Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 95

Lambeth

Whither the Lambeth Conference 2022? I’ve been turning that question over and over in my mind, and I’ve finally realized what I think. 

Imagine a married couple. The wife is dynamic, energetic, involved in the community and the pillar of the household too. The husband doesn’t do much, but he does love his weekly poker night with his friends. One afternoon he returns home after buying some beer for his poker buddies and discovers that his wife is gone. He has no idea where she is or when she might be coming back. But, you know, it’s poker night, so off he goes to Bill’s house. 

That’s what I think Lambeth 2022 was. Poker night at Bill’s house, while one’s spouse is missing. 

Kubrick the idealist

Diane Johnson, novelist and co-author with Stanley Kubrick of the screenplay of The Shining, writing just after the director’s death:

Kubrick had a strong, offended sense of the ridiculousness of the human being, and the futility of human endeavor. He returned to these points again and again — with the recruit in Full Metal Jacket, everyone in Dr. Strangelove (the characters associated with Terry Southern), the victims in A Clockwork Orange. He assailed married life and artistic pretension in The Shining, which was also to have assailed racism (the Overlook Hotel had been built on an Indian burial ground), a theme that fell by the way. The new film may assail psychiatry, another subject he was skeptical of. 

His pessimism seems to have arisen from his idealism, an outraged yearning for a better order, a wish to impose perfection on the chaotic materials of reality. This impulse is behind much art, after all, and Kubrick was above all an artist. His art was an expression of his view of things through the complicated medium of film. Like any artist, he felt an interest in controlling as many aspects of his medium as he could — set, music, costume, take — an attitude that unfairly earned him the reputation of monomaniacal difficulty.

But he thought of art as fun. Art in his view was also moral. People have tried to enlist him in the cause of hip nihilism, but this is to mistake his orthodox Sixties but rather conservative views. What was A Clockwork Orange — which he withdrew in England after some copycat killings — but a diatribe against violence? What were Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket but antiwar films? 

It is very strange to me to hear the co-author of the the movie’s screenplay say that The Shining “assails” “married life” — a thought that has never occurred to me and still, despite her statement, refuses to occur to me. But in other respects I find this meditation interesting, because I have at least some sympathy for David Thomson’s view of Kubrick — in writing about The Shining, he says, “A masterpiece. How wonderful that this straining, chilly, pretentious, antihuman director should have stumbled into it.” 

Thomson utterly despised 2001: writing in 2008 or thereabouts, he stated, as if giving testimony in court, “I believe now, as I did in 1968, that 2001 was a lavish travesty and an elaborate defense of vacancy or the reluctance to use real imagination. Of course, space can still work on film — we have had Alien, E.T., and others — but the lack of humanity is a dead end.” I think the “lack of humanity” is one of the chief points of that movie, and therefore it needed to be directed by someone whose style could fairly be described as “straining, chilly, pretentious, antihuman”; but Diane Johnson’s comments — along with those of people who knew Kubrick well — suggest that the apparent antihumanity is a mask for something deeper and more tender.

But it’s telling that if Kubrick did indeed have that more richly humanistic side — and I believe he did — he was never able to find a way to express it directly in his films. It’s something evoked by its absence, as when Shakespeare writes of “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” 

forgetting and propaganda

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda:

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness — of himself, of his condition, of his society — for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man’s inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and — to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person — against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today’s events his life by obliterating yesterday’s news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.

This situation makes the “current-events man” a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. 

Cf. my comment from a few years ago that “Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia.” 

liberalism vs. centrism, adjacency and action

I’ve written often about philosophical liberalism on this blog, because I have a complicated relationship to it. On the one hand, like John Milton, I don’t believe most of the things that philosophical liberals believe. On the other hand, it’s clear that at least some of the common critiques of liberalism fail to account for the complexity of the views of the smartest liberals, especially John Stuart Mill. Also, while the idea that liberalism provides a “level playing field” for all is and always has been a fiction, I believe that a more level playing field is something worth striving for, and that the current tendency among many Americans to make illiberal power grabs, or anyway to fantasize such power grabs, on the grounds that “politics ain’t beanbag,” is regrettable and makes me nostalgic for liberal proceduralism. 

