Don't Follow the News

[This is an old essay I wrote for a local Catholic publication a number of years ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons.]

Don’t Follow the News: A Manifesto

Don’t follow the news. Don’t watch it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t read it. Don’t engage with it. Don’t post about it or argue about it on social media. I have given this advice to friends, enemies, total strangers, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists. This is the most important advice I can give to Americans today.

Allow me to explain, in a somewhat roundabout and proverb-studded way, why I say this.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you’ve satisfied his hunger for a whole day, though, you’ve created a problem for all the people who also wanted to sell this man fish, or perhaps Hamburger Helper. Instead, try selling him a picture of a fish. When you come back to him ten minutes later, he will be even more desperate, even more fixated on fish, and his judgment will be even more impaired from the hunger. In short, he will be an even better customer than before. By the time the man finally dies of starvation a few months later, you will have had the opportunity to sell him an enormous number of pictures of fish, increasing the shareholder value of your publicly-traded fish media corporation to the greatest degree possible. Call this the economy.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Unfortunately, the money actually possessed by any given hungry and stupid man is finite. As an alternative to this system, consider one where a third party gives you money every time you manage to momentarily catch the man’s attention. Call this advertising.

There is nothing sadder than the death of a clown. A single clown, wearing the same outfit and performing the same set of tricks, possesses only a limited ability to catch and hold the same person’s attention. Also you have to pay the clown. Instead, consider getting people to send you pictures and videos and texts describing random things that may or may not be happening or have happened anywhere in the world. Using all of these, you should be able to attract the fool’s attention a great deal longer. Call this journalism.

Everyone is special. It turns out that not everything in your pile of random media is equally effective at catching and holding the fool’s attention. Perhaps you should consider constructing a robot to sort that pile into an infinity of smaller piles, each one associated algorithmically with a particular group of people. Use this robot’s findings to more effectively attract and hold your fool’s attention. Call this targeted advertising.

Sex sells. So does self-righteousness and homicidal rage. Thanks to your personal targeted advertising robot, you will soon discover that some types of content, and some types of human emotion, are more successful at attracting and holding your fool’s attention than others. Put simply, you want to be manipulating emotions that are easily activated, intense, overpowering, and self-reinforcing. You want to be able to hold up a picture and have your fool be instantly and intensely focused, resulting in a fool who is more pliant and receptive to similar content for all time thereafter. Call this, depending on the precise emotions targeted, pornography, advertising, political action, or the news.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that if you show a man a picture of his best friend being beaten to death by his oldest enemy, you will attract his attention very strongly. However, you will also produce any number of other highly incalculable effects, such as wailing and gnashing of teeth, intense depression, ritual acts of mourning, and so on, most of which stand in the way of attracting his attention again soon. Instead try showing him a picture of someone he has never met, who slightly resembles his best friend, being mildly to gravely inconvenienced by someone else he has never met, who has some random feature in common with his oldest enemy. It turns out that while this distant and possibly fictitious scenario produces a similar emotional reaction and gets the man’s attention just as effectively as a truthful account of a meaningful personal disaster, his reaction will be much more repeatable and manipulatable. Call this the news cycle.

Despair is the opiate of the masses. If you show someone a grave act of injustice happening to people they care about a few feet from them, odds are they will want to do something about it, whether that involves stopping the injustice in progress, punishing it, or perhaps creating a systemic societal revolution to prevent it from happening again. Show someone a grave act of injustice happening to perfect strangers half a world away, and they are much less likely to either want or be able to do anything about it. Show them five-hundred such injustices consecutively over the course of twenty-four hours, and they will enter a state of functional despair where the impulse to do anything meaningful in response to any injustice anywhere has totally disappeared. Minus hope, your fool’s reactions to injustice will become, as if by magic, shallow, manipulable, self-deluding, and selfish. Call this, depending on the personality of the man in question, either blackpill or entertainment.

