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. 

 

 

Saturday roundup

 "On the Cooling of Our Love" by Harrison Garlick at Public Discourse  introduced me to a new term: acedia. The definition is "spiritual or mental sloth; apathy."

Garlick steers us to Dante to flesh out our understanding of it:

Acedia is the demon of our day. Yet acedia, or what is more commonly known as sloth, is somehow both ubiquitous and unknown. It is often called the “noonday devil,” as it quietly slips into our lives in the middle of our daily work. It does not come in the darkness of night, but rather in the peak of day when there are no shadows, and it often works within us long before we know it is there.

When we think of slothfulness, we often think of laziness: binge-watching television shows or mindlessly scrolling social media. Acedia, however, is not reducible to mere laziness. The marathon runner or the successful CEO may suffer from acedia just as much as someone we would consider “lazy.” Rather, acedia is a great “cooling” of our love. Thomas Aquinas calls it a “sorrow for spiritual good,” and Saint Isidore says the acedious soul is “inclined to undue response.” 

An illustration of what acedia looks like in practice can be found in Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book in his Divine Comedy. On the fourth terrace of Mount Purgatory, the Roman poet Virgil explains to Dante the Pilgrimthat within man burns a natural love. Like fire, the soul has a natural tendency to rise. It has an endless desire to seek and be satiated in what is beautiful. Dante the Pilgrim sees a group of souls moving in great haste and calling out examples of zeal and slothfulness. It is here, on the fourth terrace, that acedia is purged. 

Dante the Poet couples Virgil’s lecture on love with the purging of acedia to show that slothfulness is a cooling of love. More specifically, he presents sloth as a smothering of the soul’s natural love and a curbing of its desire to seek what is beautiful.

Garlick then looks at the corrosive effect of acedia on the three parts of our souls:

he soul, in the Platonic Christian tradition, has three parts: the intellect, the spirited, and the appetitive. Each part loves (eros) a particular beauty and desires to satiate in it. 

The intellect, for example, loves truth. It desires to conform to reality. The spirited part (thumos) loves nobility. It craves human excellence, a certain beauty of the soul found in virtue. The lowest part of the soul, the appetitive, seeks pleasure. It enjoys good food and drink and laughing with friends, and it finds a certain zenith in the relationship between husband and wife. And, as in all things, the higher always perfects the lower; thus, the soul is first ruled by reason, then the spirited part, and then the appetitive. To disorder the loves of the soul would be to disorder its natural hierarchy.

Virtue is what makes the soul beautiful. As Virgil tells Dante the Pilgrim in Purgatorio, man may control the love burning within him and thus he is accountable for his actions. This love must be disciplined to satiate in the beautiful, in a way that accords with reason. 

For example, the intellect is perfected by prudence. The spirited part is perfected by the virtue of fortitude: the spirited soul will undergo great difficulties in order to attain what is beautiful. Such accomplishments produce honor, fame, and glory. Courage is necessary for the virtuous life. On the other hand, the appetitive part is perfected by the virtue of temperance: it moderates our pleasures and orients them toward true beauty. Justice is the virtue of being well-ordered, and in this way, it adorns the whole soul and moves its parts in harmony. The virtuous soul satiates in beauty and becomes beautiful. The virtuous life is the beautiful life, after all. 

There appears, however, to be a problem with love. When the soul satiates in beauty, it is happy. Yet, the soul does not want to be happy some of the time. It wants to be happy all of the time. In other words, our appetite for happiness is infinite. Yet, the beauties of this life are finite. Here, many souls fall into an endless pattern of consumption, mindlessly moving from one beauty to another in search of happiness. Yet, what if there is a beauty that could truly satisfy our infinite appetite?

The hierarchy of the soul and its corresponding loves—pleasure, nobility, and truth—create what has been called the “ladder of love.” The soul ascends from lesser beauties to greater ones until at the top it discovers beauty itself: God. The human soul’s infinite appetite for happiness finds satisfaction in the infinite beauty of the Divine. It finds a beauty that is not simply satisfaction but overabundance.

In fact, our natural love is enkindled in us by God to lead us back to him. “Love is a good circle” that starts with God, our enkindler, and ends with him, beauty itself. There is no problem with our love, but rather, with our misunderstanding of its purpose—it is a call to ascend and become beautiful by resting in God.

So what does this corrosion look like?

