Roger Scruton:

We should not think that these changes in the world of art – which have been paralleled, too, in the worlds of music and literature – are without significance. What we look at, listen to and read affects us in the deepest part of our being. Once we start to celebrate ugliness, then we become ugly too. Just as art and architecture have uglified themselves, so have our manners, our relationships and our language become crude.

Without the guidance offered by beauty and good taste we find it difficult to relate to each other in a natural or graceful way. Society itself becomes fractured and atomized.

This official uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes – people who have little sympathy for how the rest of us live and who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.

What they forget is that ordinary people hunger for beauty as they have always hungered, for beauty is the voice of comfort, the voice of home.

When a lovely melody, a sublime landscape or a passage of exquisite poetry comes before your senses and your mind, you know that you are at home in the world. Beauty is the voice that settles us, the assurance that we belong among others, in a place of sharing and consolation. By contrast, the ugly art and architecture of today divides society rather than bringing it together.

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote,

You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? … If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Well, Rikki Schlott has written an excellent and haunting updated version:

Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?

If you’re a parent wondering the same, I hope I can be an intermediary for you. I understand the desperation that leads parents to ask me — an older Zoomer whose iPhone has been an appendage since age 10 — to help them understand. I am on the leading edge of a tidal wave of digital natives entering adulthood with harrowing stories to share. So I’ll take my best shot at explaining the malaise of my generation.

Gen Z has inherited a post-hope world, stripped of what matters. Instead, we have been offered a smorgasbord of easy and unsatisfying substitutes.

All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.” 

Sentiments I hear often from peers:

Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”

Community — “I have enough friends online.”

Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”

Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”

Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”

Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”

Everything that matters has been devalued for Zoomers, leaving behind a generation with gaping holes where the foundations of a meaningful life should be. They’re desperately grasping for alternative purpose-making systems, all of which fall short.

I’m not saying all Zoomers should become church-going office drones who churn out babies and never question their country. But our dismal mental health records and the scars on our wrists seem to indicate that becoming faithless digital vagabonds is just not working out for us. […]

I saw a recent quote from Kevin Williamson that gets straight to the heart of a lot of contagious thinking in the last month:

If Hamas wants to put Palestinian children between Israeli soldiers and Hamas terrorists, then the deaths of those children will rightly be understood as an atrocity—but it is Hamas’ atrocity, not the Israeli Defense Forces’ atrocity.

First response: If only it were that simple.

The person who shared that quote listed it under the heading “Clear thinking.” Many, many people, it seems, share this sentiment. But I really am failing to grasp how this is clear at all.

First of all, it is not in any way clear — especially not from this side of the world — that all civilian deaths in Gaza are in fact a result of Hamas’s use of civilian shields. As we have seen and should know full well by now, the best military technology in the world still kills plenty of civilians just by being wrong about the “targets.”

As bad as the civilian deaths we “accidentally” cause are, the point being made is much more sinister. Namely, that, because this is war (which it is), and because Hamas is so evil (which it absolutely is), and because the enemy is embedded among civilians — therefore, the Israeli Defense Force bears no responsibility for who gets killed by their own warheads while they seek justice. Williamson et al. act as if this point is self-evident. It is not. There isn’t even the slightest hint of self-evidence in it.

There is no case where this sort of thinking applies at all, let alone to any extent that warrants the assumptions propping any of this argument up. If a murderer takes hostages, law enforcement doesn’t drop a bomb on the building and call it a day. “Sad for those hostages and bystanders. An atrocity, yes, but at least we know it’s not our atrocity.” Williamson may think that, since it’s war and not “police action,” the rules have changed. But he’s effectively done nothing but roll his eyes to explain why.

Granted that, as with any comparison, there are differences. While no person or group is free of all responsibility for who dies in the process of carrying out even the most righteous act, I’m not saying that there are never individual situations in war where a decision would have to be made that does lead to civilian deaths — as tragedy. But this “it’s their fault not ours” kind of thinking that Williamson exemplifies leads to civilian deaths as sloth, as the result of nothing more than the ancient sin of acedia! It’s shameful, moral laziness and it excuses so much horrifying death with a wave of the hand and a cursory shrug at responsibility.

You can say, as Williamson so stunningly and dismissively puts it, “This is not a time or an occasion for moral muddiness or intellectual flabbiness.” And, in his defense, at least in Williamson’s case, I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of intellectual laziness. He’s thought a lot about this and I have no doubt that he is much smarter than I am. That’s why I’m accusing him of sloth. It is moral laziness that he and half the western world are unwittingly preaching, while at the same time they claim to be rooting out all “intellectual flabbiness.”

(I know that sloth is a funny word, and that it gets used as virtually synonymous with laziness of any and all kinds. But it’s something much more specific, and it really does help to think of it as a moral laziness. And as such, it’s something that the hardest worker and deepest thinker can be perfectly guilty of. “Something in our soul,” Simone Weil wrote, “has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”)

The Williamsons of the world, and their much less thoughtful echoers, may not think (or want) this to be an occasion for moral muddiness, but moral muddiness is our lot, whether they like it or not. And it is the current lot of Israel and Gaza. Calls to forcefully simplify the matter by declaring muddy water clear are about as meaningful as the manager of a mid-level paper company in eastern Pennsylvania stepping out of the break room and declaring bankruptcy.

