Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 191

hoisting the flag

I mentioned on my micro.blog that I’ve been reading Stephen Harrigan’s magnificent Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. (The title comes from the painter Georgia O’Keefe, a native of Wisconsin who remembered her first coming to west Texas: “I couldn’t believe Texas was real. When I arrived out there, there wasn’t a blade of green grass or a leaf to be seen, but I was absolutely crazy about it…. For me Texas is the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”) As I said over there, the book is full of passages like this one:

The Edwards brothers, and Martin Parmer, another outraged colonist who called himself the Ringtailed Panther, launched a rebellion, wrote yet another declaration of independence, designed yet another flag, and established yet another evanescent republic. This one was called the Republic of Fredonia, a brand-new country that in the Edwardses’ mind included not just the territory of his former colony but the greater part of Texas itself. Though it was at heart an Anglo rebellion, Haden Edwards managed to enlist a smattering of Cherokee allies, under the leadership of Richard Fields, who was a tireless advocate of the tribe despite his run-of-the-mill Anglo American name and his one-eighth measure of Cherokee blood. “The flag of liberty,” Edwards exulted, “now waves in majestic triumph on the heights of Nacogdoches and despotism stands appalled at the sight.”

The rhetorical flamboyance of Edwards’s description of what he had achieved — alas, Fredonia lasted just a few months — makes me smile. Maybe you had to have a lot of energy, in those days, to try to make a go of it in Texas, and that energy manifested itself not least in your language.

Such vibrancy could be terse — as in Davy Crockett’s famous farewell to Tennessee politics: “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas” — or elegant — as when the magnificently named second President of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, offered his hopes for the country: “Our young Republic has been formed by a Spartan spirit — let it progress and ripen into Roman firmness, and Athenian gracefulness and wisdom.” But more often it was, like Haden Edwards’s encomium to Fredonia, unashamedly flashy. Presumably such flash was regularly inspired by the aforementioned “flag of liberty.” One hopeful colonist headed for what was then the northernmost province of New Spain was encouraged by a newspaper of the time with these stirring words: “God speed ye, [and] may no difficulties or obstacles oppose you — until the flag of liberty waves triumphant over the prostituted insignia of time-serving priests and the broken truncheons of substitute kings.”

I am sad that my culture has lost this facility and lost it altogether. Look at some of the statements of the Black Lives Matter organization, for instance:

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

Or:

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Doesn’t exactly stir one’s loins with revolutionary fervor, does it?

I started to write that this language sounds like it comes from a draft manifesto of the Theory Collective at a midwestern university — but then I reflected that it sounds more like an except from the Policies and Procedures manual that your Human Resources department posted on your institutional intranet. And then I realized that Black revolutionaries, literary theorists, and HR departments all write exactly the same way. What a nightmare. What a desiccated, lifeless, mechanical, exhausted and exhausting nightmare.

Friends, let us recover some of the linguistic flamboyance of our ancestors. Only then may the flag of liberty flutter and snap with proud delight as it is tickled by the powerful winds of Progress!

Also, please call me the Ringtailed Panther.

shaken

I have to admit that I am a bit shaken by Rod Dreher’s post yesterday — and more by the vehemence with which, today, he is doubling and tripling down on even the worst of its claims. 

If Rod had simply wanted to explain why he thinks the new bodycam footage will serve to exculpate the officers charged in the death of George Floyd, I would have no problem with that. But he decided to yoke that argument to a ranting attack on George Floyd, a determination to blame Floyd for what happened to him, even when offering sequentially two incompatible views of why he was at fault for his own death. (First it was because he resisted arrest; then, later, it didn’t matter whether he resisted arrest or not, he was about to die anyway. So whether it’s by resisting arrest or by taking drugs, “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.”) 

In responding to friends — Leah Libresco and me — who challenged him on his attitude, Rod wildly misrepresented half of what we said and wholly ignored the other half. The more feverish and rage-filled of his commentators, though, he seems to trust wholly. 

Well, that’s Rod’s call. Nothing I can do to change it. 

I still love Rod, and will not give up on him, because I just don’t give up on people — God, after all, did not give up on me. But I’m not reading his blog any more, and I can no longer defend him — which Lord knows I’ve spent enough hours doing over the post few years. 

