As Thanksgiving approaches

For food that stays our hunger,
For rest that brings us ease,
For homes where memories linger,
We give our thanks for these.

Assisted death

In the British Parliament:

MPs are due to vote next week on a private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. MPs have been given a free vote, meaning individuals rather than parties will decide whether to back or reject the bill. (The Guardian)

Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has expressed opposition to the bill:

‘Assisted suicide is an emotive issue where I personally disagree with what is now becoming a majority position…I worry about legislation that requires a doctor whose role has always been to preserve and extend life, to administer death as the final act of a bureaucratic procedure and I worry too about the pressures to agree such a process that in a fit of depression people may choose a course they might later regret and I worry too if older people feel they have become a burden on their relatives and put themselves under pressure to end their life.’

Brown’s decisive intervention this weekend, in his monthly comment piece for the Guardian which opened movingly with the tragic death of his and his wife Sarah’s baby daughter, was carefully thought through. ‘The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care,’ he wrote, before going on to call for a commission on improving palliative care instead of a law change. .... (more)

James Macintyre, "Gordon Brown’s assisted dying intervention could be decisive," The Spectator, Nov. 23, 2024.

Nicaea

Philip Jenkins, always worth reading, on "The Nicene Myth," in which he argues that the Council of Nicaea wasn't the inflection point that many historical accounts suggest. Here he describes the council, but the essay is much longer (do read it all, if you have the time):

The story of Nicaea is quickly told. In 312, Constantine consolidated power in the Roman Empire and granted toleration to Christianity the following year. He accepted some leading Christians as his advisors on religious matters and felt the need to demonstrate his leadership of the larger church when it fell into crisis or division.

Such a situation developed in Alexandria, where the presbyter Arius argued that Christ the Son was not fully equal to God the Father. Because the Father was unique in being unbegotten, he must be different from the Son, who was begotten in time, and through whom the Father created the world: “There was a time when He [the Son] was not.” Just how directly these ideas stemmed from any one individual such as Arius is much disputed, but it is rhetorically useful to label any given teaching as the quirky sentiments of one lone individual, rather than a broad intellectual current. It should be noted, though, that Arius was actually not departing too far from views held by eminently respectable earlier thinkers.

Even so, as the Alexandrian church debated the issue, it was Arius personally who attracted the stigma for venturing on dangerous ground, and he was condemned. To resolve the spreading controversy, Constantine summoned a great council from the whole world, the oikou mene, which thus became the church’s first “ecumenical” council.

Between 250 and 300 bishops gathered at Nicaea, representing a minority of the 1,800 or so who then held that office; only five came from the Western church. Tensions ran high during the month or so of debate, and legend holds that Arius was publicly slapped by Bishop Nicholas of Myra—the historical original of Santa Claus. Ultimately, Arius was condemned, with only two bishops prepared to speak up for him. Christ’s full equality with the Father was proclaimed in a new creed, which declared him to be of the same substance, homoousion.

With their mission duly accomplished, the Fathers dispersed to their homes, and every one, we assume, lived orthodox-ly ever after.

That history seems straightforward, and far too much so for many tastes. Through the centuries, Nicaea has become a potent symbol of whatever later believers wished to find: it offers a splendid hook on which to hang whatever trends or facts need to be stigmatized. .... (more)

Jenkins on Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code should convince readers to never rely on thrillers for historical knowledge. Jenkins also addresses, and corrects, errors from other, more serious sources.

Philip Jenkins, "The Nicene Myth," Modern Age, Nov. 18, 2024.

Reading in Bed

Norman Rockwell 1920

Outside the bubble

I didn't vote for President this year but am interested in why things turned out the way they did. More 2024 election data from a graph I came across a few days ago based on exit polling, so it is preliminary given mail-in voting and probably other factors. Indicative, though:

Financial Times

The GOP margin increased for every group in these categories except white college women and voters over 65.

From David Brooks in The New York Times on "Why We Got It So Wrong":

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. ....

