The intrinsic value of a human being

A humane society requires an understanding that precedes politics:

.... Classics in the history of Western thought place a strong emphasis on the moral and familial institutions that precede the State. The State must preserve these prior bonds and arrangements to retain its legitimacy, as the State is beholden to the natural dictates of morality, never capable of floating free of them. In his 2011 address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, Pope Benedict XVI succinctly articulated the essence of the pre-political:

The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and rob it of its completeness. (Pope Benedict XVI, “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundation of Law”)

As referenced by this quote, the value of a human person is at the heart of the pre-political. However you attempt to explain this value, it surely cannot be derived from the political. If so, the failure of any given political regime to recognize human value would mean that human beings under that political arrangement are valueless. If we wish to preclude this possibility, we need a metaphysics of the human person that precedes the political and that can deliver us something like intrinsic value. This is the kind of value that can constrain the political instead of being its subject. .... (more)

Laura Siscoe, "To Fix Politics, Think About What Comes Before Politics," Fusion.

Sons of the Father

From the final chapter of John R.W. Stott's Basic Christianity, "Being a Christian":

We saw earlier that our sins had alienated us from God. They had come as a barrier between us. Put differently, we were under the just condemnation of the Judge of all the earth. But now through Jesus Christ, who bore our condemnation and to whom by faith we have become united, we have been "justified," that is, brought into acceptance with God and pronounced righteous. Our Judge has become our Father. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are," wrote John. "Father" and "Son" are the distinctive titles which Jesus gave to God and to himself, and they are the very names which he permits us to use! By union with him we are permitted to share something of his own intimate relation to the Father. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century AD, well expresses our privilege when writing about the Lord's Prayer:

How great is the Lord's indulgence! How great are his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God—a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray.

Now at last we can repeat the Lord's Prayer without hypocrisy. Previously the words had a hollow sound; now they ring with new and noble meaning. God is indeed our Father in heaven, who knows our needs before we ask and will not fail to give good things to his children.

It may be necessary for us sometimes to receive correction at his hand, "for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." But in this he is treating us as sons and disciplining us for our good. With such a Father, loving, wise and strong, we can be delivered from all our fears.

John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Eerdman's Publishing, 1974.

Identifying the enemy

"How do we fight nothing?"

Nihilism’s root is nihil, Latin for “nothing.” No meaning. Empty; soulless. What we see is all there is. Nothing else. Nothing beyond. Nothing more. Nothing. What is the meaning? What is gained? What is lost? What is the point? Nothing.

Decades ago, Pope John Paul II popularized the phrase “culture of death.” A culture of death is a culture of nihilism. No meaning to life, nothing to aim toward or organize around, no intrinsic worth or dignity to each person, and no standard of what is good, right, and true to guide and govern us. ....

In C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon coaches his nephew on how to demonize human subjects. To corrupt the soul of a person, he says, the apprentice demon must get his subjects to misidentify the enemy. Using satirical fiction, Lewis was warning readers not to confuse our real foe. ....

The modern playbook for mobilizing others is to sow seeds of fear and harvest actions in service of someone else’s agenda. Such ground is fertilized, writes 20^th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, under conditions of isolation. Loneliness, she says, heightened in an antisocial century, “prepares men for totalitarian domination.” Related, Kyla Scanlon writes, “Anxiety creates the psychological conditions that algorithms exploit.” ....

When unity is lost, when our bonds crumble, when we literally dis-integrate—who gains? Yes, promoters, programmers, platformers, propagandists, and politicians gain. But who else benefits, spiritually speaking?

I think we are in a war. And there are forces corrupting our souls and stirring our angst.... But let us not misidentify the enemy, which must be named: evil, sin, meaninglessness, and nihilism. Nothing.

So, what do we do? How do we fight? Specifically, how do we fight nothing?

We fight nothing with something. Christians point to something—they point to Someone.

In the Gospel of John Chapter 6, the crowd following Jesus began to leave him. His teaching was hard. They did not like his absolutist claims. He failed to meet their expectations of the coming Messiah. Jesus asked the 12 disciples if they, too, wanted to leave. “Lord, to whom can we go?” responded the Apostle Peter. “You have the words of eternal life.” The most powerful response to nothingness is that which is eternal. Nihilism must not, will not, have the last word. Echoing Peter, Christians ultimately believe meaning, hope, and life are found in a person. .... (more)

Kevin Brown, "Our Real Enemy in the Culture Wars Is Nihilism," The Dispatch, Sept 21, 2025.

Where I live

I've lived on Madison's isthmus since 1982. I had been "surplused" from LaFollette High School because I was the junior member of the department. I had no idea where I would be teaching in the fall, so I decided to find a place to live in the center of the city and moved into the brand new Capitol Centre on the day it opened. I've lived here ever since, although I did move apartments a couple of times to get further from street noise and, finally, to get a much bigger balcony.

