Tim Alberta's 'The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.'

A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again.

That's maybe not the reaction you would expect to have to "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," a deeply reported look at how (mostly white) evangelical Christians have deeply compromised their supposed values to embrace the corrupt and vulgar Donald Trump — not just lending him their votes transactionally, but enthusiastically embracing his slash-and-burn style of authoritarian politics. The corruption, grifting and thirst for power on display is all pretty well-documented by now, but it's still galling (again) to read it all in one place.

Is *this* what Jesus would do?

Alberta doesn't think so. 

Jesus "talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life," Alberta writes. "Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek ... Blessed are the merciful ... Blessed are the peacemakers”) were never conducive to a stump speech."

That’s not very Trumpy.

Alberta brings an interesting set of credentials to this book: Yes, he's a reporter for The Atlantic — part of the hated liberal secular establishment — but he's also the son of a pastor, a devoted Christian himself who (we learn late in the book) is studying at seminary. Alberta is a man who wants the church to be the best version of itself, and that means doing everything it can to glorify God. 

What we have here, then, — as I've suggested in recent newsletters — might be the most unapologetically Christian book for a general secular audience that I've read in ages.

How Christian? Put it this way: Alberta devotes several passages throughout the book to the exegesis of Greek words found in the New Testament, the kind of exercise I haven't experienced much since I took Bible classes at a Mennonite college some 30 years ago.

It's also not the kind of thing I'm sure readers of The Atlantic have been exposed to much.

---

A question I've had about white evangelical Christians in recent years: If they really believe what they profess to believe — that Jesus died on the cross for their sins and was raised to life again, that God is the creator of the universe, that believers will have the ultimate victory in the form of eternal life, that all of this is temporary and fleeting — then why are they acting like this?

One obvious answer is power. "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate," the conservative Dana Loesch said during the notorious 2022 Senate race in Georgia. "How many times have I said four very important words. These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue." 

The only meaningful virtue for some folks, it seems. But power isn't the only factor here.

* For Chris Winans, the pastor of the church where Alberta's dad spent his career, it's idolatry of sorts. "America," he tells the author about his parishioners. "Too many of them worship America." Lots of Christians see the nation as their primary citizenship and allegiance — as opposed to, say, the Kingdom of God — and act accordingly.

* Fear, both real and false. "These people were scared," Alberta observes after visiting conservative activist Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom conference. "They were scared, in part, because of economic and cultural instability. But mostly they were scared because people like Reed were trying to scare them; people like Reed needed to scare them. ... The job of a political is to win campaigns. To win campaigns, Reed realized long ago, his most valuable tool was fear."

* Habits of the mind. Most of the folks in the church pews are there for only a few hours every Sunday, if that. But many of them spend the rest of the week listening to far more hours of conservative talk radio or watching Fox News, marinating in apocalyptic anger that paints Democrats and "RINOs" as enemies instead of people deserving of God's love. That shapes the minds and souls of parishioners accordingly.

The result? One of the frustratingly hilarious running themes of the book is how often its subjects — some in positions of leadership or influence in church circles, some not — just flat-out contradict the doctrines and scriptures of their religion. They either don’t know or care about the tenets of their supposed faith. "We’ve turned the other cheek,” Donald Trump Jr. says at one point, “and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay?” That thing Jesus said? No longer operational.

* Or maybe it's just a lack of faith. "You see, the kingdom of God isn't real to most of these people," one pastor tells Alberta. "They can't perceive it." 

Why don't white evangelical Christians act like what they believe is true? Maybe they don't really believe.

---

This doesn’t seem to be good for the church. The number of self-identified Christians in America is shrinking at a steady clip, and while Trumpist politics don’t explain the whole thing, they probably haven’t really helped.

A book like this isn't just supposed to diagnose the problem. It's supposed to offer solutions. It's here that Alberta struggles a bit — though to be fair, nobody has really figured out how to deal with the problem. He points to conservative Christians like Russell Moore and David French who have been cast out of their communities and demonized for their failure to make Donald Trump the lodestar of their faith. He also points to women in the church — a lawyer and a journalist — who have forced institutions like the Southern Baptist Church to account for sexual predation and corruption in their leadership ranks.

