Death in the City

(a book review)

One thing that Simone Weil, Ramon Llull, and Francis Schaeffer all have in common is an emphasis on holiness, more genuine Christianity, and also, that they're obsolete. I think obsolescence and holiness are inherently related, because to be holy is to be set apart, somewhat set apart from history. The Old Testament is a work of holiness and conservatism.

It feels kind of strange, kind of deliberate, to be reading and promoting people I feel in my flesh to be obsolete, but when I actually read them (at least, Weil, and more so, Schaeffer), I can feel myself connecting with what they talk about as though it's current. Quickly after putting the book down, I find myself back in 2019, but life was more true when I was in the book.

Holiness movements don't have to be obsolete. John Wesley had a successful one, which led to the Methodist church. The effective altruists are rather like an atheistic, humanistic holiness movement. (The effective altruists love (no, "do good to") those who are distant as well as those who are close, and they set themselves apart from climate change to focus on more neglected existential risks. If the ethos of humanism is "humans save humanity by their efforts", then they live that out in a genuine and distinctive way.) Schaeffer had some limited success with his L'Abri center, and had some effect on the political sphere. Non-Christians tend to think of him now as an architect of the Christian Right, if at all. But Schaeffer was not as fortunate as Wesley or the EAs in riding the vital wave of his culture. Wesley was a progressive. There was a time when orthodox Christian beliefs could be progressive, instead of having to split off really Christian thinking from really progressive thinking. Schaeffer seems to be trying to hold together truly Christian thinking -- attempting to stay true to Christ as revealed in the Bible, independent of human pragmatism -- with the spirit of progressive culture, the spirit of caring about people and the world. He didn't want the church to be intellectually split off from the world, but rather to be able to speak in every area, as God had spoken in every area already. But he was conservative in outlook at the same time, seemed to see himself as fighting a losing battle that had to be fought.

I read Francis Schaeffer mostly when I was in college, and there was something in the reading that said: "there's a way to reform human culture to become actually good, and the way to that is through Christianity." It was an exciting thought. I turned away from him after a while, but recently read a work I had missed, Death in the City. Here are some ideas in it:

People are taken more seriously when they are seen as capable of doing real wrong. (People are more significant.) Compassionate Christianity sees people as real and in need of salvation. Doctrine without compassion and reliance on God in daily life is dead, fake, ineffective. Through ongoing relationship with Jesus, over time we are "impregnated" to bring fruit into the world. Reformation (return to source doctrine) and revival (new work of the Spirit, new turning of hearts) go together.

If you know that God exists and has absolute standards, you care more. The stakes of life are higher, and you have to depend on him for salvation, because the standard matters and you can't make it without him. If there are real standards, then people can really be lost, and you can really care about their well-being. Being really Christian (really taking people seriously) causes people to love more genuinely and with more passion and holds society to a higher standard. A coach can get you to try harder than you would yourself. You'll set a goal to try 20% harder and only go 15% harder, but the coach will get you to try 50% harder because she knows you better than you know yourself, and after several failed attempts, you'll make it. A God outside of human pragmatism, or a standard not up for negotiation, can be that for people. To me, this sounds progressive, and in my younger days, more in the phase of life of seeking progressiveness, I saw Christianity as more progressive than secular thinking.

(A few weeks after first drafting this, I am struck by another point from Death in the City, which is that Schaeffer wanted people to have a personal relationship with God, which in some ways is like having a personal relationship with the standard. Personally-relating is the way to live all of life, including the life of bringing things up to standards. Schaeffer would say "personally-relating because of the 'God who is there'", I think, and a God who is present in your life protects you from the natural tendency toward "I'm a survivor, will think whatever I need to to survive, will write off whoever I need to to survive, will cease personally-relating mode of life, will reduce all things opposed to my survival as means to my ends.")

But even in college, I was able to tell that Schaeffer was writing to a much different world than mine. I think our world has a certain innocence to it, believe it or not, an innocence with respect to sin if not to anything else. I hardly have an inherent sense of sin. I know that many Christians still do, but my "flesh" is more secular, even if my will (perhaps my true heart), tries and tries to be Christian. But I can still see some of Schaeffer's vision, the vision that might never be, because we'll never go back to the old days of believing in real sin, real guilt, as opposed to guilty feelings or thoughts, back to real standards.

