Saturday roundup
A compendium of reading recommendations for a hammock-conducive, languid June weekend
Writing is my job, and Precipice is the most important form that takes. I realize there’s no end to the clamoring for your hard-earned dollars, and this is a time of economic uncertainty. But if you feel this site makes an important contribution to the national discourse, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
As you can see, I’ve been kind of focused, broadly speaking, on the subject of deepening one’s faith walk, with the last few posts.
This morning, I came across this piece which effectively covers some of this ground. It’s titled “How (Not) To Lose Your Christian Kids to the World,” and it’s at the Substack of Sarah Salviander, a “Bible-believing, weightlifting, cancer-surviving, PhD astrophysicist.”
Her first how-to bullet point touches on something I’ve felt Christian spiritual formation needs to get right for some time - namely, getting to the why of belief instead of being satisfied that kids are hewing to the believer’s life because you told them it was the right thing to do:
Christian kids know how to respond to questions like “Who is Jesus?” or “What did He do for us?” but most of them can’t tell you why they believe any of it. They can tell you Jesus is in their hearts, but they can’t defend serious questions like: How do you know God created the universe when science explains its origin? Why do you believe Jesus rose from the dead when that’s impossible? Where is God when bad things happen to good people?
If young Christians only encountered other believers, this might not be much of an issue. But they live in a world full of other religions and an increasing number of non-believers. If you send them to university, they will encounter serious challenges to their beliefs. Once they get on social media, they’ll face a tidal wave of objections—everything from the utterly moronic to the highly sophisticated. This deluge can wear down even the most committed Christian unless they are prepared. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 6, we need the full armor of God—and that includes knowing why we believe what we believe.
She says this in fleshing out point number two:
The truth is, strict religions succeed, mushy ones don’t. As a Star Wars nerd, I appreciated this deep dive on Mandalorian culture—specifically the strict “Children of the Watch” faction Mando belongs to—and how it relates to real-world religions. After the devastation of their home world, this group survived by doubling down on the old ways: never removing their helmets, adopting foundlings as true children, and constantly reinforcing “This is the way.” Scholars of religion show that high-demand groups like this survive by filtering out uncommitted people, creating powerful solidarity through costly practices (what they call “credibility-enhancing displays”), and building fictive kinship that treats adopted members as real family. For centuries, that described most Christian churches in the West. Today, it’s the same dynamic you see with the Amish, whose population in North America continues to double roughly every 20 years thanks to their strict practices and high commitment. These mechanisms help strict communities survive catastrophe and pass their beliefs on across generations, while loose, accommodating groups tend to fade away.
This set of questions related to point three found me guilty as charged:
It’s easy to model Christ-like virtues when things are going your way; but when life presents serious challenges, it can seem impossible. This is where real discipleship happens. If you’re tempted to take the easy way out, think about what that’s teaching your children. Do you gossip about the “losers” in your life or lapse into despair when something goes sideways? Do you snap when you’re impatient or curse in traffic while your kids are in the backseat? Your daily reactions are teaching them far more about Christian ethics than any sermon or youth group lesson on what a wonderful model Jesus was. (In case this sounds preachy: I’m talking to myself as much as to you.)
A great book review stands alone as an essay as well as wanting to make you read the book being reviewed. We get that from University of Virginia culture scholar Ryan S. Olson’s review at The Hedgehog Review of Cicero: The Man and His Works by Andrew R. Dyck.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was blessed to have a father who felt strongly about cultivating his son’s life of the mind:
Cicero hailed from Arpinum, southeast of Rome, from a noble family well established in local affairs. Being a provincial, Cicero “would have to forge an identity for himself and decide how to balance loyalties” in the great capital. His family had only become involved in Roman politics in his father’s generation, making him a relative newcomer—a novus homo, or “new man,” in the parlance of the day. This was a status that presented difficulties even for a man of Cicero’s brilliance and skill. And these challenges were heightened unimaginably in an era that turned out to be, in hindsight at least, the late Roman Republic. That historical fact points ahead to Cicero’s second education, in power.
Cicero’s tutelage aimed him at a life in politics, beginning with a legal career, which could only be provided with a secure home base in the city. Marcus Tullius senior provided an education for Marcus fils and his younger brother, Quintus, initially with a family connection, the famous orator Lucius Licinius Crassus. Cicero’s father bought a house in Rome to facilitate his children’s education—per Crassus’s advice, in Greek, with Greek tutors, and with Homer featuring, as always, most prominently. Following his bookish father, Cicero chose as his motto Homer’s line from the Iliad, “always excel [aristeuein] and overtop the rest.” If this seems bombastic, it was necessary for someone in his position: “Cicero needed such an emotional thrust,” wrote the towering Cicero scholar D.R. Shackleton Bailey, “to make his way among social superiors in a highly caste-conscious community.”
Having assumed the toga virilis, the traditional Roman coming-of-age marker worn on civic occasions, around age 16 (90 BC), Cicero was taken by his father to attend a prominent lawyer’s consultations, the equivalent of enrolling in law school. Around this time, Cicero also began, Dyck reports, “a lifelong practice of closely observing political events and public speakers,” including “almost daily attendance at political meetings called by magistrates (contiones).” The ambitious young law student always looked for “good oratorical models,” even during his obligatory military service, which happened to occur during the Social War, a struggle between groups on the Italian Peninsula.
As a teenager, Cicero also began to study philosophy, an avocation that would sustain him throughout his life. Cicero argued with all four of the major philosophical schools active during his lifetime: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Stoicism was his first stop, with his tutor Diodotus, who oversaw his study of dialectic and whom he honored in the latter’s blind old age by making him a member of Cicero’s own household. Later, he studied with Phaedrus, who eventually presided over the Epicureans at Athens. Most influentially, Dyck argues, Cicero learned from the head of Plato’s Academy, Philo of Larissa, whose own intellectual grandfather was the famous skeptic Carneades, known for lecturing in a bellowing voice that could compete with the surf’s roar, and for stimulating a stream of interpretations that filled four hundred scrolls. Cicero would draw on this intellectual lineage as a lawyer, politician, and philosopher.
Cicero’s training as a lawyer would have been incomplete without extensive tutelage in rhetoric. Here the Greek masters were his guides during their visits to Rome, and Cicero began as a student to compose a detailed rhetorical handbook—not in Greek but, tellingly, in Latin. It marked the beginning of Cicero’s efforts to bring the best of Hellenism into a distinctively Roman style and approach to rhetoric and philosophy. He began arguing cases, married, and embarked on an extensive tour of Greece and Asia Minor to freshen his oratorical style.
He also benefitted from his personal acquaintances with some late-Roman-republic heavy hitters:
an education in power that unfolded through his civic friendships with leaders in the late era of the republic, especially Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Octavian. Each wielded authority in ways that challenged Cicero’s republican ideals and imposed practical lessons in the operation of power. These relationships became a living curriculum through which Cicero tested his paideia-born convictions about virtue, eloquence, and the state.
With Pompey, who recruited his own legions and called himself Magnus (“great one”), Cicero was painfully aware of a power gap between his own middling military career and the carefully propagandized triumphs of the self-styled “warden of earth and sea.” As Dyck notes, Cicero’s “position as a self-made ‘new man’ sharpened his sensitivity to the weaknesses of the traditional aristocracy…but also left him exposed…to the jealousy and resentment of Pompey.”
Cicero’s encomium to the general’s character and courage (virtus) and good luck (felicitas) oversold Pompey, who exercised power rooted in military success and the loyalty that accompanied it. Cicero admired and resented him in equal measure, borrowing Pompey’s patriotic rhetoric even as he worried about its populist appeal. In Pompey, Cicero saw both the ideal of republican service and the temptation of tyranny. His early orations, modeled partly on Pompey’s rhetoric of defending the republic, reveal this tension.
From Julius Caesar, whose murder he witnessed and whose conspirators he advised, Cicero learned how intellect could coexist with tyranny. Dyck describes Caesar’s deliberate cultivation of Cicero—offering loans and political favors—as “a calculated campaign to draw Cicero closer to him.” Caesar dedicated his treatise On Analogy to Cicero; Cicero responded with a poem praising Caesar’s British expedition. Dyck notes that Cicero “could relate on a literary level” to Caesar, accepting him as part of an “‘intellectual community,’ distinguished by…humane values…and literary learning.” The experience taught Cicero that power could masquerade as civility, and that eloquence could serve the ends of domination. His uneasy cooperation with Caesar shaped a crucial stage in his education—the realization that moral authority was, at least in the late Roman Republic, impotent against the organized might of legionary command and the prestige garnered by military triumphs.
Cicero’s final teacher was Octavian, who perfected the art of manipulation and, with Cicero out of the way, transformed himself into the princeps senatus: Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. As Dyck recounts, the young heir to Caesar’s name played to Cicero’s vulnerabilities as a novus homo, enlisting him “to save Rome a second time.” Believing he could guide the boy toward republican virtue, Cicero threw his influence behind Octavian’s cause and “took the lead in organizing resistance to Antony,” his rival.
That association with Octavian led to a grisly end, however:
Yet Octavian’s apparent deference concealed a ruthless pragmatism. Cicero learned too late that his eloquence was being instrumentalized for another man’s ascent. After Caesar’s murder, “the three-fold world divided” among Octavian, Marcus Antonius, and Lepidus, in Shakespeare’s telling, the triumvirs made sure that Cicero’s name led the list of political enemies to be eliminated in the year 43, a sentence he received, according to Livy’s tragic account, with the words, “I shall die in the homeland I have often saved.” Roman troops tracked Cicero down near his villa, where he extended his own neck to allow the soldier to sever his head cleanly. His head and hands were displayed in the Senate, symbols of the dismemberment of republican virtue. In Octavian, Cicero confronted the final stage of his education in power, realizing that charisma, cunning, and the rhetoric of moral restoration could be fused to overthrow the very republic they claimed to save.
