Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 174

updates on this and that

In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote last August. 

I wish to align myself wholly with what Tish Harrison Warren says here about the “whole life movement.” Preach it, sister, I’m here for it all. 

In the wake of what appears to be the imminent collapse of the European Stupid League, I will just say that the most accurate and concise summary comes from Manchester City defender Aymeric Laporte: 

pic.twitter.com/Hkjs4QzHFx

— Aymeric Laporte (@Laporte)

April 20, 2021

And in other positive news, I have added to my repertoire of media ecology essays with this entry at the Hog Blog on Substack (and other new platforms) as Distributism for writers and artists. 

Seventy-three years

I can’t help being moved by the juxtaposition of these photographs. 

transnational capitalism in boots

Jonathan Liew:

Perhaps once all this has shaken out, once the imminent threat of a breakaway European super league has been resolved one way or the other, football will find the time for a little reflection.

How we reached this point. How the game’s elite clubs managed to engineer a scenario in which a hostile takeover came to feel inevitable, even irresistible. How the world’s most popular sport managed to hand over so much of its power and wealth and influence to people who despise it. 

Because make no mistake: this is an idea that could only have been devised by someone who truly hates football to its bones. Who hates football so much that they want to prune it, gut it, dismember it, from the grassroots game to the World Cup. Who finds the very idea of competitive sport offensive, an unhealthy distraction from the main objective, which in a way has always been capitalism’s main objective.

Several thoughts: 

I agree fervently with Liew.I don’t think the super league will come to pass, because I don’t think the big clubs want one. I think this is a shakedown to squeeze everyone else in soccer for more money.  I wish the national associations would call their bluff and just say “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” But I don’t think they will: those big clubs bring in a lot of revenue for everyone else. (But they don’t want any of their money to go anywhere else — thus the shakedown, and thus my plea for letting them go. Giving in to their demands would mean virtually eliminating their value to the rest of soccer.)  If the super league does come to pass, I won’t watch it. Seeing those clubs play in the late stages of the Champions League is fun; seeing them play every week, not so much. Besides, Arsenal would finish at the bottom of the league every single year, and Stan Kroenke would be just fine with that — in fact, would prefer it. He’d get the cash without having to invest in the quality of his side. (In other words, he’d simply extend his current ownership strategy.)  The domestic leagues without the big clubs would still be Very Big Businesses, but they wouldn’t be empowering the kind of transnats that Kim Stanley Robinson writes about. I could then settle in firmly as a Fulham supporter — and they need the support. Tough day for Scott Parker and the lads today. 

The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coheren...

The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused. 

— Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)

“the church itself does not believe”

This by Russell Moore is incisive — devastatingly so:

Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different — and jarring — model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.

Thousands upon thousands of young people are leaving evangelicalism because they have been told all their lives that evangelicals hold up Jesus as Lord and the Bible as God’s Word — and have seen all their lives that many evangelical leaders ignore Jesus and ignore Scripture whenever those witnesses conflict with the leaders’ preferred cultural politics. “And what if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.” 

a bit of pedagogy

College students are busy, so they practice triage: they decide (a) what must be done now, (b) what can wait until later, and (c) what need not be done at all. If a professor tells students to do something but offers no reward for doing it and no punishment for failing to do it, then it will inevitably go directly into category (c).

This is why I give reading quizzes — a common enough practice. But over the years I have come to build my entire classroom practice around those reading quizzes. My method looks like this:

We begin class with a quiz; I allow roughly one minute per question.Then we go over the quiz question by question — and everything else stems from this. Students volunteer answers, which is helpful to me not least because sometimes they have given an accurate answer that I did not anticipate. I also discover which questions they found easy and which they found difficult.After the correct answer is noted, I’ll sometimes ask “Why does that matter?” That is: Why is this a sufficiently important detail for me to put it on the quiz? This opens up the conversation, and sometimes we can spend ten or fifteen minutes unpacking the significance of just one question.In other cases I will simply unpack the significance myself, asking them to turn in their book to passages that reinforce or expand on the point the question explores.When we’re done the students grade their own quizzes, record their grades so they can retrieve them later (and always know how they’re doing), and turn the quizzes in to me.

My notes for the class will typically look like this — from Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which I just finished teaching in one of my classes. (It’s one of my favorite books to teach.) When I make up the quizzes I keep a copy for myself and annotate it, as you can see, so I can not only point to the pages where the answers may be found but also identify other key passages, many of them related, thematically, to the ones I asked the questions about.

Books I teach tend to look like this:

And there are many notes on the inside. I’m thinking that when I retire I should bundle a much-taught book with its annotated quizzes and sell the bundle as my own version of an NFT.

hoti’s business

“Kakos really ought to suffer for doing hoti!” 

“Kakos did hoti?” 

“Of course! Haven’t you heard? It’s all over Twitter.” 

