Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 161

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Trevor Responds To Crit­i­cism From The French Ambas­sador (Trevor Noah, YouTube): this is a wit­ty and insight­ful 8 minute reflec­tion on the inter­play between eth­nic her­itage and nation­al iden­ti­ty and the ways that Amer­i­cans process things dif­fer­ent­ly than the French.
  2. The New York Yan­kees Are A Moral Abom­i­na­tion (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “Real­ly, how does a Yan­kees fan’s pride in all those pur­chased cham­pi­onships dif­fer from the self-delu­sion of a man stag­ger­ing out of a bawdy house at dawn, com­pli­ment­ing him­self on his mag­nif­i­cent pow­ers of seduc­tion?” A fun­ny piece of cul­tur­al com­men­tary in the New York Times writ­ten by a the­olo­gian? Yes, please. This col­umn is about way more than base­ball.
  3. Uncom­fort­able Ques­tions in the Wake of Rus­sia Indict­ment 2.0 and Trump’s Press Con­fer­ence With Putin (Jack Gold­smith, Law­fare): “It is no response to say that the Unit­ed States doesn’t med­dle in for­eign elec­tions, because it has in the past—at least as recent­ly as Bill Clinton’s inter­ven­tion in the Russ­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 1996 and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as the Hillary Clin­ton State Department’s alleged inter­ven­tion in Russia’s 2011 leg­isla­tive elec­tions. And dur­ing the Cold War the Unit­ed States inter­vened in numer­ous for­eign elec­tions, more than twice as often as the Sovi­et Union.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law School. The whole thing is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Free Speech, Cen­sor­ship, Hate Speech, Twit­ter (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the thing: every defense, every anal­o­gy I’ve seen to jus­ti­fy ask­ing twit­ter to shut down hate speech, has come down, in the last analy­sis, to a defense of prop­er­ty rights. And yet, the most casu­al obser­va­tion ought to tell you that we are now locked in a bat­tle between prop­er­ty rights and human rights. If you must resort to a defense of prop­er­ty rights to bol­ster your argu­ment, I beg to sub­mit that you should either take anoth­er look at what you’re defend­ing, or stop call­ing your­self a pro­gres­sive.” A social­ist defense of free speech.
    • Relat­ed: I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me (Bar­rett Wil­son, Quil­lette): “In my pre­vi­ous life, I was a self-right­eous social jus­tice cru­sad­er. I would use my mid-sized Twit­ter and Face­book plat­forms to sig­nal my wok­e­ness on top­ics such as LGBT rights, rape cul­ture, and racial injus­tice…. Then one day, sud­den­ly, I was accused of some of the very trans­gres­sions I’d called out in oth­ers. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world.”
    • Also relat­ed: Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court sys­tem.” This is an old­er piece but I saw it for the first time recent­ly.
  5. For Some Gang Mem­bers In El Sal­vador, The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Offers A Way Out (Emi­ly Green, NPR): “Becom­ing a devot­ed mem­ber of an evan­gel­i­cal church at a young age is the only way many ado­les­cent boys are able to avoid being roped into a gang, Cruz says. And it’s also the only way for them to get out of a gang if they’re in it, short of leav­ing the coun­try.”
  6. Sanc­tu­ary amid hous­ing cri­sis (Wendy Lee, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “With no end in sight to soar­ing hous­ing costs, sev­er­al Bay Area faith orga­ni­za­tions have become a sanc­tu­ary of sorts — not just chan­nel­ing dona­tions and dis­trib­ut­ing food, but also offer­ing a safe place for peo­ple liv­ing in cars or RVs. The arrange­ment has some­times grat­ed on neigh­bors, but for pas­tors, it’s sim­ply an exten­sion of their mis­sion to serve human­i­ty.”
  7. Bald­ing Out (Christo­pher Bald­ing, per­son­al blog): “In Chi­na, there are very few peo­ple who I wit­ness live a tes­ta­ment of their belief. Who knows if the Par­ty mem­ber is a mem­ber because he believes in Marx­ism, Com­mu­nism, Xi-ism, or sim­ply wants a bet­ter apart­ment? Who knows if the per­son who claims to be a believ­er in democ­ra­cy but com­plies with the Par­ty actu­al­ly believes that or just tells the for­eign­er? For­eign­ers in Chi­na in posi­tions of influ­ence who claim to believe in human rights but col­lab­o­rate with the Par­ty to deny Chi­nese cit­i­zens rights need to answer for their actions. I have lit­tle idea what peo­ple in Chi­na believe but I know that if the Par­ty ever falls, there will be more than a bil­lion more peo­ple claim­ing they were clos­et democ­ra­cy advo­cates.” An Amer­i­can pro­fes­sor reflects on Chi­na as he pre­pares to leave. Very inter­est­ing, a bit ram­bly.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

The Four Loves: Friendship

The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

Now we turn to the sec­ond human love Lewis con­sid­ers: phil­ia (φιλία — friend­ship). 

Even if you’ve got­ten behind on the read­ings I encour­age you to go through this chap­ter. While much has changed in the way we think about friend­ship nowa­days (for instance, we val­ue it more than did Lewis’s con­tem­po­raries), much has not. And the nature of friend­ship has changed not at all. Lewis’s insights will help you forge bet­ter friend­ships and be a bet­ter friend.

Three com­ments before we dive in:

On to the con­tent! This is one of my favorite obser­va­tions by Lewis:

In each of my friends there is some­thing that only some oth­er friend can ful­ly bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activ­i­ty; I want oth­er lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall nev­er again see Ronald’s reac­tion to a specif­i­cal­ly Car­o­line joke. Far from hav­ing more of Ronald, hav­ing him “to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friend­ship is the least jeal­ous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the new­com­er is qual­i­fied to become a real friend. (page 783)

In case you were won­der­ing, Charles is Charles Williams (a nov­el­ist, poet, and edi­tor at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press) and Ronald is J. R. R. Tolkien (yes — that Tolkien). They along with Lewis were the cen­tral mem­bers of a lit­er­ary dis­cus­sion group called the Inklings. They would read their writ­ings aloud to one anoth­er and cri­tique each oth­er. If you’re ever in Oxford you can vis­it the pub they used to meet in — The Eagle and Child.

Back to the main top­ic. This idea of two friends bring­ing things out of each oth­er that allow me to appre­ci­ate each of them more is beau­ti­ful, and Lewis’s the­o­log­i­cal appli­ca­tion of it is one that I have found help­ful when think­ing about the glo­ry of heav­en:

…the very mul­ti­tude of the blessed (which no man can num­ber) increas­es the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, see­ing Him in her own way, doubt­less com­mu­ni­cates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are cry­ing “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one anoth­er (Isa­iah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heav­en­ly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. (page 783)

More prac­ti­cal­ly, Lewis has some thoughts on how friend­ships begin:

Friend­ship aris­es out of mere Com­pan­ion­ship when two or more of the com­pan­ions dis­cov­er that they have in com­mon some insight or inter­est or even taste which the oth­ers do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique trea­sure (or bur­den). The typ­i­cal expres­sion of open­ing Friend­ship would be some­thing like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” (page 785)

This is one rea­son why col­lege is so exhil­a­rat­ing. You have so many more peers than you did in high school that you can eas­i­ly find peo­ple who share your inter­ests. Your friend­ships in Chi Alpha espe­cial­ly have the poten­tial to become so sat­is­fy­ing because you’ve already got your faith in com­mon, and on top of that Stan­ford itself, and on top of that your expe­ri­ence of Chi Alpha instead of anoth­er Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty, and if you add on top of that just one more thing like a cer­tain sport or a spe­cif­ic fan­dom or a shared sense of humor then the odds that a sig­nif­i­cant friend­ship will form are quite high. 

