Friday, April 30, 2021

Identity politics and suffering. It's not starvation but disease that kills off population. Religious revival of the elite? The limits of sympathy. Beautiful storms.

Sorry, forgot to hit “send” yesterday! —mg

Identity Politics Is Grounded in Suffering
Carl Trueman uses an oft-quoted line from Karl Marx (a) to show us what Marx really thought about religion, and (b) to help us better understand what’s behind identity politics. In Identity Politics: Opium of the People, he writes,

The temptation on both sides of the political divide is to dismiss the identity politics of the other side as self-interested special pleading, rooted in trivial concerns: the accidental use of a wrong word; the tantrum of somebody who isn’t getting his way; a power play by an ideological bully. And certainly there is much truth here…. But we should beware of reducing the whole of identity politics to the self-serving ressentiment of those who want a turn in the limelight. Surely it is more. For many it is the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.

How Population Growth Is Slowed
A recent blog by Andrew Batson begins,

Few people are as famous for being wrong as Thomas Robert Malthus, the English cleric and early student of population growth. Malthus thought that while population could grow exponentially, food production could grow only linearly.

He goes on to review a book that argues that historically population growth has not been checked  by a shortage of food.

Something clearly operated to keep human population in check before its explosion over the last couple of centuries. But it was generally not starvation. The real problem is that population growth begets population density, and population density, in the absence of sanitation, antibiotics, and other checks on infection, begets disease and death.

This is especially interesting to ponder in light of the current pandemic and the increased urbanization seen in nearly all nations.

Looking for Revival in High Places
If you haven’t used up your five free NY Times articles for the month, Ross Douthat’s column “Can the Meritocracy Find God? The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion” is well worth your time.

The Limits of Sympathy
It’s a dangerous time to sympathize with the police, but Anthony Esolen’s “An Accident of Attention” does so in order to drive home a larger point:

We tend to see some victims and not see others. The unarmed man who is killed by a cop—we see him, as we should. We do not see the hundred cops, in the hospital, dying of heart disease in their middle age. We can’t “grasp” that; there is no clear and single picture of it. We see things that happen, but we forget about things that might have happened but did not because someone was there to prevent it. We see things that fit the stories we have been told, or that are repeated again and again, but we do not see things that do not fit the story, or that do not fit any story at all.

Sympathy depends on where we turn our gaze. That is unavoidable. It is simply impossible for a single human being to feel for every kind of suffering on earth and for every person who suffers….

… the claims on any one person’s sympathy are too many and too great. We do not have the energy for it, or the time, even if we had the God-like breadth and depth of vision that it would require. What is true of the individual is even more true of a society when it is fired by the passions of the mass phenomena. It will be intensely focused upon one thing, or upon one feature of one thing, and it will miss the rest.

Beautiful Storms
Social tsunamis, of which there are now many, are not beautiful. But natural ones can be, especially if viewed through time-lapse photography.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli
markgalli.com