Tag: idolatry

Settle in: this one’s pretty long.

Hooboy! Did I ever let time get away from me as I collected items.

We’ve been getting it backward

I love this formulation: We’re not facing a blue wave on November 3; we’re facing a red undertow.

My own instinct is revulsion with Republican corruption, not enthusiasm for Democrats, who are pretty directionless. When Democrats do manifest a sense of direction, I’m generally inclined to disagree with them. I suspect I’m not alone. But I’ll be voting for a lot of them in five days.

The corruption of the Republicans needs a response outside the polls, too. Congresswoman Slotkin is directionally right about us needing deterring prosecutions (probably impeachments to avoid Trump’s pardons), but mustn’t make that our singular focus. Sarah Isgur suggests that a Democrat President in 2029 could help heal the land by naming a Republican Attorney General to focus on the worst of the worst corruption in the second Trump administration without the partisan taint.

If you think impeaching a Trump minion who’s no longer in power is a pointless gesture, you’re wrong: “conviction upon impeachment has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from ‘any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’” (David French)

Now, like Diogenes, we need to find among the Republicans, a man — a genuinely honest and virtuous person, to fill that role.

AI as God

[W]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

Public-facing, our AI Titans spin stories of endless pleasurable leisure as our AI underlings do all the work for us. In their digital smoke-filled rooms, they wonder what to do with all us useless eaters in their tech paradise.

Meanwhile, with the Lewis quote in mind, I think about the crypto-religious devotion to, and the totalizing potential of, Artificial General Intelligence. If it is achieved. It bodes to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (he who already meddles in war policy and is also into the AI game with Grok).

Therefore, be it resolved that listening to or reading the transcript of The Zealousness of the New Tech Right, Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, be highly recommended.

(If you need more incentive, be advised that when I went to save End-Times Fascism to my wish list, the Amazon algorithm suggested that I consider also If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies: Why Pausing AI is the Real Existential Threat. The Author? Grok 4.2, Elon Musk’s AI platform.)

Killer of thousands of the poorest children in the world

We don’t know the extent of the damage Musk did to one of the most efficient aid programs in history, PEPFAR, but we can say with full certainty that the richest man in the world is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of the poorest children in the world — almost certainly more than those killed in Gaza. And he carries the weight of this like all sociopaths. He feels it not at all.

And now it appears he deliberately exposed Ukraine to Russian aggression by secretly hobbling Starlink, the satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defenses. That’s a direct intervention in a hot war to benefit America’s enemy in Moscow. According to the WSJ, he ran it by Trump first, who agreed, but not Zelensky, further destroying what little trust the US has in world affairs. This week, Trump said it was back to normal but the Ukrainians insist the slowdown is still in place. Worse: there’s a real lack of accountability in how this decision was made and who exactly can reverse it.

But let’s just say that delegating military strategy to a private individual is a new low for our increasingly banana republic. The Dems should not be discouraged from getting to the bottom of these scandals as soon as they are able.

Andrew Sullivan, My Musk Problem And Ours

“Teaching you how to think”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

Unprecedented institutional threat

Hundreds of US lawyers have agreed to work for free on efforts to monitor next month’s midterm elections in what voting rights groups say is the biggest effort of its kind to prevent meddling at the polls. “I’ve been involved in election protection since 2004 [and] I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in the midterms before,” Seth Waxman, co-chair of WilmerHale’s Supreme Court practice and the former US solicitor-general, told the FT. “In the past there . . . wasn’t a widespread institutional threat. This year is categorically different.” (Source: ft.com)

John Ellis News Items citing and quoting Financial Times.

The threat, in my opinion, is mostly from Trump’s minions, who have internalized his bogus election fraud rhetoric by trying (and failing, I hope) to counterprogram some even bigger fraud.

I’ve read enough about election security to think that the most plausible way for Trump to sow distrust in the election is something like a declaration, ipse dixit, that there’s some lefty attack on some blue state elections and sending in goons to demand protective custody of the voting machines. (Oops! Apparently, Team MAGA has been thinking much harder than I about how to screw up an election).

If he doesn’t get them, MAGA America will say the election was corrupt and untrustworthy. If he does get them, sane America will say the election was corrupted by him and sub-optimal. Since he thrives on chaos, he wins either way.

What are they giving themselves permission to do?

I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.

…

The threat of imminent doom can excuse even the inexcusable.

That’s the logic of the end justifies any means. And that logic is a perennial aspect of politics. There are certain rare and extreme situations in which the end of bare survival (facing a genuine existential threat) does justify anything that can be done to protect against that threat being fulfilled. But what about engaging during an ordinary election campaign in absurd hyperbole, exaggeration, and outright lies to justify the judgment that we face an existential threat from them, which in turn is what justifies the anything-goes mentality? The Claremont faction has been engaged in just such threat inflation or expansion ever since Michael Anton published the “Flight 93 Election” essay (in September 2016), and now the entire leadership of the right, as well as its media echo chamber, is in on the game, giving itself one concocted extreme self-justification after another for a decade.

