Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 215

eyeballs

The issue of my newsletter that I posted today is concerned largely with the Hong Kong protests, but let me add a note to that. In that post I quote Maciej Cegłowski, who has been in Hong Kong participating in the protests, and he recently tweeted:

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags pic.twitter.com/6Wb0Km6GOb

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 17, 2019

So let’s keep this in mind for future reference, okay? If you are a tyrannical government, or you work for such a government, and you want to get your lies about what’s happening in your country before as many eyeballs as possible, Twitter is ready and eager to sell you access to those eyeballs.

nationalism and religion

We conservatives, however, have our own preferred division of the political universe: one in which Anglo-American conservatism appears as a distinct political category that is obviously neither authoritarian nor liberal. With the rest of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, we uphold the principles of limited government and individual liberties. But we also see clearly (again, in keeping with our conservative tradition) that the only forces that give the state its internal coherence and stability, holding limited government in place while staving off authoritarianism, are our nationalist and religious traditions. These nationalist and religious principles are not liberal. They are prior to liberalism, in conflict with liberalism, and presently being destroyed by liberalism.

— Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony. Setting aside for a moment the debate about liberalism, the conflation here of the nationalist and the religious is troublesome, to say the least. Nationalism is and always will be dangerous to the Christian faith, because it inevitably does what it does here: co-opt “religion” as the handmaiden of nationalist interest. And there’s a reason why so many people inclined to this way of thinking love to talk about “religion” in the abstract: it enables them to evade the universal and non-negotiable claims of Jesus.

In this context it’s good to recall what Augustine says in the City of God:

Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord; the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God, the Witness of our conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, ‘Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.’ [XIV, 28, quoting Psalm 3,3]

Perhaps nationalism and “religion” alike are inimical to liberalism. But if so, they aren’t inimical in the same way or for the same reasons. Faithful Christians will always earn the response Paul and Silas got in Thessalonika: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also…. They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus.”

the most dreadful of gods

Am I the only reader who sees, in Eliot’s twinned stories of Dorothea and Lydgate (originally two separate novels, of course) an as-it-were Nausicaa/Odysseus implicit-tale of thwarted possibility? Am I the only person who thinks they’d make the perfect couple: both young, beautiful, idealistic, driven? Of course they can’t be together because Doroetha is married, and by the time she is free to marry again Lydgate is married. And I concede there’s nothing in the novel that explicitly reverts to any mutual attraction between them. Maybe it’s a mere will-to-neatness on my part that thinks in these terms, but still.

— Adam Roberts. Doesn’t every reader of Middlemarch feel precisely this way? I have always assumed so! But maybe I have a perverse expectation that the world will agree with me.

I believe that the way Dorothea and Lydgate just miss each other is one of the most important elements of the story. Had the timing of their lives been oh-so-slightly different Lydgate could well have met Dorothea before he met Rosamond and before she met Casaubon, and of course they would have fallen in love. Having met a woman of beauty and substance Lydgate would have been invulnerable to Rosamond’s shallower charms; and having met a young, good-looking man who was actually doing good to people in need, Dorothea would never for a second have considered the desiccated Casaubon as a possible love interest. Both would have been spared grief, and Lydgate would have remained a doctor committed to social reform rather than turning into a physician to the rich and gouty.

But it didn’t happen, because their social calendars didn’t quite match up. And — this is surely Eliot’s main point — on just such slender threads do all of our fates hang. She is describing for us a world in which people are not “meant for each other”: they find each other, or don’t, according to the whims of chance.

The other great novelist who shows us the world in this light is Tolstoy. I’m going to quote a (long!) passage from Anna Karenina featuring two minor characters who go out mushroom-hunting together. You’ll get the context as you read.

They walked on for some steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and panic. They had walked so far away that no one could hear them now, but still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to be silent. After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms. But against her own will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said:

“So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always fewer, though.” Sergey Ivanovitch sighed and made no answer. He was annoyed that she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to the first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after a pause of some length, as though against his own will, he made an observation in response to her last words.

