The Weekly, October 7, 2024
Hi all,
I’m getting this back up and running now after an unplanned hiatus due to a solid month of various people in our family being sick. There were a few other items I had to catch up on first, but now it’s time to get this back up and running.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Alan Guelzo’s framing of how Abraham Lincoln defined democracy: For Lincoln the essence of democracy is “no slaves, no masters.” Put another way: If you prefer not to be a slave, then neither should you be a master.
Now, this didn’t (for Lincoln) mean that hierarchy was abolished; Lincoln was a robust free-market liberal who saw the wealth generating potential of open markets as a wonderful tool to promote democracy. So his vision was not a kind of top-down system that abolished all hierarchy. Rather, his vision was one of ordinary citizens sharing a common life together, making claims about how public life should be arranged and supporting those claims, and attempting to live in friendship amongst their neighbors. At a number of points it reminded me of elements of Wendell Berry’s work. What is interesting about Lincoln is that he is born in Kentucky and is a lifelong devotee of the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay. He is, thus, more a man of the west than a man of the south—and it made me wonder if something similar might apply to Berry, actually. (Certainly Berry was taught by a 20th century man of the old American west: Wallace Stegner.)
The other thought I had, perhaps because I was reading Guelzo at the same time I was reading Dreher’s new Living in Wonder is that I think there might be an interesting interplay between democracy and enchantment. The last ¼ of Rod’s book effectively turns into an apologia for Orthodoxy, and it seems almost taken for granted at times that a return to enchantment requires a return to Rome or Constantinople, although he tries to avoid saying it quite that straight. (I think Rod has known enough Protestants that he doesn’t want to just make this claim in the plainest language, yet it does seem on his account that “enchantment” is tightly bound up with non-Protestant understandings of the sacraments, which would seem to make it inevitable that for Rod becoming reenchanted inherently requires one to be Catholic or Orthodox.)
What is interesting to me is that if you read Lincoln, there is very much a kind of enchantment running through his work—he is quite awestruck at the American land and at the capacity of human persons. Indeed, much of his fervor for the American union comes from his belief that these remarkable people in this remarkable land can only truly steward and cultivate it well if they maintain a united democratic government. A system of masters and slaves of any kind will erode a people’s capacity for self-governance, and for Lincoln that is a kind of death.
In many ways, then, Guelzo brought to mind the work of Marilynne Robinson, a Protestant liberal who, like Lincoln, very much has a kind of “enchantment” to her work.
In short, what I found myself wondering is if the issue is not so much that one must cease to be Protestant to experience these things so much as it is that through a variety of factors the faculties required to experience the world in the way of a Protestant liberal like Robinson have been eroded by a variety of technical means—and now many seem to think the only way out is to do a hard reboot and take up an alternative tradition of Christian belief.
Books
I’ve finished a few in the past month—Dreher’s forthcoming Living in Wonder, Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World, and Guelzo’s Our Ancient Faith. The Guelzo in particular was outstanding. I’m planning to write on it for the next print journal. I’m also nearly done with Postman’s Technopoly and Lande’s The Thing That Would Make Everything OK Forever. I’m also about to start Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity so perhaps all my pro-democracy sentiments are about to be imploded. We’ll see!
Articles
Brad Littlejohn on the uses of pessimism
Charles Fain Lehman on why we should ban sports betting again
Lev Grossman on the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis
Rhys Laverty on Tom Bombadil and nonsense poetry
Emma Green on large families
Bishop Conley on catholic education
Molly Worthen on Machen
Rose Horowitch on the college students who don’t read books
Elsewhere
Because Mere O doesn’t have an office and because my home study is an unfinished basement room I sometimes call “the dungeon,” I work from coffeeshops a lot. Fall, of course, is a great time to be in coffeeshops regularly. So far my favorite seasonal drink has been a spiced apple chai one of the locally owned joints in town is making. I’m not totally sure how they’re doing it—if they’re incorporating apple cider into the drink somehow or if they just have a concentrated apple syrup of some kind that they’re adding to a regular chai. But it’s very good—maybe something to experiment with at home and try to replicate.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake