Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 185

Eric Ravilious

Eric Ravilious

muting

Goodness, this post from Noah Millman is challenging. It’s about those complicated situations when we mute, unfollow, or otherwise disengage from our friends who have become overly unpleasant online. It’s a two-way street, Noah says.

On the one hand, we as a society have become far too ready to shame, harass, disown, expel, and otherwise punish people who transgress lines that often didn’t exist until the moment the mob attacks. On the other hand, our provocateurs themselves are far too ready to get high on their own supply, indifferent to whether they are actually provoking thought in those they see as complacent or oblivious, or whether they are just making those who already agree with them less thoughtful, less worthy of anyone’s time and respect.

In the end, Noah wants to make two points to those of us who disengage (as opposed to those who are disengaged from). The first is this: “We need to be clear to ourselves that our disengagement is something we’re doing for ourselves, and not for any greater good, much less for the people we’re disengaging from.” And the second: “That’s no way to be a friend. And it’s no way to be a citizen either.”

I want to take these ideas on board, but I think I also want to dissent, at least in part.

First, when I have disengaged in this way I have indeed, and absolutely, done it for myself — but I don’t think that’s necessarily a reason not to do it. I find the online direhose of wrath and contempt and misinformation immensely wearying, and indeed depressing, and especially given the damage I have sustained from the unavoidable depredations of the Year of Our Lord 2020, I think there can be good reason for avoiding the depredations that are not necessary.

Second, I think that how you disengage matters. On many occasions I have decided to unfollow or mute or just ignore people I know IRL, and when these were just acquaintances it was a simple thing to do. But on the rare occasions when they were genuine friends it was complicated. In all such cases, I began by telling them that I had problems with their online self-presentation and that I wished they would behave differently. Memory may fail me, but I can’t at the moment remember an occasion when that intervention had any effect whatsoever. So eventually I unfollowed/muted/ignored — and I told them I was doing that, also.

Before you tell someone you’re muting their online presence you take a deep breath because you don’t know what the consequences will be. In one case, my friend was a bit hurt, but our friendship is as strong now as it ever was. In another, the friendship ended.

Why the difference? It may have something to do with the character of the people involved; about that I’m not sure. But two major factors were certainly in play. One: In the first case, I had a much longer and stronger history of face-to-face connection, so that a rejection of his online persona obviously did not mean a rejection of his whole being. Two: in the second case, the friend was much more deeply invested in his online presence — maybe to the extent that he couldn’t have accepted the rejection even if we had a stronger face-to-face history.

Looking back on these situations, I am not sure what lessons to draw — Noah’s column has got me reflecting and I don’t know where that reflection will lead. But at the moment I am thinking that in all the cases where I disengaged I was right to do so — some degree of self-preservation made it necessary. But maybe I should have done so silently, and not spoken of the disengagement unless asked. I thought at the time that friendship required honesty; but maybe there’s a place for reticence in friendship also, or at least more reticence than I demonstrated.

The Return of the King

In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Susanna Clarke imagines an alternate history of England, one in which the north of England was ruled for 300 years in the Middle Ages by John Uskglass, the Raven King, who one day disappeared and never returned – though his people long for him to this day. (“This day” being the early nineteenth century.)

There’s a moment late in the book where a thoroughly modern and thoroughly nasty gentleman named Lascelles, an ally and confidante of the dourly pedantic magician Gilbert Norrell, notes with scorn and mockery a recently renewed devotion to the Raven King. This leads to a telling exchange with Norrell’s servant, one John Childermass.

“If I were you, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass, softly, “I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass’s own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is in our minds and hearts and speech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John’s Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm weather in winter or it rains in summer the country people say that John Uskglass is in love again and neglects his business. And when we are sure of something we say it is as safe as a pebble in John Uskglass’s pocket.”

Lascelles laughed. “Far be it from me, Mr Childermass, to disparage your quaint country sayings. But surely it is one thing to pay lip-service to one’s history and quite another to talk of bringing back a King who numbered Lucifer himself among his allies and overlords? No one wants that, do they? I mean apart from a few Johannites and madmen?”

“I am a North Englishman, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass. “Nothing would please me better than that my King should come home. It is what I have wished for all my life.”

It is understandable that people would long for the return of a King as a great as John Uskglass was. The talking beasts of Narnia likewise long for the return of Aslan – long for it so much that they are easily deceived by a donkey wearing a lion’s skin.