“I have heard that the white edible funguses are found principally at the edge of the wood, though I can’t tell them apart.”

Some minutes more passed, they moved still further away from the children, and were quite alone. Varenka’s heart throbbed so that she heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red and pale and red again.

To be the wife of a man like Koznishev, after her position with Madame Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And this moment it would have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded both his speaking and his not speaking.

Now or never it must be said — that Sergey Ivanovitch felt too. Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergey Ivanovitch saw it and felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments in support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words in which he meant to put his offer, but instead of those words, some utterly unexpected reflection that occurred to him made him ask:

“What is the difference between the ‘birch’ mushroom and the ‘white’ mushroom?”

Varenka’s lips quivered with emotion as she answered:

“In the top part there is scarcely any difference, it’s in the stalk.”

And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and their emotion, which had up to then been continually growing more intense, began to subside.

I read this for the first time when I was around twenty and found it utterly terrifying. It can’t be like that, I thought. (And for what it’s worth, I don’t now think that it is quite like that, though it would take me a long time to explain what I do think.) There’s a kind of clear-eyed mercilessness to the way that Tolstoy and Eliot alike reveal the workings of that most dreadful of gods, Hap.

vengeance

How much of fantasy, I wonder, is revenge fantasy? I’m asking this question, of course, because there’s a new Tarantino movie, and revenge fantasy is His Thing. But this does seem to be one of the primary functions of the fantastic: to create fictional worlds in which moral dramas can play out in ways that the authors like — and especially in which enemies are exposed and punished.

In Tarantino’s case this tends to involve simple rewriting of history, but this mode, or perhaps mood, of storytelling can take several forms.

The future fantasy, as in The Handmaid’s Tale: My enemies don’t have absolute power right now, but if they ever got it here’s the kind of thing they would do.

The alternate worlds fantasy, as in Pullman’s His Dark Materials: In our world the Catholic Church did not rule all of Europe with an iron anti-science fist, and John Calvin did not order the execution of children, but they very easily could have and might have, and see, in this universe right next door to ours we find the cold ugly logic of their position carried to its natural conclusion.

The feigned history fantasy with allegorical overtones: In The Lord of the Rings Saruman is a modern industrialist avant le lettre, and through him Tolkien gets to demonstrate how “a mind of gears and wheels” works and the kind of damage it does if its power is unconstrained. But we also get to see how that mind undoes its own plans, and how the natural world acts to restore a proper equilibrium. There’s a palpable longing in that strand of the tale: If only something like that could happen here and now.

The satirical fantasy, as in the this-world frame-story of The Silver Chair, where Lewis develops his idea that self-consciously “modern” education produces people “without chests,” without a moral foundation, and thereby unleashes the natural human propensity to nastiness. But a visit to Narnia gives Jill and Eustace the moral clarity to see and act (rather violently!) against the absurdities of Experiment House: “For, with the strength of Aslan in them, Jill plied her crop on the girls and Caspian and Eustace plied the flats of their swords on the boys so well that in two minutes all the bullies were running like mad, crying out, ‘Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn’t fair.’”

So, again: fantasy as a means of exposing and/or punishing the author’s enemies. You could put a positive spin on this and say that fantasy is preoccupied with justice; and sometimes that would be right; Tolkien’s treatment of Saruman seems the least vengeful, largely, I think, because Saruman is so often and so explicitly given the opportunity to choose a different path than the one he settles on — an opportunity Tolkien doesn’t give to Orcs, as Auden was I think the first to note. It’s when enemies are portrayed as unreformable, as incapable of repenting or in any significant way changing, that the love of justice tends to be transformed into a crowing over their wickedness, or a delight in vengeance taken upon them.

(I got an email in response to the above from my friend Adam Roberts, and realized that I needed to be more clear. Here’s my response to Adam. I hope to develop these thoughts in more detail later.)

