Freddie deBoer:

Defined by our lists of oppressive -isms, given to endless complaints about everything that’s wrong with the world, we are far less able to define a positive vision of what exactly we’re fighting for and why the world we want is better than the alternative. Surely the right’s anti-politics is worse, but as we busily undermine faith, national identity, and all other ways human beings create meaning, we risk standing for nothing and thus losing everything.

I’ve been reading Jon Meacham’s Lincoln biography, And There Was Light, mostly in the evenings. Much of it has me asking, “Has the heart of any argument changed in this country, changed at all in the last two hundred years, at least?” Whether it’s the 1850s, the 1950s, or today — it all sounds so much the same.

Take this quote from Lincoln, in a letter to Joshua Speed in 1855:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Or this summary from Meacham, of the buildup to war in the late 1850s:

In frustration and fear, the slave-owning interest caricatured their foes, affirmed their own virtue, and preached their own gospel. “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists . . . on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” the Presbyterian clergyman James Henley Thornwell, a defender of slavery from South Carolina, said in a representative sermon, “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in 1850. “In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” To Thornwell, slave owners were true Christians and adherents to the “ordinance of God.” To defend slavery, then, was to defend Christianity itself. When the issue was framed so starkly, compromise was impossible, for to compromise was to sin. Reason did not enter into it. Minds could not be changed, nor hearts altered.

Perhaps more than anything else, Lincoln spent his career arguing against a kind of destructive control — the kind of force that Simone Weil said can only crush or intoxicate. As Meacham summarizes it,

To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.”

That was Lincoln’s argument, seeking the 1860 Republican nomination, addressing a “learned, influential, and exacting” crowd in Manhattan, at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? . . . This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

No extremity in either political party, if even in the bases of each, has yet learned this lesson. “Rule or ruin in all events” could be an apt banner over much of today’s politics still.

It seems clear that great degrees of liberty and justice have, against all odds, won out over time. “Right makes might,” as Lincoln said at the end of that speech in Manhattan. That is, however, less a statement of inevitability than it is a call to faithfulness and to much patience. In any case, I don’t think that tolerance, by any serious definition, has ever been celebrated in this country. Not that I can say with any certainty where it has been truly celebrated. As Lincoln pointed out in the first quote above, it’s the pretense of it that so often flourishes.

Jon Meacham:

For many Americans, to see Lincoln whole is to glimpse ourselves in part—our hours of triumph and of grace, and our centuries of failures and of derelictions. This is why his story is neither too old nor too familiar. For so long as we are buffeted by the demands of democracy, for so long as we struggle to become what we say we already are—the world’s last, best hope, in Lincoln’s phrase—we will fall short of the ideal more often than we meet the mark. It is a fact of American history that we are not always good, but that goodness is possible. Not universal, not ubiquitous, not inevitable—but possible.

Erika Bachiochi:

In our time, I don’t know that our political trouble is so much a failure to successfully persuade as it is to make the effort at true persuasion, which (etymologically) is to convince another through sweet reason. This presupposes, at the very least, a kind of civic friendship. We rarely persuade any, after all, with the sheer force of argumentative logic, or less still, shouts and insult. True persuasion comes by attracting another to our way of living in, and of seeing the world, and so first, we must share with them a good common to us both. It may well be — indeed, this is often the case, in my experience — that the good common to both is something of what we’ve just mentioned: that we, human beings, by our very nature, seek to do the good (even if our full accounts of the good differ, for now) but are always and everywhere rent by human frailty. Living as fallible human beings who seek the good together is perhaps the first step to true persuasion. We are very, very far from that today. Seeking and offering forgiveness and reparation (which presumes, of course, some shared good we have failed to attain) is just part of the warp and woof of life, but something our politics — both left and right — has entirely forgotten. […]

How do I think we’ve gone wrong in our discussions about all this today? Because we have forgotten that quintessentially human tension I just mentioned: we have no account of 1) virtue, the good to which we are all called, and 2) vice or sin, the falling away from that good. And so, in a very Hobbesian move, we increasingly conflate our lower appetites and our propensity to vice or sin (our fallen state) with who we are, rather than understanding ourselves as created good, fallen, and in need of the virtues and grace to flourish.