It's strange. If you look close up, people do seem to care as much as they ever did. And yet, I don't see very many people caring as much as Schaeffer did. If you don't like conservative Christians, you should read Schaeffer just to see a "steel man" of their position, perhaps in his ideas, but more essentially in the kind of voice he had. I don't know too much about his life, so I won't comment on that, but a writing style isn't nothing as far as indicating what kind of person someone is.

Overall, our culture feels bustling, alive, active -- on one level. And played out, over, feeble -- on another. In the political sphere, there is militancy (godless mob absolutes), but not real love, and no guilt, no absolutes that can implicate both the executor of mob justice and its victim into a brotherhood. Opposed to that is an enfeebling blunting of absolutes, a distrust of our moral motions. (Maybe I'm caricaturing the left and liberals, respectively.) The biblical position is that we are all under God -- Schaeffer would say, "under God's wrath", but that doesn't work nowadays, but still, under God.

People nowadays who care as much as Schaeffer did tend not to be Christians (that I know of -- I think if there was someone like Schaeffer nowadays among Christians I would know about it, but maybe not). These more secular caring people seem to be putting out fires rather than thinking of the long term. It's natural during traumatic times to focus on the immediate threat and then its recurring aftershocks. Culture is something way behind the problems we have now. We want to deal with climate change now, but wouldn't it have been much better if we could have gone back to the early 20th century when we first knew the threat and adjust civilization back then? But then maybe there were many cultural reasons why we wouldn't have done that then. So then to go back to the early 19th century and deal with those 20th century cultural reasons upstream? If we could reform the culture, then we would have a base to respond to geographically distant problems (distant people), or looming threats, as one people. Most of our existential risks come from human activities. If we had a really good culture, we wouldn't have anything to fear as a species, except from the natural world.

I realize that at this point, it may be like saying to the captain of the Titanic as it goes down "You know, if you had chosen a different route a week ago, none of this would be happening." Could any of this cultural change have possibly worked in the past? Or is human nature too hard to change? Was Christianity tried and found wanting, as some would allege? Or was it not even tried, as both Gandhi and Chesterton alleged? Schaeffer quotes the book of Jeremiah in Death in the City, and Jeremiah is an interesting book because it starts off with one of my favorite writing quotes (1:9-10):

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

It seems like Jeremiah is going to be a powerful person. But nobody likes what he has to say and he gets thrown in a pit. The king burns his prophecy rather than heeding it. It looks like Jeremiah's just telling the truth, to no further purpose. Maybe his words brought on the judgment they foretold (in some way helped God bring the judgment), and maybe future people have been inspired by Jeremiah to "build and to plant" from his words. But Jeremiah's reality for many years would have been one of "I am saying what I'm supposed to say but there's no apparent power in my words."

Maybe you just have to say the truth as the ship goes down -- the truth is a good in itself. But maybe there will be the future generations who can pick up the message and apply it, and so vindicate God and Jeremiah. We live in an analogous time with climate change. We don't know how bad it will be. Our best messages probably won't turn the ship around. Perhaps only a remnant will survive, who will then have to put together a new world. What will they remember? The Israelites kept Jeremiah in mind, for generations down to this day. What is worth remembering?

One reply to Schaeffer would be: "What you're saying isn't true. You don't know that God exists." Schaeffer engaged with the people of his time and obviously was able to remain a Christian throughout (although I remember he had a period of doubt sometime during his adult life which led to him understanding Christianity better). But it's a fair point, and one which many people have tried to answer without enough success to create an actually good public religion. But another reply is "Even if what you're saying might be true, we don't want to hear it. Liberal humanism is good enough for us. It's too risky to listen to what you have to say. We like vagueness. Vagueness is peace. Absolutes lead to fanaticism and psychological distress, so don't even try to have a better approach to absolutes. Having one God is bad, too coercive. Liberal morality is a better thing to have be coercive. And isn't life beautiful? There isn't enough time to be ugly to each other. People are good and should not be made to feel bad. Let's all be one as we wait for the end."

