I hasten to add that progressives had not lost sight of enduring injustice. It was plain to see in the patterns of policing and criminal justice, housing, banking, and employment. There was still much work to do. But the rhetorical and ideological center of gravity had shifted. The progressive claim to moral legitimacy was less the demand for economic equality or even economic fairness, and more the demand for racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual inclusion and the recognition it implied. Built on the gains generated by three generations of multicultural education, “diversity” defined by the demand for recognition and approval became the byword. The advantage of this ideological shift was that it created the artifice of concern for the marginalized while retaining the newly found economic, educa-tional, and political advantages of elites. By shifting its focus from equality to diversity, progressives could now downplay, ignore, or otherwise dismiss the interests of struggling working-class people and their families—a demographic that would eventually include millions and millions of Trump voters.
The irony runs deeper still. Not only did the new progressives abandon the critique of capitalism and their defense of the interests of the working class and poor, they came to embrace bourgeois economic and cultural values. The injuries that had become more central to identity politics would now be evaluated against upper-middle-class norms of status, material comfort, mental health, and social in-dependence, which meant that the measure of inclusion was now the income, lifestyles, and social respectability of the middle and upper-middle class.”
In these ways, progressives came to redefine America’s meritocracy. Unlike the WASP meritocracy, the new meritocracy would be, in principle, multicultural (though the progressive activist demographic is overwhelmingly white). But like the old meritocracy, wealth and privilege would be concentrated in ways that would be self-protective of its status, political power, and economic interest through such strategies as exclusionary zoning, legacy college admissions, favorable tax law, and barriers to economic and educational opportunities. And very much like the old meritocracy, perhaps even more so, upward mobility into the echelons of the elite would be accompanied by a corresponding elitism, the smug sense of being on the winning side of history.
beyond a river in Egypt
Being a cynic, I find myself wondering if Democrats are pestering Biden to talk more about Trump’s conviction not so much because they expect it to work but because they’re preparing to blame him when it doesn’t. […]
I think the debate over how much to talk about the Trump verdict is largely a product of liberals staring into the abyss and worrying that nothing is going to prevent them from losing to the most grossly unfit president in American history. They’re trying to process that reality and asking themselves, “Could it be that Americans still don’t realize who Trump is? Have we not yet effectively made the case against him, maybe?”
It can’t be that the country wants him. There must be a communication gap somewhere which, once bridged, will assure his defeat. We have a messaging problem.
I know that feeling. My own astonishment and horror at Trump’s enduring viability has inspired something like 500 columns and will inspire 100 more before Election Day. “Do readers not see what a catastrophe he’d be in a second term? If I tell them another 500 times, maybe it’ll sink in.”
It’s a form of denial. The same denial is behind Democrats demanding more attacks on Trump from their nominee over the Manhattan verdict and, inevitably, faulting him for having done too little when he comes up short in November. If only Joe Biden had called Trump a “convicted felon” 800 more times, it would have sunk in.
Hardly anyone who votes for Trump this fall will harbor illusions about his sleaziness, and insofar as anyone does, the bunker of denial they’ve built for themselves is so thick that an atomic bomb blast couldn’t penetrate it. Some Americans proudly relish his sleaziness, others relish it quietly as a guilty pleasure, and others are willing to put up with it as a price worth paying in exchange for him somehow bringing grocery prices down. They’ll all know that he’s a convicted felon by November, though, whether or not Biden personally informs them. And for all but a few of them, it won’t matter.
retreating to awe, delight, and respect
A particular instance of a type of being is distinguished not by its unique character—not by what it is at all—but by the fact that it is, its existence. …
Put another way, one might say that existence is part of the very being of an individual. In searching for a way of thinking that can respect the individuality of people, we are thus looking for a mode of thought that can take existence seriously. Love may indeed do this, but only insofar as it cares for the individual because she is Mary, not because of her Mary-like traits and certainly not just because she is human. By contrast, we need an attitude that cares about individual instances of human being or essence, simply because they are such, as we all do when we recognize the dignity of strangers unnamed and unknown to us. We must somehow find a way to respond to the form or type or idea that we call “human being” and yet to care about particular examples of this type.
