Kevin Williamson

One version of illiberalism holds that somebody wins and somebody loses, and that Christians, having the upper hand in terms of numbers and political power, are entitled to impose their religion on society at large, to whatever degree they feel necessary and with only those accommodations demanded by their own forbearance. (That this is a profoundly un-Christian attitude has not stopped many Christians from embracing it.) Another version of illiberalism disguises itself as liberalism, and it insists that both Christianity and Judaism be denuded of everything that makes each distinctive, that these and all other religions be reduced to some version of the Church of Niceness, and that this orthodoxy be imposed on society at large, through formal and informal means. Genuine liberalism takes a different approach: It takes for granted that people living in a free and open society of any meaningful size or complexity will have profound, wrenching disagreements about fundamental issues, and that the job of the state and of civic institutions (including the schools) is not to scrub religions, political platforms, and creeds of anything potentially offensive but rather to create a political space in which community life can be lived peaceably. 

Tyler Austin Harper:

“This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,” Cameron Wimpy, a political scientist at Arkansas State University, told me. It would be like undertaking a book-length study demonizing Irish people, refusing to define what you mean by Irish, and then drawing on studies of native Irish in Ireland, non-Irish immigrants to Ireland, Irish Americans, people who took a 23andMe DNA test that showed Irish ancestry, and Bostonians who get drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day to build your argument about the singular danger of “the Irish.” It’s preposterous. […]

Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas, the authors of White Rural Ragecontorted studies and called unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside the house. It is not primarily the rural poor, but often successful, white metropolitan men who imperil our republic.

---

We recently, upon recommendation, watched the film Paterson, and we loved it. It’s one of those movies that feels more like staring at a painting for two hours, rather than being strung along a narrative plot-line. (Not that there’s anything wrong with plot; I just don’t prefer it these days.) Nothing in Paterson is really discussed in the movie itself; its themes are remarkably silent. And one of these silent themes is repetition. In fact, I think its the main theme. From the wake-up scenes, to the walks, to the conversations with the supervisor, to the straightening of the mailbox. Even the appearance of numerous twins throughout the film would be an otherwise bizarre occurrence were it not there alongside all these other repetitions.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that new and beautiful things don’t come out of these repetitions. But repetition is the water we are swimming in — and being called to swim in more joyfully.

Too much further explanation of the film, in this case, would risk reducing some of its magic. The only reason I wanted to put a roof nail in it was because of a quote from Edward Mendelson that I read in an interview with Alan Jacobs today.

The quote comes from Mendelson’s Early Auden, which I happily pulled off the shelf this afternoon. Mendelson is explaining a significant change of view for W. H. Auden, beginning with his poem “A Summer Night.” Up to this point Auden had, like just about everyone else, viewed repetition as a curse, “a mortifying compulsion, a doom to which everyone was condemned and which heroes struggled to escape.”

All this changed with in “A Summer Night.” Repetition now became the ground of memory, the medium of love, and for the first time Auden praised events that occurred a second time.

This was a prodigious step, made in opposition to the reigning assumptions of almost two centuries of philosophy, psychology, and art. In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest force of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, repetition has a very different import: it is the sustaining and renewing power of nature, the basis for all art and understanding. The detailed history of repetition deserves a book to itself; here it will suffice to note that repetition lost its moral value only with the spread of the industrial machine and the swelling of the romantic chorus of praise for personal originality. Until two hundred years ago virtually no one associated repetition with boredom or constraint. Ennui is ancient; its link to repetition is not. The damned in Dante’s Hell never complain that their suffering is repetitive, only that it is eternal, which is not the same thing. … When [Goethe’s] Faust asks Mephistopheles if there is a way to regain youth without resorting to witchcraft, he is advised to take up the repetitive life of a rural farmer, cultivating his garden. This is precisely what Voltaire’s Candide learned to accept only a few decades before, but Faust will have none of it. He wants no reliable satisfactions of any kind, only continual change and a perpetual unease that will call into being ever new interests and desires. He accepts a wager with the devil which he can lose only when he asks the passing moment to linger, to repeat itself in the next moment. For Faust, accepting repetition means accepting death.

