Yes, of course, as individuals and as distinct communities, we have our various religious and cultural mediations between time and eternity. All human culture, at least of the kind that emerges naturally over generations and epochs, is a structure of cyclic repetitions and returns, dramaturgical and narrative recapitulations of history and myth and the timeless origin of all things, interweaving and inflecting one another and drawing us out of the barren banality of mere sequential time. But I am talking not about individual Americans or discrete ethnic factions or elective affinities; rather, I mean America as a civic totality, and there the situation is either grave or ridiculous by turns. On the whole, religion inevitably fails in this country. We may have the greatest number of religious adherents, at least per capita, of any “developed” nation, but there is something about American culture that is relentlessly corrosive of genuinely spiritual values. Our indigenous forms of Christianity in particular are essentially shams and perversions, not only in the bizarre universe of white Evangelicalism, with its hospitality to blasphemous nationalism, diabolic militarism, and lunatic chiliasm, but also in many mainline Protestant denominations and increasingly in Catholic and Orthodox circles as well. America’s principal religion is America, and it tends to extinguish or subvert any rivals to its supremacy. One way or another, the myth of America insinuates itself into the sacred memories preserved in the faith and practices of Christian creeds and communities, and the sanguinary gods of patriotism manage to force their way into the company of Christ and the saints. Our civic pieties, moreover, are morasses of saccharine sentiment spiced with crass belligerence. Nationalism is, of course, a perennial temptation for Christians everywhere within the lands of Christendom. America is hardly unique in this regard. But here that temptation comes laden with all the ludicrous apocalypticism and messianism of America’s delusions regarding its own historical destiny. All is corrupted, all is idolatry. Only one institution stands out in public life that is more or less innocent of these evils but also capable of bearing the full weight of a people’s need for the sacred integration of personal, historical, mythic, and timeless memory: … baseball.
[…]
All right, perhaps I am, after all, indulging in hyperbole here. Love chafes at every restraint, and I truly love the game. But there is a certain serious moral point I am trying to make, all facetiousness aside. I do think that the displacement of baseball by the NFL at the center of American culture is indicative of a certain kind of spiritual sickness. In part, this is simply because it marks a movement away from the pastoral to the military in our shared imagination, and away from a lyrical celebration of grace and speed to a gladiatorial spectacle of physical prowess and brutality. It also, however, marks a turn away from dreams of eternity to ambitions with respect only to the terrestrial future. … How we dwell within time – whether as strangers and pilgrims seeking a better city or, instead, as partisans in a bloody war for the future – depends on what we choose to remember and how we cultivate that memory. To remember eternity and not merely the past, to remember God and not merely the call of destiny, is to be partially liberated from the brutality and idiocy of history. And, in its humble way, baseball really is a vehicle of reconciliation between simple recollection of the past and a transfiguring anamnesis of the eternal, experienced in the enchanted form of repeated cycles within repeated cycles, across an ever-widening expanse of years. The game really is a kind of civic liturgy, a kind of ritual repetition, that allows time to become transparent to the timeless. It cannot redeem souls, obviously, but even so it does have the power to aid in the redemption of the culture’s imagination and deepest longings. Or so I like to think. At the very least, it offers us a glimpse into paradise – into childhood’s innocence, into Eden, into what Nicholas of Cusa called the walled garden of the divine essence – all under the aspect of play; and that is a great blessing. Only in play, whether in sport or in art or in other “ahistorical” endeavors of that kind, can we really understand the true nature, the original peacefulness, and the final purpose of creation.
right-wing Obama-lambs
We should not underestimate the degree of difficulty involved in convincing the American right, a faction populated by millions of evangelical Christians, that Iran is a more trustworthy broker than Israel. But if the last 10 years have proved anything, it’s that right-wingers are willing to change their beliefs about all sorts of things to rationalize their allegiance to Donald Trump. J.D. Vance is betting that embracing Hillbilly Obama-ism toward a terrorist regime is one more belief that they’ll come around to. I wouldn’t bet against it.
Neither would I. Having seen A LOT of those changed “beliefs” myself over the years, it wouldn’t even be much of a bet. I know plenty of folks who deeply despise Obama (and not for the reasons I do) who spent 8 years whining about how soft the “community-organizer-in-chief” was on Russia, and who spent the previous 8 years praising the War on Terror. And every single one of them, on the same night, at the same time, hit their heads falling out of bed and woke up talking about NATO encroachment, neocons, and the military industrial complex.
They also still hate Obama. (It’s a both/and situation, you see.)
