While We’re At It

♦ John Rose was a junior fellow during our halcyon early days, a period that I refer to as the Wabash Years because a stream of talented and interesting characters made their way to First Things from that fine Indiana college at that time. Now associate director of the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University, John teaches a popular course, “How to Think in an Age of Political Polarization.” It’s a rare 2023 classroom in which students actually say what’s on their minds. John reports: “We talk a lot about courage—finding the courage to speak, to dissent—and I’ve observed that courage is contagious. Students will follow upon a brave comment with another brave comment.” I’ll add that it takes a lot of courage for a faculty member to venture such a course, allowing students to discuss, even debate, topics such as abortion, transgender athletes, police and violence, and even the cogency of the very notion of “race,” topics that today’s commissars (many with faculty appointments and administrative posts) have decreed closed questions. Knowing John as I do, I’m not surprised by the success of his course. He has courage, yes, but he is also blessed with a warm kindness that burnishes his rock-solid Christian convictions. Read more about John and his course (and about a surprise classroom visit by Jerry Seinfeld during a discussion of comedy’s disruptive impieties) in the university’s official organ, Duke Mag.

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♦ For a long time, it was difficult to find a copy of Ernst Jünger’s 1939 work of fiction, On the Marble Cliffs. I’ve wanted to read the book for a long time, a desire heightened by Russell Berman’s fine discussion of it in “Standing Against Tyranny” (November 2020). Fortunately, New York Review Books published a fresh translation earlier this year. After receiving my copy, I could not put it down. It’s not a novel so much as an extended prose poem about a man and his brother whose desire to escape from history is foiled by their incarnate humanity. Fantastical and dreamlike, the pages are nonetheless suffused with an unflinching realism about the human condition. The conceit that On the Marble Cliffs should be read simply as allegory for resistance to ­Nazism is not plausible. But this reputation is not entirely inapt. Like Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, On the Marble Cliffs belongs on the shelf dedicated to the question of how to preserve one’s spiritual integrity in evil times, a question of growing relevance these days.

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♦ C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” offers insights into the use and abuse of crises. I’ve updated his famous poem.

What are we waiting for, glued to the evening news?
White supremacists and semi-fascists are due here today.

Why don’t politicians do something about the open border?
Why do legislators ignore those dying of overdoses?
          Because white supremacists and semi-fascists are coming today.
          It would be irresponsible to be distracted.

Why is the President denouncing his opponents as racists?
Why issue executive orders in defiance of the Constitution?
          Because white supremacists and semi-fascists are coming today
          And the President can’t wait for Congress to act.
          It’s an emergency. He must address the threat.

Why is our society docile as billionaires shower money on rich universities?
Why are they so confident that no one will challenge
the system that made them so wealthy?
          Because white supremacists and semi-fascists are coming today
          and the impending doom dazzles columnists
and commentators.

Why do graduation speakers always sound the same note?
Why are we endlessly catechized with rainbow rhetoric?
          Because white supremacists and semi-fascists are coming
          and the people must be prepared.

Why the confusion in the universities?
(How silent the diversity deans have become.)
Why are the columnists grasping for words,
trying to find new themes?
          Because night has fallen and the white ­
          supremacists and semi-fascists have not come.
          And some of our sociologists are saying that there
          are no white supremacists or semi-fascists any longer.

Now what is going to happen to us without white supremacists and semi-fascists?
Those people were a kind of solution.

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♦ A recent Pew Research Center study provides data on American attitudes toward marriage and family. One set of polling questions sought to draw out what Americans think important for a fulfilling life. Seventy-­one percent of respondents said that having a job or career that they enjoy is Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go extremely or very important, with four percent saying that the satisfying work is not too or not at all important. Being married? Twenty-three percent say that marriage is extremely or very important, while 44 percent said it’s not too or not at all important. Having children? Twenty-six percent said very or extremely important; 42 percent said not too or not at all.

The polling shows that women are slightly more likely than men to give priority to job and career (74 percent vs. 69 percent). Women are less likely to identify marriage as very or extremely important for a fulfilling life (18 percent of women as compared to 28 percent of men). Men also give more importance to having children than do women. Not surprisingly, here as elsewhere fundamental moral and cultural priorities track the left–right divide. More than 30 percent of Republicans think marriage and children are very or extremely important; less than 20 percent of Democrats agree.

We must guard against reading too much into polling data. Nevertheless, these results suggest that the downward trend in marriage rates and decline in fertility rates will continue, not primarily because of economic pressure on families or the lack of marriageable men (although these factors no doubt have an effect). Rather, the declines are largely driven by the fact that most people don’t think marriage and children are all that important. We are socialized to be expressive individuals concerned primarily with our own self-curated lives.

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♦ Ephraim Radner, from his forthcoming book, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty: “One cannot be a slave to what one offers up.”

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♦ Genevieve Medow-Jenkins, heir to California’s longstanding tradition of alternative spirituality, ­founded Secular Sabbath. It’s a spa-day program that promises to connect you to a “higher power.” Reading about her venture made me marvel. It’s so very American: Reinventing religion while making money. Mary Baker Eddy would be proud!

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♦ Apropos of my reflections on the Great Forgetting, this is Walker Percy, writing in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book: “You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual—because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

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♦ From Iain McGilchrist’s massive book about everything, The Matter with Things:

If you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it—and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

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♦ On an evening during New York’s Fashion Week in early September I found myself at a fashion show in a dark Brooklyn warehouse that featured the latest garments by Elena Velez, a hot young designer. Although my wife needles me about my fancy suits, I’m not a regular at fashion shows, especially not the kind with throbbing techno music and models who, at the end of the show, grapple with each other in the mud, a spectacle that topped the top-ten lists in Fashion Week recaps. But I had a reason to attend. Velez titled her show The Longhouse, drawing on a First Things web essay, “What is the Longhouse?” published last February. In the notes for the show, Velez wrote: “Situated in the allegorical chthonic swamp [the mud in which the models wrestled], The Longhouse is both a celebration and exorcism of contemporary feminine influence.” Count me ­unqualified to judge whether her couture and her show succeed on those terms. Nevertheless, I’m pleased that material published by First Things influences up-and-coming creators of culture such as Elena Velez.

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♦ Fred Boley, O.P., of Jefferson City, Missouri would like to form a ROFTers group. You can contact him at fboley[at]protonmail.com.

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♦ We have a passel of ROFTers leaders who are eager for new members.

Rev. Paul Stallsworth of Kinston, North Carolina has issued a welcoming call. To join the group, get in touch: paulstallsworth[at]nccumc.org.

The group in Abington, Pennsylvania seeks new members. Contact their leader, Maurice Lee, at pastor[at]holytrinity.net.

The ROFTers group in Rochester, New York is celebrating its fifth anniversary this fall and welcomes new members. Contact group leader Alisia Chase at ­a.gracechase[at]gmail.com.

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♦ If you’d like to start a ROFTers group, send us a note at ft[at]firstthings.com, and we’ll get the word out. Interested in joining a group? Check our list at firstthings.com/rofters to see if there’s one in your area.