Sunday roundup

 At the Kyiv Independent, Khrystia Vengryniuk looks into reasons why Ukrainians don't grow up learning about their own literature as much as that from other countries, in a piece titled ""The Heavy Weight of Ukrainian Culture":

“Everything in Ukraine is about pain, tears, serfdom, and wars. Of course, children don’t want to read such literature.” I still remember this conversation from back in school when the math teacher was trying to explain to the literature teacher why her class wasn’t preparing for their lessons.

“But that’s how it really was throughout Ukraine’s history,” the surprised literature teacher replied.

“If it was like that, then it’s no wonder they don’t want to read. I myself couldn’t handle so much negativity. In foreign literature, there are adventures: Mowgli, Gulliver, Tom Sawyer. Personally, I don’t know Ukrainian literature well. We studied Russian literature in school, which included ‘The Garnet Bracelet,’ ‘The Master and Margarita,’ and even ‘War and Peace,’ which is about war too, but it’s interesting. For some reason, Russian literature isn’t as sad as ours. Wasn’t it like that for them?”

“It wasn’t,” the literature teacher replied.

“Well, that still needs to be verified,” the math teacher dismissed.

I witnessed this conversation while staying after class to work on algebra, as I was struggling with it while preparing to enter university. I knew the math teacher was wrong, and even then, it was hurtful to hear all this. I had heard similar complaints and accusations about the sadness and heaviness of Ukrainian literature and the entirety of Ukrainian culture throughout my life. 

With the full-scale invasion, there was no need to prove anything to Ukrainian Russophiles about our history or culture. Either there’s now more information about how things were, or the number of Russophiles is finally decreasing. It’s just unfortunate that many admirers of the “great” Russian culture had to see missiles destroying their homes to rid themselves of this obsession.

While preparing to enter the philology faculty with a focus on Ukrainian literature, I began to learn more about this “heavy Ukrainian culture,” about things we hadn’t even touched upon in school. After studying the literature of World War I, the Holodomor in Ukraine – which left me in a state of shock and insomnia – and World War II, I was convinced that the 1960s and 1970s would be a time of enlightenment and rebuilding, as that was when my parents were born. 

I thought about how close that was to me in time. But then, just before the Ukrainian literature exam, I read a sentence that still hangs over my consciousness when I think about the “heavy Ukrainian culture”: “The artist Alla Horska was killed with a hammer to the head for her pro-Ukrainian stance.” 

This is what the Soviet authorities did up until our independence to everyone who didn’t conform to their inhumane policies, slanders, and crimes. During that same period, the poet Vasyl Symonenko was beaten to death, and the writer Vasyl Stus was imprisoned, where he died after years of torture and inhumane conditions.

This happened to everyone who did not submit, bend the knee, keep silent, or side with the oppressors. A year ago, my fellow writers and I wrote a children’s book, “Light Catchers” about the most famous Ukrainian artists of all time, and we spent hours debating how to present all the factual information about the artists in a way that would not traumatize children, because 80% of the artists suffered from Russian atrocities.

Having entered university and started studying Ukrainian literature, I thought that with Ukraine’s independence, the gates of pain were closing, that this was a free Ukraine, and no one would ever be able to do such things to our artists or any Ukrainian again. This is the civilized modern world, after all. What persecution, heaven forbid, war, could we possibly talk about in the very heart of Europe? After all, our oppressors had long since died — we were left to build a free culture in a free country.

And, indeed, there was a period of flourishing in the 1990s, but with Russia again bearing down in Ukraine, the older zeitgeist seems to be prevailing again.

At Public Discourse, Ivana Greco asks, "When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We lose?" 

n thinking about this problem, we might consider some lessons from The Odyssey, one of humanity’s oldest stories, about a warrior’s twenty-year quest through countless dangers to return home to his wife and child. At the end of the epic, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trying to determine his identity since she does not immediately recognize him after his long absence. She asks her servant to move their marriage bed outside the bedroom so Odysseus can sleep in it. Odysseus responds that moving the bed is impossible since he personally built the bed into the trunk of an old olive tree: “My handiwork and no one else’s!” He explains that when their house was built: “I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.”  After cutting off the trees leaves and branches, he “hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up into a bed post, drilled it, let it serve as model” for the other bedposts, and he “planed them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory and stretched a bed between.” Then, reunited with his wife, the epic tells us:

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,

his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for

As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down

under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.

