A friend reminded me that this Kenyan Prayer is much like a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Mysteries, Yes.”

I like her more explicit praise for the humility of those who laugh and bow their heads — a combination with impossible-to-overstate significance and value.

CS Lewis’s devil Screwtape has a lengthy letter to his nephew Wormwood where he speaks of a group of “thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings.” It is, perhaps above all, not scoffing per se but laughter that makes them so. Though not just any kind. Of the different causes of human laughter, flippancy is regarded as the most “useful” for a thriving “Lowerarchy.”

Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. … It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.

But when joy accompanies laughter, affection is close at hand. Screwtape warns his nephew that this can be true even in a joke. In sincere joking between affectionate people there is a “pretext” to the joke which shows that the joke itself is not the real cause. “What that real cause is,” says Screwtape, “we do not know.” Even as he describes its connection to joy — that “meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us” — he admits that he doesn’t have any idea of its source or its cause.

I’m no Lewis scholar and I don’t even recall if I’ve ever read The Screwtape Letters all the way through. But I think it’s safe to say that the cause, at least as far as we can trace it — and this self-evidently explains its opacity to Screwtape — is praise. Joy can produce the deepest, bust-a-gut laughter imaginable, but it is a joy and a laughter that fundamentally takes the world — and everything and everyone in it — not only seriously but reverently. And even then it knows that it can’t really lay hands on the source.

“The world looks back,” says Christian Wiman, “at the eye that is strong enough (fortified by memory, alert to goodness) and weak enough (made quiet, the ego not eradicated but refined) to see it.”

It starts and ends in reverence and anticipation. We must, as Mary Oliver says, look and laugh with astonishment and bow our heads.

Nick Catoggio:

For nearly 40 years, Joe Biden has been dedicated to fighting on behalf of his number one issue, which is Joe Biden being the president,” New Republic editor Osita Nwanevu tweeted after the Morning Joe segment. Anyone who talked themselves into believing Biden’s cause was nobler than that, as I did, is a fool and has now been made to feel like one.

One way or another, Joe Biden’s absurdly long political career will be over by January 20 of next year. He’s actively choosing to end it in the most humiliating, destructive, and villainous way possible.

The remarkable thing about the president’s heel turn from anti-Trump champion to prideful midwife of a Trump restoration is how Trumpy it’s been. Time and again over the last two weeks, he and his cronies have borrowed political tactics from his enemy’s playbook. […]

Whenever Trump’s fragile ego is confronted with a harsh reality that it can’t bear, he protects it by retreating into denial. The same is true of Biden lately. When Stephanopoulos asked him what his plan was to turn the campaign around, the president dodged by boasting about the size of his crowds—which sounds familiar. When he was confronted with the numerous polls showing him trailing, he scoffed and insisted that “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up.”

Fake news, in other words. […]

I will make this as painful for you as I can, the president is telling his Democratic critics. If they try to end his presidential campaign, he’ll nurse a sense of betrayal among his supporters that risks a disaster for the left at the polls.

As of today, like Trump, Biden rules his party’s establishment not by affection but by fear. And like Trump, he’s not above lowbrow demagoguery aimed at “elites” to bind his grassroots supporters tightly to him. […]

The idea of “blue MAGA” is true to the spirit of this political era, though. Once again, instead of reckoning honestly with their leader’s unfitness for office, a party’s rank-and-file is rationalizing his flaws, scapegoating allies who dare to point them out as “disloyal,” and demanding that everyone get back to storming the cockpit in order to prevent the plane from crashing. […]

…[H]ad the party known the full extent of his debilitation, a serious opponent presumably would have emerged in order to spare Democrats from having to gamble the fate of the constitutional order on Joe Biden’s collapsing cognitive health. But that opponent never came because the White House aggressively deceived Americans on that subject.

Biden defrauded his party, depriving primary voters of a fully informed decision, and now he’s touting the success of that fraud as a reason for why he should be allowed to get away with it.

There’s a third absurdity to this fiasco, though: By now it should be clear to all that Kamala Harris, more so than Biden himself, is the “real” nominee this fall.

…Joe Biden might live until January 2029, but it’s inconceivable that he’ll be able to do the job until then. If he’s reelected, Harris will assuredly assume the presidency at some point.

