Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 55

Michael Luo in the New Yorker: In June, 2020, Keller anno...

Michael Luo in the New Yorker: 

In June, 2020, Keller announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. One of his final projects, completed earlier this year, was an eighty-three-page white paper he called “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church.” It offers a wide-ranging set of prescriptions for what he viewed as the profound afflictions of the evangelical movement, including its anti-intellectualism, its problems with race, and the politicization of the church that has “turned off half the country.” The document is an exhaustive blueprint, but the question now is who will carry it out. 

That is precisely the question. 

(Also, maybe I should annotate that white paper the way I annotated the terrific new essay on postrationalism by Tara Isabella Burton.) 

Tim Keller

Well, this is a day for tears. I don’t know Tim intimately, but he is a friend, and his presence in my life has been a great gift. When I look back through Tim’s emails to me over the years, the thread that runs through them is encouragement. The last words of his last email to me: “Main thing I wanted to say is how much I appreciate all you are doing.”

The main thing Tim wanted to say was always about someone other than himself: his mind seemed always to be focused on his family, his friends, those he pastored and mentored, and above all the God who is known to us in Jesus Christ. The criticism he received — almost all of it irrational and misinformed — slightly bemused him but otherwise left him unaffected; he had more important things to think about than his own reputation. 

In one of his last books he wrote of 

Christianity’s unsurpassed offers — a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death. 

All I can say is Amen to that. 

Above I spoke of my friendship with Tim in the present tense, for a good reason. I don’t know Tim intimately; but I hope to some day. Until then, I will miss him very much. 

the culture question revisited

I want to get back to the question of what theologians talk about when they talk about culture. Earlier entries: 

This essay by Brad East This response by me This follow-up from Brad 

In that follow-up, Brad writes, 

First, “culture” is one of those words (as Alan agrees) that is nigh impossible to pin down. You know it when you see it. You discover the sense of what a person is referring to through their use. The term itself could call forth an entire lifetime’s worth of study (and has done so). In that case, it’s reasonable simply to get on with the discussion and trust we’ll figure out what we’re saying in the process.

And yet — this intuition may well be wrong, and its wrongness may be evidenced in the very interminability of the post-Niebuhrian conversation. Granted! I’m honestly having trouble, however, imagining everyone offering a hyper-specific definition of “culture” or avoiding the term altogether. 

But I don’t think we have to choose between (a) “a hyper-specific definition” and (b) no account at all of what we’re talking about. I’d be willing to settle for something a little hand-wavy in preference to nothing. So let me do a little hand-waving of my own. 

Sometimes when people talk about “culture” they seem to mean pretty much everything that human beings do together. In such a case a theology of culture would be nearly indistinguishable from a complete theological anthropology. At other times when people talk about “culture” they seem to be talking primarily about the arts — music, literature, movies, etc. — in which case what’s called for is simply a theology of the arts. 

One of the primary reasons I find Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture — or anyway the categorical scheme deployed therein — completely useless is that he very clearly hasn’t thought about these issues at all. (As can be seen when he opposes “revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason” to culture, which he can do only if he thinks of culture as something like a stable social order — a place for “cultured” people. But that is a manifestly inadequate understanding of culture, and in any case is different than the implicit — always implicit, never explicit — understandings he gestures at in other parts of the book.) 

So let’s try this. When some hunter-gatherers try to frighten off would-be predators, that’s not yet culture. But when they designate certain persons in the group to be their protectors, and find some means — clothing, decoration, modes of address, increased shares of food — to acknowledge the distinctive social role of the protectors, then they’re making culture. This is why James Davison Hunter speaks of “‘spheres of symbolic activity,’ that is, areas of human endeavor where symbols are created and adapted to human needs.” 

But hang on — aren’t we approaching politics here? Isn’t the creation of a group or class of protectors-of-the-community a political act? Indeed it is. So we need to decide whether when we’re articulating a theology of culture we need to include political theology as a component of it. Do we want to do that? Maybe, maybe not. We could

envision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture that in turn contains a political theology. Russian dolls. Or we couldenvision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture and a conceptually distinct political theology. 

