From “Affirmation”:

What word of courage may I bring to you,
What word of solace or of sustenance?
Our faiths have fallen from us and left us bare;
The dream, fantastic and compassionate,
That like a veil of love and glory hung
Between us and the bitterness of things,
Is lifted, and the universe has grown
Vaster, and much more lonely. Nor shall Thought—
Crying into the dark, and listening, listening—
Get any answer to its prayer: the night
Is soundless and the starry mouths are sealed.

Yet the deep heart still knows that all is well
And the truth greater than we dare to dream,
Greater and more exalted! Though the mind,
Fashioned for humbler uses, may not grasp
The meaning of the mystery; though Thought—
For all its longing, all its labor—gain
Hardly the comfort of a hope, there is
A self within us, wiser than the mind,
And deeper than all thought, that still endures
Firm at the helm through all the storms of chance
Forever, in unquenchable belief
And courage not to be abated: life,
In rage and fear, in love and agony,
Weaving her splendor from the dust of death,
Bears in her breast—though inarticulate—
A holier confidence; her running grass,
Her herds trampling the uplands, her fierce wills
In bush and brake, her ravening hosts that throng
The fields of ocean and the aisles of air—
Furious, furious, for continuance—
These answer, these bear witness, all is well;
These in indomitable zest affirm
The wonder and glory of a universe
In which all lusts, all hungers, all defeats,
All agonies, are woven to one Doom,
And every heart-beat is an act of faith
Praising the hidden purpose!

         Stern, indeed,
Are the realities; the wheel of heaven
Revolves, with all its motions, and the planet
Heaves forward blindly, bearing us along
Into the Void—we know not why nor where;
Embattled between two oblivions
We stand, for a brief moment, and lift up
Our faces to the light—but in our blood
The voices of the generations past
Strive, and the generations yet unborn
Are urgent in us that we play our part,
As actors in a stately tragedy,
To some triumphant close. Courage and faith,
These will best serve us here. And as for Him
Whom we have sought beyond the stars in vain,
Perhaps He may be nearer than we know.

—John Hall Wheelock

I’m currently reading Žiga Vodovnik’s A Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism. The title comes from a quote from Emma Goldmann in 1969:

Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future.… It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions.… Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

This is a strong part of what draws me to anarchism. There’s something largely apophatic about it. To borrow a phrase from early in the book, anarchism says every ‘no’ for the sake of many (undefined) yeses.

Part of that apophatic face makes it good at calling bullshit. And its more prominent voice can be pretty harshly so. Howard Zinn’s brief introduction to Vodovnik is a bitchin’ example. Here’s a sample (emphasis added):

The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievement—it is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to what is most needed by people,because the organizers and distributors of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises motivated only by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes, and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to “anarchy” (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful economic system in America?

I have generally been, and remain, fairly ambivalent about “capitalism.” There are good defenders and terrible ones. And there are good critics and there are terrible ones. Often, the defenders of capitalism are describing a system which we do not, in fact, have. (As Chesterton put it, Private Enterprise is as utopian a notion as Utopia itself.) And it is also true that the maladies of the western world, or even its greed alone, cannot be summed up, and are often lazily and partisanly avoided, by talking about something called capitalism.

At the same time, however, it can’t be wrong, and in fact must be a truth-telling requirement, to admit that the products of that system we call capitalism — products of which we both happily enjoy and needlessly consume — are, as far as the system goes, only ever accidentally related to love, care, and genuine human satisfaction while being derived from a process that is wildly and needlessly destructive of many things in the course of its “churn.”

A lot of us, and especially those of us who grew up on the Right, were more or less indoctrinated trained (sometimes for understandable reasons) to react as though this kind of criticism could only ever come from the Soviet Union. (And don’t get me started about the flip flop.) The result has not only been that so much needed criticism is swept under the political rug, but that it is swept under the mental rug, precluding the ability to think about, let alone provide, that needed criticism at all.

We need to be better critics. We don’t necessarily need to be anarchists (in the proper, radical egalitarian sense, not the lawless caricature), but we could certainly gain from hearing what they have to say.

Anarchism, however, so far as I have read it, knows it cannot follow its own critique, like Zinn’s above, with an alternative systematic vision — and it does not want to, because a systematic vision is precisely what anarchism opposes.

Of course it’s true that we need to know what we are for, not merely what we are against. But for a lot of life, it really is enough to know where and when simply to say no, even if the various and often conflicting yeses that we are looking for remain unclear or unknown.