Finally: On principle I don’t sign manifestos, but if Matthew Loftus turned this into a manifesto, I would sign it.  

putting this on the record

I think this post by my friend Rod Dreher is horrifying. I think Rod ought to be ashamed of himself for writing it, and should apologize.

Rod says that recently leaked bodycam footage of George Floyd being uncooperative with police and acting in a “bizarre” fashion “dramatically changes what we thought we knew about this story.” [UPDATE: Rod, thank God, has changed the headline that was the most offensive part of the post, so I have cut some of the things I first wrote.] George Floyd behaved strangely and was uncooperative with police. He was not violent and did not threaten anyone with violence. Derek Chauvin killed him by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes. To say that George Floyd is in any way responsible for his own death is a shockingly offensive thing to write and I struggle to process the fact that Rod wrote it. But Rod went further than that: he wrote, “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.” A thousand times no. George Floyd is dead today entirely — not almost entirely, entirely — because Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for eight minutes. You can call that murder — I do — or you can call it something else, but that is how and why George Floyd died.

The newly released footage might — might — embarrass some of the people who have tried to paint Floyd as some kind of saint, papering over his history. But beyond I don’t see how the footage changes anything. I still think exactly what I thought before I saw that footage: Non-saints, indeed even habitual criminals, don’t deserve what was done to George Floyd. Behaving bizarrely, “shrieking and carrying on like a lunatic,” is not a capital offense. Some of us might even say that a person who is clearly not in his right senses deserves compassion. Instead George Floyd got death. Eight minutes of patient, calm, unrelenting asphyxiation.*

UPDATE: Rod has added the following to his post:

Floyd is dead because Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for eight minutes. That is a fact. Chauvin should have been charged with something — abuse of force? — but I don’t see how it constitutes murder. I am willing to be corrected, especially by those who understand the law.

What shocked me about this video was how wildly uncooperative Floyd was prior to the neck restraint. I had believed prior to this that the police had thrown him to the ground and subdued him with the neck restraint. I did not realize all that preceded the neck restraint. I think it is a good thing that neck restraints are being abandoned by police. If Minneapolis had not had that policy, Floyd would probably be alive today.

And if Floyd had not resisted arrest for eight minutes, he would be alive today. He shouldn’t be dead, period, but his death was not the simple case I thought it was prior to seeing this video. Context matters.

This helps, but it would be a lot better if it stopped after the first sentence.

I don’t know whether the new footage will change the thinking of a jury, but it doesn’t change my thinking one iota. If George Floyd had tried to attack Derek Chauvin, then maybe; but what I see is a pathetic, desperate, sick, terrified man. The cops could have waited him out. They chose to kill him instead.

And as for Rod’s claim that “if Floyd had not resisted arrest for eight minutes, he would be alive today,” that is true in exactly the same way, and to exactly the same degree, that “If she hadn’t been wearing that short skirt she wouldn’t have been raped” is true.

* Apologies for phrasing it this way. George Floyd did not die of asphyxiation but rather as a result of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Rod says this means “his heart and lungs stopped working,” apparently believing that the business about “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” was just tacked on the end of the medical examiner’s sentence for no reason.

So whereas earlier Rod said that George Floyd died because he resisted arrest, now he agrees with some of his readers that George Floyd — the same George Floyd we see in that bodycam video talking and moving freely — was just minutes from death anyway, and therefore it is complete accident that he happened to do so with a police officer’s knee on his neck for eight minutes. Funny old thing, death.

So the details of the story keep changing, but the main thrust doesn’t change — Rod puts it in bold type so we don’t miss it: “George Floyd is dead today almost entirely because of George Floyd.” Nothing else to see here, folks, move right along. And certainly not one drop of compassion for a man who is dead, and friends and family who are mourning him.

I have so much on my plate that I shouldn’t even be writing this, so let me end with one more comment. In an update to his post Rod quotes an email from Leah Libresco, writes maybe a thousand words in reply to it, but totally ignores her key point. I’m going to post Leah’s thoughts as my final contribution here, because I think Rod needs to hear them — and so do I.

When you hold up examples primarily of the excesses of the social justice movement, but not the evils it is responding to, I think you let down your readers. We’re called as Christians to bind up wounds. If you don’t like how that’s being done, point your readers at people who you admire who are doing this well, so they can be part of good work.

