Alan Jacobs:

Lanchester also writes, “In the US there is enormous anger at oblivious, entitled, seemingly invulnerable financial and technological elites getting ever richer as ordinary living standards stay flat in absolute terms, and in relative terms, dramatically decline.” But is the anger really so enormous? I’d say there’s not nearly as much as there ought to be, or that one would (as Lanchester suggests) expect there to be.

And many of the people who have been hit hardest by an economic system in which, Lanchester rightly says, the rich in pursuing with laser-focus their own further enrichment “have seceded from the rest of humanity,” say almost nothing about thatsituation but wax eloquent and wroth about the supposedly imminent danger of their being murdered by vast roaming gangs of illegal immigrants. Brexit and Trump are not about fixing economic inequality — which is why Trump’s version of populism has almost nothing to do with the “Share Our Wealth” vision of Huey Long, back in the day, but rather focuses with a passionate intensity on stoking fear of anyone and everything not-American.

So why is that? Why, though certainly there is some anger at the global-capitalist system, is there, relative to reasonable expectations, so little? Why don’t people care that, since the massively reckless incompetencies of 2008, almost nothing has changed? (Lanchester documents the insignificance of the changes very thoroughly.)

The first answer is that almost nobody — almost nobody — remembers what happened in 2008. And why don’t they remember? Because of social media and smartphones.

I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”

Aaron Horvath:

[Bill Gates’s] speeches, interviews, annual letters for his foundation, and op-eds—often replete with graphs and references to data—repeatedly demonstrated a self-professed “maniacal focus on…measuring results.” In many cases, measurable impact takes the lead as Gates jumps between disparate issues ranging from elementary education in the United States to antiviral medications in Burkina Faso. The connection? Both involve workers delivering well-studied interventions that advance well-defined outcomes. Measurable at every step. Reading these arguments, one quickly gets the impression that Gates’s understanding of reality is almost wholly quantitative.

And while Gates’s quantification often appears as a means to an end, there are times when he seems fixated on measurement as an end in itself. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gates muses:

If I could wave a wand, I’d love to have a way to measure how exposure to risks like disease, infection, malnutrition and problem pregnancies impact children’s potential—their ability to learn and contribute to society.

It’s a revealing bit of text: If Gates had a magic wand, he’d collect data.

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And while some hoped the turn toward metrics would restore confidence in civic organizations and inspire renewed engagement in community life, it seems to have had the opposite effect. Rather than getting involved ourselves, we look to data-savvy intermediaries to tell us what we should care about and how we should give. In other words, our fixation on quantification isn’t just the product of a civil society in decline; it has also helped to accelerate that decline by supplanting the ideal of hands-on community engagement with the ideal of unsentimental calculation.

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In the world of measurable impact, the communitarian ethos is eroded by atomistic consumerism wherein civic-minded individuals are tasked with comparison shopping for deals on progress. (Tellingly, CharityNavigator’s website displays a shopping cart in the top right corner, just like any other e-commerce site.) The diminished ideal is one where people bump into each other, encounter unfamiliar perspectives, and relinquish parochialisms. They form into groups, forge coalitions across differences, and exercise political influence. While it’s true that this romantic vision of civil society has never been fully realized, it’s also true that, on the barren landscape of measurable impact, these features are not even acknowledged.

Yascha Mounk:

The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy.

This is a good article, but of course, it stirred a thought upon a soapbox.

Putting aside that fact that Mounk does nothing to differentiate between television-journalism and journalism-journalism, I sympathize, and largely agree. But once again, as with so many other things, it’s worth asking the question: Was there ever a time of humdrum stenography, “just the facts” journalism? Many people keep referring to a time when journalists were primarily or largely objective and from which they have found some excuse to move on.

When was this time?

No one seems to know. But everyone seems to feel certain that journalism is worse and it definitely yousta be better.

That could be true to some extent. But my assumption is that the search for good journalists has always been about finding those whose reporting — their facts as well as their take and their spin — is something you can find truthful, something you gain from and that you value or simply find humorous, and something that you can feel comfortable disagreeing with from time to time. This seems perfectly normal to me, and it seems no more or less true now than at any other time.

