A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
The most recent Civil Thoughts promised to link to the speech of Bradley Prize winner James Piereson: Catch it here. Also promised was a link to the remarks by Sebastian Lai, offered on behalf of his father, honoree Jimmy Lai—the jailed Hong Kong freedom champion. You can find them here.
Switching our focus: The entity that produces this weekly missive, the Center For Civil Society, believes it is vital that we mark America’s Semiquincentennial—i.e., our 250th birthday—if only because it is an exceptional opportunity to get civics right. So mark your calendar for November 5 and 6, when the Center’s annual conference—this year’s is “Civil Society and America at 250: The Past and Future of What Has Made America Exceptional”—will be coming to Philadelphia.
Learn more about it right here.
Oh: If you missed last week’s webinar on “The Ideals of American Charity”—in which Your Humble Correspondent successfully elicited wisdom from scholars Jacob Wolf and Brad Birzer—fear not: It was recorded. You can find it on YouTube, right here.
Father Knows Best, Especially about Links and Excerpts
1. At The Free Press, Madeleine Kearns explores why Catholicism has become cool. From the piece:
Why are so many adults in the once-secularized West seeking to be baptized into the Catholic Church? I’ve been reporting on the rise in religiosity for a while now, and have heard many theories: Modern Americans are starved of beauty, meaning, purpose, and community. The Church of Rome offers all these things, but so do other religions. So: Why Catholicism?
“In an age of instability, people are attracted to ancient traditions; in an age of therapy-speak, there’s something appealing about the tough demands of Catholic doctrine,” Dan Hitchens, a senior editor at First Things and former Catholic Herald editor, told me. “Catholicism also has a visual and aesthetic heritage which has translated well into online culture. Catholics have turned out to be surprisingly good at using the internet to evangelize.”
To find out more, I tracked down a handful of the several thousand or so American adults who were baptized this past Easter, and spoke to those who hadn’t been raised Catholic, to find out why the religion appealed. Most of them were in their 20s, which makes sense: The Catholic boom is especially notable among Gen Z. A 2023 study by Harvard University found that the percentage of Gen Zers identifying as Catholic jumped from 15 percent to 21 percent from 2022 and 2023.
2. At Commentary Magazine, Irina Velitskaya explores her youth and hidden—but not too hidden—Jewish roots. From the article:
I grew up in a leper colony, in one of the Western world’s last remaining refuges for victims of a very curious disease. Leprosy is an affliction that is almost completely removed from any contemporary context, and yet it remains to this day a potent representation of body horror, social ostracization, and biblical symbology.
I never considered my upbringing unusual because, like all children everywhere and in every time, I simply accepted the circumstances into which I was born. I possessed neither the urge nor the capacity to speculate about alternative ways of life. My primitive little settlement of Sinegorskiy in far southwestern Russia was all I knew of the world and all, at the time, I could ever hope to know. “Hope” being perhaps not quite the right word here, because it never occurred to me, or to anyone in Sinegorskiy for that matter, that we could wish for anything else in life any more than a fish in a fishbowl can yearn for the unknown ocean.
Indeed, it wasn’t until years later when I had escaped to the freedom of America that I came to understand the extraordinary circumstances of my upbringing and how they had always been intertwined with my then-hidden Jewish identity.
3. At Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler delves into the too-long-awaited Sam Tanenhaus biography of William F. Buckley Jr. From the review:
One odd result is that Tanenhaus deploys a long list of extenuating explanations that amount to a repertory of damning with faint praise. For example, in the classroom young Buckley “sounded better informed than he actually was. He was ‘very good at discussing books he hadn’t read,’ as one of Bill’s favorite professors, the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss, later said.” “Buckley’s true métier as writer and talker—eventually reaching levels approaching genius,” according to Tanenhaus, “was for intellectual comedy, an almost continual repartee.” “His weapons were not his ideas, which could be heard elsewhere, but his words, which sparkled with freshness—much of the time, anyway.” “[Buckley] had befriended enough scholars to know he was not one of them. He liked knowing all the arguments—had an almost preternatural gift for assimilating first principles and lines of reasoning. But discovering new ideas or uncovering the hidden meanings of the old ones was not for him. He already knew what he thought and believed.” “He was a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.”
