Another good essay in the Atlantic analyzed the use of the word "evil" in response to the recent weekend of mass shootings.  It found that the word was used as a way of avoiding clear and difficult thinking and action.  An excerpt:

But there is a difference between acknowledging evil and using it as a scapegoat. There is a difference between the evil that is invoked to inspire conversations and the evil that is invoked to curtail them. Many of the weekend’s political deployments of “evil” served to proclaim the innocence of the system that has allowed mass shootings to become reliably atmospheric occurrences. An unbelievable amount of evil that we cannot comprehend. It conveys an easy kind of ignorance. Crime … boy, I don’t know.

Evil, summoned in this way, is an extension of thoughts and prayers. It suggests, in the face of human-made terror, not only a kind of complacency, but also a kind of helplessness. It treats the violence of mass murder—the shock; the grief; the two-month-old baby whose fingers are broken because his mother, fatally shot, apparently fought desperately to shield him from the bullets—as an abstraction. Evil is its own explanation, the logic goes; it is not interested in causes or effects. It does not want to talk about the violent ideology of white supremacy, or the mechanics of double-drum magazines, or the fact that, in the United States, a person can go to a store and purchase a military-grade weapon with the convenience of benevolent legality. Evil does not want to talk about the National Rifle Association. It makes no room for the uncomfortable details. Evil, used as a talking point, both throws up its hands and washes them.

This is the use of bad political language that Orwell warned us about.  Or the use of cliche that shuts down thinking and empathy that Hannah Arendt warned us of in Eichmann in Jerusalem.  Thank goodness we have her analysis of the banality of evil.  Yes, these attacks are evil, but evil is not something incomprehensible about which we can do nothing effective.  Evil is banal and we can rid ourselves of it by taking the right steps.

A perceptive essay by George Packer in the Atlantic examines political language, particularly that of Trump and contrasts it with the language currently used by progressives.  Some insights:

The strength of Trump’s populist language lies in its openness. It requires no expert knowledge and has no code of hidden meanings. It’s attuned to some of the strongest currents in American pop culture, and it gives rise almost spontaneously to memorable slogans—“Build the wall,” “Lock her up,” “Witch hunt,” “No collusion,” “Make America great again.” It’s the way people talk when the inhibitors are off. It’s available to anyone who’s willing to join the mob. 

***

By contrast, the language of the contemporary left is anti-populist. Its vocabulary, much of it taken from academia, is the opposite of accessible—it has to be decoded and learned. Terms such as centered, marginalized, intersectional, non-binary, and Eurocentric gender discipline separate outsiders from insiders—that’s part of their intent, as is the insistence on declaring one’s personal pronouns and showing an ability to use them accordingly. Even common words like ally and privilege acquire a resonance that takes them out of the realm of ordinary usage, because the point of this discourse is to create a sense of special virtue. Many of these changes happen by ambush—suddenly and irrevocably, with no visible trail of discussion and decision, and with quick condemnation of holdouts—which gives them a powerful mystique.

The language of the left creates a hierarchy of those who get it and those who don’t. Mastering the vocabulary is a way of signaling entry into a select world of the knowing and the just. The system is closed—there’s an internal logic that can be accepted or rejected but isn’t open to argument or question. In this sense, though much of the language of the left has academic origins, its use in the public square is almost religious. The abandonment of language that brings people in rather than shutting them out is one of the left’s many structural disadvantages in American politics today.

A fascinating article on Aeon about research into our inner voice.  This will come in handy when I start Descartes in class in a couple of weeks.

An excerpt:

In my reading this week, I came across this discussion of the truth of religious statements in George Lindbeck's classic The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age.  Reading it made me think of the recent debate around Jeff Sessions's misuse of scripture and why we can call it a misuse.

Thus for a Christian, "God is Three and One," or "Christ is Lord" are true only as parts of a total pattern of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting.  They are false when their use in any given instance is inconsistent with what the pattern as a whole affirms of God's being and will.  The crusader's battle cry "Christus est Dominus," for example, is false when used to authorize cleaving the skull of the infidel (even though the same words in other contexts may be a true utterance).  When thus employed, it contradicts the Christian understanding of Lordship as embodying, for example, suffering servanthood.

