Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 187

I think we’re all bozos on this bus

For the last few weeks I’ve been tinkering with a draft of a post on American incompetence — on the basic inability of almost everyone in this country simply to do their jobs. That was time ill spent, because Kevin Williamson has performed the task it for me, and done it well:

It is easy to see the advantage of offering not ideology or even innovation but bare competence — competence is an increasingly rare commodity in American life. Consider the 21st century so far: the intelligence and security failures that led to 9/11, the failure to secure American military and political priorities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the subprime-mortgage boom that sparked the financial crisis of 2008–09 and the subsequent recession, business bailouts, the failures and abuses of American police departments and the riots and arson that have accompanied them, the COVID–19 epidemic, the troubles in the universities, the fecklessness and mischief of the big technology companies, the political failure to deal with serious issues from illegal immigration to environmental degradation, American frustration at the rise of China as a world power and the geopolitical resurgence of such backward countries as Turkey and Russia, the remorseless piling up of the national debt and unfunded entitlement liabilities, bankrupt and nearly bankrupt cities and public agencies — the list goes on. Americans are not wrong to question the competence of American government and American institutions, nor are they alone in doing so: The rest of the world is reevaluating longstanding presumptions of American competence, too.

And furthermore:

If things go wonky on Tuesday, if the presidential election goes unresolved and the subsequent contest is marked by political violence and civil disorder, American credibility will slide further still. In the event of an electoral crisis, we will be forced to rely on institutions that already have been tested and found wanting: Congress, many state governments, the news media, the professional political caste. And Americans will turn for information and insight … where, exactly? Twitter? Facebook? Fox News? Talk radio? The New York Times? Even the police upon whom we rely for basic physical security have shown themselves all too often unable or unwilling to perform their most basic duties.

What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe. We have for decades now operated under the assumption that our material and social world will function perfectly well on its own even if we cease to attend to it. It won’t.

it’s time

I read stories like this almost every day: banned from Twitter for no good reason; banned from Facebook for no good reason; banned from Facebook supposedly by accident, but come on, we know what’s going on here.

I don’t for an instant think Bret Weinstein’s Facebook account was flagged by an algorithm: someone there wanted to silence him and hoped to get away with it. But most of the time these bans happen because the sheer scale of these platforms makes meaningful moderation impossible. Facebook and Twitter would have to hire ten times the number of moderators they currently employ to make rational judgments in these matters, and they won’t voluntarily cut into their profits. They’ll continue to rely on the algorithms and on instantaneous denials of appeals.

Here’s your semi-regular reminder: You don’t have to be there. You can quit Twitter and Facebook and never go back. You can set up social-media shop in a more humane environment, like micro.blog, or you can send emails to your friends — with photos of your cats attached! If you’re a person with a significant social-media following, you can start a newsletter; heck, you can do that if you just want to stay in touch with five of six friends. All of the big social-media platforms are way past their sell-by date. The stench of their rottenness fills the room, and the worst smells of all come from Facebook and Twitter.

In your heart you know I’m right: It’s time to go.

P.S. Of course, I’ve been singing this song for a long time. I return to it now simply because the election-as-mediated-through-social-media seems to be exacerbating the misery of millions and millions of people. I’ll try to sing a different song from now on.

rediscovery

Via Patrick Rhone, I discovered this newsletter by Mo Perry, in which she discusses the Triumph of the Scold:

Now my social media feed is full of people scolding others who have the audacity to try to salvage a shred of joy and pleasure from their lives. The lens seems largely political: as if anyone experiencing pleasure or expressing joy while Trump is president is tacitly endorsing Trump. The communally encouraged state of being is dread and misery and rage. People who eat at restaurants, people who let their kids play on playgrounds, people who walk around the lake without a mask — all condemnable, contemptible. Selfish. How dare they?

But maybe, Perry suggests, the universality of scolding is having an unanticipated consequence. She describes a recent mini-vacation with a friend:

We didn’t share a single picture or post about the trip online. Not on Instagram, not on Facebook, not on Twitter. On the one hand, it felt like a naughty indulgence — something we had to do on the DL to keep from getting in trouble. On the other, it was a revelation: This chance to rediscover privacy. To inhabit my experience without broadcasting it or framing it for public consumption.

