Tag: postliberalism

Saturday, 7/12/25

Miscellany

Intellectual honesty got in the way

Over the weekend, I listened to the six episodes of The Protocol, the new NYT podcast on child sex changes. It’s very helpful to get a chronology of the ideologically-motivated shifts in policy and treatments, and to hear a range of views, pro and con. It was also obvious that the two reporters were super-liberal, and desperately wanted to confirm the benefits of child transition – but intellectual honesty got in the way, as it must. This is a more balanced treatment than anything you will find in, say, the Washington Post.

Well worth a listen.

I was struck by a few things. Both Bowers and Kennedy – trans activists and surgeons – still eagerly deploy the trope that transition is necessary to stop children from killing themselves. They know this isn’t true at this point, and the NYT did not provide the data that shows that trans youth suicide is extremely rare (2 cases among kids denied a sex change out of 1500 in the UK over ten years, for example). That anyone would still be telling parents confronting a kid with acute gender dysphoria that their only choice is between a “live boy” or a “dead girl” is appalling, unethical and untrue. yet the leading trans activists know it’s their best line, and are happy to keep lying if it will help keep them transing children.

Bowers denies that there is any debate to be had at all – “there are not two sides” – and denigrates Hillary Cass as “haughty” and “old,” without addressing her findings. Kennedy argues that child sex changes came about at first so that black trans women would be less vulnerable to being murdered because they would pass better. (I’d suspect the opposite: that passing better as female at first makes the subsequent revelation that they are still biological men that more dangerous.) But the data we actually have suggests that black transwomen have a lower chance of being murdered than an average citizen.

Then there was the refusal of the trans activists even to acknowledge the profound differences between adults and minors. You get the sense that these older trans people are telling children to transition before puberty because they regret not having done so themselves. Again, a form of unethical projection.

The podcast argues that politics and medicine should not be entangled – and imply that the backlash to child sex changes is thereby illegitimate. But the “science” of sex and gender itself originated in postmodern ideology.

One other major lacuna: the podcast never tackles how many kids who have been mistakenly transed are gay and lesbian. The children most vulnerable to this irreversible medical treatment are same-sex attracted, which make the whole subject something that destroys the entire premise of a single LGBTQ+ identity. I understand that this is unsayable in the NYT, but it’s true nonetheless.

Listen to it and make your own mind up. It’s designed to engage liberals who have been accepting of anything any minority activists want. And that’s a good thing. Well-meaning liberals need to be better informed by liberals who actually care about the truth. Whether liberals can break free of the tribal politics that have frozen this medical scandal in place remains an open question. But I doubt it.

Andrew Sullivan

A very brief obituary for a very dubious bishop

I clip obituaries, as well as bios and interesting profiles. For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been systematically editing those old clips.

It may not qualify as an obituary, but Alan Jacobs, an Anglican, had some pointed words upon the death of John Shelby Spong, an apostate who nevertheless (or was it for that reason?) became a Bishop in the Episcopal Church U.S.:

John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.

Ease is the disease

In Bellevue, Washington, [Nick] lands the perfect job: glorified stock boy, hurtling around on a mini-forklift in an enormous Fulfillment Center, unpacking mountainous pallets of books, scanning their bar codes, then storing their precise locations in the vast, 3-D storage matrix. He’s supposed to set land speed records. He does. It’s a kind of performance piece for that most rarefied of audiences, no one.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

What Musk’s Grok thinks of Musk’s American Party

My favorite take on our newest political party is this one, brimming with nationalist scorn:

The America Party is Elon Musk’s new third-party push in 2025, born from his beef with Trump, aiming to snag a few key seats and shake up the uniparty. … It’s led by immigrants like Musk (South African) and tech bros pushing H-1B visas for cheap foreign talent over Americans. … [It’s a] power grab to flood tech with imports, under the guise of “innovation.”… It’s just elites gaming the system.

The author? Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed for The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter by its owner, Elon Musk.

Nick Catoggio

Your postliberalism versus ours

To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.

Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?

Rod Dreher, America Votes in a Clash of Postliberalisms, regarding the 2024 Presidential election.

I don’t think reframing the clash as between competing postliberalisms makes the choice clearer because I cannot identify with either postliberalism.

I fear that this really is the choice we typically face now, and I pray that whatever rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born will turn out to be a prince.

But I can’t knowingly vote for it. I refuse to choose.

