D Day’s 82nd Anniversary

Douthat

Is secular critique of AI adequate?

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>

If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.

Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.

Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.

Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.

Ross Douthat’s (further?) thoughts on the Pope’s AI encyclical.

Douthat is onto something, I think

We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.

Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.

[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.

…

In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …

I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.

But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.

…

if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.

This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.

Ross Douthat, Graham Platner and the Amoral Center, 6/3/26

Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):

“… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
“… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.

“Finishing the job” in Iran

I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.

Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.

Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

…

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

M. Gessen, New York Times.

Again, this merde is on a White House webpage.

Who is the real radical?

I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.

Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:

Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”

Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.

Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.

How much of what will focus your attention?

The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love.

But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”

(Kevin D. Williamson)

Shorts

I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
… LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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

What if the Furies came for America?

In the political sphere

What if the Furies came for America?

What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?

If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.

W. Aaron Vandiver, Trump and the Furies of Empire (Front Porch Republic)

This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff (some of which you’ll be seeing in due course), but the quote above is could be an epigraph.

If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws. 77 million voted for him.

I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wan’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you.

There’s only one sour note I noticed in this piece: Vandiver tries to shame Christians out of supporting Trump, which is well and good, but he comes across as a guy who was raised in a mainline Church that taught “be nice” as the heart of the Gospel. So I take his Christian bona fides with a grain of salt. With his makeweight “Christian” argument gone, it’s still a very solid piece.

Sophomoric trickery

[Congressman Don] Bacon recalls that his great-great-great-grandfather John lived near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. John’s uncle helped maintain it while Jefferson was away being president. John moved to Illinois and in 1861 enlisted in the Union Army. So, in 2020 it seemed like familial piety for Bacon to be a one of two prime movers of legislation to remove from Army bases (Forts Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Hood, Benning and others) the names of Confederate soldiers who did their damnedest to dismember the nation.

The legislation, which included a stipulation that no base would ever again have a Confederate’s name, inspired a provision in the 2021 defense authorization bill that became law over President Donald Trump’s veto. In 2025, however, the second Trump administration, practicing what it evidently considers sophisticated trickery, restored the names. Sort of.

Fort Bragg, which briefly was Fort Liberty, is now renamed back to Fort Bragg. Not, however, for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, but for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who won a Silver Star in World War II. Fort Pickett, which briefly became Fort Barfoot, is again Fort Pickett. This time, however, the name (we are supposed to believe) honors not the Virginian who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, but Vernon W. Pickett, a lieutenant who in World War II won a Distinguished Service Cross.

This sophomoric trickery — the cleverness of the dim-witted — by the commander in chief is intended to mock the law. This is what now passes for fulfilling the president’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

George Will, Serious. Has a spine. No wonder he’s leaving Congress.

“Republicans” and “Democrats” today

We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that’s not what a political party actually was, or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles, and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties. And so, instead, again, it’s actually increased partisanship. But it’s vibes-based. It’s this sense that you belong to, like, you know, the Starbucks, Trader Joe’s tote bag, matcha latte group. Or you belong to the pickup truck, “Yellowstone”-watching, Walmart group. And it’s not policy based.

Sarah Isgur.

Speaking of political parties, I’m really, really missing the days when they assembled in smoke-filled rooms and came up with candidates who they thought could win elections to advance their ideas. Now we have primary elections wherein the President of the United States sends out his zombie voters to politically assassinate distinguished incumbents who did something that made him mad, as GOP Senators shrug and say, in effect, “Well, it’s his party; he can kick out whoever he wants to.”. The Republican party and incumbency mean nothing to Trump.

Trump took revenge on Senator Bill Cassidy over the weekend and will unseat Thomas Massie on Tuesday. May the instruments of his revenge go down in flames in November.

And may we once again discover the importance of functioning political parties.

Thucydides trap

[On Thursday,] Xi Jinping warned Donald Trump to his face about a “Thucydides trap” potentially unfolding between our two countries.

Like everyone else, my first thought when I heard the news was, “There’s no way Trump knows what a Thucydides trap is.”

A “Thucydides trap” refers to the rising probability of war when a long-dominant power is at risk of being usurped by a rising one. America is in decline and everyone knows it, Xi was implying, and the White House should take care not to let its anxiety about that lead it to foolishly assert itself in defense of Taiwan.

Someone must have explained that to the president following the summit. “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration,” Trump clarified afterward on Truth Social, not at all defensively.

That was cute spin, but it ain’t Joe Biden whom Chinese nationalists have been moved to publicly thank for destroying U.S. global supremacy. Trump’s “tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” the New York Times reported earlier this week, summarizing the analysis of one Beijing think tank.

Nick Catoggio

Somehow, this resonates

“You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?” “Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.” “The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”

Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin

Outside the political sphere

Tech just blows my mind sometimes

China has unveiled its latest photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang 4.0, with researchers saying it can outperform the world’s fastest classical supercomputer by a vast margin … The results, published on May 13 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, mark the latest milestone in China’s rapidly advancing quantum program led by a team of scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China headed by Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei. Jiuzhang 4.0 completed a Gaussian boson sampling task in just 25 microseconds – a calculation they estimated would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan in the United States, more than 10⁴² years to finish, according to the university in the eastern city of Hefei.

John Ellis News Items.

Lingua franca

Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America.

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Where’s the poverty?

In America, the land of the free, you can earn a billion bucks and then live however you’d like so long as you wouldn’t like to live as humanely as a middle-class Parisian.

