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From an essay I wrote in 2019, in a class on the history of genocide:

In the past, one person hears “Russia” and thinks of godless communists; another hears it and thinks of heroes as compared to capitalism or colonial rule. But is either one concerned with the truth? And haven’t we seen the most bizarre flip recently between which sides of the political aisle want to emphasize Russian corruption? Is it possible that what Paul Hollander said of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who were enamored with communism—Duranty, Wells, Shaw, Sartre, to name a few—is still true today? 

“Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels. They were inclined to give every benefit of doubt to these social systems and were successful in screening out qualities that might have detracted from their positive vision. … While manipulations of the visitors’ experiences—or as I call them, the techniques of hospitality—doubtless influenced the judgements…I do not believe that these techniques were decisive. What was decisive was the predisposition of the intellectuals themselves.” (Hollander, 1981, p. 6)

How does Hollander explain the “predisposition” to overlook such corruption and suffering? Ideologies and partisan commitments. I know it is cynical—and I’m not saying that nothing has improved—but it’s hard to see how present-day Ukraine should be struck with much confidence from the west. 

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John Eskonas, on The Death of the Fact:

Few things feel more immutable or fixed than a ball of cold, solid steel. But if you have a million of them, a strange thing happens: they will behave like a fluid, sloshing this way and that, sliding underfoot, unpredictable. In the same way and for the same reason, having a small number of facts feels like certainty and understanding; having a million feels like uncertainty and befuddlement. The facts don’t lie, but data sure does. […]

But in a world of superabundant, readily recalled facts, generating the umpteenth fact rarely gets you much. More valuable is skill in rapidly re-aligning facts and assimilating new information into ever-changing stories. Professionals create value by generating, defending, and extending compelling pathways through the database of facts: media narratives, scientific theories, financial predictions, tax law interpretations, and so forth. The collapse of any particular narrative due to new information only marginally reshapes the database of all possible narratives.

---

Hannah Arendt:

And though this continuing instability gives no indication of what the truth might be, it is itself an indication, and a powerful one, of the lying character of all public utterances concerning the factual world. It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

---

Rebecca West:

There has also been in America a wave of cynicism, entirely mindless, destitute of all content, save “Oh, yeah” and “So what,” which, by a strange twist, results in a bland acceptance of the whole universe that has never been surpassed by Christian Scientists. An automatic scepticism regarding stories of atrocities leads to a rosy belief that every member of an invading army behaves with the courtesy of a cinema theatre usher. The Serbs must have been mistaken in believing that the Germans and the Austrians passed through village after village, wrecking houses, smashing the furniture, emptying corn and pouring wine and oil into the mud, and trampling on the icons. Any peasant in the invaded countries over thirty can tell you that it was so, but innumerable Americans, over and under thirty, can tell you that it was not so. This battlefield was therefore to them an area of pure nonsense, discreditable to the human race.

And so it is to some extent to many English intellectuals. If the Serbs had done something … something … something, they need not have fought. So one feels, when one is young, on hearing that a friend has to have a dangerous operation for cancer. Surely if she had not eaten meat, if she had not eaten salt, she need not have had cancer; and by inference one need not have cancer oneself. Yet cancer exists, and has a thousand ways of establishing itself in the body; and there is no end to the ways one country may make life intolerable for another. But let us not think of it any more, let us pretend that operations are unnecessary, let every battlefield seem a place of prodigious idiocy. Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there?

The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know. This battlefield is deprived of its essence in the minds of men, because of their fears and ignorances; it cannot even establish itself as a fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts.

Peggy Noonan:

And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.

Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.

Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow.

Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.

When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.

Jesse Singal:

It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years. 

This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.

Seamus Heaney:

[W]hatever the possibilities of achieving political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.

Put an image to that — the mental frontier as, say, a rocky mountain pass or meadow — and tell me it doesn’t meliorate a harsh, divided, unforgiving thought-life.

But I think there’s even more to it — something that gets at why that physical image is so mentally helpful. The very real act of physically walking that frontier, just walking around and being in the physical world, is part of that melioration. The image helps because it brings you back to what life is really like.

