Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 169

goods and harms

Jonathan Zimmerman:

A few years ago, I invited Mary Beth Tinker to meet with my undergraduate class on the history of American education. Tinker herself is an important figure in that history, because she was one of the students who wore black armbands to school in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965 to protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Sent home as a punishment, she sued her school district on free-speech grounds. Tinker v. Des Moines made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor in 1969. In a ringing decision, the Court declared that neither students nor teachers need to “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

My students loved Tinker’s story, and who doesn’t? Adorable seventh grader confronts Big Bad Authority. Adorable seventh grader wins. Cut to the credits.

But when our class discussion turned to the present, the mood changed. Students insisted that schools and universities should prohibit hate speech, which hurts innocent people. Mary Beth Tinker was fighting the good fight, against the war in Vietnam. But racists and sexists and homophobes and transphobes are different, my students said. They cause harm, offense, and even trauma in their victims. We need to shut them down.

Tinker wasn’t having it. At her middle school in Des Moines, she said, there were students who had fathers, uncles, and brothers who were fighting in Southeast Asia. Don’t you think they were offended and hurt by a snot-nosed kid whose armband suggested that their loved ones were risking their lives for a lie?

Of course they were. Speech hurts, which is why censors across time have tried to stamp it out. So if you’re going to bar speech that hurts someone, well, forget about Tinker’s armband. Forget about free speech, period.

My students took this in, and then they tried another tack. Wasn’t free speech really just a tool of the powerful? That’s why white men like it so much, of course. It lets them have their say while it harms (there’s that word again) people with less status and influence in society.

Mary Beth Tinker wasn’t having that, either. In 1965, she told the class, she was a 13-year-old girl. Free speech was the only power she had! Take that away, and she would have nothing at all.

Welcome, folks, to the world of competing, irreconcilable goods. Also a reminder of why the harm principle will never solve these problems: an unconstrained use of the harm principle can silence anything and everything, because a claim to internal psychological harm can never be assessed independently.  

China’s intellectual future

Epistemic confidence level: very low. I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, though I’m trying to know more.

In an essay published a few months ago, I looked for a way beyond what I call the Standard Critique of Technology, and suggested that one such way could be found in certain Daoist ideas about the human-built world. And I speculated that, as China grows in power and influence, and insofar as the Chinese technosphere draws upon elements of ancient intellectual traditions, there is at least the possibility that some of those ideas could make their way to the U.S. 

In light of all that, I read with great interest this essay in the LRB by Peter C. Perdue. The essay is essentially an overview of the work of a Chinese historian Ge Zhaoguang, with a particular emphasis on this new book. Ge is a passionate advocate for the Confucian intellectual tradition, and sees it not just as valuable in itself but also a kind of binding agent for Chinese culture, a project towards which Perdue is extremely skeptical. He thinks such a return to the past is necessarily Han-centric and therefore manifestly inadequate to the multicultural society that China has become. 

Yet Perdue sees the need for some kind of project of cultural and moral renewal — that is, he fully understands why Ge writes as he does. He notes that 

In 1895, China suffered a crushing military defeat at the hands of the Japanese and then came under assault from its own intellectuals, who were heavily influenced by the Western thought that had arrived with the conquerors. The result was an almost complete rejection of the Confucian tradition over the next ninety years. Ge ends his Intellectual History of China in 1895, the year in which Yan Fu, the famous translator of Darwinist thought, wrote of the extreme ‘nervous anxiety’ afflicting intellectuals of his time. Ge does not follow the story into the next two decades, when genuine faith in the classical tradition almost completely collapsed. As he writes, by 1895, the loss of territory, cultural confidence, unity and common historical identity had ‘undermined the integrity of the classical tradition’. The abolition of the examination system in 1905 and the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 sealed its fate. But China had faced foreign invasion and cultural challenges before without the collapse of the Confucian tradition. 

Other forces have rushed in to fill the gap created by the collapse of the Confucian system, Maoist Marxism above all — but not only that: “After Mao, Chinese endorsed cowboy capitalism of the most corrupt, environmentally destructive kind. Like all of us, they struggle to restrain capitalist greed with moral or legal norms; many of them, amazingly enough, have turned to Christianity for answers, but others search for guidance in Buddhism, Daoism, popular cults, and even Confucius.”

