An unposted draft from almost exactly one year ago. I think that it felt too ranty (it is), and there were some unknowns and discomforts with Crawford’s post that I didn’t want to jump into (which was part of the desire for a “bookclub” meeting). But I don’t mind posting now that the moment has well passed.

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Every once in a while you come across an article, or an essay, or a Substack post, that you want to have a “book club” meeting on. (Is there such a thing as a Substack club?)

Seriously, it’s like Matthew Crawford is reading my mind:

Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”

“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”

The rest of the post is fascinating, and adds plenty of goosebumps and exponents to the mind-reading factor.

Being from central Maine, I have little to say about the way immigration plays into this for Crawford. For the sake of this post, at least, I leave that to him and “the French,” both of whom rightfully have more to say on the subject.

But what I do see — all … the … time — is what Crawford calls an expanding field of petty harms. Between Meghan and my Dad, it’s becoming daily conversation.

I’m not claiming that all the muffler-mod and very-unnecessary-lift jockeys that needlessly (and insecurely) roam the streets trying to boost their testosterone levels are potential arsonist and psychopaths, but I do think they tend to be proverbial arsonists and real-life assholes. And though it’s a daily gripe, it is one among an increasing many.

The problem is that I haven’t figured out how seriously to take myself, because I know I sound more and more like a curmudgeon who’s losing (lost?) his mind. Here’s a small sampling of this week’s interminable thought-rant:

• A literal inability drive anywhere without being tailgated.
• An ever-increasing number of people who simply must drive 10, 15, 20 mph over the speed limit — at all times. And all of them purely indignant at the notion that any other car on the road would make them lift their toes to press the brake pedal.
• No eye-contact from the Staples/UPS guy the entire time you’re having a “conversation” with him.
• Restaurant hosts who might as well just say What do you want? when you walk in the door.
• City planners and board members who visibly roll their eyes when life-long community members (whose feet the board members should be washing!) dare to raise their hand and ask about the changes the board wants to make, changes that just happen to benefit a local real estate tycoon who (shock) used to be a board member.
• And of course there is the quaint coastal Maine home, built in 1984, that was sold by the original owner in 2021 for what was (all of 5 minutes ago) the shocking price of $290,000, then sold again in 2023 for the mind-numbing price of $440,000. And just in case you thought that that covers the sad part, this now fully-renovated home… house… building… piece of capital will soon be on the market, less than one year later, for a price that should cause all of us, the most cynical and sane alike, to become muffler-modding proverbial arsonists ourselves. If you guessed $1,000,000, congratulations, you’re off by about the normal price of a house less than a decade ago. In less than three years this lovely house went from a $290,000 home to a $1,150,000 piece of real estate.

These are only a few of the petty (and not-so-petty) harms. There is also lack of what I’ll call “petty goods” that we have for so long taken for granted. For instance, I have been to every Home Depot and Lowes in central-southern Maine. Not one of them has a professional anything who works for them anymore, or if they do you can’t find them. Instead you will find a genuinely very-nice-someone who is fresh off of “training” and who either has the bad sense to point you in the wrong direction or the good sense to point you in no direction. The common practice now is to go there and, since they have neither the product I’m looking for nor the answer I need, to spend an hour “googling” information about alternative products. (We are all Ron Swanson now, but with phones and YouTube accounts.)

I used to be very fond of the saying: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” But I’ve lost a little of the nerve to laugh at that joke because, well, I run into assholes all day long. I admit that I have lately lost a lot of patience, but I also think that the field of petty harms is actually expanding while the ballast of my ship is starting to slip.

I’m not claiming world or national historic records. And there’s a disclaimer needed about hindsight and confirmation bias and whatnot, one that involves a restaurant table in Pokrovsk covered in 1930s Chicago newspaper clippings. But that’s a post for another day.

Joshua P. Hochschild:

Josef Pieper… emphasizes that the prudent person must avoid inordinate confidence and yet cultivate a supple reli-ability. Docility, he says, “is the kind of openmindedness which recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced as does not cage itself in any presumption of deceptive knowledge.” And shrewdness is steadiness “when confronted with a sudden event,” nimbleness “in response to new situations.”

Do not these describe the qualities of a Christian who doesn’t lose faith even while being led to the lions? Note that Ignatius is not counseling apathy, or Stoic resignation. … Martyrs are clever and creative, but they do not coldly calculate the most advantageous outcome. In this light, the activity of prudence, as personally ennobling, can hardly be confused with modern social-scientific discussions of risk management, precautionary reasoning, and prediction.

The functionally amoral modern concept of prudence is essentially a fragmentation, or a disintegration, of the classical concept, breaking up elements of an organic whole. The components of prudence that Saint Thomas identified (eight of them, drawing on Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius, and others) tune judgment so that the agent can align his actions with reality. Isolating or overemphasizing any one of these removes it from the context of virtue.