The return of the King. It’s a thought that may inspire at least a tickle at the back of the neck even for the most worldly and cynical of us. And as appealing as the thought of the King’s return is, equally appealing, perhaps, is the thought that one who remains faithful in dark days will be commended on that great day of restoration by the Sovereign.

Some have even lived to see such a moment. Upon the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the steadfast British royalist John Evelyn wrote in his diary,

29th May, 1660. This day, his Majesty, Charles II. came to London, after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church, being seventeen years. This was also his birthday, and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine; the Mayor, Aldermen, and all the companies, in their liveries, chains of gold, and banners; Lords and Nobles, clad in cloth of silver, gold, and velvet; the windows and balconies, all set with ladies; trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing the city, even from two in the afternoon till nine at night.

I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him: but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.

These intense monarchial feelings, these profound heart’s desires, may be embedded more deeply within us than we typically realize. Over at the Hedgehog Review, I wrote — extending some previous work of mine — about Emile Durkheim’s belief that we had transitioned irreversibly from elementary forms of religious life to a secularized modernity:

The relevance of Durkheim to our present moment arises, it seems to me, rather paradoxically from the strong possibility that he was wrong in his belief that the transfer to a modern social order was both imminent and irreversible. Certainly it seems that in our current moment some of the features of traditional society that Durkheim calls particular attention to have undergone a kind of revival. Perhaps this is their Indian summer; or perhaps the fundamental impulses of traditional societies are harder to kill off than Durkheim thought they were.

Among the atavistic impulses we thought we had outgrown is this longing for a sacred kingship. I have been reading Isaac Ariail Reed’s extraordinary book Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, which demonstrates the various ways that that central doctrine of medieval politcal theology, the king’s two bodies, keeps returning to life, though in transfigured ways that can sometimes make it unrecognizable.

And late in the book Reed contemplates the rise of Nazism:

It is against this landscape of meaning that Carl Schmitt wrote of the importance of the discretion that accrued to judges; of the need for a sovereign to use his own judgment to decide both that there is an emergency and what to do about it; and of the grounding of all political concepts in the theological — a triptych of concerns that suggests rather strongly a particular kind of replacement for the King’s Two Bodies. In his book on Hobbes, published in 1938, Schmitt gave intellectual expression to the resentments that drove the Nazi revolution and regime. He first linked the emergence of modern, Weberian bureaucracy to the death of divine kingship as an ordered format of rule. He then preached about the inevitable collapse of liberal democracy, which he called a “fool’s paradise” with no real legitimacy. Into this breach, he could only imagine one solution: an entirely homogeneous demos could delegate to a single sovereign, who, because he was of the body of the people, would be trusted and endowed with absolute power. In this way would the dictator’s second body be born of the body of the people. It is a figuration that is still with us.

Indeed it is. As we have recently seen, people will even wish to die for Donald Trump — who is no Hitler but rather, essentially, a Shift the Ape who wears the lion’s skin himself rather than putting it on Puzzle the donkey. And Christians — Christians! — will gather on the Mall in Washington D.C. to luxuriate in the propwashed benediction of the Presidential helicopter.

O sacred monarch, do not leave us. But if you do, we your faithful people will await your coming again in glory in 2024.

To all of this, I can only summon my readers to hear the Word of the Lord:

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.” Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only — you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king…. But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” When Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice and set a king over them.”

Here endeth the reading.

sifting the words

I have decided that reading the news in America is like listening to Gollum. Gandalf:

“What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his ‘birthday-present’, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.”

Every time I read a news story I ask a series of questions:

Whom is this account trying to please?
Whom or what is it afraid of?
What pre-existing narrative is it meant to confirm?
What conclusions is it trying to prevent me from drawing?
From what inconvenient truths is it meant to distract me?
What is the “grain of truth” to be plucked from all the lies and distortions?

testing the spirits

There is no infallible means for discerning when a religious believer has been spoken to, directly and personally, by God. However, there is a reliable way to disconfirm such a claim. When a person demands that other people immediately accept that he has been spoken to by God, and treats with insult and contempt those who do not acknowledge his claim to unique revelation, then we can be sure that no genuine message has been received, and that the voice echoing in that person’s mind is not that of God but that of his own ego.

the two parties

The United States of America has long had a two-party political system, but it now has a two-party social system also. The social system is not divided between Republicans and Democrats but rather between Manichaeans and Humanists. The Manichaean Party is headed by Donald Trump. He works in close concert with Ibram X. Kendi, Eric Metaxas, Xavier Becerra, and Rush Limbaugh, but really, the Party wouldn’t exist at all without him. The Humanist Party, by contrast, doesn’t have an obvious leadership structure and doesn’t make a lot of noise; its chief concern is less to enforce an agenda than to make it a little harder for the Manichaeans to enforce theirs.