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020, he had promised to pick a woman, and when he picked his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he had promised to pick a Black woman. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition. ....

This is the idea that a person’s ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …” because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience. ....

It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed.... (more)

David Brooks, "Why We Got it So Wrong," The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2024.

Voting against

I taught high school political science electives for over three decades. That didn't make me a political scientist. I am actually skeptical of the possibility of political "science." But I like analysis that seems to understand voter behavior. Today I read Yuval Levin on what the Presidential election results likely do not mean. Some excerpts:

The immediate aftermath of an election is a terrible time for political punditry. Everything the winner did looks brilliant, everything the loser did looks dumb, and even widely predicted results feel shocking when they actually materialize. There is no way to avoid these analytical vices, but maybe one way to minimize them is to think about what isn’t all that different or surprising about the outcome—and to trace out what the election doesn’t seem to mean. ....

Approaching this election from that angle first of all clarifies the continuity of our peculiar political era. The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21^st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.

Preliminary exit polls reveal an electorate deeply unhappy with the status quo, just as in the last several elections. Voters were not so much excited about what Donald Trump was offering as they were upset at Joe Biden (and by extension Kamala Harris) for mishandling key public challenges, and above all the economy. ....

The exit polls suggest that family policy wasn’t high on voters’ minds in this election. Ukraine, one way or another, was not a priority either. The constituency for dispatching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take fluoride out of our drinking water is non-existent. People around Trump—even in the more distant reaches of his camp—are all inclined to think they’ve won a mandate for their pet cause even though voters have no idea who they are or what they want, and likely wouldn’t be on board if they did. Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.

This is the trap that our 21^st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular. ....

It would therefore also be a mistake to imagine that this election victory is an endorsement of Donald Trump’s character and behavior. In the exit polls, just 43 percent of the electorate said Trump has the moral character to be president. Fifteen percent of his own voters said he didn’t. And 67 percent of voters blamed him for the violence at the Capitol after the last election. ....

Of course, seeing what this election does not mean should not take away from what it does mean. This win has put Trump at the peak of his power. Its achievement and reach should not be underestimated, and its implications for the future of American politics are quite significant. But a peak is followed by decline, and Trump’s win does not mean that he is the future of the right or of our politics. He will return to the White House as a 78-year-old lame duck, and he has not brought American politics out of its 21^st-century deadlock. That work will have to follow in his wake. (more, possibly behind a subscription wall)

Yuval Levin, "What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean," The Dispatch, Nov. 11, 2024.

November 11

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 an armistice, ending combat between the armed forces of the Allied Powers and Imperial Germany. The day is observed variously as Armistice Day, Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. It is a day to honor all veterans, living or dead. When I was in elementary school the class paused for a minute of silence at eleven o'clock.

When a Progressive is illiberal

When I studied American history in high school and college Woodrow Wilson was taught as one of the great Progressive Presidents. Opinions have changed. Blaska's blog pointed me to a review of a biography of Wilson. Quoting from that review:

The Wilson depicted by Mr. Cox didn’t simply hold conventional views on race and sex that later generations would find offensive. He was deeply committed to the doctrine of white racial superiority and had unyielding contempt for the intellectual abilities of women. He was also, according to this assiduously researched biography, inveterately dishonest, hopelessly pretentious, cruel to the women he professed to love, heartless in the face of human suffering, humorless except when doing bad imitations of Southern blacks, indifferent to constitutional constraints, and utterly third-rate as a thinker and scholar. His chief merits, in Mr. Cox’s account, were an ability to say just enough to assure interlocutors of his good intentions without committing himself to any course of action, and an ability to look and sound—as we would say—presidential. ....

Wilson took a dim view of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Throughout his life he preferred Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the party in power does what it wants with few restraints, to America’s system of checks and balances. In 1911, as the governor of New Jersey, Wilson delivered a speech in which he asserted that the opening phrases of the Declaration—that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—were mere rhetorical flourishes, not to be taken seriously. ....

