“Giving the Sickness A Name,” by Jeff Reimer:

A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.

The desert monks who first wrestled the demon acedia to the ground did so by grinding through their prayers in the pitiless heat of the Egyptian wilderness. In doing so they became superbly intimate with their failures. Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. […]

Percy’s gaze turned outward in his subsequent work. In 1971, he said that Love in the Ruins “deals, not with the takeover of a society by tyrants or computers or whatever, but rather with the increasing malaise and finally the falling apart of a society which remains, on the surface at least, democratic and pluralistic.” By 1986, in fact, when asked by an interviewer, “Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?” he could answer, “Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom…gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.” The interviewer follows up: “In connection with what is going on in the world?” Percy’s response: “Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia.”

This is my sly way of recommending Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. When I first read it, 15-odd years ago, I found it entertaining, but in some ways thought its parody-prediction of America had barked up the wrong tree; things Percy had predicted had not panned out. Unsurprising for a book written in 1968!

However, when I re-read the book last month, I was dumbfounded. Love in the Ruins is become more prescient over time… and proved itself, in 1968, a better interpreter of the American situation than I was in 2005.

Acedia, indeed.

“Was Ebola a Near-Miss?” by Lessons from the Crisis:

From 2021’s perspective, the advice given by UK public health authorities early in the covid outbreak reads like an attempt to sound confident and reassuring, full of what we now know to have been a lot of false assumptions built on almost very unreliable information.

We heard about the need to maintain open borders, that masks wouldn’t work, that the ‘world class’ NHS was well prepared to cope with plenty of PPE, that you couldn’t pass on the virus unless you had symptoms and above all that the most important thing to do was to wash your hands, all of which turned out to be disastrously misguided.

But imagine if covid had been contained in China and never took hold in the UK- would we have ever found out how wrong this all was? Or would we have been falsely reassured that everything was in order, and our health system stood ready to cope with disaster? Because I think this is what might have happened with Ebola. Almost every wrong ‘official’ belief of the early covid era was deployed with equal confidence against ebola six years previously.

“We say what? Answers to your questions about Catholic prayers,” by The Pillar:

Another interesting thing about the Our Father is that there’s a word that nobody knows what it means. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ – that’s not really what the Greek says. The Greek word is “ἐπιούσιον” (epiousion) which doesn’t mean ‘daily’ at all, but the problem is that it’s a totally unique and untranslatable Greek term. It’s not used in any pagan Greek literature, it’s only used twice in Luke and Matthew. It’s used nowhere else. Even the Greek Fathers couldn’t agree on how to translate it. Literally, it means, ‘super-substantial.’ 

‘Give us this day our super-substantial bread.’

Now for some reason, everyone just kind of settled down with the term, ‘daily,’ but honestly, that’s not what the Greek says.

Fun stuff!

“The Central Bank Trap,” by Andrew Stuttaford (but really Nouriel Roubini):

Central banks have effectively lost their independence, because they have been given little choice but to monetize massive fiscal deficits to forestall a debt crisis. With both public and private debts having soared, they are in a debt trap. As inflation rises over the next few years, central banks will face a dilemma. If they start phasing out unconventional policies and raising policy rates to fight inflation, they will risk triggering a massive debt crisis and severe recession; but if they maintain a loose monetary policy, they will risk double-digit inflation – and deep stagflation when the next negative supply shocks emerge.

One of these days I’m going to write the blog post explaining, in layman’s terms, exactly how and why the national debt will destroy us. No one cares, of course, because we live in a democracy, and democracy is famously bad at long-term thinking. Democrats say, “We don’t need to worry about debt; sovereign nations aren’t the same as average families making a budget.” (The second half of that is true, but the first half absolutely does not follow.)

Republicans pretend to care about the debt to hurt the Democrats, then get in and vote for enormous, debt-financed tax cuts. This, in turn, really puts the lie to their claim that their problem with expanding Medicare/Medicaid is that we just can’t afford it. (I mean, it’s true, we absolutely can’t afford it, but if Republicans believed that, they wouldn’t have voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.)