Scientizing the humanities

The scientific conception of knowledge has become virtually equated with the only way of knowing there is. Not only does it dominate its own offspring, such as the social sciences and anthropology, but it has invaded the classical fields of the humanities, a fact which makes a proper understanding of poetry, for instance, almost inaccessible to the modern student. The degree to which philosophy has capitulated is clear from the extent to which it is preoccupied with such mental gymnastics as logical analysis and even mere information theory.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Thugocracy

ICE: random acts of state terror

ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notes the inevitable result of such spurts:

Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:

I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.

And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.

…

And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:

We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.

But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do.

With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror. And this, we discover, is the point. The whole purpose is to engender so much fear that migrants self-deport and potential migrants never come. The latter is an important tool for border control, as far as Miller is concerned. It’s the new wall.

…

We also have a president unique in our history in his contempt for the rule of law, who abuses the pardon power to empower lawlessness from his subordinates, deploys a rhetoric designed to encourage thuggery among the ICE rank and file, and who makes memes mocking the detained. He and his minions have also now designed a system that will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,* will not target employers, but will fill our streets with a new stormtrooper army and build super-size detention camps — some surrounded by gimmicks like gators or sharks — to generate sufficient state terror to deter anyone from coming to this country.

Andrew Sullivan

(* When Sullivan says the Administration “will not speed up legal processing of illegal immigrants,” he’s referring to the trivial increase in immigration courts compared both to their backlogs and to the huge increase in ICE’s budget.)

Another sign (as if we needed one) that we’re authoritarian now

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book How Democracies Die.

Elisabeth Bumiller

Morality is not a language Trump speaks

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

David Brooks, Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

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

Jonah Goldberg.

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

David Brooks

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 social medium.

Forest and Tree

Forest and trees revisited

[I’ve already quoted a very pungent Nick Catoggio distillation, but I keep returning to it.]

Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).

Nick Catoggio nails my feelings:

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

Many are freaking out about this.

The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:

  1. Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
  2. There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s zero-sum mentality requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
  3. Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
  4. Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).

Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.

Good People

[I]t is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)

Rod Dreher

Niall Ferguson on the bipartisan assault on the rule of law

Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.

It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.

“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .

To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.

I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.

But trashing the rule of law is another matter.

And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada (just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley ….

Niall Ferguson, Always Bet Against the Davos Man

Fascism?

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

Too much

My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.

Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.

The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.

…

Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.

My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.

But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.

Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.

When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.

Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.

Peggy Noonan

Journalism’s horrible bind

[O]n Wednesday afternoon, when I visited the essential Live Updates feed at The New York Times to check in on the latest barrage of Trump administration hyperactivity, I found literally the entire feed devoted to Trump’s bullshit “plan” for the U.S. takeover of Gaza. Breaking news stories. Reactions from around the world. Chin-scratching analysis from experts. All taking the suggestion, which Trump’s own senior staff hadn’t been expecting prior to its announcement during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with utmost seriousness. As if it was a real proposal that could conceivably become a reality.

I admit, this made me want to throw my laptop at the wall. Can’t you see he just fucking with us? But that’s unfair to the hardworking journalists at the Times. The American president’s words matter. They have to cover it as if it’s real. Which, of course, takes attention away from the things happening that are real. That illustrates quite vividly the horrible bind in which journalists, reporters, and news organizations find themselves at this maximally harrowing moment.

Damon Linker, Three Observations from the Midst of the Maelstrom

Starting your seventh-string QB

Thank god for James Carville: While the entire Dem establishment seems committed to losing at every opportunity they have, one James Carville is screaming into the void. “We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”

When the glowing orb of Carville pops up on the TV, you know you’re about to be yelled at. You know there’ll be spit on that table. Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding? Maybe in Governor Phil Murphy’s attic. Maybe somewhere in South Bend. But it’s time, guys: We need a complete-your-sentence–level politician, and we need one ba (sic)

Nellie Bowles

Born Against

Source, which is very worth reading.

Offshore politics

Obviously, there’s a lot going on, but I have limited my political comments in this post. Here are still more from my least-filtered blog:

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday, 9/4/22

Pray for your pastor

A pastor in Indiana told me that no one in her church denied the importance of Covid precautions, but the new demands that the pandemic placed on her contributed to a sense of burnout.

“I never got tired of pastoring or thinking about Scripture and preaching,” she said. “I just started associating ministry with having to learn new computer programs and having embarrassing, anxious moments around technology.” She continued, “Over time pastoral ministry started to seem like a total absurdity. The world around me was on fire and I was stuck in an empty church building figuring out Zoom.”

