Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 204

nature and freedom

The notion that we “have a nature,” far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it. If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it. The reason people view suggestions about inborn tendencies with such indiscriminate horror seems to be that they think exclusively in one particular way in which the idea of such tendencies has been misused, namely, that where conservative theorists invoke them uncritically to resist reform. But liberal theorists who combat such resistance need them just as much, and indeed, usually more. The early architects of our current notion of freedom made human nature their cornerstone. Rousseau’s trumpet call “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” makes sense only as description of our innate constitution as something positive, already determined, and conflicting with what society does to us. 

— Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979) 

Oh, how this northern Illinois boy misses the snow he us...

Oh, how this northern Illinois boy misses the snow he used to play in. So this morning he sits in the dusting that is all central Texas can muster, and remembers deep drifts. 

understanding Christians (and others) on social media

The Devil chooses to deceive some people in the following way. He will marvelously inflame their brains with the desire to uphold God’s law and destroy sin in everyone else. He will never tempt them with anything that is manifestly evil. He makes them like anxious prelates watching over the lives of Christian people of all ranks, as an abbot does over his monks. They will rebuke everyone for their faults, just as if they had their souls in their care; and it seems to them that they dare not do otherwise for God’s sake. They tell them of the faults they see, claiming to be impelled to do so by the fire of charity and the love of God in their hearts; but in truth they are lying, for it is by the fire of hell surging in their brains and their imaginations.

— The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century), Chapter 55

a few items added

One little project that I’ve been working on as time allows — and time very rarely allows — is to move some things I’ve written from somewhere else online where they might disappear to this here site o’ mine. Here are three essays I originally published on Medium before I decided that Medium is a deceptive hellhole: 

“A Different Kind of Reader” 
“From the Abundance of the Heart” 
“The Devil’s Bargain” (this one is actually pretty important to me, though I haven’t lived up to its appeal) 

And one more thing, not published elsewhere: An annotated anthology I was invited to edit — and then disinvited. 

summing up

I said in my previous post that I would be taking a break from this blog, but it occurred to me that a good way to mark that break would be to take a look back at the decade that’s just now concluding (or that everyone thinks is just now concluding, except for the precisians who insist that the decade will end a year from now).

For my family, it’s been eventful. Teri and I moved to Texas after twenty-nine years in Illinois, and have come to love Texas very much. Our son graduated from college and started his own life as a grown-ass man. I once again became a member of an Episcopal parish, something that in 2010 I would have deemed inconceivable. I entered my sixties. I am still a teacher.

I published six books, a few dozen articles, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of tweets. I regret all the tweets and some of the blog posts. The rest of the blog posts did no harm, but also did precious little good. Given that I don’t regret the books or the articles, maybe I should focus on that kind of thing in the decade to come.

I miss Books & Culture, and the First Things that was: for many years those were my two periodical-publishing homes. I now write for several venues that I never imagined I would be able to write for, but I would have been very happy to spend the whole of my career writing long reviews for Books & Culture and essays for First Things. Now B&C is defunct and FT is not interested in the kind of thing I write — which is fair enough, I suppose, because I’m not interested in the kind of thing they now publish.

The world overall is not in the worst shape it could be in, but online life seems to be chiefly a cesspool. I am glad that it is only a part of life; I hope that in the coming decade it will be, for me and for others, a decreasing part. One can always hope.

I won’t say that I’ll never return here, but right now I feel that the blogging season of my life, which started around 2007, is over. I’m excited about the work to come, the reading and thinking and writing that awaits me, and I’m especially excited about doing all of it in a less internet-connected way.

A blessed next decade to us all!

unforthcoming attractions

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

— Buzzfeed. It’s really great to be out of all this. I’ve been away from Twitter and Instagram for more than a year now, and the thought of going back to either of them prompts nightmares. Partly, but not wholly, because of my recent troubles with WordPress, I have even become disillusioned with this blog. Step by step by step I’m removing more of my life from the online world.