I would prefer the former, because I think politics is one of the permanent and necessary expressions of the broader and more fundamental human activity that we call culture; but as far as I can tell most theologians think of political theology and theology of culture as effectively two different things — not wholly disconnected from each other, but different enough that you can discuss one without feeling obliged to discuss the other. If you take the latter course, you can write a book the size of, say, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations; if you take the former course, you’ll need to write one the size of Augustine’s City of God. You pays your money and you takes your chance. But I think theologians need to be more explicit about the scope of their inquiries. 

For what it’s worth: I think the theology of culture we need would combine an inquiry into the character of our power-knowledge regime — a study of powers and demons — with an iconology, an account of the deployment of the images and symbols meant to govern our perceptions and affections. Which is to say, I think we need a new City of God — though one produced by many scholars working in more-or-less conscious coordination with one another. We can’t expect another Augustine. 

UPDATE: I think … I think … I think maybe I need to blog my way through the City of God. There, I said it. 

the three paths of micro.blog

I’ve written here from time to time about the excellent service known as micro.blog — and I still want to commend it to those of you who have had enough of the big social-media platforms. You have to pay for it, but you get a lot for your money, including freedom from advertising. 

Micro.blog is a highly flexible service with many intriguing features, and it may be hard for new users to decide just which ones are most useful for them. Perhaps it would help if you think of micro.blog as offering three different (though overlapping) paths, and spend some time considering which path best meets your needs. 

Path One: Community. For many users, micro.blog is a smallish community of like-minded people — a place to connect with interesting folks, in a much more low-key and undramatic way than what places like Facebook and Twitter (and even Mastodon) offer. If you go to the Discover page you’ll find something that looks like this: 

That’s a great way to find people who share your interests. 

Path Two: Blog. Micro.blog is also a great blogging platform. It was, as its name suggests, originally designed for small posts, but it scales up to posts of any size. When your post gets longer than 300 characters, you get the option to add a title to the post; then people looking at your timeline will see that title as a link, which they can click on to see the full post. Micro.blog also offers categories that you can use to organize different kinds of posts. Basically, it can replace any of the cruftier and less agile blog platforms, like WordPress — but it has a much more streamlined and elegant UI for posting. Best of both worlds, I think. (For longer posts, like this one, I still use the WordPress-powered blog you’re reading, because I have 15 years of tags here, but for everything else I use micro.blog because it provides such a comfortable environment for writing.) 

Path Three: Journal. This has become my primary way to use micro.blog. I mainly post (a) photos, (b) links to what I’ve been reading — micro.blog is definitively the best blogging platform for readers — and listening to, and (c) the occasional brief audio post (AKA microcast). It’s a great way for me to share what I’m up to for folks who may be interested — but also, and for me primarily, to keep a kind of life journal. 

Here’s the key takeaway for you: Micro.blog is equally useful for each of these paths. So if you start out using it just for blogging but then decide you want more of an interactive community, you can shift in that direction. It will accommodate your needs. Now, as I have said before, it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing. Micro.blog is better suited for the more human and humane paths I have identified here. 

Book Review: Heidegger in Ruins

Richard Wolin’s Heidegger in Ruins is a compelling synthesis of what scholars have learned about Heidegger over the past decade – and also an account of what has been known about him all along, but rarely directly confronted. Indeed, the greatest value of the book is not what it tells us about Heidegger, but rather what it shows about the fecklessness and dishonesty of a certain wing of the academic enterprise.

