Sarah Isgur:

This exposed a moral rot that goes far beyond “Boy, I wish the kids, you know, embraced free speech and were willing to debate controversial ideas.” No, this “speech is violence and violence is speech“ has really taken hold and in a way that should scare the shit out of us.

Giorgio De Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914 [source]

Joanna Collicut:

‘Have This Mind’

In this passage Paul urges his readers to cultivate humility and exhorts them to take Christ as their model.

Vincent van Gogh has been described as displaying a ‘passionate identification with Christ’ throughout his life (Pritchard 1971: 15), but most intensely in the years immediately preceding his emergence as an artist. Having undertaken theological studies, he was appointed as a lay pastor in the impoverished mining district of Borinage in Belgium in 1879. Van Gogh was obsessed with following Christ in his solidarity with those who serve, and for some months lived in a miner’s hut, not counting entitlement to the pastor’s lodgings ‘a thing to be grasped’ (Philippians 2:6). He even went down into the dangerous Marcasse mine. Later he would describe this as ‘the depth of the abyss’ (Van Gogh 1978: 200). Like Christ, he had descended. Not long after, having been dismissed from his position, he again modelled himself on Christ: ‘I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil…’ (Van Gogh 1978: 136). Here we see the result.

As in so many societies, the labour of women involves transporting heavy loads (children, water, crops). Here they are bent double under sacks of coal gleaned from slag-heaps to burn in their homes. The simple documentation of their work can be seen as a redemptive artistic action expressing Van Gogh’s continuing aspiration to the mind of Christ.

But there is more; the original English title almost certainly alludes to Matthew 23:4 where Jesus denounces the religious leaders for laying heavy burdens on ordinary people. The viaduct in the distance is a triumphant monument to the industry that determines the lives of the women. Behind it, separated from their world of servitude but benefiting from it, stand a Protestant and a Catholic church; these women are at once abandoned and oppressed by the hypocrisy of institutional religion.

This, we are reminded, was also true of Christ Jesus, for hanging in the right foreground we see him who ‘became obedient unto death … on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8), bearing the burden of the world, in deep solidarity with suffering humanity.

Karl Jaspers (emphasis added):

The alternative method of renouncing a true political life is to surrender to a blind political will. One who does this is discontented with his life, and complains of environing circumstances … He is inspired, now with hatred, now with enthusiasm … Although he does not know what he might know if he would, and does not know what he really wills, he talks, he chooses, and he acts as though he knew. By a short-circuit he passes abruptly from a quarter-knowledge to the licence of fanaticism. Such vociferous would-be participation is the most widespread manifestation of a reputed political knowledge and will. Persons of this kidney stumble along through the times, able to make trouble and to stir up strife, but utterly incapable of discovering the true path.

Contrast that with some guy named James:

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

“License to fanaticism” meets its opposite. No excuses. No “short-circuits” justified.

And, for those not inclined to be or follow the fantastics, Jaspers listed another way “along which man may renounce his political possibilities” — by refraining from participation:

No doubt we are constantly brought up with a jar against the effects of force as used in the existing order. We find this or that unjust or unmeaning. But those who have adopted the evasion of responsibility I am now considering, look upon it as something foreign to themselves, something which is no business of theirs. … Indifferent to the course of events, they do not allow their feelings to become involved. … Their ‘unpolitical’ behaviour is the renouncement effected by those who do not want to know what they will, because they have no will but that of realising themselves in an unworldly selfhood—as if they existed apart from time and space.…

This, not unlike the first mentioned above, is a “no compromise” stance, as much an “us and them” dichotomizing as any short-circuited fanaticism: They are of the world, but not me.

It should go without saying that for James, to be pure, peaceful, gentle, reasonable, merciful, good, requires an involved presence. Jaspers knew this as well, in his own way:

Now that the charm has been dispelled… the contemporary mental situation enables every one to enter this region of human community life. To every one the dreadfulness of the world of human activity in the domain of State reality will appear in its full inexorability. But he who is not paralysed with terror by the vision, he who does not forget and does not turn his eyes away from reality, will press onward to the point of a participating knowledge in this reality of human action and human self-determination—to the point at which it will become clear to him what he really wants, not in general and universally, but historically and in conjunction with those of his fellows who appear to him truly human.

This gets really overlappy with the the liberal-conservative-socialistic business. And I can’t think about this sort of thing without thinking about the other Karl:

“When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion” (Mt. 9:36). And the fact that He was moved with compassion means originally that He could not and would not close His mind to the existence and situation of the multitude, nor hold Himself aloof from it, but that it affected Him, that it went right to His heart, that He made it His own, that He could not but identify Himself with them. Only He could do this with the breadth with which He did so. But His community cannot follow any other line.

Daniel Raab shows no hesitation as he watches footage of 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a street in northern Gaza.

“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

[…]
“They’re thinking: ‘Oh I don’t think [I’ll get shot] because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong,” said Raab, who majored in biology at the University of Illinois before joining the Israel Defense Forces. “That’s what you have snipers for.”

After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, 51, rushed to the site, and tried to collect his sons’ bodies for burial, but was also fatally injured by a sniper.

The need for a dignified funeral for loved ones is a core human instinct, protected in law and explored in art for millennia. It is at the emotional heart of Homer’s Iliad, one of the earliest surviving works of literature.

