The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon

Jacques Maritain: 

One of the problems against which modern man beats in vain [is] the problem of ‘individualism’ and ‘personality’. Look at the Kantian shriveled up in his autonomy, the Protestant tormented by his concern for his inward liberty, the Nietzschean giving himself curvature of the spine in his effort to jump beyond good and evil, the Freudian cultivating his complexes and sublimating his libido, the thinker preparing an unpublished conception of the world for the next philosophical congress, the ‘surrealist’ hero throwing himself into a trance and plunging into the abyss of dreams, the disciple of [Andre] Gide viewing himself with gloomy enthusiasm in the mirror of his freedom: all those unhappy people are looking for their personalities; and, contrary to the Gospel promise, they knock and no man opens to them, they seek and they do not find. 

See with what religious pomp the modern world has proclaimed the sacred rights of the individual, and what a price it has paid for that proclamation. Yet was there ever a time when the individual was more completely ruled by the great anonymous powers of the State, of Money, of Opinion? What then is the mystery? 

There is no mystery in it. It is simply that the modern world confounds two things which ancient wisdom had distinguished. It confounds ‘individuality’ and ‘personality’. 

[According to Christian tradition] the ’person’ is ‘a complete individual substance, intellectual in nature and master of its actions,’ sui juris, autonomous, in the authentic sense of the word. And so the word ‘person’ is reserved for substances which possess that divine thing, the spirit, and are in consequence, each by itself, a world above the whole bodily order, a spiritual and moral world which, strictly speaking, is not a part of this universe, and whose secret is hidden even from the natural perception of the angels. The word ‘person’ is reserved for substances which, choosing their end, are capable of themselves deciding on the means and of introducing series of new events into the universe by their liberty; for substances which can say after their kind, fiat, and it is so. And what makes their dignity, what makes their personality, is just exactly the subsistence of the spiritual and immortal soul and its supreme independence in regard to all fleeting imagery and all the machinery of sensible phenomena...St. Thomas teaches that the word ‘person’ signifies the noblest and highest thing in all nature. 

The word ‘individual,’ on the contrary, is common to man and beast, to plant, microbe, and atom. And, while personality rests on the subsistence of the human soul...individuality as such is based on the peculiar needs of matter, the principle of individuation because it is the principle of division, because it requires to occupy a position and have a quantity, by which what is ‘here’ will differ from what is ‘there’. So that insofar as we are individuals, we are only a fragment of matter, a part of this universe, distinct, no doubt, but a part, a point of that immense network of forces and influences, physical and cosmic, vegetative and animal, ethnic, atavistic, hereditary, economic and historic, to whose laws we are subject. As individuals, we are subject to the stars. As persons, we rule them. 

What is modern individualism? A misunderstanding, a blunder; the exaltation of individuality camouflaged as personality, and the corresponding degradation of true personality. 

In the social order, the modern city sacrifices the ‘person’ to the ‘individual’; it gives universal suffrage, equal rights, liberty of opinion, to the individual, and delivers the person, isolated, naked, with no social framework to support and protect it, to all the devouring powers which threaten the soul’s life, to the pitiless actions and reactions of conflicting interests and appetites, to the infinite demands of matter to manufacture and use. To all the greed and all the wounds which man has by nature, it adds incessant sensual stimuli, and the countless horde of all kinds of errors, sparkling and sharpened, to which it gives free circulation in the sky of intelligence. And it says to each of the poor children of men set in the midst of this turmoil: ‘You are a free individual; defend yourself, save yourself, all by yourself.’ It is a homicidal civilization.  

{from THREE REFORMERS} (1929)   

Brief Takes

Talk about an eye-catching headline: 

Comey, Mueller Put Michael Flynn in a Cage and Shot Him 

The shocking allegation comes from Fox News legal analyst (and formerly respected law professor) Jonathan Turley: 

The case against Flynn was a "canned hunt" and investigators effectively "put him in a cage and shot him" by bringing him up on charges of lying during an interview brought about under unorthodox means. 

