Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
This was a great session, and right off the bat I was struck by this statement in President Harold B. Lee’s A Time of Decision:
I believe it is an illusion to say that this is the most critical, decisive time. Write it upon the hearts of all of us that every dispensation has been just as decisive, and likewise that every year has been the most decisive year and time for ourselves, for this nation, and for the world. This is our day and time when honorable men must be brought forward to meet the tremendous challenges before us.
I pulled a few more quotes from that talk that almost make a mini-talk of their own:
There has ever been, and ever will be, a conflict between the forces of truth and error; between the forces of righteousness and the forces of evil; between the dominion of Satan and the dominion under the banner of our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ… The greatest weapons that can be forged against any false philosophy are the positive teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ… The great danger in any society is apathy and a failure to be alert to the issues of the day, when applied to principles or to the election of public officials.
I was especially interested that apathy–as opposed to something like overt sinfulness–was the “greatest danger in any society,” second only to ignorance (and possibly because it leads to ignorance of “the issues of the day.”) I am guessing that, if President Lee were to assess the landscape of our own culture–he would add distraction to go alongside apathy.
There were some parts from Elder Marion D. Hanks’ talk (Joy Through Christ) that also really stuck out to me (both quotations from others):
“God exists in the world. He exists wherever men let him in. Perhaps it is only humble men, men in search of him, men with a great need for him, who really let him in. And God comes to such men not only because of their great need for him, but also because of his great need for them as his allies in the divine task of creating a better world, a better human society, a real kingdom of God.” (P. A. Christensen.)
“You know always in your heart that you need God more than anything else. But do you not know too that God needs you … in the fullness of His eternity He needs you?” (Martin Buber)
These comments emphasize something worth explaining in a little more detail. Up until the 19th century–when the Restoration took place–one of the core tenets of Christianity was the idea that God is impassable. What that means is that He cannot be affected by humans. Nothing we do can impact Him. Accordingly, He would not care when we suffer, and even mercy would be a question of the action of mercy rather than the feeling of compassion. Today, Christianity has more or less completely rejected this tenet, but it was the default for more than 1,000 years.
This doctrine–the idea of a perfectly remote, unempathic God–was one of the first wrongs to be set right during the Restoration. First, there was the Parable of the Vineyard in the Book of Mormon, in which “the Lord of the vineyard wept, and said unto the servant: What could I have done more for my vineyard?” Later, of course, came the story of Enoch’s witness of God’s tears: “The God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?”
Since then, the idea has become so common place that people do not realize how strange and how revolutionary the truths restored through Joseph Smith were. When we consider the implications carefully, however, when we think that there is a Heavenly Father who cares about us and our lives, the implications are still profound.
These days, there are many people who believe that the Church’s emphasis on family is something new and misguided, but I have long thought that—at a level even deeper than teaching or doctrine—the Church has long expressed a reality that family is primary and Church is secondary. What is this deeper level? Well, one way of looking that the Church is as modern day Sadducees: keepers of the temple. And what is the point of the temple? To seal families together.
In many ways that’s the most fundamental mission of the Church: to knit the entire human family together in one extended act of reconciliation. The Atonement is the center of the Church—both in practice and in belief—and the emphasis on family is like the ripples emanating out from that central act, echoes of reconciliation expanding and flowing throughout humanity, restoring what is broken and making us whole again not just as individuals, but as a collective.
Among the talks I read for this week, there was a line in Elder Victor L. Brown’s talk (The Aaronic Priesthood – A Sure Foundation) that made me think I could be on to something. He wrote:
The position of the Church is to aid the parents and the family.
It’s not definitive enough to hang your hat on all by itself, but it’s certainly something to think about. The Church exists to serve the family, not the other way around. And by “family” I mean both senses of the word. I mean my family and your family, our individual little clans here on Earth. And by “family” I also mean: all of us.
We teach our children to sing “I Am a Child of God.” And we take it seriously. In our words, in our songs, but most importantly in our actions.
I just finished listening to a bunch of science fiction stories in rapid succession so that I could cast informed votes for the annual Hugo awards and post the reviews to my new blog.[ref]The Loose Canon is where I will do most of my future blogging about science fiction.[/ref] That done, I returned to some of the non-fiction audiobooks I’ve been waiting to get into, especially Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. It’s been a fantastic spring day, and there was an exquisite, gentle evening breeze as I walked the dog. Meanwhile, Professor Steven Gimbel explained the impact of World War II on the field of social psychology:
In the first half of the 20th century, psychology had the luxury of debating whether a subconscious mind existed and whether scientific methodology required limiting the field of study to stimulus and response, but after the horrors of World War II, psychology changed… The specter of the Holocaust raised deep and troubling question about the human mind and its relation to authority… The reaction to Nazi atrocities in the scientific world is shaped by what are perhaps the three most famous psychological experiments: Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, Solomon Asch’s group think study, and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison study. [ref]The quote is my own transcription, and I added the hyperlinks.[/ref]
I think Millgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments are the most famous. At least, those are the ones that I’ve read about and seen the most. I was familiar with Asch’s study as well, but I haven’t seen it come up as often, and I was unprepared for how deeply a simple remark made by Gimbel would strike me. It hit so forcefully that I hit pause on the audiobook (to keep that thought forefront on my mind), came home, opened my laptop, and began this blog post.
In Asch’s study, participants were given a simple task. They had a reference image that showed a vertical line, and then another image that showed three vertical lines. One of the three matched the vertical line in the reference image, and all they had to do was pick out the correct match. They were asked to do this 18 times. The trick is that the participants were seated at a table with seven other people who were secretly in on the experiment. On the first two rounds, these seven individuals all gave the same answer, and it was the correct one. But on the third trial, these individuals all gave the same incorrect answer. Over the course of the next 15 trials, the seven plants gave the wrong answer 11 times, and in each case all seven of them gave the same incorrect answer.
So you’ve got eight people seated around a table answering a perfectly obvious question. Seven of them have just given the identical, incorrect answer. The point of the experiment was to find out what the eighth person–the only real subject of the study–would do. Given that this is considered one of the “three most famous psychological experiments” you can guess how it turned out even if you don’t already know: 75% of subjects went with the group consensus (even though it was obviously wrong) at least one out of the 12 times when the seven fake participants picked the wrong answer.
