Thursday, 3/30/23

Education

Alarming if true

Over a third of our college seniors couldn’t show any significant cognitive gain for their college years.

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni via William McGurn.

Saucing geese and ganders

[T]he wrongs wrought by [university DEI policies] are three: First, by folding socio-political goals into the process for tenure and promotion the policy conflates those ends with professional qualifications. This conflation infringes academic freedom. Further, were it to become acceptable for a university to commandeer its faculty toward socio-political ends, made part of the faculty’s professorial obligations, there would be no principled reason why those who fund the institution—the legislatures—should not impose those socio-political ends that they hold dear.

Prof. Matthew Finkin, Diversity! Mandating Adherence to a Secular Creed.

Note well that last sentence, particularly if you commend DEI and contemn Ron DeSantis’s dealings with New College Florida.

What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus

For a long time we tolerated campus behavior much as we used to tolerate the behavior of toddlers. They’ll grow out of it, we thought, when they enter the real world. But the joke was on us. They graduated into the real world and started to impose their views on it. Weak-kneed managers, eager to protect their privileges and preserve a quiet life, couldn’t face the hostility they’d get from their employees and a media of the same ideological mindset always willing to air the grievances.

We see the implications—occasionally bursting into the open—as when the New York Times forced its opinion editor to resign for publishing an article the radicals didn’t like, or Google dropping a Pentagon contract because employees objected to helping the U.S. defend itself. Most of the time it advances without publicity, as steadily, day by day, the former campus totalitarians make their way in the “real world.”

It’s time employers started to resist, and began to educate their employees—the hard way if necessary—why free speech is so important.

Gerrard Baker, Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance.

Culture

AR-15s and Whole Foods

If the Red Ryder BB gun is an artifact of an America in which little boys dreamed of growing up to be cowboys, then the omnipresent AR-pattern rifle testifies to a world in which the great masculine ideals are SEALs and snipers. SOCOM stands for “Special Operations Command,” but you’ll see that acronym deployed at least as often in firearms-related marketing material as you will in actual military reports.

(Incidentally, I was going to link to a “SOCOM” example above, but I am at the moment working from the cafe of a Whole Foods Market, which apparently employs a digital nanny that blocks U.S. gun-manufacturer websites. The link to the Communist Party of China works just fine. It’s a funny old world.)

Kevin D. Williamson

When polling reveals nothing useful

I am not particularly worried about a new poll everyone keeps talking about that shows collapse of civic virtues.

It’s not just that a knowledgeable pollster counsels caution about this particular due to a change in the pollster’s methodology (internet polling verses phone interview). It’s that I’ve already noted, polling aside, collapse of much about America and I don’t find quantification of it worth my time.

Progress in the 21st century

In the 21st century, Progress means the unbounded forward march of commerce and technology. And any effort at all to set any limits on that forward march, by calling for limits on the free global movement of low-skilled labour, for example, makes you far-Right by definition. As for asserting a sexed limit to self-identification, this also amounts to standing athwart the march of commerce and technology, yelling “Stop!”.

Mary Harrington, What Posie Parker learnt from Brexit

An arresting phrase

… the difference between what [J.K.] Rowling says she believes and what her critics claim she does.

J.K. Rowling Addresses Her Critics

Is Rowling a notorious liar? Are her critics clairvoyant? Are they grievance-pickers?

ICYMI

Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends. Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Politics

Radical reformers

the Ukraine episode showed how Trump and DeSantis, each lionized by their admirers as men of conviction, are opposites in a sense. Trump has extreme instincts but was deterred repeatedly from following them by his advisers while in office. DeSantis, by contrast, works his will routinely in governing Florida but retreated toward a mainstream position on Ukraine when his initial reaction proved too extreme for some of his fans.

Who is the candidate of disruption between the two? The radical who doesn’t know how to govern effectively or the effective governor whose radicalism is shallow?

Nick Cattogio

The “Christians” of Coeur d’Alene

On Wednesday, as the frenzied mob of Trump enthusiasts desecrated the US Capitol, I had to go into Coeur d’Alene to run a few errands. On the street I saw a group of men and women gathered together, glued to their phones in ecstatic glee. I went into a store, where two men approached me to check if I’d heard the wonderful news about the invasion of the Capitol. They announced that the people are taking power, and this is just the beginning of a new revolution.

“And when the revolution arrives in this town,” they told me, “we’ll be driving all the liberals and BLM people into the hills.”

…[W]hen these men announced that they hoped the storming of the Capitol would culminate in the violent expulsion of their political rivals from town, I replied, “In a free society, people have the right to be jerks if they want to.” I was shouted down by everyone in the store. “Not anymore!” they yelled. “Things are different now.”

Robin Mark Phillips, 1/11/21

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Wednesday, 8/24/22

Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces …?

On January 6, 2021, from a parking garage under the Capitol Visitor Center, then–Vice President Mike Pence ordered the military to defend the Capitol against a violent insurrection. According to a taped deposition of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pence “issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders” to him and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller: “Get the military down here. Get the Guard here. Put down this situation.”

…

In ordinary circumstances, Pence’s actions would be unconstitutional. Indeed, a vice president who usurped the president’s constitutional authority, and the Cabinet and military officers who followed his orders, could be committing an impeachable offense. …

…

Jefferson also insisted, the officer who exercises emergency power must justify his actions to “his fellow citizens generally.” For Jefferson, “the good officer” must throw “himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.”

From his title (Mike Pence Owes the Country an Explanation) and the first paragraph, I easily figured out where George Thomas was headed and why: he wants Pence to say he perceived an emergency if only because Donald Trump was failing to put down the rump insurrection.