As the higher perfects the lower, so, too, does it disorder the lower if it falls into error. If there is no truth, to what does the noble soul aspire? Neither King David nor Prince Hector stepped into greatness because of an opinion. Men do not die for ambiguity. When the spirited part of the soul cools to its love of nobility, it no longer finds the strength to overcome hardship and achieve glory. The soul becomes soft and pusillanimous. It knows of no beauty worthy of sacrifice. Climbing the ladder of love is too hard. Thus acedia produces soft-souled men who not only hate the idea of greatness in themselves but hate it in others. These souls produce cultures of mediocrity that celebrate the lukewarm.

Many souls live the life of cattle. Without truth and nobility, the soul turns to what is left: pleasure. We live our lives with our heads down, as Socrates notes, never looking up to ascend toward greatness but down toward bestial pleasures. We are the worst animals when it comes to food and sex, as Aristotle notes. Acedia hands the soul over to lust and gluttony by depriving it of its love of higher beauties. Such an attempt to satiate the soul’s need for happiness through a glutting of the baser appetites only serves to further cool the soul toward its true pleasures. Eventually, what little warmth resides in the soul cools to all pleasure, and the soul loses its love of life itself. What results is a culture of death that dehumanizes and discards others.

So what can be done?

The antidote to acedia is zeal—a committed diligence of the soul pursuing beauty and becoming beautiful. Understanding the structure of the soul provides a map for self-examination. What do I seek most in life: God, truth, nobility, or pleasure? Have I allowed God to illuminate and arrange the lesser beauties in my life? Do I cultivate an intellectual life or has my pursuit of truth quietly cooled? Am I spirited and do I seek to be magnanimous, or have I grown comfortable in mediocrity? Do I moderate pleasure, or do I make my reason a slave to my lower appetites? Do I turn to the virtues to help perfect the parts of my soul, or has the impulse to beauty waned and tired?

At Front Porch Republic, in "Sore Mouth Pond,"  Micah Paul Veillon recounts the discovery of largemouth bass in an unassuming little body of water where he'd been led to believe he shouldn't expect to see them:

 . . . after my graduation from college, and before I moved away from home (with every intent to return), I spent all of last summer fishing. I fished public lakes and creeks and the faithful fishing holes of my childhood, but I also tried a pond unfamiliar to me.

Though that pond was owned by a dear family friend I have known all my life, it was a new pond. Built in 2019, few had the chance to cast on it before COVID struck. Then I went off to college and didn’t do much fishing.

But while the world was in a frenzy our family friend fished his new pond, belaboring the hours and the fish. What else was there to do? Men have long made excuses to get out on the water. None were needed during COVID. So he fished it until he was worn slap out.

He caught every bass in that pond five times over, too. Indeed, he fished it so often he decided to name it: Sore Mouth Pond. Faulkner himself could not have drawn up a better one.

The night before I went, my youngest brother asked me where I was off to in the morning. Upon revealing to him that I was headed to Sore Mouth Pond, he forewarned me:

If you want to catch catfish until you’re blue in the face, or bluegill as big as your shoe, then it’s a fine spot. But if you’re bass fishing then don’t go. You won’t catch nothing. I’ve been a couple times and so has Sam and we ain’t even felt a bite. 

I told him I was aware of the pond’s reputation but still planned on going and that he was welcome to join me. He said his one principle in life was not to get up at five a.m. for nothing—fair enough.

He then reflects on what Kierkegaard has to say about his situation:

When I arrived at the pond the next morning the sun had started to break. A hazy, silver blue peeked over the pines past the pond, and I could see the early morning orange at their trunks. I stepped out of my truck and could smell the afternoon’s coming rain. The air was heavy and sweet. There was an undressing, a nakedness for the nostrils on the breeze. I stopped and played with the smell for a second, breathing it in and out before I made my way downhill to the pond just beyond the apple trees. Chills went up my arms in spite of the scorching summer heat.

After three hours of fishing, no bass had been caught. I did catch a stunning little sunfish on a road runner crappie jig right as the sun had cleared the pines past the pond. He had blue streaks running up his jaw like he’d been struck by lightning. Color sizzled though him. It was beautiful. It looked an awful lot like the feeling in my jaw when I drink mint juleps too quickly.

I tried multiple different crappie jigs, assuming the bass were far too accustomed to normal bass jigs and chatter baits and whopper ploppers. I even threw around a pink rooster tail and caught three catfish on it, which is incredible. With every cast I was increasingly aware of what all I did not know and could not foresee.

I did not leave disappointed, though. Rather, I was hopeful; determined to return the next evening. I wanted to catch a bass, of course, and rather badly, but I also wished to see the fog settle on the pond silhouetted against a warm sky.

