David Brooks:

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.” […]

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, [Mark] Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

This, from Amanda Mull on the Stanley water cup hullabaloo, is basically the very same explanation I would give for the Taylor Swift phenomenon:

Trying to parse why strangers ascribe such meaning to an object or product that is meaningless to you—or why they’re so set on one thing and not another, similar thing—is usually a fool’s errand. Humans by nature turn objects into meaning, and consumerism is the process by which that impulse is commodified by middlemen looking to ascribe that meaning to particular things in order to sell your identity or values or group affinity or sense of community back to you. The product itself, as long as it’s good enough, can be largely incidental to this process. If you look at all of this and see an alienated population and degraded culture, well, I don’t disagree with you. But none of that is unique to the Stanley cup. Precious little is.

David Epstein:

The phrase evolved over time, and today it’s usually “Jack of all trades, master of none.” I think it is culturally telling that we habitually hack off the end of the long version: “A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Steve Robinson:

But, I can tell you, as necessary as “masters of one” are, there is a good living to be made and a great deal of personal satisfaction being a jack of all trades. Not everything in life demands perfection, not everyone is capable of attaining perfection. The reality is, most of life for most of us is living with imperfection, flaws, damaged and blemished goods. The world is not perfect and good enough is, wellll…. good enough if good enough relieves the pain, addresses the issue, fixes the problem, saves the day, adds some beauty, or gives us some respite. And sometimes the price to make good enough perfect is too high both monetarily and existentially for most of the human race muddling through to the next broken thing, because even if it is perfect life will eventually break no matter how perfect it is and how many times it has been restored.

I used to regret mastering nothing. But these days I look at four year olds playing Paganini, mechanics building motorcycle art, sketchers rendering incredible images, carpenters, carvers, sculptors and dozens of other trades creating unimaginable structures and adornments, because I’ve dabbled at all their crafts, I have an understanding and a deep admiration, even reverence for what it took them to be able to create their works. My world is not smaller because I am not a master, it is expanded because I see more clearly the work, skill, technicality, and beauty of the work. Breadth and shallowness have made me more capable of awe and gratitude for their beauty and what little beauty I am capable of creating. 

And, because I’ve dabbled in theology, it seems to me that is our calling: to be creatures of awe, ultimately before God who is The Creator and the end of all beauty in whose image we are created. We have hands because the hand of God formed us.

Rebecca West:

Through this lovely invisible cloud we rode slowly into the harbour of Rab, and found ourselves in one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It is very little. One can see it all at once, as if it were a single building; and that sight gives a unique pleasure. Imagine finding a place where one heard perpetually a musical phrase which was different every time one moved a few steps, and was always exquisite. At Rab something comparable happens to the sight. The city covers a ridge overlooking the harbour. It is built of stone which is sometimes silver, sometimes at high noon and sunset, rose and golden, and in the shadow sometimes blue and lilac, but is always fixed in restraint by its underlying whiteness. It is dominated by four campaniles, set at irregular intervals along the crest of the ridge. From whatever point one sees it these campaniles fall into a perfect relationship with each other and the city. We sat under a pine tree on the shore and ate oranges, and the city lay before us, making a statement that was not meaningless because it was not made in words. There we undressed and swam out fifty yards, and we stopped and trod water, because the town was making another lovely statement. From every yard of the channel that divides it from its neighbour islands, from every yard of the roads that wind among the inland farms and olive terraces to the bald mountains in the centre of the island, the city can be seen making one of an infinite series of statements. Yet it achieves this expressiveness with the simplest of means: a grey horizontal oblong with four smaller vertical oblongs rising from it. Euclid never spoke more simply.

Phil Christman:

What the retrospectives about the death of Pitchfork this month — and retrospectives of the next critical publication to die next month — are really looking for is not an answer to that question that works and makes sense. We already have one. We have a million! What they’re looking for is an answer that makes sense to the bros. To the people who own the companies that buy these often modestly profitable publications and bite into them like that weird bug Annie Dillard talks about it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creekthat injects its victims with a liquefying agent and sucks their innards out — the bros who do that to our favorite magazines.

And the problem is that there’s no answer that will work on the bros. 

