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.

James Davison Hunter:

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.

Nick Catoggio:

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.