Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 205

the default assumption

Giles Fraser:

Of all the people I could imagine to be an abuser, Vanier was the least likely. He was exactly what I imagined a good person to look like. And so, I am going to have to learn to go forward with a great deal more scepticism about my heroes. Darkness also lurks where one least expects it.

The trick will be to learn how to combine trust with … well, what’s the word? Suspicion? Though that way of presenting the problem already indicates how impossible the task seems. For if someone like Vanier was untrustworthy, then I no longer know who is worthy of trust. Must I from now on look at people who do great good in the world and wonder to myself whether maybe, just maybe, they too are something different to how they seem? Cynics will think that I have seen the light. They think this sort of suspicion is the basis of a more worldly wisdom.

But this isn’t the light. This is darkness. 

It is indeed darkness, but it is the darkness in which we live. The Vanier story has been a kind of breaking point for me. I would like to propose the following response: 

Every Christian man in any authority of any kind over any persons — and that includes me, as a teacher  — should be assumed to be exploiting that authority to control others, especially women, for sexual gratification or simply in order to satisfy the libido dominandi. 

That should be the position we all take going forward. No exceptions. None of us should be trusted, none of us should be believed. You all should watch us like hawks and expect the very worst at every moment. Only by taking such apparently drastic steps do we have a chance of breaking the demonic hold of religious authority invested in men or in institutions controlled by men. 

UPDATE: I’m already getting angry emails about this! I wish to assert that I am right and the people writing the angry emails are wrong. Here’s why: 

My correspondents remind me of a certain type of character in mystery stories: the close relative or associate of the murdered person who says, in response to the inquiries of police, “You can’t possibly suspect me?!” They seem to think that the legal presumption of innocence should extend to immunity from suspicion. But most people who are murdered are murdered by people whom they know well; the suspicion is rational. 

It is equally rational, given the many abuses of power by prominent Christian men that have come to light in recent years, for other Christian men — even those who truly believe that they have done nothing wrong — to accept increased levels of suspicion, indeed to welcome it as I do above. We should acknowledge that the old rule that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is true, and that — this is the key thing — it applies to us as well as to people we don’t like. We should realize that men’s sexual (though not only sexual) exploitation of women (though not only women) is not an anomalous but a to-be-expected development among fallen people in a broken world, unless it is guarded against in a thousand ways, many of which have not been developed yet. If people suspect the worst of us, they have good reason. 

More deeply: we need to reflect on the ways that exploitation and domination are built into the structure of authority itself, in this vale of tears, and accept that some kinds of counter-structures must be devised to address the pervasiveness of this dark tendency. Those counter-structures will arise from a deep suspicion, a suspicion that I and people like me have earned. (Lauren Winner’s book The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin might be helpful to those of us attempting to think through these matters.) 

To those who think that it’s wrong for me to single out men rather than women, I have two responses: first, there aren’t enough women holding explicit authority in the Christian world for us to know much about how they characteristically handle it; and second, I believe the kind of domination of women exhibited by Jean Vanier and many other Christian men is a profound perversion of the instinct to protect that men express in distinctive ways. (We could have an argument some other time about whether that instinct is cultural or hard-wired, though for the record I think it’s the latter.) I have no doubt that Vanier’s exploitation of the women in his life started with a genuine and commendable desire to protect them from spiritual harm, and that this is often true in other similarly exploitative relationships. There are narcissists and sociopaths to whom this generous explanation does not apply. 

What’s ironic about the anger coming my way is that much of comes from men who, I bet, think the Billy Graham Rule is a wise one. But the Billy Graham Rule is just a small instance, focused on a very particular kind of situation, of what I am counseling above. The substance of that Rule is: You don’t trust me? I get it. I don’t even trust myself. Whether or not that Rule is a good one, it’s a small one: it deals with just one kind of situation, a private meeting between one man and one woman. And as I said above, we need more comprehensive counter-structures. If I have to undergo some painful scrutiny as those counter-structures are being developed, that seems to me a small price to pay to reduce the number of lives that are ruined or severely damaged. All of the women who were abused by Jean Vanier testify to the lasting psychological and spiritual harm he inflicted on them; and this is a common story. 