But the debt doesn’t care. The debt will get us in the end, whether we admit it or not. It may take a first gouge out of our skin in the near future, if Stuttaford/Roubini is right about this.

“The Kids Were Safe the Whole Time,” by David Wallace-Wells:

It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that, according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease.

Useful not just for the obvious point it makes about kids, but the broader point it makes about risk assessment, intuitions, and how badly skewed they can become in the midst of a plague (especially once that plague becomes politicized).

There is, for example, no good reason to have K-12 kids mask this fall unless our new rule is that kids should always be masked and should always have been masked. Everyone who looks at this question and isn’t in politics, right or left, draws this conclusion soon enough. But it will probably be another eighteen months before this will be accepted as conventional wisdom, even though we already know it today. (Indeed, one of the most disappointing aspects of this pandemic is our discovery that the Centers for Disease Control, which we all once esteemed very highly, actually just follows conventional wisdom, not scientific data and cost-benefit analysis, in setting policy. Sadly true under both the Trump and the Biden Administrations.)

“Lockdown Bait and Switch,” by Matt Shapiro:

I am tired of people who are even now treating all things COVID as some kind of game or political football that needs to be moved 5 yards down the field. This whole “Actually, Lockdowns Not Only Save Lives, But They Have No Downsides” is transparent nonsense. It’s not that it is stupid, it is that it is a talking point from “smart” people that is meant to convince other “smart” people that all the “smart” people made the right decisions and are not only justified in their past decisions but fully vindicated in every possibly way by The Data, which is the great oracle that grants us the grace of life and the fullness of knowledge, praise be to The Data.

I watch as pundits still treat this like a game or, at best, a science experiment. The reality is that the efficacy of lockdowns is the single most important issue to human beings who operate and exist in the real world. People are making enormous life decisions about what to do next, where to live, how to educate their kids, and who to trust and much of it depends on how a state is going to approach this topic.

As Shapiro goes on to write, he is not anti-lockdown, when circumstances call for it. But he is anti-rewriting-history-in-ways-that-will-make-our-next-pandemic-response-worse, and there is an awful lot of that going around right now among the Noah Smiths of the world.

“Culture Wars are Long Wars,” by Taneer Greer:

American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture. Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation. No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

This was not thought necessary. Conservatives had the people. One decade they were called a “silent” majority; as the culture war heated up, that majority transitioned from “silent” to “moral,” but a majority they remained.

Yeah, I know, you already read this, just like everyone else, and it’s been a few weeks, so the conversation has moved on… but it was still a worthy read, especially if these ideas weren’t already familiar to you.

Incidentally, I think there is one and perhaps only one exception to this on the Right: the pro-life movement has genuinely waged a culture war, battling not just in the judiciary and the legislatures, but on the ground, in the streets, in front of abortion clinics, and in some of the largest charitable-aid networks in the country. Perhaps not coincidentally, abortion is one of the only issues where the “Moral Majority” of old has not lost the youth. The rising generation of secular, heteroflexible youth are roughly as supportive of abortion restrictions as their grandparents, and reflect a stable age gap that’s lasted several generations. That’s stalemate, but stalemate looks a heck of a lot like a win when all your other causes have gone the way the same-sex marriage debate has.

“I’m (kind of) changing my mind about CRT,” by Isaac Saul:

There are two things I want to dig my heels in on, even after reading all your feedback and continuing to look into these bills for the last week.

One, I do not think critical race theory is particularly dangerous on its own. On the contrary, it’s a really valuable and important piece of academia. Like any critical theory, it has its flaws, but in simple terms, it really is just an academic theory that explores the way race (and racism) are embedded in our society’s laws and structures. […]

Two, on the whole, I still believe these bills banning CRT are more dangerous than helpful. I haven’t seen one yet that I’d personally vote for. If K-12 students are being taught that they are inherently inferior, superior, or racist, based on their race — or otherwise being compelled to espouse those ideas — they are already protected by our country’s laws.

