What to do when the Nazis come knocking

Only kidding. I have no idea. Still, Hannah Arendt has some things to say in Heaviosity half hour.

The marshmallow at the end of the universe

Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht has a confession to make. He’s been peddling shoddy wares – his words. And he's feeling quite bad about the whole thing. The work wasn’t just intellectually weak. It did real harm. Though his own proposals to popularise his ideas were knocked back, the so-called “marshmallow effect” went viral.

As you’ll probably recall, in the 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel ran experiments on children who were told they could have one treat (a marshmallow, an Oreo) now, or two if they waited. Years later, Mischel discovered striking correlations. Children who’d resisted the treat fared better: higher academic achievement, lower body mass.

A parable was born: delay the marshmallow, win at life. With self-control such a powerful predictor of future success Inzlicht and co sold that story to those who’d listen. They’d help them master their impulses and improve their lives.

Many years later they reviewed the evidence. And it showed “three surprising things”.

First, people with more consistent [long-term self-control habits] actually engage in less moment-to-moment struggle, not more. Second, exerting effortful control in the moment doesn’t reliably predict long-term success. And third, while people can sometimes [sustain self-control for a period], these improvements tend to disappear faster than a New Year’s resolution in February."

I respect Inzlicht’s candour. Yet even with his mea culpa I am not sure the real issue has been addressed. If the original picture was wrong, what exactly made it wrong? What kind of mistake was it — and what does it reveal about the way that knowledge was built?

The mistake

At its simplest, the mistake involved assuming causation from correlation.

But there are deeper problems.

Treating “self-control” as a unitary trait seems reasonable enough to modern sensibilities. But until modern times, such decontextualisation wasn’t really a thing. I think the decontextualisation is in large part an artefact of the scientistic method of modern academic psychology. Doing experiments and trawling existing data, it discovers regularities. These then stand in their reified glory. (For more on this see the next item below on abstractions).

In the case of self-control, there’s no shortage of richer contexts within which one might understand the kinds of problems Inzlicht discusses. Aristotle framed self-control not as resistance to temptation but as the alignment of desire with reason. It is a habituated virtue, cultivated over time. It aims at eudaimonia—a flourishing life—not productivity or compliance with something imposed from without. At least in this context, William James’ ideas were similar.

So why weren’t ideas like these considered before Inzlicht and his colleagues raced off in the direction they did?

As he confesses, “[w]e were rewarded for splashy findings, big effects, simple stories, and counterintuitive results. These were the kinds of papers that got published, cited, and funded.” He might have added that that’s what’s rewarded in the marketplace - for books and ‘content’ and short personal and professional development courses.

Science or practical wisdom?

There’s a deeper point. Aristotle distinguished between episteme and phronesis or in our language, between science and practical wisdom. The former is our knowledge of the world as it is. Practical wisdom is our capacity to operate in that world and to improve it for our purposes. Herbert Simon references this distinction when he distinguishes between science and design.

The natural sciences are concerned with how things are. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals. … Engineering [and] medicine … are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Now I have a view - contrary to Simon - that all those disciplines by which we try to better understand human society (in which I’d include psychology, sociology, and economics) should be thought of as disciplines of practical wisdom, not as sciences. But I wont pursue that here.

What I will say is that, had Izlicht and his colleagues been proposing a new medicine or bridge building material, they wouldn’t have simply announced the new material together with some observed patterns. They wouldn’t have proposed using the new knowledge in practical settings until they’d identified the steps in the process from action to desired outcome and sought to test the efficacy and risks of the new approach all along that causal pathway.

My main point is not that​​ they should have taken fewer risks with those who took their advice - though Inzlich clearly thinks this. It’s that the way they’re operating isn’t really serious. It’s obviously unfit for purpose. Even if their initial research into whether their treatment worked or not was inadequate, if the process was at all serious it would have surfaced clear evidence that it wasn’t working fairly quickly.

But that wasn’t how the discipline was built. And it continues to this day with practitioners at the commanding heights of the discipline of psychology throwing off ‘evidence-based’ odds and ends which people go out and market for all their worth pitching popular books to publishers to see if they can get their work ‘out there’.

Izlicht’s disowns the old model only to propose a new one - now split between “trait” and “state” self-control - as if this clears the confusion. But, as before, these abstract categories float freely, disconnected from any deeper suggestions of how the psyche works, or of the kind of insights into the phenomenology of the will that William James offered.

The view from blowhardia

I’ve momentarily forgotten this person’s name. A small mercy I know, but before I remember it, here’s his take on the election.

H. G. Wells, from The Time Machine, 1895

HT: Alan Jacobs

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes — to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

A new paradigm for psychology: Srsly!

“Don’t even get us started on Brain fag syndrome”.

Yes, that’s quite a claim. Not mine but the authors’ who are, unpromisingly, called Slimemold-Timemold. Anyway, it’s all both quite serious and quite fun at the same time. You can read or listen to an introduction to it here. But I thought I’d just extract (and edit down) two sections on what science isn’t because they speak to what I was on about above when criticising the marshmallow folks.

