The Homebound Symphony – Stagger onward rejoicing

November 17, 2025

W.H.A. and D.L.S.

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.)

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form.

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942.

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced:

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent.

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version:

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story.

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism.

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness:

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea:

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches.

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now.

November 12, 2025

back to the brothers

Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he lectured us about our narrow-mindedness, our parochial attitudes, our failure to introduce our students to the most challenging literary masterpieces. Instead of teaching them … well, whatever we did teach them, we should dare to assign Dostoevsky!

As this harangue went on, the woman sitting next to me — my department chair, as it happened, Beatrice Batson, an impressive Southern lady of the old school who (inexplicably) spoke with the kind of mid-Atlantic accent I associate with Irene Dunne — was steaming. When the lecture finally ended and there was a Q&A session, she stood up and informed the journalist (Sir, pronounced “Suh”) that every student at Wheaton College was required to read The Brothers Karamazov.

“Oh,” he replied.

It was true. In the two-course introduction to literature that all Wheaton students were required to take, a teacher could assign either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the Greek tragedy of one’s choice; and you needed to do some of the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy but not necessarily all of either. But when the nineteenth-century novel rolled around, one had no options: The Brothers Karamazov ended up being the only work of literature that every Wheaton College student, regardless of major, was required to read from cover to cover.

That edict remained in force for the first twenty years of my Wheaton teaching career, and in those two decades I taught Karamazov at least once each year and sometimes twice. There was a time I knew it better than any book in the world. I began by using this edition:

(Despite the testimony of this cover image, the brothers in the novel are not in their fifties.) But when the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation came out and was clearly the Cool New Thing, I switched to that. And that’s the one I know best. The curriculum had changed and my teaching assignments had changed by the time the great Gary Saul Morson’s fierce critique of their work appeared, so I never taught any alternative to P-V.

When I decided earlier this year that I would teach the book one last time, I thought long and hard about whether to go back to Constance Garnett’s version, which Morson likes, or whether to try a newer translation … but in the end I decided to stick with P-V, in large part because that allowed me to use the greatly-worn, much-annotated copy that I used all those years ago.

However, I did not realize that a revised version of the translation had appeared in 2021 — and that’s the one the bookstore ordered for my students. If the text had remained the same, I probably would’ve used my old version and identified the page numbers of the key passages for the new edition. But sometimes the actual words are different, dadgummit. (For example, where in the previous version old Karamazov claimed to love his own “wickedness,” in this one he claims to love his own “filth.” I do wonder how many of the changes are responses to Morson’s critique.) So now I’m having to transfer all my annotations and highlights from the old copy to the new, which is tiresome but probably good for me.

The book is as electrifying as ever, and I am delighted to be immersed in its strange world again. Reports from my journey will be forthcoming over the next few weeks.

November 10, 2025

the acceleration of misrepresentation

Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says,

Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse.

I think what’s going on here is something more specific. My guess is that Coviello thought (a) David Brooks is a conservative and (b) this dumb dismissal of Foucault is just what a conservative would say. I think that also helps to account for the gleefully mocking tone of Coviello’s essay: though he claims to have “all but committed to memory” Brooks’s column, it seems more likely that as soon as he got the one sentence that fit his pre-existing caricature of conservative thinking he effectively stopped reading and certainly stopped thinking.

This is a very common phenomenon.

Recently the Telegraph of London did a kind of exposé of the BBC’s political biases, focusing on (among other things) a documentary that aired just before last November’s Presidential election. In it, Donald Trump’s words on January 6, 2021 were carefully edited and spliced to connect phrases that were not connected in his speech and to alter the timing of those words. When confronted with these facts,

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, even tried to justify the doctoring of the Trump speech, telling a meeting of the broadcaster’s standards committee that it was fine because it broadly reflected the truth about Trump’s actions.

After all, it’s the kind of thing he would say.

