at Asbury University. I don’t think anyone’s fibbing about it, but the form of revived Christianity is terribly problematic from the perspective of historic Christianity.

The longing of all the nations

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

New American Religion

[W]e ended our Disney World visit in the Animal Kingdom, going through the Avatar-themed rides (drenched in pantheism, like their source material) and then heading out as dusk fell over the vast (artificial) Tree of Life at the center of that park, its trunk carved with a bestiary and its leaves suffused by colors for the park’s magic-hour light show.

There was a big crowd gathered near its rearing shape, watching both the lights and the images of the natural world projected on the trunk — a show called “Tree of Life Awakenings,” though I didn’t know that at the time. And there was a different vibe there than at the fireworks show; less celebratory and boisterous, more meditative and awe-struck, with people in a lotus position or taking other pious-seeming postures toward the tree, the show, the lights, the visions of the natural world.

It felt a little different from the rest of Disney World — more reverent than the other quasi-religious elements, less nakedly commercial, more distant from Disney’s 20th-century origins, an intimation of a 21st-century paganism or pantheism slowly taking over the Mouse Cult from within.

Ross Douthat

Poetic Wordplay

I am the singular
in free fall.
I and my doubles
carry it all:

life’s slim volume
spirally bound …

R.S. Thomas

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish.

R.S. Thomas

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

Saturday 3/4/23

Emotionally right

Don’t hold your breath for an apology from those who pooh-poohed the lab leak theory. Those smeared as conspiracy theorists will remain smeared as such. The people in charge will remain in charge, and the journalists will keep going, smug, content to be wrong but to have always been, most importantly, emotionally right.

Suzy Weiss

Fox News, again

The revelations about Fox news’ amplification of Trumpist lies about the 2020 election obviously elicit some “Whataboutism.” Is Fox on the Right really worse than, say, MSNBC? Andrew Sullivan thinks so:

The great and obvious flaw in the political right’s legitimate criticism of mainstream media bias is that the most dishonest, cynical, postmodern, post-truth, “everything-is-power” media enterprise is Fox News.

…

Fox News president, Jay Wallace, remarked that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Fox Business did. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Fox news exec Bill Sammon agreed. And he’d know.

And the topic they were lying about was not some minor culture-war controversy, or some genuinely vexing congeries of electoral glitches that could be aired out. It was the core foundation of democracy itself — the basic public legitimacy of our elections, the charge that the fraud was “massive” and comprehensive and that democracy was over.

…

The usual counter to what seems to me an open-and-shut case of grotesque corruption is as follows: well, they all do it. Fox’s lies are no different than MSNBC’s or the NYT’s or NPR’s lies — and because most media are now captured by a faction of the far left, some response from the right on the same lines is appropriate.

To which I’d make three responses. First, of course two wrongs don’t make a right. You will never get ethical journalism by practicing unethical journalism, just as you will never get rid of racism by discriminating on the basis of race. Second, if this is your view, please be consistent and condemn Fox as well as the others (and you usually won’t). But third, I do honestly think that the corruption at Fox is different.

[Whereas liberal media have actually ceased believing in objective reality, Fox hasn’t] abandoned the tradition of objective fact in favor of moral narrative. They still privately believe in empirical reality; they will just happily trash it in public if they think it will lose them viewers and thereby money. The core principle is money. Not truth, money. Not ethics, money. Not even obeying the law. Money.

(Emphasis added)

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

Kenneth Tynan via The Economist

Thursday, 3/2/23

Culture

The Wandering Minstrels

In London on [February 25,] 1871 an audience gathered in the newly-finished Royal Albert Hall to attend the first-ever concert to be performed there. This occurred a month before the official opening of this famous Victorian edifice as a special thank-you for the workers who constructed the building.

The orchestra that played that concert was famous in its day – though now totally forgotten. It was called The Wandering Minstrels and its players were all British aristocrats – Lords, Right Honourables, and senior military – who from 1861 to 1896 played exclusively for charity events. One strict rule of membership was that only amateur musicians were allowed. If you earned even one penny as a professional, you were out.