A ray of hope, this thought. That what the scolds will achieve is to push the rest of us “to rediscover privacy.” To take photos that we share only with friends; to articulate thoughts just for friends. To leave Twitter and Facebook and Instagram to the scolds, who will then have no choice but to turn on one another.

the college experience

Ian Bogost, speaking truth to both power and powerlessness:

Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, higher education was always quietly an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend. […]

The pandemic has made college frail, but it has strengthened Americans’ awareness of their attachment to the college experience. It has shown the whole nation, all at once, how invested they are in going away to school or dreaming about doing so. Facing that revelation might be the most important outcome of the pandemic for higher ed: An education may take place at college, but that’s not what colleges principally provide. Higher education survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the 1918 Spanish flu, the worst pandemic the U.S. has ever faced. American colleges will outlast this crisis, too, whether or not they are safe, whether or not they are affordable, and whether or not you or your children actually attend them. The pandemic offered an invitation to construe college as an education alone, because it was too dangerous to embrace it as an experience. Nobody was interested. They probably never will be.

This is certainly correct, and there’s no doubt that university administrators are paying close attention to the lessons this pandemic has taught. Chief among them, I predict, will be that full-time faculty are so marginal to “the college experience” that there’s no point in paying more than a handful of them — the research stars, primarily in the sciences. The adjunctification of the faculty will continue at an accelerated pace.

If Then

There are many books that I admire and love that I never for a moment dream I could have written. Right now I’m reading an old favorite, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, to my wife, and as I do so I am every minute aware that I could not write this book if you gave me a million years in which to do so.

But every now and then I encounter an admirable book that I wish I had written, that (if I squint just right) I see that I could have written. I had that experience a few years ago with Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland, and I’m having it again right now as I read Jill Lepore’s If Then. What a magnificent narrative. What a brilliant evocation of a moment in American history that is in one sense long gone and in another sense a complete anticipation of our own moment. Oh, the envy! (Especially since if I had written the book it wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is.)

We are afflicted by our ignorance of history in multiple ways, and one of my great themes for the past few years has been the damage that our presentism does to our ability to make political and moral judgments. It damages us in multiple ways. One of them, and this is the theme of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead, is that it makes us agitated and angry. When we, day by day and hour by hour, turn a direhose of distortion and misinformation directly into our own faces, we lose the ability to make measured judgments. We lash out against those we perceive to be our enemies and celebrate with an equally unreasonable passion those we deem to be our allies. We lack the tranquility and the “personal density” needed to make wise and balanced judgments about our fellow citizens and about the challenges we face.

But there is another and still simpler problem with our presentism: we have no idea whether we have been through anything like what we are currently going through. Some years ago I wrote about how comprehensively the great moral panic of the 1980s – the belief held by tens of millions of Americans that the childcare centers of America were run by Satan worshipers who sexually abused their charges – has been flushed down the memory hole. In this case, I think the amnesia has happened because a true reckoning with the situation would tell us so much about ourselves that we don’t want to know. It would teach us how credulous we are, and how when faced with lurid stories we lose our ability to make the most elementary factual and evidentiary discriminations. But of course our studied refusal to remember that particular event simply makes us more vulnerable to such panics today, especially given our unprecedentedly widespread self-induced exposure to misinformation.

Even more serious, perhaps, is our ignorance – in this case not so obviously motivated but the product rather of casual neglect — of the violent upheavals that rocked this nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Politicians and pastors and podcasters and bloggers can confidently assert that we are experiencing unprecedented levels of social mistrust and unrest, having conveniently allowed themselves to remain ignorant of what this country was like fifty years ago. (And let’s leave aside the Civil War altogether, since that happened in a prehistoric era.) Rick Perlstein is very good on this point, as I noted in this post.

All of this brings us back to Jill Lepore’s magnificent narrative about the rise and fall of a company called Simulmatics, and the rise and rise and rise, in the subsequent half-century, of what Simulmatics was created to bring into being. Everything that our current boosters of digital technology claim for their machines was claimed by their predecessors sixty years ago. The worries that we currently have about the power of technocratic overlords began to be uttered in congressional hearings and in the pages of magazines and newspapers fifty years ago. Postwar technophilia, Cold War terror, technological solutionism, racial unrest, counterculture liberationism, and free-market libertarianism — these are the key ingredients of the mixture in which our current moment has been brewed.