So why not make her the nominee now and give Americans an honest choice? Asking them to reelect Joe Biden to a four-year term he certainly won’t complete is asking for their complicity in a second fraud.

I resent that I’m being asked to participate in it. And if I resent it, imagine how swing voters who don’t view Trump as some sort of providential judgment on America feel.

Christine Emba:

In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design, as has been amply reported, relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.

Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click,” Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, told me. “There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”

The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the “excitement” of gambling everywhere.

Not “in a sense,” but actually and in every way training themselves ourselves with the exact same mental practices as those employed in and experienced through gambling addiction, and addiction of kind.

Joseph Weizenbaum:

I don’t quite know whether it is especially computer science or its subdiscipline Artificial Intelligence that has such an enormous affection for euphemism. We speak so spectacularly and without ourselves recognizing our own superficiality and immeasurable naivete with respect to these concepts. And, in the process of so speaking, we anesthetise our ability to evaluate the quality of our work and, what is more important, to identify and become conscious of its end use.

The student I mentioned above imagines his work to be about computer games for children, involving perhaps toy kittens, bears and balls. Its actual end use will likely mean that some day a young man, quite like the student himself and who has parents and possibly a girl friend, will be set afire by an exploding missile which was sent his way by a pilot’s associate system shaped by the student’s research. The psychological distance between the student’s conception of his work and its actual implications is astronomic. It is precisely this enormous distance which makes it possible not to know and not to ask if one is doing sensible work or contributing to the greater efficiency of murderous devices.

One can’t escape this state without asking, again and again: “What do I actually do? What is the final application and use of the products of my work?” and ultimately, “am I content or ashamed to have contributed to this use?”

This greatly recalls Günther Anders’ “Promethean discrepancy” — our inability, both practical and willful, “to imagine that which we have created or produced.”

We can indeed make the hydrogen bomb; but to envision for ourselves the consequences of that which we have made we are not adequate in the same manner, our capacity to feel hobbles along behind our capacity to do: we can indeed rain bombs on hundreds of thousands; to regret or weep for them we cannot.

Nick Catoggio:

The logic of hostage-taking has suffused Biden’s operation so entirely in the last 72 hours that the campaign is allegedly gaming out how to force the party to unify behind him. “They know Biden just needs to make it to the Democratic convention in Chicago, which opens eight weeks from today,” Axios wrote of the president’s advisers. “After that, unity is the only choice.”

[…]

Except it isn’t. It might be for strong Democratic partisans and for diehard anti-Trumpers like me but there aren’t enough of us to drag the old man over the finish line. Biden needs swing voters too. And each time another “senior moment” happens, and they will, he’ll lose more of them.

The president can’t win with three I’s hanging around his neck. But Jill Biden might get another Vogue cover or two before he leaves office if he stays on the ticket, which I guess is what’s really important.
Biden’s operatives let greed, pride, and fear of irrelevance steer them into a campaign they had every reason to know would implode, and by so doing they’re going to end up midwifing a fascist succession in the White House. They’re not villains of history to the degree that Republican voters, the supreme political villains of this era, are.

But they’re villains all the same. And realistically there’s not enough time left for them to do anything about it.

George Marsden (1980):

In recent years two perceptive colleagues, one in philosophy and one in the social sciences, have spoken to me of their dismay concerning the historian’s procedure. They have argued that one cannot prove anything about general phenomena by picking out a few examples. They are right, of course. No matter how long or impressive or varied the footnotes, to a degree it must require an act of faith on the part of the reader to believe that the instances selected capture the true spirit of the endless information which bears on any subject and which the historian has presumably surveyed. Like many fascinating things, however, most of history is too complex to be susceptible either to genuinely comprehensive treatment or to definitive scientific analysis. In the final analysis it can be understood and illuminated only by sympathetic insight.

Kevin Williamson:

Dr. Murthy writes: “As a father of a 6- and a 7-year-old who have already asked about social media, I worry about how my wife and I will know when to let them have accounts.” Let me help here: The answer to “when?” is: never. Social media is a sewer, smartphones are the portal to that sewer, and you shouldn’t let your children have them. You can take $1,000 to a good used-book store and get enough reading material to keep your children busy until they are adults. That and a couple of subscriptions will do it. If your children whine about it, tell them “No,” tell them “No” again as necessary, and remind yourself who is the parent and who is the child and then act accordingly.… Social media is designed to give people instant, unmediated access to the very worst that humanity has to offer. That is what it is there for. If somebody has something thoughtful, well-considered, and worthwhile to say, something that is of long-term value, then he can write a book like a civilized human being would, or at least a newspaper column.

