I have not been on a fascinating journey of self-discovery recently, and I would not like to share it with you. Thanks be to God, we have far better things to talk about.
Some common reasons they gave for not buying e-textbooks were that screens make their eyes tired, working on a computer makes them prone to distraction, and it’s easier to mark up a printed page than a digital one.
I also know that Messiah is among my favourite works to perform each year. How could this be? Why doesn’t this extreme familiarity (I have memorized the entire thing note for note) breed contempt?The academic answer is that Messiah is Handel at his most brilliant, a well-paced blend of aria and chorus that perfectly matches the arc of the Christian story, a liturgical calendar condensed into three hours.
But the real reason I and other singers love Messiah because we truly know it like no other work. Since it has become an annual Christmas tradition, most choristers have sung it in every venue, in every iteration, with every instrumentation and in every tempo, no matter how deranged or pseudo-experimental. And in that time they have come to know the strange miracle of Messiah: after years of the good and the bad and the ugly, there is always something new, something breathtaking, to be rediscovered in Handel’s writing and Charles Jennens’s libretto.
Getting a bad review is no longer an elite experience. Writers and non-writers, mandarins and proles, we’ve all been trolled, oafed, flambéed in some thread somewhere, at the bottom of some page. Scroll down, scroll down, take that Orphic trip into the underworld of the comments section, and there they are — the people who really object to you. Their indignation, their vituperation, is astonishing. It seems to predate you somehow, as if they have known and despised you in several former existences. You read their words and your body twitches with malign electricity. You must get out of this place immediately, run toward the light. Let the dead bury their dead. And don’t look back — because if you do, like Orpheus, you’ll lose what you love the most.
And it’s not just what we write or make that’s under scrutiny — it’s our whole lives. Over the last couple of weeks, I have read, with increasing dismay, a series of articles and blog posts in which evangelical Christians take it upon themselves to judge the life of a young woman who works for my former employer, Wheaton College, solely because she describes herself as a gay Christian. Some of them, with gracious condescension, deem adequate her decision to remain celibate; but they don’t like her self-description and inform her that she is foreclosing the possibility of being changed by God.
This young woman didn’t ask for any publicity, didn’t present herself as a role model, didn’t seek the approval of strangers. And yet her fellow Christians don’t hesitate a moment before reviewing her life as though it were this week’s new movie. We’re all fodder for other people’s “journalism” and blog posts. All that crap about motes and beams is so first-century.
For Whitefield, clearly, one can be aware of, and even repent of, particular sins without having a clear understanding of one’s spiritual and moral condition, and therefore without recognizing the One Path to salvation. That I commit this or that sin is not my problem; what afflicts me, rather, is this inborn, as it were “natural,” “perverseness of the heart” that sets my own will at “enmity” with the will of God. As he would put it, even more bluntly, in another sermon, “If you have never felt the weight of original sin, do not call yourselves Christians. I am verily persuaded original sin is the greatest burden of a true convert; this ever grieves the regenerate soul, the sanctified soul.”It was Whitefield’s experience — and this, I think, should seem reasonable even to those who share none of his theological beliefs — that while this message was consistently offensive to people who held some status in the world (whether the Duchess of Buckingham or Mr. Benjamin Franklin) it could be a message of great comfort to the insulted, the degraded, and the poor. Not all of them, of course: Whitefield was often mocked and heckled by at least a portion of his crowds, and in his journal makes the inadvertently slightly comical comment that he considered it an honor to be pelted with rotten fruit and “pieces of dead cats” for the sake of the Gospel. (The more dignified and scholarly John Wesley did not like the idea of outdoor evangelism precisely because he preferred not to be subjected to such possibilities, but eventually Whitefield talked him into it and he had some success.) But Whitefield also records in his journal a moving account of his experience preaching to coal miners near Bristol in 1739. The preaching did not go well at first — very likely there were some dead cats at hand — but gradually more and more of the miners came to hear his messages. “Having no righteousness of their own to renounce, they were glad to hear or a Jesus who was a friend to publicans, and came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The first discovery of their being affected, was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully ran down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits.”
