Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 194

unsolicited advice

Here in America, it’s a news week like any other.

The President retweets, for political effect, a doctored video.
Tucker Carlson says that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “a special carve-out Google has received from the United States Congress,” even though, as Senator Mike Lee points out, Section 230 was passed by Congress in 1996, two years before Google was founded.
The ACLU says that “The death penalty evolved from lynching.” Yes, really. Read the tweet and see.

I could go on. And on, and on. And there will be more of the same next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, ad infinitum and especially nauseam.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, and what I would encourage you all to do the same: First, take note of the people, like the ones listed above, who do not care whether what they say is true, but only about whether it serves their preferred narrative.

Second, look for people — politicians, journalists, academics — who do care whether what they say is true.

Third, studiously ignore the people in the first group and pay close attention to the people in the second one.

It won’t be easy to find those truth-concerned people. Sometimes you’ll feel like Diogenes with his lantern. But it must be done, for the sake of our collective sanity.

Dear Apple

Dear Apple,

I bought my first Apple products — the original (512k!) Macintosh and an ImageWriter printer — in the spring of 1985, and in the decades since have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on things made by you. Do you know why I have been so loyal all these years? Two reasons. One, the quality of your hardware. Two, the quality of the software made by independent developers who create for your platform.

Your own software — operating system and apps alike — has been woefully inconsistent. Every OS release, on all your platforms, brings new features but also new bugs. Especially on the Mac I have perpetual problems with wi-fi, Bluetooth, window management, and support for external monitors. iOS is comparatively more stable but after ten years it’s still impossible even to select text reliably. Your apps are mediocre to poor, with only a few exceptions: GarageBand is a great app, as is Keynote; Preview for the Mac is excellent, and Pages and Numbers have gotten better and better. But again, those are exceptions. Mail is an unmitigated disaster. Safari is adequate but feature-poor and only to a limited degree extensible (though at least it doesn’t eat memory the way Chrome does). Messages is barely adequate on iOS, seriously underpowered on the Mac. Even your Settings and System Preferences apps are poorly designed, in the case of iOS shockingly so.

But you have some amazing developers writing apps for your platforms. Some of the best apps, in my experience:

BBEdit for Mac
MarsEdit for Mac
Pixelmator for Mac and iOS
Omnigraffle for Mac and iOS
Drafts for Maxc and iOS
All of Rogue Amoeba’s software for Mac
All of Panic’s software for Mac and iOS

I could go on. But what I want to say in this post is simply this: Apple, you need to realize that these developers, whose work is better than that of almost any of your own software designers, drive the success of your platform. And yet, as recent events have reminded us, your treatment of them is shabby at best and in some cases indefensible. You charge them extortionate rates for appearing in your App Stores — some are not well-known enough to survive outside an App Store and yet your 30% cut eats so heavily into their profits that it’s barely worth their time to make software — and you apply your rules for appearing in those store inconsistently, even capriciously.

Your behavior has been so frustrating to the people at Rogue Amoeba that they have gotten out of the Mac App Store almost wholly — as Bare Bones, the makers of BBEdit, also did for a few years — but not every developer has the kind of widespread and loyal user base that Rogue Amoeba and Bare Bones do. And of course the iOS App Store is the only source for iOS apps, which may explain why Rogue Amoeba doesn’t make any iOS apps.

Apple, your arrogant and dictatorial behavior makes no sense. It’s not in your interest to frustrate your best independent developers. It’s in your interest to get smart, talented people excited about developing for your platforms. Heck, maybe you should be paying them. But short of that, there are three things you need to do:

Apply your existing rules consistently.
Alter those rules to promote maximum creativity and ambition in Mac/iOS software development.
Take a smaller cut so more developers can stay in the game.

last word on critical theory

In these posts on “critical theory,” I’m doing what I pretty much always do: I am separating and sorting questions that tend to be conflated. That’s my thing, right? It’s why I wrote a book called How to Think, and why I say, in a blog post, that “it seems to me that arguments about Christianity and politics have an almost unique ability to reduce the intelligence of the people involved by at least a third. We desperately need clarity about what, exactly, we’re arguing about.”

So, in that spirit, onward! — with apologies for self-quotation. A number of these issues I have dealt with before, sometimes at greater length. Here I’m trying to some up with I think are the key theological themes we need to keep in mind when evaluating what people are determined to call “critical theory.” It’s a bit of a stepping back from the details.

