Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 170

habituation

We all know — though we don’t think of it often enough — that through highlighting and repeating certain events, the media make them seem more common and therefore more characteristic than they really are. So while there’s been a lot of talk over the past week or so about the misbehavior of fans in American stadiums — the stadiums fans have only recently been allowed to reenter — I’m not sure whether this is a real phenomenon or rather just a random set of events magnified by our love of outrage and the media’s compliant provision of opportunities for us to enjoy that love.

But I do wonder whether something is going on here. One of the most common debates about social media centers on this question: Do social media exacerbate tensions among Americans and make us more likely to act badly towards one another in person, or, conversely, do social media give us a useful outlet for our frustrations, opportunities to purge our negative emotions in such a way that we can better maintain courtesy towards our neighbors? One possibility is that we are seeing now what happens when people simply get out of the habit of being in the physical presence of other human beings and instead spend a year and a half stoking their own fears and hatreds. Maybe some people have just forgotten, literally forgotten, how to act in public. If so, let’s hope that when they get little more practice they’ll do better.

excerpt from my Sent folder: mythos

About that Current Affairs essay … I think it’s pretty much wholly wrong. It’s true that fundamentalist Christianity is insistently literal about anything in the Bible that looks like historical narrative (seven literal days of creation, yes the sun did too stand still in the sky, etc.), but even more dominant than Pentateuchal literalism in the fundamentalist mindest is a fascination with prophecy, and especially with the Book of Revelation (plus parts of Daniel and Ezekiel) as a blueprint for the End Times — but the blueprint is legible only if its symbolism is properly deciphered. And especially in the 70s and 80s, such deciphering involved the most mythologically baroque interpretations imaginable. Precisely nobody thought that guys actually named Gog and Magog were going to show up when the parousia was near. When you claim, as Hal Lindsey did, that the the book of Daniel prophesied the European Common Market, your hermeneutical vice is not excessive literalism.  

The problem with things like D&D was not that they were mythoi as opposed to logoi, but rather that they were alternative mythoi — they were scary because they were potentially appealing in the same way that prophecy culture was supposed to be, by involving me as a kind of participant observer in a big coherent story. 

This would take a long time to explain, but I think the mythos/logos contrast is far less useful for describing the pathologies of fundamentalist exegesis in particular and fundamentalist culture more broadly than Kermode’s distinction in The Sense of an Ending between fictions and myths. Not that I would expect fundamentalists (or any other interpreters of Scripture) to see their exegeses as fictive! — but Kermode is brilliant, I think, on the ways that properly provisional narratives or explanations harden, calcify, into fixed myths.

Kevin Williamson:On Memorial Day, we remember those who ...

Kevin Williamson:

On Memorial Day, we remember those who took up arms because they thought their civilization represented something good and worth preserving. But we increasingly take up arms for the opposite reason: because we believe this society to be corrupt, failing, doomed. We half dread the possibility of breakdown and bloodshed — and are made half-giddy by it, too.

And that is a dangerous state of affairs. Americans don’t have a well-regulated militia — we don’t have a well-regulated anything.

partners

Whenever I hear someone refer to their husband, wife, spouse — even their Significant Other, a phrase from a now-distant past — as their “partner,” I think of something Wendell Berry wrote decades ago: 

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. 

“Partner” is, in the context of marriage or even long-term cohabitation, an ugly word, connoting as it does a business relationship for mutual profit, ready to be dissolved when the profits aren’t high enough. It should never be used in the context of mutual love.  

UPDATE: My friend Andy Crouch has written to me in defense of the word “partner,” suggesting that it “has a wider frame of reference” than I allow, and pointing out that it’s the nearly-universal translation of koinonos in Philemon 17. This is a very good point! I’ll take this under further consideration, but for now, several thoughts:  