Jürgen Moltmann:

In the contradiction between the word of promise and the experiential reality of suffering and death, faith takes its stand on hope and “hastens beyond this world,” said Calvin. He did not mean by this that Christian faith flees the world, but he did mean that it strains after the future. To believe does in fact mean to cross and transcend bounds, to be engaged in an exodus. Yet this happens in a way that does not suppress or skip the unpleasant realities. Death is real death, and decay is putrefying decay. Guilt remains guilt and suffering remains, even for the believer, a cry to which there is no ready-made answer. Faith does not overstep these realities into a heavenly utopia, does not dream itself into a reality of a different kind. It can overstep the bounds of life, with their closed wall of suffering, guilt, and death, only at the point where they have in actual fact been broken through. It is only in following the Christ who was raised from suffering, from a godforsaken death and from the grave that it gains an open prospect in which there is nothing more to oppress us, a view of the realm of freedom and of joy. Where the bounds that mark the end of all human hopes are broken through in the raising of the crucified one, there faith can and must expand into hope. There it becomes παρρησία and μακροθυμία. There its hope becomes a “passion for what is possible” (Kierkegaard), because it can be a passion for what has been made possible. There the extensio animi ad magna [the reaching out of the soul toward the great], as it was called in the Middle Ages, takes place in hope. Faith recognizes the dawning of this future of openness and freedom in the Christ event. The hope thereby kindled spans the horizons which then open over a closed existence. Faith binds man to Christ. Hope sets this faith open to the comprehensive future of Christ. Hope is therefore the “inseparable companion” of faith. “When this hope is taken away, however eloquently or elegantly we discourse concerning faith, we are convicted of having none….”

Those Greek words are parrésia (confident, open, genuine speech) and makrothumia (patience, forbearance, longsuffering).

Ashley C. Barnes:

Who cares, though, if novels have abdicated whatever secular authority they once might have exercised? One reason to worry is that we lose the necessary practices for using language to sharpen our awareness of the world outside ourselves. If love is equivalent to attentiveness, then an age of attention deficit disorder is also an age when love is disordered. L.M. Sacasas, reflecting on Murdoch’s claim that words shape human attention, suggests that greater care for language might redress our collective dimming of sight: “Were we to properly attend to the world, its particularities and distinctions would emerge, and we would be impelled to…learn to speak adequately if not exhaustively about what we have seen (or heard, or felt, or tasted, etc.).”²³ Attentiveness is the capacity most threatened by our screens and tablets. It may be the capacity that we’d most hope to regain in an afterlife blessedly free from Internet access. We need authors to show us, in writing, an appetite for the universe so strong that it might never end.

Would better words make us more loving here on earth? Is language-assisted attention what novels should train us for? Both Murdoch and James understood that fine-tuned awareness was no guarantee of virtue. As much as James has been taken up to frame an ethics of fiction, he never wavered from his early claim that a writer has no obligation to be uplifting, only to be interesting. His advice to aspiring novelists was to “be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Developing creative awareness means, for James, practicing an almost occult “power to guess the unseen from the seen.”²⁴ But this power is produced by the writer’s responsibly choosing the right words. This secular literary power is not a disclosure of what is there, nor a faithful self-portrait, but a generative as-if. It is because authorship is a powerful creative act that it entails responsibility.

If a secular age is one in which, as Charles Taylor has argued, organized religion is one option among many, then a religion of art must remain competitive against versions of Spiritualism.²⁵ That means that literary art must not only reflect or record the world we can know; it must generate worlds we cannot know by using language “whose highest bid is addressed to…the mind led captive by a charm and a spell,” as James said.²⁶ Keeping alive this secular faith in language’s generative power is one way to spur the production of great art. That faith holds fast to the claim that heaven is an object of desire, not a fact to be proved, and that anything like human immortality must be sustained by our own attentive, responsible use of language here on earth.