There is truth in Tanenhaus’s backhanded compliments. Still, they would go down better if he had at least discussed Bill’s controversial contentions more seriously. For instance, he credits Buckley’s mentor at Yale, the political scientist Willmoore Kendall, as the chief influence on Buckley’s arguments in his first three books, God and Man At Yale (1951), McCarthy and His Enemies (1954; written with Brent Bozell), and Up From Liberalism (1959). Yet Tanenhaus does not explore those arguments sufficiently to let the reader appreciate what was so controversial about them. Buckley, in his indictments of what he called “the superstitions of academic freedom” and the dogmas of democracy made very cogent arguments against the fact-value distinction and the progressive faith in History as the inevitable march of freedom and reason. The author doesn’t let us see the courage and the clarity of WFB’s arguments as over against the conformism of midcentury American public life.
4. More Buckley: At Modern Age, Edmund A. Opitz educates all on one of the great early intellectual influences on WFB—Albert J. Nock. From the article:
The lifelong concern of this man was with the quality of life lived in our civilization; he found the quality poor. Institutions of higher learning, so called, were by no means his only target. Nock was a staunch defender of capitalism, but he was unsparing in his criticism of capitalists for distrusting the free market and for trotting down to Washington begging for handouts. “Businessmen don’t want a government that will let them alone,” he wrote; “they want a government they can use.” This is not to blame businessmen for being what they are; what they are is simply a reflection of the standards and values held in common by a significant number of people in our society. This is the age of materialism, or the age of Economism, as Nock preferred to call it. Economism is the doctrine that the production and consumption of material wealth is the chief end of man; it is the notion that if only everyone were well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, who could ask for anything more? No wonder we suffer from cultural deprivation! We exhibit just that kind of life, Nock remarked, that one would expect to find if he turned over a plank which has been rotting in the muck of Economism!
Every society constructs its institutions in its own image, and thus we get the schools we deserve, the economy we deserve, and the churches we deserve. Albert Jay Nock did his graduate work in theology, and before he joined the staff of American Magazine in 1908 he had served Episcopal parishes in three states. In later life he wrote that “when Christianity became organized it immediately took on a political character radically affecting its institutional concept of religion and its institutional concept of morals; and the same tendencies observable in secular politics at once set in upon the politics of organized Christianity.” And just as schools offend against education, so churches offend against high religion.
5. At National Review, Jimmy Quinn finds that somehow, patriotism has found a nook and cranny in the Silicon Valley. From the piece:
Above all, though, this year’s gathering marked the triumph of a sense that tech is no longer in the thrall of activist employees. This is a far cry from the state of the industry seven years ago, when progressive Google employees stymied a government contract that would have seen the tech company—former slogan “Don’t be evil”—collaborate with the Pentagon on an initiative called Project Maven that uses machine learning to identify targets on the battlefield. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” employees in revolt wrote in a missive at the time. In a tacit endorsement of, or a submission to, that perspective, their bosses obliged, declining to renew the contract with the military and citing concerns about negative media coverage.
The reigning message from Silicon Valley’s power players today is the opposite. “The obvious solution to war is to have the West having the strongest, most precise deadly weapons possible so that we can minimize unnecessary, innocent deaths,” is how Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, put it during the conference’s first panel. Palantir won a Maven-related contract last year. And consider that an executive from Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spoke on a panel at the forum later in the afternoon.
Karp’s message is certainly good for business, with his company’s valuation surging on expectations that its government and defense contracts will continue to grow. But it’s also the morally right approach. Palantir has never apologized for its work with Washington, and now more of the industry has shifted to Karp’s side of the debate. His new book, The Technological Republic, a patriotic manifesto for the industry, quickly hit the top of the New York Times bestsellers’ list.
