What does it mean, ethically and morally, to make that statement? There are some folks who might view that assertion as a mark of strength and flexibility, as a sign that a decision-maker is someone who will get things done. If you set a goal, and are willing to get to that goal by any means necessary, then it is far more likely that you'll succeed.
But the problem with this declaration is obvious. If a person isn't willing to rule out any course of action, then they are amoral.
Good and moral people are defined not simply by what they do, but also by what they are unwilling to do. Morality isn't just about goals, but about the means to those goals. If I pursue a good end with evil methods, then I am evil, and the final result of my actions will be colored by my evil methods.
Still, I may reach my goal, rather than failing to do so because there are things I will not do.
In that sense, amoral and evil people have "strengths" that a moral and good person does not.
But what even is good, and what is evil, some folks might offer. My understanding of the good may differ yours, so who is to say where the truth of anything lies? In our amoral age, this amoral assertion passes for common wisdom. The sons and daughters of Pilate would have us understand truth as essentially subjective, and moral action as relative.
I reject this.
I have a clear understanding of my ethical purpose, even as I recognize my failings in striving towards it. If you are a Christian, if you make that claim about yourself, then your actions must be governed by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It's a non-negotiable. And that constrains me. Violence against others is off the table. The single minded pursuit of material gain and profit is off the table. Cruelty, lies, and manipulation are off the table. The brute consequentialism of power and dominance are off the table.
They must be, or we are not who we say we are.
We would become salt without saltiness, as Jesus once put it.
This weekend, I attended a small memorial service at my church.
It wasn't for a member, but was instead a gathering of members of a local organization whose purpose is to remember the lynchings inflicted on Black folk in the Jim Crow South. Poolesville, Maryland isn't in the South physically, but it sure was the South culturally back in the day.
The last lynching in Montgomery County was right out front of my church, as it happened, of a young man named George Peck. That 1880 murder is memorialized by a marker that sits right out front of my congregation's community garden. So to remember the anniversary of his killing and the history of racial violence in America, a little group gathered in the warmth of our sanctuary on a bitter and rainy January afternoon.
My task was nothing more than to support the gathered group, so after opening the space up, turning on heat and lights, and welcoming the organizers to our sacred space, I was done. After that, all I had to do was just sit and listen and reflect.
As friends from the community talked about the importance of remembering, and how vital it is that human beings not forget the past, I was struck by several things.
First, that so much of the language being used about the necessity of holding on to the past felt oddly...conservative. I mean, this was a gathering of Card Carrying Progressives, without question, but so much of the language was about acknowledging those who had come before, about memory, about the truths that can only be grasped if we connect with our history. As the civil rights movement was discussed, the folks gathered affirmed those who had come before, honoring their memory, their efforts, and their culture.
This is, again, a conservative thing, a holding on to what is good in the face of regime propaganda that wants us to forget anything bad ever happened ever. It's an odd inversion.
Second, the tenor and the focus of the conversation resonated off of our cultural struggles to maintain our attention and hold on to a cohesive sense of self. We are being wired differently now, trained to exist only in the ephemeral moment, to think and act without reflection. It isn't just that we forget the long deep tragic story of human history. We forget things we ourselves have experienced, and the continuity of our essential personhood becomes hazed with a cloud of dopamine and cortisone.
It's like being trapped forever as a sophomore in high school, as a "wise fool" who has intelligence but lacks the context necessary to apply it. We flit from moment to moment, good little malleable consumers, both ungrounded and purposeless, here a little, there a little, but never understanding.
If a people are separated from their history, if they are torn from their sense of place and a relationship to past, present, and future, it sabotages their souls.
I find myself, lately, wondering about the state of my playlists. Ever since adolescence, I’ve always enjoyed encountering new music, finding my way to a sound, a composer, or an artist that I’ve never encountered. Once, that came through the radio, as I’d twist that tuning knob to WCXR 105.9 or WHFS 102.3 on the FM dial. I reached back into the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s, and into the world of alternative rock, and encountered the new.
There were mix tapes provided by friends, which soon became CDs, which became playlists. Then the playlists started getting different, curated not by the human beings around me, but by algorithms designed to show me what I already like. This can lead things to feeling a little stale, a little samey samey and ultraprocessed. I hear only what I want to hear, and that makes me feel like a stagnant pond.