The pictures are of the apartment where I have lived for the last couple of decades. I have nested.

My study, where I spend much of the day:

 

 

The living room, balcony beyond:

 

 

 

The bedroom. The bed is seldom made:

 

 

 

The balcony, where I spend hours when the weather permits:

 

 

Autumn

Beginning in 1907 and annually from the 1930s to the '90s, the Sunday Chicago Tribune would publish these on the front page at some point in the fall. The cartoonist was a nationally famous Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.

The story of the cartoon is here

"Further up and further in"

I've been reading C.S. Lewis and books and articles about him for a very long time, but I knew little about what Jews think about him. I'm curious about how representative this is. From Rabbi Mark Gottlieb on "C.S. Lewis and the Jews":

C.S. Lewis, the Oxbridge scholar, literary giant, and religious apologist, is arguably every Orthodox Jew’s favorite Christian author. My own extended engagement with Lewis may be representative of this feature of contemporary Jewish intellectual life. I first encountered Lewis as a student in an AP English class at my Manhattan yeshiva high school some forty years ago. .... Lewis has been a lifelong companion and guide, a religious and intellectual lodestar for me and so many other faithful Jews. Why has this Belfast-born Anglican writer and lay theologian held such sway over me and so many of my coreligionists?

The reasons for Lewis’s popularity among believing Jews are easy enough to identify. He is a world-class polymath, deftly shuttling between the discourses of imaginative literature soaked in spirituality and hard-headed, analytic dialectic in defense of traditional religious beliefs like creation, the reality of good and evil, reward and punishment, theodicy, the afterlife, and the purpose of prayer. As a champion of creedal religion living in the university and popular literary cultures of modernity, Lewis is a skillful role model for rationality and imagination in the service of a biblical worldview, values and dispositions desperately needed by today’s tradition-oriented seekers. But if learned Jews, from laymen to rabbinic giants, think so highly of Lewis, a similar question might be asked in reverse: what did Lewis think of Judaism and the Jews who played a significant role in his life? ....

...[L]ate in life, Lewis married the American poet and former radical Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, a Lower East Side–born, Bronx-bred Jewish convert to Christianity. Joy had two sons, David and Douglas, from her first husband, William Gresham, a modestly successful author with an outsized alcohol problem. With Joy’s death from cancer in 1960, the occasion of Lewis’s profound meditation, A Grief Observed, Lewis adopted the boys as his own children and did what he could, as an aging, almost-lifelong bachelor, to care for their every need. Douglas, the younger son, continued to be nurtured by the Christian home Lewis and his brother Warnie made just outside Oxford. But in the case of the older boy, David, Lewis’s support included buying new pots and pans and kosher goods from the covered market in Oxford, as Joy’s oldest son began to reclaim his ancestral Jewish identity. Lewis also consulted with his friend, the historian Cecil Roth, in whose Oxford home David would sometimes celebrate Shabbat. ....

A careful reading of Lewis’s own writing on Judaism is a decidedly more complex—and frustrating—affair. In a 1959 letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis flatly says that the “only living Judaism is Christianity.” ....

Lewis’s views of Judaism, while disappointing from some contemporary ecumenical perspectives, is really the best that Lewis could do. But, for me at least, none of that seriously compromises the wellspring of imaginative wisdom or doctrinal clarity Lewis so clearly offers—to the faithful Jew as well as the Christian. My rabbinical mentors who encouraged reading Lewis were suggesting, usually implicitly, that Lewis could deepen and enrich my own growing Jewish faith, giving me the language, lexicon, and, crucially, the arguments to articulate a full life of traditional Jewish belief in an age of aggressive secularism. I would soon come to realize that even more than a peerless champion of reason, Lewis created the conditions for modern religious man to redeem (or, as he preferred, “to baptize”) the imagination, consecrating the entirety of the human person, even—perhaps especially—the sensual, to his Maker. ....

Lewis is needed, now more than ever, to help men and women of faith move “further up and further in.” Jews will be much better off for the journey with him. (more)

Mark Gottlieb, "A Tale of Two Jacks: C.S. Lewis and the Jews," Public Discourse, Sept. 16, 2025.

Ugly thoughts

This seems correct. When I first engaged in social media, I was often guilty of making instant comment that I regretted almost immediately (although not "horrific, cruel, and vindictive").  Jim Geraghty:

On Friday, John Podhoretz of Commentary offered a series of posts on X that succinctly encapsulated what we’ve seen since the rise of social media and why so many previously normal-ish seeming people are suddenly blurting out the most horrific, cruel, and vindictive ideas imaginable. You should read the whole thing — I hope John turns it into a column or essay — but this is the gist:

Here’s the danger of social media. It allows people to publish their internal monologues. Our internal monologues and fantasies are often incredibly ugly. People go to therapists because they feel so guilty about them, and one of the tasks of a therapist is to explain that thoughts are not actions. You can rage in your thoughts about your brother, or someone at work, even fantasize about them dying — but you have done nothing and are guilty of nothing, and you need to forgive yourself and learn how to calm yourself down.

