Commonplace book: Ross Douthat's religious conspiracies

 New Yorker:

In one column, Douthat offered his own approach to assessing fringe ideas. “To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize,” he explained. “But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations."

'Now, as ever'

"A declaration made by the poet and scholar Eve Ewing in 2017, at an event in our stores, resounds. 'No more than ever,' she said, 'I am sick of people saying, Now more than ever. ... By saying, 'Now as ever," by looking not to the next new thing but to the last enduring thing, we are more likely to grasp our unique and not not so unique challenges..."

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores

My coffee shop

There are sunflowers on the counter. 

And a customer’s pottery 

And another customer’s prints on the wall. 

And families

And students

And the manager’s dog

And readers like me. 

And it all fills my soul. 

Public service announcement

 My blogging activity has moved to Substack. 

The pro-life right's Trump problem building a 'culture of life'

The folks celebrating the Dobbs decision this week are, shall we say, an optimistic lot. Some of them genuinely believe that taking away the right to abortion is something that will someday be celebrated by the larger society -- that while it might be controversial now, it sets the stage for a broader societal reconsideration of what "life" means and who we protect.

"I believe we will defeat abortion in the long run, just as the abolitionists defeated slavery," Tim Carney writes for the Washington Examiner. "I believe that in our children's lifetimes, American society will agree that abortion is an intolerable evil and American society will welcome every child, expected or unexpected."

Maybe. I am pro-choice, but the possibility has occurred to me that sometime in the near future I'll be judged a monster for that position by, well, people like me who are just trying to do their moral best.

But Carney and his fellow travelers have a problem that stands in the way of achieving their goal: Donald Trump.

Signifying heroes and villains, good intentions and bad

One of the bigger struggles I've had during the Trump Era has been with how to identify people -- the folks with whom I disagree, the ones who are doing things I sometimes even find harmful -- who are nonetheless acting in good faith.

There are personal reasons for this. No need to get into the details publicly, but there are persons I was once close to, despite our profound differences politically, because I thought we at least shared a commitment to speaking as truthfully as we could, to seeking the Truth -- even if we defined that somewhat differently.

Then Donald Trump came along and I found out I was mistaken.

I've lost a few friends in recent years. And yet: I refuse to believe that most people are cartoon villains. (Again, the Trump Years have tested this.) The vast majority of humans -- I really, firmly believe -- understand themselves to be acting for the right reasons and noble motivations. It would not resolve our differences to understand people as they see themselves, and we don't have to accept those self-judgments as definitive, but I still think it's important to try. Even now. At least for the sake being somewhat more realistic in our assessments, and not least because the people we now define as our enemies are also our fellow citizens, and the opposite of figuring out how to live with them is too terrible to think about. 

This brings us to abortion, naturally.

On the end of Roe, and the 'culture of life'

Roe v. Wade ended today, and I'm more torn about this than someone with my politics should be.

Oh, on the whole I think the decision is bad. I'm pro-choice -- ultimately, carefully and sometimes by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin -- because I believe that women's health and freedom really are implicated in the abortion debate.

But...

I grew up among pro-life Christians. I know them, know their hearts. I know -- though I disagree, ultimately -- that many of them truly believe they are saving babies from murder, and if you thought you were saving babies from being murdered, wouldn't you be rejoicing today?

My old friends are rejoicing.

I am not.

Some of this is self-preservation, I suppose. I am married to an ardently pro-choice woman who -- in the brief moments we had to visit earlier today -- vowed resistance. And I'd be lying if I said my marriage didn't influence my politics on this issue. I don't think that's a bad thing. What's the point of joining your life to someone else's if you're not willing to let their perspective nudge and maybe even enlarge your own?

So here's the thing: I don't expect today's decision to actually produce a "culture of life."

That's the kind of thing I've seen some well-meaning conservative folks talk about today. It's not good enough to merely outlaw abortion, they say. The next step -- using all the tools at their disposal -- is to create a nation where every pregnant woman welcomes every act of conception and, ultimately, every child into a world ready to support them in thriving and surviving.

It's noble, I'll grant that. And maybe impossibly utopian. I doubt (for instance) you'll ever completely rid the world of demand for abortions.

But also: I'll believe it when I see it.

The pro-life movement has had 50 years to build a culture of life, to prepare for this moment and to entice women into making different choices. And they ... haven't. Maternal death rates have risen in America in recent decades. Black maternal death rates are even worse. And the states that have fought most vigorously to outlaw abortion are also often the states that have managed to avoid or delay the Medicaid expansion that would help the poorest would-be mothers immeasurably. 

Maybe that will change now.

I doubt it.

And if I'm wrong, I'll still have a few horse-and-cart questions about why they waited so long.

The committed pro-life people I respect most liken abortion to the Holocaust, and Roe v. Wade to Plessy v. Ferguson. The possibility sometimes haunts me. Am I the baddie? There's a possibility that I -- and millions of people like me -- will one day be judged moral monsters. That's distressing.

For now, though, I know that many if not most Americans opt -- in their hearts, and sometimes even at the polls --  for the impossible middle ground on this topic: Finding abortion unsettling, and yet fearful of losing the option entirely. That's where I'm at. Which satisfies almost none of my friends on either side of the issue.

The end result is this: I can't join my pro-life friends in rejoicing, even if I understand why they do so. I suspect today's decision will increase the sum of human misery in America. I hope I am wrong.