One last thing. I have some questions for Christian men who, like me, exercise some authority. Some of us are teachers, some pastors, some counselors — there are a hundred such callings. Do you like being admired? Do you like being looked up to? Do you like being trusted? Do these experiences make you feel good about yourself? Do you think that they could feel good enough that you’d seek them out more and more, and place particular value on those relationships that give you that kind of feeling, and maneuver yourself into situations where you get to be The Wise One who receives boundless gratitude from those you have blessed with your wisdom? Do you believe that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick”? And finally: Are there structures in your life and in your workplace to prevent you from pursuing those warm feelings beyond the point of safety, propriety, and spiritual health — for yourself and for those who are under your authority? 

Mantel’s Cromwell

Freya Johnston on Hilary Mantel’s new novel:

The Mirror and the Light, like Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, conceals through a mass of beautifully observed local colour the quiet work of advocacy it is constantly performing. Mantel is implicitly urging us to feel more sympathy for one character than for others. She does so by virtue of granting or withholding knowledge of what is going on inside her characters’ heads. The way that she handles the representation of thought processes and the mingling of those processes with an ostensibly impersonal narrative voice — in other words, her free indirect style — seem to rule out access to the ways in which bad characters think. Or perhaps she cannot help but make bad people into better ones. The prose is so raptly and sympathetically attuned to Cromwell that, despite his actions, we are made to find him at worst intriguing, sometimes manipulative — but even then, understandably so.

This comment is interesting to me, because I wrote something similar when reviewing the first volume of the trilogy ten years ago: 

This psychological focus is especially important because Mantel clearly thinks of Cromwell as the most modern person in her story — the one most like Us. In her vision he is an utterly non-ideological man with little intrinsic interest in power forced to live in a profoundly ideological and power-mad age. His strongest feelings are for his wife and children — he loses that wife and both of his daughters to the “sweating sickness” (we would call it malaria) — and when a colleague finds him weeping over his dead loved ones, Cromwell pretends that he cries for fear that he will fall when the Cardinal does. The lie is more than plausible: no one in Henry’s court could think of a more likely reason for tears. Cromwell is even tender towards animals, in an age noted for its cruelty to them. The conventional narratives of the Tudor age contrast Thomas More’s reluctant ascent to power, and stubborn loyalty to the Church even in the face of death, with Cromwell’s unprincipled Machiavellian shrewdness. Mantel doesn’t quite invert the equation, but she nearly does. Confined as we are to Cromwell’s perspective, we can’t know what really motivates More, but Cromwell certainly doubts that the piety goes all the way down: at one point he even asks More directly whether he could have risen to the place of Lord Chancellor “by accident.”

Later I wrote: “Mantel’s Cromwell is a characteristically late-modern Western man who happens to be living at the beginnings of modernity. By envisioning him so, Mantel has rendered much simpler the task of making the historical novel into a psychological novel. Could she have told the story of More, or for that matter Tyndale, in this manner? I think not. Author and protagonist merge nicely at this point: the True Believer remains inaccessible to them both.”

That’s why I didn’t go on to the second, and will not go on to the third, volume: Mantel seems interested in the inner lives only of those characters with whom she can muster significant sympathy. Oh for a writer who wants to grapple seriously with those whose beliefs and commitments are alien to her! 

productivity

My friend Richard Gibson today called my attention to this 2013 column in the Economist: 

The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be creative workers — the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part. Peter Drucker, a management guru, summed up the mood of the refuseniks: “One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours.” Creative people’s most important resource is their time — particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time — and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. 

People sometimes get irritated when I decline to do something they have asked me to do — read their novel, speak at their college — but do not pause to reflect that they’re only asking me because at many points in the past I declined to read someone else’s novel or speak at someone else’s college, and did my work instead. 

what to do on Saturday night when you have a cold

Why, you read Prince Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism from the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, of course. What else would you do? 

what’s in my bag

The Cool Tools site does a regular series in which people describe what they carry around and what they carry it around in. I thought I might do my own entry in the series, even though I don’t have affiliate links. 

