Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 38

self-repair

Michael Torevell, News of Great Joy, mixed media and digital painting, 2022 

Rowan Williams:

The basic form of the sin from which we need to be delivered is the myth of self-sufficiency. The diabolical urge that destroys our well-being again and again is the temptation to think of ourselves as somehow able to set our own agenda in isolation, and the greatest and most toxic paradox that results is that we become isolated from our own selves. We don’t and can’t know what we are as participants in the symphonic whole, and so we block off or screen out the life we need to receive, refusing to share the life we need to give. We live shrunken, hectic, short-term lives, stuck in futile conflicts and vacuous rivalries. We refine our skill at identifying other human lives, as well as the entire nonhuman environment, as competitors for space, forces that will, left to themselves, diminish rather than enrich us. We need to be healed from this habitual screening-out.

This means that the “repair” involved in Christ’s coming in flesh is a repair of our relation to ourselves.

This Plough issue on Repair is really wonderful. I expect I will post on other essays from it.

brokenism

“Everything is Broken,” Alana Newhouse wrote in an essay that I see quoted all the time. But of course when you look into the essay and into other essays that quote it approvingly, you come to understand that by “everything” they don’t mean everything, and by “broken” they don’t mean broken. They mean something like “Our dominant political and cultural institutions don’t function nearly as well as they should.” But that doesn’t sound as interesting, does it? “Everything is broken” is not a defined claim; still less is it an argument. It’s a cry of frustration. 

Matthew Crawford on a broken tail light that cost $5600 t...

Matthew Crawford on a broken tail light that cost $5600 to repair:

On this particular luxury pickup truck, moisture in the tail light caused the usual corrosion, making resistance on the circuit go out of range. This circuit is in communication with many other circuits, so electrical gremlins propagated (probably reading as ground faults) and eventually the truck was completely dead. At this stage, identifying the root cause of the breakdown was no trivial task. But most of the $5,600 charge for getting the truck running was for parts confined to the tail-light housing, not the diagnostic and parts-swapping labor. Commenting on this case, another YouTube mechanic named Uncle Tony points out that salvage yards are full of recent model cars that are in great shape — mechanically sound and rust-free, with good interiors and good paint — but underwater on repair costs due to electronic complexity. 

Presumably the carmakers want us to realize that (a) we can’t repair our cars ourselves, (b) can’t afford to have them repair our cars, and (c) therefore must buy a new car from them — just because of a broken tail light. 

I’m gonna do my best to keep my 10-year-old car for another ten years. 

Future Mann

I don’t know how many people read my recent series of posts on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — but then, I don’t know how many people read any of my posts, because I don’t have analytics enabled on this site. I always write under the assumption that I have somewhere between 40 and 50 readers. Anyway, I have been reading much more by and about Thomas Mann, focusing especially on the decade he lived in America — the 1940s, more or less — and have been fascinated by the ways that that period of Mann’s life, and what he wrote and spoke in those years, connects with the major themes of my own writing. So I will be returning to Herr Mann.

But not immediately. I have classes to finish, and then between now and the end of January I’ll be trying to finish a draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost. So I’ll be setting aside my work on Mann in the interests of Getting Things Done, and in the coming weeks blogging will be inconsistent and desultory, though there will be, as always, a drizzle of links and images at my micro.blog page.

bring back the blog

Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I was still on Twitter. I was misquoted there. I’m probably still being misquoted there, but I don’t have an account any more, so I can’t be sure. Anyway: people regularly attributed to me this statement: “The internet is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.” In fact, I never said that or wrote that. (It would never have been true anyway that the internet was the friend of information.) But I did say something rather like that, though using a word that in the intervening almost-two-decades has disappeared: in an essay for the late, lamented Books & Culture, I wrote, “Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.”

The blogosphere?

Yeah. It was a word, I didn’t make it up. The blogosphere, at least as I used the term in that essay, had two major aspects. First, in those days before social media, there were bloggers – some professional, some amateur – who used their blogs the way that many people would later use Twitter: they blogged all day every day. Two of the most famous bloggers of that era were Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit), and while Sullivan eventually took a different tack, and came to lament the effects of such constant rapid-fire posting on his mental and physical health, instapundit.com is still cranking out the posts, though not all of them are by Glenn Reynolds. I am writing these words a little after 2pm on an ordinary Monday, and a quick check informs me that there have been 52 posts so far today.

