While We’re At It

♦ An American Enterprise Institute study of loneliness (“AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States”) indicates that loneliness and political activism are strongly correlated. Here is a summary of results penned by Ryan Streeter and David Wilde:

Political volunteers [for campaigns], for example, are less embedded in the social and communal environments that produce trust and social capital. They are more than twice as likely as ordinary Americans, and three times more likely than religious Americans, to say “rarely” or “never” when asked if there are people they feel close to. They are five times more likely than religious joiners to say they rarely or never have someone they can turn to in times of need. And they are also more likely than other joiners to say their relationships are superficial.

Streeter and Wilde speculate that lonely people are attracted to the ersatz fellowship of feverish political agreement. “Lacking regular community, political joiners compensate ideologically. Eighty-seven percent report that their ideology gives them a sense of community, compared to 63 percent of ordinary Americans.”

---

♦ Writing for the European Conservative (“Why Do Bishops Cover Up Sexual Abuse?”), Joseph Shaw makes a perceptive remark about the institutional culture that gives rise to cover-ups:

In any institution the loyalty and obedience of subordinates is maintained by some kind of reward given by superiors. In commercial enterprises this is money, but money can be supplemented or replaced by many other things, including opportunities for abuse or protection against complaints. If BBC executives or Catholic bishops want to shore up their position within their organisation, protecting abusers will ensure that at least an important section of their subordinates are loyal and uncomplaining. Once a culture of abuse is established, more and more people who can be motivated in this way will be drawn into the institution, while the people not wanting to play along will be marginalised, rendered powerless, and leave.

---

♦ I noticed a clever ad for the YouVersion Bible App on a New York subway. “Zero stars,” the copy reads, with an image featuring five unchecked stars, followed by a comment: “Would not recommend. —Satan.” Senior editor Dan Hitchens saw the same ad in the London Tube, which he thought less clever than groan-inducing, as dad jokes so often are.

---

♦ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on a writer’s fears: “I regard reviews as a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or less degree. There are instances of the soundest dying of them, while the feeble often come through. Many don’t catch them at all. Attempts have often been made to ward them off with the aid of amulets of prefaces and dedications, or even to inoculate them with self-criticisms, but this doesn’t always work.”

---

♦ Jacobin purports to revive Marxism in American politics. I don’t think it succeeds. One or another species of socialism serves as the house philosophy for most elite cultural institutions. It’s hard to be anti-system when you are a central pillar of the system. (As evidence, in 2017 the foundation that publishes Jacobin received a generous grant from the über-establishment Annenberg Foundation.) Nevertheless, I enjoy paging through the quarterly issues. The artwork is superb. And I was pleased to see that the Spring 2024 number was dedicated to a theme close to my heart: religion in public life. Some content is entirely predictable: “Capitalism is itself a kind of spiritual illness.” Other material is charming in its old-fashioned conceits, such as a reference to Marxism’s “scientific understanding of history.” 1960s priests and nuns offer reassuring subject matter. Yes, Virginia, there are Christian socialists. Reza Aslan instructs readers that the notion that Jesus is God incarnate is an anachronism. After Constantine’s conversion, the doctrine was part of the Roman imperial effort to “depoliticize” Jesus, who was a political revolutionary, not a religious man. (No, wait, according to Aslan a political revolutionary is the sine qua non of true faith.) The issue includes an extensive and useful survey of religion’s influence in nations throughout the world. I cheered when a look back at the New Atheists ended with the observation that they “were bombastic and self-righteous” and “made poor instructors in the art of critical thinking.”

---

♦ Also writing about religion for Jacobin, Dustin Guastella observes that latter-day leftism may advance socialist goals in economic policy, but it tends to default to “a morally neutral egalitarianism.” According to this doctrine, everyone should have an equal opportunity to define his own values. As Guastella notes, this outlook amounts to an endorsement of liberalism’s moral minimalism: “the live-and-let-live attitude that says it’s none of my business how any particular person lives their [sic] life, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my ability to do the same.” It’s the morality suited to capitalism, Guastella argues. If socialists are to offer an alternative vision of social life, it needs to be a moral alternative:

In the coming period, socialists will again and again be forced to confront moral questions as social questions. The push for the legalization of more drugs will expand—the State of Oregon at first said yes, and then said no. Sports betting and other forms of digital gambling continue their spread. Next up is whether capitalist societies will liberalize assisted suicide—an option that will surely be taken up by the poor, the disabled, the lonely, the economically “redundant.” What do socialists say? Is it a good society that allows the consequences of its madness to be killed off “consensually”? Does it make one a good person to advocate for it?

