Zhenya Bruno writes for NYBooks.com:
In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts…
There was a flash of confidence in her eyes, a claim that certain lines should not be crossed. Elena Kostyuchenko gives us a term for this certainty. She calls it decency: “A decent person follows established rules,” she explains. “They obey their elders. They don’t insist on their rights.”
Fintan O’Toole writes for NYBooks.com:
What we encounter, then, is nothing so comforting as imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths. It is men who embody the hurly-burly that, contrary to the predictions of the witches at the start of Macbeth, is never going to be “done.” Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and Lear are distinguished in these dramas by the illusion that they can determine events by their own actions. They have, they believe, the power to say what will happen next. But no amount of power can ever be great enough in an irrational world. The universe does not follow orders. That, as Miss Prism might have said, is what Tragedy means.
It is nice to imagine a time when these plays could be loved for their poetry alone. It would be a delight to think that their pleasure would be that they speak, as Horatio has it at the end of Hamlet, to an “unknowing world/How these things came about.” But there is not yet a world that does not know the violence of these plays or the fury with which reality responds to all attempts to force it to obey one man’s will. There is no place in history where “Be not found here” is not good advice for millions of vulnerable people. We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated. They do not, when they speak, reduce the frightfulness. They allow us, rather, in those bewildering moments, to be equal to it.
Peter Brown writes for NYBooks.com:
A new history of Christianity traces its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity…
Peter Heather’s Christendom is a colossal book written by a colossus in the field. Aptly subtitled “The Triumph of a Religion,” it covers a millennium, from the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 to the baptism of Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania, the last pagan ruler in Europe, around 1250.
Heather resolutely rejects the romantic notion that Christianity rose to the top of late Roman society by its intrinsic merits alone, without the help of the powerful. His attitude is close to that of J.B. Bury, who argued that “it must never be forgotten that Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.”
To justify this view, Heather offers a cogent analysis of the structure of Roman upper-class society and its relation to the Roman state—a relation that made elites peculiarly vulnerable to pressure from a Christian court. If pressure was exercised by Constantine and his Christian successors on the wider population, it was the gentle violence of a state that lacked the strength and organizational capacity of modern dictatorships. The late Roman state was not “a decadent Leviathan,” as many scholars from the 1930s onward deemed it to be. These scholars saw the later empire as a warning for their own society, faced with the rise of totalitarian states in Europe and with what struck some of them as the ominous expansion of government associated in America with the New Deal. As a result, they greatly exaggerated the Roman Empire’s coercive powers.
Heather points out that the late Roman state could not enforce an ideology; it was too “rickety.” But it could seduce. Its immense ambitions depended on networks of friends and clients that stretched from the court to the lower reaches of the gentry in a never-ceasing waterfall of favors asked and favors received. If one wanted to get anything done, one had to please someone. And ideally this was someone who had pleased the emperor and those around him.
Once the emperor made plain that he was an orthodox Christian and that he would shut the “divine ears” to the petitions of heretics, Jews, and pagans, the message trickled down with surprising speed. A confessional state was born.
I just renewed my subscription to NYBooks. It is such a gorgeous publication.
All religious autobiography hinges on a drama of escape. The convert speaks from a vantage of liberation, having been freed from the shackles of sin, looking back on the years he lived in bondage, a “prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness,” as Thomas Merton puts it in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), his celebrated memoir about becoming a Trappist monk. The deconversion narrative relies on the same arc, but in reverse. The apostate wins her freedom by fleeing the prison of institutional religion. Each narrative is, of course, a lie. The believer, even after he has glimpsed eternity, must continue to live in the world with other fallen humans and his own wayward flesh. Anyone who has left the church finds, inevitably, that secular life has plenty of constraints and disappointments of its own. What drives the narrative impulse is that first, ecstatic taste of freedom—of having borne witness to something as formless and vast as the night sky…
In her mid-twenties she was living in Paris and writing scores for a music publisher when her father died, a trauma that hit with seismic force. Although she and her siblings had not been raised religious—neither parent was a churchgoer—her grief succeeded in convincing her that she had (so to speak) a father in heaven….