Avoiding stupidity and avoiding what you know causes harm, and refusing, wherever possible, to participate in those things — this is not nothing. Because in the midst of all those nos always remains a human soul, a walking, talking imago Dei capable at any moment of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These do not need a system or a political party or an army.

And in a world filled to the brim with power, exploitation, and hypocrisy, a righteously placed ‘no’ might often be exactly what is needed. If we denounce the bad while praising the everyday, chaotic love and goodness we find wild in the world… well, this is probably the most normal way to be human. It’s not a utopian vision or a project looking for completion but an ideal sentiment, a banner to be held aloft wherever you are.

There are many more things to say, but that’s a good start on a topic I’ve wanted to broach.

Noah Millman:

And it’s not enough to violate the law. You need to violate the law in such a way that nobody feels they are protected from the authority’s arbitrary will, lest they think the sovereign is limited in some way that privileges them, or even that they are part of the truly sovereign group. In the end, Hobbesian logic must leave every individual subject to Leviathan as fearful of random violence as they were in the state of nature, because if they have anything to rely on other than the sovereign’s inherently changeable will, that anything could be understood as a limit on the sovereign’s authority, and an authority with limits is not a sovereign at all.

I can’t know for sure, obviously, but it does feel to me like that’s the precedent the Abrego García case is intended to set. That, to me, is the difference from the Bush-era renditions. Those resulted in all sorts of horrible human rights violations, and set terrible precedents (some of which are now being relied upon). But they were fundamentally driven by policy goals related to fighting the War on Terror; the damage to the constitution was a byproduct. I don’t think that’s the case here. The Abrego García case isn’t terribly important for the government’s stated goals related to immigration, but it is perfectly designed to force the court to either accede to blatant illegality or to risk flagrant and open defiance of its edicts. It’s a constitutional crisis either way—and that’s the point. We’re facing a constitutional crisis becausethe governmentwants a constitutional crisis, because their fundamental objective is the assertion of absolute presidential sovereignty.

Peter Hooton:

Vicarious representative action comes over time … to acquire a broader significance in Bonhoeffer’s theology. In Christ, humanity is always something shared and never solitary. Ontology and ethics are inseparable. Human beings live naturally in the ethical situation of encounter. They may, of course, seek to avoid this, by notionally reducing the ethical task to the selective application of certain fixed principles—and then “withdrawing from responsibility for the whole, to a purely private bourgeois existence, or even into the monastery”—but this simply betrays a false understanding of ethics, and a shallow appreciation of life. The isolationist approach, says Bonhoeffer, will always fail “due to the historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] of human existence.”

In Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, vicarious representative action is worldly, responsible action, freely undertaken by human beings out of love for other “real” human beings. And because all such action takes place necessarily within history, it will always entail risk, and a degree of moral ambiguity. Those who act responsibly “in their own freedom” must themselves weigh the merits of their actions and be responsible for their decisions. There are no formal, saving rules of the game to which they can appeal—for in this case “they would no longer be truly free”—just as there is no “ultimately dependable [human] knowledge of good and evil” in this God-reconciled, but still fallen, sicut deus world. The responsible actor must, therefore, surrender to God, at the very moment of execution, “[t]he deed that is done, after responsibly weighing all circumstances in light of God’s becoming human in Christ.”

Nicolas Carr:

Although the importance of Google’s search engine has declined in recent years, it remains the world’s most important epistemological tool — the first place many people go to get answers to their questions and fill gaps in their knowledge. Google is now giving precedence in its search results to a chatbot that it knows is unreliable — that it knows spreads lies. That strikes me as being deeply unethical — and a sad testament to how far Google has fallen from its founding ideals.

That statement hardly seems worth bothering with. Google’s original mission statement was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But as Shoshana Zuboff has well documented, Google fell from whatever goals — stated goals, a friend reminded me — over 20 years ago when they discovered that a search engine providing genuine knowledge to the world didn’t actual command any money or power. (Spoiler alert: they opted for the money and the power.)

But the combination Carr highlights should still shock us:

• The first, prioritized place the entire world goes to search is Google

+

• The first, prioritized answer Google provides for every search is knowingly likely to be, and very often is, bullshit.

But you’re not supposed to be paying attention enough to notice or care. At a conference once, Zuboff was asked by the then vice president of Google, “Shoshana, do you really want to get in the way of organizing and making accessible the world’s information?”

Of course, there is no need to get in the way of that stated goal because Google is not even interested in making the world’s information accessible to you — to say nothing about the spread of knowledge or wisdom. They do not care if even one person’s knowledge increases or decreases, if one’s knowledge becomes more accurate or less accurate. And to the degree that it could be said that they do “care,” knowledge, truthfulness, wisdom are their kryptonite.