Not every­one acquires those friend­ships, of course. Some respond by look­ing for friends. Lewis points out why look­ing for friends direct­ly is often coun­ter­pro­duc­tive:

That is why those pathet­ic peo­ple who sim­ply “want friends” can nev­er make any. The very con­di­tion of hav­ing Friends is that we should want some­thing else besides Friends. Where the truth­ful answer to the ques­tion Do you see the same truth? would be “I see noth­ing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friend­ship can arise— though Affec­tion of course may. There would be noth­ing for the Friend­ship to be about; and Friend­ship must be about some­thing, even if it were only an enthu­si­asm for domi­noes or white mice. Those who have noth­ing can share noth­ing; those who are going nowhere can have no fel­low-trav­ellers. (page 786)

So if you feel lone­ly — pur­sue some­thing you’re inter­est­ed in. And then chat with those around you who are engaged in the same pur­suit. Friend­ship will often emerge. This will prove to be espe­cial­ly use­ful advice once you grad­u­ate and have to forge friend­ships with­out the aggres­sive help of Stan­ford Res Ed.

Lewis also address­es a peren­ni­al ques­tion among col­lege stu­dents: can guys and girls can be just friends?

When the two peo­ple who thus dis­cov­er that they are on the same secret road are of dif­fer­ent sex­es, the friend­ship which aris­es between them will very eas­i­ly pass—may pass in the first half-hour—into erot­ic love. Indeed, unless they are phys­i­cal­ly repul­sive to each oth­er or unless one or both already loves else­where, it is almost cer­tain to do so soon­er or lat­er. (page 786)

Lewis is cor­rect, and at this junc­ture I refer you to one of my favorite YouTube videos: Why Men and Women Can’t Be Friends

Near the end of the chap­ter he gives us a help­ful reminder:

…we think we have cho­sen our peers. In real­i­ty, a few years’ dif­fer­ence in the dates of our births, a few more miles between cer­tain hous­es, the choice of one uni­ver­si­ty instead of anoth­er, post­ing to dif­fer­ent reg­i­ments, the acci­dent of a top­ic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Chris­t­ian, there are, strict­ly speak­ing, no chances. A secret Mas­ter of the Cer­e­monies has been at work. Christ, who said to the dis­ci­ples “Ye have not cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you,” can tru­ly say to every group of Chris­t­ian friends “You have not cho­sen one anoth­er but I have cho­sen you for one anoth­er.” (pages 801–802)

Thank God for your friends!

Next week, roman­tic love…

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 160

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Democ­rats Are Wrong About Repub­li­cans. Repub­li­cans Are Wrong About Democ­rats. (Per­ry Bacon Jr., FiveThir­tyEight): “Blacks made up about a quar­ter of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but Repub­li­cans esti­mat­ed the share at 46 per­cent. Repub­li­cans thought 38 per­cent of Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al, while the actu­al num­ber was about 6 per­cent. Democ­rats esti­mat­ed that 44 per­cent of Repub­li­cans make more than $250,000 a year. The actu­al share was 2 per­cent. Peo­ple also over­stat­ed the num­bers of these stereo­typ­i­cal groups with­in their own par­ty — Democ­rats thought 29 per­cent of their fel­low Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al — but they weren’t off by as much as mem­bers of the oth­er par­ty.”
  2. The Social­ist Net­work (Gilad Edel­man, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “At the heart of the split between lib­er­als and social­ists, at least in the­o­ry, is the ques­tion of what to do about cap­i­tal­ism. Lib­er­als tend to see it as some­thing that needs to be fixed. Social­ists see it as some­thing to be defeat­ed. They say they do, any­way. As we’ve seen, the Mil­len­ni­al social­ist intel­lec­tu­als aren’t real­ly call­ing for gov­ern­ment takeover of indus­try.”
  3. Affirm­ing Dis­ad­van­tage (John McWhort­er, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “Do I oppose affir­ma­tive action? Not at all. But I sug­gest that what we now ‘affirm’ is dis­ad­van­tage suf­fered by all kinds of peo­ple.” The author is a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia. He earned his Ph.D. at Stan­ford, btw.
  4. Cul­ture War As Class War: How Gay Rights Rein­force Elite Pow­er (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Priv­i­leg­ing the nor­mal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty rather than, say, racial inte­gra­tion allows elites to have their diver­si­ty cake and eat it, too.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
  5. If You Care About NATO You Should Care About Ger­man Mil­i­tary Readi­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “…Germany’s mil­i­tary made head­lines when it used broom­sticks instead of machine guns dur­ing a NATO exer­cise because of a short­age of equip­ment. The lack of real weapons in the Euro­pean Union’s most pop­u­lous nation was seen as symp­to­matic of how under­fund­ed its mil­i­tary has long been.” This is scary.
  6. Learn­ing From ‘The Final Pagan Gen­er­a­tion’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): this is a long and illu­mi­nat­ing post. “Under­stand that we, like the final pagan gen­er­a­tion [in ancient Rome], might think we are fight­ing for tol­er­ance, but our oppo­nents are fight­ing for vic­to­ry. We have to change our tac­tics.” (empha­sis removed)
  7. Pres­i­dent Trump has nom­i­nat­ed Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Jus­tice. I’ve got a lot of links here — just pick one or two.
    • It Took a Vil­lage to Raise Kavanaugh (David Brooks, New York Times): “Kavanaugh is the prod­uct of a com­mu­ni­ty. He is the prod­uct of a con­ser­v­a­tive legal infra­struc­ture that devel­ops ideas, recruits tal­ent, links ris­ing stars, nur­tures genius, molds and launch­es judi­cial nom­i­nees…. If you empha­size pro­fes­sion­al excel­lence first, if you gain a foothold in society’s main­stream insti­tu­tions, if you build a cohe­sive band of broth­ers and sis­ters, you can trans­form the land­scape of your field.”
    • As Trump picks Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, evan­gel­i­cals rejoice: ‘I will vote for him again’ (Julie Zauzmer, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors and activists said they would have been pleased with any of the names report­ed to be on Trump’s short­list for the nom­i­na­tion. After all, that was the gam­bit that won Trump so many evan­gel­i­cal votes in 2016: He made the unusu­al move of releas­ing, before he was even pres­i­dent, a list of judges he would con­sid­er for the Supreme Court if elect­ed. And evan­gel­i­cals liked what they saw.”
    • Brett Kavanaugh, Don­ald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, explained (Dylan Matthews, Vox): “Kavanaugh con­tin­ued to com­pile a legal record that would lead to Durbin’s descrip­tion of him as ‘the Zelig or For­rest Gump of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. You show up at every scene of the crime … whether it is Elián González or the Starr Report, you are there.’”
    • Will Brett Kavanaugh Pass the Reli­gious Right’s New Lit­mus Test? (Sarah Pos­ner, The Nation): “Even with­out the Trump-appoint­ed Kennedy suc­ces­sor, the Court had already expand­ed ‘reli­gious free­dom’ to include pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­ined reli­gious rights.” This is an extreme­ly mis­lead­ing arti­cle, but inter­est­ing in the mis­un­der­stand­ings it reveals.
    • You’ll Hate This Post On Brett Kavanaugh And Free Speech (Ken White, Pope­hat): “Kavanaugh has been an appel­late judge for 12 years and has writ­ten many opin­ions on free speech issues. They trend very pro­tec­tive of free speech, both in sub­stance and in rhetoric.”
    • Judge Kavanaugh and the Sec­ond Amend­ment (David Kopel, Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “Judge Kavanaugh­’s text, his­to­ry, and tra­di­tion method­ol­o­gy for Sec­ond Amend­ment cas­es will not please peo­ple who believe that all gun con­trol is imper­mis­si­ble, nor will it please advo­cates who want to make the Sec­ond Amend­ment a sec­ond-class right.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

