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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: politics (page 1 of 9)

December 2, 2025

As you all know, I don’t typically post about politics, but this post by my old friend Noah Millman: brilliantly illuminates the profound ethical failures — the abdications of ethical responsibility — that underlie many of the pathologies of our current moment: 

A view of power that sees it as incompatible with any respect for law and ethics is obviously one that will trash both law and ethics. But if you follow it, you will ultimately destroy the foundation of your power as well. (Beinart would probably say that this is precisely what is happening in Israel today, and I might well agree.) The same is true for an ethics terrified of the exercise of power, though. It will obviously and directly destroy your own power, but in doing so it will also destroy your ability to act ethically or achieve ethical goals. It turns you into a supplicant at the table of those who are willing to use power, to whose consciences you have surrendered your own in order to avoid the burden of ethical choice. And what makes you think that once you have surrendered your conscience to them, those people will prove any less corruptible by that fact, any less willing to throw ethics in the garbage because that feels like power to them, than the people you once broke with because of their moral failings and corruption by power?

October 16, 2025

look who’s reasoning

Jean: You have a right to have an ideal. Oh, I guess we all have one.

Charles: What does yours look like?

Jean: He’s a little short guy with lots of money.

Charles: Why short?

Jean: What does it matter if he’s rich? It’s so he’ll look up to me. So I’ll be his ideal.

Charles: That’s a funny kind of reason.

Jean: Well, look who’s reasoning.

— Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve

Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick:

Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods. […] 

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. [Just ignore the bad grammar of that sentence.] It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go. 

I’ve looked at the paper, and it seems pretty sketchy to me: a matter of asking people vague questions and then speculating about what their answers probably mean. 

What Stein and Rutchick are overlooking, it seems to me, is what a great many of MAGA folk will tell you straight out: that if loony lefties say that X and Y are “actual facts,” that Z is a “known falsehood” “that can easily be disproved,” it ain’t necessarily so. If President Trump says that crime in Washington D.C. is the worst it’s ever been and the socialist Democrats are at fault, and then some socialist at CNN — they’re all socialists at CNN — says that some “experts” have produced “scientific” research proving him wrong … well, MAGA knows who’s more trustworthy. They say: Look who’s reasoning. 

They’re not thinking, “Yes, we know that you have the Scientific Facts on your side, but our tribal loyalties are more important to us than facts!” They’re thinking, “You claim that you have facts, but we think it’s far more likely that you have cooked the books to generate an outcome that confirms your political preferences. Hasn’t that happened often enough in the past? Haven’t you and your kind been caught in the act?” 

People across the political spectrum do this all the time. Not long ago there was an online kerfuffle stemming from a post by John Ganz called “Against Polling.” When some people declared that Ganz was anti-science, anti-data, anti-fact, he replied, 

Is it so unreasonable to ask, why is it that the data brigade and the positivists are constantly urging a move rightwards, why they happen to be the same faction that wants to mend fences with the business world and Silicon Valley, and why they have the ear (and wallets) of the donors? Why should I grant their pretensions of embodying reason and factuality itself? That’s the very definition of ideology: a tendency that claims not to be a tendency, to be in fact, the absence of tendency and pure neutrality. There’s no such thing. The polling shit is part of an ideology that hides values in value-neutral language. 

You can find similar examples every day: someone says These are the facts and someone else says Those are not the facts, they’re factoids conjured up by people in the grip of motivated reasoning. The latter group are not simply by virtue of their disagreement anti-fact weirdos whose behavior needs some deep explanation. Even when they’re MAGA, they’re often just saying: Look who’s reasoning. 

The Stein and Rutchick argument tells people on the left exactly what they want to hear: that they haven’t failed in the task of persuasion, that the blame lies wholly with those anti-data tribalists in MAGAland. A comforting message, but not, I think, the correct one. Far more people are persuadable on particular questions — like whether the crime rate in D.C. is the worst it has even been, which, for the record, it definitely isn’t — than most partisans think. But persuasion has to be done retail, not wholesale, and you can’t sell everyone instantly on everything in your store. 

Another way to put this point: Most people can be persuaded on many (probably not all) points, but not by a tweet or a link — not online at all. It’s hard work that requires patience. By contrast, dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as irrational doesn’t take any work or patience at all. 

October 5, 2025

should Christians be leftists?

Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. 

 UPDATE: Phil has written firmly to me: 

Now, listen here — I did not call you and Adam and Francis a “school!” I called you a Poundian/Wyndham Lewisian vortex and said that you don’t quite constitute an ism! If you were a school, I’d be trying to matriculate!

Disagreements about politics are one thing, about exegesis another, but a man can’t stand for misrepresentation!

Dammit, Phil is correct. I repent in sackcloth and ashes. The post will now continue but my “be true to your school” joke doesn’t work any more. That said, it’s way cooler to be a VORTEX than a mere school. 

But in any case, Francis has blurbed Phil’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists, and Adam has written at some length about the book, so I suppose I have no choice but to weigh in. Be true to your school. 

But I haven’t been able to corral my thoughts into a coherent essay, and my next week is going to be crazy busy, so I think I will present my thoughts in all their clunking incoherence as a series of numbered points.

 

1.

I would be more positively disposed to Phil’s book if it had a different title, for instance:

Though Until Quite Recently Christians Could Not Have Been Leftists Because the Nation-State Model Under Which the Category “Left” Makes Sense Did Not Exist, and With the Further Qualification That Political Questions Are Largely Empirical in Nature and Therefore If I Could Be Convinced That Some Other Political Economy Did a Better Job of Fulfilling or Helping to Fulfill the Mandates of the Sermon on the Mount I Would Adopt That Political Orientation, I Believe Christians Should Be Leftists

 

2. 

It’s noteworthy that in this interview Phil talks about how much of his money to give away in exactly the same way that my fundagelical Republican friends and family members do. “Should we be generous to the poor until it hurts us?” is a question which, for Christians, has a clear answer; “Should generosity to the poor be mediated through governmental institutions or come primarily from individual contributions and charitable NGOs?” is a question with no equally clear answer. Phil says that the teachings of Jesus demand “massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes)” — but which will it be, alms or taxes? Again, what works best is largely if not wholly an empirical question, which I think means that the decision whether to be on the Right or Left is not principial but rather pragmatic. And that lowers the stakes in the debate.

Also, I think the question above is hard to answer because it’s hard to answer this question: What’s worse, (a) a society in which the poor are in absolute terms poorer but are closer in income to the rich, or (b) a society in which poverty-as-such is greatly reduced but the rich are ever-more-filthy rich? That is: What’s the key problem here, poverty-as-such or inequality? And I don’t think the Sermon on the Mount (or the Bible as a whole) tells us.

Phil writes, “God wants all of us to acknowledge that love by lifting up those at the bottom of our social arrangements. The Bible is clearer about that then it is about most of the theological and ethical issues we fight about. And the only durable way to do this is to lift up that bottom.” Well, amen to that. But what if the best way to lift up that bottom also lifts the top? That’s basically the argument Deirdre McCloskey makes in her massive Bourgeois Trilogy, about which I’ve written a bit here and here — really important work pointing to certain indubiable facts about the astonishingly swift and great rise in wealth that has occurred throughout the world during the reign of capitalism. In my experience, most leftists just pretend that none of this even happened, but the more acute ones agree that it has happened but also that capitalism has done all the good work it can do and now needs to give way to the next stage of economic development. That, however, requires subtle and detailed argumentation, and it’s a lot easier to shout “CAPITALISM IMMISERATES” even when that’s obviously not true. Unless …

Unless you are referring not to material misery — which capitalism has dramatically reduced — but rather to the social and psychological pain of inequality. Then the question becomes: Is material improvement coupled with increased inequality and therefore decreased social solidarity a deal we’re willing to make?

Or, to return to specifically Christian terms: What does Jesus primarily want, (a) deliverance of the poor from their poverty or (b) social solidarity among us all, even if that means a reduction in collective wealth? Some people, of course, will say that we don’t have to choose, that we can all together ascend the golden escalator to universal wealth. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

 

3.

If I had been making Phil’s case, I might have said something like this:

To my conservative/libertarian brothers and sisters, greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! Obiously, we all believe that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are binding upon us, and also that the teachings of the Hebrew Prophets are equally binding upon us (because the whole of the Bible is the Word of God). That means that we are obligated to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, the despised, the outcast, the stranger. But the Bible does not tell us how we are to do that necessary work. You don’t think it should be done through the government, which, though I do not agree, I understand. But that means that you really need to raise your game. If we are not going to redistribute resources — that is, share our blessings — through governmental action, then we need as individuals and families and churches to give until it hurts. We need to increase our support of charitable organizations that do this work. We need to make sure our churches preach this Biblical message. We need to encourage our fellow Christians to give more generously — to see lifting up the poor not as a nice thing, not as an acceptable option, but an absolute Gospel mandate. Some of us (some individual Christians, some families, some churches) obey this mandate, but not all of us, not nearly enough of us, else we would not see so many people among us who can’t afford to buy healthy food for their families, can’t afford safe and clean housing, can’t afford decent health care. There are enough of us to make a far bigger difference than we make, and our goal should be that the whole world says that they know us by our love. We don’t have to do it through governmental intervention, but we have to do it, and if you can’t see any way to make that happen on the scale that it needs to happen … well, then maybe we should revisit the question of whether the government might, after all, be the best instrument to pursue this common good.

And indeed you can find an argument that touches on some of these themes in an essay I wrote in 2005. 

 

4. 

My biggest Amen goes to this paragraph from Phil’s book:

Jesus takes sides in particular situations — the victim of violence over the perpetrator; the sufferer over the oppressor. But I also think Jesus is playing for all the marbles. As he judges the oppressor’s actions, he also sees every second of the life that took the oppressor to that moment, the poor moral formation the oppressor received from his parents (and that they in turn received), the ideological lies that that oppressor started to learn before he was old enough to notice or think about them, the person that that oppressor might have been had he been born in more auspicious circumstances. Jesus sees the thing that Jesus himself, as the second person of the Trinity and God’s creative Word, formed in the womb. And he wants to redeem that too. He wants all of it. He wants all of us.

September 15, 2025

consolidation of myth

What people do in response to violence is consolidate the myths they live by. This focuses emotion and fosters solidarity, but it also renders people susceptible to control by non-human forces, submission to which, in times of crisis, looks like virtue. 

I’ve written a lot about all this. See: 

I’ve also written about the artists who reveal to us the power of our myths, including William Blake and Thomas Pynchon and, of course, Auden. 

If you want to know what’s really going on with us, you can’t just ask yourself what side to take in the tempest du jour. But of course very few people want to know what’s really going on. Most people are not interested in understanding anything, they want to experience powerful emotions, good or bad — “All emotion is pleasurable,” Craig Raine has said —, that make them feel righteous. 

See also the myth tag at the bottom of this post. 

July 23, 2025

rescue me, O Leviathan

Mary Harrington:

Bukele’s approach adumbrates a postliberal future of leaders who will operate in parallel thought-worlds: both the analytic, policy-based register of long-form literacy, whose expressive mode is logic, and the enchanted, monarchic register of secondary orality, whose expressive achievement is friendship. For a ruler or small elite able to code-switch, there need be no choice between the king and the swarm. Such a leader, rather than be subsumed by the swarm, will serve as its head or formal cause.

