Noah Millman:

But there are two other possible lessons to draw from the Hungarian election that should be more sobering for opponents of the right-wing populist turn in politics, here in America and elsewhere in the world.

The first is that winning an election is only the beginning. Now Péter Magyar will have to reckon with what you might call the Fidesz deep state, the partisan loyalists that Orbán’s party placed throughout the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media and elsewhere to entrench Fidesz’s hold on power. As Yascha Mounk points out in a valuable post-election piece, dealing with this reality presents a Hobson’s choice. If the incoming government doesn’t aggressively purge these individuals, then they can be expected to act as an entrenched opposition force thwarting, disrupting and undermining that government’s effectiveness. But if they do conduct a wholesale purge, then they’ve established a precedent that this is the normal thing for new governments to do—a precedent that will no doubt be followed by future governments, whether led by Fidesz or by some other party. In other words, either way one casualty of Fidesz’s rule might be the idea that certain parts of the government and civil society should be professional, and therefore formally non-partisan and independent. […]

The other possible lesson from Hungary, and it should be sobering indeed, is that trouncing right-wing populism, as opposed to squeaking out a narrow and evanescent victory against it, may require moving considerably further to the right than center-left parties imagine.

Before founding Tirsza, Magyar was a loyal member of the Orbán regime. He broke with Fidesz over an outrageous incident of corruption, and he ran on the government’s disastrous economic record. But with the important exceptions of relations with Europe and with Russia—Magyar promises to restore Hungary to Brussels’s good graces and to end the Hungarian veto of European loans to Ukraine—in policy terms Tirsza has promised a great deal of continuity. Magyar is an immigration restrictionist, a social conservative on issues of sex, gender and sexuality, favors expanding incentives for childbearing—all mainstays of Fidesz’s ideological positioning. The new government promises more competence, an end to corruption, a focus on domestic problem-solving, and restored relations with the rest of Europe. It does not promise a revolution in values. That proposition is what won a landslide.

The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their “nature” is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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NASA astronaut and Artemis II Pilot Victor Glover pictured here in the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II lunar flyby. Glover and his fellow crewmates spent approximately seven hours taking turns at the Orion windows capturing science data to share with their team back on Earth. At closest approach, they came within 4,067 miles of the Moon’s surface.

The Artemis II crew captures a faint view of a crescent Earth above the horizon on the Moon’s far side. (Source)

Ruth Graham:

Humans have always looked up to the skies to contemplate big questions, but we’re doing it less and less these days.

Arnold Lobel:

THE CROCODILE IN THE BEDROOM

____________

A Crocodile became increasingly fond of the wallpaper in his bedroom. He stared at it for hours and hours.

“Just look at all those neat and tidy rows of flowers and leaves,”
said the Crocodile. “They are like soldiers. There is not a single one that is out of place.

“My dear,” said the Crocodile’s wife, “you are spending too much time in bed. Come out into my garden where the air is fresh and the sun is bright and warm.”

“Well, if you insist, for just a few minutes,” said the Crocodile. He put on a pair of dark glasses to protect his eyes from the glare and went
outside.

Mrs. Crocodile was proud of her garden. “Look at the hollyhocks and the marigolds,” she said. “Smell the roses and the lilies of the valley.”

“Great heavens!” cried the Crocodile. “The flowers and leaves in this garden are growing in a terrible tangle! They are all scattered! They
are messy and entwined!”

The Crocodile rushed back to his bedroom in a state of great distress.
He was at once comforted by the sight of his wallpaper.

“Ah,” said the Crocodile. “Here is a garden that is ever so much
better. How happy and secure these flowers make me feel!”

After that the Crocodile seldom left his bed. He lay there, smiling at
the walls. He turned a very pale and sickly shade of green.

____________

Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order.

Smelling flowers in the garden last summer:

There’s a famous story about New Hampshire and the “Live Free or Die” motto. When the state decided to slap it on all their license plates, George Maynard, a Jehovah’s Witness, decided the motto was not an accurate representation of his way of life and covered up the motto on the license plates of his vehicles.

After receiving several citations and a 15-day stint in jail for failing to comply or pay his fines, Maynard sought relief from the District Court, where “a three-judge court enjoined the State from arresting and prosecuting appellees in the future for covering the motto on their license plates.”

