Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 76

This has some useful reflections on the (often unfortunat...

This has some useful reflections on the (often unfortunate) powers of literary executors — a subject about which I have written — but it doesn’t make a sufficiently clear distinction between the impediments imposed by executors and those erected by publishers. You can have the most compliant executor imaginable, but publishers will insist on their rights (which to them are best expressed through the medium of currency).  

Elizabeth D. Samet, in an interview:World War II gave us ...

Elizabeth D. Samet, in an interview:

World War II gave us a way to look at the world as an unambiguous contest between good and evil. We have used a vocabulary that was inherited from it: Fascism became Islamofascism, the Axis Powers became the Axis of Evil, the second President Bush’s term to describe a constellation of unrelated adversaries. It also left us with the belief that the exercise of U.S. force would always magically bring about victory and would serve the cause of liberating the oppressed. As a result of that, we find ourselves, after decades of war and loss, having to reckon with the fact that our way of thinking and talking about war and about the world is hopelessly out of date. 

A very interesting point! Because World War II was “the Good War,” American politicians regularly attempt to create a linguistic association between their own endeavors and that one. I wonder how long that will last, especially since the last WWII veterans are rapidly disappearing from the scene. 

Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will ...

Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade | Ars Technica:

Ars: Given what has happened over the last few years and what is expected to come, do you think the activity we’re seeing in low-Earth orbit is sustainable?

Moriba Jah: My opinion is that the answer is no, it’s not sustainable. Many people don’t like this whole “tragedy of the commons” thing, but that’s exactly what I think we’re on a present course for. Near-Earth orbital space is finite. We should be treating it like a finite resource. We should be managing it holistically across countries, with coordination and planning and these sorts of things. But we don’t do that. I think it’s analogous to the early days of air traffic and even maritime and that sort of stuff. It’s like when you have a couple of boats that are coming into a place, it’s not a big deal. But when you have increased traffic, then that needs to get coordinated because everybody’s making decisions in the absence of knowing the decisions that others are making in that finite resource.

Ars: Is it possible to manage all of this traffic in low-Earth orbit?

Jah: Right now there is no coordination planning. Each country has plans in the absence of accounting for the other country’s plans. That’s part of the problem. So it doesn’t make sense. Like, if “Amberland” was the only country doing stuff in space, then maybe it’s fine. But that’s not the case. So you have more and more countries saying, “Hey, I have free and unhindered use of outer space. Nothing legally has me reporting to anybody because I’m a sovereign nation and I get to do whatever I want.” I mean, I think that’s stupid. 

It is stupid, but a familiar kind of stupid. I must have seen a dozen essays arguing that if you can find any examples of people collaborating with regard to shared goods then the tragedy of the commons argument is wrong. Which is also stupid! If we can sometimes resist the temptations to abuse any given commons, that’s not an argument that such abuse is unlikely to happen. Of course the abuse of common goods isn’t inevitable; but it is distressingly common and we should always be on the lookout for it. In space we aren’t paying sufficient attention. 

Pelé

Brian Phillips’s new podcast episode on Pelé reminds me that, back in the day, when I was contributing to his site The Run of Play, we had a kind of sideways dialogue about that genius. Here’s my post, and here’s Brian’s. 

uninterested

A few people have asked me to write more about recent AI endeavors, but here’s the problem: I can’t summon the interest to become sufficiently well-informed. I wrote a bit about the responses of some writers to the opportunity (as they see it) to outsource their work, but I haven’t used ChatGPT or LaMDA or DALL·E or Stable Diffusion or any other recent AI project — and I haven’t used them because the very idea bores me stiff. It’s as simple as that. I just can’t think of a reason to be interested. So instead I’ll do the things that I am interested in. It’s a good policy, I find. 

attention and reading

In response to my post on my readerly annotations, my friend Adam Roberts writes: 

I buy a lot of second-hand books, and previous owners’ annotations are almost always a mere irritation. But then I think of Coleridge. From before he settled at Highgate, but very much once he had settled there, his marginalia were specifically, particularly prized. People would lend him books, sometimes very rare and very valuable books, specifically in the hope that he would annotate them, which he did so far as I can see as automatically as a dog pees on a lamppost, simply because it was what he did. And then the people who had loaned him these books would retrieve them from the Gillmans’ house with glee. STC died 1834: the first publication of his marginalia was 1836, and magazines like Blackwoods continued to print examples of them throughout the century. By far the most expensive-to-produce element in the Princeton/Bollinger Collected Coleridge set are the five volumes of Marginalia, partly because each is 1000 pages long, but also because the marginalia are printed in a different colour font to the text being annotated, and the volumes come with lavish photos of representative STC pages.

