Alan Jacobs:

The liberal arts, and the humanities, do not live only or even primarily in universities. They can, and they do, flourish elsewhere, among people who ain’t got time for academic bullshit.

I love this. And I hope it’s very true. But I don’t think it’s as true as I want it to be. I think there’s a circle that is just outside of “academic bullshit” but that still includes mostly “academics” talking to each other. People who are miles and miles from academia, the bullshit kind or otherwise, and who are thinking about the liberal arts and the humanities—where they is?

Unless, of course, what we’re talking about is the liberal arts and the humanities leaking out and bouncing around the culture but in a form not known or referred to as the liberal arts or the humanities.

I hope I’m not just being picky (or bullshitting) here. I really am interested in how “things” get passed around in their more subtle, even unnamed or nameless forms. In fact, these may be the most important forms they take, especially since, well, most people “ain’t got time for academic bullshit.”

In his essay “Self-Evident Truth and the Declaration of Independence,” Michael Zuckert makes the case that when Thomas Jefferson ultimately settled on the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he and the signers of the Declaration knew perfectly well that the truths themselves are not, strictly speaking, self-evident.

Zuckert argues that, rather than being self-evident by strict definition, the “political or practical status” of the truths listed is more the intention that Jefferson and others had in view. In their minds, since not all citizens could be scientists and philosophers, it would be necessary for many to hold such truths as if they were self-evident: “…healthy political life requires that the results of the most advanced philosophic and scientific speculation be ‘held’ in order to be effective by a community which was not itself philosophic or scientific.” The “truths” of the Declaration were not to be presented here as the result of hours, years, centuries of political insight to which anyone might dedicate himself in study.

They are rather to be held as if self-evident within the political community dedicated to making them effective. . . . While they stand as the conclusion of some (unspecified) chain of philosophical or scientific reasoning, they must stand at the beginning of all chains of political reasoning.

The benefit of this may be at least twofold. On the one hand, the actual nature of the truths themselves encourages a value for education, particularly civic education. On the other hand, the fact that they would be held in practice as though they were self-evident means that such education and proliferation of information and reason, important as they are, will not become a sine qua non for the success of that society. This is especially valuable since, as we should know quite well by now, even the learning of truth itself does not necessitate its being “held.” The emphasis in the end is on the importance that these truths be held by all, regardless of how they were arrived at by the individual.

As Jefferson put it: “He who made us would have been a pitiful burgher, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science there are thousands who are not.”

This brings to mind a famous quote from John Ruskin, perhaps one-upping the significance of widely held political truths with a version that we might apply to the liberal arts and the humanities:

Then, as touching the kind of work done by [painters and poets], the more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me,—that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,—all in one.

I hope that the “elsewhere flourishing” of the liberal arts and the humanities that Jacobs has in mind is something like this. That, far from the towers and the bowels of academia, there are thousands thinking for one who can see. That, miles from the Land of Universities, there is a simple universitas accessing “the best that has been thought and known.” That, whatever grand total of human knowledge and goodness we mean when we talk about the liberal arts and the humanities, any one of us anywhere might see and be a part of that goodness—no matter what name it goes by.

David French:

How do we fight past our partisanship to become truly curious about the truth? For me, the answer started with the first principle of my conservatism: Human beings possess incalculable worth. If that is true, and my neighbors and fellow citizens are crying out about injustice, I should hear their voices and carefully consider their claims.

My initial inability to see the truth is related to the second principle, that human beings are deeply flawed. I had no trouble applying that principle to my opponents. But it also applies to those I generally admire. It applies to police officers. It applies to me.

The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.

Susan Cain:

[In Gregory Burns’s 2005 study on social conformity,] the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain association with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.

…It’s not that you’re saying consciously, “Hmm, I’m not sure, but they all think the answer’s A, so I’ll go with that.” Nor are you saying, “I want them to like me, so I’ll just pretend that the answer’s A.” No, you are doing something much more unexpected—and dangerous. Most of Bern’s volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.

Burns refers to this as “the pain of independence,” and it has serious implications. Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

“The pain of independence” might be a suitable name for the purposes of Burns or Cain. But a better name, and one more fitting for what David French has in mind, might be something like “the pain of authenticity,” which does not require independence. Or “the pain of virtue.” Or, even better, “the pain of tzaddikim.”

It’s worth pointing out here that no film has ever done more justice to the pain and loneliness this crisis can bring than Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.