A column in the Times explores how Trump is representative of the original meaning of the word idiot--"a prepubescent, parasitic solipsist who talks only to himself."  It became clear to me during his inaugural speech that he is a pathetic little man.  The idiot is a danger to public life, as the Greeks understood:

The idiot cares nothing about public life, much less public service. The idiot cares only about his own name. The idiot, by way of his actions, can destroy the social body. Eventually, the idiot destroys himself, but in so doing, potentially annihilates everyone along with him. He is a ticking time bomb in the middle of the public square.

I recently read Lao She's classic Chinese novel Rickshaw Boy. Here's my review of the book.  One thing I enjoyed was his description.  Eloquent and beautiful descriptions of the weather and scene, but also vivid psychological detail that conveyed a certain existentialism.  Two samples:

The best he could come up with was self-pity, but even that seemed impossible, since his head was empty; he no sooner had thoughts about himself than he forgot them, like a dying candle that won't light.  Enveloped by darkness, he felt as if he were floating inside a black cloud.  Though he was aware of his existence and that he was walking forward, there was no evidence of where he was headed.  He was like a man tossed about on the open sea, no longer able to believe in himself.  Never in his life had he felt so bewildered, so downhearted, so very alone.

***

He could not shake the feeling that he'd never again be happy.  He swore off thinking, speaking, and losing his temper, and yet there was a heaviness in his chest that went away for a while when he was working but always returned when he had time on his hands--it was soft, but large; it had no definable taste, yet it choked him, like a sponge.  He's keep this suffocating something at bay by working himself half to death so he could fall into an exhausted sleep.  His nights he'd give over to his dreams, his days to his arms and legs.  He'd be like a working zombie: sweeping away snow, buying things, ordering kerosene lanterns, cleaning rickshaws, moving tables and chairs, eating the food Fourth Master supplied, and sleeping, all without knowing what was going on around him, or speaking, or even thinking, yet always dimly aware of the presence of that spongelike thing.

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Rickshaw Boy

I posted my brief review of Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika the other day.  Today I'd like to share a two paragraph excerpt as an example of his eloquent writing.

As in the just-past night, only terror tinged with a dull anger stirs in us as the normally ludicrous takes on a shape of nightmare under even so high and revealing a sun, and no laughter moves in us with its saving grace as we watch the beatings as of beasts of those still struggling to free themselves from the  hobbles of their pants, and the face of our Jerry driver floats out before me like the fragment of a dream already ages old, and I reach out as to a lost and redeeming friend, but the emptiness in me is the emptier for its finding only the Now.

The ground is firm enough under our boots, but there is a hollow ring to it as of water warningly close, and I am reckoning it will be bitter and salt as the crystals strewn like some malignant frost over the curiously ochre earth.  Also, there are shallow depressions of cracking mud that tell of water in some other time, a surging, perhaps, of a capricious tide.  The occasional scrub is twisted and black as though a fire had swept it or an enervating poison gripped its roots, and the even scarcer grass is cancerous and brittle as a dying man's hair, and I am hearing the usual silence that even our frenetic trampling cannot shatter or obscure.

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Bitter Eden

I've never really understood all the angst over political correctness.  This was a major topic when I was in high school and college in the 1990's and has resurfaced in the current presidential campaign. A good essay on Huffington Post invites us to think harder about this topic, including its history.  I learned from the article that the term was originally derived by liberals to mock the way Marxists often tried to control the way people talked.

On the one hand, we are simply talking about being nice.  When people (individuals or groups) have ways they would prefer to be addressed and spoken about, then it is simply kind to abide by their request.  Does that sometimes mean who have to be mildly inconveniced?  Sure, but that's often the case with kindness.

On the other hand, can people be overly sensitive?  Indeed they can.  We've entered into an era when people can be too easily offended and sometimes take offense on behalf of someone else.  This last year many college campuses seemed to exhibit absurd extremes in this regard.

But are those college absurdities a threat to the ordinary person compelling their political outrage?  That seems even more absurd to me.  If Yale wants to get in a furor over an e-mail about Halloween costumes, then simply roll your eyes and move on.