Superficial

Much of what passes for knowledge is superficial.

We mean "superficial" in the literal sense. When we call something superficial, we mean that it deals only with the surface appearances of a phenomenon, without making appeal or even speculating about what might be going on beneath the surface.

There are two kinds of superficial knowledge: predictions and abstractions.

1. Predictions

Predictions are superficial because they only involve anticipating what will happen, and not why.

If you ask an astronomer, "What is the sun?" and he replies, "I can tell you exactly when the sun will rise and set every day"… that's cool, but this astronomer does not know what the sun is. That will still be true even if he can name all the stars, even if he can predict eclipses, even if he can prove his calculations are accurate to the sixth decimal point.

Most forms of statistics suffer from this kind of superficiality. Any time anyone talks about correlations, they are being superficial in this way. "The closer we get to winter, the less time the sun spends in the sky." Uh huh. And what is the sun, again?

Sometimes it is ok to talk about things just in terms of their surface appearances. We didn't say "don't talk about correlations". We said, "correlations are superficial". But often we want to go deeper. When you want to go deeper, accept no substitutes!...

But people often take this lesson in reverse — they think that good predictions are a sign of a good understanding of the processes behind the thing being predicted. It can be easy to just look for good predictions, and think that's the final measure of a theory. But in reality, you can often make very good predictions despite having no idea of what is actually happening under the hood.

This is why you can operate a car or dishwasher, despite having no idea how they work. You know what will happen when you turn on your dishwasher, or shift your car into reverse. Your predictions are very good, nearly 100%. But you don't know in a mechanical sense why your car moves backwards when you shift into reverse, or how your dishwasher knows how to shut off when it's done.

If you want to fix a dishwasher that's broken, or god forbid design a better one, you need to understand the inner guts of the beast, the mechanical nature of the machine that creates those superficial features that you know how to operate...

2. Abstractions

Successful models will always be expressed in terms of entities and rules. That might seem obvious — if you're going to describe the world, of course you need to propose the units that populate it, and the rules that govern their behavior!

But in fact, people almost never do this. Instead, they come up with descriptions that involve neither entities nor rules. These are called abstractions.

Abstractions group similar observations together into the same category. But this is superficial, because the classification is based on the surface-level attributes of the observations, not their nature. All crabs look similar, but as we've learned more about their inner nature, what we call DNA, we learned that some of these crabs are only superficially similar, that they came to their crab-like design from entirely different places. The same thing is true of trees.

We certainly cannot do without abstractions like "heat", "depression", "democracy", "airplane", and so on. Sometimes you do want to group together things based on their outward appearance. But these groups are superficial at best...

Imagine that your car breaks down and you bring it to a mechanic and he tells you, "Oh, your car has a case of broken-downness." You'd know right away: this guy has no idea what he's talking about. "Broken-downness" is an abstraction; it doesn't refer to anything, and it's not going to help you fix a car.

Instead, a good mechanic will describe your car's problem in terms of entities and rules. "Your spark plugs are shot [ENTITIES], so they can't make the pistons [ENTITIES] go up and down anymore [RULES]."

It's easy to see how ridiculous abstractions are when we're talking about cars, but it can be surprisingly hard to notice them when we're talking about science.

For instance, if you feel sad all the time, a psychologist will probably tell you that you have "depression." But depression is an abstraction — it involves no theory of the entities or rules that cause you to feel sad. It's exactly like saying that your car has "broken-downness." Abstractions like this are basically useless for solving problems, so it's not surprising that we aren't very good at treating "depression."...

Abstractions are dangerous because they seduce you into thinking you know something. Medicine is especially bad at this. Take an abstraction, give it a Latin name, then say "because", and it sounds like an explanation. You've got bad breath? That's because you have halitosis, which means "bad breath". This isn't an explanation; it's a tautology.

Will the treatment for one case of halitosis work on another case? Impossible to say. It certainly could. One reason things sometimes have the same surface appearance is because they were caused in the same way. But some people have halitosis because they never brush their teeth, some people have it because they have cancer, and other people have it because they have a rotting piece of fish stuck in their nose. Those causes will require different treatments...

Abstractions can be useful starting points, but they're bad ending points. For example, people noticed that snow melts in the sunlight and gold melts in a furnace. They noticed that hot water boils and that hot skin burns. It seemed like the same force was at work in all of these cases, so they called it "heat".

The sensation of warmth, the force of sunlight, the similarities between melting and evaporation, are abstracted: "these go together so well that maybe they are one thing".

That's only a starting point. Next you have to take the hypothesis seriously and try to build a model of the thing. What are the entities and rules behind all this warming, melting, and burning?

Boy with Kookaburra Family, 2023, Dean Bowen

A year’s gaol for a nasty tweet removed after 4 hours

Capitalism and culture

Economist Branko Milanovic wrestles with what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called ‘internal’ and ‘external’ goods.

