Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 228
January 6, 2019
request for permissions
Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse looks essentially the same to me as these videos that have been appearing on YouTube using copyright-unrestricted lullabies and computer graphics designed to hold the attention of infants. “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa,” for example, now has countless variations online, some of which have received over a billion hits, some of which appear to be parodies, and some of which appear to have been produced without any human input, properly speaking, at all. It is one thing to target infants with material that presumes no well-constituted human subject as its viewer; it is quite another when thirty-somethings with Ph.D.s are content to debate the merits of the Marvel vs. the DC Comics universe or whatever.
Okay, but could I please have a list of topics it’s okay for thirty-somethings with Ph.D.s to talk about? Also somewhat older people with Ph.D.s?
scruples
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that writing an eight-thousand-word world-historical explanation for why you can’t get through your to-do list is not the best use of your energies and abilities. Think about how many tasks on her to-do list Anne Helen Petersen could have accomplished in the time it took to write such an essay!
More seriously: Is this really a generation-specific problem? I too have tasks that I roll over from week to week to week, but I don’t think I need a Universal Socio-Economic Theory of Generational Paralysis to explain why. Some tasks are annoying and I’d rather do other stuff. Over the years I’ve developed some decent strategies for coping with my reluctance — most of them belonging to the structured procrastination family — but I’ve never overcome my lack of efficiency. (Ask my wife.) I’m not sure this needs or deserves a thorough explanation. Maybe a shrug is more appropriate.
Auden once wrote, “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone. The scrupuland is a nasty specimen.” I would amend that to say that the scrupuland — the overly scrupulous person — is a tired specimen. Nothing is more exhausting than ceaseless self-examination, self-reflection, self-criticism.
The word “scruple” comes from the Latin scrūpus, a rough pebble. A little pebble stuck in your sandal that the scrupuland can’t manage to ignore, try though she might. But if you can’t remove the pebble, I think continuing to try to ignore it would be preferable to writing an eight-thousand-word essay on how the pebble got there, complete with an account of the relationship between Roman roads and the transition from Republic to Empire.
If I were a full-on curmudgeon, instead of a intermittent curmudgeon, I might shout, “Get over yourself!” But that’s not the problem here: whatever might be wrong with a Petersen’s essay, it’s not too much self-regard. I do think, though, that scrupulands need to find ways to get out of themselves, to direct their gaze away, towards other human beings, towards the natural world. But that is difficult for people of any generation who are extremely online — who are, primarily through social media, always on display. When technologically-enabled self-fashioning is a 24/7 job … well, it’s very hard to get that pebble out of your shoe. Maybe those rules for auricular confession and self-examination apply also to participating in social media: Be brief, be blunt, be gone. That won’t get those items on your to-do list done, but it might allow you to think of procrastination as a normal human imperfection rather than a generational curse and a source of ongoing angst.
January 5, 2019
Serial, Season 3
I made it through three episodes, set it aside, came back to it, set it aside again. My problem: How hard Sarah Koenig and crew labor to make sure that you come to precisely the conclusions they want you to come to. It’s strange, in a way, because they also assume that you’ll share their views about everything. They know that their audience will find Judge Gauls (episode 2) just as appallingly insensitive as they do — and yet they can’t stop themselves from critiquing him again and again and again, just in case you waver, I guess. At one point in that episode Koenig reminds the audience, with evident incredulity, that an offender named Vivian had had to come back to to Judge Gauls repeatedly “for three-and-a-half years and counting, for fewer than five grams of cocaine.”
But that’s not true. Vivian keeps getting sent back to Judge Gauls primarily for theft — in one case for stealing and using a friend’s credit card. And she keeps failing drug tests too. Her situation is not about “fewer than five grams of cocaine,” even per Koenig’s own reporting. In her determination to reject Jodge Gauls’s methods and to show that Vivian would have been better off in drug court, Koenig misdescribes her own account of Vivian’s history.
Based on what Koenig & crew tell me — which is of course all I know — I’d also send Vivian to drug court. I too find Judge Gauls smug and condescending and insensitive. But why not let me come to those conclusions on my own? Why must Koenig remind me again and again and again what I ought to believe? Enough with the lecturing — just tell me a story, please. I mean, come on: they’re already editing the story in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to see these things in any way other than the way they do. The ceaseless and repetitive commentary just pounds the reader’s head with an interpretative mallet. Now I have a massive headache.
he’s always the boss
LARRY: Well, she’s, she’s seeing Sy Ableman.
