Sunday roundup

 I'm going to do what I can to resist the temptation to tease you with the customary generous excerpts from the pieces I recommend, because there are so many of them. You'd be here at LITD forever instead of checking out the actual essays. But they're all important reading, so do that.

Anyway, herewith:

As I said in a text to my pastor when I sent him this one, it pretty much sums up the thrust of what I’m trying to get at with Precipice. Really, LITD as well. It's entitled "The Gift of Creaturely Dependence." It's by Jordan Hillebert, Director of Formation and Tutor in Theology at St. Pardans Institute at Cardiff University, and it appears at Church Life Journal.

Well, I'm already going to break the rule I've set for myself:

The modern project has been animated, to a large extent, by a resentment of dependence—a revolt against the creaturely conditions and cultural constraints that have shaped and thereby limited our pursuits of self-fulfillment. This antipathy for dependence is not, of course, an exclusively modern phenomenon. Indeed, as the opening chapters of the book of Genesis seem to suggest, it was an important feature of humanity’s original undoing: the desire to claim for oneself that which was always already available in the form of a divine gift. In modernity, however, this resentment has become something like a defining principle.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) thus defines and commends “enlightenment” as the ability to think for oneself without lazily or fearfully submitting to the guidance of others. The motto of the Enlightenment, Kant declares, is “Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’[1] Writing half a century later from the other side of the Atlantic (and giving voice to that distinct brand of individualism which has long characterized the American mythos), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) extols self-reliance as the highest ideal, the most “godlike” of all human traits. “Trust thyself,” Emerson insists, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” One must abide by her own convictions without regard for communal expectations or social conventions, for society everywhere conspires against the creative self-expression of its individual members.[2]

This resentment is taken to its extreme in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), for whom the will to power is the all-consuming “good.” For Nietzsche, the individual is (or at least ought to be) a law unto himself, answerable to no higher standard and accountable to no one else. Human existence is, for Nietzsche, the endless drive of self-assertion in pursuit of ever greater power and “efficiency.”[3]

We encounter a less sophisticated, though arguably more influential, version of the modern disdain of dependence in the fiction and essays of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), whose writings have been championed by a number of prominent Anglo-American economists and politicians on the right as offering the most convincing “moral” argument for laissez-faire capitalism. The world portrayed in works like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is one in which the heroism of creative individualism is constantly under threat by government intervention and the parasitism of the weak. “The second-hander [one who depends on the ingenuity of another] has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation,” declares the protagonist of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, “and reversed the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator [the innovator and entrepreneur]. Men have been taught that dependence is a virtue.”[4]

Sapere aude! Trust thyself! The will to power! Individualism! What becomes of a people motivated primarily by such ideals? To begin, the resentment of dependence quickly gives rise to resentment of the dependent. The privileging of self-reliance as the highest human ideal inevitably diminishes and dehumanizes those whose lives are most transparently in need of the care and support of others. The impoverished are thus scorned as mere “takers” of public resources, while the elderly, the ill, and the disabled are often portrayed as (and made to feel like) burdens on their family and caregivers. This conflation of dependence and the dependent as a common object of resentment is already evident in the writings of Rand and Nietzsche. According to Rand, those at the bottom of “the intellectual pyramid,” those who, left to themselves, would “starve in [their] hopeless ineptitude,” contribute nothing to those above them, damning the strong instead to a pattern of exploitation.[5]

For Nietzsche, meanwhile, nothing threatens the will to power more than pity. “The weak and the botched shall perish,” he declares. “And they ought even to be helped to perish.”[6] To do otherwise, to have compassion on the weak, would only spread the disease of their suffering. It is not surprising, therefore, that both thinkers express hostility towards Christianity, which Rand disparages as “the best kindergarten for Communism possible,” and Nietzsche as “the revolt of all things that crawl on their bellies against everything that is lofty.” The will to power cannot pray nor render praise to a God who takes the form of a slave (Phil 2:7) and identifies explicitly with “the least of these” (Matt 25:40).

The dependent—those broadly assumed to receive more than they give to others—may be the most obvious victims of the modern idolization of independence, but they are scarcely the only ones. Disdain for dependence threatens both our common human life and, as we have become all too painfully aware in recent years, the world we inhabit together. It leads us to see others as either irrelevant to our pursuits of self-fulfillment (in which case they can be safely ignored), or as a threat to self-fulfillment (in which case they must be heroically overcome), or as instrumental to our fulfillment (in which case they become absorbed into our own projects of self-actualization). Missing in every case is that sense of responsibility for others that arises from the awareness of our interdependence.