6. At Gatestone Institute, Robert Williams warns there is a war against city-dwellers, brought to you by the United Nations. From the article:
The ostensible goal of the climate change project is to get to “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. To do that, global leaders, led by the WEF and the UN, are apparently planning to radically transform the lives of everyone on the planet except their own.
Their plan, officially launched as the UN “Agenda 21” in 1992, during the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and now renamed “Agenda 2030,”—still under the pretext of saving the planet—sets in motion initiatives aimed at controlling every detail of people’s lives.
This agenda includes “smart cities” (also known as “15-minute cities”) that monitor, track and extract data about citizens’ lives. In addition—already in full swing, with mayors of at least 100 cities—all participants in the so-called C-40 “network of mayors of the world's leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis” are working on turning their cities into yet another UN concoction.
7. At City Journal, Robert VerBruggen checks out a new study that explains how corporations “went woke.” From the piece:
Those results are about what a casual observer would expect, though the exact timing is interesting. The 2017–2019 period begins the year after Donald Trump’s election and in between the Black Lives Matter moments of 2015 and 2020, rather than directly coinciding with a major national political development.
The authors report that “the growth of Democratic-leaning corporate speech is closely correlated with the expansion of assets under management in funds with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.” Firms with high BlackRock ownership also saw a particularly large increase after 2019, when CEO Larry Fink sent a letter encouraging corporations to dive into political controversies.
In other words, companies largely appear to be responding to direct pressure and financial incentives, as opposed to reacting to broader political developments and cultural phenomena. In addition to the overall upward trend, though, some abrupt, temporary spikes did occur around events such as the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
8. At TomKlingenstein.com, Theodore Dalrymple delves into the justifying and ever-recuperating mind of the communist ideologue. From the essay:
Before communist rule was imposed on Romania, the Communist Party was little more than a groupuscule. You had to be almost a fanatic to belong to it. When suddenly this groupuscule became all powerful, it quickly asserted itself and was responsible for thousands of deaths, complete terror, and economic dislocation. Ceausescu, who owed his reversal of fortune and extremely rapid social ascent to the Party, must have seen all this but persuaded himself that it served the interests of the humble such as he had been. Possessed of the dialectic, he was able to reconcile the appalling things seen and done with ultimate good, which was more real to him than day-to-day reality, just as, for many ecologists, the carbon dioxide content of the air is more real than the giant metal windmill on the horizon.
I surmise that he retained the belief that he developed in adolescence to the end of his days. His belief might have been absurd, but it was not insincere. If he lived in luxury by comparison with most Romanian citizens, it remained that of a poor man suddenly come into a fortune, and by the standards of rich people in the West was not remarkable. Even his privileges he would have seen as beneficial for the people, since they enabled him to work more efficiently for their good. No doubt he was protected from knowledge of the real state of affairs, with his motorcade view of the world, but such protection from it was not necessary for the preservation of his worldview: for once you have rejected the laws of identity and non-contradiction, as he had, everything becomes compatible with anything else. Yes, the people are going hungry, but that is a benefit conferred on them because they eat too much anyway.
9. At Frontiers in Mental Health, Andrew Hartz confronts the sociopolitical biases plaguing American mental health care. From the article:
To address political bias, there seem to be two broad strategies. One approach is to “fight fire with fire.” Some people frustrated with bias use fiery rhetoric or take strident positions, and some even practice equally politicized approaches to treatment. While the frustration behind these views might be understandable, this strategy is unpersuasive to most. It focuses exclusively on countering perceived opponents, which can lead to stalemates where both sides have locked horns. It’s reactive, so it can’t move discourse beyond countering opponents. At its worst, it falls into many of the same traps as left-leaning activist approaches. And when brought into psychotherapy, it can lead to unethical and countertherapeutic treatments.
