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.

My new flip phone destroyed my exercise routine

 

About a week ago, after more than a decade of owning an iPhone, I downgraded to a flip phone.

The proximate cause of this was news that Apple was going to be snooping in on users phones to look for child sexual abuse material. That's a worthy cause, but it contributed to my unease with privacy in the digital age. But I'd been thinking about making the change anyway, if only to create spaces in my life where I'm not constantly staring at a screen. And it's working! I'm finding it easier to concentrate on long-form reading, or even being present with my wife.

But there are tradeoffs.

I didn't realize the extent to which my impulse to exercise was connected to my iPhone, how the widget showing the number of steps I've taken today was a nudge toward getting out and doing something, usually early in the day so I wouldn't be haunted by low numbers all day. Since getting the flip phone, my exercise just plunged off a cliff.

Living without the iPhone means that I have to think a little more, require on nudges a little bit less. So this morning, I got up and took a walk first think. I had to be intentional about it. I will have to be. And maybe that's not the worst thing.

Reverting to pandemic habits

I find that after a couple of months of getting out, seeing people, and really enjoying it, I'm reverting to old habits from the early quarantine era -- not leaving the house much, not exercising much, and not engaging the world beyond my driveway all that much. I'm vaxxed, but the pandemic is raging once again and the old habits kept me alive for more than a year. 

But I've got to be more intentional about all this. I don't want to go back to the old ways.

In Texas, masking and vaccines are a personal choice. The consequences aren't.

AP: "Gov. Greg Abbott appealed for out-of-state help to fight the third wave of COVID-19 in Texas while two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates in defiance of the governor."

And there you have the "vaccines/masks are a personal choice" argument in a nutshell. Clearly it's not -- if protecting yourself was purely a "personal choice," you'd personally bear responsibility for the outcomes. That's not the case. Your trip to the hospital affects that hospital, clearly, and if enough other people make the same choice, then that hospital in turn needs to call for help from out-of-state nurses. The ripple effects are plain to see.

That's why stuff like this is so silly.

Right now, Abbott is asking Texas hospitals to delay elective surgeries. If you're vaxxed, your choices are constrained by the decisions of the unvaxxed. It's not the worst problem posed by the surge in hospitalizations, of course, but it does mean that the vaxxed can't simply go on their way and disregard what's happening among the unvaxxed. 

Can we save ourselves from climate change?

Helen Lewis thinks so: "I no longer feel like the dog in the cartoon, insisting that “this is fine.” This isn’t fine. We have messed up quite badly, for some noble reasons, such as lifting people out of poverty, and some less noble ones, such as enriching the shareholders of fossil-fuel companies. But the same ingenuity that got humanity here, the ingenuity that created the internal-combustion engine and the airplane and the power station and the megafarm, is what can save us."

I'm skeptical. One of the lessons of adulthood -- for me, anyway -- is that sometimes you fuck things up so badly they can't be unfucked up. If you read the climate report today, it sure seems like we've hit a level of unfuckability. It's too late to smart our way out of this -- the real hope is that we stop the bleeding. We're still going to lose a limb or two though. 

Is anybody else angry all the time?

Something that happened after Donald Trump left office in January is I got a lot less tense. Four years of checking Twitter the second I woke up, of losing friends I'd cared about deeply, of never getting to slow down seemed ... to ease up a bit. Honestly, the best thing about Joe Biden's presidency is what it's done for my mental health.

But: I think I'm moving back to that place where I'm angry all the time. I can't decide if this is a me thing or a world being stupid thing.  

Memories: The difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism

Photo by Nikko Tan from Pexels

Discussing the debates within the Southern Baptist Church, David French offers a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists (and no, he emphasizes, the two are not the same):

Instead, I’d frame the difference in a number of different ways—“grace versus law,” or perhaps “open-hearted versus closed-minded.” In an earlier newsletter, I described fundamentalists as possessing “fierce existential certainty.” The fundamentalist Christian typically possesses little tolerance for dissent and accepts few sources of truth outside of the insights that can be gleaned directly from the pages of scripture.

(Snip.)

Evangelicals often also have a higher view of grace than fundamentalists. They emphasize God’s grace more than God’s rules and are more prone to focus on God’s mercies than God’s judgment.

In my real life and my online/writing life, I refer to myself as a lapsed Mennonite, but it's actually more complicated than that. I was raised and baptized -- Feb. 27, 1983 -- in the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist nondenominational church found primarily in the south. Some of my earliest memories involve my dad's year attending what was then known as Oklahoma Christian College, a sort of denominational school, as much as there could be one, for the churches of Christ.

I grew up so afraid of sin. So afraid I would lie, then die without having had the opportunity to pray for forgiveness. It's stressful to be a kid when Hell is sitting at your elbow, constantly. Jesus dying on the cross was an act of love, but it also reflected God's Terrible Wrath. God may have so loved the world, but he also was ready to torture you eternally for getting crosswise with him, and that was the part that made an impression. I think I remember the word "grace" being used in Church of Christ sermons, but I don't really remember feeling it. 

In 1984, my family moved to Hillsboro, a central-Kansas town populated mainly -- but not exclusively -- by Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren, the latter a more evangelical branch of the church. And then, one day, my parents decided to take us to an MB service. This was shocking -- to step foot inside a church that wasn't a Church of Christ, to worship with all these people we'd been told all our lives were going to Hell because they didn't love God the right way (they used musical instruments in their worship!) was terrifying.

Over time, though, I got over it. What I remember most from this time was a transition from the constant fear, from a legalistic belief in God, to the emphasis on God's mercy -- on having a relationship with God. Hell was still there, to be sure -- it was one reason the church supported missionaries. But it receded as a presence from the center of my daily lived theology. Eventually, as I got older, I embraced the Mennonites more broadly, but then slipped away from the church. I won't lie: Along the way the old ways have occasionally stuck in the back of my mind. What if my grandparents, who stayed in the Church of Christ and who railed against my father's choices, were right? What if a little embrace of grace was just a steppingstone to Hell? 

Somewhere over the years I asked myself that question and answered: "So be it." I think it was when I encountered gay Mennonites at the original national meeting of the Mennonite Church-USA in 2001. (Oh, goodness, that's 20 years ago now.) I decided that if God really did so love the world, he wasn't going to hold it against me for trying to act in the same spirit even if I got the particulars wrong. It was liberating. Of course, that also liberated me to leave the church entirely, I suppose.

The point being: French's distinction between fundamentalists and evangelicals really resonated with me. They both might look conservative from the outside, and they are, but there are (um) fundamental differences in approach. In my life, those differences have been meaningful.