The Manichaeans say, all together and in a very loud voice, You are wholly with us or wholly against us! Make your decision! I don’t know when I’ve had an easier choice.

Cosmotechnics

My essay in the just-out edition of The New Atlantis — if you want to read it now, please subscribe to this excellent journal, and even if you don’t want to read it at all, please subscribe to this excellent journal anyway — begins with a description of what I call the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. That critique has been articulated, in varying terms but with a significant conceptual unity, by a group of thinkers I very much admire, including Albert Borgmann, Ursula Franklin, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman. An excerpt:

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, to reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

The problem with the SCT isn’t that it’s wrong — it’s admirably incisive and acute — but that it has, so far anyway, been powerless. In this essay I suggest an alternative approach — a kind of alternative to critique itself — that draws on, of all things, Daoism, approached by way of the work on “cosmotechnics” by the philosopher Yuk Hui. It’s not a definitive treatise that I have written but rather an exploration, an attempt to trace some new paths for thinking about technology and technopoly.

clarification

I normally don’t respond to reviews, either positive or negative, but because I’m getting a good deal of email about this:

I reviewed Alan Jacobs (no longer on twitter alas!)’s new book for @WSJ

My review asks 2 questions:

(1) who is the real audience for a defense of great books?

(2) there’s been a lot of defending: might it not be time for a really vigorous attack?https://t.co/FEHxSFgJVC

— Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) December 10, 2020

— I’ll make three brief comments.

My book isn’t a defense of great books, at all; it’s an argument for encountering the past. Only one chapter (Chapter 4) deals with reading the classics as such. Elsewhere in the book I refer to texts that are usually designated as classics or great books, but that designation isn’t relevant to my use of them: what matters to me is that they are old.
Callard speculates on who my audience might be, but there’s no need for speculation: I say in the Introduction that it’s readers who are in need of a more tranquil mind.
In her review Callard asks, “Could it be that those of us whose connection with the past is supposed to be rock solid, who are supposed to profess the deepest and most abiding love of great books, are struggling with our own attention problems?” And she suggests I write about that. But I already did, a decade ago. And then again a few years later.

Palaiphobia

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the present moment as a Power, a power in the Pauline sense of a massively distributed, massively influential, universal agency directing the course of this world. It seems to me that the Present is a jealous God: it wants us to think only of itself, and never of the past or the future except insofar as images of them serve this instant.

But if we must think of either the past or the future, the Present prefers for us to think of the future, for two reasons: one, any future we imagine is just that, imaginary, and is really a kind of projection of our hopes and fears for our own moment. And two, thinking about the future produces anxiety, which has the effect of driving us back towards the Present, where we can be distracted from that anxiety. That is to say, the future is potentially useful to the Present in a way that the past is not.

Now, to be sure, we can interpret the past in such a way that we reinforce our current habits and attitudes and prejudices. (I have written about this in Breaking Bread with the Dead.) But this is of limited usefulness to the Present and is not really worth the risks. From the perspective of the Present, any genuine immersion in the past is likely to complicate our understanding of this moment and make it harder for us to know precisely what to do, because of all the complexity, good and bad, of the behavior of those who lived and fought and prayed and loved before us. If we learn to have compassion for those people, we just might translate that into compassion for the people who share this world with us but do not think just as we think. And that the Present cannot have.

Why does the Present not want this? Because present-mindedness is instantaneousness, it is automatic response, it is the gratification of whatever emotion happens to arise. As the poet Craig Raine has said, “all emotion is pleasurable” — this fact is the constant pole star of the Present.