I’m not, alas, in Paris right now. But I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.”

Megan McArdle, Europe has the grandeur. But America has economic abundance.

See also Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture

Shorts

… Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns Pornhub. (The Morning Dispatch)
“Once somebody’s proven they’re too frightened of being called ‘bigot’ to defend the most vulnerable, they’ve shown who they are,” – JK Rowling via Andrew Sullivan.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all,” – Donald Trump, who “obliterated” the nuclear sites last year via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Biden] has one ability I don’t have: he sleeps. … He has an ability to fall asleep while on camera. … You’ll never see me sleeping in front of a camera,” – Trump in 2024 via Andrew Sullivan.
“2019: Donald Trump calls on China to investigate Joe Biden for having son Hunter fly to China on Air Force Two as he sought business in China. 2026: Donald Trump flies son Eric to China on Air Force One as company linked to him explores a deal with a Chinese chipmaker,” – Matt Viser via Andrew Sullivan.
“One of the enduring Two Americas truisms of the decade: Repubs convinced Obama is behind every tree and Dems wishing he would show up in the forest at all,” – Jonathan Martin via Andrew Sullivan.
Pressure on journalists has risen exponentially since the turn of the century. Many media companies require their journalists to produce up to a dozen stories a day – all in pursuit of clicks and likes. Maintaining high standards is impossible. (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News)
Never have I witnessed a White House so devoted to surfaces. Surfaces caked with makeup. Surfaces puffed up with hair spray. Surfaces glossed with gold. Surfaces that glitter blue — or someday might, if the over-budget overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ever works out as promised. (Frank Bruni)
In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Microsoft has rebranded its famed gaming division, Xbox. It will now be called XBOX. We salute the marketing team for their risk-taking, creativity, and awareness of the caps lock key. The Morning Dispatch
Epitaph for Modernity: I came, I shopped, I died. (Fr. Stephen Freeman).
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. (Jeannette Rankin)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Friday, May 8

Trump’s secret sauce (and where it falls flat)

I don’t plan anything else pointedly about Trump today, but David French’s latest (gift link) struck me as surprising and unusually powerful. And actually, it’s as much or more about the Republican politicians who now dance to Trump’s pipe and the 77 million voters who put him back in the Oval Office even after January 6.

Trump’s central political insight (and perhaps his key political advantage) is that he understood that Americans weren’t quite cynical enough about many of our politicians. As much as we already thought they placed power over principle, we didn’t know the half of it. He could see our politicians more clearly than we could — perhaps because he’d spent a lifetime in their presence, writing them large checks while hearing their empty promises.

And he showed it by placing a big carrot and a giant stick in front of the Republican political class, and then we watched as virtually everyone fell in line.

…

Trump is not a man who values dissent, to put it mildly. The idea of a “team of rivals” is completely alien to him. Talk to virtually any prominent person who breaks with Trump, and they can tell you stories of terrifying days and sleepless nights as MAGA’s minions made their lives a living hell.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

…

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

…

But [n]ot everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war …

…

Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals. Remember when he considered a “joint venture” to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?

It turns out that there is an immense difference between your median South American autocracy and Twelver Shi’ism, the dominant religion of the Iranian regime. Threatening death to people who are willing to die for their cause doesn’t have the same effect as threatening people who seek mainly wealth and power. They are also quite willing to make other people die for their cause as well — and that means the Iranian regime (like Putin’s Russia) will endure catastrophic casualties without shaking its commitment or tempting it to yield.

Why hasn’t Trump been able to force an end to the Ukraine war? There are true believers on both sides. The Ukrainians won’t willingly yield an inch to the man who wants to destroy them, and Vladimir Putin is infused with his own sense of religious purpose and historic destiny.

…

At home, Trump has obviously been flummoxed by judges who stubbornly stick to principle and seem immune to his bluster. Constitutional fidelity is alien to him. He cannot understand why the justices he appointed will not do exactly what he wants.

At the same time, it’s no coincidence that the members of the MAGA coalition who are most apt to break with him are the cranks and conspiracists — people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and even Tucker Carlson. They came into the MAGA coalition as true believers, and they’re the ones who seem genuinely outraged when Trump breaks his promises and betrays their trust.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

(Bold added)

Read the whole thing: True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind (gift link).

I cannot think of a more elegant solution to the mystery of how putative conservatives and professing Christians turned into, well, whatever the hell it is that they’ve become: they were just waiting to be bought.

This does not bode well for post-Trump America; the problem is pandemic, not confined to the White House.

The new calendar of Saints

I don’t think this readily reads as rage-bait, but just in case: I intend it as a light change of pace from the real rage-bait all around us. I don’t even intend to “own the libs” by posting it.

[C]onsider a recent Substack post by Ed West, a British conservative writer I enjoy reading. West is the kind of conservative who treats social-justice progressivism as a form of religion. I’ve done the same at times, agreeing with those who treat the trend as a post-Protestant moral crusade. But West goes much further in his post, pointing out just how many special days and months every year are now set aside in the UK for celebrating this or that protected or privileged group—and likening these celebrations to the feast days that comprised the liturgical calendar back during eras of Christian cultural dominance. Hence the tongue-in-cheek title of West’s post: “The New Calendar of Saints: Do you know your World Mental Health Day from your International Pronouns Day?”