To be online — and, admittedly, though in a very different way, even to be in books — is to be in a thought-world, one that cannot help but continuously divide and extend itself. It’s good and even fun to divide and extend ourselves, to challenge our thinking and grow our understanding. But this is meant to be done a) for bracketed amounts of time, or b) as that perpetual background noise of the conscious and sentient beings-in-the-world that we are.

Books are easy to put down, partly because they are physically put down. Through their narrative — whether fiction or non-fiction — they are also as likely to thrust us, mentally and physically, back into the real world. Books can go wrong, and so can reading them, but they bear this earth-loving propensity. Every minute spent online, however, bears the opposite propensity — it takes you further and further out from the world that houses it.

It seems so simple to say it, but the more that we are online, the less grounded we are or even can be — and the more that that online world will reflect its own reality distinct from the world it started in, the real one it was meant to (constantly) reflect and return to. Instead of reflecting and returning to that real world, more and more we simply occupy one and not the other. And what time we do spend in the real one tends to get short shrift, since the constant thought of what to write or post or react to in that other world is not much better than if we never left it. (Again, books have a decidedly different and positive effect when they are put down.)

There’s a theory about dreams that says that their purpose is connected to neuroplasticity. Put simply, the brain rewires itself too quickly to take eight hours off every day. By keeping our most important senses active while we sleep, it keeps those neurons active as well. For most of us, that means the neurons in the visual cortex. In a way, dreaming keeps the sense perceptions we value most from being hijacked while we’re asleep.

But what if we were capability of hijacking our own visual cortex while we’re awake? And what if we’re increasingly making a world that encourages us to do this? And not just with our sense of “sight,” but our entire sense of “attention”?

Compare the average day of “I wonder what’s going on on the internet” (it would help if you actually called it that, because that’s what it is) to what Mark Doty said after staring at a painting at The Met, a still-life of “a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem”:

And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

Again, this seems painfully, ridiculously obvious, but the longer this live cultural experiment goes on, the more I am convinced that one of the most important things people can do — the most meaningful thing to improve our lives — is to spend more and more time away from those “devices” that transport us out of the only world we evolved to occupy, the only places we were made to be.

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Something I read from Kay Ryan this afternoon (09/02):

I do think that people can get very stuck in detail if their memories are too accurate or, alternatively, they can live in an adolescent misty supercharged half-realm if their memories are not accurate but nonetheless intense, memories which have so ambered with repeated rememberings that they have become simplified, enlarged, and stylized (usually in the directions of Good and Evil).

This “supercharged half-realm” sounds to me like a description of the way that all too many people are walking around the world without really walking around the world. We’re so often supercharging, simplifying, enlarging, and stylizing our opinions without knowing how far off the ground we are.

Some related things on the significance of having — and finding and cultivating — ideals.

Kay Ryan:

“Odd Blocks”

Every Swiss-village
calendar instructs
as to how stone
gathers the landscape
around it, how
glacier-scattered
thousand-ton
monuments to
randomness becomes
fixed points in
finding home.
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back?

I think that speaks as much to meaningfully finding your way through life’s randomness (appreciating the “odd blocks”) as it does to having “ideals,” but I think it’s related.

More to the point, Ryan said in a 2000 essay that we all know ideals are not fully attainable.

Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners …

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Nan Shepherd:

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquilise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle — as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

That seems to me to be a perfect combination of Kay Ryan’s necessary “banners” and her beautiful, “odd blocks.”

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The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.

Now, this one sounds to me like an idealized lack of ideals, or something to that effect, which is an idea, and perhaps a phrasing, that I find quite attractive. You could say that this presentation of Christian life and practice is idealized, and I think it certainly is. But for all the eye rolling that “idealists” suffer, another way to think of some idealized good is to see it as something that must and should be worked for.

The writer’s description of Christian community may strain credulity, but it also strains possibility.

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Vladimir Solovyov:

So-called spiritual love is a phenomenon which is not only abnormal, but also completely purposeless, because the separation of the spiritual from the sensuous to which such love aspires, is accomplished without it, and in the best possible way by death. True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of immortal from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.

Love in its true form, ever both real and idealized, is love that embodies, transfigures, regenerates, resurrects — creates.