The whole interview is excellent. But this line is very rich and worth noting, bolded in the original for a good reason:

If virtue is the excellence of the soul, and each human soul is uniquely commensurated (or adapted) to its sexed body, there exists a beautiful array of what it looks like to be a virtuous woman or a virtuous man in the world. But when the two sexes are vicious, we tend to see deep gender stereotypes emerge.

The same goes for this:

But what to do about parents that think only about the good of their own children? I think a commitment to tithing is an antidote to that. I remember once explaining tithing to my eldest child (who was then four and is now a philosophy student at Notre Dame), and she responded: “So when Daddy gets paid [I was not working much then], that money is for both our family and the poor?” That’s a good insight to instill in children early on! I also deeply admire those families who make a commitment to serving the poor together. Basically, there has to be a sense in word and deed that as individual persons and as a family, we don’t exist for ourselves but for the good of others. That’s Christianity 101.

Luke Timothy Johnson, on the essays of the Czech priest Tomáš Halík:

The simpler—and in my view also more profound—essays each offer readers a dimension of the wisdom that begins with the fear of the Lord. These reflections have no trace of academic posturing. They are themselves exercises in the kenotic theology that risks the vulnerability of naked thought exposed to public view, not unlike a body baring its wounds to the gaze of others. The opening essays, for example, “Gate of the Wounded” and “Without Distance,” form a set of Easter reflections, developing the distinctive witness of Thomas among Jesus’ disciples, namely to stand as witness between two kinds of “fundamentalist” assertions: the one from the side of believers that claims to possess God as “a given,” and the other from the side of atheists that claims “there is no God.” Thomas represents those who resist such flat reductions and see God as a possibility and a challenge, who find themselves in thought and action within a dialectic movement that includes doubt, rather than in a fixed position of certainty.

On the great commission being given by the resurrected-but-still-wounded Jesus:

Being wounded is not a basis for retreating from humanity or for seeking revenge. It is, rather, an empathic lens that allows the forgiveness of others, who are viewed as also wounded.

Similarly, “Knocking on the Wall” extends the theme of forgiveness to embrace intercessory prayer for those who have wounded us. This powerful essay takes its point of departure from the striking statement of Simone Weil (which also appears as an epigraph fronting the book): “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing that separates them but is also the means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link” (Gravity and Grace). Thus, Halík argues, being wounded is a threat to meaning, but it is at the same time an invitation to understand “meaning” at a still deeper level. And here he speaks of prayer as “God’s forge, in which we are to be, in the words of the gospel, remelted and forged into God’s instrument.” God’s answer to our prayers is to enable a faithful life of hope that extends love even to those enemies who do not will our good and even seek to harm us.

And on the genuine “nature” — the genuineness — of faith:

The book’s final essay, “The Last Beatitude,” juxtaposes the eight beatitudes pronounced by Jesus to his disciples at the start of his ministry in Matthew 5:1-10 and the “beatitude” that Jesus pronounces in John 20:29 in response to Thomas’s recognition of him as Lord and God: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Halík reflects on the character of genuine faith as a lifelong fidelity to God’s call that inevitably involves moments of doubt like Thomas’s, but that is found most truly not “in what we ‘see’ or ‘think,’ or what our convictions are, but [in] our hopes, our faith, and our love. These are what we must prove and demonstrate, so that more light may penetrate the dark recesses of the world.”

Abraham Lincoln in 1836, upon hearing that Colonel Robert Allen had “hinted that he had damaging information” about him:

No one has needed favors more than I, and generally, few have been less unwilling to accept them; but in this case, favor to me, would be injustice to the public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining it. That I once had the confidence of the people of Sangamon, is sufficiently evident, and if I have since done anything, either by design or misadventure, which if known, would subject me to a forfeiture of that confidence, he that knows of that thing, and conceals it, is a traitor to his country’s interest. …

I am flattered with the personal regard you manifested for me, but I do hope that, on more mature reflection, you will view the public interest as a paramount consideration, and, therefore, determine to let the worst come.

