2024
INTEGRALISM IS JUST POPERY IN FANCY DRESS:
Two Christians Take On Postliberalism: The increasingly hostile political landscape requires a reevaluation of the roles of church and state. (Hunter Baker, March 8, 2024, Modern Age)
As a matter of conviction, Baptists would tend to reject Christian nationalism because of their strong emphasis on a regenerate church community. That means that they envision a church whose members have voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced the Christian faith. It also means Baptists have tended to be great advocates of religious liberty, as they deem forced religion to be an offense to God through its production of hypocrisy. It is no surprise, then, that Miller opposes Christian nationalism.
Wolfe, as a Presbyterian, comes from a denominational background that is connected to the Magisterial Reformation, which was certainly comfortable with national churches. It is probably no accident that the Baptists vigorously reject infant baptism, while both Presbyterians and Catholics embrace it. One cannot fail to notice that in the national churches of the types Magisterial Reformation traditions and the Catholic Church employed, to be born effectively meant to simultaneously enter the church as a Christian and the state as a citizen. This style of Christianity is comprehensive (in that it comprehends almost all citizens within its community) as opposed to the regenerate style that has appeared to work well in modernity. Wolfe would like to return to the comprehensive Christianity of the old national churches and their partner states.
THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:
REVIEW: On Muslim Democracy: Essays and Dialogue by Andrew F March and Rached Ghannouchi (Usman Butt, 3/11/24, MEMO)
Ghannouchi makes a critical shift in his political thinking from Islamism to Muslim democracy. He no longer seeks to create the ideal Islamic state. Instead, he is looking at core principles in light of democratic, pragmatic and pluralist Tunisia with all its virtues and flaws. March describes meeting Ghannouchi as being with a great living historical thinker, and insists that he should be considered in wider conversations about Muslims and democracy.
“Ghannouchi’s political theory was noteworthy for the role he imagined for an active, engaged, and deliberative democratic populus,” explains March, who argues that Ghannouchi breaks with dominant Western philosophical approaches to democracy. “Unlike Montesquieuian and Madisonian theories of the separation of powers and institutional pluralism as the ultimate check against tyranny, Ghannouchi had long stressed public virtue and public opinion.”
However, Ghannouchi also breaks with Islamic theorists. “Unlike traditional Islamic theories that placed custodianship of the law in the hands of jurists exclusively, Ghannouchi imagined the realisation of Islamic law as largely a public deliberative process involving not only experts but also ordinary citizens-believers.”
The latter idea has undergone an evolution with Ghannouchi seeing elected parliamentary members as being the check on authoritarianism. In my view, though, the “citizens-believers” bestow authority on the members of parliament, who then carryout this function, and so Ghannouchi’s current line of thinking is not a million miles away from his original line. Ghannouchi insisted on the popular will as part of the process of realising Shariah and being essential for governance, which puts him at odds with a number of Islamist thinkers.
Accepting the imperfectability of the Ummah is the whole magilla.
YEAH, BUT THEY MIGHT SEE A TICK TOCK…:
A New Engine for Human Learning and Growth (SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN, 3/11/24, Project Syndicate)
AI already shows great promise. India’s education system is in crisis. Over half of fifth graders cannot read at a second-grade level, and merely a quarter can manage simple division. If these students had a personalized curriculum – taught in their native dialect, without caste-based or economic discrimination – they could catch up. While poor incentives for educators, state-level politics, bad curricula, and socioeconomic circumstances have stood in the way of this solution, AI could make such obstacles surmountable.
Imagine an AI tutor interacting with a student from India’s poorest state, Bihar, where learning scores are abysmal, in her native Maithili dialect. It would evaluate homework through images, correct pronunciation, teach other languages, integrate numeracy through games, and offer endless, patient repetition. The same approach also could be used to offer teacher training at scale, with large language models (LLMs), like the one that powers ChatGPT, aiding curriculum development in India’s 100-plus languages and more than 10,000 dialects, all at low cost.
These AI tutors will be affordable, partly because of India’s huge market. One in three Indian students already pays for private tutoring, and well before the recent AI breakthroughs, Indians dominated YouTube, where education playlists help students master various state examinations. All the data these students provide will train models for foundational-learning tutors that can be deployed across the Global South, where students face similar problems.
NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:
Toward a Leisure Ethic: How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization. (Stuart Whatley, Spring 2024, Hedgehog Review)
This preference for leisure over work was hardly unique to Pacific Islanders. Urban and rural artisans in preindustrial England also took it as a given that more free time was better than work, even when more work promised greater monetary returns. When the prices they could command for their goods rose, they saw it as an opportunity not to amass wealth but to work less.2
In this limited respect, they were much like the elites of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the idea of working beyond what was necessary was abhorrent. Likewise for the Roman elites, though their precise views on leisure differed from those of the Greeks. In both cultures, the word for leisure seems to have come first, with work and business framed as nonleisure—scholé versus aschole in Greek, otium versus negotium in Latin.
Similarly, in later centuries, following the rise of Christendom, religious thinkers generally favored leisure over work (vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa), because that was how one drew closer to God. Work, after all, was punishment for humankind’s original sin. “The obligations of charity make us undertake righteous business [negotium],” wrote Augustine, but “if no one lays the burden upon us, we should give ourselves up to leisure [otium], to the perception and contemplation of truth.”3
All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent.