First of all, I think dreams of revenge are always moral — but of course are dreams of power too. We dream of revenge when we believe that some injustice has been done and we want to make it right, or at least redress it in some way, but can’t. Surely — to put it in Augustinian terms — the root of every dream of vengeance is a love of justice, even if the flowers thereof are fleurs du mal. I love that moment in Lord of the Rings when Sam tells Galadriel that if she had the Ring some nasty people would be paid out, and put in their place, to which she replies, “Yes. That is how it would begin.”

I’m thinking that one form of vengeance is exposure: I may not be able to stop you, but I can expose you. I see that in various ways in all the examples I give, but it seems to me especially clear in Atwood and Pullman. Atwood isn’t taking vengeance on reality, she’s taking vengeance on fundamentalist Christians who have done so much damage to women over the centuries. She is saying, “I will create a world which will give you the power you crave and in that way I will enable all my readers to see you for what you truly are, and to condemn you.”

We do learn at the end of the book that the Gilead Period eventually comes to an end, to be replaced by something not quite as bad perhaps, but there’s no real punishment for the wicked characters. That’s where Pullman goes a step further. Mrs Coulter and Father Gomez and Metatron are all killed, and Metatron’s afterlife Gulag is dismantled. So there is exposure — Pullman has said in interviews quite explicitly that Christians haven’t done the things that they do in his book only because they haven’t had the chance — but also punishment. We get to exult in the destruction of the wicked. (Lewis is playing the same song in a sillier arrangement when Eustace and Jill put the bullies to rout.)

posture

Was Adorno right? This is perhaps the wrong question to ask, because philosophy at its best offers not definitive answers but the encouragement to sustain a critical posture in all our questioning.

— Peter E. Gordon. I’ve been hearing some version of this line for around fifty years now. I don’t care for it. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, if the best that philosophy can offer me is to “sustain a critical posture in all [my] questioning,” then to hell with it. Because that “sustaining” would be an untrammeled good for me only if I never had to make any decisions, if I never had to act on the basis of what I believe to be true.

Far too often academics talk about philosophical ideas as though they are only contemplated by professional scholars for whom what matters is getting published, not acting decisively and consequentially in the world. “Sustaining a critical posture” is perfectly fine for them, because the position you take, or decline to take, has no necessary relevance to publication. (Though to be sure, academic life being what it is, if one wants to go beyond “problematizing” to affirmation there are many, many affirmations you’d better not make.)

This is why we have seen the creation of endeavors like the School of Life — institutions built for people who can’t stop asking the philosophical questions in which professional philosophers have no interest, because they’re too busy sustaining their critical posture. Which apparently is a full-time job.

great

Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the ground, dazed. He ran up to her to see if she was okay and pulled out his phone to call 911 — but she quickly, urgently said, “No! No! I can’t afford to go to the hospital!” And after taking a moment to gather herself, she got to her feet, picked up her damaged bike, and wobbled off.

And so my son stood there on the corner, surrounded by the glories of Chicago’s architecture, the superb expensive shops on the Magnificent Mile, the wealth that fairly pulsates from every building, and reflected, as one well might, on American Greatness.

a road not taken

Lately I have been reading some of the wartime letters of Dorothy Sayers — who, I have just learned, pronounced her name to rhyme with “stairs” — and have been constantly reminded of something that I wrote about a bit in my Year of Our Lord 1943: the complex network, centered of course in London, of Christians working outside of standard ecclesiastical channels to bring a vibrant Christian faith before the minds of the people of England in the midst of war. People like J. H. Oldham and Philip Mairet and, perhaps above all, James Welch of the BBC — who convinced Dorothy Sayers to write the radio plays that came to be called The Man Born to be King, recruited C. S. Lewis to give the broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity, and commissioned music from Ralph Vaughan Williams — ended up having an impact on the public face of English Christianity that was enormous but is now almost completely unknown.

At one point in researching my book I thought seriously about throwing out my plans and writing this story instead — but I couldn’t bear to let go of the fascinating interplay between ideas being articulated in England and their close siblings arising in the U.S., especially in New York City.