Maybe we are on the Titanic going down, the embodiers of a dying culture. But I want to bear witness to the possibility that if we could just believe in God, a God who cares more than Schaeffer did and asks more of us than we ask of ourselves, we could have an actually good society, and that this possibility is a good thing, and we can recognize that even if we don't think it can be realized. In other words, to become agnostics who are no longer comfortable in our agnosticism, or even atheists who regret that the best of the "widely-believed fairy tales" can never be true. If they were true, all the causes humanism concerns itself with could be addressed, with no more miracle needed than the change in heart and outlook of those responsible for human society -- all of us. All this to say that a proof of the existence of the right kind of God should be a welcome thing to a humanist.

Some cultural changes seem impossible. We can't even imagine them. To imagine them would be a cultural change. And yet cultural changes occur. More so than Schaeffer did, Llull and Weil both tried to imagine ideal societies. I can't imagine any of their obsolete visions coming true. But I am part of this culture. I realize now that I'm more likely to believe a professor's tired, off-hand comment than a homeless person's passionate, well-thought-out theories. When I was younger, I tended more to the reverse. Our civilization is old, but after it dies, there may be a younger one to replace it.

Rootedness and Respect

How should we treat young people (or anyone)? Answers: respect, make society "rooted". (Long post.)

Introduction

Rootedness: Here's Simone Weil's definition, from The Need for Roots (p.43, Beacon Press, 1952 ed.):

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of the community, which preserves in living shape certain treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession, and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.

She goes on to identify military conquest and money as things that bring the opposite of rootedness, uprootedness. People who have been uprooted can pass their uprootedness on to their children through their culture. Weil puts a high value on work and finding meaning in work. She suggests that one thing that would make work more rooted is if workers could see the things they work on being used. She also suggests that schools for peasants teach them science based around the lifecycle of plants and agriculture.

I don't know much about American Indian philosophy. Two Partially Examined Life podcast episodes (Part 1 and Part 2 of "Relating to American Indian Philosophy") taught me pretty much all I know about their philosophy. The thing that sticks out to me from that is relationality. American Indian philosophy contains the idea that everything is related to everything else. This sounds a lot like Weil's rootedness, worked into how we think about everything we see.

I had always been impressed by what I saw, from afar, as American Indian respectfulness. Not just respectfulness, but a lack of flippancy.

Rootedness breaks down when people don't take us seriously. When we are malicious, lazy, forceful, or merciless, we don't take people seriously. These are some ways to be disrespectful of other people. When we don't respect people, we betray them, destroying trust. This makes it hard for any kind of group to function. Background trust is destroyed, which makes it so that new relationships can't form.

The more damaged people are, the harder it is for them to endure social environments that aren't to their preferences. We think of preferences as based in ego, but they're also based in survival. People are individualists largely because they can't trust other people.

In a rooted society, there is a place for everyone. When we are given a place, we are given a relationality to other people, and in that, we are given respect.

The idea of boundaries connects.

In the West, we don't come from a rooted background. The West is pretty used to its own uprootedness. So we have to teach ourselves how to give each other a place, how to relate all the people to each other. But what's good about this problem, unlike many other problems, is that just about anyone can help with it. No matter where you fall on any given spectrum, there's probably someone who's sort of similar to you somewhere. Maybe, if nothing else, similar in their loneliness. People have called our society "atomized", but anyone can help make it more "composite".

How Can I Respect?

Which is worse, lack of love, or lack of respect? Which leads to more abuse? Probably lack of respect.

We sometimes view respect as optional, as something that needs to be earned. There are two kinds of respect: ego respect and survival respect. People fight to defend themselves, which is a fight to get respect. Egoistic self-defense asks for ego respect, and usually gets survival respect. Survival self-defense asks for survival respect. People who don't get survival respect get abused. People think it's their duty to oppose egoistic self-defense, but by breaking down other people's ability to defend themselves at all, they can destroy their ability to protect themselves from abuse.