I went at half past six the next day, and after fishing for two hours I had yet to get a bite on a chatter bait or any of my crankbaits. Then the night began to settle, and the critters came out to praise it. To their cue, I tied on a yellow, black speckled top water frog with black and yellow stringed legs and a white belly. At the corner of the pond were tall, healthy sweet flags that the top water frog would fall into comfortably. I made my way there. On the third cast a bass rose and struck the frog forcefully and fast. But, out of impatience, I jerked my rod too quickly and yanked it from its mouth before the hooks could even separate from the frog.

I did not see another bite so I left as all went black, and I paid no attention to the fog.

When I made it home I wrestled with the thought of fishing Sore Mouth Pond again over my nightly cup of coffee. The chief problem was not that I was bored plum out of my mind—which I surely was—but that I was bored and I knew there were fish in there. I was not fishing in a puddle. I had spoken to the owner the week before, and he assured me of the fact. No doubt, he explained, the pond was worn and the fish were weary to bite; but they’re in there, he promised, and you can catch ‘em. 

I, however, was growing annoyed. Everything was so idle on that pond. There was no action. The silence, once peaceful, had become an agitation. I was doing everything I could to keep the boredom at bay, oscillating between all the different lures and jigs. Different colors and sizes and speeds and shapes. But there was the fact: two days of bass fishing on the pond had born no bass. The boring fact.

As a result, my mind was restless—which is probably why Kierkegaard labeled boredom as the root of all evil, and the subsequent restlessness as that which “keeps a person out of the world of spirit and puts them in a class with the animals.”

Indeed, I was turning to what Kierkegaard claimed men turn to to cure them of their boredom: activity and work, which seem to annul the boredom but ultimately manufacture anxious and fidgety men resembling “humming insects … the most boring of all.”

More and more I wanted to give up on Sore Mouth Pond. I wanted to just fish somewhere else. Kierkegaard, though, condemned me again: “Change is what all who are bored cry out for.” Men grow bored of the country and move to the city; bored of where they’re at so they travel abroad, maybe even move states or countries. Bored of silver? Try gold.

The change that Kierkegaard proposed to solve boredom, though, is not change in this way at all, but a rotation of sorts. A crop rotation, as he posited. Like farmers attached to a place, Kierkegaard believed the principal boredom-curing method is not in a moving away, or a radical changing of the soil, but in the rotation of grains in the same soil. A faithfulness to the place one is in. Underlying this for Kierkegaard is the principle of limitation, “the only saving one in the world.”

In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is not bored.” One must go through the idleness when he feels boredom breathing down his neck. Fleeing it only begins the “infinite bad,” the ceaseless pursuit.

So I went to bed, resolving to go back to Sore Mouth Pond in the morning.

When I arrived the air was quiet. I could not sense if it was going to rain; it did not smell like it, but the sky was overcast, and the morning mist had yet to rise. I could not really see where I wanted to start fishing, but I knew the general direction. After walking for a minute I saw where the logs slipped into the water and went to cast there.

I decided to Texas rig a green Yamamoto Senko worm with red sand-like speckles. It’s a tried-and-true bass rig that I had assumed the bass had seen a million times. But my time on Sore Mouth Pond had already revealed all that I cannot predict. So I went with it.

I cast around the logs a few times before moving off slightly to the right, casting beyond the logs and far enough into the mist that I did not see the splash of the Senko worm. Before the second, slow revolving of my spin reel was complete the line pulsed with life like a vein with burning blood. My heart took off with the bass now firmly set on the hook. I let him run for a second and thanked God. I knew he wasn’t getting off.

He was a beautiful, two-and-a-half-pound largemouth bass with yellow ribs and green checkers falling to his tail so dark they were almost black, caught on the most standard of bass rigs I had been refusing to use the whole time. Despite my stubbornness, fidelity bore its fruit.

I held the bass, inspecting him for a minute and then placed him softly back into the water by the tail. I waved it from side to side a few times to return the breath he gave to me. The mud in the shallow of the pond billowed up like smoke, then he slipped out of my hand and slowly swam into the mist and everything was still again.

Christopher Yates's essay "Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality" at Hedgehog Review looks at humankind's fascination with quantifying and classifying the inner self.

It's not new, as he points out:

Some six centuries before the term personality became the coin of the modern humanistic realm, aptitudinal assessment programs found a toehold in China under the direction of civil service recruitment efforts. The individual became an object of attention, at least in the sense of his functional potential. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), skill-focused testing and selection measures were on a firm footing, later approaching national use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Then things set sail. 