I thought the Baby­lon Bee was excep­tion­al­ly fun­ny this week. Maybe I was just feel­ing gig­gly.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

The Four Loves: Affection

The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

YouTube has some­thing amaz­ing in rela­tion to this week’s read­ing: the man him­self deliv­er­ing the radio address upon which the chap­ter is based. Check out The Four Loves (‘Storge’ or ‘Affec­tion’) (or you can read the tran­script). You should at least lis­ten to a few min­utes if you’ve nev­er heard the voice of Lewis before.

In this chap­ter, Lewis dis­cuss­es the type of love described by the Greek word storge (στοργή). In Eng­lish we would talk about affec­tion or fond­ness. Inter­est­ing­ly (at least to me), this Greek word appears only in the neg­a­tive in the New Tes­ta­ment. In both Romans 1:31 and 2 Tim­o­thy 3:3 the word astor­gos (ἄστοργος) is ren­dered by var­i­ous trans­la­tions as “heart­less” or “unlov­ing” or “with­out nat­ur­al affec­tion.” When your Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment con­tains the word affec­tion it is prob­a­bly rep­re­sent­ing splangxnon (σπλαγχηνον) instead. This does­n’t affect what Lewis says in the slight­est. I just find it inter­est­ing.

On to what Lewis actu­al­ly said.

The first thing that stood out to me was a pithy phrase: “They seal up the very foun­tain for which they are thirsty.” (page 769)

Lewis is speak­ing about peo­ple whose crav­ing for affec­tion is so intense that they push away the peo­ple around them. It’s some­thing I’ve seen before, but the imagery Lewis uses is so evoca­tive that it made me real­ize afresh how trag­ic it is. More than that, it made me pause and reflect on whether there are any areas of my life in which I am pur­su­ing some­thing so inept­ly that I make suc­cess less like­ly with every attempt I make.

The next bit that stood out to me came near the end of the chap­ter. Lewis makes a point about our ten­den­cy to treat affec­tion gone bad as a psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem.

I do not think we shall see things more clear­ly by clas­si­fy­ing all these malef­i­cal states of Affec­tion as patho­log­i­cal. No doubt there are real­ly patho­log­i­cal con­di­tions which make the temp­ta­tion to these states abnor­mal­ly hard or even impos­si­ble to resist for par­tic­u­lar peo­ple. Send those peo­ple to the doc­tors by all means. But I believe that every­one who is hon­est with him­self will admit that he has felt these temp­ta­tions. Their occur­rence is not a dis­ease; or if it is, the name of that dis­ease is Being a Fall­en Man. In ordi­nary peo­ple the yield­ing to them—and who does not some­times yield?—is not dis­ease, but sin. Spir­i­tu­al direc­tion will here help us more than med­ical treat­ment. Med­i­cine labours to restore “nat­ur­al” struc­ture or “nor­mal” func­tion. But greed, ego­ism, self-decep­tion and self-pity are not unnat­ur­al or abnor­mal in the same sense as astig­ma­tism or a float­ing kid­ney. For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as nat­ur­al or nor­mal the man from whom these fail­ings were whol­ly absent? “Nat­ur­al,” if you like, in a quite dif­fer­ent sense; arch­nat­ur­al, unfall­en. We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist’s pic­ture of the inte­grat­ed, bal­anced, adjust­ed, hap­pi­ly mar­ried, employed, pop­u­lar cit­i­zen. You can’t real­ly be very well “adjust­ed” to your world if it says you “have a dev­il” and ends by nail­ing you up naked to a stake of wood. (page 778)

As oth­ers have said, we live in a ther­a­peu­tic age. We are con­di­tioned to assume neg­a­tive thoughts and emo­tions are psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems, but that’s not always true. I remem­ber a quote from Carl Elliott that hit me like a thun­der­bolt when I was in grad school.

On Prozac, Sisy­phus might well push the boul­der back up the moun­tain with more enthu­si­asm and more cre­ativ­i­ty. I do not want to deny the ben­e­fits of psy­choac­tive med­ica­tion. I just want to point out that Sisy­phus is not a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem. To see him as a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem is to ignore cer­tain larg­er aspects of his predica­ment con­nect­ed to boul­ders, moun­tains, and eter­ni­ty. (UPDATE: I for­get where I first saw this quote — I thought it was from The Atlantic in an arti­cle called  “The Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness”, but it was pub­lished too late for that to be the case)

Some­times neg­a­tive thoughts and feel­ings are nat­ur­al (one might even say healthy) respons­es to our sit­u­a­tion, some­times they are mis­tak­en but not espe­cial­ly harm­ful, some­times they are sin­ful, and some­times they are the result of psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems. Be open to the full range of pos­si­bil­i­ties.  

Before wind­ing this down, I’d like to high­light one more of Lewis’s insights. Ear­ly in the chap­ter as bit of an aside, Lewis says

The rival­ry between all nat­ur­al loves and the love of God is some­thing a Chris­t­ian dare not for­get. God is the great Rival, the ulti­mate object of human jeal­ousy; that beau­ty, ter­ri­ble as the Gorgon’s, which may at any moment steal from me—or it seems like steal­ing to me—my wife’s or husband’s or daughter’s heart. The bit­ter­ness of some unbe­lief, though dis­guised even from those who feel it as anti-cler­i­cal­ism or hatred of super­sti­tion, is real­ly due to this. (page 767–768, empha­sis added)

Some of your friends who are angry about reli­gion are angry because they are jeal­ous. Your friend is bent — per­haps with­out even real­iz­ing it — because some­one’s love for God has cre­at­ed dis­tance between them and your friend.  If you’re ever talk­ing about God with some­one and you can hear anger in their voice, bear this insight in mind. It might help explain what’s going on.

I’m lov­ing the Lewis read­ings so far. Next week: the love between friends. 

