Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 89

Manton Reece – Dear Elon Musk:I agree that we shouldn’t ...

Manton Reece – Dear Elon Musk:

I agree that we shouldn’t be stuck in our own bubbles of misinformation. But the part Elon gets wrong is the premise that there should even be a “common digital town square” controlled by a single company. I reject that idea.

The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models. Concentrating too much power in only a couple social media companies is what created the mess we’re in.

Adam Atheist

The other day I emailed my friend Adam Roberts and told him that I would have something to say about his despicable atheism.

Adam: “SCANDALOUS atheism! Not despicable! Scandalous!”

Me: “That’s just what a despicable atheist would say.”

Do please read Adam’s post; it’s extremely thoughtful and nuanced. Adam is responding to a claim by the late great literary critic Frank Kermode – a model of critical excellence for both Adam and me – that “From poetry and music I derive the little I know about holiness.” Adam wants to counterclaim that as much as he also is moved by poetry and music, that’s not really a religious experience.

I say so with a certain sorrow, for, like Kermode, poetry and music are very important to my life, and in them I often find the transcendence, the holiness of which he speaks here. But I don’t think his larger point is correct, actually. I cannot avoid the self-knowledge that this merely secular pseudo-faith lacks the blood, the force — lacks, the stationed and parrhesiastic surrender to absolute otherness — of religious faith in the Kierkegaardian sense I just mentioned — which is to say, in the sense that Kierkegaard understood the Christian idea of eternity as something applied to every moment of human existence.

Of course, it’s possible that speaking from experiential ignorance, as I necessarily am, leads me to over-romanticise what it is that people of faith have, and I lack. For many faith is, perhaps, a far more mundane business; it is surely, for most, a more quotidian business. Religion is a taxonomy of beliefs, yes; and it is (what I’m talking about here) an access to a transcendent otherness, an intensity of affect and apprehension, a power and glory. But more than that it is a social mode of being-in-the-world, a form of community, of belonging to a particular tribe: not just going to church, temple or mosque on high holy days, but helping-out at the church jumble sale, running the soup kitchen, reading-groups, social events, all that. It is something that serves to identify self and help it bond with others. Of seeing in other people not just strangers but brothers and sisters. Sitting at home and listening to a Bach cantata on your stereo isn’t any of that.

This is just one part of a complicated essay, but it should at least give the flavor.

All of what Adam says about religious faith – with its vertical (Godward) and horizontal (Neighborward) dimensions – seems to me correct, and useful in distinguishing such faith from whatever it is we most powerfully experience when we encounter the arts. But …

First of all, I don’t feel that I know anything about religion or religious faith in general; I only know what it means to be a Christian, or rather what it means to me to be a Christian. And to me the deepest heart of the matter is neither the ethical life of neighborliness nor an encounter with the transcendent but simply that as I read the Gospels I see in the life and words of Jesus an astonishing thing: Though I am unloveable, God loves me, and is willing to pay an enormous price to reconcile me to Himself. God loves me and hopes – “hopes” is a strange word to use with regard to the Omnipotent and Omniscient, but it’s the best word I have – God hopes that I will love Him in return.

Kierkegaard, in Philosophical Fragments:

And the cause of all this suffering is love, precisely because the God is not jealous for himself, but desires in love to be the equal of the humblest. When the seed of the oak is planted in earthen vessels, they break asunder; when new wine is poured in old leathern bottles, they burst; what must happen when the God implants himself in human weakness, unless man becomes a new vessel and a new creature! But this becoming, what labors will attend the change, how convulsed with birth-pangs! And the understanding – how precarious, and how close each moment to misunderstanding, when the anguish of guilt seeks to disturb the peace of love! And how rapt in fear; for it is indeed less terrible to fall to the ground when the mountains tremble at the voice of the God, than to sit at table with him as an equal; and yet it is the God’s concern precisely to have it so.

From my sense of this love, and its call upon my life, everything else, including the love of my neighbor, flows. Auden in “Winds,” the first of his “Bucolics”:

One bubble-brained creature said — 
   “I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
   Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.

I’m trying, heaven knows I’m trying, to stick to that logic.

That when reading about Jesus I feel drawn to this life I perceive as a free gift, a gift that, I well understand, not everyone receives. (I also understand that others receive it with far greater power than I do. I am a man of vague and shaky faith.) My friend Adam may be, like Max Weber — and the metaphor is especially appropriate given the contrasts at the heart of Adam’s post — “religiously unmusical.” But I do hope that one day he will hear the now-hidden harmonies of the Christian way; and even should he not, I trust that this ever-loving God will be infinitely merciful to him. It seems to me that Adam is a man after God’s own heart, whether he feels it or not.

announcement

I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here. 

I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I will post photos and links at my micro.blog page. 

