I love the way this describes the work of Jonathan Lasch: “Against this barrage of abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale.”

This goes perfectly to the heart of Kingsnorth and basically all of my follow-up, f***-the-machine reading this year.

To insist on the fact of human scale.

Put it on my tombstone. Put it on yours.

Jeffrey Foucault in his latest newsletter (quoted in full):

I’ve been having trouble writing this thing. I mean, if we pulled on our boots and wrapped up in heavy jackets, drove down to the falls below town to walk the access road to the No. 2 dam, I’d have my opinions. After a while. After a decent interval. But I’d want to hear what you’ve got going first. I’d want to hear about your folks, and your work. Your kids. Probably I’d hesitate to get into the heavy stuff. A stray barb and a dark chuckle might be all. 

I wake at three, humming like a tuning fork, vibrating with the collective churn of a few million other souls, everyone wondering where the ship of fools is headed. I get up and dress, start the water for coffee, go out to make kindling in the moonless dark. Empty the pan from the stove into the fire scar out by the barn, and watch as the sparse coals from the night prior blaze up as they fall. I kick the snow from my boots in the front hall, twist last years newsprint into the stove, and absently note outrages I barely remember now, splashed across the front pages in heavy type.

I read Takahashi, and Larry Levis. Set them down to fight through a chapter of science, until, distracted by an unfamiliar word, I find my notebook, and begin a poem. Or maybe it’s a song, or a grocery list, or nothing. Eventually I’ll locate my phone and check messages, look at the news of the world. The stove ticks and the light comes up, inexorable as an artesian spring.

My heart is sore, like yours. There was a story that most of us believed about this country, regardless of party, about who we were, what we did, why did it, and what it meant. That story was our culture, and it wasn’t always true, but now we don’t even tell the story. Not to ourselves, not to each other, and not to the rest of the world.

******

Still, there are things we all agree on. In our country, no one is meant to be above the law, and because officers of the state have the law on their side, they don’t wear masks, they wear uniforms. Masks are for outlaws. We don’t threaten our allies with wars of territorial aggression, or depose the leaders of other countries in order to expropriate their sovereign resources. 

Those of you familiar with our history will know that we have, in fact, done these things. In the second half of the last century alone we interfered with the governments of forty-plus nations and deposed democratically elected leaders everywhere from Iran to Chile to Congo, when they didn’t fall in line with our cold war policies. We lost fifty-eight thousand Americans – and killed two million Vietnamese – in a war prosecuted on the basis of lies. But when those and other things came to light – usually through heroic journalism or civil disobedience – we held hearings, fired people, and passed laws. It was messy, and too late, but it’s what we have. It’s how we preserve the story, and the story is everything. We have to tell it over and over.

Righteousness is dangerous, and I don’t want your approval. I don’t confuse anything that happens on the internet, where nearly every available platform is a corporate tool for data surveillance, with my moral stature. I could get on the socials and ask the thirty thousand people who already apparently approve of me to approve of me again, over this, and some people would applaud, while others would quit me, or send irate letters (I have a folder of these). In either case, I’m not famous enough to give a shit. I just feel conscience-bound to tell whoever I can tell: what’s happening right now in our country is wrong. If you live in a state with Republican legislators, they need to hear it from you directly. 

I don’t write what people like to call protest songs. The last thing in the world I want is to have a lot of people who think they agree with me show up to agree with me in person, in order to feel the thrill of having a correct opinion, without the work of having done anything. Music is a mystery, as strange as dreams, or laughter, and at its best it enlarges the space for our common humanity, our sense of the soul and of aesthetic possibility, in a world full of blindness and pain, and joy. By that definition, every song is a protest song.

Madeleine L’Engle (extended quote):

There is no more beautiful witness to the mystery of the word made flesh than a baby’s naked body. I remember with sensory clarity sitting with one of my babies on my lap and running my hand over the incredibly pure smoothness of the bare back and thinking that any mother, holding her child thus, must have at least an echo of what it is like to be Mary; that in touching the particular created matter, flesh, of our child, we are touching the Incarnation.…

Once, when I was in the hospital, the smooth and beautiful white back of the woman in the bed next to mine, a young woman dying of cancer, was a stabbing and bitter reminder of the ultimate end of all matter.

