As I've said before, a good book review stands alone as a thought-provoking essay from which one can glean insights whether one has read the book in question or not. Of course, it will also spur one to put that book on one's to-read list.
Came across a couple of those recently.
At Front Porch Republic, Christian McNamara sets the table for his discussion of Seth D. Kaplan's Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at at Time by recounting a parade in the community where he'd lived for almost five years. He didn't recognize the mayor, something which took him aback:
How is it that someone comes to live in a place for almost half a decade without being able to recognize its mayor? Or to recall his name once he has been identified as such? Or even to be sure of his political party (which I could guess at given our town’s pronounced leanings in national elections, but that I wouldn’t have bet the farm on given the possibility of idiosyncratic results at the local level)? In particular, how do these things happen when the clueless someone in question is a person who had always considered himself politically and socially engaged—aware of important legislation being considered in Congress, familiar with major cases pending before the Supreme Court, well read on the significant public policy issues of our day?
Just like him, the author of the book being reviewed was ostensibly more preoccupied by larger-scale developments:
It is against such shortsightedness—the tendency of all too many of us to ignore what is going on in our own backyards—that Seth D. Kaplan delivers a desperately needed warning in his new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. At first blush, Kaplan would seem an unlikely evangelist for the importance of focusing on the local. An expert on fragile nation-states, Kaplan has spent his career working with organizations like the World Bank and the U.S. State Department in places like Nigeria, Colombia, Libya, and Yemen. Surely this is a man for whom what happens in individual neighborhoods is small beer as compared with the important work of running a country? Yet for Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the social glue, the nature of relationships across groups, and the role of social institutions.” These are things that manifest (or fail to manifest) at the local level. The social health of our neighborhoods “determines how safe we are, the quality of the schools our kids go to, what resources we have access to daily, the kinds of job opportunities we have, our psychological well-being, and even . . . how long we live.” It also shapes, in Kaplan’s view, the state of the nation.
Which is bad news for the United States given Kaplan’s assessment that “the social decay we are experiencing in neighborhoods across America is unlike anything [he has] seen elsewhere.” This is a startling statement given the many troubled corners of the globe where Kaplan has hung his hat. As distressed as those places are, the people in them “are simply much warmer, their relationships much thicker than what [he has] experienced in countless neighborhoods here in the US.” Americans “don’t feel obligated to help our neighbors, give back to our community, or even (in many cases) care for members of our own family—and we resist joining any group or association that might create such obligations.” The result? We are “some of the most depressed, anxious, addicted, alienated, and untethered people in the world.” Not even material wealth is sufficient to protect against the effects of social poverty, with many of these problems plaguing middle- and upper-class neighborhoods as well.
The fundamental flaw besetting traditional approaches to social reform, according to Kaplan, is that they are typically top-down, one-size-supposedly-fits-all “solutions” that take no account of the unique dynamics of the specific places that are to be reformed—the particular challenges facing a given community and the assets already at its disposal for meeting those challenges. As Kaplan notes, even where initiatives succeed at relieving distress in the short run, they will ultimately have done more harm than good if they undermine the local social institutions necessary for a community to thrive over the long haul. It is not that there is no role for politics or national policy. According to Kaplan, both “[g]overnment assistance (a tool of the left) and more efficient markets (as favored by the right)” are necessary. But these interventions will be effective only insofar as they work through and are supportive of local social institutions.
At the Acton Institute's website, Brian A. Smith looks at the ongoing relevance of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:
Forty years ago, the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy published what is easily the strangest book of his writing career. Lost in the Cosmos distills the major themes of both his novels and his philosophical essays into a little over 250 pages of multiple-choice questions (and peculiar answers), hypotheticals, and brief stories. Billing it the “last self-help book,” Percy assailed virtually everything ordinary Americans take for granted about themselves—and issued stark challenges to the practitioners of the human sciences that very few scholars have bothered to take up.
The early reviewers for major newspapers loathed the book, finding Percy’s approach to be a confusing “mishmash of satire and seriousness” and “neither good philosophy nor a good read nor yet a book likely to help any Self I Know of, including its author.” Like all Percy’s works, Lost in the Cosmos has remained continuously in print and, far more than most of his novels, retains a strong following. It is probably the book that resonates most clearly with our present discontents and may well be the only one of his works that will continue to be read widely in decades to come. The critics suggest that the menu of answers Percy offers to his multiple-choice questions somehow imposes his views or pronounces his judgment upon the readers. But this is unfair: Percy isn’t exempting himself from condemnation or his own parody. Part of the discomforting joy of the book is in seeing many of our own thoughts laid bare in all their strangeness.