Until and unless the left can develop a consistent moral theory of its own, Christianity will continue to have something useful to say about the biggest social questions that confront modern society. Maybe it’s worth listening.

Indeed, it is worth listening.

---

♦ I was chatting with an Israeli friend. We talked about the role of Judaism in Israeli society. He observed that in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, there was an upsurge in demand for tzitzit, especially among IDF soldiers. (Tzitzit are specially knotted tassels on the four corners of an undergarment worn by orthodox Jews.) The phenomenon does not necessarily suggest a religious revival. It indicates the adoption of a religious symbol as the sign of national unity. As we talked, I marveled at the reversal of fortunes. In my childhood, American society was nominally religious. Today Israeli society is nominally secular. May the trend spread.

---

♦ Michael Polanyi writing in 1957: “Today, if you are resolved to flout the obvious requirements of common sense and decide to plunge the world into obscurantism, you naturally invoke the justification of science.” Prescient, especially when one thinks of late March 2020.

---

♦ The Rainbow Reich gauleiters have not been shy about exploiting the recent uproar over IVF. In a panic, the Alabama legislature passed a law giving the IVF industry in that state almost complete immunity from tort liability. In Michigan, the governor and legislature arranged for a bill that ensures enforcement of commercial surrogacy contracts. We are well on our way to the progressive goal of babies on demand. Like abortion on demand, it advances under the flag of “reproductive freedom.”

---

♦ UK Member of Parliament Miriam Cates had this to say after an official report (known as the Cass Review) raised concerns about the rush to “gender-affirming” treatment for kids: “This scandal happened because too many adults put their own desire for social approval above the safety of vulnerable children.”

---

♦ The Cass Review brings the UK in line with Denmark and other European countries where the medical establishments have expressed reservations about transgender ideology and its undue influence over medical decisions about children. The United States remains an outlier. We are the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, and we’re determined to remain so.

---

♦ UnHerd’s editor in chief Freddie Sayers dug into the origins and activities of the Global Disinformation Index. The UK organization was founded in 2018 to stifle the “wrong” sorts of messages. It rates websites, and its ratings affect online ad placements. The goal is to starve the “bad” websites of income. The index rates left-wing ProPublica as “least dangerous,” while the American Conservative and The Federalist are among those ranked “most dangerous.” Not surprisingly, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations provided funding to get this operation going. Of greater note is the fact that money also came from the UK government, the European Union, the German Foreign Office, and an entity created and funded by the State Department. There you have it: We pay taxes so that we can be censored and silenced.

---

♦ NPR veteran Uri Berliner made a stir when he wrote an exposé of the government-funded radio network’s relentless left-wing bias. He gives examples: plugging the Russian collusion hoax, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, insisting that it’s false to say that the Covid virus was produced in a Wuhan lab. In the BLM hysteria of 2020, NPR management required reporters to record the race, gender, and ethnicity of every person interviewed for their stories. Berliner’s survey of NPR’s national newsroom staff revealed eighty-seven registered Democrats, zero Republicans. That’s the bad news. The good news: NPR’s radio audience is dwindling, and its podcast downloads have declined. As Berliner notes, “The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact.” No surprise. At this juncture, the sole purpose of NPR is to validate the beliefs of rich white liberals in college towns.

---

♦ Dan Hitchens told me that my reflections about Polanyi reminded him of Ratzinger in The Feast of Faith:

The Marxist approach . . . is not affirmation but outrage, opposition to being because it is bad and so must be changed. Prayer is an act of being; it is affirmation, albeit not affirmation of myself as I am and of the world as it is, but affirmation of the ground of being and hence a purifying of myself and of the world from this ground upward. All purification (every via negation) is only possible on the rocklike basis of affirmation, of consent: Jesus Christ is Yes. (cf. 2 Cor. 1:19f.)