But not just our human bodies: all matter: the stars in their courses: everything: the end of time.

Meanwhile we are in time, and the flesh is to be honored. At all ages. For me, this summer, this has been made clear in a threefold way: I have fed, bathed, played pat-a-cake with my grandbabies. In the night when I wake up, as I usually do, I always reach out with a foot, a hand, to touch my husband’s body; I go back to sleep with my hand on his warm flesh. And my mother is almost ninety and preparing to move into a different country. I do not understand the mysteries of the flesh, but I know that we must not be afraid to reach out to each other, to hold hands, to touch.

In our bedroom there is a large old rocking chair which was in the attic of Crosswicks when we bought it. It seems to have been made especially for mothers and babies. I have sat in it and nursed my babe in the middle of the night. I have sung innumerable lullabies from it. When Hugh was in Medea, which was sent overseas in 1951 by the State Department, I sat in the rocking chair, carrying his child within me and holding our first-born in my arms, singing all the old lullabies, but especially Sweet and Low because of “over the Western sea,” and “Bring him again to me.”

This summer I sit in the rocking chair and rock and sing with one or other of my granddaughters. I sing the same songs I sang all those years ago. It feels utterly right. Natural. The same.

But it isn’t the same. I may be holding a baby just as I used to hold a baby, but chronology has done many things in the intervening years, to the world, to our country, to my children, to me. I may feel, rocking a small, loving body, no older than I felt rocking that body’s mother. But I am older bodily; my energy span is not as long as it used to be; at night my limbs ache with fatigue; my eyes are even older than the rest of me. It is going to seem very early—it is going to be very early—when the babies wake up: Alan, Josephine, Cynthia, and I take turns getting up and going downstairs with them, giving them breakfast, making the coffee. Is it my turn again so quickly?

Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.

I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.

The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.

Romano Guardini:

The old passion for a universe, limited in structure, the old desire for a world in which life was directed and channeled, disappeared. Man began to feel that expansion itself was a liberation. […]

The single historical event lost its unique significance under the immense weight of historical facts and under the impact of the new conviction that time was unlimited. The multiplicity of historic phenomena allowed a unique importance to no one event; rather all events were viewed as having an indifferent significance and value. As the old sense of limitation was sundered man lost that value given those unique historical “moments” wherein the medieval belief in order had reposed. Gone was the beginning and the end, the limit and the center. The concept of hierarchy faded; with it disappeared not only all related convictions about the nature of culture but also its many symbolic accretions. The new world seemed a fabric woven of innumerable parts, a fabric which expanded in all directions. Even as this new world view affirmed a freedom of space it denied to human existence its own proper place. While gaining infinite scope for movement man lost his own position in the realm of being.

Madeleine L’Engle:

Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.

I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.

The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.

Bethany H.:

I don’t know what to write here. Things in Minnesota are bad. A friend who lives across the country said to me a few days ago, “Maybe they exaggerate in the reports.” I’m telling you: They don’t exaggerate. If anything, the reported news understates the scope, scale, and level of fear, violence, and lawbreaking being visited on residents of the Twin Cities (and outstate as well) by agents of our own government. Read the news reports and then know that these kinds of things are happening hundreds of times over, every day, across the cities, and most of them will never reach the level of national public awareness, because there are simply too many of them. Our kids are seeing things happen that at a “normal” time, any one of which would become a national scandal, but today doesn’t reach a level of atrocity to break through the baseline level of daily atrocity. If you are a praying person, please pray for all of us.

Peter Wehner:

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

America in 2026 is not Germany in 1936; far from it. But we would be mistaken to pretend that political movements that aren’t as malevolent as Nazism can’t still advance sinister ends. We should also acknowledge that over the course of its history, Christianity, which has had glorious moments, has also taken some very dark turns.

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come.

Robert Kagan:

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

[…]

If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.

Once again, I give you Charles Krauthammer in 2016:

At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.

Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies.

It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.

All predictable and predicted… and currently widely celebrated and excused. Brace yourselves.

