David Zahl:

“Self-optimization” has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic element of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen. […]

You and I love optimization because we love the control it promises. What is the allure of measurement if not the allure of personal dominion? That if I can study my data closely enough I can manipulate its direction? Alas, once that line starts heading south, we all know where it ends. It stops in the graveyard.

And yet there are worse places to find oneself than in a cemetery, surrounded by symbols of heavenly rest. Given the fumes of optimization we’ve been inhaling, we may find that the good news emblazoned on so many tombstones shines much brighter. Who knows, we may come across an epitaph or two that speaks of a God whose specialty lies in the sanctification of unoptimized souls. We may read of a Lord who does not deal with any of us according to our productivity but according to the generosity of grace. We may even overhear words from the burial service about a Father who welcomes into arms of mercy sinners of his own redeeming.

Speaking for himself alone, the confessing subject ends up saying nothing that a discerning reader can take seriously.

Fascinating essay from Olga Litvak. A couple brief thoughts:

Some translation problems that she refers to are at least partly addressed when we consider that Garry Wills, for example, who insists on referring to Augustine’s Confessions as “The Testimony,” has argued convincingly that the word/title “confessions” is less a translation than it is a transliteration of the word confessiones or confiteri, which has a much wider and richer resonance than what is captured, particularly by our modern ears, in the word “confessions.”

And, both to and against Litvak’s point about confession and epistemological modesty, and as Gilbert Meilaender has often pointed out, a complete reading of Augustine’s “Confessions” concludes not with the “authenticity” of the confessor, but with his admitted inability to be authentic.

What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasur­able. Imagine the plains, caverns, and abysses of my memory; they are innumerable and are innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things… Through all this I range; I fly here and I fly there; I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.

So when Litvak says that Rabbinic law “operates on a normative assumption that self representation—testimony given on one’s own behalf—is not to be trusted, because people are not, as it were, sufficiently detached from themselves to attest confidently to their own behavior,” and that “confession therefore enjoys no privileged status in Jewish law,” she is at least partly agreeing with Augustine.

My sense, too, is that if some of this was taken into account, Latvik’s reading of M.L. Lilienblum’s Errors of Youth as “anti-confessional polemic” might make space for Augustine’s Confessions as at least overlapping (admittedly less humorously) with the genre of “authorial skepticism” rather than being diametric to it.

All that being said, Latvik’s exposure of “confession” — what we do usually understand and practice as confession, autobiography, authenticity — to often be little more than “compulsive truth-telling as a cover-story (an alibi) for narcissism and personal entitlement” is scathing and, I think, on target.

Sarah Reardon:

In order to achieve a culture that encourages reading, we need to build sub-cultures that do not normalize ease – the ease of flipping through TV channels or scrolling through social media – but instead recognize the value of difficult delights. Such work begins in the home, with the culture of the immediate family, and moves outward to the neighborhood and then to the church or school community. 

By difficult delights I do not mean only those found within the pages of a book, but also the delights of work in the garden or garage, or the delights of time spent at the piano bench in front of sheet music or on a ladder with a paintbrush in hand. 

For the enchantment of literature to become once again a force in our culture, we must become disenchanted with the latest offers of a passive and difficulty-free life mediated by screens and feeds. We must become disconnected from the consumerist mindset that dominates our society. When a sub-culture, however small, connects instead with gladhearted gratitude around pursuit of the good, true and beautiful – not the easy, crass and self-gratifying – children will be blessed in all variety of ways, including a fondness for good stories. 

In other words, for children to love reading again, they must be shown and learn how to love life – real, embodied life, as God has given it, with all its difficult delights. 

Paul Sellers:

George always made me think for myself. He posed questions to me all day long and then waited for answers. And it wasn’t just about wood but all kinds of things. He would reinforce the need to query what we did, what was happening around us and what was happening in the world. “Always question authority.”

How much had been passed to him was never made clear. Owning knowledge for the main part was to take ownership of it when it was ‘given’ to you. This was the way of word-of-mouth learning, where seldom were things written down in text but perhaps a few lines in a drawing on a piece of pine you were working on or the inside of a cigarette packet, an envelope or whatever was close to hand.