But while these declarations of moral simplicity may not hold a drop of water, they are anything but benign.

My sense is that, as with all culture war issues, no one involved is capable of speaking to (or, rather, against) anyone other than the worst representations of the other side. Williamson writes as though anyone who disagrees with him simply must be waving a “stop the genocide” sign. (He has, in essence, chosen to counter much of the Left’s moral laziness with his own brand of the same. Fight fire with fire, as they say.) But you can shudder with horror at everything that happened on October 7th; and you can despise the history of Judenhaas with every fiber of your being; and you support Israel’s war against Hamas as a proper seeking of justice and peace — you can do all these things without stooping to the level of moral obscenity.

Makoto Fujimura:

Hope, first of all, must be realistic. That is, hope can be hope only if it admits that which is darkest while urging toward the light.

Nothing glib, or blind, or deflective toward the depth of despair could be a contender for hope. If hope has not first been silenced before the profundity of evil and loss, then such a two-dimensional offering is more scandalous than fruitful. Realistic is not so much concerned with practicality as it is about truthfulness.

Volodymyr Zelensky:

“We are not ready to give our freedom to this f—ing terrorist Putin.”

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Thousands of bits of paper are falling into ballot-boxes today, all over the country. It is a little thing, and can be done very easily, but mighty consequences may hang on the result.

Private Wilbur Fisk of the Second Vermont, November 1864

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If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. . . .

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. . . . Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of “the lesser evil” . . . is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement

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and it was you who taught them. The only plausible meaning of this opaque clause is that if you resent these disagreeable leaders with whom you are saddled, you have only yourself to thank for fastening the administration of your society on morally dubious figures who can now be exploited by your conquerors.

Robert Alter, commentary on Jeremiah 13:21

Brian Kaylor:

We’ve seen throughout history the bloody impact of people setting off to kill some new group of “Amalekites.” Puritan leaders justified the genocide of Native Americans in the colonial period of what is now the U.S. by comparing the Native Americans to the Amalekites. As John Winthrop gave his sermonon “a model of Christian charity” to Puritans heading to the new land, he invoked the command for Saul to kill Amalek. That’s the same sermon famous for his line about the new land being “a city upon a hill.” The speech frequently quoted by politicians today to cast the U.S. as a divine city on a hill (instead of what Jesus said about the city being his followers) also includes the theological foundation for genocide against Native Americans. It’s not so shining of a speech after all.

“In America, thinking about Amalek in the 18th century also was refined through the coalescence of an ideology of America as a ‘redeemer nation’ called to defeat evil wherever it threatened Christianity,” historian John Corrigan wrote in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America as he warned about the “rhetoric of extermination” that came from the use of the Amalek story. “And the transition from colonial status to new nation lent a particularly urgent and pointed tone to the Amalek rhetoric, as Americans made efforts to explore the continent, draw and defend boundaries, and situate themselves as the dominant power in North America.”

More recently, the rhetoric of Amalek was used by some Hutu preachers in Rwanda to justify the genocide of Tutsi people there in 1994, and it was invoked by U.S. preacher John MacArthur to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Theology can be deadly.

Below is a transcript of an article written by Ralph Kennison, I believe from The Kennebec Journal around 1961. “Hum” Reynolds, seen crouching under the table to the left, was my great grandfather.

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Many times our Service Departments are called on to do unusual jobs, but the most unusual to date recently came to the Augusta Service Department—and the boys came through!

Shortly before Christmas the division office received a telephone call from a local doctor who has great faith in the Company. This doctor, a World War II Veteran, had an injury that impaired circulation in his legs. Recently, complications and a diabetic condition stopped circulation to the danger point, and he was in danger of gangrene and the possible loss of a leg.

The conversation brought out the fact that part of the treatment in a Boston hospital consisted of sleeping on an oscillating bed. Oscillating beds, while made commercially, were very high in price, and beyond the possibility of delivery in time. Question—Could we make an oscillating bed?

We said we would try if we knew what was needed, and these were the specifications: A bed spring was to he suspended on a fulcrum in the middle, and was to have a travel of 9 inches above and below the horizontal at both head and foot. No pictures or detailed specifications were available, but it was believed that the commercial beds were operated by a small motor of about one-quarter horsepower. And, and this was the big one, the complete cycle of oscillation was to be once in two minutes. This meant a reduction in speed for an ordinary motor of 3500 to 1, from 1750 rpm to ½ rpm.

No promise was made other than that we would try, and then let him know. We called Ernest Haskell, Service Foreman, told him that our ability to produce had been challenged, and asked him if he wanted to try. His answer was instantaneous:

“Yes. If anybody can make junk parts go together, I think we can.”

Tough Problem

Servicemen Kenneth Willet and Harold Heath were given the assignment. It was even a problem to know where to start. A gear reduction motor reducing the speed to 24 rpm was located in New Jersey, and the manufacturer agreed to ship immediately. Due to the Christmas rush, it did not arrive for five days. In the meantime, the doctor badly needed the bed. How could it be made out of angle iron and old parts, and above all, how was the speed to be further reduced 48 times without big pulleys and countershafts?

