Alan Jacobs

Look, I don’t expect the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the stupidity and unseriousness of our politics is exhausting. It makes me think in more more uncharitable moments that if you want to serve in Congress, something must be wrong with you.

Those of us who vote for third parties do so primarily because we feel that the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin, beholden to special interests and lobbyists, offering no real change. We feel they are groups who do not represent our own personal, moral, political, ethical views and concerns. We feel that voting for them would be a wasted vote. And so, we vote Libertarian, Socialist, Green, Constitutional, and all the other viable third-party choices that we are given.

And every year, we are mocked and derided for participating in our patriotic duty, told that we are wasting our vote by people who we feel just wasted their vote.

David Sessions has patiently answered my questions, so let me offer a few replies in turn.

First, I don’t think that “writing on the internet, arguing on the internet” is one thing, any more than writing per se and arguing per se are one thing. There are many ways to write and argue, for many different audiences, and we don’t all have to play the same “game.” More on this later.

Second, David writes, “What I’m trying to demonstrate here is that substantive argument can be combined with an appropriate degree of meanness when the target legitimates it.” I very much agree with that as a general principle, but I don’t think he lives up to it in his original post — in fact, I think he explicitly disavows it. He says that it’s “obvious” what Walsh is, and “To try to demonstrate that Matt Walsh is a douchebag would be pointless, as well as an insult to anyone who sacrifices their sanity and financial well-being to master difficult knowledge, like how to write.” So instead David calls him a douchebag, over and over again. Relatedly …

In that original post, David writes,

What Walsh shares with mainstream hot-takers and evangelical emotibloggers alike is that he writes largely without the intention of trying to stake a position, reject or argue with any position, or persuade any reader. His position is presumed from the start, and he adds nothing beyond scare-quoting and free-association. This feminism post, for example, seems to be an extended attempt to arrive at the most exalted metaphorical epithet to bestow upon that obviously Satanic movement. The whole “analysis,” which takes off from a viral video of little girls saying the F-word, depends on you already thinking it is an indication of deep moral corruption that a society could produce, much less laugh at, a video of little girls saying the F-word. (We all know kids saying the F-word, with or without political intent, is hilarious.)

It was this part of the post that made think that this might be intentional self-parody, because in the same paragraph that he complains about Walsh simply assuming the rightness of his position, he writes, “We all know kids saying the F-word, with or without political intent, is hilarious.” (“We all know.”) And in the same paragraph that he complains about Walsh using scare-quotes in place of argument, he scare-quotes “analysis.”

I don’t know whether Sessions is right about Walsh or not, and as I explained in my previous post I don’t intend to find out, but it seems to me quite clear that he is doing pretty much exactly what he accuses Walsh of doing. Rather than arguing, he says that his target is not worthy of an actual argument, and chooses instead to score easy points for an audience that he confidently presumes already agrees with him. (“We all know.”)

So insofar as David’s original post was an argument about a lamentable rhetorical style — and I took that to be his main point, with Walsh as an exemplar of it rather than a unique figure — I think it’s really unfortunate how fully he participates in that very style. If he really does care about having reasoned and charitable and substantive debate online, shouldn’t he take particular care to play a different game than Matt Walsh is playing?

Walsh’s ignorance and douchebaggery may be in a class by themselves, but his prominence is the product of forces that implicate the entire internet, the entire media, and our entire political discourse. What does it mean for the possibility of reasonable and informed debate when people like this have the ideal formula for winning the game we all, like it or not, are playing?

[gallery] The International Space Station at night is kinda scary. Via c|net.

Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | William Langewiesche

Edwards as a Christian theologian begins with belief in a creator, whose role in existence and experience no doubt elaborated itself in his understanding as he pondered the imponderable problem he had posed to himself. The intuition is sound in any case. It places humankind in any moment on the farthest edge of existence, where the utter mystery of emergent being makes a mystery of every present moment even as it slides into the mysterious past. This by itself elevates experience above the plodding positivisms that lock us in chains of causality, conceptions of reality that are at best far too simple to begin to describe a human place in the universe. Edwards’s metaphysics does not give us a spatial locus, as the old cosmology is said to have done, but instead proposes an ontology that answers to consciousness and perception and feels akin to thought. I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards’s vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty, for a universe that is orderly without being mechanical, that is open to and participates in possibility, indeterminacy, and even providence. It taught me to think in terms that finally did some justice to the complexity of things.

It is not given to us to be as close to those we love as God is. We are always a little separate from one another, always something of a mystery. That is the wonder of loving someone else – that you never know them through and through. Only God knows each of us in the blood and the bone and the heartbeat, in the millions of passing thoughts which make up each individual life, the great multitude of actions small and large – brushing teeth, or running a marathon, or bearing a child – which become someone’s personal history. We are allowed to see some of them, and we celebrate what we know and what we never quite understood, both together, when we give thanks for the people we love and now see no longer….

But in God’s sight every moment and every thought of every person’s life is so soaked through with the light of God’s own seeing that it simply is. Nothing is lost, or hidden, or forgotten. Where God is, there is no room for the darkness of death, because in him is no darkness at all. In God the dead live; in the bed of the grave the light of life springs upwards, though we cannot yet see it. The great cloud of witnesses are shot through with light perpetual.

Our seeing is only partial. Saint Paul said that, ‘we see in part’, and he compared to it a reflection in a dark room: ‘through a glass, darkly’. ‘But,’ he says, ‘one day I shall see face to face: I shall know, even as I shall be fully known.’ Those we name today know more than we do now, and see further than we can; but we are joined with them through love, which lights up the darkness like a candle flame and springs out of bare ground like new shoots in spring. So tonight we express our love through candle flames and in the sprigs of rosemary, the herb of memory, and we name those we love and cannot see, trusting that in God’s sight their lives and selves are full of unimaginable and everlasting light, and that one day, by the grace of God, we shall be like them.

— Sermon for All Souls’ Day, by Jessica Martin. My beloved father-in-law was buried on All Souls’ Day, and in light of that I can’t tell you how much these words mean to me.

Contraception, sleeping around, co-habitation, and gay sex are done in private. By and large, over the last few decades the Church in the West has adopted a don’t ask/don’t tell policy. Marriage is different. It is by definition a public institution. You can protest that recognizing gay marriage does not mean approval, but actions have symbolic meaning whether we want them to or not.

I’m sure Pius XII would have denied that signing a Concordat with Hitler’s Germany meant he approved of Nazism. But it conferred legitimacy and dramatically undercut any basis within the Church for resistance. The same goes for the concordat many Catholic institutions are signing with gay marriage. It confers legitimacy on the sexual revolution and undercuts resistance.

I can understand why Pius XII sought the Concordat with Hitler. He hoped to secure a stable basis for the Church’s ministry in Germany. I can also understand why many Catholics (including, perhaps, Pope Francis) want to make their peace with the sexual revolution, putting “divisive” culture-war issues behind them so that they can go on with the work of the Gospel and so forth. Moreover, Hitler in 1933 didn’t look so bad—and respectable gay couples don’t seem a threat to marriage or anything else.

But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American, 2) covered up torture, 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations, 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes, 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so) 6) let high-ranking national security officials break the law with impunity, and 7) persecuted whistleblowers–confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in ten Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.