Let me wrap up this post with three quotations from If Then that deserve a great deal of reflection. The first comes from early in the book:

The Cold War altered the history of knowledge by distorting the aims and ends of American universities. This began in 1947, with the passage of the National Security Act, which established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, created the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and turned the War Department into what would soon be called the Department of Defense, on the back of the belief that defending the nation’s security required massive, unprecedented military spending in peacetime. The Defense Department’s research and development budget skyrocketed. Most of that money went to research universities — the modern research university was built by the federal government — and the rest went to think tanks, including RAND, the institute of the future. There would be new planes, new bombs, and new missiles. And there would be new tools of psychological warfare: the behavioral science of mass communications.

The second quotation describes the influence of Ithiel de Sola Pool — perhaps the central figure in If Then, one of the inventors of behavioral data science and a man dedicated to using that data to fight the Cold War, win elections, predict and forestall race riots by black people, and end communism in Vietnam — on that hero of the counterculture Stewart Brand:

Few people read Pool’s words more avidly than Stewart Brand. “With each passing year the value of this 1983 book becomes more evident,” he wrote. Pool died at the age of sixty-six in the Orwellian year of 1984, the year Apple launched its first Macintosh, the year MIT was establishing a new lab, the Media Lab. Two years later, Brand moved to Cambridge to take a job at the Media Lab, a six-story, $45 million building designed by I. M. Pei and named after Jerome Wiesner, a building that represented nothing so much as a newer version of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Brand didn’t so much conduct research at the Media Lab as promote its agenda, as in his best-selling 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. The entire book, Brand said, bore the influence of Ithiel de Sola Pool, especially his Technologies of Freedom. “His book was the single most helpful text in preparing the book you’re reading and the one I would most recommend for following up issues raised here,” Brand wrote. “His interpretations of what’s really going on with the new communications technologies are the best in print.” Brand cited Pool’s work on page after page after page, treating him as the Media Lab’s founding father, which he was.

And finally: One of Lepore’s recurrent themes is the fervent commitment of the Simulmatics crew to a worldview in which nothing in the past matters, and that all we need is to study the Now in order to predict and control the Future:

Behavioral data science presented itself as if it had sprung out of nowhere or as if, like Athena, it had sprung from the head of Zeus. The method Ed Greenfield dubbed “simulmatics” in 1959 was rebranded a half century later as “predictive analytics,” a field with a market size of $4.6 billion in 2017, expected to grow to $12.4 billion by 2022. It was as if Simulmatics’ scientists, first called the “What-If Men” in 1961, had never existed, as if they represented not the past but the future. “Data without what-if modeling may be the database community’s past,” according to a 2011 journal article, “but data with what-if modeling must be its future.” A 2018 encyclopedia defined “what-if analysis” as “a data-intensive simulation,” describing it as “a relatively recent discipline.” What if, what if, what if: What if the future forgets its past?

Which of course it has. Which of course it must, else it loses its raison d’être. Thus the people who most desperately need to read Lepore’s book almost certainly never will. It’s hard to imagine a better case for the distinctive intellectual disciplines of the humanities than the one Lepore made just by writing If Then. But how to get people to confront that case who are debarred by their core convictions from taking it seriously, from even considering it?

hidden features of micro.blog

Micro.blog has some cool features that many users are not aware of. (They’re not really hidden, but that made for a better title than “not especially well-known.”) Here are some of my favorites:

1) An emoji-based system of tagging: for instance,

simple

XKCD is rarely wrong, but this:

— this is wrong. During that nine nine hours and fourteen minutes you will not do anything to “slightly improve your knowledge.” You will, instead, gradually become less knowledgeable; any genuine information you might happen on will be methodically and inexorably displaced by misinformation, deliberate twisting of the facts, rumor-mongering, hate-mongering, fear-mongering, and brazenly dishonest personal attacks on anyone and everyone.

