Came home this afternoon to find the local five-foot black rat snake (whom I call Ermengarde) sunning herself on the front steps digesting a chipmunk-sized bulge. I always like seeing Ermengarde, but she is less excited to see me, so we kept it brief. (Maybe you’ve had relationships like that.)
All right, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Here’s a go at some butterflies.
“Blasphemy” is not a phrase we are used to seeing in print these days even in magazines like this one. When it does appear, it is usually in a non-literal sense, meaning something like “insouciance.” But blasphemy is not a mere casual lack of concern for sacred things; it is their willful profanation.
If the image posted on Trump’s TruthSocial account on Sunday evening… is not blasphemous, the word has no meaning.
Walther’s rare hot takes always manage to be both cogent essays and barn-burners, but I’m going to push back, gently, and say that if one accepts his definition of blasphemy, then Trump is likely off the hook, because I see no evidence that the man has a concept of “sacred things” to be profaned. Nor do most Americans, so far as I can tell, for whom “church” and “Christianity” are lifestyle options of no more real consequence than musical tastes or sports fandom. Jesus is a brand with which Trump has identified himself, nothing more.
However.
Theologians have overplayed the idea that everybody “worships” the thing to which they devote their attention—Taylor Swift fans do not actually pray to her, nor hope for her blessing and protection. But the one idol Americans might be said truly to worship, in form and practice, is America itself: not the ideal form espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address but the image of national power that has taken shape since the Civil War and, especially, since World War II. The Pledge of Allegiance is nothing if not a prayer. The national anthem is nothing if not a hymn. (Hand on heart, gazing at the flag? And they say Protestants don’t do physical worship.) That is the real idol with which Trump wants to identify himself: the personification of American power, with doves and angels replaced by fighter planes and bombers. And I am very much afraid that American Christians have entirely paved the road he now treads. The blasphemy and the idolatry are not new, and not his: he’s only singing a song he heard on the radio. If you were shocked by his little AI gag, my friends, you simply have not been paying attention.
Man. Now lay we mortal flesh upon the fire,
And, raising toothsome searings to our nostrils,
Bring us pleasure.
Dog. My jowls are all a-water!
Man. Sit thee on thy haunches, knave, and wait!
Sweet morsels will I grant a trusty servant.
Currently reading: the new Library of America volume of John McPhee books (early evenings); a paperback P. G. Wodehouse collection I picked up this week at a used bookstore (on the nightstand); and David Kline’s The Round of a Country Year (a little at a time, in the morning).
Field madder, another tiny flower I’d never noticed before—or mistook for bluets from walking eye level. Apparently native to Europe, North Africa, and West and Central Asia, but naturalized here. (“Here” very specifically being along the edge of a mini-park.)
Ground ivy, which I had never noticed before. (I would say “never seen” but that probably isn’t true.) Lovely flowers that my phone refused to focus on even in macro mode, but you get the idea.
Mary Harrington on scrolling as the return of Charles Taylor’s unbuffered self:
[W]e should also pause for a moment on how post-print selves are now formed, in practice. Specifically: as selves are growing less buffered, many are embracing this new state of affairs with remarkably little discrimination on how external influences may contribute to the formation of mental habits…. [A]nyone who simply absorbs whatever the scroll throws up, without discernment, will end up being formed by discourses often optimised less for truth, or wisdom, or human flourishing, than for maximum immediacy in playing on intense emotions, good or bad.
On occasions I have an eerie sense that thought has me, rather than I the thought — only to realise that this is true, because the thought is a mental groove worn in my inner reflections by a specific online discourse. When you meet this in someone else, it comes across as that person treating everything they encounter as a data point for their epistemic tribe, whether that’s “gender discourse”, or Palestine, or whatever. I’ve come to think of such individuals as partially or wholly occupied by a kind of collective self, formed and consolidated by a hybrid human/machine dynamic.
This isn’t entirely new; television got us partway there decades ago. But Taylor’s buffered and unbuffered selves is a useful model, or hook. To riff on this observation: People who traditionally were unreflective about the external forces that created their selves were formed by local nature and community, and taught to be wary of evil spirits. Then came reading, and readers know and (can, should) reflect on what they’re reading, weigh it as something external to themselves, and are apt to remember their influences. Scrolling on the internet (let’s please stop calling it social media, ok? nothing social about it) has undone that awareness and reflection, without putting humans back in the context of local nature and community: so that everyone is babes in the woods, but babes who think themselves learned and wise.
Now ask yourself whether “democracy” is possible in such a condition, or what used to be called civil society. Both require selves that can be argued with, and we’re erasing them.
Finished reading: The Matter with Things Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist 📚
Those who have said that this is one of the most important books of the past (n) years are not exaggerating.