So why, for all the terrible things described here, did I find myself tempted to return to the church while reading Alberta's book?

I think it's because Alberta seems passionate about a kind of faith tradition that I was once immersed in. The Mennonites I grew up around were in America because they believed that Jesus had set an example of nonviolence that they were duty-bound to follow, and so had fled their European homelands rather than serve in the armed forces. They really believed in stuff like "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

And so do I, still. I can't explain it. Absent a faith tradition, those words seem almost illogical. Why would anybody pray for their persecutor? I don't have a good answer. All I know is that this is a violent world, and that the idea of loving your enemies is just so profoundly counter-cultural that it has to mean something, right? (Conversely, that's one thing that bothers me about the current crop of Trumpist evangelicals: If you think God is telling you to do something you already want to do ... maybe it's not God talking.)

If that's the case, why don't I actually return to the church?

Well...because I still don't know if what the church says — about the universe, about God, about itself — is actually true. 

I don't have faith. It's kind of a problem. So I am not returning to the church, at this point anyway. I've always left the door open. 

But I do want the church to be its best self. That doesn't mean evangelicals would adopt my politics, or suddenly become progressive on issues like women's rights, abortion and LGBT issues. It does mean that you'd see more Christians acting like they loved their neighbors, even amidst disagreement. And that’s what Tim Alberta seems to want, too.

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me feel so defensive.

Even now, having completed Samuel Moyn's "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," I can't decide if the problem is me or Moyn. Moyn's central idea here is that the United States has made its wars more palatable for public consumption -- particularly with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but also by focusing ever more on the international laws of war -- and in so doing has made it easier for the country to find endless wars with little or no public restraint. "American concern with war has become focused on ensuring it is humane -- not whether it drags on and on, or even should be fought in the first place," he writes.

I agree with part of Moyn's assertion. We're a country that goes to war pretty easily. Sometimes there's a debate, as when the United States invaded Iraq. Mostly, there's not: America fights or facilitates violence in places like Syria and Yemen with barely a peep of interest from the public and only the scantest attention from major media organs. And I also believe that America's increasing use of drone strikes has helped make our wars more invisible to that public, letting us spread death to alleged terrorists around the world in a fashion which invites blowback, but which is easy to ignore because U.S. soldiers are safely immune from the immediate threat of reciprocal violence. How can somebody in the Middle East take revenge against a pilot based in Las Vegas?

And yet, I really struggle with Moyn's notion that the people who try to keep war within certain bounds after it has been declared -- lawyers mostly, those who have developed the laws of war and then applied them vigorously -- have somehow enabled war. Moyn argues that as the focus on fighting wars "legally" ascended, the power of antiwar forces in American life receded. "Compared with the antiwar forces of the past, humanitarians were a far preferable foe, occypying more common terrain," he writes. Observers were right to ask if the military's "self-humanizations since My Lai entrench violence more than they regulated it." Is the choice really between arguing against war and arguing against using torture at war? It seems like I ought to be able to do both, right? Can't I be a pacifist, yet also argue against targeting civilians while the war is underway? Am I really assenting to war by criticizing its conduct? Maybe there's room for "both-and," but it's difficult to argue against Moyn's contention that it hasn't worked out that way. In his telling, the lawyers who represent Gitmo defendants might be honorable, but they're also patsies. I find that hard to swallow.

Another source of frustration: Moyn seems to wish that opponents of U.S. wars would focus more on legal arguments that those wars have often violated the United Nations' ban on wars of aggression. I find that idea naive (particularly since Moyn points out repeatedly how the laws of war have often been bent and broken with little repercussion) as is the idea that war can be stamped out. As I've written elsewhere, I've long lived at the edges of pacifism -- but I also believe there will always be wars and rumors of war. Am I betraying my own stated principles to believe in "don't kill civilians, don't torture detainees" the best second-best I might get? Am I a hypocrite? Or is Moyn being impossibly utopian? That's what I suspect is true, but again: Maybe I'm just being defensive.