I think that Americans, regardless of political persuasion, would agree that it’s unsportsmanlike to put someone in a cage and shoot them. Shame on Robert Mueller! Next time, open the cage and give the guy a fighting (or fleeing) chance. 

http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/12/13/jonathan-turley-reacts-judge-ordering-documents-mueller-flynn-charges  

Meanwhile, an old right-wing warhorse continues waging his decades-long campaign for Truth, Justice, and the Caucasian-American Way. This is from Pat Buchanan: 

As Democrats test the waters for a presidential run by savaging Trump, the establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Richard Nixon. 

By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media. And the outside world will see America again as a house divided. Our politics will be even more poisonous than now, and it is not easy to see what would bring our warring tribes together again. 

 Lest we forget, it was none other than Pat Buchanan, one of the geniuses behind the modern Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy,” who declared in 1992, “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”  

“Poisonous” politics and “warring tribes” have long been Buchanan’s specialty; they will no doubt be his legacy as well.   

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/12/14/what_lies_behind_the_malaise_of_the_west__138926.html  

The George Soros-funded America-haters at ProPublica want us to mourn the budget cutbacks and personnel reductions at the Internal Revenue Service: 

The result is a bureaucracy on life support and tens of billions in lost government revenue. ProPublica estimates a toll of at least $18 billion every year, but the true cost could easily run tens of billions of dollars higher. 

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme—and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared. 

Good luck getting Americans, whatever their income level, to advocate on behalf of the IRS. Defenders of the Deep State will insist that taxes are the price we pay for civilization; to which the obvious response is, “You call this ‘civilization’?” 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/rich-people-are-getting-away-not-paying-their-taxes/577798/?utm_source=feed  

Finally, at National Review, Buckley Fellow and aspiring Scottish songbird Madeleine Kearns warns that “At their peril, liberal elites ignore traditional theological belief.” Writing about “Atheism and Bad Religion,” both of which apparently began in the Sixties, well before she was born, the precocious Ms. Kearns reminds us: 

The hippie era saw the prominence of figures such as not only Jim Jones but also the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst. Popular culture, and Hollywood in particular, were swept up in the craze. Jayne Mansfield drank fake blood at the altar of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. And some of Neil Young’s music was partly inspired by the murderer and cult leader Charles Manson. Hence it is important to remember that the fervently religious cults of the latter half of the 20th century were often enabled, if not supported, by the liberal status quo.  

Somebody must have given Madeleine Kearns a copy of HOLLYWOOD BABYLON. It is a mystery to me that she didn't mention Rosemary's Baby, "Hotel California," or the Beach Boys' connection to Charles Manson. In any case, Ms. Kearns goes on to pose a series of strikingly random rhetorical questions: 

Why do the liberal elite fail to address — no, acknowledge — the religiosity of ISIS? What is the stringent dogma of identity politics if not a bad religion? Why, as the Pew Research Center has found, do 1.5 million Americans identity as Wiccans (witches) or pagans, outnumbering Presbyterians? Note that a handful from the Wiccan-pagan community decided to put a “hex” on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Two can play that game. Why does Madeleine Kearns care about a “hex” on Justice Kavanaugh? Doesn’t she realize that he is also the beneficiary of millions of Christian prayers? Does she doubt the efficacy of Christian prayer?  What is "bad religion," anyway, aside from a book by Ross Douthat? Why, as Skeeter Davis asked (in the Sixties!), do the birds go on singing? Why do these eyes of mine cry? 

I can answer that last one: because of articles like “Atheism and Bad Religion”. I hope, for her sake, that Madeleine Kearns is a better singer than she is a cultural historian.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/atheists-liberal-elite-ignore-traditional-religious-belief/ 

https://madeleinekearns.com/ 

The Ideological Temptation

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher recommends an essay by Conor Barnes titled “Sad Radicals” (at Quillette), in which the author looks back with regret at his teenage anarchist days and offers some hard-earned wisdom about “the roots of radicalism”. 