P.S. If, per­chance, you are behind on your read­ings then just skip ahead. Start keep­ing up now — you can always go back and read the parts you missed lat­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 159

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Police attacked me for steal­ing a car. It was my own. (Lawrence Cros­by, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Every time I see the video from that Octo­ber 2015 encounter, I expe­ri­ence fear, anger and ter­ror. Fear that the col­or of my skin will make me out to be a crim­i­nal when I have bro­ken no laws. Anger at the bla­tant dis­re­gard for human life and rights that the Con­sti­tu­tion is sup­posed to guar­an­tee to all cit­i­zens. Ter­ror to have come — per­haps — with­in sec­onds of being shot by peo­ple sworn to serve and pro­tect.” Lawrence is an alum­nus of our Chi Alpha min­istry. He just earned his Ph.D. at North­west­ern in Mate­ri­als Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing.
  2. Spi­ders Can Fly Hun­dreds of Miles Using Elec­tric­i­ty (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “They put the arach­nids on ver­ti­cal strips of card­board in the cen­ter of a plas­tic box, and then gen­er­at­ed elec­tric fields between the floor and ceil­ing of sim­i­lar strengths to what the spi­ders would expe­ri­ence out­doors.… Many of the spi­ders actu­al­ly man­aged to take off, despite being in closed box­es with no air­flow with­in them. And when Mor­ley turned off the elec­tric fields inside the box­es, the bal­loon­ing spi­ders dropped.”
  3. Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”
  4. Why Sex­ism and Racism Nev­er Diminish–Even When Every­one Becomes Less Sex­ist and Racist (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “When strong sex­ism declines, for exam­ple, the Over­ton win­dow shrinks on one end and expands on the oth­er so that what was once not con­sid­ered sex­ism at all (e.g. ‘men and women have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences which might explain job choice’) now becomes vio­lent­ly sex­ist.”
  5. For­get About It (Corey Robin, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “Ever since the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, we’ve been warned against nor­mal­iz­ing Trump. That fear of nor­mal­iza­tion mis­states the prob­lem, though. It’s nev­er the imme­di­ate present, no mat­ter how bad, that gets nor­mal­ized — it’s the not-so-dis­tant past.”
  6. A Time of Reck­on­ing (Mary Eber­stadt, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Over the years, a great many peo­ple have claimed that sex is mere­ly a pri­vate act between indi­vid­u­als. They’ve been wrong. We know now that pri­vate acts have cumu­la­tive pub­lic effects. Indi­vid­ual choic­es, such as hav­ing chil­dren out of wed­lock, have end­ed up expand­ing the mod­ern wel­fare state, for exam­ple, as the gov­ern­ment has stepped in to sup­port chil­dren who lack fathers. The explo­sion of sex­u­al activ­i­ty thanks to con­tra­cep­tion has been accom­pa­nied by lev­els of divorce, cohab­i­ta­tion, and abor­tion nev­er before seen in his­to­ry.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

The Four Loves: Introduction and Chapter One

The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

We live in an area that often over­val­ues the love of nature and under­val­ues the love of coun­try. At the end of “Lik­ings and Loves for the Sub-human” (the first chap­ter of The Four Loves) Lewis makes some astute obser­va­tions about each.

Con­cern­ing nature, he makes the claim that nature doesn’t teach us any­thing on its own.

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exact­ly the lessons you had already decid­ed to learn; this is only anoth­er way of say­ing that nature does not teach.… Over­whelm­ing gai­ety, insup­port­able grandeur, som­bre des­o­la­tion are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imper­a­tive that nature utters is, “Look. Lis­ten. Attend.” (page 755 in The C.S. Lewis Sig­na­ture Clas­sics)

While I think his main point is sound, he words things too strong­ly here. If I adopt­ed this per­spec­tive as he phrased it, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of such pas­sages as Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19.

  • Romans 1:20, “For since the cre­ation of the world God’s invis­i­ble qualities—his eter­nal pow­er and divine nature—have been clear­ly seen, being under­stood from what has been made, so that peo­ple are with­out excuse.”
  • Psalm 19:1–2, “The heav­ens declare the glo­ry of God;    the skies pro­claim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech;    night after night they reveal knowl­edge.”

These and oth­er Scrip­tures clear­ly teach that there are things God expects us to learn from nature. But there are not many of these things. Lewis is right that nature gives con­fus­ing mes­sages — we can con­struct clever nat­ur­al argu­ments for cru­el­ty as well as for mer­cy.

Rather than look­ing to nature to pro­vide our entire sys­tem of moral­i­ty and mean­ing, Lewis says it is enough to allow nature to give us a frame­work for think­ing:

Nature nev­er taught me that there exists a God of glo­ry and of infi­nite majesty. I had to learn that in oth­er ways. But nature gave the word glo­ry a mean­ing for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me any­thing but the low­est pru­den­tial efforts to be safe, if I had nev­er seen cer­tain omi­nous ravines and unap­proach­able crags. And if nature had nev­er awak­ened cer­tain long­ings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would nev­er, so far as I can see, have exist­ed. (pages 755–756)

Good stuff and well worth pon­der­ing.

Lewis goes on to make some great obser­va­tions about patri­o­tism. Patri­o­tism is a virtue for Chris­tians as Dou­glas Wil­son points out in his 2016 essay Amer­i­can Jesus:

Patri­o­tism, right­ly devel­oped, is a duty that falls under the fifth com­mand­ment. I am to hon­or my father and moth­er, and this extends beyond them in such a way as to include my peo­ple, my tribe. Ordi­nary and ordered patri­o­tism is not just okay; it is a duty, one that needs to be cul­ti­vat­ed.

I high­ly com­mend that essay to you. Wil­son is on point and adds all the caveats you might be wor­ried about.

One of Lewis’s insights about patri­ot­ic love is that it allows us to love and respect peo­ple from oth­er nations:

Of course patri­o­tism of this kind is not in the least aggres­sive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes mil­i­tant only to pro­tect what it loves. In any mind which has a pen­ny­worth of imag­i­na­tion it pro­duces a good atti­tude towards for­eign­ers. How can I love my home with­out com­ing to realise that oth­er men, no less right­ly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the French­men like cafe com­plet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make every­where else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were dif­fer­ent.

And he has par­tic­u­lar­ly strong words to say about those who try to replace the love of coun­try with a com­mit­ment to high­er ideals:

If peo­ple will spend nei­ther sweat nor blood for “their coun­try” they must be made to feel that they are spend­ing them for jus­tice, or civil­i­sa­tion, or human­i­ty. This is a step down, not up.… If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of anni­hi­la­tion. A false tran­scen­dence is giv­en to things which are very much of this world. (page 761)

Much of what Lewis says in this sec­tion reminds me of the way G.K. Chester­ton talked about patri­o­tism in Ortho­doxy chap­ter 5, “The Flag of This World.” Chesterton’s point is that patri­ots see the flaws of their nation and grieve them. Because they love their nation they want to fix it.