In the last chapter of "Capitalism, Alone", I discussed a number of changes in the private life that are introduced by greater wealth (and thus ability to procure commercially services that were in the past provided within family) and the "invasion" of capitalistic relations into our private lives. One of the issues discussed there is the diminished usefulness of family in highly commercialized societies and an obvious decline in family size (or rather expressed preference for solitary living) in more affluent societies.

Here I want to discuss another issue where we face a fundamental contradiction between the principles according to which hyper-capitalist societies are organized and what may be considered desirable outcomes. The topic is authenticity in arts, and to a lesser degree, in social sciences. When we deal with reproducible goods, the advantage of capitalism is that profit can be made only if somebody else's needs are satisfied. Thus two objectives, personal needs of a buyer and the profit goal of the producer, are aligned.

But this is not the case in arts. The reason is that arts thrive on, or require, individualism, uniqueness and authenticity. When you try to guess public's preferences in shoes, and produce such shoes, this is good and useful. But when you try to guess public's preference in literature, films or paintings, it may, if you guess them correctly, make you rich, but from the point of view of artistic creation, it could very easily be fake and ephemeral. In arts, we are interested in an individual's view of the world, not in an individual's ability to ape public preferences or prejudices.

I will illustrate it with some extreme examples. When we read Kafka's Diaries, we are sure that they represent his own true and unvarnished take on the world: he wrote them for himself, never thought they would be published, and explicitly asked that they be burned. The same is true, for example, with Marx's 1848 manuscripts which were saved largely by accident and were published more than a century after they were written. Whether one likes or not either is a matter of taste and interest. But there is no doubt that they are authentic works of these two people...

But when we watch a film whose ending was tested on different audiences to produce the ending that most people would like to see, and pay for, there is—likewise—no doubt that the author's role in such an enterprise is diminished, and in some cases totally obliterated. The same is true for works of fiction. If they are written with the main objective of money-making they have to play on popular preferences and to present as little of author's personal opinions (which may be unpopular) as possible. Why should one then, if in search of new or challenging ideas, read such novels?

We thus face a very peculiar inversion of the roles. Authors try to lose their authenticity in order to please the audience so that they can maximize income. And the only value of such an oeuvre resides in that it allows us to gauge public preferences—not in any own (inherent) value.

This problem exists in most artistic creations under capitalism. Everyone can give many examples, going perhaps from Steven Spielberg to the writers of innumerable (and readily forgotten) bestsellers...

Topics are now chosen by professionals in function of what they believe will sell: I conversed only once with a book agent, and when he began telling me what I should be writing, it was enough to dissuade me from ever talking to another one. The texts are edited and reedited to please the audience and to avoid lawsuits. Most extraordinary, authors of works of fiction attend workshops where their voice is additionally muted as they are taught how to write like everybody else.

This all makes sense if the objective is solely profit. In fact, one of the reasons I was told it is good to have an agent is because he can extract the best deal for the author from the publisher. But here is the hitch: he can extract the best deal only by stifling the authenticity of the author.

These are some areas of human endeavor where excessive commercialization is not likely to produce best results. The problem has no solution because it derives from the fundamental contradiction between a system where profit is to be made by pleasing buyers, and a system that puts the premium on individualism which, by definition, is not shared by many.

Gold leaf, or even the look of it!

More on millennials

Follow up from last week

Last week I posted extracts from an article in which a millennial outlined her generation’s loss of hope. Despite various rhetorical feints to the contrary, it was whiny and passive. Anyway, it does come with a follow up post outlining the author’s program for a way out of the predicament.

On Re-Enchantment

Having skimmed it quickly, I asked Claude to look a bit closer:

Here's a follow up post in which the author sets out things to do. Please go through it and identify anything she identifies which involves helping others.

Here’s Claude’s response.

I've carefully reviewed the follow-up essay "Re-enchanting Your Life" and looked for specific actions the author identifies that involve helping others.

What I found regarding helping others:

The author makes very few explicit recommendations about helping others. The focus is overwhelmingly on self-improvement and personal re-enchantment. Here are the limited instances where helping others is mentioned:

1. Creative work with purpose: The author suggests that if you are creative and have an audience, you should ask "whether your work is cultivating hope in a world that ultimately feels hopeless. What are you bringing to a generation that needs to re-engage its right-brain?"

2. Being vulnerable to build friendships: She mentions learning "to allow people to take care of me when I actually needed it" and quotes Simon Sinek: "We don't build trust by offering help, we build trust by asking for it." However, this is framed more as receiving help rather than giving it.

3. Indirect helping through personal transformation: The author suggests that by working on "our own heart postures, perhaps we can respond better to problems... maybe we can tackle these issues with a spark of creativity and a non-anxious demeanour."

Notable absence: Despite identifying six major societal problems in her previous essay (family breakdown, climate anxiety, digital addiction, pornography, economic regression, and spiritual emptiness), the author doesn't suggest any concrete actions to help others who are struggling with these issues. Her four main recommendations (go outside, make something, prioritize friendships, try prayer) are entirely focused on personal enrichment and self-care.