The word certainly had a wider referential scope in the past. If you look at the OED you discover that Milton’s Adam says “I stand / Before my Judge, either to undergoe / My self the total Crime, or to accuse / My other self, the partner of my life.” And Robert Southey 150 years later: “So forth I set … And took the partner of my life with me.” However, this kind of usage almost completely disappears for nearly two centuries, until it is revived largely by people looking for a word to describe committed gay and lesbian relationships, at a time when such people could not marry. But up until that time, again if the OED is any guide, the business-based meaning had for many decades almost completely displaced all others. Thus one could reasonably conclude that the business-based uses of the word have become so dominant that they cast a strong dark shadow over any current use of the word — which is my view. Or recent uses of the term certainly could reasonably be heard as a renewal of older, more richly human meanings — which is Andy’s view.So the connotative situation is definitely more complex than I acknowledge above. The economic overtones of the word would certainly be displaced if one were to follow Milton and Southey in making it a phrase, “the partner of my life,” or, more shortly, “life partner” — but that, I suspect, is a phrasing most people who employ the term wouldn’t want to commit to. Finally: I wonder if, given the connotations the word has acquired, “partner” is a good translation of koinonos, or whether an alternative needs to be considered. I notice that the 14th-century Wycliffite version of Philemon 17 has “Therefore if thou has me as a fellow, receive him as me,” which captures the idea of koinonia as a fellowship — but we don’t use “fellow” that way any more. Maybe contemporary English has no real equivalent to koinonos. That would be a situation worthy of our reflection. 

the death of journalism

From Charlie Warzel’s newsletter:

Julia Marcus: I’m fairly new to Twitter but it’s felt to me that the people who are amplified in news media as experts are often the people who have large followings on Twitter, which creates this feedback loop that can build a false sense of consensus. And that makes it very difficult to put forth alternative perspectives. It’s hard to imagine how the pandemic would’ve played out without social media but it feels to me that social media contributed to an unhelpful polarization of the discussion.

Charlie Warzel: I’ve heard public health people say that before everyone flocked to social media a lot of these scientific discussions were happening on private listservs or messageboards and in those spaces there was room for disagreement or to express a greater spectrum of doubt. It was a safe space. And then the discussion moved into the public and it was distorted. Is that true in your experience?

JM: Twitter rewards certainty. How often do you see a tweet go viral when somebody is unsure about something? And it’s an addictive process. Certainty is rewarded, high emotion is rewarded, especially anger and fear, and it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon. When the scientific discourse largely moves onto social media it begins to degrade. I think it moved to social media because it was the easiest way to get the word out, and because so many scientists were working at home and social media provided a forum for conversations in their fields. But sometimes it has felt more like a middle school cafeteria than a scientific discussion.

From Zeynep Tufekci’s newsletter:

Many top media outlets took this group of critics’ dismissal of a version of the lab leak hypothesis and then acted like that dismissal was universal and a scientific consensus, which it wasn’t, or was conclusive, which it couldn’t be simply because we … don’t know. We certainly didn’t have the evidence we need to be so conclusive, especially not at the time.

In addition, press reports suggested that everything that fell under the umbrella of the term ‘lab leak,’ which has been a conceptual mess, had also been dismissed, although it hadn’t been, even by some of the original opponents of that particular version.

Then, for a whole year, the coverage implied that any question or statement skeptical of the lab leak critics, broadly defined, was essentially unscientific and could only be motivated by racism. Social media sites took down posts, and even news articles that made such claims.

In the meantime, the reporters did not do the leg work to separate the pieces of the question or seek a broad range of experts. If they had, they might have realized that many experts were quiet on the topic partly because they didn’t want to die on this hill last year, and partly because many were actually eminent experts very very busy doing work on the pandemic itself. Unfortunately, many media outlets failed to do the work necessary to pull themselves out of the tight Twitter/media feedback loop that dominates so much of our media coverage.

Twitter has absolutely killed journalism. Killed it stone dead. And there’s not one journalist in a hundred who has brains enough to realize it.

Last year, over at the Hog Blog, I wrote a post on my sud...

Last year, over at the Hog Blog, I wrote a post on my sudden love-affair with garden shears. Now I am exploring the possibilities of muscle-powered push mowers. Am I as excited as I was about the garden shears? Spoiler: Nope. 

abandoned

From Katie Wignall’s new book Abandoned London

Hockney’s Rake

David Hockney’s set designs for the 1975 performance of The Rake’s Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. 

I have long had an intense hatred of the telephone — even...

I have long had an intense hatred of the telephone — even in the face of eloquent testimonials like this one from Suzanne Fischer — but finally I am ready to be won over. And the key to this change of direction, as Joanna Stern explains, is: Zoom. After a year-plus of Zooming, I now find myself delighted when I get to use the phone instead. I can talk while lying on the sofa with my eyes closed! 

When, in the 1930s, Auden was teaching at The Downs Schoo...

When, in the 1930s, Auden was teaching at The Downs School, he decided that the students should perform a musical, so he wrote the lyrics, composed the music, and directed it. One of the lyrics goes like this: 

I’ve the face of an angel 
I’ve got round blue eyes 
And if you knew the things I do 
It would cause you some surprise 
But when ignorance is bliss my dears 
It’s folly to be wise