Let us sup­pose we are con­front­ed with a des­per­ate thing—say Pim­li­co [Glen’s note: Pim­li­co is part of Lon­don]. If we think what is real­ly best for Pim­li­co we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mys­tic and the arbi­trary. It is not enough for a man to dis­ap­prove of Pim­li­co: in that case he will mere­ly cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, cer­tain­ly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pim­li­co: for then it will remain Pim­li­co, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for some­body to love Pim­li­co: to love it with a tran­scen­den­tal tie and with­out any earth­ly rea­son. If there arose a man who loved Pim­li­co, then Pim­li­co would rise into ivory tow­ers and gold­en pin­na­cles; Pim­li­co would attire her­self as a woman does when she is loved. For dec­o­ra­tion is not giv­en to hide hor­ri­ble things: but to dec­o­rate things already adorable. A moth­er does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly with­out it. A lover does not give a girl a neck­lace to hide her neck. If men loved Pim­li­co as moth­ers love chil­dren, arbi­trar­i­ly, because it is THEIRS, Pim­li­co in a year or two might be fair­er than Flo­rence. Some read­ers will say that this is a mere fan­ta­sy. I answer that this is the actu­al his­to­ry of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the dark­est roots of civ­i­liza­tion and you will find them knot­ted round some sacred stone or encir­cling some sacred well. Peo­ple first paid hon­our to a spot and after­wards gained glo­ry for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

So to sum­ma­rize:

  • Nature is wor­thy of love but not wor­thy of wor­ship. Our cul­tur­al cel­e­bra­tion of envi­ron­men­tal­ism far to often runs beyond the con­cerns of ecol­o­gy and veers into reli­gious ter­ri­to­ry.
  • Nations are wor­thy of love but not wor­thy of wor­ship, and we ought to cul­ti­vate a healthy and mea­sured patri­o­tism in our­selves what­ev­er our home­land may be.

See you next week!

The Abolition of Man, Chapter 3 & Appendix

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

I hope you’re enjoy­ing the read­ings as much as I am. I had for­got­ten how prophet­ic Lewis is in this lit­tle vol­ume.

If you’ve got­ten a lit­tle behind, there is an excel­lent short sum­ma­ry of all three chap­ters by Arend Smilde at Lewisiana and a 13 page study guide by Dr. David Nau­gle at Dal­las Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty.

I’ll con­tent myself with three quotes that stood out to me:

When all that says ‘It is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains…. those who stand out­side all judge­ments of val­ue can­not have any ground for pre­fer­ring one of their own impuls­es to anoth­er except the emo­tion­al strength of that impulse. (pages 723–724)

This insight alone explains SO MUCH about con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. Strength of feel­ing over­whelms every­thing else in today’s moral dis­course. In fact, emo­tion has become the new deter­min­er of moral val­ues for many peo­ple. Pick vir­tu­al­ly any news sto­ry and you will see this play­ing out, espe­cial­ly when it comes to the debates sur­round­ing the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion and its con­se­quences.

It is not sur­pris­ing that the sex­u­al norms preva­lent in our soci­ety are in direct con­tra­dic­tion to the old ones, because one of the func­tions of the Tao is to be a trel­lis upon which our emo­tions may grow. To revis­it Lewis’s phras­ing from the first chap­ter “Men With­out Chests”, it used to be that the head (rea­son) shaped the chest (emo­tions trained by habit) and there­by gov­erned the bel­ly (desire). But in our time it often hap­pens that the bel­ly shapes the chest and there­by gov­erns the head. Our wants have become self-authen­ti­cat­ing and dom­i­neer­ing.

My oth­er favorite quote from this chap­ter address­es the lim­its of skep­ti­cism:

But you can­not go on ‘explain­ing away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained expla­na­tion itself away. You can­not go on ‘see­ing through’ things for ever. The whole point of see­ing through some­thing is to see some­thing through it. It is good that the win­dow should be trans­par­ent, because the street or gar­den beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the gar­den too? It is no use try­ing to ‘see through’ first prin­ci­ples. If you see through every­thing, then every­thing is trans­par­ent. But a whol­ly trans­par­ent world is an invis­i­ble world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (page 730)

This reminds me of some­thing Lewis said in the pre­vi­ous chap­ter:

The rebel­lion of new ide­olo­gies against the Tao is a rebel­lion of the branch­es against the tree: if the rebels could suc­ceed they would find that they had destroyed them­selves. The human mind has no more pow­er of invent­ing a new val­ue than of imag­in­ing a new pri­ma­ry colour, or, indeed, of cre­at­ing a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. (page 714)

Rad­i­cal skep­ti­cism is self-defeat­ing. If it suc­ceeds it fails.

Some­thing I often tell peo­ple is that they need to learn to doubt their doubts. Our aca­d­e­m­ic cul­ture con­di­tions us to place doubt in a priv­i­leged posi­tion over trust, but doubt is not a neu­tral thing. Doubt needs a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion just as belief does, and when you are inclined to doubt (whether the word of a friend, a truth of a moral prin­ci­ple, or the accu­ra­cy of a claim) it is worth ask­ing whether the rea­sons for and costs of doubt­ing out­weigh the rea­sons for and costs of trust­ing. Some­times they will, and some­times they will not.

Skep­ti­cism, inci­den­tal­ly, is dif­fer­ent from ask­ing ques­tions. Skep­ti­cism is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent thing than curios­i­ty.

John 12:37 illus­trates the dif­fer­ence: “Even after Jesus had per­formed so many signs in their pres­ence, they still would not believe in him.” Unbe­lief, in this sense, is a choice. It is not that they did not have rea­son to believe in Jesus — it is that they did not want to believe in Jesus. Hebrews 3:12 warns us not to have “an evil, unbe­liev­ing heart.” But we must weigh that against Jude 1:22 which tells us to “be mer­ci­ful to those who doubt”, against the praise giv­en the Bere­ans for their “noble char­ac­ter” in Acts 17:11 for inves­ti­gat­ing the claims of the apos­tle Paul, and against the fact that Thomas is not con­demned for his hes­i­ta­tion to believe in John 20:24–29. Putting them togeth­er, we see that God is not both­ered by hon­est ques­tions but He is opposed to moti­vat­ed skep­ti­cism.

The lat­ter is famous­ly illus­trat­ed by Aldous Hux­ley in his book Ends and Means, “For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the phi­los­o­phy of mean­ing­less­ness was essen­tial­ly an instru­ment of lib­er­a­tion from a cer­tain sys­tem of moral­i­ty. We object­ed to the moral­i­ty because it inter­fered with our sex­u­al free­dom.”

I think there are many peo­ple in our cul­ture like Hux­ley. I pray they learn to doubt their doubts before it is too late.

Side note: Hux­ley was a con­tem­po­rary of Lewis — they actu­al­ly died with­in hours of each oth­er. There’s a fun lit­tle book premised upon this fact called Between Heav­en and Hell by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Peter Kreeft. It’s a clever dia­log between Lewis, Hux­ley, and John F. Kennedy (who also died with­in hours of these two) as they await the after­life and debate what is going to hap­pen next.

That’s all for this week. Next week we begin read­ing The Four Loves!

