Joseph E. Davis:

The fragmentation of the social world has also fostered a shift in the mode of moral reasoning. Confrontation with discrepant values, especially in competitive situations, where outcomes approximate a zero-sum formula, predisposes people to instrumental thinking of the means-end kind. What to do is a question of calculating the means that, on balance, will produce the most personally desired outcome and the ability to control future consequences. […]

But “pressure to do well” doesn’t capture what is truly involved here. Young people are expected to get good grades, aim for a good college, stand out, live up to their “full potential,” let go of “limiting” beliefs, and the like. Educational institutions, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these success-oriented values and their integral relation to the good in life. These are the standards young people have been told they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves. […]

[We need to] recognize that the conflict is not primarily between belief and behavior; it is in the realm of value itself. In our time of fragmentation and normative contingency, the priority of intrinsic goods like truthfulness cannot be taken for granted. Parents and teachers also stand on unstable ground and face ethical dilemmas that pit valued outcomes—for children, for themselves, for their institutions—against higher ideals. As students know full well, they are not the only ones prone to cheat.

Personal integrity needs social integrity. To build character, we must also work to shape a consistent environment where cheating does not possess a certain logic, where telling the truth can become a firm habit, where what it means to be a good, accomplished person does not involve tradeoffs that incentivize “any means necessary.” An environment where, to return to Guardini, our lives, individually and collectively, “must testify to the fact that truth is the basis of everything.”

James Davison Hunter:

A “safe” morality is not bad in itself, but this kind of safety has come at a cost. In the effort to establish a neutral and inclusive paradigm of formation, moral cosmologies are lifted out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts, detached from the social practices by which they are communally reinforced, and disconnected from the historical narratives that give them weight and significance. Emptied of these particu-larities, lived moralities lose the very qualities by which they could become coherent to people and binding upon them. The moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.

A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community imposes few if any moral demands or obligations (such as telling the truth or sharing some of one’s wealth with others), and therefore has few psychic consequences (whether remorse, guilt, or shame—or, conversely, pride in having done the right thing). What you end up with may be politically uncontroversial, but it will add little or nothing to the moral fortitude of the individual.

Marilynne Robinson:

The [biblical] narrative introduces the idea of divine purpose, relative to humankind, its intention to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations. The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention.

One can appreciate that this is an easily assailable position, akin to special pleading, though no less potentially true and significant for it. But also, when put in the context of things that we are regularly aware of throughout history and experience, it becomes less self-protective than a natural and understandable and relatable condition, only one extended to divine implication.

So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated. When Jesus says of his executioners “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. If the same were said of the mythic progenitors of human history, Adam and Eve, or of the splitters of the atom, the creators of antibiotics, and all the rest of us, the truth of these words would overwhelm our power to conceive.

Iron John: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly. This was a book that Meghan gave me for my birthday after we found out we were pregnant. How do you buy a parenting book for a father-to-be who would absolutely love to read “related material” but who has next to zero interest in books on “parenting.” According to one bookstore clerk in Bozeman, Iron John was one possible answer.

This is a weird book. There’s almost nothing in it that escapes strangeness — not only from the Grimm fairly tale that Bly exposits but also clearly from Bly himself — but it’s a strangeness that grows on you. And, though it took until half-way through the book to appreciate it, the mysteries of masculinity that Bly points to are clearly, evidentially, sorely needed today.

Our obligation—and I include in “our” all the women and men writing about gender—is to describe masculine in such as way that it does not exclude the masculine in women, and yet hits a resonant string in the man’s heart. No one says that there aren’t resonating strings in women’s hearts too—but in the man’s heart there is a low string that makes his whole chest tremble when the qualities of the masculine are spoken of in the right way.

Our obligation is to describe the feminine in a way that does not exclude the feminine in men but makes a large string resonate in the woman’s heart. Some strings in the man’s heart will resonate as well, but I suspect that in the woman’s heart there is a low string that makes her whole chest tremble when the qualities of the feminine are spoken of in the right way.

Call that vague and circular if you wish. But what it tells us — and what we do ourselves no favors by trying to get around — is that masculine and feminine are words that describe ancient, very real (even if still flexible) qualities of human existence for biological men and women that evade apprehension and verbal description, let alone being reduced to definition. (And are further still from arbitrary redefinition.) To say that we are starving for participation in that ancient reality, that we in fact starve ourselves of it, is an understatement.

We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. [But] a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.

A joyful participation in the tensions of an ancient world that we have learned far too little from.

The turning point in the book for me was chapter 4, “The Hunger for the King in a Time with No Father.” Bly has picked up the question “Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” and here he offers one possible answer: the loss of background. It’s become all too true that fathers today stand alone, without any resonating background of meaning or value or virtue. There is a lack of kings and heroes, no greatness from which fathers “pick up radiance from above.” “As political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun.”

