Jay Tolson:

In his new book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, cultural critic Adam Kirsch observes that humanists are at an impasse: They must either reject continued progress (and the freedom and moral autonomy bound up with it) or acknowledge, on rational grounds, the merit of transhumanist and posthumanist arguments that a world without human beings is superior to one in which humans exist. The latter view, he suggests, might even be considered the humanistic equivalent of those held by various religious traditions that have “always seen the end of days as both wonderful and dreadful.” If the end of humanity is the consummation of humanism, Kirsch concludes, “there may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: ‘There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.’”

Ian Marcus Corbin:

A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck.

The turn to panic has been an immensely frustrating aspect of the past several years. The liberal establishment has gnashed its teeth, shrieked, buried its head in the sand, blamed its comeuppance on omnipotent Russian bots, anything to avoid going back to reality and seeing what it might have missed, how its cultures have been blind, how they could be refreshed. The ongoing advancement of postwar liberalism is not guaranteed by the dictates of nature. That is fine, or it had better be, because it is true. But what should we do with that fact? Here there are infinite options. We have to say it again, and keep saying it: There is always more to see in the world; the process of understanding is unending. There are ways for America to stay America, while gathering back in its various warring factions. One thing we can say for sure is that to keep giving voice to the shouted slogans of yesterday is not one of those ways. If America wants to return to a state of relative social peace, if it wants its various peoples to be at home in its world, it had better dispatch its incumbent prophets from the noisy, contentious town square immediately. New, more capacious visions are needed—great awakenings and reformations and renaissances still to be seen. Thankfully, beautifully, reality is waiting, and reality is never spent.

Tom Nichols:

“Back then, this kind of partisanship didn’t seem like a problem: In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program. I felt like it was safe to throw elbows and do some partisan high-sticking; I believed that we were all in a giant bouncy house called the Constitution, a place where we might bump skulls or sprain an ankle now and then but where there were no sharp edges and there were only soft landings.

I don’t believe that anymore.”

Neither do I.

(There’s a similar line of thought for “the church,” but I’m still working even the description of that one out.)

Ian Bogost:

The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable. […]

[It could be] tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.

… To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often—and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

James K.A. Smith:

As I imagined a call to pastoral ministry, all I really imagined was preaching. And the only thing I could envision as preaching was teaching: didactic induction into the truth. The pulpit was where one dispensed instruction. I look at my sermon notes from this period and cringe. I want to go back to these congregations and apologize—for boring them to death, sure, but also for a youthful selfishness, imagining my abstractions and speculations had anything to do with living the Christian life. Here were people quietly burying their elders, terrified for children bent on destroying themselves, facing death and loneliness and loss, never given permission to doubt, carrying any number of secret burdens and sins they longed to confess; and here’s a 22-year-old kid who’s read a lot of books trying to parse trinitarian personhood through 19th-century scholasticism as if it matters. […]

As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manichaeans and Pelagians with ironclad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers. When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek. I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.

It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”

David Corey:

The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods is crucial, because friendship (real friendship, not the ersatz friendship we practice today) is an intrinsic good, while politics is an instrumental good. Thus, to lose a friendship over politics suggests that something is deeply disordered in our souls. […]

When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause. What it is replaced with is “allyship” or “comradeship.” And comrades are not, strictly speaking, friends. They are rather partners in a cause. …

[A] culture that views politics as war will inevitably struggle with meaninglessness. Of course, there is some sense of meaning in fighting for a cause. But in pluralist societies like ours, political causes will never be fully achieved, not only because there is no place to dispose permanently of our enemies—every victory is thus subject to reversal over time—but also because what the “warmakers” are ultimately seeking in politics is a resolution possible only on the far side of the eschaton. We are seeking perfect justice, perfect agreement, and perfect stability over time. Because perfection in this world constantly eludes us, politics is like that chain suspended in midair. Each link seems meaningful, but the chain is anchored in nothing. The war to end all wars has no end. What ends is only our healthy relationship to intrinsic goods that bring happiness and meaning to life. […]

Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in contexts where citizens share a robust conception of the good, or of God. But this is not my view. From experience I have learned that friendship does not require that friends love all the same things, much less that they love the same ultimate things. Friendships based on such common loves of course do exist, and perhaps they are of a higher order than those in which ultimate truths are not shared. But friendship is possible where what is loved is simply the person, not the person’s metaphysics or theology. Pluralism thus need not be the death of friendships that are genuine and deep.

But if pluralism does not render meaningful friendships impossible, the tendency to understand politics as a form of war certainly makes them less likely. That was the claim I supported above by distinguishing between friendship and allyship. The second claim I made was that how one understands friendship can affect how one practices politics. Why would this be so? It is because the experience of genuine friendship, which is not merely an intrinsic good but a peak intrinsic good, cannot help but put politics in its place. Politics today makes great claims about its own importance. Yet politics cannot bring meaning to our lives—not deep meaning at any rate—because it is never more than an instrumental good.

Politics is also always incomplete, while friendship is complete in itself, in that it needs nothing else to deliver such satisfaction as is possible here on earth. Of course, friendship is incomplete in its own way, in that it cannot make us perfectly whole. But this incompleteness differs in kind from the incompleteness of politics. Politics is incomplete because its work is never done. Friendship is incomplete only insofar as its complete success intimates something even higher, a kind of friendship with God that awaits us at the end of time. Those who understand what real friendship is, and what it ultimately foreshadows, will place less value in politics because they will have better things to do. They will know through experience where their deepest longings are most fully satisfied.

Rowan Williams:

There is, it seems, a pervasive loss of nerve about what we might want to convey about value or purpose to a new generation. And there is our tolerance of public rhetoric – not only online – in which aggressive performativity substitutes for truthfulness, analysis and negotiation. It’s as if we have lost not only a sense of positive continuity with the past but any kind of thoughtful capacity to imagine the future, and everything collapses into the hectic theatre of the present moment and the hunger to be made to feel better instantly.

Nadezhda Mandelstam:

We answer for everything—for every deed and every word—and memory invites us to consider why we have lived, what we have done with our lives, whether we had a preordained purpose, and if so, whether we have fulfilled it; whether our life had a unifying thread of meaning, or whether it consisted only of random and absurd happenings.

Wendell Berry:

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

Re-upping from here:

I get that both sides of the political isle—as a whole!—do a wonderful job of maintaining a mutually despising feedback loop. And I’m not saying that the Left—religious or not, non-white or otherwise—hasn’t earned a great deal of scorn. But as far as I can see, the Right, especially in its religious elements, has earned every last drop of its closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent, and lazy reputation. Its house is entirely corrupt, and that is no one’s fault but that of its own members.

And also here:

There has probably never been a time when parties were not cult-afflicted. The current Democratic Party is no exception. But the Republican Party at this point is pure cult-of-personality, cult-of-grievance. Its insanity and stupidity can not possibly be overstated.

To agree with Andrew Sullivan here:

I am not saying that the Democrats are not also corrupted by rank tribalism. At their worst, they are, as I often point out. I am saying that they do not compare with the current GOP in its hollowness and depravity and madness.

[Herschel] Walker shows that there is no principle they will not jettison, no evil they will not excuse, no crime they won’t “whatabout,” and no moron they won’t elect, if it means they gain power. There is degeneracy among many Democrats, sure. But the Republican party is defined by this putrescence. Burn it down.

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.