What I didn’t expect was that he would bring Jefferson and Lincoln into it and would persuade me of his case — and by inference to repent of my former judgment on Lincoln for his ultra vires acts.

Yup, the world is messy sometimes. This once was one of my favorite quotes, in part because it challenged my purity fetish:

Purity … is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience Lectures 14 and 15, via here.

Sorting out a jumble

[W]e have no ideal path forward. We’re damned if Attorney General Merrick Garland goes forward with a Trump prosecution and damned if Garland holds off. But the latter path should nonetheless be treated as a viable Plan B because it permits the Democrats to continue beating Trump in the political arena by the widest possible margin. That involves all kinds of risks as well, but it’s less risky than the legal option.

Damon Linker, summarizing the case against prosecution that he’s been trying to make.

To use the full powers of federal law enforcement during a Democratic administration to indict, try, convict, and punish this man would drive large numbers of Republicans even further into Trump’s arms …
The goal should be his political defeat—turning him into a loser in the court of public opinion—not using an extra-political workaround to try and exile him from political competition. If you think making Hitler and Chamberlain analogies clarifies these issues, good for you. I think it’s pretty idiotic.
For the sake of argument, I’ve been happy to concede the point and assume Trump is guilty of … something. But is it true? [] After reading a highly illuminating exchange between widely respected legal scholar Jack Goldsmith and journalist Josh Marshall, I’m honestly not sure.
Could it be that all of the sound and fury I’ve seen online from the left about the imperative of punishing Trump’s self-evident criminality is based on nothing more than a feeling, a conviction, a moral certainty that he simply must be guilty of something? If so, that would be a further sign that loathing for the former president is a fundamentally political impulse, not a legal one.

Maybe I’ll take a position on “prosecute or nolle prosequi” when someone convincingly shows that Trump committed an actual crime, and that prosecution will be a slam-dunk. Considering the proportion of Trumpists in the land, I’m not sure you’ll ever impanel a jury without one or with one that will vote to convict.

Why colleges are failing

The present model of colleges and universities is failing, for in the first place they have forgotten or even turned against their original mission; in the second, they have picked up a whole lot of unrelated sidelines, none of which they do very well, such as universal job certification; and in the third, the public is beginning to catch on that they cost far too much, and that other institutions can usually do each of these sidelines better. Barring root and branch reform – for which we must never give up hope — it’s entirely possible that in the not-so-distant future, serious humanities teaching will have to migrate to other settings than colleges and universities.

J Budziszewski

Detritus

In a nutshell

Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents

Be careful what you ask for …

History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo…

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

How low can we go?

Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump seemed like some kind of nadir, but the Florida panhandle is showing that we can go even lower: Matt Gaetz versus Rebekah Jones

Institutions trumping instinct

But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.

Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

One thing leads to another …

I was good at menial jobs like parking cars but went into radio because it was Minnesota and vacuum tubes give off heat. It was public radio where all the announcers sound like Methodist ministers except not as friendly and there is no Jesus, and I distinguished myself by telling jokes and stem-winding stories about a small town. People liked it; go figure.

Garrison Keillor

American exceptionalism plus

It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.

Zack Stanton, It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism – POLITICO

Maybe a bit harsh

I would rather have gonorrhea than a record of passionate and convinced #MAGA tweeting.

Graeme Wood, What to Do With Trumpists – The Atlantic.

Maybe a bit harsh, but then it’s dated 1/19/21, the day before Joe Biden officially became President despite Trump’s lawless efforts to retain the Presidency.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Friday, 7/15/22

Improving an old adage

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.

Oscar Wilde via Nadine Strossen, Who Really Benefits From the First Amendment?

I had never before enountered that delightful upgrade to an old saw.

We. Are. Doomed.

I learned Thursday of a newly-minted epithet for those of us who have no intention of uploading our brains to the cloud to attain immortality, and who oppose the whole project: "fleshists."

Errata

I referred recently to Herschel Walker as an in-kind contribution to Stacy Abrams’ race for Governor of Georgia. The problem is, Walker is running for Senate, not Governor. So he’s actually an in-kind contribution to Raphael Warnock. You can look that up.

Warnock, be it remembered, was elected in an early-2021 runoff partly courtesy of Orange Man petulantly implying that Georgia’s election apparatus was so corrupt that there was no point in voting. Many [brutal characterization of mental and moral capacity omitted] Georgia Republicans obliged Orange Man by staying home, so we now have an evenly-divided Senate instead of Republican control. And, God willing, liberal Raphael Warnock will not be relinquishing his seat to Orange-Man-endorsed Herschel Walker (who absolutely was a superb football player back when I watched the Cowboys religiously).

That’s from memory and opinion banks, and it’s too good to fact-check myself on it. "Orange Man bad" indeed, and bad in so many ways for the GOP that adores him.

Modern and Postmodern

Walter Pater’s aphorism that all art aspired to the condition of music alluded to the fact that music is the least explicit of all the arts (and the one most directly attuned to our embodied nature). In the twentieth century, by contrast, art has aspired to the condition of language, the most explicit and abstracted medium available to us.

Iain McGilchrist, The Modern and Postmodern Worlds in The Master and His Emissary

Abolition of biology

While some degree of ‘gender dysphoria’ is probably as old as the hills, and people who don’t conform to society’s expectations of what men and women ‘should’ be have always existed (many of us could probably comfortably fit into that category), what is happening now is something very different. Western society is engaged in a fundamental shift in its understanding not just of ‘gender roles’ – questioning them has been de rigeur for at least a century, after all – but in the nature of biological reality.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Abolition of Man (and Woman)

Last Resort

The important thing to understand about preventive attacks on other countries is that they can never be a “last resort.”

