William E Pannell, writing in 1968, reflecting on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed Carol Denise McNair, age 11, Carole Robertson, age 14, Addie Mae Collins, age 14, and Cynthia Wesley, age 14:
I now knew that I could no longer be a standard evangelical Christian, content merely to preach a typical evangelical Gospel. This ghastly event—to be followed by so many like it—happened in the “Bible belt.” The time had come to reevaluate the Gospel in terms of its meaning and application for our times. For me, the illusion was over.
This attitude may well surprise some of my friends. But then, I must confess to disappointment when they register disappointment at my concern. “But surely,” they like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?” There seems to be a hope expressed here that at least one Negro—a friend—can be counted upon to resist this civil rights insanity, and bring some assurance that the establishment has been right all along. There was a time when some of us could do that, when some of us could understand and support the Negro whose ad appeared in a Southern newspaper declaring, “This is to inform my white friends I am not now and never have been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” But those times are over.
“But surely,” they still like to say, “you are not sympathetic to all this rioting, are you?”
Gradually, and without any conscious realization, the world got smaller too. We were taught to shun the world, to be separate from it, and while I am sure the interest was right, the result of such instruction developed a negative and defensive mentality. I found myself viewing people as the enemy, especially if they smoked or cursed. They were to be saved, of course, but not necessarily to be loved as they were. Imperceptibly, I came to be more doctrine and program-centered than people-centered. Our negative world-view was further compounded by the constant stimulation we received to live a holy life. I fought the struggle and became progressively more self-centered. We wanted to become sanctified in order to serve, but for many of us the kind of sanctification we sought served only to separate us further from the world we professed to love.
I became a fundamentalist. Not that I understood what that meant, but I became one. I was, of course, anti-modernist, anti-RSV, anti-World or National Council and anti-Roman Catholic. Men became guilty by association with any of these issues or movements. I now know that we were not really trained to think. I could not have given you a good reason for many of my views. But no matter, since “orthodoxy” was all-important and at that time even love for those who differed was considered compromise, betrayal or apostasy. The same could be said, of course, for my contemporaries in liberal schools. From our “deep wells” we fought our verbal battles, never caring that we were strangers to the love of God.
But we did have zeal. There was a job to be done, a world to be saved, and time was running out.
“In 2025, Trump brought tech executives into power to dismantle regulators and write their own rules. But the instabilities they’re creating may be their downfall.”
With that subheading, I expected a hopeful uplift at the end — one that I would of course cast doubt upon. I was… incorrect. She ends thusly:
“We’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.”
The deeper danger is that we become little gods, generating life in our own image and on our own terms, yet with neither the wisdom nor understanding of an actual Creator.
This mechanistic view is a kind of rupture with God. It erases the spiritual dimension of a child growing within a mother’s womb. This mutual participation in creation breaks you open and brings you into contact with helpless love, and also with suffering that produces life.
Notice that the mechanistic is tied to the non-material. It is the mechanistic, non-physical, non-participatory non-things that erase the spiritual. While physical, participatory things break open both material and spiritual reality.
Researchers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report that by the age of two to four months, babies eyes can focus on the eyes of adults, creating what they call a “joint-networked state” during which their brain waves sync with those of the parent, bringing them into “mutual alignment”. When this state is activated by a parent’s gaze, babies try to vocalize and communicate more. If a mother’s eyes are locked onto a screen during nursing, rather than meeting the infant’s eyes, the earliest social connection is interrupted. […]
But who needs instincts, intuition, and patience when you can ask Emily Oster’s Al chatbot for parenting advice?
Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.” It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real and desirable — that the child himself is real, and cherished.
Also from Ruth:
The stories we tell ourselves about having children can be a major factor in whether people have kids.
If we encourage the idea, as some do, that motherhood is awful, that fathers are bad, that family is doomed to be dysfunctional, then, naturally, we will avoid children or else anxiously armor ourselves with every possible technology to shield us from the challenges.
But it we take the risk to become the parents that kids actually need, if we safeguard the sacred space where our most fundamental connections are formed, then—even if we aren’t perfect—and we won’t be—we might instill in those children a faith that it is possible for them to replicate the goodness that they themselves experienced.
I heard how the starfish learns the world through touch, how its chemical sense leads it to the mussel bed, how it feels its way around crevices sucking soft bodies from their shells. You can’t kill a starfish in any usual way—chop one up and it multiplies, filling the waters with quintuples of spiny legs reaching out from humped backs, and curling around the deep purple shells on the rocky bottom. Sometimes I think I know what it is to know the world through only the body. If I close my eyes, I no longer feel where my body ends and yours begins— and I can believe your hands are mine reaching for muscle, a strange body becoming my own, and in my ear an unfamiliar heartbeat pumps new blood, breath no longer mine doubles the lungs, my need growing larger than what my body can hold until there is only this way of knowing, this touch that leads me, blind as the starfish, to become what I cannot see.
In sum, it would not be terribly hard for the Justice Department to write an opinion in support of the Venezuela invasion even if the military action violates the U.N. Charter.
To repeat, that does not mean that the action is in fact lawful—and it pretty clearly isn’t under the U.N. Charter. It only means that the long line of unilateral executive branch actions, supported by promiscuously generous executive branch precedents, support it. As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”
This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.
My wife asked if we wanted to do another Year of Anti-Inflation. I think I’m always down for that, but especially after reading Byung-Chul Han last night, which pairs wonderfully with it.
In the passage that Mandy Brown referred to in this post, Han follows with this (all italics original):
In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar]. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit): it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.
Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consump-tion surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things:
The endurance of things and consumption of non-things — this under the umbrella of ritual-saturated culture as “community without communication” compared to our ritual-poor culture as “communication without community.” I’m just starting Han’s The Dissapearance of Rituals. Disclaimers about monocausal explanations notwithstanding, this is a heart-shot.
[N]ot all forms of waiting imply a negative relation to power and agency. For his part, [Harold] Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.”
We can describe waiting as a condition that is, as it were, imposed from above, but it is also possible to describe urgency, hurry, and immediacy as conditions imposed from above. In such cases, waiting could be conceived of both as a form of resistance and as a warranted insistence on the space for deliberation and reflection, which are the preconditions of freedom. Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace. Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.
We can also frame such waiting as a resistance to what I have elsewhere described as the enclosure of the human psyche. But to get there, let’s backtrack just a bit. It seems to me that there is a family resemblance between Pascal’s explorations of a spiritual restlessness that cannot abide inactivity and Bergson’s elision of waiting and being. In both cases, we come painfully close to something more basic and real than the illusions with which we ordinarily make do.
To put matter this way recalls how the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.” “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see,” Murdoch argued, “that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.” And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” Thus, in her account, “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.”
The line from waiting to the form of freedom as contact with the real that Murdoch is advocating runs through attention. Accurate vision, a form of seeing that is indistinguishable from love in its selflessness and which generates a freedom from fantasy and for action, arises from attention, which following Simone Weil, Murdoch defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” “It is a task to come to see the world as it is,” Murdoch acknowledges, and that task is chiefly the task of patiently and lovingly paying attention.
[…]
To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance. It is to learn to see independently of our desire to do as we ought. It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.
Also worth noting:
Reading Schweizer’s book, I discovered the lovely notion of “Sabbath eyes” articulated by Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia. “The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes,” Adorno wrote. “They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”
Sabbath eyes, in Schweizer’s lovely summation, are eyes that “rest on their object.” May we strive to see with such eyes in this new year.
One day, Pooh was walking along on a mission to find the lost tail of his friend Eeyore…
It was a fine spring morning in the forest as he started out. Little soft clouds played happily in a blue sky, skipping from time to time in front of the sun as if they had come to put it out, and then sliding away suddenly so that the next might have his turn. Through them and between them the sun shone bravely; and a copse which had worn its firs all the year round seemed old and dowdy now beside the new green lace which the beeches had put on so prettily. Through copse and spinney marched Bear; down open slopes of gorse and heather, over rocky beds of streams, up steep banks of sandstone into the heather again; and so at last, tired and hungry, to the Hundred Acre Wood. For it was in the Hundred Acre Wood that Owl lived.
“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” said Bear to himself, “it’s Owl who knows something about something,” he said, “or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh,” he said. “Which it is,” he added. “So there you are.”
Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:
PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.
Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:
PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.
These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.
Winnie-the-Pooh read the two notices very carefully, first from left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some of it, from right to left. Then, to make quite sure, he knocked and pulled the knocker, and he pulled and knocked the bell-rope, and he called out in a very loud voice, “Owl! I require an answer! It’s Bear speaking.” And the door opened, and Owl looked out.
“Hallo, Pooh,” he said. “How’s things?”
“Terrible and Sad,” said Pooh, “because Eeyore, who is a friend of mine, has lost his tail. And he’s Moping about it. So could you very kindly tell me how to find it for him?”
“Well,” said Owl, “the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”
“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh. “For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”
“It means the Thing to Do.”
“As long as it means that, I don’t mind,” said Pooh humbly.
“The thing to do is as follows. First, Issue a Reward. Then——”
“Just a moment,” said Pooh, holding up his paw. “What do we do to this—what you were saying? You sneezed just as you were going to tell me.”
“I didn’t sneeze.”
“Yes, you did, Owl.”
“Excuse me, Pooh, I didn’t. You can’t sneeze without knowing it.”
“Well, you can’t know it without something having been sneezed.”
“What I said was, ‘First Issue a Reward’.”
“You’re doing it again,” said Pooh sadly.
“A Reward!” said Owl very loudly. “We write a notice to say that we will give a large something to anybody who finds Eeyore’s tail.”
“I see, I see,” said Pooh, nodding his head.
Of course, Pooh gets distracted by the grumblings in his belly, while Owl goes “on and on, using longer and longer words.” But this does not prevent the simple bear, standing again outside Owl’s house, from finally noticing what the wordy Owl misses.
“Handsome bell-rope, isn’t it?” said Owl.
Pooh nodded.
“It reminds me of something,” he said, “but I can’t think what. Where did you get it?”
“I just came across it in the Forest. It was hanging over a bush, and I thought at first somebody lived there, so I rang it, and nothing happened, and then I rang it again very loudly, and it came off in my hand, and as nobody seemed to want it, I took it home, and——”
“Owl,” said Pooh solemnly, “you made a mistake. Somebody did want it.”
“Who?”
“Eeyore. My dear friend Eeyore. He was—he was fond of it.”
“Fond of it?”
“Attached to it,” said Winnie-the-Pooh sadly.
So with these words he unhooked it, and carried it back to Eeyore; and when Christopher Robin had nailed it on in its right place again, Eeyore frisked about the forest, waving his tail so happily that Winnie-the-Pooh came over all funny, and had to hurry home for a little snack of something to sustain him. And, wiping his mouth half an hour afterwards, he sang to himself proudly:
Who found the Tail? “I,” said Pooh, “At a quarter to two (Only it was quarter to eleven really), “I found the Tail!”
Read the whole little story here; I haven’t excluded much.