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 158

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Before I share this week’s links: yes, I am aware that Antho­ny Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court and think it is like­ly to be one of the most sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal devel­op­ments of my life­time. I don’t have any links about it because not much inter­est­ing has been writ­ten about it yet sim­ply because Trump has not nom­i­nat­ed a suc­ces­sor yet. Once he does, please let me know if you find any­thing fas­ci­nat­ing about either his nom­i­nee or the process.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sus­pect in Stan­ford church mur­der kills self (Palo Alto Dai­ly News): this is a trag­ic and freaky sto­ry. A less hor­rif­ic detail which amused me: “Craw­ford stayed on at Stan­ford until 1976, but he found ways to exact revenge against the uni­ver­si­ty, Her­hold said. ‘He began steal­ing stuff from offices,’ said Her­hold, who added exam­ples, includ­ing a human skull, a walk­ing cane giv­en to uni­ver­si­ty founder Leland Stan­ford and rare books. ‘The kick­er was he went down to a print shop and got a degree from Stan­ford,’ he said, using a blank Stan­ford diplo­ma.”
  2. Ebo­la Deaths Rise As Patients Turn to Mir­a­cles Over Med­i­cine (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two Ebo­la patients died last month after flee­ing a hos­pi­tal iso­la­tion ward so they could be tak­en to a prayer meet­ing, where they exposed up to 50 oth­ers.” Wow. Bad the­ol­o­gy leads to tragedy. Some­body nev­er taught them Leviti­cus 13:46. If you’re infec­tious, pay atten­tion to the phrase “call for” in James 5:14–16 and ask the elders to come to you. Quar­an­tine Laws and the Bible (Lar­ry Ball, The Aquila Report) is worth read­ing in this regard.
  3. The Span­ish Inqui­si­tion Was a Mod­er­ate Court by the Stan­dard of Its Time (Ed Con­don, Nation­al Review): “Because it was a seri­ous court, metic­u­lous case files and court records were kept. Libraries in Tole­do, Sala­man­ca, and oth­er cities are home to thou­sands of such case files. In the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Hen­ry Kamen and oth­er his­to­ri­ans were giv­en access to them. What they dis­cov­ered changed the schol­ar­ly under­stand­ing of the Inqui­si­tion. So, what of those dank dun­geons and hot pok­ers? Well, for a start, the jails of the Inqui­si­tion were uni­ver­sal­ly known to be hygien­ic and well main­tained. They were nei­ther built nor run as places of pun­ish­ment. The stan­dard of care that inmates received was high enough that pris­on­ers held by the Crown would often peti­tion to be moved to Inqui­si­tion jails. There are record­ed cas­es of crim­i­nals com­mit­ting pub­lic heresy with the express pur­pose of being held and tried by the Inqui­si­tion, rather than the sec­u­lar courts.” This is not a fringe view among schol­ars, but is def­i­nite­ly con­trary to the pop­u­lar under­stand­ing of the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion.
  4. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez on her Catholic faith and the urgency of a crim­i­nal jus­tice reform (Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez, Amer­i­ca): “By nature, a soci­ety that for­gives and reha­bil­i­tates its peo­ple is a soci­ety that for­gives and trans­forms itself. That takes a rad­i­cal kind of love, a secret of which is giv­en in the Lord’s Prayer: For­give us our tres­pass­es, as we for­give those who tres­pass against us. And let us not for­get the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of “the least among us” found in Matthew: that we are com­pelled to care for the hun­gry, thirsty, home­less, naked, sick and, yes—the impris­oned.” This, of course, is the social­ist can­di­date who unseat­ed pow­er­ful incum­bent Joe Crow­ley in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry. She is almost cer­tain to become the youngest woman ever elect­ed to Con­gress.
    • Relat­ed: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca Mem­ber­ship Surges After Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez’s Stun­ning Vic­to­ry (Gideon Resnick, The Dai­ly Beast): “Accord­ing to Lawrence Drey­fuss, a pro­gram asso­ciate for DSA, the orga­ni­za­tion saw a surge of 1,152 new mem­ber­ships on Wednesday—about 35 times more sign-ups than on an aver­age day. The last major mem­ber­ship bump DSA expe­ri­enced was in the month fol­low­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s elec­tion, dur­ing which time they had about six times more sign-ups than in the pre­vi­ous month.” Note that the orga­ni­za­tion itself is still rel­a­tive­ly small (40,000 mem­bers).
    • Pos­si­bly relat­ed: Democ­rats are los­ing the mil­len­ni­al vote and need to change mes­sage (Cas Mud­de, The Guardian): “a recent Reuters/Ipsos mega poll of 16,000 respon­dents, found that the Democ­rats are los­ing ground with mil­len­ni­als. While mil­len­ni­als still pre­fer the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty over the Repub­li­cans, that sup­port is tank­ing. In just two years, it dropped sharply from 55% to 46%. Mean­while, their sup­port for Repub­li­cans has remained rough­ly sta­ble in the past two years, falling from 28% to 27%.… their dis­like of the Repub­li­cans should not be inter­pret­ed as a like of Democ­rats.” Caveats apply: this is based on the results of one poll.
    • Def­i­nite­ly relat­ed: Dear Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists Who Think You’re Hav­ing a Moment: It’s Me, a Lib­er­tar­i­an, Who’s Been Through This. (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “Demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism, the ide­ol­o­gy with which Oca­sio-Cortez iden­ti­fies, appears to be hav­ing a polit­i­cal moment. To which I say, as a lib­er­tar­i­an who has been through the whole an-idea-whose-time-has-final­ly-come expe­ri­ence: good luck with that, com­rades. The signs are easy to mis­read.”
  5. Right-to-work laws make unions work hard­er for their mem­bers (Chris­tos Makridis, The Hill): “RTW [Right To Work] laws force unions to become more com­pet­i­tive. When unions are guar­an­teed a per­ma­nent income stream, they don’t need to work as hard to win the hearts and minds of their employ­ees; that is, they face weak­er incen­tives to pro­vide valu­able ser­vices. The adop­tion of RTW laws changes that by mak­ing union dues a vol­un­tary con­tri­bu­tion.” Yes, this is our very own recent­ly-grad­u­at­ed Chris­tos.
  6. Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-cov­ered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  7. How The Democ­rats Lost Their Way On Immi­gra­tion (Peter Bein­ert, The Atlantic): “Lib­er­als must take seri­ous­ly Amer­i­cans’ yearn­ing for social cohe­sion. To pro­mote both mass immi­gra­tion and greater eco­nom­ic redis­tri­b­u­tion, they must con­vince more native-born white Amer­i­cans that immi­grants will not weak­en the bonds of nation­al iden­ti­ty. This means dust­ing off a con­cept many on the left cur­rent­ly hate: assim­i­la­tion.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 157

