Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 201

the definitive guide

What if I made for my students a guide to Auden’s “Horae Canonicae” that looks like this?

Attaboy

Sometimes I get obsessed about something and can only manage the obsession by writing about it. So, from nine years ago: 

I’m not sure exactly what to call this kind of music, but in my mind I think of it as NCM (New Chamber Music). A small group of musicians play pieces that are technically demanding in the way that classical music often is, but they’re playing often with non-classical instruments and often in non-classical styles and with non-classical techniques. Chris Thile seems to me the prime instigator and exemplar of this movement. 

What’s exceptional about the Goat Rodeo Sessions, within this larger world of NCM, is that these sessions are conducted by musicians who have a serious claim to being the very best at what they do. Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer, and Yo-Yo Ma are commonly thought of as the epitomes of excellence on their instruments, and while probably no one would say that Stuart Duncan is the best violinist in the world, more than a few people would say he’s the best fiddler around. In any case he more than holds his own with these three titans.

This song opens in the key of A, as fiddle tunes often do. It begins with a rhythmically intricate introduction by Chris Thile, the sort of thing that he often plays, and it’s not necessarily a sign of pleasure to come. One of the problems with Thile’s work is that he really is, as T-Bone Burnett has said, a once-in-a-century musician, and the things that are fun and interesting for him to play are not necessarily the things that are the most fun and interesting for ordinary listeners to hear. There is a cerebral quality to much of his music that I happen to enjoy but that many people don’t, because it’s too distant from what they think of as … enjoyable music. This song may start in that complex mode, but very soon you get, first the violin of Duncan playing a drone, and then the lovely primary melody played by Yo-Yo Ma on his cello.

You should notice even at this early point the essential role played by Edgar Meyer’s double bass. Throughout the song he moves with perfect fluidity between bowing and plucking, always in a way designed to accentuate the beauty of his colleagues’ playing and the rhythmic integrity of the performance. He is the most musical of bassists — nothing is mechanical with him, everything he plays is melodically and rhythmically delightful. If you can listen to this on speakers that offer a reasonable degree and quality of bass response, please do. 

So after the mandolin introduction, the violin drone, and the melody played by Yo-Yo Ma, we get the elaboration of that melody on Duncan’s fiddle. Duncan has a magnificently velvety tone – there’s an interview with the four musicians in which Ma comments on the beauty of it – and he adds both urgency and plangency to the melody that Ma has initiated. Their lines intertwine and rise together, and take us into a delightful dance above which the violin soars. 

Now things get a little quieter. The bowed instruments recede into the background, and we get an intricate interlude from Thile’s mandolin. This is followed by a witty contrapuntal passage (a few moments of Celtic Baroque, maybe) and the return of the dance. Then the four musicians walk the theme down to a stop….

But we’re not done. Duncan, solo at first, leaps into a reel in G. (When the other instruments come in, take a listen to the rumble of that bass!) The pace accelerates, and now we’re headed for a breakdown — not in the psychological sense but in the bluegrass sense. Everyone is now playing at breakneck speed, and make a special note of how the fingers of Ma’s left hand move as quickly as a fiddler’s, but over a much longer neck.  

And then as the breakdown achieves maximum velocity, we ascend back to the first theme, once more in A. The full articulation of the theme is followed by another slowdown, but this time instead of the mandolin we get the violin and cello meditating together, weaving their lines quietly in and out. 

Then the music rises, and we get a return to the dance, now at its most joyful. Even the relatively stoic Meyer is caught up in the delight of it. And then another walk down, this time to the finish. 

I love this performance more than I can say. It has given me such comfort and consolation in these past few days. I hope it will do something similar for you. 

And soon the Goat Rodeo Boys will be back! 

extended families

I have written before about the experience I had growing up in the same house as my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I had an inchoate sense that my mother and father and sister and I were living in Gran and Grandma’s house. But later, after my father got out of prison and after Gran was forced into retirement after a horrific automobile accident, the terms and conditions seemed gradually to shift, and I started to feel that the house was somehow now our house and Gran and Grandma were living with us. But in fact all along we were just a family living together, and never at any point was this an odd thing. It was common enough in our social class — working class, lower-lower-middle class — in those days that I don’t think either of my parents were ever the least bit ashamed of it, though surely they were at times frustrated by it.  