Daniel Larison, Biden’s ‘Last Resort’ – by Daniel Larison – Eunomia

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Thursday, 7/14/22

A bit Snarky

Not since Jefferson dined alone

For several hours on December 18, 2020, some of the greatest legal minds of a generation gathered at the White House for a meeting that would change the course of history. Sidney Powell was there, as were onetime national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Rudy Giuliani showed up, as did Mark Meadows. Shortly after it concluded, then-President Donald Trump sent a tweet.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” he wrote. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

The Morning Dispatch.

It’s a bit of a false note for the Dispatch to lead with such snark, but I like that false note this time.

Church and State

Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert caused a stir in late June when she denounced the separation of church and state as “junk” and proclaimed that “the church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.” Bettering her usual performance, she was half-right.

William Galston, Lauren Boebert Is Half-Right on Church and State.

We don’t care. We don’t have to.

Is the ACLU’s Chase Strangio the weirdest, and least truthful, highly-placed person on the Left in America today?

It’s kind of "We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the ACLU."

The limits of prediction

People can’t predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it’s subatomic particles that they cite as “limits of prediction.” They’re ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Politics

Submission to whom?

As I watched Ms. Barrett fielding questions from senators [at confirmation hearings], I realized two things.

First, it is amazing how deeply this erasure cuts, how much I have subconsciously internalized that there is something defective about me as a woman because I do not share certain feminist tenets. … Second, I realized how many women I know—most who would not identify with the moniker “conservative”—share Ms. Barrett’s pro-life position and have felt chastened into civic silence and submission. … Too often, I keep my views quiet not out of tact but for the sake of my social life and career. In this, I submit not to the patriarchy but to the oppressive, mainstream feminist vision of myself and my peers and what we are worth to society.

Jane Sloan Peters, I See My Own Pro-Life Feminism in Amy Coney Barrett

Smash the political duopoly

Nothing says "Our political duopoly is rotten to the core" like Democrats spending tens of millions of dollars to support the most extreme, Trumpist, election-denying Republican primary candidates they can find.

You can help smash the duopoly.

Profiles in Poltroonry

Regardless of whether the committee proves Trump legally culpable for January 6, at least one top Trump adviser held him morally responsible for that day. After police shot and killed Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to breach the Capitol, Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale texted Trump operative Katrina Pierson. “This is about Trump pushing for uncertainty in our country,” Parscale—who worked on both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns—wrote, in messages provided by the Committee. “A sitting president asking for civil war. This week I felt guilty for helping him win [in 2016].”

“You did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right,” Pierson replied.

“Yeah,” Parscale wrote. “But a woman is dead.”

“You do realize this was going to happen,” Pierson said.

“Yeah,” Parscale said. “If I was Trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone.”

“It wasn’t the rhetoric.”

“Katrina. Yes it was.”

One month later, Parscale tweeted: “Statement to Trump: ‘If they only impeached you twice, you need to run again… I’m in, are you?’”

Normal bad, not existential threat

Since it’s clear (at least for now) that Ron DeSantis is the Republican most likely to unseat Donald Trump, we’re starting to see a predictable line of pieces online. Trump is bad, but DeSantis might be worse. Trump was incompetent authoritarian. DeSantis is ruthlessly efficient. You can read versions of that argument in MSNBC, the Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Magazine, and MSNBC.

I started reading many of these pieces earlier this morning, and I finished just as today’s January 6 Committee hearing got underway. The contrast, quite frankly, was jarring. One the one hand, DeSantis’s critics were describing a politician who played by the rules to enact policies they didn’t like. On the other hand, I watched yet another account of a politician who came within one Mike Pence “yes” (to his harebrained electors scheme) to plunging America into the worst constitutional crisis since 1861.

Let me make this analysis as simple as possible. Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the continued existence of the United States as an intact republic. Our nation may not survive a second Trump term. Ron DeSantis has his flaws, but he’s absolutely within the bounds of a mainstream American politician.

David French.

I was tempted to stop there, but I read on. French is not happy with DeSantis and spells out clearly why he’s not. Progressive Democrats won’t like his analysis, though.

Introduction to the analysis:

My critique of DeSantis has less to do with Donald Trump and more to do with Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. By that I mean that DeSantis is more like a California Democrat than he is like Donald Trump. Specifically, both DeSantis and Harris are culture warriors who are prone to fight the culture the wrong way—by deploying state power at the expense of civil liberties.

Portraits in Credulity

Can you believe that 38 percent of Democrats are LGBT? And that a whopping 44 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year? Those stats are from a 2018 study published by the University of Chicago based on 2015 data, but I may have messed up the delivery a little. Actually, it’s that Republicans in the study reported that 38 percent of Democrats are LGBT and Democrats believe that nearly half of Republicans make a quarter-million dollars a year. In truth, 6 percent of Democrats identify as LGBT and 2 percent of Republicans earn that high a salary. Democrats, themselves, also overestimated the number of LGBT members in their own party. But out-group members were far more likely to misperceive the opposing party’s makeup.

And aside from partisanship, interest in politics was also a great predictor of who was more likely to be wrong, i.e., consuming more political news and social media made a respondent more likely to misjudge the makeup of either party. “Interest in political news will be positively correlated with beliefs about the share of partisans belonging to party-stereotypical groups,” the authors reported.