Barnes’ essay is worth reading, based as it is on his first-hand experience with intolerant “woke” persons and with the “inbred” groups in which they thrive.* He provides insights into the unstable mix of genuine idealism, zeal for social justice, empathy for underdogs, personal unhappiness and the accompanying urge to hold the world accountable for it, intolerance for contrary opinions, impatience with meliorism, and tendency toward totalitarian “group think” that so often characterizes radical movements. 

Both Conor Barnes and (especially) Rod Dreher ask readers to believe that the “cultish thought categories and practices of the radicals have become mainstream on the Left.”  Dreher even adds, “It is also becoming mainstream in American corporations.” Since no evidence is offered for these dubious assertions, there is no reason either to believe them or to contest them; the wise reader will remain agnostic if not openly skeptical. 

More importantly, I think, Dreher fails to highlight this central passage in Barnes’ essay: 

 "No worldview maps reality perfectly. But when a worldview encounters discordant knowledge, it can either evolve to accommodate it, or it can treat it as a threat to the worldview’s integrity. If a worldview treats all discordant knowledge as threat, then it is an ideology. Its adherents learn to see themselves as guardians rather than seekers of the truth. The practical consequences of such a worldview can be devastating." 

To his credit, Rod Dreher acknowledges, albeit only at the close of his article, that such blinkered ideological thinking is “a temptation that faces all of us.” That said, the thrust of Dreher’s commentary is to call attention to the dangers on the secular Left; that is, the same dangers against which he inveighs day after day after day.  Dreher uses Barnes’ essay to support, rather than to challenge, his (Dreher’s) own mindset: which is both the easy reading and a reading that misses the larger point. 

To understand Barnes' article as being only about the "woke" Left is short-sighted. The same mindset he condemns (and rightly so) based on his anarchist days exists across the political/ideological spectrum: mote, beam, and all that. The Left may be noisy and truculent, but the Angry Right poses threats of its own; if, as Dreher claims, some radicals seek to establish “a religion without God,” history offers numerous examples of “God” being invoked to justify religious zealotry.   

The most important, and the most necessary, form of criticism is self-criticism; it is also the most difficult and therefore the least practiced. Kudos to Barnes for an illuminating essay, and thanks to Rod Dreher for calling attention to it; but let's hope Barnes' insights are not reduced to, and deployed as, mere partisan cudgels in our seemingly endless culture wars. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-roots-of-radicals-misery/  

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad-radicals/  

*As an aside: god save us all from intolerable jargon such as “woke,” or “virtue signaling,” or “Social Justice Warriors”. Whatever the origin of such terms, they quickly become little but smug signifiers, terms of opprobrium used by detractors who want to demonstrate their own superiority to such trends. Every time Rod Dreher employs the phrase “the woke Left” and every time he dismisses people as “Social Justice Warriors,” he is eschewing argument in favor of caricature. Could we please have an actual discussion without name-calling? 

The Choice We Made

Mark Noll’s THE CIVIL WAR AS A THEOLOGICAL CRISIS (2006) is a fascinating examination of how ante-bellum Americans, in both the North and the South, used the Bible to justify completely incompatible positions on slavery. Among other things, what Noll makes strikingly clear is how sincerely convinced both sides were of the rightness (and righteousness) of their interpretations. Moreover, Noll also points out that, while many abolitionists argued their case on scriptural grounds, many others were willing to abandon scripture on the issue, appealing instead to reason and to principles of equality and liberty enshrined in the Declaration of Independence; this had the unintended effect of linking abolitionism to the horrifying doctrine of “free thinking”.

