Adrian Karatnycky:

Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.”

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration campsthat recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

Samuel Earle:

Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”

It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.

This reminds me of Nick Cotaggio’s description of along the same lines: “[Trump]’s like a mobster shaking down a business owner by saying, ‘Nice shop you have. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’” Or, more particular to our case, “It’s a nice country we have. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

Which also reminds me of this Monty Python skit.

Joseph E. Davis:

The fragmentation of the social world has also fostered a shift in the mode of moral reasoning. Confrontation with discrepant values, especially in competitive situations, where outcomes approximate a zero-sum formula, predisposes people to instrumental thinking of the means-end kind. What to do is a question of calculating the means that, on balance, will produce the most personally desired outcome and the ability to control future consequences. […]

But “pressure to do well” doesn’t capture what is truly involved here. Young people are expected to get good grades, aim for a good college, stand out, live up to their “full potential,” let go of “limiting” beliefs, and the like. Educational institutions, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these success-oriented values and their integral relation to the good in life. These are the standards young people have been told they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves. […]

[We need to] recognize that the conflict is not primarily between belief and behavior; it is in the realm of value itself. In our time of fragmentation and normative contingency, the priority of intrinsic goods like truthfulness cannot be taken for granted. Parents and teachers also stand on unstable ground and face ethical dilemmas that pit valued outcomes—for children, for themselves, for their institutions—against higher ideals. As students know full well, they are not the only ones prone to cheat.

Personal integrity needs social integrity. To build character, we must also work to shape a consistent environment where cheating does not possess a certain logic, where telling the truth can become a firm habit, where what it means to be a good, accomplished person does not involve tradeoffs that incentivize “any means necessary.” An environment where, to return to Guardini, our lives, individually and collectively, “must testify to the fact that truth is the basis of everything.”

James Davison Hunter:

A “safe” morality is not bad in itself, but this kind of safety has come at a cost. In the effort to establish a neutral and inclusive paradigm of formation, moral cosmologies are lifted out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts, detached from the social practices by which they are communally reinforced, and disconnected from the historical narratives that give them weight and significance. Emptied of these particu-larities, lived moralities lose the very qualities by which they could become coherent to people and binding upon them. The moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.

A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community imposes few if any moral demands or obligations (such as telling the truth or sharing some of one’s wealth with others), and therefore has few psychic consequences (whether remorse, guilt, or shame—or, conversely, pride in having done the right thing). What you end up with may be politically uncontroversial, but it will add little or nothing to the moral fortitude of the individual.

Marilynne Robinson:

The [biblical] narrative introduces the idea of divine purpose, relative to humankind, its intention to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations. The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention.

One can appreciate that this is an easily assailable position, akin to special pleading, though no less potentially true and significant for it. But also, when put in the context of things that we are regularly aware of throughout history and experience, it becomes less self-protective than a natural and understandable and relatable condition, only one extended to divine implication.

So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated. When Jesus says of his executioners “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. If the same were said of the mythic progenitors of human history, Adam and Eve, or of the splitters of the atom, the creators of antibiotics, and all the rest of us, the truth of these words would overwhelm our power to conceive.

Anna Kamiemska:

From the start I had a great desire to change the language, for example, to replace the word “grace” with something else. I was annoyed by the word “humility” and many other words, which I hadn’t used in a long while. It seemed to me that “faith” was also a matter for the dictionary. Of course, language is a system of metaphors and contains the whole experience of farming communities, migrant peoples, various social orders, monarchy, slavery, serfdom. We’ve grown used to many words, forgetting that they’re only metaphors, though in their own time they were actively metaphoric, new discoveries. I thought that ceaseless linguistic invention was required even in the realm of faith. Thinkers must be poets.

I’m slowly relinquishing my claims in linguistic matters, though, and I humbly return to faith and to humility, since these are word-vessels so saturated with content through ages of thought and use that to abandon them would be the act of a heedless parvenu.

Iron John: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly. This was a book that Meghan gave me for my birthday after we found out we were pregnant. How do you buy a parenting book for a father-to-be who would absolutely love to read “related material” but who has next to zero interest in books on “parenting.” According to one bookstore clerk in Bozeman, Iron John was one possible answer.

This is a weird book. There’s almost nothing in it that escapes strangeness — not only from the Grimm fairly tale that Bly exposits but also clearly from Bly himself — but it’s a strangeness that grows on you. And, though it took until half-way through the book to appreciate it, the mysteries of masculinity that Bly points to are clearly, evidentially, sorely needed today.

Our obligation—and I include in “our” all the women and men writing about gender—is to describe masculine in such as way that it does not exclude the masculine in women, and yet hits a resonant string in the man’s heart. No one says that there aren’t resonating strings in women’s hearts too—but in the man’s heart there is a low string that makes his whole chest tremble when the qualities of the masculine are spoken of in the right way.

Our obligation is to describe the feminine in a way that does not exclude the feminine in men but makes a large string resonate in the woman’s heart. Some strings in the man’s heart will resonate as well, but I suspect that in the woman’s heart there is a low string that makes her whole chest tremble when the qualities of the feminine are spoken of in the right way.

Call that vague and circular if you wish. But what it tells us — and what we do ourselves no favors by trying to get around — is that masculine and feminine are words that describe ancient, very real (even if still flexible) qualities of human existence for biological men and women that evade apprehension and verbal description, let alone being reduced to definition. (And are further still from arbitrary redefinition.) To say that we are starving for participation in that ancient reality, that we in fact starve ourselves of it, is an understatement.

