While We’re At It

♦ Paul Kingsnorth opens his Erasmus Lecture with a visit to the hilltop where the flamboyant Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and his troops died in a confrontation with Indian warriors commanded by Sitting Bull. I, too, have visited Little Bighorn. On that September day the chill of fall was already in the wind that swept the landscape. I looked upon the vastness of the treeless horizon and marveled at the small number of men who had been engaged there in mortal combat. It is a famous encounter, yet the battle was inconsequential. The might of white America had long before doomed the Indian nations. Perhaps that’s why the place is eerie. We throw ourselves into our projects. We strain against the harness of life, often to magnificent and noble effect. Yet we are but small figures on a great stage, acting, living, and dying within a providential history we’d be foolish to think we grasp and understand.

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♦ I’m writing in the final weeks of Ordinary Time, when the liturgical calendar emphasizes readings that evoke final judgment. The Old Testament reading for Sunday, November 17, comprises the opening verses of the twelfth chapter of the Daniel. They tell of the day in which the Archangel Michael will rise and the affairs of men will be brought to conclusion in judgment and redemption. In his regular commentary, “Words on the Word,” Bishop Erik Varden writes: “The book of Daniel is hardly reassuring reading. . . . It speaks of the end of time and of cosmic battle. It reminds us that our life in this world is ephemeral, that all human enterprise is relative to its finality, which exceeds our projection.”

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♦ A reader asks: Should the Roman Catholic Church be a spiritual NATO and not a United Nations?

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♦ In “The Revolt of the Elites,” from his 1994 collection, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch draws attention to the ways in which upper-middle-class liberals punch down. This cohort censures those who cling to their guns and their religion, deeming them racists and homophobes who want to keep women in their place (“angry white men”). Conjoined to this intense political moralism is a demand for liberation from traditional moral norms, a paradoxically obligatory antinomianism. Lasch observes:

When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, [rich liberals] betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant. In the heat of political controversy, they find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light—those who “just don’t get it,” in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude.

Well before they came onto the scene, Lasch had described Barack and Michelle Obama very accurately.

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♦ It’s not just the Obamas. Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole’s response to Trump’s election oozes liberal contempt. He ascribes Trump’s victory to “his potent cocktail of race- and gender-based phobias with raw rotgut chauvinism.” Those who voted for Trump merit denunciation. “The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the very large cohort of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t much mind.” In his frenzy, O’Toole seems unable to contemplate the possibility that the majority of Americans are aware of his contempt, and that they voted against people like him as much as for Donald Trump.

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♦ Internet sleuth Benjamin Ryan noticed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez no longer lists her preferred pronouns (for the record, she/her) on her X bio. A search of internet archives shows that this sign of obeisance to the Rainbow Reich was deleted sometime between August 2023 and May 2024. At times, Ocasio-Cortez has shown herself to be a canny politician. Was she early in recognizing that the trans issue was a big loser for Democrats?

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♦ Jeff Shafer is a lawyer and director of the Hale Institute at New Saint Andrews College. In early November, Matthew Crawford and N. S. Lyons published on their Substacks (Archedelia and The Upheaval) Shafer’s essay, “Machine Antihumanism and the Inversion of Family Law.” Shafer observes that artificial reproductive technology (ART) transforms conception and gestation into commercial transactions: “Because the ART is a project of baby making, it veritably demands the law apply a consumer paradigm,” which includes the requirement of customer satisfaction. Shafer makes a chilling observation about the future of children-as-products:

Here we may think back to the beginning of the Ukraine war and the photos that made international news showing rows of cribs containing uncollected infants in Ukrainian surrogacy facilities. The ongoing war had kept consumers from flying in to retrieve the children they had ordered. Certain of these children may ultimately live out what they already symbolically represent: abandoned inventory, and display models for the new archetype of humanity.

Radical abortion laws and referenda passed since Dobbs underscore the children-as-products logic. In many states, a mother can declare herself unsatisfied with the “fetal product” in her womb at any point until birth.