Noll quotes the Reverend Henry Van Dyke about the dangers inherent in privileging secular reason over scripture:

‘‘Abolitionism leads, in multitudes of cases, and by a logical process, to utter infidelity. . . One of its avowed principles is, that it does not try slavery by the Bible; but . . . it tries the Bible by the principles of freedom. . . This assumption, that men are capable of judging beforehand what is to be expected in a Divine revelation, is the cockatrice’s egg, from which, in all ages, heresies have been hatched.’’ ¹  

In the course of Noll’s compelling narrative, he makes passing mention of an issue I find of particular interest: in his telling, the theological conflict over slavery in some ways helped prevent substantive theological discussion (and criticism) of the emerging industrial capitalist system. At a time when Europe was roiled with cries for revolution and demands for socialism or communism, Americans were arguing (and, eventually, going to war) over slavery, not over capitalism. There was simply not enough energy, moral or otherwise, to tackle two major social issues at once; after the War, with slavery a settled matter, the last thing anyone wanted was another fierce and divisive ideological battle.

Here is how Noll describes the situation:  

Buying and selling slaves so monopolized theological attention that little energy remained for evaluating American systems of buying and selling in general. To be sure, as a number of historians have convincingly demonstrated, Southern defenders of slavery did, in fact, raise serious questions from Scripture about the moral order of an individualistic and profit-mad economy, which they saw as the North’s aggressive alternative to a slave order. [In] Eugene Genovese’s words, the threat [to the South] was of ‘‘a materialistic, marketplace society that promoted competitive individualism and worshiped Mammon.’’ Southern critics were joined in their worries by a few political economists from the North like Francis Wayland. But since most Southern thinking on the economy came to be anathematized because of the prominence it gave to racial slavery, and since Northerners like Wayland, as if in exhaustion, gave up theological analysis of the economy once slavery had been eliminated, Christian attention to the larger economic questions tailed off dramatically after the end of the Civil War. ² {emphasis added}

“As if in exhaustion”: a helpful analogy from more recent history might be the way in which members of America's “greatest generation,” having first endured the Great Depression and then having saved the world from totalitarianism, settled down to work, to raise their children, and to watch TV while drinking Manhattans and martinis in the 1950s. They had earned their repose and they did not welcome social or cultural upheaval, thank you very much—and who can blame them? ³ How many moral crusades can anyone embark upon in one lifetime?

The consequences of the focus on slavery, and of the Civil War, included a lack of serious economic analysis of capitalism’s disruptions and dislocations. Whatever evils could be attributed to industrial capitalism and its system of wage labor, they paled in comparison to the evils of slavery, and so the greater evil drew attention while the lesser evil was allowed to flourish:

The restriction of serious theological analysis to slavery alone, at the expense of theological attention to the economy as a whole, [contributed] to the parlous economic-religious history of the latter nineteenth century. In an oversimplified picture, those were years when a commercial capitalism far larger and more all-encompassing than ever imagined by the pro-business Whigs of the antebellum era came to exert an unprecedented influence in American society; when many of the Protestants who had once guided national life retreated from efforts at shaping society in order to cultivate private gardens of inward spiritual development; and when potentially innovative religious convictions among newer immigrant groups (Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish) were only inching toward broad public commentary on economic issues.

Ironically, the loudest voices crying out against the new regime of Mammon came from Southerners, which (as already noted) guaranteed that they would not be taken seriously. Half a century later, as Noll observes, the proponents of the “social gospel” tried to rectify the situation, but the damage had been done; capitalism had conquered all and, as Noll concludes, its theological critics have never been able to dethrone it:  

In that postbellum climate, Southern Christian defenses of patriarchal communalism were fatally compromised by their association with slavery, and Northern Christian assessments of economic principle ran out of steam after human bondage was brought to an end. The result was theological weakness in the face of pressing economic circumstances: while there was a heightened capacity to produce wealth, there was also a heightened capacity to produce alienation and vast economic inequality. These issues were eventually addressed practically by pietists like the Salvation Army and theoretically by leaders of the Social Gospel, yet theological incoherence in the face of modern economic realities has remained a major problem for Christian thinking ever since the Civil War. ⁴

If Noll’s narrative is correct—and I, for one, find it persuasive—then America had the singular bad luck in the mid-19^th century to have faced two evils simultaneously (chattel slavery and nascent capitalism) and to have been able to concentrate its energies only on the one. I am by no means suggesting that the nation made the wrong choice in choosing to focus on slavery; I am only observing, and regretting, that such a choice had to be made.