Since 2007, people have [had] a means of externalizing that interior monologue....

If the world knew what was going on inside us, we would all be punished viscerally for it. Until 2007, for the most part, the world would not, could not, know. The question is, and I mean this literally: Can civilization survive now that we have been made witness to the interior lives of others?

Just about everybody’s got ugly thoughts sometimes. Thankfully, the percentage of people who act on those thoughts is pretty small; otherwise, society would be anarchy. And thankfully, most people keep those thoughts to themselves.

I would note that if you say something that violates other people’s sense of right and wrong — “I’m glad that guy is dead, I wish I had killed him myself” — in front of other people, you’re likely to see visible reactions of disapproval. You might even lose friends over it or get the sense that other people see you as a broken, hateful lunatic. That dormant sense of shame might awaken. But online, it’s much easier to dismiss those who criticize your comment, and also much easier to bask in the approval of other people, as well. ....

Jim Geraghty, "‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left," National Review, Sept. 15, 2025.

The Bird and Baby

The world's richest man has purchased the Oxford pub where the Inklings once met. From The Telegraph:

The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of £8m for the Eagle and Child, in the centre of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.

The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who would meet there regularly to socialise and discuss their work.

It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.

In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. ....

Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, [Tony] Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined. .... (more)

I had a drink there when in Oxford and, of course, visited the area in the pub where the Inklings would gather, usually on Tuesday. They would also meet in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. I hope the restoration of the pub retains reference to its association with Lewis, Tolkien, and the others. The Bird and Baby picture is one I collected some time ago..

Mick Brown, "How the world’s richest man is buying up Oxford," The Telegraph, Sept. 13, 2025.

"But"

Jonah Goldberg:

...[Y]ou often hear a lot of “buts” after an event like this. When Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was murdered, there were a lot of statements along the lines of “murder is wrong, but people need to understand how bad insurance companies are.”

(It’s depressing how I had to look up the name of the innocent victim, but knew the suspect’s name by heart).

Not everybody who said that kind of thing thought they were condoning or somehow justifying murder, but some did and more came across as if they were. And that is grotesque.

When it comes to murder—not self-defense or combat in war—there is nothing one can say after the “but” that can mitigate the wrongness of murder.

Murder is axiomatically unjustifiable.

It’s literally the word we use to describe an unjustified and unjustifiable taking of a human life. Under the law, if the justification is persuasive then it’s not murder but something else, and we use other words to describe it (negligent homicide, self-defense, manslaughter, etc.). ....

When you fail to condemn a murder because you don’t like what the victim said or believed, you are suggesting at some fundamental level that some speech or ideas should be punishable by death. That is atavistic. That is literally barbaric in that it is a throwback to a time when the powerful could kill the powerless simply because they gave offense. Every person who surrenders, even at the margins, to the idea that one can justify murdering people for expressing their beliefs is not a sophisticated modern advocate of some edgy new way of thinking. They are, all of them, reactionaries at the most metaphysical level, rejecting the core convictions of not just “modernity” but of Judeo-Christian civilization itself. .... (more)

Jonah Goldberg, "There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We.’," The Dispatch, Sept. 12, 2025.

Politics

George Will:

Today, on both sides of the barricades, politics is practiced with a snarl. It makes people cranky, permeates everything, and in two months, will spoil innumerable Thanksgiving dinners. Why then must we have politics? ....

Trout get along swimmingly without politics. Ants and beavers collaborate building anthills and dams, and bees in apiaries have hierarchies (queens and drones), but we do not speak of the “politics” of ants, beavers and bees.

Only humans have politics, for two reasons: We are opinionated, and we are egotistical. We think our opinions are preferable to others’ opinions. Hence the primary purpose and challenge of politics is to keep the peace among such creatures living together.

Many visionary nuisances think that keeping the peace is a contemptibly modest, even banal purpose for politics. They believe that social peace — living together congenially — is not merely overrated, it is evidence of bad character: too little passion for perfecting the world. Sacrificing social peace is, they think, an inevitable price worth paying for a politics with properly elevated ambitions, including the suppression of those whose opinions and egotism are impediments to politically driven progress.

Addressing what he called, with notable understatement, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” When he spoke, seven states had voted to secede. The nation was fractured by disagreement about the right of some human beings to own other human beings.

