Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 220

advice

Almost everyone knows that one of the great banes of online life is unsolicited advice. The compulsion some people feel to advise strangers is a continual puzzlement to me. You can see it especially vividly when someone says online that she really likes X or is very much enjoying Y, where X and Y can be anything from moisturizer to a typeface. Immediately someone will hop up and say, “Have you tried Z?” — or, worse, “You should try Z.” Why should she try Z? She just told you that she’s happy with X. Leave her to her enjoyment, you obnoxious person.

But as Agnes Callard points out in this excellent essay, the giving of advice is as fraught an activity when you’re being asked for it.

When starry-eyed students come to my office to ask for tips and strategies for becoming a philosopher, I find myself cringing in anticipation of the drivel I am about to spout. My advice isn’t “bad” in the sense that it will lead them astray, but it is bad nonetheless, in that it won’t lead them anywhere. It’s as though right before I give the advice, I push a button that sucks all the informational content out of what I’m about to say, and I end up saying basically nothing at all.

And then, later in the essay:

I do not have tips or tricks for becoming a philosopher to hand over to my students; my wisdom is contained in the slog of philosophical argument — the daily grind of reading old books, picking out the premises, tearing them apart. I can make you better at that, by showing you how to do more of this and less of that. I can’t help you become a philosopher without being your philosophy teacher, any more than I can massage you without touching you. Someone who wiggles her fingers and pretends she has magical powers isn’t actually getting you anywhere.

I think this is right, and what it suggests to me is something along these lines: Useful advice can only be given in response to a very specific question. “How can I become a philosopher?” (or, as I often hear, “How can I become a writer?”) is so vague and abstract a question that no meaningful answer is possible. But if you ask me “Does this sentence make sense?” or “How am I supposed to read this article?” or “Is this a good letter of application?” then perhaps I can help.

glitches, brain farts, errors

When you publish a book and look back over it later, you will find that some things are wrong. Those wrongnesses come in three varieties:

Mechanical glitches: typos and malformatting.
Brain farts.
Actual errors.

People who have not published books are often appalled at typos, because they think their presence means that the book has been proofread carelessly or not at all. And sometimes proofreading can indeed be careless. But no reputable publisher wants books to go out with typos, so typescripts get read by several people — the author, the proofreader and/or copy editor, the book editor — and each of them pores over the typescript (and later the typeset text) several times. And yet some typos, and similar errors, always remain.

On the first page of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the gypsy Melquiades comes to Macondo carrying powerful magnets, which pull all sorts of metal things along behind them, and “even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most.” Typos are like that: they appear from where they had been searched for most. At times you’re tempted to attribute them to poltergeists. When you see them you make a note to correct them in future editions (should you be so fortunate as to have a future edition), shrug, and move on with your life.

I think of typos as mechanical problems: glitches in the mechanics of typing. These can happen in formatting too. One of the most peculiar problems I have experienced happened in the printing of my Theology of Reading, where the last two pages of the footnotes got flipped. They’re accurate but out of order. Once someone wrote to me in high dudgeon, claiming that some footnotes in the last chapter were missing and that that demonstrated my carelessness as a scholar. When I explained what had happened he wrote back in still higher dudgeon that it was outrageous that I had “allowed” so gross an error to get through. I replied that I was not present when the book was printed.

Then, sometimes you just get things wrong. Maybe you got your notes mixed up and attribute a quotation to the wrong person, maybe you thought you knew something you did not in fact know. When such errors are called to my attention, I smile a grim smile, make a note to correct the mistake in a future printing, and inwardly pledge to do better the next time.

But brain farts are the worst. A brain fart happens when you know the right thing but somehow write the wrong thing. One reviewer of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer declared that I was clearly out of my depth because I thought that Thomas Cranmer had studied at Jesus College Oxford, rather than Jesus College Cambridge. Of course I knew that Cranmer was a Cambridge man! He spent nearly thirty years at Cambridge! How could I not know that? I just had a brain fart! Thinks the skeptical reviewer, Sure you did, buddy.

And that’s why brain farts are the worst.

But sometimes they’re funny. Also in my BCP book, I mention priests bearing thurifers. In fact they bear thuribles. The thurifer is the guy who carries the thurible. So thanks to my brain fart I inadvertently conjured up an image of a priest entering the nave staggering under the weight of an altar server who, in turn, is presumably striving gamely to swing the thurible to disperse the smoke of the incense.