It is expedient that one man should die for the people. Even when constantly subjected to injustices about which he can do nothing, your subject will still react to visual stimuli, building up a great deal of tension and anxiety and anger and stress. Given enough time, the man is capable of doing any number of regrettable things with these feelings, including acts of violence, rituals of mourning, psychological breakdowns, disengagement from mass media, religious conversion, or connection with other human beings. To stop these unprofitable trends in their tracks, do everything in your power to associate each and every injustice he is made to witness with groups of his fellow human beings. This will provide him with an outlet for his emotions, particularly if you can provide at the same time an arena where he can performatively and self-righteously condemn such people and be randomly cruel and hateful towards them. Find a way to monetize that, and call it social media.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Follow this process to its logical conclusion and you will have produced a society full of despairing, isolated individuals whose time, attention, and energy is totally and continually taken up with passively absorbing media that preys on their emotions and/or being randomly cruel to each other on the Internet. Meanwhile the stock market flourishes. Call this, in a final flourish of black humor, politics.

I repeat myself: nevertheless, don’t follow the news. Don’t follow the news because it’s trying to monopolize your attention for ad dollars. Don’t follow the news because most of what it shows you is either false or is deliberately designed to prevent you from doing anything about it. Don’t follow the news because it will consistently appeal to your basest instincts. Don’t follow the news because it will train you to be totally inactive and despairing in the face of injustice. Don’t follow the news because it will isolate you and teach you to hate your fellow human beings. 

A Catholic is called to live a virtuous life, a life in which through habitual action, aided by divine grace, his immediate, unthinking reactions to people, places, and things are more and more conformed to the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, and the charitable. A virtuous person does not react to injustice except so as to mourn it or work towards setting it right through  prayer and virtuous action. A virtuous Christian does not give himself over to hatred or contempt for fellow human beings, but works for their salvation through prayer and charitable action. All this requires, however, a great deal of training and retraining of our basic habits and affections. And this training requires, as its absolute sine qua non, that one not spend all one’s time and energy on a training regimen with precisely the opposite purpose.

I concede that it is not impossible to follow the news in a virtuous, charitable way. One can learn about evils happening a world away, and pray for those affected. One can learn about evils happening close to home, and work to correct them. To a limited degree. 

We live, however, in a society of addicts, and when dealing with addicts, moderate approaches are seldom effective. Which is why en masse, on balance, I would say to my fellow American Catholics: don’t follow the news. 

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

The following post will most likely interest very few people; but, well, it interests me. 

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying the history of Christian and Catholic doctrine; and have even published a scholarly volume on the subject. There are a number of interesting facets or aspects of such a study: one, which is absolutely central to any serious contemporary Christian theology, may be called the theory of development, or more precisely theories of development, encompassing all the various attempts, from Antiquity to the present day, to understand theoretically the mix of continuity and change visible in Christian doctrine over time, its causes, and its results. These theories have spanned the entire range from naive to absurd to self-contradictory to insightful and back again; and to have a real theology, in any sense, it is necessary to operate on the basis of some such schema, if only implicitly: and to have a rational, explicit, truthful theology, it is necessary to have a rational, explicit, truthful theory of development.

However, that is not what I am going to be talking about in this post, at least not directly. Rather, what I have been trying to develop, based on my studies, here and elsewhere, is what I might call a theory of deformation, or perhaps (with a nod to Whip It) a theory of devolution.

This is, however, to put the matter somewhat dramatically, as well as somewhat polemically. The more basic truth is that Christianity as such, not to mention Catholicism, embodies a highly particular metaphysics, ethics, philosophy, ethics, history, and way of living, and that there are few, if any, things in human life that it does not in some way touch on or incorporate into its grand synthesis. 

For precisely this reason, however, Catholicism necessarily overlaps withareas of human life also dealt with by more human and secular and historical sciences and philosophies and cultures and politics. It not only covers the same ground as them, but frequently addresses the same concepts, even uses the same words. It typically does so, however, in very different ways, ways that are opaque, confusing, and often even offensive to many people, and which are therefore highly susceptible to being reinterpreted entirely in light of their more common usages.

To take only one instance, the use of the term nature in Catholic Christology necessarily overlaps to some limited extent with the uses made of this concept in science, philosophy, genetics, ethics, etc, of our own or indeed any historical society--but for all that, the concept of nature used in Catholic Christology is highly different than that used in any contemporary domain. To simply take the Christological sense of nature and insert into a discussion of, say, ecology would produce nonsense; while to take the contemporary ecological sense of nature and insert it into Christology might produce nonsense, but might also produce something a great deal more like a heresy.