Perdue himself is appalled by “cowboy capitalism,” appalled by the rise of Christianity in China, appalled by Ge’s desire for a return to Classical Chinese thought. Indeed, he seems appalled by every option except China coming to embody the worldview of — well, of the LRB and its readers, I guess. “Is an alternative intellectual history of China possible? If so, it would not seek to define the unity of Chinese civilisation, but to celebrate its multiplicity. It would look to centrifugal forces, marginal figures and frontier contacts as sources of innovation, not threats to order. It would include women, non-Han peoples and non-elite traditions without trying to co-opt them into an orthodoxy.” (I’m not saying that these would be bad things, but it’s noteworthy that, while lamenting the influence in China of Western models of political economy, Perdue can only imagine a good future for China that’s based on a Western leftist cultural frame. As though the possibilities for China’s future involve choosing items from a buffet laid out by the West.) 

In my essay for The New Atlantis I invoked the fascinating work of Tongdong Bai — especially his Against Political Equality — and speculated that there might be some interest within the CCP in renewing Confucianism or other elements of the classical tradition. Perdue thinks this is happening, at least on the level of public declaration: “The Chinese state now invokes the once despised Confucius as the bedrock of native values.” But Tongdong Bai isn’t so sure, as he explained in an email to me that he has graciously given me permission to quote from: 

I don’t think CCP is that friendly to Confucianism…. My interest in Confucian political philosophy is not directly related to the mainland Chinese government and policies. Although my dear friend Daniel Bell sometimes links his proposal to the present Chinese regime, I am fundamentally different from him in this regard. What I am proposing is normative, and I don’t think the contemporary Chinese regime offers any real-world exemplification of my proposals. 

So what do I — again, a novice, if a fascinated one — make of all this?  A few things: 

There is a kind of crisis of confidence among China’s intellectual elite, a sense that the power of their state is growing faster than the moral order of their culture; For many, capitalism (whether of the cowboy variety or any other) is inadequate to providing the necessary moral order; For those many, certain religious traditions — whether the embodied-in-religious-practice forms of the Three Ways (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) or Christianity — offer themselves as alternatives; None of these alternatives is yet strong enough to displace or even really to affect the juggernaut of CCP capitalism; The hopes I articulate in my essay for a renewal of Daoism seem unlikely, in part because, as both Ge and Perdue explain, Daoism has been largely incorporated into Confucianism, or redefined by Confucianism; Christianity might therefore be a better hope for providing a moral order for Chinese culture; But Christianity, though I believe it to be true, has never developed the kind of coherent critique of technocracy that Daoism has long embodied; So if that new moral center emerges, it’s unlikely to offer significant resistance to the increasingly technocratic character of the Chinese regime and therefore the Chinese nation. 

plus ça change

Most poets in the West believe that some sort of democracy is preferable to any sort of totalitarian state and accept certain political obligations, to pay taxes, to vote for the best man or programme, to serve as jurymen, to write letters of protest against this or that act of injustice or vandalism, but I cannot think of a single poet of consequence whose work does not, either directly or by implication, condemn modern civilisation as an irremediable mistake, a bad world which we have to endure because it is there and no one knows how it could be made into a better one, but in which we can only retain our humanity in the degree to which we resist its pressures.

— Auden in Encounter (April 1954)

pluralities

One of the most fundamental ideas that Auden held in the 1950s — the period of his career that I’m working on right now — was that “pluralities” of people come in three kinds. From an essay called “Nature, History, and Poetry” (published in Thought in 1950), with bold type added by me: 

“A crowd consists of n members where n > 1, whose sole characteristic in common is togetherness. A crowd loves neither itself nor anything other than itself. It can only be counted; its existence is chimerical.” “A society consists of x members, i.e. a certain finite number, united in a specific manner into a whole with a characteristic mode of behavior which is different from the behavior of its several members in isolation (e.g. a molecule of water or a string quartet). A society has a definite size, a specific structure and an actual existence.” “A community consists of n members, all of them rational beings united by a common love for something other than themselves.” 

The tragedy of social media is this: Each given social-media platform consists of a crowd pretending to be either a society or a community. 

next steps

Work on the Invitation & Repair project has basically come to a halt, and there are three major reasons for that.

First of all, I really need to buckle down and get some work done on my project of editing Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles. I agreed to produce this edition a year or so ago, but thanks to Covid I’ve been unable to get into the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which is where the key manuscripts are located. The Ransom Center is still closed to the public, but I expect that it will be opening pretty soon and so it’s time for me to get started on this project.

