Some Secular Thoughts on the Catholic Palm Sunday Liturgy

Palm Sunday is one of the most important days of the Catholic liturgical year for reasons fundamental to the religion: it's about the condemnation and death of the Messiah. As a Catholic, I accept the theology of the whole thing. But for the last few years, I've returned to the same set of thoughts about why the liturgy is so powerful and important to me from a secular standpoint. The Catholic Church's Palm Sunday liturgy teaches us important lessons about how to live, even before we get into the great spiritual, theological, and eschatological questions about Jesus, God, and the universe itself. But if we take a "Jefferson Bible" approach to the divinity of Jesus, the lessons remain quite powerful.

The Catholic service on Palm Sunday starts with a procession and Gospel reading, which is unique in the liturgical year. In Year B, Mark's Gospel serves as the first reading. It includes the following passage, talking about what happened as Jesus entered Jersualem:

Many people spread their cloaks on the road,
and others spread leafy branches
that they had cut from the fields.
Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:
"Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
Hosanna in the highest!"

So the people hailed this guy as he entered town, waving their palms and offering encomiums (and it's why we get palms at the beginning of mass). That's the groundwork for what's about to come in about 10-15 minutes: the passion narrative.

The passion substitutes for the main gospel reading, and it's handled as a sort of "table read" for a stage play. There are four characters:

- Jesus, read by the priest.
- The narrator, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "voice," who fills in where one specific person (like Peter or Pontius Pilate) has a line of dialogue, usually read by a deacon or a lay reader.
- The "crowd," read by the congregation.

This is unique in the Catholic liturgy; normally, the Gospel reading is proclaimed by the priest or deacon, and then a homily follows. For Palm Sunday (and Good Friday), the passion stage play substitutes.

The rough narrative of the passion is as follows:

- Jesus has dinner with his apostles/followers and tells them one of them is going to betray him.
- Judas betrays him and he's arrested.
- Jesus is accused of many things but the testimony conflicts. He is eventually condemned to death for blasphemy and mocked.
- Jesus faces the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who finds no reason to put him to death.
- Pontius Pilate offers "the crowd" a choice between the release of a revolutionary and the release of Jesus, as part of a way to celebrate Passover. The crowd chooses the revolutionary.
- Jesus is mocked as "King of the Jews" and physically abused.
- Jesus is crucified and dies.

The whole stage play takes about 15 or 20 minutes to work through. For the Passion according to Mark (Year B), the crowd has a few pieces of dialogue. Several stand out. (The narrator notes are included, and the required dialogue is in quotes.)

- They all condemned him as deserving to die. Some began to spit on him. They blindfolded him and struck him and said to him, "Prophesy!"
- Pilate again said to them in reply,"Then what do you want me to do
with the man you call the king of the Jews?" They shouted again, "Crucify him."
Pilate said to them, "Why? What evil has he done?" They only shouted the louder, "Crucify him."
- The soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is, the praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort. They clothed him in purple and, weaving a crown of thorns, placed it on him. They began to salute him with, "Hail, King of the Jews!"
- With him they crucified two revolutionaries, one on his right and one on his left.
Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross."

It's a little incongruous with the rest of the Catholic liturgy. The guy we say is God and worthy of "unending hymns of praise," we're mocking and condemning to death here. Sarcasm and spite reign. What gives?

For me at least, the Palm Sunday liturgy forces me to grapple with my humanity.

First, we're fickle. We're holding palms, just like the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as a king, and then just a few minutes later, we're condemning him to death.

Second, we can be mean. The mockery Jesus faces from random people and from soldiers is just callous and cold-blooded; he's a prophet and so we say, "Oh yeah? Prophesy!" They call him a King, so we clothe him in a regal purple, give him a crown of thorns, and laugh in his face. We then nail him to a cross and tell him to come down. It's just profoundly cruel.

Third, we can get caught up in a mob. The story insists that Jesus is innocent of the charges against him, but the mob insists that he be put to death anyway, ferociously advocating for a murderer to be released over the teacher.

That we have to play the part of the mob is a reminder that any of us could have done the same thing in their position. It's why it's always been deeply unfair and silly to "blame" a certain subset of people for Jesus' death: the things that got him were fundamentally human failings. Crying out "Crucify him!" makes us feel uncomfortable, because we know that he's innocent and how the story ends. But how often are we in analogous situations today? How often do we "crucify" a blameless person by acting without compassion and by surrendering to a mobocratic spirit?

