Callum Robinson, on the look of a shocked customer who, holding the price tag of a hand-crafted table, “fixed me with an expression of such disbelief, such towering contempt, that it takes my breath away”:

What I want to say is this: forget for a moment the weeks it took to handcraft this fine solid elm table, forget the years of experience brought to bear by the maker, the thousands of hours of training and practice, the costly mistakes, the electricity, insurance and overheads, the ream of arborists who brought down the tree, the sawyer who milled and dried the boards, the man in front of you, rooted to the spot, who painstakingly selected each one before handing over many hundreds of pounds for the privilege, and think on this—this table might last a hundred years, it might last four hundred. Your children’s children might still be sitting around it when you are but a memory. A vaguely amphibian headshot gathering dust on the mantel. All this and more I want to say, but of course I don’t. I probably couldn’t. My jaw is clenched so tightly that it might as well be wired shut.

When Robinson adds that it may last four hundred years, I get shivers down my spine.

But don’t miss that word “privilege” tucked in there. 

Don’t get me wrong; the worker is worthy of his wages, as Robinson makes clear. But from Substack to IKEA and all other things simultaneously monetized and cheapened — where is this pure pleasure, this privilege simply in making? 

Noah Smith:

…the world is created anew each generation. We still call China by the same name, we still draw it the same on a map, but essentially all of the people who remember the Long March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the Battle of Shanghai are dead and gone. The hard-won wisdom that they received as inadequate compensation for suffering through those terrible events has vanished into the entropy of history, and their descendants have only war movies and books and half-remembered tales to give them thin, shadowed glimpses. 

And so the new people who are now “China” are able to believe that war is a glorious thing instead of a tragic one. They are able to imagine that by coloring Taiwan a different color on a map, their army will redress the wrongs of history, bring dignity to their race, spread the bounties of communist rule, fulfill a nation’s manifest destiny, or whatever other nonsense they tell themselves. They imagine themselves either insulated from the consequences of that violence, or purified and ennobled by their efforts to support it.

Jason Peters:

My disposition in the old astrological sense of that word is to be, if not indifferent, uninterested. 

But not disinterested. My prejudice for the local is on full display. The local is where influence of the non-planetary and non-astral sort is still possible, as many of the contributors here suggest.

I do not mean to say that there is no national stage or that the drama enacted on it has no principal parts. We know perhaps too well that there is such a stage and such actors on it, saying their lines either well or poorly. And the Leviathanic theater that we have is what it is: the work of our own hands, a wooden horse bearing our ruin that we ourselves have pushed and pulled and heaved into our own city. […]

We need not search high and low for proof. This is simply a matter of scale and of the lessons that both scale and place have to teach us, if only we were their worthy pupils. I see no shortcut here, no way around this fact. Taking the crowded frenetic bypass means only that we will never see the center, which, for want of being seen and known, cannot hold.…

So here, then, is another lesson in restraint: to the extent that we cannot refuse and turn resolutely away from the abstract means of communication that so tempt the loose atomistic individuals that Robert Nisbet said we have become, to that extent we will cut ourselves off from an available apprenticeship in civility and citizenship. […]

Now it is no part of my program to legislate against the abstract means. That would be to assume that law can accomplish what only grace can effect. What I would have are people, large numbers of them, who, understanding the dangers of abstraction, willingly turn away from it and refuse its technologies. I would have them start with the comment box and all the various forms of anti-social media on offer. And here I will defend the Miltonic position: we are sufficient to stand though free to fall. However it all played out beneath that Tree of Knowledge, one thing is certain: exercising your freedom by saying “no thank you,” especially to a glozing serpent, can make a big difference. Perhaps all that’s at stake is our civic life and the health of the Republic, which suffers sorely from our lack of restraint and from the abstract forms of communication singing their siren songs.

Peter Hooton:

Bonhoeffer thus sets out to describe what Floyd calls “a theology of consciousness” which reflects the Reformation understanding of the cor curvum in se as the beginning of human sinfulness—the principal cause of our turning away from God and each other. What is needed to make room for revelation is a theological epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge, that places the object of knowledge, whether divine or human, safely beyond the controlling reach of the knower—a way of thinking which, as Floyd describes it, gives life to transcendental philosophy’s own necessarily flawed endeavors “to think critically rather than systematically, its attempts to articulate a genuine . . . dialectics of Otherness.”