Tish Harrison Warren, Why Pastors Are Burning Out

Another difference between East and West

Even during the critical debates of the fourth century, when theological terminology was being fleshed out, Fathers such as Gregory the Theologian rejected the use of clever argumentation and Aristotelian syllogisms, preferring the philosophy of the fisherman, the Tradition of the Church.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

That the Christian Latin West turned eventually toward argumentation and syllogism is a major font of the differences between it and the Christian “Greek” East.

Therapeutic friendship

Since we last met, Marco lost his wife to cancer, and I lost mine to divorce. As I expected, my old friend was in great spirits. With Marco, he’s never faking cheerfulness. It comes from his faith. You can’t imagine faith like he has! When I was on French television a few years ago, the host asked me who my hero is. “Marco Sermarini,” I said, and it was true. I explained that it’s because here is an ordinary man, just like the rest of us, who loves life with great passion, and who has done extraordinary things because above all, he loves Christ.

Rod Dreher, The Gift Of Friendship

I’m glad Rod is spending some time with Marco. He needs it.

Blue Laws

Of course, “lowering religious participation” was always the intent and purpose of repealing blue laws, and this all negatively confirms that law is a teacher, and sometimes teaches what is false and demonstrably bad for a people. The activists who sought (in their hatred of Christianity) to repeal such laws, and the legislators and justices who did the repealing, failed to foresee how damaging the loss of such laws would be on “the social fabric of communities generally.” Among their findings is that the loss of blue laws depressed religious participation, and that this in turn made very significant portion of the population unstable, lacking the strength of “religiosity,” unable to deal with “enormous negative shocks” such as large-scale wars and natural disasters—which is to say, unable to deal with suffering.

Restoring blue laws is not a panacea. Yet as the authors show, the decline of religious adherence in America is not simply one correlative among many, but rather it is so highly correlative as to be reasonably considered the principal cause of our despair. Of course, as a theologian, I could’ve told you that, but it’s nice to have some confirmation from those who practice the dismal science as well.

Chad Pecknold, To Reverse Our Despair. (Emphasis added)

It’s sad to see Pecknold, a solid-enough guy most of the time, fairly obviously making shit up. I guess truth and sobriety come in second (or lower) behind promoting the "Postliberal Order."

Episcopalians

In the early 20th Century, there was extensive rapprochement between the Orthodox and Episcopalians. That eventually broke down, and the Episcopal Church in the U.S. has gone on to pioneer many deviations from historic Christianity, starting, by some accounts, with approving contraception. (What? You’re surprised that all Churches opposed contraception until a loosening began in the 1930s?)

For a variety of reasons, and increasingly as I grew older because of their deviations from historic Christianity, I have always been very leery of the Episcopal Church — so leery, in fact, that I could not quite imagine why a believing Christian from another tradition would become Episcopalian. (By “believing Christian” I mean to exclude those who would become Episcopalian to climb the social ladder.)

Yet I have seen that happen quite a few times in my life, and although I feel no personal draw in that direction, I think I have finally figured out why someone else might: revulsion at frivolousness or bigotry in their corner of Christianity, attraction to well-executed Episcopalian forms of worship, or both.

A large choir I’m in is preparing a celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Anniversary, and our repertoire is entirely music that was sung at Westminster Abby at her Coronation in 1953. Some of it is still sung by my local Episcopal Church choir (there’s a lot of overlap between our choir and its choir). I have viewed on YouTube grainy black-and-white videos from the coronation itself, and more recent performances of the same music, and I’ve got to say: if sacred worship music in western Christendom gets any better than that, I sure as heck don’t know where. In fact, it’s widely agreed that Episcopalians do liturgy better than Roman Catholics. (I used to jibe that “Of course they do; it’s all they’ve got.” I’ve softened on any hint that having that isn’t worth much.)

As for frivolousness or bigotry elsewhere, if you can’t spot that on your own I’m not going to wade into fetid waters to point it out. Not today anyway. (And I don’t doubt that Episcopalians are vulnerable to their own peculiar bigotries.)

For me, sound doctrine (as I then saw it) without sound worship was less unpalatable than the opposite. It would be a closer call today, but I’m in a place that has both.

I think that’s all I’ll say for now.

A certain catholic je ne sais quoi

After Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School of Indianapolis did not comply with a directive to fire one of its teachers, Archbishop Charles Thompson tried to strip the school of its Catholic school status.

