one of these is not like the other

I don’t often disagree with David French—he is, in fact, one of the people who keep me sane. But his latest Sunday newsletter says this about the two parties:

Again, remember that both of these coalitions are chock-full of Christians. It is not the case (at least not yet) that America has one religious party and one secular party. The mutual loathing you see comes from people who could recite every syllable of the Apostles’ Creed side-by-side and believe wholeheartedly in the divine inspiration of scripture.

Let’s put aside the fact that there are no more than twelve right-wing Christians in the entire country who can recite the Apostle’s Creed.

Are the two sides chock-full of Christians? Absolutely. Does the secular faction of the Democratic party often forget and overlook its (largely non-white) religious base? Absolutely. But everything French goes on to describe in his newsletter applies without question to the Republican party’s (largely white) religious base. A much better case would have to be made—and he makes no case at all—to show that the “mutual hatred” from the Left stems from its non-white religious members. I don’t think French would hold on to this statement very tightly, but why the equivalence at all?

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.

Buechner

Frederick Buechner died last week. I can probably say along with many others that I am a Christian still because of him. As Russell Moore so rightly describes him and his writing, he is one of the authors “who kept me Christian, who upended the way I think or feel about everything.” Or, as Justin Ariel Bailey puts it,

He was not interested in getting me to question my belief. Whatever he was trying to do, it didn’t feel like deconstruction.

If he challenged my unexamined certainties, he did so gently, by painting more beautiful pictures of the life of faith. He wrote so honestly about how it feels to be human: the loneliness, the confusion, the clumsy struggle to receive the love we are given or to give love in a way that can be received.

That was Buechner’s special ministry—saying the quiet part out loud. Giving language to the inarticulate murmurings of the heart. Speaking what we all felt rather than what we were supposed to say. Teaching us to tell the truth.

But what Buechner did better than almost anyone was holding the door ajar for grace to come bursting in, when it is least expected and least deserved.

Given how little of him I have read, I think it’s fair to say that few people have had a more disproportionate effect on me. Reading various profiles during the week, I was constantly reminded of the sense of his writing, something that you can catch much better than you can explain—“a light unutterable“. As Julie Mullins wrote, his legacy is a “testimony to an understated kind of faith.” All the profiles of him I’ve seen have caught this too, but what I think I enjoyed reading the most this week is Philip Yancey’s 1997 profile of Buechner in Books and Culture:

At times Buechner has been tempted to interpret his conversion experience in Freudian terms as a search for a missing father, or in existentialist terms as a self-validating response to anxiety and failure. He resists that temptation. Instead, he sees in it an exemplar of the “crazy, holy grace” that wells up from time to time “through flaws and fissures in the bedrock harshness of things.” As Buechner has noted, many modern writers have plumbed the depths of despair in a world where God seems largely absent, but few have tried to tackle the reality of what salvation, of what God’s presence, might mean.

In his own writing, Buechner has never forgotten that Christ was crowned in the presence of laughter. Beyond the shadows in which we live and move there lies, in a phrase from Tolkien he often quotes, “joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief.” Buechner writes of a magic kingdom, like Oz, of an end to our weary journey, of a home that will heal at last the homesickness that marks our days. “I have been spared the deep, visceral look into the abyss,” Buechner says. “Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike put it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent nor the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage.”

bleak, by specific definition

[T]o my Republican colleagues, who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

– Liz Cheney

In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.

– Dick Cheney

I think Liz Cheney’s phrasing was more on point than her father’s. Maybe the way to say it is this: Donald Trump is and has always been a threat to all things rational and good. That is his brand, his life’s message. (If that is news to you, or if you have even one bone in your body that resists the truth of that statement, you are beyond help.) But, if it is not true already, it is nearly true, that in our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been a political party that is a greater threat to our Republic than the current Republican Party—and the religious, Christian core of it is its most dangerous faction.

The irony of it all could not be thicker. For all the shit-talk from across the isle, the Democratic Party, as David Brooks put it, “is an institution that still practices coalition politics, that serves as a vehicle for the diverse interests and ideas in society to filter up into legislation, that plays by the rules of the game, that believes in rule of law. Right now, it is the only major party that does that.”

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.

fidelity as hope

Phil Christman, with a passing view of David Bentley Hart’s new book:

Another thing that Hart’s system can’t give us is “an unimpeachable claim to Christian orthodoxy as many people define it.” His new Tradition and Apocalypse answers this charge the only way one can: By saying, in effect, “Well, so’s your mother.” No religious tradition is particularly stable. No version of Christianity doesn’t reject a whole lot of other ones. Our record of the early church’s beliefs and behavior, even if we just confine ourselves to what we find in the New Testament, shows a group of people whose opinions sit at every point on every chart, about very important things. … What else would one expect? These people had just watched history get invaded by God. He unfurled himself around it … and … died. Then he came back, ate fish, and flew away.

The attempt to keep fidelity with such a bizarre event will surely involve as much disagreement and confusion as unity “Faith,” [Hart] writes, “is not the assurance that one possesses the fullness of truth, but is rather a fidelity to the future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows.” Efforts to reach “back through the welter of contingent events to some initial and pure impulse whose subsequent unfolding could then be followed” are doomed to failure, however interesting they may be. We are looking forward to love’s full disclosure, at the end of time, and for now we know love only – how else? – as through a glass darkly.

