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. 

Why I don't watch much sports

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Jane Coaston has one of the more interesting and lively minds around. So she even makes the experience of college football interesting for me. In her latest newsletter, she writes about her joy at Michigan's recent victory over Ohio State, its most-fierce rival:

Obviously, as I am not a member of the Michigan football team, I did not play a single snap of that game. And I watched it from my warm and cozy apartment, rather than in the snowy stands of Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. But I was so invested in the action that my heart-rate tracker thought I was working out. When the game ended, and Michigan had won, I felt as if I had won, too, from hundreds of miles away.

I am, of course, not the only one who felt this way. A fellow Michigan graduate and current N.F.L. Network host Rich Eisen told me that during the game he felt so personally involved that he turned to his wife and asked, “Why does this mean so much to me?” He said that during previous games, when Michigan was losing to Ohio State, he would have to force himself to take stock of what was good in his life. “I would often sit there and think to myself, ‘I’ve got a beautiful family, and I’ve got three healthy children.’”

After Saturday’s win, Eisen was at a loss to describe this particular brand of joy, just as I have been. “Obviously, childbirth and marriages are your best days of your life,” he told me, not all that convincingly. “But this win over Ohio State, I can’t even really put it into words, and it’s my job to do that sort of stuff.”

This is why I don't watch sports all that often.

I can tell you when and why I made the decision. In 1998, I was living in Emporia, Kansas. Gamedays for the Kansas City football team were a big deal to me then -- I planned my Sunday afternoons around them. Some friends who worked at the local university regularly hosted a group for the games, and put on quite a spread. It was joyful. That year, the Chiefs went 13-3, looked like they might go to the Super Bowl, then ... flamed out in their first playoff game.

A few months later, KU's basketball team headed into the NCAA tournament looking like a national championship contender. Paul Pierce, an eventual Hall of Famer, led the team with Raef LaFrentz. And that team ... flamed out in the second round of the tournament.

All of this made me feel awful. Obsessively awful.

So I pretty much stopped watching. Oh, I still keep an eye on how the teams I used to love are doing, but in a general way. When KU won the national championship in 2008, I did in fact go down to Massachusetts Street to join the celebration. I'm not immune to the way that victory can make my community seem joyful. But on a day-to-day, game-to-game basis, I've pretty much extracted myself from fandom. Letting my emotional well-being ride on the athletic exploits of young men just didn't seem wise to me, or a way to be happy. I didn't -- don't -- have the emotional bandwidth for sports. 

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.

A republic, not a democracy!

Chris Lehmann reviewing a new book about Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society:

Nor was this Welch’s only anticipation of the present-day reactionary temper on the right; he and his anti-statist allies saw social democracy as the harbinger of eventual Communist takeover, and so loudly insisted that the U.S. was never meant to be a democracy and that the embrace of democracy spelled certain ruin. Recommending The People’s Pottage, an anti–New Deal tract by his friend Garrett Garrett as “required reading” for all Birchers, Welch hailed its clear-eyed account of “the Communist-inspired conversion of America, from a constitutional republic of self-reliant people into an unbridled democracy of hand-out seeking whiners.” A common refrain of the Bircher faithful was that America is “a Republic … not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!”

The NYT Notable Books of 2021

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

Common book: Mercy

 “ We’re imperfect people in relationships with imperfect people. Mercy should be mandatory.” -David French

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.

Star Trek movie rankings

For the 25th anniversary of STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, my personal ranking of best Trek movies.

Top Tier Classics:

* Wrath of Khan

* First Contact

Really Good: 

* The Voyage Home

* The Undiscovered Country

Reasonably Entertaining:

* The Search for Spock

* Generations

* Nemesis (I realize I'm on the short list of people who would even rank it this high.)

* 2009 reboot

What fresh hell is this?

* The Final Frontier

* The Motion Picture

* Into Darkness

Nope

* Insurrection

* Beyond

Common book: Social security vs. police security

“In a society that doesn’t provide everyone a lifeline, order will be maintained at the point of a truncheon. There’s a tradeoff between social security and police security." -- Paolo Gerbaudo, Dissent Magazine

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.

Common book: John Banville's unguilty pleasures

 John Banville, NYT:

I'm getting a booster. But I feel kind of guilty about it.