______________________________________________

¹ The “cockatrice’s egg” is a new one on me; it sounds like a rustic version of Pandora’s box.

² This problem has persisted—20^th-century Southern critics of capitalism (such as the Southern Agrarians who collaborated on I’LL TAKE MY STAND) were also discredited because of their views on race and because of their association with Southern segregation. In fairness, had those gentlemen (Robert Penn Warren, Alan Tate, et al) broken with their segregationist heritage and distanced themselves from the prevailing racism of their beloved South, they might have found a wider audience.

³ Full disclosure: at the time, I blamed them for their conformity and passivity. But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

⁴ Eugene McCarraher’s CHRISTIAN CRITICS: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought is, despite its ungainly title, a succinct and useful survey of this “theological incoherence”.

https://epdf.tips/the-civil-war-as-a-theological-crisis.html

Sunday Sermon

William James (from "Is Life Worth Living?" 1895):

So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to be to deal with maybes.

Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can success fully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by the belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act.

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed what ever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of

"Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope?

Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are parts of it, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may be the decisive elements in determining the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a feather's weight. A long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n, o, t. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view, and we are bound to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.

Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience of ours that make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows? Once more it is a case of maybe. And once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity.

For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may with draw at will. But it feels like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem. And first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of subterranean caverns the earth's bosom exudes its waters, which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise.

Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments, the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith, sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities that we encounter; and to quote my friend William Salter, "as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

http://nebula.wsimg.com/ce88924686fd9efd108f263427f6406e?AccessKeyId=0C9C181402D54CC100D8&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

When Work Doesn't Work

You would be well-advised to skip this blog entry and go directly to The Hedgehog Review to read Jonathan Malesic’s “When Work and Meaning Part Ways”.  Some excerpts from Malesic’s essay may motivate you to do so: 

The very meaning of work is in jeopardy right now, and a big reason is that we expect too much meaning from work. We believe the false promise that work confers dignity, character, and purpose, and we inculcate that belief in our children and students. But in the present stage of American capitalism, working means having a job. It means having an employer who puts our time, sweat, and (one hopes) talent to use in accordance with current managerial doctrines and for the sake of profit. So what we say about work—at the dinner table, at graduations, in opinion columns, in sermons, on the floor of the Senate—doesn’t match the reality of the work we do. This mismatch leads us to a sad, profound irony: Our commitment to the work ethic, meant to help us live the good life, is actually keeping us from doing so. 

Alert readers may notice a similarity between Malesic’s critique and the critique made by Paul Goodman (GROWING UP ABSURD) in the early Sixties: our society pressures people to prioritize work as a source not just of income but of meaning, but fails to provide them with meaningful work—or even, increasingly, a living wage. 

Malesic explains how we have divided our world into virtuous “makers” and parasitic “takers”: 

Having a job is the sole pathway to dignity, which the sociologist Allison Pugh defines as “our capacity to stand as fully recognized participants in our social world.” If you have a job, others acknowledge you as a contributor to society and thus as someone with a say in how it operates and a right to claim its benefits. In short, work is how you earn the right to count in American society.  

Given that just under half of the country’s total population is in the civilian labor force, many Americans’ dignity is in question. To shore up the non-employed majority’s claim to social citizenship, we describe parenthood and schooling in terms of work. We call these activities “jobs” not simply because they’re difficult, but because we lack a vocabulary to talk about meritorious noneconomic activity... 

Retirees get past the social checkpoint because they’re resting after decades of hard work. They’ve put in their time. People whose illnesses or disabilities keep them from working get, at best, a grudging pass. They’re exempt from the social requirement to work and can legitimately accept meager public benefits (even John Smith made an exception for the seriously ill), but they often have to endure skepticism about their condition. They are always under the suspicion that they’re faking their disability. He sure looks like he can work says the strangely envious person of the neighbor who bears an invisible disability or suffers inescapable pain. 

