Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 73

Dominic Sandbrook:There’s no way our podcast, presented ...

Dominic Sandbrook:

There’s no way our podcast, presented by two white Oxbridge-educated middle-aged men, would be commissioned by the BBC these days. Instead of just letting us talk, they would bring in some alleged comedian to make it ‘accessible’ to younger audiences.

And not a single week would pass without the appearance of some ultra-woke U.S. academic to lecture us about slavery or to flagellate us about the imagined sins of the British Empire.

The great irony is that while the average age of Radio 4 listeners is 56, more than half of our listeners are under 34. So if the BBC want to know what’s happened to its younger audience, the answer is that they have signed up to The Rest Is History.

That’s about the size of it.

When did this practice of writing accusatory and dictator...

When did this practice of writing accusatory and dictatorial headlines begin? It’s universal now. It must get clicks, but why would people want to read stories whose headlines accuse them of error and demand that they change their ways? I never read stories that are headlined in this way.  

The Year of Focal Practices

I declared 2021 the Year of Hypomone and 2022 the Year of Repair. I have not ceased to need hypomone — the New Testament word for “patient endurance” — nor are the good things of my world in any less broken. And it seems to me that there’s a close relationship between the two themes, because those who would engage in tikkun olam, the repair of the world, will more than most others require hypomone. But how to get it? How and where to find the resources that enable the patient endurance that in turn enable us to pursue the work of repair? I declare this the Year of Focal Practices. 

What do I mean by that? It’s a concept from Albert Borgmann’s seminal 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. As Borgmann’s career moved on he became a clearer and more straightforward writer, but in 1984 … not so much. He was still, then, too Heideggerian to be lucid. So rather than quote I am going to try to summarize, drawing chiefly on chapters 9 and 23.

Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household. Various members of the family were responsible for some element of hearth-maintaining — one would chop or gather the firewood, another bring that wood into the house, another make the fire, another add logs when the fire got low or stir it to enliven it, still another to cook the family’s food over the flame — and each member benefitted from its warmth. The heath was a place for preparing food and for keeping warm; it was therefore also the place where the family gathered, where its unity and wholeness were made manifest. The household gods — the lares and penates — were above all the guardians of the hearth. They preserved and in various ways represented the family’s focus. 

Controlled fire is of course the paradigmatic technology: Prometheus’s gift of fire to humans is the definitive extension of our natural abilities, an augmentation of power, a prosthesis. But, Borgmann shows, fire-as-focus is much more than that: it generates a set of focal practices that strengthen the bonds among members of the family. Contrast the hearth at the center of a home to a central heating unit, which instead of binding us to one another invites us to go our separate ways. The central heating unit is not a focus that links us to one another; it is rather a device that facilitates our separation. 

The idea that our technological prostheses are meant to generate independence from one another is a way of thinking about technology that Borgmann calls the device paradigm. To summarize an argument I have made here, the device paradigm promises freedom but in fact — after all, it cannot be modified to suit our needs — enforces what Ursula Franklin calls a “culture of compliance.” It is, as Ivan Illich would put it, a manipulatory technology, whereas the hearth is a convivial one. 

We have good reasons for installing central heating in our homes, but we miss the hearth and look for ways to replace it. The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson often says that our evolutionary descent predisposes us to be fond of certain actions, like throwing objects at other objects and sitting around a fire telling tales. The latter impulse, he believes, draws us to the movie theater, where we gather in the darkness facing a bright light and enjoy stories — but while that provides a certain form (or simulacrum) of communal connection, it’s the television that becomes the replacement for the family hearth. Here’s a photo I took a few nights ago — I title it Focus One and Two: 

When I decided to put our TV over the fireplace, I didn’t realize the symbolic heft of my decision. But one evening, when I mused that it would be easier to show a fireplace video from YouTube than actually build a fire, all the ironies suddenly came home to me. 

Let me be clear: I loved re-watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my family as a fire crackled away in the fireplace. It was truly wonderful. But it was not, in Borgmann’s sense, a focal practice. In fact, I am inclined to think that we could enjoy it as much as we did because of other practices that have bound us as a family, practices that are truly focal. 

