Dear Intelligent American,
The subject line of this week’s missive is pinched from the Good Book (James 5:1). It’ll make you switch to decaf. While this is surely no religious enterprise, this newsletter, though it may dabble in what a friend once called bargain-basement theology, can’t help but remark on the passage. What’s a correspondent to do?—this was one of the readings at church last Sunday.
Since this enterprise indeed cares about matters of society, culture, charity, and philanthropy, what James cautions (the rest of the verse: “for your miseries that are coming on you”!) strikes a little closer to home. It’s worth sharing.
Are riches evil? No. But there are, amongst the people with whom the Center For Civil Society may come into contact or read about, those who surely are more motivated in their generosity by how it relates to eternal consequences. Fair enough. James is worth a gander (so is Mark 9) and attending contemplation, for impoverished millionaires and carrot-and-stick, fire-and-brimstone, Next-Stop-Purgatory motivatees.
Speaking of motivation: We deploy anti-crastination rhetoric to remind those Fair Readers who are by nature lollygaggers, put-offers, last-minuters that the aforementioned Center is hosting, this October 23–24 at Pepperdine University in lovely Malibu, CA, a socko conference on education reform (its full boffo title: K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed) that commands your presence. It will soon be too late to grab the last seat—you can sign up here—but we’re not there yet. Lead. Out. Get.
Excerpts. Links. Read. Thrill.
1. In an important Tocqueville symposium at The New Criterion, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney explores how progressive, intellectual elites act in a democracy where the center has not held. From the essay:
In a word, the once much-vaunted common sense of the American people, and the larger American political tradition, is hardly in evidence today. Writing about a much poorer America in 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart could ask “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” (to cite the title of his once famous book). But socialism is de rigueur in progressive circles today, and even communism has a powerful allure for those (and they are legion) who know nothing about the crimes and miseries of all sorts at the heart of what used to be called “really existing socialism.” A balanced and serious appreciation of the economic and moral merits of the market order and the historical achievements of liberal constitutionalism are not passed on to the young in any appreciable way. Where would we be without what the economist and social theorist Deirdre McCloskey has called “the great enrichment” that brought liberty and comparative prosperity to Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? As one European commentator has put it, socialist “grace” has always depended on capitalist “nature”—which is to say, the welfare state and various flawed if recurring efforts to redistribute income through state power necessarily presuppose the market’s remarkable capacity to produce the goods that allow ordinary people to live in dignity. But the modern intellectual cannot stop himself from devising ever new ways to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Modern progressives increasingly inhabit a fact-free zone, a fictive “Second Reality,” as the political philosopher Eric Voegelin called it, where their dreamy abstractions reign supreme and challenges are verboten.
2. More from TNC: Glenn Ellmers finds that the elites’ obsession with their privileged status is something the great French political philosopher warned against. From the essay:
Apart from the fact that today’s ruling class is more punitive and less benevolent than Tocqueville predicted, there are other, deeper problems with his analysis. Democracy in America will always be worth reading, of course, but what has happened in American society, over the last decade especially, shows that while Tocqueville understood the practical problem of administration, he did not fully appreciate the theoretical character of “the rational state”—the authority claimed by the bureaucratic, scientifically trained experts that supposedly justifies the nonconsensual rule of America’s managerial class.
While Tocqueville saw the importance of voluntary organizations and social cooperation, he failed to anticipate how the diktats of our new pink police have blurred the distinction between public and private. There is, for example, no clear law passed by Congress mandating DEI training in the private sector. Yet amid the incomprehensible tangle of anti-discrimination regulations, federal subsidies, tax incentives, state-funded education, public–private partnerships, and community-development projects, it is almost impossible to say where government authority ends and proactive obedience to the reigning ethos begins. Most corporations are only too eager to impose woke indoctrination without being told in so many words that their regulatory overseers require it.
3. At National Review, Frank Filocomo marches to the tune of walkable cities. From the article:
Some municipalities have attempted to design communities such that their residents can traverse the sidewalks without the fear of two-ton steel contraptions zipping by. Culdesac Tempe, a “car-free rental apartment community” in Tempe, Ariz., is paving the way for a new kind of lifestyle.