I was glad to see that your new book is split between pointing at the problem and giving examples of solutions. I think your blog and your readers would be well served by rebalancing your writing to point more toward what you admire than what you abhor. And remember, people act for the sake of a perceived good. Many of the people you disagree with are grappling with real evils, and you will do more to tell the whole truth when you acknowledge that they are motivated by a desire for justice, not just power.

when you feel you can’t win

In response to my recent post I have heard from a few (white) people who say something like this: Nothing we can do is right. If we speak, we’re wrong to speak; if we’re silent, we’re wrong to be silent. What are we supposed to do??

If you feel that people are treating you unfairly … well, to this at least there’s a straightforward answer for Christians:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

And like the commandment to forgive, this one doesn’t come with exceptions.

Easier said than done, right? Much easier. (I speak to you as the all-time grandmaster of Talking A Good Game.) And yet there’s a simplicity about this that’s immensely liberating. Just knowing what I’m supposed to relieves me of the burden of worrying about other people’s intentions, other people’s morals. It doesn’t matter what their intentions and their morals are: my job is precisely the same whatever the state of their souls.

These are the words I’ve decided to spend the next month meditating on: Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Race at Baylor

[I’m taking this post down because I need to find a more constructive and precise way to frame my thoughts. I’ll either post an update or write a new post. I find these matters difficult to write about wisely!]

kneeling

It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve moved from a situation in which people wanted to punish athletes for kneeling before a game to one in which other people want to punish athletes for not kneeling before a game. But there is at least a consistency of principle, one articulated by T. H. White in The Once and Future King: “The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.”

HEY

I was pretty excited when I learned about HEY, because it’s been a long time since anyone did any real innovation in email, even though email remains a major part of our lives. Gmail was the last innovator, and I put that in the past tense because that service has received only minor tweaks in the past decade, and its really significant ideas were implemented fifteen years ago. I decided to drop the hundred bucks necessary for a HEY account, and since then I’ve continued to work in my existing email setup while forwarding all my mail to HEY, just to give it a corpus to work on.

You need to do that because HEY requires some training to learn your email needs. Whenever an email comes in from a new sender, HEY doesn’t put it in your inbox — which it, rather unfortunately, calls your Imbox — but rather asks you what you want to do with emails from that sender: decline to receive it (at which point it disappears), file it along with receipts and other businessy things in what HEY calls the Paper Trail, move it with newsletters and the like into the Feed, or send it to the Imbox. HEY remembers your decisions for each sender and in the future follows your instructions. So there’s a good deal of training to be done at first, but over time that lessens. I’ve been dropping in a couple of times a week to work through the arriving mail, so if I do decide that I want to employ it full-time it will already be largely usable.

It’s a brilliantly designed service, I think, elegant and attractive and efficient, and I think the appeal increases in proportion to how badly you feel punished by your email. HEY basically says, “Throw out everything you have ever thought about email and do things our way.” It offers very few options to customize the service, and it can only be accessed through its website or its apps: basically you can follow the HEY way or there’s no HEY for you at all. And that’s not a criticism! — a controlled, uniform experience is really the whole point of the service. If like me you have worked hard over the years to develop a system for managing email, and that system works reasonably well, then you might not want to discard all that work to embrace a different system. But if you’re feeling defeated by email, then HEY is likely to be a really good answer.

There’s one main reason why I can’t now use HEY: All of my email, from all the accounts I have, are channeled into Gmail: from there I can reply to messages using the address to which they were sent. When I get a message at my Baylor address, especially if it’s internal, I need to be able to reply from my that address, and Gmail spoofs that address adequately. That allows me to have all my messages from all accounts in one place, organized using the same set of rules — rules which are also, by the way, applied equally on all my devices, which is not true of, say, Apple’s Mail app. (Even after more than a decade, you can’t set any rules at all in iOS, which is frankly ridiculous.) If I were to shift from Gmail to HEY, I’d have to go back and forth between HEY and another email client, which would be annoying. But if HEY ever implements the reply-from-the-account-to-which-the-message-was-sent option (RFTATWTMWS, as I like to call it), then it might be a real option for me.

more on the Dish

Since I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s renewed Dish, Andrew has reported that subscriptions are near 60,000 — probably over that mark by now — and David Brooks has weighed in with a smart take. As always, David is hopeful:

Mostly I’m hopeful that the long history of intellectual exclusion and segregation will seem disgraceful. It will seem disgraceful if you’re at a university and only 1.5 percent of the faculty members are conservative. (I’m looking at you, Harvard). A person who ideologically self-segregates will seem pathetic. I’m hoping the definition of a pundit changes — not a foot soldier out for power, but a person who argues in order to come closer to understanding.

