Daniel A. Cox:

One of the things that we were doing in all the groups that we talked to, we were talking to young single men and young single women, and we would try to get a sense of what their formative experiences were like. What were your parents telling you? … What did your parents emphasize when you were growing up? Did you hear about the importance of getting college education and the importance of being financially stable? A lot of what we heard from folks was like, yeah, their parents were emphasizing this. We had asked for a show of hands, whether it was the men’s groups or women’s groups, everyone was saying, yes, my parents were talking to me about this.

We’re like, okay, well, what about marriage? How many of you are hearing your parents talk about the importance of finding a long-term partner and getting married? And not one person raised their hand in any of these focus groups that their parents talked about this. We asked about the importance of parenthood. How many of your parents were stressing that this really matters, this is important? And again, no one raised their hands.

A couple of the women said that their grandparents had mentioned this, but their parents had not. And in a national representative survey, we took the same question and we got basically the same results: that among this generation, Generation Z, they’re far less likely to have heard about the importance and what it means to live a good life includes being a parent or getting married. It was much more about individual accomplishments and professional achievements, academic achievements. That is what folks are learning.

Frederick Buechner, in a letter to his newborn grandson to be opened on his 21st birthday:

Even if my grandfathers had been less shadowy and I had been less timid, I wonder if I would ever have been able to learn from them what I would give so much to know now about who they were, both for its own sake and also for the sake of learning something more about who I am myself. Even if I were to stretch this letter out, God forbid, to a thousand pages, would I ever be able to convey my full story to you? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that our stories in their fullness will always be hidden from each other and that all those whiskered old men and bonneted old women looking out at us from their photographs in the family album will always remain mysteries to us even if, like me, they happen to have written their memoirs. And yet I believe that all is not lost. Maybe we can never know each other’s stories in their fullness, but I believe we can know them in their depth for the reason that in their depth we all have the same story.

Whether we’re rich or poor, male or female, a nineteenth-century Swiss jeweler like Isaac Golay in his oversized frock coat, or a twentieth-century American clergyman like me with a penchant for writing books, or a young squirt celebrating his twenty-first birthday in the twenty-first century like you, our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they hadn’t, she said–but simply because the supermarket price had gone up. To paraphrase from memory, “It’s not right that I should not get paid just as much for my eggs, since they are a superior product.”

Nice timing from my friend Jeremy in his post on “luxury localism.” The first thing it reminded me of was the way that luxury localism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (I owe the discovery of Hine to Jeremy as well.) 

But it’s great timing because I was just chatting about this over the weekend. Post furniture moving on Saturday, I was shooting the shit with a couple guys and complaining about lamenting the seldom articulated difference between a free market that sets appropriate prices (what we think the market does) and one that basically asks “What’s the highest price I can get away with?” (what the market actually does).*

“Unconstrained maximization” to use a phrase from MacIntyre that I was just reading today, which is another reason it’s great timing. In fact MacIntyre, speaking of the unnecessary and harmful dichotomy between relationships of mutual advantage and relationships of sympathetic affection, gives a great example of this:

Affective and sympathetic ties are always more than a matter of affection and sympathy. And in a similar way relationships of rational exchange, governed by norms to which it is to the advantage of each participant to adhere, are also embedded in and sustained by relationships governed by norms of uncalculated and unpredicted giving and receiving. So it is with those institutionalized relationships that make possible the exchanges of markets.

It is indeed true that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations I, ii). And just as butcher, brewer, and baker generally act with regard to their own interest, so too do their customers. But if, on entering the butcher’s shop as an habitual customer I find him collapsing from a heart attack, and I merely remark ‘Ah! Not in a position to sell me my meat to-day, I see,’ and proceed immediately to his competitor’s store to complete my purchase, I will have obviously and grossly damaged my whole relationship to him, including my economic relationship, although I will have done nothing contrary to the norms of the market. Less obviously and less grossly, even if I respond to his condition only by satisfying those minimum requirements that will enable me to rebut quasilegal accusations of irresponsibility—I call an ambulance and the moment the medical technicians arrive I leave—I will still have undermined my relationship to him and his, by my avoidance of my larger responsibility. Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they so often in fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties.