ONE: As noted in an earlier post, some of the questions raised by “critical theory” are empirical ones. Has the history of what became the United States been deeply, indeed essentially, implicated in the slave trade since 1619? Is our society still dominated by white supremacy? Is our social and political order structurally racist? To answer these questions is to evaluate historical and sociological evidence. You could be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “Yes” to all those questions. You could also be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “No” to them all. It would depend on the evidence you gather and how you evaluate it.

TWO: But — and here’s where things get complicated — the people who hold the political views mentioned above tend to hold other views that are philosophically unrelated to the historical claims. Indeed many people who are not “woke” at all in their thinking about race also hold these views, which cluster around what I have called ”metaphysical capitalism”: I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. I am what I say I am. I am my own. As a Christian I do not and cannot believe this. My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

But how can I communicate this to people who aren’t Christians? Can I give them any reason to believe that they are not their own without invoking Jesus? Is there some kind of political principle accessible to non-believers that would encourage them to overcome the I-am-my-own principle? I hope so, because I think that self-ownership is destructive to the self and damaging to that self’s community. But in a plural and indeed pluralist society it’s difficult to know how to make such arguments effectively. I have tried to explore some of these issues in this essay, which, though it is largely about intra-Christian disputes, has relevance for the larger social body. I hope.

THREE: More generally, we need a great disentangling. You can see from the above how philosophically unrelated claims get entangled with one another and can seem to belong to the same general movement even when that’s logically impossible. One cannot simultaneously be fundamentally defined by one’s group identity and free to be whatever one wants to be. The attempt to hold both views at once without acknowledging their incompatibility is what leads to situations like the Hypatia transracialism controversy, in which a single academic article shorted out the entire system. Similarly, the doctrine of “intersectionality” tends, as I have written in this blog post, to focus on intersections that intensify but to ignore intersections that cancel each other out. The problem with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis is not that it’s wrong about ongoing oppression, but that the people who deploy it tend to think they need in any given situation to have a clear victim and a clear perpetrator. That’s morally simplistic, and also cannot account for the distributed character of power, as I explain in this interview: “I’ve got a chapter in my book [The Year of Our Lord 1943] called ‘Demons,’ about demonic activity. Or if you don’t want to say ‘demonic’ activity, you can call it the activity of what St. Paul calls the ‘principalities and powers.’ It’s interesting, Foucault is a kindred spirit — the ‘principalities and powers’ is a kind of Foucauldian argument, right? In the sense that it is power — and what Weil would call force — disseminated through social and political structures.” That whole interview is relevant to a lot of the questions I’ve been exploring in these posts. It’s an attempt to think in as thoroughly biblical a way as I can manage about these questions.

FOUR: The final set of questions relates to what I will call, for lack of any catchy and concise term, the practical implications of theological anthropology. My point here is closely related to the previous one. Whatever Christians think about the issues I have raised above, we are obliged to conduct ourselves in ways that avoid what I call “rhetorical Leninism.” We have to extend mercy to those whom we believe to be wrong, even tragically wrong, because this is how God treats us. He loves the unlovely, and is gracious to the wicked — like me. We are to be imitators of Him. For us there can be no “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that racist over there,” or “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that pathetic cuck over there” – there can only be “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Because when we choose to measure others according to a certain standard, we are asking that that same measure be used to measure us.

Okay, that’s it, I’m done. No more from me about this — though I am, as I mentioned earlier, engaged with some colleagues on a project that will address many of the issues at stake here. But that has to remain a Big Secret for now.

Christians and critical theory

Here’s the question I mentioned in my last post: What should be the Christian’s response to critical theory? Note that this is not a question that is equally relevant to everyone concerned with the debates over “critical theory.” (I still hate that term.) Neil Shenvi is a Christian, but James Lindsay is an atheist, last I heard anyway. What follows is specifically for Christians and will likely be of no interest to anyone else.

But note: this will not be good. Because of other commitments I don’t have time to do this thoroughly, and anyway I have serious doubts that anyone will pay attention to anything I say — the whole discourse is now running like a perpetual-motion machine and I can’t do anything even to slow it down, much less stop it. But I have promised some people that I would say something, and this is something.