If I find "Humane" to be frustrating, I also find it useful -- unexpectedly as a quick primer on Leo Tolstoy and his pacifist activism, but also the rise and development of international humanitarian law. He also provides a useful thread of how major powers have tended to observe the laws of war loosely, and usually not at all when fighting non-white peoples. American forces, for example, have often found easy justification for brutality against Native Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese an "War on Terror" combatants. The rules are supposedly for civilized people only.

Still, it was perhaps unwise of me to read Moyn while tensions are on the rise -- the weeks I spent with this book coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm angry and scared about matters of war and peace right now, anyway. Today, I watched a video of a Russian tank running over a Ukrainian civilians' car with the driver still inside. If war has become humane, it is difficult to see the evidence this week.

Bag O' Books: 'Freedom,' by Sebastian Junger

The central tale of this short book involves a long hiking trip -- a series of trips, actually, as we find out in the afterword -- that Junger took with some combat friends, along the railroad tracks of Pennsylvania, camping along the way, darting into towns for quick meals at diners. Along the way, some ruminations about freedom, which in some cases literally means "unencumbered": Junger has a lot to say how mobile hunter-gatherer tribes are more free -- and freer from hierarchies of wealth and rank -- than the place-bound farmer-city society that we call society. (He also notes that such freedom has its limits: Even the "most free man in the world" ultimately needed to connect to society.) There are detours into the relationship between testosterone and dominance, the similarities between the Taliban, the Irish of the Easter Uprising and the steel mill strikes of the Industrial Era. A short book with an even simpler message: "If you can't run a mile with all your gear, you've got too much gear."

* Book 1 of 2022.

Amanda Ripley's 'High Conflict'

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley


Amanda Ripley's book focuses on people who get trapped into endless conflict with each other, the difficulty of getting out and how it's sometimes possible. It's aimed at a readership exhausted by America's political polarization, it's clear, but mostly only nods at that Very High Conflict while focusing on smaller-scale stories.

I was reminded of a few things. About my Mennonite congregation's process to become a church that welcomed LGBT members, nearly 20 years ago. About the NYT's much-mocked reports about Trump supporters in Ohio diners. About how much conflict can embed itself into whatever culture or subculture we call home, so that the act of trying to honestly understand people with other viewpoints is very much a countercultural act. (And, frankly, even a spiritual act -- even for somebody somewhere between Mennonite-and-agnostic like myself.) About how I might unwittingly be a "conflict entrepreneur." About how I need to do better, both in my personal and professional lives.
 
Still digesting.

The NYT Notable Books of 2021

 Lists like this make me panic about how much I'm not reading.

Bag O' Books: 'Wildland: The Making of America's Fury' by Evan Osnos

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The past decade or so has brought readers a fresh round of what's probably an old genre -- the literature of American decline. Books like George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Alec MacGillis' "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America" have documented the forces tearing our society apart -- a financial system that delivers disproportionate wealth to a select few who hide themselves in walled-off supermansions; governments that neuter themselves and their ability to serve their citizens' well-being in order to make the rich richer; the left-behind places in rural America and in the Black parts of our big cities; the hollowed-out newspapers whose meager pages leave the electorate ill-informed and vulnerable to the conspiracy swamps of social media. "Wildland" is another one of these books, and it's a very good book, but it is also -- on top of those earlier examples -- exhausting. Our country is falling apart, and that's tremendously shitty, but it makes for some great literature.

Bag O' Books: 'To Start a War' by Robert Draper

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper

"In the aftershocks of 9/11,a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males." I was alive, sentient and angry during the Bush Administration's buildup to the invasion of Iraq, so I'm not sure exactly why I read this book: It just made me angry all over again. Read a certain way, though, it's almost darkly comedic -- like an episode of The Office, only one where hundreds of thousands of people end up dead unnecessarily. Above all, one of the key errors highlighted in this narrative is a sort of neediness -- the CIA needing to be relevant to the "First Customer" or be left behind, and so furnishing Bush with the (as it turns out) intelligence he (and they) wanted to see; Tony Blair's need in his faded empire to be relevant to an American-led world order; Colin Powell's need to not lose his standing in the administration and thus selling himself (and the world) out with his U.N. speech; even the need of certain media members to prove their status in the pecking order. "Careers could be made by wars," Draper notes. "It was equally true that wars could be made my careerists, including those in newsrooms." What a disaster. What an absolute disaster.

