Why I write curate others’ writing

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.”

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

For the most part, my essay-writing days are over (you’ll find much more of my own musings in earlier blog posts), but my curation of attributed quotes and their frequent juxtaposition of quotes that seem kindred express, I think, the same spirit Jacobs articulates here.

Mea culpae

Harvard polls versus polls of Harvard

Last Saturday, I gently mocked the idea that a poll at Harvard University could be a reliable indicator of the leanings of 18-24 year-olds nationwide.

Well, it turns out that it was a Harvard-Harris poll, not a poll of Harvard students.

In my defense, the writer I was gently mocking very specifically said that it was “a representative survey at Harvard University.”

On the shocking substance of the poll, see the questions raised by Ilya Somin.

Absolutely immune

I confess that I too quickly dismissed Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity — a claim that was rebuffed by the trial court, which decision Special Prosecutor Jack Smith now asks the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm. (I don’t think I scoffed here, but I did scoff.)

There are reasons why some officials enjoy absolute immunity for certain kinds of acts. Michael Warren and Sarah Isgur explain:

How would the Supreme Court decide it? 

This is the big question and it goes to the very heart of why we give immunity to some public officials. Judges, for example, enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for their judicial acts—even if they acted corruptly or maliciously—because we don’t want every judicial act subject to meta-litigation. (We should note this doesn’t apply to actions outside legal decisions they make on the bench, which is why we see some judges prosecuted on bribery charges, for instance.) Legislators and prosecutors also enjoy absolute immunity for most of their official acts too. Why? Because we want these people to do their jobs without fear or favor. So how should we think about a president?

On one end of the spectrum, not many people would argue that a former president can’t be charged with murder for, let’s say, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue just because he was president at the time he pulled the trigger. On the other end, it would seem like a bad idea to allow a current president to bring fraud charges against his predecessor for overpromising and underdelivering on a policy proposal, such as “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 

And to make this discussion more concrete, one of the things that Trump is charged with is “attempt[ing] to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.” Where does that fall on our spectrum?

It’s hard to guess where each justice will fall on this question because it involves questions about executive power, separation of powers, and all the future hypotheticals about how someone might abuse their power. In one outcome, presidents could be afraid to perform basic parts of their job because they might be charged with a crime down the road. In the other, current presidents could break the law with impunity for four years without fear of any future consequences. 

I’d expect the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case just before the New Year.

Hard cases make bad law, and Donald Trump’s odious persona makes every case hard. Tread carefully — as I trust SCOTUS will if it takes the case.

Political follies

West Coast Big Mouths

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:

The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:

I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.

James Freeman, Wall Street Journal

I wouldn’t be too hasty about moving to Texas, though I’d surely move somewhere if my household was going to get hit so heavily for something nobody in it ever did. Texas has an Attorney General who should have been convicted on his impeachment plus a legislature that seemingly cannot pass intelligible and reasonable laws plus a vendetta against public education.

I think one could do better.

Book-burning

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now (September 2020)

If you are skeptical about the transgender social contagion, you should read The secret life of gender clinicians (UnHerd) and bear in mind that most of “trans” kids, if not “transitioned,” turn out gay or lesbian, but recovered from dysphoria; in other words, they are no longer uncomfortable with their sexed bodies. That’s why there’s dark humor that the gender clinicians are killing off a generation of gay kids, and this perverse aspect is a perennial source of concern for Andrew Sullivan.

For my money, insofar as a physician refuses to exercise a “paternalistic” or “gatekeeper” function, he or she has ceased being a professional and might as well be taking orders at a burger joint (where it really is no concern whether the customer’s burger-craving conceals something deeper).

Giuliani, a genuinely tragic figure

The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.

A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.

Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.

Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.

David French

We weren’t hallucinating when we admired Rudy’s mayoralty, were we? But some horrible flaw attached him to Donald J. Trump in a way that, as other Trump sycophants have learned, ruined him.

Crunchy Left Populist Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

• Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
• Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
• Culture is more important than politics and economics.
• A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
• Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
• Beauty is more important than efficiency.
• The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
• The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right How much is today’s “conservative” party, the GOP, interested in such values? If I hold my head just right and squint, I think they might be inchoately interested in several of them, but the way they express it is pretty off-putting.