To accomplish our task requires a degree of metaphysical courage. In particular, it requires that we give up our comfortable categorization of the lived world into the two boxes called “fact” and “value.” Is our reticence about killing due to some empirical fact of life? If not, conventional thought takes it to be founded on a “value judgment” about life. For such a mindset, our proof that new or continued life cannot be valued sufficiently to prevent killing could be evidence only that our reluctance to kill is irrational and arbitrary. Yet we need not think this way. As Karl Mannheim remarked long ago:
[T]he fact that we speak about social and cultural life in terms of values is itself an attitude peculiar to our time. The notion of “value” arose and was diffused from economics. . . . This idea of value was later transferred to the ethical, aesthetic, and religious spheres, which brought about a distortion in the description of the real behavior of the human being in these spheres.
Against such economistic narrowness, this essay affirms that value language may become a trap and prison of the mind and that the moral world has a multitude of curious creatures in it, many of whom are at least as fascinating as those two beasts of burden called “fact” and “value.” Pierre Manent would agree:
It might be argued that this heterogeneity is adequately taken care of through the public acknowledgment of the legitimate plurality of human values. Nothing could be more mistaken. . . . To interpret the world of experience as constituted of admittedly diverse “values” is to reduce it to this common genus and thus to lose sight of that heterogeneity we [wish] to preserve. If God is a value, the public space a value, the moral law within my heart a value, the starry sky above my head a value, . . . what is not? . . . Value language, with the inner dispositions it encourages, makes for dreary uniformity.
Valuing seeks to dominate the material world. The entire stuff of being becomes a mere resource to be manipulated and shaped into what we value. … No wonder, then, that valuing feels bold and arrogant in contrast to the other attitudes we have examined; a world we only value is a world entirely subject to our evaluation and control.
Respect, by contrast, responds. It eschews control. It steps back before the type of thing cared about, and thus necessarily before every individual example of that type. A limit is given to us and to our schemes of domination. We can no longer destroy and rebuild as we wish; we must accept and accommodate being, even the being of individuals. If I respect human life, if I think it inviolable, then rather than making and manipulating it, I acknowledge and defer to it; I let it be. True, I may sometimes (but not necessarily or always) have a kind of attraction to the object of respect, but even here, my feeling goes beyond the achieving and holding stance that accompanies valuing, to include an appreciative awe or delight.
[…]
[P]rimarily because it is a retreat rather than a charge, respect for each human being can be shared without becoming totalizing or collectivizing. We can find solidarity more safely in a common respect than in a common goal.
wait for it
Apologetics has a noble history. It also has a potential darkness hidden within.
The darkness lies in the dangers of critical thought and argumentation.
What part of the heart is engaged by critical thought and argumentation? In most cases, it is quite possible that no part of the heart is engaged – the exercise can consist in nothing more than rational argumentation and limbic impulses (anger, fear, envy, etc.). This is to say that the “accuracy” of an apologetic article or video can be equally deadly (and sinful) in its effect.
Fr. Thomas Hopko famously taught, “Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.” (#43 in his 55 Maxims).
Hopko’s maxim is an extreme statement, one intended as a wake-up call (I suspect). As someone who has been accused of quietism, I take comfort in such extreme company. I also know that my heart struggles: many days my inner voices do nothing but argue and complain. They leave a trail of alienation and make prayer ever more difficult.
As years have gone by, the phrase, “Guard your heart,” has come to have increasing importance for me. In the course of any given day, I do not find myself struggling to believe “right things.” I am not tempted by heresies. The great struggle is to maintain the most fundamental meaning of the word, “Orthodoxia,” which is “right worship.” Right worship describes the fullness of the heart’s right disposition towards God. The heart is the true battleground of the spiritual life – it is there that I am tempted to put myself in the place of God and others in the place of objects. Such an image of hell! The self as god ruling over a universe of objects!
