On Holidays, Miracles, and Questions
What do my recent columns, the miracles of the holiday season, my consulting practice, and 2023 all have in common?
It’s been a while since I’ve dropped one of these postings in newsletter form, but the holiday season and end-of-year seem like good times to do so. I’ve got three topics for today’s, and if you stick around to the end I may just tie them together. I’ll start with the mundane: an update on the columns I’ve published since my September newsletter. I’ll move into the lofty with a few words about the season. Then I’ll tie them together with a bit of a year-end pitch.
Column Update
If you’re a regular reader, you may be interested in four recent columns I’ve published on four different topics.
In the first, I explain how the Establishment Clause can Defeat Wokeism. To cut to the chase, because I believe that Wokeism is a new religion, I also believe that government institutions (like public schools) shouldn’t be allowed to impose it. Now, I’ve got a confession about this piece: A couple of my colleagues encouraged me to crank it out even though I thought the argument was premature. There’s an intellectual foundation I need to lay before it can become a practical plan. In the meantime, if you want to know the pragmatic goal behind all my talk about America’s deep spiritual crisis, this column provides a preview.
Those same colleagues also provided the fundamentals of the second column—addressing a topic that I don’t believe I’ve ever before raised: How our newest immigrant group can save America. It’s not a trick. In fact, it’s part and parcel of what I’ve written about Jewish voters. Basically, America’s Hispanics on the cusp of thinking themselves more as Americans than as an ethnic community. Once that happens, they’ll be redpilled en masse.
My third recent article continues a theme I’ve addressed throughout the year: Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is no mere corporate takeover. It promises to transform the entire architecture of social media, media, and communications. In that vein, I saw his first moves as Chief Twit as instructive to others contemplating the transformation of major cultural institutions. The column discusses some lessons the GOP could learn from Elon Musk. My seeming obsession with Musk and Twitter is hardly new. Tech policy has long been central to my work. In fact, my first general audience book, Digital Phoenix, tackled some tough questions about what it meant to be living during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. Twenty-plus years later, I stand by my analysis (well, most of it).
Finally, in The Election America Needs, I turned my attention to 2024. It’s not an article about personalities or entitlements. I’ve been writing for quite a while about the ways that 2024 will differ from 2016 and 2020—and how the candidates we support must address those differences. In this piece I raise a bit of reality: Whoever wins the 2024 election will wake up on day one presiding over a population almost half of which is terrified about what their country is about to become. If that’s not enough to promote sober governance, nothing will. I call for an election pitting red and blue state governors against either other, trying to convince the country to become more like their own states, and prepared to reinvigorate the federalism we need to promote experimentation and permit peaceful coexistence.
A guy can dream, can’t he? Besides, though such a scenario may be improbable, it’s hardly impossible. And where there’s possibility there’s ground for hope. Which provides me with a segue into my second topic…
The Holiday Season
Many of you, like me, are celebrating Chanukah this week. Many others amony you are looking forward to Christmas. Though for many centuries adherents on both sides of the divide would have considered it sacrilege (and sadly, too many still do), I think it’s a grand time to think about the combined notion of miracle and revelation.
Chanukah embodies two very different miracles: the unlikely victory of a peasant uprising over a mighty military occupation force and the eight-day burn of a one-day supply of oil. Christmas brings a third type of miracle to the table: God walking among men to alter the spiritual reality of the world. It’s worth taking a moment to think about this continuum of divine intervention—and what it might mean for our own time.
The improbable Maccabean victory over the mighty Seleucids is the sort of miracle people witness and deny daily. After all, such an outcome was merely improbable, not impossible. Underdogs win. If a scrappy high school team took to the field tomorrow and defeated Argentina’s World Cup champions, billions of sports fans would be in shock. Few would see evidence of divine intervention? Could the source of the victory be a pre-game locker room prayer rather than specific quirky plays on the field?
Unlikely victories of good over evil happen all around us all the time. Too few of us take the time to ponder what they might truly mean. Too few of us wonder whether there’s something providential afoot. Too few of us reject the banal statistical explanation that one out of every 1000 events assigned a probability of 0.01 is expected—and that therefore, there’s nothing “miraculous” about the one that did occur. What might happen if more of us joined that few?
The miracle of the Chanukah oil is a bit trickier. If a one-day supply of anything provides 800% of expectations, some sort of explanation is required. Were our estimates off? Did we do something special to extend performance? Was there some unique environmental factor capable of explaining the anomaly? How hard is it to imagine a headline proclaiming that some laboratory scientists somewhere found a way to extract eight days of flame from a one-day oil supply—thereby debunking the Chanukah miracle? How eager would they be to use science to discredit an occurrence long considered miraculous?
Of course, the notion of “debunking” carries a lot of weight. Perhaps there are scientific processes capable of producing such an efficiency increase. So what? Is it not miraculous that a band of anti-occupation liberators, handed what they could find, at a precise moment of high-profile history, could produced the same result as a team of trained scientists given two thousand years of experimentation in a controlled environment?
