Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 173

It’s Palmer Eldritch’s world, we’re just living in it

I’m teaching Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch right now, and in my introductory comments I mentioned that one of the curious things about this book so full of fear and anxiety is the complete absence of what would have been, at the time of the book’s publication in 1965, the most common source of fear and anxiety: the Cold War, and the possibility that it would erupt into a very hot nuclear one. As Dick imagines the world of 2016, all of that has somehow been resolved or faded into insignificance. What has happened instead is a kind of unspoken and largely unacknowledged collaboration between the United Nations, which seems to be the only government that’s functioning, and what we have recently learned to call surveillance capitalism. It’s the UN that forces people to leave the overcrowded and overheated earth to live at a subsistence level on colonies elsewhere in the solar system, and it’s also the UN that turns a blind eye to the “pushers” who sell to the colonists the drugs they need to make their miserable experience tolerable. Symbiosis. 

When people talk about Dick as a prophetic writer, this is the kind of thing they have in mind: an ability to envision from 1965 not a continuation of that time’s politics but instead a tacit union between the interests of government and the interests of the world’s most powerful corporations.

But Dick takes his anticipations to another level, a level that I am especially interested in. It is of course famously difficult to say exactly what happens in this novel, because the essential question that the major characters have is always: What is actually happening? But at least one major potential timeline, perhaps the most likely timeline, tells a story like this: Palmer Eldritch is a titan of capitalism, in many respects the Jeff Bezos of this world, and he travels to Proxima Centauri on a quest that is ambiguous in character but certainly involves financial motives. Eldritch discovers on Proxima Centauri a substance that the sentient beings of that solar system use in their religious rituals — a substance he thinks he can manufacture and sell and thereby win a victory over the currently dominant corporation called PP Layouts. But on his return from the Proxima system he is — well, perhaps the word is possessed by a sentient creature from some other part of the galaxy. And this creature is at least for a time interested in distributing its consciousness, through the mediation of Palmer Eldritch and the substance he has discovered, into the consciousness of human beings.

I said in an earlier post that I am interested in demonology, and that adds to my fascination with this novel. Because Dick is imagining what might happen if an unprecedentedly powerful union of government and surveillance capitalism is taken over by what might fairly be called a demonic power. Now, you might say that what Dick describes is not a demon, but simply a creature dramatically more powerful than we are and capable of imposing its will upon us. I call that a distinction without a difference. This is, it seems to me, a sort of Foucauldian image a few years ahead of Foucault’s key works on power and domination, a picture of a world in which powers that we may be tempted to call supernatural are disseminated through the existing structures of the neoliberal order. And it doesn’t look pretty.

Of course, this is not the only possible explanation of what is happening in the book. It is certainly possible that there is no alien being possessing Palmer Eldritch; rather, Eldritch himself has, through a combination of economic leverage and biotechnology, assumed equivalent powers. That is, it may be possible for surveillance capitalism to generate its own demons. Whether this is a better or worse fate than the one I previously described I leave as an exercise for the reader.

the method

It was in that class that I first began to learn that every problem, whether serious or trifling, may be solved by the application of an always identical method, which consists in contrasting two traditional views of the question; the first is introduced by means of a justification on common-sense grounds, then the justification is destroyed with the help of the second view; finally, both are dismissed as being equally inadequate, thanks to a third view which reveals the incomplete character of the first two; these are now reduced by verbal artifice to complementary aspects of one and the same reality: form and subject-matter, container and content, being and appearance, continuity and discontinuity, essence and existence, etc. Such an exercise soon becomes purely verbal, depending, as it does, on a certain skill in punning, which replaces thought: assonance, similarity in sound and ambiguity gradually come to form the basis of those brilliantly ingenious intellectual shifts which are thought to be the sign of sound philosophizing.

Five years of study at the Sorbonne boiled down to acquiring skill in this form of mental gymnastics, the dangers of which are nevertheless obvious.  

— Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 

to sum up

“I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!”

— Lesslie Newbigin

Is Christianity declining where you are? Is it, rather, growing in power and influence? Is persecution coming for you? Or is cultural success around the corner?

None of it matters. Our calling is precisely the same, in what we call times of ease and what we call times of struggle. And the Good News is always News and always Good. Don’t bother being an optimist or a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!

the spoils

When, therefore, we see in Him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they are appropriate to nothing else but the primal and ineffable nature of deity, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder and knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds One returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death. 

— Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John

what we need

Jessica Martin’s Maundy Thursday homily at Ely Cathedral.

From Ely today, The Preaching and Proclamation of the Cross.