When people stop wanting a level playing field, they opt for a more confrontational model of politics — but there are several such models on offer, or perhaps it would be better to say that there are several kinds of confrontational practices, from the snarky to the murderous. In a new essay at the Hog Blog, I have tried to offer a taxonomy of those confrontational practices, and a suggestion that those of us who would like to see a lowering in our current level of toxicity should probably focus our attention on the people whose behavior is closest to our own. Adjacency as a guide to action. 

Let me add to this gumbo one more idea — one that I should probably develop further at some point. 

I often hear it said that people who reject illiberalism (of the right and the left, insofar as those terms have any meaning today) and who are committed to proceduralism are “centrists,” and while that might often be the case, it’s isn’t necessarily. I do not consider myself a centrist — indeed, my recent move towards anarchism (about which I’d like to say more, but I have to wait until my essay on the subject comes out) takes me considerably farther from the “center” of the current system than the Left Purity Cultists or the MAGA-heads, both of whom basically just want Management to take their side. There’s a simple distinction between ends and means at work here: the political ends I envision are pretty radical, but the means by which I hope to achieve them are peaceable and centered on persuasion, fair-mindedness, respect for the integrity of my political opponents, even charity. By contrast, the illiberals of left and right want to employ drastic means, but their ends would leave transnational capitalism securely in place. They’d just have managed to climb the greasy pole to the top; I’d like to take down the pole. 

change

In this last season of Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy becoming more reckless in ways that seem both self-endangering and dangerous to others. By recruiting an obviously unsuitable amateur like Jeff into his final series of cons, he is simply begging to get caught, and when it doesn’t look like Jeff is going to be quite as inept as one might have expected, Jimmy starts taking strange chances himself – for instance, breaking into the cancer-sufferer’s house and then lingering there in order to steal items that will ensure an immediate police involvement. (Note: As it turns out, Jeff is plenty incompetent after all.)

But as I say, this is not just about Jimmy endangering Jimmy. It’s important to note that he has never been one for physical violence. Even when, in an earlier season, he gets beaten up by a trio of young punks, when he takes his revenge on them he only scares them. They don’t even get hit. Violence is definitely not Jimmy’s thing. But in the penultimate episode we see him edging closer to it: preparing to smash an urn over the head of the drunken cancer-sufferer, and then advancing on poor Marion with her telephone cord as though preparing to strangle her with it. When he realizes what he’s doing with Marion he stops himself, but in the case of the cancer-sufferer, it’s only external circumstances – the guy falls asleep – that prevents Jimmy from bashing his head in.

It’s also worth noting that Jimmy has seen what that urn is: It contains the ashes of the man’s beloved dog, so to hit him with that, not just breaking the urn but scattering the ashes over the man and his house, would be an act of extraordinary emotional, as well as physical, cruelty. Jimmy really does seem to be tracking towards genuine sociopathy – a tendency that we’ve seen in him before, for instance when he manipulated a panel of judges into believing that he was broken-hearted about his brother’s death and then, afterward, mocking them for their emotion. (He appears never to have noticed that Kim – the woman he loves – had been feeling the same emotion and is shocked to hear him speak so callously of it.)

But in the final episode he takes that sociopathy to a new level. After he’s been arrested, he seeks an encounter with Marie Schrader – still grieving the murder of her husband, a murder for which Jimmy was partly responsible – and in a conference room with a bunch of lawyers gives her a sob story about how he too is a victim of Walter White. When a prosecutor asks him whether he thinks a jury will buy that line, Jimmy instantly snaps out of his sob-story pathetic-victim mode and says, with colossal smugness, “I only need one.” He’s not even pretending, with this poor shellshocked widow sitting right across from him, to give a rat’s ass about the death of her husband. His performance was not staged for her but for the prosecutor. She was just a prop, a necessary prop in the game of getting his inevitable prison sentence reduced. And it works.