Ted Gioia:

You can create a unifying vision. You can build something that’s fair and transparent and gets people excited about music again. […]

Taylor Swift, you are the one person who can make this happen. I believe this is your destiny.

That makes me very, very sad. (It also makes me this.) Mostly because I think if T. Swift is the only hope for the music industry, then there is no hope for the music industry. Not that I’m qualified to disagree with Ted Gioia on anything, but… There’s way too much credit given here to “taking on the system”; all things Taylor Swift are very much part of the system. Generating cult-like interest in a tour of shitty pop songs is not the congratulatory same as “generating interest in live music.” And as someone who takes the Widow’s Offering as the true standard for generosity, multi multi multi millionaires handing out bonuses will never stop being unimpressive to me.

(To quote the great Raylan Givens, “Every longtime fugitive I’ve ever run down expects me to congratulate them for not doing what no one is supposed to be doing anyhow.” Mutatis mutandis and whatnot.)

I was happily ignorant of all this for a long time, mostly because I couldn’t have told you even one song she sang, or even recognized her music on the radio. (This is a place of peace I plan to return to, if at all possible.) But then I came to Montana last February, and after about the 40th song played at work, and after about the 40th 60-year-old doctor saying “You know, her music is pretty good,” I thought I must be losing my freaking mind. Maybe Mainers have a built-in immunity to the influence of crowds, or maybe I’m just blind and oblivious, but I just didn’t see any of this before. Now I see it everywhere, and between the Trumpers and the Swifties out here, I expect the universe to implode at any minute.

In fact, I’ll go a step further. Show me that Taylor Swift fans can be talked away from the punch bowl, and I’ll believe there’s hope for the Republican — no, I’ll believe there’s hope for both political parties. Apples and oranges? Maybe. Maybe.

But at the end of the day, I can’t tell you much about meaningful differences between many of the current cultural obsessions — can’t meaningful differentiate between the Swiftie phenomenon and the recent teen obsession with Prime energy drinks or the re-obsession with Crocks.

Honestly, if Taylor Swift can marshall her powers for the forces of good, then more power to her. I’m not planting a flag or claiming a hill to die on here. I could certainly be wrong, and like many things in life, I’m happy enough to be wrong. Call it a rolling of the eyes from the peanut gallery or something. But I’m simple (I’ll always take Wendell Berry over the next Big Idea) and the whole “use the momentum of bad ideas” is exhausting.

That being said, there is a great takeaway line from the article, one from a tune Gioia has been singing for a long time:

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ten thousand musicians live on peanuts so Spotify can cut a deal with Joe Rogan.

I’ve never had a Spotify account. (My music streaming sins were committed with Amazon, to my everlasting shame.) But, while I don’t think that Swiftogeddon will be anyone’s answer to anything — much less a force for a “unifying vision” — refusing Spotify’s poisoned apple is a simple song I’m happy to keep on singing.

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Update:

For what it’s worth, I regret saying “shitty.” That was unkind, and certainly undermines what I wanted to say, which I think has little to do with “aesthetics.” Though I do think that arguments around aesthetics are unavoidable (see this post — different subject, same idea.)

Every alternative suggestion I have is based on small things for small people to do. (I have Curly Howard’s voice in my head on a regular basis: “A simple job for simple people!”) Pay for the music you listen to (i.e. buy albums) and support local music venues. It isn’t revolutionary, but at this point, even these basic things seem to constitute reform. 

I loved being a small part of One Longfellow Square back home, for instance. And they remain my favorite live music venue in the world. And I’m looking forward to doing more of that when I get back there. For streaming, I’ve switched to Bandcamp. We’ve even talked about what it would look like to go back to using CDs and DVDs so that our son has a more streaming-free, physical experience of music and movies — and thus a better experience of support for those things — in childhood. And frankly, we’d benefit just as much ourselves.