In Act and Being, Bonhoeffer seeks to expound a “genuine transcendentalism” and its correlate, a “genuine ontology,” with reference to Kant’s distinction between the transcendental unity of apperception (our self-conscious ordering of the various elements of experience) and the Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself (which lies always outside or beyond our experience). Floyd believes a genuine transcendental philosophy and a genuine ontology to be possible for Bonhoeffer only when a relationship is maintained between the act of thinking “and something transcendent to thought—ontologically distinct from the thinking subject—neither of which ‘swallows up’ the other.” This requires a dialectical form of thinking that is able to sustain “both thought—understood to be always ‘in reference to’ but not totally able to grasp reality in its entirety—and the ontological resistance of authentic otherness itself—both act and being.” It must be able to accommodate both the transcendental act of faith and the ontological being of revelation. The only alternative is systematic and totalizing thinking (“idealism,” for Bonhoeffer) which is of no value to theology because it apprehends “neither the true act of thinking-within-limits (the goal of genuine transcendental philosophy) nor the nature of the being of what-is-thought, yet remains beyond-thought—something transcendent (the goal of genuine ontology).”

Bonhoeffer argues that a “genuine ontology” requires an object of knowledge—a genuine Other—that “challenges and limits” the I; that resists being drawn into the I as a contingent object of cognition. Indeed, “the object of knowledge must so stand over against the I that it is free from becoming known.” It does not depend on the I, whose being and existing it precedes in every respect. Knowledge is suspended in “a being-already-known.”

This, as Floyd says, is why the concept of revelation is so important for Bonhoeffer—“it names that situation of openness, where reality is always and only to be understood ‘in reference to’ the thinking subject, whose process of thought is ontologically ‘suspended’ in being that it has not created.” It demands the recognition that human existence is always already a “being in.” The reality of revelation is the reality of our being already in Christ, where life plays out in manifold “acts of existence.” We have our being in Christ, in whom “alone is unity and wholeness of life,” and can speak, in this context, of a genuine ontology and a genuine transcendentalism only if we define “being in” in such a way that human knowing, “encountering itself in that which is,” is able simply to accept the being of existing things without seeking to press them into its service.

---

The Terrace

De la vaporisation et la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là.
            —Baudelaire


We ate with steeps of sky about our shoulders,
High up a mountainside,
On a terrace like a raft roving
Seas of view,

The tablecloth was green, and blurred away
Toward verdure far and wide,
And all the country came to be
Our table too.

We drank in tilted glasses of rosé,
From tinted peaks of snow,
Tasting the frothy mist, and freshest
Fathoms of air.

Women were washing linens in a stream
Deep down below,
The sound of water over their knuckles,
A sauce rare.

Imminent towns whose weatherbeaten walls
Looked like the finest cheese
Bowled us enormous melons from their
Tolling towers.

Mixt into all the day we heard the spice
Of many tangy bees
Eddying through the miles-deep
Salad of flowers.

When we were done, we had our hunger still;
We dipped our cups in light;
We caught the fine-spun shade of clouds
In spoon and plate;

Drunk with imagined breathing, we inhaled
The dancing smell of height;
We fished for the bark of a dog, the squeak
Of a pasture gate.

But for all our benedictions and our gay
Readily said graces,
The evening stole our provender and
Left us there,

And darkness filled the specious space, and fell
Betwixt our silent faces,
Pressing against our eyes its absent
Fathomless stare.

Out in the dark we felt the real mountains
Hulking in proper might,
And we felt the edge of the black wind’s
Regardless cleave,

And we knew we had eaten not the manna of heaven
But our own reflected light,
And we were the only part of the night that we
Couldn’t believe.

— Richard Wilbur

(That line from Baudelaire: “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. Everything is there.”)

The turn and finish in this poem just knocks the wind out of me.

It’s worth quoting something Bonhoeffer added in one of the passages Hooton references above: “Knowledge cannot have recourse to it as something available at one’s convenience, but as that in the presence of which it must suspend itself ever anew in knowledge.”

Abraham Lincoln:

It is easy to conceive that all these shades of opinion, and even more, may be sincerely entertained by honest and truthful men. Yet, all being for the Union, by reason of these differences, each will prefer a different way of sustaining the Union. At once sincerity is questioned, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this, as before said, may be among honest men only. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.

Nick Catoggio:

To be a populist is to be a victim and to be a victim is to lack agency, blameless for your own terrible choices. The elites have failed and so the people can’t be held responsible for not merely ignoring their advice but doing the opposite. If we end up with a measles outbreak next year because parents won’t vaccinate their kids, that’s not the parents’ fault. It’s Anthony Fauci’s fault for having misled them early in the pandemic about masks.

Nick Catoggio:

Numerous writers have tried to put their fingers on the full-spectrum norms-implosion in the country’s zeitgeist right now—the “great upheaval,” “decivilization”—but whatever you call it, there is a sense that Americans have sized up various Chesterton fences protecting political and cultural institutions and are spoiling to kick those suckers over just to see what happens.

