When I see animals successfully cross the road, I cheer them on. Literally.

While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour.

Man, Jack Meader’s essay on Tolkien’s “long defeat” was the perfect closing to the fall issue of Comment. Some essays carry the weight of a book that you want to have proudly displayed on the shelf so you can reference them for years to come. Another reason why it’s worth subscribing in print!

I love this take on Tolkien’s Shire:

In a letter written later in life, Tolkien remarked that “by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” In 1918 Tolkien was only twenty-six years old. World War I not only robbed Tolkien of his friends; it also deprived virtually all its European combatants of unfathomably large numbers of young men—permanently changing Europe’s demographics, culture, and ways of life. The world Tolkien had known as a young man really was conclusively overthrown and destroyed by the Great War. *Indeed, it is not altogether wrong to regard his creation of the Shire and even the fellowship of wandering men as a kind of love letter to that lost world, an attempt to show others who would never know it themselves what had once been.

What if we all challenged ourselves to write such a love letter — to act as though we were writing a love letter to the world?

Skyler Adlata’s version of the American dream is pitch perfect.

When fear is used to stoke a spirit of anger and suspicion, it gives rise to a kind of emotional inversion. Instead of fear giving rise to courage and in time maturing into hope, we view hope as adolescent, courage as futile, and fear as mature. This is wrong. Fear is not the proper end. Fear is useful only if it orients our agency toward a truly proper end: hope. As long as we refuse to nurse and condition our participation with fear to grow into something more, we will remain small and worried for all our lives.

You are not acknowledging the role that these guard rails played in the first Trump presidency – and these guard rails are talking to us. They have names.…They’re talking to us and they’re saying “Don’t vote for this man.”

Basically everything that Sam Harris says in this debate (though there are some additional things that I would say specifically to Christians) is what I want to say. And everything that Ben Shapiro says shows only that he chose the right career. (There are one or two exceptions, points on international policy, that he may be right to at least not panic over but which I don’t want to talk about until I see what happens next week.)

In the 1890s, William Jennings Bryan supposedly said, “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver; I’ll look up the arguments later.” You will find no better description for nearly everything Shapiro says and makes excuses for, some of which are quite shocking. The difference for Shapiro, and the reason he chose the right profession, is that he is so quick on his feet. I really struggle to see him as much more than an extension of college debate class, where he may have been assigned the defense of the Republican Party and simply never stepped out of that role.

But I’m not just being funny. I think the truth as we receive and understand it, has a very specifc weakness that finds a perfect home in Shapiro.

For a lot of people, maybe most people, I don’t think it’s that they pick the truth and “look up the arguments later.” It’s more that a) they have their regular sources of information, which probably haven’t changed in a long time and which are telling them what they want to hear. Basically, guys like Shapiro do the work for them. And he’s convincing not only because he’s very smart but because so many have chosen to be on, or to remain on, a certain side of an argument. And so b) when they hear arguments against their side, the information goes in one ear and out the other, but when they hear arguments that support their side, those arguments stick.

By “stick” I mean that this information finds a “rational” home. For instance, someone might say to me that when RFK Jr. “explains” Ukraine and Russia, “this makes sense to me.” Any lie I point out finds no purchase, and usually requires some time to explain. During which time, I end up sounding like the crazy one.

That last sentence would have been a parenthetical one, but it’s essential to the point I’m getting at, and it’s the weakness I mentioned above. It’s a point I think endlessly about and one made most succinctly, for me, by Hannah Arendt.

Since the liar is free to fashion his “facts” to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truthteller. Indeed, he will usually have plausibility on his side; his exposition will sound more logical, as it were, since the element of unexpectedness—one of the outstanding characteristics of all events—has mercifully disappeared. It is not only rational truth that, in the Hegelian phrase, stands common sense on its head; reality quite frequently offends the soundness of common-sense reasoning no less than it offends profit and pleasure.

The truth has always been harder to find, easier to avoid. Some make a living making it even easier to avoid. Ben Shapiro is one of the most reasonable sounding, articulate explainers on the right. He does his job really well. Which makes him, in my view, both the least offender “rationally” and the worst offender for being so. Honestly, it might be hard to find someone in whose hands the truth is more dangerous.

A joke, from Alexei Novalny’s prison diaries.

Someday I hope to finally get around to writing an account of the events — and the life — that spun me around so forcefully, so completely, in 2017. I noted around that time a quote from Charles Taylor about the feeling we get when we succeed in articulating something we’ve been through, something that reflects our deepest orienting beliefs about life.

…If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed, articulated, and hence let fully be..

It would not be an overstatement to say that much of my reading life is spent chasing that articulation. Occasionally, I am gifted a taste of it. The latest example is from Cavanaugh:

The best remedy for idolatry is an uncontrollable encounter with the incarnate God in the chaos and vulnerability of those who are marginalized by the idolatrous systems that eat people alive.

It has only ever been to the credit of these chaotic and vulnerable encounters, to the lives that provided them, that I have ever seriously changed.

But there is a flipside to these encounters and articulations, a “negative slope” as Taylor puts it. If the positive slope is something like Marilynne Robinson’s wild strawberries, the negative slope is “an exile, a seemingly irremediable incapacity ever to reach this place.”

If I have a desire to write about or share anything, it is this.

This lovely post reminded me again of Richard Wilbur’s “Elsewhere”:

This weekend I got to attend a local Braver Angels event, as part of the Building Bridges Maine project. I’ve been wanting to get involved with these groups for some time. We’ll see where it goes.

David Frum: “I’m not voting with enthusiasm, but I am voting with conviction.”