One of the benefits of paper reading is the increased likelihood of rereading and therefore remembering.

I was cleaning out the car yesterday and, in the rear passenger’s side, which, I now realize, never gets opened, buried under a car charging cable, a roll of toilet paper, some grocery bags, a toddler-scattered set of travel tools, a jacket, a pair of slippers, and that notorious front license plate, I found the Fall 2024 issue of The Hedgehog Review. Judging from the pencil marks, I left off 8 or 9 months ago with a not-quite-finished essay on the social harmonies of Anthony Trollope.

Some highlights from David K. Anderson’s piece that was eminently worth rereading and finishing (all emphases mine):

• For Trollope, the assessment of a character’s downfall is “a matter of grief as well as condemnation.”

• “Trollope referred to himself, with at touch of self-mockery, as ‘an advanced, but still a Conservative-Liberal.’ He was generally supportive of reform… but suspicious of reforming zeal.”

• For Trollope, no character is ever beyond sympathy:

There is seldom outright opprobrium. A bad man may have good qualities or do a good thing at a crucial moment; a good man may be unfallen only because a blade has never yet been thrust at what we come to see as a weak spot in his armor. 

In “A Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Jonathan Swift declares, on the subject of whether it is profitable to argue with skeptics, that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” The dean’s admonition remains a sound one 300 years later. I act and think on the basis of deep-laid assumptions that my reason presupposes. I did not come to hold them through a course of syllogistic logic or long study, but because they were delivered to me as axioms before I knew what an axiom was, or because they made sense of facts that seemed at one time to be paramount, or because I have a half-understood sense that they are acknowledged by others I admire. They can and should be subject to rational scrutiny but only by a long, delicate process, full of fear and trembling. There is no use arguing with me about them; their displacement, if it is possible, will not occur at the level of argument. If you want to displace them, you had better get to know me and be prepared to work hard. 

Trollope understands that people have reasons for the way they see the world, deep-rooted and pre-political, and suggests that we might do well to understand them. The simple but salutary platitude that party lines and ideological purity are no sure guide to human decency almost seems a piece of bemusing arcana when we reflect on the network of interlinked, circular firing squads that make up American democracy today.

• Trollope’s “tone is ironic but not sardonic.”

• He “constantly presses upon us the fact that there is always something to know about another person.”

• “Indignation and censure are natural and, often enough, just; however, they must be leavened with compassion, curiosity, and humility regarding our own vices and motives.”

I admit that I’ve had a hard time reading Anthony Trollope. (I believe The Warden is the only one I’ve ever made it through.) But his is a program and a prescription that I can get behind, and one that I need.

Here’s one more highlight from the start of Anderson’s essay:

• “Amid it all, he pieced together a strategy for social harmony: Don’t expect too much from others; be grateful for what good there is; strive to understand them; laugh at them and then laugh at yourself.”

“Don’t expect too much from others” may seem like a rather low and pessimistic bar, but I’m receiving it as wise advice, especially so within the wider, ever-sympathizing Trollopean context.

Perhaps a Trollope reboot is in order.

Oliver Burkeman:

It was as if I’d been assuming that what I needed was to collect sufficient resources to create momentum, when what I’d really needed was to clear enough space for momentum to arrive. 

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.

I don’t think this attitude of hoarding-as-a-substitute-for-engaging is limited to scrolling online, either. Project plans, to-do lists, bucket lists and suchlike can all end up serving a similar function. They become places to collect things you want to do later, but the collecting stands in for the doing. […]

On the contrary: by hoarding such thoughts, stowing them safely on a nice big list, I’m almost certain I’d made it less likely I’d take the plunge and do them. 

This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action… means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.

Here’s the image, sent a long time ago by a friend, that I use to represent my own surplus of FOMO read-later tabs:

Now… will I delete them?

Kevin Williamson, who I hold my nose to even quote here:

The suffering of the noncombatant civilians in Gaza is an outrage and an offense against decency—one that is being carried out by the Arab warlords and mafiosi of Gaza, not by the Jewish state. One need not think well of Benjamin Netanyahu (and I think his time has passed) to be perplexed, as I am perplexed, by polite world opinion regarding the Israeli government’s responsibility in this war, which was a war of the Arabs’ choosing, launched by a massacre of civilians accompanied by the torture and rape of civilians. […]

The Palestinians cannot choose war and then pretend that they have not also chosen the consequences of war that are currently on disturbing display in Gaza. You buy the ticket, you take the ride—and that holds true for the acquiescent Palestinian population at large as much as it does for Hamas per se. 

