Saturday roundup

It may be spring, but this weekend will still be too chilly for much outdoor activity; hence, herewith a compendium of good reads to go with your comfort food and crackling fire

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It’s been a while since we did one of these. I’ve been coming across some things that the Precipice community will find edifying. So put some porridge on the stove, grab a blanket and avail yourself.

At Touchstone, Patrick Henry Reardon notes the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed:

It is my personal habit . . . to recite that Creed each morning, just before beginning the psalms of Matins. Indeed, I think of the Creed as the key to a Christian understanding of the psalms. Going from “I believe in one God” all the way to “the life of the world to come,” I cannot think of a single line that does not resonate—deeply—in sundry verses of the Psalter.

So I endeavor to begin each day by placing my own thoughts into the shared convictions of Nicholas of Myra, Spyridon of Tremithus, Hosius of Cordova, Cecilian of Carthage, and the other saintly bishops who gathered—along with the young deacon, Athanasius of Alexandria—in 325 (and later, in 381). Thereby I take explicit possession of my inheritance.

But he cautions against having that recitation become rote:

I readily admit, of course, that there is some danger inherent in reciting the Nicene Creed or, for that matter, any other formulation of faith—the danger of thoughtless routine. So I admit that recitation of the Creed as a means of falling asleep sounds a bit suspicious.

The purpose of the Creed is, rather, to wake us up. It must not become simply an accepted formula but a treasure to fight and die for—or at least a concern that deserves the best and highest resources of our minds. Surely the Creed is an instrument for loving God with the whole mind.

Nothing is more deadly than an inherited formulation that we simply accept and never think about, a formulation receiving only a torpid, thoughtless acquiescence. “Abba, Father” and “Jesus is Lord” are not just words. They are revelations given by the Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed, that is to say, takes its rise from within the Holy Trinity. It is a formula born of a revelatory experience, the testimony of the Father and the Son to one another: “All things are delivered unto me by my Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”

As to creeds in general, it is spiritually lethal to recite them when the vigor of the mind is not engaged, when the words are received (as John Stuart Mill once wrote) “outside the mind,” when the formula never connects “itself at all with the inner life of the human being.”

I love reading, and, in addition to consuming the daily content of my favorite outlets and periodicals, I always have going some work that would qualify as something from the Western canon. (Currently making my way through The Brothers Karamazov, and I’m in no hurry to finish it. I luxuriate over each paragraph and what it reveals about human nature, God’s nature and and the world.)

That said, I’m painfully slow at it. I’ll confess; reading makes me sleepy, and if I undertake anything of any length, I know a nap is in the offing. And I often revisit books that I feel I inadequately absorbed the first time around.

Was gratified to find that this is not only my dilemma. As Stephen Akey at The Hedgehog Review demonstrates, the great essayist Montaigne had similar issues:

Although I wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much on the basis of my peculiarities, I am surely not alone in forgetting key components of important books. In fact, I have an august model in the figure of Michel de Montaigne, a world-class forgetter whose frank treatment of his own forgetfulness is a recurring sub-theme in his Essays. Naturally, I had forgotten the prevalence or even presence of this theme until I stumbled on a reference that sent me back to my own dusty copy of the Essays. There I found, in the chapter “Of Books,” one of Montaigne’s characteristic confessions of fallibility:

To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book…the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it.

Admittedly, Montaigne was forgetting books he had read in Latin; I was merely forgetting books written in or translated into my native English. Furthermore, Montaigne’s appended notes must have served their purpose, since he testified to their efficacy, whereas my annotations—well, they didn’t help me much with William James, did they? Blessedly, I never annotated my copy of Montaigne, which clears me of the embarrassment of writing about forgetting and then forgetting it.

For all the laments about his treacherous memory, Montaigne was a voracious and passionate reader. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to call him a voracious and passionate re-reader. His personal library, of about a thousand volumes, was vast by the standards of his time (1533–1592), but he returned again and again to Terence, Tacitus, Plutarch, Virgil, and other favored authors. While some scholars think he was exaggerating for effect, I have no trouble believing his claims:

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances I immediately forget.

The question is, did Montaigne’s spotty memory aid or hinder him in becoming the creative, engaged reader that he was? Yes. By which I mean to say, I think it aided him. I have no evidence for this assertion, of course, except to cite my own case, which parallels Montaigne’s in temperament, if nothing else. In spite of my lingering pedantry, I am very much the sort of unsystematic, pleasure-seeking reader that Montaigne described himself as being:

I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.

What Montaigne acquired from his reading was “something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s”—that is, he possessed, in the deepest sense, the books he read. He made them his own, never mind the weight of authority or tradition. I can’t think of a better formulation for a meaningful and personalized manner of reading. Would a less defective memory have heightened the sense of surprise and delight that Montaigne derived from his favorite books? Unlikely. I myself read the Essays—when I do—with a sense of surprise and delight (mixed, at times, with frustration and impatience). That’s because I’ve forgotten them.

