Weekend Reads (2/17/24) + Some Housekeeping
Right Wing Progressives, Cures for Deafness, Alms
Housekeeping on this Substack
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while here, you may have noticed I have not recently written. This is in part due to commitments away from the Substack dashboard and in part due to feeling divided on what I’d like to write.
Many here are subscribers because they’re interested in tech and the career/personal implications from tech. That’s great. If that’s you, hello.
But others here are subscribers because they’ve followed some of my personal interests, including those I’ve written on elsewhere or have posted on in places like X/Twitter. Hello to you, as well.
I’ve become increasingly interested in writing on topics in both buckets but particularly those that have some kind of personal or theological implication. And I understand that may not be everybody’s cup of tea, so I’ve largely kept these pieces in my drafts or given them as talks.
I’ve recent set up a section of the site for those interested more in the second category here. You can find it here. Please note that if you previously subscribed to the general Substack, I did not automatically add you to the mailing list for this section. You can find a post here on the virtue of humility and its relationship to a proper understanding of objective reality. I gave that as a talk at a retreat in Summer 2023.
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All bolds below are added by myself for emphasis.
NS Lyons on the rise of Right-Wing Progressivism
Who/what is a Right-Wing Progressive (RWP)? Start by picturing a Silicon Valley elite who is by now well-and-truly fed up with the Woke left. But the causes for the RWP’s objection to the Woke mind-virus and its regnant regime differ significantly from those of a traditional conservative. The conservative loathes the Woke for their revolutionary assault on the moral, cultural, and social order, on foundational structures of civilization like the family, and on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful writ large. In contrast, the RWP is likely to consider these things to be at most tangential to his main concern. His anti-Wokeness is motivated mostly by an assessment that the ideology is degrading meritocracy, promoting irrational stupidity, inhibiting scientific innovation, diverting investment into worthless causes, and limiting long-term economic performance – in other words that it is holding back progress.
Lyons is obviously critical of Right-Wing Progressivism, though he invokes a friend/enemy distinction to hedge his criticisms. Regardless of where one falls on Right-Wing Progressivism, I do think this is an important insight and I appreciate Lyons’ way of thinking of different political philosophies: for what do the adherents of a given philosophy maximize?
Some years ago I would have (incorrectly) described this group as “techno-libertarians,” but, as Lyons notes, they are not actually libertarians. The libertarian maximizes for individual liberty. The RWP maximizes for progress. If individual liberty is conducive to progress, the RWP supports it. But liberty serves progress for the RWP, not the other way around.
The RWP is not exactly a libertarian, even if many of his kind are often vociferous advocates of free market solutions and deregulation. Certainly he is likely to be found supporting a gamut of liberal policies and projects that most conservatives would oppose: globalization and broadly open legal immigration regimes, surrogacy, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, replacing meat with cultivated cancer-meat, and so on. But he may at the same time support a strong state, capable of maintaining domestic order and security, as well as a favorable “rules-based international order” abroad.
What really sets him apart is the end to which he believes political leadership ought to be for. Whereas the libertarian believes the state should minimize itself in order to achieve the goal of maximizing liberty, the RWP believes the purpose of the state (and in fact all of civilization) is to facilitate the maximization of progress. If a hands-off, low-tax, free market approach seems to be what will facilitate the most progress, he’s for that. If the state-directed policies of an enlightened authoritarianism would produce more progress, he’s for that too. And if what progress really demands is that democracy be replaced with a monarch, well then long live the king!
Similarly, the localist or the distributist oftentimes looks like a libertarian but actually is maximizing for another value (piety?). The socialist maximizes for some version equality. The authoritarian maximizes for some version of order. And so on.
I tend to interact with a lot of people between the two camps of the “right wing” that Lyons describes: RWPs and traditional conservatives. Observing the conflicts that have arisen between these groups in the last year or two makes me believe that thinking long and hard about this distinction is going to be increasingly important in the years to come.
For another perspective on this issue, I recommend Jon Askonas’ article here. Another piece in this vein was the recent The Atlantic piece on a new ideology of the tech elite. I think Lyons’ piece has better and fairer framing. The wrong way to look at this issue is the “tech elite” versus “the people” or “democracy” or whatever. The right way is through the lens of “to what end does progress serve?” For the RWP, Lyons contends it’s an end in itself.
