culture

As a Green Bay fan, it pains me to post something about a loss, but this is too weird to pass up:

On December 15, [1929] the week after the NFL season ended, the Green Bay Packers, undefeated NFL champions, came to town for what they expected to be an easy exhibition game. After all, opponents had scored only three touchdowns against the Packers all season. But Saunders and Maxwell had been negotiating a surprise. When the NFL season ended, Saunders paid two league players to come to Memphis. One of them was Joe Kopcha from the Chicago Bears. 8000 fans jammed the stadium and the sidelines.

h/t my mom

Trevin Wax on why even mundane things like going out to eat have become politicized:

Put those two developments together: (1) the idea that your consumer choices express your identity and (2) the idea that your political views are the essence of who you are. What happens next?

Everything gets politicized.

More and more people invest their shopping or entertainment with political significance. Political evangelists believe they are helping their cause by sticking with this brand instead of that one, by boycotting this designer or that retailer because they associate with heretics.

C.S. Lewis on becoming a bad person:

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face — that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face — turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel…

Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

It’s distressingly easy to watch this dynamic at work in virtually every domain these days.

Joe Bagel:

You’ll also be inconveniencing yourself in all sorts of unimaginable ways: no Wikipedia? no Spotify? no Google Maps? no Transit? no Uber?!?

Giving up an internet connection disqualifies you from many of modernity’s perks. However, I rarely questioned what those perks were actually costing me — and not just the monthly internet bill. For all of the minutes saved with technology, I was sacrificing hours of my attention, guzzled up by apps hellbent on dazzling me with vacuous content.

C.S. Lewis on the pursuit of culture and learning under all circumstances:

I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective, The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.

Excerpted from Lewis’ address “Learning in War-Time,” given at Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, October 22, 1939.

Jemar Tisby and Tyler Burns interview Andy Crouch on RAA’s Pass the Mic:

The call of Christians is to be so deeply prayerful that we respond with creativity rather than just reaction. And what does that look like? Well it looks different for every individual. I think [of] art, music, literature, and poetry. Anything that doesn’t seem to accomplish anything — but is nonetheless transformative because it is so excellent and so beautiful — is really important. In other words, in a world of zero sum forced coercion and violence, one of the most powerful witnesses we can make is do something beautiful and excellent.

So good. I’ve had this in the queue for awhile, and now I wish I would have listened to it when it came out two weeks ago.

WBEZ’s The View from Room 2015:

“No matter where you’re from, what neighborhood you call home, and no matter what your dreams are in life, it is right here at Penn that our children are going to get their start — so that they can have that dream, chase that dream, capture that dream and live it…. There’s no dream you can’t achieve, if you stay focused and persistent.”

And with that, [the speaker] makes very clear that it’s up to the fourth graders — and every kid in the room — to work hard and succeed.

It’s up to them and William Penn Elementary.

Moving piece that challenges the validity of the (deeply American) axiom “dream big, work hard, and succeed” in the context of a poor neighborhood school.

(The visuals on the website are good, but hearing the kids’ and teachers’ voices in the hour-long audio production is even better.)

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.

Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 July 1965.

I came across this quote in Timothy Keller’s Generous Justice, but I have linked to the whole speech above in Stanford’s King Encyclopedia.

John Inazu in USA Today:

The more we neglect political nuance and the more we simply blame “those people” for the current state of affairs, the less likely we are to see in others a shared humanity, to say nothing of a shared project of self-governance. For the sake of our modest unity, we can do better. We must do better.

We must remind ourselves that people — and voters — are more complex than labels. We must speak, write and tweet with care, depth and nuance. We must avoid the lazy thinking that encourages stereotyping.

A great read, sure to challenge all bands of the political spectrum. Particularly helpful is the charge to preserve “modest unity,” which Inazu defines as keeping sociocultural disagreements — even strong ones — a war of words rather than a “much bleaker alternative.”

See also this piece from Inazu and Tim Keller in Christianity Today.

Via ERLC

Mark Bauerlein for First Things:

When a humanities department selects its materials because they reflect identity groups, it no longer functions as a humanities department. It becomes a project of social group affirmation. The proper criteria of selection—beauty and sublimity, wit and insight—fall behind a work’s representative value.

See also this piece from the NYT.

Abraham Riesman in Vulture:

Only after speaking with Cuarón did I realize why I wept: not with sorrow, but with hope for my own future. Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.

h/t @logangreer, who also urged me to watch Children of Men back in’06.

Fredrik deBoer in The Towner:

To compare a journalist revealing the real identity of a wealthy writer to domestic abuse, enslavement, and sexual assault is to disrespect the victims of those horrible crimes in the comparison. What happened to Ferrante was unpleasant, even exploitative; it was not the same as physical or sexual abuse. This distinction is necessary if we’re to preserve the status such crimes have rightfully earned as uniquely worthy of moral condemnation. Outrage is a finite resource; to attempt to generate it over and over again ensures that it will be harder and harder for it to mean anything in the future.

Cal Newport on “digital minimalism”:

Many digital maximalists, who spend their days immersed in a dreary slog of apps and clicks, justify their behavior by listing all of the potential benefits they would miss if they began culling services from their life. I don’t buy this argument. There’s an infinite selection of activities in the world that might bring some value. If you insist on labeling every activity avoided as value lost, then no matter how frantically you fill your time, it’s unavoidable that the final tally of your daily experience will be infinitely negative.

More in the full article; great to think through coming up on a new year.

Jonathan Haidt in an interview on Mind the Campus:

So we acknowledge that if there was no discrimination at all, the field [of social psychology] would still lean left. And that’s perfectly fine with us.  We don’t give a damn about exact proportional representation. What we care about is institutionalized disconfirmation — that is, when someone says something, other people should be out there saying, “Is that really true? Let me try to disprove it.” That is now much less likely to happen if the thing said is politically pleasing to the left.