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

 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. 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 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 

Hilary White 

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."