Anne Applebaum

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.

Reading Billy Collins’s “The Trouble With Poetry” and thinking about how, as cliché as it sounds, the world is a realm of infinite possibilities. Not a place where “anything can happen,” but a place where both old and new things never stop happening.

Each one of us has an unnumbered and unnumberable amount of potential experiences — experiences both to have and to offer in the world. And those myriad experiences multiply exponentially with each encounter with another — exponential multiplicities which again and again multiply exponentially with each friendship. (And how much more so if we make those friendships with others who are not like us, who think and act and pray differently?)

This is what happens with one and then with two. And there are 8 billion of us, all bouncing our disparate and duplicate experiences off each other.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything in the world

and there is nothing left to do
but quitely close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

The delightful sarcasm of Collins is always thick in substance and light in expression!

Peggy Noonan:

Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.

The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh. […]

They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist.

Seamus Heaney:

[Poetry] does not intervene in the actual but by offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways, it does constitute a beneficent event, for poet and audience alike. It offers a response to reality which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. For the activist, there is going to be no point in envisaging an order which is comprehensive of events but not in itself productive of new events. Engaged parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image — no matter how inventive or original — of the field of force of which they are a part. They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.

So, if you are an English poet at the Front during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy. If you are an Irish poet in the wake of the 1916 executions, the pressure will be to revile the tyranny of the executing power. If you are an American poet at the height of the Vietnam War, the official expectation will be for you to wave the flag rhetorically. In these cases, to see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer, to see the British government as a body who might keep faith, to see the South-East Asian expedition as an imperial betrayal, to do any of these things is to add a complication where the general desire is for a simplification.

[…]

And in the activity of poetry too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales — a reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the historical situation. The redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.

Two quotes about MLK , from Vincent Lloyd:

While King famously proclaimed, in his final speech, that God had allowed him to go to the mountaintop and glimpse the promised land, Eig shows that in reality it was his wife Coretta who enabled and guided the great orator’s moral ascent. She was an activist before he was; she was outspoken on Vietnam before he was; she was forever giving him confidence when his spirits wavered. Plus, she was birthing and caring for four children and an extraordinarily busy household on a tight budget. (King donated all of his speaking fees to civil-rights work.) At the civil-rights movement’s height, Coretta traveled frequently to sing at rallies, always checking in to make sure her children made it to their extracurriculars. When King was called away from the founding meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Coretta filled in for him.

And:

We are tempted to imagine King as a moral saint, exceedingly earnest with a single-minded focus on improving the world. That is not who King was. Nor does it describe Christian saints. It is only from a secularist perspective that saintliness is measured by maximizing good actions at each moment in time. In the hagiographical tradition, Christian saints have good days and bad days. They curse God and they repent. Their virtues battle their vices. Their saintliness comes about because of their commitment to bringing the shape of their life into conformity with the life of Christ, not moment-by-moment but as a whole. And saints necessarily fail at this: a saint imitates Christ, but a saint is not Christ. Nonetheless, a saint provides inspiration for those who, similarly, wish to model their lives on perfect goodness.

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.