There are all kinds of interesting details to the study, especially when it comes to the rationales that the participants gave afterwards to explain why they had refused to go along with the group or why they had, at least some of the time, opted to go along with the group despite what was clearly true. But here’s what Gimbel said about the study that so arrested me:
Asch expanded the study to see what would happen. He showed that the bigger the majority, the stronger the pull to conform, but that if even one person dissented before the test subject, that the test subject was then more likely to voice his different view. Asch showed empirically that having someone else agree with you is a powerful tool in making people willing to take a contrary position. But, if that person [the test subject] were deserted by his fellow dissenter, conformity followed rapidly.[ref]I transcribed this quote from the audio and then added emphasis to the text version.[/ref]
Now, before I continue, I want to take a moment to explain that–contrary to popular opinion–I’m not interested in attacking conformity. Conformity gets a bad rap in movies like Dead Poet Society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAyr0kWRGE
The sentiment in that clip is hogswash. Unfortunately, so is most anti-non-conformity sentiment. There’s an entire guide to being a non-conformist, but–like all such ironic anti-non-conformity statements–the actual point is that non-conformity is bad because it’s a kind of conformity.
So, even the anti-non-conformists are trapped in an non-conformity mindset. Conformity can’t catch a break. Which is a shame, because conformity is actually pretty important in helping to form human society and–because we are social animals–to form who we are as well.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt introduces this concept in a chapter called “The Hive Switch.” He starts with an example of exactly the kind of military drill (e.g. marching) that Dead Poet Society maligns, citing Wiliam McNeill (a World War II veteran) describing drill this way:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 221[/ref]
After his service, McNeill studied this kind of conformity (which he called “muscular bonding”) and found that it “enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit.”[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 222[/ref] What works like Dead Poet Society miss[ref]And it is far from alone in this regard.[/ref] is that conformity is a path to collective consciousness. In the same chapter that begins with marches and drills, Jonathan Haidt goes on to discuss ecstatic mass dancing, awe in the presence of nature, hallucinogens, and raves. One of the roles of conformity, in other words, is to enable humans to access a “hive switch” that flips our identity from individualist to collective. The term “collective” often has negative connotations (like conformity itself), until one realizes that it also implies (as McNeill points out) selflessness and trust.
Writing in The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley emphasizes a similar point. One of the grand puzzles of human nature is that–alone of all animals in existence–we have the capability to come together in large groups to work for collective goals without close genetic ties.[ref]Ant colonies and bee hives work together, but they are also all (effectively) siblings, and so there is no mystery here, genetically speaking.[/ref] In his book, he surveys a lot of literature on evolutionary psychology and game theory trying to explain why it is that human beings, in practice, are able to escape the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is the most famous game theory scenario, and it proves that–if humans were strictly self-interested and rational–we would effectively never cooperate in large groups. And yet, we do cooperate in large groups. Is there any theoretically explanation for this? Yes, it turns out, there is. The only kind of society in which cooperative strategies can survive without being overwhelmed by cheating free-loaders is a conformist society.
There is one kind of cultural learning that makes cooperation more likely: conformism. If children learn not from their parents or by trial and error, but by copping whatever is the commonest tradition or fashion among adult role models, and if adults follow whatever happens to be the commonest pattern of behavior in the society—if in short we are cultural sheep–then cooperation can persist in very large groups.[ref]The Origins of Virtue, page 181[/ref]
So, instead of just making fun of non-conformists for also being conformists, it’s worth keeping in mind that conformity is a route to selflessness and, perhaps, the key to humanity’s unique ability to successfully cooperate in large, unrelated groups. But, if that’s not enough, keep in mind that things like language itself only work because of conformity. If we all tried to be non-conformists in our language, then communication would be literally impossible.
This was a long digression, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while anyway. To get things back on track: I don’t think non-conformity is a laudable goal in itself, but I do think that diversity matters a lot. I worry about echo chambers and I worry about group think and I worry about bubbles. And I worry about that eighth person, sitting at the table, staring at the line, wondering what on Earth could be happening that everyone else is reporting a reality that is the opposite to what he feels. I’m not really worried about whether or not this person gives the correct answer (more on that at the end), but I am very worried that this person feel empowered to give their honest answer.
This is what I had in mind when I recently read an older Slate Star Codex piece: All Debates Are Bravery Debates. In the piece, Scott Alexander argues for being charitable about extreme positions as follows:
Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish…
There are some people who need to hear both sides of the issue. Some people really need to hear the advice “It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” Other people really need to hear the advice “You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.”
It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. You can’t even write really complicated books on how to tell whether you need more or less selfishness in your life – they’re not going to be as buyable, as readable, or as memorable as Atlas Shrugged. To a first approximation, all you can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages, and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.
In terms of explanation, Scott Alexander is right on the money. He says, for example:
This happens a lot among, once again, atheists. One guy is like “WE NEED TO DESTROY RELIGION IT CORRUPTS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES ANYONE WHO MAKES ANY COMPROMISES WITH IT IS A TRAITOR KILL KILL KILL.” And the other guy is like “Hello? Religion may not be literally true, but it usually just makes people feel more comfortable and inspires them to do nice things and we don’t want to look like huge jerks here.” Usually the first guy was raised Jehovah’s Witness and the second guy was raised Moralistic Therapeutic Deist.
That sounds familiar, and I think we all have friends who used to be really extreme in one direction, and now they’ve gone overboard in the other extreme.[ref]In The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans de Waal pokes fun at New Atheists in general and Christopher Hitchens in particular: “Some people crave dogma, yet have trouble deciding on its contents. They become serial dogmatists.” (page 89)[/ref] Where I disagree with Scott Alexander, however, is in accepting that this kind of overreaction is basically acceptable. In my experience, both Ayn Rand (who says greed is good) and Peter Singer (who argued against any special concern for family members[ref]Frans de Waal, also in The Bonobo and the Atheist, points out that when Singer’s mother actually did become gravely ill he used his money to hire private care for her in direct contradiction of his own dogmatic utilitarian ideology. Singer said “perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it’s different when it’s your mother.” De Waal commented: “The world’s best-known utilitarian thus let personal loyalty trump aggregate well-being, which in my book was the right thing to do.” (page 184-185)[/ref]) are just plain bad. I don’t care how selfish you are, Peter Singer is still overkill. I don’t care how selfless[ref]In a pathological sense.[/ref] you are, Ayn Rand is still crazy.
So this is the world I find myself in. When I look around, I feel like the eighth guy at the table on several issues. To pick just one that we talk about a lot here at Difficult Run, go with minimum wage. I’m looking at the discussions around me,[ref]I don’t mean our commenters here at Difficult Run. I think you guys are pretty great. I mean the debates as I see them unfolding on my Facebook feed, etc.[/ref] and I just can’t really believe what I’m hearing.
But when I look around for people who will stand up with me and dissent, what I see is a lot of what Scott Alexander is describing. Take “socialism.” The term, in almost all debates you will see today, has no solid meaning. It’s just a flag. And on one side you’ll see these “taxation is theft” ultra-libertarians charging against the flag of socialism and on the other side you’ll see all these people who seem to have forgotten the second half of the twentieth century rallying around the flag of socialism. Maybe some of the “taxation is theft” folks escaped Soviet oppression (as Ayn Rand did, not by coincidence) and a lot of the “Mao? Stalin? Who were they?” socialists do come from elite backgrounds in the world’s leading capitalist economy, so “to a first approximation” their points are valid. That doesn’t mean they are actually helping matters when they add their extreme, absolutist viewpoints to the discussion. Technically, the “taxation is theft” guys are going to side with me to oppose minimum wage hikes, but I really wish they wouldn’t.