(Caption on an AP photo of the Archbishop, Lafayette Journal & Courier, 9/3/22)

“Tried to”? Really?

Brebeuf, by refusing to rid itself of a scandal as directed, is now just as Catholic as are the excommunicated schismatics styled “Roman Catholic Womenpriests.”

“Catholic” is not ineffable and interior, like “gender identity.”

Orwell in the Mediation Room

Maybe I’m missing something, but “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation” has always sounded Orwellian to me. Then came Covid, and reconciliation and grace seem to have gone away.

Doing politics Christianly

Christians seeking social influence should do so not by joining interest groups that fight for their narrow rights and certainly not those animated by hatred, fear, phobias, vengeance or violence.

Michael Gerson, Washington Post, via Alan Jacobs

True Christians and sin

A true Christian is made so by faith and love toward Christ. Our sins do not in the least hinder our Christianity, according to the words of the Savior Himself. He deigned to say: ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to salvation’ (cf. Luke 5:32); ‘There is more joy in heaven over one who repents than over ninety righteous ones’ (cf. Luke 15:7). Likewise concerning the sinful woman who touched his feet, He deigned to say to Simon the Pharisee: ‘To one who has love, a great debt is forgiven, but from one who has no love, even a small debt will be required’ (cf. Luke 7:47). From these considerations a Christian should bring himself to hope and joy, and pay not the least attention to despair that is inflicted on one.

St. Herman of Alaska

A recurring cautionary note

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Kavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced into shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

Summer Solstice ’22

Prosecute Trump?

So far, there has only been circumstantial evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 Election, so news that he admitted his loss theoretically could be huge.

However, if you have access to the New York Times, do yourself a favor and read Prosecute Trump? Put Yourself in Merrick Garland’s Shoes. I think I’d call it a day at step two of the analysis: the unlikelihood of a unanimous guilty verdict in a country where so many worship the guy. Not even in the very liberal District of Columbia.

If I made it to step three, I’d again hit a wall: Do we really want that disgraceful and disgraced humbug to star as Johnny Depp with the prosecution as Amber Heard?

So I say "no prosecution." Our best outcome will be if the current Congressional hearings sufficiently disgrace him, even to those who voted for him, that he’s politically dead and buried.

Kudos to the Dispatch

Your membership allows us to do this kind of high-quality, in-depth journalism rather than chase clicks or attempt to monetize the latest outrage. Thank you.

The Morning Dispatch, touting its multi-part report on How the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Became Law.

I’ve subscribed been a member from the beginning, and the Dispatch has consistently made good on not chasing clicks or attempting to monetize the latest outrage. Its voice is unique: clearly not Trumpist, yet not obsessively anti-Trump like The Bulwark. It is one of my most valued news and commentary sources (though Jonah Goldberg alone talks and writes more than I can find time to listen and read).

Consider joining and enjoying a play-it-straight source in this tribalist historic hiatus.

Summer Kwaanza?

Juneteenth—the annual observance celebrating the end of slavery in the United States in 1865—is a holiday that many Americans haven’t heard of until recently. That has caused some to wonder if it’s just some new “woke” holiday invented by Marxist academics, the creators of the historically inaccurate 1619 Project, or some other group on the left.

It is not.

Juneteenth has been celebrated since 1866, mostly by Black Americans; yet it’s a day that’s worthy of celebration by every American, as it represents a critical turning point in American history, not just Black history. It is the day that we as a people finally began to live up to one of the greatest principles we professed: a nation devoted to liberty for all.

Kay Cole James

Yes, I was among those world-weary folks who assumed Juneteenth was a summer Kwaanza. My bad.

How should we celebrate this newest national holiday?