This little experimental neighborhood in the desert is car-free and completely walkable. That’s right, in Culdesac, there is absolutely no residential parking. Rather, people walk and bike to where they need to go. There are also discounts on ride-sharing apps and free rides on the metro. Culdesac is replete with various shared spaces: coffee shops, picnic parks, dog parks, and a community pool. And everything is within walking or biking distance.
With its New Urbanist touches, that creates a people-friendly environment conducive to social connection. People see their neighbors on the street and wave to them. Even better, as Robert Steuteville writes in Public Square, “residents hold an outdoor monthly barbeque.”
4. At World Magazine, David Bahnsen told ya so: Working from home didn’t work. From the piece:
A wide array of COVID practices did, indeed, peak in 2020, and we will look back in amusement that anyone ever thought home-based Pelotons were going to make gyms, spin classes, and other traditional workout venues obsolete.
But perhaps the most controversial (and certainly the most presumptive) assertion coming out of the COVID era were statements like “No one needs to go to work anymore. COVID revealed that most people can easily work from home and be just as productive.” It is difficult to ascertain how many people actually believed this to be true versus how many merely wanted it to be true, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it was a consensus view for quite some time. Adding fuel to the fire was nearly every Big Tech company at the time boastfully declaring that work attendance would be optional going forward (at one point, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Salesforce, and Microsoft all made some form of that declaration).
And now, every single one of them has taken it back. Every single one.
5. At The Free Press, Suzy Weiss checks out the “Doomer Optimists.” From the article:
If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.
“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”
It appeared to be many things, all at once. There were homesteaders; there were doomsday preppers. A long-haul trucker, a radiologist, law students, veterans, activists, ecologists, minor Twitter celebs, and a self-described “would-be professional cell tower toppler.” A digital artist couple and a venture capitalist couple and a traditionalist Catholic couple.
6. At Strategika, Jerry Hendrix contemplates if permanent peace for Israel is even possible. From the piece:
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has raged back and forth for decades. Israel has taken the step of building tall walls to separate Palestinians from Israelis, creating isolated political and economic enclaves. However, the enduring nature of the Jewish state––as well as the rampant economic success of Israel in their portion of the Middle East, while the Palestinians continue to live in squalor despite billions in economic aid––has dug a moat between the two peoples that cannot be filled. Certainly, the wanton, horrific nature of the October 7, 2023, massacre will continue to divide Israelis from their nearest neighbors for years, if not decades, to come. Additionally, the clear and incontrovertible evidence that the massacre was perpetrated with the financial backing as well as political and military support of Iran, serves as a line in the sand within the region, especially since Iran has further fanned the flames of chaos through their support of the Houthis and Hezbollah.
A permanent peace in the Middle East can only be achieved when the nations of the region reconcile themselves to the return of the Jewish people to the lands of their ancient ancestors following two millennia of diaspora, oppression, and genocide. While there are clear signs of advancement that track from the Camp David Accords in 1978, to the 2020 Abraham Accords wherein increasing numbers of regional actors have signed economic and diplomatic agreements with Israel, the extremists in Iran continue to block the path to a stable comprehensive regional security arrangement.
7. At Plough Quarterly, Dori Moody explains that taking lifelong vows can be liberating. From the reflection:
Conversion has brought me life in threes. For every sinner, there is the old life, the new life, and the life to come. For every convert there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But for those who, like me, have made vows of lifetime faithfulness in a religious community, there are also the gospel counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
These are not the easiest virtues to live by. Initially, they appear narrow and restrictive—how much of myself must be stripped away? What must I renounce in this world for the sake of the world to come? But this is not the only way to look at them. Daily life is a better measure of fulfillment, for I am happy, and yes, after almost thirty years of communal living, still a bit giddy.
Poverty is the easiest. Growing up the way I did helped. Even as a child, I saw what people did with their money, and I observed that stockpiling it did not produce happiness. The love of money often brought out weakness, while those who shared were like hardwood, resilient. I also knew that private property and the urge to hoard or collect earthly things was at best a distraction, at worst idolatry. Since I owned nothing before my commitment, a much larger consideration was the decision to lay down the possibility of future earnings. Now I am relieved to be free of personal ownership, to live a life of sharing.