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned it here before — a quick search suggests not — but I have long dreamed of writing a book called Christian London: a history of the distinctive and often profoundly influential role that London has played in the history of Christianity. However, no one I have spoken to about this project — my agent, various editors, friends — has shared my enthusiasm. I might write it one day anyhow, and if I do, people like Oldham and Mairet and Welch will be major characters in one chapter.

here and there

As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this blog for longer reflections — long by internet standards, anyway.

From day to day you’ll find me posting to my micro.blog account — and if you haven’t checked out micro.blog, please do! People sometimes describe micro.blog as a “Twitter replacement,” but that’s not quite right. It may be better to think of it as what services like Twitter and Instagram could have been if they had been devoted to the open web and not subservient to the demands of venture capital. It’s a great place for low-key connection with others, and the best possible way to get started in blogging. It’s not free, but then Twitter and Instagram aren’t free either — those services just make you may in currencies other than money. Micro.blog serves no ads, respects your privacy, and allows you to own your turf. Try it!

I continue to post bookmarks — with useful excerpts! — at my Pinboard page, which I have been using for … [checks site] … ten years and two weeks.

Finally, I think my newsletter is pretty fun — a bit of a break from the incessant seriousness of our political moment.

the airless room

This is an interview with Kathryn Scanlan about her very peculiar new book, which is made up of selections from a person’s diary — read the interview to learn more, it’s really fascinating.

But I want to talk about a distraction from the real subject of the interview. Here’s a passage:

Etter: Now this is a question I have coming from a journalism background: what does it mean for fiction to take a real life and remix it, scramble it, and fine tune it into something that becomes non-real? What is it like to play with that?

Scanlan: A little bit weird. From the beginning, I felt like it was a weird thing I was doing. I don’t necessarily think it’s any particular genre, I think it has elements of all genres. I think it can be called fiction and I would call it that because of the way it’s been selected. If you are only showing part of something, it’s fiction. If you’re omitting lots of things, or if you’re focusing on only something particular, it’s fiction in my mind.

Etter: I think most journalists would probably agree with that definition — maybe not our president.

I read that and thought: Is there any chance of my getting through a recent essay, an article, a story, an interview, without a reference to That Man? Is it really necessary for every member of The Cultured to signal their disdain for him in every single conversation?

I want to say: He’s not sucking the air out of the room, you are.

Yes, I know, it’s just a passing comment. But when “passing comments” of that kind show up twenty times a day, it wears on a fella.

This is why I make my newsletter. It’s a place that I can guarantee will be free from that kind of thing, that will allow me and my readers to spend time in a broader world than that of posted and tweeted and retweeted political vaporing, posturing, and rancor.

Many of you will know this famous letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail: “The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Let not Adams have studied in vain.

on social acceleration

Recently I’ve read two of the most stimulating, provocative, generative books I’ve read in a long time. One of them is Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. I hope to have something to say about that in the near future.

The other, and the one I want to talk about here, is Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration. This one poses some real challenges to me, primarily because it bears so directly on the book I’m writing but is not the sort of thing — it gets deep into the weeds of social theory — that I can treat at length in a book for a general audience. So as relevant as it is to the argument of Breaking Bread with the Dead, I won’t say much about it there, though it will surely end up in the notes a few times. (One of the things I most want to do in my writing for general audiences is to translate complex work in theology, philosophy, and social, cultural, and literary theory into terms accessible to the common reader — and to do so without defacing the ideas by oversimplifying them.) 

I’ll unpack a bit of Rosa’s argument here, then. Rosa looks at the phenomenon of acceleration in three dimensions:

“technical acceleration, that is, the intentional acceleration of goal-directed processes”; 
“acceleration of social change, that is, the escalation of the rate of social change with respect to associational structures, knowledge (theoretical, practical, and moral), social practices, and action orientations”; 
“acceleration of the pace of life represents a reaction to the scarcity of (uncommitted) time resources. This is why, on the one hand, it is expressed in the experience of stress and a lack of time, and, on the other, it can be defined as an increase in the number of episodes of action and/or experience per unit of time.”

