I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too? 

Then there’s a pair of us! 

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog – 

To tell one’s name – the livelong June – 

To an admiring Bog!

—Emily Dickinson

Tipsy Teetotaler:

I counter with “Yes, but Trump truly is worse because he does it right out in the open, shamelessly.” If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, it joins smoking and drinking on the very short list of vices Trump doesn’t practice. Otherwise, his brazenness coarsens every thing he touches and everyone who cheers him. For a guy so enamored of gold leaf, he’s oddly opposite King Midas.

I never thought I would lament the loss of hypocrisy.

Karl Barth:

At all times there have been persons who have managed without this help [of the church]. Perhaps you are among those persons. The church has often performed her service badly. That is quite certainly true of our church and of myself. Of the church, therefore, I can only say to you: “She is there in order to serve you. Do what you think is right.” The church is not Jesus, and Jesus is not the church.

The same holds true of the so-called Christian world view. If you understand the connection between the person of Jesus and your [politcal] convictions, and if you now want to arrange your life so that it corresponds to this connection, then that does not at all mean you have to “believe” or accept this, that, and the other thing. What Jesus has to bring to us are not ideas, but a way of life. One can have Christian ideas about God and the world or about man and his redemption, and still with all that be a complete heathen. And as an atheist, a materialist, and a Darwinist, one can be a genuine follower and disciple of Jesus. Jesus is not the Christian world view and the Christian world view is not Jesus.

Gilbert Meilaender:

Anselm distinguished a divine disposition from a divine distribution. The divine disposition requires that we go where God wills, that we be obedient to his disposition, even if it should require separation from friends. At the same time, however, the divine distribution bestows the gift of friendship in our lives. This paradox, which Anselm finds in his own experience, is one of the central problems of the Christian life. Earthly affections like friendship are bestowed by the Creator and no fully human life can do without them; yet that same God may lay upon us a task which makes the enjoyment of such attachments difficult or impossible. “The cause of God,” Adele Fiske writes, “may often run contrary to human affection…. Anselm says rather piteously: ‘do not love me less because God does his will with me.’”

God gives both the earthly bond of friendship, which enriches life, and the calling, which serves the neighbor. Theories which rest content in preferential loves or, alternatively, which glorify the calling above all else fail to appreciate the paradox of the divine will which Anselm discerned. The tension between bonds of particular love and a love which is open to every neighbor (in the calling) cannot be overcome by any theory, however intricate. Our thinking can only warn against certain mistakes, certain wrong turnings which we might take. But this central problem of the Christian life must be lived, not just thought. This much, if Adele Fiske is correct, Anselm clearly realized. “St. Anselm soberly faces the fact that God’s will often seems to work against itself, destroying the gift it has given. This problem is solved ambulando, or it is not solved; he suffers and admits it, but does not try to escape by turning away from human love to love ‘God alone’.” The tension between particular bonds and a more universally open love—of which the tension between friendship and vocation is an instance—cannot be eliminated for creatures whose lives are marked by the particularities of time and place but who yet are made to share with all others the praise of God. The tension between particular and universal love is “solved” only as it is lived out in a life understood as pilgrimage toward the God who gives both the friend and the neighbor.

James Alan McPherson:

For me, the goal had never been economic success. For me, it had always been a matter of personal growth within a communal context unstructured by race. It is a very hard fact of life that there exists no such community in any part of the country. But at the same time, it does exist in every part of the country, among selected individuals from every possible background. But this community is a floating world, a ukiyo, sustained, incrementally, by letters, telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, visits from time to time. It is not proximity that keeps it alive, but periodic expenditures of human energy and imagination and grace. This is what I have now, as a substitution for a hometown. I find it more than sufficient.

Hannah Arendt (1958):

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer “human value” is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.

… In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfil certain “basic functions” but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine. The “basic functions” are of course the functions of the human animal’s life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself—not only its variations but even the “total change to a new product”—will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.

To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain objects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-end category, if this category still made any sense. … As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe this world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce the seed. By the same token it is quite probable that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature’s never-ending processes into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier between nature and themselves.

For a society of laborers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world cannot fulfil the most important task of the human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the continuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were “shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle.” Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears “as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.”

