Alan Jacobs:

It turns out that reality has limited power over an infinitely distractible and distracted society.

Blaise Pascal:

– 171. Misery. The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves… Without diversions, we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.

David Bentley Hart (2011):

How then, I asked Ambrose, should one portray the prince of darkness? 

After a pensive moment, Ambrose replied, “A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.” 

And recalling this exchange brought Donald Trump to mind. You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier—the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.

In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring “eminent domain” over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant. 

She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump could then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice. 

How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.

Addendum, 24 February 2025:

I went to add a hyperlink to this post today and found that the link to the First Things article was no longer valid. Then I found that the article was no longer on First Things at all. I checked DBH’s Substack and not only found my suspicion confirmed but discovered that DBH, having reposted the article there, also had an opinion about it:

I have received a number of requests recently that I repost this article from 2011, written long before anyone could foresee the electoral horrors then in store for the country formerly known as the United States of America. It originally appeared in a journal with which I had a professional if not always cordial association; but, recently, readers who have gone in search of it on that journal’s site have found that it has been expunged from the record. I am not wounded. No doubt it is all in keeping with a wholly understandable and blameless desire on the part of the editors to grovel, whine, pant, and slobber in positively orgiastic submission at the feet of the loathsome imbecile to whom the article’s title referred, and in service to whom they have so eagerly betrayed their professed faiths. It may profit a man little to gain the world and lose his soul, but that is still enough profit for some, and who am I to criticize good, honest, enterprising moral cowardice? Back then, they may have grasped that DJT is a cut-rate Satan, but now he’s their cut-rate Satan and so naturally they adore him. Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. At least, that would be my charitable reading of the situation. (Do I sound bitter?)

Not that it was an especially brilliant article, but it was prompted by a strange premonition whose ultimate accuracy has now been incandescently confirmed.

Nick Catoggio:

Strongmen whose power depends on perceptions of invincibility would rather destroy a system that threatens their power than yield for the common good. We saw an example of that in our own country on January 6. We’re seeing a higher-stakes example of it now in Ukraine. No one bets on a monkey with a hand grenade to behave responsibly. But just how irresponsibly it might behave when it’s threatened and desperate to save face, which is all this war is about anymore, is an imponderable we should all start pondering.

Nadezhda Mandelstam:

M. set the highest value on friendship among “men” with its “handshake at moments of danger,” “battle,” competition for women, common language, and shared jokes. The idea of “battle,” as I have already said, struck me as comic, but he was preparing for it in earnest. In our life, civic courage is a much rarer thing than military valor. People distinguished by utter cowardice in public life could prove to be brave officers or soldiers. How is this possible? The reason is, no doubt, that at the front they were under discipline and simply carried out orders. This was not “battle,” but doing one’s duty, which require not courage, but only stamina and submission to discipline rather than to a moral imperative. Indeed, a man who has lost his personality often regains a sense of his worth as a soldier, during a war. In this country he remains under discipline in peacetime as well, continuing to obey orders even if they run counter to his ideas of honor and duty (how many people still know what these are?). Dreadful as it may seem, the Second World War brought inward relief to some people, because it put an end to the divided feelings so characteristic of peacetime. M. did not survive until the outbreak of war, and in his moment of danger there was not one “man” ready to shake him by the hand. There was, however, a woman to mourn him: Akhmatova, the last person he thought of as a member of his circle. Her farewell kiss meant much more than anything the puny “men” of our era would have been capable of.

Marilynne Robinson:

Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition. By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves — prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is.

Physical courage is remarkably widespread in this population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by being universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves. 

Moral and intellectual courage are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail — financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism — are comparatively minor. I propose that these forms of courage suffer from the disadvantage of requiring new definitions continually, which must be generated out of individual perception and judgment. They threaten or violate loyalty, group identity, the sense of comme il faut. They are, intrinsically, outside the range of consensus.

The world needs mixed feelings about its politics and its politicians. For instance, I find it not one bit difficult to hold both of these views fully and simultaneous:

Patrick Chovanec:

No, I am not happy with Biden lumping pro-life people with MAGA. Unfortunately, a lot of pro-lifers have done this themselves. Still, it frustrates me when [Democrats] can’t distinguish between issues Americans have been divided on for a long time [and] the GOP’s dangerous new direction.

