Oliver Burkeman:

Barely a day passes without some new viral warning that something big is happening and most people aren’t ready or that you have only 18 months before your skills are obsolete – with the implicit or explicit caution that if you mess this up, you’ll be permanently left behind, with catastrophic results for your life.

I’m not going to link to any of these contagious anxiety-spreading pieces, for the same reason I don’t go around actively sneezing in people’s faces when I catch a cold.

AI’s “mastery of the Christian tradition outstripped many a well-trained pastor or academic,” write the editors of Comment magazine, describing/promoting Matthew Milliner’s recent piece. “Yet real humans broke the spell.”

I like Matthew Milliner. Two pieces I highly recommend are Hive Mind and The Wisdom Hypothesis. But I will not likely be reading his latest essay in Comment.

People seem to really like the piece and that’s all well and good and whatnot; I’m happy enough to just be a curmudgeon here. And don’t get me wrong, I am all for more more more stories in more places about why we absolutely do not need AI in our daily lives at all. (Ethan Hawke: “I am in open rebellion.”) But I sense the rise of a kind of “I plunged into AI, survived and have a story to tell” genre of essays. And I expect a reasonably healthy dose of “No shit, Sherlock” response essays. Put me in the latter camp.

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I have long since more than moved on from my John Piper days. In fact, one of only two memes I’ve ever made was about those days:

I guess that’s less a meme than just a borrowed cartoon with a text edit, but to any past evangelical born in the 80s it could easily obtain memehood.

But still, I did happen upon a little Piper not long ago and, although I’m not really interested in his world anymore, I’m happy to see he’s still plugging along. His message in summary: “Computers do words better-than-you-duh!”

Words do not a human make, mmkay. Not at all surprisingly, John Piper gets this. But more than a little surprisingly, I actually prefer his hard, preacher-gonna-preach, jump-scare “No!” over some self-induced AI Stockholm syndrome recovery story.

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Frankly, JP is a bit tame compared to another JP. Here’s Jason Peters from the Front Porch Republic, whose Pure Curmudgeory I am more than partial to — and maybe even aspire to:

We are assured by the maniacal technocrats suffering from acedia that AI, like the smartphone or the atomic bomb, is “just a tool.”

AI is the most insidious manifestation we have yet seen of the affront to work—work as opposed to toil—and therefore an affront to play and to art and to pleasure. It is a middle finger to the imago dei. It is Gnosticism, that deathless heresy returning in a hockey mask, knife in hand, like an immortal villain in a horror flick, except of course this protean monster will never show itself thus. It will take whatever guise suits it. It will be General Patton standing in the hatch of a tank’s turret; it will appear before us meekly, as if riding on the foal of an ass. And this manifest evil will deprive us not only of our dignity but also of the pleasure permitted us in our work.

Preach it, JPs.

From Dr. Kevin Bird’s lecture Freedom Songs: The Songs and Singing that Inspired the Civil Rights Movement:

African Americans had this bold notion that the leprous body politic of the United States might even be washed and cleansed.

And that’s a bold notion after you’ve lived through the worst episode of political violence in the Western world as ever seen in 1875, from Virginia to Texas, untold numbers of political assassinations. When you’ve lived through other eras, eras like the last eight decades of the 1800s, the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, which the Nazis looked to and said, hey, that works pretty good. Maybe we should try something like that.

You know, they’ve got some pretty good laws over there in America. Let’s copy them. Hitler himself will tell you that.

And so to have the faith that you could baptize the body politic of the United States and cleanse it in some way, that’s big faith. That’s big faith indeed.

Bird had just played a clip of Fanny Lou Hamer singing “Going Down to the River Jordan.”

There’s a line from Mark Noll that I have mentioned before, one that regularly rings in my head and that I couldn’t help thinking of listening to that lecture: “reform was born aloft on the wings of song.” It comes from his book God and Race in American Politics:

As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.

What I had forgotten is that immediately preceding this is a quote from and brief description of the life of… Fannie Lou Hamer. (“She had Mississippi in her bones.”)

I woke up this morning and had Hamer singing “Woke Up This Morning” stuck in my head. I’m driving an hour to Portland today and I’m going to do myself a favor and listen to Hamer talk and sing the whole way.

Also from the lecture, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons briefly introduces herself and her story:

And I thought, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into here? Because I was at the end of my sophomore year at Spelman College. So what did they give us? They gave us a list of members of the NAACP who lived in Laurel. And we were to go and knock on their door to see if they wanted to be a part of Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Well, that was scary. The idea of going up to somebody’s door and asking them, Are you interested in having a Freedom Summer project? Yes, you could get killed. Yes, your house could be burned down. You [could] lose your job. But are you interested? That’s what we were told to say.

And of course, I went to the first couch and the woman’s name was Eberta Spinks. And I knock on the door, she opens the door and I’m standing there trying to say… How do you ask somebody if they want to possibly be killed or have their house burned to the ground?

