While We’re At It

♦ N. S. Lyons’s reflection on C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and transhumanism recapitulates a long-standing conservative concern that modern culture trains us to love our ideals, not the real things of the world. Richard Weaver gives succinct expression to this criticism in his autobio­graphical essay, “Up From Liberalism”:

The denial of substance is one of the greatest heresies, and this is where much contemporary radicalism appears in an essentially sinful aspect. The constant warfare which it wages against anything that has status in the world, or against all the individual, particular, unique existences of the world which do not fit into a rationalistic pattern, is but a mask for the denial of substance.

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♦ I suppose Edmund Burke put the point more ­pungently:

Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man.

(With the term “metaphysician” Burke means one who engineers a perfect world in thought, not someone who contemplates the universal.) He goes on to say of such a mentality, “It is like that of the Principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil.”

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♦ Karl Marx felt the desire to annihilate. Here is the young Marx expatiating on the role of criticism. (The emphases are in the original; Marx never misses an opportunity to weight the words he hurls.)

Criticism is not passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its ­enemy which it wants not to refute, but to exterminate. . . . Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential sentiment is indignation, its essential activity is denunciation.

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♦ Rob Henderson writing on his Substack (Rob Henderson’s Newsletter) about the peculiar deference baby boomers give to young people: “Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.” Worse, “energetic young conflict entrepreneurs” seize the initiative and intimidate baby boomer leaders of institutions and companies, driving the woke agenda into a commanding role in the marketplace and government. Henderson doesn’t see any relief on the horizon. “Older adults want to be on the side of youth. [They are] desperate to pencil themselves out of the ‘old’ category. Every parent wants to be the ‘cool parent’; every professor wants to be the ‘cool professor.’” Not my colleague Mark Bauerlein. The titles of his two recent books about Millennials: The Dumbest Generation and The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.

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♦ Henderson provides a marvelous quote from Ian McGilchrist:

In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.

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♦ The sexual revolution has done more to create a hostile environment for Christian proclamation than old-fashioned scientific rationalism ever did. How do we respond to today’s sexual orthodoxies? We should begin by gaining a clear understanding of biblical teaching on the subject. To that end, I recommend a course of study offered by the Center for Christian Studies, “Glorify God with Your Body: Christian ­Sexual Ethics.” It begins on January 9, 2023, and runs through the end of February, in person or by Zoom. Founded by Keith Stanglin, the Center is our partner for the ­annual First Things lecture in Austin, Texas. It provides good resources for those seeking a sound understanding of Christian teaching. Find out more at ­christian-studies.org.

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♦ I should mention that First Things contributing editor Carl Trueman will join Keith Stanglin and others to teach the Center for Christian Studies course on ­sexual ethics.

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♦ Abraham Joshua Heschel: “We who ceaselessly toil and strive to rule the atoms and the stars fail to grasp what it means to be a man.” True today, and all the more so when we ceaselessly toil and strive to “be inclusive” and fail to grasp what it means to be a man—or a woman.

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♦ David L. Schindler passed away in November. In the 1990s, Schindler locked horns with Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Michael Novak, the neoconservative leaders of the first decades of First Things. He criticized what he thought was our too complacent Americanism. By his reckoning (in this he anticipated Patrick Deneen and others), the “logic” of American life and thought is all too congenial to abortion, euthanasia, and secularism. After all, “choice” is a great American praise word. The title of Neuhaus’s last book, American Babylon, suggests that time may have softened their differences. On the few occasions when Schindler and I met, when I was a young theologian who knew very little, he was unfailingly kind and generous. He was a man of deep theological knowledge, with a systematic mind the power of which one rarely encounters. May he rest in peace.

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♦ In the last election, men favored the GOP. Exit polling suggests that 56 percent of men went Republican and 42 percent went Democrat. Women went the other way: 53 percent Democrat to 45 percent Republican. But marital status is a more significant factor than sex. Married men were even more likely to vote Republican, and married women favored the GOP by a margin of 14 percent. Unmarried women, by contrast, are hard left. That cohort went for Democrats by a massive 37-point margin. This cohort is growing. A recent Pew study shows that a rising proportion of American adults are unmarried. Among Americans aged twenty-five to fifty-­four, in 1990 the percentage who had never married stood at 17 percent. By 2019 that cohort had grown to 33 percent. Living in New York City, I’m aware of the significant number of college-educated, professional women who are reaching the middle stages of life and still are not married. Many won’t ever marry. One ­wonders: What is it about progressivism that appeals so strongly to this group? My guess is that they interpret their frustrations as having been caused by “society.” In a certain sense that’s true. A triumphant Rainbow ­Reich has dissolved the traditional patterns of life that once brought men and women together and set them on the path toward marriage and parenthood. But the very same Rainbow Reich claims to usher in a “more inclusive” future, one in which single women are promised that their “identities” will be affirmed and their ­grievances addressed. The falsity of this promise bids fair to be the most destabilizing force in American politics in the coming decades, for it advances the very trends that lead to the frustrations and grievances of unmarried women.

