I'm trying to keep my blog somewhat "apart" from current events. I'm trying to talk about deeper structures, more permanent features, long-term realities. God knows we have enough attention to the daily news today. Probably, for many of us, too much. That's certainly true for me.

But once in a while, a momentary event will light up a deeper theme, and when that happens I don't want to miss the chance to take advantage of it. This may be one of those moments. It's about politics, but more deeply about moral psychology and maybe human self-awareness more broadly.

This morning, Jeff Flake, former Republican Senator from Arizona, has published an appeal to his fellow Republicans and former Senatorial colleagues, imploring them to realize what is going on:

At this point, the president’s conduct in office should not surprise us. But truly devastating has been our tolerance of that conduct. Our embrace of it. From the ordeal of this presidency, perhaps the most horrible — and lasting — effect on our democracy will be that at some point we simply stopped being shocked. And in that, we have failed not just as stewards of the institutions to which we have been entrusted but also as citizens. We have failed each other, and we have failed ourselves.…

Our country will have more presidents. But principles, well, we get just one crack at those. For those who want to put America first, it is critically important at this moment in the life of our country that we all, here and now, do just that.

It's moving, and a bit poignant. "Principles…we get just one crack at those." He's got a deep point: your moral choices are irrevocable, but you can change your mind.

I won't forget that Flake's views are not my own, and I don't think he did a lot of good in the Senate, in fact I think he did a fair amount of harm, and he really hasn't suffered for his convictions, except for leaving (of his own free will) a nice job (but he's landed on his feet OK). But one can sense the sincerity of this plea.

That said, I am of two minds about it, set against a broader horizon than the moment.

One mind: From my perspective, Flake is theologically entirely right. It is never too late to repent and turn. (And we should know that not only for Christian reasons, but also for other traditions--it is the midst of Rosh Hashanah right now, and Yom Kippur is coming up too, just for starters.) The work of reparation and recovery are real, and massive, but it is never too late to begin to repent. In my tradition, today is always the day of redemption. As St Paul put it: "For [God] says, 'At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.' See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation" (2 Cor 6:2). Or consider Rabbi Hillel's famous three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” If not now, when? indeed. Some moral change is large; large change cannot but seem--when it is achieved, or when one realizes that it has been achieved--dramatic, sudden. Some moral transformations are vast, and fundamental. Sometimes early Christians talked about that as metanoia, change of mind, but meaning much more than a change of opinion. These changes seem sudden, not least because they are so radical. Repentance can often seem like that, and it is always possible.

But here's my other mind: Part of the lectionary reading for yesterday in my church (Trinity Episcopal here in Charlottesville) was Luke 16:19-31, about the Rich man and Lazarus. One of the points our preacher made about that text was that, after death, the rich man, literally in Hades, still thinks that Lazarus, who is standing with Abraham on the other side of a chasm, can still be ordered to do things for him. In other words, the Rich man still doesn't fully realize his current situation; he's just as blind to his situation as he was in life. (This is a recurring theme in Dante's Inferno, too, by the way—the damned still don't properly realize that they're in Hell, they're still "spinning" their stories.) The story ends with Abraham trying to get the rich man to see that he's in Hell; and we take up the story with the rich man's reply:

He said, “Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”  He [Lazarus] said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”  He [Abe] said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

That ending is so terrific. Sometimes we imagine that one more thing could finally convince our interlocutors that they must change; but they already have enough of the "things" to realize what to do, and one more bit of evidence of that sort will simply pile up more rubble for them; they need a change of an altogether different source. Abraham's reply is spot-on: "look, they already have all the information they need, it's literally right there on the page, what you're supposed to do—if you can't see it right before your eyes, even if someone rose from the dead and yelled at you, it wouldn't be able to change your minds either."

(Look at all the italics in that paragraph! It’s like I’m trying, typographically, to show my point, in order better to say it. And maybe I am.)

This is one of the deepest, though only rarely recognized, philosophical puzzles for humanity as a whole. Soemtimes, the change people need is not more information; it's a question of what we can call "the logic of the obvious."

(Abraham's point in this passage is actually akin to a famous argument advanced by the twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, on "rule following;" as I understand that argument, Wittgenstein's point is that we typically fail to understand that our deepest learning does not happen by having more information directed at us like a radio transmission, but must happen on an entirely different level altogether, in the way that the "frames for reception," as it were, of information, must be transformed. I'm not being perfectly clear about this, I know, but I bet you can understand why Wittgenstein's point would not be entirely plausible if it were easily communicated.)

I've thought a lot about the logic of the obvious, and I want one day to write about this, perhaps in the context of Augustine's Confessions, which remains for me the most powerful single study of the logic of the obvious. Things that are obvious to us are not necessarily always obvious and to everyone; they only become so when we see them as such; but the obviousness of them is not necessarily a "universal" feature of the thing, and some people can miss it. We've all had experiences like this; but we typically don't explictly thematize them as objects of direct reflective concern.

I think we should so thematize them, at least from time to time. It would make moments like these days much less as it were traumatically surprising to us. For we are in a world of rival obviousnesses. We are in a world where it seems obvious to a large group of Americans that many other Americans have gone insane in support of a tyrannical, cruel, and mendacious regime, and where those other people see it as obvious that the first group of Americans actually are working to destroy America. The experience of all of us ought to prompt us to ask: How is it possible for people to inhabit the same country, yet live in such radically different worlds?

I am not promoting any kind of “both sides-ism”; I am one of those for whom it is obvious that Trump is bad, his supporters are just as bad (yep I said that), and the harm they are doing to the United States and the world will not be quickly repaired. I know that in a couple decades, we will look back at these years and think, how could anyone not see these things? I know that some of us are asking that question today, and some of us who are not asking it will conveniently forget that they were fervent partisans of the other side. Just like some people alive today have forgotten that they defended Richard Nixon when it was already very, very clear that he was a liar and a crook.

What’s the upshot here? I guess it’s a two-headed one. First, Flake is right that it's not too late to repent. But, second, as the Luke passage reminds us, and as current events should as well, recognizing the need for repentance is hard, very hard. Everyone by about the age of—what, ten?—knows that in their own lives; but what takes us a while longer to realize is that we're not individually especially dumb; the condition is general across all of humanity.

I think we could all do well to think harder about that second fact; don't worry, even myself.  But let me worry about me.  To you who are reading this: worry about you.