The essay is remarkably self-focused for someone who has diagnosed such significant collective problems affecting her entire generation.

It’s particularly remarkable given that this author’s substack is heavily Christian themed. Strange.

Another take

And serendipitously, just when I’d been posting on this subject, the Free Press published the winner of their essay competition. I must say reading the article made me wonder if it wasn’t a hoax. It was so extreme and so apparently tailored to what one might imagine are the Free Press’s priors - you know forget peer pressure, read good books, learn difficult subjects like languages and maths and don’t say anything about how new technologies might be embraced to good effect. (I expect hoaxes are a lot less work with the help of AI.) Anyway, if it’s not a hoax, it’s certainly impressive in a way, though I can’t help wondering about all that 17 year old earnestness.

And like Sarah above, it turns out this teenager’s solutions to the world’s ills are similarly tightly focused on self-cultivation.

TLDR:

Me to Claude: Please tell me how much this set of proposals involves practical steps to help others

Claude: Looking at Ruby LaRocca's five proposals for teenage happiness, they involve virtually no practical steps to help others.

An edited version of the article

Back in June, when we announced our first-ever high school essay contest, we invited teenagers to describe a problem troubling American society—and how they would fix it...

More than 400 teenagers entered our competition... But out of the hundreds of essays we read, one writer really stood out: 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca from Ithaca, New York.

Ruby is a homeschooled rising senior... When we tried to reach Ruby to tell her about her win, she gave us the number for her mother's cell phone because she doesn't have one of her own...

When people ask me why I sacrificed the sociable, slightly surreal daily life at my local school for the solitary life of a homeschooled student in 2021, I almost never reveal the reason: an absence of books.

For many students, books are irrelevant. They "take too long to read." Even teachers have argued for the benefits of shorter, digital resources...

But what is an English education without reading and learning to write about books?

Many of our English teachers instead encouraged extemporaneous discussions of our feelings and socioeconomic status, viewings of dance videos, and endless TED Talks. So five days into my sophomore year, I convinced my mother to homeschool me...

Distance from high school affords a clearer view of its perennial problems... Students and teachers are more exhausted and fragile than they used to be. But reducing homework or gutting it of substance, taking away structure and accountability, and creating boundless space for "student voices" feels more patronizing than supportive...

Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment.

So, here is my counterintuitive guide for teenage happiness:

#1. Read old books.

In Alan Bennett's The History Boys, the profoundly human (i.e., imperfect) teacher, Hector, reminds his students that "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours."...

#2. Memorize poetry. Learn ancient languages.

In another scene from The History Boys, one English schoolboy preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams, Timms, asks Hector why they are reading the poetry of A. E. Housman instead of doing something "practical."...

Hector: You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now, and you will understand it. . . whenever...

#3. Learn from the monks, and slow your pace—of reading, of writing, of thinking.

Someone once told me that I look like Martin Luther... I think it's funny that my hairstyle echoes my lifestyle. I wake up at 6:00 a.m., work alone for many hours on subjects that seem arcane—Latin, German, applied mathematics—spend more hours caught up in an actual printed book, and get to bed at a very reasonable, grandmotherly hour...

#4. Learn how to conduct yourself in public.

It all begins with knowing how to arrange your face when having conversations with real, living people. No one wants to talk to someone who has a slack jaw and glazed eyes, who yawns openly, who doesn't laugh at jokes or nod in recognition...

#5. Dramatically reduce use of your phone.

The final key to being a happy teenager is to do away with the "machine for feeling bad," as we call it in my house. Seriously, walk away from your phone. You've seen the statistics, you've read the Jonathan Haidt articles, and you've watched that Netflix documentary with Tristan Harris. You know it's bad for you...

My roommates at Latin summer school, a group of some of the kindest and sanest teenagers I have ever met, agree that most of their friends are unhappy and anxious...

My suggestions for teenage happiness are, I know, unlikely to appeal to the intended demographic. And yet I hope my peers will hear me: if you choose to take on three out of five of these precepts, I guarantee your heart will stop sinking.

Engineering decline

Fore Street in 1963, as the impact of industrial development controls were taking root. Photo: John Ball

The macroeconomics of Britain’s decline are understandable enough. Global power mortgages its place as the greatest empire the world has ever known to two serious bouts of world war. But there’s more to it than that. I recall when my family lived in Cambridge in 1977 there was much talk about how Japanese culture meant that the local Japanese car factory had almost no strikes compared with the local British plants. But these were British workers. And at the Japanese factory the management ate in the same café as the workers. Not so much the British factory - or the Australian ones as I learned later.

Anyway, like the deviation of Australian and New Zealand growth around 1970, the relative decline of New Zealand and Britain has remained hard to explain. The class system seems to have something to do with it. And since I’m mentioning New Zealand, here’s another straw in the wind. They’re the two countries in the Anglosphere in which the checks and balances both of federalism and bi-cameralism are the weakest. New Zealand abolished its upper house decades ago and the Brits neutered their House of Lords before WWI. It continues as an effective house of review, except for its powers to insist on anything.

