At her Substack, School of the Unconformed, Ruth Gasovsky ponders the task of "Rehabilitating Ferals of the Digital Age". She begins with an observation she made on a recent airline flight:
Our recent transatlantic flight from Switzerland back to Canada proved to be an “accidental detox” for passengers, as to the horror of most, there were no screens on the seat backs, and no charging ports for devices. After the first gasps of surprise and dismay (especially of parents with small children) subsided, a wonderful scene unfolded. I had no idea so many people still read books! The photo below is the view across the row from me. The plane was humming with conversation; two men behind me who had never met before, struck up a conversation (a joy to listen to Scottish accents) and shared beers and stories, children played paper games, and our family rotated through reading Thomas Hardy, Seinfeld scripts, Ian McEwan, C.S. Lewis, and Calvin and Hobbes (something for every age and interest). It seemed like a flight in a time machine, where people still remembered how to converse, play, read books, and spend time away from black mirrors.
The following day Thomas J Bevan pondered aloud on Notes, if people were to jettison their screens, how long it would take for minds and attention spans to return to “normal”, leading
to wonder further, “We Gen-X and older have a default to go back to. What do we do for people born after 1995 who don’t?”Thinking about this question more deeply, I realized that the offspring of the digital age have grown up as attentional and relational ferals. Many have grown up isolated from deep attention from a very young age, have social behaviour stilted by online interactions, and suffer from emaciated language skills. While the “accidental detox” flight did ignite some hope in me regarding people’s ability to engage their minds differently, this scene could only occur because people were left no other choice. I am also quite sure that that everyone quickly reverted to their usual patterns of distraction as soon as they were off that flight.
This business of paying attention is no small matter when considering what distinguishes us from lower animal species:
There are a myriad of things that make us human. But the ability to pay attention lies at the core. Relationships require attentive listeners; learning takes dedicated attention to grow knowledge and skills; reading demands attention to words, meaning, and context; work demands attention to produce carefully crafted products or services; democracy involves attention to truth and opposing positions; faith requires attention for prayer, silence, and reading scripture. Attention is it.
When deep attention has to compete with hyper attention (fractured attention that quickly zips from one point of focus to the next), it is akin to throwing a dolphin into a tank filled with piranhas and hoping that they will find a way to coexist. Although we are prone to fool ourselves, there cannot really exist a “healthy balance” between dolphins and piranhas.
Later in the piece, she offers her practical guide to reading: read physical books, read old books, get familiar with classical vocabulary.
At Acton.org, J.C. Scharl explains why we should view the recently passed Cormack McCarthy as a writer dealing with Christian faith:
Few American writers are simultaneously as popular and as unpopular as Cormac McCarthy. Those critical of McCarthy’s work generally form two camps: the more pedestrian, who find McCarthy’s writing simultaneously plotless and repulsive, and the more sophisticated, who believe McCarthy is running some kind of sham, and that all his spiraling descriptions conceal the dark truth that he has nothing to say. I have greater sympathy with one of these camps than with the other, for McCarthy’s plots are often meandering—sometimes even petering out entirely after several hundred pages, as in The Passenger—and the violence, especially in Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country for Old Men, is gut-wrenching. But the more sophisticated critics, with their suspicions that McCarthy’s voice is merely schtick, are sensing something important about McCarthy’s work, though they interpret it wrongly. They sense that McCarthy is indeed writing about a void, and at the end of the day he truly does have nothing to offer to fill that void.
Does this make McCarthy’s work a waste of time? Only, I believe, if we consider human existence a waste of time. McCarthy is obsessed with the futile offering, the empty gesture, but even as his characters demonstrate the pointlessness of the gift, he himself makes it over and over again: the gift of attending to the world, of looking, of listening, until we become convinced that even if what we attend to is loneliness, if what we look at is collapse, if what we hear is the wind whistling through an abandoned house, our attention becomes a little participation in the death of the world—a participation that, in keeping with the mystery of faith, may become some kind of atonement.
McCarthy was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and christened Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. When he was only four years old, his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. This was a momentous move for little Charles; McCarthy went on to become known as a Southern writer, and most of his books take place in the American South and Southwest. McCarthy’s family was Irish Catholic. He was baptized a Catholic and attended parochial school. He has been married three times and divorced three times. Some of his books, most notably Suttree, with its accounts of Appalachian homelessness, are discernably autobiographical. Legends of McCarthy’s eccentricities abound, from refusing to speak and receive honoraria while living in poverty in a barn, to his distaste for literary folk, preferring scientists and engineers to people of the word. From this life, rather an epic in itself, spin out the two major themes of McCarthy’s work: violence and faith.
The first of these themes is certainly the more noticeable in his novels, which are famous for their gruesomeness. McCarthy is not merely interested in evil; he is interested in violent evil, in evil that seeks to rend and skin and rip and gut, evil that wants not merely to annihilate but to dismember slowly, joint by joint, the world.
And this is no ordinary violence; the violence of McCarthy’s novels is pervasive, creative, operatic in its scale, yet keen and specific as splinters under the fingernails. Even people who have not read much McCarthy know this about his works, aided perhaps by the film versions of some of them (which are, if anything, less violent than their source material). This element of McCarthy’s voice reaches its apex in Blood Meridian, a book so bathed in blood that the plot itself dissolves into it, becomes merely a ripple in the wash.
Yet there is another theme, quieter yet persistent, that exists alongside—often within—the violence: faith in God. I have chosen those words carefully, because the theme is not God Himself, or His existence or presence, but faith in God. McCarthy does not often ask whether God exists; throughout his many works, that question is generally beyond dispute. Even the atheists, like White in The Sunset Limited, reveal eventually that they do not really disbelieve in God’s existence; it is just that they want nothing to do with Him. “Why can’t you people just accept that some people don’t want to believe in God?” Whether or not McCarthy himself assumes there is a God, his characters do, because the question of whether God exists is not within the scope of language.
What we can consider, however, is faith in God. Asking if God exists is not the role of the poet or the novelist, according to McCarthy. It may not even be the role of the human. The real question, the question McCarthy’s characters face over and over, is what do you believe about God? For example, in Cities of the Plain, John Grady Cole speaks with a blind man about his intense but conflicted love for the prostitute Magdalena. The blind man urges him to pray, then the dialogue runs as follows:
Will you?
No.
Why not?
I dont know.
You dont believe in Him?
It’s not that.
For McCarthy heroes (and even many villains), it is never “that.” Even the ragman in Suttree won’t deny God. “I always figured they was a God,” he says after getting Suttree to agree to burn his body with gasoline after he dies. “I just never did like him.”
These questioners are Job, not Sartre. It is not a lack of belief in God’s existence; often it is not even a lack of faith in prayer. It is always something else, something connected with the inescapable violence of the world, that draws such a thick veil between us and God that McCarthy’s characters often doubt whether it is worthwhile to seek to draw it back. Looking around at the world, McCarthy concludes it is a fearful thing to imagine the God who made it.
Samuel Gregg, writing at Law & Liberty, makes mincemeat of the whole enthusiasm for protectionism and industrial policy. Its glaring weakness, for those who care to look, is its incoherence:
Whether it is stakeholder capitalism on the left or the turn to economic nationalism by some on the right, America and many other nations are experiencing a swing back towards interventionist policies. Free traders in particular find themselves on defense. The charges against them range from selling out American blue-collar workers in return for cheap shirts and inexpensive video games to being sycophants of Communist China.
The shallowness of these polemics is not difficult to demonstrate. What is often absent from these discussions is appreciation of the history of that mixture of ideas otherwise known as mercantilism—or, more precisely, neomercantilism—that gave shape and form to modern-day protectionism.
Historical inquiry into neomercantilism illustrates that it is a mistake to view arguments about modern international political economy as a contest primarily between economic liberalism and Marxism. Neomercantilist ideas have long been an equal player in that competition, perhaps even a dominant one at times. But the more you learn about neomercantilism’s history, the more apparent become the contradictions of the neomercantilist outlook driving many policies being advocated across the political spectrum today.
These are just some reasons why The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, authored by the political scientist Eric Helleiner, is an especially timely work. For Helleiner, neomercantilism describes that set of ideas that emerged in response to Adam Smith’s demolition of the assumptions and policy preferences underpinning what Smith famously called the “mercantile system” that dominated the European economic world from the mid-1500s until the late eighteenth century.
Understanding many economic policymakers’ choices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the globe is difficult if neomercantilism’s influence is insufficiently appreciated. Grasping the scale and nature of that influence was what drew Helleiner to study neomercantilism’s place in debates about international political economy in the first place. As he researched the topic, however, Helleiner was particularly “struck by the absence of a comprehensive analysis of [neomercantilism’s] intellectual origins.”