The reduction of human beings to mere rationality – as if thinking of things were the sum of a human being – is a terrible error. The Liturgy suggests a much greater vision. Just prior to the great prayer of thanksgiving (the Anaphora), the congregation joins in the recitation or singing of the Nicene Creed. The Deacon calls forth this common action with significant words:
” Let us love one another! That with one mind [ὁμονοίᾳ] we may confess, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence, and undivided.”
The “one mind” is not a reference to mere intellectual agreement, but to a true communionof love in which we speak as one. It is an agreement that can only be had through love. It cannot be coerced nor settled by argument.
There is a holy and divine “weakness” within the reality of love. Love must be freely given. In the most extreme case, we may say that God Himself must wait for our love.
St. John records the post-resurrection conversation between Jesus and Simon Peter. Christ asks him, “Do you love me more than these (the other disciples)?” He uses the word “agape” – love in its fullest and most complete sense. Peter responds, “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you,” but, in answering, he uses the word “philia,” a lesser word meaning, “friendship.” Christ asks the same question a second time, and gets the same answer. The third time, Christ lessens his question and says, “Simon, do you love (philia) me?” The text says that this troubled Peter, who said, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I love (philia) You.”
It strikes me that, in that conversation, Christ never hears from Peter that his agape is returned. Peter is offering an honest answer. He knows that he has failed the test of agape in his denial of Christ on the night of Christ’s betrayal. All he can say is, “You know I am your friend” (I love you with “friend-love”). …
The patience of God extends for a lifetime (and more). It is noteworthy that Peter himself writes this:
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9 ESV)
it’s not a limit, it’s a relationship
Perhaps, then, one central issue that can’t be reached by tax changes or different housing policy that the enabling paradigm of modernity itself – of technology, of “progress” – is radically hostile to the mindset required to welcome children. This possibility then also provides a window into a great deal else, which has been marginalised by the ideology of Progress. For by extension, the technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship – because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources.…
That might mean, for example, raising meat animals in accordance with their nature rather than in accordance with the industrial search for maximum yield. And meeting someone or something where it is means accepting limits on what we can demand. In the context of human connections, as for example a baby’s needs, we don’t call this “limits” but simply “relationship”. To accept relationships that fall outside transactional logic is to accept being bound by and to something we can’t always control, and can’t always opt out of. Belonging to others means accepting that those relationships place constraints on us. As a wife and mother, for example, I couldn’t just move overseas for three months at no notice. This is not oppression; it’s an enabling condition for the freedom I have to live the life I have well.
white Christian heritage
David Walker, a free black man born in 1796, in what James Davison Hunter calls “one of the most important polemics of the early nineteenth century… a statement as radical as any of the Revolutionary period”:
Are we MEN!!—I ask you, O my brethren! are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we? Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone? Is he not their Master as well as ours?—What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we cannot precisely tell—but I declare, we judge men by their works.
The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. …
… In fact, take them as a body, they are ten times more cruel, avaricious and unmerciful than ever [pre-Christian Europeans] were; for while they were heathens, they were bad enough it is true, but it is positively a fact that they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, and through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kind of ways. While they were heathens, they were too ignorant for such barbarity. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelties. Now suppose God were to give them more sense, what would they do? If it were possible, would they not dethrone Jehovah and seat themselves upon his throne?
“Can anything,” Walker goes on to ask, “be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans?”
… He…who…has…ears — shutter.
integrity, calculations, and fire extinguishers
Most of Haley’s supporters voted for her as a way to stop Donald Trump. Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her. When she says, as she said again today, that she wishes Trump would “reach out” to her voters, she’s speaking words that may sound like English, but make no sense. The only way Trump could reach out to Trump-skeptical Republicans is by pleading guilty to the many criminal charges against him and vowing to devote the rest of his life to restitution for the victims of his many civil frauds.
[…]
From the point of view of Trump-skeptical Republicans, this election is no more about Joe Biden than a fire in a children’s hospital is about the fire extinguisher. They don’t think, Gee, I wish this extinguisher were newer, so I’ll let the children burn to death. They think, I hope there’s still an ounce or two of flame-retardant foam left in this old thing—and if there is, I’ll be damn grateful for it.
numbness, fatalism, and absolutely no surprise
If don’t have convictions that Trump shouldn’t be president after January 6, you probably don’t have convictions.