Let’s begin by trying to replace the question by a more specific and more accurate one. How should Christians respond to a workplace environment in which employees are pressured to acknowledge the historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people, and to welcome and support all efforts to remedy that oppression? I think that’s the really substantive question for the church to deal with. The questions of intellectual genealogy that I pursued in my previous post are not especially relevant here, though they might be relevant in another context.

Before going any further, it’s important to recognize that this whole question feels a lot different to a person of color than it does to a white person. I do not mean that all persons of color will agree with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis, or that all white persons will disagree with it; neither is true. But the Thesis will have different valences for different people, and much of what I say below will be more directly relevant to the fears of white people than to the experiences of others. This makes me slightly uncomfortable, but it’s white people, by and large, who are asking the question. I do believe that the general principles I articulate are valid for all Christians, as will become evident. What I’m exploring here today provides but a particular instance of the kind of challenge that most Christians regularly face, in infinitely varied forms. In one sense it represents nothing new under the sun, and there is a great tradition of faithful Christian response throughout our history for you to draw upon for instruction and courage. You’ll see what I mean.

Now, let’s get to the substance. Any valid response to the question I’m addressing will necessarily have three components: the empirical, the prudential, and the principial.

Empirical: If you claim that our society is characterized by “historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people,” you’re making an empirical claim, a claim that is to be assessed by gathering and sifting evidence. It’s not clear to me that Christians will, or should, do this any differently than anyone else. Some Christians will believe the claim to be warranted, and some will not; but I don’t see that what they believe about these matters has any necessary relation to their Christian faith. After all, a Christian might believe — many Christians do believe! — at one and the same time that (a) homosexual acts are forbidden to Christians and (b) straight Christians have singled out gays and lesbians for demonization while turning a blind eye to their own sexual sins. The empirical questions are distinct from the theological ones.

Prudential: It’s when we get to remedies that things get complicated. If your employer is suggesting remedies that you don’t think are ideal — let’s suppose that you’re not opposed to “diversity” hires but think that not enough attention is being paid to professional qualifications; or, again let’s suppose, you think an enormous amount of valuable company time is being devoted to woke “training exercises” — what, as a Christian, do you do? You do what every intelligent person does: You try to exercise prudence. You reflect on the difference between major and minor problems; you think about who in your workplace might serve as your advocate or ally; you look for ways to gently nudge the company in what you believe to be a healthier direction. Meditate on Joseph and Daniel: you think they didn’t have to deal with some messed-up stuff? They put up with certain practices and policies that troubled or even offended them because they had a strategy for faithfulness. If you don’t have one of those, you should think about getting one.

Principial: But of course, as the example of Daniel illustrates, sometimes you’re invited — or rather ordered — to cross a line that you can’t in conscience cross. Most of you will know what that line is when you’re presented with it; it’s very difficult to say in the abstract what it might be. Indeed for me it’s impossible, not knowing your situation. But that will be at the very least a small martyrdom for you, and the rule about martyrdom is very simple: Lord, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. That said, do, please, take prayerful thought to distinguish faithfulness to the True God from obeisance to any of many false gods who forever seek to occupy the highest place. It was the tragedy of Stonewall Jackson’s life that he conflated the cause of the Confederacy with the cause of Christ.

One more post is coming on all this, connecting these general reflections to some of the more technical theological issues. It also will be bad.

more on “critical theory”

This is not the promised follow-up to my recent post on fear, but it certainly concerns related matters. This is a follow-up to my earlier post on “critical theory.” Neil Shenvi has emailed to alert me to people responding to my post. So let me respond to the responses! But just as an initial clarification, I don’t reply on Twitter to people I don’t follow because I never see their tweets. That’s how I have Twitter set up. I recommend that policy to everyone.

I am truly sorry I didn’t know that Lindsay and his colleagues have written frequently about the very terminological confusion I point to in my post. That must be frustrating to them, and I apologize for adding to their frustration. I can only plead as an excuse that I wasn’t aware of the extent of their empire!

The quotes in Shenvi’s post indicate that there’s disagreement among those who critique critical theory about how confusing the term is. Such disagreement confirms the relevance of my post, which, after all, wasn’t meant primarily as criticism of Lindsay et al. so much as a capsule history lesson on all the confusion the term “critical theory” has been causing for decades.

