2014. What a year! Looking back, it’s hard for me to believe how much everything changed. I wanted to round up a few essays I read throughout the year that shaped my thinking, inspired me, or weighed heavily on my mind. I also thought you might like to see my favorite picks of my own work. Not all of the pieces I’ve chosen from around the web are from 2014, but I read them in 2014, and in some way or another, they’ll stay with me as tints and flavors of this particular trip around the sun.

Tops from the Web:

Rich Parents Planned This When poor kids become poor adults, what happens to the concern for their well being?

Do What You Love? The labor politics of chasing your dream.

Evangelii Gaudium A tour de force in Christian love.

Ferguson is our Libertarian Moment But in a purely foreboding sense.

Madame Matisse’s Hat  Modernity is outwardness.

The Voluntarism Fantasy Did we ever take care of ourselves strictly voluntarily?

On Not Going Home On the choices you make that seem small until it’s too late.

Nothing Left of the Left Adolph Reed runs up a red flag.

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain Really excellent look at women in lit.

The Shame of Our Prisons Unmissable consideration of how we treat those in our care.

Death Penalty versus Human Dignity Can one society value both? No.

What Will Happen to All of That Beauty? Gorgeous contemplation of faith, doubt, praxis, community.

Charles Taylor, Saint of our Age. And another one on modernity!

Tops from my Stuff:

Pope Francis’ 2014: Francis had a better year than all of us, I think we can agree. I’ll be discussing this piece on HuffPo Live today at 11:50 EST.

Pro-Life, Anti-Poverty: The more I think about a universal child allowance, the more I support it. Look for another piece on this topic in early January.

Mysticism & Empathy: My contribution to Boston Review’s forum on empathy. Have we lost a place for mystics in our modern world?

Mothers Work: Yes, mothers work. No, we should not create an EITC threshold to force poor moms to work more: they’re already working.

On Being Vulnerable: Life on the internet, as a writer.

Huckabee & Exemplary States: Theories of exemplary statecraft, from medieval kingship to Mike Huckabee.

Mourning in the Age of Skype: Saying goodbye. Related:

Grief for a Friend: Shortly after I left Cambridge, my friend and advisor Father John Hughes passed away unexpectedly, at a very young age.

Child Allowance = Strong Families: Gonna stump for a child allowance until you like it.

Property-Based Ethics: John Locke and the long shadow of liberal property ethics, in the context of post-Ferguson rioting.

Stories we Tell: For Jacobin, a consideration of what went wrong in the reporting of the Rolling Stone UVA case.

Rationalizing Vocation: Motherhood under capitalism.

Thanks so much for being such a stellar set of readers and thinkers. I’m so grateful to write, and so glad to share it with you. I hope everyone has a lovely New Year, and again, thanks for all your support and encouragement over the last year. You’re the best.

In this Slate post on race science, William Saletan tried to convince his liberal readers to buy into the notion that, on the whole, black people are genetically inferior to white people.

At the time this post was written (in 2007) I was sixteen years old. I was probably wading in rhetoric like this, a little less eloquent, as I hung around ascendant New Atheists at high school debate tournaments. No spin, no emoting, no superstition — just the facts, Jack. For a certain type of kid at a certain age it’s an intoxicating affect. Saletan adopted that kind of listless submission to ‘the science’ — if the data show that blacks are inferior to whites, well, what can you do…

It’s interesting to me, looking back, that the next rhetorical turn he took — knowing he would lose his liberal readers with this take — was to suggest that anyone who doesn’t respond to the facts is as stupid as a Christian. Check it out:

“If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.””

Bryan was not exactly revolutionary when it came to race. But he wasn’t wrong in this particular instance. America pioneered a eugenics program that would come to be the inspiration and envy of similar Nazi programs. People were forcibly sterilized, immigration quotas were instituted, refugees refused sanctuary, and of course, the brutal scourge of Nazi genocide scarred history permanently. Woven throughout the narrative of these events is the exact same style of rhetoric Saletan deploys here: good, right-thinking people should not let superstition interfere with progress.

What’s curious to me is that in this new age of scientism, Christian ‘superstition’ — our ethics, our value commitments, our axiomatic beliefs about the value of human life and dignity — is again becoming the hallmark of our ridiculousness. None of this is to say that evil hasn’t ever been done in the name of God, of course it has, but that isn’t what’s being lampooned here. Rather, the Christian commitment to the equal dignity of all people is conflated with piggish ignorance of science, which is synonymous with progress.

Saletan’s jab also relied upon a strange turn of events. Today, when you think of Christians who adamantly insist evolution is false and must never be taught in schools, etc., you probably think of a certain set of Christians who are mostly concerned that the undoing of the literal truth of the Genesis creation story will lead to women wearing pants and an array of sexual improprieties. Because of the co-opting of conservative Christianity by the free-market voter bloc, the connection between creation (and each person’s bearing of the imago Dei) and equality has gradually come undone. On the other hand, the Christians who, as Saletan alluded, “seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity”, are the ‘good guy’ Christians in this equation, the liberal ones.