Norms of giving and receiving are then to some large degree presupposed both by our affective ties and by our market relationships. Detach them from this background presupposition in social practice and each becomes a source of vice…

Going back to that Ian Marcus Corbin interview, there was a moment when he was describing something similar, and similarly hilariously tragic. “If you had a tribe where a small number of the people in the tribe were getting phenomenally personally wealthy by doing harm to the other people in the tribe,” Corbin say, “you would go whack those guys over the head with a club.”

Earlier in the interview he says

And I think it leads to the kind of baffling levels of hoarding and indifference that we see in a society like America right now.

Black Elk, who I mentioned before, he visited New York City in the late 19th century and he wass like, What is this? This is insane. He’s like, You have people who have more than they could ever use in their whole lives and other people who are starving, and they’re just near each other, and they’re not giving it to the people who need it. This is bananas. And you have other European observers being like, Whoa, this is so weird. Money means way too much. What’s going on?

What’s goin on is that we’ve isolated a market relationship, called it one of “mutual advantage,” and asked it the one, simple question: What is the most I/we/it can get away with? And we call the answer “fair market value.” And if asked to think further, about justice or righteousness or virtue, we shrug. What business is that of the Free Market’s? What are you, a Marxist?

____

*Better: What’s the most I can get away with?, or, What’s the least I can get away with? depending on circumstances. What it doesn’t ask is, What is the right thing to do? What price and what practice is best for this or that community? Amazon is the American dream in both directions. The seller owner gets to make billions; the participants of mutual exchange consumers get to spend less and be more lazy relax more, all while getting the privilege of being good happy little consumers, too. Win, win, win, win. But the love of money, by any other name, is still the root of all evil. 

Also, there’s a question that was raised about whether the seller of eggs in Jeremy’s post is even managing to make a profit at all. I can’t answer that. But I think Jeremy’s post stands regardless and I think he rightly laments what he observed. I can have a solid appreciation for the role of money or the market and still remember that money is, to use another, older MacIntyrean phrase, the ultimate “‘good’ external to any practice.” The perpetual struggle to make eggs answer to money-market forces may just be a great reminder of that incompatibility that we swim in so regularly. A lot of our eggs come from a neighbor down the street — as a gift. A lot of my family’s eggs come from my grandmother or my sister — as a gift. Eggs being given and received as a gift of shared neighborliness — that is a good internal to a practice, and it has no incompatibility to speak of. 

Meanwhile, the World Petroleum Congress—a nearly century-old gathering of energy ministers and oil executives that organizers expected to draw more than 25,000 people—opened in Riyadh on Sunday. Organizers had reassured investors that the kingdom’s major conferences would go ahead as planned, but the chief executives of ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, and BP withdrew. The kingdom, which has poured money from its nearly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund into an effort to become a global business hub, is also slated to host its flagship investment conference, the 10th annual Future Investment Initiative, on October 26-29, and in January, Saudi Arabia will welcome the AFC Asian Cup, hoping to draw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans.

As usual, Jeffrey Foucault brings some of the best that words can do in his latest newsletter:

You can make Tuscan Chops without fresh sage leaves but you should not. As a river without fish is only water running downhill, the Chops without fresh sage are only pork chops fried with garlic.

But to walk out in the first brisk dusk, a jazz record carrying thinly through the screen door, the grass cold under your bare feet, and to snip the broad, living leaves of sage from the garden, stacking them in your palm like pages of summer, their trichomes standing up in soft and minutely patterned resinous velvet, redolent of so many good things — Artemisia Ludoviciana, the prairie sage you have crinkled into the patch pocket of your snap shirt on rivers across the Mountain West; the pine forests of Northern Wisconsin that you wandered as a boy; the tightly coiled smudge you buy on the road every winter at the little country store in Tesuque, NM, and bring home to consecrate dark mornings by the wood stove — and then to bring the leaves in and toss them into a hot skillet with olive oil and a little butter until they become crisply translucent, small panes of stained glass scattered over a well turned pork chop, with rice and a simple pan sauce. Well, there is grace itself.

