Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 199

why Blake is terrifying

Last December, when I was in London, I spent a good deal of time at the Tate Britain’s big exhibition of Blake’s work, and found it frustrating. I ended up writing a long reflection on the exhibition, and on what it doesn’t tell us about Blake’s career, which has just been posted at the Harper’s website. (Why it took several months to be posted is a long and odd but not especially interesting story.)  

One point I didn’t pursue in the essay, but which I think is important, concerns why the curators of the exhibition might have worked so hard to downplay Blake’s religious sensibilities. In the catalogue for the exhibition, they emphasize that their goal was to display “a Blake for all,” and hint that their choices were constrained by the need to construct an exhibition that would attract corporate funding. A weirdo mystic who had visions of angels in trees and “the Ghost of a Flea” doesn’t fit the bill.

The Guardian’s review of the exhibition, by Jonathan Jones, enthusiastically echoes the exhibition’s view of Blake: 

The poster for Tate Britain’s exhibition of William Blake uses the three Rs to sell this icon of the Napoleonic age to the turbulent Britons of 2019: “Rebel, Radical, Revolutionary.” It may seem an over-eager attempt to contemporise him – but Blake was all these and more. You could add pacifist (albeit a militant one who once got arrested after a heated debate with a soldier) and anti-racist, for as Blake’s devastating portrayal of a hanged slave in this show illustrates, he passionately protested against Africa’s subjugation.

And how about feminist? There is even a book of children’s stories that he illustrated for Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the 1792 manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This hackish kids’ book wasn’t the finest hour for either, but it shows their connection through the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, while Blake’s great frontispiece to his own original work Visions of the Daughters of Albion, done in about 1795, shows what he learned from Wollstonecraft: a man and woman are chained back to back, the woman’s head lowered in despair. “Enslaved, the Daughters of Albion weep …”

This is not an exhibition of some old master honoured by kings and collected by aristocrats. It is a raw encounter with a heretical artisan who was ignored and despised in his lifetime and whose self-taught genius comes out of the popular culture of 18th-century London.

Politically radical? Check. Pacifist? Check. Feminist? Check. Pop culture maven? Check. In short, Blake was basically a Guardian reader. And that’s the kind of “Rebel, Radical, Revolutionary” that the corporate world is happy to support. Meanwhile, the visionary imagination that drove Blake’s entire career, which he believed to be pursuing in response to a Divine command — all that is to be passed over in discreet and embarrassed silence. Rebels, radicals, and revolutionaries can be commoditized and can therefore be “for all”; but ecstatic visionaries? The less said the better. T. S. Eliot found Blake “terrifying,” for reasons which the Tate exhibition tried to obscure. Fortunately, the attempt was not wholly successful. 

Saul: Season 5, final comment

In an earlier comment on this season I noted that Jimmy’s character arc is basically complete by the end of Season 4, when he registers to practice law under the name Saul Goodman. Insofar as anything substantial has happened to Jimmy’s insides this season, it has been his dawning awareness that he isn’t going to change, and because he isn’t going to change he has gone down what one episode calls “Bad Choice Road” — a road doesn’t have an exit or room to turn around. What remains is simply to find out where the road goes, because there is no alternative to it. And of course all of us who watched Breaking Bad know basically what’s ahead for Jimmy. 

Similarly, Mike’s character arc is completed this season when he decides to “play the hand he was dealt” and work full-time for Gus. And we know where his road leads him also. These two characters may participate in interesting events, and those may surprise us, but neither of these characters will surprise us. 

Nacho has not really had a character arc. He has been the same person since we first met him: a person who wants to be decent but who lacks the strength of character, or the resourcefulness, or both, to extricate himself from involvement with the cartel. We want him to get out of the bind he’s in; we are eagerly waiting to see if he does; but he is not going to change in any significant way. And meanwhile the blood on his hands is growing thicker. 

Which leaves us with Kim. At a certain point in this episode Kim learns — or thinks she learns — that Lalo Salamanca is going to die and she won’t have to fear him any more. And it is immediately after that, though the causal connection is unclear, that she seems to morph into a different person. Something seems to have been released in her, and it’s not altogether pleasant to see. It is a very strange thing to watch. When she starts musing about how she and Jimmy might destroy Howard Hamlin’s career — even though Howard has not, as Jimmy points out, done “something unforgivable,” the phrase that provides the title of the episode — Jimmy tells her that of course she wouldn’t actually do that. To which she replies, “Wouldn’t I?” And a silence ensues. 

Season 4 ended with Jimmy surprising Kim by deciding to practice under the name Saul Goodman — immediately after shocking her by revealing that his moving speech to the board reviewing his reinstatement was total bullshit.  

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Jimmy bold, confident, assured; Kim stunned, disoriented, destabilized. Our last encounter with Jimmy and Kim in Season 5 ends this way: 

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The same turn, the same gesture — but with the fingers made explicitly into pistols, rather a bold thing to do to a guy who has just been threatened at gunpoint — and now it’s Kim who is bold and assured, and Jimmy who is disoriented. 