I’d suspect these biases have gotten worse since 2015. But as I keep seeing surveys about young people refusing to be friends with someone who doesn’t share their political beliefs or people who don’t understand that social media curates their feed to show them political content that is most likely to agree with and shield them from alternative viewpoints, it’s worth a reminder that there’s no substitute—not even this newsletter—for striking up a conversation in the grocery store line, calling up a potential new friend for a beer, or asking someone a question about how he views the world and actually listening to the answer. Good luck!

Sarah Isgur, Andrew Egger, and Audrey Fahlberg, The Sweep (a publication of The Dispatch, my very best media expenditure).

Turning the tables

New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently allocated $35 million to provide special assistance to abortion providers, and there is a proposal to subsidize women’s travel to New York to procure abortions. In New York City, homeless men urinate in doorways and drug addicts shoot up in public at midday. In the face of these realities, Hochul’s commitment of resources to ensure the wide availability of abortion services seems more than a little perverse. The contrasts are even starker in Illinois. As the death toll of gun violence increases on Chicago’s South Side, Governor J. B. Pritzker has called for a special legislative session to address, not the murder rate, but “reproductive rights.”

R.R. Reno.

It’s a dubious form of argument, but the temptation to turn it against those who’ve used it for 49 years is powerful. In other words, who’s obsessed with sex now?

GOP Gift-in-Kind to Stacy Abrams

What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.

Herschel Walker, Republican nominee for Governor of Georgia, responding to a CNN reporter’s question about whether there should be new gun legislation in the wake of the Uvalde shootings. (H/T John McWhorter)

Consider his candidacy the Republican contribution to Stacy Abrams’ campaign.

Locus classicus

"I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.” “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Wednesday, 7/6/22

Eye of newt, toe of frog: what’s cooking in Nashville?

“The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be,” said former President Donald Trump, who delivered the keynote address at the event. “The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.”

Katherine Stewart, Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next

Because Trump’s words are in quotation-marks, I trust Stewart on the quote. (Otherwise, she’s prone to reckless hyperbole.) Can we agree that "you know the people I’m talking about," coming from the mouth of the man who’d have been glad of the lynching of Mike Pence on 1/6/21 for frustrating his coup attempt, is legitimately chilling?

But, ironically, he almost spoke the truth for once: the greatest danger is within, and a big part of it was listening to him with rapt attention.

The "theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society" (Stewart’s pretty accurate summary) is deeply unchristian, and I don’t mean that it isn’t nice enough or sweet enough. I’m using Christian in a, well, Christian sense, not as a synonym for "mensch." (There are nasty Christians in this world and admirable non-Christians.)

I mean that grasping for political power through threat of violence is demonic, not Christian. I don’t care what kind of half-assed "Seven Mountains Dominionism" you can brew up from eye of newt, toe of frog, tongues of glossolalia and Calvin’s sting to justify it.

No, the problem isn’t wanting to win. The problem is the unwillingness to lose. That is, the problem is the impossibility of imagining that certain forms of losing might be preferable to certain forms of winning – that some things might not be worth doing even if not doing them would entail losing.

Brad East, Another Option for Christian Politics.

The Rise and Fall of Nondenominationalism

Christianity Today had an excellent podcast series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, with Mars Hill being a Seattle-area megachurch led by its founder named Mark Driscoll. Driscoll was autocratic, toxic, and had some weird obsessions. The Church finally exploded, for reasons you can learn by listening to the podcast series.

Or, in my opinion, you could listen to one of the follow-on episodes, specifically a new interview with Tim Keller. Keller has tremendous insight, but you need to listen closely because he doesn’t say narrowly and judgmentally "this what went wrong with Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll." What he does say has to do with the weaknesses of nondenominational Evangelicalism.

It’s not that hard to connect the dots from there. And in the end, that’s far more important than the weaknesses of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill.

Stories

Stanley is convinced that at least part of a theologian’s job is to tell stories, and stories should be entertaining. Though some might take this as a sign of unsophistication, Stanley would argue that Wittgenstein and others have cured him of theology’s self-defeating post-Enlightenment attempt to ground itself on anything but the biblical narrative.

Stanley Hauerwas, John Berkman, Michael G. Cartwright, The Hauerwas Reader. Or, as Fr. Hans Jacobse said, "We are not in a post-Christian age, but in a post-Enlightenment age. The reason why these Christianities are collapsing is that they were rationalized."

Blinking in shock at a different kind of midlife crisis

Like me, Martin recently found himself blinking in shock as he was dragged unexpectedly towards Christianity in midlife, after a career as a storyteller, mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. Wondering what we can do about our mutual weird journey, we’ve put our heads together to organise a day-long event of stories, talks, workshops and other bits and pieces, aimed at reviving the wild, ancient Christian legacy of the West.

It’s quite a legacy, too. Once upon a time these islands were sprinkled with cave-dwelling monks, forest Christians, old stone monasteries, wandering fools-for-Christ and stories of faith wound deep in the woods and the wild. It’s a deep liturgical, mythological and wild legacy that most of us have forgotten, and we’re going to spend a day and a night talking about it.

Paul Kingsnorth. The "Martin" is Martin Shaw (The House of Beasts & Vines and Amazon).

These aren’t, I think, kinds of stories Stanley Hauerwas was referring to (above), because they’re not exactly biblical. But they’re very good.

I’d give a lot to hear these two together, but not as much as transatlantic air fare.

Humility Today

Ever notice how the people who mention humility the most tend to have it in the shortest supply? Citing a tweet from European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde—that she was “humbled to be awarded an honorary degree by the London School of Economics”—David Brooks dives into the false modesty phenomenon, and why it’s found such a natural home online. “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form,” he writes. “The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.’ Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.’ The whole point of humility display is to signal that you are humbled by your own magnificent accomplishments. We can all be humbled by an awesome mountain or the infinitude of the night sky, but to be humbled by being in the presence of yourself—that is a sign of truly great humility.”