8. At National Affairs, education guru Bruno Manno apostles for apprenticeships. From the article:
Registered apprenticeships prepare individuals for rewarding employment. One study shows that workers can earn $240,000 more over their lifetimes—$300,000 including benefits—by participating in a program. An evaluation of the Department of Labor's American Apprenticeship Initiative reveals that earnings increased for all participants between the year before their apprenticeship began and the year following its conclusion, regardless of the occupation or the person's demographic background. On average, earnings increased by 49% for all apprentices, with women, Hispanics, and apprentices of a race other than black or white experiencing the highest earning gains.
Regrettably, America lags behind many nations in using apprenticeships to prepare individuals for the workforce. The country's 27,000 programs enroll almost 600,000 individuals, or just 0.4% of the U.S. workforce. English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada enroll an average of eight times as many workers in apprenticeship programs as a percentage of their workforces; Germany, Austria, and Switzerland enroll up to 15 times as many. This gives the United States the lowest apprenticeship-enrollment numbers in the developed world.
What's more, as noted above, American apprenticeship programs focus heavily on construction trades like carpentry and plumbing. Other nations train apprentices for a broader range of careers, including those in the health-care, logistics, technology, and financial industries.
9. At Commentary Magazine, Joseph Epstein comes clean about his intimate pedantry. From the column:
Daily life generally offers this pedant a good workout. He calls his local library, and a robo-voice informs him that it “is now presently open.” Surely you mean “currently open,” he mutters into the phone. The play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs says that “there’s two outs,” and the pedant mentally retorts, “There ‘are’ two outs, Schmuckowitz.” At the supermarket he gets in the express line, where he is greeted by a sign that reads, “Ten Items or Less,” and thinks, whatever happened to the more correct word “fewer?”
Please note that none of these items entails a direct confrontation. My pedantry is of the shy kind. I would never correct someone in person for his misusage, and I rarely go after authors whose books I have been asked to write about and in which I find such mistakes—though not long ago, writing about a history of nostalgia, I noted that two words the author of the book used (“musealization” and “pluritemporality”) I hoped never to have to see again. I have no wish to embarrass anyone for what I take to be his or her ineptness in the use of language, at least not directly.
I think, by contrast, of the late critic John Simon, who through a long career was unable to constrain his own rampant pedantry. His book reviews usually closed with a catalogue of grammatical and other errors he found in the book under review. He reviewed and lavishly praised three different books of mine. Of one, my book on snobbery, he ranked it with “works by Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, except that it is more timely than the former and infinitely more amusing than the latter.” Yet in each of these reviews, he felt the need to take a paragraph or more to point out what he felt were errors and infelicities in my prose: my “intermittent sloppiness in matters of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and style.” He found my parallelisms faulty; we disagreed about the proper use of the word “comprise.” But, then, I, for my part, once wrote that John could find a grammatical error in a Stop sign.
10. At The American Conservative, Alan Pell Crawford pays tribute to a true character, the late Noel Parmentel. From the remembrance:
You might assume that a character like this would come to a bad end, drinking himself to death in a shabby single-room-occupancy hotel from a William Kennedy novel. Well, not so. For the past several decades, Noel lived a gracious, comfortable, and sober life on a horse farm in Connecticut owned by his longtime lady love, Vivian Sorvall—and was almost always eager to talk.
The last time I saw him, he had come to visit me in the Capitol Hill office where I was then employed. I wasn’t there the moment he showed up, so the Congressman’s chief of staff, whose desk sat just outside the door to the boss’s inner sanctum, told me what followed. When Noel learned that I was not there and the boss was back in the district, he proceeded to brush right by the chief of staff’s desk, stride into the inner sanctum, plop down behind the Congressman’s desk and begin making long-distance phone calls. The hubris, while astonishing, was thoroughly in character and, looking back, rather endearing. The congressman in question has since died, too, and, reflecting on their respective careers, it occurs to me that the country would be in better condition if we had more Noels sitting behind congressmen’s desks and fewer of the unimaginative men and women who manage to get themselves elected. This is absurd, of course, as there could never be more than one Noel Parmentel. He was sui generis, God rest his bumptious soul.