Wolin patiently lays out a series of claims and defends them in great detail:

Heidegger persisted all his life in loyalty to the key principles of National Socialism, especially the conviction that the German people are the world’s chosen Volk and the corresponding belief in what he called “world Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality.”When confronted with his history of unswerving commitment to Nazi principles, Heidegger consistently took evasive action, declaring himself one of the victims of the regime. (For instance, he often said that he had to make his criticisms indirectly because the Gestapo was surveilling him.)He pursued his self-defense through two strategies: addition and omission. That is, he added self-exculpatory passages to texts that had been written in the Nazi era, and then claimed that they had been there all along; and, in other cases, he removed incriminating passages when he had works of that period re-published later in his life. In one case he claimed that he had said something critical of National Socialism, and when it was pointed out that the transcript of his lecture contained no such statement, he countered that he couldn’t account for that but that the statement was definitely in his manuscript. When the manuscript was inspected, the relevant page was missing. This kind of thing happened over and over again.Editors of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works) – several of whom are members of Heidegger’s own family, including first his son and now his grandson – have consistently aided and abetted Heidegger’s own obfuscations. For instance, in one lecture Heidegger uses the abbreviation “N. soz.”; the lecture’s editor helpfully explains that this means not Nationalsozialismus but rather, somehow, Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences). And in the 1980s, when Peter Trawny was preparing an edition of Heidegger’s lectures, the philosopher’s literary executors pressured him to silently delete the phrase I quote above: “world Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality.” Their pressure worked, as Trawny admitted – but he didn’t admit it until 2014.

This last point is perhaps the most interesting and significant one. Wolin convincingly argues that “As a result [of such additions and omissions], for decades, the public has been presented with a misleading, politically ‘sanitized’ image of Heidegger’s thought: a bowdlerized version in which Heidegger’s profascist political allegiances have been extensively airbrushed.”

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. “Much of the damage that has been done appears to be irreparable,” because no one outside the Heidegger “family business,” as Wolin calls it, can edit the Gesamtausgabe, and “as far as the numerous translations and foreign-language editions of Heidegger’s works are concerned, from a publishing standpoint, it is essentially too late too cumbersome and too expensive to implement the requisite corrections and emendations.” He thus concludes,

As a result, for the foreseeable future, generations of students encountering Heidegger’s work for the first time will be exposed to editorially doctored, politically cleansed versions of Heidegger’s thought. These significantly flawed texts have, meretriciously, become the de facto standard editions.

Moreover, in the voluminous secondary literature on Heidegger, this web of editorial deception is rarely mentioned. Were it acknowledged, it would risk exposing a deliberate policy of textual manipulation that, by masking the philosopher’s ideological loyalties, has sought to marginalize fundamental questions bearing on the intellectual and moral integrity of his work.

Therefore, many of those defending Heidegger, especially if they have read him in English translations have never seen the whole of what he actually wrote; they have only seen the sanitized versions. 

One of the chief airbrushers over the decade since the publication of Heidegger’s revelatory and appalling Black Notebooks – which make it abundantly clear just how obsessed Heidegger was for the last fifty years of his life by the belief in German cultural superiority, its vocation to save the world – has been Giorgio Agamben, who has said that “Si tout propos critique ou négatif sur le judaïsme, même contenus dans des notes privées, est condamné comme antisémite, cela équivaut à mettre le judaïsme hors langage” – “If any critical or negative statement about Judaism, even in private notes, is condemned as anti-Semitic, that is the equivalent to putting Judaism outside of language.” But if the claim that Jews have a “predisposition to planetary criminality” – a claim that was not made in une note privée but rather in a public lecture – is not anti-Semitic, then what is it? Does Agamben really want to insulate such statements from critique? Apparently he does. But this is to put not Judaism but rather anti-Semitism hor langage.

Much of this airbrushing, by Agamben and many others, has been built around the insistence that critics of Heidegger are over-interpreting common words. Blut just means “blood,” Boden just means “soil,” Heimat just means “home,” and Führer is the common German word for “leader.”

(As Wolin points out, Führer is one German word for “leader,” another one being Leiter – why does Heidegger always choose the former? I would suggest that you can get a clue by reading Max Weber’s famous 1917 lecture “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” or “Science as a Vocation,” in which he sternly warns students against the desire for ein Führer – by which he clearly means not a plain old leader but a charismatic figure who will give your life purpose and direction.)