I get that almost nothing I support is very new or ingenious or groundbreaking. I get that the impact seems so small as to be negligible. And I get that this has been a problem that has plagued lower-case-c conservatives of technoculture (if that’s a word), from Marshall McLuhan to Wendell Berry to your local librarian. I’m just convinced that, rather than change the “strategy” of what we know to be good, the questions we face are always the same: How do we maintain our lives and support our culture in good faith, and how can we be more convincing to more people that quality work — good quality and gritty work — is the way.

All of the writers and thinkers that I love have had at least a relatively small following, and even fewer real supporters. If they were looking for some measurable standard by which to gauge their success — by which to be “realistic” — I’m sure they would’ve quit long ago. But the fact that they weren’t is an essential part of the reason I have found them to be trustworthy in the first place. 

For the record, I think that Ted Gioia has taken a higher ground than I in addressing Taylor Swift the individual. While my disagreements stand, what I cringe at is the Taylor Swift phenomenon, the “brand,” which, when a star gets as big as she is, is as real as anything else. But if T. Swift brought her acoustic guitar down to li’l ol’ One Longfellow Square, I would absolutely support her doing so.

***Please don’t misinterpret the fact that I am talking right now as genuine interest in Taylor Swift and attempt to discuss her career with me further. End of speech.

Freddie deBoer:

But we don’t have a free market healthcare system or anything like it. Most people intuitively believe that everyone should have access to healthcare, even if they deeply disagree on how best to provision it; at the very least, few people would countenance children dying of preventable illnesses simply because their parents are poor. And the crucial thing to understand is that once you extend any societal commitment to provide care, you’re making government intervention into the system inevitable. That’s why various arguments against regulation and entitlements are so wrongheaded, because they suggest a system untainted by government influence where no such system can exist. The default American system of employer-provided health insurance has always left millions uncovered, chained people to jobs they would like to leave behind, and done nothing to guarantee access after retirement. […]

I am well aware that I’m not going to change anyone’s mind here. What I’m trying to do today is to demonstrate that, first, as soon as we make the moral determination that everyone should have at least some access to medical care regardless of ability to pay, any “free market” issues go out the window and government involvement becomes necessary and inevitable. Second, the point is that getting to this point didn’t take any rabid socialist sentiments or anti-capitalist assumptions. You can get here purely through a pragmatic consideration of the underlying reality. Medicine just is not like other human goods; the basics of capitalism don’t work when people simply cannot choose to go without an expensive service, and if we agree that they shouldn’t have to, then we’re left to comprehend how much simpler, more efficient, and more humane our system could be, if we committed to providing care to everyone via the only organization in the country large and rich enough to accomplish that, the United States government.

Matthew Mullins, reflecting on what made Frederick Buechner such a deeply empathic writer:

The theologian, in a commendable attempt to make the ways of God known to humans, drifts away from the death of his dear friend, or her mother, or your mother’s dear friend, and sets out to understand death as one abstract element in the larger rubric of God’s world.

What is lost in this effort to fit death into the rational matrix of God’s world is the particularity of human experience that is integral to human understanding. […]

The poet does not seek to translate experience into the language of certainty, nor to rationalize it into a coherent and reliable system. Rather, the poet attempts to recreate the experience itself in language that enables readers to inhabit the very same experience, or a similar one perhaps. The poet sets out to use language that will allow readers to imagine a world in which they themselves can see, hear, and feel what’s happened, and to grapple with what it means to care for a sick child, or to get stuck in a thunderstorm, or to wake up from a dream. Literature doesn’t try to tell you what to think about the things that happen to you; it tries to make things happen to you.

Oh, I like this very much.

I don’t remember when it started exactly, but somewhere around 2015, I started loosening my grip when it came to “theology,” at least as I had usually understood it. I was tired and feeling (always mildly and often heavily) hypocritical and inconsistent. I don’t know what originally changed. I know there were events from 2017 and on that were very significant for me. But the “trouble” started before then and I’ve never quite been able to put a finger on it.

Some things I do remember are things I read. They are the kinds of things that, when you read them for the first time, you feel as if you’ve been preparing for it. You’re not standing in the dark and suddenly the lights come on; it’s more like watching a sunrise and then, one second more, there it is. Or maybe it is like feeling for a light switch in the dark. You don’t know exactly where or when you’ll find it, but you’re feeling around the walls for a switch and when you do find it and the lights come on you know exactly where you are.

