Peter Hooton:

Vicarious representative action comes over time … to acquire a broader significance in Bonhoeffer’s theology. In Christ, humanity is always something shared and never solitary. Ontology and ethics are inseparable. Human beings live naturally in the ethical situation of encounter. They may, of course, seek to avoid this, by notionally reducing the ethical task to the selective application of certain fixed principles—and then “withdrawing from responsibility for the whole, to a purely private bourgeois existence, or even into the monastery”—but this simply betrays a false understanding of ethics, and a shallow appreciation of life. The isolationist approach, says Bonhoeffer, will always fail “due to the historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] of human existence.”

In Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, vicarious representative action is worldly, responsible action, freely undertaken by human beings out of love for other “real” human beings. And because all such action takes place necessarily within history, it will always entail risk, and a degree of moral ambiguity. Those who act responsibly “in their own freedom” must themselves weigh the merits of their actions and be responsible for their decisions. There are no formal, saving rules of the game to which they can appeal—for in this case “they would no longer be truly free”—just as there is no “ultimately dependable [human] knowledge of good and evil” in this God-reconciled, but still fallen, sicut deus world. The responsible actor must, therefore, surrender to God, at the very moment of execution, “[t]he deed that is done, after responsibly weighing all circumstances in light of God’s becoming human in Christ.”

Nicolas Carr:

Although the importance of Google’s search engine has declined in recent years, it remains the world’s most important epistemological tool — the first place many people go to get answers to their questions and fill gaps in their knowledge. Google is now giving precedence in its search results to a chatbot that it knows is unreliable — that it knows spreads lies. That strikes me as being deeply unethical — and a sad testament to how far Google has fallen from its founding ideals.

That statement hardly seems worth bothering with. Google’s original mission statement was “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But as Shoshana Zuboff has well documented, Google fell from whatever goals — stated goals, a friend reminded me — over 20 years ago when they discovered that a search engine providing genuine knowledge to the world didn’t actual command any money or power. (Spoiler alert: they opted for the money and the power.)

But the combination Carr highlights should still shock us:

• The first, prioritized place the entire world goes to search is Google

+

• The first, prioritized answer Google provides for every search is knowingly likely to be, and very often is, bullshit.

But you’re not supposed to be paying attention enough to notice or care. At a conference once, Zuboff was asked by the then vice president of Google, “Shoshana, do you really want to get in the way of organizing and making accessible the world’s information?”

Of course, there is no need to get in the way of that stated goal because Google is not even interested in making the world’s information accessible to you — to say nothing about the spread of knowledge or wisdom. They do not care if even one person’s knowledge increases or decreases, if one’s knowledge becomes more accurate or less accurate. And to the degree that it could be said that they do “care,” knowledge, truthfulness, wisdom are their kryptonite.

“If we’re gonna fix this,” says Zuboff, “no matter how much we feel like we need this stuff, we’ve got to get to a place where we are willing to say no.”

A 2014 post from Scott Alexander (via Alan Jacobs):

At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career paths.

The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively.

Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.

But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.

[…]

Once you learn about utilitarianism and effective charity, you can become the holy madman, donating every cent you have beyond what is strictly necessary to survive and hold down a job to whatever the top rated charity is. 

Or you can become the worldly scholar, continuing to fritter away your money on things like “hot water” and “food other than gruel” but appreciating the effective-utilitarian perspective and trying to make a few particularly important concessions to it.

Or you can use it to steal other people’s cows. …

Government spending seems to be a particularly fertile case for this problem. I remember hearing some conservatives complain: sex education in public schools is an outrage, because my tax dollars are going to support something I believe is morally wrong.

This is, I guess, a demand for ethical rigor. That no one should ever be forced to pay for something they don’t like. Apply it consistently, and conservatives shouldn’t have to pay for sex ed, liberals shouldn’t have to pay for wars, and libertarians shouldn’t have to pay for anything, except maybe a $9.99 tax bill yearly to support the police and a minimal court system.

Applied consistently, you become the holy madman demanding either total anarchy or some kind of weird system of tax earmarks which would actually be pretty fun to think about. Or the worldly scholar with a strong appreciation for libertarian ideas who needs a really strong foundational justification for spending government money on things that a lot of people oppose.

Applied inconsistently, you’re just stealing cows again, coming up with a clever argument against the programs you don’t like while defending the ones you do.

For the “bang, bang” part, it’s worth reading to the end for the scene that Alexander sets up at the beginning, the climax of a “TV western… where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas.”

(“Ah yes, the Greek Western,” my friend replied this morning.)

Kevin Williamson:

The thing about this kind of work is that work works: Polio cases worldwide have been reduced by 99.9 percent since the Rotarians took on the disease. These are good people doing good things—no mystery, no radical scientific breakthrough, just consistent hard work by people who have nothing personally to gain by saving children from paralysis in Nigeria. 