We dropped the kid off at college, came home and wept. In the morning we hiked up our pants and started after our work, having our coffee together and convening again in the evenings to make the ritual of supper, and remember the antediluvian pattern of life.

We must have found the recipe in a magazine not long after I moved out here, twenty-odd years ago. But we haven’t looked at it in years, and we’ve deconstructed and elaborated upon whatever it was. The recipe is elementary and like so many of the best, depends more on grammar — time, temperature, order of operations — than on wizardry. The best food is peasant food, older than the Bible, and more forgiving.

A quick note I want to add, a little apropos of yesterday’s post. Something else from Frederick Buechner that I was reading last night, from his essay “The Longing for Home”:

The word longing comes from the same route as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space, and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to, and that belongs to us.

Earlier in the essay Buechner asks, “Are the words true home perhaps too much to apply to even the happiest home that lies within our power to create? Are they words that always point to a reality beyond themselves?”

I’m not thinking at the moment that I’m doing it justice, and maybe it’s just that I can’t hear the word antediluvian and not hear it in an eschatological and promissory way alongside its ancient, primitive ring.

Anyway, this is a reminder that — I don’t know how, I don’t know when (and I don’t know where I put my notes) — but I really want to get to Part II of that “radical anticipation” post.

Noah Smith:

Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape. The hunt for virality was everything. Viral memes were the thoughts that drifted through the mind of the social media Borg.

There are almost no memes left. For so many years there was a steady drumbeat of images and phrases that people passed around among each other ad infinitum; now, I can’t even think of the last one that really made the rounds. Twitter — now X — has not died but is diminished in scope and relevance. At times it feels like a ghost town.

Where did everybody go? I would like to think that they’re offline, living as we lived in the Before Times, running through sunlit fields blasting each other with Super Soakers or playing Dungeons and Dragons in their living rooms. Or perhaps they’re in Signal and WhatsApp chats and Discord channels, talking with their friends in the comfort and safety of privacy. I would like to think that they rejected the digital hive mind for the ancient ways of individuality and Dunbar’s Number.

But my bet is that they’re just watching short form video. Over the last few years, the entire internet has steadily carcinized into a single type of app/website/media/entertainment — a vertically scrolling feed full of short video clips. Vine invented it, TikTok popularized it, and now every other site has copied this one dominant, all-conquering format. Already, vertical short-form video feeds are more dominant than every form of media except for social media itself. 

But even this significantly understates the change. The term “social media” used to mean people writing things to each other or sending images on Facebook or Twitter; now, it’s mostly used to mean people watching videos. 

Ian Marcus Corbin:

I think for a lot of kids these days, the idea of having like really deep, rock solid values and beliefs that you would die for sounds preposterous. And I think part of it is that a lot of them live their lives in these constant three, four, five, ten second clips, right? And you get one point of view, you get one lifestyle, you get one takedown after another, after another, after another, into the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. And it really makes it difficult to formulate a solid, flexible, stable sense of yourself and of what is good in the world and how you ought to be in it.

[…]

If you get involved enough that you can understand one meme and then understand the subsequent three memes that are all responding to each other — it’s brilliant, there is a lot of intelligence being deployed. It’s hilarious and there’s a lot of ingenuity and creativity — but in this kind of nihilistic vacuum where nothing, none of it actually matters. It’s just, I’m seeing something you missed and I’m pointing out something ironic or funny that no one else has pointed out yet. And the fact that this is happening to adolescents in particular is a very strange thing.

So there’s another quote by Eliot that I begin the book with. He writes, “Home is where one starts from. We grow older / the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” My read of that is that the work of child rearing through this incredibly extended process that is really unique to us as our kind of animal is that by the time you are an adult, by the time you kind of cross that threshold, you do have a sense of of being at home in the world, knowing who you are, knowing what your tasks are, knowing what is roughly good and evil.

