Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 107

Alpinia zerumbet as syn. Renealmia nutans in Temple of Fl...

Alpinia zerumbet as syn. Renealmia nutans in Temple of Flora by Robert John Thornton (1812)

transcription

I like this from my buddy Austin Kleon: A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself — I do something similar, though not for writer’s block, because that’s an affliction I have never experienced. (“More’s the pity,” some of you are saying.) I use dictation as a means of generating unfiltered ideas, and transcription of the audio files as a way of filtering the ideas I’ve generated.

But I don’t use my phone. I use this:

Why use a separate device when I could use my phone? Because this thing ain’t connected to the internet. When I’m sitting down to do some serious reading, I don’t want any internet-connected device within reach. If I have a thought about something in a book, I grab this little recorder, note the book and the page, and briefly describe the idea. Sometimes I read a relevant passage into the mic.

Many people want a way of recording ideas that has less friction — for instance, they want a device that will transcribe their spoken thoughts for them. There are times when I use such services (Dragon is great), but I avoid them in my idea-generating phase because I think friction is my friend. It helps me a lot to have my thoughts on a device that I just have to listen to. When I do my weekly review sessions, usually on Monday mornings, I go through all the little audio files I’ve recorded in the past week to listen for ideas that have some value. Then I type out clarified and condensed versions of them, which makes them usable for essays or posts. Again: unfiltered recording, filtered transcription.

getting what you ask for

More familiar instances of toxic masculinity concern the wanton infliction of violence, especially the sexual kind, especially upon women and girls. Yet on the other side of the wall was, it seems, another sort of toxic masculinity — a platoon of armed and trained men who had evidently come to rely so heavily on guns and armor in lieu of courage and strength that they found themselves bereft of the latter when outdone in the former. Instead they were beset by cowardice, evidently as convinced as the shooter was that the gun really does make the man, and that outgunned is thus as good as outmanned.

In its own imagination, Texas is the land of men who would never admit defeat at all, much less surrender instantly with decent odds and innocent lives at stake: Surely its police ought to feel the highest and noblest sort of calling to valor, the type of vocation that surpasses profession and speaks to a person’s mission in life. Or perhaps those things, too, all the militarism and bravado, the heady authority and free respect, the unearned certainty in one’s own capacities provoked by so many Punisher bumper stickers and decals, had the same corrupting effect as the guns and body armor. Eventually, one either develops their own virtues or finds they’ve developed vices instead.

— Elizabeth Bruenig. The only thing worse, for a community, than what Radley Balko has famously called the “warrior cop” is a bunch of people who are cosplaying warrior cops.

Balko has often over the years pointed to the recruitment strategies of police departments, which commonly feature images of men in body armor riding in military assault vehicles. When your recruiting strategy targets people who get excited by that kind of thing, you get what you ask for — instead of, for instance, finding people who take satisfaction in serving and protecting the community. But even if you get emotionally immature recruits, you can train them in better ways. Alas, as Bruenig suggests, at places like Uvalde the emphasis seems to be on exacerbating their recruits’ vices rather than cultivating their virtues.

You have to hope and pray that the shame of Uvalde will cause police departments around the country to reflect on the kind of men they’re hiring — and the kind of men they’re making. But the rot is so deep that it’s hard to be hopeful.

UPDATE: Arthur Rizer: “So much of this turns out to be LARPing: half-trained, half-formed kids playing soldier in America’s streets and schools. Many of the thousands of SWAT-team members in this country don’t have the training and expertise to respond like they’re SEAL Team 6. It’s time to stop pretending that they do.”

Re: my recent essay on the dangers intrinsic to any attem...

Re: my recent essay on the dangers intrinsic to any attempt to create a monoculture, I think of this passage from Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle describing what happens to an apparatchik named (ironically enough) Innokenty Volodin after he has begun to break with his formation and training by reading forbidden books: 

It turned out that you have to know how to read. It is not just a matter of letting your eyes run down the pages. Since Innokenty, from youth on, had been shielded from erroneous or outcast books, and had read only the clearly established classics [of the Marxist-Leninist canon], he had grown used to believing every word he read, giving himself up completely to the author’s will. Now, reading writers whose opinions contradicted one another, he was unable for a while to rebel, but could only submit to one author, then to another, then to a third.

Monocultures effectively forbid reading, in any meaningful sense of the word. Consider the “sensitivity readers” that publishers now employ to make sure that books don’t offend a favored group: one could debate whether such practices do more good than harm — I can certainly imagine the value of having someone help me avoid giving unnecessary and unwanted offense — but the one thing sensitivity readers aren’t doing is reading. They should be called “sensitivity analysts” or “offense detectors.” Genuine reading requires a degree of negative capability — a virtue that any monoculture (rightly, given its interests) designates a vice. 

I’ll be totally fine if Arsenal don’t get Raphinha — I do...

I’ll be totally fine if Arsenal don’t get Raphinha — I don’t think he’s worth the amount he’ll likely command. I’m a little more positive about Gabriel Jesus, but honestly, not that much — I’m not convinced that he’ll bring consistent quality. 

Freddie deBoer:It’s very strange to think that someone wh...