Some signs of lack of respect for others:

You can see another's inferiority instead of them. Viewing a person in terms of their attributes, rather than as a person.

(When you think you're an "awesome guitar player" or "a really conscientious worker" or the like, you might not be respecting yourself -- by seeing yourself according to positive stereotypes.)

Making allowances for other people's inferiority.

Warning sign: feel a feeling of affection that you can't "unfeel", which is an emotional fact to you.

Warning: you think someone is cute.

Warning: you think someone is annoying.

Warning: seeing people as being in need of your help.

Warning: being magnanimous toward someone.

Warning: seeing someone as insufficient (weak, sick, immature, wrong, etc.)

Warning: being, or seeking to be, on another level than someone. (For instance, understanding them better than they understand themselves.)

Sign: seeing someone as useful.

Warning: seeing someone as helpful.

Warning: you think someone is beautiful.

Warning: you view someone as working through a process, rather than actually saying what they mean.

Warning: you form predictions of what other people will do or become.

Any time an attribute of someone impresses you strongly, it tempts you to see that instead of them.

Warning: when you don't understand someone.

Sign: you devalue respect.

Warning: you think ego is invalid.

Warning: you're a fake person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you're a lazy person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you're a cynical person, overall, or in some area of your life.

Warning: you have superior taste, overall, or in some area of your life.

Sign: you think someone else's desire to be better than they are is invalid.

Sign: you enjoy someone, you don't trust them, but you don't fear them.

Sign: you assume a position of dominance over someone else and you're okay with that.

Sign: you disassemble, soothe away, manage, other people's confrontations of you.

--

Lack of respect is a form of lack of trust. People who are not trusted have a harder time trusting themselves, and people who don't trust themselves can't behave as consistently. When people are respected, they behave in a way that's more objectively respect-worthy. Seeing the facts can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

--

If you like intellectual things, you can think of respect as being something like "apophatic anthropology". Or at least, that sort of indicates the right way. Apophatic theology involves seeing God as being wholly other than what we can say of him. But people who practice apophatic theology (I think) usually still think of God in the way he's described in scriptures or in their personal experience. On some level, he still has attributes, even though they try to deny them (I think) in order to gain respect for him. Apophatic theology is a formula, and so is the usual "God is love, God is powerful, God is ..." theology. The reality of God is beyond this. The answer's so far away -- but so close. God is just a person. Similarly with people.

If you like psychology, one idea that points the way to respect is "mentalizing". Mentalizing is the intuitive grasp of another person as a person, a mind with thoughts and feelings. In contrast, people can figure each other out in a "teleological" way. They put together a deliberate or semi-deliberate mental model of other people, just the same as they might figure out how an engine works. Teleological thinkers can be good at predicting other people, a lot of the time.

The analogy isn't perfect, because people can be capable of mentalizing and still disrespect people.

--

It's possible to be more mature than other people, or more skilled. This is a state which should fill you with something like sorrow, rather than triumph -- a quiet sorrow. And not a sorrow that the other person is so unfortunate, but rather that you are unfortunate. What you want is to be able to see the attribute or fact of someone's skills, be able to take that into account, while on the deepest level see them as equals and/or sufficient, or best of all, fail to see or trust the categories of "inferior", "superior", "sufficient", "insufficient", or even "equal" -- just you and them.

If you like intellectual things, you might want to read I and Thou by Martin Buber, who talks about these kinds of things in a philosophical way. He says there's such a thing as "I-You" relationships, where your pre-rational orientation toward others is that they are people. He contrasts that with the "I-It" orientation, where you see people as objects. He says that when you say "I" in "I-You" it's different than saying "I" in "I-It". It would seem from that that you have to heal your relationship to others and yourself simultaneously, that it's impossible to fix one without fixing the other, because they are actually one thing.

You can be hard on someone while respecting them -- probably the basic first step to full respect is to be hard on yourself and others -- valuing and practicing respect in an obvious way. But being hard on people isn't necessarily respectful. You can be merciless, which is a way of not seeing a person as a person.