11. At Law & Liberty, Mustafa Akyol explains what was the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate. From the essay:
The Caliphate had its ups and downs, and was at times more symbolic than effective, but it had meaningfully survived into the twentieth century under the banner of its last seat, the Ottoman Empire. But the latter collapsed in the aftermath of World War I, allowing one of its generals, the staunchly secular Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), to abolish the Ottoman monarchy in 1922 and proclaim the Republic of Turkey a year later.
However, there is a little-noted detail in this revolution: Initially, Kemal did not touch the Caliphate. While his republic commenced in the new capital, Ankara, the old Caliphate, now held by the last Ottoman crown prince Abdulmejid II, continued in Istanbul as a non-political but still prestigious institution. If things continued like that, it could have turned into an entity like the Vatican State, preserving a moral authority not just in Turkey but also in the broader Sunni world. Yet Kemal had little patience for any authority other than his own. About sixteen months after the abolition of the monarchy, he also abolished the Caliphate on March 3, 1924. On the very same day, he immediately expelled the last caliph, along with all Ottoman family members, from Turkey.
Was the abolition of the caliphate a good decision? Secularist Turks who adore Atatürk, along with many secularists or nationalists around the Muslim Middle East, would say of course. Many Westerners, who may associate the Caliphate with the various extremist manifestations of Islam today—perhaps even the notorious terror army, ISIS, which proclaimed a monstrous “caliphate” of its own—may readily agree.
12. At Modern Age, Daniel McCarthy, with plentiful reasons, frets about what will become of our republic as our hard-fought freedoms age and stomach for responsibility wanes. From the piece:
Tocqueville had seen—and eventually described in The Old Regime and the French Revolution—how the nobles responsible for local government in France had given up their duties to the communities in their care to lead lives of greater luxury in Paris and at court instead. To take their place in the country, the king of France appointed new officials answerable directly to him. Something similar could happen in America: if French aristocrats willingly gave up the burdens of responsibility for a life of ease in the capital, wouldn’t American democrats sooner or later give up self-government for the comforts of private life?
In the modern world freedom begins in virtue and ends with utility. To oppose a tyrant requires great courage, and a liberator risks his life for the good of others. As long as freedom is an aspiration, it inspires selflessness and the highest human virtues. But freedom has a different character once it is securely obtained. Instead of a single noble goal—the defeat of a wicked ruling power—freedom once in hand comes to be defined by the lack of any clear aim: it means everyone can do anything he or she wants, and every desire becomes equal. Tocqueville already saw this tendency in democratic equality nearly two centuries ago.
Because qualitative political distinctions between different personal aims are generally disapproved in a modern egalitarian democracy, distinctions are instead justified by quantitative measures. These include not only the obvious quantitative rule of greater numbers in elections but also, and more profoundly, the quantifying of the human good itself in the form of money. Whatever makes money will be perceived as good, while what makes less money—or loses money—must be bad; after all, money is simply a stand-in for the multitude (and scale) of human aims and desires.
Lucky 13. At American Reformer, Zephram Foster speaks in music, the universal language, a thing at one with creation. And spherical. From the essay:
The ancient and medieval views of the structure and nature of the cosmos are far removed from the dominant understanding today. In our reductionist and materialistic age, we have abandoned the idea of the cosmos altogether, in favor of a “universe.” Rather than a lively, vibrant, ordered cosmos teeming with life and meaning, our universe is mostly empty space, guided by impersonal laws and mathematical realities. We see the stars not for what they are, but for what they’re made of. In the Middle Ages, this was not the case. For them, the cosmos was conceived as being constructed of “spheres,” planets and celestial bodies each on their own set path in their own layer of what we reductively call “space,” spinning along with every other sphere at their own unique pace. As the spheres rotated, guided along their heavenly course by divine wills, the sound of their friction, interaction, and motion created the sound of music. This “music of the spheres” is inaudible to us, the way that the air around us is invisible. We can’t hear it because we’re accustomed to it, in it, and have never been out of it. It’s part of us, the song that creation is singing is a part of the reality we are in.