And I’m not getting much out and she looks me up and down and she says, Are you one of those Freedom Riders? Well, I hadn’t been one, but I thought maybe I should say yes. And I said, Yes, ma’am.

And she said, Come in, I’ve been waiting on you all my life. And she was in her 50s. So that was the beginning of the Laurel movement.

“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Something to keep in mind: If you want to understand what the problem is with evangelicals and “nationalism, etc.,” look no further than Psalm 11. Nearly every single thing you see or hear from that American-Christian world (and that includes the Rusty Reno Catholics), all the ‘splaining and justifying that makes up its political face, can be traced back to this problem: they are oblivious to the pure irony with which they quote that psalm. (Very few things that I have ever written or used to explain it or understand it are worth revisiting. But that little essay is.)

Mark Noll famously wrote, in one of the most unburied ledes of all time, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” That mindlessness continues apace. This particular problem, however, is hit more directly when Noll quotes Garry Wills’ 1990 book Under God:

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…

The problem with evangelical religion is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom. It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.

And that is why Stanley Hauerwas says — hear this — that the most important task of the Church is to “take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.”

Deconstruction has been one popular (though very understandable) way to escape the rot, but probably every generation of Christians in North America has been stuck with the bitter task of escaping a peculiar darkness intrinsic to American Christianity. The unpopular challenge (as Hannah Arendt also understood, in her own way) is to do it while maintaining the faith delivered, to reconstruct as much as you, however necessarily, deconstruct. And that task is right there in the 3,000-year-old Psalms.

Douthat and Catoggio below are largely approaching the same problem but from different angles (one Christian, one not). They make plenty of good sense of this mess on their own; it’ll make even more sense with Psalm 11 in mind. 

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Nick Catoggio:

And so, if Vance’s tone was that of an angry father warning his adult child to get a job or move out, Rubio’s was that of a concerned mother reminding the child that daddy’s only saying that because he loves you. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” he said on Saturday. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

The only way to defend our shared culture against the forces of “civilizational erasure,” Rubio warned his audience, is for Europeans to embrace nationalism—namely, reindustrialization and tight borders rather than unfettered free trade and mass migration. If “we Americans … sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel” on that point, he added, alluding to Vance’s speech last year and Trump’s perpetual belligerence, it’s only “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”

[…]

For postliberals, “civilization” is measured exclusively in terms of culture, not civics; illiberal modes of government don’t affect the calculation.

Absorbing that lesson has been part of Marco Rubio’s own education in nationalism.

In 2019, the then-senator from Florida co-signed a letter warning Trump about a meeting he planned to hold with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. “In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” it read, explaining that the country “has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance. … Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.” Sen. Marco Rubio was offended by Hungary’s departure from Enlightenment ideals and worried that the leader of the free world was normalizing that.

Seven years later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio swung by Budapest after his speech in Munich last week to … effectively endorse Viktor Orbán for president. And he did so at a moment when Orbán’s chief opponent is promising to end Hungary’s Putinist foreign policy if elected and reestablish strong ties with Europe.

There’s no way to reconcile that endorsement with support for “Western civilization” without reading liberalism out of your definition of the latter. Orbán, Trump, and Putin are all attempting to redefine “the West” in the same basic way, dialing up their followers’ chauvinism about cultural touchstones like Christianity while dialing down liberal expectations for constraints on their own power. According to that redefinition, the Russian army rampaging across Europe would be a triumph for Western civilization, not a calamity, which probably explains Trump’s and Orbán’s rooting interests in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Reimagining the West without liberalism is a form of “civilizational erasure” all its own. How far is Marco Rubio prepared to go to enable it?

Awfully far, it seems. … Where he and Vance get the nerve to lecture foreign diplomats on their supposed betrayal of Western culture while they preside over the institutional and ethical ruin of the United States, I simply can’t imagine.

Ross Douthat:

The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms, and to imagine that a truly postreligious culture is even possible, let alone desirable. The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.

Apart from the possibility of being a French loanword, I think Larkin has another great nonce word in his poem “Sad Steps”:

There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! …

I think most anthologies do this but I like it when a poet’s name is unknown until the end. And tonight I was not at all surprised to see whose name was at the bottom of this one:

Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.

Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.

The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?

— Robert Hayden

The original “poem, prose, & praise” began as an email to an old friend. It was a practice I never did make regular; not yet, anyway. (Did I really ever only do four of them?) I came across that email today and a postscript I think should have been included…

PS—I like the use of nonce words. This week’s word is lucifactions. Context: “Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous…”

The quote is from M. Robinson’s Housekeeping.

The sky was whited by high, even, luminous film, and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land toward the depths of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lilies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the plosh now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucitactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete.

The Essay on Architecture provides a story of man in his primitive state to explain how the creation of the “primitive man’s” house is created instinctively based on man’s need to shelter himself from nature. Laugier believed that the model of the primitive man’s hut provided the ideal principles for architecture or any structure. It was from this perspective that Laugier formed his general principles of architecture where he outlined the standard form of architecture and what he believed was fundamental to all architecture. To Laugier, the general principles of architecture were found in what was natural, intrinsic and part of natural processes.