Bag O' Books: 'The Constitution of Knowledge'

When I first started Jonathan Rauch's "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," I was preparing to arm myself with information and thinking to battle with Trump-style con artists and their followers, the kind of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly. I got a tiny bit of that. But I also came away with a bit more sympathy for the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly.

It's not that I think they might be right. They're emphatically not. But as Rauch tells us in this book, there is a lot of research telling us that human beings -- not just conservatives -- have a tendency to filter knowledge through the lens of their tribes. And once a view is adopted by the tribe, it's hard to make its members accommodate contrary facts. "Once a belief becomes important to the way we think about ourselves or important to the group we identify with, changing it becomes very costly," Rauch writes, citing the psychologist Dan Kahan. "Humans are equipped with some of evolution’s finest mental circuitry to protect us from changing our minds when doing so might alienate us from our group." When people believe stupid things and keep believing stupid things because all their friends believe stupid things, that's profoundly human.

Honestly, it makes me wonder what I believe fervently because the people around me believe it too.

This isn't to say that Rauch lets the Trumpian grifters off the hook. The book exists in large part because of them. "Trump and his media echo chambers were normalizing lying in order to obliterate the distinction, in the public realm, between truth and untruth." But it also exists in large part because of Rauch's concerns about progressive "cancel culture," citing a number of incidents on college campuses. "Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?" he asks. "The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action."

This book works best as a primer on liberalism and its achievements. (One caveat: Rauch repeatedly refers to the informal structures of knowledge creation and debate as "the Constitution of Knowledge" -- hey, that's thename of the book! -- a punchy but ultimately tiresome rebranding that becomes an overused tic.) Rauch celebrates the virtues of truth-seeking, fierce debate, free speech, thick skins and keeping an open mind to the possibility that you might be wrong about stuff -- and that somebody else might be right. And yes, it would be nice if we could return to the days of "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it."

But Rauch's weakness comes when offering ideas about what to about the present crisis of disinformation and epistemic closure. The bulk of his "what now" chapter focuses on countering cancel culture and sticking up for your right to explore controversial ideas on campus. There's nothing wrong with that, but from where I'm sitting the more urgent threat to liberalism comes from the Trumpist right. "There are state and local local laws in Republican-led states and communities on the books and being passed RIGHT NOW that are restricting what can be taught and what ideas can be discussed in schools," Nikole Hannah-Jones observed on Twitter recently. Those laws aren't being passed by woke undergrads. Readers probably come to Rauch's book already convinced -- more or less -- of the merits of truth and liberalism. They'll leave even more convinced those ideas and institutions are worth saving from the forces that most endanger it. I'm just not sure they'll have much of an idea how.

Book No. 19: 'Twilight of Democracy'

I have finished my 19th book of the year, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism" by Anne Applebaum -- a closeup survey of the rise of nationalist movements in the U.S. (Trumpism), Poland, Hungary and Spain, and the cultural and technological developments that hasten their rise. When I say "close up," I mean to say that Applebaum is former friends and colleagues with many of the people involved. No longer.

Key quote: "Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age." We have to keep fighting, in other words, to make the world we want.

Review: 'How to Hide an Empire'

"The history of the United States is the history of empire." Many American readers will recoil from that conclusion -- we think of ourselves as Luke Skywalker, not the Death Star --  but Daniel Immerwahr makes a fair case. His book as a easy-reading primer on America's territorial expansionism, ranging from Daniel Boone through the occupation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, all the way up to the military bases in Saudi Arabia that were a source of anger leading to the 9/11 attacks. (For me, reading about America's war against rebels in the Philippines during the early 20th century is always a source of shame and rage.) Even today, some four million people occupy territories governed or possessed by the U.S. At one point, that number was 19 million.

