Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 207

I’m okay with this

Something rather dramatic has happened to my Local Mainstay, Dichotomy Coffee and Spirits: 

But though I am among the most devoted Advent snobs you are ever likely to meet, I’m okay with this, for reasons my friend Michael Brendan Doughtery explains here. 

Raising Kael

Over at LitHub, I have an essay called “Raising Kael,” in which I pay homage to Pauline Kael’s centenary and argue that “in a very important sense, Citizen Kane is a comedy about newspapers.” Please check it out. 

how people change

The Mister Rogers No One Saw:

At the luncheon, Fred stood at the lectern between Bush and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He leaned in to the microphone.

He looked tiny.

“I know of a little girl who was drawing with crayons in school,” he said.

He kept looking tinier.

“The teachers asked her about her drawing,” he said. “And the little girl said, ‘Oh, I am making a picture of God.’ The teacher said, ‘But no one knows what God looks like.’ The little girl smiled and answered, ‘They will now.’ ”

With that he asked everyone to think of their own images of God, and he began praying. He talked about listening to the cries of despair in America and about turning those cries into rays of hope.

A hush fell over the room, and he wasn’t tiny anymore. He stepped away from the lectern and darted. He was always a darter, but this was extreme. “O.K., now where the hell is Fred?” Isler asked me. We darted. We combed the building and climbed stairs. The Secret Service guys had lost sight of him, too. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Newell said.

We found him outside, next to an oak tree, motionless and relaxed. “Fred!” Isler said, exasperated. Fred said he wanted to go back to the office.

“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-raising or anything else,” he told me later. “But at the same time I don’t want to be an accuser. Other people may be accusers if they want to; that may be their job. I really want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.”

What if that’s true? What if Fred Rogers was right about how people change? 

obliviousness

Radiolab just re-posted a 2017 episode on technologies for creating fake audio and video, and I noticed something this time that I missed when I first heard it. The Radiolab reporters say that the people creating such technologies “aren’t worried” about its potential abuse, but that’s not quite accurate. They haven’t thought about it. Listening to them try to answer questions about such potential — actually, inevitable — abuse, you can tell that the subject has never crossed their minds. 

so much goodness

Another amazing meal at Milo last night — this is grilled pork loin on a bed of sweet potato purée, topped with collard greens that had had something remarkable done to them. Fabulous flavors. My dear fellow Wacoans, and visitors too, don’t miss this place.

If you had told me in January that the best article about...

If you had told me in January that the best article about Christianity I’d read all year would be in the New York Review of Books…. And if you don’t need to wipe away the tears after reading it, you’re stronger than I am. 

Here’s further evidence that this three-year-old post was...

Here’s further evidence that this three-year-old post was correct.

Triode

The Iconfactory has just released an app called Triode, and I’m loving it. In essence, Triode provides a simple, clean, and lovely interface for listening to internet radio stations, and the great pleasure of using the app is that nothing about it is algorithmic. It’s the anti-Spotify. Instead of “We have analyzed your listening history and are confident that you’ll like this” it’s “We know nothing about your listening history and have no idea whether you’ll like this or not, but we’re playing it because we think it’s cool.” Unpredictable human preference! Fallible human judgment! What a concept.

the command to be reconciled

One of the chief themes of my book How to Think is the vital importance of characterizing the arguments of those you disagree fairly — ideally, in terms that they themselves would recognize as valid. It’s good for them and it’s good for you: it strengthens your intellectual muscles to contend, as my buddy Robin Sloan has put it, not with straw men but rather with steel men. 

 

 Warning: Intra-Anglican disputes ahead! 

 

I thought about all this recently as I was reading Alex Wilgus’s response to a post by Hannah King arguing that the various Anglican bodies now at odds with one another should begin to seek reconciliation. Here’s how Wilgus characterizes King’s argument: 

Rev. King has decided that the 14 year distance between the schism of ‘04 opens an opportunity for Anglicans on both sides to reunite in some way around a desire for friendship, or at least a shared dislike of division. She seems to favor gatherings that heal by giving people the opportunity to “lament” publicly. 

So Wilgus would have us believe that King’s post is motivated by a mere “desire for friendship” or a “dislike of division” — as though it were an inclination or preference. But if you read King’s post you’ll find something very different: 

As Americans, this politics of polarization is in our bones. We sort and divide and sensationalize without even realizing there is another way. One only needs to follow the news for a few days to realize that our respective political parties no longer speak to each other; instead, they speak about each other. Yet as Christians, as those who adhere to a different polis — one not of this world — we must search and pray for another way. Even if it seems mysterious or impossible to us, we can ask God, for whom all things are possible. We can pray for the prophetic imagination to participate with him in the healing of his Church. 