Another strategy is to argue against “ideology” in general and to avoid any appearance of partisanship. But this approach can have pitfalls too. First, activist leaders in mental health seem just as likely to attack this stance as “bigoted” and “political” as they do of people taking more overt political stances. Second, this approach can lead people to get mired in irresolvable philosophical debates about what is and isn’t “biased” or “ideological.” Third and most importantly, this approach can inhibit people from addressing the full extent of the shortcomings in the field. People with this view can sometimes be hamstrung by attempts to appear neutral, so they equivocate between both sides and ignore important problems because it might make the organization look partisan or ideological.
10. At Fusion, edu-guru Bruno Manno makes the case for that old virtue, prudence, being a key factor in improving education. From the analysis:
Few policy arenas demand as much prudential judgment as K-12 education. Public schooling shapes young people in many ways while navigating diverse communities and competing interests. It is inherently local yet inescapably national, personal yet political. It requires balancing innovation and stability, equity and excellence, autonomy and accountability.
Nowhere is the need for prudence more obvious than in the landscape of K-12 public school choice. The American public education system is no longer a monolith. It is a growing system of educational approaches that seeks to meet students where they are and help them get where they need to go. Properly understood, this expansion is not a departure from public education but a prudential adaptation—a recalibration of means to achieve enduring public purposes.
Consider today's public education options: magnet schools, charter schools, microschools, open enrollment, dual enrollment, and career pathways programs. These six innovations represent a many-year effort of prudential experimentation to improve young people's education.
11. At Civitas Online, Paul Zepeda sings the praises of that one old station that meant much more to civil society than just being a train terminus, and contemplates its potential rebirth. From the piece:
Ultimately, the rebuilding of Penn Station reflects how Americans view their cities and how they appreciate their heritage. Following the Second World War, cities across Europe went to great lengths to rebuild those significant structures and urban fabric that had helped to create their identity. Following the destruction of the British House of Commons in the Blitz, Churchill insisted that it be rebuilt exactly as it was, famously stating, “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Foreseeing the ultimate destruction of German-occupied Warsaw, Polish architects risked death to document and backdate their drawings of the city’s historic architecture, knowing that it would have to be rebuilt. Famously firebombed Dresden completed its reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in 2005, sixty years after its destruction in the firebombing of the city. Each of these was meticulously reconstructed because its citizens recognized the centrality of these monuments in their culture and identity. They saw that these hallmarks were what helped to define them and served as physical articulations of their way of life.
Similarly, the United States should also pursue rectification of its own cultural destruction at the hands of modernist architects during the last century. Rebuilding Penn Station in its original iteration would restore the greatest gate to the city, which was itself the greatest portal to the country. It would return to citizens their most dignified public space, affirming the nobility of those who pass through its halls. One editorial at the time of the demolition stated, “any city gets what it wants, is willing to pay for, and ultimately deserves.” Given the president’s rallying cry to Make America Great Again, it should be evident that one of the best expressions of this message would be to restore one of the nation’s greatest architectural icons and declarations of civic pride. Let New York and the United States take this incredible opportunity to reclaim its lost heritage and build towards a more beautiful future.
12. At American Reformer, Guzi He laments the threat our politics poses to conscience. From the piece:
The consequence of this momentous shift in the law and culture is the rise of a new norm whereby the state has an affirmative duty to assist citizens in realizing their chosen lifestyles. Abortion, says its advocates, must not only be legalized but publicly funded. Otherwise, the enjoyment of a child-free life remains cost-prohibitive. Concerning employer-provided health insurance plans that cover assisted reproduction, the term “infertility” must be redefined to include “a person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention,” as California did in 2023 with its S.B. 729. In other words, insurance providers will be required to create children for single women and gay couples.
Not only must the state give financial incentives to practices in line with personal autonomy, but it must also proactively dismantle existing barriers to autonomy. The latest barrier to fall within the crosshairs is the protection of conscientious objections by healthcare providers. The argument is that when healthcare providers can legally decline to perform abortions, prescribe abortifacients and contraceptives, and offer infertility treatments, access to these services would be frustrated, thus hampering the patient’s autonomy.