As AI agents improve to the point of shrinking the administrative class, we may find that what actually has the power to destroy the twentieth-century technocracy is not free markets and personal responsibility, or even anons posting memes, but developments in AI. If so, classical liberals may be disappointed to discover that just as “civil discourse” is not coming back, what comes after the deep state will not be a return to small and limited republican government. It is more likely to be big government mediated by big data, crunched by machine agents in a now almost entirely digital swarm. Should this outcome be realized within the legacy democratic paradigm, it will inevitably result in governance that is still more impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship for those ruled, than the impersonal, unaccountable bureaucrats it has rendered obsolete.

If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary. Left headless, an algorithmically swarming regime of machinic proceduralism would represent the most monstrous pseudo-democratic tyranny of all. Our best safeguard against this fate is the ordering power of a human ruler, with a human head capable of prudence and justice, and a human heart capable of friendship.

Mary Harrington’s frank longing for a king — an authoritarian leader who will dictate to us the terms according to which we shall be happy — is very consistent with the mood of First Things over the last few years, shaped as it has been by Rusty Reno’s interest in what he calls “strong gods.” This is certainly what Harrington wants here: a godlike human — he is the “formal cause” of the swarm after all, if not the First Cause — who serves as a Hobbesian Leviathan, our “Mortall God.” Indeed, we could call Harrington’s vision Leviathan 2.0.

Or we could call it The New Caesarism, according to the first Augustus’s definition of the role of Caesar: he is the one who uniquely (“I alone can fix it,” someone once said) unites virtu and fortuna, and is thus the single perfect instrument of the gods’ will. See Charles Norris Cochrane’s book Christianity and Classical Culture, which I summarize here. Cochrane also shows how that model cannot survive the encounter with Christianity and especially with St. Augustine, but I don’t think that’s something Harrington would be interested in.

The best diagnostician of this particular desire is Auden. His diagnosis appears throughout his work in the 1940s, which makes sense because his ideas arise from the war between democracy and authoritarianism, a war in which democracy temporarily allies itself with totalitarianism. Auden certainly had no illusions about what the Soviet Union was all about, nor did the other figures I wrote about in The Year of Our Lord 1943: they understood the strength of the temptation to fight despotism with a temporarily nicer despotism, because after all Desperate times require desperate measures. (This is the defining proverb of those who long for Leviathan. It’s an accurate précis of Harrington’s argument.)

In Auden’s The Age of Anxiety our misery arises from our belief that we once had such a wise and kind Caesar but he has now departed. In one section of the poem — published separately as “Lament for a Lawgiver” — the characters sing a great dirge for him: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.” With you gone, “Who will dust / The cobwebbed kingdoms now?” Dad has passed on, and we want him to come back, and until he comes back, we don’t know how to sort ourselves out. We are anxious, and long for Dad to return to save us — or for a new paterfamilias to arrive; in either case, Father knows best — because we know we can’t save ourselves, and (this is essential) we don’t trust that God will do it in a way that we recognize as pleasingly salvific. See 1 Samuel 8:7: “And the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”

Auden anatomizes this desire more specifically in his slightly earlier poem, The Sea and the Mirror. There we see two groups of people: one commonplace, one unusual — more aesthetic, more intellectual. All of these people feel that they have reached a dead end and cannot save themselves, and are looking for a strong King or God or God-King to save them. But the ordinary people think it’s a matter of going back to the good old days:

Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butterfly nets and the old women keep sweet-shops in the cobbled side streets, or back to the upland mill town (gunpowder and plush) with its grope-movie and its poolroom lit by gas, carry me back to the days before my wife had put on weight, back to the years when beer was cheap and the rivers really froze in winter. Pity me, Captain, pity a poor old stranded sea-salt whom an unlucky voyage has wrecked on the desolate mahogany coast of this bar with nothing left him but his big moustache. Give me my passage home, let me see that harbour once again just as it was before I learned the bad words. Patriarchs wiser than Abraham mended their nets on the modest wharf; white and wonderful beings undressed on the sand-dunes; sunset glittered on the plate-glass windows of the Marine Biological Station; far off on the extreme horizon a whale spouted. Look, Uncle, look. They have broken my glasses and I have lost my silver whistle. Pick me up, Uncle, let little Johnny ride away on your massive shoulders to recover his green kingdom, where the steam rollers are as friendly as the farm dogs and it would never become necessary to look over one’s left shoulder or clench one’s right fist in one’s pocket.

The smaller group, the rarer group, the more aesthetic and intellectual group, don’t long for the past, because the past is particular: they long for the realm of pure abstract Good:

Deliver us, dear Spirit, from the tantrums of our telephones and the whispers of our secretaries conspiring against Man; deliver us from these helpless agglomerations of dishevelled creatures with their bed-wetting, vomiting, weeping bodies, their giggling, fugitive, disappointing hearts, and scrawling, blotted, misspelt minds, to whom we have so foolishly tried to bring the light they did not want; deliver us from all the litter of billets-doux, empty beer bottles, laundry lists, directives, promissory notes and broken toys, the terrible mess that this particularised life, which we have so futilely attempted to tidy, sullenly insists on leaving behind it; translate us, bright Angel, from this hell of inert and ailing matter, growing steadily senile in a time for ever immature, to that blessed realm, so far above the twelve impertinent winds and the four unreliable seasons, that Heaven of the Really General Case where, tortured no longer by three dimensions and immune from temporal vertigo, Life turns into Light, absorbed for good into the permanently stationary, completely self-sufficient, absolutely reasonable One.

Both of these longings — one of which remembers an innocent past, while the other hopes for a perfected future — are evasions of responsibility. They are ways of looking for rescue, not through self-correction and self-improvement, not through social negotiation and collaboration, and not through submission the one and only God. It is a human or humanoid authoritarian figure that they want to submit to. “Carry me back, Master”; “Deliver us, dear Spirit.” They’re not going to turn to Jesus because Jesus has already told them that His kingdom is not of this world. He’s useless, and they know that. He doesn’t look to them like a strong god. And whether they want to go backward or forward, they want a recognizable mighty King to lead, guide, and protect them.

Writers and scholars in the middle of the 20th century thought deeply about these matters, for reasons that should be obvious; it wouldn’t hurt today’s commentators to discover what their predecessors thought, and what they said. Another key work, especially in light of Harrington’s hope for a King who is our friend, is Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, about the arrival on Earth, or at first above Earth, of a powerful alien species who come to be known as the Overlords. The most famous scene in the novel comes when we see the Overlords for the first time, as one of them emerges from his ship:

A vast silence lay over the whole world for the space of twenty seconds — though, afterward, no one could believe that the time had been so short. Then the darkness of the great opening seemed to move forward, and Karellen came forth into the sunlight. The boy was sitting on his left arm, the girl on his right. They were both too busy playing with Karellen’s wings to take any notice of the watching multitude.

It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever.

There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail — all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.

The really key thing here, the thing that connects Clarke’s vision with Harrington’s vision, is that Karellen gently holds children. He’s going to be our friend. He’s going to make friendship possible. See? Nothing to be afraid of. Yes, he has horns and a tail, and he’s enormous and frightening, but he’s our friend. Just look at the little children sitting comfortably on his shoulders and playing with his wings.

But, of course, the Overlords end up destroying the Earth and almost everybody in it. They have no love for us. They are interested in accelerating the evolution of humanity — in a few humans who are able to go to the next level of consciousness and power, children whom they take with them; the rest of us are to be eradicated. This is inevitable.

It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.

The powerful love and recognize only power. They’re never going to be our friends. They’re going to use us and discard us. Power alienates, and absolute power alienates absolutely. That is why the Bible says, “Put not your trust in princes.” But Harrington does put her trust in princes — or hopes to.

Did the twentieth century teach us nothing?

Which leads me to the third work of mid-century literature that I have in mind. Big Brother isn’t even here yet, and already Harrington has won the victory over herself. She loves Big Brother. But should her dream come true, one day he’ll say to her, and to all of us unfortunate enough to be present, “I’m not your brother, and I’m not your friend.”

Tv childhoods1a.

June 23, 2025

the health of the state

Mary Harrington:

Decriminalising full term abortion signals a profound moral bankruptcy in England’s leadership class, made all the more grotesque by the thin and (I suspect) bad-faith arguments about compassion to “desperate women” under which this measure has travelled. The same goes for legalising the killing of our old and terminally ill, in a bill that rejected any duty to improve palliative care provision or even give regard to ensuring no one is coerced. This reveals the truth, that the animating desire for these policies of death was never compassion. It was always the political imposition on us all of radical alone-ness: complete liberation for each individual, from the givens of embodiment and our relatedness to one another.

We cannot, in this vision, be fully free until every vestige of human nature and purpose has been scrubbed away by the solvent power of technology and the all-powerful state, leaving only contingent causality and the brute stuff of our flesh. 

Randolph Bourne, famously, wrote that “war is the health of the state.” We’re seeing that these days too. The more general truth is: Death is the health of the state. The state magnifies and extends its power through killing — through all the ways of killing. When we empower the state with the idea that it will act to save lives, we are more fundamentally authorizing it to end other lives (and maybe, eventually, the ones it now saves). That’s just how it works. 

As I wrote a few years ago, 

Proudhon, in the middle of the nineteenth century, asserted that liberty is “not the daughter but the mother of order,” and that “society seeks order in anarchy.” Anarchists do not reject order or rule or governance but insist that in a healthy society these things cannot be imposed from above — from some arche, some authoritative source. Rather they emerge from negotiations between social equals. When complex phenomena arise from simple rules distributed throughout a large population — as can be seen best in social insects and slime molds — modern humans tend to be puzzled. For a long time scientists thought that there had to be intelligent queens in bee colonies giving directions to the other bees, because how else could the behavior within colonies be explained? The idea that the complexity simply emerges from the rigorous application of a handful of simple behavioral rules is hard for us to grasp. Bees and ants demonstrate how anarchy is order. It’s a shame that Proudhon did not know this. 

Anarchy is thus the fons et origo of healthy order, and I am increasingly coming to believe that anarchy is the precondition of conservation. Anarchism (in this sense, the sense of order emerging from the voluntary collaborations of social equals) is the true conservatism. 

States sometimes do good things, but we can trust the state only to enable killing and to kill. Anything better than killing can reliably be achieved only by civil society, and civil society will thrive only insofar as we practice voluntary collaboration — and it requires practice: voluntary collaboration is something the state has taught us to be bad at. 

June 14, 2025

Buckley

I’ve just finished Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley, which is magisterial. I have many, many thoughts, only a few of which I’ll share here.

Buckley’s greatest virtue and greatest vice was loyalty. Again and again we see him behaving with exceptional generosity to friends and family, even when that generosity was costly to him in dollars, in reputation, or in both. Once he came to think of someone as belonging in some way, in any way, to “us,” then it was almost impossible to dislodge his loyalty to them — even when they had, by any serious measure, betrayed that loyalty. Having settled on anything — a spouse, a friend, a house, a belief, a political stance — he couldn’t face abandoning him or her or it. 

Buckley begins his book In Search of Anti-Semitism by frankly acknowledging that his own father was an antisemite, though he doesn’t go into any detail. (Tanenhaus does, though, and it’s not pretty.) But immediately after acknowledging his father’s views, he goes on to say that “the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father’s ten children…, except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father’s opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa.” Okay … but what is that “attenuated sense”? The passage goes on without a break, as though to explain:  

Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn’t intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938 — I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century. 

The is strangely evasive, except in one respect: Buckley bluntly refuses to distinguish himself from his siblings simply because they burned the cross and he didn’t. Loyalty! If they are to be condemned, then he will share in their condemnation!