I wish I had time to support these claims in detail, but I don’t, so just for what little it’s worth, here’s my take: The movement Lindsay et al. are opposed to did not originate with the Frankfurt School, and would be largely what it is if Horkheimer and Adorno had never lived. Its raw materials derive from Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire and bell hooks and Edward Said etc. — the people who get quoted by today’s activists! — scholars who rarely if ever refer to the Frankfurt School or, in the case of Said, claim that that school was culpably negligent in its failure to combat racism and colonialism. The crisis of colonialism, and maybe more than anywhere else in French Algeria, has had an almost infinitely greater role in shaping today’s discourse than the Frankfurt School. It was French thought, not German, that dominated American humanities departments in the last third of the 20th century, and bequeathed a vocabulary that people are still using. (Beyond that lie the “masters of suspicion” I mentioned in my post.) One reason that that French discourse — along with certain English-language writers like C. L. R. James and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose “Decolonising the Mind” is hugely influential — has been so dominant is that France and England had vast colonial enterprises and Germany did not. You can hardly overstate the extent to which colonialism has established the terms for current discourse about race and ethnicity and even gender and sexuality. I really do believe that the term “critical theory” misleads people about the relevant history. (By the way, Ngũgĩ decolonized his own mind by ceasing to write in English and turning to Gikuyu instead.)

One might of course argue that all of this intellectual genealogy is beside the point, and what really matters is combating false and dangerous ideas. But the genealogy is what my post was about. Also, I don’t mean that Lindsay and colleagues are wrong about everything, or even about many things. I mean to suggest only that they get the genealogy wrong. I am actually at work, with some other folks, on a project that will address these issues, but I am sworn to secrecy about that right now. More in due course.

Randomly: James Lindsay thinks I’ve been irresponsible in failing to … I’m not sure, do what he does, maybe? I suppose my most recent essay to addresses the same movements that Lindsay does is this one, from 2017; my first one, an ethical critique of deconstruction, and in fact my first published scholarly article, appeared in 1987. So I’ve been at this for a while. But indeed that kind of thing isn’t my chief focus, because quite early on I came to believe 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.

Okay, all that duly noted, I suppose I need to say something in response to a question I get asked all the time: What should be the Christian’s response to this “critical theory”? I’ll do that in my next post — but I will do it badly. This I pledge to you.

fear

In the most recent issue of his newsletter, David French writes,

The fear of the Christian “best” is harming this nation…. [Some], in spite of Christ’s admonition to deny yourself and take up your cross to follow Him, are not willing to risk tweetings when the apostles braved beatings. Their jobs are too precious to risk. Though they enjoy greater freedom from actual censorship than arguably any people in the history of the planet, self-censorship suffices to drive too many thoughtful Christian voices from the academy, the boardroom, and the office. But shrinking back in the face of challenges to career and reputation communicates fear, not faith, to a broken world. While the fearful Christian would never say this out loud, they’re functionally treating the “strong gods” of the partisan political moment as greater and more powerful than the God of the universe they seek to serve.

He also says, “My friend Rod Dreher’s influential blog has become a clearing-house for frightened Christian professionals to (anonymously) express their deep fears.“

So it’s not surprising that Rod replied, thus:

I like and respect David. Let nobody deny his courage in the public arena. I’m serious about that. I agree with him that Christians cannot be silent, that we have to be willing to be criticized, and even suffer for our faith. The most important chapter in Live Not By Lies is the chapter on suffering as Christian witness. But I read David’s essay as way more optimistic than facts warrant. There really is a difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a mindset before it is anything else. Totalitarianism is the idea that there is no area of life that is free from politics — and that also means cultural politics. I don’t believe that we will have a Woke Stasi in this country. But I also believe we won’t need one for the progressive radicals to achieve what they want to do. Justice Alito said in his dissent today that the ruling raises the question of whether employers will force employees to keep quiet regarding their opinions critical of homosexuality and transgenderism. Might you lose your job over your private social media posts affirming what your church teaches? Yes, you might — and you might have no recourse.

So yes, I completely agree with David that Christians should be more bold … but let’s not downplay how much they (we) are going to be made to suffer under the new and emerging cultural and legal regime.