And as always, I’m a little less hopeful than David — or maybe I place my hope in slightly different places — in ways that I can explain by quoting another passage from his column:

Other heterodox writers are already on Substack. Matt Taibbi and Judd Legum are iconoclastic left-wing writers with large subscriber bases. The Dispatch is a conservative publication featuring Jonah Goldberg, David French and Stephen F. Hayes, superb writers but too critical of Trump for the orthodox right. The Dispatch is reportedly making about $2 million a year on Substack.

The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling. A young, talented heterodox thinker doesn’t have to worry that less talented conformists in his or her organization will use ideology as an outlet for their resentments. The next good thing is there are no ads, just subscription revenue. Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.

Is it really true that there’s “no canceling” on Substack? I think we’ll only know that in time. We’re about two weeks, by my reckoning, from #BoycottSubstack becoming a prominent hashtag on Woke Twitter. It would be stupid for Substack to care. But in the past year or two a whole lot of organizations have been stupid enough to fold in the face of a few red-faced social-media scolds.

So maybe there will be canceling on Substack — but there are many alternatives to Substack. And the really good thing about all this is that newsletters are built on email, and email is transmitted through a series of open protocols that no one controls. It would be perfectly possible for people like Andrew and Matt Taibbi and other independent thinkers, if they got canceled by Substack, to hire someone to build out their own distribution system and continue as though nothing had ever happened.

The woke mobs are apoplectic, but not always stupid: they have reliably gone straight at the gatekeepers of culture, and the gatekeepers of culture, faced with a handful of people with plenty of spare time and no rhetorical restraint, have reliably folded like a cheap tent. So what’s the point of reading, much less paying for, a magazine or newspaper where, as Bari Weiss has rightly said of the NYT, “Twitter is the ultimate editor”? You know that almost everything you read will have been vetted to ensure that it conforms to the Authorized Narrative, so why bother? Even if you actually believe in the Authorized Narrative, do you really need to pay money to have your opinions confirmed, day after day?

No; I think even some of the woke, or at least the wokish, will send their money to venues,and writers, who say what they actually think. What a concept! And what makes this possible is the open web and the pre-web internet. How cool is that?

One of the greatest things about the open web and the pre-web internet is that they work at any scale. There is no difference, from the reader’s perspective, between reading a newsletter with 250,000 subscribers and reading one with ten subscribers. As I wrote a while back,

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace…. Whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

And in case you don’t know, my own little contribution to the Republic of Newsletters may be found here.

proportional representation

Jill Lepore wrote, “One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.” In fact, the actual percentage is not 66% but something closer to 0.2%.

Estimate subject to further correction, of course, but there’s no question that Lepore misread the relevant study and misread it very badly indeed. The sentence I quoted has now been changed, with an acknowledgement of error at the bottom of the article.

The interesting thing to me here is that Lepore seems not to have been skeptical about what anyone who thought about the matter for two seconds would surely have seen as a bizarrely high number. I’ve been an American “between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms,” indeed this happened to me several times, and in every case except one I was there because of a sports injury. Two broken arms, a badly sprained ankle, a couple of dislocated or broken fingers, an eye that had had someone else’s finger jammed into it … these are my emergency room stories, and they are very common indeed. (The one exception was a car accident that left me with whiplash.) Then there are the young people who have bicycle or motorcycle crashes, falls while drunk, accidents at work, appendicitis attacks … and Jill Lepore, one of our most distinguished historians, thought it was perfectly plausible that if you took every single one of those causes of ER visits, plus every other cause of an ER visit, and then doubled them — you’d have the number of ER visits for “injuries inflicted by police and security guards.”