There's another part that's important, though: the passion play also tells us that we can be better. Several characters do better: the nameless woman who anoints Jesus' head with oil; Simon the Cyrenian, who helps carry his cross; and Joseph of Arimathea, who prepares Jesus' body for burial. They're the ones to emulate, not the mob.

And so the Palm Sunday liturgy--and the audience participation therein--is an annual reminder for me: any of us can get caught in the mob, and all of us can aspire to do better.

On Football's Thursday Night Problem

This one is straightforward: Thursday Night Football games are by and large trash: lots of penalties, sloppy play, big margins. And this makes sense: if Thursday Night Football games were consistently better, it would refute the need for practice and recovery weeks in general.

So, with a hat tip to @rchatter29 on Twitter, this is the way to handle it:

1. Move to two bye weeks per team. That expands the season to 18 weeks, rather than 17. Bye weeks begin as early as Week 2, and run through Week 16 now.
2. The week 1 game does not "count" for the Thursday night slate; there's no rest issue there.
3. Every team gets a bye week prior to their Thursday night game, in addition to one other bye week somewhere else in the schedule. This ensures 10 days of rest on either side of the game.
4. Every team gets a Thursday night game. The week 1 teams get 2.
5. Start the Thursday night slate in Week 3.

The math works out fine, too, for a 32-team league.

Week 1 - doesn't count for the Thursday Night slate
Week 2 - no game
Week 3 - 1/2
Week 4 - 3/4
Week 5 - 5/6
Week 6 - 7/8
Week 7 - 9/10
Week 8 - 11/12
Week 9 - 13/14
Week 10 - 15/16
Week 11 - 17/18
Week 12 (Thanksgiving) - 19/20, 21/22, 23/24
Week 13 - 25/26
Week 14 - 27/28
Week 15 - 29/30
Week 16 - 31/32
Week 17 - probably Saturday games
Week 18 - everybody on Sunday

This lengthens the season and gives NFL players more rest in general. Who says no?

On Puglistic Communitarianism

Joe Arpaio is the epitome of a dangerous sort of conservatism.

I write about conservatism a lot from where I see it. I think of conservatism as a combination of a few things: respect for tradition, local preferences, apolitical spaces, the rule of law, epistemological modesty, bottom-up experimentation, and skepticism of both populism and technocracy. (I even wrote a bunch of rambling pieces to this effect!)

But people aren't voting for conservatives because they like the things I wrote about. Those factors are why I think conservatism is useful and essential--or, if I'm feeling cynical, how I rationalize my voting pattern post hoc. But conservatism in popular opinion seems to be more often a response to the perception of a threat.

Let's be clear: threats are real! The world is dangerous; people are fallen and sinful; our more enthusiastic reformers are often careless in attempting to destroy existing structures en route to immanetizing the eschaton. It is not prima facie irrational to be concerned about the preservation of what exists ovetrthe creation of the New Jerusalem.

It's useful to think of reflexive conservatism in the face of this struggle as a sort of pugilistic communitarianism. That's not my phrase; that's from a perceptive article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells about Chris Christie's response to the Ebola scare of 2014.  He wrote about how Christie's default posture was to position himself as the defender of the "in-group" against external threats--but also to define the in-group very broadly.

Wallace-Wells suggested that Christie was at times "heading for a truly great political accomplishment, modernizing conservative communitarianism, expanding the in-group so that it is no longer simply just white, Christian, male, and socially repressive." A great example of this was his defense of his nomination of Sohail Mohmamed for a Superior Court judgeship in New Jersey.

In this context, the "crazies" were the out-group, and Mohammed can be part of a broad American in-group.

While his article was insightful, Wallace-Wells missed the boat a bit on the zeitgeist. He writes,

The country is evolving; in-group ties are weakening, and a politics of individual rights has grown stronger. Christie’s own politics, his instinctive pugilistic communitarianism, may seem a little anachronistic in a country less inclined to see outsiders as enemies.