The question isn’t whether there is a large overlap between pro-lifers and pro-Trumpers – there clearly is. The question is whether holding this position is one of the things that makes pro-Trumpers a “threat to the Republic”.

Biden has come very close to implying it is, and I think that includes a lot of people… who have no truck with what happened on 1/6, and actually helped prevent it from succeeding.

Americans are going to disagree fiercely about many issues for years to come. It is important to distinguish between this and the rising flirtation with authoritarian populism.

Andrew Sullivan:

And yes, two cheers for Biden. I need to say this more. With some luck but also persistent, quiet outreach to Europe and tight military collaboration with Ukraine, he has a significant foreign policy coup shaping up. His open sharing of US intelligence has kept Russia off-balance; his balanced arming of Ukraine has prevented the war from spiraling out of control; his marshaling of NATO has been superb.

Diana Butler Bass:

From what historians can gather, hospitality — not martyrdom — served as the main motivator for conversions. And early Christians found both spiritual and social power in such acts, for creating inclusive community, a community of radical welcome and love, can put one at odds with ungodly authorities. “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of our many opponents,” claimed the African theologian Tertullian, “’Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” 

Would that every faith community was like a swarm of bees, running out to meet the displaced, the lost, and the unexpected strangers with the same delight, zeal, and alacrity as the earliest Christians. Theologian Letty Russell once noted, “The word for hospitality in the Greek New Testament is philoxenia, love of the stranger. Its opposite is xenophobia, hatred of the stranger.” Philoxenia turns strangers into friends.

Daniel Mendelsohn:

As recently as the early twentieth century, the Aeneid was embraced as a justification of the Roman—and, by extension, any—empire: “a classic vindication of the European world-order,” as one scholar put it. (This position is known among classicists as the “optimistic” interpretation.) The marmoreal perfections of its verse seemed to reflect the grand façades of the Roman state itself: Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.

But in the second half of the last century more and more [“pessimistic”] scholars came to see some of the epic’s most wrenching episodes as attempts to draw attention to the toll that the exercise of imperium inevitably takes. […]

But perhaps we don’t need a translation to drag the Aeneid into the modern era. Maybe it’s always been here, and we’re just looking at it from the wrong angle—or looking for the wrong things. Maybe the inconsistencies in the hero and his poem that have distressed readers and critics—the certainties alternating with doubt, the sudden careening from coolness to high emotion, the poet’s admiring embrace of an empire whose moral offenses he can’t help cataloguing, the optimistic portrait of a great nation rising haunted by a cynical appraisal of Realpolitik at work—aren’t problems of interpretation that we have to solve but, rather, the qualities in which this work’s modernity resides.

This, at any rate, is what was going through my mind one day fifteen years ago, when, I like to think, I finally began to understand the Aeneid. At the time, I was working on a book about the Holocaust, and had spent several years interviewing the few remaining survivors from a small Polish town whose Jewish population had been obliterated by what you could legitimately call an exercise of imperium. As I pressed these elderly people for their memories, I was struck by the similarities in the way they talked: a kind of resigned fatalism, a forlorn acknowledgment that the world they were trying to describe was, in the end, impossible to evoke; strange swings between an almost abnormal detachment when describing unspeakable atrocities and sudden eruptions of ungovernable rage and grief triggered by the most trivial memory.

Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.

Or, indeed, a more modern story. What is the Aeneid about? It is about a tiny band of outcasts, the survivors of a terrible persecution. It is about how these survivors—clinging to a divine assurance that an unknown and faraway land will become their new home—arduously cross the seas, determined to refashion themselves as a new people, a nation of victors rather than victims. It is about how, when they finally get there, they find their new homeland inhabited by locals who have no intention of making way for them. It is about how this geopolitical tragedy generates new wars, wars that will, in turn, trigger further conflicts: bella horrida bella. It is about how such conflicts leave those involved in them morally unrecognizable, even to themselves. This is a story that both the Old and the New Worlds know too well; and Virgil was the first to tell it. Whatever it meant in the past, and however it discomfits the present, the Aeneid has, alas, always anticipated the future.