Alan Jacobs

Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to deny the value of absolute sovereignty or the lone nation-state. Tragically, the Reformation, Roundhead, nonconformist, puritan, whig, capitalist, liberal version of Britishness last night triumphed over our deep ancient character which is Catholic or Anglican, Cavalier, Jacobite, High Tory or Socialist. The spirit of both Burke and Cobbett has been denied by the small-minded, bitter, puritanical, greedy and Unitarian element in our modern legacy. Unfortunately it has duped the working classes, once again to their further ruination.

— John Milbank. Aside from its rather massive condescension — We of the cultural elite know what's best for those poor duped working-class folk who simply can't be trusted to act in their own self-interest — this comment perfectly embodies what we might call Zombie Hegelianism. The genuine and full-blooded belief in the irresistible forward march of the Weltgeist has long-since died, but here's its reanimated corpse: a vague notion that there's some correspondence between the current European project and the transnational, transcultural Body of Christ. But if we're going to immanentize the eschaton can't we ask for something more robust than a bloodless bureaucracy?

Better still, perhaps we could think of the European political order as a set of practical arrangements for improving the common weal and evaluate them in that pragmatic spirit, rather than as spiritual prostheses, extensions of the Church of Jesus Christ.

As a conservative-liberal-socialist, I don’t fit onto any political maps that I know of, and I am accustomed to feeling slightly out of place — more, out of focus — in any given policy debate. But despite the sizable liberal element in my own personal political constitution, in times of serious conflict — today’s Brexit contretemps, for instance — I am always temperamentally alienated from liberalism. For what distinguishes many (most?) liberals from both conservatives and socialists, as today’s social media torpedoes reveal, is genuine incomprehension that any sane and decent person could disagree with them. By contrast, conservatives and socialists, accustomed as they are to being distinctly out of the norm and to having their views go largely unrepresented in mainstream media, expect and are prepared to deal with disagreement.

So when liberals lose contests, they have a marked tendency to attribute disagreement to malice or stupidity or, when they’re being kind, naked emotionalism — though they themselves can get altogether overwrought in their insistence that the liberal position simply is the rational one. As a result, when they don’t win they sound, to put it bluntly, like whiny babies. And this is why, despite the significant proportion of my political views that is genuinely liberal, I am less at home among liberals than among any other political group. Once their howls of outrage get wound up — and there is no outrage like that of a thwarted cultural elite — I just want to back quietly out of the room, close the door behind me, and get as far away as I can.

Oh, sure, UK : EU :: Texas : USA. I mean, if Texas had been an independent nation for a thousand years before joining a brand-new United States twenty years ago, retaining its own national sovereignty, its own military, and its own currency. Those trivial differences aside, great analogy.

A view from the English channel, looking towards England — as seen in the fevered imagination of Felix Salmon. "That world—the world of hope, the world of ever-closer union among countries which for centuries would kill each other by the million—came to a shattering end on Thursday." Good grief. Listening to Salmon's shrieking, you'd never know that the EU is less than a quarter-century old, and is the product of post-World-War-II cooperation, not the cause of it. Brexit may have been a mistake, but apocalyptic rhetoric like this is just ridiculous.

One: I only wish this had happened when I was in London last week: those snooty waiters at those posh restaurants would have fallen at my feet when I waved American currency before them.

Two: Chris Hayes gives us the tweet of the century (in more ways than one):

I don't want a future in which politics is primarily a battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 24, 2016

 

Three: Since Plato’s Republic, rational political planners have lamented and sneered at and railed against humans’ tendency to have strong local, familial, and communal ties, and weak ties to larger and more abstract entities. But the planners have never taken those preferences seriously, or tried seriously to persuade those who don’t already share their understanding of what counts as rational. They have always blamed the rubes and rednecks for their lack of sophistication, and that will continue in this moment. The one certainty is that no one in Brussels will say: Man, we really screwed this up.

Four: Europe now consists of Germany and a set of its client states.

Five: The functional language of the EU is a bizarre variant of English sometimes called Brussels English. With Brexit, will English gradually be deprecated within the corridors of the EU headquarters? Seems unlikely, but that would be a curious development. Perhaps Esperanto’s day has come at last.