I liked this piece a great deal because, even though I think both those conclusions are completely wrong, even naive and shortsighted, Mr. Saul arrives at them through a process of very visible, reasoned thoughtfulness. Even though I disagreed with his conclusions, reading his piece softened my own attitudes toward Critical Race Theory* somewhat.

*I know we’re not supposed to call it that anymore, but, y’know, c’mon.

I am really proud of myself, because I resisted the temptation to anchor this week’s Worthy Reads around the little-noticed but pretty popcorn-worthy debate between Micah Meadowcroft and Curtis Yarvin. Their debate wasn’t really insightful enough (IMO) to earn a place here, but Meadowcroft scored some wonderful ripostes that I hope Yarvin himself appreciated.

(Yarvin then proceeded to miss Meadowcroft’s entire point… but he did so in a way that was so entirely at right angles to Meadowcroft that it was, itself, characteristically interesting. And look at me, I’m afraid to directly say a clearly nice thing about Yarvin in public! I’d much rather you think I was cheering uncomplicatedly for Meadowcroft, which itself provides evidence for a lot of Yarvin’s claims — claims I don’t think Meadowcroft would even dispute. Anyway.)

Briefly, without excerpts or commentary, here is that debate:

“We Are Going To Win,” by Meadowcroft

“You Are Going to Lose,” by Yarvin [was paywalled; isn’t now? huh]

“Roman Rhetoric and Florentine Politics,” by Meadowcroft

“The Real Great Reset,” by Yarvin

And that’s it for this week! See you later.

As the saying goes: Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article. (I mean, gracious, Ian Milhiser’s on this week’s list!)

“Against Crippled Religion” by Steve Skojec:

I sometimes feel as though in my own work, all I’ve been doing, day after day, year after year, is staring into the abyss that is the Catholic Church in the 21st century and pulling out monsters to display in public: “See? Do you see this twisted, evil thing? This is what’s going on! We have to stop it!” But there is no stopping it; it is an absolute radioactive sinkhole of abuse, corruption, cronyism, perversion, and heterodoxy, much of it concentrated around the pope himself. We have no power to change it. It’s enough to make anyone despair, and some have broken under the pressure. There are any number of examples, but perhaps most obvious are those who invented bizarre conspiracy theories to explain things away, like the one about how none of the present papal crisis is really happening, because Pope Benedict hadn’t really resigned and was still in charge, and a handful of bloggers had decoded his secret signals telling us all would be revealed…

Nobody is coming to save us. Not even God.

That’s not the kind of thing you’re allowed to think, but I couldn’t stop thinking it.

“Fixing a Broken Antitrust Regime: A Review of Sen. Klobuchar’s Antitrust“ by Hal Singer:

The Chicago School of Thought, which was propagated chiefly by Judge (and Yale Law School professor) Robert Bork and other University of Chicago professors, stresses low prices in the final goods market as the sole criterion for assessing potentially anticompetitive conduct. When undertaken by a single firm, conduct that had been deemed exclusionary as recently as the 1960s (think predatory pricing, tying, exclusive dealing) was suddenly considered innocuous in the absence of higher prices or lower output. Under this “consumer welfare” framework, which Klobuchar rightly labels “Bork’s incredibly misleading misnomer,” the welfare of workers and other input providers was made subservient to the needs of end users. 

A student of modern antitrust law, steeped in the Chicago School orthodoxy, might be confused to hear Klobuchar’s origins story and to reconcile it with the consumer-welfare lens: A key animating thrust of antitrust law, per Klobuchar’s history, was the protection of workers and farmers in their dealings with monopsonists. If workers weren’t supreme, they were at least equal to consumers in the eyes of the law. Klobuchar’s origins story puts the lie to Bork’s history of antitrust. And if the Chicago School is built on a deliberate misreading of history, then it should be easier to unwind.

“You Aren’t Actually Mad At the SATs (You’re Mad At What They Reveal)” by Freddie deBoer (I heavily spliced this excerpt without ellipses):

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are:

1. SATs don’t predict college success. (They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true. )

2. The SATs only tell you how well a student takes the SAT. (No: they tell you how well a student is likely to perform in college.)