The state, (ahem) “seeking to communicate to others an official view as to proper appreciation of history, state pride, and individualism,” appealed the decision, eventually landing in the Supreme Court case of Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977), which ruled in favor of Maynard.

The case could just as easily have been called Irony v. Irony, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t sympathize with Maynard. Representing himself in court for the early citations, he defended himself thusly:

[B]y religious training and belief, I believe my ‘government’ — Jehovah’s Kingdom — offers everlasting life. It would be contrary to that belief to give up my life for the state, even if it meant living in bondage. Although I obey all laws of the State not in conflict with my conscience, this slogan is directly at odds with my deeply held religious convictions.

. . . I also disagree with the motto on political grounds. I believe that life is more precious than freedom.

Here’s the thing that brings all this to mind now: I’m a fan of Something Called Democracy and will continue being so. But I think that most of us use the term believing ourselves to be on the side of Mr. Maynard, while history will show “democracy” and its advocates to be a lot more like the state of New Hampshire.

Alan Jacobs, on reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things:

What an infuriating endeavor. … I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 

It’s funny because I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader of Jacobs, but lately…

This is a reminder that I need to sit down and finish that last defense of Kingsnorth. It’s mostly written; I just haven’t felt like finishing it. But Jacobs is one of the reasons why I haven’t. And of course, the fact that I have a one-month-old and a two-year-old at home.

Peco and Ruth Gaskovski:

If it is our aim to remain fully human with our feet firmly planted in reality, then we will need to actually translate our ideas into tangible actions. From our individual actions we do not need to expect sweeping societal change, but we have to start somewhere. Fasting from the virtual while feasting on simple, anachronisitc actions is a tangible beginning. We also believe that there is a fundamental power of face-to-face conversation around a kitchen table. One of the most earth-shattering changes in history did not come to pass through political action, institutional change, or mass demonstrations; it was preceded by a meal around a dinner table, sharing bread and wine.

The Gaskovskis have written before about what they call practicing acts of anachronism, which I have kept meaning to come back around to. I love the phrase, partly because when I read the original post I mistakenly read the entire thing as “small acts of anarchism,” which is just as good a phrase as far as I’m concerned.

“It was one of the small anachronisms that resisted the unbearably fast pace of life,” Ruth writes of simply walking to the grocery store with their small children and loading up a hiking backpack with groceries instead of driving, “and prompted many a driver who zoomed past to take note and wonder: Why would anyone choose to do something so slow and effortful?”

Why? Because “in an age where technology has wholly reformed our imagination, visible models of anachronism serve an essential role in reminding us that slowness and effort make us more human.”

That’s about as straightforward and essential as you can put it.

(It reminds me of a surgeon I used to work with who was in a pick-up basketball league where, of course, everyone tried to make their team names as creative as possible. His team went with “We May Be Small But We’re Slow.”)

Via Jeremy Abel

Stanley Hauerwas:

Christians believe that the true history of the world, that history that determines our destiny, is not carried by the nation-state. In spite of its powerful moral appeal, this history is a history of godlessness. Only the church has the stance, therefore, to describe war for what it is, for the world is too broken to know the reality of war. For what is war but the desire to be rid of God, to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and destiny? Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies in the name of protecting the common history we share with our friends, is but the manifestation of our hatred of God.

Matthew Giambrone:

“Well, son, what do you think? Is the volume of the universe infinite, or is it finite but expanding faster than the speed of light, or is it static and somehow bounded?” (I suppose I’m kind of a jerk, but at least I left out the part about quantum fluctuations.) He promptly replied: “What?”

I tried again. “What do you think, son: is the universe infinitely large?” Again, “What?”

I made a third go at it: “How big is the universe?” He was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “Big to us and small to God.”

Simultaneously humbled and proud, I no longer felt like the smart one in the car. “That’s a wonderful answer, the best possible answer.” No other words were spoken on the matter, and really no other words need to be. At least not by me.

God, though, did speak something else on it, lest this be to us not only a big universe but a big, hopeless universe. He spoke before all other words, before even his own words that called this physical realm into existence (13.8 billion years ago, I’m told). Before and beyond all that, there was another Word, which is always being spoken. And thus it was that God found a way to fit inside this place, this little universe that is much too small to hold him. The most miraculous thing about the Incarnation is that the universe did not immediately burst.