I remember when someone I’ve known my whole life, a lifelong Republican 20 years my senior, looked at me in one of those many various political conversations and said of the person we were discussing, “Yeah, but isn’t her husband a neocon?” I cannot overstate how utterly strange it was — to say nothing of the irony — to hear this person say that. And I think I learned more about political “logic” in that sentence than in any other I’ve ever heard. I promise you he did not come up with that sentence or arrive at the meaning of that term through the channels of logic and experience; he repeated it in the exact same way a parrot would. I know many such people whose lives I greatly, greatly admire. But when it comes to politics, the adults in the room are little more than willingly indoctrinated teenagers.
As I have said before, I have no problem criticizing NATO, neoconservatives, or the military industrial complex — when we’ve defined our terms and admitted our history. But I get real annoyed when I have to listening to lectures on the topics from lifelong, by-definition-neoconservative amnesiacs. Right or wrong, the truth can’t live here.
Here’s Jonah Goldberg the other day:
The real Trump never left. He does what he does for reasons having to do with his self-interest. That’s it. It’s not more complicated than that. If he can do the right thing easily and at low cost, he’ll do the right thing if he gets the credit for it. If it becomes hard, boring, costly, or embarrassing, he’ll give up or reverse course.
Ditto for the parrots, who will “change their mind” again, and again, with no aim toward learning anything or establishing any integrity.
Do you know what happens when you spend a decade praising or otherwise excusing flagella-driven bacteria? You become one.
re: “get big or get out”
If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But to [Joel] Salatin, it’s only natural — and beneficial — that regenerative farming would lead to a need for more farmers. “Duplication is the way nature increases stuff,” he explains. “If nature wants more humans, it doesn’t make a bigger human, it makes babies. If nature needs more tomatoes, it doesn’t make a monstrous tomato plant, it expects people to plant more tomatoes.” The analogy with small-time farmers versus massive industrial operations is obvious. The former is healthy, the latter is abnormal — farming like Frankenstein.
spooked by legislation
Everything Sargeant calls on the state to do is of a piece with the standard demands of her analogues on the left. Indeed, if what we are seeking is a society oriented around dependence and care, the left offers to provide even more fully for the beleaguered modern woman by deconstructing capitalism and replacing it with a need-based economy that socializes the “burdens of care.” Sargeant wants the state to limit the tyrannical demands of private employers on workers’ time and to subsidize the non-market care work of (mainly) women. This would “accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk-taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another” without imposing all the economic disadvantages that absence from the labor force now entails for women. But why not do women one better and replace the tyrannical private employers hamstrung by a benevolent state with a benevolent state employer that ensures everyone has the time and resources to exuberantly pour out their love on whomever and in whatever way they wish?
That is one of the dumbest paragraphs in what has to be the worst piece I have ever read from The New Atlantis. When Koganzin says “why not do women one better,” there is no conceivable way to understand what she could possibly mean by “one.” Nothing in the gap between Sargeant’s plea and the full blown erasure of private employment could ever be reduced to “one” anything — even for the sake of a poorly chosen idiom.
Yesterday On Monday, while I was trying to think of a satisfyingly sarcastic parody of Koganzin’s logic, I came home to find the summer issue of the magazine on the counter, which includes a little tit for tat between her and Sargeant.
Here’s Sargeant:
If Koganzon is looking for a defense against totalizing solutions, she will find it in my book’s praise of embracing the natural volatility of life. Fertility and family life cannot be made tame or trivial. As I write, “A woman’s fertility and biology generate friction in a world that demands smooth stability.” Women should not accept demands to flatten ourselves to better fit standardized solutions, whether from the state or society at large. I prefer the approach of disability activists, who push for adaptive designs, which can adjust to suit the user.
And here’s an example from Sargeant’s book:
Reform is disruptive as well — just as it is when a home is flooded with sewage after a storm and all the drywall must be ripped out and reset. But there’s no health that comes in living in denial amid the debris. Day by day, the most vulnerable bear the costs of living in a society that is delusional about dependence.
The alternative is actively choosing the disruption that allows [economic] growth to occur. As Sharon Rose Christner observes amid the nightly pilgrimage of the poor to the Italian policlinico, a “yes” to need is a step into the unknown. “We must know, when we call ourselves merciful, when we designate ourselves as people or institutions of mercy, when we display our neat, quick, beautiful merciful acts in the day: people will see them and come to us for mercies we have not yet shown. Mercies that, like the night, are longer, quieter, stranger.”
Clearing away the laws that limit care and beginning to treat dependence as ordinary and expected will involve costs and benefits we cannot yet anticipate. A person pinioned by chains will long for freedom without being able to fully imagine it. The aim is more than ending the hostility to and degradation of the vulnerable and those who love them. Our society should make a positive and generous shift. We need to go beyond neutrality to anticipate and accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another.