Jake Meador:

Tolerance is founded not on the idea that it is good that injustice be allowed, but rather on the idea that our own ability to define justice or goodness or truth is actually far more limited than many of us think. Tolerance is founded on the simple but essential form of intellectual modesty (and truthfulness!) that is willing to say, “but I could be wrong.” Tolerance flows from a recognition of our own fallibility as humans and an appropriate fear that we would act in the name of something we believe to be good only to discover, perhaps too late and after hurting others, that we were wrong. It is indeed one liberal virtue that we might call one of liberalism’s strong gods because it calls us to see glories and goodnesses that do not exist today but might one day come to fruition, if only we would bear with one another and patiently endure our disagreements as they exist amid our shared civic life. […]

The great object of your decisions made today should not simply be “What will satisfy me now?” but rather: “What will shape me so that I will be healthy and joyful in 50 years … or in 1,000 years?” Patience justifies the practice of mercy and tolerance because it recognizes that we ourselves will change with time, as will our neighbors. So, it is wise and good to give people space and opportunity to change organically in response to love and care and the ordinary happenings of life, rather than seeking to impose stringent and exacting demands on them as part of some doomed project of political perfectionism.

This, then, is how to argue for liberalism in an age of strong gods and agonistic politics: Do you wish to be healthy and easily capable of giving and receiving love decades from now? Then be patient. Do you desire to be like God? Show mercy. If you do not believe in God, do you desire to be free from resentment, bitterness, and anger? Do you desire to be free from the negative control exerted on you by the person you struggle to forgive? Then you too should be merciful. Do you hope that you and your family will have the chance to grow naturally across time toward health and maturity and belonging? Then practice toleration. 

Heather Cox Richardson:

In 1817, given the choice of subjects to paint for the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington’s resignation from the army. As he discussed the project with President James Madison, Trumbull told the president: “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success, and such irreproachable moderation.”

Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily walking away from the leadership of a powerful army rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the Capitol Rotunda.

Chris Owen:

We are motorboat people in a motorboat world. The wind doesn’t matter. Motorboat people don’t discern. We decide. […]

By contrast, sailing is a conversation. The wind makes an assertion, and the sails take in what the wind has spoken; the boat tilts, as if cocking an ear in response. The helmsman listens, and seeks to connect the wind’s assertion and the boat’s response to the course this conversation is on, contextualizing the exchange, making meaning. The helmsman may affirm what the wind has said or remain silent. Or he may introduce a new idea entirely, bringing the boat through the eye of the wind, continuing the conversation now from a fresh angle. The wind, the boat, and the sailor listen to one another and respond.

This conversation is not small talk; these are not idle words.

Here’s an emotional reaction I wouldn’t mind a little more insight into.

When I saw David Brooks’ piece listed on the cover of the new Comment issue, I have to admit that I was a little annoyed and/or sad to see it. Absolutely irrespective of who he is married to, I think this has mostly to do with mixing things I don’t want mixed — Comment ain’t a New York Times column.

But there might be more to it.

I tried reading the piece several times this morning, only to sluggishly get through a third of it. I’m sure the whole thing is a wise and commendable piece (here: I commend it to you), and I’m absolutely sure that I both agree with it and would be goodly challenged by it — and by the wisdom of those he pulls it all from.

But I just can’t finish it.

I like David Brooks, I really do. But for all of Brooks’ thoughtfulness and wisdom — he is thoughtful; he is wise — I can’t help feeling that I don’t want to read anything from him for at least the rest of the year.

Have I just grown tired of his writing? Annoyed, even? Is it merely fallout from my current push to unplug every cord from the walls for 167.5 hours of the week?

Or is there something else? Is there possibly something vacuous to it that I just can’t put my finger on?

Would that make it fallout, ripple effect, or feature?

Or is it just me?

Wright Morris’s 1948 book Home Place is about as dull and uneventful a book as I have ever read — and I could not love it more. An antidote for the times if ever I’ve found one. (An antidote for his times as well, it’s worth noting.)

Most of what Morris holds forth in this little book is held forth slant. Some of it is in the story, which is fiction and describes a single day with a man returned to his home farm from the city with his wife and two kids, and some in the images and in the layout, which contains for every page of text a black & white picture from a Morris family farm in Nebraska. (The final 20 or so pages, with only a portion of text on the page for each picture opposite it, is a stunningly slant move that works on memory in way you’d just have to read the book for.)

