revolution and carpet slippers

Robert Nozick (somewhat ironically out of context—he’s differentiating between “design” and “filter” devices of construction —but I love the thought):

It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”

James C. Scott (emphasis added):

[T]he legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. …
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

Alan Jacobs:

I have said that Auden was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, but he gradually came to understand that there were some valuable things, necessary things, that Kierkegaard didn’t understand. Late in his life, Auden would write of Kierkegaard that, “like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament — in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice — but is deaf to its rich polyphony…. The Passion of Christ was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” Auden contends that, while Kierkegaard’s consciously held beliefs were scrupulously orthodox, he was “in his sensibility” a Manichee, who felt strongly the evil and degradation of matter, of our bodies. Indeed, Auden wrote in another essay, with pardonable exaggeration, “A planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.” And to have bodies of flesh and blood is to live in the world of nature’s necessity as well as in the world of history, of existential choice.
We are therefore, Auden came more and more to reflect, compound beings: subject always to natural laws and yet called upon to “assume responsibility for time” by making decisions — decisions whose inevitable consequences are yet another form of necessity. For Auden, this peculiar situation is above all comic: there is something intrinsically funny about our mixed identity, as we try to exercise Divine powers of decision and yet always find our bodies getting in the way. “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws.” And this sense of humor about one’s condition is for Auden absolutely necessary to spiritual health: he may have dreamed in his youth of redeeming the world through his poetic power, or being destroyed in the effort, but as an older man he found himself, as he often remarked, just a “martyr to corns,” which afflicted his feet and made him comfortable only in carpet slippers.

voilà, water isn’t wet

Ted Goia, on the pervasiveness of practitioners of sophistry, “a group that thrives on not calling things by their true names” (a group also known as Pretty Much Everybody Everywhere All the Time):

We need to go back to the ancient Greeks to come up with a working definition of sophistry. And as soon as I start describing it, you will nod your head in agreement. You will realize that sophistry reallymust be word of the year—because it’s even more popular than binge-watching and selfie sticks put together.
And it’s not surprising that sophists should be so active nowadays. The history of sophistry reveals that it is closely aligned with the rise of democracy, especially unruly and disordered democracy. Thus the Sophists exerted enormous influence in ancient Greece during the late fifth century BC, when they played decisive roles in many settings, especially legal proceedings and political gatherings.
Below is a definition of the sophist, drawn mostly from Plato and Aristotle—who feared the tremendous influence of these public figures.

The sophists, unlike philosophers, do not pursue the truth, but only master the art of persuasion.
In a very real sense, talking is their vocation, although you might guess otherwise from their rhetoric, which invariably promises more than any sophist will ever deliver.
Despite the shallowness of their thinking, sophists have far more influence than honest and serious thinkers, especially in matters of politics and policy. This is because the sophist’s rhetoric is always shaped by what their audience wants to hear.
For that same reason, sophists will avoid painful truths that run counter to popular demand. Addressing hard truths is bad for their business.
Sophists are frequently deceivers and sometimes outright charlatans, whose goal is to make people believe whatever they want—and thus, according to Plato and Aristotle, they are responsible for a large portion of the public holding false beliefs.
If necessary, a sophist can actually argue both sides of any issue—and thus has the skill to make the bad seem good, or evil look like justice.
They are often aligned with the rich and powerful, and have a knack for making money from their abilities.
In the words of one classicist, the end result is a powerful group of influencers (as we would call them today) who are “crudely self-serving” and “frivolously manipulative.”
Yet the sophists remain popular despite all these obvious warning signs. That’s no coincidence, because the sophists practice a vocation that deliberately aims at enriching and empowering the possessor of sophistical skills. […]

I remember someone advising me on social media to avoid engaging a certain person in dialogue. My friend told me: “Beware of [name omitted], because once he gets started he will insist that water isn’t wet.”
I laughed at that description. Can you really do that? Hey, once you learn a few sophistic rules, it’s easy.
Stop acting like a dimwit, Ted. You certainly know that at certain temperatures, water achieves a solidity in which all moisture is absent. So when you claim that water is wet, you’re the one who’s all wet. Conversely, at higher temperatures, the water enters a gaseous state. So if you persist in denying that, Ted, you’re full of gas yourself. Etc. etc. etc.
Voilá—water isn’t wet.
You’re nodding your heads again. So you’ve met people like that too?
Of course you have. They’re everywhere. They take showers in the morning and don’t even need to towel off, because their water isn’t wet.
In all fairness to my critics, I don’t think they were deliberately trying to mislead. The fact that they were practicing these rhetorical tricks—which we call sophistry—was simply due to the fact that this is how all disagreements are handled nowadays.
I fear it’s so pervasive that no sphere of society is unaffected. Even married couples probably practice sophistry in their household arguments.
And this is sad, because this style of discourse makes everyone angrier and angrier. No one likes criticism, but how much worse when the attacks aren’t even focused on reality, but rely on the most blatant manipulation of words?
At that juncture, genuine communication becomes impossible. I’m not even referring to finding agreement or reaching a compromise—which don’t even figure as goals anymore. Just having an honest dialogue has disappeared, because both parties prefer a sophistic monologue.