“THE MOST HEAVENLY TASTE”:
Make the Ancient Road Snack of Central Asian Nomads: Qurt is salty, long-lasting, and packed with protein. (SUSIE ARMITAGE, MARCH 8, 2021, Atlas Obscura)
ONE WINTER MORNING, PRISONERS AT the Akmola Labor Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, part of the Soviet gulag system from the 1930s to 1950s, trudged to a nearby lake. As they began gathering reeds to heat their frigid barracks, children and elders from the neighboring community approached the shore. The kids hurled small, hard white balls toward the women, and the camp guards cackled: Their charges weren’t hated only in Moscow, but here in remote Kazakhstan as well, recalled Gertrude Platais, who had been arrested in 1938 and sent to serve her sentence there.While it initially seemed like an insult, the villagers had the opposite intent. One of the prisoners tripped on the projectiles, got a whiff of milk, and suspected they were edible. Back in the barracks, Kazakh prisoners explained that it was qurt, a traditional dried dairy product that had sustained nomads across Central Asia for centuries. Long-lasting, easy to carry, and packed with protein and calcium, the balls—described as “precious stones” in a poem about the incident by Raisa Golubeva—provided a much-needed supplement to the sparse prison rations.
MAGA JOE:
Biden’s “An Illegal” Remark Is More Than Just a Slip: The president has moved right on immigration. (Isabela Dias, 3/08/24, MoJo)
Biden’s impromptu flub echoed the direction of his policies—making immigrants, as a collective, seem lesser, somehow stripped of peoplehood.
“The rhetoric President Biden used tonight was dangerously close to language from Donald Trump that puts a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere,” Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas said on social media. “Democrats shouldn’t be taking our cues from MAGA extremism.” The National Immigrant Justice Center’s X account posted that “blaming an entire group of people for the alleged acts of one person is xenophobia which must not be tolerated in part of the US government.”Naturally, Biden’s “an illegal” moment played right into Greene’s hands. The congresswoman took credit for making Biden “go off script” and telling the “truth” by admitting “Laken Riley was murdered by an ILLEGAL!!!” […]
Immigration and the border have been front and center this campaign cycle. Biden also took the opportunity to rail against Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers for tanking a bipartisan senate border deal so restrictive it would have previously been unthinkable for Democrats to stand behind it.
HOW COULD DECLINING ENERGY COSTS POSSIBLY AID GROWTH…:
Can We Slash Carbon Emissions and Still Have Economic Growth? (AKIELLY HU & JOSEPH WINTERS, 3/10/24, Grist)
But the kind of decoupling needed to achieve international climate targets is called “absolute” decoupling, when economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions veer in opposite directions: GDP up, emissions down. More recent research has documented this in a number of high-income countries. The U.S., for example, saw a 32 percent increase in GDP between 2005 and 2021, while its overall CO2 emissions fell by about 17 percent.Something similar appears to have happened in other developed economies like France, Sweden, and Germany—even when you account for so-called “consumption-based” emissions, which include emissions from the production of goods that are imported or exported. In other words, these countries seem to really be reducing climate pollution and not just offshoring it to the developing world.
Since 2016, reports from the World Resources Institute, the Breakthrough Institute, and independent researchers have shown more and more countries achieving periods of absolute decoupling, including their consumption-based emissions. Perhaps the splashiest analysis came in 2022, when a Financial Times data columnist reported that 70 countries—one in three worldwide—had experienced at least five consecutive years of absolute decoupling between 1990 and 2020. “Green growth is already here,” the columnist wrote.
SO FRENCH (profanity alert):
Run, Nikki, run! (Dan Hannan, March 7, 2024, Washington Examiner)
Such politicians are not exceptional. For example, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France is Trumpist, as is Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy. They, too, lean left on economics and right on immigration and have a weird thing about their leaders. It is hardly surprising that some Americans should be in that tradition.
The surprising thing, the thing I am still no closer to understanding after eight years, is how the GOP rolled over for someone who so obviously despised it. The most basic Republican principle is a suspicion of concentrated power. Yet the only nonnegotiable requirement to belong to MAGA is to grovel publicly before former President Donald Trump. Again and again, senior Republicans who had previously called Trump dishonest, vain, self-obsessed, cowardly, megalomaniac, or deranged have dropped to their knees before him. […]
It’s so un-American, this fawning, this cultishness, this Führerprinzip. Yet it has taken over a party that used to believe in the dispersal of power, the constraint of executive authority, and the equality of all adult citizens before the law.
IT’S A CONSERVATIVE EPOCH:
Irish voters reject bid to rewrite constitution’s view of women and family (SHAWN POGATCHNIK, 3/09/24, Politico)
DUBLIN — Ireland’s effort to remove old-fashioned family values from its constitution suffered a double defeat Saturday as voters rejected the amendments on offer as maddeningly vague and threatening to property rights.The leaders of Ireland’s three-party government conceded defeat as early returns from Friday’s referendums confirmed that an overwhelming majority of voters had said “no” to its proposed replacements for constitutional clauses on marriage and family care.
In final results announced Saturday night, the amendment to change the constitutional definition of family was rejected by 67.7 percent of voters. The proposed changes on family care took an even harsher drubbing, with 73.9 percent against — the greatest defeat of an amendment in Irish constitutional history.
It’s a heartening rejection of Identitarianism.