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. These Har­vard Kids Got the Les­son of Their Lives in the Heart­land (Sale­na Zito, NY Post): “I have been a nation­al polit­i­cal jour­nal­ist for near­ly 15 years. When­ev­er and wher­ev­er I trav­el in this coun­try, I abide by a few sim­ple rules: No planes, no inter­states and no hotels. And def­i­nite­ly no chain restau­rants…. Those sim­ple rules are what intrigued stu­dents at the Har­vard Insti­tute of Pol­i­tics (IOP) after hear­ing me speak at a Piz­za and Pol­i­tics event on the school’s cam­pus last fall.”
  2. Don’t Quit the Repub­li­can Par­ty. Stay and Fight (Michael Wear, Time Mag­a­zine): “The prob­lem is that pol­i­tics is not an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic endeav­or. Inde­pen­dents tend to spurn insti­tu­tions gen­er­al­ly, and then feel vin­di­cat­ed when our insti­tu­tions do not reflect their views. But while Inde­pen­dents think they are send­ing polit­i­cal par­ties a mes­sage, polit­i­cal par­ties do not hear them…. In essence, Inde­pen­dents active­ly min­i­mize their impact on elec­tions and par­ty posi­tions. When peo­ple leave (or fail to join) par­ties in protest, they starve those par­ties of ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, dri­ving them to their extremes.”
    • On Twit­ter the author (a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer) says “The head­line is mis­lead­ing. My argu­ment is a cau­tion against becom­ing an indy. If you read the arti­cle, I explic­it­ly argue that if you believe the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty more close­ly aligns with your vision of what is best for our nation’s pol­i­tics, you should become a Demo­c­rat.” In case you didn’t know, authors rarely choose their head­lines (or even the titles of their books).
  3. When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gen­der-iden­ti­ty explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long-term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles.
  4. The Sin Of Silence (Joshua Pease, Wash­ing­ton Post): “With­out a cen­tral­ized the­o­log­i­cal body, evan­gel­i­cal poli­cies and cul­tures vary rad­i­cal­ly, and while some church lead­ers have worked to pre­vent abuse and harass­ment, many have not. The caus­es are man­i­fold: author­i­tar­i­an lead­er­ship, twist­ed the­ol­o­gy, insti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tion, obliv­i­ous­ness about the prob­lem and, per­haps most shock­ing, a dimin­ish­ment of the trau­ma sex­u­al abuse cre­ates — espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing in a church cul­ture that believes strong­ly in the sanc­ti­ty of sex…. Roger Canaff, a for­mer New York state pros­e­cu­tor who spe­cial­ized in child sex­u­al abuse, tells me that many wor­shipers he encoun­tered felt per­se­cut­ed by the sec­u­lar cul­ture around them — and dis­in­clined to reach out to their per­se­cu­tors for help in solv­ing prob­lems.”
  5. Con­tra Caplan On Arbi­trary Deplor­ing (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “This is my long-wind­ed answer to a ques­tion sev­er­al peo­ple asked on the last links post – why should we pri­or­i­tize respond­ing to China’s mass incar­cer­a­tion of the Uighurs? Aren’t there oth­er equal­ly bad things going on else­where in the world, like malar­ia? Yes. But I had opti­misti­cal­ly thought we had most­ly estab­lished a strong norm around ‘don’t put minori­ties in con­cen­tra­tion camps’. Resources devot­ed to enforc­ing that norm won’t just solve the imme­di­ate prob­lem in Chi­na, they’ll also help main­tain a cred­i­ble taboo against this kind of thing so it’s less like­ly to hap­pen the next time.”
  6. The Hand­maids of Cap­i­tal­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Fem­i­nists were divid­ed over sur­ro­ga­cy and com­mer­cial­ized fer­til­i­ty, but the oppo­si­tion to both prac­tices grad­u­al­ly dis­solved, and now only eccen­tric con­ser­v­a­tives notice the weird resem­blances between Cal­i­for­nia-style sur­ro­ga­cy prac­tices and the hand­maids and econowives of Gilead. They were divid­ed over pornog­ra­phy, often bit­ter­ly — but over time the sex-pos­i­tive side increas­ing­ly won out over the Andrea Dworkin­ish dis­senters, even as the online realm was over­run with images and videos that more than jus­ti­fied her argu­ments. They were, and are, divid­ed over pros­ti­tu­tion, but it’s pret­ty clear that the ver­sion of fem­i­nism that sup­ports the rights of sex work­ers to sell their bod­ies in the mar­ket­place has the intel­lec­tu­al momen­tum.”
  7. More on bor­der fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tions, a pol­i­cy that has been stopped by exec­u­tive order after mas­sive pub­lic out­cry.
    • The Less­er Cru­el­ty On Immi­gra­tion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “it would be use­ful for every­one if the Trump White House just admit­ted that this pol­i­cy was con­ceived as a deter­rent — trau­ma­tiz­ing a cer­tain num­ber of fam­i­lies in the hopes of bring­ing greater order to the bor­der in the long run. That admis­sion would get us clos­er to the hard prob­lem in migra­tion pol­i­cy. Some harsh­ness, some deter­rence, real­ly is unavoid­able in any immi­gra­tion sys­tem that doesn’t sim­ply dis­solve bor­ders. So pol­i­cy­mak­ers are there­fore oblig­ed to choose tol­er­a­ble cru­el­ties over the intol­er­a­ble one that we’re wit­ness­ing in action right now.”
    • Immi­gra­tion: Was A.G. Ses­sions Right to Quote the Bible in Defense of Fam­i­ly Sep­a­ra­tion? (Bruce Ash­ford, per­son­al blog): “Paul is say­ing, in effect, ‘Look, it’s true that Jesus is the ulti­mate Ruler of a cos­mic King­dom while Cae­sar is only the tem­po­rary ruler of a lim­it­ed earth­ly king­dom. But that doesn’t mean you’re above the law. You should be a good cit­i­zen and obey the law except, of course, when God’s law con­flicts with Caesar’s law.’”
    • A case study in the prop­er role of Chris­tians in pol­i­tics (Michael J. Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the case of child sep­a­ra­tion, some of the most effec­tive resis­tance has come from reli­gious lead­ers — Catholic, Protes­tant main­line and even some evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (see Car­di­nal Tim­o­thy Dolan and Franklin Gra­ham). It was a case study in the prop­er and pos­i­tive role that reli­gion can play in our com­mon life.”
    • Enforce the Bor­der — Humane­ly (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Ille­gal immi­grants are com­mit­ting no moral wrong. They are doing what we might do in their place—as we, by defend­ing bor­ders, are doing what they would do if they were in ours. Like so many human insti­tu­tions, bor­ders are both arbi­trary and indis­pens­able. With­out them, there are no nations. With­out nations, there can be no democ­ra­cy and no lib­er­al­ism. John Lennon may imag­ine that with­out nations there will be only human­i­ty. More like­ly, with­out nations there will only be tribes.”
    • Our Debate On Ille­gal Immi­gra­tion Is A Nation­al Dis­as­ter (David Harsanyi, The Fed­er­al­ist): “The major­i­ty of kids in care of the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, most often teenagers, are appre­hend­ed because they’re here with­out any par­ents. It’s a grow­ing prob­lem. In 2013, a lit­tle few­er than 40,000 unac­com­pa­nied minors were appre­hend­ed by the Bor­der Patrol. That was a his­toric high. In 2016 there were near­ly 60,000. This year there are like­ly to be more than 80,000.”
    • Amer­i­can Fam­i­lies Should­n’t Be Sep­a­rat­ed, Either (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View): “Obvi­ous­ly, a case can be made for enforc­ing the bor­der, but delib­er­ate cru­el­ty is nev­er a good idea. Those chil­dren — inno­cent vic­tims all of them — will like­ly be trau­ma­tized for life…. If you agree with me on this, I’d like to push you one step fur­ther. It’s hor­ri­ble to forcibly sep­a­rate law­break­ing par­ents from their young chil­dren, but we do that to Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, too. Accord­ing to one 2010 study, more than 1.1 mil­lion men and 120,000 women in U.S. jails and pris­ons have chil­dren under the age of 17.” This is one of the most intrigu­ing things I read this week.
    • The Rise of the Amnesty Thugs (David Brooks, New York Times): “For cen­turies, con­ser­v­a­tives have repeat­ed a spe­cif­ic cri­tique against state pow­er. Sta­tism, con­ser­v­a­tives have argued, has a ten­den­cy to become bru­tal­ist and inhu­mane because a bureau­cra­cy can’t see or account for the com­plex­i­ty of real­i­ty. It tries to impose uni­form rules on the organ­ic intri­ca­cy of human rela­tion­ships. Sta­tist social engi­neer­ing projects cause hor­rif­ic suf­fer­ing because in the mind of sta­tists, the abstract rule is more impor­tant than the human being in front of them. The per­son must be crushed for the sake of the abstrac­tion.” Astute insights in this op-ed. Rec­om­mend­ed. Also, the title is slight­ly mis­lead­ing.
    • A Twit­ter thread from an immi­gra­tion attor­ney explain­ing how long­stand­ing this prob­lem has been