But Morris can also look a thing in the face in a way most of us would have to admit we are inspired and guilted by:

I put my hands up to my face, as it occurred to me, suddenly, how people looking in a Daily News photograph. A smiling face at the scene of a bloody accident. A quartet of gay waitresses near the body slumped over the bar. God only knows why I thought of that, but I put up my hands, covering my face, as if I was there, on the spot, and didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be violated, that is. The camera eye knows no privacy, the really private is its business, and in our time business is good. But what, in God’s name, did that have to do with me? At the moment, I guess, I was that kind of camera.

Was there something holy about these things? If not, why had I used that word? For holy things, they were ugly enough. I looked at the odds and ends on the bureau, the pin-cushion lid on the cigar box, the faded Legion poppies, assorted pills, patent medicines. There was not a thing of beauty, a man-made loveliness, anywhere. A strange thing, for whatever it was I was feeling, at that moment, was what I expect a thing of beauty to make me feel. To take me out of my self, into the selves of other things. I’ve been in the habit, recently, of saying that if we could feel anything, very long, it would kill us, and that we get on by not even feeling ourselves. To keep that from happening we have this thing called embarrassment. That snaps it off, like an antisepsis, or we rely on our wives, or one of our friends, to take the pressure out of the room with a crack of some kind. That’s what I was about to do. For once in my life I didn’t, but as I had to do something I went into Ed’s room, opened the bureau drawer, and called, “Oh, Peg!” When she came in I said— “Ed used to hunt. He used to go off for a day at a time, with a dog and a gun, up the river. When I was a kid there was still a wolf or two around here.” I said that, then I closed the drawer, making it clear that we could mind his public business, but leave his private business alone. There were several snapshots on the mirror and I looked at them—for my mother—but I didn’t turn them over to read on the back. “Well, she’s not there,” I said, and came back to the table, pulled out a chair, and looked at the old man’s shoes on the seat.

For thirty years I’ve had a clear idea what the home place lacked, and why the old man pained me, but I’ve never really known what they had. I know now. But I haven’t the word for it. The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn’t describe what there is about an old man’s shoes. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib, with the ironed-in stitches, of an old man’s overalls. Character is the word, but it doesn’t cover the ground. It doesn’t cover what there is moving about it, that is. I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That’s too bad. For this character is beautiful. I’m not going to labor the point, but there’s something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character. The same word, but a new specific gravity. Perhaps all I’m saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of Passion has made them holy things. That kind of holiness, I’d say, is abstinence, frugality, and independence—the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity. Not the land of plenty, the old age pension, or the full dinner pail. Independence, not abundance, is the heart of America.

Blathmac son of Cú Brettan son of Congus of the Fir Rois, 8th century (via Conor McDonough):

A stream of blood gushed forth – too severe –

so that the bark of every tree became red.

There was gore on surfaces of the world,

in the treetops of every chief forest. It was fitting for God’s elements,

beautiful sea, blue sky, this earth,

that they should change their aspect

when lamenting their hero (ll. 241-248, 257-260).

His Grace Bishop Irenei of London and Western Europe:

So there have been a few reports of late, including this most recent one currently making the rounds, about a number of young people converting to Orthodoxy, particularly young men, converting because they find in the Orthodox Church, according to these reports, an environment that preaches ‘masculinity’ and real ‘manhood’. And I want to say that if you’re here because you think that that’s what we are here to do, then you are a fool. This is stupidity. ‘Masculinity’, so far as I am aware, is not an Orthodox term. It is not a term that has any traditional place in Christianity. It is a term embraced by the secular world because this world has rejected normal concepts of humanity, in which of course there is male and there is female, there is child, there is adult. These are simply human beings. But because the world has lost sight of the basics of what it means to be human, it is forced to respond to the lack of clarity it has pushed on itself by fostering these concepts of ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’, and so on. 

None of this has anything to do with the teaching of Jesus Christ. This Church proclaims a simple reality that in Jesus Christ our Saviour, all of us discover what it means to be a human being, what it means to become a human person. And this is to live according to the Gospel after the image of Christ. If you have lost sight of what it means to be a man in this strange world, or if you have lost sight of what it means to be a woman in this strange world, this is hardly surprising. This world is more confused about these simple concepts than about almost anything else. So if you are here because you are confused and you wish to find sanity and normality in the teaching of Christ: God bless you, and may we by God’s mercy be of some help.

But if you are here because you think this is a place where you can reinforce some cultural masculinity, if you’re here because you think this is the place to rebel against what you see going on politically around you or socially around you, please keep on going — go somewhere else. We are not here for this reason. We preach one thing and one thing only: the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord. We preach it without fear, and we preach it without agenda. Our only goal is that every single human being might become a living image of Christ Himself. That men might become Christ-like men; that women might become Christ-like women; that children might be true children of God; that the aged might find the real respect due to those who long live and struggle for Christ; that this world might come to understand what it means to be redeemed.