Induction
Heavens to Betsy — lovelily is an actual word! I haven’t been just making up an adverb all these years when people ask, How are you doing?
OED’s earliest evidence for lovelily is from before 1400, in Cursor Mundi: a Northumbrian poem of the 14th century.
Apparently that poem is the “second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether.”
A brief excursion shows it spelled “luflyly,” and that it also shows up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Dougald Hine:
We are dealing with something that implies a transformation we have hardly begun to acknowledge. Even the bold talk about human extinction can be a way to defer acknowledgement: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.
Hine is talking about climate change and climate change language, but, wow, does this have broader applications. And it’s a perfect opportunity to channel Walter Brueggamann!
(This was a draft post from a month ago that I never published, probably because I wanted to do more with it. But it’s a theme that bears repeating.)
I’ve been thinking of the line from James Lawson (via David Dark), “You have to keep in your mind an imagery of infinite possibility.” (“I give that to you as an oracle of beloved community,” Dark adds.) And I’ve been occasionally picking back through Pieper’s On Hope, and came across this highlight:
it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.
For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.
With this proliferation of know-how, technology, and weaponry, warfare is changing. A cheap commercial drone equipped with weapons, guided by another cheap drone packed with sensors, can hit specific faraway targets or conduct surveillance operations. And because they are relatively inexpensive, such aircraft can be deployed at scale.
It’s not just MRIs and cell phones that enjoy innovation. As with medicine, so goes the killing. One thing has remained true — as Günther Anders put it: “our capacity to feel hobbles along behind our capacity to do: we can indeed rain bombs on hundreds of thousands; to regret or weep for them we cannot.”
I wrote an essay on this topic 7 years ago called “Blips on a Radar Screen,” which I put up on the bigger blog.
Currently Reading: Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson 📚
Paul D. Miller’s analogy in the opening of his piece at The Dispatch this morning is good.
In one of Aesop’s fables, a deer fleeing hunters takes refuge in a cave, only to fall prey to a lion into whose den he had stumbled. The moral: Sometimes safety is an illusion hiding greater dangers.
Let me offer an updated version: The deer flees to the cave knowing the lion was there, hoping to hire the lion to take out the hunter. The lion takes payment, roars at the hunter, and eats the deer. Who got the better deal?
In case it’s not obvious, Miller makes it clear: “deer” is to “conservative Christians” as “hunter” is to “progressive left.”
Quite fitting. I would correct some misleading parts of the analogy, however. All of the deer that I know did not jump into a cave and make a deal with a lion. They carved out their own cave, invited a lion in for protection, and told themselves and everyone else that the lion is not, in fact, a lion but is really a fluffy bunny rabbit being framed as a lion by the hunter.
Anyway, we all know how it turns out with the fluffy rabbit…
Fleeing the conformity of what I viewed as an arbitrarily oppressive world, I’d flung myself into the service of something much more tyrannical: myself.
Jordan Castro’s essay on literature, escape, and addiction from the autumn Plough Quarterly, which I’m just now getting around to, was perfectly timed. About which I will hopefully say more.