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

The Abolition of Man: Chapters One and Two

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

Wel­come to week one of the Chi Alpha sum­mer read­ing project!

Some resources that may prove use­ful to you:

On to Lewis’s argu­ment. He noticed a fea­ture in an Eng­lish text­book which great­ly both­ered him: the authors teach that val­ue judg­ments about the world are state­ments of feel­ing rather than state­ments of fact. Lewis points out that this is a very pow­er­ful form of indoc­tri­na­tion and adds that this is an enor­mous dif­fer­ence from the past.

Until quite mod­ern times all teach­ers and even all men believed the uni­verse to be such that cer­tain emo­tion­al reac­tions on our part could be either con­gru­ous or incon­gru­ous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not mere­ly receive, but could mer­it, our approval or dis­ap­proval, our rev­er­ence or our con­tempt. (page 699 in our anthol­o­gy)

He gives sev­er­al exam­ples and lumps them togeth­er under the com­mon name of the Tao:

This con­cep­tion in all its forms, Pla­ton­ic, Aris­totelian, Sto­ic, Chris­t­ian, and Ori­en­tal alike, I shall hence­forth refer to for brevi­ty sim­ply as ‘the Tao’.… what is com­mon to them all is some­thing we can­not neglect. It is the doc­trine of objec­tive val­ue, the belief that cer­tain atti­tudes are real­ly true, and oth­ers real­ly false, to the kind of thing the uni­verse is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call chil­dren delight­ful or old men ven­er­a­ble is not sim­ply to record a psy­cho­log­i­cal fact about our own parental or fil­ial emo­tions at the moment, but to rec­og­nize a qual­i­ty which demands a cer­tain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the soci­ety of small chil­dren: because I speak from with­in the Tao I rec­og­nize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to rec­og­nize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and dis­ap­provals are thus recog­ni­tions of objec­tive val­ue or respons­es to an objec­tive order, there­fore emo­tion­al states can be in har­mo­ny with rea­son (when we feel lik­ing for what ought to be approved) or out of har­mo­ny with rea­son (when we per­ceive that lik­ing is due but can­not feel it). (pages 701–702)

It is worth think­ing about his illus­tra­tion. I sus­pect some of you will strong­ly dis­agree with it with­out quite know­ing why. Here it is in bare form: not lik­ing chil­dren is a moral defect. It is not “just the way you are.” It is the way you have become, and you have an oblig­a­tion to try to become some­one bet­ter. And even if your dis­like of chil­dren was a mat­ter of your genet­ics of some­thing else beyond your con­trol it would not stop being a moral defect.

But our cul­ture rejects these moral oblig­a­tions along with many oth­ers; more than that, we refuse to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er that they might actu­al­ly be moral oblig­a­tions instead of per­son­al choic­es. We teach that val­ues are mat­ters of opin­ion. And this leads to the stun­ning per­ora­tion of the first lec­ture:

In a sort of ghast­ly sim­plic­i­ty we remove the organ and demand the func­tion. We make men with­out chests and expect of them virtue and enter­prise. We laugh at hon­our and are shocked to find trai­tors in our midst. We cas­trate and bid the geld­ings be fruit­ful. (page 704)

In light of Lewis’ argu­ment, reflect on this recent essay about an arti­cle in the pres­ti­gious pub­li­ca­tion For­eign Pol­i­cy: Should Ama­zon tribes be allowed to kill their young? For­eign Pol­i­cy edi­tors aren’t sure (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion):

“In recent years, cer­tain tribes in the Ama­zon region have been in the news because of their unpleas­ant habit of killing deformed or hand­i­capped chil­dren as well as twins, and even off­spring of sin­gle moms, soon after birth. They also may kill trans­gen­dered indi­vid­u­als. I thought the con­sen­sus was pret­ty clear that such prac­tices were evil. But along came an arti­cle (it was a month ago, but I’m only get­ting around to it now) in For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine that argued how sav­ing the lives of these chil­dren was a west­ern val­ue that didn’t fit with the cus­toms and lifestyle of these tribes.”

If he read that arti­cle, Lewis would not be sur­prised. Reject­ing the Tao opens the door to mad­ness.

In the sec­ond chap­ter, “The Way”, Lewis points out that many peo­ple attempt to hold on to objec­tive ethics with­out admit­ting that they are doing so.

A great many of those who ‘debunk’ tra­di­tion­al or (as they would say) ‘sen­ti­men­tal’ val­ues have in the back­ground val­ues of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunk­ing process. They claim to be cut­ting away the par­a­sitic growth of emo­tion, reli­gious sanc­tion, and inher­it­ed taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ val­ues may emerge. I will now try to find out what hap­pens if this is seri­ous­ly attempt­ed. (page 706)

The most com­mon attempt to find a source of val­ues apart from the Tao is to appeal to human nature. When I talk with skep­tics on cam­pus they most com­mon­ly try to ground moral­i­ty in evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy. But it doesn’t work. Lewis explains:

From propo­si­tions about fact alone no prac­ti­cal con­clu­sion can ever be drawn. This will pre­serve soci­ety can­not lead to do this except by the medi­a­tion of soci­ety ought to be pre­served. This will cost you your life can­not lead direct­ly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowl­edged duty of self-preser­va­tion. The Inno­va­tor is try­ing to get a con­clu­sion in the imper­a­tive mood out of pre­miss­es in the indica­tive mood: and though he con­tin­ues try­ing to all eter­ni­ty he can­not suc­ceed, for the thing is impos­si­ble. (page 707)

In oth­er words, the only way to derive moral­i­ty is to pre­sup­pose moral­i­ty. Just as the sum of two num­bers will itself be a num­ber, facts can only pro­duce moral oblig­a­tions if moral oblig­a­tions are them­selves facts.

Lewis says a lot more in these chap­ters, but this email is already too lengthy.

Those are the things that stood out to me. What stood out to you?