Kim knows what she is echoing. She remembers how Jimmy played her. But what does her echo of his gesture mean? It makes me wonder whether all the changes in Kim’s relationship with Jimmy, including their marriage of convenience, have been part of a plan. But what plan? I also find myself thinking about something apparently unrelated: We are allowed in this very eventful episode to spend several minutes with Kim in a room filled with the files of people in need of legal defense. From those she selects people to represent — but how does she decide? Does she choose at random, at least among those accused of felonies (which she has specifically requested)? Or is she looking for something? And if so … what? 

All of which leads me to one more question: What do we really know about Kim Wexler? 

thoughts

thinking during Covidtide

Content warning: the second half of this post is mainly for my fellow Christians 

 

For me, this Covidtide has been an unwelcome opportunity to revisit the experience of writing my book How to Think. Again and again my reading in these past two months has drawn me back to that book’s themes. On my Pinboard page, a good many of the links tagged covid19 are also tagged HTT for “How To Think.” (HTT is a tag on this blog too: see the bottom of this post.) 

Three themes of that book, focusing on the sources of erroneous thinking, have proven to be especially relevant to this moment: 

The “Repugnant Cultural Other” 
The sunk costs fallacy
The necessity of finding people who are trustworthy to think with 

The RCO. I borrow that term from the anthropologist Susan Friend Harding, and you can find a nice summary of the ongoing relevance of the concept to anthropology here. To understand the phenomenon (though without the term) you might also look at this superb post by Scott Alexander. In times of crisis people desperately crave moral and practical clarity, and one of the most efficient means of achieving such clarity is by designating an Outgroup, an Other, which you find repugnant, so you can take your bearings by opposition. This can be seen everywhere — see these quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal piece for an international perspective — but I have been especially distressed to see it among my fellow Christians, who think that if academics and people on CNN are saying that the coronavirus is dangerous then it must be fake news. 

Sunk Costs. I recently wrote about this problem at some length here, so I won’t repeat myself. I’ll just add that this also is universal, and related to the RCO problem. If your moral framework is built upon your opposition to an Other, then it will be very hard for you to let go of, or even modify, a narrative that you’re so heavily invested in. 

Whom to Think With. Again and again in my book I emphasize that we cannot “think for ourselves,“ that we always think in response to and in relation to others, and so the real challenge for all of us is not to become independent from others but rather to find the people who are most trustworthy to think with. When people let their thinking about the coronavirus, and responses to it, be guided by TV networks desperate for viewers and websites desperate for clicks, they are not choosing their interlocutors wisely. 

Again, these three sources of cognitive error interact with one another, and interact as certain combinations of drugs do to magnify and multiply consequences. You can see how this destructive multiplication works, especially among conservatives and Christians, in several anecdotes told by my friend Rod Dreher in this post. You can see Christians who are driven by enmity invest their whole lives in a narrative of binary opposition and then choose to think, or “think,” only with those who share that investment, that enmity, and then dismiss any countervailing evidence as “fake news.“ 

It’s tragic when this happens to anyone, but it’s especially tragic when it happens to Christians, who are supposed to be known for their compassion, their kindness, their self-sacrifice, their love of God and neighbor. But if you listen to the Christians whom Rod quotes in that post, you’ll see that a very different theme eclipses all of that stuff: They talk ceaselessly, not about love or service or obligation, but about their rights. (Never the rights of others — only their rights.) As Rod, in response to this talk, rightly says, 

Mother Teresa, speaking about abortion, said, “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” Along those lines, we might say, “It is a poverty to decide that old people, those with weak immune systems, obese people, and others must die so that you may live as you wish.” 

Allow me to emphasize once more a recurrent theme on this here blog: We are looking here at the consequences of decades of neglect by American churches, and what they have neglected is Christian formation. The whole point of discipleship — which is, nota bene, a word derived from discipline — is to take what Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” and make it, if not straight, then straighter. To form it in the image of Jesus Christ. And yes, with humans this is impossible, but with a gracious God all things are possible. And it’s a good thing that with a gracious God it is possible, because He demands it of those who would follow Jesus. Bonhoeffer says, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” He doesn’t bid us demand our rights. Indeed he forbids us to. “Love is patient and kind,” his apostle tells us; “love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Christians haven’t always met that description, but there was a time when we knew that it existed, which made it harder to avoid. 

We are unlikely to act well until we think well; we are unlikely to think well until our will has undergone the proper discipline; and that discipline begins with proper instruction. Maybe Christians who want to act wisely and well in this vale of tears should start by memorizing 1 Corinthians 13. 

scenes

Saul: Season 5, Comment 3

Earlier in this season, Mike Ehrmantraut is so disturbed at the way his life is going — at the decisions he has made, and the people he’s connected to — that, working over his troubles in hid head, he lashes out (verballly) at his young granddaughter, which leads his daughter-in-law to suggest, as gently as she can, that maybe Mike shouldn’t be around that granddaughter any more. This drives Mike to certain self-destructive actions that result in his waking up in a tiny Mexican village with a stab wound in his side. 