If you have any concern whatsoever for acquiring knowledge, you won’t be on social media at all for the next month. It’s as simple as that.

the Great Crumping revisited

A surprising number of readers of my previous post have written out of concern for my state of mind, which is kind of them, but I think they have read as a cri de coeur what was meant as a simple summary of the facts. Not pleasant facts, I freely admit, but surely uncontroversial ones. Stating them so bluntly is just one element of my current period of reflection.

The primary reason I am not in despair is simply this: I know some history. I think we will probably see, in the coming decades, the dramatic reduction or elimination of humanities requirements and the closure of whole humanities departments in many American universities, but that will not mean the death of the humanities. Humane learning, literature, art, music have all thrived in places where they were altogether without institutional support. Indeed, I have suggested that it is in times of the breaking of institutions that poetry becomes as necessary as bread.

Similarly, while attendance at Episcopalian and other Anglican churches has been dropping at a steep rate for decades, and I expect will in my lifetime dwindle to nearly nothing, there will still be people worshipping with the Book of Common Prayer as long as … well, as long as there are people, I think. And if evangelicalism completely collapses as a movement — for what it’s worth, I think it already has — that will simply mean a return to an earlier state of affairs. The various flagship institutions of American evangelicalism are (in their current form at least) about as old as I am. The collapse I speak of is, or will be, simply a return to a status quo ante bellum, the bellum in question being World War II, more or less. And goodness, it’s not as if even the Great Awakening had the kind of impact on its culture, all things demographically considered, as one might suspect from its name and from its place in historians’ imaginations.

This doesn’t mean I don’t regret the collapse of the institutions that have helped to sustain me throughout my adult life. I do, very much. And I will do my best to hekp them survive, if in somewhat constrained and diminished form. But Put not your trust in institutions, as no wise man has even quite said, even as you work to sustain them. It’s what (or Who) stands behind those institutions and gives them their purpose that I believe in and ultimately trust.

The Great Crumping is going on all around me. But if there’s one thing that as a Christian and a student of history I know, it’s this: Crump happens.

excerpt from my Sent folder: crumped

I think regularly about Orwell’s “Why I Write,” and especially about the fourth of his four reasons for writing: “Political purpose … Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” I have always in this broad sense been a political writer. Mainly I have tried to commend, in various ways, a principled yet generous, conservative yet open, living-out of commitment to evangelical Christianity, Anglicanism, and humane learning. (Not always in that order.) And evangelical Christianity, Anglicanism, and humane learning have all crumped.

Have you come across that word? I hadn’t heard it before Covid. Apparently it refers to a patient’s sharp, steep decline — not a complete and irreversible crash, but a plunge into serious danger. Everything I care about and have written to defend has crumped, is crumping, will crump.

civility revisited

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey has written a lovely defense of civility as a political virtue. Her case is essentially prudential, grounded in what should be the obvious fact that the winners of any given American political fight will still be living in the same country as the losers:

What happens when one side has won? Will the tactics employed in winning have made the victory worthwhile? Will the winners restore civility, or will they decide that the losers, having held the wrong ideas, must be dominated and forced into submission? These questions highlight the problems with political warfare within a country, just as in a marital fight or neighborhood dispute. What was said in anger and frustration will not be forgotten, and all the participants must still live together. The insults will often outlive the battle and poison the community, foreclosing the possibility of connecting in other ways.

Moreover, Corey argues, the American founders built a system that disincentivizes heatedness and extremism of passion, and rewards instead patience and collaboration:

Recognizing the universal inclination toward excessive self-interest, Alexander Hamilton pleaded for moderation (and implicitly, civility) in Federalist 1. There he lamented that political parties would likely “hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.” Yet he knew that in politics, “as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” Thus Hamilton and others advocated for a system in which power checked power, and no one person or branch of government could dominate opponents in this way.

To practice civility, then, is to work with the grain of the American Constitutional system.

Corey’s argument has received a rather scornful reply by Scott Yenor, but unfortunately Yenor pays no attention to what Corey wrote and devotes his time instead to constructing a straw man. Central to Yenor’s response is his claim that “civility demands that we … put the best construction on everything,” which is, he says, suicidally naïve. But Corey never claims that civility makes such a demand; nor does any other defender of civility that I know of. Civility is a set of practices, and those practices can (and if Corey is correct, should) be cultivated regardless of what the practitioner knows or guesses about the motives and character of the person on the other side of an argument.