The Morning Dispatch

Pride is generally thought a, if not the, cardinal sin. Humility is its opposite. When people turn "humbled" into the equivalent of "proud", we’re in a world of hurt — worse by far than when they turned "literally" into another word for "figuratively."

David Brooks is one of a handful of reasons I renewed my New York Times subscription after they offered another year at 75%+ discount. Ask and ye shall receive, I guess.

School Shootings (and likely more, but tacitly)

The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.

Malcolm Gladwell via David French, on school shootings as slow-motion riots (among other things).

French:

[T]he “ideology of masculinity” is more dysfunctional than I’ve ever seen. It’s trapped between two competing extremes, a far-left version that casts common male characteristics as inherently toxic or unhealthy and a right-wing masculine counterculture that often revels in aggression and intimidation. One extreme says, “Traditional masculinity is toxic,” and the other extreme responds, “I’ll show you toxic masculinity.” In the meantime, all too many ordinary young men lack any kind of common vision for a moral, meaningful life.

The Supreme Court’s War on Life, the Universe and Everything

From the first full term of a high court whose majority is committed to interpreting the law rather than making it, we know definitively it is for many Americans a revolutionary concept tantamount to an act of aggression. The left and its standard bearers in the media have become so inured to the idea of the judicial branch as an additional arm of the legislature that they regard any departure as an act of hostility.

For that half-century, judges have been allies in the progressive struggle to remake America—either as friendly facilitators of the aims of Democratic presidents and lawmakers or as useful bulwarks against the efforts of Republicans.

The left has surely been encouraged in this belief by the apparently bipartisan nature of the progressive, activist interpretation of the judiciary’s role. Justices appointed by presidents of both parties, have affirmed it. If Anthony Kennedy could reaffirm Roe and John Roberts could uphold ObamaCare, then this is surely the settled and universally agreed-on function of the court: to align itself efficiently with the dominant ideology of the times.

This ideology requires the judiciary to view its role not as the independent interpreter of law in the light of what the Constitution as written permits, but as supplier of a spurious legal authority for explicitly political goals that have no constitutional justification.

Gerard Baker, The Supreme Court’s War on Life, the Universe and Everything

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Random thoughts and clippings

With so many people voluntarily (and bafflingly) unemployed, I’m not hearing much talk about how Universal Basic Income wouldn’t disincentivize work.

I’m not going to quote much from this short Volokh Conspiracy item. It involves lesbians who are excoriated — sometimes by themselves — for shunning "trans women."

I’m also going to resist the temptation to valorize the relatively sane just because they’re being attacked by the batshit crazies.

But I cannot resist the three-point view of Eugene Volokh:

People who want to have sex with you may indeed try to make you feel bad for not agreeing.
"You owe it to someone to enjoy letting me penetrate you" is a very old story.
It’s just not clear to me how this gives them the moral high ground.

Nothing Says "Free to Be Me" Like Compulsory Pansexuality – Reason.com

In a way Republicans have already won in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and longtime party mover, has been forced to fight for his life in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points. If Mr. McAuliffe pulls it out Tuesday, his not-so-Trumpy challenger, Glenn Youngkin, will still have come close in the age of Trump, and his campaign will have provided a rough pathway for how future party candidates can make their way through: 1. Be a respectable, capable-seeming person who focuses on legitimate local issues (schools, taxes.) 2. Don’t say crazy things. 3. Don’t insult Donald Trump but do everything to keep him away.

If forced to wager I’d bet on Mr. Youngkin. I think he’s done something remarkable. But whatever happens Democrats should stay nervous and Republicans can feel some degree of relief: a template is emerging, at least as to states like bluish-purple Virginia.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is very sharp, but I fear she, with her long-term crush on the GOP, has lapsed into wishcasting here about the winning "template."

The "Christian’s" political favorite gives his favorite life advice:

In a 2011 speech, Donald Trump explained his single top rule in life: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.” He’s repeated the same idea over and over again in speeches, tweets, and books published under his byline. In 2024, the targets of Trump’s revenge are American law and American democracy. At a September 25 rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump excoriated state Republican officials who failed to subvert the state election for him. In Iowa two weeks later, Trump delivered more attacks on the 2020 election process, focusing this time on state Republicans who failed to steal Arizona for him.

In 2016 and through the early part of Trump’s presidency, there was often an edge of Friars Club comedy to Trump’s rally performances: not very nice comedy, a little out of style in tone and sensibility, but comedy all the same. Not in 2021. Now it’s all dark and bitter.

David Frum, ‌Is Donald Trump Already Running for President in 2024?

Most Republicans have wagered that the road to office runs through Mar-a-Loco, where you must walk barefoot across the hot ashes of your incinerated pride to kneel at his throne and feed a bit of your soul to him.

Frank Bruni, ‌J.D. Vance’s hillbilly hypocrisy Vance has made that pilgrimage.

A New York Times Guest Column Saturday:

The Only Way to Solve Our Supply Chain Crisis Is to Rethink Trade

The pandemic has exposed problems decades in the making. We need to fix them.

By Josh Hawley
Oct. 29, 2021

The topic interested me, but Josh Hawley has so beslimed himself that I no longer trust a word he says or writes.

Anyway, I’d eat my hat if he conceded that bringing more production back to the U.S. would result in a lower "standard of living" under our current consumerist models (which live by the fallacy "if we can’t measure it, it isn’t real). Rather, he would perpetuate the delusion that we can have it all, no trade-offs.

