Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 63

unstacked

This afternoon, after I got some dreary-but-necessary work done, I took some time to browse through a goodly number of Substack newsletters that various folks have recommended. Now, this is by no means a random sample of Substacks, so I don’t claim any general validity for the judgments I am about to make. But in reading through a whole bunch of these newsletters, I noticed two major themes: 

The great majority of these writers consider themselves to be the World’s Greatest Expert in something. They truly believe they know more than anyone else about how to fix AI, or what various literary classics really mean, or how to renew Christendom, or who the next POTUS will be. Again, no random sample here, but holy moly is there a lot of pontificating, asserting from on high, dictating, declaring. Is there some narcissism-elevating chemical in the Substack water? I ask because while there are obnoxious bloggers — that is to say, other writers who don’t have editors — they do not, in my experience, nearly as often assume the tone of relentlessly pedagogical arrogance that characterizes many of the Substacks I’ve been reading.     Almost all of them write four times more posts than they have ideas to fill.  

There are probably some hidden Substack gems out there, but … then again, maybe not. Please don’t recommend any to me. 

UPDATE: I’m thinking maybe this is the value proposition of Substack — i.e. You should pay me money because I am bringing something super-special that you can’t get anywhere else. There might be a little more of that tone among Substackers who haven’t already made a career elsewhere. If you’re already known quantity, then perhaps you can afford to be a little more modest. 

Yair Rosenberg:In 2013, Google shut down its celebrated R...

Yair Rosenberg:

In 2013, Google shut down its celebrated RSS client, Google Reader, citing a decline in RSS usage. Today, millions of people still use RSS readers, but many times more use social-media sites and don’t even know that RSS exists. This imbalance means that media outlets and other content providers have greater incentive to invest in social-media infrastructure rather than RSS support, leading some to drop the latter entirely. But though the internet’s creative output deserves our attention, social-media companies do not. When the primary way we read online is filtered through the algorithms of capricious corporations that can change what we see on a whim, both writers and readers suffer. RSS is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Long-time readers know that I’ve been preaching this message for years and years (see the “RSS” tag at the bottom of this post). If you don’t believe me maybe you’ll believe Yair.

the sovereignty of mercy

In his sixth-and-lastly LOTR post, Adam Roberts graciously responds to my recent attempts to correct his errors, and this leads him into some fascinating territory, e.g. “the lack, or apparent lack, of the death penalty in Middle Earth.” 

I can think of two examples in LOTR of a death penalty having been decreed, and they come close together: those who wander in Ithilien without the permission of the Lord Steward of Gondor, and those who come to Henneth Annûn, the Forbidden Pool, are alike to be killed. Yet Faramir overrides both decrees, in the full knowledge that his decisions, if his father hears about them, could cost him his own life. What underlies those decisions he explains to Sam, when the young hobbit rashly challenges Faramir’s treatment of Frodo: 

‘Patience!’ said Faramir, but without anger. ‘Do not speak before your master, whose wit is greater than yours. And I do not need any to teach me of our peril. Even so, I spare a brief time, in order to judge justly in a hard matter. Were I as hasty as you, I might have slain you long ago. For I am commanded to slay all whom I find in this land without the leave of the Lord of Gondor. But I do not slay man or beast needlessly, and not gladly even when it is needed. Neither do I talk in vain. So be comforted. Sit by your master, and be silent!’  

That is, Faramir has internalized the very standards that, as Adam notes, Gandalf articulates in the second chapter of the whole novel, “The Shadow of the Past”: the sovereignty (among moral imperatives) of pity and mercy. Faramir is indeed what his father accuses him of being: “a wizard’s pupil.” 

“Sovereignty” is a key concept here, as Carl Schmitt realized when he said that the sovereign is whoever or whatever can “declare the state of exception.” Faramir is assuming a local sovereignty when he overrides the death penalty in these two cases — as, by the way, do Eomer (when he allows Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas to ride free in the Mark rather than bring them back to Theoden) and Háma, the doorward of Theoden: 

‘The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age, said Háma. He looked hard at the ash-staff on which Gandalf leaned. ‘Yet in doubt a man of worth will trust to his own wisdom. I believe you are friends and folk worthy of honour, who have no evil purpose. You may go in.’ 

So you can see that one of the great themes in the middle two books of the novel is the necessity of wisdom — of prudential judgment that overrides the letter of the law. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that any law is necessarily deficient because of its generality, so wise rulers will need to develop the virtue of ἐπιείκεια (epieikeia), a word impossible to translate: in many contexts it means clemency, gentleness, or, yes, mercy, but Aristotle seems to mean something broader: perhaps discretion is the best one-word translation. But discretion will typically, for Aristotle, involve relaxing or modulating the demands of the law. In any case, again and again in LOTR the success of our heroes depends on their encountering people in power who manifest such ἐπιείκεια. 