I know a lot of people who say they don’t trust the left-wing media. If I had a dollar for every time someone said “The Left won’t tell you this…,” I wouldn’t be driving 5 to 10 hours a week to find work to pay the mortgage on my 200-year-old house. But here’s the catch: If I only counted the number of times I heard this sentiment from someone who actual reads any of the left-wing sources they have in mind, I would have… the exact same amount of money. The Left may in fact be batshit biased, but all those around me — that is, the physical people in my life — who insist that it is simply cannot know this in any meaningful sense; they have been told it for 30 years by their own batshit biased sources (and now, of course, by their own essentially self-curated algorithms) and have repeated it so many times that they are hardly even conscious of the fact that they say it.

While I’m fairly certain that I have never been told something on a subject that I could not find written about in the pages of The New York Times (they have 1,700 staff writers, ffs), I have nothing but sympathy for those annoyed by the overwhelming net bias that so many rightly accuse them of. But that’s not the point. It’s not even the point to ask the most basic question: Why on earth should NYT stretch itself out toward you who neither subscribe nor read at all? Granted I’d like to see more grace and understanding toward “outsiders” everywhere, but if the Jesus-following church members I know can’t be bothered to reach passed Fox News, why would they expect the Times to reach passed its left-wing subscribers? It is not, after all, The New York Times or CNN who claims to have been given a mandate from God to love their enemies or whose favorite apostle boasted that he “became all things to all people.”

But again, that’s not the point. What I have tried to argue with so many friends and family members is really nothing more than what most of them taught me growing up.

Here’s John Stuart Mill, in what I assume is one of his most famous statements on the reason for free speech:

[E]ven if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but … the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

I am no idealist when it comes to human raaationalism, but I have generally hoped that this approach to truth and/in politics was at least mildly attainable background noise for our truth seeking endeavors. Yet it is very hard to argue that the deeply rooted claim of bias in The Media, whether true or not in itself, is anything more than a dogma at this point, “a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good.” When an entire group of people — people who have essentially moved to Abilene — believe so strongly in something so universally unexperienced and unchallenged, how could it be otherwise? In other words: the truth can’t live here, even if it happens to stop by.

Again, true or not, the point is to ask why you believe it is true. And if you believe it for bullshit reasons, then what good is your approach to truth? It continues to amaze me that so many spend so little effort actually seeking the truth but think that somehow whatever happens to float in through the same old easy sources is good enough.

(This is by no means restricted to any one political party, but I try really hard to both criticize primarily my own house and to base most of my criticisms on real-life contact.)

When it comes to journalism, we can keep unwittingly referring to some Platonic ideal-that-never-was, or we can, as I said above, admit what has always been the truth: journalism is complicated because humans are complicated. The search has never been easy, but it is critical — and can be a lot of fun.

David Frum:

When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.

Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.

He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.

He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.

He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.

He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.

For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.

[…]

Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.

“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.

Bret Stephens (emphasis added):

There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.

Make your peace, indeed.

Reflecting on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Martha Nussbaum points out that, up to a point, the pressure that Agamemnon felt to appease Artemis by sacrificing his daughter, and thereby resuming the campaign commanded by Zeus, had reflected a great internal struggle that was not unlike that of Abraham and Isaac. “We might, then,” says Nussbaum, “expect to see next the delicate struggle between love and pious obligation that we sense in Abraham’s equivocal words to Isaac, followed by a sacrifice executed with horror and reluctance.”

Recall that when Isaac, seeing no animal, asked what was to be sacrificed, Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Agamemnon is faced with a similarly awful choice, but without a happy ending. (Neither Zeus nor Artemis will be stepping in to provide the sacrifice.) But it’s not the different ending, or even the different narrative, that Nussbaum is concerned with; it’s the passion involved. No matter how resolved Abraham is to obey God, he is still essentially reluctant and grieved. Not so with Agamemnon. Rather, as Nussbaum explains, “something strange takes place.”

The Chorus had already prepared us for it in introducing their narrative: ‘Blaming no prophet, he blew together with the winds of luck that struck against him’ (186-8). The bold wind metaphor coined by the Chorus (the word sumpneō is used here, apparently, for the first time in Greek) expresses an unnatural cooperation of internal with external forces. Voicing no blame of the prophet or his terrible message, Agamemnon now begins to cooperate inwardly with necessity, arranging his feelings to accord with his fortune. From the moment he makes his decision, itself the best he could have made, he strangely turns himself into a collaborator, a willing victim.