I didn’t start reading until my later 20’s. Until that time, I’m certain I could count on one hand the number of books I had actually read. Naturally, there was a lot to catch up on, and one of the first books on my list was G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. If I were going to recommend only one chapter in that book, it would be “The Ethics of Elfland.”

Here is a key passage from that chapter:

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. … Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Exulting in the monotony — not because we are limited, not because nature says we have to, but because it is “the ground of memory, the medium of love.”

Paterson emulates this wonderfully.

Stanley Hauerwas, in the closing lines to his Gifford Lectures:

Christians believe that God has given us all the time we need to address one challenge, one argument at a time. We can take our time to make our arguments because we know that our lives are not our own; thus it is possible for us to live without our living being no more than a hedge against death, that is, it is possible for us to live as witnesses. I have said that without witness, there is no argument. But it does not follow that arguments always accompany witness. Sometimes witnesses are all Christians have to offer, and sometimes witnesses are enough; for what could be more powerful than the discovery that human beings have been made part of God’s care of creation through the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Adrian Karatnycky:

Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.”

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration campsthat recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

Samuel Earle:

Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”

It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.

This reminds me of Nick Cotaggio’s description of along the same lines: “[Trump]’s like a mobster shaking down a business owner by saying, ‘Nice shop you have. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’” Or, more particular to our case, “It’s a nice country we have. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

Which also reminds me of this Monty Python skit.

Joseph E. Davis:

The fragmentation of the social world has also fostered a shift in the mode of moral reasoning. Confrontation with discrepant values, especially in competitive situations, where outcomes approximate a zero-sum formula, predisposes people to instrumental thinking of the means-end kind. What to do is a question of calculating the means that, on balance, will produce the most personally desired outcome and the ability to control future consequences. […]

But “pressure to do well” doesn’t capture what is truly involved here. Young people are expected to get good grades, aim for a good college, stand out, live up to their “full potential,” let go of “limiting” beliefs, and the like. Educational institutions, not to mention parents, media, and employers, all, in various ways, communicate these success-oriented values and their integral relation to the good in life. These are the standards young people have been told they should meet, the yardsticks by which they should measure themselves. […]

[We need to] recognize that the conflict is not primarily between belief and behavior; it is in the realm of value itself. In our time of fragmentation and normative contingency, the priority of intrinsic goods like truthfulness cannot be taken for granted. Parents and teachers also stand on unstable ground and face ethical dilemmas that pit valued outcomes—for children, for themselves, for their institutions—against higher ideals. As students know full well, they are not the only ones prone to cheat.

Personal integrity needs social integrity. To build character, we must also work to shape a consistent environment where cheating does not possess a certain logic, where telling the truth can become a firm habit, where what it means to be a good, accomplished person does not involve tradeoffs that incentivize “any means necessary.” An environment where, to return to Guardini, our lives, individually and collectively, “must testify to the fact that truth is the basis of everything.”

James Davison Hunter:

A “safe” morality is not bad in itself, but this kind of safety has come at a cost. In the effort to establish a neutral and inclusive paradigm of formation, moral cosmologies are lifted out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts, detached from the social practices by which they are communally reinforced, and disconnected from the historical narratives that give them weight and significance. Emptied of these particu-larities, lived moralities lose the very qualities by which they could become coherent to people and binding upon them. The moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.

A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community imposes few if any moral demands or obligations (such as telling the truth or sharing some of one’s wealth with others), and therefore has few psychic consequences (whether remorse, guilt, or shame—or, conversely, pride in having done the right thing). What you end up with may be politically uncontroversial, but it will add little or nothing to the moral fortitude of the individual.

Marilynne Robinson:

The [biblical] narrative introduces the idea of divine purpose, relative to humankind, its intention to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations. The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention.

One can appreciate that this is an easily assailable position, akin to special pleading, though no less potentially true and significant for it. But also, when put in the context of things that we are regularly aware of throughout history and experience, it becomes less self-protective than a natural and understandable and relatable condition, only one extended to divine implication.

So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated. When Jesus says of his executioners “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. If the same were said of the mythic progenitors of human history, Adam and Eve, or of the splitters of the atom, the creators of antibiotics, and all the rest of us, the truth of these words would overwhelm our power to conceive.