On the contrary: the ongoing disaster of 2016 and 2017 has proved that in-group ties are strengthening in our era of identity politics. Indeed, Donald Trump exploited a sort of narrow in-grouping--or white identity politics--en route to his narrow election win. It is through this prism that we should see the divide over Joe Arpaio. For a certain sort of conservative, Arpaio protects a narrow in-group from threats, and whatever method he chooses for the job is inherently justified. The rest is noise.

Unfortunately, pugilistic communitarian in the absence of charity is a dangerous place for the Right to be. And while Arpaio may feign religion by playing Christmas carols for his prisoners 12 hours a day, the condition of his jails suggests that he did not respect the inherent dignity of his charges. This leads to moral atrocities, with the complicity of a disinterested or uncompassionate electorate.

Right now, the public demands government, and the Right needs a better answer than narrow in-group pugilistic communitarianism that leads to Trump and Arpaio. For the sake of our souls, the Right probably needs to return to Christie's broader approach. If only Chris Christie were better than he is.

The Most Important Life Lesson

Take responsibility for your actions.

A lot of people in America can get away with avoiding this one. The structures of American society are tilted at times, towards, among other folks, white people, rich people, and people who exercise the powers of the state. They are able to make mistakes or commit wrongdoing and use the criminal justice system, connections, public goodwill, or personal and family wealth to avoid genuine consequences.

Others do not have access to those advantages, and face the full brunt of the justice system in the face of their errors and crimes. This is obviously disproportionate.

And yet the solution is not to allow anything and everything because we cannot always offer equal treatment. Our response must be twofold. First, we must continue to focus on redressing the imbalances of opportunity and treatment in our society. But second, we must build a culture where individuals take responsibility for their actions. This should be the most important thing we teach our kids. Bad things will happen sometimes; these things will often be inadvertent. It may not seem fair that 10 minutes--or even 10 seconds--of misjudgment or rage will affect the rest of your life. But sometimes, it must.

But do not despair. Instead, don't try to hide your actions. Don't tolerate a cover-up. Tell the truth about what happened, as soon as you can. Trust that society will be merciful if you demonstrate contrition. Don't accept the easy way out because you can. Remember that your life and lifestyle here on Earth are not the most important thing. "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." - Romans 12:2

NHL Expansion/Playoff Reform

No one asked, but I did it anyway: how to do expansion in the NHL and handle the geographic imbalance.

1. Move the Arizona Coyotes to Quebec City. Long overdue.

2. Add an expansion team in Seattle. They want the Pacific NW rivalry.

3. Massive realignment: four divisions of eight teams, no conferences. Name each division after a famous hockey player.

GRETZKY DIVISION

Vancouver Canucks
Seattle Downpours
San Jose Sharks
Los Angeles Kings
Anaheim Ducks
Vegas Golden Knights
Calgary Flames
Edmonton Oilers

ORR DIVISION

Colorado Avalanche
Winnipeg Jets
Minnesota Wild
Dallas Stars
St. Louis Blues
Chicago Blackhawks
Nashville Predators
Columbus Blue Jackets

HOWE DIVISION

Pittsburgh Penguins
Toronto Maple Leafs
Detroit Red Wings
Buffalo Sabres
Ottawa Senators
Montreal Canadiens
Quebec Nordiques
Boston Bruins

LEMIEUX DIVISION

New York Rangers
New York Islanders
New Jersey Devils
Philadelphia Flyers
Washington Capitals
Carolina Hurricanes
Tampa Bay Lightning
Florida Panthers

4. For the playoffs: the top team in each division makes it automatically. The next 12 highest scoring teams are assigned by lottery into a playoff division.

5. Instead of best-of-7 series, we go to a round-robin of sorts, closer to the World Cup than the Stanley Cup. The "second season" is 12 games each for every team. You play each team 4 times. The highest scoring team in each group advances to the semifinals. The goal of this is to reduce potential cross-country travel. (Ties in "playoff points" are broken by regular season point totals.)

6. The winners of the round-robin go into best-of-7 series, as is today. These will be seeded by total regular season points--the top regular season point-getter plays the bottom regular season point-getter and gets home ice advantage. The #2 plays the #3.

7. Winners play for the Stanley Cup in a best-of-7.

You're welcome, Canada. (And America, I guess.)

A Short Rant on "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me"

I used to listen to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, NPR's very funny weekly news quiz, as a podcast. Some time in 2016 (I think roughly after the Florida primary), I abruptly stopped doing so, because the snark about the GOP process was just too depressing for me. (Also, my cheap phone has such little capacity.)

