Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 96

liberals believe

Stanley Fish, from How Milton Works: 

Liberals believe that knowledge of an object (be it a piece of data, a person, a concept) is one thing and evaluation of it is another, so that it makes perfect sense to say, as Satan does, I know what the good is — I just choose another path (as if knowledge and inclination could be severed from each other and opposed). Liberals believe that facts (of history, justice, science) are independent of the knower, and that it is the knower’s obligation to approach the task of knowing with as few preconceptions as possible so that the understanding he finally achieves is impersonal rather than a reflection of his antecedently held views and preferences; one must come to any situation calling for a decision (about what to think or what to say or what to do) with an open mind, a mind prepared to jettison its most cherished convictions should the evidence tell against them. Liberals believe that evidence lies about in the world waiting to be gathered and then arranged in patterns it itself suggests. Liberals believe that if we are sufficiently careful in our gathering of evidence (careful, that is, to keep ourselves and our desires out of the process) the truth will will finally emerge in a form everyone (whose mind is open) acknowledge. Liberals believe that when the truth to be determined is the meaning (political, moral, legal) of an action, the previous history of the actor — whether he has in the past been a good or bad man — is largely irrelevant and that we should look only to the shape of the present circumstances when assessing him. And because liberals believe in all of the above, they believe in the efficacy of procedures — scientific, parliamentary, judicial — designed to protect us from the overhasty judgments we make when we allow our commitments and allegiances to blind us. Liberals believe that the most important of these procedures is the machinery of rationality, of those laws of logic attached to to no agenda or vision, but sufficiently general in their scope as provide a normative perspective from the vantage point of which any agenda or vision can be assessed and, if necessary, corrected. Liberals believe that communication and persuasion take place (or should take place) in the context of that rationality and that it is possible to bring anyone — except, perhaps, the mentally impaired — to a clear understanding, so long as he or she is willing to set aside or bracket all biases and preconceptions.

Milton believes none of these things.

heads up

I’ve got a number of brief quote-posts queued up for the next week, and a couple of slightly longer ones, but I won’t be around. I’m off Monday for a brief writing retreat, to see if I can finish a complete draft of my “biography” of Paradise Lost … which has been fun to write but also immensely challenging. It occurred to me the other day that if I had to rewrite the book using nothing I have used so far — none of the facts about Milton’s life, none of the quotations from Paradise Lost, none of the references to later readers and writers — I could easily do it. That’s how much material there is to draw on. And I have to keep the whole thing to 50,000 words! 

There’s a self-regarding preciousness to much of Donald J...

There’s a self-regarding preciousness to much of Donald Judd’s work — and to the whole town of Marfa — that I don’t care for, but he also did some truly major work and I hope the Chinati Foundation reaches its financial goals. The most interesting installation there, I think, is Robert Irwin’s massive study in light and shade. 

Taylor Dotson, “Unsustainable Alarmism”:Consider alarmism...

Taylor Dotson, “Unsustainable Alarmism”:

Consider alarmism in the climate debate. Presenting climate change in catastrophic terms has allowed activists to discredit anyone who doubts worst-case climate scenarios as “denialists.” While crusading against denialism might seem like a strategy for achieving a consensus about the problem’s seriousness, it often ends up undermining the very conditions that make public deliberation possible. As Matthew Nisbet has argued, the “denialist” label is a way of “controlling who has the authority to speak on the subject.” When expressions of personal alarm become a litmus test for who has a reasonable understanding of the problem, alarmists naturally have sole authority. The effect, as Nisbet writes, is a “culture where protecting one’s own identity, group, and preferred storyline takes priority over constructive consideration of knowledge and evidence.” 

I like the concept of alarm as a finite resource. There are a lot of people out there who seem to believe that what I have called “the absolutizing of fright” is sustainable forever. When everything is a world-ending disaster, then nothing is. It’s very difficult for us to weigh our problems accurately when all day every day we’re being told that something/everything is the WORST. 

(And by something/everything I don’t mean the Todd Rundgren album Something/Anything, which in fact is the BEST.) 

The Contingency of Listening – by Damon Krukowski:Albums...

The Contingency of Listening – by Damon Krukowski:

Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog – the last of my own records made that way was Galaxie 500’s second album, in 1989 – the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records.

In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound. The record is.