At some point, Agamemnon ceases to blame or to justify, to understand or, it seems, even to lament. Instead, he begins “cooperating inwardly with [the winds of] necessity, arranging his feelings to accord with his fortune.” It wasn’t just that he made a difficult decision; “his attitude,” says Nussbaum, “toward the decision itself seems to have changed with the making of it.”

The thought of sumpneō should be a haunting one.

In the run-up to the election this year, I heard from a number of people about how a coalition had been formed/was forming around Donald Trump. The tone ranged from matter-of-fact pride to something more like a praised inevitability. (It was a little eerie, if I’m being honest.) Among Republicans in 2016, I knew a lot of reluctant Trump voters, and a few reluctant abstainers; in 2024, I know none. In fact, I am hard-pressed to honestly insert the word “reluctant” anywhere near these folks.

Postman-laden disclaimers about “The Media,” and filtered information, and what exactly people “know” about Trump and the Republican Party notwithstanding — there is a frightening, damning, nearly 2500-year-old warning found in Aeschylus, for anyone with ears still left to hear.

The Chorus goes on to give a most explicit description of the rationalizing — and, nota bene, therefore, passion-altering — description of what it means to “collaborate with the winds of misfortune” (emphasis added):

And when he had slipped his neck through the yoke-strap of necessity, blowing his thought in an impious change of direction, from that moment he changed his mind and turned to thinking the all-daring. For men are made bold by base-counselling wretched madness.

Nick Catoggio:

An American right that despises classical liberals like Paul Ryan far more intensely than it does progressives like Bernie Sanders might even prefer an authoritarian left-wing government on balance to a traditional right-wing one. You don’t need to believe in “horseshoe theory” to see that. Look no further than Kennedy and Gabbard, both of whom started off in politics as oddball leftists with a taste for illiberalism before finding community with the illiberal oddballs of the populist GOP.

President Tulsi or President Mitt Romney: Is there any doubt which one the party of Trump would prefer to be governed by?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

And from his poem, Frost at Midnight:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Martha Nussbaum:

For Neoptolemus, the awareness that he can choose to act justly is as painful as Philoctetes’ attack: he uses the same expression, papai, to signal the agony of recognized agency.

I believe that the “stark fictions” of the Greeks challenge their audience to just such difficult reflections on the causes of disaster: is the cause immutable necessity, or is it malice and folly? Where should we draw the line between the one and the other? We gain understanding from the subtle and frequently indeterminate way in which tragedies pose that question, and from the challenges they give us to confront the role of blameworthy agency even in something that seems as natural as breathing. We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change. (In 415 B.C.E., the year that Euripides’ Trojan Women was produced, the Athenians killed all the male citizens of the rebellious colony Melos and enslaved the women and children.)

In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.

In our contemporary world, in which it is a good assumption that most of the starvation and much of the other misery we witness is the result of culpable negligence by the powerful, metaphysical resignation would, again, be relatively good news, letting the powerful off the hook. But the truthful news of Greek tragedy, for us, as for the Athenians, is far worse than that: for the bad news is that we are as culpable as Zeus in the Trachiniai, and the Greek generals in The Trojan Women, and Odysseus in Philotetes, and many other gods and mortals at many times and places — unless and until we throw off our laziness and selfish ambition and obtuseness and ask ourselves how the harms we witness might have been prevented. As Philoctetes knew, pity means action: intervention on behalf of the suffering, even if it is difficult and repellent. If you leave out the action, you are an ignoble coward, perhaps also a hypocrite and a liar. If you help, you have done something fine.

Christina Bieber Lake:

When it comes to our experience of the arts, the twenty-first century is unprecedented—and weird. We have greater access to more works of art than ever before, and it is glorious. We can pull up almost any text or painting on our smartphones in seconds. We can discover new artists and listen to entire albums on Spotify. We can even watch complete performances of operas and plays on YouTube. But this greater access has come at a cost so ubiquitous and invisible that it is easy to forget we are paying it. The cost is that nearly every experience of art that we have is heavily mediated and controlled, shifting the source of our pleasure in the experience from gift recipient to consumer and critic. With that shift we become less able than ever to experience resonance—and the transformation that potentially comes through it.