Similarly, in 2024, when it was pointed out to J. D. Vance that there had actually been no reports of Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets, he replied,

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.

Maybe the Haitian immigrants didn’t kill and eat pets, but it’s the kind of thing they would do, or might do, and it calls attention to real problems. In short, “it broadly reflected the truth” about Haitian immigrants in America.

To be sure, the BBC’s reports came much closer to reflecting the truth about Trump than Vance’s lie-spreading did to teaching Americans about Haitian immigrants; but all the parties mentioned above are on a down escalator to the sub-basement, and once you step onto that device it’s extremely difficult to get off.

If you report that someone said X, not because she said X, but rather because X seems broadly consistent with what you take her views to be, then X becomes your new baseline for interpreting her. Then if someone tells you she said something much more extreme, say 2X, well, that’s plausible, isn’t it? After all, she said X, you remember that. And now 2X is the new baseline, so when you hear that she said 3X…. And before too long the escalator dumps you off in the sub-basement, where you’ll say anything at all about those you believe to be your Repugnant Cultural Other, because, after all, you have so much evidence against them.

November 5, 2025

Tot

I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take notes as well as keep a journal. I even tried Apple’s own Notes app, though I hate everything about it, starting with its ugly yellow color. Etc. (I’m not naming them all, so do not write me to ask “Have you tried … ?” Whatever it is, the answer is Yes: I have tried it.) My favorite was Notational Velocity, in its original form — I dislike all the supposedly more capable forks of it.

After a long while, I finally came to realize that what all note-taking applications have in common, what they primarily feature, is for me a bug. What they all offer is a place to store text — and in some cases images, though that starts to take us into Everything Bucket territory. And yes, I’ve tried all the Everything Bucket apps as well, starting with Evernote and then moving to Yojimbo and then DEVONThink — among others.

Anyway: the promise of the note-taking app is that you can jot down or copy bits of text, put them in folders or add tags or employ some other way to organize them, and then retrieve them later. But I didn’t retrieve them later. I dutifully tagged them and then … almost always forgot about them. If I happened to remember, then I could do a quick search and easily find them, but that was a rare event. Thus, the fact that all my little scraps of text were present and searchable did me no good at all. If I could have asked an app “Look through the hundreds of items in your database and find the five that would be of greatest interest to me right now,” and gotten a useful answer — well, then that app would have been tremendously useful to me. But technology hasn’t reached that point.

So for years I just kept on adding notes to apps and then forgetting about them. Lord knows what brilliant ideas of mine are hidden away in those now-neglected apps, because I have no idea how to search for them. I would just have to take time out to scroll through note after note after note, which of course makes the whole tagging-and-organizing thing pointless.

My search for a proper notes app ended when I realized that what virtually all notes apps do is counterproductive for me. The answer, for me, turned out to be Tot. Tot is beautiful, simple, limited in its formatting possibilities, easy of access on all my devices, and — this is the absolutely essential thing — it allows me to make seven notes. Seven. That’s it.

What that means for me is this: when I want to store a chunk of text, written by me or by others, I put it in Tot. But then, after a few days, I’ve run out of storage spots. So then I take a look at my most recent additions to Tot and ask myself: What do I want to do with this? I can put it in a micro.blog post, put it in a post for this blog, create a draft of an essay containing it, add some task associated with it to my Reminders list, or delete it. Tot’s limitations force me into that decision, and for me that’s ideal. Textual things don’t just disappear into the depths of a database: they have to be dealt with, so I deal with them. Productive resistance for the win, once again!

November 3, 2025

Pynchon and Woolf

Edward Mendelson, writing in 2013 on two apparently very different novels, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

I have no way of knowing whether Pynchon has ever read Virginia Woolf, but it seems clear that both chose a similar problem and found a similar solution. Each experienced, as everyone does sooner or later, the great unanswerable questions that only get asked in solitude and silence, when the fuss and clatter of daily life suddenly falls silent and “the party’s splendour fell to the floor.” Each chose a more or less ordinary woman, with no special strengths beyond a sharp distaste for power-hunger and cruelty, as the reluctant hero of an inward quest for meaning and value. Each told a story with little outward drama, because the heroine faces a crisis that is invisible to everyone but herself.