Having no righteousness of their own to renounce — this is the heart of the matter, and a thought deeply consistent with the Catholic Rosenstock-Huessy’s celebration of the feast of All Souls’ as the “universal democracy” of sinners under judgment. These coal miners, who knew that they were not thought worthy of education, or the vote, or perhaps even admission to the local Anglican church, heard from Whitefield that their condition was truly dire — but no more dire than his own, or that of the local Lord, or the owners of the coal pits. One of the great hymns of later (nineteenth-century) evangelicalism is Charlotte Elliott’s “Just As I Am” —
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come— and this was the word of comfort that Whitefield brought to the miners: that God loves them just as they are, and asks for nothing more than their repentant hearts, which is what he asks of everyone, even the Duchess of Buckingham. Really, it’s no wonder they wept.
On the 300th birthday of George Whitefield, an excerpt from my book Original Sin: A Cultural History.
I mention the Duchess of Buckingham here because of her response to an aristocratic friend who had shared with her the message of the “new evangelical preachers”: “It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”
the future of ambition
I’m not sure this essay by Michael Hanlon on the lack of technical and scientific progress over the past 40 years adds much to other recent speculations on the same theme: Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation, talks by Neal Stephenson on our lack of visionary imagination, and so on.
But it’s an indication at least of a growing awareness that, despite the determined efforts of the advertising world to suggest that everything is getting better all the time, our society is stuck in something of a technological rut, especially with regard to travel and, more important, medical care. Flying is a more frustrating experience than it has ever been and is only getting worse; only Google and Elon Musk are even trying to innovate in automobiling; and, as Hanlon points out, a person getting cancer today will receive treatment not fundamentally different than he or she would have received in 1970, and doesn’t stand a much greater chance of beating the disease.
So why aren’t we doing better? Hanlon offers a few fairly vague suggestions, as does Cowen, but this is an inquiry in its early stages. Let me just offer my two cents — precisely two.
Cent number one: Litigiousness. Every technological development in every field, but especially in health care, is hamstrung by the need to perform due diligence, and then beyond-due diligence, and then absurdly-over-the-top diligence, before putting a product on the market lest the developing company be sued by someone unhappy with their results. How many times have you read about some exciting new cancer treatment — and then never hear about it again, as it disappears into the endless Purgatory of tiny clinical trials that dying people beg (usually unsuccessfully) to be allowed to participate in?
Cent number two: Self-soothing by Device. I suspect that few will think that addition to distractive devices could even possibly be related to a cultural lack of ambition, but I genuinely think it’s significant. Truly difficult scientific and technological challenges are almost always surmounted by obsessive people — people who are grabbed by a question that won’t let them go. Such an experience is not comfortable, not pleasant; but it is essential to the perseverance without which no Big Question is ever answered. To judge by the autobiographical accounts of scientific and technological geniuses, there is a real sense in which those Questions force themselves on the people who stand a chance of answering them. But if it is always trivially easy to set the question aside — thanks to a device that you carry with you everywhere you go — can the Question make itself sufficiently present to you that answering is becomes something essential to your well-being? I doubt it.
[gallery] See all the metrics. Some interesting things about this one: the relative illiteracy of New Yorkers; the extremity of the top and bottom cities; the significant difference in my new home state of Texas between Houstonians and Dallasites.
It is a very religious world, far more religious than it was 50 years ago….Furthermore, in every nook and cranny left by organized faiths, all manner of unconventional spiritual and mystical practices are booming. There are more occult healers than medical doctors in Russia, 38 percent of the French believe in astrology, 35 percent of the Swiss agree that “some fortune tellers really can foresee the future,” and nearly everyone in Japan is careful to have their new car blessed by a Shinto priest.
In the meantime, the problem seems to grow only more urgent. There’s a ton of ugly vitriol being poured into social media. We need to keep the Internet free and open, but we also need it to be a civilized, hospitable place where all people can be comfortable and safe. Creative solutions are vital.
Near the end of “Labor’s Love Lost,” his illuminating new book on the decline of the working-class family, the Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin cites research suggesting that many working-class men, far from being trapped in an antique paradigm of “restricted emotional language,” have actually thrown themselves into therapeutic, “spiritual but not religious” questing, substituting Oprah-esque self-help for more traditional forms of self-conceiving and belonging.Cherlin, working from progressive premises, sees this as potentially good news: a sign that these men are getting over Gary Cooper and preparing to embrace the more egalitarian and emotionally open patterns of the upper class.
But given that this shift has coincided with lost ground for blue-collar men, another interpretation seems possible. We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.