Wolin patiently works his way through these and other words, repeatedly showing us the very distinctive character certain previously ordinary German words assumed under Nazism. Wolin points out that in his 1946 book The Myth of the State, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer had mused on what Nazism had done to the German language:

If nowadays I happen to read a German book, published in these last ten years, not a political but a theoretical book, a work dealing with philosophical, historical, or economic problems — I find to my amazement that I no longer understand the German language. New words have been coined; and even the old ones are used in a new sense; they have undergone a deep change of meaning. This change of meaning depends upon the fact that those words which formerly were used in a descriptive, logical, or semantic sense, are now used as magic words that are destined to produce certain effects and to stir up certain emotions. Our ordinary words are charged with meanings; but these new-fangled words are charged with feelings and violent passions.

The defenders of Heidegger’s use of these “magic words” have to assume, and have to encourage us to assume, that Heidegger was somehow ignorant of or indifferent to this change in the character of the German language — deaf to the “magic words.” As early as 1939, Heidegger’s former student Karl Löwith wrote – though he did not then publish – an essay showing how implausible such an idea was:

Given the significant attachment of the philosopher to the climate and intellectual habitus of National Socialism, it would be inappropriate to criticize or exonerate his political decision in isolation from the very principles of Heideggerian philosophy itself. It is not Heidegger, who, in opting for Hitler, “misunderstood himself;” instead, those who cannot understand why he acted this way have failed to understand him.

Heidegger understood the Nazi language and the habitus it embodied and reflected; and he wholly endorsed the whole package — and, Löwith says, did not simply do so personally but also as a thinker. If belief in Heidegger’s innocence was implausible to a knowledgable observer in 1939, it is, as Wolin patiently and thoroughly shows, completely indefensible today.

Finally: I should mention something in Wolin’s argument that troubles me personally. I am among those who have found some value in the critique of technology that Heidegger developed in the decade or so after the end of World War II. But Wolin indicates that already in the 1950s a young philosopher named Jürgen Habermas had called the logic of Heidegger’s critique into question: By arguing that the real crisis of the mid-twentieth century was “the planetary imperialism of the technically organized human beings,” the rise of technology as “the instrument for total … dominion over the earth,” Heidegger was implicitly reducing the significance of the Holocaust, reducing the guilt of the German Volk. And not always implicitly: in his “Bremen Lectures” of 1949, he straightforwardly claimed that “mechanized agriculture [is] in essence, the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps.” A farmer sitting on a tractor and a German soldier shoving emaciated Jews into a gas chamber – who can say which is the more wicked? I am always drawn to a strong critique of modern technology, but Wolin’s account makes me wonder what that inclination might have led me to overlook. This is a point I may develop in future posts. 

Study of a Kingfisher, with dominant Reference to Colour,...

Study of a Kingfisher, with dominant Reference to Colour, by John Ruskin

Scott Alexander:If you could really plug an AI’s intellec...

Scott Alexander:

If you could really plug an AI’s intellectual knowledge into its motivational system, and get it to be motivated by doing things humans want and approve of, to the full extent of its knowledge of what those things are3 – then I think that would solve alignment. A superintelligence would understand ethics very well, so it would have very ethical behavior. 

Setting aside the whole language of “motivation,” which I think wildly inappropriate in this context, I would ask Alexander a question: Are professors of ethics, who “understand ethics very well,” the most ethical people? 

The idea that behaving ethically is a function or consequence of understanding is grossly misbegotten. Many sociopaths understand ethics very well; their knowledge of what most people believe to be ethical behavior is essential to their powers of manipulation. There is no correlation between understanding ethics and living virtuously. 

locating intellectuals

In his great book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Wilken writes: 

In an age in which thinkers of all kinds, even poets, are creatures of the academy, it is well to remember that most of the writers considered in this book were bishops who presided regularly at the celebration of the Eucharist, the church’s communal offering to God, and at the annual reception of catechumens in the church through baptism at Easter. The bishop also preached several times a week and could be seen of a Wednesday or Friday or Saturday as well as on Sunday seated before the Christian community expounding the Sacred Scriptures. Some of the most precious sources for early Christian thought are sermons taken down in shorthand as they were being preached in the ancient basilicas. In them the bishop speaks as successor of the apostles to a community that looks to him as teacher and guide. For intellectuals of this sort, even when they were writing learned tomes in the solitude of their studies, there was always a living community before their eyes. Faithfulness, not originality, was the mark of a good teacher. 