The relationship between these three dimensions, Rosa shows, is complex: after all, when you have technical acceleration, especially in the form of what we call “labor-saving devices,” shouldn’t our pace of life slow down? And yet it often doesn’t — or, perhaps more accurately, we don’t feel that it does.

Rosa also discusses various “decelerating” forces or institutions, and it’s the last of those that I want to focus on here. Unlike the deceleration of a technologically backward society with scant or no access to the most current technologies — and also unlike the deliberate choice, long term or short, of technological limitation (the family living “off the grid” or the techbro vacationing in a monastery) — this final kind of deceleration is “the paradoxical flip side of social acceleration.” Many people in our time have “the experience of an uneventfulness and standstill that underlies the rapidly changing surface of social conditions and events, one that accompanies the modern perception of dynamization from the very beginning as a second fundamental experience of modernization.” Rosa often uses in the book a phrase by the cultural theorist Paul Virilio: “frenetic standstill” — the widespread sense that the world around us is in constant flux and yet nothing essential is happening — nothing essential can happen. (There’s a fascinating section of the book on the ways that depression is a natural response to this and therefore the characteristic disease of late modernity.) 

This sense of “frenetic standstill” is especially common when the second dimension, acceleration of social change, crosses a certain threshold. Rosa looks at three social conditions, divided by two thresholds. In the first condition no obviously major change happens over several generations, or if it does happen it happens with imperceptible slowness, which lends to everyone in that society a feeling of stability, even permanence. Thus it was, thus it is, thus it shall ever be.

But when a major change occurs fast enough so that one generation of people can see that they’re living in a different form of life than their parents, or grandparents, did, then a threshold has been crossed. And Rosa argues that when this happens people tend to perceive that change as progressive: the world is going somewhere, it has a direction, and if I go with it my life can have a progressive direction too.

However: there’s another threshold to cross, as we have recently learned, and that’s when significant social change happens within a generation. Not only is your social world different than the one your parents experienced and came to count on, it’s different than the social world you experienced even a short time ago. When that happens, you see a couple getting a divorce because when they married they were “different people.” You get Farhad Manjoo feeling that the gender that he absolutely took for granted just a few years ago is now an “ubiquitous prison for the mind.” You get a Christian academic like David Gushee making a career of chastising people for holding views he himself held quite recently. And everyone thinks this kind of thing is normal: to look upon your very self of five years ago as a stranger, and presumably one for whose beliefs and actions your NowSelf cannot possibly be held responsible.

But, Rosa reminds us, we don’t really how what life on this side of that second threshold is going to do to us.

An intragenerational tempo of change thus undeniably raises the question of the temporally specific, so to speak, load-bearing capacity of cultural reproduction and social integration. The consequences of the growing intergenerational divide in lifeworld orientations and everyday practices as well as the ongoing devaluation of experience for the exchange between generations, for the passing on of cultural knowledge, and for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity have hardly been studied at all.

It hasn’t been studied, but the consequences are going to be interesting (and, I think, not pleasant) to see unfold. For instance, here’s one aspect of the “ongoing devaluation of experience for the exchange between generations, for the passing on of cultural knowledge, and for the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity”: a currently small but increasing number of parents live in absolute terror of “assigning” gender to their children. Some decades from now there will surely be some powerfully embittered people who will despise their parents for having forced such choices on them when they were wholly unprepared to make them.

And yet many of those same parents don’t hesitate to forbid the eating of meat or Twinkies or Doritos to those same children, and will be deeply grieved when, as is inevitable, some of those kids end up as junk-food junkies. So I don’t think there will ever be a wolesale abandonment of “the passing on of cultural knowledge,” or of a desire for “the maintenance of intergenerational solidarity.” But what, specifically, people will want to pass down to their children will change. And there’s no doubt that as long as social change happens, or is felt to, at the current rate, parents will want to give their children free choices as often as they can possibly bear to. The “load-bearing capacity of cultural reproduction and social integration” will continue to decline, it seems likely. 

And yet maybe not inevitable. There’s a passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia that I think of often — and that Rosa refers briefly to at one point: “Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.”