Martha Nussbaum:

For Neoptolemus, the awareness that he can choose to act justly is as painful as Philoctetes’ attack: he uses the same expression, papai, to signal the agony of recognized agency.

I believe that the “stark fictions” of the Greeks challenge their audience to just such difficult reflections on the causes of disaster: is the cause immutable necessity, or is it malice and folly? Where should we draw the line between the one and the other? We gain understanding from the subtle and frequently indeterminate way in which tragedies pose that question, and from the challenges they give us to confront the role of blameworthy agency even in something that seems as natural as breathing. We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change. (In 415 B.C.E., the year that Euripides’ Trojan Women was produced, the Athenians killed all the male citizens of the rebellious colony Melos and enslaved the women and children.)

In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.

In our contemporary world, in which it is a good assumption that most of the starvation and much of the other misery we witness is the result of culpable negligence by the powerful, metaphysical resignation would, again, be relatively good news, letting the powerful off the hook. But the truthful news of Greek tragedy, for us, as for the Athenians, is far worse than that: for the bad news is that we are as culpable as Zeus in the Trachiniai, and the Greek generals in The Trojan Women, and Odysseus in Philotetes, and many other gods and mortals at many times and places — unless and until we throw off our laziness and selfish ambition and obtuseness and ask ourselves how the harms we witness might have been prevented. As Philoctetes knew, pity means action: intervention on behalf of the suffering, even if it is difficult and repellent. If you leave out the action, you are an ignoble coward, perhaps also a hypocrite and a liar. If you help, you have done something fine.

Christina Bieber Lake:

When it comes to our experience of the arts, the twenty-first century is unprecedented—and weird. We have greater access to more works of art than ever before, and it is glorious. We can pull up almost any text or painting on our smartphones in seconds. We can discover new artists and listen to entire albums on Spotify. We can even watch complete performances of operas and plays on YouTube. But this greater access has come at a cost so ubiquitous and invisible that it is easy to forget we are paying it. The cost is that nearly every experience of art that we have is heavily mediated and controlled, shifting the source of our pleasure in the experience from gift recipient to consumer and critic. With that shift we become less able than ever to experience resonance—and the transformation that potentially comes through it.

William McGurn:

A few observers have made much of the Fox News voter analysis finding that Ms. Harris outperformed Mr. Trump with the “nones.” These are voters who reported no reli-gion, and they went for her, 69% to 29%.

But don’t let the “none” part kid you: The Democratic Party today holds orthodoxies, pieties and heresies every bit as dogmatic and unyielding as traditional religion. And it’s the reason so many Democrats are responding to the election results not by re-examining their own policy positions but by blaming the voters for their apostasy.

Dougald Hine:

Something is coming over the horizon: a humbling from which none of us will be spared, that will not be managed or controlled, but will leave us changed. Before it is over, I suspect, we will need to learn again what it means to take seriously things that are larger or smaller than were allowed to be real or significant, according to the scales and systems of modernity. We will need to dance again with the rhythms of cosmology, to be carried by the kind of stories and images in whose company — as the mythographer Martin Shaw would say — a universe becomes a cosmos. We will need to remember that we are not alone and never were, that we are part of a world of many worlds, only some of which are human. And we will need to rediscover that any world worth living for centres not on the vast systems we built to secure the future, but on those encounters that are proportioned to the kind of creatures we are, the places where we meet, the acts of friendship and the acts of hospitality in which we offer shelter and kindness to the stranger at the door. In this way, even now, there may be time to find our place within the vastly larger and older story of which we always were a part.

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

---

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.

Simone Weil

---

Let me start by saying that I am pissed off quite often. I appreciate a good amount of anger and I am not above some quality venting. I’m a practitioner of keep’n-it-real-ism, as well as stick-it-to-the-man-eosis. At times, to quote a line from American History X, “I believe in death, destruction, chaos, filth, and greeeed!” 

I am also sorry for all of these things, justified or not.