Like all of Virginia Woolf’s novels and, despite their misplaced reputation for high-tech cleverness, all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, including his latest one, both books point toward the kind of knowledge of the inner life that only poems and novels can convey, a knowledge that eludes all other techniques of understanding, and that the bureaucratic and collective world disdains or ignores. Yet for anyone who has ever known, even in a crowded room, the solitude and darkness that Clarissa and Oedipa enter for a few moments, that experience, however brief and elusive, is “another mode of meaning behind the obvious” and, however obscured behind corruption, lies, and chatter, “a thing there was that mattered.”

A good passage to remember with the nearly-simultaneous release of a new Pynchon novel, Mendelson’s edition of Mrs. Dalloway, and his new monograph on that wonderful novel.

October 31, 2025

towards Old Man Willow

Brian Eno, interviewed by Ezra Klein, recalled a moment some years ago when he was talking with the engineers at Yamaha about one of their synthesizers. Like most synthesizers, this one came with a series of preset tones but was also programmable, and Eno told the engineers that they should make the synthesizer easier to program. They replied that nobody ever programs the synthesizer, they just use the presets. There would be no value for Yamaha in investing the thought and effort into making programming easier, given the vanishingly small number of people who would benefit from the change.

In a sense, these people are not not using the synthesizer; the synthesizer is using them. You know the old line that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg? Well, a human being’s fingers are a synthesizer’s way of getting its preset sounds played. A human thumb is the TikTok interface’s way of getting itself scrolled. The human being is a means to the device’s end. And that’s ultimately what the device paradigm, as Albert Borgmann called it, leads to. When Eno told that story about his encounters with Yamaha Ezra Klein rightly commented that people who think they are using social media end up conforming themselves more and more closely to the affordances of whatever social-media platform they’re on.

I’m reminded of that passage in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are trying to get through the Old Forest, and the one way that they don’t want to go is down into the valley of the Withywindle. But they keep being forced down there. The lay of the land, the affordances of the land push them towards the place they’re trying to avoid. And eventually they discover that resisting those affordances is just too exhausting. And that’s what it’s like when we use social media, and when we use chatbots: it’s characteristic of all of our currently dominant technologies to force us to become devices. The entire system is oriented towards the transformation of what had formerly been human beings into devices. Jaron Lanier says You Are Not a Gadget but, increasingly, you really are. Eventually you’re drawn head-first into the roots of Old Man Willow and in danger of being crushed to death.

This explains why, in the face of varied but always vociferous complaints, the big tech companies keep shoving their AI programs in our faces, keep building out data centers in the face of protests, keep stealing people’s electricity and water, etc. etc. People say, You can’t force this on us against our will, and the techlords reply, Of course we can, we always have. Eventually down into the valley of the Withywindle we’ll go — unless we don’t enter the Old Forest in the first place.

And for now, anyway, we have that choice. The other day I happened to read this piece by Charlie Warzel on the deluge of AI slop that he encounters every day. “This Is Just the Internet Now,” the title says. But it isn’t. I’m on the internet every day, and I haven’t seen any of the crap he describes. Almost all of it comes from the major social-media platforms and I’m not on any of them — and you don’t have to be either. The hobbits had good reason to take the great risk of entering the Old Forest; I don’t.

UPDATE: A friend wrote to disagree with this post, but I think he misunderstood both Eno and me. So I’m pasting in some of my reply here in case I’ve confused others also.

Eno didn’t [criticize people who use] presets. He just said that he thinks it would be better if people had a legitimate option to program if they want to. They shouldn’t have to be technical wizards in order to program. Yamaha could have made it easier, so that someone might think, Hmmm, what could I do with this?