There is no answer to the question “What is criticism for” that will work on them. There is also no answer to the question “What is education for” that will work on them. There is no answer to the question “Why give health care to a poor person” that will work on them. There is no answer to the question “Why live” or “Why save the planet” or “Why be human” that will work on them. They subordinate their souls, their judgment, their common sense, even their practicality (the thing you’re supposed to be able to rely on businessmen for) to a machine logic that does not finally need any people — that would be perfectly content with endless gathering of paper wealth on a dead planet with no people anywhere on it, just computers talking to each other. This is the real meaning of Elon Musk’s obsession with figuring out how to prevent artificial intelligence from going Skynet, or with Rosco’s Basilisk or whatever. Artificial intelligence will never be intelligent enough to simply bring about nuclear apocalypse or create Hell for the unbelieving, but guys like him, in control of everything, will do both of those things, feel that they have to constantly do both of those things in small ways every day. Because their job is not to answer questions, render judgment, discern, think. It’s to be “clear-minded” and “unsentimental” enough to just let the spreadsheets think everything for them. If we want human minds with human values to be making the decisions about what gets cut and what gets continued, we have to remove guys like this from power, and replace them with people who understand that efficiency and practicality and profit for their own sakes eventually cease even to be efficient, practical, and profitable. Efficiency, practicality, and profit exist for people to help people do people things.

Most are probably familiar with Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches [100%].”

Mike Godwin, the coiner of this law, has an interesting addendum, inspired by the recent debacle with Masha Gessen:

Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

A few things that belong together…

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David Bentley Hart:

In Matthew’s [gospel], one’s failure to recognize the face of Christ – and therefore the face of God – in the abject and oppressed, the suffering and disenfranchised, is the revelation that one has chosen hell as one’s home.

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[Rev. Munther] Isaac says the idea of a Nativity scene amidst a pile of rubble comes from the distressing images he sees every day on television of the “children in Gaza being pulled from under the rubble.”

“We’re tired of these images, and the justification of the world to these images, as if our children don’t matter, (but) we see the image of Jesus in every child,” he says.

Reflecting on the dire situation in the enclave, Isaac insists, “If Jesus was to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza, as a sign of solidarity with the children of Gaza who are dying every day.”

Isaac says with the symbolic gesture, the church wants to convey a clear message to the world that “this is what Christmas looks like in Palestine.”

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Frederick Buechner:

As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Just as Jesus appeared at his birth as a helpless child that the world was free to care for or destroy, so now he appears in his resurrection as the pauper, the prisoner, the stranger: appears in every form of human need that the world is free to serve or to ignore.

Paul Tillich:

Only he who can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can say: Mine eyes have seen thy salvation.

It is hard to say this in our days. But it always has been hard and it always will be hard. It was and is and will be a mystery, the mystery of a child. And however deep the world might fall, even into utter self-destruction, as long as there are men they will experience this mystery and say: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that we see.” (Luke 10:23)

Ross Douthat:

Now, the most stringent sort of conservative Protestant will naturally disagree with my assessment of the Roman church’s importance and see in Rome’s crisis simple vindication for Calvin or Luther or their contemporary heirs. And people who are personally wounded or devastated by some particular aspect of the Catholic crisis, who face not just a general spiritual challenge but some specific form of mistreatment, will not be comforted by an argument that stresses Catholicism’s general providential significance. If you are drawn or tied to the Roman church but feel that in the present chaos you cannot be a faithful Christian except in Eastern Orthodoxy or Anglicanism or some other safer-seeming harbor, I don’t expect to win you over by saying, “Stick with us, we’re too big to fail!”

But I do think that even the quest for a safer harbor will not fully separate you from whatever destiny awaits Roman Catholicism. And if your doubts and issues aren’t personal but general and institutional, I don’t think there is a safe harbor anywhere: What the Francis era has proved above all is that no institution can simply be a fortress against the struggles of the age.

When I meet people who are becoming Catholic now, “at a time like this,” the fact that those struggles are present inside the church does not seem to especially bother them. They’re used to struggle and uncertainty, they don’t expect a simple refuge, and they recognize that any space of real spiritual power — which the Catholic Church still is, I promise — will inevitably be a zone of contestation as well.