“This time the old mother has forgotten the old creature’s birthday, which if I am not mistaken falls on October 15.” — Nietzsche in a letter to his mother. My friend and colleague Rob Miner explains why Nietzsche loved birthdays.
the beginning of politics
Leah Libresco Sargeant on an “illiberalism of the weak”:
To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or our society to serve a totally independent, autonomous person [which is the person imagined by liberalism] who never has and never will exist. Repeating that lie will leave us bereft: first, of sympathy from our friends when our physical weakness breaks the implicit promise that no one can keep, and second, of hope, when our moral weakness should lead us, like the prodigal, to rush back into the arms of the Father who remains faithful. Our present politics can only be challenged by an illiberalism that cherishes the weak and centers its policies on their needs and dignity.
This is a strong and vital word. But genuinely to hear it we will have to dethrone the two idols that almost everyone with a political opinion worships: My People and Winning. The goal of almost every political activist and pundit is the same: My people must win, and those who are not my people must lose. Do not be deceived by talk of the “common good,” because the often quite explicit message of the common-good conservatives is: My people are the ones who know what the common good is, and that common good can only be achieved if my people win. A politics of weakness and dependence, a politics of bearing one another’s burdens, can only begin when those two idols are slain.
UPDATE: Rowan Williams, from a review of God: An Anatomy, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou:
Stavrakopoulou … takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.
In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.
If you use your economics, then no matter how complex the supply-chain problems might appear, they can be solved using the price system. The price system may or may not be able to call forth more supply, but it certainly can ration demand, and it can do so more efficiently than is being done at present. Everywhere the supply chain is “broken,” higher prices can ensure that scarce goods are allocated to the highest-priority uses.
Wherever you see buyers unable to find goods, you should ask why the rationing takes place by availability rather than by price. If the market were operating smoothly, the shelves would be fully stocked, but prices would be higher.
My hypothesis for why we observe price stickiness is that businesses fear consumer backlash. When the price is high, the consumer blames the business. If instead the product is not in the store, the consumer blames “the supply chain.” In fact, it should be the other way around—the business should be blamed for not raising prices to prevent a shortage, and the higher prices should in turn be blamed on higher costs in the supply chain.
There’s a lot of talk around here about Baylor’s being “an unambiguously Christian university.” I wonder how this fits in.
a brief note on narrative
Recently I've come across a number of pieces dismissing or critiquing the idea of “narrative” – the idea being that when you call something a narrative you're turning it into a subjective account that isn't subject to empirical verification, or external assessment of any kind. I suppose this critique arises from the increasingly common use over the past decade of phrases like “my truth” and “my story.”
But maybe it's worth noting that for a long time the primary meaning of the word “narrative” was “faithful account” – that is, to call something a narrative is to proclaim that it tells the truth about something that happened. In the early modern period the word was primarily used in legal contexts; it meant what we might now call “the facts of the case.”
That's why Frederick Douglas's autobiography is not called an autobiography but rather a narrative: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass’s point in so titling his autobiography wasn’t “This is my truth” but rather “This is what actually happened, so help me God.” Fiction writers who wanted to add an aura of verisimilitude to their stories would sometimes appropriate this usage, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. But this only worked because people generally understood the word “narrative” to mean “true account.”
Am I a different person when I travel? Yes. A stressed and unhappy person.
Christians have long credited the pagan poet Virgil, in his fourth eclogue, with prophesying Christ. In Chesterton’s day that view was becoming unfashionable, but he defended the interpretation. “Virgil… stand[s] for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice.” But whereas the case that Virgil anticipated Christ is disputable, and still looked upon with skepticism, the case that North American Indians anticipated Christianity is on much firmer ground. Nicholas Black Elk, whose Lakota wisdom is this continent’s analogue to Platonism, did not find that wisdom to be sufficient. He famously converted to Catholicism, brought hundreds to the same faith in his role as Catechist, and is up for sainthood. But that is only the most famous example. Chief Joseph River Wind claims that the entire Sundance ritual is itself a prophecy of the crucifixion, which — it turns out — is a rather common observation in Indigenous Christian communities. Indigenous encounters with Christ during the ecstatic ritual of the Ghost Dance, well documented in Louis Warren’s God’s Red Son, were common enough to frustrate white Christian missionaries who wanted natives to come to faith on their own terms.
A wonderful essay on Chesterton, cave art, America and Americans, the varieties of paganism, and … well, all the stuff you see in the remarkable paragraph just quoted.
a Black cop's son
It turns out that one of the most essential cultural commentators in America today is a 74-year-old retired basketball player. I highly recommend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack newsletter, the most recent edition of which contains an excerpt from a long essay that he has published as a Kindle e-book. The excerpt is fine in itself, but the full essay is absolutely fascinating. Here’s the heart of the story:
For fifty years I’ve been both defending and criticizing the police. I’ve criticized them when their actions reflected the violent systemic racism that resulted in the deaths of unarmed minorities. I’ve defended them when their good works were overlooked. I especially didn’t want all cops lumped together as a monolithic hive-mind, the way so many have done with marginalized people in this country. They, too, have a voice that needs to be heard. This precarious tightrope act has resulted in venomous backlash from both sides. I’ve been accused of being both a Black anti-cop agitator and an apologist for racist police violence. My ability to see both sides isn’t the result of trying to please both sides; my perspective is the result of having been raised by a Black police officer in New York City during the most tumultuous civil rights upheaval the country has ever been through and of the effect both those influences had on me throughout my life.
Anyone with even the mildest interest in race in America ought to read Kareem’s essay. It’s that good. Yes, it also has some inaccurate statements about the Capitol riot of January 6, errors that should have been discovered and excised in the editing process. And some of his political claims are debatable — as if any political claims aren’t. But don’t let those things distract you from the complex and necessary message of the story as a whole.
One insignificant point that delighted me: the apartment that Kareem lived in when he was growing up had a window that overlooked The Cloisters.
Nobody today could write Cassirer’s Essay on Man, just as nobody could write Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. But when the old idea collapsed something valuable may have been lost. Humanism may be an ideology, but it is also an ideal that the ideology betrayed, and dismissing the one with the other has become a bad reflex among the cynics and cognoscenti who regard all ideals with withering suspicion. While there is much in Cassirer’s book that we might now dispute, it was written at a time when fidelity to humanism appeared not naive but necessary. Though his erudition was distinctively European his political commitments were cosmopolitan in the best sense, and he continued to uphold those commitments even when much of the world fell into darkness. It is still in darkness. But even if we now speak the word with embarrassment, humanism may be the only alternative to inhumanity.
— Peter E. Gordon, from his Introduction to a new edition of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man. It occurs to me that the tag at the bottom of this post provides a good introduction to a topic I desperately want to write more fully about but can’t see the chance to. (Not anytime in the next 75 years or so, probably.)