In addition to those two, West highlights:

International Women’s Day

Zero Discrimination Day

Equal Pay Day

The International Day to Combat Islamophobia

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

And the International Transgender Day of Visibility

If you’d like to see more, West provides a link to an organization based in Washington DC that compiles these and many more progressive feast days, including the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia on May 17, the International Nonbinary People’s Day on July 17, and many others.

It’s certainly possible to go about your life without giving such culturally mandated celebrations much thought. But in public schools and many workplaces in the United States, they will be announced, sometimes with programming added to ensure everyone within earshot learns proper moral lessons about each group and its mistreatment at the hands of … those who aren’t members of the group.

The question, once again, is who devised these occasions, proclaiming them into existence? And why did others in positions of authority and influence decide to go along with it, expecting that the rest of us would welcome the conjuring of a novel series of public celebrations of various multicultural-intersectional victim groups? Did I miss the election in which we cast ballots for this? Was even an opinion poll taken beforehand to gauge support for it? Or did someone simply decide for us, for our own good? And what about the “international” aspect to so many of these special days and months? That raises a slew of additional questions, including: Is there a committee at the United Nations or the Hague where such things are decided and imposed upon the nations, and through them the citizens, of the world?

Damon Linker, Mar 15, 2024

Abortion politics

There was a time when I was very much in the abortion fray on the pro-life side. I even was paid some legal fees to help. How I came to disengage is not worth telling, even assuming that I could tell the story with fly-on-the-wall accuracy, but it wasn’t because I switched to the pro-choice/abortion side.

I continued to watch developments, though, and the current kerfuffle over interstate distribution of mifepristone is a nice chance for me to say “I told you so.” I knew that the overruling of Roe v. Wade would not remotely lay the abortion issue to rest, and not just because 50 years of readily available abortion would not be relinquished without a fierce fight. What too many people didn’t seem to understand was that reversal of Roe would merely return abortion law to the political realm, where “chemical (pharmaceutical) abortions” via interstate mails was most definitely foreseen as a battle field.

We’re on that battle field now, even if other public affairs overshadow it for most of us.

Insatiable

What makes this sin so strange, counterproductive, and perhaps unforgivable, is that popular views on basic issues of tolerance and equality have become much more liberal over the years. The very things the Left was originally fighting for have become less controversial and more accepted—from gay marriage to women’s and racial equality to opposition to discrimination. The Left won.

Ruy Teixera, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

This reminds me of a quip, from William F. Buckley, I think, about a liberal being the kind of person who cannot say what social improvements would be enough to turn him into a conservative.

Shorts

St Seraphim of Sarov, who lived at the turn of the 19th century, observed, “We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves.” (Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner)
Spoken of a post-op patient in Waco, TX, by her nurse — a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.” (Alan Jacobs)
In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. (Kevin Fenton)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Ss. Peter and Paul

Entrenched myth

The picture of the world as divided among major “religions” offering alternative means to “salvation” or “enlightenment” is thoroughly entrenched in the modern imagination.

Brent Nongbri, ‌ Before Religion

Nationalist Churches

I trust that my Protestant friends will forgive this Puritan-friendly Catholic what might sound at first like a sectarian point, but: While most Protestants today not only accept but also cherish the principle of religious liberty, the entire point of the English Reformation—not merely an unintended consequence—was ending the separation of church and state. English religious history does more than rhyme: They had two kings called Henry (II and VIII) with chancellors called Thomas (Becket and More) who became martyrs (in 1170 and 1535, respectively) because they insisted that there were limits to what a king could do to the church, that altar could not be entirely subordinated to throne. There is a reason so many of the churches of the Reformation became state churches: The Catholic Church was the premier European multinational organization, and it was not only in England that the Reformation was a nationalist project that produced national and nationalist churches. If you ever heard Nigel Farage talking about the European Union in the days before Brexit, you heard a very old and very English voice—and I do not mean only his accent.

… [T]he Henrician line of thinking—that the church and its officers must ultimately bend the knee to the king rather than to the King of Kings—has never quite gone away.

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago, envisioning life under such totalitarian assumptions:

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

Kevin D. Williamson, inveighing against a Washington State law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional.

I would venture an educated guess that the law takes in Orthodox priests as well, and any other priests who hear confessions sacramentally and under seal.

It will not stand.

Philosophy infiltrating theology

[T]hat aspects of the Christian doctrine were now codified in forms which were binding upon, and therefore mentally accessible to, individuals regardless of the capacity of these latter to experience the Truth which they express, exposed the doctrine in a new and dangerous degree to what may be described as the infiltrations of the philosophical mentality.

What this means should, perhaps, be explained more clearly. We have noted that, where Christianity is concerned, there is an intimate connexion between doctrine and method: the Truth of the doctrine, that which doctrinal formulations not only ‘reveal’ but also ‘conceal’, is, in its essential and universal nature, something that can be known only by one who is ‘initiated’ into it through following the discipline of the Christian Way itself. It is not something which man can arrive at through the unaided processes of human thought. It transcends the reason, It transcends logic.

Rational and logical demonstrations are only ‘true’, and this in a relative sense, provided that they begin in, and develop from, an a priori realization of what is in itself supra-rational and supra-logical. If they do not begin in, and develop from, such a realization, but merely in and from some arbitrary fiat of the human mind, what they represent is no more than a blind and unreal operation, lacking all objective validity.