I was in the car this morning, though, returning from the grocery store, and I happened to flip to NPR, just when this week's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, was airing. The show starts "Who's Bill This Time?," where velvety-voiced announcer Bill Kurtis reads quotes from the previous week and asks a caller to identify the .

I didn't hear the first quote, but in context, it was pretty clearly about Trump. The host and the panelists went back and forth with some amusing bits about Trump and the truck, the fact that he doesn't share a bedroom with his wife, and his casual relationship with the truth. (The joke there was that "truth died after the Republicans took away its health insurance.")

But the second quote was the galling one. It was a Ryan quote. I'm transcribing the section below:

Bill Kurtis: "We've been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking at a keg."
Peter Sagal: "That was Speaker of the House Paul Ryan last week talking about his days as an idealistic college student drinking some beers with his bros and dreaming of taking away what from people?"

After a short pause, the caller guessed... "Medicaid?"

Sagal's response: "Close enough! Yes, health care! That's exactly right."

The caller actually was closer to Ryan's point than was the Wait Wait! staff, though. Ryan had not been "dreaming about taking away" people's health care since he was in college. He was dreaming about capping the growth rate of Medicaid and block granting it to the States, which has been a GOP wonk policy proposal for decades. Republicans passed it in 1995, and Bill Clinton vetoed it. But Democrats were of mixed minds on block grants for a long time. Democratic Governor Howard Dean of Vermont noted, "I have an open mind on block grants for Medicaid. The flexibility of a Medicaid block grant is extraordinarily appealing, but we need to work out some protection for children." Then two years later, Clinton himself proposed a version of Medicaid block granting that didn't go anywhere.

It's just a comedy quiz show--sort of The Daily Show, but a bit more clever--and I shouldn't take it seriously.  But it's one of those reasons why politics is so frustrating these days. Block granting Medicaid is not a monstrous proposal. It's a reasonable response to explosive cost growth that may or may not result in added efficiencies at the state level, and small-government-minded GOP folks like Ryan have supported the concept for a long time. But here, it's treated by the show's writers like some sort of draconian, cruel idea.

The inability to step outside of a given worldview and evaluate an idea on its own terms is destructive to the discourse. And yet it continues, unabated, as we careen further and further towards extremism.

Defending Conservatism, Part 8: The Way Forward and Additional (Better) Reading

So far, I have mostly spoken in favor of approaches to politics and policy, rather than details. This is in the interest of being somewhat ecumenical; I think these approaches can work for people across the political spectrum, and I want to avoid too many landmines in making that case. But for me, the final piece of the puzzle is more specific, and less philosophical than actuarial. In short: I think the trajectory of America’s entitlement programs, specifically Medicare, is simply unsustainable. Progressives wish to continue expanding those commitments, or adopt mostly-destructive top-down solutions (like the rationing of care) to reduce their costs. Most of what I believe in terms of making changes to existing and venerable programs comes down to my read of the math. (This is why I have insisted for years that it is appropriate for middle- and upper-class people pay more for predictable health care expenses.) I do not trust the top-down solutions to solve those problems optimally. For years, I have believed that Republicans were more likely to solve this issue than Democrats, and as such, I have voted for Republican after Republican.

Alas, the election of Trump changes all that. Trump does not recognize the problem. It is likely that he will be followed as president by a Democrat who also does not recognize this, or who places it below the desire for additional government spending. That would take us to 2024 or 2028 before we’d even have a slight chance of fixing this problem. Meanwhile, every year, the problem will get worse. So now we have two parties that refuse to grapple with this problem, and the party that used to rhetorically has abandoned its position.

It’s hard to say where things go from here, but I suspect the answer is in a very negative direction. American politics for the next few decades will likely be a constant fight over health care spending and benefits: what services are required, what services are non-essential, what experimental drugs are available, what drugs are not covered, what treatments get subsidized, etc. I expect health care delivery to become increasingly mechanical, with less and less personal care and attention from medical professionals, and more and more from standard operating procedures, written by technical experts and vetted and approved by bureaucrats. At the same time, I expect medical innovation to slow to a trickle, as government increasingly regulates prices, and research and development budgets get slashed.