The resentment of dependence leads likewise to the exploitation of the natural world. Impatient with the limits we encounter in the world around us (the time between harvests, the carrying capacity of the land, the slow growth to maturation in livestock, etc.), we employ every political, economic, and technological means available to mitigate our dependence on nature’s limits. Increased agricultural inputs (synthetic pesticides and fertilizers) lead to quicker and more bountiful harvests. Global trade and the growing hegemony of supra-national corporations allow for the consumption of a greater number of goods without the constraints of local seasons and climate. Advances in biotechnology (the use of growth hormones and genetic modification) enable a swifter transition from calf to beef.

In the short term, therefore, it would appear that we have indeed successfully circumvented the laws and limits of nature, enabling greater production, consumption, and ultimately profit. We are however now witnessing the first fruits of the disastrous long-term effects of such an exploitative and “extractivist” approach. The chemical warfare that we have waged against agricultural pests and diseases has poisoned our water and soil in turn. The hormones that we have infused into our livestock have greatly diminished their health and increased their suffering. The gross amounts of fossil fuel required to transport “out of season” produce across oceans and continents has polluted the air and contributed to the planet’s warming. In short, our attempts to transcend the limits of nature have greatly increased the natural limitations that now confront us (more extreme weather events, fewer natural “resources,” depleted topsoil, etc.). We are increasingly enslaved to the very conditions that we have introduced into nature in our pursuit of greater independence from nature.

None of this should come as a surprise to those steeped in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. At root, the resentment of dependence is a resentment of our own creatureliness. It is destructive precisely because it is untrue, placing us in contradiction with the order of things that God has made. To be a creature is to belong within a network of interdependent relations which are created and sustained by God, and which find their fulfilment in the loving praise of God (e.g., Psalm 148:3–5; cf. Psalm 124; 140). Human flourishing is therefore bound up with the flourishing of this created order. To rebel against our creatureliness, to seek to place ourselves over and above (and thus ultimately against) the created order is to alienate ourselves from our creator and from the network of creaturely relations through which we are formed and to which we are, in an important sense, responsible.

It goes on. He draws Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Henri de Lubac into the making of his point, the conclusion of which is - well, the theme that preoccupies me these days: the flouting of the transcendent order.

And, dang it, I gotta excerpt this one at some length, too. Ben Sears is one of my fellow contributors to Ordinary Times whose stuff is always among my must-reads. On Fridays, he does installments of a series, each one featuring a poet he's been thinking about and reading. Last week it was Kingsley Amis:

In a letter to his former roommate Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin writes with admiring jealousy. “I mean, you’ve become what I dreamed of becoming, and I don’t suppose you ever dreamed of being a librarian. If I’m so good why don’t they pay me enough money to go to some southern beach and lie on my belly (or someone else’s)? Eh?”

He was referring to the notorious incident on an Italian beach where Amis’s soon to be ex-wife, having just found out about yet another affair, wrote in lipstick on his sleeping back “1 Fat Englishman. I F*** Anything.” Her suntan epigram gave us the title of his subsequent novel, One Fat Englishman.

The two friends were opposites in some ways – Larkin’s balding, awkward, and dumpy to Amis’s dashing, fair haired, and suave – but both were alike in that they were cads, and puerilely so, though Larkin had to work harder at it, as he writes in “A Letter to a Friend About Girls”:

My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness—

and

Described on Sundays only, where to want
Is straightway to be wanted, seek to find,
And no one gets upset or seems to mind
At what you say to them, or what you don’t:
A world where all the nonsense is annulled,

And beauty is accepted slang for yes.

He apparently made seduction, made everything, look easy though he was very disciplined in his writing. He worked at his craft. It may not seem like much but he insisted on five hundred words output every day. In his life he published over forty books, mostly novels, but including six volumes of poetry, collections of essays (New Maps of Hell is not to be missed by science fiction fans), usage manuals, and collections of shorter fiction. I’ve read a handful and found them all to be deceptive in their simplicity but consistent in that the voice he uses in mystery is known to the reader of his fiction which is known to the reader of his poetry. The smirk is ever-present.

I’ve tried to square his caddishness with what else I know of him. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of his Collected Poems is helpful in many regards. First, from it I learned that there is a whole branch of divination based on allum. It surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. Cromyomancy. Divination by means of onions.

Green Heart

Cromyomancy carves out a preview
And a foretaste of you:
Brittle as gold-leaf the outer skin,
Firmness within;
Peach or strawberry;
The heart will grow.

From the beginning, tears flow,
But of no rage or grief:
Wise cromyomancers know
Weeping augers belief.

Second, the introduction by Clive James frames the collection as a “richly various expression of a moral personality coming to terms with the world.” The poems, as selected and laid out by Amis, are chronological. Development, poetically, from Audenworship through emergence of his own distinct voice, and conscientiously is apparent.