Making an apprentice think was critical to ownership. “Why do we leave a gap at the bottom of a mortise hole, Paul?” or, “Uh oh, why is that haunch tight cut?” Thinking about the reasoning, reasoning it out, gave you better ownership of knowledge without being told the reason why. It’s different. Just different.

John F. Woolverton in 1997, on the future study of Hans W. Frei (fittingly published in just such a future study of Frei over two decades later):

Such a study will no doubt begin with Jesus’ relation to his disciples and to later followers or, as Frei preferred to call them, pilgrims. The term “pilgrim” was a non-heroic one which he liked and used. Seldom was the pilgrim glamorous or “an aristocrat of the spirit,” but quite ordinary. He “always follows his Lord at a distance,” much as the disciples followed Jesus to Jerusalem. The pilgrim’s track is “mysterious yet directed” and may involve a single person or a whole people who move toward a promised land or a heavenly city. In either case the journey is eschatological; its goal and destiny in the future.

Of that destiny Christ is the fulfillment and the fulfiller. For Frei Jesus does not so much command his disciples, “follow me,” as allure and captivate them with that invitation. Jesus is able to do so by self-identifying with them. He is “not identical but identified with the poor, the undeserving, the spiritual and economic underclass.” They may not know it, judged Frei, and “there may be more of them who would laugh at rather than be comforted. …” The Savior’s act of walking incognito among them—or ahead of them—is the act not of a commanding officer but of a friend. Jesus’ power in powerlessness together with his concealment led Frei to approve of the remark made by a friend to her theologian husband, “You didn’t really become fully human until you stopped being totally preoccupied with Jesus.” Frei thought that there could be no textual meeting with the Savior until a person had at the same time met him incognito in a crowd. Frei found Matthew’s “identity description” of Jesus (25:40), “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me,” a haunting one. In his relationship with pilgrims on the way, Jesus’ humaneness which “allows us to counter his compassion and severity with each other” caused him to stand out as a very specific person. Frei found “miraculous” Jesus’ ordinary kindness, his natural gentleness, his “enjoyment of the neighbor in her or his peculiar character, religion, lifestyle, and work—the enjoyment of just the way she or he is. …” Such enjoyment was part of the service of Christ.

Frei often spoke of how many professors he knew at Yale University who had come from seemingly strong Christian backgrounds but who had thrown over the faith. Did he sense that commands were not enough in a society increasingly disengaged from the Church? The answer is yes. Obedience remained for the pilgrim, but the accompanying attitude had changed. Frei saw that the call to the apostolate as command more often than not failed to focus on Jesus’ own call and was often confined by sacramentalism or born-againism or some other “apostolic succession.” Disciples “hounding them [potential converts] with the image of Jesus overstepped the line between devotion in religious service and fanatical religious imperialism.” It was to be sure a thin line, “but it is real and deep, and a generous unobsessive love of the neighbor marks that line.” Jesus was indeed the caller, gatherer, and upholder of pilgrims, and he called, gathered, and upheld with strange effectiveness, by inviting wonderment and captivation.

Nor should we be surprised that Hans Frei thought in such comprehensive terms. He himself excluded none. He was after all by race Jewish and once a refugee, by birth German, by early baptism Lutheran; he was schooled by English Quakers, attracted at one point to Roman Catholic monasticism, ordained Baptist and then Episcopalian; in nationality American and New England Puritan American at that, in theology reformed, a disciple of Calvin and Barth. For this painstaking, daring Christian intellectual, the relation of Savior to pilgrim was bound to take an appealing—and more biblical?—form. And then, for Frei, these pilgrims, while they tend not to walk in formation, enjoy a very simple consensus: “Jesus of Nazareth has been in all ages at the center of Christian living, Christian devotion, and Christian thought.” Further that “the story of Jesus is about him, not about someone else or about nobody in particular or about all of us.”

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.