It’s immediately after this encounter that Jimmy learns that Kim has confessed everything that she and Jimmy did to Howard Hamlin. And we are asked to believe that this is such a shock to Jimmy’s system that he does an absolute 180: from descending into self-destructive sociopathy, he instantly transforms into a man who is willing to confess everything and spend the rest of his life, maybe forty years or more, in prison. He does everything except declaim “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” 

Does that strike you as a plausible event? As this episode reminds us, as the entire series never fails to insist to us, Jimmy is a con man deep in his bones. As Walter White says to him in a flashback scene in this episode, “So you’ve always been this way.” And he has! He has always been this way. Are we really to believe that Kim’s confession, all by itself, would have the power to produce a complete reversal of character in such a person?

I just can’t buy it. Jimmy has seen Kim act with integrity many times. He has seen her quit her life as a lawyer out of guilt and shame, and refuse the large sum of money she was owed from the Sandpiper settlement. Indeed, her refusing that money is something that, when they were signing their divorce papers, he openly mocked her for. Over and over again he has seen Kim take a principled stand – not always, because Kim loves Con Life also, is always excited by it. But eventually, when the chips are down, she has regularly chosen the more principled path over the more self-gratifying one, and Jimmy has seen that every time – and it has never had any effect on him whatsoever. Now it’s supposed to change his life in the most radical way possible?

I could imagine Jimmy going through with his seven years in federal prison and feeling that in that way he had owned up to his past, had owned up to his deeds. I could see him even taking the tougher prison instead of the cushy one he had originally negotiated for himself. Chuck McGill believes that people don’t change; I believe that they do, but this radically, this instantaneously? The idea that Jimmy McGill at the end of it all would become a self-sacrificing speaker of the Truth … I just can’t get there. It feels like a massive misstep by the show at the worst possible time — an easy, cheap consolation from a show that has typically denied us such consolations. 

me to Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan

Laurence Sterne, from A Sentimental Journey through Franc...

Laurence Sterne, from A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy:

Lord! said I, … — What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing, and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on!

— If this won’t turn out something, — another will; — no matter, — ’tis an assay upon human nature — I get my labour for my pains, — ’tis enough; — the pleasure of the experiment has kept my senses and the best part of my blood awake, and laid the gross to sleep.

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren; — and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands cheerily together, that were I in a desert, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections: — if I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to; — I would court their shade, and greet them kindly for their protection. — I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desert: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn; and, when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them.

tolerance

In Defense of National Conservatism – Scott Yenor:

National conservatives would have public and private institutions honor Christianity above other religions and would protect the rights of minorities to practice their religious traditions. Fundamentally, national conservatives think that America should take its Protestant roots more seriously and legislate toward a Protestant vision of family life, public research and so on. 

It’s worth noting that this is an explicit repudiation of a principle George Washington thought essential. In his once-famous and now-neglected letter to the Newport synagogue, Washington replies to a letter of praise and gratitude from members of that synagogue. They had written, 

Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine: This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual Confidence and Publick Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies Of Heaven and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good. 

Washington expresses his appreciation for these kind words, but also insists upon a clarification: 

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. 

That is: I and people like me do not offer “toleration” to you and people like you, because it is not in the power of some Americans merely to tolerate the exercise of other Americans’ rights. To be an American is to be on the same footing with every other American. This is the view that Yenor rejects: he’s explicitly pursuing an America in which Protestant Christians have the power to tolerate others, and the liberties of those others depend upon the sufferance of their Protestant rulers.

It’s not going to happen, of course, but it’s another entry in the Dictionary of Contemporary Illiberalism. That Dictionary is getting pretty thick! 

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

lost causes and places of hope

Better late than never, Ezra — props to you for finally coming around. But not many of your generation will. Indeed, for policy if not for personal purposes, we should probably treat everyone over thirty as a lost cause. They’ve been sucked into the black hole of social media and we won’t see them in the real world again. (“Never trust anyone over thirty,” we were told all those decades ago, and now I’m saying “Never hope for anyone over thirty.” In each case there are exceptions, though maybe not enough to bother with.) The key thing, then, is to save the coming generations from the conflagration, and Yuval Levin has a proposal for achieving that.