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.

My bucket list for 2022

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No resolutions. But a few things I'd like to do.

* Finally read Robert Caro's "The Power Broker.": Kind of astonishing I've made it this far into my career without checking that box. I've read and loved literally every other book that Caro has published. This one intimidated me, though. I've already ordered a paperback version through the local bookstore, and ergonomically I wish to hell there was an e-version. But there isn't. 

* Travel. I've barely left the state of Kansas the last two years, except to go to Arkansas to visit my wife's parents. I'd like to go someplace that's not where I usually am. One possibility: Getting on Amtrak's Southwest Chief and head west. Never been to Albuquerque. But I'd also really like to return (home?) to Philadelphia, which we'd planned to do the summer of 2020. You know how that went.

* Find my "thick community." Nuff said. 

Missing 'thick community,' still

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Bonnie Kristian is my editor at The Week. She's also a columnist for Christianity Today. Her latest starts:

This is a season for taking stock of who we are, how we live, and what we are building. It is the best season, perhaps, to ask ourselves the question of poet T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock: “Have you built well?”

In 1934, Eliot penned The Rock to fundraise for 45 church buildings near London. Appropriately, his frequent theme was building—not only churches but also the church as a thick community, an institution, a people seeking knowledge of God, a sanctuary from alienation and futility.

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building?

The phrase "thick community struck me, and reminded me of something I wrote about a year ago this time: "In 2021, I need to rebuild my personal community."

Even before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer who works from home and who attends church once or twice a year. It didn't feel great! I could go days without leaving the house, even, unless I made a real effort. Oh, I have a few friends I see now and again, and sitting outside the coffee shop with a socially distanced group of men has saved my sanity over the last few months, but the truth is it has been awhile since I was enmeshed in the networks he describes here. I feel their absence.

To be sure, I'm not sure how to reclaim those networks for myself. But I've come to realize I need to try, somehow.

I haven't made great progress. I go to the coffee shop regularly, but mostly I just sit there alone.

Truth be told, I miss the church community I had 20 years ago -- miss it ferociously. When I left the church, I did a fair approximation of re-creating it among a group of people roughly my age who were regulars at the downtown coffee shop. But those folks have largely moved on. And I find myself missing the richness of my life during those years. Outside of the family in my house, the people I talk to most are online -- on Twitter or colleagues that I message throughout the day. I know I'm missing something important, something I love. I know I'm missing "thick community," and I don't have the foggiest idea how to rebuild it.

An additional note on turning the other cheek

Yesterday I wrote:

Our instinct is never to turn the other cheek, but to repay injury with injury. The people among us who try to live by a "turn the other cheek" ethic are basically saints. And too often, their example can be misused by those who would happily inflict injury but naturally wish to avoid consequences for their actions.

I think referring to such folks as "saints" might accidentally create the impression that they exist on a higher moral plain than the rest of us. They don't. The people who live by nonviolence -- Gandhi, MLK, Desmond Tutu -- were pretty rigorous about the reasoning behind their approach, and disciplined enough to see it through in the face of great injustice. There's no reason the rest of us can't do the same. 

Jesus, Desmond Tutu, and Donald Trump Jr.

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So here's the deal: I'm not really a Bible-believing Christian anymore. But ... I think I'm a Bible-believing agnostic? Weird thing to say, I realize, but the point is that while I'm not really sure I have a grip on metaphysics I know my moral outlook is very much shaped by growing up in the church, and particularly my association with the Mennonite Church.

So that's why I found it so interesting that Donald Trump Jr. came in for some mockery and criticism this week. Here's what he said: 

“If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won’t. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because — I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

Emphasis added. Peter Wehner took note of the comment at The Atlantic.

...the former president’s son has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have “gotten us nothing.” It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go.

Decency is for suckers.

 Ed Kilgore piled on at New York:

We have grown accustomed to the irony of conservative Christians all but idolizing a politician who is the most heathenish public figure of our generation, inordinately proud of his power over women in particular and supposedly lesser beings generally and incapable of confessing a single sin or weakness or defeat. But it’s still a bit jarring to hear this chip off the old block openly calling for an ethic of hatred, resentment, and vengeance against his imagined persecutors.

Wehner and Kilgore are right, but incomplete. It's easy to mock Donald Trump Jr. for his callow approach to Christianity, but honestly: Isn't he just saying the quiet part out loud? If America is nominally a Christian country -- most of us still claim the religion, however tightly or loosely those affiliations are held -- can we be said to be a society that "turns the other cheek?"

Think about where that phrase originates:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

That's a radical command. It's one that almost nobody -- least of all self-proclaimed Christians -- follows.

If we were that kind of society, we might not have a death penalty. If we lived by a "turn the other cheek" ethos, we might not have troops spread out around the globe, ready to deliver violence at a moment's notice. If that's who we were, we wouldn't have grown men continuing to use John Wayne as a model of masculinity. And honestly, I'm not sure I know if it's possible to build a society on a "turn the other cheek" ethos. What I do know is that we're not in danger of finding out anytime soon. Donald Trump Jr. is just expressing the way we already live.

What does it look like to live in that fashion? Michael Eric Dyson gets at the possibilities in a reflection on the legacy of  Archbishop Desmond Tutu: 

When people claim the political utility of forgiveness, they help stabilize a culture addicted to the satisfaction of petty vengeance, establishing in its stead a measure of justice supported by big-picture moral values and social visions.

“Thus,” Archbishop Tutu argued, “to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest, since anger, resentment and revenge” undermine the common good. South African leaders borrowed from Black American kin in their fight against apartheid. Nelson Mandela promoted armed resistance against murderous white rule, while Archbishop Tutu advocated nonviolent resistance against white supremacy. As the head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Tutu believed that the only way to achieve a thriving democracy was for its citizens to come clean about their sins. He argued that Black forgiveness would remake South African society and pave the way for true justice.