Second, I’ve lined up the project that will follow that one. Years ago I had a wonderful time writing about the Book of Common Prayer for the Princeton University Press series Lives of Great Religious Books, and I’m delighted that I have the opportunity to write another volume in that series. This time my subject will be Milton’s Paradise Lost. More about that in due course.

The third reason for putting Invitation & Repair on hold is that it has recently become clear to me that while I have done a good bit of thinking about the techno element of technopoly, I haven’t thought enough about the poly element, that is to say the political and economic structures and practices that make it possible for digital technologies to dominate so much of our lives. I’ve come to realize that I really need to educate myself in political economy, with a particular eye towards understanding what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — with a special emphasis on what capitalism actually was, is, and might become — and also to try to figure out what plausible alternatives there are to that way of being in the world. I made a first stab at that when I wrote this essay on certain recent technological developments as a kind of distributism for creatives — and also, I guess, in the small things I’ve written about anarchism. But those are baby steps. So over the next couple of years, in my spare time, if I have any, I’m going to be trying to get a better understanding of the political economy of our moment. Because my imagination is reliably activated by fiction, one of the first things I’m going to do is read John Lanchester’s novel Capital.

Anyway, the Invitation & Repair idea continues to be important to me, but it’s going to be moving slowly for quite some time. You’re never too old to learn, but learning takes time. Which also means that there may not be much blogging here for a while, though I will still, I think, be posting photos to my micro.blog. 

thick and thin

I taught for many years at Wheaton College, which has a detailed Statement of Faith that everyone on campus signs. From this detailed statement emerges what we might call a thick theological anthropology, built up from layers of Biblical interpretation and historically orthodox theological formulations. By contrast, this is what my current employer, Baylor University, asks of its faculty: 

Faculty members at Baylor University are expected to be in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission: “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The personal and professional conduct of each faculty member should be supportive of and consistent with this mission. 

That’s it. There can be a lot of debate about what it means to be “in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission”: in the Honors College, where I teach, it certainly requires open and substantive Christian commitment, but that’s not the case everywhere at Baylor, and as I have said before I think of us in the HC as Baylor’s equivalent of Tom Bombadil. Baylor talks a lot about being “unambiguously Christian,” but the statement on expectations for faculty strikes me as an ambiguous one — and surely intentionally so, because it gives to the administration a great deal of leeway in determining whether a particular candidate is, as administrators like to say, a “good institutional fit.” It would be possible to interpret it in ways that do not require from the faculty any religious belief at all. 

There are eminently defensible reasons to do things Baylor’s way rather than Wheaton’s; if I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have changed jobs. But it’s obvious that thin communal commitments do not lead to, and are not even conducive to, a thick theological anthropology, and it would be foolish to expect people held together by such weak confessional ties to share views that only make sense within the robust account of human life generated by historic Christian orthodoxy. 

David French:In white Evangelicalism the true challenge o...

David French:

In white Evangelicalism the true challenge of “wokeness” isn’t that congregations will embrace critical race theory, it’s that fear of critical race theory will drive congregations away from thoughtful, necessary engagements with the world as it is — a world that is still too far removed from the hope of King’s dream.

Spot on, alas.

step by step

Jonah Goldberg:

For five years now, we’ve watched as one political and psychological levee after another has been broken. If in 2016, I’d have hypothetically described the events that led to Trump’s first impeachment to, say, Lindsey Graham, he’d have been appalled. But he’d also have insisted such a scenario was farfetched. If I told him he’d be a shameless apologist for Trump, he’d have been profoundly offended. He’d probably even have been sincere. But because of a series of decisions he made over the course of Trump’s presidency, Graham acclimated to political and psychological appeasement to Trump.

But in 2019, even after that first impeachment and the years Graham spent incrementally selling his soul to Trump, if I hypothetically described the events that led to the second impeachment, he’d still have said, “There’s no way I would stick with Trump if he did all that.” This isn’t even speculation. We saw that Lindsey Graham resurface for a few days after the siege of the Capitol.

“Count me out,” Graham declared in the well of the Senate. In an interview he added that he’d “never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country.” But now, he’s back in Renfield mode.