I still love posting to my Pinboard page and writing my newsletter, so those are the primary places to find me in 2020. It’s also possible that I will post the occasional photo here, though I’m not sure about that. I will have another little project to announce … later. But I expect I will make that announcement, and others, on my official home page. There won’t be much, if anything, going on here for the near future.

a partial fix

Still lots of weird things going on in my WordPress installation; a complete fix would take, yeeeesh, weeks probably. ButI’ve sorted out a few things. More of the recent posts at least should appear in the timeline, and the posts tagged “Christmas” should all be there. So there’s that. 

something strange

Some very strange stuff is happening to my blog right now. Many posts, at least recent ones, have disappeared from the homepage, though they’re still online and visible if you know the URL. At first I thought only photo posts were missing — see for instance this and this and this — but now I see that some text posts are missing also. And tags don’t seem to be working properly: some of them turn up no posts, others turn up only a few when there are in fact many. 

Ironically enough, one of the posts missing is one in which I admit that I don’t own my turf. 

I don’t know when I’ll get a fix. Other things are on my mind this Christmas Eve! 

one man’s view of Christmas

Christmas to me is the remnant of an evaporating culture to which I once belonged. I am not a Christian, yet I am attached to its culture, personally, nostalgically and sentimentally. It is not the only culture available, there are others, equally valid or invalid, both religious and secular. But, for me, as someone who grew up in an Anglican home, sang in the cathedral choir, and has an enduring fascination with the Christian scriptures, the Christian story, in all its quaintness and implausibility, holds great meaning. Christ continues to move through my imagination, a vaporous ghost beckoning from the shadows, and his story affects me deeply. Jesus is an absurdity that continues to rise eerily from my yearning for spiritual comfort, within a cosmos I cannot begin to understand…. 

Christ is a symbol of our imperfect and limited attempt at understanding eternity, and addresses the vulnerability of humanity itself. Perhaps we should not look at the Christian story as a symbol of our naivety or ignorance, but instead cherish it as our attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible.

So, Tim and Joshua, as Christianity retreats back into the churches and cathedrals, as all conspicuous notions of Christ fade from our culture, and Christmas becomes the sole province of a roly-poly man in a Coca-Cola red suit (whose days may also be numbered) I will visit a church this Christmas; I will kneel before the fading vestiges of an outmoded idea called spiritual transcendence and our beautiful and moving attempt to humanise the ecstatic cosmic drama, and I will pray.

Love, Nick

(If perchance you’d like a wider range of views of Christmas, please click on the “Christmas” tag at the bottom of this post.)

attention and sympathy

The Richard Brody review of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a reminder of something that’s quite pervasive in criticism, though rarely talked about: the way that a lack of sympathy with a work of art can lead to a lack of attention to it. For instance, Brody says — and he’s not the only critic to have said this – that there aren’t any doubts in the movie, but of course everyone except Franz doubts the wisdom of what he has done. His wife struggles with it, his mother blames his wife for having made him too religious, the people in the village condemn him … and he is not unaffected by these judgments. We don’t know just how affected he is until a moment near the end of the story, when he has the last of his encounters with the last of his questioners, the judge who will pass sentence on him (played with extraordinary power by Bruno Ganz, in his final film role). Franz intuits that this man is different than the others who have interrogated him. All the others have been asking him questions to try to push him in a particular direction, or to fulfill their assigned role, but this judge asks questions because he wants to know their answers. And Franz tells the judge plainly that he simply doesn’t know whether he’s doing the right thing. Even though this is one of the most powerful and affecting scenes in the entire film, Brody manages to miss it.

It’s not the only thing Brody misses. For instance, he says that the Nazis speak German and Franz and his wife Fani speak English. In fact that is incorrect. Most of the movie is in English — for obvious reasons, I trust — but German is used on varying occasions and for varying purposes. One of the most moving moments in the film comes when the imprisoned and beaten and almost despairing Franz prays the Lord’s Prayer – in German. His family also prays in German. In this story German is both the most public and the most private of languages, while English occupies the conversational middle. The strategy is quite complex, but Brody’s lack of sympathy and interest in film disables him from noticing it.