As Eliot says, then life goes on and you have to bear the burdens of an adult and you have to see things you wish you didn’t have to see and go through things you wish you didn’t have to go through. And that kind of groundedness becomes unsettled, right? And maybe by midlife or before, you’re like, OK, what am I doing? Who am I really? And what is worth pursuing? … It’s a life-long thing to see all that and take all that in and confront the death of people you love and your own impending death. And then at the end to be able to say, OK, I understand this. Here I am. But that’s premised on this kind of, not traditional, but archetypal departure from home and then return to home.

But I don’t know what it looks like if we become unable to give young people a sense of who they are to begin with. … I don’t envy it. And I want to tell my kids, and my students as well, just acknowledge that this is an odd moment. This is a very strange moment to be coming of age.

I meant to add to the last post…

*I’m reminded of a line from Marilynne Robinson’s Genesis:

Jesus is attentive to the matter of debt. It figures often in his parables. He teaches his disciples to say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” To some traditions, and to the translators of the King James Version, his language must have seemed unpoetical or inexact, and they have supplied sin or trespass in place of this blunt word, which, in context, might imply that we should, ahem, forgive our debtors. Trespass is an ancient term in European property law. It need not imply that any harm is done as ordinarily defined, only that there has been an undesired intrusion of some kind. Whether this is an appropriate metaphor here—those without property rights cannot be intruded upon, which certainly does not mean they cannot be injured—I leave to others. Sin is anodyne. The word in the version in the Gospel of Matthew 6:12 is the Greek word meaning “debt,” which is the word that also appears in the parables of Jesus where debt figures. The difference is significant. To forgive a trespasser might cost nothing. The law of Moses gives the poor and strangers access to fields and vineyards and the right to gather food in them, so the legal protections of property that lie behind trespass as a concept are biblically dubious. On the other hand, to forgive a debt means first of all to abandon the expectation of repayment of money or goods, at a cost that could be substantial. This sounds more like Jesus.

I didn’t have my copy Karl Barth’s Romans when I was quoting Hunsinger the other day, but I wanted to chase down some of Barth’s lines. Yesterday I did… at length:

But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is a minister of God, an avenger for wrath to him that doeth evil. We are wont also to overlook far too easily that other warning—the warning against the doing of that which is evil. We must indeed be led to see that we continually overlook it. Every step we take in this world we take in the shadow of evil. Even the earnestness with which in the midst of evil we do good, even our patient, busy reforms which for many of us take the place of revolution, do not bring us out of the shadow of evil. Our whole visible behaviour is either an acceptance of the present order or a denial of it; and in both cases we do wrong. We can do right only in the ‘not-doing’ of our relationship to God. The warning with which we are now concerned merely emphasizes that our whole experience does thus move within the shadow of evil, and bids us not be wholly engulfed by it. In the shadow of the kingdom of death we must be afraid; for there we are encompassed by enemies and rivals, by jealous and dangerous friends, by men whose success is insecure and by those who gloat over the failure of others. There set-backs and periods of stagnation await us, obstacles and disappointments, failures and defeats, which come upon us unexpectedly one after another. There legal proceedings and quarrellings take place, confusions and all manner of tragic complications. On this board we make no move that is not met by some dangerous counter-move; no step that does not in some way have back at us; no possibility that does not contain its own impossibility. Whether we support or oppose the existing order, we stand on the same level with it, and are subjected to one condemnation. Occupying some position, positive or negative, on the plane of the existing order, we are bound to have to pay for the fact that all are relative. We attack or defend, we build or tear down, fight or are at peace, affirm or deny; but sooner or later we are compelled to halt before a last threatening danger and a last heavy punishment—the danger that, after all, we are men, and the punishment for being so. God does not yield before our encroachments and when do we not encroach upon His rights? The encroachments of revolution He meets with the sword of government; the encroachments of government with the sword of revolution. And in the fate of both we behold our own destiny—in fear and in pity. The wrath of God falls upon all of us. Upon each one in some way or other the sword is drawn; and it is not drawn in vain. Whether we attempt to build up some positive human thing or to demolish what others have erected, all our endeavors to justify ourselves are in one way or another shattered in pieces. We must now assert that all these endeavours of ours not merely cannot be successful, but ought not to be so.