Similarly, with social media, Instagram for example, there might be very legitimate reasons for people to choose an algorithmic timeline rather than a chronological one — but they don’t have the choice. Meta doesn’t make it difficult to view posts chronologically, they make it impossible. With Substack, if I don’t want to see Notes — and I damn sure DON’T want to see Notes — I have no way to opt out. (I just have to avoid the Substack homepage, which I do. That’s something, I guess.) An algorithmic timeline by default is fine, a Notes view by default is fine, but when the defaults become the only option then that technology is undergoing enshittification.

And when you make your synthesizer so that choosing anything but the presets is impossible, or impossible for you if you’re not a wizard, then that’s the same kind of enshittification. [I should add here — I didn’t put this in my email — that I don’t think it’s nearly as bad for an individual instrument to be enshittified in this way, because no single model of any instrument has the kind of dominance that the big social media platforms have in their domain. You can usually, if not always, buy other instruments with different features. The enshittification of the really big social-media platforms is more consequential — though even then we are other options, e.g. for posting photographs, that aren’t enshittified in the way Instagram is.]

Eno’s point is not a criticism of the users of technologies, it’s a criticism of the makers of technologies.

October 29, 2025

Murray and Mann

Lauren Walsh:

Thomas Mann’s four-part novel, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), a tremendously important book to [Albert] Murray’s thinking, enacts this mix of gravity and lightness, in this case even desolation and resilience. In the titular character, who was sold into slavery, Murray saw a rascally figure of the hero who endures despite the odds. One day, Murray and I read together the opening of Joseph in Egypt (the third book of the novel), where Joseph yammers on to one of his captors, waxing rather philosophical about the interwovenness of individual destinies. Murray laughed in response to the scene, delightedly calling the protagonist a “cocky, conceited S.O.B.” Indeed, even Joseph’s captor notes that he talks too much. But it’s a spirited moment and Murray admired the character’s spunk and intellect, as well as the author’s decision to craft a hero who is arrogant but at times also humbled. After his laughter broke, and in a tone both serious and full of exuberant zest, Murray went on to talk about how “Mann is singin’ it” in his exploration of the human condition and his allegorical confrontation of contemporary problems.

Joseph and His Brothers was foundational to Murray’s aesthetic philosophy and theories of culture. As Murray explains in The Hero and the Blues (1973), “to make the telling more effective is to make the tale more to the point.” In other words, literary craft — sophisticated, textured, allegorical style that elevates prose to fine art — serves socially committed writing that educates, while still “singing.” He also regarded Mann’s Joseph as a timeless and universal hero, a blues hero before there was the blues: one who rises above the obstacles in his path through improvisation and wit, a highly developed figure of unbroken human spirit. For Murray, there was no dissonance in linking this European retelling of a Bible story with the American blues idiom. Joseph, an “excellent epic prototype,” was of a piece with the American blues hero because he “goes beyond his failures in the very blues singing process of acknowledging them.”

This makes a lovely and thought-provoking connection between my 2023 essay on Murray and my series of posts on Mann — from the same year!

October 28, 2025

two quotations on economics

John Ruskin, from Unto This Last (1860):

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

A strange political economy; the only one, nevertheless, that ever was or can be: all political economy founded on self-interest being but the fulfilment of that which once brought schism into the Policy of angels, and ruin into the Economy of Heaven.

David Graeber, from “Bullshit Jobs” (2013):

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it. […]

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

October 27, 2025

the Newman problem

Any serious reader of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and of the many controversies appertaining thereunto, will repeatedly face a certain kind of problem. I will explain by reference to one example, though I could choose dozens of others.