But should they be condemned? Should they have known that this was something rather more serious than “a Halloween prank”? Does he expect us to believe that the cross-burning just happened to have been done on a site belonging to Jews and that any other place favored by “adults” would have done just as well? (If not, why does he bring in the “scaring adults” line at all? And why does he include it in a paragraph about the relationship between his father’s antisemitism and the beliefs of his children?)

Does he now, at the time of writing, think it something that should have been seen as a serious offense? Or, rather, that no one could have been expected to take it seriously in 1937 but should have done so after Kristallnacht? Or even that it wouldn’t have been seen as serious in 1938 but on that point Jews have a “legitimate grievance”? 

Who can say?

But note that every possibility listed reminds us that Buckley is only seeing this from the perspective of the people who had their “lark,” not the Jews who looked out their hotel window to find a cross burning on the lawn. For them he does not spare a thought. (Something similar occurs in his discussion of Joseph Sobran, a blatant Jew-hater whom Buckley allowed for a long time to write for National Review and dismissed only under significant pressure: when Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, protested Sobran’s writings Buckley replied that “you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you.” I’m the real victim here!) 

Similarly: he knew what Joe McCarthy was, knew what terrible sins and crimes he committed, and he was too honest to deny those sins and crimes; but out of loyalty he minimized them and said — well, what he always said from the beginning of his career to the end: The other side is worse and therefore hypocritical. “They” are worse than “we.” The people unjustly smeared by McCarthy simply don’t show up on Buckley’s radar at all. 

He took the same approach to Southern racists who thought of themselves are preserving Southern traditions — people like his parents, to whom of course he was loyal. (His father was a Texan and his mother from New Orleans, and they split their time between a home in Connecticut and one in South Carolina. Buckley grew up in both worlds.) In 1959 he wrote a column for National Review that astounds me:

In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white — as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advantage of white over Negro; but the statistics are there, and are not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People. There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational. The question the white community faces, then, is whether the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede universal suffrage.

He answers Yes: indeed, “the claims of civilization” justify denying black people the vote. That’s not the astonishing part, though: what strikes me is Buckley’s quite explicit denial of the central claim of the Southern segregationists, which is that blacks are intrinsically and necessarily inferior to whites. Nonsense, Buckley says: “There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro disabilities.” White culture is superior to black culture because of the “preternatural advantages” granted by “tradition, training, and economic status.” But because it is superior, it should be allowed to rule. Which is no different than saying that a man who steals all my money should be allowed to keep it because he’s richer than I am. The plain old racists have at least the merit of consistency. 

Now, in his famous Cambridge debate with James Baldwin in 1965, when a man in the audience shouted that black people in Mississippi should be allowed to vote, Buckley said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.” But then he went on to say “I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi, sir, is not that not enough Negroes are voting but that too many white people are voting.” He then went on to suggest an elevation of the standards of voting — presumably by refusing the vote to those unable to pass a civics test — that would dramatically reduce the number of white people allowed to vote but at the same time, given the racial inequities in the Mississippi education system, would certainly reduce by an even greater degree the number of black voters. 

In 2004 Buckley told an interviewer: “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” A pundit admitting error is a remarkable thing, seen but a few times a century. That is admirable. But I do wonder how he could ever have believed, even in 1959, that people whose entire lives were built on the conviction of white supremacy would somehow “evolve” into something different? I doubt that he ever did believe it, though he may have wished for it. Primarily what he was doing in that column was being loyal to his parents and to their social world.

All that duly noted, I came away from this biography admiring Buckley for some things, and maybe most of all for his commitment to debate, especially on his TV show Firing Line. The very first episode of that show featured the socialist Michael Harrington, and at the end of it Buckley commended Harrington for making the most eloquent defense of President Johnson’s anti-poverty programs that he had ever heard.

And as Tanenhaus notes, Firing Line became the place to go if you wanted to hear what the radical black activists of the Sixties and Seventies — Huey Newton! Eldridge Cleaver! Roy Innis! — actually thought:

Buckley interviewed these activists, and opened his microphones to them, at a time when their exposure on mainstream television was limited to footage of violent demonstrations. “Amazingly,” writes the media historian Heather Hendershot, “a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism [broadcast] some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power from [its] era outside of the underground press and other alternative sources.”

(Link added.) That’s pretty cool.

I have a great deal to think through after reading this remarkable book. There may be more thoughts later — I feel that I ought to say more about what Buckley got right, because there were a few things. But for now I’m out of time. 

February 19, 2025

activism

I’ve pretty much stopped writing about politics, for reasons explained here, but that doesn’t mean I hold no political views and take no political action. Here’s how I think about political activism. 

Premise: Every government does unjust harm to some persons and groups of persons. (One’s general political philosophy will be largely determined by how much harm one thinks that any government does as a matter of course, and one’s voting patterns will be largely determined by that philosophy, but none of that is relevant to this particular post. What I’m about to say is, I think, universally applicable.) 

From this premise I think some questions should arise: 

  1. In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed? 
  2. Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community? 
  3. What organizations serve and seek to protect those people? 
  4. How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations? 

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action. Note that this plan will differ according to the political party that happens to be in charge. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” the Prologue to the Letters and Papers from Prison: 

We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hand of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s largeheartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not, from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behaviour. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.

February 3, 2025

Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

  • It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;
  • it has no ancient or biblical warrant;
  • it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;
  • it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;
  • the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;
  • the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;
  • the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;
  • it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,
  • and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend. 

December 19, 2024

five true things

  1. Murder is very wrong. 
  2. Killing a health care CEO in protest against the inequities of the American health-care system is pointless and counterproductive. 
  3. American insurance companies regularly refuse to meet the terms of their contracts with their customers, and consider themselves justified in such refusals because they are “maximizing value for shareholders.” Here’s a case that’s extreme in some respects but typical of the procedural logic. Here’s a less dramatic example from my own experience. 
  4. American laws do not do enough to protect customers from corrupt insurance companies. 
  5. Changing from a for-profit system to a single-payer system will not in itself fix anything. As Kevin Williamson has written, “If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it?” 

All of these things are true, and by affirming or denying one you are saying absolutely nothing about any of the others. Distinguo! 

December 4, 2024

reasons for tolerance

There are two major reasons to practice tolerance of ideas that differ from, or conflict with, your own: 

Epistemic humility: You may be wrong about some things, and even if you’re not wrong, may not fully understand your own position and may not be equipped to defend it against your opponents. Therefore you extend tolerance not only for the sake of your opponents but also for your own intellectual good. (This is a major theme in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.) 

Political pragmatism: If you’re not powerful enough to silence your enemies, your attempts to do so may bring on a fight you can’t win. Worse, the attempt to silence others may lead to their attempting to silence you — and if they’re sufficiently strong that attempt might just succeed. And then where would you be? 

In our current political moment, it is trivially easy to find strong, confident voices that confirm our opinions. And because we do not understand scale, it is easy to believe that everyone who matters, everyone who thinks, everyone who is decent is on our side. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. It is virtually impossible in such a climate to make an appeal to epistemic humility. Therefore tolerance can really only be recommended on the groud of political pragmatism. 

But even this is difficult for people for whom political opponents are the Repugnant Cultural Other. As I wrote in yet another essay, “For those who have been formed largely by the mythical core of human culture, disagreement and alternative points of view may well appear to them not as matters for rational adjudication but as defilement from which they must be cleansed.” What is happening on the American left right now, in the wake of the recent election, is a struggle between political pragmatism and the deeply felt need for social hygiene. 

Which will win? 

UPDATE: This from John Ganz in The Nation is representative of a typical left postmortem of the election: 

The Democrats don’t need to program differently — they need to think differently. The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic — to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above. They need to reject their allergy to “debate bros” and learn how to argue and debate again; indeed, they need to recover the central challenge of politics — to persuade people. 

But you can’t persuade people when you feel defiled by their very presence. Thus the choice I have pointed to. 

November 28, 2024

The New New Class? – by Noah Millman:

Just as Bill Clinton was our first meritocratic president—the first one whose path to success and power ran from someplace like Hope, Arkansas to Georgetown and Oxford rather than from Hope to the army and the local party machines—Donald Trump is our first attention-economy president, our first influencer president. Not Ronald Reagan; Reagan was an actor, and his acting experience served him well as he became the Great Communicator, but he came up as an actor in the old studio system, served as a union president and worked for General Electric before entering California Republican politics as a party man. He was a natural talent, but he was the product of institutions. Trump isn’t really the product of institutions, but neither, for all that he ran a variety of (mostly unsuccessful) businesses, is he the creator of institutions. He is and always has been first and foremost someone good at drawing attention to himself. Everything else flows from that. 

Noah’s description of our cultural move from being led by a meritocratic class to being led by an influencer class is brilliant. 

November 27, 2024

The Ad That Radicalised Me – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian:

I haven’t heard the [assisted-dying] bill’s opponents deny the fact of suffering, however. I have heard the bill’s supporters deny or avoid the trade-off they are proposing. They pretend there will be no cases of coercion, when of course there will be, human nature and the state of our public services being what they are. The most honest argument for the bill — even if it’s not one I buy — is a utilitarian one: that the injustice and cruelty thus perpetrated will be outweighed by the suffering prevented.

But it’s always hard to make utilitarian arguments persuasive because they seem so mechanical and inhuman. Unthinking emotionalism and the avoidance of uncomfortable truths make for better rhetoric, which is why this bill may well pass on Friday. Although I was already leaning against it, intellectually, it was those grotesque ads which really crystallised how I have come to feel about assisted dying. State-managed death is being wrapped up as self-fulfilment. I don’t feel good about that. I feel sick.

November 27, 2024

disposition

Here I am not trying to say anything original; I’m trying to put clearly what are (in some circles anyway) familiar points.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

Therefore,

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Not indicentally, it is because conservatism is a disposition that Oakeshott titles this essay “On Being Conservative” rather than “On Being a Conservative.”

If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.

Note that this highly-valued inheritance takes many forms. It may be a marriage; a larger family; a friendship or network of friendships; a parish church; a university; a body of knowledge; a collection of artworks; the oeuvre of a novelist or poet or composer or painter. It is whatever one is grateful to have received; whatever encounter appears to one as a gift.

I would add that the disposition to conserve one’s inheritance is truly and fully healthy only when it is accompanied by a desire to share one’s good inheritance with others who lack access to it or even awareness of it. To conserve only for oneself and one’s own is avarice. As Lewis Hyde has noted, good gifts find their fulfillment in circulation. This is why I have written so often of repair: repair is often the first step in conservation. We want to pass our inheritance along in better shape than we found it.

The questions that then arise are:

  • What forces tend towards the preservation of my inheritance?
  • What forces tends towards its dissipation or depredation?
  • By what means might I protect it from harm?
  • By what means might I increase its health and extend its reach?

Among the conserving and destroying forces are

  • personal vices and virtues
  • social institutions and practices (healthy and unhealthy)
  • forms of government (healthy and unhealthy)

And the means of conserving are also to be pursued on each of these three axes.

From this outline several conclusions may be drawn. In this post and in subsequent ones I will try to draw some of them.

Let’s begin here: For the person of conservative disposition, the question of what form of government to prefer is secondary and instrumental. That is, it lies downstream of the inheritance one wishes to conserve.

Governance does not create or bestow any genuine inheritance; rather, its fulfills its purpose by safeguarding, or helping to safeguard, and extending, or helping to extend, the good things that are made and found extra-governmentally. Whether to prefer socialism to free-market capitalism or vice-versa is an empirical question, not a principial one. Those empirical reasons may be very strong but should never assume the status of first principles.