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With boosters widely approved now, I'm planning getting a booster sometime in the next few days: Today is six months since my last shot, and I've got the comorbidities. But I don't feel great about it. 

NYT: "As the United States prepares to offer Covid booster shots to tens of millions of people, representatives of the World Health Organization continue to sound the alarm over the disparity in vaccine access globally, with the world’s poorest countries struggling to get even a first dose into their citizens’ arms." 

How can I justify benefiting from the disparity? 

My local hospital has been slammed the last few months. Some -- not even close to a majority, but some -- of those patients were already vaccinated. I have friends on staff there. Yes, I'm eager to not get sick (and whispers about a possible new Delta sub-variant in the UK terrify me) but anything I can do to stay out of bed seems like a duty to my community. But it still doesn't feel optimal. 

Bad sign for Facebook?

 The most-read story at WaPo: 

Sometimes I think....

 ...about how Morgan Freeman was a working actor, but didn't really become a star until he was around 50.

That gives me hope.

Common Book: Bad books

 The Tin Drum:

A thing I didn't know: Soil

Washington Post: "Research suggests that the world’s soils are now eroding 100 times faster than new soil can form, and an estimated 33 percent of soil is so degraded that its ability to grow crops is compromised."

Also: "The combined debt of all U.S. farmers totals more than $400 billion."

Common Book: The 'demonic energy' of COVID schadenfreude

Sarah Jones, New York: This happened to me recently when I lost my temper with a woman I’d known in college. She is a nurse and wrote on Facebook that she refuses to get vaccinated. I told her that people like her are the reason my grandfather is dead. That wasn’t exactly true — my grandfather died before the vaccines were available — but her indifference toward the virus had irked me. I don’t think I changed her mind. I felt better for an instant and then I went back to feeling angry, both with her and with myself. Whatever compelled me to comment on her Facebook post could have become much uglier if I had allowed it. On the r/HermanCainAward sub-Reddit, people post screenshots of comments from anti-vaxxers who later died of COVID. To some, death has become a spectacle at which they are entitled to gawk. That’s how demonic energy must feel. Right now, it’s everywhere.

We don't have a crime problem. We have a gun problem.

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Henry Olsen at the Washington Post, on the FBI's scary murder statistics: "Murders in the United States rose by 30 percent in 2020, the largest one-year increase on record. There are likely many factors that contributed to the spike, but there’s one thing that clearly did not help: the blanket anti-police mantra adopted by many urban and national leaders after the killing of George Floyd"

It pains me to admit he might be right*. Here's The Guardian in July: 

Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 – even before pandemic-related shutdowns started in March, the analysis found. But there was also a “structural break” in the data in June, indicating “a large, statistically significant increase” in the homicide rate, around the same time as the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

But also: 

A preprint study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that a spike in gun purchases during the early months of the pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in gun violence from March through May, or 776 additional fatal and nonfatal shooting injuries nationwide. The researchers found that states that had lower levels of violent crime pre-Covid saw a stronger connection between additional gun purchases and more gun violence.

And indeed, here's a notable paragraph in another WaPo article on the FBI's statistics:

The FBI data also shows how much killing in America is fueled by shootings. Guns accounted for 73 percent of homicides in 2019, but that increased to 76 percent of homicides in 2020. Gun killings rose 55 percent in Houston, from 221 in 2019 to 343 in 2020. Overall, the city saw more than 400 killings last year.

It's not just that we have more homicides, but a higher proportion of homicides are committed with guns -- fueled by the presence of more guns out in society. We don't have a crime problem, or at least not just a crime problem. We have a gun problem. 

* Chicken-and-egg question: Does the murder rate spring from anti-police sentiment, or from police delegitimizing themselves through things like murdering civilians on the street? Not sure the two can be untangled.

Reading…

 …a good novel on paper, not on a screen, slows my brain down wonderfully. 

Milley's challenge: How do we stop presidents from committing nuclear genocide?

I agree with a lot in this piece by Tom Z. Collina of the Ploughshares Fund: 

Just after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Gen. Mark Milley faced an impossible choice: should he allow President Trump to retain sole authority to start nuclear war, or should he intervene to block such an order?  