There is, says Malesic, a “Get Out from Under Suspicion” card that certain non-working individuals can play, a card that reads “Control of Capital”: 

The other big exception to the working/worthless binary is owners of capital, who make money passively, through other people’s labor. They’re even better than workers; they’re “job creators.” With their godlike power, they make it possible for others to enjoy the social esteem of work and avoid the shame of unemployment. 

Our cup overfloweth with gratitude for the job creators, without whom we could not put food on our family, find meaning in our lives, or look our neighbor in the eye. 

Work does serve a number of purposes, individual and social. It is one thing, however, to claim that all work possesses inherent dignity. It is quite another to pretend that all work is personally meaningful or satisfying: 

The transformation of work into a spiritual enterprise, the site of our highest aspirations—to transcend ourselves, to encounter a higher reality, to serve others—is the work ethic’s cruelest unfulfilled promise. Like the idea that work earns one dignity and character, belief in work’s higher purpose trains people to accept lower salaries and worse conditions in their jobs, convinced that spiritual satisfaction is a fair substitute. That on its own isn’t inherently cruel. There is, indeed, more to life than money. We should applaud and not weep for the talented attorney who chooses public service over a career in corporate tax law. She’s responding to a noble calling. 

We tell people “Do what you love,” knowing full well that option isn’t available for most and knowing full well that such rhetoric will lead people to feel guilty that they aren’t doing what they love—after all, they chose to take a bullshit job:   

But the language of self-fulfillment even appears in rhetoric around low-pay, low-status work. “Vocation” remains a common catchall term for work in Christian circles, sacralizing every position in the business hierarchy. The Wegmans grocery store chain has used the phrase “Do What You Love” in ads inviting applications for work stocking shelves and ringing up groceries. (Miya Tokumitsu rightly criticizes the imperative to love our jobs in her book, Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness.) This high-flown language coexists with a sense in office culture that we aren’t really doing anything. We aren’t making a dent in the universe parked in front of our laptops at our fourth strategy meeting of the day. We aren’t sure the universe—or even our customers—would notice if our jobs ceased to exist. We have what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.”   

At the same time, those whose jobs do provide a sense of purpose and satisfaction are overworked, underpaid, and rarely appreciated. In our culture, unless you’re in the military or you’re a “first responder,” no one considers you a hero: 

Meanwhile, people whose work has undeniable social value—nurses, physicians, teachers—burn out at alarming rates. Their love turns to hatred. Their pursuit of purpose leads to spiritual barrenness. In a tragic irony, they go beyond themselves, but they end up feeling useless and unfulfilled. 

In the end, Malesic does his best to put a positive, but not entirely convincing, spin on the situation: 

Our work-centered culture hasn’t collapsed yet. We have time now to get off the rickety scaffolding and build a new culture before disaster hits. If we do that, then the fully automated age won’t be a disaster at all...The system that finds so much meaning in work already doesn’t do what it purports to do. We just have to stop insisting that it does, and then we can begin to change. 

As I said, you should really just read the essay yourself. 

https://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Fall_Malesic.php  

On Philosophy

Leszek Kolakowski:

Philosophy is not there to be liked. I remember a colleague of mine, a professor of philosophy, describing his 6- year-old-son's first day at school. The teacher asked all the children to say their names and then what their fathers did. The boy refused to say anything, and the teacher was angry. Later, at home, he explained: "But I couldn't tell them that my daddy is a philosopher, because all the children would have laughed at me." Indeed, they would have laughed at him. But if the boy had said that his father was a circus clown, they would have laughed as well, even though it is a nice, respectable job to be a circus clown. And they would have laughed if the boy had said that his daddy was a garbage collector, too, although the profession of garbage collector is not only respectable but one of the most important in today's world; without garbage collectors we would not survive for long. And so, in matters of philosophy, let us not rely on the opinions of children. One might add that the profession of philosopher has a significant affinity with the two professions just mentioned: that of a circus clown and that of a garbage collector.

http://www.filosofia.it/archivio/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=55 

My Latest Mistake

For a variety of reasons, Montana has long had one of the highest rates of suicide in the nation; according to the most recent statistics, it now has the highest. This is a dubious accomplishment, to say the least, and Montanans across the state are working to do something about it. 