---

♦ A female friend expressed outrage that Caitlin Clark would be paid a piddling $76,000 in her first year in the WNBA. (By comparison, the first pick in the 2023 NBA draft signed a four-year contract for $55 million.) I asked her what team drafted Clark. She did not know. I asked her whether she knew the name of New York’s WNBA team. She did not. The name of any team in the WNBA? Nope. A famous player in the WNBA? Again, no answer.

---

♦ The UKis presently being convulsed by efforts to suppress nicotine, not just in the form of cigarettes, but also in other methods of delivery, such as vaping. We’re experiencing a similar although less advanced campaign against nicotine in the United States, in parallel with the drive toward decriminalizing marijuana. Along with potatoes, tobacco came to Europe soon after Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. One would think that the anti-colonialist lobby would defend nicotine as a shining non-Western contribution to Western civilization.

---

♦ The National Conservatism movement (with which I am associated) scheduled a conference in Brussels in mid-April. Featured speakers included Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage, who are invariably described by the mainstream press as “far right.” Not one, but two venues were pressured to cancel the conference. After a third was secured, the left-wing regional mayor sent the police to shut it down, citing public safety. A Belgian court struck down the order that evening, and the conference was able to go on as planned. Ryszard Legutko was one of the speakers. (He’s a First Things writer, I’m proud to say.) He had this to say in Compact magazine:

The incident encapsulates much of what is wrong in the West today. To put it simply, no principle generally proclaimed to be sacred is really sacred. Freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, the sanctity of privacy—the rules to which the European elites unceasingly pay lip service—don’t count. When it comes to fighting conservatives, the principles can be easily suspended or ignored. The European Parliament didn’t react to the incident, although several of its members [Legutko among them] were among those whose freedoms had been violated. Belgium’s prime minister satisfied himself with a statement of mild indignation but did nothing practical to change the situation. I heard of no protests from mainstream institutions and organizations. Needless to say, such protests would have undoubtedly exploded throughout Europe if the victims were liberals, socialists, environmentalists, LGBT activists, or other left-wing groups.

Legutko concludes with an observation about the failure of the purportedly liberal establishment to take a firm stand: “Cowards will always find an excuse for failing to act decently and hide their fear behind clumsy arguments. In a society that has increasingly busied itself with tracking down enemies, fear is on the rise, and so is cowardly behavior.” The observation applies to many leaders of elite universities in the United States.

---

♦ Anti-fascist hysteria licenses political violence. We saw it happen in Portland, Oregon, where in 2020 left-wing radicals regularly clashed with police in front of a federal courthouse. The danger is greater still in Germany. Alternative für Deutschland politicians are regularly targeted with death threats. Some have been assaulted and hospitalized. The line often attributed to the Louisiana populist Huey Long comes to mind: “When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism.”

---

♦ Readers of this magazine are an impressive bunch. It takes some intellectual horsepower to motor through an issue. As one reader put it, “Subscribing to First Things is like doing a graduate degree in philosophy and theology.” It’s natural to want to share this exciting enterprise, which is why ROFTers groups spring up in so many places. This month we have three readers who want to form new ROFTers groups:

Jeff LeMaster of Orlando, Florida. Contact him at jefflemaster[at]gmail.com.

John Trecker of Kansas City, Kansas. He can be reached at jttrecker[at]gmail.com.

Spencer Revely of Honolulu, Hawaii. His contact: sdrevely[at]gmail.com.

---

♦ The ROFTers group of Northern Colorado (Fort Collins, Greeley, Loveland) is looking for new members. If you’d like to meet every two weeks with First Things devotees, get in touch with Paul Wilson: paulwilson4872[at]gmail.com.

---

♦ Final numbers are in for our fundraising effort to support the redesign of firstthings.com. Our goal was to raise 60 percent of the $114,000 estimated cost of a new website. We exceeded that goal as 270 donors contributed a total of $74,011. Thank you for your support.