Therefore, persons of conservative disposition will not make their preferences in electoral politics, their party affiliations, central to their identity. Those affiliations will always be held relatively loosely, and will remain subject to critical reflection and reassessment.

Moreover, such persons will realize that an over-emphasis on party affiliation leads to a neglect of the other major forces that affect the conservation of their inheritance. They will understand that no matter who is elected to office, possibilities remain for personal formation, the strengthening of families, and the building and sustaining of the institutions of civil society. To be sure, governments can help or hinder such projects, often in powerful ways, but what Oliver Goldsmith wrote 250 years ago remains true:

In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

If we forget this, then we will falsely believe that we can preserve what we have inherited while watching institutions crumble and accepting or even delighting in vice — as though being on the Right Side excuses every other shortcoming. What does it profit a conservative to win an election but lose his soul — and along with it his inheritance?

Some people will read the above and think that my point is that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump. That is not my point. I am arguing that any vote for any candidate in any election (a) should be made with an eye towards preserving one’s inheritance and (b) should be one element in a larger pattern of thought and action that keeps questions of governance in their proper and limited place. I did not vote for Donald Trump and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would do so, but I believe I could come up with a dispositionally-conservative defense of voting for Trump. It would not be a defense that I believe in but rather one that I regard as rational. (I say I could make such a case, not that I will.)

What I’ve done in this post is simply to outline what I think the conservative disposition is and what its key points of focus should be. In future posts I will write about some particular elements of our inheritance and what might be done to conserve them. For instance:

November 15, 2024

excerpt from my Sent folder: unions

From an email to a British friend

One more contributor to Trump’s win that hasn’t been sufficiently acknowledged: it’s one of the consequences of the collapse of labor unions. My father (Teamsters) and my paternal grandfather (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen) were both union men. Back in the day, almost every union man in America was a Democrat, because the GOP was the party of Big Business. That is also why the GOP was, it seemed permanently, a minority party. 

But when industrial production started moving overseas and the unions got weaker, their leaders tried to play a weakened hand as though it were still a strong hand. (This of course happened in your country as well. I started to write “R.I.P. Arthur Scargill” but did a quick check and he’s still alive!) It was no longer necessary for the Dems to please the unions, and the party soon left them behind — and the people who belonged to them, and the people who never joined unions but did the same kinds of work — and pursued the more interesting clientele of student activists and their professors. 

Meanwhile the GOP continued to be the GOP, so there was no party left to advocate for blue-collar workers. There were of course isolated figures who upheld the old commitments, most notably Bernie Sanders; but Bernie was from the Northeast and therefore an alien to most of the nation’s workers, for whom “socialism” is a dirty word anyway.   

Then Donald Trump came along and said to the workers “I’ll be your defender.” Few politicians could be a less plausible fit for that role, or less likely to keep promises … but he was the only one to show up. It was a classic businessman’s move: He saw a large and wholly untapped market and he moved into it. And here we are. 

I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it. 

November 1, 2024

what’s up

The Finnish comedian Ismo has a nice routine in which he describes how hard it is to learn the nuances of spoken English. The best-known part of the routine (justifiably!) is when he explains why he thinks the most complicated word in English is “ass.” But I also like his comment that it took him a long time to learn that the proper response to the phrase “What’s up?” … is the phrase “What’s up”?

I thought about that when I took a look at an essay many people have recently recommended: this one by Nathan Pinkoski. The first sentence of the essay is: “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed.” And my first thought at reading that first sentence was: Has it? Has it really? Because, you know, a whole lot of what I see around me looks a great deal like what I saw around me in the twentieth century. I mean, many things have definitely changed — there’s a lot more internet, for instance. But we have the same banking system, the same car manufacturers, the same hostilities in the Middle East, the same attempts to “dismantle the canon” in university English departments, the same tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the same dumb artistic provocateurs making the same dumb provocations. We’re voting the same way we voted in the twentieth century, except that more of us get to vote early. We’re less religious then we were fifty years ago, but more religious than at other times in our history, and in any case there doesn’t yet seem to be a obvious correlation between irreligion and civilizational collapse. 

But that’s just in America. What about elsewhere? Well, immigration has altered European civilization, but “collapse” seems even there to be a strong word. China and India are richer and more powerful than they were in the twentieth century; China in particular may be headed for trouble, but “collapse”? 

I could go on, but you get the point. 

Who didn’t get the point was me, who for a moment took Pinkoski’s statement as a declaration of fact. My bad! It was actually a liturgical greeting, as when we Anglicans exchange the Peace in the middle of the Eucharistic rite. Technically we should (I think) be saying (1) “The peace of the Lord be always with you” followed by (2) “And also with you.” But usually we say (1) “The peace of the Lord” and (2) “The peace of the Lord.”

Similarly, people who (like me) grew up as University of Alabama football fans know how to greet each other: Salutation: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.” Response: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.”

Initially, I took Pinkoski’s first sentence as a statement of fact when in fact it was a tribal salutation, the proper response to which is the same phrase: (1) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?” (2) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?”

But I’m not a member of that tribe, so I didn’t say the phrase. Nor did I read any further. The essay clearly wasn’t meant for me, and it was kind of Pinkoski to begin with the tribal salutation that informed me of that. 

October 21, 2024

trustfulness

I know some people who teach at Columbia University, and I’ve been worried about them. Reading the reports of student unrest there, and especially of the surge in antisemitism, I’ve wondered how they have been holding up in what must surely be impossible conditions for teaching. Feeling guilty for my neglect, I decided I needed to check in. 

Turns out they’re doing just fine. Yes, they have to show their ID cards to be admitted to what had previously been an open campus, but that simply revealed just how many of the protestors last spring had no connection to Columbia. On the first day of classes a protest was held just outside the gates, and the local TV stations — thinking like old-time movie directors on severely constrained budgets — placed their cameras to make the crowd look enormous. But one of the professors I know happened to be arriving on campus at that time and paused to count them: forty-two people. And after an hour or so they all wandered away. 

This fall there have been rallies on campus — pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — but it appears that those have been both brief and relatively uneventful. Yes, there are a handful of extremely noisy and aggressive student protestors, but one professor tells me that a number of students who got involved in the protests last spring are now feeling embarrassed about the whole business and glad to be able to return their focus to their classes. Indeed, for some, and maybe for a great many, classrooms where serious ideas can be explored and discussed provide a welcome refuge from overheated political tribalism. 

Reading such reports, I started laughing — ruefully — at my naïveté. I realized that, though I know perfectly well the almost inevitable over-dramatization of events by journalists desperately for eyeballs and clicks, I had somehow suspended my usual skepticism in this case — maybe because it’s New York City, which on other grounds is typically described as a city in crisis. I was, I realized, imagining professors navigating the life-threatening horrors of the subway only to arrive at the second hellscape of Morningside Heights, where police in riot gear marched through clouds of tear gas to break up roving gangs of masked (and possibly armed) protestors. 

I slightly exaggerate. And I don’t mean to suggest that New York doesn’t have real and serious problems. But I’m reminded that several New Yorkers have complained to me that the whole subway system is frequently described as broken, when in fact the problems are largely confined to certain lines at certain times. Now, to be sure, they themselves may be downplaying the seriousness of the issue — people who have invested their lives in a place don’t often want to think the worst of it. But when you hear only reports from an industry principially devoted to alarmism, even a little civic boosterism can be a useful corrective, and a reminder not to be overly trusting in news reports. 

And in the case of Columbia University, I am grateful to have on-the-ground evidence that many students and faculty, while they know perfectly well that protests continue, manage without much difficulty to keep their focus on the studies that brought them to the university in the first place. Others may feel the effects of the protests more strongly, of course; but consider this as an account from actual insiders who have been watching and reading news reports with bemusement and annoyance. I was told, “Come and see for yourself!” 

To be sure, one correspondent reports that a fresh-vegetable stand has popped up just outside the gate where he typically enters the university. But, he says, he just walks boldly past the looming asparagus and mushrooming mushrooms. New Yorkers are made of stern stuff. 

October 17, 2024

true believers

David Brooks:

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

This is brilliant by Brooks, so read the whole thing. But than I would think so, wouldn’t I, because this converges with points I have been making for years. When the Repugnant Cultural Other becomes the Repugnant Religious Other — when the Other is a heretic out to destroy your very soul — then being “buried within the walls of your own catechism” is the Prime Directive. (“For the love of God, Montresor, don’t tear down this wall.”) 

Wow, that’s three allusions in, like, ten words. I should be on BookTok or something.

Anyway, this analysis helps to explain one of Brooks’s key points, which is that none of the priests who lead these two competing religions seem interested in making converts, only in dissing the other side.  As I wrote in another post, 

Recently I was reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, and while I venerate GSM just this side idolatry, I don’t think the book quite works as intended. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll say that its core argument is (a) that our culture is dominated by a set of fundamentalisms — “At the heart of any fundamentalism, as we define it, is a disdain for learning from evidence. Truth is already known, given, and clear” — and (b) that the fundamentalist mindset is incapable of persuasion, of bringing skeptics over to its side. 

All of which is true, but (and this is a major theme of my How to Think) what if people don’t want to persuade others? What if they don’t just hate their Repugnant Cultural Other but need him or her in order to define themselves and their Inner Ring? 

If I may cite myself one more time: Hatred alone is immortal. This is our problem in a nutshell. 

October 10, 2024

Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

UPDATE: This essay by Joshua Rothman — with the telling title “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?” — is a useful addendum to this post. 

September 25, 2024

what Milton isn’t

This is an excellent essay by Mark Edmundson, so of course I am going to write about the part I disagree with: 

I like to teach a class on Milton and Whitman. I do so from a political vantage, seeing Whitman as an archetypal progressive, a breaker of boundaries, an opener of new roads. Milton, by contrast, is an archconservative, someone who brilliantly dramatizes the allure of order, degree, and hierarchy. Few students have trouble entertaining Whitmanian values. What 20-year-old isn’t attracted to freedom? But with Milton, matters change. He believes that people can be happy only when they are installed in a hierarchy. We should revere what is above us and care for what is below. Milton’s views of hierarchy implicate religious, political, and family life. Reading these two poets side by side offers plenty of illuminating conflicts. 

The problem with this account is that, while Milton indeed believed in “order, degree, and hierarchy,” he thought it essential to ask which order, which model of degree, which system of hierarchy a society embodies. Because he thought his own society had radically misconceived such matters, Milton was not an “archconservative,” but rather was a political revolutionary who advocated for and then defended the violent overthrow of the monarchy, and then worked for a decade in the new anti-monarchical government. Moreover, his theology was very much his own; though he never repudiated the Church of England and is buried in one of its churches, he could not have been ordained in it, and probably not in any other church either. 

Whitman was a far more conventional figure than Milton. Though his poems were thought by some obscene, this was only by implication and suggestion, and in Whitman’s lifetime Leaves of Grass became a famous and celebrated work, despite its sensuality and its formal innovations. Whitman’s devotion to America and American exceptionalism was intense — he was a patriotic poet to a high degree, and famously the most eloquent celebrant in his time of Abraham Lincoln. 

I am perhaps overstressing the point — in many respects Whitman was a new thing in the world. But what I am trying to suggest is that our categories of “conservative” and “progressive” do not map very neatly onto periods other than our own. 

