Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 188

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.

an intractable problem

For anyone who thinks about the relations between the past and the present, intellectual maturity consists in understanding that (a) the world is always getting better in some ways and worse in other ways, and that (b) we have no reliable calculus by which we might assign a single composite value to those changes.

re-reading

Categories:

Books I have read and know well and want to re-read precisely because I know them well. Books I have read but feel I haven’t fully grasped and so want to re-read to get more out of them. Books I have read but don’t remember a damn thing about, so I can’t say that I am re-reading them but rather reading them for the first time … again.

incomprehension

For decades now, James Wood has been writing about his Christian upbringing, but he has gotten progressively worse at it. For instance, compare his 1996 essay in the London Review of Books with his new piece in the New Yorker. Both essays emerge from the same perspective: a kind of bemusement at the world he was raised in, an attempt (one he knows will have limited success) to explain that world to an uninformed and possibly uninterested audience. But in 1996 he certainly knew what Christians think and believe, whereas in 2020 he seems to have forgotten — and doesn’t seem interested in recollecting, either.

Let me draw my examples from a single paragraph:

Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God (“Silence is prayer to thee,” Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back. But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry.

The quote from Maimonides is accurate but scarcely to the point, especially as an intended contrast to “chatty” evangelicals, to what one of E. M. Forster’s characters calls “poor little talkative Christianity.” Does Wood think Jews don’t talk to God, and don’t believe He talks back? Does he think Jews don’t petition God? Has he never heard of the Psalms?

He continues,

The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: “Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer.” They called this “the spiritualization of magic.” Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, near to them. I’m reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.

Again, one has to wonder what Wood is thinking — or rather not thinking. Can he not imagine any other reason for an athlete to pray than to secure victory against his opponents? If he were to ask players why they cross themselves as they come onto the pitch, he would learn that the great majority of them are praying to be protected from injury. Many players pray for everyone on both teams to be so protected. Javier Hernandez, the Mexican striker, kneels and prays on the pitch before each match to thank God for the opportunity to play the game.

And yet it does not occur to Wood that there could be any explanation for praying before an athletic contest other than pleading for conquest. He cannot imagine any reason for drawing near to Jesus other than siphoning some of the power of a sorcerer. But surely there was a time when he knew these words: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.”

At one point, early in the essay, Wood writes of his account of his childhood church experiences, “I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency — there was plenty of that around, too.” He writes as though, having not seen the goodness and decency then, he is somehow forbidden to see it now. He just plows ahead with what seems to me a studied incomprehension, an almost desperate determination to put the least charitable, least human, construal on every manifestation of religious belief and practice. I almost want to ask him what he’s afraid of.

the Qoheleth of Austin

Texas Monthly has a terrific podcast called “One by Willie,” each episode of which features a musician talking with the host, John Spong, about one Willie Nelson song. The second episode’s guest is Lyle Lovett, and at one point in the conversation Lyle discuses Willie’s decision in the early 1970s to leave Nashville — which had turned into a quasi-Taylorized songwriting and hit-making factory — in order to return to his native Texas and start a new life in Austin. And that was when Willie became Willie – or, as Willie himself might put it, that was where and when he was able to really be himself. Lyle goes on to say that in his experience Willie’s most consistent and admirable trait is his acceptance of other people — not just his willingness to let you be you but his encouragement to you simply to be you and not what someone else expects you to be. He wants others to feel the freedom that he himself enjoyed when he traded factory life in Nashville for his own life in Austin.  

It’s hard to imagine anything more clichéd than the language of “being yourself.” And yet, thanks to our moment’s everyone’s-a-cop policing of every minuscule deviation from every imaginable orthodoxy, as I listened to Lyle Lovett’s praise of Willie Nelson this hoary old cliché felt to me like a breath of cool clean air. I reflected that clichés become clichés for a reason: because they express something true. Of course, the time comes when that true point has been made so many times that it becomes a truism, and further repetition of it feels pointless and tiresome. And yet, like Fortuna’s wheel in the Middle Ages, the social world continues to turn and eventually that worn old nostrum that had become something to roll your eyes at takes on bright new life.

Be yourself. Don’t worry about what other people think. Don’t be terrified by the perceptions of others, by the judgments of others, the demands of others that you conform oh-so-precisely to their way of understanding the world. Just be yourself. I don’t really believe that life works that way. I don’t believe in individualism. I think that our selves, our persons, are made up of our interactions with others, are dialogical all the way down. Yet there’s something in it, something about the value of a life not lived in fear, not determined by the thirst for others’ approval regardless of who the others are. In this tiresome era of relentless policing, the admonition to be yourself suddenly sounds like something from the Bible’s wisdom books, an ancient proverb or the counsel of sagacious old Qoheleth. 

two quotations on American politics

Barack Obama:

The point I’ve always made to Ta-Nehisi, the point I sometimes make to Michelle, the point I sometimes make to my own kids — the question is, for me, “Can we make things better?”

I used to explain to my staff after we had a long policy debate about anything, and we had to make a decision about X or Y, “Well, if we do this I understand we’re not getting everything we’re hoping for, but is this better?” And they say yes, and I say, “Well, better is good. Nothing wrong with better.”

Ibram X. Kendi:

There’s no saving America’s soul. There’s no restoring the soul. There’s no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls of America. There is only fighting off the other soul of America.

Obama and Trump did not poison the American soul any more than Biden can heal it. Trump battled for the soul of injustice, and the voters sent him home. Soon, President Biden can battle for the soul of justice.