B.D. McClay, on “The Phenomenology of Guns“:

A person who keeps guns around to go hunting knows why they’re there. And hunting itself isn’t simply spree-killing wild animals; when you can go hunting is carefully regulated, certain animals are off-limits, and obligations to the animal—like a clean death—are enforced. In imbuing guns with a clear purpose, hunting also gives them an ethical framework.

But the United States is full of guns—including not only those owned by private individuals, but also the police—that have no purpose at all except to be used, one day or another, on human beings. How or why or when they will be used is almost impossible to answer. When they are, the only ethical guide available to consult at that moment is the user’s fear. If you’re sufficiently afraid, you can shoot a woman through the door. If you’re sufficiently afraid, you can shoot a man at a traffic stop for no reason at all, or a child who is doing nothing but playing outside. […]

I didn’t buy a tool to defend myself because I knew it would make me afraid—not that it would admit fear, but that it would transform the world around me into a world of potential threats. And while in fact I’ve had my share of low-level ugly encounters walking around my neighborhood—from nasty comments to someone blocking my way across the street with his car—I never wished that I had a can of wasp spray sitting in my pocket. If I had to say what I wished, it would be for the people who made it their business to intimidate me to see me as a person, too.

But if I had come to meet them armed, I would not have seen them as people either. They would have been unreal targets of potential violence—mine. And all I really know is that price is too high to pay.

I have no idea what got me onto this topic, but a few weeks ago I opened my mobile Scrivener app and started jotting down bullet points on why I keep two separate blogs. This is the squished-together result.

It started (I think) with this website, shortly after the pandemic started (I think), with texting a friend about taking the blog-plunge and about finding a unique name for a website that I could stick with. The purpose was to force myself to at least try a blog of some sort. A lot of people seem to be into the “commonplace blog,” so I just went for that. I looked at dozens of different themes, but this one (Independent Publisher) just fit perfectly, especially since it pretty much looks like an online notebook. No muss, little fuss.

As a commonplace blog, ninety percent of what gets posted here is quotes and links to articles and books I like. (It really helps to keep track of them. Sometimes I go back and read some of these posts and I have no memory of ever reading or posting them. And while I mainly post them as a way of keeping track of them, it’s also the best way I can find to share them. The thing is, I think that almost everything I read is worth reading, which means it’s worth sharing, and if I had it my way, I would be blowing up everyone’s phones all day long with links and quotes. No one wants this. A public place where anyone can read excerpts or follow links if they want is much better.) And sometimes, I try to write something that seems worth saying. Even these, however, aren’t usually attempts at public writing so much as exercises in discovery, either of the topic at hand or writing as a practice itself. The way I have put it before is this: Essentially, everything that I put online is for me. But it helps that it’s pubic—for family, friends, or anyone else—so that it at least can be for others. I also think that it does something for me (epistemologically?) to do personal thinking and writing in a public way.

The “micro blog” followed about a year later (I think). I have not had any sort of social media for years, and when I was leaving Maine to travel, many wanted a way to “follow along.” Micro.blog was the solution, mainly for those family and friends who have asked for some online “social” presence from me. (To be honest, I don’t think most of the people who asked actually follow it. In my experience, for most people, if it doesn’t automatically show up in their Facebook or Instagram feed, it’s too much work. And I have had zero success in getting anyone to transition away from the major social media platforms.) I would add, now, that it is also for whatever online community that may develop, and also just because I enjoy it.

Both of these spaces act, for me, as commonplace blogs. But they each have a different function. Generically speaking, one is for keeping quotes and for writing what little I do write. The other is more of a travel-, book-, and daily-life log.

There is, however, a deeper reason why I keep two blogs. I can’t say that it’s why it started, and I can’t say what got me thinking about it this way, but it certainly seems valid going forward. There’s a lot of talk about the damages of social media, and for a nearly infinite number of reasons. (Again, I don’t know what good knowing any of this, which we’ve known for at least a decade, does. I can think of only one person that I know who has gotten off the major platforms, and only one other who is straight-forward about it.) But one of the more prominent reasons for damage is the way that it paints—encourages us to paint—too rosy a picture of our lives.

I don’t talk much online about personal stuff. I don’t mention that, while I don’t think I’m depressed, I am “down” much of the time; that, while I’ve never really felt like I needed to give up on religion, I struggle deeply with faith; that, while I don’t imagine my own suicide, I constantly think about the ones that did do it; that, while I have a hard time imagining having lived life another way, I can’t help feeling that I’ve let my family and friends (and, frankly, the thing-that-is-my-life) down; that, while I want desperately to be a meaningful force for good, I feel less like a cog in the machine than an ant running around the cogs; that, on the whole, I feel stuck with more regrets than achievements. You aren’t likely to read about those thing here—but you are likely to catch intimations of them. That’s because the things that get posted on this blog are things that speak to that person.