This framing, however, is a bit more abstract than is necessary. I do not think, really, that most historical or contemporary heresies arise from mere confusion of the technical language of Catholicism with the technical language of contemporaneous science or philosophy. This has been, in the past, a common way of interpreting historical heresies; and it usually produces historiography (and heresiography) that is overly schematic and conceptually muddled. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases technical domains, so long as they remain technical and specific, remain to that extent open to broader domains of philosophy and metaphysics and theology, or more precisely subordinate to them in the sense that they deal with more particular matters that can and should and to an extent even must be integrated with broader domains: and to the extent this is true, engagements between technical domains and theology, so long as they are done skillfully, can produce positive fruit in both domains. 

Rather, what usually happens in regards to serious deformations of Catholic doctrine, I think, is quite a bit more subtle than this, and much harder to resolve simply with reference to mere definitions.

Most people do not study technical fields; but most people do live in societies, in communities, and in institutions. And these societies, communities, and institutions, explicitly or implicitly, run off of and embed and embody and incarnate particular views of the world, particular anthropologies, particular practical ethical goals and conceptions of the good. And it is these, in particular, that most directly and frequently clash with the overarching, holistic ethics and metaphysics of Catholicism; and which most frequently and impactfully lead to reinterpretations and deformations of Catholic belief and practice.

To take only one example, my scholarly book (AVAILABLE NOW!) focuses in part on the complex conceptual and practical clash between the implicit and explicit views of God, man, person, nature, equality, hierarchy, etc, found in the world of Late Imperial politics and Late Antique Christianity: and the various ways in which this led to radical reinterpretations of Imperial politics in terms of Christianity, and of Christianity in terms of Imperial politics. This is, of course, by no means a simplistic one-way affair, without ambiguity.

Still, if one accepts the basic framework above, it becomes clear that something like this has happened again and again in the history of the Catholic Church; and, considered soberly, to some degree must happen, in every age, place, institution, culture, and time. For, after all, the truth, even considered qua abstract and universal, must be concretely and particularly received and understood in every age, by every person: and for it to be understood, it must be related to existing stores of knowledge, culture, terminology, and so on. And if it is possible for this to be done well, in a way faithful to the essential meaning of Christian revelation, subordinating earthly knowledge to divine revelation, it is also possible, and intrinsically a great deal more likely, to be done badly.

And more interestingly, all this must happen here and now, and in the future: and must be, to some degree, predictable and understandable, even where said deformations are only implicit or only incipient. 

Here, then, is the ambitious and likely ludicrous "thought experiment" I wish to engage in this post: namely, to see if I can to some extent predict, to some extent extend, and to some extent make explicit the implicit deformations of core Catholic doctrines created by, or likely to be created by, our contemporary institutions and social systems. In so doing, I wish to be clear that I am using the term "heresy" only in a colloquial sense, as a helpful abstraction, and that I am in no way attempting to preempt Church authority, define a canonical crime, and/or accuse anyone of being a formal heretic deprived of divine grace and/or liable to ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, in dealing with the below "heresies," I am in no way predicting, even theoretically, that anyone in particular will ever explicitly argue for the positions laid out below, let alone turn them into widespread theological or popular or religious movements. I am merely postulating that the following deformations of Catholic belief do exist or will exist, explicitly or implicitly, to vastly varying degrees, in the lives and thoughts and arguments of Catholics: and as such, will have, to vastly varying degrees, negative effects.

For my next blog post, most likely, I will be examining what I think are the emerging political principles likely to govern global and American politics over the next several decades. Before doing that, though, I wish to preserve the proper hierarchical order of things, and deal first with the higher domain of theology, before proceeding to lesser matters. 

The 2024 Election

THE 2024 ELECTION

I went to the polls this past Wednesday to vote in the 2024 Election. 

I think we can all, regardless of our political beliefs, agree that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, perhaps in the entire history of our nation, even of the human race. Hence, I wanted to make sure to participate fully in the event by voting early.

The week before, I had received in the mail a missive from the pro-turnout Super-PAC "Democracy in Action." The ad featured a grainy photograph of me, taken apparently from across the street near my house, and pinned to an ordinary piece of lined paper. Above the photograph, scrawled in black marker, was the message: "IF YOU DO NOT VOTE WE WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY." 