These days, though, there can be great shame associated with living in extended families, because of the peculiar sense of independence that so many of us have. Young adults don’t feel independent unless and until they are living away from their parents; and as for the parents, as they age they dread the loss of independence that would accompany having to move in with their children. 

There is at least the chance that the current crisis will change those feelings. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans are going to lose their jobs in the coming months. Not all of them will have homes to go to — “homes” in the Robert Frost sense of a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in — but those who do will have a chance to revisit our assumptions about the necessity, indeed the very value, of independence. And that may not be an altogether bad thing. 

Morning Prayer

Each weekday at 7:30am, my parish church, St. Alban’s, is livestreaming Morning Prayer. It is a simple service but I have found it moving and meaningful. I’ve been reminded of the consolatory function of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (Matins and Evensong) for so many Christians for so many years of pain and trouble and fear. I’m going to post here a relevant passage from my biography of the Book of Common Prayer.  

So days were begun and ended in communal prayer. In institutions that featured chapel services — the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge most famously, but also public schools, preparatory schools, the Inns of Court — and where attendance was mandatory, this rhythm of worship was still more pronounced. Cranmer’s 1549 order, which would later undergo significant change, begins with the priest reciting the Lord’s Prayer “with a loud voice” — this in contrast to the old Roman practice, which likewise began Matins with the Lord’s Prayer but instructed the priest to say it silently. After centuries of liturgical prayers being muttered in low tones, and in a language unknown to the people, the new model demands audible English. After this prayer comes a beautiful exchange taken from Psalm 51: the priest says, “O Lord, open thou my lips,” and the people reply, “And my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” Then “O God, make speed to save me” calls forth the answer, “O Lord, make haste to help me.” Such echoes and alternations are intrinsic to the structure of liturgical prayer: praise and petition, gratitude and need. The whole of the Matins service repeatedly enacts this oscillation.

After further prayers and readings from Scripture, the service comes to a close with a series of “collects” (pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable): these brief but highly condensed prayers were a specialty of Cranmer’s. He did not invent them — Latin liturgies are full of them — but he gave them a distinctive English style that would be much imitated in the coming centuries. Here is the final collect of Matins:

O Lord our heavenly father, almighty and ever-living God, which hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day: defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight: through Jesus Christ our lord. Amen.

Here we see the rhetorical structure common to most collects: a salutation to God; an acknowledgment of some core truth, in this case that the people come to prayer only because God has “safely brought us to the beginning of this day”; a petition (“grant us this day we fall into no sin”); an aspiration, or hope and purpose for the prayer, often introduced by the word “that” (“that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance”); and a concluding appeal to Jesus Christ as the mediator and advocate for God’s people. Anglican liturgies are studded with these collects, many of them either composed fresh by Cranmer or adapted by him from Latin sources. They are among the most characteristic and recognizable features of prayer-book worship.

For the people of the sixteenth century, this thanksgiving for safe passage to a new day would not have been a merely pro forma acknowledgment. As A. Roger Ekirch has shown in his extraordinary history At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the early modern period in England was marked by deep anxiety about the dangers of the nighttime world. With only limited forms of artificial lighting, people found the darkness continually befuddling: friend could not be distinguished from foe, nor animate objects from inanimate ones. The moon was thought to bring both madness and disease, and the night air was perceived as unhealthy, even poisonous. Ekirch quotes one woman whose thoughts were typical of the period: “At night, I pray Almighty God to keep me from ye power of evil spirits, and of evil men; from fearfull dreams and terrifying imaginations; from fire, and all sad accidents . . . so many mischiefs, I know of, doubtless more that I know not of.” Doubtless more that I know not of: the “Terrors of the Night,” as Thomas Nashe called them in a 1594 pamphlet, multiplied relentlessly in the mind.