---

Malcolm Guite:

I have found that in the composition of sonnets the form itself, far from constraining me, gives me freedom. It enables me to say things with a power, a concentration, a fully embodied form, that a freer and perhaps more rambling exercise in vers libre could not attain. This paradox, that we find freedom through form, has been frequently attested and indeed explored by poets who have chosen to write in form, particularly in the sonnet form. Samuel Daniel, the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet who wrote a sonnet sequence called Delia, puts it very well in his A Defence of Ryme: “Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.”

Time and again I have had this experience of being carried “beyond my power” to “a far happier flight.” Something far more generative, more creative, is drawn from me in the very exercise of keeping to my self-imposed boundaries. The “bounding line,” as William Blake called it, is, in the very act of setting a boundary, concentrating the energy of the poem, like the banks of a river channeling the current that might otherwise dissipate in a tepid lake. The poet in Timon of Athens says poetry is “a current [which] flies each bound it chafes.” The very effort to channel it is what gives the current force, and of course the “bound,” the end of the line, or the turn of the sonnet can sometimes be overrun to great effect – the poem can fly the bound. Yet even that freedom to play with and stretch the rule is not an effect one can achieve without the self-imposed rule.

---

William Carlos Williams:

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

            yet men die miserably every day

                         for lack

of what is found there.

How right Williams was, and how literally so.

Peter Pomerantsev:

Did the [Ukrainians’] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.

I really think this is one of the most important things to have some understanding of. I have friends and relatives who tend to make excuses in Russia’s — or, rather, Putin’s direction. When I mention the Bucha massacre, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. When I explain it, they are merely skeptical. (As far as they’re concerned, Russia withdrew from the Kyiv offensive “in good faith” until the US and UK burned the deal because… military industrial complex, etc. And they have now been listening to that narrative on repeat for nearly three years.)

So as I see it, the first problem is memory. I recently heard Megyn Kelly saying something typically dumb about Ukraine-Russia and she added something like “We [Fox News] covered this [the 2014 Russian invasion and the Minsk Accords] in real time. Why doesn’t anyone remember this?” But what she doesn’t say is that they covered it in exactly the opposite way they cover it now. But she doesn’t have to say that because none of her listeners or today’s Fox viewers remember it anyway. (It’s worth keeping in mind, back when RFK Jr. was picking up steam last year, he sat in front of Sean Hannity and spun the most outrageous and obvious historical lies about the Minsk Accords, with zero pushback from Hannity and nothing but nods from the audience.)

Anne Applebaum, who has worked closely with Pomerantsev, said in her 2003 book Gulag, 

If the Russian people and the Russian elite remembered—viscerally, emotionally remembered—what Stalin did to the Chechens, they could not have invaded Chechnya in the 1990s, not once and not twice. To do so was the moral equivalent of postwar Germany invading western Poland. Very few Russians saw it that way—which is itself evidence of how little they know about their own history.

We are not even a little immune, in our own way, from this memory problem. 

Beyond that, I have constant questions about how this happens. It’s not just a matter of weighing evidence and determining what we “believe.” In fact, “weighing” hardly ever comes into it at all. It’s more often and more simply about who we are listening to, and occasionally why we listen to them. (If only we all stood outside the local shop and listened to the radio together! 🙂) You can’t weigh evidence that you never hear or don’t remember. And I’ve never been confident about just how consciously any of this takes place. 

So yes, the truth may be a treated as a subset of power, but it also ends up a subset of memory, opinion, and whim. Doing things for the sake of power may be in there somewhere, it may even be at the root, but I suspect that when it is, perhaps excepting those few who are extraordinarily vigilant of their own conscience, power may ultimately be a motive that only God can uncover.

In any case, “power” has become another one of those “you keep saying that word” things for me. Especially when we’re talking about the average citizen (i.e., any person I actually know or even have met), it does nothing to explain anything to me, and I suspect that unless we are quite specific about who we’re talking about and why (and no, “the Russian people” is not specific enough), it will only ever prevent anyone from understanding anything about anyone else.

Hannah Arendt:

Ever since the radical criticism of religious beliefs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it has remained characteristic of the modern age to doubt religious truth, and this is true for believers and nonbelievers alike. Since Pascal and, even more pointedly, since Kierkegaard, doubt has been carried into belief, and the modern believer must constantly guard his beliefs against doubts; not the Christian faith as such, but Christianity (and Judaism, of course) in the modern age is ridden by paradoxes and absurdity. And whatever else may be able to survive absurdity—philosophy perhaps can—religion certainly cannot. Yet this loss of belief in the dogmas of institutional religion need not necessarily imply a loss or even a crisis of faith, for religion and faith, or belief and faith, are by no means the same. Only belief, but not faith, has an inherent affinity with and is constantly exposed to doubt. But who can deny that faith too, for so many centuries securely protected by religion, its beliefs and its dogmas, has been gravely endangered through what is actually only a crisis of institutional religion?