We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. [But] a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.

A joyful participation in the tensions of an ancient world that we have learned far too little from.

The turning point in the book for me was chapter 4, “The Hunger for the King in a Time with No Father.” Bly has picked up the question “Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” and here he offers one possible answer: the loss of background. It’s become all too true that fathers today stand alone, without any resonating background of meaning or value or virtue. There is a lack of kings and heroes, no greatness from which fathers “pick up radiance from above.” “As political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun.”

Charles Taylor put it similarly when he said that “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.” He goes on:

But the sense of emptiness, or non-resonance, … can come in the feeling that the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, arrange them, in order to live has no meaning, beauty, depth, sense. There can be a kind of “nausée” before this meaningless world.

This loss occurs under the guise of freedom — liberty at best; autonomy at worst — and surely there has been much genuine freedom and gain. (There is no hindsight bias here. Neither Bly nor Taylor is arguing for a return to the past.) And yet, who can deny that something is missing and that we are the ones who lost it? We act as though we have finally gained our wanted freedom, but we sense that we have multiplied our chains. As William Shakespeare put it, “All this world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

Here’s Bly again:

During the Middle Ages, kings would take tours of their earthly realms. Hundreds of people waited in English village lanes, for example, to see the king go by. They probably felt a blessing coming from the Sacred King as the physical one passed silently by.

The problem is that when the political king disappears from the lanes, even for good reason, we find it difficult to “see” or feel the eternal King. I am not saying that the king-killing was an error, nor that we should resurrect the king and send him out along the lanes again, but we need to notice that our visual imagination becomes confused when we can no longer see the physical king. Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination. Each person has to repair that imagination on his or her own.

Is that not the definition of loneliness? I found it immensely helpful to think of how fathers can lose their heroic image, not simply because they lack it themselves but because there is no bolstering value around them, because the culture behind them has no way of resonating the heroic image. The result, as Bly points out, is a profound lack of trust between generations: sons not only don’t look up to their fathers, they don’t trust them.

(With this sort of tearing down of hierarchies, I often think of C.S. Lewis: “a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”)

In any case, though I didn’t think I would like the book when I first started it, I’ve grown a little fond of its quirkiness. There is much in it to appreciate.

At his most plain, Bly is plainly inspiring:

If one appreciates the harmony of the strings, sunlight on a leaf, the grace of the wind, the folds of a curtain, then one can enter the garden of love at unexpected moments.

At other times, he can be more humorous:

If the therapist doesn’t dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.

A more serious tone is sometimes called for, as when he criticizes the chronological snobbery of modern man, à la animal sacrifice:

In our industrial system, we ignore the Great Mother, and we ignore the Lord of the Animals also. We are some of the first people in history who have tried to live without honoring him and his depth, his woundedness, and his knowledge of appropriate sacrifice. As a result, our sacrifices have become unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive, and massive.

By the end of the book, Bly has given us an anthropologically wide and mythological rich “book about men.” Weird as it often was, and idiosyncratic as it may sound, I am inspired by this:

We need to build a body, not on the parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body, strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires. The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art, and receiving the second heart.

Top that off with just a little more humor:

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy.

Instead, the “Wild” that Bly has in mind, and that of the Grimm fairy story, is “the path that involves intensity, awareness of the wound, alertness to impulse, the possibility of a fall.” Equally important, the Wild Man is “part of a company or a community” in the head and the heart. “A whole community of beings is what is called a grown man.”

I can’t imagine there are many who would think this book has aged well. (It was published in 1990.) But I would say that, given the historical breadth and depth that he regards, it’s a safe bet that the things that Bly sees and writes about will age better than almost anything we “heedless parvenus” are doing today.

George Weigel:

In [Pope Francis’s] interview, there was evidently no papal call to Russia to cease its aggression, which has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and done a trillion dollars worth of damage. There was no papal demand that Catholics be allowed to worship freely in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, where Catholic rites are now banned. There was no papal insistence that Russia release the tens of thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children who are being “re-educated.” There was no papal condemnation of Russian war crimes in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and elsewhere. Nor did the pope denounce the Russian Orthodox Church’s relentless campaign of disinformation in support of Vladimir Putin’s war.

Though a “just defense” seems as moral and rational as anything, I’m generally ambivalent about “just war theory,” at least as most people have appeared to me to use and apply it. I go back to Stanley Hauerwas often for his quite honorable commitment to pacifism — specifically Christian pacifism, I should add. It’s a commitment I have never been able to fully make or justify. (95% pacifism works for me.) But I do believe that we are morally and rationally obligated to ask a scarily damning question which Hauerwas once presciently put to Richard John Neuhaus: “Do we have a population trained well enough in the habits of sacrifice to make just war possible?”

We should also ask first, Do we have leaders or experts of any kind who are even interested in something we might call “habits of sacrifice”?

“Realism,” as I see it, is never anything more than the implications of the answers to the questions we are willing to ask.

One of the first rules to any moral assessment of … anything, is: Never assume that you are asking the right question(s).

(Also worth noting the phrase “navigating the wilderness of mirrors that is the new world disorder.”)

Just putting my own pin in this pin from Kevin Williamson in 2016:

Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.