These thoughts, though they’ve occupied me for a long time, were recently brought to the forefront of my mind by an essay on Harper Lee by Casey Cep, which contains this passage:

There is an important and interesting conversation happening now about the relevance of To Kill a Mockingbird to our country’s pursuit of racial justice and how we teach civic virtues like tolerance. For a long time, Lee’s novel has been one of the most banned books in the country, first criticized by conservatives who disapproved of its integrationist politics, then by liberals who disapproved of its use of racial slurs, and all along by censors of all persuasions who object to its depiction of rape and incest. Lately, though, the novel’s detractors are not calling for a ban or censorship, just retirement: taking it off of syllabi in order to make room for books by a more diverse group of authors, offering students work written with an eye to the current fight for racial justice, not one from the last century.

I don’t really care whether people keep reading To Kill a Mockingbird. What interests me about this paragraph is the idea — and it’s not necessarily Cep’s idea, just one that she rightly discerns as common — that there is a “current fight for racial justice” that’s different from “one from the last century.” But, you know, Dorothy Counts is still alive.

And Ruby Bridges is still alive — indeed, just now reaching retirement age.

John Lewis, the last of the Big Six, just died a few months ago. I myself remember quite vividly the integration of Birmingham’s schools. This isn’t ancient history we’re talking about, and we shouldn’t allow the artificial convention of “centuries” deceive us into believing that it is. The story of Dorothy Counts and Ruby Bridges and John Lewis and all the rest of those amazing people who now get lumped into that comforting abstraction we call the Civil Rights Movement is our story, though the Present wants us to forget that, wants to separate us from our brothers and sisters, wants to break all chains that link us to one another — so that we can be wholly absorbed into Now and indulge our instantaneous emotions rather than reflect thoughtfully on the ways that the past is not dead, it is not even past.

The Present wants to infect us with what I have decided to call palaiphobia, from παλαιός, palaiós, old, worn out. That’s how it alienates us from one another, makes us wholly dependent on what it can offer: sentimentality and rage.

UPDATE: My friend Adam Roberts has, quite justifiably, wondered whether my coinage uses the right word. Here’s what I wrote in reply to him:

I have to say something about my decision to write of palaiphobia rather than archephobia. It was an agonizing one, I assure you. In these matters I take my bearings primarily from New Testament Greek, as you know, and of course there’s considerable overlap between the two words. When Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 that the old has gone and the new is here, he uses ἀρχαῖα; but when he talks about the “old leaven” in 1 Corinthians 5 he uses παλαιὰν ζύμην. As far as I can tell ἀρχαῖα and παλαιὰν would be interchangeable in those contexts. Both words can be neutral in their valence. But if you look at the overall patterns of usage, it seems that there’s something more generally disparaging about παλαιὸς, whereas there’s at least a potential dignity in ἀρχαῖα. When Paul talks, as he often does, about the “old man” that we must put off, he says παλαιὸς ἄνθρωπος. And παλαιὸς often has the connotation of something worn out, as when Jesus talks (in Matthew 9:16) about patching old clothes, ἱματίῳ παλαιῷ. I wanted to capture that disparagement in my coinage, the sense that the past is worn out, useless, of no value. I wonder if you think that makes sense? 

under pressure

Technology Review has a good article on ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who recently co-authored a paper questioning the social and environmental effects of some of Google’s projects and got herself sacked for it. One specific element of the story has caught my attention.

Only one of Gebru’s co-authors talked with Technology Review about their troublesome paper: Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. From the article:

Gebru and Bender’s paper has six coauthors, four of whom are Google researchers. Bender asked to avoid disclosing their names for fear of repercussions. (Bender, by contrast, is a tenured professor: “I think this is underscoring the value of academic freedom,” she says.)

Please consider that story in light of this one from the WSJ, which describes how Medaille College and other American colleges and universities are eliminating tenure in response to financial troubles. At Medaille the word tenure is still used but, as the article makes clear, it doesn’t mean anything: “Professors remain tenured but the term no longer carries traditional protections. Tenured faculty will work on three-year renewable contracts, class loads are about 20% larger, and even they can be laid off with two months’ notice.”

Add to that the situations — some listed here — in which insufficient wokeness is cause for the dismissal of non-tenured faculty and ongoing harassment and public humiliation of the tenured. (Though I suspect that for us academics getting in trouble with the Woke Police ought to be pretty far down on our list of worries.)

Now, ask youself: When researchers in the academy are subjected to political pressures from the left and financial pressures from budget-slashing administrators — who never, by the way, slash administrative budgets: those continue to grow apace — and when researchers outside the academy are subject to immediate dismissal for speaking truths that are inconvenient to their employers, what’s the outlook for truly groundbreaking research, in any field? Spoiler: Not great.