Some essays of mine that treat the issues Edmundson raises: 

August 12, 2024

the diaconal charism

Earlier today I read this conversation with David French about how he was made unwelcome at his church because of race and politics. I had read an earlier column by him on the subject, but I was especially attentive to this discussion because I just before I read it I had been walking Angus and listening to Morning Prayer on my phone. 

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely love the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app. It takes about 20 minutes to listen to any one of the services, which features a liturgy well said, lectionary passages well read, and the occasional psalm or canticle well sung. 

Anyway, one of the Scripture readings for Monday, August 12 is the passage from Acts 6 that describes the founding of the order of deacons. And I was noticing, as I heard that passage read, that the whole impetus for this new order was an injustice in the life of the church: “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.” The Hellenists are Greek-speaking Jews, people shaped to a considerable degree by Greek culture; many of them were born and raised outside Israel. The Hebrews were Jews of Israel, speakers of Aramaic and readers of Hebrew, who clearly considered themselves more culturally (and religiously) pure than the Hellenists. 

So we see here the very common injustice that arises from people preferring members of their own cultural group to “others,” not realizing, or not accepting, that such distinctions are erased when one enters the Body of Christ. And when I consider what happened to David French in his family, I think: Every church needs deacons to do precisely what the first deacons did — that is, to give comfort and support to the people of God justly, that is, with no regard to differences in culture or race or politics, because, as Peter says a little later in Acts, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).

The diaconal charism is indifference, in an old meaning of the word: “Without difference of inclination; not inclined to prefer one person or thing to another; unbiased, impartial, disinterested, neutral; fair, just, even, even-handed” (OED definition I.1). And divided as we Christians are by so many worldly or diabolical forces, we desperately need that charism. 

Stephen is of course the patron saint of deacons, but if they need a priestly and episcopal patron also, I would suggest Basil the Great, for reasons I explain in the opening paragraph of this post. And if you want more along these lines, I wrote in more detail about Basil and his extraordinary family here. They all exhibited, to an extraordinary degree, this diaconal charism that I believe is so woefully lacking in the American church. (And probably in every other church as well.) 

August 12, 2024

anarchism as a spiritual discipline

Perhaps the most unusual element of my 2022 essay on anarchism is this: I present anarchism not as a political system but as a spiritual discipline. I don’t put the point quite that bluntly, but I come fairly close:

The first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy — what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power.

You’ll have to read the essay to find out who Odo is.

It should be obvious that if you are delighted with power politics – if you think the purpose of politics is “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” of your victory – then you won’t be worried about your own will to power. You can just turn off your conscience and go on the attack, thinking only about winning (good) and losing (bad). My suggestion that the desire to impose order on others is a desire that needs to be reflected on will seem obviously silly to you. But there’s another way of thinking about the political order that is equally incompatible with the kind of reflection I counsel in that essay: the libertarian model.

Libertarianism doesn’t want to impose order on others, but its most passionate advocates have a strong tendency to assess existence in terms of winning and losing – winning and losing not in the corridors of political power but in the marketplace; the individual entrepreneur controlling the segment of the market in which he works. As Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, it’s all about DOMINATION; just not domination by law. Anarchism, by contrast — this is my argument in that essay — stands between (libertarian) chaos and (seeking to become) the Man. Some of the most thoughtful anarchists like to say that “anarchy is order” – but order that emerges from collaboration and cooperation rather than being imposed by governmental power. I don’t think it’s possible to create an anarchist system, because an anarchism imposed on people by those in power isn’t anarchism.

Here’s what I think can be done: Try, in every way we can think of, to increase the number of situations in our lives in which we are neither dehumanized by an omnipotent state nor engaged in ceaseless competition with one another in an omnipotent marketplace. As Wendell Berry has written, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” We should assume that privilege whenever we can, and take it upon ourselves as a collaborative of equals to determine what, in any given case facing us, justice and mercy are. In other words, what I call the anarchic imperative is an attempt to rebalance what Berry has called “the two economies”:

For the thing that so troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, it is probably natural to pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out. And we can say without presuming too much, that the first principle of the kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it, we may say, whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it. That is to say that the kingdom of God is orderly.

Amen to that. But what is the nature of that order? Eschatologically, it certainly ain’t anarchic: it is the kingdom of the archē, the source of all things, the Lord. But to understand and instantiate that Kingdom here and now – when, as St. Augustine says, the City of God and the City of Man are inevitably and confusingly mixed – we need to collaborate with one another to increase both our knowledge and our ability to act effectively.

I have argued at some length that Christians aren’t pluralists – we believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10) – but in our current position we should expect, accept, and even embrace plurality. We need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to a plural world, and we can do that by expanding the sphere of voluntary collaboration, negotiation among equals, emergent order, even when such expansion makes life more difficult for us. That’s anarchism as a spiritual discipline.

Since for almost everyone politics is about two questions — “How can I get everything I want?” and “How can I thwart and punish my enemies?” — I have no illusions that this post will find any sympathetic readers. But it’s what I think. Whaddyagonnado.

August 9, 2024

colonialist owls

This is a fascinating report: “Very soon, the federal government may authorize the killing of nearly a half-million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest in a desperate bid to save the northern spotted owl.” The argument appended to the report is that this proposal is unwise. 

The key passage, I think, is this: 

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense. 

The authors don’t say this explicitly, but it seems clear that the federal campaign against the barred owl depends on a reading of human political history. The movement of the barred owl westward is analogized to the movement of Europeans into the North American continent and across it.

Without that history in mind, the increasing dominance of the barred owl over the spotted owl would be just One of Those Things that happens in nature. But by using human political history to interpret such events, the government teaches itself to see barred owls as “invasive” — like they’re on the Oregon Trail or something.

It’s silly, but it’s also one of the subtler forms that the politicization of science takes. 

August 7, 2024

the state and the people

A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, of history, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. I am reading it right now, and when I saw the book’s first two paragraphs I thought, Damn, I wish I had known this when I wrote that essay. Here they are:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since I January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

Highlighting mine. Of course it would be war that created the bureaucratic mechanisms of modern identity, for, as Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”

I’m just making notes for later reflection here, but: The creation of this identity system led to a complex and ever-shifting pattern of relation between the state and modern capitalism. James Burnham, in his landmark book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the comprehensive power of the state would lead to the rise of a managerial class that would take power away from the capitalists. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

When I come back to these issues — which I will do eventually — I expect to say a little more about Bourne and Burnham, about George Orwell’s reviews of Burnham, and about anarchism. And maybe even about the Church.

July 11, 2024

political proverbs

Nothing good ever comes from indulging the egos of old men. 

Nothing good comes from indulging the ego of any politician, but the you-can’t-tell-me-I’ve-seen-it-all arrogance of old men is especially dangerous. 

If you want political success, it’s better to be fortunate in your enemies than in your friends. An incompetent enemy can do more for you than a devoted friend ever could. 

When Congress will not do its job, attempts by the other two branches to do Congress’s job will always create more problems than they solve. 

It is said that Marcus Aurelius had a servant whose sole talk was to whisper in his ear, “You are but a man, you will die.” Every Supreme Court justice should have a clerk whose job is to whisper “The more times you tell yourself that you’re not a legislator, the more effectively you hide from yourself your temptation to legislate.” Not as terse, but just as needful.  

No one is less trustworthy in reporting on the Supreme Court than a periodical’s “Supreme Court reporter.” 

There is no correlation between memes and votes.

People elect performers rather than genuine representatives because they think our social and economic system will continue to function without human intervention, like a solar-powered street light. 

To put the same point otherwise: The besetting sin of the people who talk politics ceaselessly is a failure to take politics seriously. 

In the country of the Know-less-than-nothings, the Know-nothing is king. 

May 3, 2024

P.S.A.

A number of people have asked me for my thoughts about the current university campus protests. I have very few. As the novelist John Barth said when asked why he hadn’t been involved in the anti-war protests of the Sixties, “the fact that the situation is desperate doesn’t make it any more interesting.” People who aren’t interested in learning (or in politics either, in any meaningful way) have thrown a monkey wrench into the works of universities that don’t care about teaching them. Not my bag. 

I think this Ross Douthat column is good, though. I’m grateful that Ross writes about things like this so I can write about very different things. 

May 3, 2024

refuge

Bryan Garsten: 

Liberal societies, I want to suggest, are those that offer refuge from the very people they empower. The reach of this formulation will become evident when we allow ourselves to use “refuge” in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, so that institutions and practices can offer refuge from a powerful person as much as a fortress can. […] 

Because liberal societies offer within them different sorts of refuge, they should not produce many refugees fleeing elsewhere. The United States does not generally produce large refugee flows, but those it has at times produced — as when enslaved Americans fled to Canada before the American Civil War — have offered good indices of weaknesses in its liberal credentials. Liberal societies themselves should by their nature appreciate the plight of foreign refugees and err on the side of welcoming them, but the facts do not allow us to say that liberal societies are always more welcoming than nonliberal societies. The crucial indicator of liberalism is whether a society produces refugees. A society becomes more liberal when it reduces the reasons that people have to flee — not by converting all people to one outlook or identity, but by offering them the chance to find refuge internally. Liberal societies aim to generate no exodus. 

It is in this sense that many of the recent developments I have regularly decried on this blog — surveillance capitalism, panoptic governance, coercive administrative practices (especially in academia) — are straightforwardly anti-liberal, sometimes consciously, sometimes blindly. I like the framing of refuge. From Florida’s “Stop WOKE” law to the anti-bias “teams” and “task forces” that populate American campuses, the common theme is: You have no refuge from us. Resistance is futile.

Garsten’s essay is trying to do a lot of things, and I think he gets tangled up at times, in interesting ways. For instance, on page 143 he moves seamlessly from celebrating the founding of cities to celebrating the spread of markets, in a way that suggests that he thinks that the reason we have cities is to spread markets. There are other views on that point. But the major themes involve certain claims about healthy societies. Such societies 

  • do not generate many refugees 
  • are hospitable to refugees from elsewhere 
  • provide means of exit from their internal systems and structures 
  • provide means of exit from the society altogether 

Thus the conclusion: 

Some critics worry that if we are given the choice to flee evils in the many ways a liberalism of refuge protects, our mobility will turn us into “rootless” beings. This concern has been given too much weight since Heidegger and Arendt. We are not trees who flourish when deeply rooted in the soil. We are human beings with legs, meant to explore. What we need to flourish is not roots so much as refuges from which we can venture forth and to which we can retreat. Often, we end up returning to where we started with new insight or appreciation, like Odysseus gratefully coming home. Sometimes we do not, or cannot, return home, and so we begin again and find, in those beginnings, a distinctively liberal adventure — the noble work of building a new society that refugees know so well. 

I have reservations. For one thing, whether “building a new society” is “noble work” depends on the kind of society you’re building. (See: the Taliban.) More important: Is “exploring” the main thing that legs are for? Again, it depends on why you’re exploring. If Garsten had said that legs are for exploring to find food for your family and community, and to bring that food back to those who hunger, I’d have been happier. And in general, I think it’s more important for our minds to explore than our legs, even if when doesn’t create new markets. 

In general, Garsten’s vision is a libertarian one, whereas I prefer anarchist models. In my view the primarily difference between libertarianism and anarchism is that the former wants to expand the scope of individual freedom while the latter wants to expand the scope of collaboration and cooperation. What if we were to re-frame “refuge” and “exit” in anarchist, or at least communitarian, terms? 