At City Journal, Mark P. Mills makes it clear that “We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition”:

So, which is it? Inevitable or a “scam?”

We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.

For the transitionists, this is just proof that we need more spending and more aggressive mandates. Set aside whether any political appetite exists for either more such inflationary spending or more intrusive energy diktats. The fundamental question is whether any energy transition is even possible—or even whether such has ever happened.

The transition narrative is tenacious. Even Cembalest uses the word 41 times in his report. While the idea of an energy transition anchors the raison d’être for green and climate-advocacy groups, it also gets bandied about constantly in popular media, as well as in virtually all the statements from major energy companies, electric utilities, energy analysts, and investment banks. Among myriad examples, the week after Trump’s congressional address, The Economist hosted an Energy Transition Summit, and Reuters holds its Energy Transition North America conference this fall in Houston.

Underlying the narrative is the implicit—and often explicit—conviction that the long and now “accelerating” march of technology means that ancient energy sources, like fossil fuels, are inevitably being replaced by newer ones. We are reminded, constantly, of analogous tech transitions such as landline-to-cellphone or horses-to-cars. But such analogies are category errors. Technological progress more often changes—rather than replaces—how we access, move, and manipulate materials. We still use ancient materials like wood, stone, concrete, and glass, and at far greater scale than any time in history. Indeed, the facts show that no energy transition of any kind has ever occurred in history (with one minor exception, which we’ll get to).

Humanity has used the same six primary energy sources for millennia. In reductionist terms, these are: grains, animal fats, wood, water, wind, and fossil fuels. The world today uses more of all of these categories than ever before.

Of course, we have seen reductions in the share of energy supplied by these sources, but that’s not what the transitionists mean. To illustrate the fatuousness of the central idea of an “energy transition” that eliminates the use of any of these sources, consider some history.

Grains have long fueled the biological “machines” of human civilization, the various beasts of burden—and, tragically, slave labor—used in farming, industry, and transportation. Sadly, civilization hasn’t even transitioned away from slavery, not least in the case of African mining, as documented in the book Cobalt Red. If the Global Slavery Index is correct, more humans are mired in forced labor now than at any time in history. Likewise, the world today uses more “working animals” than ever—some 200 million, fueled by grain.

Even in the U.S., despite far fewer grain-fueled working animals (mainly in boutique applications like policing or entertainment), the tonnage of grain used to fuel transportation is now 300 percent greater than during America’s peak horse era. This is the result of the ill-advised 10 percent grain-ethanol mandate for gasoline.

Since ancient times, humans have used the fat from slaughtered animals, rendered as oils or tallow for illumination, including candle-making. Today, global biofuels production (biodiesel) is about 1,000 times greater than two centuries ago. While that production is now dominated by plant oils (especially soybean and Jatropha), roughly 100 times more animal fats are used today for fuel as during the peak whale-harvesting era. Abandoning whale oil is history’s one clear exception to the no-energy-transitions rule.

Whales were saved by advances in chemical science and the invention, circa 1840, of coal-to-kerosene synthesis (well before the modern oil era began). As inefficient as this early process was, it meant that one ton of coal could yield as much oil as harvesting three tons of whales. This staggeringly more cost-effective chemical process collapsed the value of harvesting whales.

As for wood, the amount burned for energy today is greater than at any time in history. Overall, burning wood supplies the world with twice as much energy as do all the world’s solar and wind machines combined. Even in the U.S., use of wood for fuel is greater now than a century ago. A wood transition? Not yet.

The use of watermills for industrial grinding of grains dates back to ancient Greece. It soared during the Middle Ages, when an estimated 500,000 watermills operated in Europe. But that was hardly peak waterpower. Global hydro dams today produce roughly 500 times more energy.

Windmills, similarly, didn’t peak in the past, though there were, by most counts, 200,000 of them in the Middle Ages, as well as tens of thousands of wind-powered vessels, a.k.a. sailing ships, by the nineteenth century. Global wind turbines harvest at least fifty-fold more wind energy than at any time in history.

Finally, there are the reviled fossil fuels. Despite the epic expansions in all of the above itemized fuel sources, the fossil fuels supply over 80 percent of all global needs today. Their use, however, is hardly new. Archeologists date coal use back to the Paleolithic era. The ancients also used hydrocarbon tars and pitch for heat and lighting (and warfighting). But the world obviously uses far more coal, oil, and natural gas than at any time in history. Indeed, the world today uses more of every kind of energy deployed since the dawn of civilization (with the notable exceptions of whale oil).

There’s never been an energy transition.