In late 1845, when Newman had recently swum the Tiber, “the editor of a magazine who had in former days accused me, to my indignation, of tending towards Rome, wrote to me to ask, which of the two was now right, he or I?” Newman replied at length, and, among other things, said this:

I have felt all along that Bp. Bull’s theology was the only theology on which the English Church could stand. I have felt, that opposition to the Church of Rome was part of that theology; and that he who could not protest against the Church of Rome was no true divine in the English Church. I have never said, nor attempted to say, that any one in office in the English Church, whether Bishop or incumbent, could be otherwise than in hostility to the Church of Rome.

And yet — I thought as I read those words — earlier in the Apologia he says that

I had a great and growing dislike, after the summer of 1839, to speak against the Roman Church herself or her formal doctrines. I was very averse to speak against doctrines, which might possibly turn out to be true, though at the time I had no reason for thinking they were, or against the Church, which had preserved them. I began to have misgivings, that, strong as my own feelings had been against her, yet in some things which I had said, I had taken the statements of Anglican divines for granted without weighing them for myself. I said to a friend in 1840, in a letter, which I shall use presently, “I am troubled by doubts whether as it is, I have not, in what I have published, spoken too strongly against Rome, though I think I did it in a kind of faith, being determined to put myself into the English system, and say all that our divines said, whether I had fully weighed it or not.” I was sore about the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say strong things, which facts did not justify. Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office. I felt the force of the usual Protestant objections against her; I believed that we had the apostolical succession in the Anglican Church, and the grace of the sacraments; I was not sure that the difficulty of its isolation might not be overcome, though I was far from sure that it could. I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth; and I was not sure that it would not revive into full apostolic purity and strength, and grow into union with Rome herself (Rome explaining her doctrines and guarding against their abuse), that is, if we were but patient and hopeful.

When I look at the overall tone of this passage, it seems obvious to me that these are not the words of someone “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” How could you be said to be hostile to an institution that you “dislike” speaking against, whose doctrines you felt “might possibly turn out to be true,” and about which you “did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth”? None of that sounds the least hostile.

But then I have to ask: what does Newman mean by “hostility”? I could imagine him saying that anyone not submitting to the authority of Rome is ipso facto hostile to that Church — and in that sense even one holding the views he held when he wrote Tract 90 would still be “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” Now, of course, that would be to use the term in a highly idiosyncratic way — in a way likely to confuse others. But this is what Newman does all the time.

Many of his disputes with his contemporaries take this form:

Opponent: You lied when you said X.

Newman: I did not lie. How dare you accuse me so?

Opponent: You certainly did lie, for elsewhere you say Z, and Z contradicts X.

Newman: Z is fully compatible with X.

Opponent: How so?

Newman: By Z I mean to affirm φ.

Opponent: But Z does not entail φ, it entails δ!

Newman: I define it so as to entail φ.

Opponent: You know perfectly well that everyone thinks that Z entails δ!

Newman: I am greatly surprised by what you say. It had never occurred to me that anyone would ever infer δ from Z.

Opponent: You deliberately misled your readers!

Newman: You have merely reiterated your former accusation in a new form. As an English gentlemen I resent this attack upon my honour.

(In his disputation with Charles Kingsley Newman often appeals to his honour as an English gentleman.) So I could easily imagine Newman saying “I never imagined that anyone would think ‘hostility to Rome’ to mean anything other than ‘disinclination to submit to Roman authority, even when full of admiration for almost everything that Rome stands for.’”

But even if we allow Newman to appeal to the authority of his own private, unstated definitions of key terms, he is still in difficulty — or rather, we his readers are. We still have questions. How can he at one and the same time think that the distinctively Roman doctrines “might possibly turn out to be true” and that he has no reason for thinking them true? Here his answer would presumably be that he has no evidence one way or the other, because he had never actually studied the matter but instead had trusted “the great Anglican divines.” Fair enough — though should not Newman be “sore” at himself for trusting without evidence, instead of resenting the people whose opinions he had trusted?

