Blessing of Unicorns: Fighting Despair, embracing useless knowledge, light-up bath toys supply chains, and more

One unicorn is just one unicorn. Did you even see it, you wonder. Gather a herd together, and they form a Blessing of Unicorns upon your weekend! This week, be encouraged to fight despair, read good books (the two are related), Christian posture toward work, and more book reviews and book news.

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Jake Meador comments on this stage of the election season: “The Argument for Despair is Impenetrable.” A taste:

Often the move toward negative definition comes from the sense of determinism Berry identifies as being part of “the machine age.” I expect that the annoying and regrettable language we use every four years ahead of an election is similarly part of that age. When we become convinced that something is “inevitable” we can, Saruman like, fool ourselves into siding with it. Or we can, on the other hand, convince ourselves that this supposed inevitability has the effect of suspending otherwise normal moral norms or practices of virtue. The illusion of inevitability becomes the justification for a Schmittian state of exception, if you are a bit of a nerd and want to put it that way.

Berry’s reply rips the rug out from under those who argue in such ways. The voice that tells us some undesired trend or danger is inevitable is the voice of Giant Despair, and like Pilgrim we should resist his call. Berry offers one way we can do that.

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Periodically, someone starts blasting pro-Hitler sentiment, and historians (rightly) lose their minds. Then we repeat the cycle another 3-6 months later. Anyway, this week Miles Smith corrects Tucker Carlson: “No, Churchill Did Not Instigate WWII Against Hitler.”

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Joel Miller reviews Abraham Flexner’s The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. A taste:

How important was Albert Einstein? I guess it depends on how much you enjoy GPS. It might depend on your appreciation of other things, as well of course. Lasers, solar panels, and stock-market modeling all depend to one degree or another on Einstein’s noodling.

Einstein wasn’t trying to improve the accuracy of global positioning satellites; they didn’t exist then. Nor did Einstein intend to invent lasers; he was puzzling over Max Planck’s quantum theory of radiation and developed the idea of photons, an essential precursor.

The question behind these stories is simple enough: What’s an idea for? The answer is trickier. It depends on when and how you try to apply it. An idea might appear useless in one context; in another, it could prove the key to innovation and advancement.

That generates some drama because ideas aren’t free. They take resources—usually money, always time—to develop, which puts pressure on ideators to ensure their contributions are useful, immediately so if possible. The trouble is ideas don’t work like that; it usually takes a while for an idea to ferment. 

Meanwhile, an idea might appear vapid, pointless, and wasteful before it reaches its potential—if it ever does. It’s tough raising money for research when you can’t promise a return on schedule, or at all.

Okay, now this suddenly sounds not so different from historical research too…

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Speaking of research that’s just a little bit creepy, you can read here about robots controlled by a king oyster mushroom.

(One mushroom to rule them all…)

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Tara Isabella Burton and Dhananjay Jagannathan are continuing a symposium on the novel at their Substack. This installment from Phil Christman about beauty and especially Marilynne Robinson’s novels is lovely. A taste:

I’m not sure when I first started to ponder the question of whether it mattered, from a Christian perspective, that art be good. It was as a lover of music, and not of literature, that this problem first presented itself to me. I was confronted, every Sunday of my childhood, with music I found painful when incompetently performed, and worse when done right. Our church’s music ran the gamut from the forced pep and aggressive joviality of ‘20s revival hymns to the Godvertising jingles of ‘80s Christian pop. 

The novel, of course, is not music—except to the considerable extent that it is. A euphony fetishist like William Gass or Rikki Ducornet, a novelist-musician like Joyce or Ellison, makes the similarities harder to tune out. (Please do not imagine for a moment that I use the term “euphony fetishist” any way but admiringly.) In another essay, Robinson likens characterization to finding the particular “music” of a character. A novel is made of words, but some of its deepest meanings are non-semantic.

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Let’s switch things up a bit and talk light-up bath toys supply chains. Dominic Pino’s review of Peter S. Goodman’s How the World Ran Out of Everything is a fascinating analysis of supply chain disruptions during Covid. Pino argues that as a journalist, Goodman merely sees “things seen,” but economists see “things unseen.” This makes a book by a journalist about economics a bit skewed.

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Moving on to other things. Benjamin Quinn asks: What Is the Way of Christ in Work and Rest? A taste:

In her well-known essay “Why Work?”, Dorothy Sayers asked the Church a penetrating question concerning the connection between our faith and our work:

“How can one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

Sayers puts her finger on a serious disconnect for Christians—that the distance between our Sunday confession and our weekly profession is far too wide. Jesus matters for all our work and callings in life, and this doesn’t apply only to pastors and missionaries. After all, we knew Jesus as carpenter before we knew him as the Christ.

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Andrew Spencer reviews Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. A taste from his introduction:

Something has changed in the last decade or so. The change has been unthinkably rapid, incredibly widespread, and dangerously subversive.

One aspect of that change is, as Carl Trueman argues in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, that statements like “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” have gone from being obvious nonsense to considered inviolable statements of identity. But such statements, which are extreme fulfillments of expressive individualism, have moved from the fringes of internet chatrooms to the basis for laws, regulations, classroom rules, and corporate HR practices.

Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time documents the rise of the extreme emphasis on identity, identifies the ways that it makes the world unlivable, and provides a roadmap for avoiding the identity trap. The description and prescription are both enhanced by Mounk’s perspective as a progressive commenting on the excesses of the far left. Mounk’s analysis is helpful because he identified the Achilles heel of the identity movement––strategic essentialism—and points to a helpful solution—a return to universal idealism.

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Current writer and Arena regular Dixie Dillon Lane has big news: a shiny new book contract!!! You can read all about it here.

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Speaking of books, if you see Current Contributing Editor Adam Jortner in real life or interact with him elsewhere, be sure to congratulate him on his new book, out in the wild now. Want to learn more about this project in tandem with reading or before you pick up a copy? Good news: Jortner is writing an essay about it for Current, coming in early October.