Wherefore ye must needs be in subjection, not only because of the wrath, but also for conscience sake. To experience the wrath of God as wrath only would be eternal death. It is, however, our conscience that understands the ‘Halt’! of the drawn sword, and recognizes God in His wrath. Our conscience prevents us from supposing that the evil we encounter is merely obstruction and fate. It reminds us that we are evil; but it also recognizes in the sword that is drawn upon us the righteousness of the hand of God. Conscience sees in the evil that is done against us the minister of good. It interprets our judgement, not to our advantage, but to our salvation. It makes of the injury done to us, not our justification, but our hope. Conscience, therefore, does not allow us to rise up from the severity of our lives embittered and ready to revolt; rather, it pronounces the end of the grim cycle of evil unto evil. Conscience leads us out of the turmoil of human suffering back to our Primal Origin, back to God—Wherefore ye must needs be in subjection. Revolution provides the great opportunity of willing to do what God does. And yet, such an intention is impossible; for we have to understand that our ‘new’ is not THE ‘New.’ We have therefore to return to the source of our rebellion, to the apprehension of the evil in the existing order before there had issued from it revolutionary thought and action, before ever revolution was born. Our terror then was a guiltless terror, for we were then terrified with God at the misery of the creature. Then we knew also and this knowledge was our deepest, most assured knowledge the hope of the creation. Then was the ‘Moment’ when our most simple perception of the relation between God and man was identical with the doing that which is good. But this pure ‘Moment’ was no moment in time; and therefore being in subjection is also no temporal human action. And yet, to know that we have no Right, even when we are in the right, is a knowledge in time. It is this knowledge which reveals that we have a hope—the hope of the Coming World where Revolution and Order are one.

For this cause ye pay tribute also. A strange conclusion! Ye are actually acting more or less willingly.—Ye are paying taxes to the State. It is important, however, for you to know what ye are doing. Your action is, in fact, pregnant with ‘not-doing,’ with knowledge, with hope. They are God’s priests, attending continually upon this very thing. Are then he people in power, the Government Officials who represent the existing order—God’s priests? Yes, assuredly! precisely they! For their whole existence and authority, their whole strange being-justified-before-you, loudly proclaims the One—the unrighteousness of men and the Goal which is God’s World. Would ye, then, destroy this order which speaks so loudly of another wholly difterent order? Surely not—Render to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. How trivial and uninteresting seems the command that men should—do what they are already doing! To our question concerning the right of the existing order and the right of revolution this may indeed seem an ‘unsatisfactory’ conclusion. Perhaps this is inevitable. Beyond all those interesting and important problems concerning what we ought to do lies the great negative possibility of God. Perhaps we are, in fact, unable to demonstrate on its behalf better than by doing—as men who know!—what we are already doing.

[…]

Owe no man anything save to love one another. No debts! Paraphrased, this means non-resistance! It means not to enter the field of evil and seek a decision by negation and demolition!* This is the significance of all those strange possibilities of ‘not-doing’ which we have described first as ‘Negative Possibilities’ and then, comprehensively, as the ‘Great Negative Possibility.’ Save—and here, making a breach in our own wall, we turn from the demonstration of ‘not-doing’ to demonstrative action, to ‘Positive Possibilities’—to love one another! To every man we should owe love. It is not permitted us to excuse ourselves for the absence of love by saying that, since we live in the shadowy region of evil, we can only bear witness to the Coming World by ‘not-doing’. Even in the world of shadows love must come into active prominence, for it does not stand under the law of evil. Love of one another ought to be undertaken as the protest against the course of this world, and it ought to continue without interruption. We remember that human conduct is positively ethical when it is not conformed to this world, when, within the framework of this world and in complete secrecy, it bears witness to the strangeness of God. We define love as the ‘GREAT Positive Possibility’ for the same reason as we had previously defined subjection as the ‘GREAT Negative Possibility’. We are not now thinking of a single act, but of the combination of all positive—that is to say, protesting—possibilities; we are thinking of a general ethical manner of behaving. We define love as the ‘Great POSITIVE Possibility,’ because in it there is brought to light the revolutionary aspect of all ethical behaviour, and because it is veritably concerned with the denial and breaking up of the existing order. It is love that places the reactionary also finally in the wrong, despite the wrongness of the revolutionary. Inasmuch as we love one another we cannot wish to uphold the present order as such, for by love we do the ‘new’ by which the ‘old’ is overthrown. And so, in speaking of the breach in the wall of the incomprehensible ‘not-doing’, we have to speak now of the much more incomprehensible action of love.