…

What are they giving themselves permission to do? The answer: Anything and everything necessary to protect themselves from suffering utter destruction at the hands of their mortal enemies (aka, losing an upcoming election).

Damon Linker

Are to classics too white?

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”…

Andrew Sullivan, The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics

If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist …

… I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate. From one of his classics:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Flat-out fake polling

[B]efore you dye your hair blue, you should know that tons and tons of polling you read is fake. Like, literally just fake. The latest here is a public opinion polling shop called Wedgewood Polling, which was cited on MS NOW and in The New York Times (places that would never lead us astray). Wedgewood made this statement on their now-terminated X account:

WEDGEWOOD POLLING, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry, makes this public statement. . . . Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.

Ha ha. Cool. You got us, Wedgewood! Why do I increasingly feel like we’re all a part of a YouTube prank show?

Nellie Bowles

Wish fulfilled

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.

Russell Vought, 2023

A hacking group leaked the names, phone numbers, and addresses of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and associates, including about 10,000 linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigative arm, some of them involved in undercover operations. DHS said it was aware of a “potential breach.”

TMD

Postliberalism

Readwise seems to have decided one recent day to give me a couple of postliberal-leaning “Daily Highlights” from my past reading:

Liberal democracy is more restrictive, being strongly correlated with egalitarian principles that are quite wrongly believed to generate diversity. The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

I am quite dubious about the concept of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong, we really are an exceptional nation; that’s even clearer to me from living abroad. But there’s a lot of hubris in that. We really believe somehow that we can defy the laws of history, that as long as we work hard and mean well, goodness will prevail.

Rod Dreher, Farewell to Hungary, And to Europe

For the record, I remain unconvinced that any of the postliberal or illiberal alternatives to liberal democracy would be an improvement. Insert your own criteria for the desiderata in relation to which “improvement” is measured. Mine are that Christians “may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.” But I’m trying to learn in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content..

October

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

Louise Gluck, October

Shorts

  • If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards. (Nick Catoggio of Sen. Jon Husted)
  • It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. (The late Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
  • I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (Simone Weil, Love in the Void)
  • Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. (M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived)
  • [I]f you see a man in skinny jeans and long necklaces leaping around with a light show behind him, well, that’s a man who wants to have sex with a lot of random people. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a rock band or talking about God. These are ancient mating dances. These are ancient male archetypes. (Nellie Bowles)
  • The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. (Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal)
  • Fundamentalist intellectual habits … have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. (Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • America’s wedded couples are far less likely to stay together than Sweden’s cohabiting couples are. (Gracy Olmstead, Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family)
  • We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs. (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Samaritan Woman/Midfeast

Colonizers

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Fissiparous

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion.

“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.

Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know

Catechesis

If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.

…

We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

One of the things I can’t un-see

In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.

This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).

The Mother of God

Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint

No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.

St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.

The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

I John 1:5-7

Southern Gothic

Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, characterizing a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.

I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.

No graven images

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”

(Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol).

After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)

Two observations:

  1. Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
  2. Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)

Incomplete Renunciation

Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal
dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
through the eye of a needle.

(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Two clips, 12/11/18

1

Recently billboards have appeared along major U.S. freeways depicting Trump’s face and the quote from John 1 “And the Word became flesh.” Another saying on the billboards is “Make the gospel great again.” Predictably these billboards have raised concerns and questions. The Christians who sponsor the billboards have defended them, claiming that they do not equate Trump with Jesus Christ. But the billboards are what they are. Whatever the sponsor’s thoughts and intentions may be, the billboards scream out that Trump is “up there with Jesus” in terms of messiahship, saviorhood, worthiness of ultimate loyalty.

Again, whatever the billboards’ sponsors say, the billboards communicate a dangerous message and even the most die-hard Trump supporters must speak out against that message. I am not charging the billboards’ creators and sponsors with heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, or idolatry, but I will say the billboards’ message constitutes those. No amount of denial or defense can undo the message; the message is what it is.

Roger W. Olson

I hope that the sponsor, Make the Gospel Great Again, is a false flag operation (they’re not being campy about it—apart from the billboard itself), but the idolatrous echoes of 80 years ago, noted by Olson, prevent me being blasé about it.

2

A French reader e-mails Rod Dreher:

I told you in a previous email that after three centuries of an anomalous absence, anti-clericalism had finally arrived to America. Jenny Nagel proves me right and if things are going by the French textbook it’s only the beginning and Christians can expect the worse in years to come, without any possibility to answer in kind as the most vicious attacks will come from “protected minorities”. Being rubbished by despicable people is something French Catholics have had to live for two centuries, and American Christians will have to live it until either they regain control of the culture (unlikely at this stage) or stop being nice guys (and girls) and fight back. I know, that’s unlikely too – it hasn’t happened yet in France either.

 

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