This is an old story. Most people don’t start out corrupted or evil. They make a series of seemingly easy and harmless decisions for short-term gain until one day the person they see in the mirror has suddenly become a villain. Whether it’s King Saul, Michael Corleone, or Walter White, the path to ruin is one long series of choose-your-own-adventure decisions. 

This is cogent and quite helpful to me. I think I better understand the Republican capitulation to Donald Trump when I think of their decision to nominate him as the GOP Presidential candidate in 2016 as the equivalent of Walter White’s decision to hold Krazy-8 captive in a basement. 

I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time — it seemed like the only real option. But then, once you have him in the basement, what do you do with him? Until you decide, you are as much his prisoner as he is yours.

So Walt sits down with a legal pad to map out the plusses and minuses of releasing Krazy-8 … and realizes that if he lets him go the end result will be the murder of Walt’s whole family. So he has to kill him. Killing Krazy-8 is basically the equivalent of electing Trump President. From that point on there seems to be no path back to a normal way of life. 

This is how the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking leads inexorably to the Fallacy of Sunk Costs, and then back to the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking again. 

In the end, having succumbed to the tyranny of his sunk costs, Walt has to watch — with genuine agonized horror, but also with at least a subliminal awareness of his own culpability — the execution of his brother-in-law, Hank. This is January 6, 2021. Trump supporters didn’t want that to happen — and yet they willed everything that led up to it, everything that made it inevitable. 

Walt eventually was forced, by the return of his cancer, to make a reckoning with his long slow slide into evil. Not a full reckoning, perhaps, but something of one. But clinging to the fantasy of a stolen 2020 election is, above else, a way to avoid reckoning with the real character of one’s sequence of decisions. 

Though the world reckons with those who cannot confront their own decisions. As Kevin Williamson writes in a brilliant essay Goldberg quotes, 

When Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans already controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate. In 2021, they control the board of commissioners in Minnehaha County, S.D., and several very highly regarded hills of beans. Trump never got even to 50 percent approval, the first president in a generation to stay underwater for his entire term in office — and also the first since Herbert Hoover to see his party lose the White House and both houses of Congress in one term. Trump-aligned figures are hearing footsteps in Republican states, with Senator Ted Cruz, for example, having come within a few points of losing reelection to a callow nobody in a race in which he lost every city in Texas more populous than Lubbock.

One in six of the people who identified as Republicans on Election Day in 2020 no longer associate themselves with the Republican party — only 25 percent of American voters do. That’s the political price of January 6 and Trump’s post-election shenanigans. Any more unity, and Republicans will be holding their next convention in a corner booth at Denny’s.

changing priors, changing life

I taught a a class last term called Philosophy and Literature, and for our last book we read Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (hereafter RNG). The chapter that gives the book its title is a delightful imitation Platonic dialogue by RNG in which Plato, on book tour, comes to give a talk at Google headquarters. The primary character in the dialogue, aside from Plato himself, is a publicist named Cheryl, a shepherd and minder of authors on tour, who finds herself pushed by Plato to rethink some of her core assumptions about life. The whole conversation is handled with great subtlety and skill – it’s just the kind of thing that I wish I had written, though I have neither the knowledge nor the skill to do what RNG does here.

There’s a point near the end of the dialogue where Cheryl is reflecting on her experience with Plato, and tells a friend that the world needs more people like Plato, “super-arguers” she calls them, because the super-arguer has the power to force us out of our well-worn tracks of thought and practice. As we were discussing this passage in class, I suggested that what Cheryl is saying could be explained in Bayesian terms. So I gave my students a brief overview of Bayesian reasoning. We talked about priors, that is, our current assessments of probability, and how Bayes articulates the ways we revise our priors in light of subsequent experience. The thing that makes Bayesian reasoning so attractive is his ability to see probability not as a fixed proportion, but rather as one that is continually being revised — or at least should be if our minds are functioning properly.

One of the books that we read earlier in the class is Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — about which I recently wrote a few words here — so I asked my students to engage in a thought experiment: You are walking across campus and see a spacecraft descend and land; from it emerges a man with a mechanical arm, steel teeth, and a kind of visor where his eyes should be, who offers you a drug called Chew-Z, which he claims will confer immortality upon its user. I asked: Would you take the drug? 