“If we’re gonna fix this,” says Zuboff, “no matter how much we feel like we need this stuff, we’ve got to get to a place where we are willing to say no.”

A 2014 post from Scott Alexander (via Alan Jacobs):

At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career paths.

The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively.

Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.

But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.

[…]

Once you learn about utilitarianism and effective charity, you can become the holy madman, donating every cent you have beyond what is strictly necessary to survive and hold down a job to whatever the top rated charity is. 

Or you can become the worldly scholar, continuing to fritter away your money on things like “hot water” and “food other than gruel” but appreciating the effective-utilitarian perspective and trying to make a few particularly important concessions to it.

Or you can use it to steal other people’s cows. …

Government spending seems to be a particularly fertile case for this problem. I remember hearing some conservatives complain: sex education in public schools is an outrage, because my tax dollars are going to support something I believe is morally wrong.

This is, I guess, a demand for ethical rigor. That no one should ever be forced to pay for something they don’t like. Apply it consistently, and conservatives shouldn’t have to pay for sex ed, liberals shouldn’t have to pay for wars, and libertarians shouldn’t have to pay for anything, except maybe a $9.99 tax bill yearly to support the police and a minimal court system.

Applied consistently, you become the holy madman demanding either total anarchy or some kind of weird system of tax earmarks which would actually be pretty fun to think about. Or the worldly scholar with a strong appreciation for libertarian ideas who needs a really strong foundational justification for spending government money on things that a lot of people oppose.

Applied inconsistently, you’re just stealing cows again, coming up with a clever argument against the programs you don’t like while defending the ones you do.

For the “bang, bang” part, it’s worth reading to the end for the scene that Alexander sets up at the beginning, the climax of a “TV western… where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas.”

(“Ah yes, the Greek Western,” my friend replied this morning.)

Kevin Williamson:

The thing about this kind of work is that work works: Polio cases worldwide have been reduced by 99.9 percent since the Rotarians took on the disease. These are good people doing good things—no mystery, no radical scientific breakthrough, just consistent hard work by people who have nothing personally to gain by saving children from paralysis in Nigeria. 

I would like to emphasize the contrast here: On one hand, we have those Americans in the Rotary clubs and others like them, who do hard things competently and with humility, dedicating years of selfless effort toward getting it right on one big thing; on the other hand, we have a class of American gadflies who are endlessly self-aggrandizing, who live only for their own status and wealth, whose only credo is “What’s in it for me?” and who are, in spite of their posturing as hard-headed realists, the most absurd gang of chiseling incompetents ever to bring such an abbreviated attention span to bear on the nation’s problems, who wreck institutions and alliances and Ebola-control programs simply because they refuse to do their homework, and who have managed to destroy more than $7 trillion in wealth in only a few days while setting fire to a system of international economic and security cooperation that was built over the course of decades by better and more capable men than these misfits could ever hope to be. The Rotarians don’t talk about politics at their meetings, but there is a politically meaningful contrast to be seen there: between the best kind of Americans and the worst kind. 

Timothy Snyder:

It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.

The base at Pituffik (formerly Thule) only exists because Denmark permitted the US to build it at a sensitive time. It has served for decades as a central part of the US’s nuclear armoury and then as an early-warning system against Soviet and then Russian nuclear attack.

When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the Nato alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of Nato, and it is already the US’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend them in return.

Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked article 5, the mutual defence obligation of the Nato treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita, almost as many Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war as were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?

The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the Nato mission. But right now the US is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire Nato mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. But Vance opposes helping Ukraine, spreads Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and is best known for yelling at Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office. On the base, Vance blamed the killing in Ukraine on Joe Biden rather than on Vladimir Putin, which is grotesque. Vance claimed that there is now an energy ceasefire in place between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, Russia violated it immediately. Russia is now preparing a massive spring offensive against Ukraine; the response of Musk-Trump has been to ignore this larger reality completely while allowing Biden-era aid to Ukraine to come to an end. Denmark, meanwhile, has given four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as the US.

From Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters in The New Atlantis (I’m not sure about how much “Americans once understood,” but the either-ors listed are worth including):

Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness.

Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.

Rightly wary of the threats from big government, we have too often allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by lobbyists spinning this fairytale, and are now awakening to find ourselves in an inhumane dystopia in which technology has increasingly been turned, from conception to death, against the human person and against the family, in which we flourish. Today, with an unlikely coalition of pro-family conservatives and techno-optimists propelling a second Trump administration into the White House, we stand at a point of decision. Will we accelerate our regime of hacking — or begin to reckon with its costs?