Conversion experiences are always the least convincing part of a faith narrative. It would be easy to chalk this up to secularization, our loss of faith in the reality of faith itself, but the problem, I think, is broader than that. (“And then I realized—” the poet Robert Haas once observed, is “the part of stories one never quite believes.”) Epiphanies, those watermarks of shifting internal states, consist of pure, untested potentiality. Coldstream’s passages about her contact with the divine during those early years of prayer are, fittingly, vague to the point of meaninglessness…
…few things are more disappointing to the new convert than religious laxity. But Coldstream makes little effort to put these complaints in perspective, to see them as the follies of youthful purity, or to consider why her aloofness and superiority are so alienating to the other nuns, most of whom are cradle Catholics. Recalling how she was often chided for her “convert’s enthusiasm”…
…As I read page after page of schoolyard bullying and mean-girl snubs, I could not help but long for a different storyline, one in which Coldstream fully embraces her prophetic megalomania and does what so many saints have done—disappearing into the desert, climbing to the top of some ragged mountain, calling on a complacent church to find its way back to its pioneering ideals..
Lucy is one of many nuns who over the years succumb to mental illness and are forced to leave the convent, a fact that Coldstream attributes to prolonged repression. The religious call to “self-immolation,” the tireless effort to conquer temptation and suppress one’s true feelings, is unnatural, she writes, because “the shadow side of the psyche…cannot be kept down for ever.” This is an odd about-face, given her original complaints about religious laxity. She was the one who wanted more self-immolation. But in trying to account for the growing tension she experienced—her attempts to suppress her artistic, solitary, and prophetic nature—and the array of personal dysfunction she witnessed at the convent, she ends up concluding that the problem is the unnatural discipline of monasticism itself. The ascetic life that survived two millennia of Christianity had finally, at the dawn of the third, become untenable.
01:00 In which room and in which clothes do you watch this show?
03:00 New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West,
https://www.amazon.com/New-Cold-Wars-Invasion-Americas/dp/0593443594
13:00 Stephen Walt: Biden’s Foreign Policy Problem Is Incompetence, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/04/biden-foreign-policy-gaza-ukraine-foreign-policy-incompetence/
20:00 Shut Up Joe Biden, https://newrepublic.com/article/153762/mighty-mouth
25:30 DTG: Slavoj Žižek: When is a shark not a shark?, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/slavoj-zizek-when-is-a-shark-not-a-shark
28:00 Tom Landry’s trick plays were designed to make him look smart, not to win Super Bowls
33:45 Eastern Europeans enjoy irritating people
40:00 Why is everyone on steroids, https://www.gq.com/story/why-is-everyone-on-steroids-now
49:40 Zizek is a classic secular guru
50:00 How Zizek is like the streamer Destiny
51:00 Dr Delgado’s anti-White scholarship, https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/dr-delgados-anti-white-scholarship
54:00 The Tower and the Sewer, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/20/the-tower-and-the-sewer-why-liberalism-failed-deneen/
1:07:50 What is psychodynamic therapy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6eel0K24MQ
1:10:00 Remember when the intelligence community and the MSM said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation?
Podnotes AI summary: I am curious if you have a special room for watching the show or wear specific clothes like your Sunday best. Ever thought of writing to me about why you watch or what you do during it? Maybe there’s art or drinks you prefer while viewing? I imagine a dedicated space and attire that honors our soul connection.
I’m reading David Sanger’s book on new cold wars, China’s rise, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and America defending the West. It mentions Biden’s involvement in Ukraine in 2014 – classic Biden overstepping his abilities unlike Obama who was cautious with foreign policy.
Obama resisted war with Russia over Crimea to avoid dire consequences for the U.S., adhering to “Don’t do stupid shit” as his motto. He knew Ukraine wasn’t vital to US security just as current conflicts don’t affect American welfare directly.
Biden is framing his reelection around defending democracy globally but Americans aren’t interested in overseas conflicts like those in Ukraine and Gaza – they want domestic focus instead.