Second-hand reading list

  • American Rhyd Wildermuth is writing about his new life in Luxembourg, discovering the complexity of European culture from the perspective of a recovering US ‘progressive’. His observations about the mapping of a simplistic American race narrative onto the old and ever-shifting cultures and ethnicities of Europe is spot-on, I think. I have long felt that the language in which British and some European cultural elites now talk about race – dividing the world artificially into ‘whites’ and ‘people of colour’, for example – is a form of American colonialism which both obscures the reality of European culture and history, and increases or introduces racial tension. Rhyd writes about this sensitively and sharply.
  • If ‘the modern world is a hell’ seems like overkill to you, this recent Guardian interview with transhumanist author Elise Bohan may wake you up, for Bohan is quite clear about where it is leading, and she can’t wait. The aim of transhumanism, she explains, is to allow us to move beyond the ‘ape-brained meat sack’ otherwise known as the human body, so that we can beat death, remake humanity, perfect nature and ultimately, in her own words ‘build God’ anew. Bohan, of course, like her interviewer, doesn’t believe in God. If she did, she might recognise that the argument she is making is precisely the same one that was made by the serpent in the Garden of Eden – which is to say that, as I suggested in my last essay, it is literally Satanic.
  • What is the alternative to this future? Neuroscientist Erik Hoel, in a long and interesting essay on his own Substack, suggests that the answer might lie in Shakespeare. Humanity is messy. Nature is complex, and not under our control. The likes of Bohan, who are designing our future, can’t cope with this mess, just as they can’t cope with loss, death, humility, the unknown, the transcendent or anything else they can’t turn into an equation or replicate in a lab. The ‘coming inhuman future’, as Hoel calls it, can only be fought with a defence of the irrational, messy, dark, light and mysterious complexity of nature, which includes our human nature. Arm yourselves.

Paul Kingsnorth, Intermission: Reading and Writing – by Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth recommended some others, too, but these are what I’m going to read.

A quick, partial critique of liberalism

It has now become indisputable that the liberal order not only uses a variety of quasi coercive legal instruments such as bureaucratic guidances, selective funding of NGOs, and so forth, but it also exploits the liberal version of the public-private distinction to full advantage. It deploys selective enforcement of the law against “private violence” and takes political advantage of background conditions of economic necessity (“the market”) and of the radical conformity of public opinion under liberalism, instigated by the media. It controls its subjects with mobs both virtual and real, threats of ostracism, loss of employment, and a sort of reputational death (the dreaded state of being “out of the mainstream,” enforced politically by a cordon sanitaire).

Adrian Vermeule.

I continue to struggle: I want classical liberalism to work, but I am conversant with powerful critiques, including from sorta-scary guys like Vermeule. Monday, I finally ordered a primary source for its defense: Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man, having read quite a bit about it over the past few days.

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

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.

Faith Issues, Roe (and more)

Faith matters

Theology vs. Academic Theology

Theologians, like all academics, have to keep coming up with original things to say. If you just kept repeating the words you received from your old professors, it would get you nowhere. What you need is fresh, even daring, new material. And that means theology will always be in flux.

A venerable Catholic theologian once told me, with great irritation, “Lay people don’t understand what theology is!” They think it’s set in stone, he said, but it’s always evolving and progressing. He seemed to think that theology was something lay people could never hope to keep up with. Their meddling was annoying. They should get out of the way, and wait for the professionals to tell them what the new thinking is.

Theology has a completely different basis in Orthodoxy. It doesn’t change, because it is the faith taught by the Apostles themselves; Orthodoxy is the unbroken continuation of the Church founded by Christ, and carried by the Apostles into the world. We do keep repeating the words we received from our teachers and elders in Christ. Orthodoxy doesn’t need updating, because it provides everything a person needs to be saturated with the presence of God (a process called “theosis”). It fits the needs of every human being like water and air do, no matter what culture or time.

Frederica Matthewes-Green in a letter to Rod Dreher.

Do take note of that first paragraph. Heresy is baked right into the cake of academic theology as presently structured. And that’s an insight that is baked pretty deeply into my bones now. Calling a theological writing “novel” is generally a powerful insult in Orthodoxy.

Not following which faith?

People often talk to me about their adult children who are not following the Lord. I think they want to introduce them to me, as if my brand of wacky Miss Frizzle theologian would inspire them to follow Jesus (reader, I am not that compelling). I have started to ask these folks, which faith do you think your children are longer following? Tell me about it. Was it perhaps one that promised that Jesus would be primarily a place where they got their psychological needs met? Did you raise them to believe that middle-class respectability and good religious feelings were the goal of following Christ? Did you teach them how to suffer?

To the Shire

Classical Liberalism or Postliberalism?

Over a busy weekend (my final choral concert of the Spring), I almost forgot to share two very civil and worthwhile (opening?) arguments on how conservative Christians should behave in 2022:

Apart from the response’s resonance with my lifelong habits of thought, I think the response convincingly shows that the opening volley’s premise that we’ve recently entered “negative world” (cultural hostility to Christianity, which the coiner of the term thinks follows a long stretch of American approbation of Christianity and a few decades of neutrality) is dubious if not mythical. The folks who are more openly hostile now were just subtler before. I fear I greeted the original “negative world” theory with a lot of confirmation bias.