Anyway, this article points the finger at something else. Incompetently imposed ‘levelling up’ policy. Who knew? Not me.

For 40 years, an early 'levelling up' policy curtailed the city's industrial potential and constrained its growth

In 1860, an unemployed father of six, who had once sold paraffin from a cart in the streets of Hockley, tried his luck with a new metal-pressing business. Two decades later, Joseph Lucas' bet paid off. The first Lucas factory opened on Hockley's Great Hampton Street, and it would go on to become a giant of British industry.

In the early 1900s, Birmingham was booming. In 1902, the London-based General Electric Company set up its first purpose-built factory, the Witton Engineering Works, in Aston. At its peak, it employed 18,000 people, making it one of the largest electrical engineering complexes in the world...

Today, neither company has any real presence in Birmingham, despite their heritage in the city. Lucas is a shadow of its former self, while GEC has vanished. Rebranded as Marconi, it collapsed infamously in 2006...

For more than three decades — from the introduction of the Distribution of Industry Act in 1945 to the beginning of the 1980s — it was impossible to set up a new factory in Birmingham, or to expand one, without an "Industrial Development Certificate" (IDC) from the government.

This policy was not limited to Birmingham, but it was enforced stringently there, the idea being to force industry into more deprived parts of the country.

Lucas' plans for expansion in the city were blocked; instead it established new plants in South Wales. Meanwhile, GEC's expansion happened in Merseyside and the North East, rather than in Birmingham. The motor industry followed suit, opening new facilities elsewhere. This fragmentation damaged the prospects of all the businesses involved — as well as the city that once housed them...

It left Birmingham almost uniquely exposed to the economic storms of the 1980s; within just a decade it went from the richest big city outside London to one notorious for its economic underperformance.

The roots of the policy lie in the 1930s. These were the years of the Great Depression and unemployment, when the government was under pressure to help towns that had lost their livelihoods through the decline of heavy industry...

In 1940, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population report made some pivotal recommendations. The growth of cities needed to be checked, the report said, and the population spread more evenly around the country...

Westminster's intention to shrink Birmingham was reinforced in the 1946 West Midlands plan. The city's industries would be discouraged from expanding, with essential businesses forced out to "overspill towns." Almost a fifth of Birmingham's 1.1m population was earmarked to go with them; over 200,000 would be "decanted" elsewhere...

The combined impact was to destroy the diversity and variety of industry in the city. The city's economy was frozen in aspic, preventing new industries that would drive future growth from setting up locally.

In 1967, a report by the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce claimed that dozens of firms wanted to expand or establish new operations in the West Midlands but were deterred by the IDC regime...

Birmingham had once been the resilient "city of a thousand trades", described in 1969 by the American urbanist Jane Jacobs as "economically vigorous and prosperous", while Manchester was "the very symbol of a city in long and unremitting decline"...

But she was out of date. Birmingham was becoming exactly the sort of obsolescent, overly concentrated economy she had disparaged. IDCs were far more likely to be approved for the motor industry than any other...

When Thatcher arrived to power in 1979, the IDC system was repealed. But the dominant philosophy of the period was the free market; industrial and regional policy were deeply unfashionable. The Thatcher government was no more responsive to the woes of the British car industry than it was to coal mining.

The diversity of the city's industries had helped it through economic storms before but this time they had been fatally undermined. The city and the wider West Midlands lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. What had been the wealthiest region outside the capital became the poorest...

Sammy J’s masterpiece

I often enjoy Sammy J’s efforts. But this piece of his after the 2019 election is as good as anything done that decade.

From Father Bob to Pope Leo

This piece from the NYT seemed a bit hagiographic. Not a lot to dislike, but it was interesting nevertheless though I’ve only extracted a little of it.

From Chicago to the Vatican

Father Robert Prevost told the Peruvian soldiers to back off.

It was the mid-1990s, and the troops, armed to the teeth, had stopped and boarded a minibus carrying the American priest and a group of young Peruvian seminarians. The soldiers tried to forcibly recruit the men.

Citing a law that exempted clerics from military service, Father Prevost told the soldiers, "No, these young men are going to be priests, they cannot go to the barracks," said the Rev. Ramiro Castillo, one of the seminarians in the van. "When he had to speak, he spoke."...

A man with a foot in two continents and multiple languages, Pope Leo XIV brings to bear a résumé that got him the job, full of deep religious education, frontline pastoral work, global order management and top Vatican governance experience. He also had a powerful booster in Pope Francis, who, at the end of his life, urgently pushed the American's career forward.

Throughout, Bob, as his American friends still call him, or Roberto, as his Spanish and Italian ones do, has remained consistently low-key, a gray man in a world of outsized personalities cloaked in sumptuous scarlet cassocks, an earnest admin of the apostles...

"I see one has to give up many things," he said at the lunch, according to the Rev. Alejandro Moral Antón, an old friend in the room.