One cannot accuse Percy of failing to alert the reader to the kind of intellectual assault that awaits them. He opens with a “preliminary short quiz” to determine whether one is, in fact, lost to oneself. This mix of open-ended and multiple-choice questions offers some challenges to our everyday experience. For example, “Why is it that one can look at a lion or a plant or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?” Readers are encouraged to reflect on aspects of human experience that are familiar but also strange. This then prompts them to wonder whether they understand the human condition at all.
This isn’t to say that aspects of the book aren’t dated. Readers will be excused for looking up Phil Donahue, Leo Buscaglia, and a handful of other references that would have been immediately familiar to Percy’s readers in the 1980s. But these callouts appear in the course of questions and scenarios we still face today—and the American craze for self-help guides, experts, and shortcuts “to a better you” certainly hasn’t abated. It isn’t the cultural references that pose problems so much as Percy’s own peculiar method of leading the reader to grapple with the depth of the human predicament.
Smith says that Percy's essential question to the reader is, "Who are you?"
In the book’s opening pages, Percy asks readers to evaluate which view of the “consciousness of self,” if any, they think explains one’s sense of the human condition. These run a gamut from pagan to theistic to modern-philosophic: Are you a cosmological self; a Brahmin-Buddhist, Jew, or Christian: a “role-taker”; a scientist or an artist; a fully autonomous being; or perhaps a totalitarian? Some of the options might have been plausible in the quite recent past, even. Consider the “standard American-Jeffersonian high-school-commencement Republican-and-Democratic-platform self”:
The self is an individual entity created by God and endowed with certain inalienable rights and the freedom to pursue happiness and fulfill its potential. It achieves itself through work, participation in society, family, the marketplace, the political process, cultural activities, sports, the sciences, and the arts. It follows that in a free and affluent society the self should succeed more often than not in fulfilling itself. Happiness can be pursued and to a degree caught.
This and all his descriptions nudge the reader to address a challenge: Is this really good enough to explain you, much less help you live well?
Percy’s questions help us see the real deficiency of virtually all self-help literature: these works presuppose that by simply learning the “habits of effective people” or practicing some slate of life management strategies, we will emerge as better versions of ourselves. What most people learn from embracing these fads is that even if we succeed in living out the advice, the self we help is still human and remains stuck in an inescapable predicament—a crisis driven by the inadequacy of our self-understanding.
Percy pushes the boundaries of what most people are usually willing to contemplate. Lost in the Cosmos relentlessly forces us to probe the limits of our conventional explanations for “extreme” or “dangerous” behavior. He suggests that even most religious believers lack an adequate grasp of how to grapple with the challenges of our times and are just as prone to seek escape from their everyday lives in what Percy calls immanence and transcendence.
We escape ourselves on the path of immanence through a variety of means. Among these are shopping, television, drugs, sex, and violence. But why? One possible answer:
The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one’s own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being.
Just as stark are Percy’s explorations of how we seek to transcend our ordinary condition. Artists express what we hope and feel; scientists can grasp the causal relations between objects in the natural world. For both, he suggests, there is a kind of escape: “The pleasure of such transcendence derives not from the recovery of the self but from the loss of self.” We can lose ourselves in a variety of ways.
Human beings don’t follow a straight course. We oscillate between one extreme and the next. A mathematician might spend eight hours barely noticing the needs of the body then escape from work into a night of drug-fueled carousing, never considering for a moment anything about the peculiarity of being a complete person, both body and soul. Percy fears these kinds of individuals can become unmoored from everyone and everything:
None is as murderous as the autonomous self who, believing in nothing, can fall prey to ideology and kill millions of people—unwanted people, old people, sick people, useless people, unborn people, enemies of the state—and do so reasonably, without passion, even decently, certainly with the least obnoxiousness.
Lost in the Cosmos does a great service to its readers by helping outline the mental state that so often accompanies modern boredom or everydayness, that leads us into yearning for disasters or bad news or fleeing from our ordinary existence through consumerism, travel, sex, or other enthusiasms. Percy’s achievement is to suggest what we really need: a better sense of who and what we really are—and he approaches this in a manner aimed at persuading Americans who lean into either spiritualism or science to see where they need a better sense of the self.