Unfortunately, under existing policy the only way to safeguard the nuclear arsenal from an unstable president is not to elect one. Once in office, the president gains the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, the president can unleash hundreds of atomic bombs, or just one. He does not need a second opinion. The defense secretary has no say, and Congress has no role.

In retrospect, voters should never have entrusted Trump with the power to end the world. But do we really think any president should have this power? By now, it should be clear that no one person should have the unilateral power to end our civilization. Such unchecked authority is undemocratic, unnecessary and extremely dangerous.

But I'm skeptical of his proposed solution:

President Joe Biden needs to fix the system for himself and all future presidents.

First, Biden should announce he will share authority to use nuclear weapons first with a select group in Congress. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war, not the president. The first use of nuclear weapons is clearly an act of war.

Second, Biden should also declare that the United States will never start a nuclear war and would use the bomb only in retaliation.

Leaving aside whether the U.S. should declare a first-strike off-limits -- something that should happen, but I'm skeptical will -- Collina's fix basically involves the problem he identifies in the first place: It requires continuing to elect non-nutty presidents. That's far from guaranteed. 

Biden could announce that he'll share nuke authorities with Congress. Subsequent presidents could revoke that pledge, though -- and if they're anything like Trump, they probably will. The only real way to limit a president's power over nuclear war is for Congress to pass a law.  That hasn't happened yet, either, but perhaps Gen. Milley's experience will persuade enough members that it's time.

Rod Dreher and Robert E. Lee: The little-known third option

 Dreher offers up a semi-defense of Lee, reflecting on a 1970s-era essay by Wendell Berry: 

As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them.

This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction.

Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circumstance under which I could do that, but it would be extreme. I would like to think that I would have fought against the slave state of the Confederacy, but I think it would have been so very difficult for a Southerner in 1861 to have turned his back on everything and everyone he had ever known to take up arms against them, even if he believed their cause was unjust.

There was a third option, of course: Not to make war at all.

I understand that would have been a difficult choice to make, particularly for Lee, a lifelong military man. I suspect there is no realistic counterfactual that involves him choosing neither to fight against the Union nor to make war on his own family. It's likely he would have been imprisoned or otherwise persecuted -- by one side or the other -- to put his military skills to use. Still, Lee made a choice, and one of the choices on offer was to sit this one out. Instead he lead an army in defense of slavery and for the dissolution of his country. It wasn't a great choice. 

Losing sleep over the pandemic

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 Vox:

When the pandemic hit, rates of insomnia spiked around the world, driven by everything from the stress of living during an international public health crisis to the changes in daily life wrought by lockdowns. “People had additional responsibilities, new challenges, much more uncertainty,” Lauren Hale, a professor of family, population, and preventive medicine at Stony Brook University, told Vox.

And as the delta variant continues to spread around the country, that uncertainty and its effects on sleep may not have abated. Some people have just gotten used to disrupted cycles and 3 am anxiety spirals; it’s how life is now.

I've mentioned this before, but my experience has been totally the opposite. After nearly a decade of sleep deprivation -- to the point that work was nearly impossible, depression gripped me, and I expected to die any day -- I finally started sleeping again not long into the pandemic. Some of this, I think, was due to quarantine-induced diet changes: I stopped eating fried food so much, and I stopped drinking caffeinated coffee because anxiety was producing heart palpitations. Within a few months, I was sleeping better than I had in years, with huge results: Less depression, more energy, more hope. Sleep, I've come to believe, is the most important factor in my well-being. 

Are evangelicalism and Trumpism the same thing?

 Interesting news from Pew:

Contrary to what some may have expected, a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data finds that there has been no large-scale departure from evangelicalism among White Americans. In fact, there is solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.

Additionally, the surveys do not clearly show that White evangelicals who opposed Trump were significantly more likely than Trump supporters to drop the evangelical label. The data also shows that Trump’s electoral performance among White evangelicals was even stronger in 2020 than in 2016, partially due to increased support among White voters who described themselves as evangelicals throughout this period.