The Neomercantilists represents Helleiner’s effort to correct that deficiency. His research more than fills the gap. It is both comprehensive and readable. At the same time, Helleiner’s analysis demonstrates 1) why neomercantilist thought has failed to overcome long-standing critiques of protectionist and state-led development programs and 2) why neomercantilist policies are nevertheless politically attractive.
Any "conservatives" who are tempted to flirt with this stuff ought to take the long view and see that the end product is the leftist dream: the predominance of state power:
Some neomercantilists were intellectually honest enough to recognize their theoretical weaknesses. To compensate for this, they sought legitimacy for their economic ideas by attaching them to political positions that acquired intellectual and political ascendency at particular historical periods. Among others, these included nineteenth-century imperialism, social Darwinism, and, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, ideologies like corporatism, Latin American populisms of left and right, and aggressive forms of ethno-nationalism.
It isn’t a coincidence that advocates of neomercantilist policies tend to gravitate towards political positions that seek to bolster state power. This, it turns out, is not a bug in neomercantilism’s software. It is a central feature of the neomercantilist operating system. This constitutes a significant continuity between mercantilist and neomercantilist thought. To varying degrees, most of the neomercantilists highlighted by Helleiner shared the pre-Smithian conviction of figures like Louis XIV’s chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) that their version of political economy would build up the wealth and power of a state in often very unstable international political environments.
Figures like Colbert held that a strong and powerful state was necessary to produce great wealth and that great wealth facilitated a strong and powerful state. This mutually reinforcing axiom was attractive to proponents of national developmentalism in developing countries like Argentina in the 1940s as well as political leaders anxious to solidify particular political arrangements like Imperial Germany’s first Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in the late-nineteenth century. They came to regard neomercantilist policies as a way to make government the central player in economic life without utterly destroying market institutions.
Ironically, building up government power was not the primary goal of leading neomercantilists such as List. While List had difficulty delineating a principled framework for explaining why and how to apply tariffs, Helleiner shows that List was not concerned with enhancing the strength of centralized government for its own sake.
Here, however, some of the problems that bedevil neomercantilist policies become readily apparent. Perhaps the most prominent is that there is nothing in neomercantilism’s internal logic to place any decisive limitation on the endless expansion of state power. Neomercantilist policies thus tend to marginalize economic freedom over time and gradually turn ostensibly-free economic actors into mildly indentured servants of the state. The well-known consequences for political freedom are dire.
Aaron Renn has a piece at his Substack about the implications for our civilization of the dwindling population:
In the future, many if not most of us will be living in places whose population is shrinking. This will have profound consequences - fiscally, economically, in terms of services, and for anyone running a business, church, ministry or other organization in these places.
Shrinking cities have long been a phenomenon of the Rust Belt, as well as analogous regions around the globe. As suburbanization and then deindustrialization hit, cities like Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, South Bend, and a host of others lost a huge share of their population. Even some metropolitan areas lost population on a regional basis.
The response of most people who don’t live in these places has been “too bad, so sad.” Shrinkage was seen as a phenomenon that affected a relative handful of unlucky places but was pretty much irrelevant to everybody else. The 2016 election caused people to pay more attention, but shrinkage has still been viewed as a contained phenomenon.
Alan Mallach argues that far from being an anomaly, shrinkage is likely to become the norm, in the US and abroad - even in China, saying, “By 2050, shrinking cities will have become the dominant urban form in China.”
Mallach is an urban planner who has studied shrinking cities in the Rust Belt for years. So he’s very aware of all the issues in these places. He’s one of the most knowledgeable, thoughtful people on the subject and one of the few who is willing to venture independent thought. He has a new book out called Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth.
Check out this upside-the-head stat:
In the book he notes that US population growth has slowed significantly in recent years. The birth rate is far below replacement, which is starting to show up in population figures. I just took a look at the data, and almost 75% of counties in the country had more deaths than births last year. Traditionally, births outnumbered deaths, so much so that the births minus deaths figure was called “natural increase” by demographers. Natural decrease was rare - but now it’s the norm. In fact, the Census Bureau actually renamed the field in its data release this year, calling it “natural change.”
Lest you're tempted to react with a "no biggie" shrug, consider this:
The pre-industrial world was able to exist with more or less steady population for hundreds of years. But industrial society is built on growth and seems to function poorly without it. In this environment, shrinkage is a major threat. As Mallach puts it, “Population loss is a powerful risk factor increasing the likelihood that any or all of a long list of potential outcomes, mostly bad, will take place.”