Logic is but the science of mental co-ordination and of arriving at rational conclusions from a given starting-point. If the starting-point is a supra-logical ‘visionary’ knowledge of the Truth attained through initiation, then logic has a positive content in the way we have indicated. But if man merely ‘thinks’ of the Truth with his mind, then all his logic is useless to him because he starts with an initial fallacy, the fallacy that the Truth attained by the unaided processes of human thought.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

Secular expressions

Liberalism is a secular expression of the Christian teaching that the individual is sacred and deserving of protection. Socialism is a secular expression of Christian concern for the poor and downtrodden. Globalism is a secular expression of the Christian hope that history is leading to a kingdom of universal peace and justice. … And here we reach the essence of the Christian Question. Christianity denied what antiquity had serenely assumed: that the strong are destined to rule the weak, that we have no obligations to strangers, and that our identities are constituted by our social status.

Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism

Fullness

I wish everyone would convert to Orthodoxy, not because there is no truth in their own ecclesial communion, but because I believe Orthodoxy has the fullness of the truth.

… I don’t see the Church — Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant — as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of theosis, or full unity with God.

Rod Dreher

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

June 11, 2025

Culture

Beauty

Many catholic young people should have arrived at Chartres Tuesday or Wenesday, having averaged about 20 miles a day in pilgrimage since leaving St. Sulpice in Paris on Sunday:

I spoke with a 32-year-old American priest who was there with a group of teenage boys from his local high school. He talked about the appeal of the old mass, and Catholic tradition, to kids today. They had been earlier on a retreat at the traditionalist Benedictine abbey of Fontgombault, and he said these American boys had been blown away by what they had seen and done there. The priest predicted that they were going to be overwhelmed by the beauty of Chartres. He said that most American boys their age have already seen the worst of humanity in hardcore porn, before they have ever seen real beauty. So Chartres is going to be a revelation for them.

Rod Dreher, Surprising Hope in the Streets of Paris (bold added)

What a thought! There is precious little “real beauty” around us in the USA, especially real manmade beauty. But there’s plenty of rot.

A part of the American ethic

Take, for instance, when the doctors were asked whether they would go to court to override the parents’ wishes if the child did not have Down Syndrome. They responded unanimously that they would, and they gave the following rationale: “When a retarded (sic) child presents us with the same problem, a different value system comes in; and not only does the staff acquiesce in the parent’s decision to let the child die, but it’s probable that the courts would also. That is, there is a different standard. . . . There is this tendency to value life on the basis of intelligence. . . . [It’s] a part of the American ethic.”

Justin Hawkins, Dignity Beyond Accomplishment – Mere Orthodoxy (bold added)

Sexual stereotypes

Popular sites like What to Expect verify that some aspects of child development differ by gender, yet even such sites advise parents to try to equalize or neutralize the differences. We’re so influenced by the Gender Ideology that we don’t seem to consider the possibility of embracing the children’s own preferences for activities that are “stereotypically” male or female.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

I do not recommend this book. How little did I like it? Enough that having read it when considering a conference where the author was a keynote speaker, I forewent the conference.

But it’s hard to write a whole book without an observation or two that’s both accurate and temperately made.

I am also adamant that breaking sexual stereotypes is not a sign that one is “in the wrong body.”

Marriage today

… marriage American-style, an obligation easier to walk away from than student loans or credit card debt …

Kevin D. Williamson, Husbandry Matters

Custom

I’ve been watching enough BritBox to reflexively view Elon as in the driver’s seat.

AI

Yeah, everybody’s got to prattle about AI as the topic du jour for countless jours now. I’ll try not to be anodyne or banal.

The rule of Nobody

What with expectations that AI will become our new deity, coupled with the profit motive and AI hallucinations, Matthew Crawford returns to a variation on the theme that first made him famous 16 years ago:

In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.

AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.

Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” which is Business English for “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”

Your call is important to us…. This post was remarkably persuasive to me, with a dandy analogy from “work-to-rule slowdowns” in labor disputes.

Language no longer implies thinking

LLMs (the so-called AI process) are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another …

People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence. The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain’s tendency to associate language with thinking: “We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.”

…

Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age.

Tyler Austin Harper, What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works

Enough

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

Denying our Civil Religion

America has a civil religion that is the equal of any other religion. “Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is in itself an interesting problem.” If American nationalism is so obviously a religion, in other words, why do we deny it? Bellah posits that conservative religious groups deny it because they believe that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. As recently as the 1950s they proposed a constitutional amendment recognizing the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Secularists deny that America has a civil religion because they do not believe the nation-state does or should have anything to do with religion.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Short-form social media

[W]hether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

“Here is some information”
“Look at how funny I am”
“Look at how stupid my enemies are”
“Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”
“Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

(Alan Jacobs)

Sorta political

Henry and Thomas

Each of Henry II and Henry VIII had a Thomas, Becket and More respectively, who were martyred for their resistance to totalitarian pretentions:

Washington has passed a law requiring that Catholic [also Orthodox, I’m sure, though with progressives one never knows] priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional …

What Henry II and Henry VIII could not live with was the idea that there were centers of power independent of the state—that the power of the king was limited. Americans supposedly cherish the notion of limited government and insist that we would abide no king, but we are in most things perfectly happy to let presidents behave as though they were Louis XIV—as long as they are doing what we want them to do, or at least as long as they are irritating and discomfiting those we regard as our rivals and enemies.

…

If you cleave to a political philosophy holding that there is nothing outside of the state, then you are a partisan, however well-meaning, of absolutism and totalitarianism. Not every totalitarian temptation indulged leads directly to 1984. … There are many stops, many way stations, and (one prays) many off-ramps along the road to serfdom. But allowing the state to shove its stupid snout into the confessional is a big step in the wrong direction. It is one that should be resisted not only by litigation but also through civil disobedience, if necessary.