Would we be as moved by this scene of a husband and wife coming back together after a twenty-year separation, but with an Ikea bed assembled by someone paid $15/hour from the TaskRabbit app as the central reference point? I think not. Efficiency is good, but it is not the most important thing. When it comes to making a home, there are other virtues that matter far more.

Aaron Renn has been getting more bracing in his commentary of late. (I discussed this in a recent post over at Precipice.) Today, he offers up a real upside-the-head at his Substack. He says we are moving even beyond his positive-neutral-negative formulation for how the culture relates to Christianity. He says we're seeing four civilizational shifts: from Christian to post-Christian, classical liberalism to Nietzchean nihilism, global West to global East, and Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment enchantment. The three reasons these shifts matter are that "these realities are going to be the context of discipleship for our children," the need for a new approach to missions, and "these changes will challenge our collective sense of identity":

Faithfulness to the gospel may increasingly put our political geographic citizenship in tension with our spiritual citizenship in heaven. We are kingdom people first. If the West (read: the United States) becomes increasingly seen as the source of the spiritual problem, then we may have to orient ourselves at home as missionaries have been doing over the course of the past decades. We're going to have to develop a greater sensitivity to our Western and Enlightenment accommodation of the gospel.

The American evangelical church is ill-prepared for adapting to these shifts. The likelihood is that under sustained cultural pressure, it will resort to doubling-down on past approaches, wearing an anti-intellectual, anti-elitist, populist-fundamentalist resistance as a badge of honor. This is the equivalent of being in a foreign country and talking louder and slower. This will only serve to further marginalize the American evangelical church's impact in the ongoing cultural conversation. By spiritualizing their resistance and demonizing the other, they will further the degree of polarization and potential for any meaningful impact.

We are as a Western Christian church at an historic inflection point. We are at a point of decision.  To meet our moment, we will need the courage to face these realities, the humility to seek God's leading, and the discernment to balance innovation with historic orthodoxy.

In "Why Israel's Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire" at Commentary, Seth Mandel makes the point that Hamas has no reason to not comment to the table, other than that it doesn't want any "peace" other than the obliteration of Israel:

Without any credible way to absolve Hamas of blame for the lack of a deal, the terms must change. The protesters, their supporters in the Squad faction of Congress, their mentors at “elite” universities—by and large these folks merely want Israel’s defeat, whatever the specific methods.

Of course, if they really wanted a ceasefire, they would have been horrified by October 7 and angry at Hamas, since there was a ceasefire in place that Hamas broke by slaughtering over a thousand innocents, ensuring there’d be a significant response. To a true ceasefire supporter, let alone a person of any moral fiber, Hamas’s attack would have been the great unforgivable crime of the century.

But the rallies in support of Hamas by progressive groups and on campuses began immediately after the massacre. Not only were these groups willing to forgive Hamas for destroying a status quo ceasefire, many of them were downright jubilant at the death and destruction caused by the terror group.

Since it’s never actually been about a ceasefire, it has been easy for the “pro-Gaza” protest movement to pivot in its demands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ringleader of the Democratic anti-Zionist caucus who has long demanded that the U.S. go far beyond a ceasefire and take action against Israel, had a prime speaking slot at Harris’s nominating convention last night.

There’s some value, of course, in all this dropping of pretensions. The Democratic Party with Harris as its standard-bearer is telegraphing a posture change; some in the party, such as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, are hinting that such a shift could come sooner than later. It turns out that all it might take for Israel’s critics to drop the “ceasefire” charade is an actual ceasefire.

I've been busy over at Precipice.

In "A Bit About the Geological Makeup of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain," I discuss the primacy of cultivating virtue.

In "The Two-to-Tango Adage Seems Applicable," I cover similar terrain to that covered by Mandel. Namely, that, for all the clamor worldwide, including in Israel, for a deal that will get the hostages released, Hamas ain't at the table for the current round of talks.

I indulged the historian in me with "The Two Great Northern Migrations of the Early 20th Century." One of the migrations gave us country music, one gave us the blues, and both provided a steady stream of factory workers.