The second element of the blogosphere was: comments. Almost every big blog had a robust, not to say mob-like, comments section, and while many of us tend to think that comments were killed by social media, most of those 52 Instapundit posts from today have more than 100 comments, and an Open Thread post that went up last night has 1723 comments and counting. (“Whatever happened to Camel Jockey?” one commenter asks. “He just quit posting.” Apparently he’s one of the few.) And while many of the old-school blogs are dead and gone, a surprising number of them remain active, and still have a multitude of commenters. In turns out that social media did not kill blogs, but just co-opted the discourse about blogs. Once journalists got addicted to Twitter, they stopped paying attention to what was happening elsewhere — but that didn’t stop it from happening.

So when I wrote about the blogosphere I meant these two things: rapid-fire hour-by-hour posting coupled with lots of comments. And my point, in making that statement so often misquoted, was simply that you could get a great deal of information from those bloggers – Sullivan and Reynolds in those days rarely linked to fake news – but because the pace was so fast, because the bloggers and their commenters alike were responding so quickly to so many stories, there was no time to think.

I wrote that little essay at almost exactly the moment that Twitter went public. Soon thereafter (I signed up for Twitter in March of 2007) I learned more than I had ever thought it was possible to know about responding without thinking. The blogosphere was, though I didn’t know it in 2006, the least of our worries.

But of course, not all blogs belonged to the blogosphere, as I was using the term in that essay. The original blogs, or “web logs,” were just lists of links to interesting things a person had found on the nascent internet. But then – especially after the creation of the Movable Type web publishing software in 2001 – the blog became, for many people, especially those who didn’t aspire to journalism, a kind of online diary or journal. And while I don’t want to bring back the blogosphere, I definitely want to bring back the blog.

Now that the white-hot fire of Twitter is burning itself out, and its various alternatives (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon) are generating merely gentle (or sputtering) flames, and TikTok (which is not a social-media site in any meaningful sense but rather a media-consumption platform) is still going nova, this is the time for people to rediscover the pleasures of blogging – of writing at whatever length you want, and posting photos, and embedding videos, and linking to music playlists, all on your little corner of the internet.

Let’s bring back the blog. And leave all the bad things spawned by the blogosphere to social media, where they belong. 

a Beatly note

One of the many provocative (or brilliant) (or crazy) assertions Ian MacDonald makes is his Revolution in the Head concerns the relationship between the personnel of a band and the band’s songwriting. MacDonald’s entry on “Helter Skelter” begins thus: 

The ‘heavy metal’ idiom of the Seventies originated in the mid-Sixties switch from the low-volume standard pop four-piece to the vastly amplified rock ‘power trio’, a format change in which the redundant rhythm guitarist was replaced by turning up the bass, close-miking the drums, and adding a range of signal-distortion effects to the lead guitar. Led by groups like The Who, Cream, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, this move was, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of bigger and better amps and speakers designed for larger and more remunerative venues. Yet the loss of the craft of the rhythm guitarist was soon felt in a degradation of texture and a decline in overall musical subtlety. Rhythm guitarists were usually songwriters, and the variety of articulation and accenting techniques they used also shaped their compositions. The average power trio, lacking such a musical brain, was in effect an excuse to replace songs with riffs and discard nuance for noise. 

Is this claim true? Even though I’ve thought about it a lot since I’ve first read it, I’m still not sure. But here’s an interesting data point. In his biography of John Lennon, Philip Norman quotes George Martin on how different John and Paul were in their songwriting practices:

“Paul would think of a tune and then think ‘What words can I put to it?’ John tended to develop his melodies as the thing went along. Generally he built up a song on a structure of chords which he would ramble and find on his guitar until he had an interesting sequence. After that, the words were more important than anything else. They used to come out sometimes as a monotone, just one note punctuated by the rhythm of the words. He never set out to write a melody and put lyrics to it. He always thought of the structure, the harmonic content and the lyrics first, and the melody would then come out of that.” 