My students all agreed they would not. Their priors tell them that such an experience might be an illusion of some kind, or a prank, a reaction to medicine, a side effect of exhaustion – all of these seem clearly more probable occurrences than the actual arrival of a strange man in a spaceship bearing a drug that supposedly confers immortality. And this is setting aside the question of whether, assuming the reality of Palmer Eldritch, his intentions are indeed benign and his claims truthful. But then, I said, suppose it happens again tomorrow, and the day after. Or suppose it happens to a friend of yours, and that friend decides to take the drug and claims to have achieved enlightenment as a result. None of this might be enough to cause you to change your mind about taking the drug, but it would be enough, I think, to cause you to revise your prior assumptions about the possibility of weird men in spaceships landing in Waco. You don’t move from a “confidence interval” of 0% to 100%, but the probability definitely rises. 

So that’s how Bayesian reasoning works. And you can see that what Cheryl is praising in super-arguers like Plato is their ability to cause us to revise our priors. They are, and this is RNG’s chief point in the dialogue, socially useful as, shall we say, gadflies – gadflies who are annoying enough to force us out of our usual patterns. And I think this is true. But, as the example of Dick’s novel suggests, there are other forces in addition to skilled argumentation that can press us to revise our priors. In fact, this is one of the ways in which some scholars have accounted for, or at least helped to explain, the extraordinary effects of LSD upon people: psychotropic drugs have the effect of weakening our priors and making us open to possibilities that we previously had not been open to. Now, as I pointed out, this weakening of our priors may be truth-conducive or may be the opposite: it all depends on how good our priors were. Opening our minds to new possibilities can sometimes lead to disaster, even if it can also sometimes lead to enlightenment.

I also noted that the book we read just before Plato at the Googleplex, Iris Murdoch’s novel The Good Apprentice, concerns some of the same themes. In one sense the story can be described as a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son: we have a father, or rather two potential fathers, and two sons, one who pursues goodness in a way that seems extreme and weird to other characters, and a second who falls into a pit of anguish and despair because — here come the drugs again — he surreptitiously administered a dose of LSD to a friend of his who then walked out of the window of his apartment and fell to his death. So you can see the story as the story of fathers, sons, brothers — a small unit of men who need to find some way to be reconciled to one another.

But that’s not all that the story is about. It seems to me that Murdoch is actually slightly more interested in the effects that extremity of experience or belief have, not upon the people who hold these extreme beliefs or have these extreme experiences, but on the people around them. The younger son Edward’s overwhelming misery is not just a challenge for him, it’s a challenge for everybody who knows him. It forces them to think about guilt and responsibility, about the conditions of healing, about what can be done to atone for sin. They don’t know what to say to Edward, and that reveals to them what they don’t understand about their own lives. Similarly, Stuart, the elder brother, who has commenced a quest for pure goodness and is willing to renounce anything in life that interferes with that pursuit, strikes many of the people in the novel as simply inhuman. He is often compared to an animal, which is odd, because what he is doing is precisely the opposite of animal life: he is questioning his instincts, questioning his desires — but his friends and family don’t have a language for someone who does this. They perceive it to be inhuman, and the only form of inhumanity that they can readily lay hold of is the bestial. In fact, though, Stuart is trying to be a saint. That doesn’t mean he’s right cut: George Orwell once said that “sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid.” But that’s the proper description for his quest.

In any case, Murdoch’s chief theme seems to be that extremity of moral experience, whether it is an extremity of the desire for good or an extremity of guilt and shame, dislocates lives — not just the lives of the people who are having those experiences but also the lives of those who surround them. And that too can be explained in Bayesian terms: in the presence of moral extremity, everyone’s priors are weakened and disrupted. And in the presence of religious ecstasy. And in the presence of psychotropic drugs. And in the presence of super-arguers. 

So it turns out that what we were dealing with in that class was a series of stories about forces strong enough to weaken our priors. Because when our priors are weakened is when reflection begins. 

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)  
 

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Ted Gioia:I’m not a Hollywood scriptwriter, but if I were...

Ted Gioia:

I’m not a Hollywood scriptwriter, but if I were, I know what screenplay I’d write. Imagine a violent murder at the epicenter of early Santa Clara Valley — soon to be renamed Silicon Valley in the popular imagination — and an innocent man sent to Death Row at San Quentin. But a famous literary critic emerges as the super sleuth who gets him freed, amid dark evocations of scandal involving corrupt politicians and murky underworld figures.

What a story.