In place of the current system of conscience protections at the federal and state levels, advocates of autonomy propose “a collective obligation of the [medical] profession to provide non-discriminatory access to all lawful services.” Taken to its logical end, this obligation would make it impossible for any physician, nurse, or pharmacist to exercise their conscience. Instead, obedience to the patient becomes a condition for practicing medicine.
Lucky 13. At Law & Liberty, Walker Wright says commerce and civil society go hand in hand. From the essay:
So concerns about economic liberalism’s erosion of civil society aren’t really borne out by the evidence. But there are good reasons to be concerned about economic centralization through government power. Recent research using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset has looked at how state ownership of the economy affects civil society institutions and found that greater state ownership of the economy leads to repression of and lower participation in civil society organizations and religion. State ownership of the economy also reduces the autonomy of civil society organizations and increases state-sponsored monopolies among them. Finally, civil society organizations are less likely to have influence among policymakers where there is greater state ownership of the economy.
Similarly, Ginny Choi and Virgil Henry Storr of the Mercatus Center found that more people in market societies report being active members in recreational organizations compared to nonmarket societies. According to their data, religious affiliation is about the same in both market and nonmarket societies. Overall, they showed that those in market societies have stronger personal relationships, social network support, and more civic engagement. Healthy, influential civil societies are found predominantly within market economies. Markets provide the space in which civil society, social capital, and associational life thrive. Adam Smith’s commercial society and civil society go hand-in-hand.
Bonus. At Catholic World Report, Sandra Miesel explains the glories of Chartres. From the reflection:
Gold was the mortar of medieval holy places. The eighty cathedrals, five hundred major churches, and tens of thousands of minor ones built in France between 1050 and 1350 didn’t come cheap. Not only did skilled workers command good wages, raw materials and transportation were much more expensive than labor. Massive timber was becoming scare and the cost of moving stone even from a nearby quarry equaled the cost of the stone itself.
Chartres was no exception to these rules. Although no ledgers survive and it’s difficult to convert medieval money in modern sums, the equivalent of several million current dollars was spent on Chartres each year during the most rapid phase of construction. The cathedral canons pledged three years’ income to start the project. Then donations poured in from all over. Royalty and high nobility contributed, as well as local guilds, affluent burghers, and humble folk who could only give a few coppers.
The diocese of Chartres could well afford such expense because it was the largest and richest in France. Its bishop earned several million dollars a year and its cathedral chapter collectively even more. The town’s 9,000 inhabitants were also prosperous, thanks to four annual trade fairs keyed to major feasts of the Blessed Virgin, patroness of Chartres. Besides its location on two routes to the great Spanish shrine of Santiago de Compostela, free-spending pilgrims also swarmed in to pay homage to Chartres’ own relics of local martyrs and an archaic Madonna called the Virgo paritura (“the Virgin about to give birth”) supposedly re-purposed from an ancient Celtic idol. There was also a hospital where people suffering from St. Anthony’s Fire (ergotism) might be healed. The prime attraction, however, was the silken sancta camisia, the Holy Chemise that Mary was said to have worn while giving birth to Jesus.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Giovanni Del Piero lays up a take on the charitable ways of the Golden State Warriors’ foundation. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Chris Whitford makes clear why philanthropy must foster actual belonging. Read it here.
Tre. The new episode of the “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast finds host Jeremy Beer discussing subsidiarity with Joshua Hochschild. Catch it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the restaurant on the Moon get bad reviews?
A: It had no atmosphere.
A Dios
Riots are happening in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. You may know it better as “Los Angeles.” How can we inspire Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel to pay it a visit and engage in a celestial whupping of the loons defiling it?
May the Father of All Bless the Fathers of Some,
Jack Fowler, who waxes paternalistic at jfowler@amphil.com.