That happened to one member, the composer Frederick Clay, who had to leave The Wandering Minstrels when music he wrote for the stage started to pull in a few pennies. Clay even collaborated with W.S. Gilbert, the famous librettist for Sir Arthur Sullivan, who himself occasionally performed as a guest with The Wandering Minstrels.

And yes, it’s likely that the Gilbert & Sullivan song A Wandering Minstrel I from The Mikado was an in-joke reference to the aristocratic orchestra, especially since Nanki-Poo, who sings it, was (after all) a nobleman in disguise.

Opening of Royal Albert Hall

Is Fred Phelps the father of cancel culture?

“Part of the reason you don’t hear as much about Westboro [Baptist Church]anymore, is that the tactics that made us infamous are now used by so many people on all sides,” – Megan Phelps-Roper, former cult member of Westboro Baptist Church.

(Quoted by Andrew Sullivan)

Conspiracy theories

Mary Harrington reports from her hairdresser conversation that “Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently).” I hadn’t heard that one, but it reminds me of the flake who insisted that Michelle Obama was a guy (“just look how wide her shoulders are” or something like that).

Of modern conspiracy theories she has much to say, but I’d distill it to “stereotype accuracy” or (my words) “true enough.”

Why, despite so much, I still read him

To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard.

David French

Harry Potter orders a black coffee

Alex Wicker is used to odd looks from baristas when he stops by his local coffee shop. His order is unusual: black coffee.

“Asking for just ‘coffee’ with no added context, without going through a round of 20 questions with the server, has become impossible at this point,” said Mr. Wicker, a 23-year-old student from Shelbyville, Ind.

In a nation awash in Pistachio Cream Cold Brew and Iced Chocolate Almondmilk Shaken Espresso with Chestnut Praline Syrup, black-coffee drinkers like Mr. Wicker are becoming a rare breed.

Hold the extras. Yes, really.

What lovers of straight black consider simple, easy-to-pour orders can wind up stuck behind a jam of customized, multipump concoctions, they said. Sometimes their pristine black joe is lightened with sugar or cream anyway. Some baristas seem bewildered by the concept of coffee taken plain.

Mr. Wicker said his purist take on coffee makes him feel like an outcast. “I don’t know a single person within my age range that enjoys drinking black coffee,” he said.

Ticket for Coffee Shop Frustration: Ordering Black Coffee – WSJ

A tip for Mr. Wicker. I have finally watched a Harry Potter movie and I can report that the proper Starbucks incantation is and long has been “Venti bold, no room.” If they’re out of “bold” (dark roast – which they tend not to brew in the afternoon), they’ll tell you and you can get a Pike Place — or you can wait for a “pourover.”

I know no further incantation for getting your coffee quickly, ahead of all the frou-frou drinks of people who don’t really love coffee and who drink it only for fashion. But there’s no reason why the person who takes your order can’t fulfill it on the spot.

Or just order this and make it at home.

Cuts both ways

“No, I can’t believe this. No. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower,” – Angela Davis, being told exactly that by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I suspect my readers are old enough to remember Angela Davis, but in case I’m wrong, see here.

Scott Adams

I’ve seen people “cancelled” over respectable conservative opinions or fairly anodyne statements. Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, is not one of them.

Scott Adams somehow foresaw that Donald Trump would win the Presidency and went on record with that prediction — at first, noncommittally (I had no idea that word had so many double-letters). He went on to become a Trumpist in his activities outside of Dilbert, so I’ve been leery of him personally. And now he seems to have gone into racially divisive advice.

But if my local rag drops Dilbert, I’ll continue reading it on the web here until the strip itself becomes toxic.