One of those territories is Guam. Immerwahr quotes a military analyst discussing how the Guam's people have no say in how the United States uses their territory as a military base:

People on Guam were forgetting that “they are a possession, and not an equal partner,” the analyst explained. “If California says they want to do this or that, it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he continued, pointing to his coffee mug, “expresses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me and I can do with you as best I please.”

Immerwahr goes further, showing how technology has enabled the U.S. to mostly evolve away from a territorial empire into something more subtle: Globalization. America dominates the Internet, the setting of international industrial standards, and even the language that people around the world use to speak and write to each other. In so doing it has created what the author -- quoting Winston Churchill -- calls "empires of the mind."

That doesn't seem as obviously, immediately pernicious or racist as taking over a distant island and telling its people they have no say in how their collective futures. But knowing that might change the way Americans see themselves -- and how they might expect to be seen from the outside.  They can start by picking up Immerwahr's breezy, very readable short book.

Review: 'Klara and the Sun'

(Spoilers ahead).

Faith is something we cobble together out of our own needs, observations, coincidences and hope. And yet it also helps us create the story of ourselves for ourselves -- it might be not entirely rational or correct, but that doesn't mean it can't be meaningful. 

A lot of reviewers have talked about Kashuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" as a love story, and it's sort of that, but it's Klara's faith journey that sits with me most. Our protagonist is an "artificial friend," a living doll of sorts chosen to be a companion for a young, sick girl. Klara, we see from the beginning, is endowed with a consciousness, but is treated by humans around her either as an object of sorts -- one unkind character likens Klara to a vacuum cleaner -- or as a potential vessel for something of more value than she intrinsically possesses.

We see from the beginning that Klara sees the world in patterns, observing objects and vistas as something less than the whole of their parts -- describing the world instead as a series of colliding geometries; it often takes time for her to reconcile those geometries into a rough understanding of who, or what, she might be seeing. In reverse fashion, she takes a series of observations and coincidences -- as well as her own body's particular needs -- to fashion a likeness of religious faith, treating the Sun as a deity endowed with its own consciousness of its own. In both cases, Klara never quite sees a thing for what it is.

And yet, a miracle happens. 

Or does it? The medical crisis at the center of the book is resolved, seemingly by divine intervention. But we're also told that other people who have suffered the same sickness have sometimes -- sometimes -- gotten better for good after experiencing the same condition. Maybe what looks like a faith healing is in fact something a bit more random.

But the faith version of the story gives Klara a way to organize everything she's seen -- a way to "place her memories in the right order," as she says at the end of the book.

There are many ideas going on in "Klara." Thoughts about how elites treat those below them as disposable. How those "lesser" people find meaning in a world not built for them. Ishiguro's prose is as elegant as ever -- and his themes as large, and unsettling, as they've always been.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

This book feels like a companion and sequel -- an epilogue, even -- to George Packer's "The Great Unwinding," which told the stories of the Great Recession and how we got there through the stories of individuals across America. Macgillis goes just as deep, describing the evolution of America's economy from manufacturing and local retailers to the dominance of Amazon today. He focuses on the changes Amazon's hometown, Seattle, and witnesses Baltimore's evolution from a steelmaking colossus to logistics hub. It's not a happy story.

But this book is highly recommended. Masterfully reported and briskly written.

"Breaking Bread With The Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind" by Alan Jacobs

The writing of Alan Jacobs has proven useful to me over time. In 2011, when I was recovering from multiple surgeries -- and the brain fog that made sustained reading nearly impossible for me -- "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" was both the kind of encouragement I needed, and the first book of any real substance that I was able to complete. A few years ago, when I'd just about abandoned any hope or motivations of bridging ideological divides, his more recent book "How to Think" caused me to reconsider. It's a book, in fact, that I need to revisit -- but his latest, "Breaking Bread With the Dead" is a fine companion to both those earlier books, a guide not on how to think but how to ground your thinking by careful consideration of words written in the far-ago past.

One of Jacobs' central beliefs here is that reading old books -- not just books, but old books -- can remove us from the constant flow of information that washes over us through our social media feeds, that they can take us out of the concerns of the moment so that we can take both a broader view but also a more nuanced view of the times before us. Those old books can also help us encounter diverse and strange ideas in -- to use modern parlance (mine, not Jacobs') a safe space.

"Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is not to make the other identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor," he writes, adding on the next page: "We do not have the same intensity of involvement in the past that we do in the present, and it's precisely that which makes the past most useful to us."

Jacobs worries about a modern tendency to dispose of old books because their authors -- or the times their authors lived in -- held different morals than our own, about race, about gender relations. He doesn't ask us to suspend our judgments, though. Instead, Jacobs suggests we bring our judgments with us in an informed way -- to find the nuggets of beauty and/or truth that might reside in a work -- and provides some examples of how this might be done. And he cautions against an opposite impulse, as well: "To say 'This text offends me, I will read no further' may be shortsighted; but to read a 'great book' from the past with such reverence that you can't see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better."

In "How to Think" Jacobs urges readers to be able to articulate views we disagree with in such a fashion that the persons holding those views would understand and express them, instead of how we might cariacature them. A similar thread flows through this book, a nudge to read stuff that doesn't share our precise viewpoints anyway. And to be generous toward the people who wrote those words. They built the world we inherited; some other people will inherit the world we build on top of that. We may hope they are generous to us, as well.

"When we own our kinship to those people," he writes of old books," they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have overcome, but as neighbors and even teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us."

In offering us ideas about to read and wrestle with old and difficult books, then, Jacobs also points a way toward a way we can live and think morally in a world that often seems immoral, as well. He uses the word "love" -- I might offer the word "generous." Call it a literary Golden Rule: "Read unto others as you would have them read unto you."

"Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own," by Eddie Glaude Jr.

Just under the wire, I have finished my last book of 2020: "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own," by Eddie Glaude Jr. One of the central themes is one I have long felt -- that the triumphalist narrative of American history is a lie, that we fail to truly grapple with the sins of the real history in favor of a myth that comforts us even as it works to cement the results of those sins in place.

This is a passage I have highlighted in my own copy of Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," and Glaude excerpts it in this book:

"To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded--and at this embattled hour of the world's history--is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

Glaude echoes that notion in his reflections on Baldwin.

"We have to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this belief that white people matter more than others," he writes, "or we're doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history over and over again." He calls for "a world and a society that reflect the value that all human life, no matter the color of your skin, your zip code, your gender, or who you love, is sacred."

But, he also says, as an aside: "My understanding of history suggests that we will probably fail trying."

That, unfortunately, is also my understanding of history. We humans are fallen creatures, prone to drawing lines that pit us -- however we define "us" in any given moment -- against "them." It seems inherent to us as a species.

And yet: We need people like Baldwin, like Glaude, to continue to insist that we reach for that impossible world, the "New Jerusalem" as Baldwin calls it, and a new American founding as Glaude calls it. It is only by striving to rise above that that we ever do any rising -- even if we fall short of the heights we're aiming for.

Update: Coincidentally, after posting this, I ended up listening to this podcast on my walk ... featuring Glaude speaking about the book. It's a good overview, if you don't want to read the entire (short) work. It opens with a Baldwin quote I'd forgotten: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” That says what I was getting at, but better of course.

Book Review: "Divided We Fall" by David French

I like David French.

Oh, I don't much agree with David French. He has a more pro-gun sensibility than I do, and a more restrictive sense of what sexuality and orientation is proper. But he strikes me as being thoughtful and independent -- he doesn't just follow the crowd, even when it's "his" crowd -- and having integrity: He won't call an evil thing good even if his side is for it. That has cost him professional relationships on the right, and his family has endured fierce criticism and ugly threats for it. He remains who he is, a conservative Christian -- but not in the sense the phrase "conservative Christian" has come to mean during the Trump years. In those respects, French is a writer whose way of thinking I personally would do well to emulate.

So I was interested to check out his new book, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation," in which he worries that United States is coming apart, driven by increasing polarization in which both sides don't just want to see their side win, but to see the other side broken and dominated -- and, ultimately silenced. Americans have mostly given up on pluralism and classical liberalism, French writes.