And: 

I believe God called me to be a priest in the ACNA. But that doesn’t mean I disparage the Episcopal Church. I am less interested in who is “right” and who is “wrong” than I am in where God is asking us to go from here. None of us has the road map for this; but we do know the Guide. He has given himself to us fully and freely. Indeed, his body was broken for us — and it remains broken while his Church is broken. He has absorbed our separation in his own flesh, holding us together at his expense. As we feed on him and follow him, nourished by his very life, may we find ourselves put back together: reconciled to God and each other, one Body on earth and in Heaven. 

So it’s clear that King is not indulging a preference, but rather asking what obedience to a Lord who prays that we will be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21), and is at work reconciling all things to himself (Col. 1:20), might look like in this case. I’d like to see someone respond to a steel version of King’s argument, not one of straw.  

King says that she need not disparage the Episcopal Church. Wilgus thinks he must do exactly that, because “the very existence of the ACNA contradicts the ministry of TEC,” and insists moreover that the choice faced by Anglican clergy is strictly binary: “We as clergy are still presented the same choice as those who went before us, to lead our flocks into worship in Spirit and Truth, or to fall back into old habits of approving of sin and error.” Would that it were so simple. It is, alas, perfectly possible to avoid some habits of sin and error while plunging headfirst into others, including, possibly, the habit of taking satisfaction in our divisions rather than prayerfully seeking to overcome them. Hannah King says that “It would be naïve to suggest that such activity is a simple road to reunification; but it would be jaded to deny that it could be a starting point.” Alex Wilgus’s post sounds jaded to me. 

I should declare an interest here. There is a faithful and flourishing ACNA parish here in Waco, Christ Church, which I attended for a while. I still miss the people there, clergy and laypeople alike, but the fact of the matter is that Christ Church is very much Anglo-Catholic and I am very much not. So I now attend a faithful and flourishing Episcopal parish, St. Alban’s. The primary reason both churches are growing is simply this: they preach the same Gospel. And that ought to count for something. That ought to be a starting point, as Hannah King says, in our prayers for reunion, for oneness, and (yes) lamentation over our current severances. And I pray every day for that oneness, because I believe that the very same Lord preached in both of those churches is the one before whom, ultimately, every knee will bow, and whose Lordship every tongue will confess. 

on lost causes

There’s a scene early in Neal Stephenson’s new novel Fall: or, Dodge in Hell, in which a tech billionaire, sick of the way that misinformation spreads across the Internet like Western wildfires, decides to stage an intervention. He spends about a million bucks — he doesn’t need more — to create and distribute digital “evidence” of a tactical nuclear strike on the town of Moab, Utah. He hires actors, CGI experts, everything you need in order to fake a tragedy and make your creation go viral online. The idea is that once people see that completely made-up shit can utterly dominate the Internet, that there are no guard rails or boundaries to prevent that from happening, they will realize that they are continually being snookered and will grow a carapace of skepticism.

This is followed by a scene in which an master programmer creates highly advanced bots capable of relentlessly pushing petabytes of inconsistent and incoherent misinformation onto the internet, thus reinforcing the billionaire’s lesson on an unimaginably massive scale. The ENSU project starts by spewing its misinformation about one woman, who cheerfully cooperates:

If everything went according to plan, the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking would now issue a press release announcing its existence and explaining what it was doing. It would include a signed statement, as well as a video clip, from Maeve Braden, announcing that she was completely fine with all of this. Also included were links to servers where all of the code was available in the form of a carefully documented open-source code package, complete with sample projects that programmers could use to modify and extend it in various ways. Following up on an idea that had emerged during the conversation on the jet, ENSU also made public a list of several hundred completely imaginary, nonexistent people against whom campaigns of reckless slander and defamation could now be unleashed, as well as an easy-to-use tool that anyone could exploit to create new such fake persons and reasonably convincing social media shaming campaigns that would make those fake persons the object of real, genuine, sincere obloquy on the part of millions of social media users who were dumb enough to believe everything that scrolled across their screens.

You know the old Justice Brandeis line that the remedy for malicious and deceitful speech is more speech? A version of that is what’s happening here: the remedy for malicious and deceitful memes is more memes. So much malice and deceit and that people will give up believing any of it. Brilliant.

Now fast-forward fifteen years or so:

The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk.

In short, nothing changed. People kept believing whatever they saw online that they wanted to believe. They could actually go to Moab and see that it has not been damaged and is not radiation-riddled, but they don’t.

Some elements of Stephenson’s anticipated future seem unlikely to me, but not this. This seems not just plausible but highly probable. (Cf. Alex Jones and Sandy Hook.)

Nobody is beyond hope. This is an article of faith for me. But if at this stage of the game, given what we know about how social media work and about the incentives of the people who make TV, you’re still getting your dopamine rush by recycling TV-news clips and shouting at people on the Internet, you’re about as close to beyond hope as a human being gets. There is no point talking to you, trying to reason with you, giving you facts and the sources of those facts. You have made yourself invulnerable to reason and evidence. You’re a Moab truther in the making. So, though I do not in theory write anyone off, in practice I do. It’s time to give you up as a lost cause and start figuring out how to prevent the next generation from becoming like you.