After he finished, Leo, whose greatest pleasure was driving hours on dusty open roads, or across American highways, or over European borders, climbed into the back of a black Volkswagen Tiguan SUV for a few-hundred-feet ride back to the Vatican, surrounded by security, mobbed by crowds and hounded by reporters.

A Spiritual Education

Bob Prevost was not sure what to do. For years, he seemed destined for the priesthood. He grew up in a deeply Catholic family outside Chicago's South Side, where his friends and teachers in elementary school felt he had the calling. Even the old woman across the street told him, when he was only a boy, that she thought he would be the first American pope...

"Maybe it would be better I leave this life and get married; I want to have children, a normal life," the future pope, in a 2024 interview on Italian television, recalled saying. His father responded, he said, in a very human but deep way, telling his youngest son that, yes, "the intimacy between him and my mom" was important, but so was the intimacy between a priest and the love of God.

"There's something," then-Cardinal Prevost recalled thinking, "to listen to here."...

He had expected to attend an Illinois seminary for Augustinians, but it folded, so he instead went to Villanova, in 1973. He majored in math and attended Masses that were sometimes interrupted by shouts of "Hoagie Man!" when a guy selling subs passed by...

Pastoral Politics

Father Prevost was still working on his doctoral thesis in 1985 when he moved to Peru as a young missionary and priest in the country's remote northern reaches.

"There is no room in Augustine's concept of authority for one who is self-seeking and in search of power over others," he wrote in his thesis. For more than a decade in Peru, he put his ideas about the faith into action...

Prevost expanded the church's reach to absorb a wave of displaced Peruvians escaping the poverty and violence. He washed the feet of the faithful in a shack with a dirt floor, wore jeans and spoke plainly.

His homilies were unusually direct. "He'd say that a homily should be short and to the point, like a miniskirt," said Elsa Ocampo, 81, a volunteer at the Our Lady of Montserrat church in Trujillo...

The Vatican Fast Track

As Pope Francis began to get weaker, he started putting Bishop Prevost, whom he had paid special attention to, on a fast track.

"If I name Prevost as the head of the office for the bishops, how do you think he will do?" Father Moral Antón said Francis asked him in the library of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.

Father Moral Antón said he would do well.

"I also think he will," Francis answered.

In 2023, Francis brought the American back to Rome to lead that office — which vetted candidates to become bishops — one of the most important ways to shape the future of the church. He increased his stature by making him a cardinal that same year...

Father Banks said he texted his old boss after Francis died. "I think you'd make a great pope," he said he wrote, "but I hope for your sake you're not elected."

The cardinal responded, Father Banks said, writing, "'I'm an American, I can't be elected.'"

He still promptly responds to friends. The pope sometimes signs messages Leo XIV — sometimes Bob.

Full audio of the above article here

Lauren Sanchez as a figurehead

Because I knew you’d find it uplifting.

Heaviosity half hour

Hannah Arendt on personal responsibility under dictatorship

I read this essay wondering whether it had advice for how to resist dictatorship. Other than not being individually complicit in the moral inversions of dictatorship, it doesn’t really. Which is a pity. Still Arendt’s moral clarity is a fine thing to encounter, especially when we know her own backstory of resistance (including a few days with the Gestapo.) It’s notable also that this was from a time when academics were not lost in their own footnote chases and theoretical echo chambers but sought to help their community understand the fundamental ethics of public life.

The other thing that jumped out at me is Arendt’s agreement with a point made by Chomsky, that the educated middle class tend to be functionaries and that, as a result they tend to line up more rapidly with power than - those closer to the life world.

To begin, I want to comment on the rather furious controversy touched off by my book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I deliberately use the words "touched off," rather than the word "caused," for a large part of the controversy was devoted to a book that was never written. My first reaction, therefore, was to dismiss the whole affair with the famous words of an Austrian wit: "There is nothing so entertaining as the discussion of a book nobody has read." As this went on, however, and as, especially in its later stages, there were more and more voices who not only attacked me for what I had never said but, on the contrary, began to defend me for it, it dawned on me that there might be more to this slightly eerie exercise than sensation or entertainment. It seemed to me also that more than "emotions" were involved, that is, more than honest misunderstandings that in some instances caused an authentic breakdown of communication between author and reader—and more too than the distortions and falsifications of interest groups, which were much less afraid of my book than that it might initiate an impartial and detailed further examination of the period in question.

The controversy invariably raised all kinds of strictly moral issues, many of which had never occurred to me, whereas others had been mentioned by me only in passing. I had given a factual account of the trial, and even the book's subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil, seemed to me so glaringly borne out by the facts of the case that I felt it needed no further explanation. I had pointed to a fact which I felt was shocking because it contradicts our theories concerning evil, hence to something true but not plausible.

I had somehow taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. This belief turned out to be a mistake. There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says, 'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification. Finally, and in a way most surprisingly, since after all we dealt with a trial whose result invariably was the passing of judgment, I was told that judging itself is wrong: no one can judge who had not been there. This, incidentally, was Eichmann's own argument against the district court's judgment. When told that there had been alternatives and that he could have escaped his murderous duties, he insisted that these were postwar legends born of hindsight and supported by people who did not know or had forgotten how things had actually been.