About this time “Hum” Reynolds heard about the deal, and thought he could help. “Hum” is one of our appliance salesmen, but lives on and runs a farm, is an all around handy man, and has a junk pile of parts that “might come in handy sometime.” From this pile he produced a worm gear reduction from an old Everybody’s Washer.

From that point on, “Hum” worked all his spare time with the service men, and did all the welding to save the delay of having it done outside. This second gear reduction with proper pulleys and a vee belt did the trick, one revolution in exactly two minutes. The Yankee ingenuity of Willett and Reynolds and the machining of bearings, cranks, shaft extensions and lever arm by Harold Heath produced a bed which the doctor says is better made and better looking than those used by the hospital, and yet it was produced without a picture to go by. The cost, about half the commercial price. The time, one week, far superior to any commercial delivery.

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The work of a democracy devoted to such an idea is to lead a sufficient number of individuals to share a moral vision about power, liberty, justice, security, and opportunity in the hope that people—and peoples—might be in closer harmony with the good. As a multitude of individuals, a nation possesses a collective conscience—one manifested in how that nation chooses, through the means of politics, to view rights and responsibilities.

Jon Meacham, And There Was Light

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Meacham’s excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln has one very clear, overarching theme: the existence, and perseverance, of character and goodness amid(st) many flaws — both the cultural flaws (and evils) of Lincoln’s time, and the personal flaws of Lincoln himself.

W.E.B. Du Bois put it most profoundly:

Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

Though this quote from Du Bois comes from Meacham’s final chapter, I have to think that he had it ringing in his head from the beginning, if it wasn’t the inspiration for the project itself. For this is the theme throughout the biography: An imperfect man trying very hard to do the right thing.

It’s so easy to overlook the simplicity of that statement, but trying very hard to do the right thing (especially for any extended period of time, let alone for one’s whole life) is a vastly neglected gift of consciousness, not its natural fruit. Lincoln has always stood out for this effort-that-is-character — because it is so very rare. But he should stand out even more so because that character which history knows him for persisted no less for the flaws alongside it.

“Imperfect” is, of course, a soft word for some of Lincoln’s flaws. (By almost any standard today, Lincoln would be, at least at times, quite guilty of bigotry and even racism.) This is not a hidden attribute in the book, but a feature. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” Frederick Douglass said. But, he added, “measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesmen to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The embarrassing fact is, most of us could probably congratulate ourselves, rightly congratulate ourselves, for holding better ideas of racial equality than Lincoln did, and yet still not come comparatively close to his depth of character.

Perhaps the biggest explanation for this type of thing is plain and simple humility. Whatever views Lincoln held, he held them with deep, patient concern and at least potential uncertainty. He was always ready to stand his ground, but he was also ready to learn a better way. As Horace Greeley put it, “Mr. Lincoln was essentially a growing man.”

Here is how Lincoln himself put it to Maine’s Republican Senator Lot M. Morrill:

I don’t know but that God has created some one man great enough to comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis and transaction from end to end, and endowed him with sufficient wisdom to manage and direct it. I confess that I do not fully understand and foresee it all. But I am placed here where I am obliged, to the best of my poor ability, to deal with it. And that being the case, I can only go just as fast as I can see how to go.

Again, going back to Du Bois, the profundity lies in the way that such praiseworthy character and humility can (and must) not only “emerge from the gutter” but coexist within it.

I’m going to be thinking a lot about this over the next year, about what it means to recognize character within the flaws — in leaders especially, but also in the everyday anyone. Of course, that will mean asking many muddy questions. What constitutes only a flaw and what constitutes corrupt character? What sort of flaws are “forgivable” and for what degree of character are they forgivable? And when do we make the call to sacrifice “practicality” in order to keep our integrity, and vice versa?

Again, Lincoln is a perfect case study here, because he absolutely did both of these things. Many times he conceded to practical considerations, but he also often stayed the course, come what may.

But I am specifically encouraged to look for character, for moral strength, in the places where I am not predisposed to find it. Real moral strength is such a funny and difficult thing to pin down. Sometimes the people I like the most fail to show it. And quite often the people I like the least show more of it than anyone else. So it goes and so it has always gone — and we all do well, we all gain, to admit it.

It follows and ought to be true that the exact same humility and depth of character which history rightly continues to praise in Abraham Lincoln, despite his flaws, can also be found in others today, despite their flaws.

As Lincoln said after winning reelection,

What has occurred in this case, must ever occur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.

It’s not an easy philosophy to learn wisdom from, involving a lot of hard work and uncertainty. But as long as we are so fortunate as to be, as Meacham put it, “buffeted by the demands of democracy,” we are also duty-bound to seek and to find, not what is evil or inevitable, but what is good and what is possible.

And no one knows what effect anyone might have. All of the things that history knows Lincoln for, all the things that we know his era for, and especially the good things — they were not inevitable. They were surprises. Surprises that came about because someone, somewhere, however imperfectly, was trying with their “whole soul” to do the right thing.

For Lincoln . . . [t]he task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.