I'm tempted to think this isn't sustainable, if only for reasons of tactics. Evangelicals tend to be a bit mission-oriented, believing that they're called to share "the good news" of Jesus Christ. Trumpism, on the other hand, is fairly insular -- more interested in cultivating the base than expanding its appeal. Trump and Christ aren't the same thing, of course, but there's a difference in mindsets -- and if evangelicalism and Trumpism become closer to being the same thing, I suspect it's evangelicalism that will lose its character.

Update:

We got our Child Tax Credit check today...

 ...but neither me nor my wife quit our jobs. 

One more thought about the Woodward book

John Adams said we have a government "of laws and not of men." But reporting on the late Trump era suggests that it's both, actually. When lawful governance was teetering under Trump's assaults, it was a few individuals -- a Mark Milley here, a Dan Quayle(!!!) there, a lone Michigan Republican  voting for the truth and not his party's inclinations  -- who provided the nudges needed to preserve the system, and perhaps even the country. Occasionally (as with Milley) they had to do it in ways that -- on the surface, at least -- seemed to contradict the rule of law, and of civilian control of the military. But what was the alternative?

The real villains of the Woodward book? Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell.

It was clear then -- and clearer now -- that Trump should have been removed from office after Jan. 6. Pence could've led the 25th Amendment option. He didn't. McConnell could have sped up the impeachment process. He slow-walked it. That forced a group of people worried for their nation into apparently extra-legal maneuverings to ensure that Trump didn't destroy everything. When the responsible people aren't responsible, bad choices are the only option. 

Rod Dreher plays dummy, again.

Photo by Nikolett Emmert from Pexels

I've previously expressed my feelings about Rod Dreher in this space, but dammit I can't quit him. So of course I read the latest New Yorker profile of Dreher and his dalliance with Hungary's right-illiberal Orbanistas. 

He mounted his usual defense of Viktor Orban:

Quite quickly, in the course of his dinners and meetings and observational trips on Budapest’s convenient public-transit system, Dreher began to form a dissenting opinion of the political situation in Hungary. “I was there about ten days before I realized that eighty, ninety per cent of the American narrative about the country just isn’t true,” he told me recently. He had heard Hungary described as an authoritarian state, but in Budapest he saw everyone seemed free to speak their mind. Dreher noted that he had appeared at a conference with an opponent of Orbán, who was critical of the Prime Minister. What’s more, Orbán, Dreher came to think, had a keener grasp of the “crisis—political, even civilizational” facing traditionalists than nearly any American conservative. Dreher liked how openly nationalist Orbán was, picking fights with his partners in the European Union when it grew too progressive, and how he had often set aside free-market principles in order to promote conservative social values—offering state subsidies to women to stay home and have more Hungarian children.

Needless to say, however, I wasn't surprised when I got to this section: 

When I asked about Orbán’s campaigns against the Roma—his government refused to pay court-ordered compensation to Roma children who had been confined to segregated schools, and his political party blamed George Soros when pressed about it—Dreher, who does not speak Hungarian, told me he had heard that many Roma supported Orbán, but “I don’t know much, to be honest.”

If you follow Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, you'll probably notice this is a fairly frequent thing he does. Americans don't understand what Hungary's really like! It's so much better than you heard! But when pressed on specific critiques about the regime, Dreher suggests he doesn't really understand what Hungary's really like either. I don't know much, to be honest. 

My conclusion: Dreher wants a strongman to punch his enemies in the mouth, but doesn't want to think too much about what happens when people start bleeding as a result. 

Exercise and mental health

Photo by Vlad Chețan from Pexels

It never ceases to amaze me: I get cranky and depressed, unable to see anything good about the day or my future. All the good things are over in my life. It's just a matter of playing out the string until I die, to be forgotten and legacyless.

And then I go to the gym and move.

I am no paragon of fitness -- overweight and broken. I will never be beautiful again. But I don't exercise to be beautiful, or really even in the hopes of extending my lifespan. I do it to feel a little better about life, right now.

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.

Mom

My mother would have turned 70 years old today. Spending the evening listening to one of her old albums.

Why I'm in favor of anti-vax stigma

AP has a piece today questioning the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" storyline that has emerged amidst the Delta-fueled COVID surge. Some hospitalized people are vaccinated, after all, but the broader concern seems to be that some medical observers worry about stigmatizing the unvaxxed.