It's come to my attention that Lost in the Cosmos is one of theologian Peter Kreeft's favorite books, a further selling point for me.
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute looks at how woefully skewed the whole field of high school civics is:
Last month, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) touted a new study reporting that, as the press release headline had it, “State-Mandated Civics Test Policy Does Not Improve Youth Voter Turnout.” With more than a little evident glee, given the education school community’s hostility to anything that smacks of testing, the Penn State researchers reported that requiring high schoolers to pass a civics test didn’t lead to statewide increases in self-reported voting by 18 to 22-year-olds.
Now, there are several issues with this study, including the fact that boiling millions of students down to several dozen state-level aggregates made it unlikely that the researchers would find an impact. Indeed, one might wonder why the AERA chose to highlight the non-findings of a not-very-compelling study.
But let’s focus on the larger issue: The study fundamentally misconstrues the point of civics instruction. In American education today, it’s widely assumed that voting, advocacy, and “speaking out” are the ultimate aim of civic education.
There’s something odd about that premise. In a landscape pocked by hyperbolic social media, pro-terrorist theatrics on campus, and performative MAGA lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives, does it look like America’s problem is a lack of activism? Last week, Students for Justice in Palestine published an op-ed in Columbia University’s newspaper “celebrating” their having held “one of the largest campus protests” in Columbia’s history. The presumption is that a big protest is innately deserving of celebration. This is what follows from the premise that “activism is good,” even when it’s on behalf of rapists, kidnapers, and murderers.
As a one-time high school civics teacher, I wholly embrace the need to prepare students for democratic citizenship. But democratic government is about a lot more than activism and voting. It’s also about respect for rules, personal responsibility, patience, and a willingness to work with those who see things differently.
And those are the things that are getting neglected. After all, voter participation is at record highs. Impassioned activists and “small-money” donors are calling the shots in party primaries. The nation’s most visible lawmakers are those who have the least interest in the job of actually crafting laws. The U.S. citizenry is lacking not political participation but restraint, trust, knowledge, and respect for institutions and norms.
Democratic self-government is secured less by getting students to pull a lever (or mail in a ballot) than by helping them develop a proper respect for due process, free speech and a free press, canvassing boards that faithfully review vote tallies, election officials who resist political pressure, public agencies that maintain public trust, independent courts, responsible legislators, and limited executive authority. This is what civics needs to teach.
Today, civics education isn’t doing that. Teachers don’t even realize they’re supposed to teach those basic values. How do I know this? Because teachers themselves say so. The RAND Corporation has found that barely half of social studies teachers think it essential that students understand concepts like the separation of powers or checks and balances. In 2022, another RAND survey of K-12 teachers found that more thought a key aim of civics education is promoting environmental activism than “knowledge of social, political, and civic institutions.”
Longtime readers of LITD know that my view of Donald Trump is that, as long as he was merely a cartoonish media personality, he was no more culturally or societally harmful than any other outrageous, amoral celebrity our culture has been producing for the last half-century, but that, with his entry into the political realm, he'd wreaked ruin on our nation on an unprecedented scale.
Now that he's had a taste of the Oval Office, his appetite for yet another foray into authoritarianism has been whetted. Jack Shafer of Politico has the details:
According to a page one story in The Washington Post Monday, Trump plans on the first day of his new administration to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can dispatch the military to counter any demonstrations that might resist his policies.
Why might he need the Insurrection Act? Well, the piece also notes Trump intends to turbo-politicize the Department of Justice and order prosecutions of his former aides and officials who have criticized him. Perhaps he thinks the country won’t let him go buck wild on the rule of law without a stink, so he wants to be ready to sic troops on the inevitable protestors. Fingered by Trump for legal beat-downs, the Post reports, are one-time Trump stalwarts and staffers like former chief of staff John F. Kelly, former attorney general William Barr, his ex-attorney Ty Cobb, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark A. Milley. Trump has singled out other officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice for prosecution, the piece adds, as well as President Joe Biden and his family.