There’s a lot here that needs to be sorted out. Let me make my best effort at the sorting. Here are the key questions:

Are Christians as such widely in danger of losing their jobs?
Or, are they merely in danger of losing their social standing, or of getting dragged on Twitter?
Or, are Christians as such okay, but those Christians who hold traditional views on marriage and sexuality have become personae non gratae in polite society?
Assuming that you are a Christian in some sort of genuine professional or personal danger, what is the proper Christian response to that?

These are difficult questions, and I would just encourage everyone engaged in these debates to be clear about what specifically they are talking about and what their answers to the above are. Then we can have more meaningful discussions.

In this post I just want to make a couple of points that may provide grist for our common mill.

I’ve met a shockingly large number of closeted academic Christians over the years, and received emails from them. I can think of one visit I made a few years ago to a university that everyone would recognize and recognize as thoroughly secular, at which no fewer than three faculty members approached me when no one else was around to confess, sotto voce, their Christian faith and thank me for my witness. It was obvious that outing themselves as Christians was unthinkable to them. But none of the three had tenure, so I understood. I really doubted whether they would’ve been in danger, because none of them struck me as conservative in their politics or their theology, but people on the tenure clock are easily spooked. The question I found myself asking, though, was: Do they know about one another? I doubted it. But wouldn’t they have been encouraged to know they had company? If even one of them had come out it might have meant a lot to the others.

Which brings me to the person Rod Dreher calls Professor Kingsfield. Professor Kingsfield is a tenured law professor “at one of the country’s elite law schools” who secretly confessed his views to Rod a few years back, and in my judgment Professor Kingsfield ought to be ashamed of himself. Just think of how much encouragement he could have given to other Christians at his law school and elsewhere! He could not have feared losing his job, only potentially the approval of some of his colleagues. The very worst possibility would have been something like being denied promotion from associate to full professor. And he couldn’t face that? He should spend some time reflecting on Polycarp of Smyrna (AD 69–155), who, when as an elderly man he was threatened with being burned to death if he did not renounce Christ, replied, “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior?”

Setting aside whatever judgment he may face when the Lord Christ comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead and he has to explain why he could not bring himself to utter the name of Jesus for terror of the Associate Dean, Professor Kingsfield has dug a hole to hide himself into which others have fallen. A pox, then, on Kingsfield, who has made it more difficult for people who come after him to navigate these difficult days, and a murrain on all of his ilk. On all of them David French’s critique falls forcefully and unambiguously.

However. The situation of the tenured faculty member is an extremely rare one in our world. Very few Americans have the kind of job security Professor Kingsfield and I have, and David French needs to have more sympathy for those who don’t — and who don’t have the benefit that he has, and as far as I can tell has had his entire career, of working for institutions that are either explicitly Christian or explicitly open to Christians. (I have that benefit too!) Should The Dispatch fail, French, thanks to his prominence and a writer and to his previous career as a lawyer, has options to fall back on that few of his fellow American believers have. For them it’s not just a matter of risking “tweetings”: as we have seen countless times, people lose jobs because of what they post on social media or what someone with a smartphone captures them saying on video. And for many millions of Americans, losing a job means losing the ability to feed the family and pay the rent. French’s failure to acknowledge the real potential costs for such Christians is insensitive at best.

That said, I can’t help wondering what would happen if the Christians of America en masse started confessing their faith openly. Not going on a crusade against sexual deviancy or whatever — but simply saying that they believe that Jesus is Lord and that they hope to serve Him, which means to love the Lord their God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind, and love their neighbors as themselves. To comfort the widows and orphans in their distress. To do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. To put no other gods before Him, even the “strong gods” who preen and strut on social media. (Facebook and Twitter are “principalities and powers,” and we should never forget it.)

I don’t know whether that would “work,” whether it would be “effective.” But those aren’t Christian categories anyway. What matters is being faithful to the God who saves us, and that necessarily has a public dimension.

In his famous Divinity School address, Ralph Waldo Emerson complained about those Trinitarian Christians who “dwell with noxious exaggeration upon the person of Jesus.” I often tell people that I want that to be on my tombstone: He dwelt with noxious exaggeration upon the person of Jesus. If Even a relative handful of us did that, what might happen? One thing’s for sure: We and our neighbors would realize that there are more of us than anyone had thought.

I hope to revisit these and related matters in subsequent posts.