In 1832, the English East India Company employed assessments in the selection of personnel for overseas duty, a practice that led to the British Civil Service’s initiation of such testing in 1885. In 1883, the US Civil Service Commission was vested with responsibility for administering numerous aptitudinal examinations relevant to government work.9 During World War I, Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth began developing the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet for use by the US Army to sift out panic-prone soldiers. After Germany’s defeat in that war, the German High Command “established a program for the assessment and selection of officers and specialists that was of unprecedented proportions,” ambitiously seeking to interpret the “total person.”10 The US government would go on to stitch comprehensive assessment examinations into the fiber of the War Officer Selection Boards starting in 1943.11 Increasingly psychologically informed and questionnaire based, the aptitudinal trajectory was principally concerned with what we call personality as a matter of fine-tuning job placement for the sake of building state power and winning wars. At the same time, such pragmatism was nested within a much larger transition in the Western conception of the self, the full significance of which was not yet apparent. What the adoption of Woodworth’s instrument reflected was a slight tilt in civic managerialism away from what historian Warren Susman calls the “culture of character” and toward a new “culture of personality” (my emphases).12 I say “slight” because the aptitudinal developments just noted had one foot on the character side and the other on the personality side. In the American milieu especially, the duty to serve was partly derived from the nineteenth century’s understanding of “character” as those aspects of a citizen that promoted the health of the societal order. The worth and meaning of the self were measured (not entirely, but significantly and intuitively) in terms of how well one embodied “a standard of conduct that assured the interrelationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘moral’” in their own localized and/or institutionalized ways.13 In short, personhood was understood in terms of duty, and duty lay in the application of virtues. 

And then in the twentieth century, industrial psychology came into its own:

Some six centuries before the term personality became the coin of the modern humanistic realm, aptitudinal assessment programs found a toehold in China under the direction of civil service recruitment efforts. The individual became an object of attention, at least in the sense of his functional potential. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), skill-focused testing and selection measures were on a firm footing, later approaching national use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Then things set sail. 

In 1832, the English East India Company employed assessments in the selection of personnel for overseas duty, a practice that led to the British Civil Service’s initiation of such testing in 1885. In 1883, the US Civil Service Commission was vested with responsibility for administering numerous aptitudinal examinations relevant to government work.9 During World War I, Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth began developing the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet for use by the US Army to sift out panic-prone soldiers. After Germany’s defeat in that war, the German High Command “established a program for the assessment and selection of officers and specialists that was of unprecedented proportions,” ambitiously seeking to interpret the “total person.”10 The US government would go on to stitch comprehensive assessment examinations into the fiber of the War Officer Selection Boards starting in 1943.11 Increasingly psychologically informed and questionnaire based, the aptitudinal trajectory was principally concerned with what we call personality as a matter of fine-tuning job placement for the sake of building state power and winning wars. At the same time, such pragmatism was nested within a much larger transition in the Western conception of the self, the full significance of which was not yet apparent. What the adoption of Woodworth’s instrument reflected was a slight tilt in civic managerialism away from what historian Warren Susman calls the “culture of character” and toward a new “culture of personality” (my emphases).12 I say “slight” because the aptitudinal developments just noted had one foot on the character side and the other on the personality side. In the American milieu especially, the duty to serve was partly derived from the nineteenth century’s understanding of “character” as those aspects of a citizen that promoted the health of the societal order. The worth and meaning of the self were measured (not entirely, but significantly and intuitively) in terms of how well one embodied “a standard of conduct that assured the interrelationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘moral’” in their own localized and/or institutionalized ways.13 In short, personhood was understood in terms of duty, and duty lay in the application of virtues. 

At the American Enterprise Institute's website, husband-and-wife education-research team Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey alert us to an encouraging well-looky-there phenomenon: the possibility of a humanities revival in education:

For the first time in decades, certain parts of the long-suffering humanities are a growth sector in higher ed. Even more surprisingly, this expansion is being driven by state legislatures and governing boards dominated by Republicans.

At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event.

Because a political party intensely critical of higher education has backed the founding of those programs, some worry that they will debase academic standards, subject intellectual life to political imperatives, and constrain teaching within certain ideological limits. Others hope that this burst of hiring might help colleges better prepare students for civic life and rebuild interest in the humanities.

Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus?

The Storeys wisely caution those spearheading this move to avoid its politicization. 