Someone said that hope is a sense both of desire and likelihood, as though the two are a bit hard to distinguish. So we recognize that when people abuse each other, they do so out of a love of evil and a sense of power at the same time. So we try to break other people's sense of power, so that they don't do evil. Some people are capable of doing good while having a sense that there are no consequences, but not everyone is on that level. People whom you wouldn't think, need consequences -- people who wouldn't think they were the kind of people to need consequences. Enforcement makes us better people, better than we realize. This is relevant to the problem of young people disrespecting otheres.

People who genuinely do respect people are the ones in the position to break the power of other people -- something they do without any pleasure or deadness -- and to "put the fear of God" in other people -- something they do without malice, and, somehow, without being forceful or merciless, without writing people off.

If I give practical steps, people who are inclined to "work a program" will do everything but still miss the point. Sometimes the only thing that seems to teach people in a deeper way has to rewrite who they are on a flesh level. You have to be broken by life in order to start changing your mind. It's awful to really grow on a deeper level -- at least, it is for a lot of people. The Bible talks about "fools", who need correction and hate correction. What might work to avoid foolishness is to get the full value of being broken, rather than turning away from its lessons when you get back to health. That's hard, though, because life tells us to have power and power tells us to disrespect. You can try to get the most out of your pain, though.

One of the best ways to respect someone is to listen to them. One of the best ways to listen is to be silent. When you talk to people, be weaker than their words.

Maybe art can help. I wrote a short story as part of How Can We Love?, one of my books, which is about respect and disrespect, called "My Son". It's about how messed up a person can be by someone who doesn't respect them, and it's vivid. A narrative like that might help -- or it might be just more words.

One practice that could help would be focused contemplation. Spend two hours doing something relaxing and thinking about the different people in your life and whether you respect them. When you interact with people, ask God what lesson you need to learn.

Being careful not to believe false things can help you be more "epistemically empathetic", and this can help you take other people's beliefs seriously. If you hold yourself to know reality as it is, if that's something that has power over you, to which you submit, then you are more the kind of person who will try to find the reality of persons in themselves. We can never know reality in itself, in a way that we can put into words, and so it is with people. Trying in one domain helps in another.

One "bottom line" is: let other people have power over you. A form of trust. Trust people. People who don't listen may do so out of the survival distrust, or out of ego distrust, or out of inertial distrust, the distrust left over from survival distrust that is no longer necessary. But trust as much as you can. In religious terms, not trusting when you can is saying that creation is not good for a reason other than the Fall.

A corollary to that is: when you can't trust someone, stay away from them.

A Reading from The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots by Simone Weil, p. 134 - 136:

It is true that men are capable of dividing their minds into compartments, in each of which an idea lives a sort of life of its own, undisturbed by other ideas. They don't care for either critical or synthetic effort, and won't submit to making either unless obliged.

But in situations of fear, anguish, when the flesh draws back before the prospect of death, or too great a degree of suffering or danger, in the mind of every man, even if he is completely uneducated, a manufacturer of arguments suddenly stands forth, who elaborates proofs to demonstrate why it is legitimate and right to avoid that particular death, suffering, or danger. Such proofs can either be good or bad, depending on the particular case. At all events, at the time, the body's disturbed condition gives them an intensity of persuasive force that no orator has ever succeeded in acquiring.

There are people to whom things do not happen in this way. This is either because their natures protect them from fear, that their flesh, blood, and bowels remain unaffected by the presence of death or suffering; or else because their minds have attained such a degree of unity that this manufacturer of arguments has no opportunity of getting to work in them. With others, again, he is able to get to work, and makes his arguments felt, but they are scorned nevertheless. That in itself presupposes either an already high degree of inward unity, or else powerful outward incentives.

Hitler's profound remark on the subject of propaganda, namely that brute force is unable to prevail over ideas if it is alone, but that it easily manages to do so by taking unto itself a few ideas of no matter how base a nature, provides also the key to the inner life. The tumults of the flesh, however violent they may be, cannot prevail over a thought in the mind, if they act alone. But their victory is an easy one if they communicate their persuasive force to some other thought, however inferior it may be. That is the important point. No thought is of too inferior a quality for the role of ally of the flesh. But the flesh needs thought of some kind as an ally.