In the last six months, there’s been a new shift in the approach to recommendation. Take, for instance, my recent tendency to listen to Parisian jazz. A sultry chanteuse singing wistfully of l’amour jazzie is chill enough to take the edge off of any commute, but…the algorithms being the algorithms…my lists were getting a bit stale. So I went looking for more, and from artists I didn’t know. What I found was dozens of new albums, all filled with voices I’d never heard. Like, say, Eva LaNuit, whose music filled my car on a recent drive. Je n’ai pas change, purred the voice beneath a guttural sax, and I thought, who is this?
Her versions of old standards felt like slipping into a well worn shoe. Tight and interestingly constructed improvisationally, her sound was exactly what I was looking for, exactly. So I looked her up when I got home, and of course, she doesn’t exist. She’s an AI simulacrum, her voice and her tightly tasteful backup band all constructed from extant music and prompts from a user in Morocco, ones and zeros. She is not the droid I am looking for.
But many people are in this strange new age. The AI “band” Breaking Rust recently had the best selling streaming single in all of country music, with the unsettlingly good single Walk My Walk. An AI “artist” called Solomon Ray has repeatedly topped the Gospel charts, which is remarkable for a singer that literally has no soul. The songs are catchy, the songs work, and once you listen to one, the machine just keeps serving them up, over and over again. The cup of AI slop runneth over, and I want nothing more than to wash it all from my mind. It is a new thing, and there’s plenty of it.
There come times when societies fall into decadence, when they forget their purpose and what makes them good, and culture begins to rot. How, if one lives in such a time, do you restore your sense of self and sanity? How do you commit to reclaiming what was lost?
In first century Judah, you did that by being baptized. Baptism finds its spiritual foundation in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing. That practice literally washed away impurities of the flesh, allowing a person to return to connection with community. By the time of Jesus, baptism had become a way to renew one’s commitment to God’s covenant of faithfulness and justice, as the Temple in Jerusalem became more and more woven up with the greed and moral rot of the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great and his incestuous brood were interested only in their own gain, and that corruption trickled down to the priesthood and the temple, an edifice wrapped in gold and ego.
Out in the desert wilderness, John the Baptist wasn’t just there because he liked the feel of camel hair and the satisfying crunch of protein rich locust chitin. He was there to share a message to a people who knew they had lost their way, who sensed that all around them had yielded to the siren song of greed and power, and who felt the loss of their identity as a covenant people.
And so the ritual of baptism became a way to recommit yourself to the faith of your people, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.
In Christianity, that ancient sacred tradition was continued. It became the symbolic entry into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by mammon, domination, and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.
New life, however, doesn’t mean the things we tend to think it means. It doesn’t mean more of the things that our society teaches us to view as success. It is explicitly and intentionally not that. There is nothing more dangerous to our souls than hearing only what you expect to hear. If we are walking the Way of Jesus, it means day after day recalling the purpose established in our baptism.
So what to do, when the songs around us are no longer truly human, and when the mediating structures that connect us no longer do so?
I wonder that, in my listening to the music that fills my hours. It’s not that AI-generated music is bad in the abstract. It is not, not any more, not like the amusingly incompetent bluegrass hymn I had an AI make in praise of Poolesville Presbyterian church a year ago. Just twelve months ago, the best AI could do worked for two verses, then descended into something that sounded like speaking in tongues, which isn’t particularly Presbyterian.
Now, it’s perfect, seamless, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect.
The easy Turkish-delight sweetness of it is as tempting as the songs that filled the ears of Odysseus with yearning as he strained against the mast.
So I attend to every new song I hear with care. If the images accompanying the music are all AI generated, that’s a marker. If the musician has no history, no story, and seems to have just popped into existence a month ago, that’s a marker. I ask myself, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?
I scrub my playlists clean, and seek instead real human voices, in all our most beautiful variety and difference.
And I start considering my tendency to use AI for things that once would have been the realm of artists and photographers. Those images were only there, after all, to market my writing, to create a visual splash on social media platforms I no longer use. Why use them at all? Perhaps now is the time to make that change.
After I rewatched a few old SCTV videos and dear old John Daker last week, the algorithms decided to introduce me to Stairway to Stardom. It's a New York city public access television show from the early 1980s, one in which eager unknowns performed in a "studio." They sang, they danced, they did their routines, all with the hope that this show would be the first rung on the ladder to fortune.
It never, ever was. Not once.