— The Primitive Hut

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An illustration of the primitive hut by Charles Dominique Eisen was the frontispiece for the second edition of Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1755). … The message the illustration was suggesting was clear: that the essay would suggest a new direction or a new order for architecture. In the image a young woman who personifies architecture draws the attention of an angelic child towards the primitive hut. Architecture is pointing to a new structural clarity found in nature, rather than the ironic ruins of the past.

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Lovely to stumble upon this. One of those “I’ll read you next” books I’ve had sitting around the house is R. D. Dripps’ The First House (1997). Marc-Antoine Laugier’s “satisfying hut” is mentioned parenthetically on the first page, though it’s understood by Dripp to have taken on a speculative historical role rather than a guiding one. Either way, that long stitch embroidery piece I picked up a couple weeks ago is looking even more timely and fitting.

From the preface:

The disengaged or reductive quality of current architectural discourse unfortunately does not seem to produce arguments and theories sufficiently broad in scope and adventuresome to continue to address important political, cultural, and ecological issues. Thoughts, actions, and artifacts appear to be floating freely, with no apparent engagement with the intellectual and physical world they must have come from and which one would hope they might help to direct. Without a connection to the immense intellectual project of understanding the world and our place within it, thinking closes in on itself, producing hypotheses that are increasingly autonomous, hermetic, and diminished in reach.

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Matt Rota (source). What a loaded image!

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A rough note on some dots that ought to connect somehow — or that point at things we should want to connect:

• Kevin Bales’s and Michael Rota’s book Friends of God and Slaves of Men (Interview with the authors at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture)
  • “The fundamental fact of slavery, past and present, is that a person is reduced to ‘property’ and may be used, abused, exploited, bought, sold, or killed. Slaves today, because they tend to be much less costly than slaves in the past, are normally treated as disposable inputs in criminal activities.”
• Free the Slaves:
  • “Modern slavery is a result of social, cultural, and political conditions that make people vulnerable. Poverty, war and conflict, migration, lack of access to basic human rights, and many other related factors create conditions where the powerful have the opportunity to oppress and exploit the weak. To end slavery, those most vulnerable to slavery must have the knowledge and resources they need to protect themselves and their communities.”
• Carmen Imes’ “Bearing,” “Being,” “Becoming” series (Interview with Imes at OnScript — “This is God yelling.”)
• Amy Pope’s piece (and interview) on immigration and labor in Foreign Affairs
  • “When immigration is poorly managed, communities feel the tension. Yet when local officials receive the support and resources required to manage immigration, they are often the first to express their support for newcomers.”
• Luke 13:23-30 — “The narrow door and the table of God” (emphasis on “striving,” agōnizesthe, as compared to, say, excuse-making or “realism”)
• Sarah Susanka in her book The Not So Big House:
  • “Frank Lloyd Wright believed that everyone should be able to live in an architect-designed house, each on its own acre of land. Much of his life and work was devoted to the de-urbanization of America, with the single-family homestead as the basic building block of civilized life. Wright designed a series of houses that were affordable and smaller than the typical house of the day—interestingly enough, promoting the idea even then of eliminating the formal space of the house and integrating the kitchen into the primary living space.”
• Christopher Alexander’s Timless Way
  • “When a pattern language is properly used, it allows the person who uses it to make places which are part of nature. The character of nature is not something added to a good design. It comes directly from the order of the language. When the order of the patterns and the language is correct, the differentiating process allows the design to unfold as smoothly as an opening flower.” (Some mutatis mutandis required, but maybe not as much as you might think.)
• Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age:
  • “My main point is that the dismal economics of the self-employed vegetable grower are ultimately a reflection, if a slightly distorted one, of the real economy of nature and Earth systems, to which all of us are destined to return.”
  • “Instead of a politics of labour agitation that hopes to summon greater riches for workers out of capital, we need to degrade capital so that we can interact with each other in community as owners of our own labour and necessary capital, including land.”
  • “In view of the enormous uncertainties of the present meta-crisis, it’s worth everybody imagining themselves as a potentially friendless migrant.”
  • Also, Smaje and Michael Budde in the previous post

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And of course, words from a Silly Old Bear:

“I’ve been thinking,” said Pooh, “and what I’ve been thinking is this. I’ve been thinking about Eeyore.”

“What about Eeyore?”

“Well, poor Eeyore has nowhere to live.”

“Nor he has,” said Piglet.

“You have a house, Piglet, and I have a house, and they are very good houses. And Christopher Robin has a house, and Owl and Kanga and Rabbit have houses, and even Rabbit’s friends and relations have houses or somethings, but poor Eeyore has nothing. So what I’ve been thinking is: Let’s build him a house.”

“That,” said Piglet, “is a Grand Idea. Where shall we build it?”