Here are some of the bad things that happen with population shrinkage:
Many of the costs of local government - infrastructure maintenance, debt, etc - are fixed. So if you lose population, that means higher taxes for everyone else. Which of course only encourages them to leave, too. And eventually cities can’t pay for basic services.
With a shrinking labor force and consumer market, the economy will also shrink. This means lots of places will go out of business. This includes churches, which can’t sustain themselves with fewer members and less wealth in the community.
The above fuel disinvestment in and abandonment of both public and private properties, producing blight.
Growing cities have a bigger pie, so everyone can get a bigger slice. Shrinking cities are a zero sum or negative sum game. Someone’s win is somebody’s else’s loss. This make productive collaboration difficult and fuels corruption, which in my experience is pervasive in shrinking cities (Muncie, Indiana is a good example).
Decline causes many people who can to leave. This is disproportionately the most entrepreneurial (migration is an inherently entrepreneurial act) people in the city, as well as people with money.
Poverty and dysfunction grow, increasing social service needs, but with less local money to pay for them. Eventually the city becomes a ward of the state, or what Mallach calls the “urban transfer payment economy,” subsisting almost entirely on federal and state transfer payments. Youngstown is an example there. Even most people who nominally work in the private sector, like health care, are ultimately paid through transfer payments like Medicaid.
All of this produces a self-reinforcing cycle of decline. Just as growth begets more growth, often decline (other than that produced by temporary shocks) begets more decline.
He devotes a considerable portion of his piece to the idea of ideological capture:
One of the most fundamental tenets of localism has to be breaking from the national/global ideologies created and promoted by the most successful and elite people and places (and which are designed to entrench their success), and focus on what’s right for your community.
There are plenty of environmental initiatives that make sense for shrinking cities. Which ones vary by place. Cleaning up contaminated “brownfield” sites is an example. Improving parks or encouraging urban agriculture could be another. If I had a few million dollars to spend on environmental problems, I’d probably spend it on something like lead abatement. (Lead can cause permanent cognitive impairment in children). Any types of carbon reduction or “sustainability” initiatives wouldn’t even make the list, unless there was some specific local concern such as increased flooding along a nearby river.
The second ideological case is when Mallach extensively criticizes populism, which he says is simply “neofascism.” (Conversely, the word “riot” only appears once, and that in a historical context). This is basically saying that any Trump supporters and their views are beyond the pale and completely illegitimate - and by implication should be excluded from participating in civic renewal efforts. So while like almost everyone, Mallach is very keen on “inclusion,” it’s clear that not everyone is to be included. While in the bigger shrinking cities like Cleveland, there aren’t many of those people and thus they can be safely ignored, in many smaller shrinking places there are a lot of them, sometimes a majority. And a lot of places - including in some heavily minority areas - have seen a strong shift in that direction.
I also searched for the word “church” in his book and there are only a handful of mentions, mostly negative and only one positive. Instead he focuses on NGOs, or the non-profit complex. Although churches are technically non-profits, they are rarely included in most people’s idea of the term. He obviously doesn’t view them, whether conservative or liberal, as a major localist force.
As my friend Connor has noted, one of the big problems facing cities of all varieties is the excessive power wielded by what he calls the “NGOctopus.” In smaller cities, where there’s little in the way of individual wealth or for-profit industry to counterbalance these, NGOs are particularly powerful.
Virtually all NGOs, whether community non-profits, universities, philanthropies, etc. are 100% compliant with national/global left ideology. The people who staff them are often true believers, but even if not, it would be almost physically impossible for them to say or do anything that conflicted with these ideologies because it would destroy their future employability. Remaining bankable in society at large outweighs every other consideration for almost every business or civic leader everywhere in America. We’ve probably never been a bigger go along to get along society than we are today.
It’s hard to see how you could have genuine localism in a city where a third or more of the population is systematically excluded from the table as illegitimate fascists, and where the people who are at the table are structurally unable to say or do anything that conflicts with national/global left ideology.
He then makes this interesting observation:
Ironically, it’s the elite, successful progressive cities where there is more genuine ideological dynamism and genuine discussion of ideas, and as a result more space for localism. There are many groups from left to right in NYC with a lot of different and genuinely local ideas. It even has a major conservative tabloid newspaper, the New York Post. A lot of high wattage heterodox people have moved to Austin. There are wealthy tech bros pushing back on the left in San Francisco.