This was the context in which people came to Matins thanking the God “which hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day,” and the context that determines the sober mood of Evensong. One can easily imagine the felt need to come together in church, before the fall of night, to beg God’s protection, and indeed Evensong, which begins with a shortened version of the exchange that opens Matins — “O God, make speed to save me”; “O Lord, make haste to help me” — concludes with a collect frankly admitting the fear of the dark, in a prayer so urgent that it even forgoes the customary decorous address to God and rushes straight to its petition: “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord, & by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of thy only son, our savior Jesus Christ. Amen.”

rocketing the mind

In his glorious poem “Advice to a Prophet,” Richard Wilbur begins:

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Oddly enough, perhaps, I think this is relevant to the proposal that has emerged today to give all Americans a thousand bucks — or, in some proposals, more — to compensate for the afflictions many will experience because of the economic consequences of the coronavirus. The idea of giving everyone in America that much money strikes us, initially and instinctively, as an insane amount of money. But let’s run the numbers.

There are 330 million Americans, more or less. Giving a thousand bucks to each of then would be $330 billion. But the federal budget that Donald Trump has just proposed is $4.8 trillion. So a thousand bucks for everyone is doable — not easily, mind you, but doable. It’s even doable more than once, especially if people like me, who are financially secure, donate our thousand to charity.

It doesn’t feel doable. The numbers “rocket the mind.” But I think we owe it to Andrew Yang that many people are able to overcome their initial feelings — their “unreckoning hearts” — and realize that this is something we can do, if we want to.

folly

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish — a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations. We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them. We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability. It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances: on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors. If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” (1943)

incuriosity and indifference

Incuriosity and indifference — intellectual laziness and the absence of compassion — are vices that feed each other. If you don’t care about what happens to people, then you are unlikely to seek out more knowledge of their condition; and the less you know about their condition, the less you will feel called to compassion for that condition. Exhibit A for this vicious circle is this despicable essay by Heather Mac Donald. It’s not something I even want to talk about, but perhaps some commentary will be useful. Let’s start by zeroing in on one paragraph: 

Much has been made of the “exponential” rate of infection in European and Asian countries — as if the spread of all transmittable diseases did not develop along geometric, as opposed to arithmetic, growth patterns. What actually matters is whether or not the growing “pandemic” overwhelms our ability to ensure the well-being of U.S.residents with efficiency and precision. But fear of the disease, and not the disease itself, has already spoiled that for us. Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of .000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to .12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic. 

(1) Notice the scare-quotes around “exponential” and “pandemic,” as though those are examples of Fake News. But they are precisely the accurate terms — which, in the former case, Mac Donald even acknowledges. So why the scare-quotes? Presumably they are an attempt to generate skepticism where no skepticism is warranted. 

(2) Mac Donald clearly doesn’t understand the difference between the mortality rate of a disease and any currently uninfected individual’s likelihood of dying from the disease — because she hasn’t thought about it. She’s just tossing around numbers she thinks help her case. But for the record, if .12% — that is, a little more than one-tenth of one percent — of Americans died from COVID-19, that would be approximately 400,000 deaths. She’s “happy” with that. 

(3) More to the point, MacDonald is obscuring, or is ignorant of, the relevant time-frames for considering these matters. She writes, “So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection…. By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019.” But that is to compare data about one thing for an entire year with data about another thing for less than a month. Her essay was published on March 13; the first American to die from COVID-19 died just two weeks earlier, on February 28. Even if the rate of deaths from the virus remained steady — which Mac Donald admits will not happen — that would be an annual rate of over a thousand deaths. 

(4) But this takes us back to the matter of geometric progression. In Italy, the first person to be diagnosed with COVID-19 was so diagnosed on January 30. I am not sure when the first person in Italy died of the disease, but as I write, 1,441 people in Italy have died from the virus — of 21,157 confirmed cases! — and the cases are increasing rather than slowing down. In short: this disease moves quickly. Take a look at this chart:

Full size version here. Two vital pieces of information in this chart: first, the rate at which cases in Italy are confirmed is increasing; second, the rate of infection for the United States looks a lot more like that of Italy than that of Japan or Singapore or Hong Kong. So over time the ten-thousand-fold increase that Mac Donald treats as an absurd extrapolation is certain to be dramatically exceeded. We can and should still do a lot to mitigate the effects, but a month from now the comparison to traffic deaths will not look good for Mac Donald’s case. She doesn’t anticipate this because, though she acknowledges geometric progression, she doesn’t grasp it, and as a result thinks only in terms of the present moment. Thus she writes, “The number of cases in most afflicted countries is paltry.” Yes; and the damage done to a coastal city by a hurricane is paltry — in the first ten minutes after landfall. 

