On the downside of the permanent campaign

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One other thing that struck me in that Peggy Noonan column, “There Is No New Frontier,” was this paragraph:

I’m not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between “us versus them” and “us.” People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public’s enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don’t want whatever it is they’re about to get, and they’re about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

I hadn’t really thought about the difference between campaigning and governing in that way, but I think she’s right. Given that governing has become increasingly partisan, increasingly “us versus them,” in recent years, it’s no wonder that popular fatigue and disgust with politics has been increasing.

That of course is why the Obama campaign was so powerful, because it found a way to overcome that fatigue and disgust and generate new enthusiasm and energy for Barack Obama; but while they seem to think they can keep that up forever, this would tend to suggest that in fact, if they keep up the campaign approach, they’ll ultimately get a nasty case of elastic recoil back in their collective face. He can only keep it up so long before his admirers decide he’s just another politician after all . . . and at that point, he’s off the pedestal for good.

“A nation fully settled by government”

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Peggy Noonan wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called “There Is No New Frontier” that I’ve been mulling for a while now.  The core of her argument is an analysis of the differing contexts of FDR’s expansion of government in the 1930s and Barack Obama’s efforts to do the same. It’s more of an analogical analysis than a logical one, but I think it holds pretty well:

A big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they’re living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we’re in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn’t claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It’s not virgin territory anymore, it’s crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren’t all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it’s a world America has been to. It isn’t new to us. And we don’t have too many illusions about it.

Her argument rests less on propositions than on metaphor, on the image she invokes; but it’s a powerful image, and if it’s a valid one—which I believe it is—then I think her argument holds. The President and his administration think they have an opportunity to bring about another major expansion of government, and are determined not to let the crisis go to waste (to use Rahm Emanuel’s language)—but the context isn’t what they think it is, and the parallels they think they see with President Roosevelt don’t actually apply, because the popular attitude toward government isn’t the same now as it was then. They’re failing to factor in the reality that those past interventions have had their own effects, and have changed the board in some important ways.

Americans of FDR’s time could be persuaded that government could do a better job and fix all their problems, because it hadn’t really been tried much before. Americans of our time know better. The New Deal has already been tried, and the Great Frontier, and pushed to the point that another president could stand up and declare, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem”; that bell cannot be unrung. While President Obama may well in the end get his government-bloating agenda through, for the powers of the Executive Branch are great, one thing he cannot be is another President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; that opportunity has passed, and ours is a different world.

Farewell to GeoCities

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You probably noticed that Yahoo rather ignominiously killed off GeoCities this week. That probably didn’t matter a whit to your life, though, which illustrates why they did it as well as anything could. GeoCities has long since been rendered irrelevant by Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and the whole world of what’s commonly called Web 2.0. If you’re like me, your primary mental picture of GeoCities is of acres and acres of ugly websites (which, unfortunately, spawned imitators such as SiteRightNow that are still around, helping people build bad GeoCities knockoffs).

As Slate points out, though, that undersells GeoCities. For all the disaster it became (especially for Yahoo), GeoCities had the right idea. In fact, it was ahead of its time. (That may have been the problem—it was too far ahead of its time for its founders to see the right way to implement its core idea. They did the right thing, but in the wrong way to produce long-term success.)

GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—”user-generated content.”

The company’s founding goal—to give everyone with Internet access a free place on the Web—sounds pretty mundane now. But GeoCities launched in 1995 (it was originally called Beverly Hills Internet), when there were just a few million people online. Back then, the idea that anyone would want to carve out his own space on this strange new medium—and that you could make money by letting people do so—bordered on crazy. (Two other free hosting companies—Tripod and Angelfire—started up at around the same time, but they proved far less popular than GeoCities.) In an early press release, David Bohnett, one of GeoCities’ co-founders, hailed the idea this way: “This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation.” Look past the tech-biz jargon, and his prediction is startlingly prescient. Today, few of us think of the Web as a simple source for information; it’s also a place for dissemination, the place where we share life’s most intimate details. In other words, it’s for “habitation”—and GeoCities helped start that trend.

This is why one insider commented,

Had they done things right with GeoCities, there would be no Facebook, YouTube or MySpace.

Unfortunately for them, though, they didn’t, because they only got half the picture; they missed what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious corollary of their big idea.

The site came upon one of the chief ingredients of Web success—letting people put up their own stuff—but was missing what we’ve since learned is another key feature: a way to help people find an audience for their daily ramblings. The main difference between GeoCities and MySpace is the social network: Both sites let you indulge your creativity, but MySpace gave people a way to show off their pages to friends. On MySpace, your site was no longer shunted off to some little-traveled corner of the Web. Instead it was at the center of your friends’ lives—and so there was some small reward to keep hacking away at it. At least, that was true when MySpace was hot, which is no longer the case—just like GeoCities, it lost cultural cachet to newer, better sites that came along after. In this way, too, GeoCities was a trailblazer, the first example of another reality of user-generated sites: They’re extremely susceptible to faddism. You want a page on GeoCities or MySpace or whatever else only if other people are there too. As soon as the place becomes uncool . . . everyone leaves in droves.