Thanks to all for reading. 

seed funding for the arts

The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing – by Ted Gioia:

There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a modest allocation of resources. If the Duke Foundation, for example, funded 50 people in 50 cities with $50K per year to cover their local music scene it would cost a grand total of $2.5 million. And, if they got ambitious, they could place 4 writers in each city, and still only spend around $10 million.

Did you get that? You could have in-depth arts coverage in every major city for less than the cost of a sneaker endorsement from a third-tier NBA star or the salary of the University of Alabama’s football coach. That’s chump change for those well-funded arts institutions, and it would have an immediate positive impact on culture and arts everywhere in this country.

But they don’t do it. They don’t even consider doing it, as far as I can tell. Who can say why. Maybe journalism isn’t glamorous enough for institutions that prefer to anoint geniuses. 

This is a brilliant idea by Ted, and I desperately hope some foundation leaders will read it. Throwing money at “geniuses” — the great majority of whom are already well-fixed — is like giving your money to Yale or Harvard, AKA hedge funds with universities loosely attached. It does nothing to nurture or generate a culture of creativity — and a culture is precisely what we need. 

Translation: “I’m not paying you to teach me organic chem...

Translation: “I’m not paying you to teach me organic chemistry, I’m paying you to tell medical schools that I know organic chemistry — and you’re not keeping your end of the bargain!” 

Bresson and the power of habit

Robert Bresson’s films A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) are book-matched movies, mirror images of each other. In the first an honest and humble man is imprisoned, but eventually escapes; in the second an arrogant and dishonest man freely commits crimes for a long time, but is eventually caught and imprisoned.

The films mirror one another technically as well – and in not just the sense that almost all Bresson movies are technically similar. Bresson relied exclusively on a 50mm lens, because, he believed, that focal length most closely approximates human vision. The great Yasojiru Ozu believed this also, as did that prince of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Were they correct? Well, it’s complicated.) 

Anyway: in both A Man Escaped and Pickpocket the protagonist narrates his story in voiceover. In both films, close attention is given to the details of certain manual actions repeated almost mechanically: A Man Escaped shows us the prisoner’s methodical work to make an opening in his cell door and then his weaving of long ropes, while Pickpocket shows us the thief’s equally methodical practice of the techniques of his art.

And in each film the protagonist is played by a non-professional (though François Leterrier later became a director and Martin LaSalle an actor). Bresson’s disdain for professional actors – whom he believed could only seem – and his alternative preference for using non-actors or what he called “models” – whom he believed could genuinely be – was, in my view, a catastrophic error of judgment. Almost all of Bresson’s “models” fail in their task, I think, and his movies are much the worse for it. This is very much a minority view, I know, but I really do believe that Bresson, for all his gifts, fails to reach the highest level of filmmaking precisely because of his refusal to use adequate actors. (To be sure, Bresson’s thinking in these matters is subtle and in a way profound; I just don’t think it works.)  

The chief exception to this rule is Leterrier in A Man Escaped: he’s excellent. (Claude Laydu, who is superb in Diary of a Country Priest, had never been in a movie before but had trained as an actor.) Martin LaSalle in Pickpocket is just terrible, at least when he speaks – he and Marika Green alike seem to be merely reciting their lines throughout – and that really compromises, for me, what otherwise could have been a remarkable achievement.

Pickpocket is a simplified retelling of Crime and Punishment, though with less serious crime (Michel, our thieving protagonist, is not a violent man). We get the idea of “l’homme superieur,” the verbal sparring with an apparently meek police officer, the undeserved love of an innocent woman. But there’s an interesting little twist that Bresson, who wrote the screenplay, adds. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov, after his two murders, falls helplessly into a bipolar oscillation, full of arrogance one hour, full of self-loathing the next, and his only anchor in these psychological storms is Sonia, who urges him to confess his crimes – which ultimately he does.

In Pickpocket the Sonia figure is Jeanne, whose kindness to the needy (including Michel’s own mother, whom he is too ashamed to visit) and ready forgiveness of sin eventually touch Michel’s heart: when she becomes a single mother and is in need, he pledges her his help. He promises to go straight, to make an honest living, to help her care for her child. Love changes him – as it changes Raskolnikov.

But this is where the twist comes in – and where we see why Bresson makes Michel a pickpocket rather than a murderer. For the sake of Jeanne and her child, Michel becomes an honest worker … but the work is so long, and the rewards so few. And look, here’s this man with a wallet full of banknotes: just an artful flick of my hand would be enough to liberate that money and to provide for dear Jeanne and her child for months … what would be the harm?

So here Bresson is reflecting on a point related to the themes of Crime and Punishment but bringing those themes home to those of us who are sinners but not murderers: the overwhelming power of habit. Michel had built up over a long time the habits of a thief, and while he had justified them by his belief that he is one of those superior men, after he abandons that belief the habits remain. He has, as it were, demolished the building but left standing the scaffolding he used to construct it. True love, it turns out, is powerful, but habit is even more powerful; and so Michel finds that he cannot make a new life quite so easily. First he must lose everything.