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♦ In the introduction to The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (2023), James Kalb provides a general description of our predicament:

What is man, and who is this particular man? Nothing very definite, we are now told: the habit of classifying human beings, even the concept of “human nature,” is oppressive. But that means that when we deal with people we cannot be guided by what they are as human beings or the particular kind of people they are. We must consider them from some other perspective—perhaps as creators of who they are, or alternatively as resources for the projects of others. We are marching into a post-human future in which man, depending on point of view, is either a god or less than a beast.

As a matter of fact, only a small number of people have the status and wealth to be self-creators. In our brave new world, most become resources for the projects of others, raw material for the enterprises of the powerful. Case in point: the unborn.

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♦ A reader in Chicago took daily walks last summer along Lake Michigan. He reports that the majority of strollers were occupied by pets, not children.

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♦ Nottingham University offers a class, “Chaucer and His Contemporaries.” Ever concerned for the delicate sensibilities of its students, the institution issued a warning: The assigned texts related “incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith.” No doubt the bureaucrats at Nottingham would affix a warning label to First Things.

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♦ On his Substack Archedelia, Matthew Crawford observes, “The great political divide in U.S. politics at present is not between men and women, as is often reported, but rather between never-married and childless women and everyone else.” David Samuels calls this cohort of women “Brides of the State.” His assessment at UnHerd (quoted by Crawford): “Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. These single women are a most reliable voting block for the Democratic Party.” A recent Pew survey reports: “Women who have never married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” As Crawford notes, in 1980, only 6 percent of women over forty had never married. Now that cohort is 22 percent of all women and rising. A recent study predicted that 45 percent of women aged twenty-five to forty-four will be single by 2030.

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♦ Writing in the New Yorker, anthropology professor Manvir Singh reports his skepticism about objective morality (“Are Your Morals Too Good to be True?” September 16, 2024). There is no moral truth, he decides. But fear not, we can adopt “moral fictionalism,” which commits us to act as though moral truth were real, even though, as a proponent of “moral fictionalism,” we suspects that it is not. Retired philosophy professor Joel Marks has no time for such solutions. He does not object to the hypocrisy of pretending to believe what one thinks is false. No, truth is dangerous. Writing in a letter to the editor (The New Yorker, October 14, 2024):

What [Singh’s] approach overlooks . . . is that a belief in objective morality also has considerable downsides. In a meta-ethical sense, it encourages hypocrisy, arrogance, and the adoption of intransigent positions that promote endless conflict. Fortunately, a number of ethicists have come to the conclusion that humans have sufficiently robust mental resources to adopt an alternative way of thinking. I, for one, would have us rely on our considered desires. The cultivation of rationality and compassion can go a long way toward remedying and even precluding various human behaviors and societal ills without the superfluous discord that moral judgments and attitudes so often introduce.

One is hard pressed to formulate a calmer and more complacent expression of the open-society consensus. Truth is dangerous and oppressive, and a love of truth takes us down the road to mean-spirited intransigence and conflict. Imagine the horrifying prospect: a medical student who refuses to be trained to perform abortions!

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♦ The Center for Christian Studies co-sponsors our annual lecture in Austin, Texas. The Center also offers short courses addressing essential topics for Christians seeking to live faithfully in a post-Christian world. This winter, a seven-week class will be led by the Center’s director, Keith Stanglin: “In Defense of Hope: Why Christianity Makes Sense.” The class will meet on Monday evenings (January 27–March 10). You can participate in person or on Zoom. The class fee is $150. If you are a First Things subscriber, the fee is $100, a $50 discount. For more information, visit christian-studies.org.

The Center for Christian Studies publishes the Journal of Christian Studies, which I strongly recommend. If you subscribe, you’ll receive an additional $50 discount on class fees for the Center’s winter course.

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♦ I’m delighted to welcome Virginia Aabram to our editorial staff. A graduate of Hillsdale College, Virginia has written for the Washington Examiner and other publications. She is serving as associate editor.

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♦ Pip Donahoe of Chatum, New Jersey, would like to form a ROFTers group. If you’d like to meet once a month to discuss articles in First Things, get in touch with her: pipdonahoe@gmail.com.

The ROFTers group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is looking for new members. Contact Elizabeth Siegel to join: eesiegel@aol.com.

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