3. SATs just replicate the income distribution. (No. Again, asserted with utter confidence by liberals despite overwhelming evidence that this is not true.)

4. SATs are easily gamed with expensive tutoring. (They are not. This one is perhaps less empirically certain than the prior two.)

5. Going test optional increases racial diversity. (This one, I think, must be called scientifically unsettled.)

All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

DeBoer goes on to reply to criticisms in “Please Think Critically about the SATs”:

One of my great frustrations with this conversation is that it typically involves idealizing the college admissions process, which is in reality about the least idealistic process I can think of. This must be drilled into the heads of the liberals who think that eliminating the SAT is the key to getting more poor Black and Hispanic students into elite colleges: we have every reason to believe that colleges and universities are meeting their internal diversity goals by pursuing affluent first-generation and international Black and Hispanic students. Private colleges and universities jealously guard their internal admissions data, which is absurd for several reasons, the biggest of which is that we are handing them massive tax breaks in exchange for a complete lack of transparency in how they choose students. But both research and widespread industry perception tells us that, for many colleges, and particularly elite colleges, slots reserved for Black and Hispanic students are going to wealthy first generation children of affluent African and South American parents or to international students…

What’s the goal, here? If it’s to increase cardboard-cutout “diversity” by giving schools more leeway to recruit wealthy kids from Argentina and Nigeria, well, cool. It’ll probably work. But for the poor minority students, particularly the descendants of African slaves that most people think of when they think of affirmative action? No. Admissions departments at most colleges are revenue-generation units before they are anything else.

“The Self-Licking Napalm Ice Cream Cone: Is Science Having a Stroke?” by Curtis Yarvin:

When you’re debugging a broken system, the most interesting thing is when it works.

You are not trying to prove that it’s broken. You know it’s broken. The question is why it’s broken. This involves knowing how it’s supposed to work. When every once in a while the machine does work, reality flashes a light on why it much more often doesn’t.

In this case, our giant planetary brain is correcting an error. It is realizing that, despite its earlier statements, covid maybe probably did escape from a lab. Since the brain, like any brain, is supposed to be automatically self-correcting—this is the brain working.

This brain of course works very well in in many ways. But one thing it does not do well is proving itself wrong—especially if the error would cast it in a harsh light…. [So w]hen it suddenly—changes its mind—on something huge, it’s best to pay attention. This doesn’t happen often.

Probably the best example I know of happened 70 years ago. The details are different; but no one at all disputes them now, so—I hate to digress—

Most people have heard about Stalin’s murder of the Polish officers in 1940 at Katyn. Most people do not know that until 1952, the USSR’s narrative was our own American narrative—that the Poles were shot by the SS in 1941.

“Conservative Notes on Democracy: Are Republicans really anti-democratic? It’s complicated.” by Michael Brendan Dougherty:

Are we not democrats? John Ganz alleges that “it’s very difficult to seriously maintain that the modern GOP and Conservative movement, either in ideology or in practice, is substantially committed to majority rule” and that “the entire ideological edifice of Conservatism at this point is just a sustained attack on the principle of majority rule, either through open rejection of its legitimacy or a more subtle redefinition of democracy into something unrecognizable.”

Ganz’s short essay is probably among the strongest restatements of a case that is becoming the most common indictment of Republicans among the most voracious consumers of political media who are aligned with the Democratic Party. 

[…]

Ganz mentions that some anti-democratic rhetoric on the right is merely opportunistic. He could explore whether the arguments for decreasing checks on the majority are the same for liberals and progressives. Liberals and progressives in other nations have recently found themselves in the opposite position. After losing a referendum on Brexit, liberal and progressive Remainers launched a boldly anti-democratic campaign against it via institutions they still controlled, even executing a temporary legal coup on the British constitution via the Supreme Court. Conservative populists who won free and fair elections in Poland and Hungary have been chastised as “undemocratic” and “threats to democracy,” often when their reforms expand democratic control over more areas of the government or other institutions. Poland moved toward democratic checks on its judicial guild, bringing it closer to norms in the United States. Liberals in Poland and across the world balked at it. Hungary’s government has similarly used its democratic mandate to go after institutions run by a small number of elites.