First comes my Tom Bihn Synapse 19 backpack, which I find to be brilliantly designed — with the right number of pockets in all the right places — extremely comfortable to wear, and sufficiently rugged that I will probably have it for the rest of my life. (I’ve had it for seven or eight years and it still looks basically new.) The chief things you’ll find inside it are … 

My 12” MacBook, in Tom Bihn’s bespoke sleeve
Apple AirPods Pro 
Pentel Energel pens 
Palomino Blackwing pencils + sharpener 
Leuchtturm A5 Hardcover notebook 
Kindle Voyage
Whatever books I happen to be teaching at the moment 
Ibuprofen and hand sanitizer 

Other things come and go but those are the permanent essentials. I’m not adding links (except to the Tom Bihn site) because the most obvious place to link to is Amazon and I don’t really want to promote Amazon. Just search for items you’re interested in! 

one more post about Twitter

I deactivated my Twitter account more than a year ago, and set a recurrent reminder to log in every 28 days to reactivate and then deactivate again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to let my handle go to some other person who would no doubt bring shame onto the noble ayjay name. This little dance became tiresome, and my publishers like it when I broadcast useful (read: sales-related) info on social media, so I decided to make the account active again and leave it that way.

Twitter is even worse than I remember it being. The same compulsive temporary madness-of-crowds obsessions — sure, of course, Kobe Bryant is the most important person in your life, even though you’ve never mentioned him before and will probably never mention him again — but conducted with a greater intensity than I had remembered. Also, it seems that the reply function is now reserved as a dedicated performance space for sociopaths (if you don’t believe me, look at the first ten replies to any widely-read tweet).

What a horrible, horrible thing Twitter is. If the people who work there weren’t sociopaths themselves they’d shut the whole thing down for the good of humanity.

So I’m bringing back Freedom, which I had used in the past but set aside when I left Twitter. There will be 20 minutes a day when I can see Twitter, mainly to be sure that things I post here actually show up there. I’ll spend the rest of my time praying that the whole platform will die a swift and irreversible death.

a perfect ratio

There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be….

Time and the winds will sooner or later bury the Seven Cities of Cibola — Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, all of them — under dunes of glowing sand, over which blue-eyed Navajo bedouin will herd their sheep and horses, following the river in winter, the mountains in summer, and sometimes striking off across the desert toward the red canyons of Utah where great waterfalls plunge over silt-filled, ancient, mysterious dams.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

loss and grief

To go from Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines to the Dark Mountain Manifesto is to take a 180° turn — a turn downward. If Kurzweil reached up towards the stars, the authors of the Manifesto tell us to walk down that dark mountain to re-enter the world of “nature” which we had thought to have conquered, to have risen above, to have mastered, to have become capable of disregarding. “We believe it is time to look down.” But what might it mean to “look down”?

In my class we try to get at that question by reading Helen McDonald’s magnificent book H Is For Hawk. Because, partly intentionally and partly unintentionally, this is the story of how a woman looked down into the world that we call “nature” — and became a hawk. 

For years I’d scoffed at [T. H.] White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite of passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. Because it wasn’t like that. I knew it wasn’t. I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But while the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk. 

The really fascinating thing here is that the same thing prompts McDonald’s immersion in the training of her goshawk Mabel as prompts Ray Kurzweil’s frantic experiments with life extension and ultimately immortality: the loss of a father. It is the death of Ray Kurzweil’s father that he continually grieves, it is the hope of somehow being reunited with his father which drives much of his work. And so too, in a strange inverted sort of correspondence, Helen McDonald deals with the death of her beloved father by turning to the world of nature. To learn to think as a hawk thinks — or, rather, and more to the point, to not think as a hawk doesn’t think. (“Goshawks are nervous because they live life ten times faster than we do, and they react to stimuli literally without thinking.”) 

Perhaps the ocsillations I have been describing between a quest for an enchanted world and the acceptance of a disenchanted one are motivated by the same fundamental experience: Death, and grief.

oscillations

Here’s a brief summary by Charles Taylor of a contrast that’s vital to his thinking: porous vs. buffered selves. The porous self is open to a wide range of forces, from the divine to the demonic; the buffered self is protected from those forces, understands them as definitively outside of it. The attraction of the porous self is that it offers a rich, multidimensional cosmos that’s full of life and saturated in meaning; but that cosmos also feels dangerous. One’s very being can become a site of contestation among powerful animate forces. The buffered self provides bulwarks against all that: it denies the existence of those forces or demotes them to delusions that can be eradicated through therapy or medication. But the world of the buffered self can feel lonely, empty, flat. “Is that all there is?” 

The positive valence of porosity is fullness; its negative valence is terror.

The positive valence of bufferdness is protection; its negative valence is emptiness.