Here’s how Seamus Heaney describes what I think is this same feeling. Referring to Borges’s introduction to his own first book of poems:

Borges is talking about the fluid, exhilarating moment which lies at the heart of any memorable reading, the undisappointed joy of finding that everything holds up and answers the desire that it awakens. At such moments, the delight of having all one’s faculties simultaneously provoked and gratified is like gaining an upper hand over all that is contingent and (as Borges says) ‘inconsequential.’ There is a sensation both of arrival and of prospect, so that one does indeed seem to ‘recover a past’ and ‘prefigure a future’, and thereby to complete the circle of one’s being.

To complete the circle of one’s being — and not only once, and never perfectly, but continuously to do so. This is what I mean by being prepared for it. The fact is, the best reading a person will ever do isn’t the kind that corrects all of his or her mistakes, but that steers toward completion those thousand internal works which, whether we know it or not, are just waiting for the right word to come along.

I remember, for example, reading Gilbert Meilaender’s book on C. S. Lewis, The Taste for the Other, and the description of what he calls Lewis’s “reality principle,” that we are made for relationship with God and each other and the world. Given the inherent messiness, sacrifice, self-denial, discovery, and everything else that goes with it, the opposite of “reality” is the purchasing of “a tidy view of life at the cost of the world.” Lewis believed that, rather than systematizing the world, “the theologian must give himself, as it were, to the amazing multiplicity of experience and wrestle with the data of a pilgrim existence.”

So while I can’t say exactly why it started to happen, one way to describe what did happen is that I started losing whatever tidy picture of the world I had had. Which meant that I lost the need to explain things that I didn’t and shouldn’t know how to explain. I started losing the need for answers, and therefore the (usually unstated) need for perfection. And what followed was greater, more natural human sincerity. Genuineness, in other words.

Here’s Czeslaw Milosz, describing something very similar:

When I was, as they say, in harmony with God and the world, I felt I was false, as if pretending to be somebody else. I recovered my identity when I found myself again in the skin of a sinner and nonbeliever. This repeated itself in my life several times. For, undoubtedly, I liked the image of myself as a decent man, but, immediately after I put that mask on, my conscience whispered that I was deceiving others and myself.

The notion of sacrum is necessary but impossible without experiencing sin. I am dirty, I am a sinner, I am unworthy, and not even because of my behavior but because of the evil sitting in me. And only when I conceded that it was not for me to reach so high have I felt that I was genuine.

There is a lot to be said about this feeling. It matters to me that Milosz doesn’t say that he’s realized there’s nothing actually wrong with him. Somehow he realizes that he’s been unnecessarily hard on himself without be entirely wrong about himself. Imperfection is simply his condition. I think that sometimes when we notice that imperfection, we are driven to undo it. Or, if not to undo it, perhaps by systematizing it and telling ourselves and others that we’ve understood it all, we can get a similar feeling. We don’t tell ourselves that we’ve undone our condition per se; we’re not that openly arrogant. But our (supposed) extensive grasp of the situation lets us feel just about as good as if we did somehow get around it.

The opposite of getting around it is jumping into it. “Always,” Lewis wrote, “one must throw oneself into the wave.”

Kay Ryan said of Emily Dickinson that “She sends very hot things through the cooling coils of her poems and plays with them in her bare hands. For of course poems must include hot things; if all the hot things are removed the result cannot be poetry since it is the job of poetry to remain open to the whole catastrophe.”

“Open to the whole catastrophe.” Is that not a better image of theology — an image of better theology — than the “systematic” one that has dominated the craft for so long?

Of course, the only possible way to end this is with a poem.

Richard Wilbur:

SOMEONE TALKING TO HIMSELF

Love is the greatest mercy,
A volley of the sun
That lashes all with shade,
That first day be mended;
And yet, so soon undone,
It is the lover’s curse
Till time be comprehended
And the flawed heart unmade.
What can I do but move
From folly to defeat,
And call that sorrow sweet
That teaches us to see
The final face of love
In what we cannot be?