Too often it seems like your choices are either (1) conform to the political fad of the day or (2) engage in extreme, overreactions. Pick your poison.
But I don’t want to pick my poison.
I don’t, for example, want to have to pick and choose between conformity and diversity. I value both. Conformity is essential for language, is vital for social cohesion, and is–in short–the glue that holds the fabric of our society together. Anyone who says they are a nonconformist is lying or a sociopath, just like anyone who says that they don’t care what other people think about them is lying or a sociopath. Everyone is a social animal, everyone cares what (some) other people think, and everyone conforms (to some group). But if you overemphasize conformity, then you get group-think. You stifle creativity, restrict free inquiry, stifle scientific curiosity, and hamstring debate and compromise. We need diversity, too. We need both.
Here’s the reason I wrote this post. Here’s the thing that Gimbel said, about the Asch experiments, that really stood out. What did it take to empower that eighth person to answer honestly? They didn’t need anything extreme. They didn’t need any theatrics. They didn’t need Ayn Rand and they didn’t need Peter Singer. All it took was one person just calmly, quietly validating what they saw.
In Asch’s experiment, the truth was obvious. In the real world, on most issues where there is a lot of debate, the truth isn’t obvious. What’s more, I’m going to be publishing a post (hopefully soon) called “Nobody Gets It All Right” that will say just that: based on my understanding of history and various biographies, everybody is wrong about most of what they believe. And I take that to heart. I have a lot of opinions. Most of them are probably wrong, at least in the sens that–two decades or two centuries from now–the things I think are true will be either discredited or (more likely) irrelevant.[ref]Don’t get too excited. The same is true for you, too.[/ref]
So I do want to dissent. I do want to raise my voice–calmly, politely, modestly–and say that the emperor’s got no clothes on when it appears to me that the emperor, in fact, does not have clothes on. But the basis of my dissent is not “I am confident that I am right.” At this point in my life, that conviction alone is not enough to stir me to publish a post. Instead, my motivation is something like, “I am dedicated to living in the kind of world where people speak their minds honestly.” Because, if I have to pick just a few areas where I want to place a very high degree of confidence–like only two or three–that’s going to be one of them.
There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Internet debating. The point of the debate is never to persuade the other guy. The debate is always for the sake of the audience. There’s truth to that, but it can be taken too far, and made into a philosophy where arguing online is a gladiatorial spectator sport with both sides essentially playing to their respective fan bases with no interest in sincere, honest interaction with each other’s points. That’s not what I want to do.
Instead, I just want to be the one guy at the table who says, “I see things differently” that thereby enables the eighth guy to have an easier time in saying the same thing.
That, in a nutshell, is one of the fundamental reasons Difficult Run exists.
The Saturday afternoon session of the April 1972 General Conference had eight speakers. Yes, eight. And so it ended the way your local ward’s sacrament meeting might occasionally end, with the last couple of speakers tossing their prepared remarks when they got to the stand, bearing a quick testimony instead, and sitting down. For some reason, I found that adorable, especially the humility with which these leaders accepted the lack of time. Elder Howard W. Hunter simply said, “Observing the clock, I fold the notes that I have prepared and place them in my inside pocket,” and then he told a beautiful little anecdote about an adult bird teaching a baby bird how to catch a worm, taking less than 300 words in total.
This unassuming humility echoed the first talk of the session, President Hinckley’s What Will the Church Do for You, a Man? In the talk, he lists several benefits of active membership in the Church, specifically for the men:
It will bring you into the greatest fraternity in the world.
Active membership in the Church will motivate a man to clean up his life, if that is necessary.
Activity in the Church will afford you growth through responsibility.
Membership in the Church and active participation therein will give a new dimension to your life, a spiritual dimension that will become as a rock of faith, with an endowment of authority to speak in the name of God.
It will assist you in the governance of your home.
The Church makes it possible for you, a man, to bind to you for eternity those you love most..
It’s an interesting list in a couple of ways. First, several of the things that the Church will ostensibly “do for you” are actually things you have to do for others: “growth through responsibility,” “governance of your home,” and the rest are also things that generally fall under the heading of work, like cleaning up your life. What the Church provides, in short, is work.[ref]This is something Walker writes about a lot: the vital role of work in living a meaningful life.[/ref]
Something else? The General Authorities espouse the way things ought to be more than the way things are. The role of a prophet, first and foremost, is to reveal the gap between what we are and what we should be. This, as you can imagine, is a thankless job. But recognizing and even embracing the capacity to stare this gap in the face is recognized by some as an absolutely vital prerequisite to improvement.
The most prominent of these is Ira Glass (host of NPR’s This American Life), and one version of his account can be read here. The central quote, from Glass, is this:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
Glass is talking about art, but I believe it applies just as much to life in general. The only difference is that, in the context of an organized religion, you don’t just rely on your own personal taste as the guideline. Instead, you have authoritative sources—scripture and leaders—who work in conjunction with your conscience to highlight the gap between who you are and who you’d like to be.
This is hard. Very, very hard.
But, especially for Mormons, it is essential. We believe that the ultimate objective of our time here on Earth is to become more like God. That’s what discipleship means. It’s a lofty ambition, and it entails that, as an integral purpose of our life, we should seek out and collide with our own weaknesses like fault-seeking missiles. The higher the tolerance for recognizing our mistakes, the more we are able to work to ameliorate them.
Now, there is an absolutely vital role that Christ’s grace has to play in this, but that’s not my emphasis for today. Today, I just wanted to point out that as members of any organized religion and especially as Mormons, we face a compounded gap problem because we answer not only to our conscience (which is sort of like a sense of taste, but for the moral instead of the aesthetic sphere), but also to external guides.
Why did this come to mind for me in relation to this particular talk? From the first item on President Hinckley’s list. I’m an introvert with an ambiguous (at best) relationship to the idea of formal organizations and a personal history that, for uninteresting reasons, meant that I had essentially no Mormon friends for most of my life. It’s not just that I don’t feel that the Elder’s Quorum is “the greatest fraternity in the world.” It’s also that “the greatest fraternity in the world” doesn’t sound appealing to me in the first place. I had absolutely zero interest in joining one in college; why should I want to join one now?
I enjoy sacrament meeting. I enjoy Sunday school. I go to Elder’s Quorum because I’m told to go.[ref]Apologies to anyone in my EQ who reads this but, in 100% sincerity, it’s not you. It’s me.[/ref] I don’t really get it. And left, to my own devices, I never would.