There is a further irony as we add digital into the picture. Digital reproduction does not alter the master the way that analog does. For many commercial CDs, the final product actually is the original master, and vice-versa. Even when a digital master is higher resolution than CDs can reproduce, it is still possible to listen to them via computers without any degradation at all.

When CDs first came out, many of them sounded awful in part for this very transparency – they were duplicating analog master tapes more or less directly, rather than interpreting how they were meant to sound at the end of the process for reproducing records. Digital was blamed for those “harsh” CDs – but that is also simply how some analog master tapes can sound. 

Fascinating! 

another friendly reminder

Here’s the good news: Most Americans are not hateful conspiracy-theorists who want to destroy their wrongthinking neighbors.

Here’s the bad news: The hateful conspiracy-theorists who want to destroy their wrongthinking neighbors dominate social media – they’re on it all the time. They toil not, neither do they spin, but they never stop posting and tweeting and reposting and retweeting and shitposting and shittweeting.

And here’s more bad news: the professional media make bank by showcasing the hateful conspiracy-theorists who want to destroy their wrongthinking neighbors – and they too never stop their destructive work. There is a malice there that does not sleep.

But – finally – here’s more good news:

You can stop reading Twitter and Facebook, you can stop watching TV “news,” you can stop listening to loudmouthed podcasters.You can change your news consumption to a weekly cycle rather than a daily – or hourly – one.You can spend more time with monthly or quarterly periodicals; you can read books — even old books. You can also listen to music, ideally music not served up to you algorithmically. Buy one CD or vinyl record per month and listen to it all the way through, multiple times. Retrain your attention.Go outside as often as you can, ideally without devices. Work in the yard, or just walk around. Pause occasionally to take a few deep breaths. When you come back in, do not head straight for your device; instead, make a cup of tea, straighten your shelves, or pray.

We can do this! 

trolleys

Every day, American politicians re-enact the Trolley Problem, and every day, they find a third option: to run themselves over with the trolley. 

exhaustion, its causes and treatments

I thought of calling this post, “You’re Exhausted Because You Don’t Have Enough to Do” – which, yeah, I know: a trolling, clickbaity headline if there ever was one. But bear with me: I have a point. And it’s not accusatory.

Let’s begin with a few things we all know – for instance, that everyone is exhausted. We know this because people keep telling us so. So. Tired. The universal declaration.

As Anna Katharina Schaffner shows in her 2016 book Exhaustion: A History, people have always been exhausted, though they have explained that experience in a wide variety of ways. And the different explanations often arise from legitimately different causes. For instance, there are very good reasons to believe that a common exhaustion of our time and place – of the social environment of, say, people who read the news online – arises largely from the ways that alway-on connectivity allows us no boundaries: emails from work can arrive at any time, and while we might try to tell ourselves that they can wait until the next time we are officially on the clock, in practice we often find it less stressful to get it off (a) and (b) our plate by answering immediately. Which results in a ping on our co-worker’s phone, which may promot her to think that she needs to get it off her mind and off her plate … and so the cycle continues.

It continues in another way also: seeking refuge from the stress, we turn to social media or streaming videos – that is, to the very same devices that have made us anxious in the first place. Devices that can still ping us … and so the cycle continues. An endless sequence of stimulus and response, as we are gradually transformed into mere servers.

Thus also – we’re still talking about things we know – the proliferation of articles and books and YouTube videos and podcasts on the inestimable blessing of disconnection. Silence, or at least quiet; Off rather than On. And there’s no doubt that for those who are able to manage it, such disconnection is a Good Thing. But maybe not the best thing.

The problem with the imperative to disconnect is that it operates still within the world of stimulus and response. Its only real point is to remove the stimulus in hopes that after a while we’ll stop twitching. And maybe that’s how it works, for some of us anyway. But eventually we have to turn our phones back on, and … well, once more, the cycle resumes. The cycle of being frayed by a certain set of stimuli and responding to the fraying by taking refuge in a different set of stimuli. But this does not relieve our exhaustion or restore our good health because constant stimulation is exhausting in itself – even when the stimulation comes from things we like, or think we like.