Freddie deBoer:

It’s very strange to think that someone who murders a convenience store employee in a botched robbery deserves another shot at life but someone who, say, was put on a list for having “creepy vibes” should have that fact scuttle his chances at getting a job years in the future. It’s very weird indeed. The best part of the anti-police state, anti-mass incarceration movement is its wise recognition that we are all fallen, all guilty, and a healthy and compassionate society is one that opens up many paths to second chances and redemption. And I say that with the authority of someone who has done bad things and had to ask forgiveness in turn.

To say, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has, that the bis...

To say, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has, that the bishops at the forthcoming Lambeth Conference won’t be passing resolutions but rather “issuing Calls” is pretty much the ne plus ultra of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is coupling the absurd to the ineffectual. 

Machenesque and Menckenesque

From H. L. Mencken’s obituary for J. Gresham Machen, the proto-evangelical:

There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming majority of educated men were believers, but that is apparently true no longer. Indeed, it is my impression that at least two-thirds of them are now frank skeptics. But it is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another thing to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science, comparable to graphology, “education,” or osteopathy. 

That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done, no doubt with the best intentions in the world. They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. They may be good people and they may even be contented and happy, but they are no more religious than Dr. Einstein. Religion is something else again — in Henrik Ibsen’s phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mudupbringing, Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Mohammed. He failed — but he was undoubtedly right. 

This has always struck me as the proper view of the matter. I could be Machenesque or I could be Menckenesque, but I could never be a theological Modernist. 

The first person to demonstrate this to me was Nietzsche, in his great early essay “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” in Untimely Meditations. Nietzsche’s scorn for Strauss’s attempt to build a post-Christian religion on the foundation of Darwinism is eviscerating. Nietzsche shows that the Darwinian model of the cosmos is not exactly a consoling one — and yet Strauss wants to console, wants to be a kind of optimist. So: 

Whereupon Strauss started the ‘soothing oil’ flowing, led on a God who errs out of a passion for error, and assumed for once the wholly uncongenial role of a metaphysical architect. He does all this because his ‘we’ are afraid and he himself is afraid – and here we discover the limits of his courage, even with respect to his ‘we’. For he does not dare to tell them honestly: I have liberated you from a helpful and merciful God, the universe is only a rigid machine, take care you are not mangled in its wheels! This he dares not do: so he has to call in the sorceress, that is to say metaphysics. 

A metaphysics meant, essentially, to make his readers believe that the “rigid machine” of the cosmos is a kind of worship-worthy God, or at least the secure grounding of a new religion. 

At bottom, then, the new religion is not a new faith but precisely on a par with modern science and thus not religion at all. If Strauss nevertheless asserts that he does have a religion, the reasons for it lie outside the domain of contemporary science. Only a minute portion of Strauss’s book, amounting to no more than a few scattered pages, treats of that which Strauss could have a right to call a faith: namely that feeling for the cosmos for which he demands the same piety as the believer of the old stamp feels towards his God. In these pages at least the scientific spirit is certainly not in evidence: but we could wish for a little more strength and naturalness of faith! For what is so extremely striking is the artificiality of the procedures our author has to adopt in order to convince himself he still possesses a faith and a religion at all: as we have seen, he has to resort to jabbing and cudgelling. It creeps weakly along, this stimulated faith: we freeze at the sight of it. 

Nietzsche has a usefully clarifying effect on those of us who want to see what our actual choices are. Mencken was pretty good at that also. 

From Agnes Giberne’s Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beg...

From Agnes Giberne’s Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners (1879)

self-understanding and resistance

In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says that whenever people in the Soviet Union were arrested they all said the same thing: “Me? What for?” When he was arrested that’s what he said too. Then, when he was brought before an official, preparatory to being stuffed into an interrogation cell, he had some papers thrust under his nose which he was told to sign. He signed them, he says, because “I didn’t know what else to do.” 

When reading this passage I think about a couple of things. First, I remember James Scott’s book Seeing Like a State and its emphasis on all the ways that modern nation-states make us “legible” to its functions – and, perhaps even more important, teach us to believe that such legibility is necessary and vital. Second, I remember the comment that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes in Tristes Tropiques that throughout history the primary function of writing has been to enable slavery.

So into the belly of the beast Solzhenitsyn goes, and remains for several miserable years – but then, at a certain point, he begins what he calls his “ascent.” And the beginning of the ascent is marked by one of the most famous passages in all of twentieth century writing:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Bless you, prison, bless you for being in my life! For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity, as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul. 

NOTE

If you want to know why Solzhenitsyn is truly great as a writer, you should take note of the very next sentence he writes: “(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is all very well for you to say that — you who came out of it alive!)”

It is after this that Solzhenitsyn begins to describe, not only the change in him, but the change in his relations with others. He no longer simply accepts the imposed and inflexible laws of the Gulag, he and his colleagues began to form strategies of resistance. When asked “Why did you put up with all that?” he answers that many of us did not – but it is absolutely essential, if you want to understand Solzhenitsyn, to realize that he was able to resist constructively only after he acknowledged his own personal guilt, only after he began a long process of repentance.

That is, Solzhenitsyn makes it quite clear that meaningful resistance begins with self-understanding. You can only make an intelligent attempt to alter your circumstances if you understand who you are, which means understanding that your own innate human nature is not different from that of your captors.