Via Ken Myers, an absolutely superb 30 minute overview, with key excerpts, of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

strategy and vocation

It’s rare for me to disagree with Ross Douthat as thoroughly as I disagree with this reflection on Christian intellectuals. I disagree not because I doubt his particular judgments, but because I think he has misconceived the entire subject. He has done so, I believe, by approaching the role of Christian intellectual as a matter of strategy, when it is more properly a matter of vocation. As the bearer of a vocation — a particular calling within the general calling of the Christian life — the Christian intellectual someone who engages in a practice — and (following MacIntyre here and therefore following both Aristotle and Aquinas) to be a practitioner in this sense means that your calling is circumscribed by the requirement to exhibit certain virtues, virtues the possession of which enable you to follow your calling faithfully — and, therefore, virtues whose absence will compromise or vitiate your ability to fulfill your calling. And for the Christian those must be, to start with, the core Christian virtues. (To which are added certain specifically intellectual virtues.) 

To me, then, it’s noteworthy that some of the people he singles out as exemplary Christian intellectuals are people notorious for their belittlement of, their mockery of, their contempt for pretty much anyone, Christian or not, who disagrees with them. Douthat’s exemplary Christian intellectuals seem often to think that, because (in their view) they hold the right positions, and have the right strategy, they are therefore exempt from any of the Biblical commandments about how to deal with our Christian siblings and our enemies alike. 

That habitual sneering at dissenters is not especially relevant if you think of the Christian intellectual life simply as a mater of strategy; but it matters very much if you think of that life as a vocation which has certain standards intrinsic to it, standards that emerge from the Christian account of the virtuous (the Christlike) person. Considering Christian intellectual life as a matter of vocation might lead to a different list of exemplary figures than the one Ross employs — and would demand a different conceptual framing too.  

It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambi...

It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambidextrous person, I endorse this verdict. Though — if I must be truthful — I’m not in any straightforward sense ambidextrous, because while there are things that I do much better with my left hand and things I do much better with my right hand, there is almost nothing that I do equally well with both hands. I think I would’ve been more left-handed except that my parents when I was very young encouraged me to use my right hand for things they noticed, like writing and throwing. But things that they didn’t pay attention to  — brushing my teeth, combing my hair, shooting pool, archery — I did, and do, with my left hand. (Well, not brushing my hair, because my hair is too short to brush. But when I buzz my head or trim my heard, I hold the clippers in my left hand.) In general, my right hand is the Hand of Power, and my left hand is the Hand of Precision. Anything that requires fine motor skills: left. Anything that requires strength, like opening a tightly-sealed jar: right.

three lessons

I’ve known Erin Kissane virtually for around a decade now — our IRL paths almost crossed a few years ago when she was still living in New York City and I gave a talk at Vassar, but that’s as close as we’ve come — and I have always had enormous admiration for her kind heart and steel spine. I was reminded of that admiration when I read her summing-up post for her year as the managing editor of the Covid Tracking Project. I strongly encourage you to read it all, and pay particular attention to these three sentences:

I suspect that intentional constraints on scope and scale allow for deeper, more satisfying, and ultimately more useful work. I suspect that a disciplined commitment to messy truths over smooth narratives would also breathe life into technology, journalism, and public health efforts that too frequently paper over the complex, many-voiced nature of the world. And I suspect that treating people like humans who are intrinsically motivated to do useful work in the world, and who deserve genuine care, allows far more people to do their best work without destroying themselves in the process.

I would love to see more institutions, whether in crisis time or in “normal” time, think long and hard about those three lessons, so beautifully articulated by Erin. Now I hope she can get some rest!

Left Purity Culture

Like many other people, I’m not happy with the terms “woke” and “wokeness,” but I haven’t been sure what a good alternative is. Then, just the other day, as I was reading a few of the thousands of op-eds that have recently been written about Christian “purity culture,” I realized that what people typically call “woke” culture is really a different sort of purity culture, one for the secular left. Just as the messages of Christian purity culture are that you must be eternally vigilant in maintaining your purity; you must sign up to pledges of purity; you must denounce those who are impure; if you lose your purity you can never get it back, your defilement marks you forever; so — well, the parallels make themselves, don’t they. So instead of “wokeness” I will from now on refer to Left Purity Culture (LPC). I’ve altered the relevant tags for this blog accordingly. 

UPDATE: My friend Brad East points out that his colleague Richard Beck wrote six years ago — as a self-described progressive Christian — about “The Purity Culture of Progressive Christianity.” It’s a really interesting post, and there’s an equally interesting follow-up. 

stocking up

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has a problem. Their business depends almost wholly on showing movies from the pre-woke world — movies that cannot possibly survive the strict moral scrutiny to which our major media institutions now must subject all artworks. So what to do? Well, show the movies but tag them as problematic; acknowledge the difficulties but try to defend the films anyway. We’ll see how that strategy works out. 

As I have said on a number of occasions, I think LPC (Left Purity Culture) will burn itself out, as it always does. In the end, when there’s no one left to execute, Robespierre has to guillotine the executioner: 

But who knows when that day will come? Meanwhile, I realized after I read the stories I link to above, I don’t have my own copy of John Ford’s The Searchers, which I consider one of the greatest movies ever made. So I’m remedying that deficiency. 

I’m also going to make a list of (a) great films that (b) I do not own and that (c) Amazon and other guardians of the virtue of late capitalism may decide to blackball. Then I’m going to buy one of them each month.