“But is there any evidence he did it?” 

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Anyway, I wouldn’t put anything past Kakos.” 

“Why not?” 

“Well, he did hoti, didn’t he?” 

the sprawling toolbox

In one of his notebooks Wittgenstein wrote, “I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else…. — What I invent are new similes.” Maybe that’s what humanistic thought is essentially: a search for new similes, new ways of perceiving the familiar — better to appreciate it when it deserves appreciation and better to change it when it requires changing. A mode of lateral thinking. A way of restocking the toolbox. 

In such a project, the late great Mary Midgely once argued, religious experience is vital, because “there is a general tendency for new imaginative ways of understanding life to emerge from religious thinking – that is, from thoughts which go beyond current human horizons.” That is, one of the social functions of religious experience — wholly aside from whether any particular religion is true or not — is to create similes, to extend thinking laterally, to add to the toolbox. “The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish ‘folk-psychology’. It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose.” 

The sociologist David Martin — also late and great; he died just a few months after Midgely — thought that this proliferation of similes is indeed essential to humanistic discourse, and thought he knew why. In his late book Ruin and Restoration: On Violence, Liturgy and Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2016) he wrote:

The cultural disciplines, theology included alongside sociology, depend on history. History involves narrative, and narrative involves contingency and subjectivity … History can only be narrated in ordinary language, in principle available to any competent language user. The same applies to the cultural disciplines. They have no concepts like ‘quasars’ in astrophysics or even ‘metabolism’ in medicine, unless metabolism is used metaphorically. The fundamental role played by contingent narrative expressed in ordinary language means that the cultural disciplines are metaphorical and rhetorical to a degree not found in the natural sciences and they proliferate taxonomies. They sprawl because attended by numerous qualifications dependent on cultural time and space. The setting out of the ceteris paribus clause can be very extended indeed. (p. 9) 

The irony here is that one invokes ceteris paribus — all things being equal — precisely because all things rarely are equal. One must continually account for cultural and social and experiential difference, make “numerous qualifications dependent on cultural time and space.” 

I have made a similar version of this point in particular relation to the need for a theological anthropology adequate to our moment: 

To this claim there may be the immediate response, especially from orthodox Christians, that theology need not be different in this age than in any other, for human nature does not change: it remains true now as it has been since the angels with their flaming swords were posted at the gates of Eden that we are made in the image of God and yet have defaced that image, and that what theologians call “the Christ event” — the incarnation, preaching, healing, death, resurrection, ascension, and ultimate return of the second person of the Trinity — is the means by which that image will be restored and the wounds we have inflicted on the Creation healed. And indeed all that does, I believe, remain true. Yet it does not follow from such foundational salvation history that “theology need not be different in this age than any other.”

We may indeed believe in some universal human nature and nevertheless believe that certain frequencies on the human spectrum of possibility become more audible at times; indeed, the dominance of certain frequencies in one era can render others unheard, and only when that era passes and a new one replaces it may we realize that there were all along transmissions that we couldn’t hear because they were drowned out, overwhelmed. The moral and spiritual soundscape of the world is in constant flux, and calls forth, if we have ears to hear and a willingness to respond, new theological reflections that do not erase the truthfulness or even significance of former theological articulations but have a responsibility to add to them. In this sense at least there must be “development of doctrine.” 

Note that the invocation of a “soundscape” is itself an attempt at coining a useful simile. It may be related to the concept of stochastic resonance in reading. It is probably not wholly compatible with the metaphor of vendoring culture. You generate the similes, you try them out, you discard some and lean on others. You hope that at some point you’re able not just to invent them but use them to aid understanding: there’s no point in having a big sprawling toolbox if you don’t put the tools to work. But right now I’m working on the development of those tools. 

Or am I sowing seeds in my blog garden? This business of simile-generation is complicated. 

I found this to be a moving, frustrating, painful, and ye...

I found this to be a moving, frustrating, painful, and yet somehow also heartwarming story about a young man who deserves a whole lot more than his society is allowing him to have. It’s a story about many things, but above all, I think, about the search for meaning and hope in an economic order that can’t, or doesn’t, provide either.

touch not the unclean thing

I pay for four Substack newsletters, but am on the free tier for several others, and the writers I follow who are huffily declaring their departure from Substack because Substack will tolerate [insert taboo object here] perfectly illustrate Left Purity Culture. What’s sad/funny about this is that the platforms they are decamping for are no more pure than Substack. (You think no right-wingers use Tinyletter? Also: You’re announcing your purgative action … on Twitter? Wow, you can’t get more ideologically pure than that.) It’s a useful reminder that ritual cleanliness bears no resemblance to actual cleanliness. It’s just a matter of making the approved gestures. But it may have the self-fulfilling prophecy effect: Eventually the claim that “Substack is just a venue for right-wingers” may be largely true.