“The Beatings Will Continue Until the Stupidity Ends” by the late lamented Thomas H. Crown (from 2019):

…As the late Justice Scalia also noted, “when the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villains — and more specifically with the Templars.”

There is no liberal solution to this. The tools of liberalism are thwarted, capriciously or at least without much reflection to their nominal sources of authority, by the illiberal part of the system to which we agreed, and from which we cannot extricate ourselves without armed rebellion or exile; and by a culture that has the ear of that illiberal block. So even when we win liberally, not only do we lose, but we have agreed to the means of our defeat and exile from future competition. 

How do you fight this? French says he’s won using the tools of liberalism and he’s right, but he then points to victories we all know are etched in sand — every win to which he proudly (and rightfully!) points was made in court and is therefore subject to a later court pulling a Lawrence to his Bowers, or was accomplished legislatively and is therefore even more fragile. Ahmari says that the tide is coming, and he’s right, but he completely lacks any description or even general idea of how we get around this. 

“Justice Breyer’s New Warning for Democrats Couldn’t Have Come at a Worse Time” by Ian Milhiser.

In this article, someone on the judicial hard-left (Milhiser) attacks the quintessential judicial center-leftist (Justice Breyer). Although it’s always instructive to follow intramural debates on both sides of the aisle, I’m actually sharing this one for the cognitive dissonance Milhiser displays:

No serious person would claim that, say, Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett is the moral equivalent of a Nazi. But Breyer is either asking us to accept a Supreme Court that could entrench the Republican Party’s power, or denying we have such a Court right now.

If the former is true, he should explain why the “rule of law” is worth maintaining if the people have no control over who writes the laws. If he’s claiming the latter, well, I hope he’s correct. But, should he allow his seat on the Supreme Court to be filled by another Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch, both of whom have called for extraordinary new constraints on voting rights, he may not remain correct for very long.

Breyer’s argument is that you can’t have a functioning republic without a legitimate Supreme Court, and that progressive proposals are going to gut that legitimacy). Milhiser’s counterargument is that we have no choice but to gut the legitimacy of the Supreme Court (he never resists the force of Breyer’s point here), because the conservative justices will otherwise make our republic non-functional by other means.

The evidence for his extraordinary claim that conservative justices will render the republic non-functional boil down to hypotheticals and this complaint that, in the 2020 election, Thomas and Gorsuch would have (correctly) thrown out a lot of ballots that were cast illegally with the blessing of local officials. Throwing those ballots out would not have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, which was razor-thin, and would certainly have had no effect in a “normal” election. He then gets into a stemwinder about Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die that cites 1/6 and Merrick Garland, but neither the BLM riots nor Estrada.

Milhiser’s still a cut above Mark Joseph Stern, though. And I did like the bit about the “two-front war” (read the article; I didn’t excerpt it). As a right-wing, anti-progressive liberal, I sympathize greatly. Liberalism does place heavier burdens on its supporters than its rival strongman ideologies. But guess what? That’s always been the price of civilization.

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words, free documentary on TubiTV.

I liked this for a lot of reasons, but the part that resonated with me most was his time in Catholic seminary… a seminary the future Justice Thomas left because he saw racism in the Catholic Church that the Church refused to stand up against. This sparked a moral crisis in Thomas’s life (many serious Catholics go through something similar at some point, especially ex-seminarians) that drove him out of the Church into the arms of radical Marxists. His road back from Black Nationalist Marxism to being the smartest, wisest, most consistent justice on the Supreme Court over the majority of his time serving there (and, yes, I do rank Thomas above Scalia) is a road worth walking with him.

I was, however, very non-plussed by the way the documentary brushed off Justice Thomas’s mid-1980s divorce as “one of those things.” We’re trying to understand Thomas as a man, and the collapse of a marriage is not something you can look away from — especially not for a Catholic. (Thomas was reconciled to the Church in the ’90s; his second wife later converted.)

In any event, worth watching, especially if you’re not someone who is already rather reflexively inclined to like and respect Justice Clarence Thomas.