Seth Mandel at Commentary points out that Columbia University has reached the point at which reliance on the federal teat runs headlong into the school’s tolerance for Jew-hatred:

while the prevailing narrative is that Trump is seeking to “make an example” out of Columbia, singling out the university for a sort of political hazing, the opposite is probably true: Columbia, as an institution, genuinely is in worse shape than anyone would have believed prior to the tentifada protests that broke out in support of Hamas after the latter’s Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. In that sense, the psychotic break the school has been having for 16 months is akin to an addict having to hit rock bottom before getting clean.

A good example—and one that probably has something to do with Columbia’s sudden cooperative tone—is the story that came out this week in the New York Post about the abuse faced by school janitors. As I wrote last week, one janitor on duty during last spring’s infamous Hamilton Hall occupation by pro-Hamas forces filed a report outlining how he was “assaulted and battered, and wrongfully imprisoned” by anti-Zionist activists. Now it turns out he and another janitor have filed a civil-rights claim over the alleged harassment they faced in retaliation for “reporting antisemitic and racist conduct.”

According to the complaint, soon after the Hamas attacks in 2023, students started drawing swastikas on the walls of buildings that Lester Wilson and Mario Torres worked in. They were ordered to simply scrub the swastikas and otherwise do nothing. “No matter how many times Mr. Wilson removed the swastikas, individuals kept replacing them with more,” the complaint alleges.

One of the janitors started removing chalk from the rooms after-hours so the swastikas would stop appearing, but was reprimanded by the school for doing so. When protesters ran through the building drawing anti-Semitic symbols, the janitors were told that “the trespassers and vandals were exercising their First Amendment rights.”

When the tentifada encampments began springing up around campus, the janitors were offered overtime to clean up around the camps. When another janitor did so, he was taunted as a “Jew-lover” by the students he was cleaning up after.

It turns out, then, that Columbia had something of a Nazi problem on campus. They were privileged kids in masks, but functionally Nazis nonetheless, obsessed with Nazi symbolism and Nazi language. Their violence toward the building workers only increased over time, as did their anti-Semitic harassment of Jews on campus.

This is what makes Columbia so unsympathetic. If Trump were merely trying to make an example of them, it could be easily demonstrated by showing that Columbia’s disorder was representative of the situation at universities across the country. But is it really the case that the Nazified atmosphere at Columbia is par for the course in American higher education? I don’t think academics at other schools really want to make this argument.

This one’s a real bracing upside-the-head. At Politico, James Kirchick convincingly asserts that “The ‘Free World’ Is Gone, and There’s No Turning Back”:

While many may view that two-week period as indistinguishable from the rest of the Trump era, future historians won’t: They’ll record it as marking an epochal shift in global politics potentially even more significant than the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It marked the end of an era — the era of the American-led liberal international order.

That era began after the Second World War when an isolationist country reluctantly assumed the mantle of world leadership, an enormous, multifarious endeavor resulting in historically unprecedented economic growth, scientific discovery, human flourishing and peace. America’s material resources were essential to this decadeslong, globe-spanning effort, but more important was the conviction, shared not only by hundreds of millions of Americans but countless people around the world, underlying it: that the United States was an exceptional nation uniquely positioned to be a force for good in the world.

Across those eight decades, an ethic of idealism undergirded American foreign policy, one traceable to the country’s founding. Whether Republican or Democrat, American presidents regularly invoked the providential role that the United States, as the world’s oldest democracy, was destined to play on the global stage. President Thomas Jefferson referred to the young nation he helped found as “the world’s best hope” while his archrival John Adams sent arms to the leaders of a slave rebellion that liberated Haiti. Over 150 years later, Dwight Eisenhower declared that “We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress.” His successor John F. Kennedy famously declared that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” And in his farewell address Ronald Reagan spoke of America as a “shining city upon a hill,” a phrase that his ideological polar opposite Barack Obama invoked during the 2016 election.

Fulfillment of these lofty ambitions obliged America to support democracies and oppose dictatorships. As a global superpower with responsibilities no other nation was either able — or willing — to undertake, it could not afford to have the impeccably moral foreign policy of Sweden. Idealism inevitably clashed with realism, with the latter often triumphing over the former. This was especially true during the Cold War, when Washington helped engineer the overthrow of democratically elected leaders and supported authoritarian regimes. And it continues today with American backing of repressive governments in the Middle East. But even while employing immoral means, American leaders did so in the pursuit of what they considered moral ends, whether fighting communism, halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or resisting radical Islam.

Opponents of the American-led liberal international order harp endlessly upon its faults while taking its virtues — free and open sea lanes, the spread of liberal democracy, values-based alliances, the protection of human rights — for granted. Eager to lambaste the order for its many faults, they prefer not to grapple with the international system rapidly taking its place, a dog-eats-dog world where America has abdicated its role as global policeman and authoritarian states gain spheres of influence in which less powerful countries must bend to their will. Even the most vociferous critics of American global power may come to miss it once Russia, China and Iran gain dominance over Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

There. That ought to keep you out of mischief this weekend.