Teach Us to Number our GNR
Friday Takes About Wisdom, Boersma, BookTok, Frail Empires, and how much I hate Grammarly
One
Thousands of years ago, I feel like I perfected Jen’s 7 Quick Takes. That was the one day I would manage to blog when I couldn’t get anything else done or think a complete thought about the world or myself. I would start out writing about one thing, and by the seventh take, I would have pulled the whole week into some kind of mental order. This was my best post, or at least a good representation, back in the day.
But eventually, Jen moved on to other things, and passed them off to This Ain’t the Lyceum, and I hung on as they dwindled to maybe five people posting their takes every week, and then three. What is that called? The bitter end, I think. So Kelly gave them a merciful death, and I had a necessary blogging break. But now that I am trying to blog regularly again, I’m still not ready to give them up. Is it that I have a hard time with transitions? Or maybe it’s that I like the creative form—trying to either narrow down the cosmos to seven, or stretch my tiny mind to think of five. So anyway, I’m going to keep doing Friday Takes. And I’m going to try to Do Better, as they say.
Two
I have tried really hard not to read too much about people enthralled with the idea of transhumanism, nor people who call themselves (checking my notes) Anthropocene because, well, it’s absolutely terrifying. But this very long and fascinating piece seems like a good primer for people like me. Basically, there are two schools of thought—the people who think we’re going to destroy ourselves and that’s good (anti-humanists) and people who think we’re going, at the eleventh hour, to invent a way not to destroy ourselves (transhumanists). What I like best is how the writer of the piece vaguely passes over one person who articulates an alternative way…actual wisdom:
One of the most eloquent opponents of transhumanist ambitions is Leon Kass, a molecular biologist who emerged in the 1990s as a leading conservative bioethicist. In his book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity (2002), Kass asserts that “in some crucial cases … repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.” Our instinctive revulsion toward incest, for instance, goes beyond a rational critique of the genetic dangers of inbreeding; we see it not as a mere error but in terms of “horror” and “defilement.” If cloning provokes a similar repulsion in most people, Kass writes, that proves it involves a “violation of things that we rightfully hold dear.”
The writer believes that Kass’ caution isn’t of much use because something like disgust is irrational, or, rather, it cannot be explained by reason:
For Kass, human nature is constituted by limits—to our rationality, our power, the satisfaction of our desires. If science and technology succeed in abolishing those limits, we will forfeit what we value most in ourselves, the quality Kass calls “human dignity.” Dignity may elude exact definition, but he is certain of “what a dignified human life is all about: engagement, seriousness, the love of beauty, the practice of moral virtue, the aspiration to something transcendent, the love of understanding, the gift of children and the possibility of perpetuating a life devoted to a high and holy calling.” It’s not immediately obvious what all these things have in common, or why a cloned human being couldn’t experience them as authentically as an identical twin, who is also the genetic duplicate of another person.
Heh—“it’s not immediately obvious.” I guess not to you. But some of us, who haven’t yet let go of the knowledge and love of God, do see how they are all connected, and that without too much mental strain.
And I do love that—“the quality Kass calls ‘human dignity.” Does anyone even know what that is? I love love love love (when you say it three times it becomes sarcastic) the boundless optimism of the secularist, even as he wanders around the crumbling aqueduct, poking it with his well-manicured finger, never imagining to himself that there is some other way of knowing something, some, what might you call it? It does start with ‘trans’ and it doesn’t end with human, but rhymes with ‘pendant.’ It’s where you admit that you are not God and then you ask God to reveal himself to you, and then you sort through a stack of…what are those called? Books? Until you find the dustiest one and then you crack it open. But even then you’re too stupid to understand it, which you will see if you read the whole piece.
Three
It just so happened that I was reading stuff about Carl Jung for some reason, and came across this excellent CRJ piece that also summarized, rather neatly I think, Hans Boersma’s thesis. Like a fine wine, it nicely answers the dull people who don’t know what “human dignity” even is. Here is a wonderful paragraph:
Carl Jung was a secular prophet announcing the depth of this “de-incarnational” crisis, this rupture between meaning and matter. The psychologically wounded lined up outside Jung’s door like lost sheep, seeking wholeness and purpose. Many were post-Protestants who had drifted away from the church and found themselves on the analyst’s couch. Therapy stepped in where sacramental liturgy waned. “They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church,” Jung wrote, “but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves ‘hanging on’ to the treatment. Something in them clings, often with the strength of despair, as if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves.”