It strikes me that the dismissal of whole books on the basis of a few typos, or brain farts, or even factual errors is characteristic of our cultural moment, in which people tend to be categorized and defined by the worst thing they are known to have done, and often accordingly expelled from polite society. And if people, why not books? But a book is an enormously complicated project that it is simply impossible to carry out perfectly. As is life.

#ShunTheTake

Last week I walked into one of my classes to discover fourteen students sitting in complete silence. Each one of them — I believe; there may have been a single exception — was reading or typing on a phone. I said, “Hey everybody!” No one looked up or spoke. I suppose I should be grateful that when I pulled out the day’s reading quiz they put their phones away.

If I wanted to produce a #HotTake, boy, did I have a prompt for one.

But: two hours earlier I had walked into another classroom to find the students already in animated conversation about the reading for the day. I sat and listened for several minutes, gradually realizing that I could ignore my plan for the class session because the students had, without my assistance, set the agenda for the discussion.

I’d advise all of you who read this post to remember those two moments the next time someone tries to tell you what an entire generation is like. These two classes were occupied not only by people of the same generation, but by people who are studying in the same program (the Honors Program) in the same university. And yet, for complicated reasons, their behavior in my classes was very different.

Most things that happen happen for complicated reasons. Don’t stop looking and enquiring the moment you find an anecdote that confirms your priors.

#ShunTheTake

working the refs

Last Sunday afternoon, in the aftermath of the first game of the NBA playoff series between the Houston Rockets and the Golden State Warriors, there was much online huffing and puffing about whether the game’s referees had failed to call fouls against the Rockets’ James Harden and Chris Paul.

But something important was overlooked in said huffing and puffing: the fact that, whether Harden and Paul were fouled or not, they were desperately trying to get fouls called against their opponents. And that makes the last few seconds of that game a kind of parable of our cultural moment.

It’s possible that the Warriors’ Draymond Green grazed James Harden as Harden came to earth after shooting — after, that is, missing a shot quite badly, possibly because he was thinking less about making the shot than about getting the ref to believe that Green had fouled him, which he did by falling, completely unnecessarily, to the ground. The ball ended up in Chris Paul’s hands, and Paul charged into the Warriors’ Klay Thompson while flailing his arms wildly, determined to force a call. (He did not get the call, and in his rage shouldered the referee, which has earned him a fine.)

This kind of thing has, of course, long been the bane of soccer: players who might have a legitimate chance to score a goal, or at least got off a shot on goal, fling themselves to the ground and roll about in feigned agony hoping that they will get a penalty called or a yellow card assigned to the opponent.

I have come to believe that this is what almost all of our culture is about now: working the refs. Trying to get the refs, whoever the refs might be in any given instance, to make calls in our favor — to rule against our enemies and for us, and therefore justify us before the whole world.

What are students doing when they try to get speakers disinvited from their campus? Or when Twitter users try to get other Twitter users banned from the platform? Or when people try to get executives or members of some board of directors fired from their jobs? In each case, it’s an appeal to the refs. These people are not trying to persuade through reasoned argument or to attract public opinion to their side through the charm of their personality. They’re demanding that the designated arbitrators arbitrate in their favor. (Sometimes, as in the case of the college admissions, scandal, they just bribe the refs.)

And it’s easy to see why people would think this way: If I assume the point of view underlying this habit, it means that nothing that goes wrong is ever my fault. If anything that I want to go my way doesn’t go my way, it’s because the referees didn’t make the right call. It’s never because I made any dumb mistakes, or indeed had any shortcomings of any kind. Things didn’t go my way because, whether through incompetence or bias, the refs suck. I would’ve won if it hadn’t been for the stupid refs.

I think this is a particularly attractive strategy in our current moment, especially on social media. As I wrote a couple of years ago,

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.

Call-out culture has many, many mechanisms of enforcement but none of forgiveness or restoration. A culture that knows only how to punish creates an environment in which, as Freddie deBoer has said, “everyone’s a cop”; but it simultaneously creates disincentives for people to admit they they might themselves need policing. Because who wants to apply the single-sanction one-strike-and-you’re-out criterion to themselves?

These reflections might help to explain a phenomenon that Michael Lewis describes on his new podcast “Against the Rules”: that the NBA is dealing with unprecedented levels of complaint about its officials at the moment when the league gives those very officials unprecedented levels of scrutiny, and unprecedented levels of training, and unprecedented opportunities to review and correct bad calls.