Today, American politics is embittered by many disagreements, but not even all of them cumulatively begin to justify the insanely disproportionate furies that so many people on both sides of the metaphoric barricades relish feeling. Perhaps they feel important, even to themselves, only when cloaked in the derivative importance that comes from immersion in apocalyptic politics. Politics too grand to settle for merely keeping the peace that gives congeniality a chance. ....

George Will, "William F. Buckley Jr. would recognize Charlie Kirk as a kindred spirit," The Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2025.

Compassion and permissiveness are not the same

"The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska" describes what happened, but also why it shouldn't have happened:

Until the...security footage from that night was released—footage that shows not just the moments leading up to Zarutska’s murder, but the horrifying aftermath as Brown stalks up and down the car leaving a literal trail of blood in his wake—the story oddly flew under the radar. It did so for the same reasons that it’s now become a flashpoint in the online discourse about crime, disorder, and public safety in American cities today. ....

The greater issue is a cultural one: a growing frustration with what often feels like limitless tolerance for public disorder and antisocial behavior—and with it, a sense that one must not only avoid discussing these things to remain a liberal in good standing, but actively pretend they don’t exist. ....

In shying away from what is politically inconvenient, ugly, or otherwise uncomfortable, we not only cede the conversation to racist idiots, but relinquish with it all hopes of a better future. The problem is not politics per se, but an inability to course correct when what seemed like progress turned out to be a misstep.

Nowhere is that clearer than in a well-intentioned attempt to give the mentally ill more agency that instead resulted in vastly fewer people accessing the care they desperately needed. ....

...[T]he tragedy is not just how badly this country failed to protect Iryna Zarutska from someone like Decarlos Brown Jr.—or to save Decarlos Brown Jr. from becoming the monster who killed her. It’s that we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same. In doing so, we have lost sight of the fact that a country founded on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is also founded on the promise that when you come here, you will be not just free but safe. The tragedy is that a woman who fled the terror and disorder of war for a better life in a peaceful America instead ended up, unknown to her, in an America where we have tacitly abandoned certain public spaces to the most disordered and depraved among us because enforcing the law feels mean and makes us uncomfortable. .... (more, perhaps behind a paywall)

Kat Rosenfield, "The Taboo That Killed Iryna Zarutska," The Free Press, Sept. 8, 2025.

The best of the past

A friend thought I might appreciate this by Peggy Noonan. He was right. The excerpts below begin with a quotation from David McCullough:

.... “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation.” Everything we have, he says, all the great institutions, the arts, our law, exists because those who came before us built them. Why did they do that? What drove them, what obstacles did they face, how are we doing as stewards and creators? “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude.” This is a wonderful sentence because it is true and bluntly put. Ignorance is a form of ingratitude. ....

Earlier this summer I wrote that we now routinely say and do things in our public life that are at odds with our history, that are unlike us. I focused on President Trump’s language and imagery when speaking to the troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., in early June. His remarks were partisan in the extreme, even for him; it was a Trump rally, not a president addressing the troops. Elsewhere, on sending the National Guard into Los Angeles: “When they spit, we hit.” All of it, the rally and what he said, was, I said, the kind of thing we don’t do. And we mustn’t lose sight of what we don’t do. ....

You can’t be dreamy about the past and say, “It was nice then.” It was never nice, it was made by human beings. You can’t say, “People were better then.” They weren’t. But in even the recent past the allowable boundaries of public behavior were firmer, and the expectations we held for our leaders higher. And their public behavior (not private, or not necessarily private) was often preferable to the public behavior we see today. So you don’t want to live in the past, but you do want to bring the best of the past into the present. .... (more)

Peggy Noonan, "We Need to Know History, Especially Now," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2025

What the law requires

On September 9^th, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Listening to the Law will be published. Her decisions on the Court have annoyed both liberals and MAGA types, but not, I think, those who understand what judges are supposed to do. "Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be." This is excerpted from an excerpt from the coming book:

...[I]n our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. Thus, the most important question for a nominee is whether she will honor her commitment to do so. Though the confirmation process sometimes suggests otherwise, it shouldn’t matter what the nominee thinks about the death penalty, abortion, affirmative action, or any other politically charged topic. What matters is whether she will respect the people’s resolution of such issues.

The judicial oath demands no less. The Constitution requires that all federal and state officials, including judges, “be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” To enforce this requirement, Congress mandates that all federal officials swear to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.”

Federal judges take an additional oath, swearing to “administer justice without respect to persons” and to “faithfully and impartially discharge” their duties under the Constitution. Each of these oaths is a promise to leave personal preferences and biases at the courthouse door. The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice. .... (more)

Amy Coney Barrett, Listening to the Law, The Free Press, Sept. 3, 2025.