All of this to say: maybe there's something here to help us in developing respect. Respect is an attitude we have toward other people, most importantly a pre-rational one. It could be a passion of ours, some fleshly desire, which requires some kind of rational form for us to fully trust. It's not just pre-rational, but also an explicit belief. It could be that the passion of love for someone causes us to want to form the pre-rational attitude of respect. I think that's true a lot of the time. But warring with love is its appetitive side, the extent to which love is a form of enjoyment, or feeds enjoyment, or enjoyment is taken for love. Enjoyment is a passion that asks for disrespect to be formed. Likewise we have the passion of power, which casts about for a an idea or pre-rational attitude to justify it. So we might want to learn to be afraid, not of enjoyable things, but of our enjoyment of them, to enjoy things in holy fear, to only enjoy things because we have to in order to experience reality. And likewise to feel utterly undeserving of our power, like it ought to be taken away from us at any moment.

People can be very strong in their beliefs, as with those whose "natures protect them from fear, [...] their flesh, blood, and bowels [...] unaffected by the presence of death or suffering", whose "minds have attained such a degree of unity that this manufacturer of arguments has no opportunity of getting to work in them." In Weil's context, this helps people resist evil, but the faculties and dispositions for resisting evil can also be those of not listening to other people. People can be spiritually and psychologically muscle-bound. This is parallel to those who seem strong and combative who are actually acting out of trauma and thin resources. In both cases there is a tendency to lunge out. A very put-together person -- a secure, mature person -- can fail to pay attention to other people out of their mind's "degree of unity" -- and this is somewhat frightening, because one's own security and maturity are so persuasively trust-producing to oneself, that one won't think to question oneself. What is trustworthy is trust-producing, but not all trust is itself the most trustworthy, and people who get out of the habit of distrusting themselves are in danger of disconnection with reality. I suppose the positive way to put it is, keep trusting the process of better and better trustworthiness, keep trying to trust more, and in the process you will trust yourself less sometimes.

In trustworthy settings, we tend to trust, and when we trust, we can trust anything, including love -- which motivates us to respect. Or a setting could be useful for the purpose of developing respect. In this case it would be trustworthy in a limited way, for that purpose. A respect-producing environment might be one in which respect is modeled by those in positions of power, influence, or authority. Another respect-producing environment could be one that emphasized people's connection to other people, since respect is relational. Self-respect involves seeing the other as one who will respect you, as much as saying "You" involves saying "I" in the "I-You" way. In order to respect other people, see them as "you"s, you have to be different to yourself.

Another respect-producing environment would be one which emphasized reality, because fake respect is disrespect, and is where disrespect can hide in those who in some sense don't want to disrespect. But overall trustworthiness enables people to enter the general state of trust, out of which respect-producing motions can come. Therefore it could be counterproductive to try to make respect a formula for a group, a "core value". Overall trustworthiness, including respect, is needed for any group to function anyway.

Declaring core values, and that you're going to do things, is of some value, but what's more essential for trust, and respect, is your pre-rational attitudes, all the betrayals that don't happen because they're not in your nature to cause. Telling yourself that you want self-respect, that you want to be respected, doesn't do as much good as seeing other people as those who will respect you, and likewise telling yourself that you want to respect other people doesn't do as much good as just doing it. Talking about things can be a placeholder.

So an organization needs people who understand what is needed intuitively, and can embody what is required for a trustworthy environment.

To get back to the Weil quote one more time: in the last paragraph, she mentions that inferior ideas can be used by the flesh's needs. But perhaps good drives can annex to themselves inferior ideas. Perhaps that's an explanation for "faith", that God gives us a drive to believe, or God as he contacts us is the drive to believe, which attaches itself to inferior ideas. I don't think Weil believed that humans are unable to believe ideas because they are superior, otherwise, how could we think that any were superior to begin with? But it may be that ideas, as much as words, are not really the point, and that wordless, idealess realities are more important. But we still seem to need ideas for some sort of purpose. Words are useful in pointing out wordless realities. If I say "sky", you know what I'm talking about, more or less. I'm not talking about "s-k-y", I'm talking about ... I have to use words to describe the sky, but you get the picture: it's this thing that I can see but can't touch, which I can see above me, blue or grey or pink in the daytime and black or dark grey in the nighttime. Similarly with ideas -- they point to non-cognitive realities. Pointing something out can open a pathway to deliberate action, and can help us notice a phenomenon more often.