If refs are doing their job better than ever and simultaneously catching more grief for their errors, that just might be a result of our expecting more of them than is reasonable. In the NBA, and also in society at large, we do better when we try to solve problems ourselves rather than try to manipulate the refs into solving them all for us. I hope the Rockets get swept by the Warriors. (And that the Warriors swept in the next round, because their moaning and bitching are almost as bad.)

UPDATE: I realized something right after I posted this — that’s always how it happens, isn’t it? — which is that by circling back to the NBA at the end of the post I elided a major distinction: The NBA refs may be “doing their job better than ever,” but that doesn’t mean that the same can be said for all our society’s referees. Indeed, many of them are doing a very bad job indeed. More on that in another post. (This is also what I get for writing a short post about an issue that needs to be treated at length.)

what dogs think

The spate of dog mind-focused books raises the question: After at least 14,000 years of living with dogs, why are we only now getting around to considering what goes on inside their heads? There are many possible explanations, but one is that in the last two decades science has discovered more about dog cognition than in the previous two centuries combined.”

— Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare. Hey folks, ever heard of a guy named Jack London? And of course, London didn’t invent the idea of a story told from a dog’s point of view. Heck, there’s a moment told from a dog’s point of view in the Odyssey.

This is what happens when you are formed, as these scholars apparently were formed, in a radically presentist soocial order: you make the most ridiculous assumptions about everyone born more than a few decades ago. The idea that people could have lived with dogs for “at least 14,000 years” without ever growing curious about what dogs think doesn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny. But then, Woods and Hare don’t give the idea a moment’s scrutiny. They unreflectively assume that all generations preceding Us were just plain stoopid.

Les Murray is dead

I am grieved to learn that Les Murray has died. For many years, if anyone asked me to name the greatest poet writing in English, I knew the answer. Now I don’t. This post is tagged with his name, as are several others on this blog — please read them, since they include some of his poems. I wrote a piece about him here. You were one of the few truly great ones, Les. Rest in peace and rise in glory.

We’re still using your imagination,

It was stronger than all ours.

the strange pleasure of the mob

What would Freud make of group minds in the digital age? I don’t think he’d be surprised by the witch hunts, call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons. On the other hand, social media allow for the creation of micro-communities and the fostering of niche interests. Digital affiliations may discourage collective action, insofar as online discourse can substitute for “live” interaction, or they may send more of us into the street – like my Canadian friends and I, stirred into action by the online calls to march on Washington. Social media may alter the way we join and negotiate our group memberships, but it’s unlikely to change our fundamental need to be part of something larger than ourselves. Humans are social animals by nature and by evolution; we thrive by working together. This will always be something of a paradox to an introvert like me, whose idea of a party is a locked door and a good book. And yet, having tasted the strange pleasures of the mob, I’m certain I could be lured out from my behind my own barricades again. For a good cause, of course.

— Sarah Henstra. One of ther major themes of my How to Think is the vital importance of distinguishing between the “mobs” and “crowds” and “Inner Rings” who discourage or forbid thinking from the kinds of groups that offer us the possibility of genuine membership and that, accordingly, encourage us to think — and are, therefore, good people to think with.

plugged into the machine

Alexis Madrigal:

As the platforms age, their devotees become more and more distinct from the regular person. For more than a decade now, many people in media and technology have been feeding an hour or two of Twitter into our brains every single day. Because we’re surrounded by people who live their lives like this — and, crucially, because so many of the journalists who write about the internet experience the internet in this way — it might feel like this is just how Twitter is, that a representative sample of America is plugged into the machine in this way.

And thus I renew my plea to journalists.

debt and forgiveness

For me, the obvious question about the proposal to forgive student loans — as made, for instance, by Astra Taylor here — is this: Why only student loans? Millions of Americans who have never attended college are being crushed by debt. Why shouldn’t something be done for them? 

Imagine how this looks to all those working-class people who aren’t sure how they’re going to pay their rent next month, who have made far too many visits to payday lenders. “We’re going to have everything we own taken away while all you super-woke people campaign to have the government pay for your MFA in set design. And you call that being progressive.”

UPDATE: Freddie’s position is the right one to take about these matters. If people who are currently focused obsessively on getting their own loans canceled took their bearings from what he says here, this conversation would be a more productive once.

Before you take seriously Bret Easton Ellis’s claim that ...

Before you take seriously Bret Easton Ellis’s claim that millennials don’t read, look at the tag on this post and read the other posts with that tag. A consistent theme of this kind of discourse is that the people with the most confident opinions about millennials and Gen Z’ers don’t spend much time around the people they have such confident opinions about. Which is also true of every other person who likes to make summative judgments about vast cohorts.