Last night I attended a community discussion on suicide/suicide prevention, held at St. James Episcopal Church in Lewistown. There were, I’m guessing, fifty people or more in attendance—impressive for a chilly December night and even more so for a town of only 5000 people. Most impressive of all was the presentation itself, by three local mental-health professionals; I’ve attended (and given) my share of such presentations, and this may have been the best I’ve witnessed. The presenters offered enough statistics to put the issue of Montana suicide in context (but not so much data as to overwhelm us); they discussed the basics of how to help a person in a suicidal crisis, focusing on the importance of listening, empathy, and human connection (the presenter was assisted by a couple of brief YouTube videos); and they reviewed the crisis resources and procedures in Lewistown, an isolated community in “frontier Montana” with no resident psychiatrists and no inpatient psychiatric facilities.  Questions from the audience were handled with aplomb, and the entire presentation was as engaging as it could be—given, of course, the gravity of the topic. 

I write this in part because of my own experience in the field of mental health issues and suicide prevention; I write this also because last night’s presentation reminded me that, no matter where I go, I want to be involved with such efforts. I write this mostly, though, to admit that, moving here, I underestimated both the capacity and the compassion of this community when it comes to mental health concerns. I accepted the stereotype that, in “this part” of the state, such issues are taboo and most people are in denial about them; I also assumed that a small town such as Lewistown would not attract qualified mental health providers. 

I was wrong. Last night I saw, and heard, care and concern and compassion from dozens of people; I also saw and heard their frustration with the mental health system and with the lack of local resources. I saw and heard three eminently qualified and obviously capable mental health professionals who understand the challenges and obstacles they face in “frontier Montana,” and who are deeply committed to helping people, to responding to their pain, and to keeping them alive. Lewistown is lucky to have them (and their colleagues) on hand. 

I am embarrassed to have underestimated this community and these people; I am glad to have been wrong about their awareness and their compassion; mostly, I am grateful to be able to live here and to be part of a town that has much more to offer than I realized. I’m looking forward to learning more about Lewistown, and I’m looking forward to making what contribution I can while I’m here.

There is hope. There is help. Reach out: National Suicide Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 / or text (in Montana) "MT" to 741-741 

Sunday Sermon

David Bentley Hart: 

Modern thinking differs from premodern nowhere more starkly than on the nature of freedom...the modern notion of freedom is essentially “nihilistic”: that is, the tendency of modern thought is to see the locus of liberty as situated primarily in an individual subject’s spontaneous power of choice, rather than in the ends that subject might actually choose Freedom, thus understood, consists solely in the power of choosing as such. Neither God, then, nor nature, nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only because it might be done in defiance of all three.  

Throughout most of Christian history, theologians followed classical precedent in conceiving of creaturely freedom principally as the freedom of any being’s nature from any alien constraint or external limitation or misuse that might prevent that nature from reaching its full fruition in the end appropriate to it... 

In late scholastic thought, however, there arose a new theological tendency, traditionally referred to as “voluntarism,” which placed an altogether unprecedented metaphysical emphasis upon the sheer sovereignty of the divine will, and upon the inscrutable liberty of that sovereignty...for the first time in Western thought, freedom was defined not as the unobstructed realization of a nature but as the absolute power of the will to determine even what that nature might be [and] if this is what freedom is for God, then this must be what freedom is for us as well...Rene Descartes spoke at once as an heir to the late scholastic tradition and as the father of modern Western philosophy when he declared in his Meditations that the true image of God within human beings consists in the godlike liberty and incomprehensibility of the will. 