Gus Fring — who has transported Mike there — visits him and initiates a conversation. He says, “It seems to me that you are at a crossroads. You can continue as you are… drinking, estranged from your family, brawling with street hoods. We both know how that ends.” 

And to this Mike says: “Yeah.” (Jonathan Banks should get an Emmy just for that one line reading.) Ultimately, Mike agrees to continue to work with Gus. Later, when he visits his daughter-in-law again, he tells her that he is better, and when she asks why he is better, he says, “I decided to play the hand I was dealt.” 

I decided to play the hand I was dealt. It’s this hard-earned and bitterly worldly wisdom that Mike shares with Jimmy in Episode 9. “Look. We all make our choices. And those choices, they put us on a road. Sometimes those choices seem small, but they put you on the road. You think about getting off … but eventually, you’re back on it. And the road we’re on led us out to the desert, and everything that happened there, and straight back to where we are right now … and nothing — nothing — can be done about that. Do you understand that?” 

But Jimmy doesn’t want to understand that. He doesn’t want to believe it. He wants to think that there is always a way out, that if you’re clever enough and resourceful enough you can slip out of the consequences of your actions, and play a better hand that the one that you’ve been dealt. (Or that you’ve dealt yourself.) And yet, confronted by an angry Lalo Salamanca who knows that Jimmy has been lying to him, he’s helpless. He has no answers, no strategy — he can’t even muster evasive action. 

It’s Kim who saves Jimmy’s ass. It’s Kim who has the brains and the resourcefulness and the sheer guts to confront a terrifying man, a drug cartel kingpin, a cold-blooded murderer — and to send him away in silence, defeated. It’s Kim who can find a way out of playing the hand she’s been dealt, if anyone can. 

But can anyone so escape? Can anyone get off that road that Mike tells Jimmy you can’t get off? It’s the theme of this season, and in some ways of the whole series. Earlier in the season, Jimmy is talking with Nacho about the consequences of some work he’s doing for the Salamancas: “I mean, if there’s gonna be blowback, I don’t wanna be in the middle of it.” To which Nacho: “It’s not about what you want. When you’re in — you’re in.”

Kim is cracking under the strain of trying to get out. Kim, who always keeps herself together, is on the verge of collapse at the beginning and the end of this episode. And it’s all because she got drawn into the world of Jimmy Effing McGill. 

My newsletter this Easter week is devoted to Arcabas.

My newsletter this Easter week is devoted to Arcabas. 

Tom Holland: That a man who had himself been crucified...

Tom Holland: 

That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.

Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim he had come. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.

This Sunday, when billons of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Arcabas, Le retour du fils

I have some questions

My questions concern Adrian Vermeule’s already-much-talked-about argument for “Common-Good Constitutionalism” — especially this paragraph: 

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. Unions, guilds and crafts, cities and localities, and other solidaristic associations will benefit from the presumptive favor of the law, as will the traditional family; in virtue of subsidiarity, the aim of rule will be not to displace these associations, but to help them function well. Elaborating on the common-good principle that no constitutional right to refuse vaccination exists, constitutional law will define in broad terms the authority of the state to protect the public’s health and well-being, protecting the weak from pandemics and scourges of many kinds — biological, social, and economic — even when doing so requires overriding the selfish claims of individuals to private “rights.” Thus the state will enjoy authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals who so often place their own satisfactions (financial and sexual) and the good of their class or social milieu above the common good.

The entire paragraph is cast in the future tense: the auxiliary verb “will” appears seven times. But note that it undergoes a transformation. At the beginning we learn about what common-good constitutionalism (CGC, let’s call it) will favor; but most of the paragraph concerns what will happen under the beneficent rule of CGC. Vermeule starts with a dream and then assumes that the dream will come true. 

But what are the chances? How will CGC manifest itself electorally? Will the Republican Party be converted to CGC, or will there be a new party that emerges to promote and embody it? 

More: What is the role of Congress in this vision of CGC-in-action? At one point Vermeule says that “the general-welfare clause, which gives Congress ‘power to … provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,’ is an obvious place to ground principles of common-good constitutionalism,” but if so, why does he describe how it works exclusively in terms of “a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy”? The whole vision seems to be focused on policies created and overseen by the Executive branch — what need has CGC for Congress?

And if there is no substantive role for Congress, then in what sense is CGC “constitutionalism”? It sounds more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary than the United States of America. It’s hard for me to see how CGC emerges, at least as it’s described here, without significant changes to the Constitution itself, including perhaps changes to the Bill of Rights. (In one mention of rights he puts the word in scare-quotes, in another he writes, “Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go.”) What are the rights recognized by CGC? Or, to put the point another and more general way, what is the constitution in relation to which this is constitutionalism? 

Finally: Who, in Vermeule’s vision of CGC, determines what the common good actually is? As I read the essay I kept thinking of Rousseau’s “general will,” which does not know itself and therefore has to be instructed, in a sense created, by Those Who Know.