I would like to emphasize the contrast here: On one hand, we have those Americans in the Rotary clubs and others like them, who do hard things competently and with humility, dedicating years of selfless effort toward getting it right on one big thing; on the other hand, we have a class of American gadflies who are endlessly self-aggrandizing, who live only for their own status and wealth, whose only credo is “What’s in it for me?” and who are, in spite of their posturing as hard-headed realists, the most absurd gang of chiseling incompetents ever to bring such an abbreviated attention span to bear on the nation’s problems, who wreck institutions and alliances and Ebola-control programs simply because they refuse to do their homework, and who have managed to destroy more than $7 trillion in wealth in only a few days while setting fire to a system of international economic and security cooperation that was built over the course of decades by better and more capable men than these misfits could ever hope to be. The Rotarians don’t talk about politics at their meetings, but there is a politically meaningful contrast to be seen there: between the best kind of Americans and the worst kind. 

Timothy Snyder:

It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.

The base at Pituffik (formerly Thule) only exists because Denmark permitted the US to build it at a sensitive time. It has served for decades as a central part of the US’s nuclear armoury and then as an early-warning system against Soviet and then Russian nuclear attack.

When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the Nato alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of Nato, and it is already the US’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend them in return.

Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked article 5, the mutual defence obligation of the Nato treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita, almost as many Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war as were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?

The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the Nato mission. But right now the US is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire Nato mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. But Vance opposes helping Ukraine, spreads Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and is best known for yelling at Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office. On the base, Vance blamed the killing in Ukraine on Joe Biden rather than on Vladimir Putin, which is grotesque. Vance claimed that there is now an energy ceasefire in place between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, Russia violated it immediately. Russia is now preparing a massive spring offensive against Ukraine; the response of Musk-Trump has been to ignore this larger reality completely while allowing Biden-era aid to Ukraine to come to an end. Denmark, meanwhile, has given four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as the US.

From Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters in The New Atlantis (I’m not sure about how much “Americans once understood,” but the either-ors listed are worth including):

Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness.

Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.

Rightly wary of the threats from big government, we have too often allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by lobbyists spinning this fairytale, and are now awakening to find ourselves in an inhumane dystopia in which technology has increasingly been turned, from conception to death, against the human person and against the family, in which we flourish. Today, with an unlikely coalition of pro-family conservatives and techno-optimists propelling a second Trump administration into the White House, we stand at a point of decision. Will we accelerate our regime of hacking — or begin to reckon with its costs?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens:

Back in 1931, when the West really was on the brink of being overrun by card-carrying fascists, the German-Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin found himself exasperated with exactly this kind of knee-jerk negative posture. The left of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin felt, was winning the moral high ground but losing the rhetorical (and therefore political) war. In a widely read review titled “Left-Wing Melancholy,” he took aim at the New Objectivity, an artistic movement that satirized the vacuousness of modern life. These artists and writers, he wrote, had abandoned the “gift” of disgust with present material conditions in favor of rote, routine and self-flattering criticism. Preferring to pose as a “spiritual elite” rather than actively engage with the labor movement, they were guilty of a “grotesque underestimation of the opponent” (in this case, capitalism). Where their ideals used to be, Benjamin lamented, there lay only “the empty spaces where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed” with a “know-all irony” that “turns the yawning emptiness into a celebration.”

For many progressives, Benjamin’s gift of disgust with material conditions has likewise been displaced, shifting instead to a disgust with the people who vote for Trump. Since 2016, it has become common across the left-liberal spectrum to argue that these voters are low-information, cast ballots against their own interests, are primarily motivated by misogyny and racism, and on top of this are just plain stupid. While a pedigreed “spiritual elite” has tried to educate these voters out of their incorrect economic assessments and backwards cultural beliefs, it has in the meantime allowed a “yawning emptiness”—a silence—to engulf issues that its ostensible base, working-class voters, say really matter to them.

I think it’s worth pointing out that part of that yawning emptiness includes the “God gap,” finely highlighted by David French. “A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith,” says French, “is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.” That elephant in the blue room seems to almost-but-not-quite have a place in this essay.

Helpfully getting more specific, Stevens goes on to describe the way that, in the last four years, the narrative on the left repeatedly dismissed economic complaints as essentially fictional:

The reasoning went something like this: Consumer sentiment (bad) had become spuriously uncoupled from the underlying macroeconomic data (good) and could therefore be dismissed as “bad vibes.” All Biden—and Harris after him, forced to clean up the campaign disaster he left in his wake—had to do was show us enough data to make us believe inflation was under control. Never mind that other year-over-year data for 2022-23 showed trends like worsening inequality, a deepening affordability crisis (especially pronounced in blue states, which have failed to build housing), an uptick in credit-card defaults and a 12 percent increase in the national homelessness rate. The standard political vocabulary—GDP is rocking!—failed to capture the underlying reality, which is that it rocked unequally. The Democrats used this language anyway. The idea of a “vibecession,” meanwhile, smuggled in the contemptuous suggestion that the problem lay with the voters themselves, who simply refused to admit how wonderfully they were doing.