An interesting book in this regard is Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and especially the character of McPhee. McPhee is basically Lewis’s old tutor, William Kirkpatrick, AKA Kirk or the Great Knock, and I have always found it touching that Lewis sought to find some way to offer that dour atheist the blessings of Christian community, but without as it were forcing him into a false conversion. 

The community of St. Anne’s — an attempt by Lewis to embody the themes of his great essay “Membership” — is not quite anarchic, and I say that not because it has a Director but rather because no one else but Mr. Fisher-King could be the Director. Still, it is a collaborative and cooperative endeavor, and no one is coerced into participation, nor is anyone who wishes to belong excluded — though they may not choose their own roles: the community strives to make charitable but honest assessments of what its members are capable of, and especially what risks they can be expected to take. 

No community is perfect, of course. When the people of St. Anne’s become aware of the gifts of Jane Studdock, one of them goes to far as to say “You have to join us” — but that is immediately recognized not only as counterproductive (Jane flees at the first hint of coercion) but also contrary to the character of the community. One must enter freely or not at all, and the damage done by that moment of impulsiveness is almost irreversible. 

St. Anne’s is of course an intentionally Christian community or “body” through and through, which leads to the question: Why is McPhee there? He is no Christian, and for all his respect for the Director, he believes the man prone to nonsensical words and thoughts. 

The answer is that McPhee is there because he wants to be. Eccentric though he is, the community gives him refuge — indeed, it would violate its character as much by exclusion as by coercion. He is given tasks appropriate to his abilities, though he cannot participate directly in the spiritual warfare which, in this story, comes to be the chief business of St. Anne’s. As one who does not believe and therefore does not pray, he lacks the protection he needs against supernatural Powers. He cannot — as the Apostle, or John Bunyan, might say — “put on the armor of God.” If McPhee resents this, he doesn’t say much about it; after all, he has found a place where he is respected and loved, and where his service is welcomed with gratitude. And what better refuge can any of us hope for? 

April 24, 2024

more on costs and choices

Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli”:

The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value – higher than, indeed wholly incommensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial goal, any economic or military or aesthetic consideration. Machiavelli lays it down that out of men who believe in such ideals, and practise them, no satisfactory human community, in his Roman sense, can in principle be constructed. It is not simply a question of the unattainability of an ideal because of human imperfection, original sin, or bad luck, or ignorance, or insufficiency of material means. It is not, in other words, the inability in practice on the part of ordinary human beings to rise to a sufficiently high level of Christian virtue (which may, indeed, be the inescapable lot of sinful men on earth) that makes it, for him, impracticable to establish, even to seek after, the good Christian State. It is the very opposite: Machiavelli is convinced that what are commonly thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever their intrinsic value, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes that it is natural for all normal men to want – the kind of community that, in his view, satisfies men’s permanent desires and interests. […]

It is important to realise that Machiavelli does not wish to deny that what Christians call good is, in fact, good, that what they call virtue and vice are in fact virtue and vice. Unlike Hobbes or Spinoza (or eighteenth-century philosophes or, for that matter, the first Stoics), who try to define (or redefine) moral notions in such a way as to fit in with the kind of community that, in their view, rational men must, if they are consistent, wish to build, Machiavelli does not fly in the face of common notions — the traditional, accepted moral vocabulary of mankind. He does not say or imply (as various radical philosophical reformers have done) that humility, kindness, unworldliness, faith in God, sanctity, Christian love, unwavering truthfulness, compassion are bad or unimportant attributes; or that cruelty, bad faith, power politics, sacrifice of innocent men to social needs, and so on are good ones.

But if history, and the insights of wise statesmen, especially in the ancient world, verified as they have been in practice (verità effettuale), are to guide us, it will be seen that it is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose. 

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both! 

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything. 

See my recent post on costs and the “plurality” tag at the bottom of this post. 

April 22, 2024

Gilead revisited

The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

– Marilynne Robinson, “Puritans and Prigs” (1996)

I’m re-reading Gilead now, in preparation for teaching it, and I am struck all over again by what an extraordinary book it is, what a gift it has been to so many readers — millions of them, maybe. (Promotional material for the book has long shouted A MILLION COPIES SOLD, but the count might be two million by now, and of course many thousands of people have read used and library copies.) Really, it’s some kind of miracle. The novels that have followed it are excellent novels indeed, but they aren’t miraculous. Gilead certainly is. 

But today, twenty years later, would Gilead even be published by a big trade house? As long as the author could say that she teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, probably. Would it be widely read and celebrated? Almost certainly not. The self-appointed cultural gatekeepers would denounce it as a project of white cis-het imperialism, and trepidatious reviewers would either ignore it or offer, at best, muted praise. And if it were a first novel, it might not get published at all — though perhaps an outfit like Belt Publishing would take it on.

As I read Gilead today it still feels like a great gift, but also an artifact of a lost era. 

April 22, 2024

costs

A brief follow-up to this post from last week: In our current climate of political assholery, no self-described “activist” can answer what I think of as an essential question: If you get what you want, what will be the costs? Every choice — every choice ever made by every human being — carries costs. Some of the costs are easily borne; some, though, are unmanageable, or even catastrophic. Especially if you’re a political activist, you have a responsibility to anticipate the costs of your preferred policy and develop a plan for dealing with them. But if you ask people who call themselves activists the question above, you’ll only get two responses: dumfounded blankness or sheer rage.

CDN media

April 19, 2024

adult children

I think there’s a strong causal relationship between (a) the overly structured lives of children today and (b) the silly political stunts of protestors and “activists.”

As has often been noted, American children today rarely play: they engage in planned, supervised activities completely dictated by adults. Those of us who were raised in less fearful times spent a lot of time, especially during school vacations, figuring out what to do: what games to play, what sorts of things to build, etc. To do all this, we had to learn strategies of negotiation and persuasion and give-and-take. I might agree to play the game Jerry wants to play today on the condition that we play the game I want to play tomorrow. You could of course refuse to negotiate, but then people would just stop playing with you. Over time, therefore, kids sorted these matters out: maybe one became the regular leader, maybe they took turns, maybe some kids opted out and spent more time by themselves. Some were happy about how things worked out, some less happy; there were occasionally hurt feelings and fights; some kids became the butt of jokes.

I was one of those last because I was always younger and smaller than the others. (Story of my childhood in one sentence.) That’s why I often decided to stay home and read or play with Lego. But eventually I would come back, and when I did I was, more or less, welcomed. We worked it out. It wasn’t painless, but it wasn’t The Lord of the Flies either. We came to an understanding; we negotiated our way to a functional little society of neighborhood children.

But in today’s anti-ludic world of “planned activities,” kids don’t learn those skills. In their tightly managed environments, they basically have two options: acquiescence and “acting out.” And thus when they become politically aware young adults and find themselves in situations they can’t in conscience acquiesce to, acting out is basically the only tool in their toolbox. So they bring a microphone and speaker to a dinner at someone’s house and demand that everyone listen to their speech on their pet issue. Or they blockade a bridge, thereby annoying people who probably agree with their political views and giving decision-makers good reason to condemn them. Or they dress up in American flags and storm the U. S. Capitol building. And they act out because they can’t think of anything else to do when political decisions don’t go their way. After all, they’ve been doing it all their lives.

When kids do this kind of thing, we’re not surprised; we say, hey, kids will be kids. When adults do it, we call them assholes. We raise our children in such a way – this is my thesis – that we almost guarantee that they’ll grow up to be assholes. Congratulations to us! We’ve created a world in which, pretty soon, the Politics of Assholery will be the only kind of politics there is.

P.S. This is why I’m interested in anarchism! As I have said several times, the difference between libertarianism and anarchism is simply this: the goal of libertarianism is to expand the realm of individual freedom, while the goal of anarchism is to expand the realm of collaboration and cooperation. We need more anarchic childhoods today to have a more mature and constructive politics tomorrow.

February 6, 2024

Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics | The Nation:

But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year — a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort. 

Why should Teachout have made that effort? He “eschewed” political controversy so he could write about the things he most cared about: the arts. Seems a reasonable decision to me, and one I wish more writers made. There aren’t enough writers who are conservative in Teachout’s mode. 

(Teachout was a terrific writer in so many ways, but I must pause to note that the one great outlier in his body of work was his absurdly unfair, tendentious, and just plain hostile biography of Duke Ellington. I’ve never understood his attitude towards the Duke. Ethan Iverson’s detailed critique of the biography, mentioned in the Nation essay, is very good, and is usefully supplemented by an equally detailed response by the Duke’s nephew.) 

December 11, 2023

art for humanity’s sake

Daniel Walden:

Criticism of this kind is a misuse of learning to muddle discussion for the sake of scoring points rather than to clarify it for a curious public. There is plenty of intelligent and reasonable criticism of Wilson’s work to be had from people who know the poems well — the Bryn Mawr Classical Review was positive but not uncritical, and I myself think her choices at Odyssey 15.365 were the wrong ones — and there is no need to give credence to people who consider their own desire for attention an adequate substitute for the knowledge and consideration that must attend real critical judgment.

This is well said. To almost everyone writing about art today I want to say: Dragging every scholar, every critic, every translator, every artist, every artwork before the bar of your political tribunal might, just conceivably, not be the only or even the best thing you can do when confronted by a work of art. 

I don’t think we’ve ever needed genuine works of art — imaginative creations that press us to see the world in larger or at least different ways than our standard everyday media-navigation categories allow — more than we do now. But our current resources are few, because of the ways the major art-related organizations have lost any discernible sense of purpose. They are merely reactive to social-media pressure. Examples: 

In light of these developments I’ve come to believe that the most important thing I can do here on this blog is to write about art as art — which is not to say that art lacks political purposes and implications. Often it is powerfully political. But no artwork worthy of our attention approaches politics the way that journalists and people on X do, as a matter of checking the right boxes to avoid exclusion from the Inner Ring. One thing good art always does is to remind us that our experience is dramatically larger than our quotidian political categories suggest. We are unfinalizable; we sprawl. The failure to recognize that is a terrible disease of the intellect. 

I am finished — not altogether, but largely, I think — with political and cultural disputation. I want to write about works of art that transcend the box-checking, that thwart easy dismissals, that shake us up. And if the current art scene doesn’t offer any of that, then I can always continue to break bread with the dead. 

December 6, 2023

brokenism

“Everything is Broken,” Alana Newhouse wrote in an essay that I see quoted all the time. But of course when you look into the essay and into other essays that quote it approvingly, you come to understand that by “everything” they don’t mean everything, and by “broken” they don’t mean broken. They mean something like “Our dominant political and cultural institutions don’t function nearly as well as they should.” But that doesn’t sound as interesting, does it? “Everything is broken” is not a defined claim; still less is it an argument. It’s a cry of frustration. 

November 30, 2023

conceptual Marxism

In most respects, the concerns of Marx & Engels are very different than those of today’s Left, but in certain other respects their work, especially in the Communist Manifesto, provide a template for almost all Leftist thought. There are three especially important ways in which they provide such a template.

One: M & E write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical. One class oppresses the other. There are no negotiations, no balance of powers, no possibility of collaboration or reconciliation. Moreover, “the history of class struggles” is the only history – it’s not the main event, it’s the one event. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists.

Two: Oppressors do nothing but oppress. It is their only form of action. Thus, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Oppressors do not – indeed cannot – love children. They can only exploit and oppress children, both theirs and the children of others. It is not possible for the oppressor class to have virtues.