Instead, he says, we've mostly retreated into tribalism. "There is no anguished choice between truth and tribe," he writes, critically, about the ideological wars that consume the country's political class. "The truth was never an option. When push comes to shove, they place self-interest and partisan interest over even the most basic of virtues."

French is at his best when diagnosing this problem -- he is unabashedly conservative, but he's lived among liberals, and he can speak their language (I'm guessing not many conservatives use variations on the phrase "marginalized people" as much as he does in this book.) and can fairly, accurately sum up their perspective even when he disagrees with them. (And liberals would benefit from reading this book to get a sympathetic account of some of the things conservatives believe.) I am reminded of Alan Jacobs' book, "How to Think," in which Jacobs challenges readers to do just that. French, meanwhile, describes how Americans are increasingly clustered: Left-leaning people live among left-leaning people and right-leaning people do the same. And polarization has a cascading effect -- being around liberal people tends to make liberals more liberal, and so on.The more we cluster among like-minded folks, the less familiar we are with people who think differently -- and, perhaps more importantly, makes it easier for us to dehumanize them.

"There is a vast difference between disagreeing with your opponent and believing their views are outside the realm of acceptable discourse," he writes. "And if you believe your opponent’s views are outside short trip to conclude that they shouldn’t enjoy the right to speak at all." One poll of college students, he notes, found that "when asked to choose between free speech and inclusivity, the students chose inclusivity by a 53–46 percent margin."

French argues that's a false choice. "I remember once asking the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, an early member of the Congressional Black Caucus, why he believed the movement for African American equality made such rapid legal gains once it was able to fully mobilize. 'Almighty God and the First Amendment,' he responded."

If French is good at diagnosing, though, the worst part -- or, at least, the most-distressing and least-readable -- is the middle portion, in which he writes fictional scenarios envisioning America's slide into disunion. I'll leave that portion to other readers for comment.

The solution to these problems, he argues, is twofold. First, America would do well to commit itself to a "healthy federalism" in which states are allowed to make vastly different policy choices while still adhering to the Bill of Rights. He doesn't think that is likely to happen, though, because both sides of the ideological divide are so committed to ideological domination they won't let the other have a win, even if that win is contained to the state of Tennessee.

There is some truth to that, but it is limited in its explanatory power. "Just stick to the Bill of Rights" seems like a clean instruction to states until you realize that we're still arguing about what those rights encompass. Sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's not. The Second Amendment, for example, is read by folks like French as guaranteeing an individual right to bear arms. Many on the left, though, see that right as being tied to a "well-regulated militia." And let's not even get started on abortion! The problems that divide us don't entirely reside in our collective bad attitudes, but in a real disagreement over what the Constitution even means and requries of us.

French's second solution -- a bit more ephemeral, but also difficult to achieve -- is that we have to aspire again to be able to disagree without hating each other for it. This isn't a call for moderation, he makes clear, but a rededication to the idea that we have to allow other people to be wrong about stuff. 

...mercy and humility, are indispensable to our national life. Mercy is the quality we display when We treat them not with contempt but with compassion. In the aftermath of political victory, we seek reconciliation. We operate with 'malice towards none.'

Humility reminds us that we are not perfect. Indeed, we are often wrong and will ourselves need mercy.

What can I say to that but, 'Amen.'

In the end, French argues that the big conflict in American culture is less between left and right than between decency and indecency, between "those people of all political persuasions who continue to believe in constitutional processes and basic democratic norms, on the one hand, and those people who’ve adopted the anything-goes, end-justifies-the-means tactics of the campus social justice warrior or the “Flight 93” Trump populist, on the other."

Right now, it looks like the latter group is winning. And like French, I'm dubious that will change -- I worry, in fact, we're already too far down the road toward division. That might not be all bad, but it will probably be painful. The last few years have challenged my commitment to seeing many conservatives as essentially good people -- I'm speaking more of my neighbors here in Kansas, not so much Donald Trump and his immediate enablers-- even if I disagree with them on stuff. French's book is a reminder to me to keep trying. 