As Freddie deBoer has argued, you don’t need “rabid socialist sentiments or anti-capitalist assumptions. You can get here purely through a pragmatic consideration of the underlying reality.” The difference is that, unlike deBoer, Sargeant doesn’t seem to me the least bit interested in “socialism.” And unlike Koganzin, Sargeant seems perfectly capable of an aim toward social legislation that appreciates the human being for what it is without getting bogged down in — or, more accurately, spooked by — “socialism.”
A brief look at Koganzin’s resume makes me think she’s still someone I would take very seriously. But my goodness what a bad faith review she offers.
This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”
I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.
Sadly, the answer is that we are going to complain about it, write about it, and, yes, wait.
a foreign and alien land
Thinking of picking up Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism. Which means the random toddler-inspired bookshelf grab this morning is timely. Here’s Wendell Berry in The Need to Be Whole, describing a sympathy I have never moved past:
With us, so far, states of mind cannot be out-lawed. But we need to pay some attention to unprominent prejudices that are merely habits of ordinary life: prejudices, I mean, against farmers, country people, people of small towns, white southerners, white people, white men, men, Kentuckians, Kan-sans, manual workers, poor people, people who have not attended college. Some intellectuals are prejudiced against anybody of any religion, and this they see as honesty and courage.
Lately among leftish politicians, intellectuals, and journalists, another prejudice has been revealed: a half-hysterical fear and hatred of a country called Rural America, which they have not seen except distantly and swiftly from the interstate highways or from thousands of feet in the air. Seen thus “objectively,” Rural America is filled only with Trump voters, disbelievers in science, climate change deniers, racists, sexists, homophobes, backward “non-college” country people, manually working white people with dirty hands and blue collars. The further revelation is that when urban Americans speak of “our country” they are using a metaphor; they mean the government, the economy, the military, the transportation system, and the more spectacular parks and wilderness areas; they don’t mean the actual country from which they mine their food, clothing, shelter, fuels, and ores. Their own actual country is to them a foreign and an alien land.
Sunday poem
Richard Wilbur:
all the help we can get
One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. “Tragedy,” though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clichés. The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality. In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks, financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. No single vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts. And they cheat the rest of us, for readers need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us.
— Mark Noll, foreword to Roger Lindon’s
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, 1998
deconstructed by frogs
Driving home from a party, parsing
conversations, car windows down
to greet first real summer heat,
we pass through zones of peeper—not song, not chorus, though
scientists no doubt find pattern
in the high-pitched whatever it is.
Nor peep, which reminds you ofsilly chicks falling over each other
in an incubator. Every moist venue
between Pretty Marsh and Somesville,
every hundred yards bringsthis antic singing, somewhat
alien in tone, magical too,
like fireflies but auditory,
not synthesized but a perfectcacophony of the higher ranges,
tiny frogs doing their spring thing,
flinging music into dank milieu
of pond edge and marsh, inspiringa certain joy in our recap of the evening
as if every fault could be forgiven
when you consider the rest of the world
wild and wet and flipping out.
the human(oid) face of medicine
Yes, OpenEvidence, “the default operating system of medical knowledge in the United States” (their words, emphasis included), is a tech startup zipping through the first phase of enshittification, i.e. attracting users with a high-quality offering. …
I won’t cry for the billionaires involved. I will, however, mourn the opportunity cost of so many smart physicians and programmers on their medical and technical teams spending their time on point-one-percenter enrichment instead of truly building our generation’s PubMed. It would not even require compute! The true value of OE is the curated collection and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journals, treatment guidelines, and systematic reviews, supplements and all. Let me google all that — or better yet, look it up on Kagi — and I will not care at all for the LLM-generated veneer glued onto man-made knowledge. But good luck having NEJM, JAMA et al. open their vaults without the VC-backed carrot of (I suspect) God knows how many millions of dollars for access rights combined with the FOMO stick that Anthropic and OpenAI’s PR teams have been so diligently whittling.
… the mounds of AI slop added to OE search results aren’t just wasteful, they are dangerous. Back in the Triassic era when shmucks like yours truly were nursing their middle-finger calluses writing progress notes by hand you knew that every part of that note contained useful knowledge. With the electronic medical record mandate — thanks, Obama — much of it became an unreadable mix of computer-generated charts and copypasta; you had to look at the end of the note to find actual human thought, whether it is in the Assessment and Plan or the Attending Addendum section. Well, I can report from the front lines that much of the time even that one meager paragraph has become a copy/paste job carrying with it that distinct LLM waft.
I am not against using LLMs for progress notes — we have been using human scribes for decades to write up the facts of the doctor-patient encounter. But those are costly and your rural primary care physician certainly won’t have one, so why not delegate that work to AI? The assessment and plan, however, are where you infuse those facts with meaning and then act on them, which is the entire purpose of the physician’s job. Writing is thinking and millions of US medical professionals have decided to delegate the one job they have to AI while keeping all the moral and legal responsibility, reverse-centauring themselves willingly and with eyes wide open.