(5) Similarly, Mac Donald writes, “We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu.” Indeed, and that’s because the flu has been around long enough that many people have developed immunity to it, which means that flu cases do not increase at a geometric rate. But the coronavirus is novel, which means that no one has yet acquired immunity. That’s why it moves so fast. Contra Mac Donald, not all transmissible diseases spread at a geometric rate — those rates vary quite a bit for many reasons, including the means by which they are transmitted — COVID-19 would be even worse if it were airborne — but also according to whether they’ve been through a particular population before. These are not difficult distinctions to grasp. For those who are willing to grasp them. 

(6) We now reach the point in the essay at which intellectual laziness slides into moral callousness: “As of Monday, approximately 89 percent of Italy’s coronavirus deaths had been over the age of seventy, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sad to say, those victims were already nearing the end of their lifespans. They might have soon died from another illness.” Maybe! But — I’m not sure about the data in Italy — in the United States someone who is currently 70 years old can expect to live another fifteen years; and an 80-year-old can reasonably expect another nine years. These are not insignificant years to lose. Those can be times not just of personal satisfaction — older people are happier than younger ones — but also times when they can give counsel to their children and love to their grandchildren, or indeed give to others who are willing to acknowledge their personal value. 

The only value Mac Donald seems to cherish is that of a stock market portfolio — for financial losses she feels great compassion, though she has none to spare for human beings. She should reflect on something John Ruskin taught us long ago: “There is no wealth but life.” 

Stonehenge 1947

Bill Brandt. Warren Ellis posted this somewhere. 

reading in a time of anxiety

One of the first things to go in a time of stress like ours is concentration. We know so little about the coronavirus: whether we will get it and how many people we know will, how serious the disease will be if we do, how long schools and businesses will be closed, the long-term effect on the economy — not to mention the possibility of the virus’s return at some later stage. With all these uncertainties, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, buzzing about in our heads the prospect of sitting down to read a book seems … remote, alien, impossible. And yet all of us could use a vacation from our anxieties, something to occupy our minds. My suggestion: Take some time to read short stories and essays.

Many of the finest short stories ever written are available for free at Project Gutenberg: 

Anton Chekhov
M. R. James (the greatest of writers of ghost stories)
Rudyard Kipling 
Katherine Mansfield 
E. F. Benson (another fine writer of scary tales) 
Saki (the master of the twist ending) 
Oscar Wilde 

And then if you want to turn to essays: 

The incomparable Charles Lamb 
Robert Louis Stevenson (much neglected as an essayist) 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 
G. K. Chesterton 

That’s just selecting from the freebies! Maybe I’ll have another post later on things you’d actually need to buy. 

who you gonna believe?

Rush Limbaugh says, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says, “I mean, people always say, well, the flu, you know, the flu does this, the flu does that. The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This is ten times that.” (He could have said “at least ten times that.”) 

Question: Why does Rush Limbaugh think he knows better than Fauci? Potential answers:  

He doesn’t. He’s just saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear in order to keep them listening, keep his advertising rates high, and put more money in his pocket. 
He’s a narcissist who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect. 
It’s a classic case of motivated reasoning: Like all of us, he would prefer that COVID-19 be an insignificant threat to public health, so he finds a way to believe it. 
He sees a vast conspiracy of elite culture against Donald Trump in particular and conservatism in general, and Fauci, as the director of a federal agency, is ipso facto a member of that elite; therefore it is logical to assume that Fauci is part of that conspiracy. (Perhaps not consciously; perhaps Limbaugh would think that Fauci is the one guilty of motivated reasoning.) 