People like to share conversion experiences all the time, and not just religious ones. The pattern is the same, “I thought I wouldn’t like it, but some external reason compelled me to try it, and now I love it!” Could be about being a Christian. Could also be about discovering your favorite TV show. The point is, people generally wait until after they have had their “ah-ha!” moment to share these stories.
Well, I’m sharing mine pre-emptively. Today, I don’t get it. One day, I believe I will. That’s true of this “greatest fraternity in the world,” but it’s true of a lot of other things as well. I’m confident, based on prior experience, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes more sense and has more to offer than I recognize at any point in time. That is, essentially, why I’m still here. Trying to serve. Hoping to grow.
This is one article, so it’s not proof, but the sources seem very legit. For example: National Enquirer is kind of a joke, but they were right about Tiger Woods. And John Edwards. (See the article for more.)
I have never liked Ted Cruz. He is second only to Donald Trump on my list of major candidates that I’d rather not see in the general (let along the White House), and has been for a while. I disagree with his politics, but more than that I have found his behavior in the past to be dishonorable. In short: he panders. A lot. In most cases, I’d rather vote for someone with good character than someone who perfectly matches my political philosophy.[ref]When I told Ro, she said, “I can spot a creeper.” Ro never liked Cruz either.[/ref]
Can this GOP primary season get any worse?
Bet you’re glad Kasich didn’t drop out, now.
I’d really like a 15 minute conversation with Glenn Beck. I think he’s sincere and I respect him a lot for standing up consistently against Donald Trump. However, he’s been in the tank for Cruz for a long time, and I knew he was getting conned. Beck’s heart is in the right place, but he’s not a very good judge of character or politics. His advisers suck.[ref]Everyone else is thinking: Nathaniel, I thought you were sane. You like Glenn Beck? What can I say? He’s so awkward and earnest that I’ve got a soft spot for him. He’s sort of like a fun-house mirror reflection of Camille Paglia.[/ref]
I enjoyed the Saturday morning session of the April 1972 General Conference right from the first talk, Elder N. Eldon Tanner’s “Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged.” The message is clear enough, but it’s not something I recall hearing an entire talk dedicated before reading this one. Elder Tanner makes the case strongly that we cannot judge because “We cannot see what is in the heart. We do not know motives, although we impute motives to every action we see. They may be pure while we think they are improper.” He goes on:
It is not possible to judge another fairly unless you know his desires, his faith, and his goals. Because of a different environment, unequal opportunity, and many other things, people are not in the same position. One may start at the top and the other at the bottom, and they may meet as they are going in opposite directions. Someone has said that it is not where you are but the direction in which you are going that counts; not how close you are to failure or success but which way you are headed. How can we, with all our weaknesses and frailties, dare to arrogate to ourselves the position of a judge? At best, man can judge only what he sees; he cannot judge the heart or the intention, or begin to judge the potential of his neighbor.
It’s a great quote, and it falls in line with the emphasis on intellectual humility that is the central theme for this blog.[ref]Did you know that we had one? We do.[/ref] Elder Tanner made some additional strong points that I’m still mulling over. For example, he said that “only by suspending judgment do we exhibit real charity.” And so that has me thinking about the relationship between suspending judgment and loving unconditionally. And that is also the entire point of our mortal experience: judgment is postponed. That makes this mortal life chaotic and confusing (because consequences do not follow immediately and inexorably from our decision), but it also carves out space for the atonement–the ultimate act of love–to work.
Elder Tanner also talked about the relationship between not judging and optimism, urging us to “look for the good rather than try to discover any hidden evil.” I believe there is something noble and empowering in trying to see the best in the people around you rather than engaging in easy, seductive cynicism.
Regardless of our ego, our pride, or our feeling of insecurity, our lives would be happier, we would be contributing more to social welfare and the happiness of others, if we would love one another, forgive one another, repent of our wrongdoings, and judge not.
Although here, too, there is a connection to love. “Even in families, divorce has resulted and families have been broken up because the husband or wife was looking for and emphasizing the faults rather than loving and extolling the virtues of the other.” When a Mormon man and woman are sealed to one another, they are stuck with each other for eternity. The time for criticism and judgment is past. From that point on, the goal is to love the one you’re with, in part by emphasizing their virtues and strengths in your own estimation.[ref]There are exceptional cases, such as abuse. I’m not referring to those, but to ordinary marriages that just need work and love to stay happy and strong.[/ref]
Lastly, this idea of optimism vs. cynicism and judging bears on the political arena.
Tirades against men in office or against one’s opponent tend to cause our youth and others to lose faith in the individual and others in government and often even our form of government itself.
How true is this of our nation today? How many of us have lost complete faith in our representatives and also in our form of government? There are two reasons for this, I believe. The first is that we–as everyday Americans–have long since abandoned the idea of holding our leaders (and ourselves) to high moral standards. Elder Tanner addressed this, writing that “it is most important that all of us, including our politicians, strive to live so that our actions will be above reproach and criticism.” Coincidental with that, we have also begun to engage in complaints and mockery–often with a partisan edge–as a kind of public spectacle and blood sport. It is bad enough that we tolerate and condone unethical behavior by our leaders. This encourage precisely the wrong kind of men and women to run for office to enrich themselves with the opportunities afforded by public office. It compounds the problem to then grow so cynical about our leaders that we do not believe any of them can act for decent or humane motives. This discourages preciesly the right kind of men and women from running for office, because who wants to deal with that? Our judgmentalism, because it is cynical and divorced from principle, increases the incentives for corrupt politicians and decreases the incentives for honest ones. And yes, that’s a thing. The results, as we see on the news every day, are lamentable.
There is a difference between being non judgmental and being unprincipled. A non judgmental person has principles, but is generous in interpreting the actions, intentions, and motives of others. An unprincipled person has no moral true north, but can easily engage in ad hoc judgmentalism nonetheless.
I liked Elder ElRay L. Christiansen’s talk Successful Parenthood—A Noteworthy Accomplishment. First, I have to remind folks of what is—for me—the most memorable quote of this entire General Conference Odyssey so far. It comes from Elder Marvin J. Ashton’s talk in the April 1971 General Conference Love of the Right. Elder Ashton said:
Following one of our recent general conference sessions, a troubled mother approached me and said, “I need to know what is meant by the statement, ‘No success can compensate for failure in the home.’” Knowing a little of the burdens this friend of mine carries in her mind and heart because of a rebellious, wayward daughter, I shared this meaning with her: I believe we start to fail in the home when we give up on each other. We have not failed until we have quit trying. As long as we are working diligently with love, patience, and long-suffering, despite the odds or the apparent lack of progress, we are not classified as failures in the home. We only start to fail when we give up on a son, daughter, mother, or father.
