"Therapy didn’t work for you. But church does," said Usha to JD Vance.

Quoted in JD's new memoir, "Communion" (commission earned).

Did he need therapy and what's the story of its not working on him?

My traumatic childhood had made me resentful and left me with awful conflict management skills. I would overreact or withdraw—fight or flight!—over minor transgressions.... Because of Usha, I attended a few therapy sessions at the Yale student health clinic. The therapist I spoke with was a good guy, but I found therapy too uncomfortable. I didn’t like to talk to my own girlfriend about how crazy my homelife was, so why would I talk to a stranger? But there was a deeper problem with therapy as I encountered it. It was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt. In one session, we explored an incident that I’ve since discussed publicly: Driving with my mother on a relatively rural road, she loses her temper. She accelerates the car, threatening to crash and kill both of us.... Experts tend to describe unresolved trauma as when a person experiences “disruptive physical and emotional reactions in the present as their body and mind continue to defend against” threats they faced in the past. The gist is that my fight-or-flight response, my temper, and my general resentment about my feelings of insecurity were consequences of trauma I had experienced and hadn’t properly “processed.” And of course, part of that processing was understanding how trauma across the generations was linked. The trauma I experienced at the hand of my mother was connected to the time my grandfather got drunk and beat her. And of course, my grandfather didn’t have it easy growing up in the deep poverty of Kentucky coal country. I resisted this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the framing turned me into a victim rather than an actor.... The therapist’s framing... removed the moral dimension from human conduct.... I was searching for a more satisfying accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and willpower. Of virtue and guilt.... [M]ost of all I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to be worthy of this woman I was madly in love with. And I began to fear that the past was a prologue: that whatever happened to my mother, whatever destroyed marriages and friendships in my family, would eventually destroy what I had with Usha....

The proposed rule would impose "a narrow, culturally specific understanding of family" that "privileges a dominant cultural framework over the lived realities of communities of color and global Christians."

I'm reading "Presbyterian Church faces revolt after proposing clergy must be in monogamous relationships — and critics blame white privilege" (NY Post).

The headline is miswritten. The rule doesn't require a relationship. Clergy can still be single. They just can't have more than one partner. It seems that clergy can have sequential sexual relationships — with no commitment at all — as long as they follow a one-at-a-time approach. 

The Presbyterians on both sides of this controversy are relying on progressivism. Opponents tap into racial critique — that "lived realities" discourse. 

Proponents deploy feminist critique. They're "arguing that the practice of polyamory or polygamy can create 'power imbalances, emotional harm, and spiritual confusion,' particularly for women, children, and historically marginalized persons."

It seems that no one wants to get caught invoking tradition. History is that place where persons were marginalized. It's something to be undone. 

***

I love the stock photo the Post chose to illustrate this story. It's like an ad for fabric softener:

Which one is supposed to be the Presbyterian clergyperson?

"I have no patience, incidentally, with those whataboutery critics invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades to diss Leo’s credentials."

"Nationalism, imperialism, fascism and communism are already far bigger killers than Catholicism, despite having been around for much less time. The main reason for that is, besides being inefficient, it is morally repugnant to most people to kill face to face, but to do it from a distance — with a machinegun, with artillery, with an aerial bomb, with a drone, now with a robot controlled by an algorithm — has become progressively easier over the past 150 years. As the Pope says, not 'seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.' That is why he has called for 'the strictest ethical constraints' on the use of AI in warfare. He is right, obviously. I hate AI. But then I think social media has been a disaster and I don’t much like predictive texting, spellcheck or digital train tickets either. I’d have pulled the plug on the whole shebang in 2006, after email, Wikipedia and YouTube but before any of the other nonsense. But hey, I am also a realist.... We have to live with this madness. Given that, why would we let a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits decide what’s ethical AI and what isn’t?"

Writes Robert Crampton, in "Pope Leo’s come out all guns blazing against the AI war machine. Good/Allowing a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits to decide what is and isn’t ethical would be madness" (London Times).