At The National Interest, Bruce W. Bennett observes that, probably unwisely, The United States has acquiesced to the existence of a nuclear North Korea, and then says that if that is the case, everything possible must be done to minimize its threat:

While the U.S. government still seeks North Korean denuclearization, senior U.S. personnel have recently argued that the United States is prepared to negotiate interim steps to achieve that objective. Which is to say that the U.S. government believes that it can live with North Korean nuclear weapons for some significant period of time.

And that is very risky for many reasons. If Kim had only five to ten nuclear weapons and a very stable country, that would be one thing. But Kim already likely has fifty to 100 nuclear weapons or so, and he appears to be shooting to produce hundreds at an exponentially increasing rate.

North Korea’s instability and growing nuclear weapon inventory could embolden him to carry out limited conventional force attacks on the South and perhaps even nuclear attacks. That could put the United States in a difficult position because any military response to such provocations could escalate to full nuclear weapon employment by North Korea. Kim might hope that this “nuclear shadow” effect would undercut the South Korea-U.S. alliance, one of his key objectives.

While the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been stern in threatening serious retaliation against North Korean attacks, the United States has sought to avoid any kind of military escalation on the Korean Peninsula. The United States clearly worries that Kim has threatened to annihilate South Korea or at the very least conquer and annex it. Once a military conflict begins, the United States may not be able to control the subsequent escalation.

North Korean instability would also factor into Kim’s behavior. This instability might increase Kim’s use of provocations to divert the North Koreans from their miserable living circumstances. And he may hope that South Korea will respond to a limited North Korean conventional attack with an escalation that demonstrates to the North Korean people that the South really is the enemy of the North. Kim could then appear justified in the North for blaming various regime failures on the South as the regime’s main enemy. This also would confirm Kim’s renunciation of negotiated unification because the South is such an enemy.

Bracing stuff.

I've been busy over at Precipice.

My latest, "But Then We'll Be Alright, Won't We?" says that, for all the focus this week on Biden's obvious senility, it's really just

. . .  a symptom of our nation’s flatlining spiritual health. There are layers and layers of symptoms that are outward expressions of the actual cause of our dire circumstances.

"Developing A Sense of Smell" takes the 1980s fans of Latin American radicals such as the Sandinistas to task for their role in what  has now been wrought: a scheme cooked up by Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba to give bad actors from around the world flights into Managua, so as to facilitate their entry into the barely-existent US southern border.

"Once Again, The 2020s Right Attempts To Make A Perfectly Valid Point In the Most Boneheaded, Ineffective Way Possible" discusses Louisiana's new Ten-Commandments-in-every-classroom law.

"The Two-Edged Sword That Is Modernity" asserts that the West is exhausted from all the advancement it's achieved over the last 200 years. 

There. That ought to keep you out of trouble this weekend.

 

 

 

 

Saturday roundup

 Paul Kingsnorth has become one of my favorite Christian writers to check out on a regular basis. I think I've mentioned his journey here at LITD before: from atheism through Buddhism to Eastern Orthodox faith. One of his recurrent themes is how, in the process of achieving material advancement, we have mechanized out souls. 

I'm here linking to a piece that he wrote for his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, in May of 2022, but its point remains at least as timely as it was when he published it.

It's titled "What Progress Wants," and, in the course of arriving at his crescendo, he cites the observations of some figures who share his concern about this mechanization. It's an eclectic bunch, and by no means exclusively Christian. He includes René Guénon (1886-1951), a Frenchman who searched for a unifying principle in Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism and Christianity, Catholic priest and theologian Ivan Illich, and Beat poet Allen Ginsburg.

But it's the final figure whose disturbance about humanity's course provides the framework that Kingsnorth requires to make his own point:

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution - a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as ‘someone who thinks that “today it is no longer possible…”’ We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before. Instead, we believe we live after what Del Noce called a ‘violent break with history’: a move from the ‘kingdom of necessity’ to the ‘kingdom of freedom.’ In the story of Progress which informs our view of history and society, the revolutions of the modern age - industrial, political and intellectual - are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced ‘a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history.’ 

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters. What is it, asks Del Noce that ‘is no longer possible’?

The answer … is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process towards radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.

Del Noce’s ideas are complex, but this claim gets to the heart of the matter. The modern epoch, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything ‘unseen’ or ‘beyond’. From the eighteenth century onwards, philosophy sweeps away religion: the world is now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything becomes immanent: literally down-to-Earth. There are no principalities or powers, and so everything is potentially transformable and explicable through human might. This is another way of framing Guénon’s ‘Western deviation’: a ‘progressive materialisation’ that leads us into a ‘reign of quantity,’ in which we take on the role of the Creator for ourselves. 