And it makes sense that a rhythm guitarist, who spends most of his time playing chords — and maybe also looking for some new or different chords to play — might be especially attentive to “the structure, the harmonic content.” And that in turn might lead to songs with unexpected chord progressions, which John Lennon’s songs have plenty of. 

As I’ve noted before, guitarists who play in standard tuning are helped in this search by certain elementary principles of physics: among the common chords (“cowboy chords”) the two easiest to make are D major and A minor. And once you’ve gripped one of those it’s the easiest thing in the world to slide up a couple of frets to see what that sounds like. And then maybe a couple of frets more. You can find some weird and wonderful harmonies that way. And new chords and new harmonies are what the rhythm guitarist needs — unlike the lead guitarist, who has other business to attend to, business that doesn’t often result in the discovery of an unexpected melody. 

Venkatesh Rao:Despite its very different political-econom...

Venkatesh Rao:

Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate. And it’s hard to blame any particular party in the picture. The technical decisions that lead to the sort of messy problem that afflicted this site can’t be attributed to malice, objectionable politics, or billionaires behaving badly. They’re within the band of ordinary technology management decisions I see all over the place in my consulting work. Humans are just not good at building complex technologies that mature to a graceful immortality. The WordPress-based blogosphere is at the outer limit of complexity we are capable of getting to. 

As someone committed to blogging, I worry about this — especially the “aging people who maintain it” problem. When people who blog, or even who once blogged, retire, will engineers from the post-blogging social-media era think that a platform like this is worth saving? 

Scott Alexander suggesting the criteria that make someone...

Scott Alexander suggesting the criteria that make someone an Effective Altruist:

1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field.

2. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree.

3. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON’T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY’RE “OBVIOUS” BUT THEN NOT DO THEM! 

Alexander then says, “I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists.” I don’t know how we’d go about measuring that, but I know a great many people who do all three of these things and none of them call themselves effective altruists; I suspect that very few of them have ever heard the term “Effective Altruism.” (For instance, I have been involved in many debates within churches about what charitable organizations to support, and those have invariably been serious conversations that involve, among other things, close scrutiny not just of those organizations’ mission statements but also of their financial reports.) Like many people who either live in Silicon Valley or dwell in the penumbra of its culture, Alexander has no idea how tiny his bubble is; nor is he aware of how many thoughtful givers to charity there are in the world.  

works for me

I find this interesting: John Gruber reports that more of his listeners on The Talk Show use Overcast than Apple Podcasts. I used to love Overcast, but about three years ago it simply stopped playing podcasts in the queue. No matter what was in the queue or how I had added it, Overcast played the current podcast and then stopped. So I had to abandon it for Apple Podcasts. 

By the way, I’m mentioning this here rather than on micro.blog because of a Law of Social Media Life: Every time a person reports that an app or a device isn’t working for them, people reply to say “Works for me.” Which is strange, if you think about it. I mean, if someone writes “I broke my leg yesterday,” people don’t reply “My leg is just fine.” 

conceptual Marxism

In most respects, the concerns of Marx & Engels are very different than those of today’s Left, but in certain other respects their work, especially in the Communist Manifesto, provide a template for almost all Leftist thought. There are three especially important ways in which they provide such a template.

One: M & E write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical. One class oppresses the other. There are no negotiations, no balance of powers, no possibility of collaboration or reconciliation. Moreover, “the history of class struggles” is the only history – it’s not the main event, it’s the one event. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists.

Two: Oppressors do nothing but oppress. It is their only form of action. Thus, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Oppressors do not – indeed cannot – love children. They can only exploit and oppress children, both theirs and the children of others. It is not possible for the oppressor class to have virtues.

Three: Communism, as Marx & Engels articulate it, is anti-humanistic. That is to say, they have no category of “the human.” As Edmund Wilson points out in To the Finland Station, their contemporaries the Communist League (also known as the League of the Just) adopted the motto “All Men Are Brothers.” This idea Marx & Engels strenuously repudiate. “Workers of the world, unite!” – and unite against your class enemies, with whom you cannot be reconciled, whom you must utterly destroy. A version of genocide – class being the marker of gens – is baked into the system.

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter.