Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 15

David Brooks:Most admissions officers at elite universit...

David Brooks:

Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands. (In one survey, 87 percent of admissions officers and high-school college counselors said the U.S. News rankings force schools to take measures that are “counterproductive” to their educational mission.)

In other words, we’re all trapped in a system that was built on a series of ideological assumptions that were accepted 70 or 80 years ago but that now look shaky or just plain wrong. The six deadly sins of the meritocracy have become pretty obvious. 

Then he lists the sins. One of Brooks’s finest essays, I think. 

Substack vs. Indie

Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators, says Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s true, but it’s important to remember that people on Substack, like Ted, are not “indie creators” in the fullest sense — they’re dependent on a platform that sets the terms of engagement. 

Now, to be sure, if I were going to write on any social-media platform it would be Substack. Most people who write there make little or no money, but it’s possible to do very well indeed, and the 90/10 split of the subscription revenue is remarkably generous. (“Remarkably” because if they had chosen 80/20 or even 70/30 — the latter being Apple’s cut for app creators — not many people would have complained.) But: 

Substack is not a profitable company. Its CEO says it could be, but those are just words.Its unprofitability means that it’s still dependent on investment from venture capitalists, and they can put pressure on the people who run the show to change things up — for instance, to take a bigger cut of the revenues. The same pressure could lead to the introduction of ads. Their CEO has written that they don’t like the algorithmic determination of content — but also that they’re “not against algorithms” and will use them if that helps their users. What does and does not help their users is for them to determine, and they can change their minds at any time, for any reason or none. (And they already do use an algorithm to feed you what they want you to see in Notes, their version of Twitter or Bluesky, which shows up on your home page and cannot be hidden). Not only could the founders of Substack change their minds about any of their policies and procedures, and do so at any time, they could also sell the company. Indeed, this would be the norm for Silicon Valley startups. In short, Substack is as subject to enshittification as any other platform. And for Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification “is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.” 

If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now. 

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Substack — Austin Kleon, whom I just linked to, has a great Substack — and what Freddie says is true: 

No matter what the usual suspects say, Substack has dramatically expanded the number of people making money as writers and deepened the engagement of a lot of passionate and talented amateurs, and for that I’m grateful. At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere. 

No such insistence here! I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup. 

The New New Class? – by Noah Millman:Just as Bill Clinton...

The New New Class? – by Noah Millman:

Just as Bill Clinton was our first meritocratic president—the first one whose path to success and power ran from someplace like Hope, Arkansas to Georgetown and Oxford rather than from Hope to the army and the local party machines—Donald Trump is our first attention-economy president, our first influencer president. Not Ronald Reagan; Reagan was an actor, and his acting experience served him well as he became the Great Communicator, but he came up as an actor in the old studio system, served as a union president and worked for General Electric before entering California Republican politics as a party man. He was a natural talent, but he was the product of institutions. Trump isn’t really the product of institutions, but neither, for all that he ran a variety of (mostly unsuccessful) businesses, is he the creator of institutions. He is and always has been first and foremost someone good at drawing attention to himself. Everything else flows from that. 

Noah’s description of our cultural move from being led by a meritocratic class to being led by an influencer class is brilliant. 

The Ad That Radicalised Me – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian:...

The Ad That Radicalised Me – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian:

I haven’t heard the [assisted-dying] bill’s opponents deny the fact of suffering, however. I have heard the bill’s supporters deny or avoid the trade-off they are proposing. They pretend there will be no cases of coercion, when of course there will be, human nature and the state of our public services being what they are. The most honest argument for the bill — even if it’s not one I buy — is a utilitarian one: that the injustice and cruelty thus perpetrated will be outweighed by the suffering prevented.

But it’s always hard to make utilitarian arguments persuasive because they seem so mechanical and inhuman. Unthinking emotionalism and the avoidance of uncomfortable truths make for better rhetoric, which is why this bill may well pass on Friday. Although I was already leaning against it, intellectually, it was those grotesque ads which really crystallised how I have come to feel about assisted dying. State-managed death is being wrapped up as self-fulfilment. I don’t feel good about that. I feel sick.

disposition

Here I am not trying to say anything original; I’m trying to put clearly what are (in some circles anyway) familiar points.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

Therefore,

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Not indicentally, it is because conservatism is a disposition that Oakeshott titles this essay “On Being Conservative” rather than “On Being a Conservative.”

If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.

Note that this highly-valued inheritance takes many forms. It may be a marriage; a larger family; a friendship or network of friendships; a parish church; a university; a body of knowledge; a collection of artworks; the oeuvre of a novelist or poet or composer or painter. It is whatever one is grateful to have received; whatever encounter appears to one as a gift.

I would add that the disposition to conserve one’s inheritance is truly and fully healthy only when it is accompanied by a desire to share one’s good inheritance with others who lack access to it or even awareness of it. To conserve only for oneself and one’s own is avarice. As Lewis Hyde has noted, good gifts find their fulfillment in circulation. This is why I have written so often of repair: repair is often the first step in conservation. We want to pass our inheritance along in better shape than we found it.

The questions that then arise are:

What forces tend towards the preservation of my inheritance?What forces tends towards its dissipation or depredation?By what means might I protect it from harm?By what means might I increase its health and extend its reach?

Among the conserving and destroying forces are

personal vices and virtuessocial institutions and practices (healthy and unhealthy)forms of government (healthy and unhealthy)

And the means of conserving are also to be pursued on each of these three axes.

From this outline several conclusions may be drawn. In this post and in subsequent ones I will try to draw some of them.

Let’s begin here: For the person of conservative disposition, the question of what form of government to prefer is secondary and instrumental. That is, it lies downstream of the inheritance one wishes to conserve.

Governance does not create or bestow any genuine inheritance; rather, its fulfills its purpose by safeguarding, or helping to safeguard, and extending, or helping to extend, the good things that are made and found extra-governmentally. Whether to prefer socialism to free-market capitalism or vice-versa is an empirical question, not a principial one. Those empirical reasons may be very strong but should never assume the status of first principles.

Therefore, persons of conservative disposition will not make their preferences in electoral politics, their party affiliations, central to their identity. Those affiliations will always be held relatively loosely, and will remain subject to critical reflection and reassessment.

Moreover, such persons will realize that an over-emphasis on party affiliation leads to a neglect of the other major forces that affect the conservation of their inheritance. They will understand that no matter who is elected to office, possibilities remain for personal formation, the strengthening of families, and the building and sustaining of the institutions of civil society. To be sure, governments can help or hinder such projects, often in powerful ways, but what Oliver Goldsmith wrote 250 years ago remains true:

In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

If we forget this, then we will falsely believe that we can preserve what we have inherited while watching institutions crumble and accepting or even delighting in vice — as though being on the Right Side excuses every other shortcoming. What does it profit a conservative to win an election but lose his soul — and along with it his inheritance?

Some people will read the above and think that my point is that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump. That is not my point. I am arguing that any vote for any candidate in any election (a) should be made with an eye towards preserving one’s inheritance and (b) should be one element in a larger pattern of thought and action that keeps questions of governance in their proper and limited place. I did not vote for Donald Trump and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would do so, but I believe I could come up with a dispositionally-conservative defense of voting for Trump. It would not be a defense that I believe in but rather one that I regard as rational. (I say I could make such a case, not that I will.)

What I’ve done in this post is simply to outline what I think the conservative disposition is and what its key points of focus should be. In future posts I will write about some particular elements of our inheritance and what might be done to conserve them. For instance:

the artsthe Churchthe familythe good Earth

Michael Clune:While academics have real expertise in thei...

Michael Clune:

While academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power. 

I’m not sure it’s an abuse of power as such, because no one takes us seriously when we do crap like that, but it’s an abuse of our vocation; it’s a refusal of our professional responsibilities. And it’s childish. 

two quotations: Kingsnorth v. Peterson

Rowan Williams on Jordan Peterson’s new book:

“Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.”

Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.

Paul Kingsnorth:

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction – ‘do not resist evil’ – is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

two quotes: Kingsnorth v. Peterson

Rowan Williams on Jordan Peterson’s new book:

“Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.”

Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.

Paul Kingsnorth:

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction – ‘do not resist evil’ – is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

open up!

The best running joke in The Innocents Abroad involves European tour guides. Whenever a guide shows the American visitors some representation of a great and famous European, the Innocents look thoughtfully at it and say, “Is — ah — is he dead?”

“Ah, look, genteelmen! — beautiful, grand, — bust Christopher Colombo! — beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!”

The doctor put up his eye-glass — procured for such occasions: “Ah — what did you say this gentleman’s name was?”

“Christopher Colombo! — ze great Christopher Colombo!”

“Christopher Colombo — the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?”

“Discover America! — discover America, Oh, ze devil!”

“Discover America. No — that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo — pleasant name — is — is he dead?”

I’ve developed my own version of this response when reading some of our current celebrants of re-enchantment. Paul Kingsnorth, for instance, wrote a long series on his Substack about the holy wells of Ireland. Centuries of pilgrims visiting them; thin places; spiritual auras. To which I say: “Yes — very nice — but is, ah, is Jesus Lord?” Because if He isn’t then I don’t give a rat’s ass about holy wells. Even if you tell me about angelic and/or demonic forces at loose in the world, I say: “Wow! Amazing! But, uh, is … is Jesus Lord?”

I understand the thinking behind this approach: it concerns what the great sociologist of religion Peter Berger called plausibility structures. The idea is that if people are open to the possibility of something beyond the strictly material, they will eventually become more receptive to the Christian gospel. And by calling attention to phenomena inexplicable by current science, maybe you shift the Overton Window for religious belief. From this point of view it’s a very good thing that, as Matt Crawford says, “America is ready for weirdness.” Weirdness as a gateway drug to Christianity.

In one very general sense I’m in this camp. I too have long wanted to make Christianity a live possibility for people who do not believe. But I have taken a very different approach. Instead of commending spiritual experience I have tried to make the core beliefs of Christianity comprehensible to a world for which such beliefs are strange to the point of outrageousness. Thus my book on the idea of original sin. Thus my work to explain and illuminate the works of Christian writers and thinkers who flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Even my recent essay in Harper’s on myth and myth-making is an exercise in the same vein, though two or three steps back from Christian faith as such. (However … for those with ears to hear, you know.) And so on.

There are, I think, three major problems with the “openness to spiritual experience” route.

The “science can’t explain this” trope is highly vulnerable for reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer (famously) pointed out long ago: “How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”It seems to me highly unlikely that anyone will readily move from “spiritual experience” to “Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” As C. S. Lewis, writing around the same time as Bonhoeffer, said about the then-common idea that there is a cosmic “Life-Force” beneficently guiding the affairs of this world, “All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?” Wouldn’t you prefer the cost-free frisson of “spiritual experience” to Paul’s experience of being “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20)? I know I would.As Ross Douthat wrote last year, “If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.” Or, as another wise man said, “Are you frightened? Not nearly frightened enough. I know what hunts you.”

But back to Paul Kingsnorth. Recently he gave the Erasmus Lecture in New York City, and if you listen to that talk (it starts around the 28-minute mark) you’ll be quite clear about whether he thinks Jesus is Lord. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Weil and antisemitism

Madoc Cairns on a new book on Simone Weil:

Wallace’s subjects attempt to frame Weil’s antisemitism as an exception: a lacuna in her universal empathy, to be explained rather than understood; a psychological quirk, cultural inertia; a darkness (Gordon posits) impervious to interpretation. Wallace echoes one modern apologia: Weil lacked exposure to scholarly peers, who, sharing her concerns, reached different conclusions. But the same could be said of Weil’s eccentric reading of the classics: within her “Greek tradition”, Plato was crowned the “father of occidental mysticism”; Aristotle, by contrast, found no place at all. So too her account of medieval Languedoc as a fusion of ancient Egypt, the Athenian Golden Age and a repristinate – if suspiciously Weilian – Christianity of pacific, cultured humanism. So too the work these misreadings inspired. To excuse her errors is to excise her insights. Dismiss Weil’s idiosyncrasies and you dismiss Weil.

Recognize them, though, and Weil becomes unrecognizable. One exemplum: her disaffection with the Church and her attacks on Judaism are hard to disentwine. Her interpretation of Christianity was one systematically expurgated of Jewish influence. Athens displaced Jerusalem, with the Gospels reread as the “last and most marvellous account of Greek genius”, and Dionysus and Osiris recast as “in a certain sense, Christ Himself”. In Weil’s schema, radically Hellenistic and radically universalizing, non-Christian spiritualities have a place. Judaism – an exclusive revelation, for a people apart – has none.

Here’s what I said in The Year of Our Lord 1943 about Weil’s Judenhass:

The greatest blot on Weil’s thought and character is her extreme antisemitism. Many of her statements about Jews are indistinguishable from the utterances of Hitler. Of the history of Israel, Weil wrote that “from Abraham onwards,” and only “excepting some of the prophets,” “everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!” Even the courageous resistance of the Jews to Roman tyranny is, bizarrely, portrayed by her as a vice: “The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile.” Her comment on the idea that the Jews are the Chosen People of God: “A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.”

Weil’s hatred of Judaism centered on the idea of the Chosen People — which is to say, it bears a close kinship to her repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church’s practices of exclusion.

By “practices of exclusion” I mean Baptism — those baptized are “inside,” others “outside” — and limitations on the reception of Holy Communion. Weil hated every such distinction with a furious hatred. It’s hard to say whether Weil’s antisemitism develops from her rejection of what she calls the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the Roman Catholic Church, or the other way around. She was a very strange person and it is often impossible to discover the roots of her various absolutisms.