The result is best summed up by T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is cool in more ways than I can count

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HT: my wife

I think these folks are right to say, “the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do”; but honestly, that only begins to bring out all the lessons from this one. Imagine the teaching opportunity of staircases like that, what they would do for people’s understanding and appreciation of music . . . we could use many, many more of these.Though Hap is right—our kids being who they are, if we had a staircase like that on our regular route, we’d never get anywhere on time.

Adventures in Greek

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I wound up this evening, through a series of events, teaching the girls how to say “Thank you” in Greek—eucharistō in Koine, which has evolved to efcharistō in modern Greek. Their attempts to pronounce it were (of course) uneven, crowned by our youngest, who at one point came out with “used-car-isto”; I had to tell her no one would take that as a thank-you. The images that one generated were priceless.

God, game theory, and the inscrutability of providence

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If you don’t read Fangraphs (and if you’re a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees’ sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year’s American League Championship Series and asking the question, “Were they good calls?” His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won’t pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one’s chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.

Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one’s team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what’s going to happen? The other team is going to know what’s coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.

Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don’t really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I’m more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the “best move” isn’t the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.

Read more→

Politics and the practical problem of evil

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In his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson begins the chapter on Psalm 124 with this story:

I was at a Red Cross bloodmobile to donate my annual pint, and being asked a series of questions by a nurse to see if there was any reason for disqualification. The final question on the list was, “Do you engage in hazardous work?” I said, “Yes.” She was interrupted from her routine and looked up, a little surprised, for I was wearing a clerical collar by which she could identify me as a pastor. Her hesitation was only momentary; she smiled, ignored my answer and marked the no on her questionnaire, saying, “I don’t mean that kind of hazardous.”

Eugene didn’t pursue that discussion, as there was a line of people behind him, but he notes later in that chapter that the nurse missed his point. It’s not the particular work of a pastor but the life of discipleship in general which is hazardous; and one reason for that is the power of evil in this world.

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T. F. Torrance rocks the gospel

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Maybe it’s partly because I’m a Celtophile, but I have a tremendous appreciation for the Torrance brothers of Scotland (Thomas F. and James B.). They don’t seem to be all that well-known on the American side of the big puddle, but I think both were among the great theologians of the past half-century. I’m particularly grateful for J. B. Torrance’s strongly Trinitarian and covenantal understanding of Reformed theology, which I think provides a powerful corrective to the tendency toward gracelessness in certain strains of the Reformed communions, and for T. F. Torrance’s work on theology and science (a good brief introduction to his thought in this area can be found in the little book Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking).

I mention this to highlight the fact that the two most recent quotes posted on Of First Importance are both from T. F. Torrance, and both wonderful and important statements. Yesterday’s lays out the implications of our union with Christ (a doctrine on which the Scots seem to be a good bit stronger than most Americans):

From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.

Today’s shows how that underpins the gospel of grace:

To preach the Gospel of the unconditional grace of God in that unconditional way is to set before people the astonishingly good news of what God has freely provided for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.

This radical understanding, that life is all of Christ, and all in Christ, and none of me, is the heart of the gospel; it’s what we as Christians are called to preach and to live out.

Now, who is this church thing about, again?

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I was blown away last night by a great post from the Vice Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Rev. Byron Wade. I’ve never met him, but I’m confident in saying two things about him: 1) he’s good people, and 2) he’s on the liberal side of things in his beliefs. He was, after all, chosen for this position by the Moderator of that GA, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, of whom both those things are also true. (GA always elects liberals.) I’ve had various interactions with Bruce online—on this blog, and his, and Facebook—and I like and respect him a great deal; he’s the sort of person who can disagree with you with grace, respect, affection, and an honest desire to understand where you’re coming from. That’s all too rare (and probably always has been). As such, though I don’t know the man he chose as vice moderator, in my book, Byron Wade comes well recommended for character.

All of this is by way of saying that the following passage comes from someone with a real heart for the church, but not from an evangelical (as in fact he says himself):

The surprising thing that I have heard in my travels is stories about pastors/laity who do not preach and/or mention Jesus Christ. While I have not heard it a lot, it has been said to me enough that it caused me some alarm. . . .

I am in no way a Fundamentalist or a person who is considered an “evangelical street preacher.” What I am saying is that I believe that we who call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ may want to preach him to others, for if we don’t people will go elsewhere. And I would hate to think that we are losing out on witnessing to others because we don’t talk about Jesus.

Byron titled his post (quite properly, I think) “Is it just me or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?” Read the whole thing—some of the stories he tells truly are worrisome. As I read, two thoughts struck me, both rather sad. First, it’s a wonderful thing to hear this point being made by somebody on the liberal side of the aisle; I don’t say that all liberal Christians shy away from talking about Jesus, but one doesn’t often hear liberals calling out the American church for its Christlessness. Second, several of the stories he tells may perfectly well have happened in churches that consider themselves “evangelical”; when folks like Jared Wilson and Michael Spencer criticize the Jesuslessness of the church in this country, it’s not Ivy League liberals they have in mind.

As such, it’s a good thing to be able to make common cause with more liberal folks like the Vice Moderator to ask the American church together, “Is it just me, or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?” Who knows—maybe coming from someone like Byron, it will actually scandalize the church into paying attention.

Another random Internet find

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also preserved years ago from someone’s signature on a message board:

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, whacks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.