But Christianity softening down into a subtler account of its ethic of equal dignity is not a victory for anybody. In the case of the march of eugenic scientism, Christianity was one of the agonistes. Sophie Scholl, unofficial patron saint of young female Christian dissenters (I’m in love with her) was an antagonist to the pathological grafting of scientific-parallel ideologies into ethics. She believed in the inalienability of equal human dignity. Christianity should still be that voice of dissent, as we enter into another age of dilettante scientism, with all its attendant facets.

Because the shape of things has, to some extent, changed — but the threat is all the same. Nowadays when we talk about the straight facts on the science of racial inequality, and we’re asked to put aside our silly Christian superstitions, we’re probably not about to encounter the kind of eugenic arguments we would have a few decades ago. But when we’re asked to formulate, in Saletan’s words, a “subtler account of creation and human dignity,” we’re being asked to put aside a strong account of human dignity in favor of a more factual and data-based one. In many cases this means giving up on an axiomatic commitment to equal dignity in favor of a steely, rational acceptance of the ‘reality’: people are unequal, it’s there in your bones. Put aside your childish things, your egalitarian projects, your programs predicated on the belief that in each person there is infinite worth.

Saletan was wrong about creation and evolution in the Christian frame; he was thinking of a particular kind of Evangelical because he wanted to make his liberal readers a particular kind of uncomfortable. But he was also wrong about the solution to the problem he identified: a subtler account of human dignity went along with scientism, yes, and the result was heinous. The trick for Christians of this era will be to push back on the new scientism — on the truism that some people are just worth less, say, in market terms — while living in a world that identifies a total commitment to human dignity as a ridiculous superstition. But it’s what we have to do.

 

There is a paradox in mass movements wherein a person or group of people will commit some terrible act, claim an association with a particular movement, and then people outside the movement will demand that the people inside of it disavow those who committed the terrible act.

It’s pretty typical, for instance, of Islam. The narrative goes like this: some terrorist group or individual terrorist does something terrible, and non-Muslims call upon Muslim leaders to disown or disavow the terrible acts and their perpetrators. There are a few problems with this response, whether the case is terrorism or not. Here are some.

1.) To call upon “moderate Muslims” to disown “extremist Muslims” is to suggest — just as the terrorists do — that Islam is a big continuum with the most committed people perpetrating acts of violence, and the lesser committed people not perpetrating acts of violence. This is a handy way to reinforce the idea that whether or not you commit acts of violence is a good litmus test for whether or not you’re a real [whatever].

2.) Disavowal has a kind of transitive property. What I mean by this is that when we call upon groups to disown violent factions we oftentimes wind up expecting these ‘good’ people to offer a blanket disavowal, a total disassociation, a complete rejection of everything the violent faction claimed and/or stood for. Because demands for disavowal usually come at moments of fervor — nobody is calling upon Christians to mass-disavow the Serbian Christians who committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims, because it happened twentysomething years ago — it is hard to render a nuanced response in disavowal-form. The whole genre of disowning is about performing an act of penance, which you can’t do in measured tones. (Thus the language often used to demand repudiation/disavowal of Muslim terrorists from everyday Muslims extends even to demands that Muslims ‘refudiate‘ the construction of mosques in particular places, because 9/11.)

3.) Disavowal doesn’t even do much, especially when it is preferred to other forms of (actually targeted) accountability. Look at Ron Paul: he was more than happy to disown fans of his who hate Jews and Black people, and he was more than happy to accept their money and support.

4.) Demands for disavowal can reify movements in way that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Movements are multi-valent, they have a lot of moving parts, and usually an array of primary and secondary goals. More vexing yet, goals and motives can be separate things. One’s motive, for example, for participating in the Catholic worker movement might be a belief in the universal value of human life and dignity, and a sense that workers are being abused on those counts; but the goals can be enumerated in much more concrete terms — having to do with wages, benefits, labor protections, and so on. So, do we categorize movements by their goals or motives? This is fraught ground, but when you demand that group x condemn person y, you’re presuming the movement is ‘about’ whatever they seem to share, when that might not be quite true. (Libertarians will also tell you they care a lot about human life/dignity, but they certainly share few goals with the Catholic worker movement; likewise, pro-Israel Evangelicals and Zionists have the same short-term goals, but I don’t think it would be an honest gesture to say they belong to the same movement.)

So the urge to call for disavowal isn’t very good for politics. It can encourage the behavior it intends to discourage and it can cripple movements that have good intentions by conflating them with ones who have only bad intentions. Further, it can distort good messages and engender further resentment where it already exists, which is the last thing anybody should want in a particularly tense political moment.

This post is about the police officers who were killed today in New York. Evidently the person who killed them did so out of vengeance, which I detest. I sort of suspect we will soon begin to hear calls for disavowal directed at protesters and leaders of the protest movements spurred on by the killings of black men by police recently. None of those protests have anything meaningful in common with this event, which was indisputably evil. I just hope that a more constructive approach is chosen than the usual I-demand-you-disown-this approach, because it is not a very good one, and certainly doesn’t sow peace.