There’s just one problem, Kevin (several actually, but let’s pick one that you can’t not know): the utter meaninglessness, let alone exculpatory power, of the phrase “a war of the Arabs’ choosing,” especially given the fact that you are arguing — correctly, I think, from my own armchair — that there is no Palestinian “state” worthy of the title, even if there can and should be.

“To expect the Israelis to proceed as though their own national interests should be subordinated to the humanitarian interests of the people whose political leaders are trying to murder them” is not absurd, Kevin. Subordinating national interests for the sake of humanitarian interests is a pretty big part of the game. It isn’t absurd if you can tie the people directly and meaningfully to the political leaders of a legitimate state, and it’s even less absurd if you can’t. What is absurd is your incessant insinuation that every man, woman, and child in Gaza had it coming. (There’s some deeply troubling kettle logic here that you seem all too content with: “Well, those civilian deaths are tragic, but it’s Hamas’ fault, not ours. And, all those people basically asked for it anyway.”)

As J. Budziszewski (speaking of What You Can’t Not Know) put it in 2001:

The fact that terrorists reject the principles does not justify us in violating them — not even to act against terrorism. By violating them, rather than ridding the world of terrorists we would merely make ourselves the biggest, strongest terrorists of all.  Murder remains murder, even when the murdered man might justly have been executed.

Note that in that post he is largely making the case for war. You don’t need to be an anti-Zionist to get here. You don’t need to be a pacifist or an ethicist or a journalist either. A former warehouse worker with a microphone can get it as easily as anyone else.

Jew-hatred disguised as Palestinian support is certainly an ugly problem. But the inability — and here I speak not of Israel but of you, dear journalist — to even want to separate Palestinian civilians and children from Hamas coupled with this cynicism toward anyone who genuinely doesn’t want anyone’s children crushed or mutilated or starved — this is also a massive problem.

I refuse to believe that you can’t find any thoughtful, pro-Israel objectors to the civilian death toll in Gaza. If you can find those folks, it might be the most telling thing of all that you continue not only to write as if they don’t exist but as if they could not possibly exist. I like a lot of your writing and I quote you often, but as I said the last time you peddled this crap, it can only be sheer moral laziness to assume that any milquetoast who blinks in the face of human carnage is just disguising his hatred of Israel.

You once travelled to Springfield, Ohio to diligently counter the bullshit slanders about immigrants there. Rather than assume (and assume and assume and assume), that the whole lot of Palestinian civilians are simply suffering the consequences of a war they “chose,” might I suggest that you close your eyes, lean back in that posh executive office chair of yours, and at least try to imagine traveling to Gaza as you did to Ohio, and just imagine the possibility that you might be overwhelmed by how many people there never wanted this.

And about that Mancur Olson view to which you “very much subscribe” — you should subscribe harder. Olson concludes, by his own theory, “that autocracy is prevented and democracy permitted by the accidents of history that leave a balance of power or stalemate—a dispersion of force and resources that makes it impossible for any one leader or group to overpower all of the others.” You can “face head-on” the conclusion that Palestinians “have not lifted a finger” to improve their plight, that “a single authentic gesture toward real peace” is all that’s missing and all that’s required. In fact, you can headbutt that fact feeling all day if you like, but I doubt your boy Olson would ever have joined you. As far as I can tell, the only “unusually heavy expectations” being thrown around here are yours for the “peace-whenever-they-want-it,” “not-a-lick-of-sense” Palestinians.

So if you can stand to stretch your imagination an inch further, try to conjure up the very noncomplex idea that an internally and externally besieged people without so much as a state to call their home, are no less deserving of unbombed houses than you and your children are.

Daniel Bezalel Richardsen:

In one of [Luigi] Giussani’s several exegeses of Scripture, Abraham becomes a prefigurement of Christ in the sense that Abraham’s following of God’s voice, in having “his consciousness . . . woven together with that presence,” was so total that Abraham’s discovery of an absolute dependence would become “the prototype of all those whom the Lord would one day choose.” For Giussani, the awareness of this absolute belonging is the beginning of morality: 

God, the creator, made himself visible in Christ, and made humanity visible to itself, penetrated its existence, and moved it toward destiny. And this is the difficulty: not so much to be perfect, to be coherent, but to be ourselves. Life and time are given to us to become always more true, always more ourselves.

