five quotes (3.27/8.26)
five things I read while spring-breaking in florida + eating pasta in Italy
I just returned from my annual trip to Rome and Florence with students from my school, as well as a short getaway to Florida with my family. I will resume regular programming during Holy Week.
By 2018, Christie’s case had landed before the Supreme Court, which overturned the federal ban on sports betting. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, made no effort to consider the public-policy rationale that had led Congress to make the law, or the cascading consequences of overturning it. He simply ruled that the Constitution empowers states, not the federal government, to regulate gambling, and scrapped the entire legal framework that had been in place for the past quarter century. No one involved—not Alito; nor the five justices who joined him; nor the legislators in 36 states who would legalize sports betting for their constituents; nor the league commissioners, who would rush into partnerships with online sportsbooks—seemed acquainted with Chesterton’s fence.
Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?
—McKay Coppins, “Sucker: My Year As a Degenerate Gambler” (The Atlantic)
Fascinating article. The Atlantic fronted Coppins $10k to gamble on the football season. In this (long) article, he recounts his experiences. There are a lot of standout excerpts, but this one struck me as uniquely insightful. Chesterton’s fence, for the uninitiated, is his story of two men coming to a fence crossing a road. The first man demands that the fence be torn down; the second decides they had better spend some time thinking first, asking why people would have erected the fence in the first place. American morality in 2026 can essentially be described as “Fence! Bad! Remove it!” No consequences, no long-term thinking about why that fence was put up in the first place. Just destruction.
My experience of men’s “accountability groups” fits this description. To help men resist pornography, many church cultures encourage regular meetups at which men confess their weekly lapses. Fear of having to confess is considered a motivator to purity. The fact that such groups are devoted exclusively to pornography (I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man confess anger or laziness in these contexts) reinforces the sense that porn consumption is a special sin. Likewise, immodesty effectively ranks as a special sin for women, so that policing swimsuit style or skirt length becomes a way of sorting the acceptable girls from the unacceptable girls.
This kind of shame is counterproductive. Nobody wants relationships that are grounded in embarrassment over one’s vices.
—Samuel D. James, “A New Purity Culture” (First Things)
Whenever people complain about “purity culture,” my riposte is, “So what do you want, impurity culture?” I actually mean that. I think purity culture had some excesses, covered by James in this article, but I think it needs to be rehabilitated. My linguistic shift would be to call it chastity culture, but that term is equally broken. But the reality is that Christians are called to holiness in sexuality as in everything else. Now, the main problem with purity culture is the one highlighted above: it focuses too intently on one category of sin and leaves others to the side. If I skip the pornography but waste my evenings on my phone, I haven’t necessarily made a moral leap. In fact, as I argue to my students pretty often, big sins confront us with our essential sinfulness; the smaller sins are easier to sweep under the rug.
I do not imagine for a moment that Wim thinks art should ignore the great and persistent injustices of the world. He seems to believe, as I do, that using art to raise awareness of these injustices can be extremely effective, but perhaps he also believes that art is more than the sum of its utility; it is more than a tool or a weapon. Maybe he believes, as I do, that at its core, great art exists purely for its own sake — and that at its most transformative it reveals itself subtly, ambiguously, and curiously; that it is something we approach with awe and wonder, that humbles us whilst also enlarging our hearts, that works its way into our souls and spirits, guiding us towards what is good, beautiful, and true. Art captivates us and imparts a sense of what it means to be human, broadening our understanding of the world and our own place within it — that we have the right to love, laugh, cry, and be thrilled by the world. This is art’s largesse — to remind us that life is worth living.
—Nick Cave, “Issue 355” (The Red Hand Files)
Nick Cave rules. While I don’t adhere to the theology of this song, listen to it without being moved (I dare you!). He is exactly right here. People should be able to sniff out propaganda when they encounter it. What art does is transport us, out of our temporality, our ethnicity, and our narrow range of common concerns. It broadens us. Propaganda narrows. The reaction to propaganda is a head shaken in agreement; the reaction to art is a soul uplifted in largesse.
The result is a bottleneck. Women with money and flexibility can have both family and status. Women without those resources face a harder choice. In wealthy countries, fertility rates are falling among the poorest women, while highly educated women have been having more children since 2010. Thus, credentialed elites greet falling birthrates with indifference or even enthusiasm. Their world shields them from the cost of the norms they help create.
Children didn’t become impossibly expensive. Elite expectations did. Parenthood has become a luxury project rather than a normal part of life.
—Rob Henderson, “The Class Wars Come for Fertility” (Wall Street Journal)
I have quoted the Charles Murray line many times that the Left “needs to preach what it practices,” but it is still worth quoting Rich women have children. Rich women have children because they can afford all the bells and whistles we have made integral to modern parenting. Meanwhile, the poor are shut out. Childbearing, the essential human relational activity, has become a preserve for the wealthy or the indifferent. The wealthy, as always, are shielded from the consequences of their actions.
Given what we now know about the impact of smartphones, why has there been no large-scale movement away from them? Why have the ranks of smartphone-abstainers continued to shrink? The obvious answer is that people have become acclimated. But even those who recognize that such acclimatization has left them worse off haven’t put up much of a fight. Our lives seem irrevocably structured around our phones now, and we see no viable alternative to the status quo.
What we need is a concrete program for cultural revolution. Any such program includes two elements: an animating vision, and a practical strategy. I address the first in the present section, and the second in the next.
—Phil Woodward, “Why and How to Give Up Your Smartphone” (Mere Orthodoxy)
This was a good one to puzzle over this break. As part of our travel policy, students are not allowed to bring smartphones on our trips. It is the best decision we have ever made for this program. Students are more attentive and relational. They are quicker to recognize others' needs and respond to them. The success of the smartphone, for those of us interested in lessening its cultural impacts, is how smoothly and quickly it obviated any sense of how we did things in an era before the smartphone. It is hard to imagine, for example, leading 22 students across Rome and Florence without a smartphone (even though people did this very thing regularly not 20 years ago). This is how all successful technology ultimately works: it makes us forget what life was like before its adoption.