“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
– Justice Robert Jackson
“Woke”: Aware of and opposed to bigotry and oppression.
From Garret Keizer‘s, One Resolution You Might Just Keep:
If resolution makers wanted a patron saint, they could do worse than Samuel Johnson (1709 to 1784), a lifelong resolver and by his own admission a lifelong failure at keeping his resolutions. Reading his diaries, we may sigh in recognition as time after time — at the New Year, at Easter and on his birthday — Johnson renews his intentions to rise early, to be more studious, to be more moderate in his intake of food and drink, and laments his neglect of those same intentions in the year past…
For Johnson, however, the critical question was not whether he’d accomplished great things but whether he’d accomplished them in proportion to his talents and his limited time. He was hyperconscious of mortality — on his watch was engraved “The night cometh, when no man can work” — and painfully frustrated by his seeming inability to keep the simplest promise to himself. Like almost everyone I know, he felt he should be accomplishing much more than he did…
It’s easy to miss the one resolution Johnson did keep, though to my knowledge he never wrote it down: the resolution to continue resolving. You can see that doggedness as an exercise in futility on Johnson’s part, but I prefer to see it as an act of charity toward himself. If Johnson is known for anything besides his literary accomplishments and his quotable remarks, it is his charity. He housed a motley assortment of needy dependents under his own roof. He pressed pennies into the hands of indigent children sleeping on the London streets. His almsgiving was so well known that he could scarcely leave his lodgings without being accosted by beggars. What was the point? A friend once asked him. “To enable them to beg on,” he said…
Johnson’s personal struggle is worth remembering not only as we form private resolutions to be better people but also as we ponder those collective resolutions repeatedly broken, and in some cases yet to be made, to confront such evils as environmental destruction and systemic racism…
Most of us know that heady sense of reprieve and possibility implicit in the mention of “another year.” I’ve made it this far. I’m not dead yet. I still have a chance — if only to take better care of those for whom “another year” means another term of misery. Johnson seems never to have lost sight of that chance. He saw it all around him, sleeping in the ashes, collapsed in the mire, and he seized it with compassion. How much happier this New Year would be if we resolved to do the same.
From Peter Wehner’s “Why Jesus Matters“:
“Our witness is not right doctrine; it is our relational orientation… As friends of Jesus, we love one another — and that includes people different from us. In fact, no one can be an ‘other’, because in Christ we belong to one another.” We are called to love one another, honor one another, welcome one another, encourage one another and bear one another’s burdens…
Jesus says if we are his friends, we will do what he commands, and several times in John 15 he is specific about what that means: Love each other as I have loved you. There are countless ways to love others, based on our talents and life circumstances, but the command is clear enough. We are not only to experience love; we are to extend it to others.
Going to church helps ‘keep me honest’ when it comes to extending love to others. It can be challenging, as MLK Jr. spoke to in his “Loving Your Enemies” sermon. It can be challenging but keep at it.
“A criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time.”
– Calvin Trillin
Over the past couple years Carlos Lozada has become a must-read writer for me. His column in yesterday’s New York Times is a good example of why. Some excerpts from “How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It“:
[The] right-side-of-history argument… is rarely about history at all. It is a pre-emptive assertion of one side’s virtue and another’s wickedness; it is not about interpreting the past but about scoring points in the present to shape the future. Hirschman likened this argument to “the earlier assurance, much sought after by all combatants, that God was on their side.” The comparison is apt: God on your side will help you win, and history on your side will say that you did….
“You are extreme and destructive; I have history on my side.”… renders dialogue not just impossible but unfathomable….
Thought for the Week:
Any theoretical formation with a self-defense mechanism that refashions those that disagree with it into a symptom of the problem it is diagnosing has most likely cross the line from theory into theology. Like Marxists who reflexively label any criticism as petty bourgeois or Lacanians anxious to read any pushback as the outcome of unconscious repression, there is no way to test it except on the terms that it has itself provided.
I listened to Know Your Enemy: Christopher Lasch’s Critique of Progress, with Chris Lehmann again this week. It was even better the second time through. (Lasch’s writing was a big influence when I was forming my view of the world in my twenties.)
Resolved: Coalitions comprised of people with different cultural capital are weak.
Reluctantly, I’m inclined to agree. What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Usually so, but not always? What exceptions can you think of?
FWIW, I looked up a bunch of definitions of “cultural capital”. I find Wikipedia’s definition the easiest to understand:
Cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society.
“While to-day we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”
Betty Hall, founder of Simon’s Rock, on education:
“There is a four-year span here when youth should become acquainted with the whole range of human inquiry – man in relation to his physical environment – man in relation to his fellow man or social environment – and man in relation to the world of his own creation, his music, his art, religion, literature, and philosophy.”