“It is true that the unvaccinated are the biggest driver, but we mustn’t forget that the vaccinated are part of it as well, in part because of the delta variant,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “The pandemic clearly involves all people, not just the unvaccinated.”

Branding it “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” could have the unintended consequence of stigmatizing the unvaccinated, he added. “We should not partition them as the exclusive problem,” Topol said.

Instead officials should call out vaccine disinformation, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A sketchy stream of dubious arguments continues to undermine public confidence.

“We can say that the virus has reemerged in the southern United States, primarily among unvaccinated people, but it doesn’t mean we have to blame the unvaccinated,” Hotez said. “The people we have to target are the purveyors of disinformation, and we have to recognize that the unvaccinated themselves are victims of disinformation.”

Well, yes and no.

I'm all for calling out the purveyors of disinformation, but it's probably important to recognize there's an audience out there for the disinformation. People make choices not just based on correct information, but how they feel about things, and one of the factors that shapes those feelings is whether something is broadly understood -- by the culture, by community, by neighbors and friends -- to be good or bad. 

What's more, the medical community understands this and has used it to further public health goals in this country. Have you seen an anti-smoking ad in the last few years? They can be gruesome beyond belief. 

There is information being conveyed here, yes. But some of the information is designed to make smoking seem, frankly, unnattractive. You don't just see this ad and want to protect your health. You want to make sure you don't end up looking or sounding like this poor woman. The point here is to create visceral disgust -- to create a stigma against the act of smoking.

And these efforts, along with increasingly stringent regulation over decades, has worked.

Adult smoking rates dropped from 42% in 1965 to 14% in 2019, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has not released last year's data but the Quitline report cited U.S. Treasury Department data showing cigarette sales increased 1% in 2020 after dropping 4 to 5% each year since 2015.

"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" is admittedly a broad description, but it also seems to capture the heart of the problem facing the United States: 

By late July, a total of about 26 adults per 100,000 vaccinated people had been hospitalized for COVID-19. That’s compared with about 431 hospitalized people for every 100,000 unvaccinated individuals — a rate roughly 17 times as high as for those who were vaccinated. The data come from 13 states, including California, Georgia and Utah.

So I'm fine with continuing to use the label, despite AP's objections. I don't love "stigma" generally. But sometimes it has its uses. 

The New York Times, theology and the death penalty

This NYT podcast featuring David French and Elizabeth Bruenig debating the death penalty is more loaded with theological arguments than just about any supposedly secular thing I've heard in a long time. 

Everybody Hurts

A few years ago, when we were leaving Philadelphia to return to Lawrence, I did something that still hurts today: I gave away almost the entirety of my CD collection, which I'd spent decades building. There was a rational reason for this -- we had very limited room in the "cube" that was going on the moving truck, and had to make a lot of snap decisions about what had to go and what we'd keep. 

I've spent the last couple of years buying albums I'd already bought 15 or 20 years ago, that I've missed.

This week, I got a package in the mail from eBay: REM's "Automatic for the People." I'm listening to it now. It remains beautiful and dirgelike, in the best way. Event the peppier songs, like "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" can't dent the overall effect of the album, which puts me in an almost-meditative state.

The killer track on the album, though, is "Everybody Hurts" -- a universal anthem if ever there was one. The video is killer, too.

Back when we made mixtapes, my roommate put that song on a mix he made for a relative who was grieving -- not to strong a word, I think -- a lost relationship. Too on the nose? I don't know. I don't think so. Everybody does hurt at some point or another, and Michael Stipe and company acknowledge that, but they also don't wallow in it -- the end of the song features and triumphant orchestral swell, a reminder that (often, hopefully) better days are ahead.

But it's ok to sit with the pain a bit, too, consoled by the fact you're not the only one who has ever felt these feelings. 

Common Book: These minds are made for rationalizing

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge:

Think of it this way: 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. We have hundreds of thousands of years of practice at believing whatever will keep us in good standing with our tribe, even if that requires denying, discounting, rationalizing, misperceiving, and ignoring the evidence in front of our nose.

Common Book posts are quotes from whatever I'm reading. Sometimes you'll get lots of them. Sometimes not so many. 

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.