And while he was in it, he spoke a few more words. He said that when it comes time for us to leave the universe, we ought to go out through the narrow gate. Then he did leave it, briefly, and then he came back a few days later, and afterward, that gate was not quite so narrow as it had been. In fact, it was stretched immeasurably wide because he himself had passed through it. So we, too, can now pass through, as was his purpose. But it also remains narrow. Like the universe it adjoins, it is both big and small: it could accommodate the entire human race, yet you might easily walk right by it without even noticing. Many people do.

But on that day when he returned, when he gloriously arose from his three days away, I imagine that for a moment the universe was indeed filled with infinite light and everything was infinitely bright. And enough of that light remains for us to find the gate — to find our way from this place into the other one, the one that is truly infinite.

Wendell Berry:

But the point of industrialism across all that time has been the replacement of people with machinery, and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so that now, well, we can see both of those goals approaching some kind of fulfillment, some kind of realization. … This limitless process of industrialization, what it has done, as far as I see it, is liberate our vices and suppress the efficacy of our virtues.

Nicolas Carr:

The web wasn’t corrupted by outside forces. The corruption was there from the start, latent in its design. A vast, decentralized communication network that can transmit data of all sorts to all people is not resistant to the establishment of information monopolies; it encourages their formation. Decentralization at a technical level breeds centralization at an industrial level. What Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” is not a bug but a feature.

The reasons are manifold:

1. The web is subject to particularly strong network effects. Because a communication system becomes more valuable to users as the number of users increases, a boundaryless network with few physical or technical constraints on its expansion will consolidate traffic on a massive scale, giving strong advantages to the biggest players.
2. The web is a marketplace where an unimaginable number of transactions, both financial and social, are completed every second without regard to the physical location of the participants. That favors large intermediaries, or middlemen, that have the infrastructure necessary to host myriad market participants, execute transactions quickly and precisely, and maintain detailed records of all that transpires.
3. Operating at such scale requires large capital investments—for servers, storage drives, networking gear, cooling systems, and the like. The capital requirements present daunting barriers to entry for newcomers, barriers that are growing more forbidding as resource-intensive AI routines are incorporated into online processes and services.
4. The interpersonal links [celebrated] for their intellectual and social value also have outsized financial value when captured as data and analyzed by computers. The network effect applies not just to people but to information about people. The more aggregated the information, the bigger an asset it becomes for companies that profit by predicting attitudes and behavior.
5. Consumers benefit from the companies’ scale. Whatever fears people may have about privacy invasions or wealth concentration, they enjoy the personalization, convenience, and diversion that social media companies and other internet outfits serve up in endless quantities for free. People’s loyalty to algorithmically-tuned feeds may be a form of addiction, but it doesn’t seem to be an addiction many are eager to break.

Drusilla Scott:

Popular books on evolution tell us we are the accidental result of the chance interactions of atoms, which have somehow produced us as vehicles for the survival of genes. Popular books on artificial intelligence tell us that computers will soon outstrip man, taking all the necessary decisions faster and better than we can. The odd thing is that books of this sort are not written as terrible prophecies of doom, they are cheery best-sellers. It seems we enjoy being told we are robots blindly programmed for survival, or that we are inferior to robots and will soon have to hand over to them.

There are examples everywhere of the use of ‘science’ to undermine confidence in any other way of knowing. “More research is needed” – “Statistics tell us” – “Laboratory tests have conclusively proved” – this kind of phrase is common and builds up the assumption that if you don’t know in a scientific way, you don’t know. Any judgment of value, any intuitive wisdom, is banished to the realm of fantasy or whim, while any statistical or scientific type statement gets an automatic endorsement. Studies that are not scientific start to cringe, and try to ape science, however inappropriate. The effects are felt disastrously in education, where for instance the study of human nature is more likely to mean sociology and psychology than literature and history; where the psychologist is likely to feel more authentic and confident the more he works in laboratories, the less he deals with actual people. Subjects are distorted, values destroyed, by this pseudo-scientific masquerade, yet how hard it is to stand against it, since the underlying false assumption is that science is truth, all else is self deception.

The devaluing of personal judgment is a self-fulfilling principle, since any faculty that is unused tends to decay. Many people have in any case less opportunity for using their personal judgment than men had in the past, and when they are consistently told it is unreliable and irrelevant, they use it even less, and it becomes unreliable and irrelevant. We wait for ‘science’ to pronounce.