(Later in the book he says that his reliance on the Anglican divines “of course was a fault” — but he strictly constrains the scope of the fault as he sees it: “This [trust in the divines] did not imply any broad misstatements on my part, arising from reliance on their authority, but it implied carelessness in matters of detail.” That’s as far as he will go in self-criticism. But was it a “matter of detail” that they condemned in harsh and strict terms the very Church that Newman would later enter?)

Setting such issues aside, there’s a further question to be asked: If he had realized that his judgments on Rome were derived at second-hand from others and therefore had no real value, why does he say, “Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office”? He still holds in substance the views that he just said he had no evidence for holding? This seems impossible, for in 1833 he had written, for instance, “Rome is heretical now … Their communion is infected with heresy; we are bound to flee it as a pestilence,” whereas he says that in 1839 “I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth.” (The earlier statements were the subject of his post-conversion retractions.) These positions are quite obviously irreconcilable with one another, so how Newman could say that they were “in substance” consistent I cannot imagine.

I say that; though I suspect that if I were to challenge Newman on this point he would reply, “Ah, but when I said those things in 1933 I was not speaking in my Prophetical Office,” and then would go on to define in exhaustive detail how he distinguishes between things said in his Prophetical Office and things said in other offices, and further to explain that any inconsistencies in statements made in the different offices are not blameworthy in any sense.

This is just how Newman thinks. What almost everyone else believes to be cheese-paring, logic-chopping, evasive circumlocution he sees as perfectly normal and indeed commendable. The avalanche of accusations he gets not only from avowed enemies but also from many friends he responds to with blank incomprehension:

I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority.

Now I will say here frankly, that this sort of charge is a matter which I cannot properly meet, because I cannot duly realise it. I have never had any suspicion of my own honesty; and, when men say that I was dishonest, I cannot grasp the accusation as a distinct conception, such as it is possible to encounter.

And I don’t believe he was intentionally dishonest, at least, not more often than anyone else — though I cannot think of another writer whose absence of self-knowledge is quite so complete. That he never suspected his own honesty is something he avers in his own favor, but it’s a damning admission. All of us should sometimes ask whether we are what we habitually tell ourselves we are. Whatever the logical virtues (if any) of his natural method of thought, it had the effect of disguising from himself and from others the complex truth of his own ever-shifting responses to his Anglican inheritance and the Roman church towards which he was ever more strongly drawn. And it had the further effect of preventing him from acknowledging the influence he had over so many others.

But of course, all this concerns retrospection: accounting for something one said in the past. It is odd that Newman gets so pettifogging about these matters when, almost immediately after the passages I have been quoting, he freely confesses, in one of the more moving passages in the Apologia, how long he struggled to make logical sense of his position:

What then was I to say, when acute minds urged this or that application of [the principle of Antiquity] against the Via Media? it was impossible that, in such circumstances, any answer could be given which was not unsatisfactory, or any behaviour adopted which was not mysterious. Again, sometimes in what I wrote I went just as far as I saw, and could as little say more, as I could see what is below the horizon; and therefore, when asked as to the consequences of what I had said, had no answer to give. Again, sometimes when I was asked, whether certain conclusions did not follow from a certain principle, I might not be able to tell at the moment, especially if the matter were complicated; and for this reason, if for no other, because there is great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle. Or it might so happen that I got simply confused, by the very clearness of the logic which was administered to me, and thus gave my sanction to conclusions which really were not mine; and when the report of those conclusions came round to me through others, I had to unsay them. And then again, perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalised by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have touched them to the day of their death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, “Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;” — I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; … Great acts take time. At least this is what I felt in my own case; and therefore to come to me with methods of logic, had in it the nature of a provocation, and, though I do not think I ever showed it, made me somewhat indifferent how I met them, and perhaps led me, as a means of relieving my impatience, to be mysterious or irrelevant, or to give in because I could not reply. And a greater trouble still than these logical mazes, was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as it was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that “the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic.” One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of the Movement, in which I have taken so prominent a part. What I have been observing is, that this phase had a tendency to bewilder and to upset me, and, that instead of saying so, as I ought to have done, in a sort of easiness, for what I know, I gave answers at random, which have led to my appearing close or inconsistent.