It's like America's Got Talent, only without all that much of the latter. Nothing about it parses as professional, which makes the performances a little painful to watch. "Cringe," as the kids used to say, but no longer do. The mismatch between the desire for fame and artistry is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon, and as high as Olympus Mons.
There have always been folks who hunger for celebrity, who yearn for fame, who get caught up in the desperate grasping struggle to push their way into the public consciousness.
Back then, it meant shows like this one. Now, it means TikTok and YouTube.
Because the height of fame means you're gonna live forever, and people will remember your name, as that old film and TV series once sang into the eager ears of a generation. You shine like a star in the sky, and everyone thinks they know you, because they do, sort of.
And fame gives you power.
Social influence is one of the most ancient forms of power, stretching back deep into human history. If you are known, and you know people, those relationships translate into material success, which translates into more people knowing you, which translates into more power.
In the era of social media and "going viral," that hunger has spread further and and further into our culture, as commodified sociality has been reinforced, over and over again. You never know what moment might go viral, and that borderline subliminal awareness worms its way into our every relationship. Ooh, here's a cute dog pic! Here's me reacting to a thing I didn't make! look at me Look At Me LOOK AT ME! One needs no special talent, or any special skill at anything. Just dumb luck and pathological self-promotion. How else to explain Mr. Beast?
Filtered through the profit seeking lenses of corporate social media, our creative efforts stop being valuable in and of themselves, and become a parasocial means to an end. For the owners of the media, our art and music becomes a thing to be scraped for data and used for marketing. For us, it can...if we are not wary...mean our grasp of the point of art is drowned in a sea of grasping egotism.
Every form of human creativity has intrinsic value, but the moment we cease to delight in the act of creation and sharing? The moment we see it primarily in terms of Mammon's shine, of more and more and always more?
Last night I spent a little over an hour making mac and cheese.
It's a recipe we've prepared before, and it requires a whole bunch of effort. Butternut squash must be peeled, cubed, and roasted, and then blended up in a food processor. After that, it's mixed with the macaroni and a buttery nutmeg/rosemary infused sauce in a large pan. From there, it's poured into a casserole dish, topped with panko and baked.
It requires a significant period of sustained focus, as do many recipes, and at the end of the process, you have...mac and cheese. Delicious, flavorful, utterly satisfying, it's vastly better than the boxed and powdered equivalent.
But it takes five times more time to prepare than a buck-fifty box of Kraft. It is inconvenient. It provides no immediate gratification. It is not easy to the point of mindlessness.
As I puttered about in the kitchen, sipping an inexpensive Cabernet with a chill synth-jazz theremin album humming through my headphones, I wondered at how we use our time and effort.
Because making the meal was work. It required effort towards a singular purpose over time. I was required to focus, measuring out ingredients, prestaging them neatly in bowls and cups. Given the ingredients, that effort went back even further. The butternut squash was my own, a cupboard-stored winter squash from my late fall harvest. The tablespoon of chopped rosemary was clipped fresh from one of the two plants in my herb garden, five minutes before it was tossed into the pan.
The meal drew fractionally from many, many hours of labor, digging and composting, seedsaving and planting, watering and weeding. A portion of the sweat of years, all contributing to the table.
To what better use could I have put that time? Because the gardening was a pleasure, and the preparation was a pleasure, and the meal was a pleasure.
Should I have been doomscrolling instead? Or passively consuming a prepackaged entertainment?
That would have robbed me of the delight of the work of my hands, and the flavor of time well-spent.
Nicolas Maduro isn't a particularly decent human being. He's a despot and an authoritarian, without question, for whom elections and press freedoms have little meaning. He's ignored or misrepresented voting results, insisting on power despite the will of the people. Venezuela has not thrived under his rule.
And now the United States has him, and we're intent on trying him for his crimes. Specifically, the crime of narcoterrorism, for which the Trump administration has secured an indictment. Meaning, distributing cocaine, conspiring to distribute cocaine, and violating gun laws by owning automatic weapons. The indictment, in full, can be found at this link.
We are told, by our current attorney general, that Maduro is to face the wrath of American justice.
What, precisely, does the "wrath of American justice" mean?
It means a fair trial, the right to a legal defense, and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. The sword is applied only after the balances are weighed, blindly and without prejudice. Or it should.
Reading through the 25 page indictment, which I encourage you to do, it's not a slam dunk case.