Still, even the miracle of the oil is the sort of divine intervention people can and do reject in the face of alternate explanations. Not so the miracle of Christ. Direct divine intervention is the matter of pure faith. Either God sent His only son to walk among us and die for our sins or He did not. There is no third possibility. Direct divine intervention is the sort of miracle for which all people of faith pray. It’s the sort of miracle that all people of faith believe happened to their distant ancestors. It’s the sort of miracle that many people of faith believe will happen again—perhaps even imminently. But it’s also the sort of miracle that even people of the deepest faith concede has not happened much lately.
In this holiday season, it’s fine to pray for Christmas-type Messianic deliverance. Many problems plague our world. Direct divine intervention capable of returning us to the path of propriety would be a wonderful gift—or perhaps I should say that it will be a wonderful gift whenever it arrives. In the meantime, let’s take a moment to appreciate Chanukah-type miracles: Those that seem to beg for an alternative explanation that is imaginable if elusive, and those that require no spiritual or metaphysical inquiry at all.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the miracles we experience every day. The acts of kindness, altruism, decency, and basic humanity we encounter even as society pushes hard in the other direction. The unexpected victories of good over evil. The buried truths brought to the fore to redeem the long-scorned virtuous and punish the cruelty of those who seemed to be winning. The emergence of specific improbable occurrences from amidst the pool of equal improbabilities.
It doesn’t much matter what you believe. Take a holiday season—even if comprised entirely of the holidays of others—to reflect upon the miracles that abound in everyday life. You’ll improve your own life and the lives of those around you if you do. Which brings me to my…
Year-End Pitch
Much as I enjoy writing columns, a guy’s got to pay the bills. (Spoiler: “A guy” means “me”). Though my eagerness to share my thoughts and build a following means that I’m loath to hide anything behind a paywall, I’m not beyond rattling my tip jar on occasion. Granted, Substack calls it a subscribe button, but since mine is entirely optional I prefer to think of it in different terms. So please, if I’ve written anything this year that’s made you think or made you laugh, I’m not too proud to take tips.
Perhaps more importantly, I’ve got a consulting practice to run. I’m eager to find new opportunities and new clients.
Since I’m certain that you’re all eager to help me out, you might want to know what I do. You can find my professional website here. The bottom line is that I’m a troubleshooter and a problem solver. I’ve got a broad methodological toolkit, drawing upon work and training in computing, probability & statistics, formal logic, cognitive psychology, management science, economics, law, and Talmudic exegesis (astoundingly applicable to Internet research)—as well as excellent writing and presentation skills.
I’m the guy you call when the pieces of a problem don’t seem to fit together, when the folks within your organization seem flummoxed, when you’ve done everything that seems reasonable, when you’ve waited until it’s too late—and yet you still think there must be an answer.
I’m also the guy you call to say “we should have listened to you 2-3 years ago.” So I’m urging you to call today, not in 2-3 years.
How do I do it? A slogan I put on one of my business cards provides a hint: “Ask the right questions.” I’ve got a simple formulation. I spend 49% of my time framing the question, 2% finding the answer (typically obvious if you’ve got the question right) and 49% convincing others that the obvious answer is right.
I use that strategy to help clients devise customized approaches to strategy, growth, idea deployment, litigation, valuation, diligence, and (on occasion) life coaching.
So…if you know of anyone out to start something new, if you know of anyone who believes that their current venture is underperforming, if you know of anyone who needs assistance with research, writing, problem-solving, strategy formation, policy analysis, reassessment, or training, please direct me their way—and even more importantly, please direct them towards me. I welcome all referrals.
Making it All Make Sense
To tie together the three strands of today’s posting, I’d like to put out a call for one of those everyday miracles. I believe that I’m uniquely poised to contribute to two of the great stories of our time. The first involves the spiritual crisis I’ve come to see as the root of the challenges befalling our country—as I mentioned above and in several postings throughout the year. The second involves the re-regulation of the information economy necessary to support a robust free society—alluded to in my discussion of my Musk/Twitter article above.
While there are others exploring these ideas, I’ve yet to see anyone putting the pieces together to tell the stories I believe needs telling—or recommend the practical fixes I believe might help. More importantly, because we have yet to frame the questions properly, American society is destined to drift ever further from workable solutions. Unless we can soon address both challenges appropriately, the balance of the twenty-first century may represent a step backwards for both faith and freedom.
More than anything, America needs to start asking the right questions. If you know anyone with the funding, platform, or megaphone who can help me raise public consciousness of those questions, it would be a genuine mitzvah to connect us.
Enjoy the holidays, have a Happy New Year, and take a moment to appreciate the next everyday miracle to enter your life—whatever it may be.
.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at https://coalition4america.com/.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.