We need not choose one or two explanations: probably all four factors are at work, though it would be impossible to know in what proportion. Certainly Limbaugh wouldn’t know, in precisely the same way that I don’t understand my own motivations. 

But maybe more significant is this question: Why do many Americans — millions of them, I suppose — believe Limbaugh rather than Fauci? Presumably answers 3 and 4 above play a major role. But the matter bears more reflection. 

I believe the key issue that must be addressed in this situation concerns what Tom Nichols calls the death of expertise — and, more important still, what might be done to restore public trust in genuine expertise. For my money, the really vital chapter in Nichols’s book is the one on the wrongness of experts — why they get things wrong and what happens when they do. Indeed, that should be a book in itself.

I want to call attention to a few passages from Nichols’s book, starting with this one: 

[Our] daily trust in professionals … is a prosaic matter of necessity. It is much the same way we trust everyone else in our daily lives, including the bus driver we assume isn’t drunk or the restaurant worker we assume has washed her hands. This is not the same thing as trusting professionals when it comes to matters of public policy: to say that we trust our doctors to write us the correct prescription is not the same thing as saying we trust all medical professionals about whether America should have a system of national health care. To say that we trust a college professor to teach our sons and daughters the history of World War II is not the same thing as saying that we there- fore trust all academic historians to advise the president of the United States on matters of war and peace. […] 

Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try to stretch their expertise from one area to another. This is not only a recipe for error, but is maddening to other experts as well. In some cases, the cross-expertise poaching is obvious, as when entertainers — experts in their own fields, to be sure — confuse art with life and start issuing explanations of complicated matters.

But it’s not just “entertainers” like Limbaugh who are to blame here. A classic example of the abuse of expertise, as I wrote a few years ago, is the Doomsday Clock. If I may quote myself: “No actual science goes into the decision of where to place the hands of the clock. The scientists who make the decision have no particular expertise in geopolitical strategy, military and political risk assessment, or even climatology (relevant since they incorporate climate change into their assessment). They just read a bunch of stuff and take their own emotional temperature.” 

Related to this is the reluctance of many experts to acknowledge the vital distinction between what can be known precisely — and therefore precisely anticipated — and that which is too complex, or too dependent on unknown unknowns, to be subject to confident prediction. If you listen to Dr. Fauci’s full testimony, you’ll see, I think, that it’s an outstanding example of how to distinguish between what experts can know and what they cannot. But that sort of caution is, alas, not the norm.  

That’s why I think Nichols ends his chapter on the wrong note. It’s not that what he says is incorrect — it isn’t. It’s true. Here’s his last paragraph: 

For laypeople to use expert advice and to place professionals in their proper roles as servants, rather than masters, they must accept their own limitations as well. Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves. 

But had I been writing that I would’ve placed more stress on the need for experts to police themselves far more carefully then they currently do: to maintain the strictest standards of impartiality, and to make clear distinctions among (a) what they know, (b) matters about which they can reasonably surmise, and (c) those topics on which their opinions are no better than yours or mine. One of the primary responsibilities of genuine experts, in a heavily polluted informational ecosystem, is to give uninformed laypeople no justification, however implausible, for preferring their own judgment to that of the genuinely knowledgable. That wouldn’t eliminate the Dunning-Kruger effect, nor would it get rid of a President who thinks he has a “natural ability” to understand complex scientific matters in which he has no training whatsoever; but over the long haul, incrementally, it would help. 

 

UPDATE: A fascinating and illuminating comment on this post from Samuel James: “You know what the most interesting thing is about Limbaugh’s COVID commentary? The fact that he was recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. It stands to reason, does it not, that a man who desperately needs the best experts and credentialed information in this season of his (possibly fading) life would see the value of expert testimony? But in my experience, this actually has little effect on people. My family tree is full of people who practically live in the hospital and eat prescriptions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but who are confident that Sean Hannity knows more about anything than any scientist, lawyer, or even theologian. The death of expertise is so nefarious precisely because it’s resistant to cognitive dissonance.”