Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 98

What is the meaning of ‘transfiguration’? | Psephizo:We a...

What is the meaning of ‘transfiguration’? | Psephizo:

We are so used to speaking of ‘transfiguration’ in Christian terms that we have not realised how remarkable it is that Mark and Matthew used the Greek verb metamorphoō (in the passive: metamorphoumai) at all.  In classical Greek and Latin literature, the verb, and the noun metamorphōsis, are both slippery, ambivalent words, largely used in mythological or magical contexts.  It does not appear at all in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament’.… Why did Mark use that verb at all in the first place? It’s a rare word, without any of the positive connotations that we assume today. 

A very interesting reflection! 

The New York Times:Born in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. [Freema...

The New York Times:

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. [Freeman] Hrabowski came of age in the thick of the Jim Crow era. The notion that Black children didn’t deserve a quality education brought out the fighter in the self-described “fat, nerdy kid who could only attack a math problem” at a very young age.

He was 12 when he participated in the historic Children’s March inspired by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. He was among the hundreds of boys and girls arrested while they marched for equal rights, and spent five days in jail.

Dr. Hrabowski has largely declined to discuss the details of what he saw and experienced in the Birmingham jail. Some of it will forever remain unspeakable, he said. But in an interview, he recalled a visit from Dr. King.

“What you do this day will have an impact on children not yet born,” Dr. Hrabowski remembered him telling the jailed children. 

I was five at the time, living about two miles from the site of the march. Children just a few years older than me were thrown in jail. God bless Dr. Hrabowski. He has fought the good fight for a long time. 

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, wort...

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. 

— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street 

violence and boredom

Adam Roberts, from an essay that (caveat lector) is full of explicit violence:

Be honest: when I confessed, early on in this post, how squeamish I am about the representation of violence in art, did you nod in agreement with me? Or, on the contrary, did you find yourself tut-tutting: really? you don’t have the stomach for this kind of art? what kind of weakling are you, Adam? Man that’s lame: I’m certainly tougher than that. Perhaps part of the appeal of this art is that we flatter ourselves that we can take it. We might even egg ourselves on to watch increasingly violent representations. That’s how desensitization works. The political logic of ‘toughness’ is that we need to ‘toughen up’ (to ‘grow a pair’, to ‘man the fuck up’) whenever our conscience prompts us to show compassion for our fellow human beings. That we need to harden our hearts, like pharaoh. 

Adam’s developing a theory here, a pretty complicated one, and I need to think it over. But for now, just a few brief comments. 

(1) Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an essay about how much people love TV shows about animals eating other animals: 

But I have found that whenever I point out this rage for watching predators devour their prey, nearly everyone defends the shows, and their arguments almost always use the same terms: The old nature documentaries sanitized and prettified the animal world, disguising from us the harsh truth of “nature red in tooth and claw.” These newer documentaries merely present to us The Way Things Are — and thus are beyond reproach.

Now it is true that predation is part of The Way Things Are, but sleeping is even more a part of The Way Things Are: For every hour a lioness spends hunting she spends a dozen sleeping, yet our television documentaries picture few somnolent cats. And the hard, slow work that hunting chiefly amounts to is given insignificant representation in comparison to the moment at which the claws catch an antelope and the teeth tear its neck. Moreover, animals who eat also defecate, yet I cannot remember seeing our intrepid documentarians exploring that subject with telephoto lenses and extreme slow motion. 

My chief point was this: We have to begin our reflection on these matters by acknowledging a simple fact: People watch shows like this because they like it. Only then can we go on to ask why people like it. There’s a lot of squirming evasion of that first and essential point. I think the same thing is true of fictional violence against human beings (or other sentient creatures): People enjoy writing it, and other people enjoy reading it. So I think that Category One in this discourse needs to be pleasure, enjoyment. 

(2) I don’t like it. I never have and I expect I never will. I do not mean to be self-praising here; there are plenty of things I do like that I shouldn’t. But from my early childhood I’ve been the same way about violence in all its forms. When I was six years old and my grandfather and father took me bird-hunting I would think, every minute, Why are we doing this? Why would you want to kill another creature? I understood the need to kill, in order to eat; I even understood choosing to eat meat when it’s not necessary to eat meat; I couldn’t and can’t understand taking pleasure in killing. I sometimes found it disturbing, but always and to a far stronger degree I found it boring. And I feel the same way about violence in movies and in fiction. This crap again? I just can’t being myself to read it unless duty requires it, and in those cases I can barely restrain my sighs and eyerolls. 