The only Republican who has held up fairly well against my initial expectations (yes, I had hopes for Hawley) is Ben Sasse. So far, I’m interested in rookie Pete Meijer, too — who is the current occupant of Justin Amash’s old seat. Southwest Michigan produces some interesting pols these days.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Calling spades “spades”

Four snippets over the past few days (several of the articles are months old, though) from people who were taking no guff.

From New York Magazine last November, on turmoil at the New York Times:

Twitter presented innumerable headaches, with reporters having to be chastised for being overtly political, or simply for sounding un-Timesian in their pursuit of likes and retweets. “There’s a very sad need for validation,” one Times journalist who has tweeted tens of thousands of times told me.
Some of the trickiest jounalistic questions have centered on what the Times is or isn’t willing to say. After [James] Bennet’s ouster, [A.G.] Sulzberger met with a columnist for the “Opinion” section who had expressed consternation about the decision. Sulzberger promised the columnist that the Times would not shy away from publishing pieces to which the Times’ core audience might object. “We haven’t lost our nerve,” Sulzberger said.
“Yes, you have,” the columnist told Sulzberger. “You lost your nerve in the most explicit way I’ve ever seen anyone lose their nerve. You can say people are still gonna be able to do controversial work, but I’m not gonna be the first to try. You don’t know what you’ll be able to do, because you are not in charge of this publication — Twitter is. As long as Twitter is editing this bitch, you cannot promise me anything.”

Reeves Wiedeman, Inside the New York Times’ Heated Reckoning With Itself

I had forgotten this prophesy:

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.
Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.
Maybe you hesitate. Is it a fact that if Trump loses, he will reject defeat, come what may? Do we know that? Technically, you feel obliged to point out, the proposition is framed in the future conditional, and prophecy is no man’s gift, and so forth. With all due respect, that is pettifoggery. We know this man. We cannot afford to pretend.

Barton Gellman, What if Trump Refuses to Concede?, September 23, 2020.

Successful Substack writers continues to evoke envy, which tends to get expressed (in writing inferior to the Substack average) as addlepated moral outrage. Marxist blogger-turned-Substacker Freddie de Boer has had lots of thoughts about that, culminating most recently in this:

I write tens of thousands of words on topics ranging from why everyone is actually exhausted to The Giving Tree to the Nation of Islam to Instagram feminism to the charter school scam to atheism after the New Atheists (coming Monday!). Don’t like it? Write better shit, man. Or get mad online. It’s up to you. My people will support me, and I earned that.

What are you, 12? There’s no “deserves”

I hadn’t thought about the implications of some prominent Federalist Society members being implicated in the January 6 insurrection. But David Lat had thought about it quite a lot in the two weeks after:

The Federalist Society is a nonpartisan organization that does not — and cannot, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — endorse candidates for elective public office. It therefore has no official relationship with Donald Trump …
…
Unfortunately — and quite reprehensibly — several prominent FedSoc figures played roles in Trump’s baseless challenge to the 2020 election results, and therefore bear significant blame for the Capitol attack. Law professor John Eastman — chair of FedSoc’s Federalism and Separation of Powers practice group, and a frequent participant in Society events over the years — represented Trump in his (meritless and unsuccessful) attempt to get the Supreme Court to intervene in the election, urged Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results, and had a prominent speaking role at the rally that was the precursor to the riots. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), two members of what conservative law professor John O. McGinnis once dubbed “the Federalist Society caucus” … led the charge in the Senate against certification of the election results, just hours after the horrific Capitol attack. In light of all this, a reckoning at the Federalist Society is in order.
…
So what should FedSoc do in the wake of the Capitol riots? …
First, and most obviously, the Society should no longer allow John Eastman, a prominent promoter of poisonous conspiracy theories about the election, to remain in leadership, as chair of the Federalism and Separation of Powers practice group …
Second, the Society should no longer host events with Eastman, Hawley, and Cruz …
Third, as a more general matter, the Federalist Society should try harder to steer clear of partisan politics. It should be non-partisan not just in name, but in spirit.
…
Of course, the larger and longer-term issue, not just for the Federalist Society but for conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans, is how much of their principles they are willing to sacrifice for power. Allying themselves with Donald Trump for four years got them tax reform, three Supreme Court seats, more than 200 lower-court judgeships, and all sorts of other goodies. But was it worth it?
… I am the last person to underestimate the importance of judges, but if you will allow me to close by paraphrasing Meatloaf, here is my bottom line:
“I would do anything for judges — but I won’t do that.”

David Lat, The Federalist Society And The Capitol Attack: What Is To Be Done?

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Toxic Trump’s Toxic Traces

On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced. We’ll still have a cultural elite that knows little about people in red America and daily sends the message that they are illegitimate. We’ll still have yawning inequalities, residential segregation, crumbling social capital, a crisis in family formation.

Trump’s rise in 2016 was a symptom of all these crises, long before he had a chance to become an additional cause of them.

What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”

I’d add that this individualism, atomism and selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”

A lot of people look around at the conditions of this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing, how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires faith, confidence. In none of it do they feel a part.

If you don’t breathe the spirit of the nation, if you don’t have a fierce sense of belonging to each other, you’re not going to sacrifice for the common good. We’re confronted with a succession of wicked problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.

David Brooks, ‘The Coronavirus and America’s Humiliation

American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.