The thing that strikes me about this (speaking as somehow who’s read a lot of it) is that the marginalia themselves are, probably, per proportion, something like 20:80, interesting/incisive:blather. So what was the appeal? Some must have been the same that inspired generations of autograph hunters … and I wonder if that’s a hobby that has died out in the digital age? But some of it must have been the way owning a book that Coleridge had annotated brought you closer to the idea of Coleridge himself reading a book. STC was a great writer (obviously you’d expect me to say so) but he’s perhaps an even greater reader, and there’s value, as you put it, in the sense that by reading STC’s marginalia you are as it were peering over STC’s shoulder as he reads. 

I think this is a fascinating comment, and, because I have work facing me that I want to put off, I shall now expand on it. 

I’ve just read David Marno’s fine book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, which is largely about John Donne but also about what people in the seventeenth century thought attention is. Marno points out that philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche talk about attention a good deal, see it as essential to the task of philosophy, but also never define it. They don’t bother to do so, Marno claims, because everyone already understood attention through its religious contexts, its centrality to Christian prayer. Such philosophers thus secularized the act (or faculty) of attention; and as those religious contexts moved from the cultural center to its margins, attention eventually had to be defined, a project still ongoing today. 

Marno further argues — or rather, I guess, implies; I am somewhat overstating his case here — that when Donne’s poetry was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and became greatly celebrated (most famously by T. S. Eliot), the focus on “holy attention” in his sacred poems became matters of scholarly interest. Critics like I. A. Richards continued the work of secularizing attention by seeing the challenge of attentiveness that Donne describes as a challenge for 20th-century readers also. As Donne strove to attend to Christ on the Cross, so Richard’s students strive to attend to Donne’s poetry. Marno notes that Richards isn’t at all interested in the Christian context of Donne’s meditations, and so, rather than suggesting that his students learn something about either Catholic or Protestant devotional endeavors, he points them towards Confucian practices. 

What I want to suggest here is that Coleridge is a kind of bridge spanning the 17th-century and the 20th-century accounts of attentiveness. He is, for his contemporaries, a kind of icon of holy attention — but the holiness resides not in the objects of his attention (which are typically poetic, historical, and philosophical) but rather in the particular character of his own mental dispositions and practices. Yes, Coleridge had deep theological interests, and those intensified as he grew older, but those who saw him as the ideal reader and wanted to collect the sacred relics of his reading didn’t necessarily share his interests or his beliefs. For them, the holiness was not in the text but in the reader. 

defilement redux

What the Hell Happened to PayPal?:

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

An obvious point, but one worth making: We tend to think of social-credit systems as the province of governments, but the big American tech companies are right now imposing their own such system — and in some ways are better placed to do it than our government would be. 

As I have been saying for several years now, the “ideology [is] lacking clearly defined ideological contours” because it’s not an ideology, it’s a feeling of defilement and a consequent need to be purified, cleansed. I should do a long readthrough here on the blog of Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil…. 

my skillz

So I just re-read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World — a book I read not long after it came out, but uncarefully. Now I have read it with great care and attention, and … well, you can look at the image above to get a sense of how immersed in it I have been. I will have more, much more, to say about its key themes in due course. 

But for now I want to talk about something else. 

Among the many — too many — things I own, the most valuable to me are books that I have read and annotated as thoroughly as I have read this one. Family photos? I have digital copies of those. Similarly, my computer could be replaced, as could my guitars. Furniture, ditto. I could buy replacements for my guitars, my camera, my clothes. But the annotated books? Irreplaceable. Oh sure, I could buy other copies and annotate them, but those markings would be different than the ones I now have. (I’m especially fond of books that I have read multiple times, with different annotations at each reading — here’s an example.) 

But the really interesting thing about these heavily annotated books is this: they are extremely valuable to me, but have virtually no value for anyone else. Think about it this way: If I put this book up for sale, I would be unlikely to get any offers for it. I mean, why would anyone want it? What meaning would all those tabs and scribbles and highlights have to them? Wouldn’t a fresh copy of the book be a better use of money? 

But suppose someone said they would offer me twenty bucks for it. I wouldn’t consider that for a moment — and not because of the IKEA Effect. That is, the value of the book to be does not lie in the work I put into it in the past, but rather the value I expect it to have in the future, as I return to consult it, think about it, maybe write about it. If I were never going to use the book again I might well sell it — and in such circumstances the IKEA Effect would kick in, and I’d want a dollar amount that corresponded, in my mind, to the effort I put into annotating it; which would definitely be more than $20. But at the right price, sure, I’d sell it. People talk about “sentimental value,” but I am not a sentimental guy, not in this respect anyway. 

