Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 97

exousia

The Greek word exousia (ἐξουσία) is one that develops in curious ways.

In Plato its connotations are often (though not invariably) pejorative: for instance, in the famous story of the Ring of Gyges (Republic, Book II), the trait that Gyges exhibits in using the power of his ring so lavishly is exousia. It is a kind of license, a recklessness in exercising one’s own will without restraint.The Stoics, though, gave the word a positive spin. The great goal of the Stoic sage was freedom (eleutheria), and they actually defined freedom as a kind of exousia: “the authority of self-action” (exousia autopragias).In the New Testament the word has overwhelmingly positive connotations, and I am especially interested in its use to describe Jesus: “He spoke as one with authority” (ēn gar didaskōn autous hōs exousian echōn) — unlike the scribes and Pharisees. They have the institutional power, but he, this peripatetic sage and prophet, has the real authority. Also, the word often suggests speaking or acting in a way properly “authorized”: See Matthew 8:9 and especially Matthew 28:18: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Edothē moi pasa exousia en ouranō kai epi tēs gēs).

The more I think about this the more I see consistency rather than change in this history. Always, what exousia is depends on the character of the person exercising it. (A distinction we capture in English when we say authoritative or authoritarian.) Exousia in a selfish man, like Gyges, will produce vice; in a sage will produce freedom; in the Son of God will produce compelling teaching, a call to righteousness and intimacy with God. Exousia for Gyges yields self-gratification, while for the Stoic sage it yields self-fulfillment; but in Jesus it manifests itself in words of life for others.

Albert Murray in his apartment in Harlem, 1970s

Albert Murray in his apartment in Harlem, 1970s

Le Guin and forgiveness

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote very few bad stories, but among those few is, surely, The Word for World is Forest. And though she never called it a bad story, she knew that in it something had gone awry. In an introduction to the novella that she wrote some years after its first publication, she explains that she wrote it in a period in which she was much occupied with organizing and participating in demonstrations “first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Vietnam.” And these were not pleasant times for her, because the protests against atomic bomb testing proved futile, and the situation in Vietnam was only getting worse, and the deterioration of that situation was accompanied by an increase in and intensification of lies from the government. She writes,

It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted: forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance. I have said elsewhere that I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely – and with less pleasure.

I knew, because of the compulsive quality of the composition, that it was likely to become a preachment, and I struggled against this.

In parts of the story, and some of the characters, she feels that she succeeded in her struggle. But not in the case of the villain of the piece, a man named Davidson, a pretty transparent representative of the American military in Vietnam, just moved to a different planet. “Davidson is, though not uncomplex, pure; he is purely evil – and I don’t, consciously, believe purely evil people exist. But my unconscious has other opinions. It looked into itself and produced, from itself, Captain Davidson. I do not disclaim him.”

Her refusal to “disclaim” – it’s an interesting word – a character whose over-simplicity she acknowledges is an important thing. It’s like Prospero on Caliban: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” But it’s also a way of accepting the consequences of what, elsewhere in this same introduction, she designates as the strongest imperative of the artist: freedom.

She had sought and claimed for herself artistic freedom, the liberty to raise up characters from her own mind, and having exercised that liberty, she now sees that the results are not always what she would want, are not always admirable. Well. Such is freedom’s price. In the last paragraph of her introduction, she writes:

American involvement in Vietnam is now past; the immediately intolerable pressures have shifted to other areas; and so the moralizing aspects of the story are now plainly visible. These I regret, but I do not disclaim them either. The work must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit, or grace, or liberty.

That’s an extraordinarily complex statement, and, moreover, one that I think is relevant to our own moment. Because what Le Guin understood, especially later in her career, looking back on her story in retrospect, is that “of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing is ever made,” and therefore one’s own work will inevitably contain the residue of one’s own unresolved internal conflicts. And she forgives herself for any impurities in the story. (It’s noteworthy that she titled a later story-suite Five Ways to Forgiveness – I should do a post on those stories at some point.)

I have said before that our society is so miserable right now because it combines judgementalism with an inability to offer or receive forgiveness, which essentially means that every error is infinitely punishable. And it also means that in such an environment there can be no artistic freedom. Le Guin believed that a society in which artistic freedom is impossible is necessarily a sick society. And she was correct. 

It’s common these days to believe that strict scrutiny — to borrow a legal term — must be applied to imaginative works to be sure that no wrongthink is published. But what if that scrutiny also impedes works of major creativity, works that enable new worlds of thought and sympathy? Unlike people on Twitter, Le Guin was an adult, and understood that every decision involves trade-offs: freedom to imagine and write and publish means that some of what is imagined and published is regrettable — even one’s own imaginings. She counted and cost, made her decision, and lived with the consequences. Like an adult.  

It’s the cup of tea that just makes this one.

It’s the cup of tea that just makes this one. 

Photograph by Stanley Kubrick (1947) — taken, I think, wi...