I am inclined to think that the cultivation of genuinely focal practices — on the familial level and on that of whole communities — is essential to the development of hypomone, and hypomone is essential to the work of repair. I want to think about these matters quite a bit in 2023, and so I have added a “focus” tag to this post — to prompt me to keep thinking and writing on this subject. We’ll see how it goes. 

George Giusti

George Giusti

“Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort ...

“Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of” – The best brief overview I’ve seen of the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of the decentralized social web.

removals: a few year-endish thoughts

One: I don’t do year-end lists, and I typically don’t read those of others. (Those of you who write them: Please forgive me!) I make note of books I’ve read, music I’ve listened to, and movies I’ve watched, but I do it in my paper planner. I like seeing my aesthetic experiences in their Lebenswelt: I watched The Awful Truth after making steak frites for my family; I read Trickster Makes This World while our floors were being refinished. To take those experiences out of those contexts seems, to me, to transform them into mere calculations. (I also record some of these experiences on my micro.blog page, but I’m not super-disciplined about it.) 

This means that I also never have any idea how many books I’ve read or movies I’ve watched in any given period of time; and of course if I’m not keeping track of that, I can’t have any “reading goals.” And I don’t want any reading goals: it’s a matter of, again, the And Then What? problem. Some books should be savored — read slowly, meditated on, returned to — but if I’ve made it my goal to read X number of books or watch Z number of movies, then I won’t give such works the time they ask of me. I’ll rush through them so I can mark them off my list and move on to The Next Thing. 

Two: There’s some good stuff in the Guardian, but there’s also a lot of incurious leftist reflexiveness, and, moreover, a pervasive (almost obsessive) anti-Americanism. I don’t mean critiques of American politics and American culture — Lord knows we deserve all of that we get, and more — but a kind of newspaper-wide tic, an inability to resist mocking and sneering at anyone and anything American, even when America and Americans have nothing to do with the subject at hand. (There’s a lot of that in the paper’s sports section.) At some point this year I got sick of it and simply removed every Guardian feed from my RSS reader. And you know what? I didn’t miss it. Not for one second.  

This got me thinking about what I read and listen to by mere habit, even though I am frustrated by it. I decided to do a reverse Marie Kondo and ask, “Does this spark annoyance?” I went through my RSS feeds and deleted many more sites; I started realizing how many podcasts I subscribe to through an obscure feeling of duty but don’t really want to listen to. So let’s say I listen to one of them: and then what? Listen to some more just to cross them off my list? Why? I deleted a bunch of those subscriptions too. 

Three: I made it through another year, my third in a row, without getting on an airplane. My wife, who has to fly several times a year, has commented that not only have passengers stopped wearing masks, they now don’t even cover their mouths when they cough — they’ve descended into a kind of barbarism. On her last trip she didn’t contract Covid, but she did pick up RSV and had a cough for a month. Passengers behaving badly, airline staff undertrained and impatient, delays and cancellations rampant, security theater now in its third decade of mindlessness … Why would I ever voluntarily subject myself to this kind of crap? 

I do hope to travel overseas again, someday, and when I do I’ll gladly get on a plane. But I’m now seriously wondering if I can simply not fly within the U.S. any more, and drive whenever I need to get somewhere. The problem with this, of course, is that I live deep in the heart of Texas, and it is one hell of a long way to anywhere else. On the other hand, it’s a two-day drive from most places in this country I’d ever have a need to visit. (It’s almost exactly the same distance from Waco to Washington D.C. and to Los Angeles.)

I’ve twice made the drive to and from Charlottesville, VA, and while it’s no fun having to stop in a hotel overnight, I do enjoy the scenery, the thinking time, even the occasional audiobook (typically not my thing, but enjoyable on a long drive). And it’s nice simply to throw whatever I think I might need into the car, not worrying about having to go through security and getting sneezed on by strangers. Maybe it’s time for me to read Matt Crawford’s book on driving and embrace “the philosophy of the open road.” 