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago, envisioning life under such totalitarian assumptions:

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

The cardinal’s words had more impact than he intended: “I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said,” he later said about his famous statement, “but the words were captured on somebody’s smartphone and have now gone viral.” But his views were no less dramatic when expressed in less dramatic language: “The greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence,” he later wrote. And his actions bore out his convictions: When the state of Illinois insisted that funding for adoption and foster care providers would be restricted to those that agreed to provide services to same-sex couples, the cardinal, with regret, instructed Catholic Charities to refuse to comply, and the archdiocese eventually discontinued those services. That is the totalitarian tendency at work: The question wasn’t whether there would be 500 adoption agencies that serve same-sex couples but whether the 12.7 million people of Illinois could tolerate one that did not.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional

For what it’s worth: How do the bien pensants of Washington expect that a violation of this law will ever be discovered?

Department of Justice crashes

The Administration’s bad faith comes home to roost already.

Can’t be bothered to learn

Elon Musk’s disinterest in learning the first thing about government, combined with his enthusiasm for performatively cutting the parts of it that irked him politically (in at least some cases because he has become a deranged conspiracy theorist), led him to eviscerate USAID, and to brag about it on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone [sic] to some great parties.

Did that instead.

This decision led and will continue to lead to a heartbreaking amount of suffering and death — to children and babies dying because they were cut off from access to, for example, U.S.-provided peanut paste (cost: $1 a day). One statistical model published by a Boston University public health researcher projects that Musk’s cuts will cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. I have not looked closely into that model, but let’s say its estimate of 300,000 is off by a massive amount and Musk’s actions only led to 75,000 deaths. Was it worth it?

I don’t think Elon Musk woke up one day and decided to starve some Yemeni children to death. Rather, I think he couldn’t be arsed to learn the details of what he was doing, and instead succumbed to conspiracy theories about USAID (the drug use can’t have helped here), until he really did convince himself USAID was “a criminal organization” that needed to “die.”

Jesse Singal

Bro, you gave up a podcast. And you’re not divorced. Or separated.

It is easy to make fun of Dan Bongino, the emotionally incontinent former cop turned podcaster appointed for some inexplicable reason by Donald Trump to serve as deputy director of the FBI as a subordinate to Kash Patel, whose main qualification for the job was having been the author of … a children’s book about the Steele dossier, a fact that sounds totally made-up but that is totally not made-up.

And it is a good week for making fun of Bongino, who recently had a public emotional breakdown on Fox News—where else?—about how he “gave up everything” to take on a thankless job in public service. About which: Bro, you gave up a podcast. Bongino went on to say that the job was so hard that he was now divorced from his wife, only to realize that he didn’t exactly mean what he said. The bombastic mode of speech that is apparently obligatory in Trump’s orbit had served him poorly, and so he corrected himself: “separated.” But he didn’t mean “separated” the way it sounds when it is used in conjunction with “divorce.” He just meant that he’s spending a lot of time at the office away from his family.

Kevin D. Williamson

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks)

Sunday before Theophany

Myth and Truth

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” So claimed C. S. Lewis in his 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact.” Lewis insisted that myth lies at the heart of the faith—even if it embarrasses those moderns who would cover over the mythic imagery of Scripture with the whitewash of literalism, replacing lively stories with morals, principles, and ideas. The similarities between the Christian faith and the myths of the pagans need not occasion unease, Lewis argued; rather, they manifest a “mythical radiance” that should be preserved within our theology.

…

Jordan Peterson is an especially vivid example of one who feeds upon the Christian story as myth, while not believing it as fact. He is far from alone, and though We Who Wrestle with God is not a true Christian reading of Holy Scripture, it represents an encouraging trend of serious thinkers recognizing the vital cultural significance of the Bible. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans—and a spur to Christians to return to a spiritual reading of Holy Scripture. In myth, as Lewis recognized, meaning is encountered neither as abstract nor as bound to the particular, but as reality. And in the Incarnation, myth and fact are joined.

Alastair Roberts, Jordan Peterson’s “God”.

My attitude toward Jordan Peterson is vexed. I pray for him as a very important Christian-adjacent “influencer” — that he will lead his (mostly young, or so I hear) followers to good places and that he himself will embrace the Orthodox Christian faith to which he is is multiple ways very close. On the other hand, I don’t have time for his logorrhea and circumlocution.

Ritual

The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings. It allows us to express our faith through an act.

Andrew Sullivan via Peter Savodnik

Why so much doctrine in catechesis?

Frs. Andrew and Stephen, in an un-transcribed asynchronous Q&A podcast, observed that although catechesis ideally should be more about how to live an Orthodox life, less about what the Orthodox Church believes (90% of that can be gotten from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church), nonetheless people come to Orthodoxy thinking, for instance, “St. Paul taught X, Y and Z in Romans” when in fact he did not so teach. Leaving that Protestant artifact unaddressed will lead some people to a place where they feel that the Church is contradicting St. Paul. So we’ve got to do some doctrine in catechesis.

My comment: One of the doctrines we need to emphasize with converts coming from a left-brain culture is that praxis may be more important than doctrine.