Nevertheless, this breaking commentary, directed at those complaining that Adams is a victim of cancel cultue:

[T]he writer Thomas Chatterton Williams dealt with that complaint elegantly. When we think of “cancel culture,” he said, we think of people being ostracized for violating social norms that haven’t been broadly agreed upon. That’s not what Adams did. Advising white people to “get the hell away from black people” has been pretty well settled as Bad for, oh, 50 to 60 years.

Covid origins

For the record, I presume (and have presumed since the earliest days of the pandemic) that Covid resulted from a Wuhan lab leak.

That implies or is adjacent to a lot of other things, such as our government lying to us about the likely source, and more specifically, Anthony Fauci lying about U.S. involvement in gain-of-function research.

One reason I haven’t taken up arms against the liars is the paucity of honest replacements.

Legalia

It’s not inconsistency, it’s hierarchy

In response to those who complain that different treatment is meted out to those on the Left or the Right for what is essentially the same behaviour, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule is fond of saying ‘It’s not inconsistency, it’s hierarchy’. Some groups, that is, receive more favourable treatment than others because they rank higher. The always perspicacious NS Lyons sums this view up here.

So some groups are preferred over others. What about ideas, though? Why should we be encouraged to deconstruct one generalisation on the basis of a few outliers, but castigated for employing the same critical attitude toward a different generalisation on the basis of outliers? It’s either faulty logic, or there’s an implicit hierarchy that isn’t being spelled out.

I think it’s the latter. And the governing principle isn’t logic but constraint. For the new faithful, ideas aren’t evaluated on the basis of being true, or even reasonable, but on how much they constrain desire. This explains why sex dimorphism is considered ‘outdated’, despite its features being consistent across a great many species, including humans, and (among humans) all but a very small number of outliers. Nonetheless, it must be deconstructed, because the reality of living in a sexed body constrains the things any given individual can desire. We see this in Marsh’s ‘no such thing as boys or girls’ video, which suggests that a few outliers render sex dimorphism meaningless, and concludes triumphantly: “Where does this leave you? Free!”

Mary Harrington

I hate it when Adrian Vermeule makes an observation that’s so powerful and so undeniable. Especially since it pushes me toward Harrington’s conclusion, in which “howling fury” may be more than verbal:

There is, in fact, no resolution, save insisting that human life cannot proceed without some constraints, and insisting on their imposition, and weathering the howling fury this will inevitably cause.

Once again, I’m in turmoil about whether it’s time to forsake the center-right for the postliberal right.

Is it is or is it ain’t a hate crime?

Schroedinger’s Hate Crime – Mary Harrington’s coinage for the ritual of trumpeting accusations that some mass murder was the consequence of right-wing “stochastic terrorism,” followed by the sotto voce revelation that the murderer had no right-wing affiliations.

(I realized after writing this that Harrington only addressed one incident, the Colorado Springs gay club mass shooting, but I trust that she is aware of this repetitive pattern.)

Even more than I tend to forget that there’s a porn pandemic do I tend to forget that academic cheating is epidemic:

Professors describe feeling demoralized—“I didn’t get into academia to be a cop,” a CUNY professor in the English department told me. Faculty at other schools likewise describe feeling helpless when it comes to calling out cheating, or even catching it. There’s always another app, another workaround.

Plus, it’s not necessarily smart to report bad behavior.

“Nontenured faculty have no real choice but to compromise their professional standards and the quality of the students’ own education to take a customer’s-always-right approach,” Gabriel Rossman at UCLA told me.

That’s because lower level courses, where cheating is more rampant, tend to be taught by nontenured faculty with little job security—the kind of people who fear getting negative student evaluations. “Students can be tyrants,” the CUNY English professor said. “It’s like Yelp. The only four people who are going to review the restaurant are the people who are mad.”

Suzy Weiss And you’ve got to keep the customers happy when, as at several top universities, administrators are roughly as numerous as undergraduates.