Though perhaps not physically or technically correct as a view of the solar system, the medieval view is far closer to understanding the nature of reality and God’s spoken world than our modern, mechanical understanding. Music, to the medieval mind, was inherently baked into creation. Music was the best way to understand and explain the inner workings of the world around us. The world around us is in constant motion, a world of cycles, of death and birth, of growing and changing. It’s a vast and complex web of interconnected systems, each supporting another, all weaving together every second. In a word, the world is harmony–not unison, where each voice sings the same note, but many different voices singing different notes, blending into one beautiful chord.
Bonus. At The Lamp, Robert Wyllie shares his passion for Willa Cather. From the piece:
Long before Death Comes to the Archbishop threatened to make her a “Catholic writer,” and even before her trips to the vanishing world of the Old Southwest in 1912 and 1915, Cather was telling the overlooked stories of hard-working Catholic immigrants. Cather’s first published story, “Peter,” which appeared in the Boston literary magazine the Mahogany Tree in 1892, introduces a Bohemian immigrant who plays “Ave Maria” on the violin he refuses to sell, prays the Lord’s Prayer in the only Latin he knows, and fears the devil and his Sabbath-breaking son. Peter Sadelack is a first sketch of Ántonia Shimerda’s father, the devout Bohemian violinist who is tragically unsuited to the pioneer lifestyle. From the very first, Cather wishes to show us the world of the Nebraska frontier through the Catholic eyes of her Czech neighbors, like her childhood friend Annie Sadilek, the model for her humble heroine Ántonia. Ralph McInerny reminds us that O Pioneers! and My Ántonia already establish Cather as the writer who tells the overlooked stories of especially rural Catholic immigrants. She admired tough Catholic women in the first place.
Me too. I am grateful for my Catholic roots, and so to Gram, for making the Church a home to me from childhood. These allowed me to deepen my faith privately, that is, as a child can, gradually and alongside stupid youthful enthusiasms—libertarianism, Tolstoyism, process theology—for which only old friends can embarrass me still. One does not have to be a famous writer like Cather to seem like a stage Catholic nowadays. There are Catholic lifestyle influencers on social media. The conversions of actors, athletes, journalists, students, and whatever Russell Brand is are very public affairs now. Many zealous converts feel the burden of making a strong and respectable performance for the world—they know it will not be a popular one. They are paraded around with all the answers. Alas, they do not have all the answers. Social media gives many converts a hard yoke and a heavy burden. Gram could not give me the faith in any direct sense, obviously, but she and my mother led me as a child to where the easy yoke is found.
Of Special Importance
The Center for Civil Society publishes Philanthropy Daily, which has embarked on a special series of articles on the Corporal Works of Mercy. These will roll out over the upcoming days and weeks. As we go to press, two have already been published, the first, by Alice Nye, on Giving Drink to the Thirsty Around the World, and the second, by Chas Baines, on Feeding the Hungry in War-Torn Nations. Please do read them.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. Again, complete information about that coming-up-quick C4CS education-reform convening at Pepperdine can be found here.
Due. By December 5th you’ll have digested the turkey, had sufficient naps, and be ready for some wisdom sharing—which is what you can expect that day at the Center for Civil Society’s Master Class on “Elements of Grant Writing,” which is a must for any and all toiling in the fundraising fields. Get complete information right here.
Tre. More from C4CS that’s worth the while of nonprofit worker bees: Coming this Thursday, October 10th, is a Master Class on Planned Giving (via Zoom, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern), where you’ll learn how to identify planned giving prospects, how to build a better planned giving program, and much more. Get complete information right here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the butter keep telling jokes?
A: He was on a roll.
A Dios
This missive just makes the cut of wishing our Brothers and Sisters in Abraham a blessed Rosh Hashanah, and in advance offers our fervent hopes that Yom Kippur, coming next week—which will mark the anniversary of the horrible terrorist slaughter of October 7th—will bring upon all who seek them the plentiful graces of the merciful Creator. And may He too move us to help our fellow countrymen whose lives have been so devastated by the terrible hurricane.
May We Be Generous with That Over Which We Are Stewards,
Jack Fowler, who searches for his piggybank at jfowler@amphil.com.