Bag O' Books: CASTE

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

There's a question that pops up now and again. About whether, if you lived in the era of slavery, or as a German during the Third Reich, if you would be the kind of person to go against the grain-- to stand for human dignity and freedom.

We like to think we'd be the exception.

But most of us would be the rule.

I think I shared this book's overall viewpoint, but I learned things new to me about the history of racism and slavery in America, some ugly and breath-taking details about the immense evils done to black people in this country. You can know it's bad and still get sucker-punched with a fresh realization of just how bad it is. And it is distressing to know how difficult, how dangerous it was for people of goodwill to step outside that system.

I worry there are evils that I am now complicit with that I don't even recognize because I am immersed in them. All I can try to do is evaluate the day-to-day details of my own life and work to act as humanely as possible in every situation -- even when doing so isn't to my advantage.

Wilkerson writes:

"We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share."

I must try to do better.

(Via Goodreads)

Bag O' Books: THE ROUND HOUSE

The Round House by Louise Erdrich


This is the first Louise Erdrich novel I've read from beginning to end (I started "The Night Watchman" right when the pandemic started and got distracted) and I am utterly devastated.

This novel plays like an update of "Stand By Me," only set on a reservation. But the indigenous setting aside, I was about the age of the protagonist, Joe, in the precise era of this story, and shared Joe's obsession with "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the time. I am stunned out how clearly and precisely Erdrich nails the interior life of an early teen nerdy boy -- I feel completely seen.

But I don't just love this novel because it reminds me of, well, me, but for how well it transports me into a real but unfamiliar world, it's details so closely observed, its storytelling so readable. I learned things from "The Round House." But I was captured by it, too.

Utterly absorbing. Heart-breaking. This is my favorite book I've read this year.

View all my reviews

Bag O' Books: MOBY DICK

A spoiler or two follows, but kids: The book is 170 years old. It's not my fault if you get spoiled.

There are some works of art that I am slow to getting to because the weight of their reputation makes them seem -- forgive me, teachers -- like homework. I didn't watch "The Godfather" for years for precisely that reason: It just seemed like too much. Then I watched it and fell in an obsessive kind of love.

"Moby Dick" turns out to be a similar experience. I didn't read it for a long time, because in addition to the weight of the book's reputation, there was the sheer damn size of the actual physical novel. It's not small! But the pandemic slowed my life down a little, and I have resolved to tackle some works of literature I'd skipped before.

Things about "Moby Dick" that I didn't expect:

* That it would be so gay. 

Bag O' Books: FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM

This has been, for many white Americans, the summer of anti-racism reading. I guess that my dive into David Blight's FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM counts in that category. I can't tell other people how to try and figure out how to do their own thinking about race -- but I don't have much patience for "how to" books like "White Fragility." I'd rather read histories and current books by and about people who have lived the struggle. I've re-read James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" this summer, as well as Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Next up on my reading list is Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste." In between all of these books, I'm getting in a chapter or two of "Moby Dick" now and again.

Among the lessons to be learned from Blight's book is that discerning the One True Way to battle the evil of racism may not be so easy, or even possible. Douglass evolved over time from a "moral suasionist" form of abolition to a fiery advocate of righteous, cleansing violence. He moved from being a radical outsider to a Republican "party man." He struggled with human foibles. 

The two through-lines in his life, though, are this: He always fought for the advancement of his race. And he often did so by telling his own story -- a biography in which he escaped slavery and rose to become a preeminent orator, writer and (three times!) autobiographer.

The other through line, perhaps, is that the struggle never ends. Douglass started his fight against slavery and ended it an enemy of lynching. Evil never subsides. It just takes on new-- and, sometimes, not-so-new -- forms to be opposed.

The best way for me to do sustained reading these days...

 

...is to deactivate my Twitter account. 

I don't mean log out. I mean deactivate it entirely. It's easy enough to reactivate, so the practical difference between logging out and deactivating probably isn't that great. But, psychologically, it slows down my tendency to check in and then keep scrolling, scrolling.

This afternoon, I deactivated my account and read two chapters of David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, and a few chapters of MOBY DICK. My head feels better for slowing down.