This kind of work is -- let's be honest -- unnatural. Our instinct is never to turn the other cheek, but to repay injury with injury. The people among us who try to live by a "turn the other cheek" ethic are basically saints. And too often, their example can be misused by those who would happily inflict injury but naturally wish to avoid consequences for their actions. (Oh, all the people who love to quote Martin Luther King Jr. without following his example!) 

So: I have no respect for Donald Trump Jr. But he's an easy target. In our lives, in our politics, in our actions, most of us think -- even if we're not really willing to say -- that the biblical reference gets us nothing. He was just being honest about it. 

Losing that 'boundless sense of optimism'

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Damir Marusic reflects on the emotional damage done by two years of pandemic:

Maybe as the variants get less deadly and we get better at managing sporadic outbreaks of novel mutations, something approaching the previous normalcy will re-emerge. But that’s not really what we mean when we say “getting back to normal.” We want to have our innocence restored, to once again believe in a kind of permanence to our lives. I think that’s gone for good, though. That longed-for permanence is similar to the sense of ourselves we have before we experience the death of a friend. We implicitly believed we were somehow indestructible. Not immortal, but that the same rules didn’t exactly apply to us. A friend’s death shows us that in fact they do. It’s the same with COVID.

It’s a lesson we can, with time, choose not to dwell on but can never unlearn. It’s a part of growing wiser. Eventually we move on, having internalized these hard lessons. Eventually, we straighten up out of our crouch and re-engage with the world. We may memory-hole much of the emptiness that characterized the last two years of our lives, but we won’t regain that sense of boundless optimism born of a belief in stability that we had before.

Emphasis added. The bolded lines caught me up short because they described precisely the same sense I had about 10 years ago, after I'd lost my job and then had a close brush with death all in the span of a year. When I came out the other side -- to the extent that I did -- the thing I mourned most, aside from my lost health, was the death of that "boundless optimism." Somewhere in the back of my head, I think I'd believed that things would always work out somehow, because they always had. (Believe me, I know what a privilege -- perhaps callow -- it was to have ever possessed such a belief.) After my year-plus of calamity, I no longer felt that to be true: Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes the losses are permanent. 

There's been a lot of talk the last few years about the trauma we're all experiencing. But Marusic's reflections prompt another possibility: Quite inadvertently, we've all been given what amounts to a midlife crisis at the exact same time -- come face-to-face with our mortality, a lesson that we can't ever quite unforget. We're more aware of our boundaries, our limits, a sense that time is running out because it always is. It's natural that eventually, for most of us, "boundless optimism" fades with age. That's life, and life experience. But it's a tragedy for so many of us to have experienced as younger people, because so much of what is created and made by human beings comes from the ferment of energy and joy that isn't yet haunted by death. I wonder what we're losing, that we've lost, that we can't see because it was never made.

Can I be friends with a conservative?

 Axios:

Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn't be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling. ... 5% of Republicans said they wouldn't be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats.

At New York, the writer Sarah Jones offers her approval: 

...bipartisan relationships are more fraught, if indeed they were ever advisable at all. Such unions hark back to an earlier age in Washington when the roots of Trumpism flourished within the GOP and Democrats preferred not to notice. Some feel nostalgia for that age; that’s evident in every lament for the bygone civility of Capitol Hill. That age is now beyond recovery. There is only a post-Trump present, and young liberals are coping with it. With few exceptions, loving a Republican means loving someone who voted for Trump, twice, despite the racism and the COVID denial and the credible sexual-assault allegations. Even befriending a Republican involves a certain amount of tolerance, and tolerance is not always a virtue, as conservatives themselves have argued for decades.

I get this feeling, but also don't really want to surrender to it. I've lost conservative friends during the Trump Era, and I guess it's safe to say I haven't made any new conservative friends during that time. So beware, reader, I'm not very good at practicing what I'm about to preach.

Which is this: Everybody has to set their own red lines about what relationships they can sustain and which ones they can't. But I think it would be a mistake to automatically reject the notion of befriending people on the "other side." Even if I think those votes are awful. I'm old enough to remember when somebody could legitimately say that "loving a Democrat means loving someone who voted for Bill Clinton, twice, despite the racism and the executions and the credible sexual assault allegations." People are complicated. Sometimes we make political choices that make sense to us in the moment and look shitty in hindsight. Sometimes we just make mistakes. Sometimes we believe bad stuff, and can't see beyond ourselves to know that it's bad, or why. That's true of all humanity, not just conservatives. Which suggests to me a little bit of grace might be called for.

Beyond that, I think back to people whose lives have changed because somebody else was willing to be gentle and open with them despite having massive disagreements with their beliefs. I think about Derek Black, a scion of white supremacy who changed his mind and his life after being befriended by an Orthodox Jew at college. I think about Megan Phelps-Roper, of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, who was raised to sling homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs and then found her way out with the help of people who treated her as a human instead of as a cartoon villain -- which was probably what she deserved. I don't think that people should make friends with other people who have repulsive ideas simply  to convert them; I do think those moments don't happen if a few brave, gentle souls among us embrace the notion that tolerance should be rejected. 

Again, everybody has to make these decisions for themselves. Not everybody can embrace a racist or a misogynist or a homophobe and be true to themselves, much less preserve their own sanity.  And I'm not convinced that everybody who calls themselves a conservative fits those descriptions, though some folks surely are. But I don't believe, as Jones says, that "tolerance is possible only when a certain political equilibrium exists." What that means is that "tolerance is only possible when I've already won the war." That's not really tolerance.