This is a bleak vision, and we will never know the lives lost--or at least shortened--by the errors that will emerge in this process, and the lost or delayed medical advances.

It actually gets worse, though: what I have outlined above is essentially a society governed by the politics of scarcity, which are substantially scarier than the politics of abundance that characterized much of the 20th century. Scarcity is terrible, and we should expect people to vote out of desperation. The first salvo in that new world was election of Trump. We should not expect it to be the last.

This all means that it is critical that we do what we must to avoid the further fraying of the social ties that bind us. The approach I have outlined here is specifically tailored to avoid backlash. Give people more of an investment in their communities through decentralization. Avoid politicizing every sphere of life, so that people can form stronger, lasting connections. Create predictable laws so that the government treats people equally, and people don’t get frustrated by favoritism. Don’t push policy that destroys or weakens the hold of traditional institutions without extreme caution and care. Take the broad population’s concerns to heart by not reflexively dismissing populist movements. In a world we don’t understand, these are prudential steps to deal with uncertainty.

The alternative, in my estimation, is a society that continues to fracture as people are constantly disappointed, and a political order that swerves violently between the political poles, driven by aggressive executive action rather than prudential lawmaking. Our victories will be temporary, our struggles permanent. That is the future I wish to avoid.

I’ll close with Lincoln. Though I don’t anticipate violent civil war, we are drifting in a bad direction, and Lincoln’s conciliatory words closing his First Inaugural are always worth remembering:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

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OK, so you’ve made it this far and you don’t hate yourself for wasting your time. Who should you be reading instead? By and large, right-leaning media is horrendous (see: Breitbart, FOX, etc.), but the Right commentariat is really quite good: they engage thoughtfully with their progressive interlocutors in different ways and from different perspectives, and they often engage with one another over their various differences on policy and priority.

I’ll offer a few people:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writings helped crystallize some sentiments I had about the social sciences; I started to read him right after I got out of college, at a time where I was open to his ideas. I’m glad I did! Taleb has persuasively written on the problems of living in a world we don’t understand, and saw the financial crisis coming years in advance. The Black Swan is the essential text. Antifragile is a tougher read, but worthwhile as well.

Next, the Catholics: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Ross Douthat, and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry are sort of on the same spectrum, with Dougherty the most skeptical about foreign entanglements and Emmanuel-Gobry the most enthusiastic (though also measured). All are probably best described as “reform conservatives,” and all are deeply influenced by their Catholicism. Douthat is both a wonderful prose stylist and the most consistently thoughtful writer I read. Dougherty and Emmanuel-Gobry write at The Week; Douthat retains his perch as the New York Times’ token conservative columnist.

Next, the libertarians. Tyler Cowen should probably win a Nobel Prize in Economics for his prolific blogging, writing, and general status as a polymath. He is always interesting. His stuff is compiled at Marginal Revolution, where he blogs with Alex Tabarrok. Megan McArdle is an equally-prolific blogger over at Bloomberg, and her writing has greatly influenced how I make and evaluate an argument. She is a principled, pragmatic libertarian.

Reihan Salam is a brilliant writer and journalist. He has taken a special interest in how conservative ideas can interact with urban societies. He writes a column for Slate and is an editor at National Review.

The most intelligent, thoughtful “movement conservative” I read regularly is Ramesh Ponnuru. He also has a column at Bloomberg (a trend here), and works for National Review. You’ll also periodically hear him sparring with EJ Dionne on NPR if David Brooks isn’t available.

Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard has been a great political commentator for over a decade, and is a recently-minted PhD from the University of Chicago. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of history, which gives him the ability to put current events in perspective, and is also somewhat heterodox on key conservative policy issues. He left the GOP over Trump.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist is the best media critic on the Right writing today; she’s absolutely fearless and quite compelling. She relentlessly identifies double standards and weak logic.

For environment and technology questions, I tend to defer to Jim Manzi. Manzi doesn’t write often, but he’s always excellent. I’ve adapted some of the ideas in his excellent book, Uncontrolled, as part of the framing here.

But on the Right, Yuval Levin towers above all. He’s not on Twitter or social media, but he blogs (periodically) at National Review Online, and his contributions are always the most thoughtful on the site. He is also the editor of National Affairs, a policy journal released once per quarter.