And of course, this debate, nominally about Tim Keller’s approach to politics, is a microcosm of the much larger argument, widely contested among self-identified Christians, about classical liberalism (French) versus some manner of postliberalism (Wood). Don’t cabin this argument.

Update: Rod Dreher weighs in against French, failing badly if he was trying to cover himself in glory instead of just waving the tribal flag. I wonder if American Conservative would give him a sabbatical while he works through a few things? I wonder if it would really make things better if they did.

The impending “reversal of Roe“

The salutary political consequences

Peggy Noonan goes a bit meta on the consequences if SCOTUS “reverses Roe“:

[Roe] left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

How will the court “reverse Roe“?

Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast persuaded me, without saying it in so many words, that Alito’s first draft won’t be his last. He has a bit of a needle to thread (the needle is oxymoronically named “Substantive Due Process”) and the first draft doesn’t persuasively thread it.

The main article in Friday’s Morning Dispatch also covers the question of unenumerated rights that might theoretically be at risk if the opinion doesn’t get the reasoning right.

My own opinion (caveat: I’m retired and rusty on legal analysis, and my opinion has been clarified only recently by thinking harder than before about stare decisis) is that:

  • almost all the cases recognizing unenumerated rights over the last 60 years have been bogus, the right to marry across lines of “race” (Loving v. Virginia) being the only exception I can think of readily;
  • of the remaining bogus decisions (Griswold, Lawrence, Obergefell) I can think of none that require reversal under the considerations that come into play in stare decisis. That’s another way of saying that “wrongly decided” (or “bogus”) doesn’t necessarily imply “should be reversed”; it’s more complicated than that.

Concise

The latest theme on the political left is that the Supreme Court Justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade are at war with democracy. It’s a strange argument, since overturning Roe would merely return abortion policy to the states for political debate in elections and legislatures. That’s the definition of democracy.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Most Editorial Board editorials aren’t worth reading, but that first paragraph was at least concise. The rest of the editorial? Meh.

American progressives, and some on the right, have convinced themselves that legal abortion will disappear the moment the Supreme Court reverses its Roe v. Wade precedent. Since the Court is contemplating this, readers might appreciate examples from democracies that have grappled with this difficult issue without nine Justices to tell them what to do.

We mean Europe, where abortion is legal in most countries, usually with limits that are more strict than America’s and generally as a result of democratic choice.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board separately.

Worth your time

Overruling Roe Would Extinguish A Judicially Created Right, But Would Restore The People’s “Precious Right To Govern Themselves”

The other stuff

An artefact of sensible times

For those curious, the Fifth Circuit [U.S. Court of Appeals] is holding its conference in Nashville because, apparently, there are no facilities large enough in Mississippi to host this confab.

Update: I have since been reliably informed that judicial conferences are not held in Mississippi for another reason: all of the hotels large enough in the state are attached to casinos, and some rule prohibits holding judicial functions in places attached to casinos. As a result, several hotels in Mississippi are large enough, but due to the casinos, none are not suitable.

Josh Blackman

An interesting rule from the days when people were smart enough to know that casinos are disreputable. They still are — as is commercial gambling on sports.

But we’ve decided to monetize vice, often with the promise that the revenue will fund schools. Monetizing vice does indeed “school” children, but not in any good way.

Surviving big cultural disasters

Having an inner life is how we can survive if the world falls apart … It’s how people have endured and thrived living under authoritarian regimes … If a populist regime … is in the cards, it’s time to become bird-watchers and hikers and readers of classics and take care of our friends and children and ignore the ignorance and cruelty afar.

Garrison Keillor, with some historic particulars elided. Some of the elisions may leave the impression that Keillor is opposed to all populism, though I don’t know that. I’d like to think there could be a populism that isn’t ignorant and cruel, though I see few signs of one yet.

Facing the end of life

I realize that we are all circling around the Airport of Death, but it just seems to me that if you take that step [moving to a retirement community] it means that you are entering your landing pattern. I think that I will rather just live until I die.

Terry Cowan.

At 73, I think I’ve fairly realistically reckoned with my mortality at last.

But that can be dangerous; you mustn’t just sit and wait for the grim reaper when getting up and moving could keep him away a bit longer. Sloth is a sin even for oldsters. And even if moving hurts a bit.

Wordplay

  • the right place to be is surely in the woods, or in a monastery. Or in a monastery in the woods.

Paul Kingsnorth

  • All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton

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.