As a Never Trumper, it’s my duty today to be furious at Nikki Haley. Yet I feel nothing…
How angry can one be about this, realistically?
It’s traumatic to watch a “principled conservative” roll over for a proto-fascist out of rote partisanship, but we’ve all gotten used to that particular trauma by now. The anger is spent. Numbness and fatalism are what’s left.
[…]
Watching Haley back Trump on Wednesday, I had dark visions of what might be in store for her. In 2028: “J.D. Vance has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Gretchen Whitmer would be a catastrophe.” Then 2032: “Tucker Carlson has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Josh Shapiro would be a catastrophe.” Or 2036: “Nick Fuentes has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Wes Moore would be a catastrophe.”
It’s 2016 forever. The future is delayed, but rest assured that it’s coming.
words v. reality
The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.
An added note for clarity: I have my differing feelings about much of the protest-leaning middle ground in Smith’s piece, most of which, in spite of the “words,” does little to really address the Jew-hatred that thrives on these campuses. But the above point is sharp. And it’s a point I will not stop making.
Capital-L Life on the Drina
There had been and there would be again starlight nights on the kapia and rich constellations and moonlight, but there had never been, and God alone knows whether there would be again, such young men who in such conversations and with such feelings and ideas would keep vigil on the kapia. That was a generation of rebel angels, in that short moment while they still had all the power and all the rights of angels and also the flaming pride of rebels. These sons of peasants, traders or artisans from a remote Bosnian township had obtained from fate, without any special effort of their own, a free entry into the world and the great illusion of freedom. With their inborn small-town characteristics, they went out into the world, chose more or less for themselves and according to their own inclinations, momentary moods or the whims of chance, the subject of their studies, the nature of their entertainments and the circle of their friends and acquaintances. For the most part they were unable, or did not know how, to seize and make use of what they succeeded in seeing, but there was not one of them who did not have the feeling that he could take what he wished and that all that he took was his. Life (that word came up very often in their conversations, as it did in the literature and politics of the time, when it was always written with a capital letter), Life stood before them as an object, as a field of action for their liberated senses, for their intellectual curiosity and their sentimental exploits, which knew no limits. All roads were open to them, onward to infinity; on most of those roads they would never even set foot, but none the less the intoxicating lust for life lay in the fact that they could (in theory at least) be free to choose which they would and dare to cross from one to the other. All that other men, other races, in other times and lands, had achieved and attained in the course of generations, through centuries of effort, at the cost of lives, of renunciations and of sacrifices greater and dearer than life, now lay before them as a chance inheritance and a dangerous gift of fate. It seemed fantastic and improbable but was none the less true; they could do with their youth what they liked, and give their judgments freely and without restriction; they dared to say what they liked and for many of them those words were the same as deeds, satisfying their atavistic need for heroism and glory, violence and destruction, yet they did not entail any obligation to act nor any visible responsibility for what had been said. The most gifted amongst them despised all that they should have learnt and underestimated all that they were able to do, but they boasted of what they did not know and waxed enthusiastic at what was beyond their powers to achieve. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous manner of entering into life or a surer way towards exceptional deeds or total disaster. Only the best and strongest amongst them threw themselves into action with the fanaticism of fakirs and were there burnt up like flies, to be immediately hailed by their fellows as martyrs and saints (for there is no generation without its saints) and placed on pedestals as inaccessible examples.
Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. This generation which was now discussing philosophy, social and political questions on the kapia under the stars, above the waters, was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling both of lighting the first fires of one new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another which was burning out. What could especially be said of them was that there had not been for a long time past a generation which with greater boldness had dreamed and spoken about life, enjoyment and freedom and which had received less of life, suffered worse, laboured more hardly and died more often than had this one. But in those summer days of 1913 all was still undetermined, unsure. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and men imagine or do.