Everyone knows Walt Whitman’s line about contradicting ourselves: “Very well, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” But I prefer a lyric from Joe Pugg: “I have come here to say exactly what I mean — and I mean so many things.”

The funny thing about the short “venting” rant I linked to above is that I originally wrote it toward the end of a post where I was trying to do the exact opposite, to resist what every bone in my body wants to do — namely, to rail against “all the sons of bitches who still block up their ears and close their eyes” (to borrow a phrase from one of the greatest women of the 20th century.) I was trying to defend the role of sympathy. Naturally, I thought that flatly calling everyone stupid undermined the point, so I took it out. But it also didn’t feel right pretending I don’t feel it and didn’t write it — and of course, it felt good venting it. So I posted it by itself. 

I am a multitude, and I mean so many things. 

So yes, whenever Nick Catoggio says — specifically or in any of a thousand other ways — that Republican voters are “the supreme political villains of this era,” I say to myself, Preach on, brother.

But like any person with an interest in the character and destiny of souls — my own not least of all — I am also capable of being shamed for the excesses of my contempt. I need to hear a blessèd peacemaker once in a while. And my very safe bet is that, like it or not, you do too. 

Here’s Jonah Goldberg, writing in the pages of the same online magazine as Catoggio:

Assuming that all Americans share precisely your understanding of Trump—or any candidate—and voted for him anyway is just wrong, factually and, I would say, morally. Saying that a Latino mechanic in Philly who voted for Trump magically became a fascist the moment he filled the oval for someone you think is a fascist is magical thinking. And if you’re a Democrat who wants to win back that mechanic in 2028, calling him a fascist isn’t going to get you very far. Persuading him that he was wrong is a much more fruitful avenue.

Jonah Goldberg is not my favorite journalist. (Though he may be my favorite pundit podcaster.) But I’ve printed out that newsletter (in booklet/bulletin form) to pass around the house, and I’m tempted to print a hundred more and walk down the street passing them out like a Jehovah’s Witness. A piece like this gets pretty intense reactions, especially this close to the election-that-didn’t-go-well, because it doesn’t sufficiently meet our anger. (NB: If it means anything to you, by any measure that’s being used in American culture, Jesus didn’t sufficiently meet our anger either.) But I think that it’s exactly what people need to hear. 

Most thoughtful people I know or read have been right, I think, to point out that the excesses of contempt for the political left are a driving force, if not the main driving force, on the political right. So how do we answer it? Do we borrow the playbook and join them? Trump says that the real problem America faces is the radical left, the “enemy within.” Am I supposed to believe that barely closeted “enemy within” talk directed back at his supporters is better?

Nope. Join the inferno if you like. But I don’t want to — no matter how much I feel like I want to.

I admit, Goldberg’s suggestion that we choose patient persuasion over belittling dismissal may seem quaint, even simple-minded at this point. I honestly don’t know anybody, Left or Right, who I would call even a little bit persuadable — if by “persuadable” we mean “open to the Socratic method of dialogue.” That clearly doesn’t work, at least not where we think it does, no matter how much people want to believe in the shining brightness of their rationality. As I quoted from Norman Wirzba this week:

People find it hard to live honestly with themselves. They prefer to repeat to themselves and to others stories about the past that cast them in a good or at least acceptable light. The impulse reverberates in the cultural liturgies that perpetuate myths of a community’s or nation’s innocent and glorious past. But the impulse also resounds in individuals, as Jacqueline Rose observes: “Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.”

Our … human … minds are endlessly engaged in this self-defensive activity. And breaking free of it, to whatever degree we can, involves enough luck and miracle to make humility not just a good disposition, but a moral obligation. 

Fifteen years ago if you had told Republicans that they were just a short time away from overwhelmingly supporting one of the lowest con men on the planet for president and offering pathetic excuses for Putin as the defender of conservative values, they would have called you crazy. But it’s also true that if, at the same time, you told Democrats that they would be vying for the expansion of NATO and the miltibillion-dollar sale of weapons to Ukraine, they also would have called you crazy. I chose to vote for the Democratic ticket this time around, and I strongly believe I was right to do so. But in a room full of broken clocks, I’m hesitant to claim too much moral superiority for choosing the one that happens to be telling the right time at that moment. 