But what is the origin of the laws they they thus relax? It seems that in every case they arise from personal decrees by rulers. (Denethor speaks and it is so.) Because the Shire doesn’t have a ruler, the hobbits who live there seem to depend not on law at all but rather custom. The law in any sense recognizable to us — an entity like the Code of Hammurabi or the Mosaic law — doesn’t appear to exist in Middle-Earth. 

And I wonder if this absence of Law-as-such is related to the (oft-noted) absence of Religion-as-such. Our word religion comes from the Latin religio which in turn probably comes from religare, to bind. N.B.: to bind — the One Ring as the One Religion and One Law of Middle-Earth in the Third Age. It is noteworthy that most of the various decrees which good men exercise their ἐπιείκεια to relax were created in response to the increasing power and ambition of Mordor. Those who act wisely in this book seem to be aware, perhaps not quite consciously, that decrees made in order to respond to Mordor will likely be tainted by Mordor’s logic of power. Eomer and Háma and especially Faramir seem to intuit another logic, a greater logic of ἐπιείκεια that comes not from the decrees of the sovereign but rather … well, from where? 

When I teach The Lord of the Rings I take my students through the book’s oddly pervasive use, in certain circumstances, of the passive voice. Gandalf  tells Frodo that he and Bilbo were meant to find the Ring; Frodo asks, “Why was I chosen?” — by whom, we wonder; Elrond tells the council gathered at Rivendell that they were called there (“though I did not call you.”) There are many more examples. Says Gandalf, “Behind that” — Bilbo’s finding of the Ring — “there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker.” But what? No one seems to know, though perhaps Gandalf does know and is reluctant (or forbidden) to say. But whatever it is, it seems to whisper of the sovereignty of mercy above that of legal decree. It shows us a world in which penalties of death are declared, but are then abrogated by the wise and kind. A world in which Schmitt’s “state of exception” is indeed declared, but not by the power-hungry — rather, by the merciful, and at whatever cost to them. 

Claude Monet, The Thames below Westminster

Claude Monet, The Thames below Westminster

“What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises over Amari...

“What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises over Amarillo do you not see a series of metal pylons connected to the electrical grid O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host raising their arms in praise and crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Turns 50 – by Ted Gioi...

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Turns 50 – by Ted Gioia:

Pynchon may still have many admirers, but few who are willing to follow in his footsteps. Even an explicitly Pynchonian novel of more modern times, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, eventually rests its fictive universe on a compassionate, humanistic foundation, one that has no equivalent in Pynchon’s worldview. If Pynchon’s books were boats, they would be ones without a sea floor on which to set anchor. 

Ted is wrong about this, as I explain at some length — as in fifteen thousand words — in a forthcoming essay for the Hedgehog Review: “The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian.”  

See also one of my favorites among my own essays, “Filth ...

See also one of my favorites among my own essays, “Filth Therapy.” 

I appreciate the respectful tone of this essay, but … I g...

I appreciate the respectful tone of this essay, but … I guess I am bemused by the widespread feeling that the American South needs to be explained. (And is susceptible to explanation.) The view seems to be that people born elsewhere — Iowa, in Jeff Taylor’s case — constitute a norm from which the South is in various ways, some good and some bad, a deviation. Taylor is a native midwesterner who lived in the South for three years and is now explaining it; I am a native Alabaman who lived in northern Illinois for twenty-nine years, but it would never occur to me to write an essay explaining the Midwest. 

David Hockey, from A Rake’s Progress (1963)

David Hockey, from A Rake’s Progress (1963) 

Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Nor...

Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?:

Most professors, students said, grasp that the American campus has changed—big time. That the paradigm has shifted. Professors want a comfortable perch that looks nice on their résumés where they can write their articles and books and get ahead—just like the students want to get ahead, just like the universities want to get ahead. (Sam Beyda, the Columbia economics major, pointed out that his own school’s administration had been accused of manipulating data to game the U.S. News & World Report rankings.)

A recent Yale University graduate said his professors had encouraged him to get diagnosed with ADHD so he could get more time to finish homework or take exams. One student he knew received extra time for “academic-induced depression.” He smirked when he said it. 

I hear from my fellow professors all the time that recent technologies (and not just the new chatbots) have simply exposed for all to see the heretofore unspoken deal between teachers and students: We pretend to teach them and they pretend to learn. Henry James Sumner Maine may have talked about the move from status to contract as the foundation of the social order, but what we have in academia is an unwritten contract that allows both parties to increase their status. 

I know this will be hard to believe, but: We genuinely do things differently here in Baylor’s Honors College. Why? I think it’s a combination of (a) the presence of Christian commitments, among both professors and students, that encourage us to remember that education is personal formation; and (b) the fact that Baylor as a whole is not an elite institution. Students who come here tend not to think that they’re gonna rule the world someday; they want to do well in life, of course, but they’re not set on a lifetime of climbing Success’s greasy pole. And we can help them think about how to pursue good things in life that don’t involve stock options.