As a native Austinite, I surely have a biased and overly-sentimental attachment to the great republic of Texas and, in particular, to the capitol city. I grant all that. Even so, I’ve become increasingly impatient with people who complain about where they live. This applies more broadly than just to Austin. I’m convinced that any place on earth has a certain charm or beauty waiting to be discovered. The issue is one of attention. If we see a place as boring or ugly, the problem is likely one of perspective. Seeing the beauty of the place where one lives is, I think, a spiritual practice—a demanding discipline—of attending.

Matthew Crawford, on the problem of science being wielded as a form of authority—in service of technocratic ends—rather than utilized as a mode of inquiry:

As authority, Science is invoked to legitimize the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest. During the pandemic, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterized as “anti-science”.

One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly governed by this device. An emergency “state of exception” is declared to renew acquiescence in a public that has grown skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise. And this is happening across many domains. Policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation. In this way, epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people.

Alan Jacobs:

A surprisingly large and rapidly growing body of Americans have looked at what the educational establishment is offering and have said, No thank you. From kindergarten through university, that establishment has decided that its job is not to teach any particular skills or bodies of knowledge, but rather to perform certain quite specific political attitudes; to strike poses and teach students to strike the same poses. […]

However, it seems that many parents would prefer their children to learn something substantial. And this enrages the educational establishment and its enablers in the political sphere, who will brook no criticism, even when what their favored groups choose to perform is plain racial hatred, especially of Jews. A “factory of unreason” is what they’ve built, and they’ll do anything they can to prevent people from opting out of labor in that factory.

I am a fan of almost anything that disrupts the hegemony of this fatuously self-righteous and profoundly anti-intellectual educational establishment, which exists not to lift up the marginalized and excluded but rather to soothe the consciences of the ruling class. May the forces of disruption flourish.

May they flourish indeed.

Currently Listening: Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? by The Cranberries

Karl Barth, with important words for preachers on this Easter Sunday:

In our preaching on Easter Day, we say something about the rejuvenation of nature, or the romantic reappearing of the blossoms, or the revival of the frozen torpid meadows. We interpret the message that Jesus is victor, not in its literal sense, but we interpreter it as a symbol or a human idea. In that case the message tells us that the world is not so bad off. After each and all evils there naturally follows something good. One must hope, and not lose courage!

We may be satisfied with this sort of resurrection. We may get along very well for some time with the comfort that death is not so terrible: “One must just not lose one’s courage!” We may be satisfied for a long time with the romantic reappearing of the blossoms and the rejuvenation of spring, and thus forget the bitterness of present reality. It may be that, even as we stand beside the graves of loved ones, we find contentment in the thought of a spiritual continuation of this life. But the remarkable thing about it is that the real truth of the resurrection seems to be too strong for us, because it will not suffer itself to be hidden or concealed in these harmless clothes. It always breaks forth; it rises up and shouts at us, asking: “Do you really think that is all I have to say to you? Do you really believe that is why Jesus came to earth, why he agonized and suffered, why he was crucified and rose again on the third day, to become merely a symbol for the truth—which really is no truth—that eventually everything will be all right?”

No cultural education, no art, no evolutionary development helps us beyond our sins. We must receive assistance from the ground up. Then the steep walls of our security are broken to bits, and we are forced to become humble, poor, pleading. Thus we are driven more and more to surrender and give up all that we have, surrender and give up those things which we formerly used to protect and defend and hold to ourselves against the voice of the resurrection’s truth.

Karl Barth:

Nothing, absolutely nothing, can one do who is fated to this life of sin and death, with its thousand-fold festering needs; nothing can one do to amend it; nothing fills up this vacuum. Admit it; there is no way out! Unless it is the possibility of a miracle happening—no, not a miracle, but the miracle, the miracle of God—God’s incomprehensible, saving intervention and mercy, the all-inclusive renewal that leads from death to life that comes from him, God’s life-word, resurrection from the dead!

Resurrection—not progress, not evolution, not enlightenment, but a call from heaven to us: “Rise up! You are dead, but I will give you life.” That is what is proclaimed here, and it is the only way that the world can be saved. Take away this summons, and make something else of it, something smaller, less than the absolute ultimate, or less than the absolutely powerful, and you have taken away all, the unique, the last hope there is for us on earth.

Christine Rosen:

The rise of public digital surveillance is both a symptom of and an attempt to address a larger problem: that our own neighbors may be strangers to us. According to a Pew survey in 2018, 57 percent of Americans say they know only some of their neighbors. But among people aged 18 to 29, almost a quarter say they know none, compared to only 4 percent among people over 65. As residents turn to digitized forms of monitoring and surveillance for peace of mind, the root cause — weak neighborhood bonds — is left unaddressed.

Our new tools also habituate us to expect a level of control over others that might undermine the possibility of trust. They can encourage us to engage in new forms of ethical distancing: Viewing the behavior of members of our communities through a Ring camera feed rather than in face-to-face interactions in public space degrades not only our physical interactions but our sense of obligation to others. Healthy communities rely on the people within them to maintain order and offer help when needed. Outsourcing that to machines is an acknowledgement that we have given up on that expectation, even as the convenience of being able to see a package delivered to our doorstep while we’re away brings a sense of control and convenience.

Personal surveillance also poses new challenges to our most intimate relationships. It is not a coincidence that so many of the new domestic interpersonal surveillance technologies are marketed as tools to watch the very young and the very old, populations that require more hands-on human support, who are less autonomous and more vulnerable. Amazon markets its Astro household robot in conjunction with its Alexa Together “remote caregiving service” as “a new way to remotely care for aging loved ones.” Outsourcing the responsibility to keep an eye on others to surveillance-enabled machines brings practical benefits, but also exacts moral costs regarding our duty to care. These surveillance tools often start as surrogates, but quickly become seen as necessary to our busy lifestyles and allow us to justify not taking the time to be with those who need us most.