But on that day, Raab treated love and grief as cause to kill. “They just kept on coming to try and take these bodies,” he said.

Karl Jaspers:

The technical life-order which came into being for the supply of the needs of the masses did at the outset preserve these real worlds of human creatures, by furnishing them with commodities. But when at length the time arrived when nothing in the individual’s immediate and real environing world was any longer made, shaped, or fashioned by that individual for his own purposes; when everything that came, came merely as the gratification of momentary need, to be used up and cast aside; when the very dwelling-place was machine-made, when the environment had become despiritualised, when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life—then man was, as it were, bereft of his world. Cast adrift in this way, lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man. The universalisation of the life-order threatens to reduce the life of the real man in a real world to mere functioning.

But man as individual refuses to allow himself to be absorbed into a life-order which would only leave him in being as a function for the maintenance of the whole. True, he can live in the apparatus with the aid of a thousand relationships on which he is dependent and in which he collaborates; but since he has become a mere replaceable cog in a wheelwork regardless of his individuality, he rebels if there is no other way in which he can manifest his selfhood.

If, however, he wants to be himself, if he craves for self-expression, there promptly arises a tension between his self-preservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood, on the other. Immediate self-will is what primarily moves him, for he is animated by a blind desire for the advantages attendant on making good in the struggle for life. Yet the urge to self-expression drives him into incalculable hazards which may render his means of livelihood perilously insecure. Under stress of these two conflicting impulses he may act in ways which will interfere with the tranquil and stable functioning of the life-order. Consequently the disturbance of the life-order has its permanent antinomy in a twofold possibility. Inasmuch as self-will provides the space wherein selfhood can realise itself as existence, the former is as it were the body of the latter, and may drag the latter down to ruin or (in favourable circumstances) bring it to fruition.

If, then, self-will and existence both seek a world for themselves, they come into conflict with the universal life-order. But this, in its turn, strives to gain mastery over the powers which are threatening its frontiers. It is, therefore, profoundly concerned about matters which are not directly contributory to the self-preservative impulse. This latter, which can be indifferently regarded as a vital need for obtaining the necessaries of life and as an existential absolute, may be termed the ‘non-rational.’ When thus negatively conceived, it is degraded to a being of the second order: but it is either promoted once more to the first rank within certain restricted provinces; in contrast with purely rational aims, it may acquire a positive interest, as in love, adventure, sport, and play. Or it may be resisted as undesirable, this being what we see in those who are affected with a dread of life or a lack of joy in work. Thus in one or other of these ways it is diverted into the decisively and exclusively vital field—to the denial of the claim to existence slumbering within it. The powers interested in the functioning of the apparatus, in the paralysing of the masses, in the individual mind, seek to further the demands of the self-preservative impulse as a non-committal gratification, and to deprive it of its possible absoluteness. By rationalising the non-rational, in order to re-establish it as a kind of gratification of elementary needs, the attempt is made to achieve that which is not genuinely possible. The result is that what was originally fostered as something other than it is, is destroyed by what seems to be an endeavour to care for it. A prey to technical domi-nance, it assumes a grey tint or a crude motley colora-tion, wherein man no longer recognises himself, being robbed of his individuality as a human creature. Yet, since it is uncontrollable, it rides rough-shod over the ordinances formulated to destroy it.

Erin Plunkett:

“Political,” in Patočka’s thought, means caring for the polis, tending to the conditions that make life in common possible. These conditions are not political in the ordinary sense of the word but have to do with caring for that part of ourselves (and our neighbours) that cries out for truth, for meaning—in short, care for the soul. This is why, for Patočka, the life in truth is a political life: it is forged in times of uncertainty, when assumptions about the nature of what is and what is possible come undone, so that the question of what we want our lives to be like is raised anew, or perhaps for the first time. One begins wandering. A community is formed within this activity of unsettlement: the “solidarity of the shaken.” In this account, the foundation of political life and solidarity with others is not identity, of whatever kind, not the natural affinity we feel toward people like us, not the securing of rights, nor rational self-interest, but a shared experience of crying out for meaning and refusing easy answers. 

Tommy Dixon:

One of the reasons I like reading old letters and diaries is that people censor themselves less than if they were writing to an audience. They are not trying to sound impressive or worrying whether their thoughts are interesting, but rather writing clear and hard about what they want to say. Using plain language to put their mind, as it is, on the page. In a strange way, this often makes for good writing. The lack of rhythm becomes its own kind of rhythm, the casualness creating a sense of comfort.

David Dark:

In exchanges with friends and family and alleged students, I often find it challenging to get folks to reflect harder before speaking as if “the left” or “maga” or “the right” or “the media” are a person doing things. It is not possible to rightly quote an abstraction, but it is catastrophically easy to attribute words and motives and actions to one and then, like magic, imagine that a real and living someone said something that they did not in fact say. It seems to me that, at our healthiest, we take it one person at a time, getting really specific over who said and did what and when, and thereby avoid succumbing to hot generalization in our imaginings and our speech. Unexamined generalization generates heat without light. Generalization is fascism’s oxygen supply. Specificity cuts it off. […]

…most Americans and most human beings can distinguish between fear and love and behave beautifully. It starts, I think, with feeling and seeing and speaking and acting with precision and specificity, with wanting to know what’s true. Be specific. We have work to do.