Moroccan boy in Philadelphia is first recipient of gene therapy for congenital deafness (NYT)
On Oct. 4, Aissam was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, becoming the first person to get gene therapy in the United States for congenital deafness. The goal was to provide him with hearing, but the researchers had no idea if the treatment would work or, if it did, how much he would hear.
The treatment was a success, introducing a child who had known nothing of sound to a new world.
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“There has never been a biological or medical or surgical way to correct the underlying biological changes that cause the inner ear to not function,” Dr. Chan said.
Although otoferlin mutations are not the most common cause of congenital deafness, there is a reason so many researchers started with it. That form of congenital deafness, said Dr. John A. Germiller, an otolaryngologist who is leading the CHOP study, is “low hanging fruit.”
The mutated otoferlin gene destroys a protein in the inner ear’s hair cells necessary to transmit sound to the brain. With many of the other mutations that cause deafness, hair cells die during infancy or even at the fetal stage. But with otoferlin deafness, hair cells can survive for years, allowing time for the defective gene to be replaced with gene therapy.
Some years ago I took a bioethics class at university. Bioethics is the kind of class where you get weird thought experiments (“Imagine a world-famous violinist…”, “picture a future where billions of people live but live poor lives; versus a world with thousands who live better lives…”, and of course the trolley problem) and absurd conclusions, mostly meant to help tease out the intuitions and beliefs that motivate certain ethical claims.
One of the hardest-to-understand set of claims I came across was those made by the Deaf Community, saying, more or less, that it would be unethical to cure a child of deafness at a young age.
I may write on this more in the future, but for now I figured the article above is interesting enough to read and a good example of medicine being used to repair the natural order to its rightly-ordered state (assuming the means through which the procedure are done are themselves rightly-ordered and licit).
OpenAI announces Sora — text to video
Not an article, but felt like this was significant enough and relevant to our audience here that I wanted to include it. Click through, watch the videos, and read the prompts underneath used to generate the text. Impressive.
“Christians Give Alms” by Jacob Imam
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was no virtue to give to the poor. In fact, they didn’t even have a word that meant almsgiving until the Christians invented one. As Roman Garrison writes, “The lack of terminology in the Greek tradition (and the Roman as well) for the concept of almsgiving proves to be symptomatic of a certain disinterest in the plight of the impoverished.”[1] It was Christianity, and Judaism before it, that introduced almsgiving to the world.
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Alms—in Greek elemosina—pertains to mercy, the extravagant, hard-to-conceptualize, I’m-not-sure-this-really-makes-sense mercy of God. We show mercy to the poor in the form of alms because God showed us mercy in the form of his Son. In almsgiving we participate in God’s extravagance.
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Tired of hearing his congregants complain about the poor failing to show gratitude for their alms, Saint Caesarius of Arles railed, “Give to a poor man, and perhaps some day he will repay you with abuse? You sought praise from the pauper, not reward from God. Now you judge that you acted without reason because you only found ingratitude, as though God, who wishes to reward you for good deeds, won’t or perhaps can’t.”[10] The point of almsgiving is not to obtain any result from man, but a reward from God. Almsgiving is one of the least utilitarian things a person can do; a dive into the abyss of uselessness.
It’s the first weekend of Lent, a period during which the Christian Church traditionally fasts, gives alms, and prays more in preparation for the Paschal Feast on Easter Sunday.
While the period is mostly associated nowadays with things like Fish Fries and giving up vices like sweets or social media, the core three practices were always fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. Of the three of these, almsgiving is the one that I feel we hear about the least in our times, despite many pages of ink and papyrus being spent on it by early Christians.
For those whose curiosity is piqued by this topic, I’d recommend St. John Chrysostom’s On Wealth and Poverty.
Newsletter Recommendation
Myles Cooks by Myles Snider is one of my favorite recent Substack subscriptions. Myles runs a cooking program called 80/20 Cooking for which I cannot currently vouch, but his newsletters have some of the best recipes, product recommendations, and simple “need-to-knows” for great cooking. I’ve used it already to buy improved cookware and for gift-hunting.
"unethical to cure deafness" - sometimes(*frequently*) the stupidity of academia just astounds me. obviously you shouldn't FORCE someone to accept a cure for their deafness, but withholding it on ethical grounds is just ridiculous.