I think I’m going to keep repeating this often, basically anytime the idea of family and success or failure comes up, because it’s so crucial to keep in mind. As long as you have not given up on your family, you have not failed your family.
Now, getting back to Elder Christiansen’s talk from the Thursday afternoon session of the April 1972 General Conference, the thing that stands out the most is how consistent the theme of family is from General Conference talks more than half a century ago.[ref]You might be wondering why I keep repeating that the family isn’t a new focus. It’s because a common theme in the Bloggernacle is the idea that the emphasis on the family is an innovation since the 1990’s that was basically invented to give cover to the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage. I was always suspicious of this claim, but it’s only by going back and reading the talks from the 1970’s that I see how untrue it is. The Church’s emphasis on the family is not new. It’s very, very old. Thus the title of this post: the family, the family, the family.[/ref]
First, I love Elder Christiansen’s optimism: “Now, this is a world in difficulty and trouble, but we shouldn’t merely bemoan the fact. We should, as far as our powers can help us, be anxiously engaged in rectifying it.” I taught lesson 10 from the Book of Mormon on Sunday, which covers 2 Nephi 26-30. There’s a lot of grim, last days kind of stuff going on, but we talked about the importance of keeping our eyes on the light of Christ and maintaining faith, optimism, and confidence. (This Mormon aptitude for tackling tragedy with optimism is something I’ve written about before.)
So, how should we be “anxiously engaged” in combatting the world’s problems? “Just before we sang,” said Elder Christiansen, “I wrote this down: If you and I are to help restore this sick world to its spiritual health, we must begin at the proper place—that is, with ourselves and with our families.”
He went on to give specific direction about what this means, writing that:
Parents cannot, without regrettable consequences, shirk the responsibility of teaching and showing their children through their example the attributes of character that lead them unhesitatingly to appreciate and accept the good, the decent, the beautiful, and help them to develop the desire and the courage to turn from that which is coarse or crude or wrong.
This reminded me of the passage I shared from the March 2016 First Presidency message. Just after quoting Matthew 18:1-3, about the need to become like little children, Elder Monson wrote:
In the Church, the goal of gospel teaching is not to pour information into the minds of God’s children, whether at home, in the classroom, or in the mission field. It is not to show how much the parent, teacher, or missionary knows. Nor is it merely to increase knowledge about the Savior and His Church.
The basic goal of teaching is to help the sons and daughters of Heavenly Father return to His presence and enjoy eternal life with Him. To do this, gospel teaching must encourage them along the path of daily discipleship and sacred covenants. The aim is to inspire individuals to think about, feel about, and then do something about living gospel principles. The objective is to develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and to become converted to His gospel.
Once again, there’s this consistency not only in the fact that the family needs to be our emphasis, but also how. This is especially important for parents of younger children. Trying to teach them the principles of the Gospel through didactic methods—repeating facts, reading scriptures, and even bearing testimony—is necessary but insufficient. What is needed is the inculcation of habits. What we need to teach is action. It is the action—actions such as praying, reading the scriptures, and learning to forgive and to repent—which can become the foundation for a child’s testimony even at a young age. I’m a verbose guy. I write a lot, and I talk a lot. And so it’s important for me to realize that that’s not the best way to reach my children.
Home is the template for heaven. And so Elder Christiansen writes:
Success in family life calls for parents who take time to enjoy their children; who read with them; who play with them; who let them participate in planning special occasions, seeking to make wholesome family traditions a proud part of family life.
Here is something else that stood out to me:
Another essential in successful parenthood is for fathers and mothers to avoid disputations. Such situations may seem harmless to the parents, but in the eyes of their children, the two most important people in the world are in conflict, and from their limited perspective, the whole world is in trouble.
What this reiterates is that the Church’s emphasis on family is inseparable from concern for the most vulnerable among us: children. Family, in the Church’s teachings, is not an institution for the benefit of spouses. It is an institution for the benefic and protection of children. Along those lines Elder Christiansen also said that it is important for parents to listen to any problems their children have, adding that “if we are wise, we will not minimize [their problems].” It’s obvious, but it’s also important: the primary purpose of the family is to provide a haven for children. I believe this obligation (because family is primarily about duty rather than rights) does not in any way detract from the essential bond of husband and wife. Just as, from a genetic or a biological perspective, a child represents the shared investment of a mother and father so, too, does the shared spiritual goal of protecting and training children create a unifying mission for a husband and wife.
Elder Christiansen concludes:
No nation can long endure unless the great majority of its families and its homes are made secure through faith in God—an active, living faith.
The Church’s emphasis on the importance of the family is not new. The nature of that commitment—tying together our obligation to our children with the Plan of Salvation—is also not new. And the prophetic teaching that the health of our families will determine the health of our society is also not new. This is what has been taught for quite literally longer than I have been alive.
Some General Conference sessions seem brimming with impactful revelations and guidance. And some do not.
I believe in a lot of cases the variable isn’t the session or an individual talk; it’s me. When I was a missionary in the MTC, the October 2000 General Conference was absolutely riveting. Every single session captured my full attention. On my mission, I devoured the conference issues of the Ensign, avidly reading every word of every single talk. But this was all a very drastic change from how I approached General Conferences before and after my mission. In both cases—at least until recently—it was a rare accomplishment just to stay awake for an entire Sunday session, and I frequently didn’t even try to catch the Saturday sessions. Most of the difference was simply what I brought to the table. Like scripture, you get more out of General Conferences when you put more into them.
But it would be strange to think that that’s the only variable in play. Some talks resonate more with different parts of the audience than others. And surely, if some talks stand out as legendary and unique, then other talks by definition have to be somewhat ordinary by comparison. This session, for me at least, was full of those kinds of talks.
As I read the first five talks, I found interesting things to note, but nothing that really stood out. I have itching ears. I like to hear new things. That’s not a bad trait in general—curiosity is essential to a meaningful life—but when it creates a thirst for novelty for novelty’s sake it can become a problem.
Which is exactly what I realized when I came to the last talk of the session, Keep the Lines of Communication Strong by President Spencer W. Kimball. His emphasis was first and foremost on the lines of communication within a marriage, and he begins with a story of a young couple who grew apart because of mismatched expectations and goals and, more importantly, because they stopped communicating with each other and turned to someone else for comfort:
In time, each found another person and set up different communication lines for sympathy and understanding and comfort; and this disloyalty led to physical adventures that resulted in adulteries and two broken homes and disillusioned spouses and crushed hopes and injured children.
President Kimball writes that “all this [happened] because two basically good people let their communication lines get down.” From there, he segues into a discussion about the line of communication in faith, about the necessity of maintaining a habit of daily prayer and reading the scriptures and how—without these habits—we will not have a vibrant, thriving spiritual life to fall back upon in challenging and lean times.
These points are interesting, and they are good, but they aren’t really new, are they? Isn’t the advice about keeping open the lines of communication with our spouses just common sense? Isn’t the advice about keeping open the lines of communication with our Heavenly Father just a restatement of the Parable of the Ten Virgins?
Yes and no. It depends, to a great extent, on what we bring to the message.
For me, I realized when reading President Kimball’s talk how important it was for me to slog through the first five talks of the session even though I didn’t enjoy them as much as I often do. Sometimes keeping the line of communication open isn’t novel, or exciting, or revelatory. Sometimes the conversations you have with your spouse aren’t scintillating. You’re just sharing ordinary concerns and relating everyday events. But if you only talked to your spouse when at least one of you had something really thrilling or intrinsically exciting to say, then how often would you talk at all? And, facing that kind of scrutiny, how could you possible put in the simple moments—day after day, week after week, year after year—to keep lines of communication open?
It reminds me of a quote from an amazing science fiction novel by the Chinese author Cixin Liu:
As had occurred so many times before, their eyes met and intertwined, a continuation of that gaze they had held in front of the Mona Lisa’s smile two centuries before. They had discovered that the language of the eyes that [his wife] had dreamed up was now a reality. Or maybe loving humans had always possessed this language. When they looked at each other, a richness of meaning poured from their eyes, just as the clouds poured from the … endless and unceasing. But it wasn’t a language of this world. It constructed a world that gave it meaning, and only in that rosy world did the words of the language find their corresponding referents. Everyone in that world was God. All had the ability to instantaneously count and remember every grain of sand in the desert. All were able to string together stars into a crystal necklace to hang around a lover’s neck.
The point of the secret communication between this husband and wife wasn’t what they had to say. It was that they were saying it to each other. This otherworldly communication is possible in all loving relationships, I believe, a secret language only understood by a man and wife who have built a lifetime together. And every simple, boring, commonplace exchange—when part of a grand project of keeping open the lines of communication—becomes another element to their private language.
There is this fascinating connection in the scriptures between marital fidelity and religious fidelity. Between adultery and apostasy. It’s no coincidence that President Kimball chose to emphasis those two stories in his talk about lines of communication: because in both cases, the work of maintaining the lines of communication is the work of protecting and preserving a special relationship.
Writing about the importance of love in human society and psychology, Jonathan Haidt pointed out that although we often celebrate the idea of universal love, there is actually something vital about specific love:
Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence towards everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return. [emphasis added]
That kind of specific love is tied in some way to exclusivity. It is why idealistic, naïve arguments for polyamory—although superficially commendable: shouldn’t love be devoid of jealousy and possession?—are so foolish. The love of man and wife is sacred because they have each chosen the other in particular and above all others. And this is very similar to our discipleship, in that we must choose to love and follow God in particular and above all others.
So yes: sometimes General Conference talks are boring. Sometimes they are repetitive. Sometimes the talks are little more than just long recitations of scriptures we already know, without any new or unique twist or insight. And listening to these talks is not as much fun as listening to a talk that seems to expand our minds our souls with every word, but listening to these workaday talks is important, because the mundane and the repetitive and the commonplace are the building blocks of the sacred and the transcendent.
Keeping open lines of communication is a chore sometimes. It’s a chore with our spouses, with our children, with our family, with our friends, and with our God. But these relationships are also the treasures of eternity. They are, especially for Mormons, the whole point. A little boredom is a small price to pay. If Naaman could be troubled to bathe in the humble Jordan,[ref]2 Kings 5[/ref] then I can be troubled to read even the General Conference talks that don’t appear to sparkle. The cost of admission is so low, and we have so little to lose in paying it.
As a last observation: I believe I may have wandered a little far afield of President Kimball’s talk. I have pulled in quotes from social science and science fiction, and gone off (as far as I can tell) on a tangent of my own. If the digression has been a good one, it is also evidence of how we—the audience—have an obligation to make what we hear our own. To “liken [scriptures] unto yourselves,” is everyone’s duty.[ref]1 Nephi 19:23[/ref] Sometimes a General Conference is a delicious prepared meal, ready to be consumed. Other times, it is raw ingredients we have to cook ourselves. Sometimes, it might even feel like just the seeds to grow the plants to cook the meal! No matter. There is honor and dignity and even love in taking what we are given and making it what we desire.
The chance that I will be bored by another General Conference talk—or even an entire session—is quite high. Knowing what to do doesn’t make it easy. But this post represents the way I will try to approach them in the future. If “all things work together for good to them that love God,” clearly this “all things” must include even the boring General Conference talks, right?[ref]Romans 8:28[/ref]
And so I will read every single one. Even the boring ones. I will keep the lines of communication open.
If you weren’t aware, Mitt Romney gave a speech this morning attacking Trump’s candidacy. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Mitt Romney, and I have been since his unsuccessful primary run in 2008. So I was looking forward to this speech enough that I queued it up on my iPhone and played it through my car speakers live as I drove. It was a great speech, in my mind, but you can see for yourself:
Obviously Trump fans don’t like it, but lots of Republicans and conservative are also criticizing the speech for two things: first, being pointless and second, giving ammunition to the left. So here are some thoughts.
I agree: this speech didn’t persuade a single Trump supporter. That’s not the point. Think about Trump supporters for a moment. Is there a speech that could have had an impact on that audience? No, there is not. Trump has basically two kinds of supporters at this point. There are those who take his provocative, bigoted statements at face value and approve of them. There is no decent or reasonable way to appeal to these people, because they are supporting Trump explicitly because of his lack of decency and his lack of reasonability. The Republican Party neither needs nor wants this dead weight. Then there are those who are so cynical and jaded that the content of Trump’s statements–and the content of the attacks on him–are irrelevant. These people hear political debates the same way that Charlie Brown listens to his teacher.
These folks, I believe, do not share the extreme and noxious views that have become the hallmark of Trump’s campaign. But they are still completely and totally beyond rational appeal because all they care about is who is talking not what is being said. If you come from “the establishment,” then whatever you say is a lie, no matter what you say. The point is: nobody in Trump’s corner would have listened to anything that Romney had to say, no matter what it was.
Give the man some credit. That wasn’t his goal. It’s clear from the speech that none of it was addressing Trump supporters. What was his goal, then? Who was he addressing?
If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state. [emphasis added]
Romney is addressing Republicans and conservatives who are already leery of Trump’s campaign, and his goal is to encourage these people to get out and vote (part one) and to do so strategically (part two). We can’t know just yet what effect this appeal will have, but it is certainly more tactically aware than a tone-deaf appeal to an audience defined by having their fingers jammed into their ears.
So let’s talk about this idea that Romney is giving ammunition to the left. That he represents “the establishment.” That he’s a RINO. This is the response of, for example, Rush Limbaugh and his audience, although I’ve also seen more reasonable and sophisticated Republicans (who don’t like Trump) make a similar claim.