He then introduces a term I'd not encountered before: hicklibs. I don't know if he coined it, but it sure is applicable to a certain type of person dwelling in smaller flyover-country communities who considers himself / herself an engaged citizen but is awfully preoccupied with distinguishing himself / herself from the rubes with which he / she daily interacts:
But shrinking cities - and many second tier and below cities in general - are dominated by “hicklibs.” These are moderately talented but very insecure people who are completely imitative of what they think their aspirational peers in coastal cities believe. In red states, they are also often deeply animated by a kind of ressentimentagainst conservatives and state government. This leads to a suffocating uniformity of thought, typically ideological placed between the center-left and far-left, with remarkably little dissent except for the occasional Republican candidate for office. These places are intellectually moribund.
He says hicklibs do have a point - Trumpists are boneheads in the throes of equally intense ideological capture - but that it's not particularly helpful in getting us to a viable localism.
Daren Jonescu, at his blog, examines the arrogance - and mistakenness - of the modern notion in "education" that previous periods in history were characterized by ignorant ways we've evolved past:
Almost two thousand years ago, the Romans rounded up Christians and other offenders against official beliefs and fed them to wild dogs and lions, as a form of popular religious expression/entertainment. A few hundred years ago, it was Christians of Europe and America rounding up alleged witches, and burning them at the stake or hanging them, as an expression of religious orthodoxy.
What do we learn from these examples? If your reaction is, “We learn that people of past ages were irrational, intolerant, and brutal,” then you have not fully escaped the effects of your progressive education. For the Roman Empire that was feeding Christians to the beasts as mass spectacle was the standard-bearer of civilization in late antiquity. The Christians burning witches were involved in the development of the moral constructs of some of the leading, and most civilized, nations of our late modern world.
Meanwhile, in today’s most forward-looking nations, so sure that they are living far above and beyond such inhumanity, millions of healthy human lives are aborted each year, and several European nations boast of having eradicated various genetic defects, by which they mean simply that they have systematically determined to identify fetuses likely to be born with imperfections and kill them.
Furthermore, today, almost every human being who is fortunate enough not to be killed in early development is removed by law, at about age five, from the primary care of his parents, and thenceforth raised, in all essential regards, in government indoctrination centers, by trained and employed agents of government social control, with parents treated, for the most part and increasingly so, as rivals and obstacles to the total absorption of the child into the unified wave of the collective, i.e., the unwavering will of the state.
At the other end of our modern indoctrination process, all the old social customs and moral rules regarding marriage and childrearing, which were developed and maintained for millennia with a view to delaying or curtailing easy physical gratifications, thereby moderating and guiding men’s desires in order to promote deeper attachments to other individuals and to the community, which in turn would foster the properly human longing for the beautiful, with its variously civilizing forms of expression — family love, religious devotion, unifying art, principled statesmanship, intellectual friendship, the search for truth — are being quickly dispatched in favor of the most pettily self-absorbed forms of hedonism. Every pleasure or whim, particularly the most intense, immature, and immediate, is now judged an essential and overriding good, and even more absurdly, a primary source of personal identity; anything that would forestall such pleasures or whims is therefore judged essentially evil, and all attempts to curtail or moderate any urge for gratification unjust. Due to the mechanisms of this carefully manufactured ersatz freedom, which is in truth a reversion to the vectors of material necessity, all the specifically human endeavors — community, art, faith, politics, and thought — are diminished and dying among us, as our species retreats to a superficially decorated primordial existence of impulsively scratching random itches while pounding one other over the head for food and fear.
The only solution is real education:
one which is liberal and non-dogmatic, in the sense of encompassing and respectfully considering all the most forceful and efficacious of humanity’s attempts and alternatives thus far, however distant some of these may seem from present norms, as well as being elitist and impious, in the sense of paying no heed to current political expectations or popular standards of right thinking.
Nothing is worthy of the name “higher education” which does not meet those criteria. For the truest education is always and necessarily that which begins by rejecting the soul-stultifying path of reinforcing the presuppositions and indoctrinated self-certainties of those undergoing it. The key to the heights in education lies precisely in the uncomfortable but ennobling attainment of a position of self-aware uncertainty, and in the subsequent willingness to proceed, with guidance, from this fresh starting point — the first step in philosophical investigation, the rejection of vested interests and predetermined interpretive “frameworks” — toward a naïve engagement with the ideas and figures history has judged to have offered the most enduring and fruitful avenues in the search for ultimate meaning and purpose.
My latest at Precipice is entitled "There's a Little Prometheus In Us All."