Esau McCaulley:How do we order society in such a way tha...

Esau McCaulley:

How do we order society in such a way that increases human flourishing and limits suffering? What is the good, the true and the beautiful? How do we make sense of the sins of the past and the way the legacies of those failures follow us to the present? What is justice? What is love and why does it hurt us so? What is the good life? Is there a God who orders the galaxies, or did we come from chaos, destined only to return to it?

The answers to those questions that I received from my teachers varied. I do not judge the worth of my former educators by whether I agreed with them. I value those who made me think and did not punish me when I diverged from them.

If there is a danger facing this generation of students, it is not the absence of information. The internet exists; politicians are fools if they think that they can hide the troubles of the world. If parents and politicians truly care about their children’s education, they should not only ask what a teacher said about a controversial issue, they should also ask how the teacher said it, and whether students were assessed based on the quality of their work rather than conformity to a particular ideological perspective.

This ability to hold fair and stirring conversation is the gift that all great teachers have. It is impossible to legislate. This is a gift that can either be honed or ground to rubble by unrelenting competing agendas. We must protect teachers who do it well and do not so overburden and underpay them that they despair of their vocation.

Stop Donating to Your Elite University – The Atlantic:“E...

Stop Donating to Your Elite University – The Atlantic:

“Everything we do in academia is based on the assumption that merit can be assessed,” Son Hing said, citing Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think, a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at the peer-review process. Virtually every evaluative mechanism in the academy—peer review of scholarly articles and grant applications, grading, and tenure evaluation—purports to be objective and are supremely hierarchical.

The process culminates with the types of careers that elite colleges steer students into. The majority of Harvard graduates take a job in technology, investment banking, or management consulting—occupations that make wealthy people wealthier and, research shows, increase their support for social hierarchy. In a survey of Harvard’s class of 2020, only 4 percent of seniors entering the workforce said they planned to go into public service or work for a nonprofit organization.

So elite colleges disproportionately let in affluent applicants who are predisposed to denying inequality, surround them with similar people, teach them in a system that confirms their belief in merit, and, finally, steer them into careers that cement this worldview.

de-streaming

‘There’s endless choice, but you’re not listening’: fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music:

Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”

It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.

Hey, everybody is different and there are a thousand ways to use the streaming services other than the model outlines here, but still: Count me a big fan of this move. I have for the past few years almost completely abandoned streaming: I buy records (vinyl and CD, sometimes digital files) whenever I can, and having purchased them I tend to listen to them more often and more carefully.

If you can’t afford to stream and buy, then consider this: with the money you’d save by cancelling your streaming service, you could buy one new or two used recordings a month. Imagine that you had a much smaller collection of music, but it consisted of the most important music to you, and you came to know that music intimately. Wouldn’t that be a pretty good trade-off? It’s worth considering anyway.

forming the public self

When I read about what children should be taught at school about gender, I find myself thinking back to the scene early in Hunger of Memory in which the nuns from Richard’s parochial school come to his house to tell his parents that they should speak English, not Spanish, at home. Richard later comes to believe that the nuns did the right thing, because he needed to acquire a public self, and learning to speak English was essential to that public self’s formation. (This was one of Rodriguez’s more controversial opinions when the book appeared in 1982, near the height of the push for bilingual education — though he had first articulated his opposition to bilingual education in a 1974 essay. The whole story is fascinating, though the argument now seems to belong to a distant world.) 

Underlying this scene, and underlying our current argument about what children should be taught about gender, is the assumption that it’s the job of our schools to make public selves. Different groups specify this task in different ways; for instance, we have long heard people say that the job of school is to make citizens. The new movement is not about making citizens, but rather about making metaphysical capitalists, making people who are capable of purchasing and displaying their selves in society, with “gender” – which is, let’s be clear, a non-concept, an empty signifier – as one of the necessary components. Gender is something our health-care system will sell to you, and school is where you learn not to think of yourself as a member of a family or community but rather as an atomized and docile consumer of the Regime’s products, including the health-care sub-regime’s products.

That is to say, the primary function of schooling, for many people on the cutting edge of educationism, is to sell the available gender products. 

People who think that leftist agitators for gender fluidity are driven by ideology are correct, but it’s probably not the ideology they think it is: it’s good old capitalism — capitalism extended into the deepest recesses of personal identity. We can create that for you wholesale.  

It’s a pretty debased ideal in comparison to the ideal of citizen-making, but both of those models of what a public self should be rely on schools to be the primary locations of formation. And I just don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think schools are suited for self-making; rather, I think that’s what families are for. But man, is that a losing proposition in the current moment. 

Okay, I’ve been cursing the darkness lately, and that’s not my lane — back to lighting candles!