This isn’t about leveling any fields or bothsidesing the political moment. I’m not even trying to say that we all need to “see the good” in everyone. In fact, what I really want to do is take Goldberg’s point and put a decisively negative spin on it. As I’ve said before, “It’s nice to think about the world being divided into smart people and stupid people. But the truth is that anybody — anybody — no matter how intelligent, can be as dumb as a rock.”

My main self-assessing takeaway from the Braver Angels workshop last month, as you can probably see, is that my “centrism” — ideally an opportunity to hear people on both sides — is often experienced as little more than equal-opportunity disdain: You know what I’m good at? Mocking everyone in any political direction who I think is a moron or a hypocrite. It’s fun, and more people should join me in the middle. But does that make me better than them?

Of course it doesn’t. Being in the middle is meaningless, unless you can define it as being among. 

There are no rose-colored glasses within a hundred miles of this post. I’m not closing my eyes or blocking up my ears. When David Frum says of the election, and the electorate, “Don’t underestimate how bad this is,” I’m taking note and you should too. But what I’m also saying is that every single one of us needs to pull back the rage-blinders and see the desperate need for mercy in every corner of this country, no matter how anyone votes or why we assume they voted the way they did. 

“Voting is not a window into the soul,” Goldberg emphasizes. And I believe he is correct. More importantly, I believe that to move on from this election we must assume that this correct, we must live and talk as if it is. The alternative is only anger, self-righteousness, and further separation. 

People may not be persuadable by reason, and we don’t need to assume that they are. But we do have to live as if people are persuadable by love, mercy, and the life you are willing to live with them. This is, after all, the most meaningful form the truth ever takes. 

Love, mercy, and a life lived well right along side them. If you are not physically using these to persuade others, then you are not really trying to persuade anyone. 

There is a story that Stanley Hauerwas has recounted about returning to Texas from college and receiving a restored deer hunting rifle from his dad. The young Hauerwas looked the gun over, handed it back and said “That’s beautiful work, Daddy, but you know someday somebody is going to have to take these goddamn things away from you people.” 

Hauerwas doesn’t have only one point to make with that story, but he has a main one and it might not be what you think. Hauerwas has spent a lifetime denouncing violence, especially the violence of Americans. He hates guns and believes he spoke truthfully to his father. But he also knows that he was at that time becoming something of an “east coast shithead,” returning to Texas from a world at Yale that his father probably couldn’t even imagine. Moreover, he knows that he failed to see and appreciate his father’s world, and he failed to communicate the love his father put into the gift. He knows that he should have told the truth as he understood it in a way that gestured an appreciation for the love that was given as his father understood it. “But I didn’t really know how to do that,” he says. 

I will continue to rant, to mourn the loss of the world I thought existed but that was always wholly mistaken. And when I drive up to central Maine on Monday for 5 am coffee with my Dad and my uncles, the loggers and the farmers — all but one of whom have supported Trump — I probably won’t resist the urge to call someone stupid. But I will do it to their faces while laughing at the jokes and listening to their stories, their grievances, and their personal insights. 

Do you have a better idea?

These are my multitudes, the many, many things I mean. And the only way to work them out is face to face. “We are not enemies,” as the ending of American History X so wrenchingly puts it. If Lincoln could say it, and mean it, then so can I. So can you.

Mary Harrington:

But the greatest uncertainty … is what this campaign’s influx of Big Tech money will mean, in terms of how the administration shifts. Everyone can see that this is Elon Musk’s win as much as Trump’s: what does that mean for the conservative establishment?