Three: Communism, as Marx & Engels articulate it, is anti-humanistic. That is to say, they have no category of “the human.” As Edmund Wilson points out in To the Finland Station, their contemporaries the Communist League (also known as the League of the Just) adopted the motto “All Men Are Brothers.” This idea Marx & Engels strenuously repudiate. “Workers of the world, unite!” – and unite against your class enemies, with whom you cannot be reconciled, whom you must utterly destroy. A version of genocide – class being the marker of gens – is baked into the system.

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter. 

November 27, 2023

John Stuart Mill:

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. 

November 22, 2023

costs, continued

Once you face the real human costs of your preferred policies in peace or war, you may then

  1. Warmly embrace them;
  2. Accept them with a shrug;
  3. Work to mitigate them;
  4. Decide that they’re too high and look for alternative policies. 

A combination of the sunk costs fallacy and the fear of shame makes the fourth option very rare indeed. Would that it were more common. 

November 18, 2023

second thoughts, worse thoughts?

A week ago I explained that I had written and then decided not to publish a post on Israel and Gaza. At least one of my readers thought this was a good decision, and approved my restraint enough to buy me a dragon to reward me for my silence. Well, I may have to give that person a refund, because I’ve decided to post some thoughts after all. We’re a week further into this miserable situation, and there are some things that I think need to be said that I haven’t seen said. (Who knows, though? So much has been written that someone unknown to me may have made my argument better than I have.) In deference to my readers who really don’t want me to write about all this, I’ve not written a post here but have posted it otherwhere. Don’t click the disclosure triangle below if you prefer not to know more.

Look if you dare!

Here are my thoughts.

November 15, 2023

what everything costs

As long as resources are finite, any political or social policy helps some people at the expense of others. Any serious thinker will admit this and will be quite clear about who gets hurt. For instance, Marx & Engels in the Communist Manifesto say to the bourgeoisie, “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.” And, they explain, we’re doing it because (a) you have immiserated the proletariat and therefore deserve to have everything taken away from you, and (b) revolution against your class is a necessary step towards social utopia. Couldn’t be more straightforward! (That said, M & E are not always so straightforward, as I will explain in a later post.)

I speak of political thinkers here because I take it as axiomatic that no politician will ever acknowledge the costs of his or her preferred policies.

Especially in time of war, few political commentators take even the first step towards this vital honesty, which is to admit that someone will be hurt. Significantly fewer still take the next step, which is to acknowledge the extent of such pain — they will make their calculations based on the best-case scenario, or indeed something rather better than that.

Commentators who frankly and openly acknowledge the real likely costs of their preferred policies are to be prized above rubies. But there will never be many of them, because — again, especially in time of war — almost every policy has higher costs than its supporters want to admit, and if readers see the probable consequences, they may well decide that the game isn’t worth the candle. And indeed, partisans and advocates are always (usually unconsciously) preventing themselves from thinking through what will happen if they get their way, because if they look clear-sightedly at reality they might lose their nerve. This is why, George Orwell, in the essay in which he says, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,” also says that people employ vacuous clichés because “at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

I just finished teaching Middlemarch, that incomparable book, and there’s an immensely touching moment near the end when Dorothea is preparing to embrace a more financially constrained life, and in her ardent way talks of how she will change her habits. She ends by saying, almost sobbing, “And I will learn what everything costs.” Socrates, what is best for men? Maybe it’s to learn what everything costs.

November 14, 2023

Me, writing in 1996:

In Sartre’s political world there were only oppressors and oppressed: fascism stood for the former, communism for the latter. Likewise, in Algeria, since the native Algerians were by definition the oppressed, they were incapable of sin; conversely, the pieds noirs, the French colonists, were reprobate and irredeemable. Thus Sartre endorsed the decision of the Algerian FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) to kill any and all French men, women, and children in Algeria whenever possible, a position he was still taking in 1961 when he wrote a famous and lengthy introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, the major work by one of this century’s greatest theorists of terrorism, Franz Fanon.

Camus, on the other hand, was himself a pied noir; his family’s roots in Algeria went back a century and a half. Members of his family, including his mother, still lived in Algeria and were endangered daily by the FLN’s random shootings and bombings. Yet Camus was not, nor had he ever been, indifferent to the abuses the French had inflicted on the Arabs of Algeria. Indeed, in the 1930s, at the beginning of his career as a writer, Camus had striven ceaselessly to call attention to these abuses, but he was generally ignored — by the French Left no less than the Right.

So he was not pleased to have a difficult and morally complex political situation reduced to an opportunity for French intellectuals to strike noble poses: to those who would “point to the French in Algeria as scapegoats (‘Go ahead and die; that’s what we deserve!’),” Camus retorted, “it seems to me revolting to beat one’s mea culpa, as our judge-penitents do, on someone else’s breast.”

November 7, 2023

Josh Barro:

Land acknowledgements are widely derided as farces and, generally, I agree that they are. When Microsoft sets aside time to open its internal communications with a list of Coast Salish peoples that “since time immemorial” occupied the area that is now the company’s headquarters, this does not imply that they intend to return the land to the indigenous people who once lived on it, or even that they will do anything else substantive for their benefit. It’s just marketing, much as it is when REI does it at the start of a video urging its employees not to unionize. And yet, there has been quite a bit of surprise this month at the number of people who, when they talk about “decolonization” and the idea that Palestine should extend “from the river to the sea,” appear to literally mean that the seven million Jewish “settler-colonialists” who live there ought to be eliminated from the area, whether through death or expulsion.

Any argument that “decolonization” is a moral imperative requiring the removal of Jews from Israel applies equally to the non-indigenous population of the United States. Actually, it applies more clearly, given the ambiguity about who was really in the Holy Land first and the clear fact that Coast Salish people were in (what is now) Redmond, Washington before white people. Is it a good idea for non-indigenous Americans to adopt a rhetorical framework that implies we ought to give our land back and leave our home country on the basis of the idea that everyone knows we don’t really mean it? 

Of course it’s a good idea! It’s not like anyone thinks such people are serious about anything. As Barro says, it’s marketing. 

There’s a faction of the left — how large a faction I have no idea — obsessed with the idea that political sins must be paid for, though always exempting themselves from the responsibility of payment. I think of Albert Camus’s paraphrase of the attitude of the lefties of Metropolitan France to the Algerian pieds-noirs: “Go ahead and die; that’s what we deserve!” To all these people desperate to find someone else to bear their sins, I want to say: Have you ever heard of Jesus? 

October 25, 2023

adjusting expectations

One thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that lawyers who are good on social media and television aren’t necessarily good in the courtroom. In fact, the very traits that make a good media lawyer — bold assertiveness, hardass rhetoric, creativity with insults — not only don’t work in the courtroom, they are often forbidden in the courtroom. People watch a lawyer perform on TV and think “Wow, I wish I could get that guy to represent me” — well, be careful what you wish for. Hire a lawyer in haste, repent at leisure — in an orange jumpsuit. 

But there’s another side to this distinction, one that works in favor of defendants, not against them: People are convicted all the time in the court of social media opinion who would never be convicted in a courtroom. In jury trials, the defense attorney only has to get one holdout. Another way to think about that, in relation to a very famous defendant: around 35% of Americans strongly support Donald Trump, while a single juror is only 8% of a jury. If you’re Donald Trump’s defense attorney and the prosecutor has an iron-clad case against your client, you only need to have gotten one diehard Trump supporter — probably someone smart enough or devious enough to disguise his or her passion — onto the jury, and your guy walks. 

And that’s if the prosecution has an ironclad case. What if the case isn’t ironclad? What if there’s room for doubt? Then you don’t even need a Trump supporter: you just need one person to take seriously what the judge tells the jury about our legal system’s presumption of innocence. Moreover, as Ken White has explained, prosecutors have to prove, not just suggest, that Trump explicitly intended to overthrow a legal election, not that he ranted and raved, or that he had a reckless disregard for truth. Everyone, including his strongest supporters, knows that he has a reckless disregard for truth, but that’s not a crime. And, given his long history of refusing to allow any significant duscussions to be put in writing, he may well be able to make a strong case that he was only acting on advice of counsel. (A defendant who makes such a plea gives up attorney-client privilege, but if nothing is in writing, then that may not hurt him. We’d just end up with conflicting bald assertions. Former attorney says X, former client says not-X.) 

This is why prosecutors offer plea deals: Jury trials are a kind of judicial Russian roulette. They will not want to offer any plea deals to Donald Trump, but in the end I suspect that that’s what they’ll do. And I also suspect that Trump will refuse to accept the deal, preferring take his chances in court. 

So, to people who read the news and see all these co-conspirators copping pleas and think that justice is finally coming for Orange Man: maybe you should adjust your expectations? Like you, there’s nothing (aside from peace in the Middle East) that I’d more like to see than Donald Trump cleaning toilets in prison. But unlike you, I don’t believe it will happen. Based on my understanding of the actual law, not how things are discussed on social media, I figure that there’s less than a 15% chance of his ever being convicted of anything, and a near-zero chance that he’ll ever serve time. Alas. 

October 20, 2023

periodicity

This piece from the Dispatch (possibly paywalled) on how The New York Times misled its readers with an overly “Hamas-friendly” headline makes a valid point, I guess — but I think much of the problem here is baked-in to minute-by-minute journalism. You don’t have to be a hard-core opponent of Israel to get a headline like that wrong — in the heat of the moment even a slight lean towards the people living in Gaza might be enough to influence your headline. If you have to post something on your website, and post it right now, you’ll not be consistently judicious and fair-minded. 

[UPDATE: The Times has published an apology.] 

I didn’t know that the Times had perpetrated this headline because any political crisis strengthens me in the habits I have been trying to cultivate for some years now: to watch no TV news at all — that part’s easy, I haven’t seen TV news in the past thirty years, except when I’m in an airport — and to read news on a once-a-week rather than a several-times-a-day basis. My primary way to get political news, national and international, is to read the Economist when it shows up at my house, which it does on Saturday or Monday. (I don’t keep the Economist app on my phone.) I have eliminated political sites from my RSS feed, and only happened upon the Dispatch report when I was looking for something else at the site. 

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress. 

It’s important to remember this: businesses that rely on constant online or televisual engagement — social media platforms, TV news channels, news websites — make bank from our rage. They have every incentive, whether they are aware of it or not, to inflame our passions. (This is why pundits who are always wrong can keep their jobs: they don’t have to be right, they just have to be skilled at stimulating the collective amygdala.) As the intervals of production increase — from hourly to daily to weekly to monthly to annually — the incentives shift away from being merely provocative and towards being more informative. Rage-baiting never disappears altogether, but books aren’t well-suited to it: even the angriest book has to have passages of relative calm, which allows the reader to stop and think — a terrible consequence for the dedicated rage-baiter. 

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe, though I have in the past made the case for idiocy. But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated. Try giving yourself a break from it. Look at this stuff at wider intervals, and in between sessions, give yourself time to think and assess.

UPDATE 2023–10–23: One tiny result of the Israel/Gaza nightmare, for me, is that it has revealed to me those among the writers I follow via RSS who are prone to making uninformed, dimwitted political pronouncements. Those feeds I have deleted without hesitation. 

October 18, 2023

diseases of the intellect

Twenty years ago, I had an exceptionally intelligent student who was a passionate defender of and advocate for Saddam Hussein. She wanted me to denounce the American invasion of Iraq, which I was willing to do — though not in precisely the terms that she demanded, because she wanted me to do so on the ground that Saddam Hussein was a generous and beneficent ruler of his people. That is, her denunciation of America as the Bad Guy was inextricably connected with her belief that there simply had to be on the other side a Good Guy. The notion that the American invasion was wrong but also that Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule was indefensible — that pair of concepts she could not simultaneously entertain. Because there can’t be any stories with no Good Guys … can there? 

