We have a three-day respite from routine and toil stretched out before us. It's going to be sweltering. You'll no doubt want to be at a pool, or a beach, or at least in an air-conditioned environment. Herewith some reading recommendations to add some enrichment to your state of leisure.
Lee Trepanier has a piece at Public Discourse entitled "An Aristotelian Defense of Ownership in the Age of the Sharing Economy." His premise is that private property - a clear understanding of what is yours and what is mine - hones our character and also better suits us for membership in a community.
Take, for example, the modern attitude toward popular culture, and what it has done to that realm:
Of course, companies like Netflix or Apple are not representatives of the political community since they are private entities. In fact, a good case could be made that the streaming service industry itself is an oligopoly. However, the ability to stream implicitly asks whether private property is necessary for one’s entertainment. Except for the hipsters who collect LPs, many consumers in this new world of streaming would say no. Socrates, I suspect, would be smiling at this, while Aristotle would recoil.
When popular culture is distributed as private property, it creates the possibility for voluntary sharing from one person to another. In Aristotle’s world of private property, when I want to share my experience of watching a television show, I must decide whether I want to give that DVD in the first place; and if so, to whom. This creates the opportunity for me to practice the virtue of generosity. By contrast, in Socrates’ world of common property, I just have to tell the person the name of the show and let him stream it. Since there is no transaction between us, there is no virtue.
As Aristotle correctly observed, the scarcity of something makes it more valuable, leading people to take care of the item and to share it, if they wish. This makes possible the virtues of moderation and generosity, and the maintenance of civil society itself.
At The Daily Beast, Bonnie Kristian invites us to take a view of what Ron DeSantis represents within the Republican Party - namely, per the title of her article, the rise of incoherent folk libertarianism.
At Religion News Service, Karen Swallow Prior deals with a subject about which I've written here at LITD: the report on sexual corruption within the Southern Baptist Conference. She says that any needle-moving response to it is going to require a hefty dose of humility:
Humility is obedience — obedience to the point of death.
Just as true humility is rare, false humility is common. False humility seeks to manipulate and control in service to self rather than others.
With declining numbers not only in the SBC but in the church in America as a whole, with more and more people deconstructing their faith and even deconverting, we who remain must cling to obedience and humble ourselves. In so doing, we get ourselves out of the way in order to fully reveal the mercy and justice of a holy God.
On the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon call student loan forgiveness what it is: a bribe:
Advocates for student-debt forgiveness are open about their political motivation. “It is actually delusional to believe Dems can get re-elected without acting on filibuster or student debt,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in December. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said in May: “Democrats win when we deliver, and we have to deliver in ways that are impactful, tangible and transformative, like canceling student debt.” A headline on an April column in the Los Angeles Times read “Elizabeth Warren knows how Democrats can win the midterms. It starts with canceling student loan debt.” The New Republic signaled its agreement: “Biden’s Only Good Pre-Midterm Play: Cancel Student Debt.”
The debate has centered on how debt forgiveness will play politically because no other justification exists. The average student loan borrower leaves college with a debt of $28,400. What do students get for that debt? Over the course of their earning lives, those with only some college gained a lifetime earnings increase relative to someone who only completed high school that is 10 times the average debt incurred. On average a graduate with a bachelor’s degree earns 40 times as much; a graduate with a master’s earns 53 times; and a doctoral graduate earns 80 times as much as the debt. Law and medical degree holders earn almost 100 times as much. Even as the share of the population with a college degree has tripled to 30.7% from 10.5% in 1967, the value of that degree has grown. The wage premium for having a college degree has grown to 96.2% today from 55.9% in 1967.
Brian Gitt, a former advocate for play-like energy forms, details at Real Clear Energy his growth into an understanding of what is really required for human advancement:
I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to help promote green home upgrades, and I led business development for a company making wireless power technology.
But by 2008, I started to see cracks in my beliefs. The Obama administration had earmarked billions of dollars in federal funding to create jobs in the energy sector, and my company won multi-year contracts valued at over $60 million. Creating jobs and making buildings more energy-efficient were worthy goals. But the project was an utter failure. It didn’t get anywhere close to achieving the goals that the government had set. But what was really shocking to me was how the government refused to admit the project had failed. All of its public communications about the project boasted about its effectiveness.
I started to realize that I had accepted as true certain claims about energy and our environment. Now I began to see those claims were false. For example:
I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas.
I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%.
I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.
It’s now clear I was chasing utopian energy. I was using green energy myths as moral camouflage, and I was able to believe those myths as long as I remained ignorant about the real costs and benefits of different energy sources.
At National Affairs, Andy Smarick explains the importance of subsidiarity to family policy:
. . . if some American families need support — and they do — what is the right way for public leaders to engage on the issue?
The principle of subsidiarity can be of enormous help on this question. It recognizes the family as the cornerstone of society while offering a coherent vision of the duties and authorities of the government and other institutions. This includes the aid that different social bodies owe to one another as well as the limits on such support. From subsidiarity, we can derive six governing rules of thumb that will enable us to appreciate such things as what the New Deal and the Great Society got wrong, why the welfare reforms of 1996 were so valuable, why state family-focused policies that operate through non-profits are sound, and why today's proposals for child allowances and a universal basic income are misguided.