How could Lepore ever have thought that was plausible? I can only think of one explanation: Because she unconsciously assumed that what she reads in the papers, what she sees on TV, what gets tweeted about on Twitter, is not only important but proportionately representative of what happens in the world. Maybe there’s a lesson here for all of us.

plurality and unity

In this essay from a couple of years ago and today’s post at the Hog Blog — the first for a Christian audience, the second for a general one — I’m trying to think through what I’m calling plurality without pluralism. I take it that pluralism is a preferential option for a diversity of human ends, as well as the means by which to pursue those ends. I also take it that Christians cannot affirm such pluralism. Christians believe that “the chief end of man is to glory God and enjoy him forever,” or, if they would not put it precisely that way, perhaps they would say, with St. Augustine in the final chapter of the City of God that our end is the Great Sabbath of God:

Suffice it to say that the seventh day will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal rest not only of the Spirit, but of the body also. There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be, in the end to which there shall be no end! For what other end do we set for ourselves than to reach that kingdom of which there is no end?

However we choose to put it, it is surely clear that there is no diffuse plurality of ends for human beings, but rather one great one. In Revelation 7, we see “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” but they are all “standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and singing the same hymn: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Jesus commands us to be one as he and the Father are one.

There’s no need to belabor the point — nothing could be more foundational to the Christian faith. So why, then, do I think I have cause to give at least one cheer, maybe two, for plurality?

1) The diversity of callings in the church, and of charisms, which it seems we always struggle to acknowledge and accept, though Catholics do a much better job of it than Protestants, at least in my experience. These callings and charisms, when rightly exercised, all tend towards the one telos of Christians, but they often don’t look that way. The teacher leading students in conversation, the contemplative in ecstasy, the hospice worker cleaning the body of a dying woman, seem to be following wholly different models of the conduct of life, and indeed can themselves be tempted to think that way. People called to any active form of life always tend to suspect the contemplative of not really doing anything. Examples could be multiplied endlessly.

2) The double character, immediate and eschatological, of Jesus’s commandments. We are commanded to be One even as the Father and the Son are one, but this does not give us license to enforce a merely visible oneness — this is what Simone Weil calls “spiritual totalitarianism” and Charles Williams “the method of imposition of belief.” (In The Year of Our Lord 1943 I explore this theme in more detail.) Just as there is an idolatry of experience that drives us apart, there is also an idolatry of order that unwisely strives to force us together. The commandments must be pursued immediately but will only be fully realized eschatologically. “Be perfect, even as my Father in heaven is perfect” is not something I will do today.

3) The need, resulting from the former two points, for humility. We must be constantly aware of the self-blinding nature of sin, yes, and that should be enough to guarantee at least a measure of humility. But more than that, we need to remember the general character of revelation about both human and cosmic teleology. “No man knows the hour” and all that. And still more we must acknowledge the imperfect knowledge that comes from being simply finite creatures. Even the wisdom of the unfallen Adam was a human and thus a finite wisdom. I’m not a fan of Schleiermacher, but every Christian needs a theology of finitude.

A few years ago I would have said that the greatest danger facing the Christians I know was a kind of carelessness about the truth, a shrugging at difference and disagreement; now I think it’s the opposite, a kind of premature foreclosure, which is a way of immanentizing the eschaton. Obviously in any group of people we will find both intellectual flaccidity and intellectual rigidity present, but I do think that rigidity is now in the ascendent, simply because it is in the ascendent in our ambient culture and Christians, for the most part, behave as their ambient culture behaves.

In a recent conversation with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum, I recommended what I called — then half-jokingly, and now that I think about it more seriously — the Gandalf Option. I take that phrase from something Galdalf says to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who believes that Gandalf is plotting to rule that kingdom:

“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”

I think we Christians today have become so exercised by the felt need to sniff out and banish disagreement and difference that we are forgetting to nurture the worthy things in this world that are now in peril. Thus I said, in a recent post, that “pure critique is a high-demand, low-reward kind of work. It can be helpful if you want to rally your base, but I find it more useful to celebrate what I believe to be true, and true, and beautiful, and embed critique in a larger, more constructive enterprise.” We are called to be gardeners, but it often seems that we prefer to be cops.

We need to remember that — to cite Gandalf again! — that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” and that we are just a handful of people in the great procession of Christ’s saints. That’s why I think I can, with a bit of adaptation, be comforted by some words that Tom Stoppard gives to Alexander Herzen, which I discuss in today’s post — words that call us to work patiently towards oneness without demanding, or even expecting, that in this vale of tears we will come into the full inheritance of it: The Gospel of Jesus Christ “will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.”