This student was not a bad person — she was, indeed, a highly compassionate person, and deeply committed to justice. She was not morally corrupt. But she was, I think, suffering from a disease of the intellect. 

What do I mean by that? Everyone’s habitus includes, as part of its basic equipment, a general conceptual frame, a mental model of the world that serves to organize our experience. Within this model we all have what Kenneth Burke called terministic screens, but also conceptual screens which allow us to employ key terms in some contexts while making them unavailable in others. We will not be forbidden to use a word like “compassion” in responding to our Friends, but it will not occur to us to use it when responding to our Enemies. (Paging Carl Schmitt.) 

My student’s conceptual screens made certain moral descriptions — for instance, saying that a particular politician or action is “cruel” or “tyrannical” — necessary when describing President Bush but unavailable when describing Saddam Hussein. But I seriously doubt that this distinction ever presented itself to her conscious mind. It worked in the background to determine which thoughts were allowed to rise to conscious awareness and therefore become a matter for debate. To return to a distinction that, drawing on Leszek Kołakowski, I have made before, the elements of our conceptual screens that can rise to consciousness belong to the “technological core” of human experience, while those that remain invisible (repressed, a Freudian would say) belong to the “mythical core.” 

I could see these patterns of screening in my student; I cannot see them in myself, even though I know that everything I have said applies to me just as completely as it applies to her, if not more so. 

Certain writers are highly concerned with these mental states, and the genre in which they tend to describe them is called the Menippean satire. (That link is to a post of mine on C. S. Lewis as a notable writer in this genre, though this has rarely been recognized.) In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye wrote, 

The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent…. The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect. [p. 309] 

Thus the title of my post. 

I think much of our current political discourse is generated and sustained by such screening, screening that an age of social media makes at once more necessary and more pathological. Also more universally “occupational,” because in some arena of our society — journalism and the academy especially — the deployment of the correct conceptual screens becomes one’s occupational duty, and any failure so to maintain can result in an ostracism that is both social and professional. And that’s how people, and not just fictional characters, become “mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.” 

None of this is hard to see in some general and abstract sense, but it’s hard to see clearly. What Lewis calls the “Inner Ring” is largely concerned to enforce the correct conceptual screens, and because those screens don’t rise to conscious awareness, much less open statement, the work of enforcement tends to be indirect and subtle, and perhaps for that very reason irresistible. It’s like being subject to gravity. 

In certain cases the stress of maintaining such conceptual screens grows to be too much for a person; the strain of cognitive dissonance becomes disabling. Crises in one’s conceptual screening, as Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, were of particular interest to Dostoevsky:

In the menippea there appears for the first time what might be called moral-psychological experimentation: a representation of the unusual, abnormal moral and psychic states of man — insanity of all sorts (the theme of the maniac), split personality, unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering on madness, suicides, and so forth. These phenomena do not function narrowly in the menippea as mere themes, but have a formal generic significance. Dreams, daydreams, insanity destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate: the possibilities of another person and another life are revealed in him, he loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself. [pp. 116-19]

This deserves at least a post of its own. But in general it’s surprising how powerful people’s conceptual screens are, how impervious to attack. But maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, since those screens are the primary tools that enable us to “mean only one thing” to ourselves; they allow us to coincide with ourselves in ways that soothe and satisfy. The functions of the conceptual screens are at once social and personal. 

All this helps to explain why the whole of our public discourse on Israel and Palestine is so fraught: the people participating in it are drawing upon some of their most fundamental conceptual screens, whether those screens involve words like “colonialism” or words like “pogrom.” But this of course also makes rational conversation and debate nearly impossible. The one thing that might help our fraying social fabric is an understanding that, when people are wrong about such matters — and that includes you and me —, the wrongness is typically not an indication of moral corruption but rather the product of a disease of the intellect.

And we all live in a social order whose leading institutions deliberately infect us with those diseases and work hard to create variants that are as infectious as possible. So my curse is straightforwardly upon them. 

I don’t want to pretend that I am above the fray here. I have Opinions about the war, pretty strong ones at that, and I have sat on this post for a week or so, hemming and hawing about whether I have an obligation to state my position, given the sheer human gravity of the situation. But while I’m not wholly ignorant, I don’t think that my Opinions are especially well-informed, and if I put them before my readers — well, I feel that that would be presumptuous. (Even though I live in an era in which most people find it disturbing or even perverse if you hold views without proclaiming them.) There are thousands of writers you could read to find stronger and better-informed arguments than any I could make.

But I do think I can recognize and diagnose diseases of the intellect when I see them. That’s maybe the only contribution I can make to this horrifying mess of a situation, and I’m counting on its being more useful if it isn’t accompanied by a statement of position.   

I hope this won’t be taken as a plague-on-both-your-houses argument, though I’m sure it will. (I have made such arguments about some things in the past, but I am not making one here.) When you write, as I do above, about the problem with a conceptual screen that requires one purely innocent party and one purely guilty party, you will surely be accused of “false equivalency” or “blaming the victim.” But you don’t have to say that a person, or a nation, or a people is utterly spotless in order to see them as truly victimized. Sometimes a person or a nation or a people is, to borrow King Lear’s phrase, “more sinned against than sinning” without being sinless. And I think that applies no matter what role you assign to which party in the current disaster. 

With all that said, here are some concluding thoughts: 

  1. A monolithic focus on assigning blame to one party while completely exonerating the other party is a sign of a conceptual screen working at high intensity. 
  2. Such a monolithic focus on blame-assignation is also incapable of ameliorating suffering or preventing it in the future. (Note the use of the italicized adjective in these two points: the proper assessment of blame is not a useless thing, but it’s never the only thing, and it is rarely the most important thing, for observers to do.) 
  3. If you are consumed with rage at anyone who does not assign blame as you do, that indicates two things: (a) you have a mistaken belief that disagreement with you is a sign of moral corruption, and (b) your conceptual screen is under great stress and is consequently overheating. 
  4. It is more important, even if it’s infinitely harder, for you to discover and comprehend your own conceptual screens that for you to see the screens at work in another’s mind. And it is important not just because it’s good for you to have self-knowledge, but also because our competing conceptual screens are regularly interfering with our ability to develop practices and policies that ameliorate current suffering and prevent future suffering. 
  5. A possible strategy: When you’re talking with someone who says “Party X is wholly at fault here,” simply waive the point. Say: “Fine. I won’t argue. So what do we do now?” Then you might begin to get somewhere — though you’re more likely to discover that your interlocutor’s ideas begin and end with the assigning of blame. 
August 29, 2023

bureaucratic sustainability

Matt Crawford:

The example of China’s explosive growth in the last thirty years showed that capitalism can “work” without the political liberalism that was once thought to be its necessary corollary. The West seems to be arriving at the same conclusion, embracing a form of capitalism that is more tightly tied to Party purposes. But there is a crucial difference in the direction given to the economy by the party-state in the two cases. In the West, the party-state is consistently anti-productive. For example, it promotes proportional representation over competence in labor markets (affirmative action). There are probably sound reasons for doing so, all things considered, but it comes at a cost that is rarely entered into the national ledger. Less defensibly, the party-state installs a layer of political cadres in every institution (the exploding DEI bureaucracy). The mandate of these cadres is to divert time and energy to struggle sessions that serve nobody but the cadres themselves. And the Party is consistently opposed to the most efficient energy technologies that could contribute to shared prosperity (nuclear energy, as well as domestic oil and gas), preferring to direct investment to visionary energy projects. The result has been a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to Party-aligned actors. The stylized facts and preferred narratives of the Party can be maintained as “expert consensus” only by the suppression of inquiry and speech about their underlying premises. The resulting dysfunction makes the present order unsustainable. 

This is an incisive essay by Matt, as always, and I agree with almost all of it — the exception being the last sentence quoted here. It seems to me that the current system is indeed sustainable, for quite some time, at least in many arenas.

For instance, in the American university system the vast expansion of DEI apparat simply follows the previous (and not yet complete) expansion of the mental-health apparat, all of which siphons resources away from the teaching of students. But that’s okay, because almost no one — least of all students and their parents — thinks that learning is the point of university. The university is for socialization, networking, and credentialing, and I expect to see a continuing expansion of the bureaucracies that promote these imperatives and a corresponding contraction of the number of teachers. And anyway, insofar as teaching and learning remain a burdensome necessity, if an annoying one, much of that work can be outsourced to ed-teach products and, now, to chatbots. 

Genuine teaching and genuine learning will always go on, but for the foreseeable future it will happen at the margins of our universities or outside the universities altogether. Meanwhile, the symbolic work of the party-state will grind on, because it must: 

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. 

August 2, 2023

Yuval Levin:

This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.

A brilliant essay.

July 27, 2023

abnegation

A brilliant, angry, nearly-despairing essay by Justin Smith-Ruiu, one that grows out of a reading of William Gaddis’s brilliant, angry, almost-completely-despairing novel JR:

Is there any more vivid expression of the reduction of lived reality to two-dimensional catchphrases than the one conveyed in a sentence beginning with, “Speaking as an X …”? Our entire social reality is built up out of catchphrases now, and the people who really ought to be criticizing this nightmarish condition have instead abnegated their duty as intellectuals and have taken on the task of enforcing the repetition of certain catchphrases and of muffling other ones. And there is really no one left to perform that last doomed heroic gesture of [Edward] Bast’s, and to force us to hear something truly beautiful through all the noise, incessant and insane, of the Discourse. […] 

In fact the sorry truth is that [mass entertainments] may well be the best thing on offer, simply because the forces that produced them have absolutely bulldozed the last surviving hopes for art as a sphere of autonomous creation. But if that’s the case, well, then at least we have an archive of how things used to be, of postmodern novels from the late twentieth century, for example, which we are still free, for now, to go back and consult at our leisure, in order to remind ourselves how irreducibly complicated, and ultimately insaisissable, artists and intellectuals once knew the world to be. 

The “gesture” he refers to in the first paragraph quoted is the great moment when Bast, a failed or anyway failing composer, tries to make JR, an 11-year-old idiot savant of finance, pause in his manic quest for cash to take just a few moments to listen to Bach’s haunting and glorious cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis. Smith-Ruiu is right to call Bast’s desperate buttonholing of JR a mere gesture, because it’s hopeless, impossible … but perhaps all the more beautiful for that. 

For a moment I thought that, in the sentence I’ve highlighted, Smith-Ruiu meant to use the word “abdicated,” but on reflection decided that “abnegated” is indeed the right word. 

July 16, 2023

David Samuels:

The reasons for the Nobel Committee’s snub [of Milan Kundera], which occurred at the height of the award’s geopolitical if not literary significance, are not hard to fathom. Most obviously, Kundera was never particularly interested in or engaged by politics. Instead, his work was a passionate defence of the right to pursue one’s own individual desires and lusts against bureaucratic maniacs of whatever stripe who wished to colonise individual experience on behalf of the state. To his critics on both the Right and the Left, Kundera’s stance was borderline immoral, not to mention hopelessly bourgeois. While the Left preferred Che and the Right preferred Solzhenitsyn, Kundera insisted on the human right to be left alone.

July 4, 2023

George Orwell, review of Mein Kampf (1940):

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal. 

UPDATE: My friend Adam Roberts thinks that this review may have inspired one of Churchill’s most famous speeches.

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