Ukrainian morale is low; Putin seeks ceasefire; Europe and the U.S. support negotiations but Biden pushes forward. The U.S.’s role should be checking China rather than meddling elsewhere.
In other news, debates rage on political retribution and Trump accuses opponents of plotting jail time against him – claims without basis stirring media frenzy.
Decoding gurus discussed Zizek, noting how some figures use dramatic language for attention which can be tiring despite occasional necessity for radical change highlighted by historical revolutions like Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement succeeding partly due to more extreme threats behind it.
In the 1979 Super Bowl, The Cowboys started strong against the Steelers, dominating with their run game in a single drive before a fumble turned the tide. Tom Landry’s call for a double reverse led to disaster, and Pittsburgh recovered, ultimately winning.
Mandela’s revolutionary stance is often criticized as mere attention-seeking, but violence and populist uprisings can be essential for change. Revolutions are complex; France swung between republics and monarchies until finding its current state.
A friend chose silence over confronting middle-aged men discussing Israel and Gaza—a wise move considering how heated such debates can get. Ideals can lead to either positive change or disaster; they’re not inherently good or bad.
Steroid use has surged as people seek external solutions to internal problems—whether it’s radical politics, religion, or physical enhancement through performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). The risks include health issues like kidney damage and mood disorders. Education around PEDs is lacking among users and medical professionals alike.
Rituals that seem transgressive may actually reinforce social bonds within certain ideologies or institutions—inversion of status during rituals releases social tension. Nation-states sometimes engage in hypocritical actions contrary to their stated values out of perceived necessity or practicality.
Philosophers like Zizek challenge us with thought experiments rather than empirical evidence—valuable for provoking thought but not always grounded in scientific rigor. While philosophers’ interpretations vary widely, they serve an important role in questioning societal norms.
He’s a guy with strong opinions, commenting on social and political issues. He thinks he’s not liked but sees himself as an iconoclast. Despite claiming to be unpopular, his ideas are widely discussed, even in major publications that warn against taking him lightly.
Talking about critical race theory (CRT), Richard Delgado is criticized for suggesting aggressive solutions to racial injustice. His work implies violence might be necessary, which the author finds dangerous and irresponsible. The author renews their subscription to insightful essays that explore different ideologies.
Alfred Adler’s personal experiences led him to create psychotherapy as a distinct form of mental health treatment from Freudian psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy has since evolved into various approaches still used today.
The Canadian Association of Black Lawyers criticizes proposed auto theft amendments for being ineffective and disproportionately affecting minority communities. Meanwhile, misinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop was spread by politicians and media before the 2020 election.
Ideological commitments have both rational arguments and emotional resonance; great novelists like Conrad and Mann understood this dual nature well. Political analysis should consider both aspects rather than seeking “gotcha moments” that dismiss people’s stated reasons for their beliefs.
A skilled psychoanalyst views us in two ways: as truth-seekers and self-deceivers. This dual analysis applies to current ideological movements too. For the New York Review of Books author, a key conservative strand is Catholic post-liberalism, which values community over individual rights and aims for the common good.
This perspective challenges liberal individualism and prioritizes national well-being. It envisions democratic institutions serving specific peoples rather than abstract principles. The author argues that people seeking meaning through dramatic ideological shifts may actually be filling voids from lacking personal connections.
In discussing critical race theory (CRT), there’s debate on whether its extreme ideas permeate K-12 education. Some claim CRT isn’t taught at this level, but foundational concepts are often introduced early on in other subjects like math without controversy.
The essay also touches on right-wing strategies to influence U.S institutions and criticizes post-liberals for not focusing enough on transforming society through Christian teachings from the ground up. Instead, they seem drawn to cultural wars which could lead to disappointment in secular America.
Ultimately, the writer suggests that young people attracted to these ideologies might be better off nurturing their minds and souls instead of getting entangled in political struggles – implying that inner peace comes from self-contentment rather than external battles or historical narratives.