What Progress wants is the end of transcendence.

All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a ‘sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods.’ Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. No longer, said Del Noce: the only ‘transcendence’ that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves :

Modernity marks a major break by fully developing the anthropological theme, so that transcendence pictured as ‘beyond’ is replaced by transcendence within the world. 

‘Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained twentieth century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results. 

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? ‘The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science’, writes Del Noce. A ‘totalitarian conception of science’ sees

… science regarded as the only true form of knowledge. According to this view, every other type of knowledge - metaphysical or religious - expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead - as noted by Illich - religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was ‘resolved into philosophy’, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. ‘The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity’, said Del Noce, ‘accelerated the process of disintegration’ that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. 

Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution. The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. ‘The revolutionary attitude of creative violence’, writes Del Noce, ‘has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world.’ If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had. 

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the twentieth century - which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 - spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, the most immanent nation in history, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging ‘the Enlightenment’s war against their own past.’ America, said Del Noce, was now ‘the wellspring of the principle of disintegration’, which, along with its European allies and mentors, it was spreading around the world through the globalisation of its institutions and worldview. 

Del Noce agreed with the prophetic Simone Weil that ‘the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world’ - and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others: 

Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now - oh, wonder! - in order to feign regret they are applying the same method to themselves.

What Progress wants is colonisation.

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and ‘the death of the sacred.’ The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting ‘permissive society’, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family - but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact: 

It is now clear how the process of criticism of authority, which originally was directed against conservatism, against false consciousness, against mystification, etc, ends up reaching the greatest degree of conservatism and linguistic falsification ever known in history. It would be easy to illustrate from this perspective the new features displayed by the contemporary crisis: the collapse of faith in all ideals, to a degree never seen before; the resulting loss of hope; the falsification of love, almost always bestowed on something ‘far’ in order to justify indifference or hostility towards what is near.

What Progress wants is the uprooting of everything

Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a ‘new totalitarianism’. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth:

The age of the revolution gave up on searching for unity, and accepted a sharp opposition. The ideal endpoint is identified with liberation from authority, from the reign of force and necessity. However, what has happened so far suggests, rather, that the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power.’

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters. 

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would ‘absolutely deny traditional morality and religion’, basing its worldview instead on ‘scientistic dogmatism.’ It would negate all ‘spiritual forces’, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: ‘the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism.’ It would be a ‘totalitarianism of disintegration’, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, ‘the complete negation of all tradition’, including that of ‘fatherlands’ - nations - would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations. 

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that ‘current political formulas are completely inadequate’. Neither left nor right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the left blaming ‘fascists’ and the right blaming ‘communists’ for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine. 

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution, and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced, pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism. 

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one - and getting it right this time:

Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organisation that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.

What Progress wants is to move beyond nature

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple ‘reaction’, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines. 

What Moloch wants - Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks - is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards - where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people - they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us. 

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

Mary Harrington fleshes out, in a piece for UnHerd that also dates from last spring, what the concrete fruits of this "progress" are. She asserts that the Judeo-Chrisitanity which shaped the West for centuries, which has as its premise the fairly self-evident fact that we did not create ourselves, has been supplanted by the exact opposite of that premise:

State power across the Anglosphere is ever more explicitly ordered to religious beliefs; it’s just that these beliefs aren’t Roman Catholic. Instead, what’s now granted state backing is a belief in the absolute moral sanctity of bodily self-creation. 

In Canada, legislation has just been proposed that would ban protests within 100 metres of a Drag Queen Story Hour. This proposal echoes an existing provision in the UK that bans even silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics. And over in the USA, a Christian mother is suing the state of Oregon, which has barred her from adoption for saying she wouldn’t accept a putative adoptee’s self-declared pronouns or permit them to take puberty blockers. 

What, then, is the sacred value being enforced here? In the words of one supporter of both abortion and gender ideology, the common thread is “bodily autonomy and attempts to define the futures of others”. From this perspective, power should be ordered to the sacred value of self-creation, even over normal aspects of our organism such as puberty, pregnancy, or sex dimorphism. There is no sense in which our bodies should be accepted as a given, and anything we don’t like about them is a problem we’re entitled to solve as we see fit. 

She foresees "increasingly bitter political and religious schisms over what (if anything) is sacred about the human organism."

