Retractiones: For Your Weekend Enjoyment
From When the Few and Faithful Were Reading
Revisiting some pieces from the early days of the newsletter that are worth the light of day.
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It’s Not Bragging To Say Something’s Good When It Is
Humility is badly misunderstood, and frequently gets coded in the worst kinds of self-abasement. This is, in part, because we believe all the world to be a power struggle, with any concession a form of weakness, and all humility therefore either appeasement to tyrants or cowardice. As far as humility goes, nothing could be further from the truth: humility is a kind of acknowledgment of truthful things, that God is God and we are not. Whether or not tyrants benefit from me telling the truth about things is really beside the point.
But humility goes hand in hand with the avoidance of false humility: saying that something we’ve done is bad when it’s good, actually. It’s good for someone with crazy talent to say that they’re proud of their work, or for someone who’s really done something excellent to say “this is excellent”. Such speech is just telling the truth, and is a form of humility of its own.
On either side of humility lies an easier form of speech which would deflect attention from you. Saying that “this isn’t really that good” and “it was really a group effort” deflect from a person having to own their own work, and to have to stand up under the gift of excellence that they have been given to bear. Being able to own goodness rather than look away from it is a way of saying “Yes, this is good, and worth your time.”
So, here we go. These are good, and old, and worth your time.
With that in mind, I want to draw attention to four old pieces from this newsletter from the days when less 300 people were reading it:
When Dorothy Day Had An Abortion—a meditation on a little-discussed aspect of Day’s own biography, which later became a piece for Comment. After a few months of writing this, this was one of the first pieces when I let myself be less staid and have my own voice.
On Not Having Moral Agency—a brief piece on Stanley Hauerwas’ notion of us being able to act as part of a community, for better or worse.
The Institutions Cannot Love You—the first part of a series on the nature of institutions, and how when they hurt you, it’s probably not personal.
You Really Should (Mostly) Get Rid of Online Church—riffing off a Tish Warren piece that got her into all kinds of trouble, and spawned a thousand defenses of online church.
Saying When You’re Wrong, or Not Quite Right
But enough with the fancy kind of humility. The straightforward version of humility—submitting oneself to the truth—is to say when you’re wrong, and in what way you were wrong. So, here we go.
Augustine, toward the end of his life, published a work entitled Retractions, in which he sought to give account for his published work, to make adjustments, and to say where he’d do something differently. Writing is a mode of thinking in public, and not all of the pieces I’ve done here were quite right. Thankfully, nothing lives forever on the Internet.
Empathy Fatigue—my second-ever piece, in which I try to puzzle out why we quit caring about the desperate plights of others. Since writing this, I’ve come to believe that our passions and emotions play a much bigger role in the things we choose to intellectually identify with, and that our ability to intellectually tarry with those we disagree with comes from our ability to care for them first. Absent a community of common care, we can’t readily discover (or attend to or care about) those intellectual disagreements.
Emotions are Not Arguments—another along that line: I still hold to the basic thesis, that emotivism is a really terrible way to engage arguments, but with a slight change. I’d probably amend this to something like “I get that you don’t like the argument, but that not-liking of a thing probably points to something important that you can’t articulate yet”. All that’s to say that I still don’t buy that “love has its reasons of which reason knows not”, but that love or disgust present to us something which we need to pay attention to.
What Does the Digital Life Have to Do With Obligations? On this one, I hold to what I have, but would just add: clickbait writers don’t belong in limbo—they belong in the ring of Inferno belonging to the envious. Because anyone can write a listsicle of gifs, but trying to hack out thinking in words and arguments? That’s harder work. The clickbait writers are wanting not the fame of the writer—because none of them have that—they’re wanting the skill. Thus, envy circle.