Charles Taylor put it similarly when he said that “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.” He goes on:

But the sense of emptiness, or non-resonance, … can come in the feeling that the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, arrange them, in order to live has no meaning, beauty, depth, sense. There can be a kind of “nausée” before this meaningless world.

This loss occurs under the guise of freedom — liberty at best; autonomy at worst — and surely there has been much genuine freedom and gain. (There is no hindsight bias here. Neither Bly nor Taylor is arguing for a return to the past.) And yet, who can deny that something is missing and that we are the ones who lost it? We act as though we have finally gained our wanted freedom, but we sense that we have multiplied our chains. As William Shakespeare put it, “All this world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

Here’s Bly again:

During the Middle Ages, kings would take tours of their earthly realms. Hundreds of people waited in English village lanes, for example, to see the king go by. They probably felt a blessing coming from the Sacred King as the physical one passed silently by.

The problem is that when the political king disappears from the lanes, even for good reason, we find it difficult to “see” or feel the eternal King. I am not saying that the king-killing was an error, nor that we should resurrect the king and send him out along the lanes again, but we need to notice that our visual imagination becomes confused when we can no longer see the physical king. Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination. Each person has to repair that imagination on his or her own.

Is that not the definition of loneliness? I found it immensely helpful to think of how fathers can lose their heroic image, not simply because they lack it themselves but because there is no bolstering value around them, because the culture behind them has no way of resonating the heroic image. The result, as Bly points out, is a profound lack of trust between generations: sons not only don’t look up to their fathers, they don’t trust them.

(With this sort of tearing down of hierarchies, I often think of C.S. Lewis: “a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”)

In any case, though I didn’t think I would like the book when I first started it, I’ve grown a little fond of its quirkiness. There is much in it to appreciate.

At his most plain, Bly is plainly inspiring:

If one appreciates the harmony of the strings, sunlight on a leaf, the grace of the wind, the folds of a curtain, then one can enter the garden of love at unexpected moments.

At other times, he can be more humorous:

If the therapist doesn’t dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.

A more serious tone is sometimes called for, as when he criticizes the chronological snobbery of modern man, à la animal sacrifice:

In our industrial system, we ignore the Great Mother, and we ignore the Lord of the Animals also. We are some of the first people in history who have tried to live without honoring him and his depth, his woundedness, and his knowledge of appropriate sacrifice. As a result, our sacrifices have become unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive, and massive.

By the end of the book, Bly has given us an anthropologically wide and mythological rich “book about men.” Weird as it often was, and idiosyncratic as it may sound, I am inspired by this:

We need to build a body, not on the parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body, strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires. The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art, and receiving the second heart.

Top that off with just a little more humor:

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy.

Instead, the “Wild” that Bly has in mind, and that of the Grimm fairy story, is “the path that involves intensity, awareness of the wound, alertness to impulse, the possibility of a fall.” Equally important, the Wild Man is “part of a company or a community” in the head and the heart. “A whole community of beings is what is called a grown man.”

I can’t imagine there are many who would think this book has aged well. (It was published in 1990.) But I would say that, given the historical breadth and depth that he regards, it’s a safe bet that the things that Bly sees and writes about will age better than almost anything we “heedless parvenus” are doing today.

Just putting my own pin in this pin from Kevin Williamson in 2016:

Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.

Mark Shiffman:

The core elements of Rousseau’s revolutionary victimology—the spirited moral stance of protest and resistance, self-exoneration through commitment and compassion, and the heaping of all guilt onto the evil reactionary oppressors—serve to construct and sustain a gratifying self-image more powerfully than actually governing ever could. The revolutionaries, the conscious and committed, are the virtuous redeemers not only of themselves and the oppressed, but of human nature as such and History itself. Best of all, being on “the right side of History” (that is, protesting against the past because it has victimized us all in distorting our natural goodness, and the oppressed even more) only really requires us to feel correctly, and maybe to express our support for victims; action is optional.

If, however, providential History will not oblige us by delivering the redemptive order, and thus both kinds of victims remain forever among us (the universal victims of civilization and the particular victims of inequitable civil order), then Rousseau’s victimology serves mainly to de-legitimate all actual regimes and to legitimate a revolutionary regime officially devoted to eliminating the specified types of victimhood. This revolutionary regime does not have to attain the projected harmonization of man; its relentless official devotion to the elimination of victimhood will sustain its aura of legitimacy. Its devotees gain a kind of anticipatory citizen-legitimacy as political actors through their commitment to the future egalitarian regime, the only truly legitimate regime; they are thus authorized to denounce as supporters of an illegitimate regime all who are not so committed. […]

Since, however, there is ultimately something undignified about the therapeutic-liberationist whining of the pampered and privileged, they cannot resist making common cause with those struggling violently against political and economic oppression, who are even more admirable if they are throwing off colonialism. Hence the irresistible allure (or pressure) of “allyship” with identity groups asserting themselves, even when they make the privileged liberal nervous. Hence also the appeal of Hamas, which raises to a higher level the self-satisfaction liberationists already take from common cause with disadvantaged racial minorities and analogously “marginalized” groups.