In a December piece at The Catholic World Report, Christopher R. Altieri notes the difference in the way the recent Fiducia supplicans (the Vatican document on administering blessings to "couples" with unorthodox bonds) has been received in the global north and global south:

Fiducia supplicans is crowded with caveats and brimming with qualifications, many very carefully drawn, over 5,000 words. It is evident that the declaration’s author and his commissioning principal both knew it would make waves. But it is unlikely either Fernandez or Pope Francis expected the tsunami of reaction that came in short order.

Some dioceses—mainly though not exclusively in western Europe—made a show of enthusiastically embracing the business, even though a facial reading of Fiducia would require many of them to halt plans for para-ritual blessings of gay unions or even roll back policies already articulated, for the implementation of which blessing formulae have already received at least preliminary local approval.

From other jurisdictions—many of them geographically located in the global south—the reception ranged from frigid to actively hostile, with several national bishops’ conferences flatly refusing to implement the declaration at all.

The cardinal-president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conference of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), Fridolin Ambongo, issued a call mid-week for talks among African bishops with a view to preparing a unified “continental” response.

That is a politically fascinating development, since it came from a fellow who is a member of Pope Francis’s C9 “small council” of cardinal advisors. It raises the question whether Ambongo has deployed a temporizing measure in hope of allowing Francis to walk things back. Alternatively, he may have thrown in with his continental confreres in the episcopate, many of whom have already balked at Fiducia supplicans.

Document author Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez is going to have some difficulty putting some teeth behind his insistence that all of Catholicism get on board:

Fernández, for his part, has staked a long and rocky row to hoe, insisting in the interview that bishops may not prohibit what the pope has permitted with Fiducia supplicans, especially since at least one national conference—Malawi—has already issued an explicit prohibition, in addition to the dioceses and conferences that have said they won’t be implementing it.

At Very Serious, Josh Barro looks at the atmosphere on university campuses that made possible the recent Claudine Gay debacle:

Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately-notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation — not only failing to show that Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented, but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.

The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of Historian Finds Yet Another Thing That Is Racist, garnered a lot of credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal who published it came out with a What Is Truth, Anyway-type word salad in defense of the article, including this:

We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

These ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approaches also extend into the soft social sciences — see, for example, the theme of the 2024 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, which declares an intention to “reimagine” anthropology in a way that breaks down the barrier between theory and practice to make more room for more social activism, so that anthropology better serves as a tool to respond to “systemic oppression.”

People (including me) look at papers and statements like this and conclude that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research . . . 

At Honest to Goodness, Kaely Triller Harms asks, just what is it that those outraged by Beth Moore claim to be her violation of basic doctrine?

. . . in the Protestant church, one of the women who has cared the very most [about the Church turning a blind eye to various forms of corruption] and done the lion’s share of the heavy lifting is Beth Moore, who has stood bravely in the gap and said, “Church! We must learn to bind these wounds and pursue justice for the hurting.”

But the church keeps kicking her in the teeth for saying it. I’ve honestly never seen another Christian endure so much mudslinging, vitriol, and contempt from her own camp in my entire life. They call her a Jezebel, a false teacher, a harlot, a cancer. The relentlessly vicious blowhard William Wolfe just used his massive platform this past week to invite other Christians to call her demonic. Other influencers like Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry joined the pile-on. They make cartoon caricatures of her. They put her name in headlines like “The Moore of Babylon.” They claim she’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though half the people making these claims can’t even tell you exactly what she’s done that’s this horrific. Some dude on Twitter today told me the Bible commands us to drive women like her out of the church. I asked why.

“Women shouldn’t preach” came the triumphant reply. I didn’t even have the bandwidth to explain to him that Beth does not inhabit a pulpit, nor did she ever set out to preach to men. Her target audience has always been women, and enough men found value in her words that some of them stuck around to hear what she was saying. Should she have kicked them out? Returned their man cards to them and diminutively encouraged them to only listen to male wisdom? 

And let’s be honest; even if you DO think this constitutes preaching, and even if you are of the conviction that the pulpit is reserved for men, this is a tertiary issue, and there are a great many faithful, orthodox Christians who disagree about it. I don’t see any of these guys chasing NT Wright down with a pitchfork on Twitter just because he thinks women should be able to preach. 

So far Beth’s crimes seem to be that she’s a woman with a voice, she said true things about Donald Trump, and she thinks we need to improve our communications about racism. And these are damnable offenses apparently. Remember, according to Wolfe, the woman is downright demonic.