This reminds me that his his biography of Lesslie Newbigin, Geoffrey Wainwright comments that the bishop-theologian was once a common type of Christian intellectual, indeed in some senses the characteristic type — but that is no longer the case: 

Christian theology is more immediately a practical than a speculative discipline, and such speculation as it harbors stands ultimately in the service of right worship, right confession of Christ, and right living. Right practice demands, of course, critical and constructive reflection, and the best Christian theology takes place in the interplay between reflection and practice. That is why honor is traditionally given to those practical thinkers and preachers who are designated “Fathers of the Church.” Most of them were bishops who, in the early centuries of Christianity, supervised the teaching of catechumens, delivered homilies in the liturgical assembly, oversaw the spiritual and moral life of their communities, gathered in council when needed to clarify and determine the faith, and took charge of the mission to the world as evangelistic opportunities arose. A figure of comparable stature and range in the ecumenical twentieth century was Lesslie Newbigin. 

I have often written about the ways in which the modern university is built on perverse incentives, and, putting that together with these comments on bishops, I am mulling over two questions: 

Should Christians look primarily to scholars and thinkers outside the academy for theological leadership? Should our society in general look primarily to scholars and thinkers outside the academy for intellectual leadership? 

Or, more concisely: Where are the thinkers who always have “a living community before their eyes”? 

without principle

‘The Godfather of AI’ Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead:

Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore. 

As someone who has been writing for some years now about what I call the Oppenheimer Principle, I find this moment piquant. 

But I was also troubled by President Biden’s Grandpa Joe moment when he wandered into a meeting between the Vice-President and the nation’s leading professional sociopaths and then asked those sociopaths to “educate us.” Ah well. It could be worse, and we all know how it could be worse. 

cosplaying Kingship

In a much-celebrated essay on King Lear, Stephen Greenblatt writes about theatrical costumes: 

During the Reformation Catholic clerical garments – the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts – were sold to the players. An actor in a history play taking the part of an English bishop could conceivably have worn the actual robes of the character he was representing. Far more than thrift is involved here. The transmigration of a single ecclesiastical cloak from the vestry to the wardrobe may stand as an emblem of the more complex and elusive institutional exchanges that are my subject: a sacred sign, designed to be displayed before a crowd of men and women, is emptied, made negotiable, traded from one institution to another. Such exchanges are rarely so tangible; they are not usually registered in inventories, not often sealed with a cash payment. Nonetheless they occur constantly, for through institutional negotiation and exchange differentiated expressive systems, distinct cultural discourses, are fashioned.

What happens when the piece of cloth is passed from the Church to the playhouse? A consecrated object is reclassified, assigned a cash value, transferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage. The theater company is willing to pay for the object not because it contributes to naturalistic representation but because it still bears a symbolic value, however attenuated. On the bare Elizabethan stage costumes were particularly important – companies were willing to pay more for a good costume than for a good play – and that importance in turn reflected the culture’s fetishistic obsession with clothes as a mark of status and degree. 

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was a genuinely sacral occasion; the coronation of her son will be a theatrical one. The regalia of sacred Christian kingship has been sold to the players — because they, and their international television audience, are the only ones interested. 

But perhaps, through the scrim of spectacle and costume, some observers will catch a glimpse of what the whole business once meant, a brief vision of something I’ve written about occasionally here: the deep human longing for a righteous anointed King. 

P.S.

This “deep human longing for a righteous anointed King” is central to my argument for anarchism. But an explanation of that will have to wait for another day.