First, I don’t think these people paid very much attention to Mitt Romney’s words. Romney was not attacking the right from the center. His attacks related primarily to the realism of Trump’s proposals and, even more so, went to Trump’s character and temperament. These are apolitical attacks. Secondly, Romney included an extended take-down of Clinton:
Now, Mr. Trump relishes any poll that reflects what he thinks of himself. But polls are also saying that he will lose to Hillary Clinton. Think about that. On Hillary Clinton’s watch, the State Department, when she was guiding it and part of the Obama administration, that State Department watched as America’s interests were diminished at every corner of the world.
She compromised our national secrets. She dissembled to the families of the slain. And she jettisoned her most profound beliefs to gain presidential power. For the last three decades, the Clintons have lived at the intersection of money and politics, trading their political influence to enrich their personal finances.
They embody the term, “crony capitalism.” It disgusts the American people and causes them to lose faith in our political process. A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president.
Of course, a Trump nomination enables her victory.
There is precious little evidence in Mitt Romney’s speech of the alleged base / establishment divide. And that’s something that we really need to emphasize with great force here: Trump does not speak for, represent, or enjoy the support of the GOP base in some kind of glorious crusade to purge the GOP of ideological heretics. Exhibit A in this case is Glenn Beck, who refers to Trump as “a pathological narcissistic sociopath,” Beck is far from the GOP establishment: he’s a social values populist who supports Cruz over Rubio, and who has little love for Romney. Or consider Matt Walsh, another representative of the social values populism that truly reflects the GOP base, and who has been attacking Trump and Trump supporters for months. He wrote articles in July 2015, Aug 2015, January 2016, and yet again last month.
Trump’s rise is not a reflection of some kind of broad-based populist revolt by ideological pure conservatives against an elite cadre of moderate establishmentarians. If that were the case, Trump would be pulling in more than a paltry one third of Republican primary voters. If that were the case, Trump would have strong, consistent, clearly articulated positions on the key conservative issues: abortion, the second amendment, limited government, and religious liberty. Instead, Trump’s positions on all of these issues are farcically out of touch with the base of the conservative movement. He keeps defending Planned Parenthood, has no credible history on gun rights, consistently threatens to abuse executive power if he gets it, and is laughably ignorant of even basic religious cultural touchstones.
As The Atlantic covered, there is a “clear ‘soft spot’ in Trump’s [evangelical] support: weekly church attendance.” In other words, the evangelicals who actually go to church, don’t trust Trump. That’s the template for every issue down the line. Politically informed conservatives who are pro-life, or pro-second amendment, or are for limited government are all skeptical of Trump because they have the depth of knowledge (on their respective issues) to spot a liar and a phony. Jonah Goldberg, writing for the National Review, has come to the same conclusion:
Until Trump descended his golden escalator, the “conservative base” generally referred to committed pro-lifers and other social conservatives. The term also suggested people who were for very limited government, strict adherence to the Constitution, etc. Most of all, it described people who called themselves “very conservative.”
While it’s absolutely true that Trump draws support from people who fit such descriptions, it’s far from the entirety of Trump’s following. According to polls, Trump draws heavily from more secular Republicans who are more likely to describe themselves as “liberal” or “moderate” than “conservative” or “very conservative.” Ted Cruz draws more exclusively from the traditional base.
One thing should be crystal clear: the Trump phenomenon is not a conservative revolt against the establishment or anything else because it’s emphatically not conservative.
So where does it come from? What’s fueling Trump’s rise? This is an important question, because it will get back to Romney’s motivation for his speech.
I believe the story goes like this:
Since the 1970s, journalists have increasingly shifted towards the left. This led to slight but universal anti-conservative bias. It was subtle because standards of professionalism kept it from getting too extreme, but it was also pervasive. Rush Limbaugh was the reaction to that. He was conservatives saying, “Fine, if our views aren’t going to get a fair hearing in your media, we will make our own.”
Unfortunately, Limbaugh is an unprincipled, egotistical, self-aggrandizing rabble rouser. He responded to a grievance that was genuine, but the solution he proffered made things worse. This isn’t accidental, Limbaugh—as an avatar of retribution—tied his fortunes to the continuation and exacerbation of the media-bias.
An outlet like the National Review tries to provide some balance to the left-leaning conversation, but it does so while buying into the fundamental premise that the Fourth Estate is a noble calling with an accompanying sense of duty, and of pride, and of responsibility. Limbaugh could care less about any of that. From his perspective, the more outrageous he is the better, because that provokes the mainstream media into attacking him, and those attacks are the red meat he feeds his audience.
This kicked off a feedback loop of mutual polarization. Mainstream media in the 1990s was significantly more anti-conservative than in the 1980s in no small part because they were reacting to Limbaugh. This in turn fed the conservative response, leading to Fox News. This was basically just Rush Limbaugh on an industrial scale. All the commercial polish of a cable news network was used to funnel paranoia and tribalism and sophistry from the AM radios onto HD TVs.
And then the left upped the ante once more. Two examples: Although MSNBC had been founded in 1996, the shift to becoming the Fox news of the left started around 2000, and Real Time with Bill Maherlaunched on HBO in 2003. By this time, the mainstream media was already overwhelmingly left-leaning, and President Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased the extent to which the media had all but completely abandoned the ideals of objectivity, responsibility, and criticism that had once differentiated them from firebrands like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
This represents just one aspect of the overall trend. Polarization has also continued apace in both academia and in social networking, with titans like Twitter engaging in “shadowbanning” of conservatives and other politically-slanted tactics. Together, this means that the public sphere in the United States today is incredibly hostile towards conservatives, as Business Insider reported.[ref]Yes, I’ve used this charge before.[/ref]
It is pretty common to use allegations of media bias to excuse conservatives or advocate for their perspective, but that’s not where I’m going today. Instead, I want to consider how the asymmetry of this conflict effects how it is prosecuted by both sides. It is an immutable law of human conflict that asymmetric conflicts are among the nastiest and most vicious. The side with less conventional power is not constrained by conventional norms of conduct (because they have less to lose) and is more willing to adopt proscribed tactics (because they can be rationalized by appeal to underdog status and also because there are fewer options to “approved” methods of fighting.) The side with greater conventional power is initially constrained in its response but–over time–begins to use the bad conduct of the insurgent force to excuse violations of their self-imposed constraints.
Case in point: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel acts with relative restraint because it has a lot to lose: a fairly prosperous, stable economy and government, Palestinian terrorist organization are classical insurgents, however, with nothing to lose they are willing to engage in reprehensible, violent tactics such as suicide bombings and indiscriminate targeting of civilians.
