Much has been written and said about this presidential election. I have absolutely nothing to add on a personal note. (Well, that’s not totally true. I’ve got something lined up for tomorrow, but more on that then.)
Tomorrow was the topic, though, of a recent article at The Week by Michael Brendan Dougherty. The article, “The Election That Forgot About the Future,” almost plays out like a riff on Yuval Levin’s thesis from The Fractured Republic. Dougherty begins:
America used to be obsessed with the future. But, perhaps predictably in a campaign led by two baby boomers, this campaign has been about the past.
He then makes connections to different aspects of the past as embodied by our two candidates (just like Levin traced the nostalgic trajectory of the two parties through the last half of the 20th century). We have forgot about the future, it seems.
Our politics have ceded the future to the market and Silicon Valley. The question of social organization, presumably, has been mostly solved by the wonks. Liberal democracies are increasingly convinced that there is no innovation in political thinking allowed. We simply adjust the levers of policy at appropriate times, and focus on atoning for past sins. The global elite is converging on economic integration, low trade barriers, universal benefits, light regulation, and the cultivation of a global class of politicians and plutocrats who socialize and groom each other and their children for continued benevolent rule. Sometimes, in their darker moments, they cede the future to China, thinking that some kind of autocratic capitalism might produce better trains and faster growing cities.
And whatever hope we have for thoughtful pushback doesn’t seem to exist:
A normal age would produce a culture of letters that recognizes this for what it is: exhaustion on a deep level.
Our politics are obsessed with the past because we aren’t invested in the future the way a normal society should be. So we hardly imagine what we might build. We live on credit in the somewhat secure knowledge that our creditors can’t collect even if they were to rob our graves. Like the Clintons, our elites live with dual incomes and one kid. And we search for ways to do good, when the getting’s good for us too. Like Donald Trump, we’re hoping to stick some nameless others with our moral and financial debt.
This pattern of life — a life oriented to no future at all — will end soon, because it is unsustainable. And because, if we can bear to look, it disgusts us.
You can read the whole article here.
(image from physicsworld.com)
Yesterday marked the 499th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The folks at First Things posted a great article by Timothy George about one of the phrases often associated with the “movement,” the concept of the “priesthood of the believer.” I’d go so far as to say that of all the phrases, “the priesthood of the believer” has been the one I’ve heard most often as a Baptist. Mr. George asserts that we’ve gotten it wrong.
Last week I got to watch a couple of episodes of the first season of Black Mirror, a BBC anthology show that’s been called the technology version of The Twilight Zone. While the content pushed a number of envelopes, it did so to help us see something about the way we live life today, which isn’t always that easy or simple of a task. How do we regularly look at the world around us with fresh eyes?
I’m always interested in (and frustrated by) the weird intersection between thought and action in the Christian faith. The two should be hold well together, but we tend to focus one over the other, disparaging thoughtless deeds or deedless thought. N. T. Wright acknowledges this early in The Day the Revolution Began. It makes sense to how many books about the cross one might need to read (or write) in order to understand the implications of the event.
Space Enough, and Time 