He that loveth the other hath fulfilled the law. In considering the relation between man and God, we have, at crucial moments, encountered the extremely enigmatic conception of love. It has been noteworthy that we have always encountered it lying beyond the possibility, the conceivable possibility, of any concrete or analysable experience of the relation between man and God, beyond, that is to say, Law and Religion, beyond all the demands which they are wont to make upon men’s minds and wills; we have encountered it, moreover, as the unobservable point where men’s highest endeavours are related to God, and therefore where they are immediately reversed. We have described the conception of love as that reality which, since it is contrasted with the ambiguity of our existence, cannot be defined in terms of an act of human will or thought, but only as the pre-supposition of all that is analysable and observable. We have described it, in fact, as the outpouring of the Spirit (v. 5), that is to say, as that reality by which men know God, lay hold of Him, and cling to Him, as the Unknown, Hidden God, as the final ‘ Yes’ in the final ‘No’ of all concrete, observable life. Love is the existential standing-before-God of men, their being touched by His freedom, whereby their personalities are established, whereby, we might perhaps say, they are ‘individuated’. Love is the still more excellent (incomprehensible) way (I Cor. xii. 31), the eternal meaning of our comprehensible ways, and the realization of their ‘highest places’. Love is therefore human religious impossibility—when it is apprehended as the possibility of God: in other words, love is the fulfilling of the law. But what can all this mean, when we remember that all these reflections of ours, as our reflections, are disturbed by their relation to the concrete world in which we live? Our conversations about God are always interrupted conversations; for He withdraws Himself from us and opposes Himself to us when we are confronted by the question, What shall we do? To this question we now answer—Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Lev. xix. 18), inasmuch as He that loveth the other hath fulfilled the law, does the truth, and is therefore proceeding along the more excellent way.

Thou shalt love thy NEIGHBOUR. In the concrete fact of the neighbour we encounter, finally and supremely, the ambiguity of our existence, since in the particularity of others we are reminded of our own particularity, of our own createdness, our own lost state, our own sin, and our own death. That men should be thus confronted by men is the riddle presented to us in the primitive constitution of nature. The solution to this riddle must also be the solution of those perpetually recurring interruptions of our conversations about God. Here a decision must be sought as to whether the impossible possibility of God—which lies beyond all human possibility—is or is not a mere phantom of metaphysics; whether, when we speak of the presupposition behind all things that are capable of analysis and description, when we speak of the outpouring of the Spirit in our hearts, we are or are not merely dreaming; whether our apprehension of the final ‘Yes’ in the final ‘No’ is or is not merely a wild guess; whether our knowledge of God is or is not simply the ‘renunciation of knowledge’ (Kierkegaard); whether the Unknown God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ; whether our being touched by the freedom of God, the establishing of our personalities, our proceeding along the still more excellent way, are existential events. The decision lies in our answer to the question—Do we, in the unknowable neighbour, apprehend and love the Unknown God? Do we, in the complete Otherness of the other—in whom the whole riddle of existence is summed up in such a manner as to require its solution in an action on our part—hear the voice of the One? We must, at this point, remember that our love of God takes place as an event when, in the ambiguity of our existence, a contrasted, unobservable ‘Thou’ presses upon us so insistently that we are confronted inevitably by the question, Who then am ‘I’? Nor do we forget that the answer to the problem of the opposing ‘Thou’ lies in the question concerning this ‘I’, since we cannot but recognize that our most questionable ‘I’ is one with the ‘Thou’ by which we are confronted. And moreover, as we have already seen, it is in the ambiguity of the neighbour who fell among thieves that we encounter primarily and supremely the ‘Thou’ which is both question and answer. If I hear in the neighbour only the voice of the other and not also the voice of the One—that is to say, if I do not detect in him both question AND answer,—then, quite certainly, the voice of the One is nowhere to be heard.