…Dismissing the economic experiences and self-perception of low- and middle-income voters is also a bad idea for a party that is still seen as having presided over the biggest bailout for banks in global history. The appeal to “vibecession,” itself a gross misdescription of how “real people” experience the “real economy,” in fact recalls the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis: back then, financiers chose to dress up the economic outlook in fancy math and intentionally obfuscating language that directly contradicted the underlying—and structurally rotten—material conditions.

Stevens’s essay, titled “Left-Wing Irony,” is a good example of (and step toward?) the conversation that I wish would take place publicly on the left today. “Irony Abounds” could just as easily have been the essay title, and to counter that sea of irony, on both the left and the right, Stevens says the left needs a better “type” of irony:

A more productive left-wing irony might be rooted not in the ideological certainty of the smug critic—the “know-all” irony of Benjamin’s “spiritual elite”—but in ideological humility. The irony, that is, of holding two thoughts in mind at once: my experience, and yours.

She goes on to prescribe Richard Rorty’s “liberal irony” as just such a productive humility:

This is irony as reconnaissance mission: it requires paying attention to a wide range of experiences in order to accurately describe how people are living today and what they desire—especially people whose experiences are different from yours. It provides a blueprint for the contemporary left-wing irony American politics so desperately needs.

Though I admire the honest criticism and love some of the descriptions of vision that Stevens lays out, I don’t think she has much of substance to offer even a sympathetic reader like myself. And I’m not even a little convinced that Rorty is a source improvement. (Mark Edmundson has argued convincingly that Rorty’s philosophy is a substantial part of what led us exactly to where we are, so it’s difficult to see how he could simultaneously appear as a source of needed wisdom.) Stevens saves a fair amount of space at the end of the essay to lay out a little Rortian groundwork as she sees and recommends it, but I felt like I was waiting for a package that never showed up.

This a great time for me to be starting O. Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human. Although he does say his book is explicitly about law, it seems pretty clear to me that the anthropology that Snead advocates is both firmer and more dynamic ground than Rorty’s liberal irony.

From the introduction:

Building upon this richer anthropological account, the book argues … that for both their basic survival and their flourishing, embodied (vulnerable) human beings depend on networks of “uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” constituted by other people who are willing to make the good of others’ their own, regardless of what this might offer by way of recompense. By first depending on these networks, and then participating in them, individuals become the sort of people who can care for others in this same way. This transformation of persons from needy consumers of unconditional care and support to mature uncalculating caregivers for others, of course, guarantees the sustainability of these essential networks. But, more importantly, it also helps people to develop into what an embodied being should become, namely, the kind of people who make the good of others their own. Put most simply and directly, by virtue of their embodiment, human beings are made for love and friendship.

In older, dried out parlance, this is about moving the conversation away from the dominant language of negative rights and back to where it was always meant to be: responsibility and care.

I’m looking for more of the criticism that Stevens offers, and more anthropological cow bell from folks like Snead. This is good stuff.

In Blake Smith’s essay “Just Another Liberalism?” he describes liberalism, à la Michel Foucault, as having a “nondogmatic reflexivity.” I like that phrase. It recalls Alasdair MacIntyre’s description of the flexibility and expandability within the boundaries of a living tradition — boundaries which are also flexible yet in a way consistent with the tradition itself. Liberalism’s reflexivity, says Smith, is part of a larger “capacity for imagining utopias… in spaces outside of state power.”

Liberalism’s utopias reside in liberal subjects’ capacities (themselves instantiated by a wider culture and its pedagogical institutions, such as schools, media, and the political process itself) to imagine themselves as the agents of their own lives, which are most intensely and happily lived where the shadow of politics least falls.

Our lives are “most intensely and happily lived where the shadow of politics least falls.” I think that’s a great place to plug the “anarchism” in the politics quadrilateral.

As many, many, many have pointed out for some time, liberalism has been slowly losing (and ceding) ground to both “neoliberalism” and illiberalism. (Of course, these are words that are happily and helpfully avoided in the healthy day-to-day.) That loss of ground has occurred not only because of badly misguided politics and poor civic education, but because the proponents of liberalism have so neglected that life outside the shadows. On this, Smith/Foucault offer a grave warning.

If liberals do not recover these traditions, they—and the vitalizing energies of political life—may pass wholly over to their enemies, who may be able to appropriate for themselves, on the one hand, all our longings for a natural, normal, quiet life outside of politics, and, on the other, all our desires to be something greater (larger and more estimable) than a self-interested individual calculating his potential gains.