He doesn’t, strictly from a reading of his poems, repudiate his choices, of which I’m glad. I like my rogues unrepentant. He accepts his temptations as a fixture in life and assumes that we all suffer from the same discreditable wants. The trick in life is not in banishing your demons, but in making them a plaything of the mind; keeping them at bay and going on about life in an upright way.

“Look, if they knew me, well and good, / There might be cause to run;” he writes in “Sight Unseen.” But he tells us what runs through his mind. In “A Dream of Fair Women”:

Speech fails them, amorous, but each one’s look
Endorsed in other ways, begs me to sign
Her body’s autograph book;
‘Me first, Kingsley; I’m cleverest’ each declares,
But no gourmet races downstairs to dine,
Nor will I race upstairs.

He’s not confessional so much as matter of fact.

Coming of Age

Twenty years ago he slipped into town,
A spiritual secret agent; took
Rooms right in the cathedral close; wrote down
Verbatim all their direst idioms;
Made phonetic transcripts in his black book;
Mimicked their dress, their gestures as they sat
Chaffering and chaffing in the Grand Hotel;
Infiltrated their glass and plastic homes,
Watched from the inside; then – his deadliest blow –
Went and married one of them (what about that?);
At the first christening played his part so well
That he started living it from then on,
His trick of camouflage no longer a trick.
Isn’t it the spy’s rarest triumph to grow
Indistinguishable from the spied upon,
The stick insect’s to become a stick?

In addition to Larkin, he seemed to form deep friendships. Robert Conquest was a longtime friend and collaborator. The poet Cecil Day-Lewis convalesced and passed at the house Amis shared with Elizabeth Jane Howard. He pops up in other writers’ lives in situations you’d assume reserved for intimate acquaintances.

C.S. Lewis hosted and recorded a symposium of three in his rooms at either Oxford or Cambridge on the subject of science fiction, or “scientifiction” as Lewis called it. Amis was one of the two invitees to a convivial conversation; banter that indicates familiarity. He’s an interesting figure consistently among interesting company.

He writes with wit. You’ll see what I mean in the poem below, one of my favorites of his, “Against Romanticism.”

In the 1950s he, along with a handful of poets including Larkin, Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings, and Thom Gunn, formed a movement in to counter what they saw as the excessive experimentation of the early twentieth century by the likes of Ezra Pound. It was Dylan Thomas, though, that they held out as their bete noire. According to David Lodge, in Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, “Dylan Thomas was made to stand for everything they detested: verbal obscurity, metaphysical pretentiousness, and romantic rhapsodizing.” In keeping with their opposition to ostentation, they called their movement The Movement and “Against Romanticism” was their declaration of intent.

It’s a call for celebrating things as they are; a frustration with what they saw as poetic inflation that devalued reality with over-the-top metaphor. 

Great bit of cultural observation at the Washington Examiner. Mark Judge says he recently saw the Barbie movie, and also had occasion to revisit the 1988 film The Fabulous Baker Boys. He was led to make a comparison about what they have to say about men and women:

From Susie Diamond to Barbie, there has been a massive shift in the culture. In the Baker Boys scene where Diamond gets the gig , it’s quite surprising to modern ears how self-assured she is. When the Baker Boys try to dismiss her because she is late, she ignores them and then slyly asks, “So, where’s the winner?” She then says she expected the place to be “more glamorous” and states that she “had an intuition” she would get the job. She sings, hits a home run, and changes the lives of the two small-time entertainers.

This is a strong, intelligent, street-smart, and wise female protagonist who is also not a Mary Sue, a character found in modern films (Rey in Star Wars) who does everything flawlessly and doesn’t need a man. As Diamond shows at the end of the film, she does, in fact, need a man. He is just going to have to work for her, something that Ken is willing to do for Barbie, all to no avail. This is why some male reviewers are calling Ken the “tragic hero” of Barbie.

As Barbie goes through her reeducation camp, the tone shifts to that of resentment — toward men, toward capitalism, toward anyone who criticizes any woman for any reason.

"Cultural Gatekeepers and Books" by John Wilson at First Things calls for an arbiter of good reading that takes on its tasks with "wit, energy and high spirits" - because that's sorely lacking at present.  

"The Quest for Pelts" by Greg Koabel at Quillette  is a look at the economic and geopolitical levels of significance of changes in the eastern Canadian fur trade in the 1500s and 1600s:

In the second half of the sixteenth century, two separate yet related developments took place in what would become eastern Canada. The first was a sudden explosion in exchange between European traders and Algonquin-speaking fur trappers on Canada’s Atlantic coast. French, English, and Basque visitors had long been doing a decent side business while pursuing their main purpose of fishing or whaling, exchanging iron tools or scrap metal for animal skins. However, the 1580s witnessed a significant increase in the scale of this trade. For the first time, ships were sailing across the Atlantic for the express purpose of procuring furs.