Taylor’s thesis is that over the past five hundred years Western culture has moved from a general condition of porosity to a general condition of bufferedness. That claim can be, and has been, contested: see this post on my old Text Patterns blog for an example. But I think he’s probably basically right. Taylor doesn’t see this movement occurring in a straight line; he discerns again and again dillusionment with the disenchanted world of the Modern Modern Order generating alternatives, from nature-worship to spiritualism; but he does see a general trend towards accepting a disenchanted world. 

Even if that’s true, I am interested in the ways that individuals and cultures oscillate between the porous and the buffered condition. As terror grows, we seek protection; but as emptiness grows, we seek fullness. And I am, further, interested in the ways that people seek an escape from this oscillation, some structure of experience that claims to provide fullness without terror, protection without emptiness. That’s why, having in the past taught a course called The History of Disenchantment, I’m now teaching one called Beyond Disenchantment.

The story I’ve just sketched out is, I believe, proper context in which to read, as we just have, Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. The one thing needful for the person encountering Kurzweil’s book is to realize that, for all his technological talk, it’s not a narrative that arises from the “technological core” of society but rather from the “mythical core” — indeed, it is itself a myth, the myth by which Kurzweil himself hopes to live. Kurzweil’s myth promises the security, stability, safety of a self that’s uploaded to the cloud and multiply backed up, and the fullness that comes from the ability always to fulfill not only our sexual desires but our spiritual ones, located in the God module. No terror, no emptiness — so says the myth. 

If you grasp this, you will understand why Meghan O’Gieblyn responded to the book the way she did:

I first read Kurzweil’s 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. […]

At Bible school, I had studied a branch of dispensational theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth: the Dispensation of Innocence, the Dispensation of Conscience, the Dispensation of Government … We were told we were living in the Dispensation of Grace, the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the Millennial Kingdom, when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this teleological narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending assuredly toward a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my subjective experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves. […]

It’s difficult to account for the totemic power I ascribed to the book. Its cover was made from some kind of metallic material that shimmered with unexpected colors when it caught the light. I carried it with me everywhere, tucked in the recesses of my backpack, though I was paranoid about being seen with it in public. It seemed to me a work of alchemy or a secret gospel. It’s strange, in retrospect, that I was not more skeptical of these promises. I’d grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweil’s prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science. 

O’Gieblyn was “not more skeptical” of Kurzweil’s promises because they provided a mythological framework to replace the mythological framework that she had recently lost.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse — drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate — were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans.

And “what makes the transhumanist movement so seductive,” especially to someone who has undergone that profound loss, “is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself obliterated.” It is a myth against myth. When Kurzweil tells you that nanobots — he loves to talk about the infinite powers of nanobots — will do nondestructive scans of your brain and upload your identity to the cloud forever, such utterances are functionally identical to “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” And about as empirically justified.

So now on to a myth that is essentially the opposite of Kurzweil’s: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

reading Paul: 2

Nota bene: This is not a scholarly exercise but rather a readerly one. My students and I are not reading theologians or scholars of the New Testament. We are going so far as to try to forget what we know about the later development of Christianity. (Trying and failing, of course, but that doesn’t make the trying valueless.) We seek to place ourselves imaginatively in the minds of those for whom the Way was an emergent phenomenon. What did Paul’s letters sound like to them? 

Now we come to Romans, and what a change. All of our previous readings have been letters in the primary familiar sense of that term, clearly written from a distinct person to distinct other persons, emotionally colored by a highly particular history of experience. Not so this one. The differences are obvious from the opening salutation — dignified, expansive, layered with dependent clauses, adumbrating the themes of the letter as a whole: 

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

There’s no question that this is no hurriedly-dashed-off note, but rather a considered performance, full of oratorical flourishes. We might expect from this not a few notes based on the questions and concerns of a particular local congregation, but rather a highly organized treatise. And indeed that’s just what we get: a semi-systematic exposition of the Gospel as Paul understood it, in a fashion almost denuded of personality, at least as compared to the previous letters.

And as far as Chapter 8. After the glorious heights of that section of the letter — “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” — the tone alters markedly. Paul’s personality asserts itself, and we see flashes of the cranky and anxious man we have come to know from earlier letters. But now it is not “anxiety for all the churches” that afflicts him, but rather for the children of Israel: “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” And what is perhaps even more striking about this section of the letter is how uncertain Paul’s views are: it seems obvious that he has received no clear revelation of the precise relationship of the Lord’s covenant with Israel and the salvation that has been accomplished by Jesus Christ. So in the end he can only say: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”