What underlies the reactions of those on the political right is that suddenly (at least to them it is sudden) all sorts of viewpoints they took for granted have become taboo in the wider culture.  

Today I began reading Simon Schama's first volume of The Story of the Jews.  I ordered it last winter when the PBS documentary aired, and it kept getting bumped in my reading for other things pertinent to stuff I was doing at church.  I am mesmerized by Schama's prose in this book (in 2008 I read his Landscape and Memory).  Here are some excellent excerpts only from the four page Foreword:

For a couple of hours after supper, the sages, false messiahs, poets and rabble-rousers came into our little company as we cracked walnuts and jokes, and drank wine and the brimming cup of Jewish words.

***

Over everything else, understandably, the crematoria smoke still hung its tragic pall.

***

But, whatever the cost of breaking it, silence is not a historian's option.

***

We would moor under the willows to wrestle with the pain of Shylock.

My good friend Greg Horton has posted a response to the Hobby Lobby case that I found to be very good.  His main purpose, as Greg usually does on his blog, is to discuss the role of language.  In particular here he is discussing whether faith-talk can define medical categories like "pregnancy."  He concludes, of course, that it cannot.  Which leads him to conclude that "The Hobby Lobby decision is a hydra-headed clusterfuck."  Amen.

Two parts of this post also get to issues that I had with the majority decision, but haven't written about yet, as I also didn't want to jump into the fray before but wanted to read, listen, and mull things over.  Here is issue one, as described by Greg:

To be clear, the case rested on the Green family being allowed to define pregnancy in a way that is counter to how medical professionals define pregnancy. I have no idea why I should take the word of business owners who specialize in selling imported crap for display in middle class homes around evangelicaldom when the American Medical Association seems a far more reliable source of information about medicine, but it's America, and as my students regularly inform me with scalable—depending on their level of offense at my cultural blasphemy—levels of indignation, "Everyone has a right to their own opinion."

In reading the majority decision I was horrified by the line of Justice Alito's that the court was protecting the Green family's belief that four of these contraception methods were abortifacients.  Despite the fact that the scientific and medical communities, including the FDA, don't categorize them as such.  Justice Ginsburg was shocked that the Court now will be adjudicating religious beliefs in a way it never has before, determining if they are sincerely held in order to apply this ruling in other cases.  It is, of course, shocking that the Court is protecting a claim that is empirically false.  I'm not sure how an empirically false medical claim becomes a religious belief, but it did on Tuesday.  And that is Greg's problem, as he concludes his post:

Faith in god does not imply the ability to define non-theological terms, like pregnancy, so that they are consistent with a particular brand of theism. The object of faith is not definitions or meanings that are only tangentially related to words in a sacred text; the object of faith is god. This will necessitate that theists believe certain things are true or false, but extracting categories from the text and then insisting testable truths be understood in light of those categories is not helpful in communicating with members of various tribes who do not share those categories. Pregnant means, for all tribes, a fertilized egg is implanted in the wall of the uterus. To equate faith with the belief in definitions that are contrary to known scientific realities is to impose an anti-intellectual burden on believers that makes meaningful, intertribal communication impossible.

The second big issue I had with the ruling, is also something Greg addresses tangentially.

That the SCOTUS majority opinion specifically said the decision could not be used for precedential purposes related to blood transfusions and other medical realities about which different faith traditions have differing beliefs is a strong indication that they know this was a perilously bad decision. Either the principle applies or it doesn't, and in this case, they treated a comprehensive application of principle as an ad hoc application of principle, but the box is still open and the five justices in the majority will be living with their decision in the form of litigation for years to come.

First, as a practical matter, you cannot claim that the ruling is not a precedent, for clearly lower court judges will be compelled to use it as a precedent when adjudicating similar cases.

Second, the ruling defies the laws of logic that most people learn as an undergraduate in college.  According to those laws it is the basic form of the argument that is valid, regardless of what the particulars are.  The particulars in this case had to do with contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act.  But if the argument itself is valid, then you can change that particulars and get the same conclusion.  That the Court in point of fact says that the form of argument is not valid when applied to other particulars entails that it is not valid when applied to this particular.  This part of ruling must be making every logicians head spin.

So, we'll be living with this "hydra-headed clusterfuck" for some time.