It is [important] to ask where the ascendancy of our modern notion of freedom as pure spontaneity of the will leads the culture it pervades. At a rather ordinary level of public discourse, it obviously leads to a degradation of the very notion of freedom, its reduction in the cultural imagination to a fairly banal kind of liberty, no more—though no less—significant than a consumer’s freedom to choose among different kinds of bread, shoes, televisions, political parties, or religions. At the level of conventional social behaviors, it leads perhaps toward a decay of a shared sense of obligation or common cause, or toward an increasingly insipid and self-absorbed private culture, or toward a pronounced tendency in society at large less to judge the laudability of particular choices by reference to the worthiness of their objects than to judge objects worthy solely because they have been chosen. 

Our modern concept of freedom can, however, lead to other, more terrible things as well; for what the will may will, when it is subordinate to nothing but its own native exuberance, is practically without limit...something dangerously novel entered our culture when we began to believe that the proper end of the will might simply be willing as such. Nor does the truly liberated will have to confine its energies to the adventure of the self’s discovery and invention of itself; collective will is ever so much more exhilaratingly potent than individual will, at least if it can be disciplined and marshaled for some “greater” purpose, and the material upon which it can exercise its plastic powers is ever so much more immense than the paltry canvas of a private psychology.  

Moreover, if there really is no transcendent source of the good to which the will is naturally drawn, but only the power of the will to decide what ends it desires—by which to create and determine itself for itself—then no human can be said to be inherently irrational, or (for that matter) inherently abominable. If freedom of the will is our supreme value, after all, then it is for all intents and purposes our god. And certain kinds of god (as our pagan forebears understood) expect to be fed. 

{from ATHEIST DELUSIONS}

Books Report Redux

Always more books... 

The “Book Station” here in Lewistown, Montana is a second-hand bookstore with a twist: it’s owned and operated by the Lewistown Public Library (though it’s housed in a separate building across the street) and it’s only open once a month—the first Saturday of each month, as it happens, from 9 a.m. to noon. It’s a five-minute walk from my house, so of course I made the trek this morning down our snowy streets and got there promptly at 9:03. 

Today's book haul (at $1 apiece!): 

Sebastian Junger’s A DEATH IN BELMONT, a 2006 non-fiction narrative about the Boston Strangler and his interactions with Junger’s family around the time of the murders. Junger is best-known for A PERFECT STORM, but he’s written several other solid efforts as well. 

AT HOME is by Bill Bryson, an unfailingly entertaining writer most of whose books I’ve read. This book was published in 2010, and in it, Bryson offers “A Short History of Private Life” (hopefully in less daunting prose than that of Fernand Braudel’s THE STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE). It’s a novel notion for most people that “private life” even has a history, as do marriage, work, individual identity, and everything else about human existence; we generally assume that the way things are is the way things have always been, except now everything is cleaner, easier, more comfortable, and cheaper. That assumption is quite mistaken, and Bryson’s book is a step towards helping us understand some of the ways in which “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” (L.P. Hartley). 

Finally, what seems like a find: THE SOUL OF AMERICA: The People, Places, and Spirit of a Great Nation. I suspect that the title is misleadingly jingoistic; this is a 1985 collection of essays from and for Esquire, and it includes authors like Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Ken Kesey, William Kennedy, David Halberstam, and more. 1985 was the mid-point of the Reagan years, and I can’t help but think that it might be instructive to recall what perceptive observers thought at that time about the nation’s existential condition, and about its future. At least, I hope it’s instructive; because right now we can use all the wisdom about America we can find.

{I should add that all three books are hard-covers and in excellent condition. I noticed more recent books on the shelves as well: Richard Haas's "A World in Disarray" and John Nichols' "Dollarocracy," among others. Kudos and thanks to the folks at the Lewistown Public Library; they may be strict about their computer-use policy, but they make some darned good books available at ridiculously cheap prices.}