He adds that “in order for us to become truly wise, to desire, to be free—in order for us to become a true personality, which is the reason God created us—we must follow another. There is no other way, no intellectual effort or human cunning, that has the value of this method.” 

Theologian Aaron Riches states that according to Giussani “it is no longer the man of genius who is preferred but it is the one who is lowly, who is simple, who is pure of heart, who is able to recognize this event, this encounter.” For Giussani, an “existential awareness of what faith truly is” does not emerge from “a reasoning process nor of our study.” Rather, it is fundamentally “the fruit of an encounter” that elicits one “to make a total response” and becomes an event, leading to a life that dramatically gains an inner cohesion, which in turn changes how we perceive our relationship with others, with what has been given to us in our time, talent, and treasure, and transforms even how we look at our sins and limitations.

One of the principal ways that Christ transforms our humanity for Giussani is not simply in extraordinary gestures but in experiencing a redefinition of the everyday, the banal. He writes that “the most minute things in our daily life acquire dignity, have a vast horizon, are no longer a source of tedium and suffocation, and become above all a peaceful responsibility. . . . The banal is not what is small or habitual but that which denies the infinite, a forgetfulness of the God through whom we exist.” 

This perspective is not solipsistic but involves “the limit par excellence,” which is “the person next to us, whoever he or she may be.” We see here a reversal of Sartre’s maxim: Heaven is other people. In regaining our “I,” we learn how to truly say “you” to others, a deficiency that Giussani diagnoses as “the ultimate and hidden root of violence” in human relationships. 

Richardson closes with this from Giussani:

[In] the expectation of Christ’s final return—lived not as the resolution of present anguish or a formula for detachment, or even recrimination of the present time, but as the urgency to be awake to the truth of every contingent commitment, as the prophetic content of every serious love and responsibility toward the concrete path of life . . . a surprising affection for Christ flourishes, which is the supreme gift of the Spirit and the most authentic miracle of Christian life, of holiness. . . . 

The privilege given to one who abandons everything to Christ, the determining presence of my own “I” and the maker of my destiny, does not obliterate and does not sidestep the intelligent, serious engagement that makes judgments, the reason that searches, or the heart that is committed to the point of sacrificing itself, or the will that spends its energy in the tension of a struggle with daily work: this privilege allows all of this to come true and to endure in time. The abandonment of the self to Christ implies the co-involvement of all the forces of the “I.” What we want to affirm, characterizing the Christian life or holiness, is that everything is done for a love. 

Frederica Mathewes-Green:

When somebody refers to a church that “never changes,” that adheres to “ancient tradition,” we picture one that requires strict adherence to correct forms and behavior—sort of like people who reenact historic battles, but this time wearing Byzantine outfits. The motivation might be fear of the new, and fixation on the old simply because it is old. The desired result would be something like a museum diorama.

But think instead about what “unchanging” and “tradition” mean in a family—say, Christmas traditions. Every family that celebrates Christmas has its own traditions. In one family, everyone knows that it’s the angel, not the star, that goes on top of the tree. They know that everyone must wear one of Great-Grandma’s homemade scarves to the midnight church service. 

They know that you can open one, and only one, present on Christmas Eve. At Christmas dinner, they know to set the table with the now-faded red and green napkins.

But they also know that it doesn’t matter who gets what color. If Grandpa had a red one last year and gets a green one now, no one would even notice. An outsider might say, “Aha! You broke your tradition!” But those inside the family know, instinctively it seems, how to handle variations. There’s not only a tradition; there’s a tradition about the tradition. You couldn’t figure it out by looking from the outside. You’d think they were always breaking their own rules. But those who are inside a community learn by living, it seems, where tradition is stretchy and where it is not.

That’s the kind of tradition people follow willingly. It’s not a dead tradition, but a living, life-giving tradition. It can be called “living” even though it doesn’t change. In fact, its unchanging quality is somehow part of its strength, as those alive today link arms with all who went before.