Meanwhile, for the Innu and Mi’kmaq living along the Atlantic coast, the period brought the beginning of a dramatic change in economic and social conditions. For decades, they too had seen the fur trade as a supplement to the seasonal exploitation of fish and game resources. But now a new economic model was becoming viable. And in many ways, it was more attractive than the old model.

Time that had previously been spent fishing, hunting caribou and other game, or crafting stone tools and pottery, was now better spent hunting the animals that Europeans were interested in, such as lynx, fox, marten, and, most of all, beaver. Those skins could be traded for food, metal tools, and copper kettles far in excess of what domestic production could manage. In microeconomic terms, they were leveraging the power of comparative advantage.

However, it was not all good news. The more dependent on European trade these peoples became, the more susceptible they were to abrupt swings in the European fur market, not to mention the political and military pressures that European powers were able to apply.

The second development took place a few hundred kilometers inland, up the St. Lawrence River that Jacques Cartier had explored (and named) a half century earlier. The main Indigenous players in this narrative were the same ones whom Cartier met at Stadacona and Hochelaga (modern Quebec City and Montreal, respectively). Or, more accurately, their children and grandchildren.

There’s no record of any European following Cartier up the river for about a generation after the failed French colonization attempts of the 1540s. So researchers have had to reconstruct the events that followed through a mixture of archaeology, historical hearsay, and guesswork. 

The upper St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region witnessed massive turmoil in the decades that followed Cartier’s visits—so much so that by the time the French visited the area again at the end of the sixteenth century, they found a political landscape that Cartier would have found unrecognizable.

One of the more important debates among historians is whether these two stories were related to one another. Did European demand for fur send shock waves through the economic and political networks of eastern Canada in the late sixteenth century? Or were the Iroquoian speakers of the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence region being affected by their own historical currents, which were only marginally affected by Europeans at this point.

Well, so much for my resolve to keep these recommendations brief.

The latest at Rob Henderson's Substack is a review of a 1951 book, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. Hoffer's look is about mass movements, and Henderson sees some parallels between the ones Hoffer discusses and the present situation in post-America.

Graham McAleer's "Camus and the Crisis of the West" at Law & Liberty is kind of a review of a book published in 1954, Camus's The Rebel.

Matt Ridley's "Why Scientific Research Is in Crisis" at Spectator World examines the deterioration of the peer review standard to the point of its meaninglessness. 

Paterrico really lets loose at his Substack in a piece entitled "Fine, I'll Write About the Trump Indictment for Trying to Steal the Election."  A taste:

OK, enough general discussion and hypotheticals. Let’s get into the nitty gritty of Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Before we discuss what the actual plan was, I think it’s very, very important, right off the bat, to establish that Trump’s arguments about the election being stolen from him are utter, complete, and total horseshit, and he knew it. Everything I discuss in this post depends on this.

And I'll tell you right now I'm going to excerpt generously from this op-ed by Amotz Asa-el at the Jerusalem Post entitled "The US Needs a Trump-free Republican Party to Make America Sane Again": 

Surely, Trump’s political survival speaks volumes about America’s broader social crisis, but before that it calls to task the people these polls survey and the political home they share: the Republican Party that was Abraham Lincoln’s accelerator of racial justice, Dwight Eisenhower’s edifice of national stability, and Ronald Regan’s engine of economic revival and international sway.

Now this party, if it’s up to its primary voters, will install in the Oval Office a man whose very reappearance at the White House’s threshold will underscore their party’s vertigo, their country’s decline, and Western democracy’s potential demise.

DOUBTS OVER Trump’s presidential suitability were originally about a flamboyant businessman’s career change. Age 70 when he won the Republican nomination, Trump’s baggage raised questions about his political experience, diplomatic expertise, and intellectual gravitas.

This was on the professional side. On the moral side, there were esthetical problems – his profane language and impulsive temper – as well as behavioral scandals, like his flings with prostitutes.

Hovering above all this was a veneer of frivolity, arrogance, an utter disrespect for other people’s feelings and values, and a perversion of the patriotic ideal.

A case in point was Trump’s quip about the late John McCain. “I like people who weren’t captured,” said the draft dodger in reference to the combat pilot who survived Vietnamese captivity, into which he fell severely wounded after a missile hit his plane.

In Israel, such a statement can kill a political career. Too many people here know what war is, what enduring its horrors involves, and what evading its call says about the evader. There was a time when saluting patriots was what America’s Republicans were all about. That time ended when the Republican Party bargained its soul to Trump.

My latest at Precipice is entitled "Despair and Faith."