naming the finitude of it all

Jonathan Lear:

Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem. …
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It [is] as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.

peeing

ODE TO THE URGE

Urination is the major accomplishment of engineering
at least insofar as drainage is concerned.
Furthermore, to urinate is a pleasure.
What’s there to say? One takes a leak
saluting love and friends,
one spills himself long into the throat of the world
to remind himself we’re warm inside, and to stay tuned up.
All this is important
now that the world’s emitting disaster signals,
intoxicated hiccups.
Because it’s necessary, for pure love of life, to urinate
on the silver service,
on the seats of sports cars,
in swimming pools with underwater lights
worth easily 15 or 16 times more than their owners.
To urinate until our throats ache,
right down to the last drops of blood.
To urinate on those who see life as a waltz,
to scream at them, Long live the Cumbia, señores,
Everybody up to shake his ass,
until we shake off this mystery we are
and the fucked-up love of suffering it.
And long live the Jarabe Zapateado too,
because reality is in the back and to the right,
where you don’t go wearing a tux.
(Nobody’s yet gotten rid of TB by beating his chest.)
I’m pissing down from the manger of life:
I just want to be the greatest pisser in history,
Oh Mama, for the love of God, the greatest pisser in history.

Ricardo Castillo
(Translated from Spanish by Robert L. Jones)

a thousand little coercions

Marilynne Robinson, in 1998:

Trivial failures of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instance, and yet they change history and society. They also change culture.

To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed.

Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. There are little jokes about being born again. There are little lectures about religion as a cheap cure for existential anxiety. Now, I do feel fairly confident that I know what religion is. I have spent decades informing myself about it, an advantage I can claim over any of my would-be rescuers. I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant, as these same people know. I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it at all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements.

Nevertheless, I experience these little coercions. Am I the last one to get the news that this religion that has so profoundly influenced world civilization over centuries has been ceded to the clods and the obscurantists? Don’t I know that J. S. Bach and Martin Luther King have been entirely eclipsed by Jerry Falwell? The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? I suspect it demonstrates the existence of a human herding instinct. After all, “egregious” means at root “outside the flock.” There are always a great many people who are confident that they recognize deviation from group mores, and so they police the boundaries and round up the strays.

This is only one instance of a very pervasive phenomenon, a pressure toward concessions no one has a right to ask. These are concessions courage would refuse if it were once acknowledged that a minor and insidious fear is the prod that coaxes us toward conforming our lives, and even our thoughts, to norms that are effective markers of group identity precisely because they are shibboleths, a contemporary equivalent of using the correct fork. These signals of inclusion and exclusion, minor as they seem, have huge consequences historically because they are used to apportion the benefits and the burdens of collective life. The example of coercion I have offered, the standing invitation to sacrifice one’s metaphysics to one’s sense of comme il faut, has had the effect of marginalizing the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity. The consequences of handing over the whole of Christianity to one momentarily influential fringe is clearly borne out in the silencing of social criticism and the collapse of social reform, both traditionally championed by American mainline churches, as no one seems any longer to remember.

* * *

The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. So it is to a greater or lesser degree with the media in general. It is painful to watch decent and distinguished people struggle to function politically in this non-rational and valueless environment. …

Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.

weak victories

Ross Douthat:

The pro-life movement was an always-marginal and embattled cause, and in [1992] it did seem defeated.
Yet 30 years [after Roe], here we are. And for all the contingency involved, future scholars of mass movements will find in the pro-life cause a remarkable example of sustained activism against substantial odds, of grass-roots mobilization in defiance of elite consensus — of “democratic virtues,” to borrow from the political scientist Jon Shields, that would be much more widely recognized and studied if they had not been exercised in a cause opposed by progressives and the left.
But the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

I would at least add that, more significantly, the pro-life movement does not command any sort of durable moral or integrity-filled support, which is far more important than majority support.

But here’s David French:

The culture of political engagement centers around animosity. Church and family life is being transformed, congregation by congregation, household by household, by argument and division. The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.
Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat rightly cautioned that “the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies. […]
…the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?