Christmas traditions aren’t maintained for the sake of tradition, but for the sake of the family. Traditions are kept because they do something. They foster love and joy, and bind people together. Family members don’t complain that a Christmas tradition is old-fashioned, or that it’s the same thing they did last year. Old, familiar traditions seem fresh and lively, because they renew the family’s life.

Imagine that a member of this family wanted to add a new tradition—say, that on Christmas Eve they’d all watch the movie A Christmas Story together. That new tradition might fit right into the old, overarching tradition. It wouldn’t feel like it was challenging or revising that tradition, but like an enhancement, a bonus.

But now imagine that, after a few years, people have had more than enough of A Christmas Story. They start coming late to the Christmas gathering just so they don’t have to watch it again. That new tradition failed; it didn’t pass the test of generating life and joy. A custom could slide into, then out of, a family’s Christmas traditions without much fanfare either way. […]

When something new is added to the toolbox, it has to prove itself; it must be shown effective in the transformation process. […]

You’ll sometimes hear it said that there are big-T Traditions that are observed everywhere, and little-t traditions that are more flexible. That is sometimes a useful distinction, but not always, I think; the gradations can be so much more subtle than that, and there are also times when people disagree about whether something is a big or small T.

Such disagreements don’t always have to be resolved. Sometimes we can just wait them out, while the healing mission of the Church continues unimpeded. 

These devices, and especially these apps, were designed to hook your child. They were designed with full knowledge of brain development, dopamine circuits, motivation, insecurity. These are predatory programs that prey on children.

Freddie deBoer:

I am far from the first to observe that while TikTok’s persona is defined by its teenaged users its reality is defined by adult users who would like to think of themselves as one of those teenaged users. It’s not a symbol of actual teen culture; it’s a symbol of the adult yearning to be a teen. The reality seems to be that when you hand people a front-facing camera, they look into it hoping to find someone who looks younger than they really do. This is a human impulse, an understandable one, but with the notion that adulthood is something to prize and maturity nothing to fear long dead, when there’s no counterweight, you end up with a culture that can’t look at itself in an honest way. Print the legend, I guess. […]

The more depressing thing about the short-lived TikTok freakout, to me, was the deepening sense that adults are not just refusing to ever adopt interests that are appropriate for their age, but increasingly shameless about doing so, unconcerned with even appearing to move on. That’s scarier, to me. Because while I believe that everything should be embraced in moderation, including maturity – yes, I did buy The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered – I also think that a little guilt about our vices is a good thing. And what adult addiction to TikTok and FunkoPop and JoJo Siwa shows is an America that has rejected the idea that permanent childhood is a vice at all.

…What gets to me, these days, is not so much the fact that more and more people seem utterly resistant to acting their age. That’s an old story. What gets to me is the fact that more and more people are utterly unembarrassed about it – that they don’t even feel the need to pretend to act their age. The sensation that we should feel shame about a refusal to grow up now seems somewhat quaint to me. As in so many other domains of human socialization, it seems like many people feel like it’s too hard to object, and so just go along with wherever culture is blowing.

As a Millennial, I’ve gotten a front row seat to observe a generation reach middle age and decide, instead, to continue acting like we’re in the flower of our youth – delaying the trappings of adulthood like marriage and children, job hopping, obsessing over beauty and appearing young, drinking and smoking weed with the same frequency as the young, refusing to ever graduate on from the media and pop culture of one’s youth and towards something more mature, insisting to everyone and everything that you are still a work in progress or other expressions of responsibility-shucking bad faith, and more than anything, an all-encompassing belief that one should still be extended the affordances we give to people whose youth implies a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and grace. People love to unapologetically proclaim that they’re “a 33 year old teenager” or similar. Well, what cultural force exists now to pressure them to act their actual, numeric age? […]

I think the refusal of adulthood has many, many causes. But the identification of the death of context, here, is quite helpful. Ami and I are ingesting a lot amount of information about young babies, for obvious reasons, and it’s interesting to think of what it’s like to be a newborn – so many things are undifferentiated. I read that for infants colors bleed into each other, sounds can’t be separated, and in fact young enough babies are apparently not even aware that there is a difference between themselves and their environments. The point is that the cultural substrate has shifted in such a way that this undifferentiated affect, this sensory flood without context or development, has become a feature of not just infancy but of adult consciousness. The baby doesn’t know the difference between a lullaby and the hum of a refrigerator. Likewise, the adult in the algorithm doesn’t know the difference between sincerity and irony, the tragic and the comic, an actual person’s emotional unraveling and a bit. And crucially, more and more, they don’t want to know. Discernment is exhausting, and the vibe is everything. “Is this real?” becomes less important than “does this vibe?” Which is how you get people openly crying about a cat video one moment and then openly mocking someone else’s pain in the next, with neither leaving any mark. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Nothing matters. […]