He specifies three ways in which subsidiarity can meet family needs:
Limiting the state doesn't mean that important needs must go unmet, however. Subsidiarity ensures this in three ways. First, it asserts that all entities have non-transferable duties they are obligated to carry out. Individuals, for example, are expected to behave ethically and to participate in family and public life. Such participation — which is "inherent in the dignity of the human person" — begins by "taking charge of the areas for which one assumes personal responsibility." John XXIII observed that the individual is "primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his family." By obliging people to work and care for themselves and their families, subsidiarity situates some social responsibilities at the individual level.
Second, subsidiarity requires individuals and other lower-order entities to resist interference by higher-order ones. As Hochschild puts it, lower-order associations have the "burden of responsibility...to keep proper functions from being taken over by higher associations." By limiting the need for state intervention, subsidiarity keeps social arrangements in balance.
Third, subsidiarity recognizes that all entities occasionally need help. But instead of directing them to turn to the state for assistance, subsidiarity obligates these entities to help one another, and explains how this web of support should operate.
In her piece "Against Pro-Life Triumphalism" at Plough, Jane Clark Scharl points to the humane and humble way Christians should proceed in the wake of the Dobbs decision:
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, I have been praying over the scriptural mandate to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” The rejoicing here is clear: I can rejoice with everyone who has worked to overturn an unjust law that denied the sanctity of all human life. The weeping is less obvious, but clear enough: most women – and men too – who choose abortion do so in tears, out of a sense of desperation. Hardly anyone delights in abortion. Almost invariably men and women (I include men here because conception, pregnancy, abortion, and birth are not only women’s issues; the illusion that they are is a large part of the catastrophe we are in today) choose abortion in grief, confusion, or dismay. They choose it because they feel alone and ill-equipped; because they cannot imagine juggling a baby and full-time work; because their parents or partners give them an ultimatum.
This is where pro-life activists must begin the difficult work of addressing the root causes of abortion, cultural, moral, or economic. This last may be where we can have the greatest impact in the lives of others, but that will require acknowledging how intractably entangled those roots are with capitalism.
And I always like an essay that steers me to a book I'd been unacquainted with but that now goes on my must-read list. Such is the case with one she mentions in the next paragraph;
I use the word “capitalism” with trepidation, for there are few flags of brighter red than this one, few totems of greater mystic value in the West. When I say “capitalism,” I mean the undergirding ideology of a society that values humans primarily in terms of productivity and consumption. In his 2015 book The Burnout Society philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.” Within such a world, only achievement is valued. And the lower one is in the social hierarchy, the greater the marginalizing effect of “lack of achievement.”
What I mean by that jargony sentence is quite simple: it is harder for a lower-class woman to take time off for maternity leave than for a higher-class woman. The “lost achievement” is greater, and its ripple effect is wider. It is also harder for a woman who already has children and has clawed her way back into a career to step out again for maternity leave, or even barring leave, for the inevitable mental and physical fatigue that comes with the first eighteen months of caring for a new human. Then there are the expenses of paying for childcare, or the lost earning potential while caring for one’s own children. And there are few financial benefits to having children to compensate for all this – because in an achievement society, children are a detriment.
"My Morality," a recent post at Daren Jonescu's blog, sums up what strikes me as the proper way to go about establishing a criterion for a system of values:
The voices of the modern world tell us every day that we should “live for our desires,” but they really mean we should live to satisfy our desires, which means to end them or erase them through pleasure and comfort. As much pleasure and comfort as possible, as easily gained as possible. This, they think, will reduce the pain of lack and need, and therefore make us “happy.” (That is the progressive formula which Nietzsche identified as “the last man,” and which Huxley encapsulated, in Brave New World, with his apt descriptive phrase “twenty piddling little fountains.”)
When they say “happy,” they merely mean comfortable, free of the pains and struggles associated with desire and deficiency. But the painful experience of desire and deficiency is life, understood in the sense of one ascending from profound depths — the sense which has been judged antithetical, even offensive, to our age of surfaces without depths. Thus, when modern voices tell us to “live for our desires,” they are really telling us to stop living.
I refuse to stop living. I refuse to be modern in their way. I refuse to mistake satisfaction for meaning. I refuse the easy escape from the pain and need of purposeful living into the pleasure and comfort of insensitive existence. I choose to suffer with the pain and need, struggle with them, dig deep into them to find the beautiful, although it sometimes hurts — or rather because it sometimes hurts, inasmuch as some forms of pain may be the surest signs of life in an incomplete being.
I want to find the ultimately desirable, to observe it, to study all its surprising levels of being, to suffer through struggling to attain it, and (to borrow the great Platonic metaphor) to give birth to ideas and understanding through these labor pains. Thus, everything that helps me find the object I seek, or that reminds me of it, or that keeps me focused on the search, is good. Everything that merely relieves this discomfort, or helps me “forget,” is evil. That is my morality. All proper morality, in the end, is about living without the perfection we seek. The plausible differences between moral frameworks come down to whether, in that definitional phrase, one places one’s emotional emphasis on the word “without” or the word “seek.”
Anyone who would deprive me of my form of spiritual agitation, or try to weaken it, is aligned with evil, in the sense of being harmful to me. Today, the human world taken as a whole contrives and conspires to divest me of my beneficial and enriching pain, “for my own good” as they say in their more progressive moments. This makes the human world, in its current form, a particular existential threat, a nemesis, to be resisted at all costs.
And, finally, I've been busy over at Precipice.
There's my piece on turning 13 in the year 1968.
And one entitled "In Pursuit of a Conservatism That's not Spiritually Ugly."
And my latest, "Spirituality Without a Lodestar Inevitably Comes Up Empty."
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