What’s necessary, I think, is breaking the circuit that keeps the cycle going. And the key to how to do that may be found, I think, in a single claim made by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality. Here it is: “institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them.” Let’s unpack this:

Our “anonymous institutions” – especially the international and transnational media companies – are always telling us what they can do for us: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google, back in the day); “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Meta);But what they do for us always comes packaged in the stimulus/response model;And constant immersion in the stimulus/respons environment exhausts us;So the “delicate balance” Illich speaks of has not been achieved – we are constantly being pressured to forget what we can do for ourselves;Therefore our institutions are not functional, and neither are we.

This is what my title means: We’re exhausted because we don’t have enough to do. Instead of meaningful action, we have only responses to stimuli.

The first step in making ourselves and our institutions more functional is simply this: To try doing for ourselves what the anonymous media companies are always telling us they can do for us.

Think, then, of a social ill you want to see remedied; now, with that ill fixed firmly in your mind, imagine that there are no social media – no internet even. What do you do? Throw up your hands in despair? That wouldn’t be necessary. You write letters; you see if a local organization devoted to that cause needs volunteers; you attend city council or school board meetings; you change your own behavior in whatever ways might make a small difference. You have more time to do these things because you are no longer trapped in the stimulus/response cycle that is the only thing our media institutions have to offer us. You may well discover that while in one sense you’re doing more – you’re taking action rather than responding digitally to digital stimuli – you’re not as tired. In many circumstances – not all, to be sure, but many, especially in our part of the world – the world of atoms is less wearisome to us than the world of bits.

So, paradoxically but truly, the way out of our current exhaustion is not to do less but do other – or rather, genuinely to do rather than merely to react. And then when you do return to the media world, you’ll do so as someone who has helped to re-establish that “delicate balance” Illich speaks of. You’ll have taken a step towards healing yourself, and taken a step towards healing our institutions. What do you have to lose except your Pavlovian chains?

a friendly reminder

A year ago I wrote: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” The same rule applies to TV, radio, podcasts. If their clicks and ratings and ad revenues go up when we hate one another, flee them like the plague they are. 

thoughts, nearing the end

The shot above is — in context — one of the most amazing things this amazing show has done. 

If Rhea Seehorn doesn’t win an Emmy, there should be riots in the streets. 

If Carol Burnett doesn’t win an Emmy, there should also be riots in the streets. Burnett, as famous as she is, has been an utter revelation as Marion. 

Everything is unraveling fast, and it started unraveling when Francesca told Jimmy that Kim had called (in the aftermath of his disappearance at the end of Breaking Bad) to see if he was alive. That led him to call Kim, and that spectacularly disastrous decision led both of them to actions that will define the conclusion of the story they share.

Kim tells Jimmy that he should turn himself in, which infuriates him: he tells her that if she has a guilty conscience she should turn herself in — which she does. The chief effect Jimmy’s call has on Kim is to make her realize that all her attempts to finish the business of her life with Jimmy have proved unsuccessful — business remains, and that business is confession and atonement.

Meanwhile, in his rage Jimmy takes the opposite path: he resumes his downward spiral. He had dragged Jeff into a con because Jeff, a former resident of Albuquerque, had recognized him as Saul Goodman; once Jeff has committed a felony Jimmy can command his silence. He’s done with Jeff — until the phone call. Now — perhaps because he sees that he can never reconnect with Kim — he quickly becomes the worst version of himself, both unprecedentedly malicious and unprecedentedly careless. Once before he had unwisely gotten involved with “amateurs,” as Mike (in a flashback scene) calls Walt and Jesse, but then he was led by arrogance — he boasted that when he looked at Walt he saw 170 pounds of clay to sculpt; now he’s getting involved with amateurs again, but this time he’s driven by despair. 

When Jeff recognized “Saul,” Jimmy called the Disappearer — but then, in mid-call, decided, “I’ll take care of this myself.” That may prove to be one of the unwisest decisions in a life full of unwise decisions. I don’t think he can make that call again. And I don’t think there’s a way out for him. 

I’ll make two predictions for the finale. One, that everything will end, however it ends, for Jimmy and Kim alike, in Albuquerque; and second, that we’ll see one more flashback to Jimmy and Chuck — maybe in their childhood. Because Chuck understood his brother all along, understood him better than anyone. Several seasons back, he told Kim the necessary truth: “My brother is not a bad person. He has a good heart. It’s just … he can’t help himself. And everyone’s left picking up the pieces.” To her great misery, Kim found out just how right Chuck was. And she’s trying, one last time, to pick up those pieces.