Daniel Sarewitz:

Seventy years of growing entanglement between science and politics show that the truths that matter most in democratic decision-making emerge from the political arena, not the laboratory. When Democrats sell themselves as the party of science, truth, and rationality, what they are really saying is that if you are rational and believe in science and truth then obviously you will support Democratic policies. But given that half the country does not ideologically align itself with Democrats, this is a hard case to make, and those who disagree with Democratic agendas may in turn wonder why they should accept the science those agendas bring with them. Such skepticism may not be irrational, or even anti-science. Yet it has created a space not just for Trump’s endless effusion of lies, but for the attacks he and his minions are mounting on mainstream scientific knowledge and on the scientific institutions that Democrats had labeled as their own.

Meša Selimović:

I laughed at his discomfort. It was inconvenient, no doubt, but one couldn’t help laughing. He talked of his fear like a child, openly and directly, without any self-consciousness. Fear is ugly when we see it in another.

I wouldn’t have it like that! I’d said, pretty insincerely, trying to encourage him, “A man dies only once.” But now I really thought that way. It wasn’t courage but shame at being humiliated. Fear was the worst traitor, Osman had said. But it seemed to me that fear was the greatest shame in this world and man’s greatest humiliation, raised above him like a whip, pointed at his throat like a knife. Man is surrounded by fear as by flame, drowned in it, as in water. He fears fate, the morrow, the law, a stronger man; and he isn’t what he wants to be but what he has to be. He fawns before fate, prays to the morrow, blindly follows the law, smiles humbly at the man in power whom he hates, reconciled to being a monstrous creation made up of fear and obedience.

If man was sometimes sad, it was because he recalled himself as he was in his dreams, as he could have been, were he not as he was. And if the world were not what it is.

I wouldn’t have it like that!

I said, I am not afraid of you, fate! Nor you, tomorrow! Nor you, powerful man! But this I said to myself, and I said it with fear, half free, split down the middle. One part isolating itself because it couldn’t accept, the other silent because I didn’t want to suffer.

Bill Drexel:

According to a publication of the state media company Shanghai United Media Group, the president and cofounder of BGI forbids his employees from having children with birth defects, which he says would be a “disgrace” to the company. Not one of the 1,400 children born to employees has had serious congenital diseases, he says. “In the United States and in the West, you have a certain way,” he told the New Yorker. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah. You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations. You need somebody to change it. To blow it up.”

If history is any guide, China will do just that. The world has become desensitized to the incredible scale of China’s flagrant human rights violations. Though exact numbers are unknown, the country’s system of forcibly — and sometimes fatally — removing and selling the organs of religious minorities and prisoners of conscience is among the largest and most grotesque violations of medical norms in the modern world. So too is the state’s use of forced abortions, sterilizations, and birth control on Uyghurs in the service of its genocide against the Muslim minority. And though the one-child policy was lifted in 2015, it was the largest reproductive social experiment in the history of humanity, involving untold numbers of brutal, state-administered forced abortions and sterilizations, and leading to an imbalance of 30 million more men than women in the country due to selective abortion of girls. And while these atrocities relied on relatively rudimentary technologies, China’s biotechnology ascent suggests that its next round of ethics violations are likely to be at the cutting edge of eugenics and genetic enhancement.

Anne Applebaum:

Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to “communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when “people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it, if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at sundown.

It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.

On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.

But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.

Karl Barth, speaking to a trade union in Safenwil, December 17th, 1911:

Everything now seems to be crystal clear, yet perhaps nowhere else has Christianity fallen farther away from the spirit of her Lord and Master than precisely in this estimation of the relation between spirit and matter, inner and outer, heaven and earth. One might well say that for eighteen hundred years the Christian church, when confronted by social misery, has always referred to the Spirit, to the inner life, to heaven. The church has preached, instructed, and consoled, but she has not helped. Indeed, in the face of social misery she has always commended help as a good work of Christian love, but she has not dared to say that help is the good work. She has not said that social misery ought not to be in order then to summon all her power for the sake of this conviction that it ought not to be. She has entrenched herself behind a falsely understood saying of Jesus, taken out of context, which says that “the poor you always have with you” (John 12:8). She has accepted social misery as an accomplished fact in order to talk about the Spirit, to cultivate the inner life, and to prepare candidates for the kingdom of heaven. That is the great, momentous apostasy of the Christian church, her apostasy from Christ. When social democracy then appeared with its gospel of heaven on earth, this very church dared to stand in judgment over it, because it had denied the Spirit. She referred with smug horror to the little verse about angels and sparrows, and to similar expressions. She accused social democracy of vulgar materialism, and beat upon her breast: “Lord, we thank you that we are not as they are, that we are still idealists who regard spirit as the highest value and believe in heaven.” Thus spoke and wrote the pastors—who would then sit down and eat a hearty midday meal!