Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 193

a message to my students

I have been starting school each August for the past fifty-six years. A great many things have changed in my life over the decades, but not that. And here we are in August 2020 and school is about to start … but not in a way I have ever experienced before.

If we were beginning an online semester, I would find the experience less familiar but also less disturbing. I learned a lot last semester about teaching online, and if we need to go back to online teaching and learning again, I will be prepared. Fair warning: I don’t do it the way most of your teachers do it. I won’t use Canvas at all, and I think there are better tools than Zoom for the kind of teaching I do — though I would be happy to use Zoom to chat with y’all individually. (Zoomy office hours aren’t a bad thing at all.)

But for now we’re coming to class together, physically. I have argued that, with proper precautions in place, this is a good idea, but I have to admit that as the time draws nearer I doubt my position more. I try not to worry — and when worry creeps in I pray for the peace that surpasses understanding, a practice that I would recommend to you all — but while I have absolutely no health issues that I know of, my wife has some quite serious underlying conditions that would make contracting COVID-19 very, very dangerous for her. So I have to be exceptionally attentive to all risks. I will be spending as little time as possible on campus — basically I will be coming in to teach our classes and then heading back home again — but I promise that you will find me accessible and responsive to you.

A related point: I humbly but fervently ask your cooperation with all of Baylor’s precautionary policies, even when you think they’re extreme. Your compliance or non-compliance could make a big difference in the lives of others, and maybe in your own as well.

And one more thing. I’m hearing from a number of students who are themselves concerned about their health, and who want me to make various adjustments for them. You need to understand that this is not possible. A great many things have changed, but one thing that has not changed is that there are many more of you (the students) than there are of us (your professors). Plus, we’re all having to plan and prepare for two very different ways of conducting our classes, and furthermore must be ready to take over for colleagues if they get sick. (All of us have had backup teachers assigned to our classes, and have been assigned as backup teachers for others.) This is definitely the most demanding and stressful period of preparation for a semester that I have ever had.

I mention that because y’all need to understand that if we can’t make the kinds of accommodations and adjustments that you want, that’s not because we are mean and selfish, but rather because we are finite human beings with limited amounts of energy and a fixed number of hours in each day.

So let’s be patient with one another. I will try not to ask more of you than is reasonable in the circumstances, and I hope you will do the same for me. And I would encourage you all to keep in mind, as we begin this strange term, these words from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.”

Texas City

As several people have pointed out, the recent explosion in Beirut bears many eerie similarities to the Texas City disaster of 1947. Also, it happened on a rather smaller level seven years ago and about 20 miles from where I am sitting, in West, Texas. Maybe the world needs a serious rethinking of how we store ammonium nitrate.

The official death count for the Texas City explosions was 581, but there’s good reason to believe that many more died. And Stephen Harrigan, in Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, adds this mournful postscript:

Of the 468 bodies deposited at the local funeral home and at a makeshift morgue in the garage of a gas station, 63 could not be identified. It was decided that they would be buried in the same location, with best guesses made about which body parts should go into which coffins. Preliminary arrangements were made for a parcel of land a few miles away in the town of Hitchcock to be used for the burial, but the citizens there wanted to know beforehand whether there were any black people among the dead. When they were told there were, they canceled the deal.

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.