My first draft of this post had one more sentence, but I decided to cut it because I think it's dumb and distracting. For the record, it's "They would blow up the world, as Pope Leo didn’t quite say but I’ll say it for him, if they thought it would bag them a hot babe with fake boobs." But what do you think of the sexualized analysis? The tech leaders are "super-rich weird nerdy misfits" driven by sexual frustration. I used to read analysis like that all the time 60 years ago, when Freudianism was still going strong. It's interesting, but that doesn't make it true. If these men are super-rich, can't they find sexual partners? And why fake boobs? Also, isn't it gauche these days to disparage the neurodivergent with insults like "weird nerdy misfits"?

I remember when a major political party in the United States got the idea that calling a weird person "weird" would be an effective way to win a presidential election. 

"It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice."

"This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.... [But reading] is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world...."

Writes Adam Kirsch, in "Reading Is a Vice/Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive" (The Atlantic).

"I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly."

"And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance, that's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly."

Said JD Vance on the new episode of Ross Douthat's "Interesting Times" podcast — audio and transcript at Podscribe.

Douthat was challenging him to coordinate his political thinking with his Catholicism. To quote a bit more of what Vance said:

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

"Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion."

"Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm. 'If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,' [writes Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab]. At another point: 'All people share a harm-based moral mind.' At still another: 'Harm is the master key of morality.'..."

Writes Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today" (The New Yorker).

"There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good..."

"... but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in 'Wicked' does these great 'yasss girl' ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being 'good' is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters."

Says Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?" (NYT)(free-access link, because this is a long conversation with, obviously, 4 voices).

"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."

"I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trump voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trump’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trump’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trump’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison."

Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.

Douthat invites French to say something nice about MAGA. French says:

At the Moral Urgency Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photo — showing the University of Wisconsin's central campus at night — was taken by my son Chris.

And here's another Chris pic that has an animal theme (see the kittycat?):

"When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things."

"Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort. While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold.... I can’t blame younger writers for believing that it is their job to convey a strenuously correct public morality...."

From "Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable" by the writer Jen Silverman, in the NYT.

Can't blame them? I say blame them. They're already feeling bad about not doing everything possible to promote prescribed morality. Make them feel bad about making bad art. You've got to leverage the bad feeling. 

"Mr. Haidt has a metaphor... Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning..."

"... is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why. 'Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,' Mr. Haidt said. 'This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.'"

From "First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones/The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the 'coddling' of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z" (NYT).

The "idea for fixing Gen Z" is "no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools."

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

"Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively..."

"... because it creates more children.... But the Alabama decision 'is a very morally honest opinion,' said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F. 'It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,' he said. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden. The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an 'offense against chastity,' according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental 'conjugal act' of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an 'abortive practice.'..."

From "What Christian Traditions Say About I.V.F. Treatments/While Catholic teaching expressly forbids in vitro fertilization, Protestants tend to be more open" (NYT).

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

"I sleep with my friends, and I befriend the people I sleep with. As a result, my social life mostly consists of a sort of merry traveling band of fellows..."

"... with whom I have happily porous and shifting relationships. This is what we all used to do when we were young and then grew out of when we moved into the serious part of life. Except I just didn’t. I know this sounds like hell to most people.... When it works, though, it feels like a vindication that the worth men and women can hold for one another is beyond sexual and romantic and also that it can continuously change, like everything else. When it doesn’t, it’s still pretty hot."

Said Megan Nolan, one of 16 writers asked to name one "irresponsible, immoral, indulgent" thing they do. 

This collection of confessions — in the NYT — goes along with an opinion piece, "I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You" by the clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. 

Nolan, a novelist, should add: And to whatever degree it works or does not work, I get raw material for novels.

By the way, the comments over there are all about the one person who confesses to shoplifting. That person, Thomas Morton, tries to sort of justify his behavior on the ground that the prices — in the airport where he commits his crime — are high, the employees are underpaid, and he loves the feeling of "having stuff... that I didn't pay for." I think that entry should have been left out, because it distracted readers from all the interesting material 15 other writers contributed.

Morton was an editor at Vice Magazine. Here's his Wikipedia article, which has already been updated to contain the report of his confession "to habitual shoplifting at airport stores." I would expect to hear from him soon that he was describing a fantasy — nothing he really does.