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G. K. Chesterton:

I believe myself that this braver world of his will certainly return; for I believe that it is bound up with realities, like morning and the spring. But for those who beyond remedy regard it as an error, I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First let us sympathize, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If democracy has disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but at least as a broken heart, an old love-affair. Do not sneer at the time when the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon; treat it with the dreadful reverence that is due to youth. For you, perhaps, a drearier philosophy has covered and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, «Abandon hope all ye who enter here» over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of today have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, forego for a little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear; deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very flower of your culture; give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.

You won’t find much more Chestertonian Chesterton than that!

ABANDON HOPELESSNESS, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!

That strikes me as a perfect banner to hold aloft, “stitched in gold upon a field of gold.”

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Søren Kierkegaard:

Suppose there are two artists and one of them says, “I have traveled much and seen much in the world, but I have sought in vain to find a person worth painting. I have found no face that was the perfect image of beauty to such a degree that I could decide to sketch it, in every face I have seen one or another little defect, and therefore I seek in vain.” Would this be a sign that this artist is a great artist? The other artist, however, says, “Well, I do not actually profess to be an artist; I have not traveled abroad either but stay at home with the little circle of people who are closest to me, since I have not found one single face to be so insignificant or so faulted that I still could not discern a more beautiful side and discover something transfigured in it. That is why, without claiming to be an artist, I am happy in the art I practice and find it satisfying.” Would this not be a sign that he is indeed the artist, he who by bringing a certain something with him found right on the spot what the well-traveled artist did not find anywhere in the world — perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him!

Whether you’re talking about an art or an ideal, or about love or faith: you bring a certain something with you and you discover something transfigured in what you see.

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Richard Wilbur:

A Summer Morning


Her young employers, having got in late
From seeing friends in town
And scraped the right front fender on the gate,
Will not, the cook expects, be coming down.

She makes a quiet breakfast for herself,
The coffee-pot is bright,
The jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,

Then, with the bread-knife lifted, stands and hears,
The sweet efficient sounds
Of thrush and catbird, and the snip of shears
Where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,

A gardener works before the heat of the day.
He straightens for a view
Of the big house ascending stony-gray
Out of his beds mosaic with the dew.

His young employers having got in late,
He and the cook alone
Receive the morning on their old estate,
Possessing what the owners can but own.

| The GOP Cowardice Caucus |

In a live, nationally televised address forty-nine years ago this month, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, telling the American people that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress” to survive Watergate and serve out his term. This August, charges were brought against Donald Trump in both federal court and in Fulton County, Georgia, for his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. At rallies, on cable TV, and in social media, Trump has railed at the charges against him, repeated the falsehoods that led to them, mocked the prosecutors who brought them, and issued thinly veiled threats against judges and potential witnesses. He has taken advantage of free media publicity to rake in millions of dollars from small donors, much of which he is apparently using to pay his mounting legal bills. Nevertheless, Trump still has the backing of more than half of Republican primary voters. Not coincidentally, he enjoys what Nixon, who faced no criminal charges, did not: a solid base of support from Republicans in Congress.

As the editors go on to say, cowardice is the only reason that Republican leaders, and the Party in general, have not rid themselves of Trump.

But is it the only reason? Or is Trump’s support from Republicans more deeply rooted? Perhaps they do not need to rid themselves of Trump because that is who they are now. Maybe he actually represents them.

To repeatedly beat a dead horse: The Republican Party is not really a political party. More than anything else, it is a cult of grievance and personality. It has no positive vision and exists solely to piss off the other party.

As bad as he is for everything in the world, Trump is perfect for them. Just perfect.

Rohit Krishnan:

Because we know how these breaks help people who are lucky enough to take them. By helping them learn new things, but helping them to get time to think more deeply, by taking time to travel and experience life. We know from countless examples how pivotal this “time off” can be in incubating new ideas, digging deeper into existing ones, and acting like the starting gun for a new journey. And yet, for most professionals, taking a substantial break remains all but impossible. It is a lost art, the province of the privileged few.

The remaining question is one of opportunity cost and the benefits. Because the costs are easily visible – a year’s salary or so, gone. The benefits are diffuse, a new passion, a new project, a new way of thinking, inspiration, all hard to either measure or anticipate. Invisible to the naked eye perhaps, but no less real for it.

Robert Pogue Harrison:

It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called on to forge.