Polanyi expressed it like this – “Backed by a science which sternly professes that ultimately all things in the world – including all the achievements of man from the Homeric poems to the Critique of Pure Reason – will somehow be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, these theories assume that the path to reality lies invariably in representing higher things in terms of their baser particulars. This is indeed almost universally regarded today as the supremely critical method, which resists the flattering illusions cherished by men about their nobler faculties.”

Such assumptions, about what is real and what is not, must and do affect men’s behaviour. Lately an Archbishop of York made a comment to this effect about vandalism. “We look,” he said, “for reasons why young people, not necessarily poor or deprived, should smash and destroy their expensive surroundings.” He quoted from Bertrand Russell a phrase about the accidental, purposeless nature of the universe, and suggested the violence and destruction might be a shout of anger at the meaninglessness of life. “Only a very old philosopher or a very young vandal could live in such a world,” he said.

A shout of anger – or perhaps the very young vandal is merely being what the very old philosopher tells him we all are. […]

… What we find real depends on how we know, and is a matter of life or death.

“It may appear extravagant,” Polanyi wrote, “to hope that these self-destructive forces may be harmonised by reconsidering the way we know things. If I still believe that a reconsideration of knowledge may be effective today, it is because for some time past a revulsion has been noticeable against the ideas which brought us to our present state. Both inside and outside the Soviet empire, men are getting weary of ideas sprung from a combination of scepticism and perfectionism. It may be worth trying to go back to our foundations and seek to lay them anew, more truly.”

Bruce T. Morrill:

[Johann Baptist] Metz develops his “political theology of the subject” as a corrective to the transcendental fundamental theology of his mentor and friend, Rahner, whose theological anthropology he extols as the finest exercise exploring the formal subject produced by the Enlightenment. In reflecting upon existence, person, subject or the human, Rahner achieved the pinnacle of Roman Catholic theology’s belated response to Kantian transcendental philosophy.

The problem, however, is the level of abstraction. Modern theology has failed to ask whether such a religious subject actually exists, that is, whether or to what extent actual people in modern society approach their personal and societal lives on the basis and priority of Christian concepts of reason, freedom and autonomy.

As a privatized affair, Christian religion functions as affirmation of values the middle-class subject attains elsewhere in society. In the public sphere, it is reduced to providing customs for holiday celebrations. For a growing majority, Christian faith becomes a “religious paraphrase” of how they already perceive and practice their lives in the world, thereby making participation in liturgical worship expendable. Meanwhile, a much smaller minority, in contrast, seeks refuge in a rigid “pure traditionalism” that threatens the church with sectarian isolation.

In establishing the concept of political theology, Metz analyzes the threatening socioeconomic conditions of late modernity in order to argue that the Christian message can realize its salvific import today only if recognized as a “dangerous memory,” the memoria passionis. […]

Far from generating the sort of optimistic view of history and nature that characterized the 19th century, the present valorization of technical reason has produced deep measures of fatalism and apathy. People find themselves part of an anonymous, inevitable, timeless technological and economic process. The need to conform for success in these systems depletes people’s imaginations, inhibits dreams for the future, and ultimately threatens the loss of their subjectivity and freedom.

In its now near universality, the exchange mentality inherent to market capitalism integrally influences not only politics but also the foundations of spiritual life in a culture of the makeable, replaceable and consumable, eroding commitments, attitudes of gratuity, and capacities to sit with sorrow or feel profound joy. …

… Metz articulates the current danger to humanity… Anonymous progress is interrupted by questioning whose progress, at what cost to the freedom of others and, with increasing awareness, to the ecology. Remembrance of the victims of these social processes constitutes an interruption of the abstract arguments for progress.

Metz then turns to the memory of Jesus, the narrative of whose passion, death and resurrection reveals God’s identification with and promise of redemption for all victims of humanity’s inhumanity.

The pattern of Jesus’ life and death, one of service to the oppressed, constitutes the pattern of life that can be salvific for Christians now, a pattern that promises an authentic subjectivity and freedom. Metz thereby recovers the tradition of the imitatio Christi — an imitation dangerous both in the conversion it requires of its practitioners, away from a privatized view of salvation, and in the threat it poses to the conventional (evolutionary) wisdom of society.

This praxis of mysticism and politics, liturgy and ethics, likewise becomes the means for believers to know, in an experiential or practical way, deep joy and hopeful consolation, freedom lived in the presence of God, the God of Israel and Jesus, the God of the living and the dead.