You think I've been sleeping?  Well, maybe I have been sleeping.  But also surfing.

“Beyond the bluster of Washington and Beijing, a fluid working group has emerged, with a rotating cast of leaders that has the potential to challenge the bullying of China, fill the vacuums left by America, and do what no lesser power could do on its own.” A good insight: middle-power countries are banding together to try to provide global leadership in the pandemic, including getting to the bottom of why it happened.  China isn’t happy, and the US is sitting it out.  The only two bits of good news here are that these countries are taking more responsibility for the global order (a good thing), and people across the world are growing increasingly alarmed by China’s bullying.  The part that worries me: “At some point, Australia and the other nations will have to decide whether to focus on reforming the old system or trying to build something new.”

Nice review of Claire Carlisle’s new biography of Kierkegaard, which has this wonderful exposition of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the Akedah (the “binding,” the near-sacrifice of Isaac) in Fear and Trembling:

God’s covenant with his people begins with a promise to the old and childless Abraham that his descendants will be as many as the stars in the sky. This promise is advanced with the birth of a son, Isaac, but God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac atop Mount Moriah. From the historical point of view, we know that this is a test of faith: Abraham will bring Isaac up the mountain and bind him for the sacrifice, but God will intervene before it is completed. Yet it is in the nature of such a test that one can’t know it to be a test at the time. Abraham must show himself willing to do something inexcusable, and the fact that he never actually does it is beside the point. What’s more, he does not tell anyone—not even Isaac—what he is doing. He suffers the anxiety of that trip up Mount Moriah alone, suffers even the possibility that he has misunderstood God’s command, that he is about to do something unforgivable. Finally, having passed the test, he descends the mountain again and returns to his old life, proceeding as though nothing had happened—as indeed, objectively, nothing did.

For Kierkegaard, this was the nature of the truly religious life. It entailed an inward turning toward God, one that could not be reduced to a moral law. In the preceding decades, great effort had been made to rationalize Christianity and situate it as the foundation of a universally binding ethical code. The problem, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, was that Jesus did not call us to obey a set of rules; he called us to love. It cannot be that adherence to an ethical code is the highest life, because it is possible to obey every rule placed in front of you without ever feeling love in your heart. To the aesthetic and the ethical was added a third category, the religious, which was beyond both.

Also, there’s this:

what does Kierkegaard have to tell our age?  It is almost a truism now that we are each called to take up our own life as a creative project, to make of it what we will, but our culture treats this project as a kind of performance, to be judged by others according to appearances. Kierkegaard’s concept of inwardness gives us this task in a very different form. No amount of likes or clicks can tell us whether we are living the life to which we have actually been called. In fact, the process of submitting our lives for public approval can only ever undermine our efforts. So much about contemporary society—not just the public curation of social media, but the consumer culture that presents us an endless stream of choices, none of which ultimately matter—is designed to distract from the truth of our existential situation. Kierkegaard tells us to hold this truth always in mind, to move toward, not away from, the anxiety and despair that must naturally follow from recognizing it.

But perhaps the greatest thing Kierkegaard has to tell our age is that we might stop thinking of ourselves as occupying an age at all—stop thinking that the meaning of our lives is determined by impersonal historical forces outside our control, or that our primary objective in life is to respond to the peculiar challenges of our moment. In 1848, the liberal revolutions sweeping through Europe arrived in Denmark, transforming the absolute monarchy into a constitutional democracy. “Out there everything is agitated,” Kierkegaard wrote in his journals. “I sit in a quiet room (no doubt I will soon be in bad repute for indifference to the nation’s cause)—I know only one risk, the risk of religiousness.”

This is the risk he believed we all must take up on our own terms. Since no one else can take it up for us, it doesn’t matter how late in history we have arrived at it. We are called to the same fundamental task as every previous age, and that is to learn how to love: “Whatever one generation learns from another,” Kierkegaard wrote, “no generation learns the genuinely human from a previous one.”

Can complex extraterrestrial life evolve in alien worlds? This article discusses some scholars who are using Bayesian methods to illuminate this fascinating puzzle. 

Nice piece by Richard Amesbury on legitimation in an age of popular sovereignty: 

The circular logic of popular sovereignty means that legitimation can never quite catch up with itself. States invent peoples, but “the people” can be imagined to take many forms, some narrow and exclusionary, others open and expansive, and the people on which democratic politics relies need not be configured nationalistically at all. Democracy is not reducible to the modalities of state power. If, as Miguel Abensour has argued, “democracy is essentially a political institution of human sociality, then tensions, conflicts and even contradictions emerge between democracy and the State” (xlv). Rather than something given, the people is always a work in progress, a failure, an aspiration yet to be achieved.  

Advice for managing anxiety about Coronavirus.  Not bad for life, too.   

We’ve heard from Camus and Defoe, might as well hear from Boccaccio too:

The fourteenth-century response to plague is no idle artifact of the past: it still continues to frame our understanding of how people think about infectious disease, and, indeed, what kind of humans we become in the midst of a pandemic. Rereading these first famous pages of Boccaccio’s Decameron, I find myself thinking how well he would have understood our own dilemmas in the age of COVID-19. What advice he might have offered?

Nice piece about the 17th century German composer Heinrich Schütz, whom some consider second only to Bach as a Baroque German composer.  I admit I had never heard of him, I think, despite being a big Bach-head and having read a number of books about Bach.  Looking forward to learning more.  

Haven’t read The Mirror and the Light yet, but I know I will, because I’ve really enjoyed the earlier Cromwell novels by Hilary Mantel.  Oddly, I’ve not been able to get more than twenty pages into A Place of Greater Safety, though—her earlier novel about the French Revolution—despite attempting it two or three times.  This piece is about the way this third volume has become a “cultural event”.  

Be well!  Get enough sleep.  Read mostly books, off-line.