Olson says of Dyck’s book that it’s “an extended meditation—every page inflected by historical depth and biographical breadth—on the limits of reason and rhetoric in an age when the republic itself was collapsing.”
Yuval Levin acknowledges at the outset that the title of his piece at The Dispatch - “Is the American Experiment Legitimate?” - is going to have a well-duh kind of effect on a lot of readers, but then also explains why we should hear him out:
Is our government legitimate?
Although we rarely ask that question quite so bluntly, it actually lies at the bottom of many of our deepest disputes. Those disagreements that really cut to the core of our politics tend to be less about the direction of public policy in one arena or another than about who should have power in our government, by what right, in what way, through what means, and to what ends.
These questions were at the very heart of the American Revolution, which took itself to be responding to an abdication of governmental legitimacy. And they were then crucial to the effort to frame a legitimate constitutional system in the revolution’s wake.
Some of the most fundamental political debates we have today are about whether that effort succeeded. There have long been critics of the U.S. Constitution who argue that the system lacks legitimacy. Some of them now teach in America’s leading law schools and occasionally populate the upper reaches of government. But even at their most intellectually serious, such critics too rarely engage with what our Constitution is really trying to achieve when it comes to legitimacy, and why.
So in this 250th year of our republic, as we reflect on our history and also look forward, it is worth asking some basic questions: What did the American founders think a legitimate form of government needed to look like? Does their test of legitimacy still make sense? And does the form of government we inherited from them pass that test?
Consider the decade-plus in which the founders saw what had been left undone by the Declaration:
The Constitution, like the Declaration, came together in the summer, in Philadelphia, in what we now call Independence Hall. The two documents were debated and approved in the same room, but 11 years apart. And the experience of those 11 years confirmed the difficulty of the challenge that the Declaration had sketched out.
They were seven years of war and four years of peace. The war was fought for self-government, and against abuses of power by a government that was not sufficiently accountable to the people it governed. The revolution came to be understood, at least by the end of the war, as what we might call a struggle for democracy. And the forms of government established in the states during and after the war tended to be radically democratic: Strong legislatures kept close to the people, in several cases through annual elections, and a kind of thoroughgoing majority rule.
There was general agreement in America that these republican forms were necessary, and in some respects that they were key to what the war was about. But by the end of the war, and especially in those first years of peace, it also became increasingly clear that these modes of government were not working well. They didn’t govern effectively, nor did they protect the rights of the people effectively. The populist governance of those years regularly devolved into mob rule, which led to widespread instability, governmental dysfunction, and in some cases, outright political violence.
Toward the end, he gets directly to the question that makes for his title:
When we take our system of government for granted, we tend to see only what it prevents us from doing and to ignore what it enables us to do. We see the bad but not the good. And that is precisely because of how extraordinarily effective our system has been at securing the good. Its success has led us to forget why it is necessary.
But if our form of government is going to last another 250 years, we will have to grasp just how successful it has been and therefore also just how necessary it remains. The greatest challenge we will face is the challenge we have faced from the start: the challenge of legitimacy.
In his June 3 post at his Substack Onward & Upward, Jay Nordlinger employs the random-thoughts format. Here are three random thoughts from it that tie together:
Again, young people might be shocked: Republicans once prided themselves on being “the party of ideas.” Let me walk down Memory Lane a little.
In 1980, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) made a widely quoted statement: “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”
Years later, I took a friend of mine, Howard Kissel, a well-known theater and music critic in New York, to a gathering at Bill Buckley’s. Afterward, he said, “It was so strange to attend something where everyone was talking about ideas. It was wonderful.”
***
On social media the other day, someone reacted to a statement of mine by saying, “The Buckleyites just won’t die off soon enough.”
I have terrible news for this fellow: I know some Buckley conservatives in their twenties. Not an army—but a decent platoon, for sure. Maybe even a company.
***
Every moment of every day, the snorters snort, the dunkers dunk, and the owners own. Bill (Buckley) referred to this as “attitudinizing.” He warned against it, arguing instead for recta ratio, or “right reason”—with flair, if possible.
(He even titled a collection of his “Right Reason.” It came out when I was in college, and I inhaled it.)
How much of what you and I are consuming, or producing, is “attitudinizing” and how much is something more substantial and edifying? I have thought about this lately—and by “lately,” I mean for the last many years …
Well, okay. That ought to while away the sultry hours this weekend. Can I get you another glass of lemonade while I’m up?