Elon is, after all, not your regular social conservative. He wants to colonise Mars. He has something like 12 children, with multiple women, via a mix of surrogacy, IVF and the old-fashioned method. He wants to implant chips in people’s brains. He envisions using technology to become something more than human. And he now owns the world’s town square, and the incoming President of the United States owes him a favour.

At least some of these things will (to put it mildly) place a strain on fundamental social conservative precepts about the family and the human person. 

At the risk of overstatement (which is how I should start every sentence for the next few weeks), I highly doubt that conservatives those on the right with newfound admiration for Musk — the other businessman who will fix everything — have given this sort of incongruity any thought at all.

Martin Bucer, in Instructions in Christian Love (via Jake Meader):

God established these two general orders, the spiritual ministry and the secular authority, in order to further the public good. They could perceptibly bring it about if they attended to their commission, but they could also irreparably injure it if they sought on their own interest. Below the aforesaid two orders are the most Christian orders or professions. They are agriculture, cattle-raising, and the necessary occupations therewith connected. These professions are the most profitable to the neighbors and cause them the least trouble. Every man should encourage his child to enter these professions because children should be encouraged to enter the best profession, and the best profession is the one which brings most profit to neighbors.

But nowadays most men want their children to become clergymen. In the present circumstances, this means to lead a child into the most dangerous and godless position. The rest of men wish their children to become businessmen always with the idea that they would become rich without working, against the commandment of God, and with the idea that they will seek their own profit while exploiting and ruining others, against the divine order and the whole Christian spirit. Encouraging youth to enter that road is leaving them to eternal death, while the path to eternal life is only through keeping the divine commandments. And all commandments will be fulfilled in the single injunction of brotherly love, which always seeks the interest of the neighbor and not its own.

Norman Wirzba:

Tutu, Krog, Gobodo-Madikizela, and others working with the TRC understood that the work of forgiveness is ongoing. It doesn’t end when a perpetrator confesses and offers an apology, or when a victim says, “I forgive you.” A genuine apology “must communicate, convey, and perform as a ‘speech act’ that expresses a desire to right the relationship damaged through the actions of the apologizer… It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings.” Or as Stefaans Coetzee (a member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement convicted of killing four people and injuring sixty-seven others in a bomb attack) came to realize, saying sorry isn’t enough. “There must be doing of sorry.”

…If people fail to investigate the past, they will fail to notice how past structures and patterns of behaving are still influencing and operating in the present and thus not have a clear understanding of what needs to change. But dealing with all the past is not easily done, especially when recalling it brings people face to face with histories of violence and neglect. As numerous scholars have noted, people find it hard to live honestly with themselves. They prefer to repeat to themselves and to others stories about the past that cast them in a good or at least acceptable light. The impulse reverberates in the cultural liturgies that perpetuate myths of a community’s or nation’s innocent and glorious past. But the impulse also resounds in individuals, as Jacqueline Rose observes: “Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.” This strategy is dangerous because it depends on people denying or distorting their histories. In this denial and distortion they (a) lie about the pain and suffering circulating through the world and (b) refuse to acknowledge their role in perpetuating, whether intentionally or not, that pain and suffering. When people repudiate their role in the creation and perpetuation of brutality in the world, they grant violence “its license to roam, since it then becomes essential that someone else bear the responsibility, shoulder the burden, pay the price.”

Kevin Williamson:

In our time of imbecilic populism, there is an imperative for politicians and activists to pretend that We the People can never be wrong. And that ends up being a problem when We the People—who are, in the main, fools and worse—aren’t with you on an issue. And so you have to invent some new categories—the Real Americans™ who are always on your side—or else pretend that We the People have been misled, that (the Republican version) they are victims of media bias or (the Democratic version) that they have been bamboozled by people who exploit their quaint religious beliefs in order to blind them to their own interests. We the People and the world’s political forces are like the czar and his ministers: The former must always be good and wise and holy, while the latter is responsible for anything that goes wrong. The czar has absolute power and is responsible for absolutely nothing. All of this nonsense is easier to keep straight in your head if you believe that the other side is simply evil.