On that note, Kagan is weirdly on the same page as Chris Smaje. They’re coming from, and going in, very different directions, but they have a good deal of diagnostic and predictive overlap. 

Smaje quotes political scientist Michael Albert:

Some nation-states may retain effective governance capacities, but most would eventually fragment and give way to a complex neofeudal geography composed of political-economic and security assemblages cooperating and competing over territory and resources — including corporate quasi-states, city-states, feudalized rentier capitalists and warlords that offer livelihood protection in exchange for tribute, and numerous communities of surplas populations left to develop their own survival strategies.

Smaje later adds, “I’d argue that staying committed to the sun model of the present nation-state system as a way of avoiding troubled future times now looks pretty utopian.”

Kagan:

Even the most well-managed multi­polar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. […]

Today’s equivalent of 19th-­century multi­polarity would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale. That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.

Ruth Graham:

When asked if he had ever said anything negative publicly about Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson paused for several seconds. “I doubt it,” he concluded. After reflecting more, he offered one potential area for improvement: The evangelist Franklin Graham, he said, is working to get the president to stop cursing.

(The concomitant willful ignorance and general effusion of associated aromas notwithstanding…)

Addendum: This post is really about a personal beef I have with a few folks I know on the “conservative” “Christian” right, who are not even close to alone, apparently. Namely, the excusing or ignoring or spreading all manner of lies and injustices and nonsense while the complaint about people who (gasp) use fowl language is never far from them.

Of course, everyone knows that on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ, the first question St. Peter shall ask will not be about widows and orphans, nor about justice, mercy, and humility, nor about bearing witness, but about whether you said or condoned saying fuck, shit, or asshole like some goddamn heathen. (“I’m just proving a point. You don’t have to celebrate it, Frank.”) 

Naturally, President DJT is never mentioned, and if I bring him up I’ll get a “Well, I didn’t say I like his language.” (“Well” is the only meaningful part of that sentence.) The woke F-bomb mob is public enemy number one, of course, all day and night, but no thought is given to Mr. “Get the fuck out of the car or my friend will shoot you in the face.”

You could call it a righteousness narrowly defined, but as I’ve encountered it I would only call it self-righteousness — petty psychological appeasement for a shallow corrupted American conscience. Anything to tell yourself — thank God! — you’re not like them.

Frederick Buechner:

OUT OF THE GROUND the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). Following Adam’s lead, we say that is the elephant and the albatross, that is the weasel and the goldfish. What or who they really are we do not know because they do not tell. They do not tell because they lack what is either the gift or the curse of speech, depending on your point of view. …

Humans live largely inside their heads, from which they tell the rest of their bodies what to do, except for occasional passionate moments when the tables are turned. Animals, on the other hand, do not seem compartmentalized that way. Everything they are is in every move they make. When a dachshund takes a shine to you, it is not likely to be because he has thought it over ahead of time. Or in spite of certain reservations. Or in expectation of certain benefits. It seems to be just because it feels to him like a good idea at the time. Such as he is, he gives himself to you hook, line, and sinker, the bad breath no less than the frenzied tail and the front paws climbing the air. Needless to say, the whole picture can change in a flash if you try to make off with his dinner, but for the moment his entire being is an act of love bordering on the beatific. 

“Ask the animals, and they will teach you,” Job says to his foul-weather friends. Innocence, as above, is one of their lessons, but the one Job has in mind is another, that is, that “in [the Lord’s] hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being” (Job 12:7,10). When the ravens came and fed Elijah bread and meat by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:6), we’re told they did it because the Lord commanded them to. However, I suspect that since, in spite of Poe, ravens are largely nonverbal, the Lord caused the sight of the old man to be itself the command the way the smell of breakfast is a command to be hungry or the sound of your best friend on the stair a command to rejoice. 

Elijah sat there all by himself—bald, on the run, in danger of starving to death. If the ravens could have talked, they would probably have tried to talk either the Lord or themselves out of doing anything about it. As it was, there was simply nothing for it but to bring him two squares a day till he moved on somewhere else. The sleek, black birds and the bony, intractable prophet—since all life is one life, to save another is to save yourself, and with their wings, and beaks, and throbbing birds’ hearts all working at once, the ravens set about doing it.