Since the Pandemic, the roads I would ordinarily take to get to the polling site have been "Closed for Repair," blocked off with yellow tape and barbed wire and barricades and medical checkpoints. To get there now means a dangerous journey down the River; and as I lacked the requisite funds to hire the well-armored personnel transports that serve most voters in my generally upscale neighborhood, I had to make do with one of the "General Admission" voting ferries sponsored by Bain Capital, LP as part of a get-out-the-vote effort ultimately masterminded (according to Internet rumor) by Kamala Harris' husband's aunt's former accountant, now the CEO of an Albanian arms company with ties to the UAE. 

I set out just before dawn so as to arrive at the jetty in time for the scheduled 7:15 AM departure time; but as it turned out, the ferry was nearly three hours late, arriving just after 10 AM. When I first arrived at the jetty, there were only a few elderly women there, apparently Kamala Harris campaign volunteers, in oversized, lime-green t-shirts worn down to their ankles, clustered around a large pot of stew stirring and adding herbs from fanny packs around their waists. One of them offered me a cup of soup, but as I had already eaten breakfast I declined. 

After about half an hour, a few apparent voters arrived, one an old man dressed in rags, barefoot, with a long grizzled beard, wearing a MAGA hat on his head; the other a tall, thin young woman bundled up to her eyes in blue-tinted furs, who (after eagerly accepting a cup of soup) eyed me suspiciously and crossed to the far end of the jetty to sit crosslegged on the planks. The morning was cool and dim, and fog shrouded the banks all around us. From time to time, I pulled out and checked the sample ballot in my pocket, or sat and watched the huge, dark shapes moving in the water below. 

When the boat had still not arrived at 9:30, I found myself hungry once again, and belatedly approached the old women, who eyed me eagerly, licking their lips. "C-could I have some soup please?" I stammered. 

The tallest of the old women, with rank, black hair that might have been dyed, dipped a cup of the soup out of the cast-iron pot, began handing it to me, then stopped, her eyes going dark, and hissing out of suddenly pressed lips: "Which side are you on?" I said nothing, and after another moment she smiled again and handed me the cup of soup. There was no spoon.

The soup had been cooking on an open flame for hours, and by this time had something of the consistency of glue--but its pungent flavors of sage and rosemary reminded me irresistibly of long summer evenings on the patio at Luigi's Pizza, and I wolfed down the whole cup in a matter of minutes. 

A few minutes after 10 o'clock, the jetty was abruptly flooded with passengers, all, male and female, clad in the loose brown tunics and smocks typical of peasants in the lowlands, many with campaign buttons pinned onto the smocks, and all bearing pilgrim's staves and large rucksacks. A few led mules or donkeys, and all pointedly refused the old women's offer of soup. Some wandered sociably around the jetty from end to end, while others sat with their feet swinging off the end and throwing stones or pieces of bread from their rucksack into the water for the creatures below; but all talked loudly with each other about the election, the journey, and the latest poll forecasts and modeling from FiveThirtyEight. 

The young woman, meanwhile, had gotten up and fled to stand with the old women, who spoke to her and stroked her hair comfortingly while (almost imperceptibly) pulling off small pieces of it to add to their pot. 

A few minutes later, when the ferry at last came into sight, the assembled passengers broke into raucous applause, cheering and throwing their rucksacks and bits of bread into the air. The day was cool, dark, and misty, so at first the yellow light streaming from the ferry was so overwhelming that I had to shield my face with my hand.

Buy My Book!

Those readers of this blog who do not otherwise know me may be interested to learn that my first academic book, from Oxford University Press, has just been published.

Entitled Christ the Emperor: Christian Theology and the Roman Emperor in the 4th Century AD, the book aims to give a new, intertwined narrative of the dynasty of Constantine and the Arian Controversy, focusing on the political theologies espoused by both Emperors and bishops and by theologians on both sides of the controversy. 

You can order it from the Oxford University Press website here, as well as from Amazon here. It is also available at a number of other online retailers, including international ones. Amazon and Google Books both feature roughly ~50 page previews that you are welcome to check out even if you don't end up buying. 

This is obviously a work of academic historiography and so quite different from the sort of writing I do on this blog. However, if you can stomach my overly-long essays and are generally interested in the sort of topics I cover here, I would imagine you would enjoy and get something out of the book as well.

Godspeed!