Andrew Willard Jones, director of the Catholic Studies program at Franciscan University, writing at The Hedgehog Review, demonstrates how friendship is essential to any kind of subsidiarity we can achieve:

. . . families should control the majority of productive property and massive corporations little of it. This is not some novel notion. Aristotle asserted that the most just regime would have a large, politically dominant middle class, while Thomas Jefferson famously said that the backbone of a just republic was the property-owning small farmer.

But scale is not the only consideration. Most of our work should not be paid. This is another way of saying that in a healthy society, most of our social activity would not be commercialized. Activities that used to have nothing to do with money and which now do—sports, entertainment, socializing, family time, childcare, cooking, holidays and celebrations, caring for the elderly, education, home maintenance, even agriculture—are now dominated by commercial interests. Our world increasingly appears to be a giant marketplace. Instead, when we look out at our world, we should see mostly a shared space, a socially constructed world within which private spaces have a limited but important place and commercial spaces are relatively rare. This would, no doubt, mean getting poorer according to the metrics of economists, but the common good is measured in happiness, not wealth.

As for wealth, the pursuit of money as an end should be looked down upon. When kids talk about getting rich, we should correct them, not praise them. When grownups talk about their investment returns, we should shake our heads at their faux pas, not ask about their financial adviser. We should, rather, praise a person who displays a love of family, city, region, country, and humanity—in that order. The ancients called this piety; we might call it patriotism. The point is that an honorable person knows the proper importance of levels of order for the attainment of the common good, knows where he stands in that order, and directs his powers accordingly. This is the ethical posture which produces the distribution of power that corresponds to an order of subsidiarity. In such a distribution, authorities toward the top of the social order are appropriately obeyed by, even as they are appropriately afraid of, persons toward the bottom, where the power really lies.

Finally, ideological thinking should be treated as repugnant and, well, sometimes a bit silly. When it comes to appropriate political action in pursuit of the common good, almost everything is on the table because politics is a prudential art. Aristotle asserted that you could identify a free man because he is the one who will not endure tyranny—he will not serve it and he will not betray his friends to it. We should be a society of free people, whose freedom is secured, in the end, by friendship. Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.

This next one's real recent, as in two days ago. Public Discourse interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made, Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. A taste:

. . . increasingly we see, especially over the nineteenth century, the shift from “become a more virtuous person, live industriously, and have a moral life.” There are a whole bunch of nineteenth-century texts by Charles Seymour, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that teach about the lives of self-made men in order to become like secular hagiographies. And that started to switch in the late 19th century to a much more individualistic sense of “read these books and learn to focus on what you want, what you need” in a semi-spiritual way, influenced by a quasi-religious movement known as New Thought, where you can manifest wealth, health, success, by meditating upon it.

In the late nineteenth century, in what’s known as the Gilded Age, this became a huge publishing boon, it became a huge phenomenon, and it ultimately set the stage for modern self-help, which became less about “how do I conform myself to religious or secular virtues in order to be a better person?” and much more about “how do I harness the energy of the universe to get what I want?” There is a very spiritual dimension there, even if it is not traditionally religious in nature. There is this implicit metaphysic that the “vibes,” the energy, the forces out there in the universe govern us, and that we can affect those forces by getting in touch with them in our own internal selves.

She calls this shift a "relocation of enchantment":

I’m less likely to want to speak of disenchantment than of a relocation of enchantment, which is to say that I think the “traditional,” roughly speaking, medieval pre-modern Christian worldview is enchanted in the sense that it sees the world, the universe, as a holistic whole, where our social selves, our biological selves, our natural selves, are all bound up in it. There’s a synthesis in the purpose of all creation, of all telos. That vision of the universe as not just fundamentally rational, but fundamentally with a divine purpose, really started changing in the Enlightenment. 

But in the nineteenth century, what ended up happening in slightly different ways in Europe and America was that that sense of the sacred became identified in slightly different ways with the human will and human desire. And the European model, which perhaps is more explicitly nihilistic, more explicitly influenced by Nietzche in particular, was the sense that nothing is real, nothing is meaningful, except what we decide it is. And the figure of the Dandy, who always has this slightly nihilistic streak, evolves into the figure of the Übermensch and the person who can create reality according to his will, precisely because reality itself is only ever about perception . . . whatever magic, sacredness, sanctity, whatever you want to call it, there is in the world, it comes from the self and our desires.

There's a common theme discernible in several of these pieces, is there not?

We Western humans have fully given ourselves over to the arrogance that sets us up as masters of our own destinies. 

It doesn't seem to be working out well.