On the other hand, life is full of simple and beautiful things. A while back, I was listening to a conversation between Kathryn Schulz and Andrew Sullivan on Schulz’s book Lost and Found. At some point in the interview, the two of them briefly lament the way that, in the wake of large numbers of trauma narratives, which are massively important, regular images of happy lives have in some ways become the “object of a lot of skepticism.” And as Schulz so simply put it, “I think that’s very sad.”

I was thinking about this on an early morning hike the other day. One of the reasons I like micro.blog is it’s built-in tendency to encourage authenticity over show. It may be the way the site is designed, or it may be that the design invites a certain kind of person and practice. The best way to explain it might be an example: In my experience, I am not likely to see someone post about “living their best life” at the beach; I am likely to see someone post a picture of a seashell they found and enjoyed seeing while they were at the beach. The difference between those two kinds of posts is, uh… night and day.

So I suppose the one blog is more likely to deal with the harder, deeper things—because life is hard and it has more depth than we ever know. The other is hopefully, simply about more hopeful, simple things—because life is good, and sometimes a nice picture of almost anything that someone cares about can remind you of this simple and hopeful goodness. Life is hard, painful, sometimes very shitty—but still good, still beautiful, still full of the most profound joys.

And so, for me, keeping two blogs helps to add to the dialectic, to “keep it real,” to stir up thoughtfulness and happiness. That’s the hope, anyway.

Michael Walzer:

A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. …

… The adjective is a pluralizing adjective. With regard to democracy, it implies that there is a right of opposition to the ruling party, which means that there have to be other parties.

Sometimes when someone asks what my political affiliations are, I answer, “I’m a conservative-liberal-soicialist-anarchist.” While I’m definitely trying to be funny, I’m also completely serious; I really do think that all those things can be true at the same time. Or at least that there are qualities of each that can be held together.

I’ve never gone very far in spelling out those qualities, in thought let alone in writing, but it would be fun and very helpful to do. That quote from Walzer, whose new book I have not read (yet), is a great start. And maybe indicates a more specific arrangement of words: I’m a liberal conservative-socialist-anarchist.

It’s worth quoting Walzer from the beginning of the interview:

If we imagine the kinds of battles that are going on over democracy…; if we imagine some of the long, old arguments about the role of vanguards in the forward movement of socialism; if we think about the battles that are now going on over nationalism in many parts of the world, where we are facing an increasingly illiberal version of nationalism—in all these cases, it seems that getting democracy right, getting socialism right, getting nationalism right really hangs on getting the liberal adjective in place and insisting on the qualifications that it brings with it. I imagine those battles as hanging on the value and the effectiveness of that adjective.

In other words, being a liberal means being humble before the world and generous toward others. And it is the necessity of humility and generosity. Far from any sort of squishy relativism, it qualifies the thing you stand for, however passionately.

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote that

courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.

Gilbert Meilaender, commenting on that line from Lewis, adds that

even if courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point, it is not the whole of virtue. It may be that courage must always be present if another virtue such as prudence or humility is to be consistently displayed in a person’s life. That does not mean, however, that nothing more than courage need be present. Evidently each of the virtues has its own objective end. Courage does not enter into the definition of the other virtues; rather, it is necessary to sustain them.

Courage is to virtue as liberality is to ideology. (And they overlap! But that’s another thought for another day.)

Miroslav Volf on joy as something formative/interpretive, hopeful/collaborative, and fragmentary/proleptic:

Joy involves the construal of the object of joy as good; it is tied to how I perceive things rather than to what things are in themselves. …

Related as it is to intentional objects, joy depends both on the more objective character of things and on my subjective construal of them. If I find a desirable item on my table and construe it as a gift, I will rejoice; if I construe it as a bribe, I will become disturbed. On the one hand, joy is not entirely self-generated; because it has an object and is a response, it comes partly from outside, from the character of the world I encounter. On the other hand, I can rob myself of joy by failing to perceive good things as good things and to respond to them properly.

With its four structural elements (intentional object, perception of the object as good, experience of the object as un-owed and a positive hedonic response), we can define joy as emotional attunement between the self and the world – usually a small portion of it – experienced as blessing.