Many now herald “lab-grown meat” – that is, animal protein unmoored from the living form and telos of an actual animal … But it felt stomach-churningly apt to discover recently that this product is produced in laboratory conditions thanks to the use of ‘immortal cells’: that is, cells that don’t stop growing when they’ve done their job, which is usually to grow some part of an animal body. And the other word for cells that don’t know when to stop proliferating is “cancer”. To put it another way: “lab-grown meat” is a polite way of saying “edible vat-grown tumours”.

Mary Harrington, Culture as Metastasis

Not at all sure I believe this …

Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.

Adam Serwer

Politics

DeSantis or Trump?

Damon Linker wrote an NYT Op-Ed about Ron DeSantis and then referenced it on his Substack. Substack reactions include:

[H]e would bore enthusiastic visitors to the Nixon museum — and he wholly lacks Trump’s entertainment skills This is a big deal when you’re in the grievance-feeding business, and you’re looking to bring out the fringe element that was hiding before 2016. He has a bit of Trump’s shamelessness, but notwithstanding the Martha’s Vineyard stunt, it is blatantly imitative, and for the true believers, ultimately unsatisfying. I can’t imagine him inciting a riot in any capital, any more than I could see him selling out a medium size venue for an hour of spritzing insults and comedic asides. (J Dalessandro)
I’m surprised that you rarely mention something that bothers even a diehard fan like me about DeSantis. That is, he constantly sets traps for the left, and my side finds so much joy in it, because they usually do walk right into them. (Tony)

My current stance on DeSantis: very unlikely to vote for him in a primary or general election. 2024 might just be the first time I’ve ever sat out an election. But if there’s a Trump-DeSantis primary contest in Indiana and it appears close (and Indiana’s late primaries are not already irrelevant to the nomination), I’ll gladly vote for the lesser evil.

Power grabbing from the right is not fascism

Damon Linker got a lot of flak from extremely contentious progressives for the above-referenced NYT Op-Ed.

The flak included the customary drumbeat of the “f-word,” but Linker’s having none of it:

Ronald Reagan was not a fascist.

George H. W. Bush was not a fascist.

George W. Bush was not and is not a fascist.

John McCain was not a fascist.

Mitt Romney was not and is not a fascist.

But what about Ron DeSantis? To answer that question, we first have to ask if Hungarian president Viktor Orbán is a fascist.

That’s because DeSantis is clearly modeling some of his culture-war initiatives on things Orbán has done in office. Yet I don’t think it’s accurate to call Orbán a fascist. He’s some kind of soft authoritarian or illiberal democrat—both of which are very bad. I think, likewise, that much of what DeSantis is doing in Florida—for example, his moves to severely restrict academic freedom at public universities in the state—is atrocious. But using a landslide victory in his re-election bid as leverage to impose a conservative clampdown on publicly funded universities is not fascism. It’s a power grab from the right that liberals should be fighting hard. But reaching for the most hyperbolic epithet they can think of and hurling it at him and his supporters on social media isn’t fighting hard. It’s a panic attack.

I think Linker is spot-on about this. It has occurred to me that if I had given up on liberal democracy (I’ve only come close to giving up so far), DeSantis would probably be my man, because he’d be far likelier than Trump to realize a tolerable illiberal democracy.

Conservatism today

I think there should be a statute of limitations for calling a person a legal conservative. Show me what you’ve done lately.

Josh Blackman, reacting to J. Michael Luttig’s NYT Op-Ed Mike Pence Should Drop His Grand Jury Subpoena Gambit.

Luttig was considered conservative when he was a Federal Circuit Court judge, but then he left for a gig at Boeing, and his conservative credentials haven’t been renewed.

I’ll go Blackman one better, though: I think there should be a statute of limitations for calling a person any kind of conservative. I say that because the popular usage of “conservative” has shifted so much that I’m not sure I qualify any longer, whatever my reflexes may say about my place on the spectrum.

Good news from Congress?!

Kevin McCarthy has formed a decent working relationship with minority leader Hakeem Jeffries:

The parties have big differences on major issues, and each has its share of loudmouths who see taking cheap shots as the shortest route to a cable-news appearance. But the parties’ leaders are trying to find ways to mitigate dysfunction where they can.