There are a number of reasons why the discussion of the right or the ability to judge touches on the most important moral issue. Two things are involved here: First, how can I tell right from wrong, if the majority or my whole environment has prejudged the issue? Who am I to judge? And second, to what extent, if at all, can we judge past events or occurrences at which we were not present? As to the latter, it seems glaringly obvious that no historiography and no courtroom procedure would be possible at all if we denied ourselves this capability. One might go a step further and maintain that there are very few instances in which, in using our capacity to judge, we do not judge by hindsight, and again this is equally true of the historiographer as it is of the trial judge, who may have good reasons to mistrust eyewitness accounts or the judgment of those who were present. Moreover, since this question of judging without being present is usually coupled with the accusation of arrogance, who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it? Even the judge who condemns a man for murder may still say, and there but for the grace of God go I!

Thus, prima facie, all this looks like elaborate nonsense, but when many people, without having been manipulated, begin to talk nonsense, and if intelligent people are among them, there is usually more involved than just nonsense. There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and if this fear speaks in terms of "casting the first stone," it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We're all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning....

To give at this point but one particular instance of our bedevilment in all these matters, consider the question of legal punishment, punishment that is usually justified on one of the following grounds: the need of society to be protected against crime, the improvement of the criminal, the deterring force of the warning example for potential criminals, and, finally, retributive justice. A moment of reflection will convince you that none of these grounds is valid for the punishment of the so-called war criminals: these people were not ordinary criminals and hardly anyone of them can reasonably be expected to commit further crimes; society is in no need of being protected from them. That they can be improved through prison sentences is even less likely than in the case of ordinary criminals, and as to the possibility of deterring such criminals in the future, the chances again are dismally small in view of the extraordinary circumstances under which these crimes were committed or might be committed in the future. Even the notion of retribution, the only nonutilitarian reason given for legal punishment and hence somehow out of tune with current legal thought, is hardly applicable in view of the magnitude of the crime. And yet, though none of the reasons for punishment which we usually invoke is valid, our sense of justice would find it intolerable to forego punishment and let those who murdered thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions go scot-free. If this were nothing but a desire for revenge, it would be ridiculous, quite apart from the fact that the law and the punishment it metes out appeared on earth in order to break the unending vicious circle of vengeance. Thus, here we are, demanding and meting out punishment in accordance with our sense of justice, while, on the other hand, this same sense of justice informs us that all our previous notions about punishment and its justifications have failed us.

To clarify this predicament of judging without being able to fall back upon the application of generally accepted rules, I'll switch from moral to legal standards because the latter are generally better defined. You may know that in the trials of war criminals and the discussion of personal responsibility, the defendants and their lawyers appealed either to the argument that these crimes were "acts of state," or that they were committed upon "superior orders." These two categories should not be confused. Superior orders are legally within the realm of jurisdiction, even though the defendant may find himself in the classically "difficult position" of the soldier "liable to be shot by a court martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it" (as Dicey puts it in his Law of the Constitution). Acts of state, however, are altogether outside the legal framework; they are presumably sovereign acts over which no court has jurisdiction....

What neither the political reason-of-state theory nor the legal concept of acts of state foresaw was the complete reversal of legality; in the case of the Hitler regime, the whole state machinery enforced what normally are considered criminal activities, to put it mildly: there was hardly an act of state which according to normal standards was not criminal. Hence, it was no longer the criminal act which, as an exception to the rule, supposedly served to maintain the rule of the party in power—as for instance in the case of such famous crimes as the murder of Matteoti in Mussolini's Italy, or the assassination of the duc d'Enghien by Napoleon—but on the contrary, occasional noncriminal acts—such as Himmler's order to stop the extermination program—were exceptions to the "law" of Nazi Germany, concessions made to dire necessity....

In a similar way the argument of "superior orders," or the judges' counterargument that the fact of superior orders is no excuse for the commission of crimes, is inadequate. Here, too, the presupposition is that orders normally are not criminal and that for this very reason the receiver of orders can be expected to recognize the criminal nature of a particular order—as in the case of an officer gone mad who orders the shooting of other officers or in the case of maltreatment or killing of prisoners of war. In juridical terms, the orders to be disobeyed must be "manifestly unlawful"; unlawfulness "should fly like a black flag as a warning reading Prohibited." In other words, as far as the man is concerned who has to decide whether to obey or disobey, the order must be clearly marked off as an exception, and the trouble is that in totalitarian regimes, and especially in the last years of the Hitler regime, this mark clearly belonged to noncriminal orders. Thus for Eichmann, who had decided to be and remain a law-abiding citizen of the Third Reich, the black flag of manifest unlawfulness flew above those late orders given by Himmler in the fall of 1944, according to which deportations were to be stopped and the installations of the death factories dismantled....