Remember when this whole thing was all about boats filled with deadly fentanyl? The ones we were sinking, daily, because fentanyl and opiates are a plague in America? Nowhere in the indictment is fentanyl even mentioned. Instead, every last one of the charges are about cocaine and firearm possession.
The indictment is a laundry list of claims, most of which involve the actions of alleged co-conspirators and not Maduro himself. While Maduro is a leftist brute, Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine. That would be, instead, Columbia, Bolivia, and Peru. It does pass through Venezuela, and is distributed there, but that's true of Mexico, too...and also true of the United States. That part of the indictment, for all of its legalese and hyperbole, seems a significant overreach.
And the firearm charges seem to neglect a significant jurisdictional detail. Where were those firearms used and possessed? In Venezuela. Do the firearms regulations of the United States apply in Venezuela?
Is there a significant doubt about Maduro's despotic rule? There is not. But he isn't being charged for being a tyrant.
Might there be a significant doubt about these charges? There might. Presuming, of course, that American justice still exists.
Which, if it is simply an implement to facilitate our brute force seizure of the world's largest oil reserves, it does not.
There is some question as to whether or not I'll get home tomorrow. Not much, mind you, but enough that I find myself a little unsettled.
Last night, after I warmed up our old Honda van to schlep the family to a nearby pizzeria, I was unpleasantly surprised when...goaded to movement...it sputtered into silence. Sure, the temperature was barely fifteen Fahrenheit, but it had started without a hitch, and it'd warmed up for ten minutes with no problem. I'd expected to slither it out through the eight inches of wind-driven snow without too much difficulty.
That was not, however, what the Fates had in mind. The idiot lights, suddenly all illumined. A warning on the primitive LCD informed all who cared that the charging system had failed. The lights dimmed. The engine pulsed and surged and waned, then went cold. The van was kaput. It would not restart.
It was, as intuition and a little frantic dabbling through Reddit revealed, the alternator. Almost without a doubt.
The thwarted family recoalesced into three smaller vehicles, and together we made our way to an Uno's dinner. But my mind was on the van, and the uncertain return to Virginia. My thoughts remained there throughout the night, as my sleep was repeatedly disturbed by fretfulness. Where would it be repaired? And could the repair be accomplished in time to get me back for worship on Sunday? None of these things were known, when I went to sleep last night, so Lethe was miserly with her ministrations.
But further, there was my peculiar care for the van itself. Not for its use. For what it is.
We have had that van for thirteen years. It has been, for a quarter of my middle-aged life, a perfect and practical thing. It's been a shared family space, not a home but very much homely. I have taught children to drive in that van. Eager teen canoodling has happened in that van, because, yes, my sons, I know why those rear seats were down in the morning. It has carried us all, together, to vacations and graduations, to funerals and marriages, to weeping and joy, all in humble comfort. It's a liminal space, a travelling space, a Maker of the Ways, in an Esu Ellegua/Soichiro Honda sort of way.
We've been sinking money into it lately, more and more as the years have progressed. System after system has failed, five figures worth in the last twelve months. It is a dying Honda in winter. My Scots blood knows that to continue this is madness.
Part of me...probably the Irish part...wants to hold onto it forever, like I'm Cubano and it's a '57 Chevy. But it's fading, and unreliable, and practical me struggles to justify such a romantic absurdity. It may be time, I say, and my wife...never one to care about my concupiscent lust for novel wheeled and motorized things...agrees.
It is doomed.
"I can see the van recoiling in terror," said my older son, who drove it to prom, and who was moved in and out of college with it many a time. "'No, surely, surely you won't, not after all these years,' it cries."
I too personify this object. It has the heft of time and care. I allow it to be imbued with my deep fatherly male pleasure in its function, in providing both utility and comfort and a sense that all is well, that all is safe, and that all are cared for. It is now The Van. We have named it.
Yet I remember the van that was The Van before it. A machine that held that name, that carried tiny little ones in carseats, that carried beloved family that are now ancestors, and that schlepped mulch and brick and appliances.
And though my midlife cries out in protest against it, surely and convertible yearnings be damned, there will be a van that follows the Van.
That will, in time, become the Van. As I hope, someday, not to be the Dad, or my wife the Mom. That a small voice will name another with our name, and that will be a good thing.
Assuming, of course, that the country garage that holds our van now delivers it, functioning, as expected.
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