Leading Trump’s Insurrection Act initiative is Jeffrey Clark, a Trump-era Department of Justice official currently being prosecuted for his part in an alleged scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. According to the Post piece, Trump intends to leaven the entire federal bureaucracy with appointees like Clark who are willing to do his bidding. (Told by a colleague that there would be riots in the streets if Trump sought to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, Clark is said to have responded, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”)
How much of this Trump power lust is new? Recall that he called for the Constitution’s termination in December 2022 so he could return to the presidency. Also, he’s always loved to entertain himself and his followers by talking about throwing opponents in jail. Over the summer, ABC News compiled a list of plenty of people he wanted indicted or jailed for their crimes, including ex-FBI Director James Comey, former special counsel Robert Mueller, Steele dossier author Christopher Steele, Bill and Hillary Clinton, former national security adviser John Bolton. You may recall that locking up Hillary Clinton was elemental to his 2016 campaign. As for testing the limits of presidential power, that’s old hat, too. During his first administration, he banned Muslim visitors, issued an emergency declaration to build a border wallafter Congress refused to pay for it, and sought to overturn the 2020 electionresults.
But this new round of bombast and threats is not just a matter of Trump being Trump. What’s different this time is that Trump’s building an extra-legal foundation of declarations and appointments to make his 2017-2021 aspirations, which sounded like off-the-cuff ravings at the time, come true. Recall the scary preview of his ambitions he gave in a March 2023 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which he promised his “wronged and betrayed” supporters that he would be their “justice” and “retribution.”
However critically you think of the team Trump assembled in his first administration, he could never convince them to conduct prosecutions of either his political opponents or officials who defied him. The next time around we won’t be lucky if he succeeds in peppering the Department of Justice and other agencies with his yes-men. Can he get away with it? It’s not illegal for a president to instruct an attorney general on how to do his job as long as those instructions are consistent with the law. But lining up presidential critics for prosecution, as Trump appears ready to do, makes a mockery of that consistency — especially when no laws appear to have been broken!
I am pleased to announce that I am now a contributor to The Freemen News-Letter, a project of The Freemen Foundation, the mission of which is "to conserve and renew American constitutionalism." There are several newsletters within it.
For Self-Evident, I wrote "Conservatism and Immutable Verities."
In the run-up to Halloween, The Seeing Place did a series on scary movies that raise broad considerations. To that, I contributed "Points of No Return," in which I examine scenes from two classic Universal horror films.
For The Daily Saucer, I wrote "The Conflation Problem." It's about a subject I've visited many times, because I feel it's crucial to an understanding of our bleak predicament, namely, that the general public in post-America now assumes that Trumpist bombast is a key element of the conservative project, which it most definitely is not.
I've been busy over at Precipice (and may I ask here if you're a subscriber yet):
"The Pervasiveness of Human Waywardness" is a thought process kicked off by the role of abortion in last Tuesday's Democrat electoral success:
What would it take to uphold the ideal of family, that most basic of social units, where, when it’s in a healthy condition, is the environment in which we learn about how to lovingly interact with other people? What about venerating nurturing, guidance, encouragement, team spirit, humor, and generosity?
There seems something bitter at the core of a pro-choice position. Its inclination is to respond to what I’m saying in the above paragraph with, “Yeah, show me an actual family that unfailingly venerates those things, that sustains the happiness of everyone in it, that isn’t fraught with underlying issues.”
And there’s a valid point there. Any family anywhere is comprised of fallen human beings. That’s why I used the term “ideal” rather than “actual.”
It doesn’t help that a lot of Christians go about their family-venerating in the most boneheaded way they possibly could. .
In 2023, we’re not going to be able to avoid the hot potato of patriarchy and complimentarianism. Not only is it going to make a society-wide conversation difficult if not impossible, given our polarization, but Christians are at a standoff about it among themselves.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a lightning rod within institutional Christianity. Its Nashville Statement looks at first glance like a tidy summation of proper relations and dynamics between the sexes. But men being what they are, they can indulge their inclination to imperiously shoot off their mouths and alienate a whole lot of their sisters in Christ. Witness John McArthur’s advice to Beth Moore to “go home.” The ripple effects of that one are still being felt.
In "I'm a Non-Voter Precisely Because I'm Engaged With Policy and Culture," I say that I'm still planning to stay home next May and November.
"Jews, the West, and Whether Our Species Still Deserves the Description 'Human'" was inspired by the big matter on our plate for the last month.
"Maybe Some Seriousness Is In Order" is a brisk heads-up about the present moment.
That ought to keep you out of trouble this weekend.