I would only clarify, for my own sake, at least, that those efforts to “reach back and follow” are doomed not to failure but to strife, friction. Understanding them this way can produce much harmony and joy in the midst of the strife—in the midst of the friction-that-is-not-failure.

seriously

Jonah Goldberg:

What happens next? The ousted ruler and his representatives claim that this affront to his dignity is really an insult to all of his supporters. Like followers of Hugo Chavez or Manuel Ortega, they insist that only by returning their leader in internal exile to power can they avenge this travesty and purge the government of these enemies of the people.

That’s the argument raging like a religious awakening across much of the right this week. Once Trump announces he’s running for president, Mike Huckabee insists, “We need to rally around him and simply say, ‘He is the candidate.’ He will be re-elected. That’s because he’s the only candidate who’ll have the guts to take on this incredibly corrupt machine. We must put him back in and let him do this. I’m convinced at this point that this is the only hope for our nation, to get it back to the point where people can believe in it.”

This isn’t an argument against banana republic politics, it is banana republic politics. Let’s put aside any consideration of primaries or policy debates and simply anoint a strong man to redeem our nation, purge corruption, and punish our enemies.

I’ll put it plainly: If your “belief” in our country is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose “hope for our nation” unless Donald Trump is given free reign to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American.

I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. …

Presidents are not redeemers, messiahs, incarnations of mystical aspirations, or righteous settlers of seething grievances. They’re not god-kings or the fathers of our American family. They’re politicians elected to do some specific things as the head of one branch of one level of government. They get that job for a limited and defined period of time, and afterward they’re simply citizens.

It’s a source of constant consternation and amazement for me that so many people either don’t understand this or simply pretend not to.

I don’t know for sure which politicians and pundits yammering about our “corrupt regime” are truly ignorant and which are merely duplicitous demagogues chumming the waters with bloody nonsense. But I do know it’s dangerous, because whether they believe it or not, they want millions of people to believe it. […]

If you’re worried about America looking like a banana republic, please don’t tell me that the first president in American history to defecate on the peaceful transfer of power is the antidote to the rot of Third World corruption of our regime. He is the rot.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?

The entire article behind that Huckabee link is truly astonishing. As someone who once respected Huckabee—for what reasons I’m not sure—I’m beyond comprehending any of it. I can only echo Goldberg’s cry: Seriously, what the FUCK is wrong with you people?!

the rocks will cry out

Very related to this post, here’s Adam Mastroianni:

[Charles] Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitols is not going to help you solve them.

We all share some blame with Spearman, of course, because everybody talks about smarts as if they’re one thing. Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters. These are all difficult problems, but they are well-defined, and that makes it easy to rank people. The best chess player in the world is the one who can beat everybody else. The best mathematician is the one who can solve the problems that nobody else could solve. That makes it seem like the best chess players and mathematicians are not just the smartest in their fields, but the smartest in the whole world.

It also reminds me of this, from Julian Barnes, which sort of takes it to another level:

I used to believe, when I was ‘just’ a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive- also less vain, less selfish- than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing and particularizing- but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It’s not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?

“Not a whit wiser for being philosophers,” replies my brother. “Worse, in their semi-public lives, far less wise than many other species of academics.” I remember once laying down Bertrand Russel’s autobiography in a moment, not of disbelief, more a kind of appalled belief. This is how he describes the beginning of the end of his first marriage: “I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.” The only logical response to this, to its implications and manner of expression, would be: keep philosophers off bicycles. Or perhaps, keep philosophers out of marriage. Save them for discussing truth with God. I would want Russel on my side for that.

It’s nice to think about the world being divided into smart people and stupid people. But the truth is that anybody—anybody—no matter how intelligent, can be as dumb as a rock.

Nonetheless, the rocks will cry out.

true patriotism

A more complete version of the previous quote from Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos:

What you say about nationalism, war, and French foreign policy after the war is equally sympathetic to me. I was ten years old at the time of Versailles, and up to then I had been patriotically thrilled as children are in war-time. But the will to humiliate the defeated enemy which revealed itself so loathsomely everywhere at that time (and in the following years) was enough to cure me once for all of that naive sort of patriotism, I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Related, Vaclav Havel, in his 1990 New Year’s Address to Czechoslovakia:

Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt. Let us try to introduce this kind of self-confidence into the life of our community and, as nations, into our behavior on the international stage. Only thus can we restore our self-respect and our respect for one another as well as the respect of other nations.

the long magnificent defeat

Frederick Buechner:

Jacob is winning. … Then suddenly, all is reversed.

He merely touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and in a moment Jacob is lying there crippled and helpless. The sense we have, which Jacob must have had, that the whole battle was from the beginning fated to end this way, that the stranger had simply held back until now, letting Jacob exert all his strength and almost win so that when he was defeated, he would know that he was truly defeated; so that he would know that not all the shrewdness, will, brute force that he could muster were enough to get this. Jacob will not release his grip, only now it is a grip not of violence but of need, like the grip of a drowning man.

The darkness has faded just enough so that for the first time he can dimly see his opponent’s face. And what he sees is something more terrible than the face of death—the face of love. It is vast and strong, half ruined with suffering and fierce with joy, the face a man flees down all the darkness of his days until at last he cries out, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me!” Not a blessing that he can have now by the strength of his cunning or the force of his will, but a blessing that he can have only as a gift.

Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another we all of us fight—God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, he demands of us everything; before giving us life, he demands our lives—our selves, our wills, our treasure.

Will we give them, you and I? I do not know. Only remember the last glimpse we have of Jacob, limping home against the great conflagration of the dawn. Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat that is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

refusing to partake

Jonathan Haidt:

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. …

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.