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♦ I’ve followed the FTX cryptocurrency caper only at a distance. It’s not clear to me whether the digital currency company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is a crook in the Bernie Madoff mold, or whether he’s simply a wildly incompetent windbag. Anonymous ­sources suggest that billions were transferred from FTX customer accounts to another Bankman-Fried entity, ­Alameda Research, a trading firm that got upside-down on cryptocurrency bets as prices fell. Until recently, the CEO of Alameda was Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who apparently worked with Bankman-­Fried on these fishy financial transactions. As everything fell apart, insiders reported on the ten-­person “cabal of roommates” who slept with each other and took Adderall to fuel the manic pace of trading. Bankman-Fried, who made a name for himself as a proponent of progressive causes and “effective ­altruism,” admitted that his public positions were designed to win favorable treatment from investors and regulators. In that adventure he was successful, it seems. The criminality, cynicism, and moral disorder of this debacle are, perhaps, all too common. More remarkable is the way in which so many Establishment heavyweights fawned over Bankman-Fried. I suppose the fact that FTX was the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party in 2022 (more than $70 million) helped win him plaudits from the Great and the Good.

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♦ Speaking of blinkered fawning, as I write, the New York Times “DealBook Summit” on November 30 continues to feature Bankman-Fried. He’s slated to appear on a panel with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A guy who oversaw the theft of billions from client accounts serving as a featured speaker a high-level conference: Is our elite really this corrupt?

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♦ David Hume: “Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” He did not live in the twentieth century.

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♦ I do not spend much time thinking about what seems to be Pope Francis’s signature initiative, which Fr. ­Raymond de Souza dubs “the synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church.” When I do, I find myself harkening to some lines penned by Joseph Ratzinger for an introduction to a reissue of Henri de Lubac’s 1947 classic, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. The man who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote,

The social dimension which de Lubac saw rooted in deepest mystery has often sunk to the merely sociological so that the unique Christian contribution to the right understanding of history and community has disappeared from sight. Instead of a leaven for the age, or its salt, we are often simply its echo.

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♦ The Tablet’s Rome correspondent, Christopher Lamb, recently interviewed Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia. In 2016, Pope Francis appointed his excellency to be president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and grand chancellor of what is now the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family ­Sciences. John XXIII’s image of opening the windows of the church and letting in fresh air ranks among the most shopworn clichés in the history of Catholicism. Lamb cannot resist using it in his puff-piece.

As we speak, the early afternoon sunshine is streaming through an open window, and our discussion is frequently interrupted by screaming sirens and the cacophony of Roman traffic. It strikes me as a metaphor for what Paglia is trying to do: while he wants to let some light into the room and hear the noise from the street, some would prefer to keep the curtains drawn and for the sounds of the outside world to be silenced.

I suppose Paglia himself evokes this very tired metaphor. The seventy-seven-year-old Jesuit is the model modern theologian, pining for “broad engagement” that is “more inclusive” and “respects diversity” in order to combat “rigid” and “ideological” positions that are not open to “dialogue.” It’s very tired and tiresome at this late date.

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♦ As I’ve written many times in these pages, the ­Francis pontificate represents the sector of the Catholic Church that’s desperate to sign a concordat with the sexual revolution. (See, for example, “A New Concordat?,” January 2015.) Paglia and others regard this hoped-for concordat as necessary so that the church can pivot away from nettlesome moral questions, questions that bear upon the most intimate aspects of our lives and implicate our souls, in order to concentrate on what r­eally matters, which is social justice.

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♦ I have a long row of books by John Lukacs, the Hungarian-­born historian. His meditation on the social history of the twentieth century through the 1960s, A Thread of Years, affected me deeply. He was a marvelous storyteller, paradoxically able to capture that which has been lost. And he had reliably good judgment about human affairs. For example, from The Passing of the Modern Age: “Our world has come to the edge of disaster precisely because of its preoccupation with justice, indeed, often at the expense of truth.” Social justice warriors are doomed to dissatisfaction: “This false priority preoccupies us; we attempt to satisfy our consciences with the thin gruel of worldly justice, limited and rather hopeless as it is.” And they misjudge the human condition: “A man can live with injustice a long time, indeed, that is the human condition: but he cannot long live with untruth.”

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♦ After hitting the pause button during Covid, the ROFTERS of Columbus, Ohio, are renewing their vigorous discussions of the latest issues of this fine journal. If you want to join the group, get in touch with Adam Pasternack at firstthingscolumbus@gmail.com.

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♦ Aidan Beveridge would like to form a ROFTERS group in the area of Escondido, California. You can reach him at aidanpxbev@gmail.com.

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♦ Want to find out if there’s a ROFTERS group near you? Go to our list of active groups at firsttthings.com/rofters.

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♦ I’d like to welcome Francis X. Maier to the masthead as consulting editor. He has been working behind the scenes for a good while. It’s long past time to recognize the many contributions he makes.

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♦ As you receive this issue of First Things, our ­year-end campaign will be in full swing. I hope you will donate. We are only as strong as the support we receive from our readers. Fortunately, First Things readers are the world’s best—not only intelligent and faithful, but wonderfully generous. Thank you for your ­support!