Importantly, this is not isolated on the Left. He goes on:

Whereas Rousseauan-therapeutic and Lockean-liberal factions previously worked out their conflicts inside the national frameworks of liberal order, their offspring—identity politicians and the equally illiberal working class Lockean patriots—seem to offer signs of the end of liberalism. Considering themselves victims, the one of the “system” and the other of the “deep state,” each constitutes itself as “the people” on the basis of that victimhood and claims a source of legitimacy of its own, diminishing the legitimacy of the state, which rests upon the sovereignty of “the people” as a unified pool of those protected by the state from victimization.

And, lest the centrist or those otherwise still committed to liberalism (yours truly) should be feel safely left out, he adds:

Those fully committed to the liberal order—libertarians, neoliberals, and neoconservatives—will object that liberalism has a different legitimating principle, namely representative government. They tend to believe that, if we can restore representative institutions and reform the economy to hum along providing prosperity to most Americans, we can put the victimological genie back into the bottle. I believe this is an illusion; but that is material for another essay.

Kevin Williamson:

If your management philosophy is that you are doing potential workers a favor by offering them a job and that they should be grateful when they learn that whatever it is you are offering them isn’t even more disappointing than they might have expected it to be—yeah, you’re going to experience a “labor shortage.” Because you’re a terrible employer. […]

Higher wages would eat into some corporate profits, to be sure. Have you had a look at the corporate profit chart lately? It looks like my blood pressure graph after two Red Bulls. Corporate profits at last reading were more than 40 percent higher than their pre-COVID peak. I don’t want to be simple-minded about this—a lot of those profits are being driven by the businesses that aren’t complaining about a labor shortage, while many of the firms struggling to attract workers are not hugely profitable—but there’s an awful lot of money sloshing around in the profit bucket, and we have many examples of highly profitable high-growth businesses paying considerable wages for jobs that aren’t reserved for STEM graduates and artificial intelligence specialists and the like. Every C-suite dork walking the face of God’s green Earth says something like, “Our people are our most important asset,” but a little bit of scrutiny shows that to be, in a lot of cases, pure unadulterated corporate-speak bulls—t.

Nick Cotaggio:

The time of death for the conservative movement was 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning. …

In every way, the man who demolished her is less fit for office now than he was eight years ago, when he was arguably already the most grotesquely unfit major party nominee in American history. Older, crazier, more vindictive, more fascist, more criminally exposed: He won in a waltz over a smart, likable, well-qualified, electable conservative despite having barely campaigned and never debating. …

No one, let alone a conservative, should serve as an accomplice to this horde of vicious, illiberal, obscurantist miscreants and freaks. If the swing voters of this country insist on remaining willfully blind to the nature of Trump’s movement in the foolish hope of bringing back grocery prices circa 2019, let them do so without the complicity of those who know better.

Kevin Williamson:

In 2016, I argued that conservatives had to choose whether theirs was going to be a movement of cranks and quacks and conspiracy-peddlers or a movement of meaningful conservatism. They made their choice, and I suppose they are learning to live with it—standing athwart history, barking at the moon with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the filth, waste, and imbecility for which he stands. Maybe they will choose to be something else, someday. Maybe not. The ’60s counterculture did not choose to reform itself—it was simply absorbed into the body politic, like a virus, hijacking the healthy organic processes of infected cells and organs. 

Sören Kierkegaard:

There is only one end: the genuine Good; and only one means: this, to be willing only to use those means which genuinely are good — but the genuine Good is precisely the end. In time and on earth one distinguishes between the two and considers that the end is more important than the means. One thinks that the end is the main thing and demands of one who is striving that he reach the end. He need not be so particular about the means. Yet this is not so, and to gain an end in this fashion is an unholy act of impatience. In the judgment of eternity the relation between the end and the means is rather the reverse of this. If a man sets himself a goal for his endeavor here in this life, and he fails to reach it, then, in the judgment of eternity, it is quite possible that he may be blameless. Yes, he may even be worthy of praise. He might have been prevented by death, or by an adversity that is beyond his control: in which case he is entirely without blame. He might even have been prevented from reaching the goal just by being unwilling to use any other means than those which the judgment of eternity permits. In which case by his very renunciation of the impatience of passion and the inventions of cleverness, he is even worthy of praise. He is not, therefore, eternally responsible for whether he reaches his goal within this world of time. But without exception, he is eternally responsible for the kind of means he uses. And when he will only use or only uses those means which are genuinely good, then, in the judgment of eternity, he is at the goal.