Nick Catoggio:, on Angela Paxton’s “get the whole team across the finish line” add:

What even is “the team” at this point?

Millions of Republicans joined the team years ago because they believed in free markets, limited government, and advancing America’s interests by encouraging Western liberal values abroad. The leadership of Team GOP no longer supports any of that. The president levies tariffs by whim, demands government stakes in private companies, wages unauthorized wars, sics law enforcement on his political enemies, and routinely behaves more aggressively toward traditional American allies than toward enemies. […]

Angela Paxton’s pitch is the political equivalent of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous bit about sports fandom being a matter of “rooting for laundry.” The entire roster might be replaced within a few seasons, he observed, but the fans’ loyalty persists because ultimately they’re cheering for the franchise—for its uniforms, i.e., laundry—more so than its individual personnel.

That’s a defensible attitude for a silly pastime. But apply it to politics and you get anti-anti-Trumpism, the belief that being governed by any Republican beats being governed by any Democrat because the Republican laundry is better, however filthy it may have become. […]

The “team” the president and both Paxtons are playing for isn’t actually the Republican Party. Partisanship is simply what they’re selling to immiserated right-wing suckers to try to goose their enthusiasm and get them to turn out this year, another “lesser of two evils” pitch from a political movement that’s morally incapable of offering anything else. […]

The team they’re playing for is postliberalism. Given how comprehensive Ken Paxton’s unfitness for office is, encompassing not just personal sins like philandering but all manner of abuses of his public office, the inescapable takeaway from Angela Paxton’s ad is that no amount of immorality committed by a right-wing candidate can ever disqualify him from wielding power. That’s an essential pillar of postliberal thought, essential to the core conviction that power must be wielded immorally to have any chance of defeating the left.

I am a happily “unaffiliated registered voter.” I left the GOP a decade ago without the slightest hesitation, but I have never been called a RINO (“Republican in name only”). I am constantly pushing back against things people say are really just problems for the “very online.” (The response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting was far worse in real life than it was online.) The spillover or cross-contamination or whatever is under-appreciated. I do maintain that the spell can be broken anytime. If you can get people away from the screens and algorithms and turbo-charged individualism, I think it could be broken very quickly. But that “if” has a broken back, two left feet, each in need of an ankle fusion, and hasn’t had a single vegetable or protein in its diet for over two decades. So let your heart be ready when it happens, but don’t hold your breath until the power goes out.

But the term RINO really is, I think, reserved for Online Speak and right wing camera virtue-signaling. Though it may have been implied, no one has ever called me a RINO. But I’ve called myself one! Honestly, I’m kinda bummed no one has called me that. I have never understood why it is anything other than a compliment. If it isn’t a compliment, then politics really is just Seinfeld’s laundry-sports — if not Seinfeld writ large, where nothing meaningful ever really happens.

I do not believe in the principle of voting for the lesser of two weevils — sorry: the lesser of two evils. I do believe in the freedom to make occasional exceptions. But the principle, which strangles the oxygen out of every voting booth in the country (by shoving pie in your face, or whatever) — nope, nope, nope. 

If I was going to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’d certainly vote Democrat. Why? Because I’m a RINO, that’s why. (A former RINO, anyway.) It’s because I am, among other things, a conservative, which is a principle and a mentality rather than a name glued over an amorphous tent. The fact that I find the Democratic Party to be the more conservative of the two parties is shocking given a long backward glance; less shocking given a 10-year glance.

Don’t think I don’t notice that other “if” — it may have more athleticism in it, but it is still an if. I don’t know yet how I’ll vote in Maine. I’d like to see every Republican seat up for reelection overturned, but generally speaking Susan Collins is about as straight a politician as you’re likely to find in this here world of ours, and I’m reluctant to kick over tables anywhere but in the houses of religious hypocrisy.

I’m not looking for a revolution and I don’t trust revolutionaries. If I voted for the Democratic ticket, it would be with a conservative-liberal impulse that wants to preserve a world worth witnessing to outside the pie-eating contest.

In spite of it all, I think that’s still a big IF.