Caveat Zeitgeist

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Golden Rule, misapplied

“Why do you defame us?” asks the former president. “Why concentrate on the negative? We give you the Alumnus of the Year award, and you turn around and lambaste us in your writing every chance you get.” Blindsided, I don’t reply right away. Finally, I say, “I don’t intend to demean anyone. I guess I’m still trying to sort through the mixed messages I got here.” He doesn’t back off. “I know all sorts of juicy stories about people in Christian ministry,” he says. “But I would never write about them because of the pain it would cause. I go by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as I would have them do to me.” Later, as his comment sinks in, I realize that is the very reason I probe my past, even though it may cause others pain. My brother’s question plagues me still: What is real, and what is fake? I know of no more real or honest book than the Bible, which hides none of its characters’ flaws. If I’ve distorted reality or misrepresented myself, I would hope someone would call me out.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell.

Yancey’s interlocutor wants to be left alone, and thinks that’s the meaning of the “Golden Rule.” Yancey won’t leave him alone because he wouldn’t want to be left alone if he strayed.

I’m with Yancey, but it seems like the world around me, including purported Christians, is almost unanimously with his interlocutor.

A most kingly Reformation

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

That God-shaped hole

“There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” [Jonathan Haidt] said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Peter Savodnik again.

The emergent culture

In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday, 11/17/24

Permeable walls

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of my formal entry into the Orthodox Christian Faith. Unlike my departure from frank evangelicalism for Calvinism two decades earlier, this felt like a conversion, not an incidental change of denomination.

Part of that feeling may have been that the evangelical-to-Calvinist transition was largely invisible to observers: I didn’t quit our Baptist church and go to the tiny PCA startup in town; instead I moved across the country to go back to school, so of course I had to find a new church; I graduated, moved, and began practicing law in my hometown, so again I had to find a new church.

That each of those steps was away from evangelicalism and toward Calvinism would have been apparent only to someone for whom the permeability of denominational walls in Protestantism seems odd, and I think there most Protestants who take that permeability for granted (if they even think about “denominations” in an age of tens of thousands of crypto-baptist nondenominational pastoral fiefdoms). Indeed, during this transition, I published a law journal note titled Church Property Disputes in an Age of Common-Core Protestantism, based on the premise that someone who became a Presbyterian or Methodist or Episcopalian was unlikely to be buying into denominational ownership or control of the local church’s temporalities that he (or she) now donated to maintaining.

But another part of the “conversion” sensation certainly was that I had to be catechized to enter Orthodoxy. Its walls are not permeable. I became an “ecclesial Christian” as Richard John Neuhaus described it: one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. I finally believed that the one holy, catholic and apostolic church is visible and distinct, not invisible and amorphous.

Today, I’m more interested in a question one could phrase in an article title as Church Discipline in an Age of Permeable-Wall Protestantism. Others have doubtless gone deeper into the topic of how there can be effective church discipline, how can flagrant sinners be brought to repentance, when they can just move to another church before the heat melts their hearts? Maybe he can even start and pastor his own church (or get nominated as Attorney General). In a largely Protestant nation, it’s hard for an ecclesial Christian convert not to at least dabble in other people’s business.

A bold claim

I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen De Young’s book St. Paul the Pharisee, which I hoped would focus on this bold claim:

Mostly it doesn’t, or it doesn’t do so explicitly except for that quote.

But Fr. Stephen’s “interpretive translation” of Paul’s epistles subtly undermines the tendency to view them as theological treatises rather than pastoral guidance.

Instrumentalist faith

In the last few years, there has been no shortage of political commentary—much of which I agree with—that has argued that Christianity is needed for Western civilization and its guiding principles to survive. Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.

The outcome is not a secret. The churches that live as though Jesus is optional have been, despite their best verbal efforts, saying effectively and forcefully to their members and to the world that what the church uniquely has to offer is not needed, and that the church is here to serve those realities which already exist beyond the church’s baptismal boundaries.

…

I have become convinced that one of the primary challenges for Christians today is to come to terms with the overwhelming success of secularized Christianity. It is a great comfort to a Christian to say to himself or herself that secularized faith doesn’t actually work: it is how we tell ourselves that secularism will collapse under its own weight and that we’ll be here waiting when it happens, ready to welcome the world back into our arms. But of course, this is a fantasy about our own relevance. We are the secular culture’s ex-girlfriend, and telling ourselves that the new girlfriend isn’t pretty and that the culture will eventually see that it needs us is a pathetic expression of our need, not the world’s.

Matthew Burdette, Is the Church Obsolete? (H/T Brad East)

I honestly don’t think I’ve heard any Orthodox Christian talking about the importance of the Orthodox Church in secular instrumental terms. But to be honest, I sometimes think of the Catholic and Protestant churches as important to the survival of western civilization — and for some of its peculiarities.

Enculturation

Sometimes I have the unsettling sense that everyone possesses a spiritual secret but me. Other students speak of God as an intimate friend. They seem perfectly content studying the Bible all day, and unquestioningly accept whatever the professors say. More often, I conclude there is no secret, just a learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

Of this “learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words,” I recently heard the sympathetic observation that people can believe absurd things, even contradictory things, because of where they are enculturated.

For anyone who thinks he (or she) has found the truth, and who can’t understand why others cannot see it, this is helpful to remember — in both directions. I don’t mean there’s no truth, only enculturation, but something about empathy and humility.