"While violence is never the ideal, self-defense has a morally universal appeal and justification."

"And there comes a time when defense is the only option, when standing upright is the only appropriate posture. Describing the events in this case, even Montgomery’s police chief pointed out that members of the riverboat’s crew 'came to Mr. Pickett’s defense.'"

Writes Charles M. Blow in "The Montgomery Brawl Was, for Some, a Clarifying Moment" (NYT).

This is the incident we discussed here 2 days ago, in "The joy that Black people across the country are feeling over the Montgomery Riverfront Uprising, aka the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, is filling my soul."

The better term for what happened, rather than "self-defense," is "defense of others." One man was attacked by a few men and badly outnumbered, and those men, in turn, were badly outnumbered by a much larger group that came in on the side of the one man. It got chaotic, and what happened seems to have gone well beyond what was needed to rescue that man. As a viewer of the viral video, you may find yourself enjoying that extra dose of payback.

ADDED: As I said in the comments to the 2-day-old post: "It really is an example of 'try that in a small town.'" I hope Charles Blow and others who are finding some form of joy in that video take a new look at what Jason Aldean was singing about. 

"Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced..."

"... and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on 'Saturday Night Live' against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone...."

Writes Jason Zinoman in "In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird/Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character" (NYT).

That awful arrest took place in 1991, O'Connor's tearing of a photograph of the Pope happened in 1992. If you lived though that era — the NYT considers it an entire "age"! — do you remember with any specificity the kind of "moralizing"? I remember the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I remember "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." If the "age" that is 1991-1992 is expansive enough to go back to 1985, I remember when 11-year-old Karenna Gore activated her mother by playing Prince's "Darling Nikki."

If only there were blogging back then! The "dopey moralizing scandals" — is that the right phrase? — of the time had to do with fearsome sexuality. I don't think it's wise to explain them as transitory dopiness. We can always predict that 3 decades later we will look back and think we were dumb, but it's also dumb to think that there's no worthy morality, just "dopey moralizing."

By the way, the opposite of "dopey" — which means stupefied by sleep or a drug — is "woke."

"Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content."

Writes Adam Kotsko, in "Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism/The left has embraced an approach long favored by the evangelical right" (The Atlantic).

And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism.... By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.... 

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences.... Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics.....

"During World War I, eating less was considered patriotic, a way of freeing up precious caloric resources for American troops fighting abroad."

"Later, doctors and psychologists came to the (wrong) conclusion that overweight people were lazy, and society adjudicated heaviness a 'disgrace,' in the words of Lulu Hunt Peters, an early diet-book author. Dieting organizations ruthlessly shamed people into losing weight. In the early ’50s, one such 'support' group held public weigh-ins and forced members who’d gained weight to stand in a 'pig line,' where they would sing a song that included the lyric 'We are plump little pigs who ate too much, fat, fat, fat.'"

Writes Olga Khazan in "People Just Want to Lose Weight/Americans go on yo-yo diets, but we also have a yo-yo relationship to dieting" (The Atlantic).

"When people were asked about the morality of people close to them or who lived before they were born and they didn't know, 'the perception of moral decline was attenuated, eliminated or reversed.'"

From "Many people believe morality is declining — but it may be an illusion" (Axios), summarizing "The illusion of moral decline" by Adam M. Mastroianni & Daniel T. Gilbert (in Nature).

ADDED: You have to realize what these researchers were talking about when they talked about "morality." As Axios put it:

The study... focuses on "everyday morality," the kindness, respect, and honesty that most people agree are a reflection of morality.

The researchers also surveyed people in January 2020 and asked them to compare whether people were "kind, honest, nice, and good" in 2020, 2010, and 2000, as well as at various times in the past, including when they turned 20 years old and the year they were born.

Most people agree that "kindness, respect, and honesty" reflect morality? But then we're told that people were not asked about "kindness, respect, and honesty" but "kind, honest, nice, and good." Did the researchers equate respect and niceness? I don't think niceness is a reflection of morality. Do "most people"? Niceness is superficial behavior that may arise from genuine beneficence but could just as well come from a desire to get along and fit in or to manipulate others.