Yenor has a long laundry list of situations in which leftists have been uncivil to conservatives — I guess he couldn’t find any examples of the reverse, though I’m sure he looked hard for them — and claims that civility “cannot provide an adequate political response in such circumstances.” If by “adequate” he means “sufficient,” then Corey doesn’t claim that either; the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions applies here. Civility can be a necessary political virtue without being the only one needful.

Yenor asserts over and over again that civility is useless or worse, but he never once addresses Corey’s arguments for its prudential usefulness, especially within the American constitutional context. If he had tried to address what she actually argued — instead of building straw men and making the utterly ad hominem suggestion that she has “excessive worry about gaining a reputation for incivility” — he might have found the case against civility harder to make than he does.

But there’s something on the other side of prudence and usefulness, at least for some of us. Let’s move towards that.

I want to return to a passage that I earlier quoted with ellipses and quote the whole of it: “civility demands that we teachers (and we Christians) put the best construction on everything.” (Again, the claim is simply false, but never mind.) So Yenor is a Christian. What consequence does that fact have for his thinking about politics? It’s hard to tell from this piece. But I think one ought to be able to discern something even in so brief an essay, if only because of its topic.

At one point he writes,

Civility is a philosophic and scholarly virtue. Still, there is a chasm between philosophy and the city. The place of civility in politics is much more circumscribed. It is pretty to think we are not at war. But if we are at war, then civility is worse than useless. It is unilateral disarmament. Civility is a philosophic and scholarly virtue. Still, there is a chasm between philosophy and the city. The place of civility in politics is much more circumscribed. It is pretty to think we are not at war. But if we are at war, then civility is worse than useless. It is unilateral disarmament. It is a lullaby that prevents us from seeing and acting as is necessary or that presumes that the conflicts are less fundamental than they are.

Insofar as civility has any role in politics whatever, then, it “is a virtue fit for small ball politics, not for civil wars, cold or hot.”

What I wonder is whether civility is a Christian virtue. That depends, as I wrote a while back, “on whether ‘civility’ is a useful shorthand proxy for a series of traits that certainly are Christian virtues: patience, forbearance, kindness, generosity, turning the other cheek, blessing those who spitefully use you, etc.” Whether civility is indeed related to those virtues — for the record, it certainly is — there seems to be no place for any of them in Yenor’s conception of politics. He certainly gives every appearance of conceiving of the sphere of politics as a realm where the writ of Jesus does not run. Jesus seems to be on the other side of the “chasm” Yenor describes.

I hear all the time from my fellow Christians arguments along the lines of Yenor’s: that pollitics is a hard game, that these are not ordinary times, that we are in a crisis, that desperate times require desperate measures, that, yes, trying to practice the virtues we are repeatedly commanded in Scripture to cultivate is in politics naïve and indeed indefensible — that we must do what is “necessary.”

Elizabeth Corey has made an eloquent prudential case for civility in politics, which deserves a more far more careful and attentive engagement than Yenor has given it. But prudence is not the only consideration for the Christian. If anyone lived through extraordinary circumstances, it was a a man who was rejected and scorned by his own people, then arrested, tortured, and crucified by Roman officials, but who nevertheless said of all his killers, as he hung dying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Such absolute forgiveness may be beyond our reach, but perhaps the more easily acquired virtue of civility is achievable. Indeed, I suspect that it is, and moreover is, according to a calculus Yenor disdains, necessary. 

P. S. Whenever I make this argument, or one like it, I get at least one email from a reader who reminds me that Jesus drove the moneylenders from the Temple. This event looms large in the imaginations of many Christians, so large that it displaces everything else Jesus ever did or said. Jesus may have made some casual comments about turning the other cheek and blessing those who spitefully use you, but he turned over the moneylenders’ tables so watch me kick some ass. (This is not a tendency confined to the religious right, by the. The most enthusiastic proponents of this particular hermeneutics I have ever seen are decidedly left-wing pacifists.)