Falling Out of Love with Hate, a Placeholder

There are a handful of pundits whom I avoid reading.

I avoid reading them because I find them so reliably infuriating that I end up saying regrettable things; or at the very least, with my blood pressure elevated beyond all possible benefit to the exposure to ideas I find objectionable.

There is no particular thread connecting these pundits. They are liberal, conservative, male, female, religious, atheist. The only common theme is that when I read them I want to punch them in the face; or at least call the out publicly as fools and frauds.

Two things bring this gallery of rogues to mind.

The first is this paragraph posted by Alan Jacobs on the new book Unapologetic, and the reception it’s received from (some of) his fellow Christians:

“I’ve read the whole of Unapologetic and I think it’s a uniquely beautiful book. Of course, there is much in it that I don’t agree with, but you know what? Maybe in those areas Spufford is right and I am wrong. I need to consider that possibility. Moreover, there are surely many people who know nothing about Christianity, or who know little and want to know even less, who will be touched by Spufford’s approach in ways that they could never be touched by anything I write.”

The second is this paragraph from an Essay by Noah Millman, The Return of Fromm’s Fear Of Freedom:

“Deep social structures that provide a sense of meaning to life are not imposed; they grow – that’s why we call them “organic.” If the problem is that these forms are unable to grow in the world we are building, or simply that they haven’t grown much yet because they haven’t had much time to do so, then the challenge isn’t to come up with a Big Idea that can provide us poor mortals with Grounding, but simply to make it, at the margins, easier for social structures that work for people to grow, and trust that they will grow, even if what grows doesn’t look precisely like what grew in earlier generations.”

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I have a persistent daydream, and that daydream find me and the afore mentioned fools and frauds on my boat. We are in the middle of a passage, an easy one, like California to Hawaii. We have time on our hands. There’s no hurry.

There’s also no one there watching us. We are face to face, stuck with each other, with only ourselves and each other to impress. No reblogging, no commentary, no page views; at least not until we arrive at our destination and each of us (undoubtably) recounts our passage.

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This post is a placeholder. A public reminder to myself of things I want to explore in greater detail when time allows. Think Thermomixed Up, but with less hate.