Belonging and Wider Rootedness

A person can be a word to us, in their image of personality, pointing to an unspoken reality, or a force or desire within us.

You meet someone who gives you a sense of belonging -- a "one-person rootedness environment". Through them, everything around you is home. You relate to other people through them, because they do, because of the home they bring you all around the very places that weren't home before. You are inclined to worship them and "eat" them -- to disrespect them.

Narrow-scale rootedness could be called "belonging". We seek belonging, and when we get it, we stop caring about society-wide rootedness. The desire to understand the big picture -- truth as a whole, society as a whole, the past and the future (the whole skein) -- can come out of a desire for rootedness, a kind of cognitive rootedness. God is connected to the big picture, and we connect through God through our connection to the big picture. The desire to relate to the truth as a whole, society as a whole, to God, can in fact often enough really just be a desire for belonging, and once we get belonging -- from a friend, lover, family, assembly, or whatever -- we lose interest in God, in society, in the truth as a whole. The most powerful and effective temptations are where a connection with a good thing destroys, mutes, quenches another.

There can be belonging based around uprootedness. Gathering and bonding while mocking the same things, forming gangs or armies. Young men are tempted to do this, naturally do this. We like people who are uprooted like us -- let's be uprooted together, as a song might go.

As a shadow -- or anti-shadow -- version of this, there can be a rootedness in a world beyond this world. This is like the moth flying to the star -- it doesn't feel the same to connect to what you can only see far away, as a point of light, which never warms you. This kind of rootedness helps you not be beguiled by belonging and the preservation of the status quo, which follows from belonging.

It's respectful see the danger in a dangerous person, the evil in an evil person, not only the good in them. So it's respectful to see the evil and danger in yourself, and not only the good in you, while also seeing yourself as Beyond Attributes -- as just a person. I think that's the most hopeful way to approach yourself, both if you're a young person or an older person.

The rootedness of childhood leads to the disrespect of the adolescent. The spiritual nourishment of a (relatively) protected childhood gives you "stores of fat" to fuel your disrespect as you enter the years where childhood order and restraint break down. Perhaps "stores of fat" disconnected from a source of nourishment just are the spiritual-fleshly condition behind disrespect.

Gravity and Grace

Simone Weil wrote a set of notes which were published under the title of Gravity and Grace. Most of the book is about other things, but there is a section about the titular "gravity" and "grace". Here are some of the thoughts from it, to help explain the meaning of the terms:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity, unless there is supernatural intervention.

Lear, a tragedy of gravity. Everything we call base is a phenomenon due to gravity. Moreover the word baseness is an indication of this fact.

Queueing for food. The same action is easier if the motive is base than if it is noble. Base motives have in them more energy than noble ones. Problem: In what way can the energy belonging to the base motives be transferred to the noble ones?

Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." There is no good apart from this capacity.

To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights.

The Moth and the Star / The Owl Who Was God

Here is a link to the James Thurber story "The Moth and the Star". It's a story about seeking the unseekable, impractical, almost-non-existent and how that makes you a fool and keeps your body beautiful. The link also includes Thurber's "The Owl Who Was God", which is like a mirror version of "The Moth and the Star".

Apparently, someone set "The Moth and the Star" to music.

I could connect "The Moth and the Star" to gravity and grace. Star-seeking (what the one moth does) is sort of like seeking grace. The bridge lamps (what the other moths seek) are like gravity.

We devour people and crave power in this world, because that's reality. But realisticness isn't always trustworthy.

I don't know if Thurber intended this, but one could contrast the moth, who flies to something impersonal and more or less infinitely far away, with the birds in "The Owl Who Was God", who follow the owl, something personal and tangible and present. Moth contrasted with birds, star contrasted with owl.