Our past breaths do not bind our future breaths. I can battle for the soul of justice. And so can you. And so can we. Like our ancestors, for our children. We can change the world for Gianna Floyd. We can — once and for all — win the battle between the souls of America.

This morning I’m doing my weekly reading of the news, and I’ve just read these two stories, from the same magazine, back to back. The contrast is illuminating. One sees politics as the hard slow work of improving the world; the other see politics as the movement towards a final confrontation, on the plain of Megiddo I suppose, between the forces of Righteousness and the forces of Evil.

mistrust

An update on this post:

I occasionally read NYT news stories now, for a very particular reason: the newspaper’s two chief religion reporters, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, are former students of mine, and I am so proud of the careers they have made for themselves — they are both outstanding at what they do.

So I read whatever they write, but not much else, from the news side anyway. (Sometimes friends send me links and I will usually read those stories.) In general, I simply can’t rely on the NYT, any more than I can rely on Fox News, to tell the truth about anything that I really care about — and my suspicion has increased, if that’s possible, in the year since I wrote that post, thanks to the gradual conquest of the NYT newsroom by “insurrectionists” who openly disdain fair-minded reporting in favor of whatever stories and angles they think will serve their political agenda, AKA Justice.

Recently Elizabeth and Ruth were interviewed in the Times itself about “the challenges of covering religion during a pandemic in a campaign season,” and one thread that ran through the whole interview was reporting under conditions of mistrust. Elizabeth: “I’ve found conservatives are increasingly wary of talking with us no matter what the story is.” Ruth: “The rising distrust of the media among a lot of conservative religious people is a major challenge, and one that is not going away.”

Now, I’m not one of the conservatives they’re talking about — QAnon true believers, MAGA-hat wearers — at least I don’t think I am; maybe Elizabeth and Ruth would disagree. But in any case, if in the highly unlikely event that either Elizabeth or Ruth wanted to interview me about religion, I would be really hesitant. I trust them — I trust them both implicitly — but I don’t trust their editors or the newsroom in which they do their work. I don’t feel I could reasonably expect the final published version of any such story to be … well, to be anything but driven by an ideological urgency in which any white male small-o orthodox Christian such as myself is an Enemy of the People.

This is I think the inevitable outcome in a journalistic world increasingly shaped by Manichaean binaries of the kind that the Right used to specialize in (remember RINOs?) but that the Left now owns the rights to. Consider for instance an idea that I’m sure is highly popular in the NYT newsroom, Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that everyone is either a racist or an antiracist — with the implicit but necessary corollary that he and people who agree with him wholly get to (a) establish the categories, (b) define the categories, and (c) put any given person definitively in the category they choose. What category do you think I am going to be in, regardless of what I have written or said?

In such an environment it’s hard for me to see what good would come of my being interviewed in the New York Times, at least about matters Christian — even if I were being interviewed by people with the honesty and integrity that Elizabeth and Ruth possess. I just think that’s where we are right now.

odds

Chance that even one of the election lawsuits will be decided in Trump’s favor: 3%
Chance that Trump will accept the validity of any legal ruling against him: 0% 
Chance that when, after all legal avenues have been exhausted and Trump has declared himself the true but unacknowledged winner of the election — the wrongly deposed King, our very own Richard II, the Lord’s Anointed from whose sacred brow the balm of kingship can never be washed away — the leadership of the GOP will finally break with him: …

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter much to me personally — in the sense that I haven’t voted for a Presidential candidate from either major party for thirty years, and I am completely done with the GOP — but it will be a clarifying moment for many of us when the GOP bosses decide whether they want to live in America or live in Trumpistan.

Excerpt from my Sent folder: quarantine and quizzes

Hello friends,

A handful of you have told me that you’ll need to be quarantined for a while — I’m sorry to hear it. Here’s hoping for clean tests and a quick return!

If you find yourself in this situation, here’s what you need to do:

Email me to let me know at least a couple of hours before each class you will miss. Please do so even if you have already emailed me. I get torrential downpours of email and things can get swept away by the tides.
Give your email a useful subject line, like “HEADS UP: ABSENCE FROM CLASS.”
Just as class begins, check your email to see if there is a reading quiz. If there is, then take the usual allotted time — one minute per question — to answer, and simply reply to the email. Then, as we go over the quiz in class, grade it as usual and send me another reply with your grade.
Then open up Zoom and join the meeting I have invited you to. I’ll usually send the invite while people are taking the quiz, but if there is no quiz then I’ll send the invite just before class begins.

A couple of additional notes.

Please do not cheat on your quizzes. Last semester when I had to administer email quizzes several people confessed to me that they had cheated. For this reason, I won’t accept quizzes if they are timestamped more than a minute or two beyond the allotted time.

Finally, if you are ill or otherwise indisposed, please do not ask me to add you to the Zoom list. If you want to get a friend to Zoom you in, you may, but otherwise let’s treat illness just the way we did before Zoom was invented. That is, some days you don’t feel well and miss class, after which you get notes from friends, etc.

I’m actually rather concerned about the problems the use of Zoom creates, and I’m not sure what I am going to do in the future. Allowing people to Zoom into class whenever they feel like it creates many bad incentives: the incentive not to participate fully in class, the incentive to pay more attention to your messages app than to the books we’re discussing, the incentive to cheat on quizzes. I’m afraid that the widespread use of Zoom will force me to change methods of teaching I’ve developed over the past thirty-eight years, and that makes me a little sad, because I think the methods I’ve developed really help you to learn.

Blessings to all,

AJ