The thought of a company going (somewhat naturally, it would seem) from pet cameras to armed drones, to say nothing about the 5 stages of drone autonomy in warfare, throws me back on something that I think will be increasingly important: everyone will need to work moral overtime if we want to avoid becoming Günther Anders’ “murderers without malice.”

Martha Nussbaum has drawn this lesson thoroughly from Greek tragedy. I’ve mentioned Agamemnon before, but another example she gives comes from Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes. Eteocles, king of Thebes, son of Oedipus, upon realizing the seventh Argive fighter at the gate is his own brother, chooses to go with the other six Theban fighters so that he may oppose his brother himself. After a brief lament, Eteocles declares “it is not fitting to weep or grieve” and seems to conclude that “brother against brother” is as fitting and just a conflict as “foe against foe.”

It’s important to note that Nussbaum is willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, that Eteocles has made the best decision he can, that, given the circumstances, it may in fact be the right decision to have made. But the Chorus of Thebes is struck not by his choice but by the way he faces and embraces it:

The Chorus of Theban women, themselves mothers of families, feels this strangeness, reproaching their king not so much for his decision — or at any rate not only for his decision — but, far more, for the responses and feelings with which he approaches the chosen action. ‘O child of Oedipus, dearest of men’, they implore him, ‘do not become similar in passion (orgēn) to a person who is called by the worst names’ (677-8). He is showing the feelings of a criminal, although he may have reasoned well. Again they implore him: ‘Why are you so eager, child? Do not let some spear-craving delusion (ata) filling your spirit (thumoplēthēs) bear you away. Cast out the authority of this bad passion (kakou erōtos)’ (686-8).

Nussbaum calls this a perversity of imaginative and emotional responses to a serious practical dilemma.

Meša Selimović:

I told all this, for the first time, to a little girl; the first time, from beginning to end, in some sort of order. In this way I put it together as a consistent story, one that had, hitherto, always lost itself in a confusion of isolated parts, in a fog of fear, in a sort of extratemporal occurrence. Perhaps it went beyond any defined meaning, like some bad dream that I could neither accept nor reject. And why to her particularly, and why this, is something I can’t explain, even to myself. I felt she might have the ability to listen. For sure, she’d not understand, but, then, listening is more important than understanding.

Experience had taught me that what you can’t explain to yourself is better told to another. You can deceive yourself with just one part of the picture that happens to impose itself with a feeling difficult to express, since it hides in the face of the pain of comprehension and flies into the mists, into the intoxication that seeks no meaning. For the other, exact speech is essential, and this forces you to seek it, to feel its presence somewhere within you, and to grasp it, it or its shadow, so as to recognize it in another’s face, in another’s glance, as he begins to comprehend it. The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word. Or, still more important—if he desires to understand.

He adds: “All unusual, all as it should not be. But I didn’t choose the circumstances, nor they me: We were like two birds in a storm.”

Jeffrey Foucault:

I went to the river too because living in America means absorbing an endless broadcast of technicolor neuroses, like a B-grade drive-in horror movie projected onto a paper screen in the rain. Going outside is the only specific remedy available. To hear a river and smell it, and if you elect to keep the occasional fish, to taste it as well, may put you in relationship to the world again.

Last year I taped two small pieces of paper above my desk. On one I’d written in block letters, REFUSE, and the other, SIMPLIFY. Each of these things, like the Golden Rule, is easy to say and hard to accomplish.

I recently looked back through ten years of journals and letters and found, predictably, that my obsessions didn’t change. Love, death, weather, family, fishing, God, booze, landscape, books, music, history, memory, America, time, all make serial appearances. But what struck home like a harpoon was the litany of complaint, bordering on despair, about digital life, as the culture vanished into parody, like a long joke with no punch line. And through all those years, I stayed in harness. We all did, as our politics darkened and decoupled, and the kids got all fucked up. We kept working for the Corporations, full time. We pay to play, and go on paying. Posting a letter like this to the socials feels like trying to communicate by passenger pigeon, if you strangled the pigeon, and just threw it in the direction you wanted it to go. […]

After a while I sat down on a deadfall, lay the stick at my feet in the shallows, and watched a cloud of minnows negotiate the soft hydraulic that pulled on my boots, as they fed on whatever I’d kicked up. I listened to the buzzing high summer day, the water sliding by, the sounds of birds that don’t know that we name them. I was treasuring up a fund of daylight and silence to get through the fall, and this world we’ve made.