That calculating, self-interested individual is the human as homo economicus, the primacy of which, according to Foucault, marks neoliberalism from its more “polyvalent” classical rendering. I count myself a fan of that polyvalent liberalism, of that polyvalent treatment of the liberal subject in all of his or her diverse capacities, no matter how idealized and unrealized it has always been. That it is infinitely preferable to the ever-self-intersted, necessarily disenchanted neoliberal subject should always have been obvious. But even this subject — the blindered, morally shallow, left-brained human — might find itself in danger very soon.

Left with no decent passions at its command, liberalism would be—and perhaps is—a spent force. But even illiberalism seems trapped within the specifically neoliberal anthropology, narrower and meaner than the expansive, polyvalent vision of humanity at the heart of the liberal tradition. And what comes may be still worse. The rational, self-interested individual, however base we consider him, possessed at least a certain coherence. Contemporary technologies of distraction seem to act increasingly on fragmented, disconnected parts of a splintering subject, while contemporary political rhetoric, in its systemic and transparent falsehoods, bypasses the minimal conditions of instrumental reason. If there is a subject of governance after neoliberalism, rather than transcending self-interest, he may be too psychically scattered and disoriented to be considered a self. The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination in its true political dimensions (and not merely as the false charms of an aestheticized inner life) may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism.

Despite being explicitly about liberalism, all of this also points pretty clearly to a need for the “conservatism” in the above mentioned quadrilateral — conservatism that values the past, as well as the unknown and uncontrolled, and is therefore wisely skeptical of change (especially the “inevitable” kind), and is therefore always inclined toward reform over revolution. (At least this is true in the political realm; the clearly conservative anarchist revolucion is another thing.)

Yes, this conservatism is utterly opposed to progressivism, as well as zealotry and the pride of victory, but that’s because it is more fundamentally concerned with inheritance and with gratitude — that is, with the human condition itself, improvement of which cannot erase a loving “fidelity to daily tasks.” There is still plenty of legroom here for a nondogmatic reflexivity, plenty of capacity for imagining utopias, in spaces both within and without state power. As Ivan Šarčević wrote about tradition and inherited identity: “Like the parable of the talents, in gratitude for the inheritance, with things he received an individual regains not only the equal worth of the inheritance but the chance to engage in creative work with the gifts and have them ‘double” in value.’”

To me, the opposite of conservatism is not progressivism but neglect. (By its nature, it’s primarily neglect of the past, but always of the present and future, too.) One of the obvious problems with this neglect — that is, with our neglect of any of life’s conservative elements — is that whatever starting point one envisions, whether for conviviality or for revolution, will be more callow and tenuous. Whereas inheritance and gratitude, with a little reflexive critique and utopian-inspired imagination and investment — to this, more will be given.

In any case, it is not, and has never been, possible to avoid being a bit idealistic. Envisioning a liberal-conservative(-socialist)-anarchist imagination, however proleptically, is not an easy thing, let alone enacting such a vision. But as Kay Ryan once wrote (and many others have said to similar effect): “This is, of course, an ideal, and one not fully attainable. Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners.”

As Nicholas Carr took the time to warn us yet again, there’s a lot of present and future space currently being carved out by and for very small, very callow souls who possess as little human imagination as possible — if a capacity for human beings exists in that space at all.

Whether you’re a liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, or all or none of the above, now’s not a bad time to decide what banners you and yours want to stitch and hold aloft. And make ‘em count.

Josef Pieper:

Supernatural hope, then, which embraces not only the firm expectation itself, but also the living source of this expectation, is able to rejuvenate and give new vigor even to natural hope. “Rejuvenate” is precisely the right word here. Youth and hope are ordered to one another in manifold ways. They belong together in the natural as well as in the supernatural sphere. The figure of youth is the eternal symbol of hope, just as it is the symbol of magnanimity.

Natural hope blossoms with the strength of youth and withers when youth withers. “Youth is a cause of hope. For youth, the future is long and the past is short.”37 On the other hand, it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.

For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.

The supernatural vitality of hope overflows, moreover, and sheds its light also upon the rejuvenated powers of natural hope. The lives of countless saints attest to this truly astonishing fact. It seems surprising, however, how seldom the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints is noticed; especially of those saints who were active in the world as builders and founders. There is hardly anything comparable to just this youthfulness of the saint that testifies so challengingly to the fact that is surely most relevant for contemporary man: that, in the most literal sense of these words, nothing more eminently preserves and founds “eternal youth” than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady preseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them lovable.

We must not regard this as a fatal concession to the Zeitgeist. As Saint Augustine so aptly says: “God is younger than all else.”