On June 26, a day when the U.S. notched some 45,000 new cases—how’s that for “American carnage”?—the European Union announced that it would loosen some travel restrictions but extend its ban on visitors from the United States and other hot-spot nations. On Tuesday, it[confirmed][4] that remarkable and deeply humiliating decision, a clear message that in pandemic management, the EU believes that the United States is no better than Russia and Brazil—autocrat-run public-health disasters—and that American tourists would pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our lockdown has earned us. So much for the myth that the American political system and way of life are a model for the world.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Americans Don’t Get How Badly They’re Handling COVID-19

President Trump on Thursday morning appeared before reporters in the White House briefing room to rattle off a bunch of numbers — unemployment numbers, stock-market numbers, consumer-confidence numbers. For much of the presentation, he was reading off of prepared materials. But this is a fellow who can’t resist ad-libbing.

And so at one point, he added, “It’s coming back faster, bigger and better than we ever thought possible,” said Trump of a bounce-back in economic indicators. “These are not numbers made up by me. These are numbers.”

… Someone who lies as much as Trump needs a way to signal when he’s not lying.

Eric Wemple, Trump drops bombshell: ‘These are numbers’ (emphasis in original)

The American experiment has always been messy. In fact, that’s part of the appeal. But this is not America at its best. America, at its best, is not banned from traveling to Europe because it has so badly failed to contain a disease that a mere tourist is considered a public health risk. At its best, America does not get so swept up in the mob mentality that it indiscriminately tears down monuments of abolitionists and patriots, nor does it shrug its collective shoulders when it learns a foreign adversary placed bounties on the heads of our servicemen and women.

Here’s hoping the country feels more like celebrating next year.

The Morning Dispatch: American Pride Hits Record Low

* * * * *

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

* * * * *

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Miscellany

From the official U.S. Department of Justice account:

During this sacred week for many Americans, AG Barr is monitoring govt regulation of religious services. While social distancing policies are appropriate during this emergency, they must be applied evenhandedly & not single out religious orgs. Expect action from DOJ next week!

— KerriKupecDOJ (@KerriKupecDOJ) April 12, 2020

Donald Trump has led by example. The example is to announce trivia by Tweet and to put exclamation points at the end.

This is why we can’t have nice things!

Wall Street Journal story headline:

Your Favorite Celebrity Will See You Now

If I cannot think of a “favorite celebrity,” does that make me a bad person?

Cyrus Habib had a good chance of becoming Governor of Washington before age 40, with higher offices likely to come. But he glimpsed his his metastasizing ego and is taking the cure.

Memo to Max Boot:

“President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers” ≠ conservatives.

There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump …

Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival.

Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent …

… With cable news constantly covering the pandemic, he seems to be going through withdrawal. He needs an outlet for his political glossolalia, or his constantly replenishing reservoir of grievance and insecurity will burst its seams.

… Trump begins every one of these disastrous briefings by hypnotically reading high-minded phrases to which he shows no connection. These texts are exercises in futility, but they at least show some sense of what a typical person with friends and a family might want to sound like during a national crisis. Once he finishes stumbling through these robotic recitations, he’s back to his grievances.

… Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments.

…

Daily, Trump’s opponents are enraged by yet another assault on the truth and basic human decency. His followers are delighted by yet more vulgar attacks on the media and the Democrats. And all of us, angry or pleased, become more like Trump, because just like the president, we end up thinking about only Trump, instead of our families, our fellow citizens, our health-care workers, or the future of our country. We are all forced to take sides every day, and those two sides are always “Trump” and “everyone else.”

… As Jennifer Melfi, the psychotherapist for HBO’s fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, realized at the end of the series, when she finally threw him out of her office, counseling someone incapable of reflection or remorse is pointless; it makes the counselor into a worse person for enduring such long exposure to the patient.

Likewise, Trump’s spiritual poverty is making all of us into worse people.

Tom Nichols

And you can repeat such insights only at the cost of still further making it all about Trump.

When I was young, I confess that I didn’t care much about Easter. I mean, I appreciated it. In the semi-abstract way that many young people who’ve been brought up in the church appreciate the resurrection. You believe in it. You don’t really comprehend it. Belief in the resurrection is one of those boxes you check. Virgin birth? Yup. Sinless in life? Sure. Blameless in death? Absolutely. Resurrection? Of course. I’m a Christian, and that’s what Christians believe.

David French

This is exactly where I was when on the cusp of my 20th birthday. How I came out of it is so different than how French came out of it that I can barely relate to his version.

Part of it is intramural: Orthodox Christians versus Reformed Christians (though in musical tastes, French is much more like a mainstream Evangelical than like the Reformed I knew) who used to be Charismatic Christians.On the other hand, my initial “how I came out of it” was into Evangelicalism, and I remember it pretty well. It wasn’t like what French describes.

Part of it is that French seems to have decided to call “resurrection power” any life that changes suddenly and dramatically for the better. Such changes are wonderful, of course, but that’s turning resurrection into something way too metaphoric for my tastes.

75 years ago, FDR died and a nobody became President of the United States. He had no Twitter followers. He’d never even heard of Reality TV. But he was a nobody who understood politics, and took responsibility:

[C]ompare Roosevelt and Truman, hailing, it seems, from different planets. Roosevelt was a New York aristocrat whose forebears owned a chunk of an island called Manhattan, land on which the Empire State Building rose. Reared in mansions, educated at Groton and Harvard, Roosevelt married a favorite niece of a U.S. president, who gave her away at the altar. And here was Truman, a Missouri farm boy, schooled mainly by the stacks of a small-town library. He moved into the White House having never even owned his own home. Mrs. Roosevelt required 20 trucks to vacate the premises; the Truman family just one to move in their belongings.