(See also Ashley Colby, The Case for Left Conservatism and Fr. Stephen Freeman, A Day Off Versus The Day Of)

Culture

El Rushbo revisited

His obituaries in the mainstream press were mostly judgment, no mercy. It’s not nice when malice gets a final, unanswered shot. On the conservative side, TV commentaries were cloying to the point of cultish. It gives a sense of horror to see people who are essentially cold enact warmth of feeling.

Peggy Noonan, on the “complicated legacy” of Rush Limbaugh

More:

What made Rush Limbaugh’s show possible was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which, starting in 1949, mandated that holders of broadcast licenses must both give airtime to important issues and include opposing views. It asserted a real public-interest obligation from broadcasters.

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

War and poetry

It has been said that the Second World War did not produce great poets like the First War did. The Second War did not produce a Wilfred Owen or even a Siegfried Sassoon.

But that is because the great poems of the Second World War were not written in English. They were written in German and in Russian.

Douglas Murray, Things Worth Remembering: A Grave You Will Have in the Clouds, introducing Paul Celan.

Rod Dreher

Sometimes, it feels as if one of my roles in the world is to read Rod Dreher so others don’t have to. His hair is frequently on fire (or he’s gotten good at pretending it is; for the sake of his soul, it’s probably better that it be authentic, not feigned).

Why do I follow him? Well, I became a fan with his book Crunchy Cons (and see above, too), lo these seventeen years past. I’ve bought every book since, though some didn’t touch me and one made me cringe. I followed him at American Conservative, where his cultural catastrophizing enabled him to blog prolifically. I followed his departure from the Roman Catholic Church, gutted, and his prompt discovery of the Orthodox Church. I’ve attended a conference where he was a keynoter and chatted one-on-one. Now I’ve followed him through his divorce, the causes of which he has concealed beyond the generalities that both were at fault in some measure but neither was unfaithful, and which has left him, once again, gutted.

I’d call it “friendship” were it not that he almost certainly doesn’t remember me (he might say he’s met me before if he saw a picture). That, plus he so frequently puts his finger on something with pretty articulate analysis.

So it was twice this week. First (though second chronologically):

So: in the Church of Pope Francis, a priest can bless a gay couple who are engaged in sodomy, but that priest cannot say the Tridentine mass. This is where Catholicism in in 2023. When I became a Catholic, and after I left the Catholic Church, I have always believed that the health and stability of Christianity in the West depends on the health and stability of the Catholic Church, as the mother church of the West. This is not a day for any Protestant or Orthodox Christian living in the West to feel smug and superior. The loss of Rome to the Great Queering — and if you think Rome will stop here, you need to talk to some people who have lived through the queering of their Protestant communions — is going to be a massive blow to all Biblically faithful Christians living in Western civilization.

The next papal conclave — one of the most important in Church history — will determine if Francis was an aberration, or if his liberalizing is the new normal. And if the next pope reverses some or all of this, what kind of fight will he have on his hands?

(See section III of this for background; it’s very fresh news)

And as if anticipating this development:

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon.

That “homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching” is a hard teaching in this age, and obviously there are progressives in the Church of England (and elsewhere) that think otherwise. But when one sees Christianity as a way of life suited to the salvation of human persons rather than a checklist of doctrines to affirm, anthropology because pretty central.

I’m increasingly inclined to renew Dreher’s Rod’s Substack at annual renewal time in a few months, despite how I felt a few months ago.

This is water

As they say, something can be so obvious that it becomes invisible.

The old saw that “courts decide cases” is not accurate when the subject is the United States Supreme Court. It decides issues that it thinks important.

That said, I think Ben Johnson, The Supreme Court Doesn’t Just Decide Cases, gets a lot wrong (I don’t see, and Johnson doesn’t try to show, how picking issues turns the court into a legislature), though I’m (we’re?) indebted to him for pointing out the novelty (a mere 80 years) of abstracting issues from the case context, and the shaky legal basis for doing so.

Shorts

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer

* * *

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Fredrik Pohl

* * *

… an age which advances progressively backwards …

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

* * *

Over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers are displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present.

Dense Discovery #269

---

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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.