At the president’s April 1913 cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson suggested that the time had come to introduce segregation “in all Departments of the Government.” This, Burleson said, would be “best for the negro.” The president agreed, and soon restrooms and dining halls throughout Washington were labeled “white” and “colored”; black officials at Treasury and elsewhere—appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor, William Howard Taft—found themselves demoted or their positions eliminated. ....

That Wilson has largely escaped vilification by liberal historians is no doubt a consequence of the Progressive-era reforms accomplished during his eight years in office (1913-21): the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission; the passage of the income tax and child-labor laws. Wilson’s leading role in the founding of the League of Nations during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-20 has earned him the approbation of liberal internationalists and other advocates of transnational governance.

The usually unstated view seems to be that Wilson’s white supremacy and disdain for women were departures from his progressive outlook. ....

Was there a contradiction, though? At the core of progressivism, both in its original form and in the present day, is the belief that most people lack the wisdom to govern themselves and require a class of educated elites to organize society according to a shifting set of ideals. Wilson’s warped ideas on race and sex weren’t departures from progressivism but variant expressions of it. .... (more)

From Birth of a Nation, a film that gloried the KKK, and that Wilson had shown in the White House

 Barton Swaim, "Woodrow Wilson Review: Liberty Limited," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 8, 2024.

Read "The Lord of the Rings"

Five Books recommends reading Tolkien because the books are a different experience than the films:

These are stories of adventure that have the epic feel that the movies capture, but against a backdrop of conviviality and the pleasures of eating, drinking and telling stories by the fireside as you gather with your companions. Notably, the books are filled with poems that are composed and told by the main characters and pay homage to an oral storytelling tradition that has largely disappeared from our culture but Tolkien clearly admired.

The Hobbit is the recommended first read. I have known people who could not get through it and consequently went no further. I did read it first and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Hobbit introduces the creature known as a hobbit, about half the height of a human, beardless, and with hairy feet. In particular, the book introduces the figure of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit in his 50s who enjoys eating, smoking his pipe and taking it easy, and who is very emphatically NOT in search of an adventure. Unfortunately, a visit from Gandalf, a wizard, and 13 dwarves changes all that. Mr Baggins is dragged off from his comfortable home on a quest to recover a treasure.

The Hobbit is fun and light-hearted but has a slightly two-dimensional feel—featuring elves, goblins and dragons: creatures you might expect in a magical story for kids. It does not yet have the epic and ‘real’ feel of The Lord of the Rings. However, it’s in The Hobbit that a magical ring first makes its appearance, as does the creature who is obsessed with it—called Gollum because of the strange noise he makes in his throat when he talks. It’s clear that the ring’s power and the role it would play in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had yet to take shape in Tolkien’s mind.

Continue "Lord of the Rings Books in Order" here. If you have read the books there are no surprises. But the descriptions may intrigue those who haven't without giving too much away.

"Lord of the Rings Books in Order," Best Books for Kids, Nov. 2, 2024.

All Saints

From a few years ago, a few thoughts about the significance of All Saints' Day:

For over a thousand years, many Christians have celebrated November 1 as All Saints’ Day. In America, the day is best known for the preceding day: All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween. On Halloween we try to scare each other and dress up as what we are not. On All Saints’ Day, we encourage each other by remembering who we are. ....

Like any holiday, All Saints’ Day means various things to various people. Holidays are like that. They carry many meanings. As I see it, All Saints’ Day has three themes: (1) the union of all Christians, living and dead, in one organism, the body of Christ, (2) the inspiring example of other Christians, especially those who have died, and (3) remembering those who are no longer physically with us. ....

For me, there are two essentials for worship on All Saints’: the collect (or opening prayer) for All Saints’ Day and singing six or more stanzas (to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s tune) of William How’s hymn “For All the Saints.” ....

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

.... All Saints’ Day is a day when we remember that we are by God’s grace one body in Christ Jesus, united with Christians around the world and in heaven in praising and serving God. .... (more)

David Bains, "All Saints’ Day: Three Themes," Samford University, Oct. 28, 2020.