Photograph by Stanley Kubrick (1947) — taken, I think, with a Rolleiflex, because he used one often in those days. I do love me a square format camera. 

two quotations on church

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time: 

The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to “rock.” Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word” — when the church and I were one. 

Michael Warner, from his essay “Tongues Untied”, on listening to a lay teacher at his family’s Pentecostal church:  

Every Wednesday night without fail, as this man wound himself through an internal deconstruction of the entire Calvinist tradition, in a fastidiously Protestant return to a more anthropomorphic God, foam dried and flecked on his lips. For our petit-bourgeois family it was unbearable to watch, but we kept coming back. I remember feeling the tension in my mother’s body next to me, all her perception concentrated on the desire to hand him the Kleenex that, as usual, she had thoughtfully brought along. 

Being a literary critic is nice, I have to say, but for lip-whitening, veinpopping thrills it doesn’t compete. Not even in the headier regions of Theory can we approximate that saturation of life by argument. In the car on the way home, we would talk it over. Was he right? If so, what were the consequences? Mother, I recall, distrusted an argument that seemed to demote God to the level of the angels; she thought Christianity without an omniscient God was too Manichaean, just God and Satan going at it. She also complained that if God were not omniscient, prophecy would make no sense. She scored big with this objection, I remember; at the time, we kept ourselves up-to-date on Pat Robertson’s calculations about the imminent Rapture. I, however, cottoned on to the heretical engineer’s arguments with all the vengeful pleasure of an adolescent. God’s own limits were in sight: this was satisfaction in its own right, as was the thought of holding all mankind responsible in some way.

enough is enough

It’s been said many times by many people, but the state of officiating in the Premier League is disgraceful — and does not appear to be improving. In today’s match between Brighton and Manchester United, there were several major errors, every one of which went in favor of the bigger club — which is par for the course in the PL, I’m afraid. Lisandro Martinez shoved Danny Welbeck right in the back in the box; no penalty, and VAR contrived not to see anything. Harry Maguire, already on a yellow, grabbed Leandro Trossard by the neck and threw him to the ground; ref didn’t see it, VAR didn’t look. Other calls were possibly defensible — an early offside call against Welbeck, a booking for Scott McTominay that probably should have been a red — but oddly enough, they went Man Utd.’s way also … and they still lost, which tells you what a shambles that side is right now. 

As I’ve said many times, the ref in a modern top-level football match has an impossible job: the game is too fast and there are too many players. That’s why VAR exists — but in my experience, VAR gets calls wrong about as often as it gets them right. The Premier League makes so much money that it doesn’t care about any of this, but it ought to care. 

Oh, one more thing: there’s talk that the VAR program will be turned over to the recently retired Mike Dean. Well, that would fix it! [cue maniacal laughter] 

“One Manner of Law,” by Marilynne Robinson:Hugh Peters, m...

“One Manner of Law,” by Marilynne Robinson:

Hugh Peters, most disparaged of Puritans, wanted to exclude poor artists from taxation. He proposed that there be peacemakers appointed to settle disputes before anyone could be arrested or imprisoned. Writing as someone who was forced to flee England under the threat of persecution, and whose fellow dissenters had experienced prison and worse, he does not call for any equivalent punishment or any punishment at all for his (temporarily) defeated persecutors, but instead for an alleviation of the punitive bent in the assertion of public authority. 

A fascinating historical essay. 

my new spiritual discipline …

… is: watching Arsenal play soccer. 

For the past few years I have rarely watched Arsenal matches live. Too much stress for me, too much swearing for my family. Highlights and replays have been good enough. I watch lots and lots of live soccer; just not any featuring the team I (however reluctantly, grudgingly, painfully) support. 

Basically, I’ve become like my Uncle Bob, who for decades now has declined to watch University of Alabama football games live. (American college football, y’all.) He records them, and then, when the game should be over, he calls his sister, AKA my mother. The conversations always go the same way: the phone rings, my mom answers, Uncle Bob says “Can I watch?” My mom says Yes or No. If Yes, he hangs up and watches the game; if No, he hangs up and deletes his recording. Simple. 

And yet … not ideal, I think? Or rather, I know — I know because too often I have watched matches knowing exactly how they will turn out. Takes away some of the excitement, to say the least. And back when I watched live, I saw things like, oh, you know, the most beautiful goal ever scored in the Premier League. Saw it as it happened.  

Thus my new discipline, starting in about one hour: watching Arsenal play Premier League footy. It’s gonna be terrible. They’ll give away cheap penalties, Xhaka will be sent off, they’ll be totally incompetent on defense, their attack will look fluid but will be unable to create any goals, and I’ll spend the last ten minutes of the match listening to Palace supporters sing “You’re getting sacked in the morning” to Mikel Arteta. Yay. 

Also, they’ll finish fifth again. You can count on it. But I love these guys anyway. 

The Southern Courier was published weekly from 1965 to 19...

The Southern Courier was published weekly from 1965 to 1968.