Knowing that I will use it again in the future, though, alters my calculus radically. Obviously, I could buy another copy, re-read it, and annotate it all over again — but would I notice the same points? I could well miss some important ideas and implications reading the new copy that I caught the one I sold. (After all, didn’t I read it badly the first time? Maybe the stars have to align for a person and a book to make the sweetest connection.) The whole situation would be fraught with uncertainties; I therefore would be reluctant to sell the book for any imaginable price. 

And by “imaginable” I mean that if someone offered me ten thousand bucks for it I’d agree before they could change their mind. 

I think reading and annotating books is the thing I do best — it’s my most sharply-honed skill. But that in itself has almost no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting. 

why liberals should read smart conservatives

Liberals should read smart conservatives not because they need to be convinced by conservative arguments — though let’s face it, sometimes they do — but rather because conservatives frame issues differently than liberals do. They describe the conditions of history, and the circumstances of our debates, in a language that’s strange to liberals. And dealing with these alternative framings can be very clarifying indeed. 

An example: in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Christopher Caldwell argues that the grief over the assassination of President Kennedy led to more sweeping legislation than JFK himself would have dared to pursue: “A welfare state expanded by Medicare and Medicaid, the vast mobilization of young men to fight the Vietnam War, but, above all, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts — these were all memorials to a slain ruler, resolved in haste over a few months in 1964 and 1965 by a people undergoing a delirium of national grief.” And he then claims that this set in motion a dramatic transformation of the American legal and political order — a transformation that we have inherited: 

The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. The increasing necessity that citizens choose between these two orders, and the poisonous conflict into which it ultimately drove the country, is what this book describes.

Now, it is probably true that only someone who questions the wisdom of “the de facto constitution of 1964” would frame our recent history in this way; but it is certainly true that this framing is powerfully illuminating: it yields insight into both the nature and the intensity of our current political differences. You may not interpret or judge those differences as Caldwell does, but even so, he has presented their causes in ways that ought to earn your assent. 

Another example: Mary Harrington is not just a conservative, she is a self-described reactionary. But some of her recent work is, like that of Caldwell, extremely useful, especially her argument — in, for instance, this essay, which has many links to her earlier work — that what I have called Left Purity Culture (see the LPC tag at the bottom of this post) operates as a kind of de-personalized and even de-humanized swarm. And in certain recent controversies, especially the ones involving Twitter, that swarm is confronted by a version of what she calls Caesarism: 

The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy”, but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable. Instead, consequential decisions are as far as possible pushed out to supposedly neutral procedures or even machines. When NGO officials whom you can’t vote out of your political ecosystem talk about “our democracy”, they’re talking about swarmism.

Caesarism, on the other hand, looks substantially the same at lower levels. The main difference is that you get named humans in key decision-making roles — complete with human partiality, eccentricity, and occasional fallibility. Twitter was, until recently, a key vector of elite swarmism. And to swarmists, such rule by a named individual, rather than a collective and some committee-generated “guidelines”, is by definition morally wrong. This core assumption oozes, for example, from this report on the takeover, with its empathetic depiction of the anonymous, collegiate collective of sacked Trust and Safety workers sharply contrasted with the autocratic, erratic individual Elon Musk. 

This, like Caldwell’s framing of American history since the 1960s, is not just interesting but useful. It helps me to think about the structure, as it were, of the debates over Twitter. Now, I might prefer a swarm to a Caesar — and Harrington herself doesn’t see anyone to support here: “I’m not cheerleading for Musk as Caesar. Just because I dislike faceless proceduralism doesn’t mean I have much appetite to see political authority gathered into the mercurial hands of a transhumanist billionaire who wants to implant microchips in human brains.” But whether you take the swarm’s side or Caesar’s side or no side at all, this is a very helpful way of describing the conflict, and is a description that neither a a swarmist nor a Caesarist would have been likely to discern. 

leopards

Fifty or sixty years ago, one of the most common genres of nonfiction book in this country concerned advertising. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Naked Society (1964), Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction (1973), and the many books that addressed the effects of television generally but included advertising as an essential element of their critique: Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug (1977), Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), George W. S. Trow’s In the Context of No Context (1980), Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). 

This kind of book doesn’t get published any more, because writers and publishers alike know that those authors definitively lost the battle they were fighting. And the white flag of surrender was run up the flagpole when David Foster Wallace published his brilliant and still-relevant essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in 1993. 

DFW’s essay is the Kafka’s Leopards moment in the American response to television advertising. Here is Kafka’s little parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers. This is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”