There are places we remember, and things we used to do. Like the river I imagine they change and breathe, in fact and in memory. I think we can go back there and find them. That’s what I’m going to try to do.

Luigi Giussani (1985) on the confusion, even disollution, of the “I” and the “you”:

In the confusion surrounding the ultimate face of the I and of reality, an extreme attempt is developing today that would pursue this flight from the relationship with the infinite Mystery which every reasonable man sees as the horizon and root of every human experience…. If reality seems to escape one’s every attempt at mastery, the extreme resource of pride is to deny reality any consistency, arbitrarily considering everything as an illusion or a game. We call “nihilism” that which reigns today in the world of thought and the worldview of the dominant culture. But it is a nihilism that does not even have a tragic feeling for the defeat behind it and rather conceals this tragedy in a false reduction of everything to a game, to an arbitrary invitation to skepticism and moral superficiality.

For two thousand years, the encounter with the Christian event has been the encounter with a human phenomenon (a man, a companionship) in which the passion for the discovery of the human face and the openness to reality are strangely awakened. This passion is continually reawakened by something that is not the result of our thoughts or of a particular philosophy.

The first two who followed Jesus along the banks of the Jordan are the first protagonists, after the Virgin Mary, of the mysterious re-conquest of our humanity: these were the first protagonists of the encounter with Christ, with this exceptional presence in history. In the Gospel, in which, after so many years, John wrote down his memory of that day, of the encounter with Jesus by the Jordan, of having followed him after the strange words of the Baptist who pointed him out, of the visit to the house where after their question he simply responded, “Come and see,” all these things are described. And yet, as François Mauriac recognizes in a page of his Life of Jesus, this episode remains the most moving episode of the Gospel. In fact, it tells of a precise, historic encounter (it even tells us the time: four in the afternoon!), but in the notes of the disciple almost everything is left implicit. We can imagine what is said only implicitly, seeing how it would become explicit and change the life of those two fishermen, but already their humanity and their heart in that first decisive encounter were struck by a presentiment, by an initial but certain piece of evidence: no man ever spoke like him; they had never met anyone like him. After many years, how many other things they saw and understood, albeit confusedly, about what he started to tell them that day; and still the exceptionality of that encounter remained intact to the eyes of the elderly evangelist. Their heart, that day, ran into a presence that corresponded in an unexpected and clear way to the desire for truth, for beauty, for justice which constituted their simple and humble humanity. From that moment, notwithstanding a thousand betrayals and misunderstandings, they would never abandon him…

Giussani goes on to quote Romano Guardini: “In the experience of a great love, everything that happens becomes an event within its sphere.”

Nick Catoggio:

The tone lately among Trump critics has shifted from “it’ll happen here if we don’t do something” to “it’s happening right now” because it’s hard to accept—even now—that the country we grew up in doesn’t care much about any of this. There remains a blind hope that Americans still don’t understand; if we raise our voices louder and dial up the urgency to 11, at last they’ll be roused.

They won’t be, though. They do understand. They don’t care. “The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump,” Sullivan acknowledged in his piece. “They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.” That’s a nice précis of the conclusions I’ve drawn in dozens of editions of this newsletter. Americans will not be roused. All indications are that they’re going to ride this rocket into the ground.

For once, Pete Hegseth is right: This is what the country voted for.
I’m glad to see fellow critics of the president refusing to look for their own excuses to let those voters off the hook morally for the choice they made. “Trump’s great authoritarian insight is that Americans will tolerate a lot more than you might think if they’re properly desensitized to the means and properly inflamed about the ends,” I wrote in June. As right-wingers openly fantasize about a “Bukele-style crackdown on D.C. crime,” ask yourself how much worse that desensitization might get.

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

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

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

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

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

• For Trollope, no character is ever beyond sympathy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps a Trollope reboot is in order.

Oliver Burkeman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now… will I delete them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Bezalel Richardsen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richardson closes with this from Giussani:

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

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