Post-feast mood
The one constant for us at Thanksgiving: butternut squash and leek soup. Anything else I can skip, but there would be violent protests if I didn’t make this.
WSJ: “So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed? … Bitcoin has failed to live up to its original promise of being cheap online cash, but crypto keeps on reinventing itself. It’s so technically satisfying that it must be the solution to something, but quite what remains a mystery.”
costs, continued
Once you face the real human costs of your preferred policies in peace or war, you may then
- Warmly embrace them;
- Accept them with a shrug;
- Work to mitigate them;
- Decide that they’re too high and look for alternative policies.
A combination of the sunk costs fallacy and the fear of shame makes the fourth option very rare indeed. Would that it were more common.
mood
“You have to brace yourself for the bozos.” — Werner Herzog
Now this is what I call a magazine cover.
Kinda weird to hear Julian Lage strumming, but this is a sweet tune.
When Zena Hitz explains the Catherine Project (a series of online and in-person seminars) or when Nathan Beacom describes a revival of the Lyceum movement for adults, the reader is left to wonder whether the liberal arts need to be tied to our universities at all. This is no idle concern — the average annual cost of tuition at a liberal-arts college is $24,000 a year. If one can engage in liberating learning for a small donation to the Catherine Project, doesn’t it make more sense to learn in one’s leisure time rather than bother with an expensive four-year degree? Even if such study is liberatory, is it worth the student debt, especially when its own practitioners agree that it can be pursued just as profitably on the side for a pittance? In Ms. Hitz’s own words, “universities are wonderful, but they are not necessary for human flourishing.”
If liberal learning does not need the university, we might ask whether the university needs liberal learning. One might worry that, in trying to prove that the liberal arts are not elitist, we have only shown that we can uncouple them from universities and be no worse off for it. If liberal learning is for everyone and can be pursued anywhere — in prison, in elementary schools, by people in poverty — why would anyone pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for it? Is it because, as Don Eben argues, a habit of learning and analysis makes students better future white-collar workers? Or, as Rachel Griffis argues, because a liberal-arts education complements professional training, thus becoming a good financial investment? Is the only good argument for liberal learning in universities, ultimately, instrumental?
Jennifer Frey is the dean of an Honors College at a private university; I teach in an Honors College at a private university. You could say that we both have an investment in keeping that flame burning. But I think even we ought to be asking the questions Frey asks here. As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university.
an update on motives
Freddie (like many people, it seems) is critical of the reasons Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cited for her conversion to Christianity. I’m not. My view is that everyone has to start somewhere — she’s very forthright about being a newcomer to all this — and what matters is not where you start but where you end up. One person may seek a bulwark against relativism; another may long for architectural or linguistic or musical beauty; another may crave community. Christian life is a house with many entrances. I became a Christian because I fell head-over-heels for a Christian girl who wouldn’t date me otherwise, so how could I judge anyone else’s reasons for converting? As Rebecca West said, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive”; and God, as I understand things, is not the judge but the transformer of motives.
This reminded the excellent Yair Rosenberg of something — something I knew nothing about. Yair wrote to me to share a passage from Pesachim 50b of the Babylonian Talmud:
On the topic of reward for a mitzva fulfilled without intent, Rava raised a contradiction: It is written: “For Your mercy is great unto the heavens, and Your truth reaches the skies” (Psalms 57:11); and it is written elsewhere: “For Your mercy is great above the heavens, and Your truth reaches the skies” (Psalms 108:5). How so? How can these verses be reconciled? The Gemara explains: Here, where the verse says that God’s mercy is above the heavens, it is referring to a case where one performs a mitzva for its own sake; and here, where the verse says that God’s mercy reaches the heavens, it is referring to a case where one performs a mitzva not for its own sake. Even a mitzva performed with ulterior motives garners reward, as Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: A person should always engage in Torah study and performance of mitzvot, even if he does so not for their own sake, as through the performance of mitzvot not for their own sake, one gains understanding and comes to perform them for their own sake.
Those old rabbis, they knew a thing or two about human nature.
Paul Kingsnorth: “So: out with St George, I say, and in with one of the nation’s original native patrons (in early medieval England there were several at once), the saint whose feast is celebrated today: Edmund the Martyr. Edmund’s story is simple and stark. Wistful too, I think. He didn’t slay a dragon: instead, he slew himself. There is a message for us there, if we can hear it.”
Great to see this tribute to Philip Johnson’s Chapel of St. Basil, a wonderful building. Note that this central quadrangle is a kind of commentary on the Lawn of the University of Virginia, with the domed chapel an answer to Jefferson’s Rotunda.
second thoughts, worse thoughts?
A week ago I explained that I had written and then decided not to publish a post on Israel and Gaza. At least one of my readers thought this was a good decision, and approved my restraint enough to buy me a dragon to reward me for my silence. Well, I may have to give that person a refund, because I’ve decided to post some thoughts after all. We’re a week further into this miserable situation, and there are some things that I think need to be said that I haven’t seen said. (Who knows, though? So much has been written that someone unknown to me may have made my argument better than I have.) In deference to my readers who really don’t want me to write about all this, I’ve not written a post here but have posted it otherwhere. Don’t click the disclosure triangle below if you prefer not to know more.