Hence, the rather optimistic view of human nature, which speaks so clearly from the verdict not only of the judges in the Jerusalem trial but of all postwar trials, presupposes an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises. Perhaps we do possess such a faculty and are lawgivers, every single one of us, whenever we act: but this was not the opinion of the judges. Despite all the rhetoric, they meant hardly more than that a feeling for such things has been inbred in us for so many centuries that it could not suddenly have been lost. And this, I think, is very doubtful in view of the evidence we possess, and also in view of the fact that year in, year out, one "unlawful" order followed the other, all of them not haphazardly demanding just any crimes that were unconnected with each other, but building up with utter consistency and care the so-called new order. This "new order" was exactly what it said it was—not only gruesomely novel, but also and above all, an order.

The widespread notion that we deal here with nothing more than a gang of criminals who in conspiracy will commit just any crimes is grieviously misleading. True, there was a fluctuating number of criminals in the elite formations of the movement and a greater number of men guilty of atrocities. Only in the beginning of the regime, however, in the concentration camps under the authority of the storm troopers, did these atrocities have a clear political object: to spread fear and to flood in a wave of unspeakable terror all attempts at organized opposition. But these atrocities were not typical and what is more important, although there was a great permissiveness about them, they were not actually permitted. Just as stealing was not permitted or the acceptance of bribes. On the contrary, as Eichmann was to insist time and again, the directives said: "unnecessary hardships are to be avoided," and when during the police interrogation it was suggested to him that these words sounded a bit ironical when dealing with people who were being sent to their certain deaths, he did not even understand what the examining police officer was talking about. Eichmann's conscience rebelled at the idea of cruelty, not that of murder. Equally misleading is the common notion that we deal here with an outbreak of modern nihilism, if we understand the nihilistic credo in the sense of the nineteenth century: "all is permitted." The ease with which consciences could be dulled was partly the direct consequence of the fact that by no means all was permitted.

For the moral point of this matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of "genocide" or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize that this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this "new law" consisted of the command "Thou shalt kill," not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian considerations. The killing program was not meant to come to an end with the last Jew to be found on earth, and it had nothing to do with the war except that Hitler believed he needed a war as a smoke screen for his nonmilitary killing operations; those operations themselves were intended to continue on an even more grandiose scale in time of peace. And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society. Finally, it must be realized that although these mass murderers acted consistently with a racist or anti-Semitic, or at any rate a demographic ideology, the murderers and their direct accomplices more often than not did not believe in these ideological justifications; for them, it was enough that everything happened according to the "will of the Fuhrer," which was the law of the land, and in accordance with the "words of the Fuhrer," which had the force of law....

I have dwelt at some length upon this overall situation because no discussion of personal responsibility would make much sense without some precise knowledge of the factual background. Let me now raise two questions: First, in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, though they could not and did not rise in rebellion? And second, if we agree that those who did serve on whatever level and in whatever capacity were not simply monsters, what was it that made them behave as they did? On what moral, as distinguished from legal, grounds did they justify their conduct after the defeat of the regime and the breakdown of the "new order" with its new set of values? The answer to the first question is relatively simple: the nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command "Thou shalt not kill," but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.

The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking. This kind of thinking, though at the root of all philosophical thought, is not technical and does not concern theoretical problems. The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

But how is it with the reproach of irresponsibility leveled against these few who washed their hands of what was going on all around them? I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes at least a minimum of political power. Impotence or complete powerlessnes is, I think, a valid excuse. Its validity is all the stronger as it seems to require a certain moral quality even to recognize powerlessness, the good will and good faith to face realities and not to live in illusions. Moreover, it is precisely in this admission of one's own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions....

This last point may become a bit clearer when we now turn our attention to my second question, to those who not only participated willy-nilly as it were but who thought it their duty to do whatever was demanded. Their argument was different from those of the mere participants who invoked the lesser evil, or the Zeitgeist, thereby implicitly denying the human faculty of judgment, or in surprisingly rare cases the fear which in totalitarian governments is all pervasive. The argument from the Nuremberg trials to the Eichmann trial and the more recent trials in Germany has always been the same: every organization demands obedience to superiors as well as obedience to the laws of the land. Obedience is a political virtue of the first order, and without it no body politic could survive. Unrestricted freedom of conscience exists nowhere, for it would spell the doom of every organized community. All this sounds so plausible that it takes some effort to detect the fallacy. Its plausibility rests on the truth that "all governments," in the words of Madison, even the most autocratic ones, even tyrannies, "rest on consent," and the fallacy lies in the equation of consent with obedience. An adult consents where a child obeys; if an adult is said to obey, he actually supports the organization or the authority or the law that claims "obedience." The fallacy is all the more pernicious as it can claim a very old tradition. Our use of the word "obedience" for all these strictly political situations goes back to the age-old notion of political science which, since Plato and Aristotle, tells us that every body politic is constituted of rulers and ruled, and that the former give commands and the latter obey orders. ...

In these terms, the non-participators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of "responsibility" where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act "irresponsibly" and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance—for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience—which are being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.

Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, "Why did you obey?" but "Why did you support?" This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere "words" have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word "obedience" from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.