The American Hermeneutic

The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Of Nietzsche

Ironically, the fallen antichrist spent his long years of decline in the same female company that he claimed to have detested as a boy. He ended his life as the charge of his sister, but for many years after his collapse he was cared for by his mother. We know almost nothing about this quiet, pious woman, the widow of a Lutheran minister. But her act of taking the invalid into her home and enduring his catatonic silence, marked by occasional screaming fits, could only have been motivated by maternal love and Christian pity, two of the most debilitating values in what the philosopher had called the “slave morality.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

The flight into nondenominationalism

I’ve noticed Churches changing names to drop denominational identifiers. The Church I grew up in is considering dropping “Evangelical” from its name, not because it identifies the denomination but because of the debasement of the term into a political category.

Mites and motes

People who want to bring heaven upon earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the one thing they cannot do, which is to cure themselves.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Complicit

The spectacle of [John] Lennon imagining a world without possessions while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers. As Nietzsche spun furiously in his grave, ‘Imagine’ became the anthem of atheism.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Command performance

The logic of those prayers, if one was reading between the lines, was something like this:

“Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have You over a barrel and can quote Your own book back at you! And in case You’re thinking of weaseling out of this deal, we claim Your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since You wrote it all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say, and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

Any questions?

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

The Say Hey Kid was that rarity who played a boy’s game with a boy’s joy and a man’s discipline and shrewdness.

National Review, The Week. That’s got to be the best “in a nutshell” on Mays. One consolation of being 75 most of this year is the memory of Willie Mays playing live, not just on highlight reels. You kids have no idea ….

Even the secularists have rituals

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

I became an “Apple guy” at home before retirement, though I still had to use Windows at work. Now our house is all Apple (or nearly so). (I confess to brief side-eyed looks at Linux, but it’s never stuck; I’ve just got my Apple gear set up to do what I want, quickly, so why change?)

Still, VisionPro was a bridge or two too far — way too much money for a novelty. Now:

Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025. (Source: theinformation.com)

Via John Ellis

Freud

In his fanciful narrative, religion and the civilization that springs from it are reducible to a primordial event of psychosexual violence. … For Freud, at the dawn of human civilization a group of brothers, desiring sexual gratification with their mother, spontaneously rise up against their father and commit parricide. They then devour his body in a ritual act, joining incest to cannibalism. Because of their guilt, however, they internalize their absent father’s authority, which takes the place of a collective superego. From that moment on, human civilization has worked to suppress the libidinal will to power in men by repressing desire and transferring it to more “sublimated” activities. All religions—but especially Christianity with its doctrine of God the Father—are compensations for this primordial act of parricide. They can all be traced back to this scientifically formulated (and completely theoretical) act of original sin.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

His polemical broadsides vaulted him to the forefront of a group of revisionist skeptics loosely known as the Freud bashers.

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

Obituary for Frederick Crews: “A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.”

It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materially discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

Recent dustups over the supposedly racist implications of advocating marriage, thrift, and a good work ethic reveal the logic of cultural deregulation. The goal is to strip society of norms, leaving unsheltered those who cannot afford to live in well-appointed enclaves that covertly sustain modified bourgeois norms for the rich and their children. In the open culture, the lives of ordinary people become more disordered and less functional.

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

[I]t has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”

…

[U]nlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.

…

[I]t’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

So it is that the gendered nature of the body is under attack, from the Left and Right, as is the connection between sex and babies. Left and Right alike resent the limitations of the human body. There’s just one small problem: sex does make babies and men and women are different. An ideology that cannot make room for the basic facts of human reproduction and sex differences is an ideology that will end up at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race. In that war, it will go looking for allies where it can find them. It finds its most powerful, its indispensable, ally in the State.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

By quoting, I’m not endorsing this book. I read it in preparation for a Symposium where the author was to be one of three keynote speakers. Based partly on the book, which did make a few points in a temperate register, I decided not to register for the symposium.

Self-delegitimation

As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

WordPress unfortunately has been “improving” things again, so I cannot figure out how to embed a YouTube video, but I recommend the video at this link.

Theory 1: Putin is a revanchist, with many screws loose, who wants to rebuild the USSR in toto.
Theory 2: Putin would not tolerate NATO being extended to its very border with Ukraine (which the US promised it would not allow), kinda like our Monroe Doctrine.

Expats

“I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

…

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come ….

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

One thing I think we can rule out right away is that the drop in support for same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality is a function of religion. I’m aware of no evidence that the United States is undergoing a religious Great Awakening, at least when it comes institutional forms of worship handed down from the past. As sociologist Samuel Perry recently put it in a useful summary for Time magazine:

According to data from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.

Why, then, might Republicans have begun turning against same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality in the past two years?

This is just speculation, but I’d wager it has something to do with the way left-wing activists have taken up the cause of transgender rights as the next front in the now-decades-long cultural revolution. To be clear: I don’t think such a backlash, if there’s been one, has arisen over calls to protect the civil rights of the tiny number of transgender people in the country. Rather, the backlash would come from opposition to the ideology of transgenderism promulgated by the most militant activists on the left—and the extraordinary rapidity with which that ideology’s assumptions and assertions have come to be treated as conventional wisdom among many of those who run government bureaucracies, public and private schools and universities, medical institutions, and the business sector.

…

If I’m right that declining support for same-sex marriage and homosexual acceptance among Republicans derives (at least in part) from a backlash against transgender activism, that would likely mean that more conservative-minded Americans have concluded the gay-rights movement was a Trojan Horse for something far more extreme and destabilizing. It’s not inevitable that they would conclude this, since as Andrew Sullivan and other champions of gay rights have persuasively argued, the interests of homosexuals stand in considerable tension with those asserted by the most radical transgender activists. But the Activist and Donor Complex on the left has made it natural for the rest of the country to make the leap from one to the other by bundling the two movements together in an ever-expanding, alphabet-soup abbreviation: LGBTTTIQA+, etc.

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

…

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

…

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. It changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to “Hatewatch,” and began issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC’s blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don’t exist, or are harmless (such as a Confederate memorabilia shop that made the list), or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC’s lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson … The SPLC’s appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million.

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

I personally know progressives who are absolutely furious that GOP figures don’t speak out against Trump, but those same individuals are petrified of the intolerant elements of their own political tribe. They wouldn’t dream of speaking against the most-woke elements of the radical left. After all, their jobs are at stake. Their reputations hang in the balance. Remember the now-famous Vox essay, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”? I’ve heard that sentiment many times.

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

If the sudden prospect of electing the first president who is a convicted felon hasn’t put Americans off Trump, why would Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, or anyone else think that reminding them of his coup plot and the insurrection it led to will do so?

On the other hand, how can one run against Donald Trump and not make his authoritarian ambitions the centerpiece of the campaign? He’s not shy about expressing those ambitions; should he win in November, the next four years will in fact be defined by his attempts to subvert the constitutional order. The right’s hostility to Western liberalism is the elephant in the room of this election. How can the president resist making a spectacle of it?

I think his and Donilon’s strategy of making the race about democracy is simultaneously weak and quite possibly the strongest one available to them.

…

There’s another case for the Donilon strategy. Namely, it’s worked before. And I don’t just mean in 2020.

Five days before the 2022 midterms Biden delivered a speech warning Americans that, with so many Trump-backed post-liberal populist Republicans running for major offices, “democracy is on the ballot.” He called on voters to ask themselves this question when considering a candidate: “Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?”

Some pundits called the address “head-scratching” in light of polling that showed the economy, not democracy, dominating when voters were asked what the most important issue in the election was. Yet five days later Republicans ended up underperforming badly in a midterm in which the out-party typically cleans up. One Trump-endorsed MAGA acolyte after another fell short in key races, holding the GOP to modest gains in the House and helping Democrats gain a seat in the Senate.

…

For me, the great virtue of the Donilon strategy is that it’ll leave America with no excuses if Trump wins. An election framed around the economy or immigration that ends in Republican victory will let denialists about the country’s decline insist that things would have been different if only Biden had taken a different approach. “He should have emphasized the coup attempt and January 6,” they’ll say. “Surely Americans wouldn’t have reelected Trump if the election had been about that.”

I’m not sure of that at all, personally. I’d like to test the proposition. And if Trump is returned to power, I’d find comfort in knowing that we maximized our collective shame by approaching the race as a referendum on the constitutional order—and chose the other option. If we do this, let’s be clear-eyed about it. No excuses. Trump 2024: Maximum Shame.

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Frank Bruni

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in.

Populism anticipated

For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court:

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

Australia can have him

Julian Assange on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Jim Ellis, News Items

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

Catholic Integralism
Calvinistic Reconstructionism
A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Pascha 2024

I was nurtured on stories as a child that contrasted Christ’s “non-judging” (“Jesus, meek and mild”) with Christ the coming Judge (at His dread Second Coming). I was told that His second coming would be very unlike His first. There was a sense that Jesus, meek and mild, was something of a pretender, revealing His true and eternal character only later as the avenging Judge.

This, of course, is both distortion and heresy. The judgment of God is revealed in Holy Week. The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection reconcile man to God, not God to man. The difference in outlook is immense. God never departs from us. It is we who depart from Him. It is we who become spiritually ill through sin. It is we who need to be cured and restored. The Orthodox view is that “by his sacrifice on the Cross Christ did not propitiate his Father, but he cured the ailing nature of man.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

That is a good segué to my “what I learned during Lent this year” report.

I learned, at a deeper-than-usual level, the grace of God. That doesn’t mean He’s fine with us as we are; it means that He doesn’t forsake us, and that that nothing we’ve done is too bad for Him to forgive if we repent.

Repentance, though, is a constant, daily need, and doubly so when even religion and Christian education can be off the mark and unhelpful, even toxic.

Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World described America as a place “where the religious ‘boom’ is due primarily to the secularization of religion.”

Father Schmemann has been gone for decades now, but his observation still seems true. Most religion in the US is secular because the media and the society teach nonstop that secular and political concerns are real, religion ephemeral. Shallow Christianity, in response, secularizes itself because it wants to be considered real.

Politics is one obvious secularization in North America (I thank Thee, O Lord, that I am not like other man, especially those icky evangelicals who’ve been taken in by an orange con man, let alone an integralist or a Seven Mountain Mandate flake), but if politicization of faith were to end overnight, all would not be well. No, it wouldn’t:

Finding a (Real) Christian College.” For college decision day, I wrote for Christianity Today about what students should look for when deciding on what college to attend: “the most overlooked and therefore most insidious threat to Christian education in America right now [is] not progressive theology. It’s a pervasive consumerist anthropology. Theological anthropology concerns our assumptions about the nature and purpose of humanity. And by ‘consumerist anthropology’ I mean the belief—often subconsciously held—that people are essentially consumers who should maximize their earning potential so they can consume as many entertaining experiences and products as possible.

Jeffrey Bilbro

“Consumerist anthropology” is the new water.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)