Karl Rove

Populist losers

It seems that the Michigan GOP has some problems:

“There’s no way in hell you can look at the state party apparatus as a stock and say: ‘Gee, I want to invest more in that stock.’ Just the opposite,” Jimmy Greene, president and CEO of Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan, told The Dispatch. “The party is a grievance driven party and not one to be taken seriously.”

…

[I]nterviews with several well-placed Michigan Republicans revealed widespread pessimism about the party’s prospects after grassroots delegates to the state GOP’s mid-February convention elected Karamo the new chairman. They say Karamo can’t raise money or manage a multimillion dollar organization, claim she is a poor communicator and repels swing voters by denying her loss to Benson, and argue she is hostile to traditional Republicans.

“It is a disaster and there’s no way to overstate what a disaster it is,” said Jason Roe (no relation to Jamie Roe), a Republican strategist in Michigan and former top aide at the state GOP. “It’s embarrassing. The media is going to love to turn to Karamo and hear her say things that make us look insane.”

“We’re going to lose elections,” a longtime Republican operative in the state said flatly, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.

Even Trump spurned Karamo in the chairman’s race, backing Matt DePerno, who lost the race for state attorney general last November. He too promoted Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Republicans opposed to Karamo emphasize the biggest casualty of her reign will be the party’s ability to raise and maximize resources. Whatever windfall in small donations that might pour in from grassroots contributors enthusiastic about Karamo’s election, it’s unlikely to compensate for the millions of dollars from wealthy financiers her chairmanship costs the state party. There’s also the issue of discounted rates for bulk, direct-mail political advertising available to state parties but not individual candidates or the national party committees.

Michigan Republicans Fear a Split Ahead of 2024 – The Dispatch

I’m not closely familiar with the situation, but I’d wager that the populist “grassroots” who elected Karamo would defend the choice by noting that “traditional Republicans” never cared about them and would ignore them again if back in power.

It’s not clear when Team Trump, promised that they were going to win so much they’d cry for mercy, will get so tired of losing that they move on or learn that politics requires compromise. They don’t show much sign of letting up yet.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

The sacking of Troy

Desperate Christians?

Rigor, whether you like it or not

German Catholicism

Rome jumps the shark on war and killing

Prissy Dissenter

Culture

Wandering as the birds of the air, then snared

Not the usual b*llsh*t about wokeness

Counter-anticulture

Prescient

Politics

New class war

Poor Mike Pence

Viva la difference!

Cant

Diversity

Thinking outside the box

Silence

Other wordplay

The secret of life

The Past

Culture

Obituary — Traute Lafrenz

Picking the lesser evil

How to treat critics of democracy

Go thou and do likewise, HRC

Ginger Prince welcomes “dialog”

Learning from Armenians

Journalism

Bothsidesism failure

With what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged

Politics

What is “woke”?

Making your adversaries second-class citizens

Heuristics to counteract gaslighting

Election 2024 storm clouds

Smart takes, dumb takes

Close encounters

Duck!

Another close encounter

Losing Passion

Priorities

Making a virtue of one of the great vices

Myth and Tradition

Not Just Another Pretty Face

Ravi Zacharias

Who can theologize?

The Gospel of Progress

Attempted aphorism

Culture

What is it about “bad” they don’t understand?

Gender news

Monkey Business

Shorts

Erasure

Poetic Wordplay

One of three

Virtue-signaling is alive and well

I miss not being able to miss out

Fox News

Public lies

Pretense

No consistency, hobgoblin or otherwise, at Fox

Politics

Losers

Be it remembered …

Clear and convincing evidence

Fox News: A Safe Space for Conservative Snowflakes

Culture

Journalism

Following the herd

Folk wisdom

Generally

Flipping the script on its head

Boors

Destined for obsolescence?

Teaching in Prison

Breaking Covenant

Legalia

Not the usual bllsht about wokeness