It’s worth emphasizing that French has consistently sought and now celebrates, if cautiously, the undoing of Roe. But, as he points out, that doesn’t mean that the situation on the ground is worth celebrating. As French aptly summarizes that situation, “A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love.”

I think not only is the movement not ready, but, more pointedly, regardless of legal “victories,” that movement cannot offer, foster, or encourage what it does not possess.

good God the winter

Christian Wiman:

GOOD LORD THE LIGHT

Good morning misery,
goodbye belief,
good Lord the light
cutting across the lake
so long gone
to ice—

There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimsons
no one need see
to see.

Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.

ffs, Jason

Nick Cave, responding to a guy named Jason, who tactfully commented, “For fuck’s sake, enough of the God and Jesus bullshit!”:

As so to Jesus, dear Jason. Jesus roamed the land expressing what were, at the time, considered dangerous and heretical ideas. He was literally the embodiment of the terrifying idea. He was followed around by a nervous coterie of muttering scribes and Pharisees whose purpose was to catch him out – expose not just His dangerous ideas, but to lay bare and persecute his uniqueness. They, of course, succeeded and Christ was cancelled upon the Cross. These impossible, dangerous ideas – to love your enemy, to love the poor, to forgive others – were terrifying and unconscionable and forbidden in His day, but became, in time, the better ideas that underpin the society in which many of us are lucky enough go live today. It is worth remembering that. I think we must be careful around our assumptions of what ideas we think are right and what ideas we think are wrong, and what we do with those ideas, because it is the terrifying idea – the shocking, offending, unique idea – that may just save the world.

Frederick Buechner:

This then is the gospel that Jesus seems both to have proclaimed with his lips and lived with his life, not just preaching to the dispossessed of his day from a high pulpit, but coming down and acting it out by giving himself to them body and soul as if he actually enjoyed it—horrifying all Jericho by spending the night there not with the local rabbi, say, or some prominent Pharisee but with Zaccheus of all people, the crooked tax collector. When Simon the Pharisee laid into him for letting a streetwalker dry his feet with her hair, Jesus said, “I tell you her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.” It is no wonder that from the very start of his ministry the forces of Jewish morality and of Roman law were both out to get him because to him the only morality that mattered was the one that sprang from the forgiven heart like fruit from the well-watered tree, and the only law he acknowledged as ultimate was the law of love.

reaping and sowing, etc

Ross Douthat, with a crucial summary description:

Religious power wielded wisely and mildly and indirectly, with due respect to liberty and diversity and a focus first on the faith’s internal health and zeal, can sustain a religious ascendancy for many generations.
But religious power wielded too much against pluralism, with political ambition substituting for real faithfulness, will corrupt and enervate and bring about its own reward

caught off guard

The thing about consciences is, “we don’t get to choose when to lean on them.”

Jennifer Bryson:

If there is anything I learned during my time as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, it is the importance of a well-formed conscience. Too seldom do we use periods of ease to ready our souls for the great challenges each of us must face. I certainly didn’t, and I wish I had. […]
Recently I found a description of how conscience functions, one that reflects my experience at Guantanamo, in the book by Ida Friederike Görres, Die leibhaftige Kirche. Görres asks, “And do we imagine this ‘conscience’—piecemeal, unstable, difficult to control, subject to many subliminal forces—would be able to find the hidden will of God from within itself at any time, right away?” She continues, warning against any assumption that conscience is available on-tap, fully formed, just waiting for us to flip a switch and activate it. Instead:
“What practice and depth of prayer, what clarity of character, what sharpness of self-reflection, what strength to take on difficult things you assume if you expect that everyone, just when it matters, that is, in confusing situations, amid conflicting duties, caught off guard, during depression, under the pressure of a threat, discerns, recognizes, draws out, and asserts his own most secret tentative intimation of the good against all other impressions and impulses!” […]
Görres, writing in reference to a passage in Sigrid Undset’s novel Ida Elisabeth, describes conscience as “the fearful cry of a petite female teacher who is supposed to shout over a schoolyard full of mutinous boys.” When I read that image for the first time in the winter of 2021, my mind was immediately back at Guantanamo in the dumpy trailer that served as our office. Conscience itself is often just a small voice shouting to be heard over a cacophony of conflicting demands. And in my case, this was not only figuratively but also quite literally so. […]
What I learned from my time at Guantanamo is that the time to deliberate, seek advice, and reflect for long periods of time in prayer so that we have a conscience that can stand on solid footing “just when it matters” exists only ahead of time, when one can’t foresee the curveballs. Conscience is, after all, not a rabbit one can suddenly pull out of a magic hat. It is something that must be cultivated and developed over time so that it is available and ready to go when one of those “just when it matters” moments comes our way.