Eric Ravilious

Eric Ravilious

getting back to the open web via micro.blog

I was a Kickstarter backer of micro.blog and an early enthusiast, but I eventually drifted away from it because I was having trouble getting it to do what I want it to do. In some cases there were bugs in the system — it’s still a new platform, after all — and in some cases my brain was just not getting in sync with it. But I have continued to pay my monthly fee and to cheer it on, and micro.blog’s founding genius Manton Reece has been working away at improving the platform and extending its capabilities. Now I’ve decided to come back. Here’s why:

My micro.blog page is part of my own domain — it’s on my turf. My data belongs to me.
I need, for the usual professional reasons, to have a Twitter account, and the frictionless cross-posting from micro.blog allows to me to do so without stepping into the minefields of Twitter itself.
I used to have an Instagram account, but I hated having even a tiny place in Zuckerworld, and micro.blog offers easy and clean image posting, plus a dedicated page for all my photos.
Also, I devoted many years to using Pinboard as a bookmark manager, but (a) I was saving too much stuff; (b) the site has only been minimally improved over the past decade — it still lacks a responsive design, which is a crime in 2020; and (c) it’s not on my turf. Why not use micro.blog to post links with brief quotes?
I’ve been thinking about doing — well, not a podcast as such, but occasional short audio, posts, microcasts one might say. The ability to do that is baked into micro.blog.

So basically micro.blog is a way for me to put everything I do online that is visually small — anything small enough not to require scrolling: quotes, links, images, audio files — in one place, and a place on my own site. The only weird thing about this setup is that it will make me look like I’m super-active on Twitter when I’m barely ever on Twitter. But that’s a small price to pay for moving my stuff out of the walled gardens and onto the open web. And maybe when I don’t have a new book to promote I can deactivate my Twitter account — again.

I’ll continue to use this particular wing of the ayjay.org empire for occasional longer posts, but most of the action will be happening over there. Oh, and it has its own RSS feed too — I recommend that in preference to finding my microposts there through Twitter.

more on the mania for unanimity

Theodore Dalrymple writes,

Lewis Hamilton, the six-time world champion British Formula One driver, recently criticised his colleagues in the sport for saying nothing in the wake George Floyd’s death.

If any answer to this accusation were required, a reasonable one might have been that it was not their place as mere car racers to comment on such matters. If they had wanted to engage in polemics, however, they might have pointed out that Hamilton had remained silent about many terrible events in the world, for example (to take only one such) the war around the Great Lakes of Central Africa, which so far has claimed not one life, but several million lives. Black lives matter to Hamilton, they might have said, but apparently not the lives of these Africans.

Now, Dalrymple is nothing if not a curmudgeonly traditionalist; and he fails to note that Hamilton linked racism in the U.S. with racism in his own country and the rest of Europe; but still, doesn’t Dalrymple raise an interesting question here? That is: How exactly does a narrative coalesce such that “silence is violence” about some forms of suffering but not others, even if the others have greater scope?

Consider this: Several of the largest tech companies in the world have banded together as The Technology Coalition: “We seek to prevent and eradicate online child sexual exploitation and abuse.” Why is no one — literally no one — demanding that businesses and other institutions make statements against the sexual exploitation of children? Why, for that matter, did I feel that I needed to write something about police brutality in America but not one word about Central African wars, or child sexual exploitation, or China’s treatment of the Uighurs, or a dozen other atrocities that by any rational comparative assessment are worse than police brutality in America?

Well, at least in part I felt the need to write because, as I commented in this earlier post, I’ve been thinking and writing about American racism all my adult life. But as I also note in that post, it wasn’t that long ago that I had to deal with people who criticized me for focusing too much on racial relations. Why has that topic now become something about which there are universal demands for public statements?

Three reasons. The murder of George Floyd (1) happened in America, (2) was captured on a video that seems agonizingly long but is just short enough for people to watch fully, and (3) was shared widely on social media — American social media.

(1) What happens in this country will for obvious reasons be more evident and relevant to Americans than what happens elsewhere, but the U.S. is also the media center of the world, and all eyes are typically drawn here. That’s why anything that Americans obsess over is likely to become at least a point of interest for non-Americans.