What kind of future does joy want? As it projects itself into the future, joy doesn’t aim directly at changing the world; it simply delights in and celebrates the good that is and proclaims, implicitly, that it is good for that good to continue to be. “All joy wants eternity – wants deep, deep eternity,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. Like love, joy is one of the “eternity seeking” emotions. It wills itself as a permanent state. But just for that reason it also wills all the “objects” which give it rise. In this willing joy sets itself tacitly against features of the world over which one cannot or should not rejoice, and does so without resentment and judgment. As such, joy is both the beginning and the end of authentic personal, social, and political transformation.

Joy is best experienced in community. Joy seeks company (“come and rejoice with me”) and the company of those who rejoice feeds the joy of each. Feasts and celebrations both express and nourish joy. As feasts and celebrations illustrate, though joy is irreducibly personal – nobody can rejoice in my place – joyfulness can also be an aura of a social space, whether a household or a larger community, so that when we enter such a space, we enter into joy, and, often, joy enters into us.

For the most part, segments of our life – often entire chunks of it – aren’t going well and much of it we don’t live well. Given that joy attaches to life going well and being led well, must joy be lost to us? It need not be. We can rejoice over the many small goods we experience, and for those of us who are religious, we can find joy in the One Good that is both the source and the goal of our existence.

Though fragmentary, all small joys celebrate goods in our lives that are and remain wonderful, at times no more than tender plants in the cracks of our otherwise heavily cemented and gray lives. And in all true joys we yearn for, and perhaps also faintly experience, a world in which all things and all manner of things shall be well.

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Spangled and Fulfilled

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I was sitting at the bar in a downtown restaurant the other day. Meghan was admiring the brick wall behind us and wondered if one of its features was the result of creative construction sometime after the wall was originally built. At points throughout the wall, some single bricks had apparently been taken out, paired up, turned 90 degrees, and put back in, mortar and all, so that now there were as many as thirty or more small brick shelves for wine bottles or plants or other decorations. “It’s nice,” she said, “but it just seems so unnecessary.”

Now, most of the time I would almost certainly agree; I think many things in life are very, very unnecessary. But, on this one, I cringed a little when she said it. Why should “necessary” have the final say? In fact, aren’t there many, many places in life where “necessary” should have no say at all?

If I didn’t have this poem from Richard Wilbur in mind at the time, I certainly could have:

AT MOORDITCH

“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”

“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book.”

“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”

“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”

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I did have that poem in mind while I was reading Jonathan Raban’s fantastic book, Bad Land: An American Romance. Having just moved myself to Montana for the rest of winter and into spring, it was easily picked up from the “Montana” section at a local bookstore last week. Raban traces the zealously encouraged settlement of eastern Montana in the early 20th century. Between government incentives, railroad company pamphlets, creative advertising and photography, and the enthusiastic hopes and dreams of migrants, many found the new life being offered hard to resist. But it was, on the whole, a dreadful failure.

They’d come to the land and tried to shape it according to their imported ideas of science, progress, community, landscape. Now the land began to shape them. Its message to the people was blunt: live here, and you will live barely and in isolation. It shook itself free of the litter of surplus buildings, the fence posts and barbed wire with which Lilliputian homesteaders had tried to pin it down.

The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it. Of course, nature often struck petulantly back at man, with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and fires; but this inflexible drawing of lines and limits was alien to the American temper. The prairie was not amenable to problem solving; it wasn’t going to be fixed by new farming methods, or turned green by applied electromagnetism. It was what it was, which was not at all what people had conceived it to be.

Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers, and in the abandoned cabins of the rolling stones. Those who were left were marked out by their willingness to submit to the land’s terms…”

If the decorated wall spoke to me of the crayon, Raban’s book speaks to the reality that resists that crayon.

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All throughout Raban’s history of eastern Montana, which is almost perfectly told, he points to the “innocent optimism” of those who bought into the dream being sold and who attempted to make a home there.

The pamphlet readers, innocent of the reality of America, brought to the text both a willing credulity and a readiness to fill in the spaces between the words with their own local, European experience. They had no more real idea of Montana than they had of the dark side of the moon. But they were devout believers and imaginers. The authors of the railroad pamphlets were able to reach out to an audience of ideal readers of the kind that novelists dream about, usually in vain.

Surely there is much to be said about this, about the sham advertising combined with exaggerated scientific knowledge combined with overconfident idealism—it is, after all, “an American romance.” There is much to be pitied looking back on this chapter in American history, and Raban, I think, clearly loves the lives and the families that he traces through it. And of course, too much cannot be said about the historical (and continual) insistence of forcing our will onto the land, into the world—“…sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.”