So, you’ll note, 2022 was at least partly a year of removals, of excisions. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t plan to, but I eliminated a lot of noise, and therefore a lot of frustration. It has felt good, and I want to do more of the same in 2023. 

at the movies

The “movies” tag at the bottom of this post will point you to what I’ve written about that artform on this blog, but I’ve published a few things elsewhere too:

A reflection on the extravagant art of Jean-Luc GodardA meditation on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden LifeA complicated argument about Citizen Kane, Pauline Kael, and newspapersAn essay partly about Inside Out

I think there are others, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.

Amna Khalid:But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. I...

Amna Khalid:

But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view. The administrators have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought. Their insistence that figurative representations of Muhammad are “forbidden for Muslims to look upon” runs counter to historical and contemporary evidence. As Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, reminds us, Muslim artists since the 14th century have depicted Muhammad visually — images that were painted “by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran.” Such images were, “by definition, Islamophilic from their inception to their reception.” Far from being forbidden, many Muslims, even today, appreciate such figurative representations. While more common among Shia Muslims, even Sunnis are known to have made such images. (In fact, the painting the professor showed was commissioned by a Sunni king in the 14th century.)

“But one of our Muslim students claimed to feel marginalized and excluded! We had no choice!”

 

casting about

I recently re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and experienced an epiphany: the perfect Aunt Emily — and Aunt Emily is the most important character in the book to cast properly — would be Joanne Woodward, from her Mr. And Mrs. Bridge era. Absolutely perfect. I am now filled with regret that Terrence Malick never managed to make that movie that he so longed to make. 

illusions and their removal

In The Point of View of My Work as an Author Kierkegaard explains why he writes sometimes under his own name and sometimes under pseudonyms. One of his primary goals — or, as he rather curiously puts it, one of the primary goals of “the authorship” — is to attack the illusions under which his fellow Danes are living, the chief among them being that they are living in a Christian society (which means that they believe themselves to have received Christianity as a kind of natural inheritance). The problem, Kierkegaard says, is that such illusions are hard to remove by direct attack — and indeed, the deeper the illusion is the more resistant it is to any direct confrontation.

No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it is an illusion that all are Christians — and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all….

There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anyone prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God—that he has lived hitherto in an illusion.

I especially adore this: “for love is always shy.” See also the magnificent tale of the king and the lowly maiden in the Philosophical Fragments.

There is much more that could be said about this, and how it relates to, for instance, Leo Strauss’s case for the value of esoteric writing in philosophy (something I have often mused on when engaged in my own writing). But for now I simply want to ask this question: What can I do to remove my own illusions?

I think it was A. J. Ayer — one of those 20th century Oxford philosophers anyway — whose highest praise of any other philosopher was “Yes, he’s very well defended.” I think almost all of us are well-defended against the dispelling of our illusions. This is why Kierkegaard said that the person whose life is governed by some powerful illusion must be as it were approached from behind. But how could I approach myself from behind? After all, as I recently wrote, the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Shouldn’t I take seriously my own position?

Well, for the past couple of years I’ve been trying to do just that. I’m not any less interested in theological reflection (or in being a Christian!) that I used to be, but I’ve been reading theology for so long that it’s hard for me to be surprised by it — hard for me not to assimilate whatever I’m reading to my existing categories. So I’ve been trying to read more stuff that evades those categories, that forces me into a less predictable and (ideally) more creative response.

That’s why I’ve been trying to learn from Russian socialists and Daoists and anarchists — they’re all people who are trying to address the same social and ethical issues that concern me, but who do so from different perspectives and with the use of different intellectual tools. But I’m now thinking that, having been fortified by my encounters with those traditions of thought, it may be time to return to my specifically theological concerns and see what they look like in light of what I’ve learned. For instance: 

What does Christian peaceableness look like in light of Alexander Herzen’s melioristic approach to social change? Is there really, as I have suspected, a kind of familial resemblance between Daoism and Franciscan spirituality? Can the “emergent order” of anarchism be a key to the building of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community”? 

In short: Can I, through these oddball explorations, remove the illusions that prevent me from seeing what I should see about myself and the world? Can I learn through these exercises to think more wisely and act more justly? I dunno. I hope so.