(2) George Floyd’s murder was captured on video, and video has power that text does not have. Everyone could see just how long Derek Chauvin crushed George Floyd’s neck, the remorseless asphyxiation as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. But the murder wasn’t bloody and wasn’t grossly violent, and so it could be shown. (The very slowness that makes it horrible also makes it publishable.) Compare that with child sexual exploitation, which is often recorded on video but which Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t allow anyone to post; or with depredations that never get filmed at all. We are often at the mercy of the emotions aroused by what’s put before our eyes. We feel the need for catharsis, for some kind of purging of what we have seen. Our visual cortex orients our attention and our moral response.

(3) Social media are force multipliers for America-centrism and visual stimulation; and they multiply these forces in the way they always do, by generating herd effects and the madness of crowds. The particular kind of madness generated here is a mania for unanimity that doesn’t just punish dissent, but even punishes agreement if the agreement isn’t loud enough or phrased in precisely the correct way. And this moment certainly leaves no room for those who aren’t paying much attention to George Floyd because they’re concerned with the seemingly endless wars in Central Africa or with the horrific specter of child sexual exploitation.

By contrast, I think there are so many cruelties and injustices in this world that anyone who is working to constrain any of them should be applauded. And no one should assume that others are inactive simply because they’re not strutting and fretting their hour upon the social-media stage. It turns out that the biggest problem with the herd mentality is the hatred generated for anyone who won’t — for any reason — join that herd. There’s no violence in silence about a problem the great majority of the angriest weren’t thinking about in April and won’t be thinking about in August either. I am glad that the death of George Floyd has forced many Americans to confront injustices that we have ignored or minimized for far too long; but if you’re just using Floyd’s death as an excuse to coerce and threaten others, you’re not helping.

stochastic resonance in reading

Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding white noise to the signal, which contains a wide spectrum of frequencies. The frequencies in the white noise corresponding to the original signal’s frequencies will resonate with each other, amplifying the original signal while not amplifying the rest of the white noise (thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio which makes the original signal more prominent). Further, the added white noise can be enough to be detectable by the sensor, which can then filter it out to effectively detect the original, previously undetectable signal.

This works for sound and image alike, for example:

SR may help to explain why some people learn better when surrounded by white noise — thus writers who hang out in coffee shops. SR has been identified in the sensory neurobiology of many creatures, but I don’t understand that stuff at all, so please don’t have any illusions about my competence to grasp serious scientific ideas.

I mention all this because I think reading texts from the past — something about which I have written a book — is a way of usefully introducing stochastic resonance into our mental lives. Maybe I’m stretching a metaphor here, but bear with me.

Some people say we live in an age of information overload. Clay Shirky has said that it’s not information overload but rather “filter failure.” A slightly different way to put Shirky’s point is to say that a super-surplus of input makes it difficult for us to discern genuine information, to distinguish signal from noise. We can’t sift and sort and bring order to all the stuff assaulting us.

But if you step back from the endless flow of social media and the internet more generally, and sit down with a book from the past that appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the affairs of the moment, something curious and rather wonderful can happen. Unexpectedly and randomly — stochastically — you begin to perceive resonances with your own moment, with the concerns that you may have turned to the past in order to escape.

When you approach the text from the past on its own terms and for its own sake, it becomes a kind of white noise in relation to present concerns. Your attention to the long ago and far away makes the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart. (Allusion alert!) It’s when the current environment lies outside the scope of your attention, when you neither seek nor expect any connection to it, that you make room for random resonances to form.

And when they do form, you begin to discern the really key features of your moment more clearly. An image begins to appear where there had been formlessness. Useless and pernicious statements start to recede into the background as you perceive them for what they are. The salient and the helpful points move to the forefront of your attention.

You can’t force this to happen — indeed, any attempt to force it will result in the simple confirmation of what you already think. It’s only when the resonances feel truly random — when they arise at moments when you’re not looking for or expecting them — that they have the power of clarification. You can predict that resonances will occur; but you can’t predict when they’ll show up or what they’ll be.

This may be a subset of the Eureka phenomenon, but at the moment I’m inclined to think that it’s largely distinct from that, though not unrelated.

By the way, I think all that I’ve described here describes equally well the experience of reading much science fiction and fantasy. The fact that almost all of my leisure reading is (a) old books, (b) SF, (c) fantasy suggests that my fundamental orientation as a reader is a hopeful openness to stochastic resonance.