(3) You may therefore be unsurprised to know that I am colossally bored by the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, who combines ridiculous levels of violence with a cod-Faulknerian style that was barely tolerable when Faulkner himself deployed it. I think James Wood, in a 2005 essay on McCarthy, gets at something important: 

McCarthy has said, in interviews, that there is “no such thing as life without bloodshed,” and that the novelist’s proper occupation is with death. His work gives eloquent witness to this vision. Lester Ballard, watching two hawks, reflects that “he did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.” Judge Holden, in Blood Meridian, proclaims that war endures “because young men love it and old men love it in them.” The Duena Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses announces that “what is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God — who knows all that can be known — seems powerless to change.” McCarthy risks being accused of appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records; this is the fate of the stylist who stoops to gore, and it seems an unfair complaint (though one never feels, as one always does in Dostoyevsky, the novelist flinching from the suffering he is recording). The problem with a novel like No Country for Old Men is that it cannot give violence any depth, context, or even reality. The artificial theatre of the writing makes the violence routine and showy. And McCarthy’s idea — his novelistic picture of life’s evil is limited, and literal: it is only ever of physical violence. Though one wouldn’t want to turn McCarthy into Henry James, there are surely ways to use a novel to register the more impalpable forms of evil and violence as well as the palpable. 

This seems to me right about McCarthy, and even more right about Dostoevsky. 

(4) Adam’s novels are not without violence themselves, though never (to my recollection) in the delighted grimdark mode. Does he, I wonder, have to overcome his own “squeamishness” to write such passages? 

representation

A while back I mused on a question: What do we owe the more-than-human world? It seems to me that that question has a certain set of implications for the way we design our political order. For instance, here in the United States we have a representative body, the Senate, that many people denounce as insufficiently democratic. How, they ask, can it be reasonable for Wyoming (pop. 576,850) to have the same number of Senators as New York (pop. 20,215,751). One reasonable answer is that Senators don’t just represent people; they also represent places. I don’t think it would be politically healthy for people in New York and California to have, simply because of their sheer numbers, nearly untrammeled power over a place that’s a thousand or two thousand miles away from them, a place they will probably never see, a place whose land and creatures they will never know. 

Of course, people elected to office by their neighbors can make unwise decisions, can be corrupt, can be selfish, can abuse their environment; but they are much more likely to suffer consequences for what they do, either directly or as a result of public pressure, than those who make such decisions from great distances. 

A system such as ours, with representation split between the Senate and the House, is certainly not the only way to maintain some degree of local control over local environments; and it may not be the best way. But such control is necessary for the flourishing of places and communities. So those who want to abolish the Senate need to decide what they’re going to replace it with, because a system that gives even more power to the coasts over flyover country will necessarily be a more unjust system than the one we now have. 

From a Polish performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Parad...

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From a Polish performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Paradise Lost 

decline and fall

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants: A very interesting post by Cal Newport. His thesis is, essentially, as follows: TikTok’s popularity has alarmed Facebook — a company that has a history of forgetting what it does well in order to chase immediate relevance — and as a result Facebook is neglecting to consolidate its advantage in the “social graph.” The result will inevitably be a further and more precipitous decline in Facebook’s influence — but it is also unlikely that TikTok itself will remain as dominant as it is. 

As Newport says in an accompanying blog post, “If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage. Subject, all at once, to the fierce competitive pressures of the mobile attention economy, it’s unclear whether they can survive without this protection.” Thus: “If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution, we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.” 

Well, let’s hope so. I’d love to see a future in which the algorithmic social-media domination of our online lives ended, and we returned to online life at a more human scale. But how likely is that? We know that the venture capitalists and angel investors don’t want moderate successes — they want The Next Enormous Thing. Will they get it? I think it all hinges on how strongly people respond to VR environments. 

Noah Millman:The popular series Stranger Things is meticu...

Noah Millman:

The popular series Stranger Things is meticulous about getting details right, but it’s a Frankenstein world, built of spare parts from earlier movies; there is nothing genuinely real or living about it. Indeed, the entire premise of the series (a premise that has paid off handsomely) is that audiences would love to participate in a festival of pure nostalgia that isn’t at all about life, but entirely about how life was represented. The fantasy being sold is less of living in the 1980s than of watching 1980s-era movies.

incentives

Consider this an addendum to my recent post on an influential study of Alzheimer’s that looks to have featured manipulated data. Retraction Watch has been in business for quite some time now, and is likely to get busier because of the extra opportunities for dishonesty available through machine learning. This situation will continue to get worse until science — and academia more generally — begins to get serious about correcting its perverse incentives. Every scientist knows that certain kinds of results get (a) attention and (b) citations, resulting in (c) prestige for the researchers’ institutions and (d) promotions and raises and maybe better jobs elsewhere for the researchers. 

Again, this is a problem for all of academia: as I have written elsewhere, “the academic enterprise is not a Weberian ‘iron cage,’ it’s a cage made from a bundle of thin sticks of perverse incentives held together with a putty of bullshit.” But when the bullshit takes over the sciences, especially the health sciences, people die. The incentive structure has to change. 

All forms of privilege — including the ones I benefit fro...

All forms of privilege — including the ones I benefit from — are morally dangerous, but I think the form of privilege that does the greatest social and political damage is that of never having to live among or even talk to people who disagree with you about the Good.