I’m trying to wrap up my (hopefully short) Brianna Wiest thing, and that paragraph almost perfectly describes my feelings about her writing.
Four
I haven’t spent any time on TikTok, except when I’m looking for fodder about Manifesting and stuff like that, and so I didn’t know that there is a sub-genre called BookTok. Apparently, readers of novels are finding writers of novels and forming excited and supported fandoms (is that like a fiefdom?):
Although the Barnes & Noble event caters to fans of romance and fantasy, BookTok is vast and multifarious. The community is a constellation of fandoms. There are fandoms around authors (Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Elif Batuman); identity tags (Sapphic lit; Black romance); feelings (saddest books I’ve ever read); vibes (dark academia; dark romance). For every bestselling BookTok title, you can find a hundred videos from creators telling you it’s overhyped—and recommending something else to read instead. The hype, and the backlash to that hype, have helped to make BookTok into the most powerful word-of-mouth engine the book publishing industry has ever seen. According to Publishers Lunch, the top 90 BookTok authors saw their cumulative sales go from nine million units in 2020 to 20 million in 2021. Overall, 2022 print book sales were slightly down from 2021, but are still ahead of 2019; adult fiction sales in 2022 outperformed every other category.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have time to go over there and try to figure out what all this is about. But it is so interesting how the various platforms, with so much goodness and badness jumbled together, allow people to go find what they’re interested in. Although, of course, what people are most interested in are “adult” things—what a misnomer that is—and so that is also very dull and depressing.
Five
This brings me to the point of this entire post, and that is that I hate Grammarly. In fact, as if to remind me of how very much I hate it, Grammarly is this moment suggesting that I go back and capitalize its name, which I have obediently done, even though I don’t want to and don’t believe it deserves any such honor. And yes, I know, I can’t spell the word—Grammarly—it is hard to type or spell.
Why do I hate it? I hate that it’s so invasive and suggests so many stupid things. And yet, like everything, I can’t get rid of it because I really can’t spell. The older I get the worse I spell. It’s absolutely ghastly.
Why is Grammarly so ghastly? It flattens everything. It ruins the rhythm of typing and thinking. It masquerades as wisdom but it is only a stupid algorithm, or something like that. To irritate it, I put in a lot of commas wherever I want. I am a free thinker…I am I am I am….
Six
I got to the end of Rebecca West’s chapter, “Sarajevo VII,” in Black Lamb last night. In it, she visits the grave of the man who killed Archduke Ferdinand and describes what happened to all the people involved in the conspiracy. This bit is worth committing to memory:
In an essay Werfel has recorded his surprise at finding that the Slav assassin, whom he had imagined as wolfish and demented, should turn out to be this delicate and gentle boy, smiling faintly in his distress. It can be recognized from his account that Chabrinovitch used in prison that quality which annoyed his less-gifted friends, which was the antithesis, or perhaps the supplement, of Princip’s single-mindedness. He took all experience that came his way and played with it, discussed it, overstated it, understated it, moaned over it, joked about it, tried out all its intellectual and emotional potentialities. What these youths did was abominable, precisely as abominable as the tyranny they destroyed. Yet it need not be denied that they might have grown to be good men, and perhaps great men, if the Austrian Empire had not crashed down on them in its collapse. But the monstrous frailty of empire involves such losses.
Seven
There is only one way to avoid climbing a mountain and finding it is actually a doomed precipice over which you will certainly fall by your own power if you don’t ask someone—God—for help. And that is not to climb at all, but rather to begin by falling down. I love the way the psalmist put it this morning:
We will go into his tabernacle,*
and fall low on our knees before his footstool.
Arise, O Lord, into your resting-place,*
you and the ark of your strength.
Ok, so, have a nice weekend! I’ll be at Stand Firm on Sunday.