RABBI SCOTT: Oh.
LARRY: She’s, they’re planning, that’s why they want the Get.
RABBI SCOTT: Oh. I’m sorry.
LARRY: It was his idea.
RABBI SCOTT: Well, they do need a Get to remarry in the faith. But this is life. For you too. You can’t cut yourself off from the mystical or you’ll be — you’ll remain — completely lost. You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will. You don’t have to like it, of course.
LARRY: The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.
RABBI SCOTT: Ha-ha-ha! That’s right, things aren’t so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry. [Rabbi Scott gazes out, marveling.] Just look at that parking lot.
— The Coen Brothers, A Serious Man
December 31, 2018
aversion, general repulsion
from
A Manual of Gesture
, by Albert M. Bacon (thanks to Richard Gibson for the link)
December 28, 2018
Science and the Good
Denunciations of “scientism” are a dime a dozen these days, but this isn’t that kind of book. (It doesn’t even use the term “scientism.”) Rather, it’s a patient and careful exploration of the question, “Can science demonstrate what morality is and how we should live?” — and more than that, a genealogy of the question. Hunter and Nedelisky (H&N) are especially skillful in exploring why and how so many people came to believe that science is the only plausible “rational arbiter” of our disputes about how best to live, individually and collectively.
The core finding of the book is that the “new science of morality” is able to use science to establish our moral path only by defining morality down — by simply ignoring ancient questions about how human beings should live in favor of a kind of stripped-down utilitarianism, a philosophically shallow criterion of “usefulness.”
Here’s a key passage from early in the book:
While the new science of morality presses onward, the idea of morality – as a mind-independent reality — has lost plausibility for the new moral scientists. They no longer believe such a thing exists. Thus, when they say they are investigating morality scientifically, they now mean something different by “morality“ from what most people in the past have meant by it and what most people today still mean by it. In place of moral goodness, they substitute the merely useful, which is something science can discover. Despite using the language of morality, they embrace a view that, in its net effect, amounts to moral nihilism.
H&N are clear that very few of these “new moral scientists” believe themselves to be nihilists, or want to be. They have fallen into it inevitably because they are not equipped to think seriously about morals. Much later in the book, H&N comment that
What is confusing [about this situation] is that the language of morality is preserved. The new moral science still speaks of what we “should“ or “should not“ do – but the meaning has been changed. Normative guidance is now about achieving certain practical ends. Given that we want this or that, what should we do in order to obtain it?
The quest, then, has been fundamentally redirected. The science of morality is no longer about discovering how we are to live – though it is still often presented as such. Rather, it is now concerned with exploiting scientific and technological know-how in order to achieve practical goals grounded in whatever social consensus can justify.
For this reason, “in their various policy or behavioral proposals, the new moral scientists never fail to recommend that was sanctioned by safe, liberal, humanitarian values.“ Science done in WEIRD societies, then, faithfully reflects WEIRD values — a phenomenon that, H&N point out, proponents of the science of morality seem constitutionally unable to reflect on. They think they are just doing science, but it it really likely that the assured results of unbiased scientific exploration will unfailingly support so consistently the policy preferences of the educated elite of one of the world’s many cultures?
It’s not likely that this book will convince many proponents of the new science of morality that their quest is quixotic; such people are deeply invested in believing themselves Objective, able to achieve the view from nowhere; moreover, the depth of our social fissures really does call out for some arbiter, and the idea that science, or SCIENCE, might be that arbiter is both attractive and superficially plausible. But upon reflection — the kind of reflection offered by this book — the claims of these new scientists become harder to sustain.
One can only hope that Science and the Good will prompt such reflection. For if we must have a morality guided by science, we need that science to be better than it currently is — and that will only happen if the moral thought prompting it is better. At the very least, we need some New Scientists of Morality to turn some of the skepticism on their own assumptions and preferences that they so eagerly devote to all previous moral traditions.
December 27, 2018
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