So what’s left? If you abandon the moral authority of adulthood, if you abandon taste, if you abandon the concept of context, if you even abandon shame, then what remains is a kind of permanent ambient performance of “relatability.” That’s all TikTok is, at bottom: endless pantomimes of your internal life, designed to be recognized, not judged. It’s not about being funny or clever or beautiful or interesting, although all of those qualities are occasionally present. It’s about performing your proximity to the audience, performing sameness. I’m just like you, and you’re just like me. Which sounds democratic until you realize that the price of entry is the annihilation of self-differentiation. You can’t grow up if your prime directive is to remain legible to everyone else.

People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.

This, for me, is the core anxiety around TikTok and TikTokification: not that people are having fun, or even that people are being silly, but that so much of adult life is now defined by explicitly disavowing adulthood. Not by immaturity, but by a performative allergy to maturity. It’s not that we’re aging poorly, but that we’re pretending we’re not aging at all. And as always, once something becomes the dominant cultural mode, it becomes invisible. The fact that grown people spend multiple hours a day watching strangers lip sync and point at words in the air doesn’t strike anyone as odd anymore. We’ve all agreed not to be the scold, not to be the buzzkill, not to be the person who says “this might be a little bit sad.”

…There’s more people my age who want to live like teenagers than you may know. They like to believe that they’re still waiting for their lives to begin and they will do so even after they have the financial means to grow up. Again, undifferentiated – the denial of aging allows for the perpetual right to say “I am still unformed.” Adults cosplay as “neurodivergent” rather than admit to the mundane pains of being anxious or bored; adults refer to their spouses as “my partner in crime” and their dogs as their “fur babies”; adults find meaning only in being seen, rather than being responsible for anything. Adults brag about having no opinions, no preferences, no convictions, only vibes. It’s not a subculture. It’s the culture. […]

…The culture now rewards you for saying yes to everything. Yes to the 40-year-old’s toy haul, yes to never traveling anywhere but to Disneyland, yes to celebrity divorce gossip, yes to fake ADHD self-diagnosis, yes to the Spotify feed tube of pop dross that thrills 13-year-olds, yes to the holy algorithm. It’s so easy to say yes. And if that’s your prerogative, fine. But the more people who choose that route, the fewer people are left to say no: no to cruelty, no to laziness, no to willful ignorance. No to being less than what you are capable of becoming. Adulthood is hard. But it’s not a trap. It’s the mechanism by which we build a world worth living in.

“Thank goodness we’re all dead inside, as otherwise the pathos of our national decline might kill us.”

Freddie deBoer:

I’m a writer. Though I’m given to waxing pretentious about my profession, here that’s not a philosophical statement or some soul-searching claim about vocation; I mean it in the most banal way possible. I write things, and sometimes people read them. If I’m lucky, they think about the things that I’ve written after they read them. If I’m really, really lucky, some small number of them change their minds, in however small a way. That is the actual arc of what I do: words, then readers, then (rare but real) effects on thinking, usually minor ones. That arc is narrow, fragile, and unpredictable. The range of things I can meaningfully influence is small. The kinds of readers I reach are finite. And when it comes to Donald Trump, there is nothing I can say that will matter, not even a little bit.

That’s not some empty gesture of fatalism. It’s a recognition of reality. There’s already an immense and suffocating media ecosystem built entirely around Donald Trump, pro and con, left and right, earnest and cynical. The man is the gravitational center of modern American political discourse. He is the sun around which all else orbits. He has been analyzed, dissected, profiled, parodied, investigated, indicted, psychoanalyzed, lionized, and demonized to a degree that exceeds comprehension. Every possible critique of him has already been made, often in triplicate. His corruption, his cruelty, his incompetence, his shamelessness – all of it has been written a thousand times, often by people far more credentialed and connected in the world of partisan politics than I am. He and his reign are topics so saturated with analysis that there’s scarcely any rhetorical oxygen left to consume.