Six: Love means never having to say you’re sorry:

A photo posted by Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) on Jun 15, 2016 at 5:13am PDT

Seven: Watch this (preferably with the bombastic music turned low) and remember that Europe is more than the EU — and that some things of beauty will remain even when the EU has long since passed away:

Byzantine - BigFly from BigFly.fr on Vimeo.

“Imagination” became a word to conjure with in the Romantic era, thanks largely to Coleridge, with some help from Shelley, but it’s interesting to note that in the early modern period it’s usually, if not invariably, pejorative: e.g. Tyndale has Paul denouncing people who are “full of vanities in their imaginations” (Romans 1) and saying “we overthrow imaginations” (2 Corinthians 10). It’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for years, because I have an inchoate theory about how imagination is a dangerous thing in an enchanted world but a necessary thing in a disenchanted one.

In any case, we need some kind of language to describe the mental investment of the listener or reader in generating a lively sense of what he or she is encountering artistically – the sort of constructive ability of the receiving mind to capture which Coleridge coins the adjective “esemplastic.” I wonder if the language used in cultivating The Art of Memory (the title of Frances Yates’s great book) in the early modern period, which was so relentlessly visual, would be helpful to you…

Yesterday I woke up in Rome at 6:30am, had a quick breakfast at the absolutely delightful hotel my friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey had recommended to me, and then:

• walked to the Circo Massimo metro stop
• took the metro to Termini (Rome’s chief train station)
• took the Leonardo Express to Fiumicino Airport
• walked from the train into Terminal 3
• took a shuttle bus to Terminal 5
• got into a long queue to be asked questions about my visit by a security agent
• was funneled into another long queue with people who were checking bags, even though I already had my boarding pass and wasn’t checking a bag
• got into another long queue to have bags and body scanned
• got into a fourth queue to have my passport stamped
• was funneled into as fifth queue to get on another shuttle bus to take me back to Terminal 3, where I was finally dropped off near my gate
• took a ten-hour flight (complete with screaming baby) to Charlotte
• got off the plane, went through customs
• got back into the TSA security line
• walked to my gate
• took a two-hour flight to Dallas
• waited for four hours for my two-hour-delayed flight to Waco (spending some of that listening to an American Airlines employee be loudly rude to an old man in a wheelchair who had missed the last flight of the day to his destination, Madison WI)
• flew home, arriving at 11pm Texas time, which is to say, nearly 24 hours after I woke up.

This is simply insane. There is no way for the airlines and our security-theater system to make a voyage like that pleasant, and yes, Louis C.K., I heard you, but everyone seems to have gone out of their way to make it as complicated, confusing, frustrating, and generally unpleasant as possible. My visit to Rome was wonderful, if exhausting, but the memory of yesterday is going to have to fade considerably before I will be able even to contemplate another overseas trip.

Evangelical leaders: If you back Trump, for the rest of your days, you will be forced to live with having had a hand in fracturing our nation on the basis of race, discarding the sanctity of marriage, and scorning honesty itself — all for the chance, the remote chance, that Trump will make one or two decent Supreme Court picks. You will be selling your integrity for the most meager of returns.

Otherwise, you can fight all the way to Cleveland, and beyond if a strong independent candidate emerges. If the choice does come down to Trump or Hillary Clinton, you can instead reserve your vote only for those down-ballot candidates with the integrity to resist corruption from either presidential nominee. Faced with the choice between further debasing our politics and refusing to do so, you’ll emerge with your integrity intact.

Christians have had to take tougher stands in darker times before. They do so in other nations today. This decision, by contrast, should be easy. Trump is not worth your consideration or even one moment of your time. Let others bend the knee.

— David French

There is a unity which we must seek, and a unity we cannot allow. The capitulation of the Religious Right is now complete. It is a tragically comic ending to a movement that has done far, far more harm than good.

— Matthew Lee Anderson, speaking the plain truth.

“This is a medium-sized temple. But this is a LARGE temple.”

“And then he fell in love with a boy. Well … the homosexual laws … "

“Some of the emperors were very bad indeed.”

“This is marble intaglio. Do you follow me?” [N.B. Pretty sure there’s no such thing as marble intaglio.]

“There are several triumphant arches here in the Forum.”

“I’ll just be back at the apartment if you need me.”