The same thing has unfolded in the American political arena (albeit largely without literal violence thus far). The American left, despite being outnumbered (according to most polls) occupies the position of strength: professional journalists, tenured professors, and (at least on social issues), Silicon Valley billionaires. As a result, they have often prosecuted their war with relative restraint. Bias was omnipresent, but often extremely subtle, for example, and news outlets continued to–in word and to some extent in fact–pursue fairness and objectivity. The American right, despite broad public support, has subsisted at the margins of the public sphere and they have adopted proscribed tactics accordingly. The rhetoric is nastier and more provocative, and there is often not the slightest pretext to objectivity or, in some cases, even basic civility. At a very abstract level, the strategic logic that differentiates the tactics of Hamas and the IDF also differentiates the tactics of NPR and Rush Limbaugh.
What we have been witnessing, at least since the 1980s, is an escalating cycle of mutually-reinforcing rhetorical violence. I do not want to trivialize the horror of actual warfare, but the strategic analogy is sound. This a tribal blood feud, and such a feud will continue to spiral out of control–threatening the fabric of our entire society–unless and until the belligerents can begin to exercise self-control. One side can never browbeat, humiliate, or intimidate the other side into submission. Nobody ever wins a fight of this nature but, if we are to preserve our civil society, someone has to lead their own sides back from the brink. That–even more than the immediate tactical implications–is what Mitt Romney’s speech was truly about.
There is one last thing that we need to keep in mind. As much as folks are (understandably) transfixed by the juggernaut of awful that is the Trump movement, the man himself is irrelevant. Trump is not a demon, a genius, or an angel.[ref]Not even an angel of destruction.[/ref] He had to be rich enough, famous enough, and outrageous enough to fulfill a certain role but he’s essentially just a guy who happens to fit a costume that was already laying around, waiting for someone to put it on. Or, to use another metaphor, he’s just a guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time to hitch a ride on a particularly vicious political current. And it’s the current that’s carrying Trump along—not the man hitching a ride on it—that merits our long-term attention. Because, no matter what happens with Trump in 2016, the political forces that have brought us to this point are unlikely to dissipate any time soon. My sobering word of caution is this: as bad as you think Trump is, there is room for things to get much, much worse if the underlying political dynamics don’t change.
A two-front war is every general’s nightmare, but that’s what we have. As a committed conservative, I have two goals in mind. The first is to advocate for policies that I believe will make our country–and the world–better. I believe that all human beings deserve first and foremost the fundamental right to life, and so I am pro-life. I believe that free markets empower our economy at home and lead to poverty-eradicating growth world-wide, and so I am a capitalist. I believe that power tends to corrupt, and that corruption leads to misery and injustice, and so I support limited government. For these, and other reasons, I am a conservative. But I also believe that it is possible for decent, reasonable people to differ with me on these issues and/or to have their own legitimate agenda with their own competing priorities. And I believe that resolving the conflict should happen in a social and political atmosphere of tolerance, respect, and peace.
I am not naive enough to believe that political conflict will ever be swept away by mutual respect and admiration, and that Democrats and Republicans will all roast smores together and hold hands and sing songs while finding painless compromises to solve all our problems. But that doesn’t mean that I have to just accept an unlimited amount of vitriol, tribalism, and intolerance as the cost of doing politics. It is not only possible to fight over the direction which the good ship United States should sail without threatening to sink her, it is necessary. That, more than anything else, is what I drew from Mitt Romney’s speech, and it is why I am such a fan.
I was very struck by Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s statement in How to Worship that “[God] has planted in our hearts an instinctive desire to worship, to seek salvation, to love and server a power or being greater than ourselves.” I imagine it’s a claim that would strike many as controversial, but it brought to mind quotes about the role of the sacred in the lives of atheists and agnostics.
First, there’s Jonathan Haidt (an atheist) citing Mircea Eliade’s concept of “crypto-religious” behavior in The Happiness Hypothesis. The argument is that secularists have
privileged places, qualitatively different from all others — a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.[ref]The Happiness Hypothesis, page 193[/ref]
According to Haidt, Eliade captured his feelings perfectly: “Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature.”[ref]The Happiness Hypothesis, page 193.[/ref]
Haidt and Eliade are from alone in making this observation. The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans de Waal (also an atheist), describes how science can function as a religious pursuit:
Instead of turning to religion, the majority of us are agnostic or atheist. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that science answers questions of meaning and purpose, however. Even the scientists who recently confirmed the “God particle” knew that it was a far cry from confirming why we are on earth and even less whether or not God exists. No, the big difference for scientists is that the thirst for knowledge itself, the lifeblood of our profession, fills a spiritual void by religion in most other people. Like treasure hunters for whom the hunt is about as important as the treasurer itself, we feel great purpose in trying to pierce the veil of ignorance. We feel united in this effort, being part of a worldwide network. This means that we also enjoyed this other aspects of religion: a community of white-minded people. At a recent workshop, a retired astronomer teared up while discussing humanities place in the cosmos. He stopped talking for two minutes, causing his audience to become restless, before explaining that he had pursued this question since childhood. The site of images from billions of light-years ago still overwhelms him, making him realize how much we are connected with the universe. He wouldn’t call it a religious experience, but it sounded very much like it.[ref]The Bonobo and the Atheist, page 106[/ref]
If, as Eliade, Haidt, and Gleiser agree, there is a tendency towards the spiritual in all of us, then Elder McConkie’s second statement is also true:
The issue is not whether men shall worship, but who or what is to be the object of their devotions and how they shall go about paying the devotions to their chosen Most High.
Elder McConkie speaks fairly sternly about worshiping the wrong gods, and maybe a little too sternly. He says,
If a man worships a cow or a crocodile, he can gain any reward that cows and crocodiles happen to be passing out this season.
And also:
If he worships the laws of the universe or the forces of nature, no doubt the earth will continue to spin, the sun to shine, and the rains to fall on the just and on the unjust.
By contrast, however,
But if he worships the true and living God, in spirit and in truth, then God Almighty will pour out his Spirit upon him, and he will have power to raise the dead, move mountains, entertain angels, and walk in celestial streets.
I don’t disagree. I just think John Locke may add some perspective as well: “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” In other words, what we really believe–and what we really worship–is not so much about names or beliefs as it is about action. Which is exactly what Elder McConkie goes on to articulate with his extensive–and vitally important–list of worship examples.
To the extent that we know love, we also know an aspect of God. To the extent that we act on that love, we worship Him. And this is true, even if we do not mean to do so. It’s not about the words you say. It’s about the life you live.
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.[ref]Matthew 7:21[/ref]
So, even the anti-non-conformists are trapped in an non-conformity mindset. Conformity can’t catch a break. Which is a shame, because conformity is actually pretty important in helping to form human society and–because we are social animals–to form who we are as well.
Writing in 
I was very struck by Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s statement in 
Haidt and Eliade are from alone in making this observation.