I do, however, wish that Raban had more to say about that spirit of imagination, that property of vision, that tries (dares) to see more than we can see. There was recognition at times, but on the whole, the hopes and dreams of these migrants seem to be cast entirely as mistaken, as sorry and pitiful, if still lovable and relatable. And they certainly are those things—loveable, relatable, and mistaken—all of which is wonderfully told by Raban. But it seems to me that there is something missing. Perhaps the best way that I can put it is to say that I wish the book had more of a place in it for Richard Wilbur’s poem, that Raban had perhaps included a little more praise for “the heart’s crayon.”

Of course, it doesn’t mean that any desert will turn oasis with the right amount of willpower, or imagination, or prayer. Certainly our hopes have to be properly placed, directed, applied. But what if the world is not the world until the heart and mind engage it with a crayon?

And if not quite that—if not praise for the pull to transform, to bring something dull to colorful life—then at least a simpler love, a love that might accomplish something like it. Maybe something like what Christian Wiman has in mind in his poem “The Reservoir”:

There comes a time when it is time to be
alive by a lake where the sun dies and dies.
Brown, glintless, it lies in the land and in the mind.
A man might be forgiven for loving dust,
dead weeds and a cracked, receding shore,
a sky so empty that it has no end.

It may not be a desert turned into a garden, but surely that is its own kind of spangling and fulfillment.

Tom Nichols:

But we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s gibbering for harmless political glossolalia. As Charlie Sykes said this morning, CPAC is “a serious threat masquerading as a cultic circus cum clown car,” and revealed “what a Trump 2.0 would look like.” This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law. …

We’ve all cataloged this kind of Trumpian weirdness many times, and I still feel pity for the fact-checkers who try to keep up with him. But I wonder if there is any point. By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.

Michael Weinman:

As [Hannah Arendt] sees things, the “professional thinker” in the modern age—the theorist operating in academe—has forged an amalgam of the dispassionate and disinterested pursuit of wisdom performed by the solitary philosopher and the passionate and profoundly interested pursuit of pure, unworldly, goodness performed by the lonely saint. What is destroyed in that powerful amalgam—for which Arendt (quoting Alfred North Whitehead) gives ultimate credit to René Descartes and Cartesian radical doubt—is the very possibility of common sense: “Cartesian reason is entirely based ‘on the implicit assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced’…. For common sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses [were] fitted into the common world…now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. The sense now was called common merely because it happened to be common to all.^“ In other words, Arendt argues, with the triumph of Descartes, the common of “common sense” diametrically shifts from the world to its opposite, the inner faculty—thought—that forms the object that the sense perceives. Quite literally, modern Cartesian individuals become a world unto themselves: Small wonder that the prevalence of alternative facts becomes an ever more salient issue. […]

Arendt argues that the ability to act politically—in principle given to all human beings by virtue of their birth—is constrained by the conditions of modern life, with professionalization and its compartmentalization as one key element of that constraint. To act responsibly, human beings require a practical capacity to make themselves visible to their fellows in order, together, to open up the shared world in their unique ways. Such reflexivity is facilitated by the ability to think politically, if only that ability is actually practiced, such that reflective judgment is actually exercised in public. For Arendt, this is both the means and the end of her own “exercises in political thinking,” which are intended to help political actors understand the common world and communicate in it in a common political language. These exercises are the ongoing practice of reflection in which we engage together with her as we read, accept, reject, and modify her judgments in conversation with her work and that of others. When we do so, we and she are not “doing theory”; rather, we are thinking in concert against theory.

If we acknowledge that for Arendt, theorizing was an attempt to think about and understand phenomena of the world, and that her judging was more a practice than a theory, we notice that she aimed not to display a theory of judgment for others to implement but to describe a lived experience of judging as political thinking and to explore ways we can make the common world better. Or, of course, fail in the attempt to do so. The core of this experience is uncertainty. There is no human being in the world who always makes the right judgment. We never know in a particular present moment if our judgment is “right” or if the future will confirm its truthfulness.

Unlike that human birthright, action, the ability to judge requires development and improvement. Since the common world is a political space that people share with one another in its plurality, and since this world is by definition subject to constant change and development, the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized. The wealth of perspectives that can be taken into account expands again and again, and varies depending on the question the person making the judgment aims to address. Political thinking is therefore not a competence acquired once and for all, but must be grasped in its shifting dynamics.