What the men shared was politics. It’s a dirty word today, as we look for leaders on social media and reality television. Politics isn’t perfect; it smells of swamps and tycoons, elites and establishments, corruption and compromise. Roosevelt and Truman had both inhaled these odors on the way up (for human nature never loses its distinctive scents). They navigated a world dominated by urban political bosses, teaching them that special interests, inside traders, patronage hunters, double-dealers, hypocrites, weaklings and bullies all feature regularly in the public’s business. A leader says no to most but yes to some — enough to make measurable progress for the community.

Politics taught, above all, accountability. Bosses and their candidates made promises before Election Day, then tried to keep enough to be reelected. They sought and embraced responsibility, whether it was Roosevelt saying, during hisfirst inaugural address, that he would shoulder extraordinary risks to confront the Great Depression, or Truman promising that all the world’s buck-passing would end at his desk. Responsibility created a record; a record made for a future.

Not everyone knew it on that stunning April day, but Truman’s leadership had been tested repeatedly during the decades before “the moon, the stars, and all the planets” fell on him, as the new president described his sudden responsibilities. His entry to politics had come thanks to his performance as a captain in World War I; an admiring junior officer was the nephew of the Kansas City boss. Truman’s record of delivering roads on time and below budget boosted him to the Senate. His case to be vice president was helped by his senatorial reputation as the scourge of war profiteers.

Full disclosure: I am a volunteer board member of the foundation that supports Truman’s presidential library. I concur with history’s high opinion of him. But marking this date when his record was yet to be written, I emphasize his pragmatic preparation. Look around: The world is reminding us that politics have consequences and results genuinely matter. A nation run by people without records, who take no responsibility, who claim to be better than politics, is destined to be in a world of trouble.

David Von Drehle

Maritain believed that these challenges needed to be faced with moral clarity and intellectual energy because, at the moment when he was speaking, and on all political sides, education was assuming what he believed to be an unnaturally and inappropriately central role:

As a result of the present disintegration of family life, of a crisis in morality and the break between religion and life, and finally of a crisis in the political state and the civic conscience, and the necessity for democratic states to rebuild themselves according to new patterns, there is a tendency, everywhere, to burden education with remedying all these deficiencies.

In a properly functioning society, those other institutions (family, church, politics broadly conceived) play a role in forming persons for service to the community and for their own inner flourishing. But those institutions had been gravely damaged by those anarchic and despotic forces that he sees as enemies to true personhood. It is surely unfair to expect education to heal such vast and complex afflictions, especially since the very attempt “involves a risk of warping educational work”; moreover, as we have seen, Maritain believed that “the saints and martyrs are the true educators of mankind.” But in these exceptional circumstances “extraneous burdens superadded to the normal task of education must be accepted for the sake of the general welfare.”

It is, however, vital not to accept these “extraneous burdens” on behalf of the state and its interests: “the state would summon education to make up for all that is lacking in the surrounding order in the matter of common political inspiration, stable customs and traditions, common inherited standards, moral unity and unanimity.” But if education is recruited by the state “to compensate for all the deficiencies in civil society,” then “education would become . . . uniquely dependent on the management of the state,” and as a direct consequence “both the essence and the freedom of education would be ruined.” The well-educated person will always and necessarily, in an age afflicted by both anarchic and despotic tendencies, be in tension with the surrounding society: “The freedom enjoyed by education . . . will not be a quiet and easygoing, peacefully expanding freedom, but a tense and fighting one.” There will be, especially in the years following the war, a danger of shaping people not in a “truly human” way, but rather making them merely into “the organ of a technocratic society.” …

— The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis pp. 129-30

Why am I soooo loving The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis?

Partly because I don’t know enough about Maritain, Eliot, Auden and Weil as Christian humanists.

But it surely is partly, as well, because the fundamental issues that we’re dealing with are not all that different, and their insights matter.

Finally, it’s because that era was unlike ours in that there were still Christian Public Intellectuals who were respected. Would that it were still so! (And that, gentle reader, is an appropriate use of an exclamation point.)

* * * * *

Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship. I stress:—not of God’s existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both “posits” his humanity and fulfills it.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Appendix 1

[O]nce you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness,
And they will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach ….

Wendell Berry, Do Not Be Ashamed

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Democrat face-plant

[I]n the area of historical consciousness [Donald Trump] is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.

Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.

Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious …

And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.

“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.

…

Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” …

The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute …

More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.

This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.

Peggy Noonan (emphasis added) Note that this is her blog, with no paywall (unlike the Wall Street Journal version).

I quote at length because this is the rare occasion when I was uncomfortable with her column. Apart from

the snooty liberals and progressives talking a far, far better “common man” game than they’ve played in decades,
that there is a realignment of parties still going on, and
that Trump is a bad man and half mad.

we were not seeing things alike.

But put those three bullet points together and subtract the Republican loyalty she retains but I’ve abandoned, and we are seeing things substantially alike! I just had to read more carefully and mull it a bit.

I try to avoid watching that man because I don’t enjoy feeling enraged. So I might conceivably have noticed “shrewd” or “astute” had I been watching. She is paid to watch things like that and to call them to others’ attention.

I thought it meet and right to share the impressions of someone shrewder and of cooler head than my own. You may enjoy the entirety, of course, by clicking the link, which I recommend.

* * * * *

Trump didn’t do the thing he’s accused of doing, but if he did it was fine, and in fact that’s exactly what he did, get over it, because it’s not only fine, it’s precisely what we want from a president, and can you believe that Biden did the same thing, shame on him.

Peter Sunderman

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.