As far as I can tell, this is as close as he comes to taking responsibility for the confusion he so often sowed in others.

October 24, 2025

paranoia strikes deep

Ars Technica:

In an April 28, 2025, appearance on Dr. Phil Primetime, an audience member asked Kennedy what he would do about “stratospheric aerosol injections,” which she claimed are “continuously peppered on us every day.” Kennedy responded: “It’s done, we think by DARPA [a research agency in the Department of Defense] and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. … I am going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who is going to think only about that — find out who is doing it and holding them accountable.”

In 2023, Kennedy spoke with chemtrail activist Dane Wigington on a podcast and credited actor Woody Harrelson for making him believe in chemtrails after watching contrails from a plane transform into clouds.

“I’ve looked up many times since then and seen that happening, and I don’t have a good explanation for it,” Kennedy said.

Me on a Thomas Pynchon novel, 2013:

Pynchon seems from early in his career to have intuited what Michel Foucault writes about in books like Discipline and Punish: a “power-knowledge regime” which cannot be located in a person or institution, but whose control of our world is imperceptibly dispersed — an evil inversion of the ancient mystical definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. A secret cabal of Freemasons or Communists or Republicans would be comforting by comparison, as a character in Bleeding Edge, an aging Sixties-style radical, notes: “Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.” Or, as Doc [Sportello, in Inherent Vice] reflects further on the existence of those “rigid, unsmiling” men at the periphery of every festivity,

“If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen. Was it possible, that at every gathering — concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?”

From within this paranoid (or observantly realist) logic, there is an obvious answer to the question, “Was 9/11 an inside job?” — Of course it was. The invisible power-knowledge regime brought about the destruction of the Twin Towers when that suited its interests — just as it had earlier erected them for equally inscrutable reasons — and those who think that President Bush and his henchmen engineered 9/11 are not looking far enough inside: in this vision the Bushies were at most servants or emissaries of larger, ever-nameless forces.

I keep telling you people that Pynchon explains everything, but you don’t listen.

October 22, 2025

pinches of Pynchon

The NYT asked a number of people to share their favorite moments from Thomas Pynchon’s fiction. Yikes. I have so many. The problem is that not one of the greatest passages in his glorious body of work makes complete sense to out of its rich and densely-woven context.

I’m gonna break the rules and choose two. Both concern rubbish — a topic in which I am greatly interested.

The first is from my favorite Pynchon novel, Mason & Dixon:

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream — in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ’tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, — serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, — Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, — winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

The second is from Bleeding Edge:

Sid kills the running lights and the motor, and they settle in behind Island of Meadows, at the intersection of Fresh and Arthur Kills, toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal, everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be itself, and here unexpectedly at the heart of it is this 100 acres of untouched marshland, directly underneath the North Atlantic flyway, sequestered by law from development and dumping, marsh birds sleeping in safety. Which, given the real-estate imperatives running this town, is really, if you want to know, fucking depressing, because how long can it last? How long can any of these innocent critters depend on finding safety around here? It’s exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer’s heart sing — typically, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land.”

Every Fairway bag full of potato peels, coffee grounds, uneaten Chinese food, used tissues and tampons and paper napkins and disposable diapers, fruit gone bad, yogurt past its sell-by date that Maxine has ever thrown away is up in there someplace, multiplied by everybody in the city she knows, multiplied by everybody she doesn’t know, since 1948, before she was even born, and what she thought was lost and out of her life has only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything — suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero.

This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it.

October 20, 2025

judgment day

Daring Fireball:

If your opinion of a work art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […] If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically.

Gruber is a tech writer, not an art critic, but his view is not uncommon, and I think it’s nonsense. Knowing how Chuck Close’s paintings were made changes the experience of them, and should.

A close up of one of Chuck's paintings made up of lots of colourful diamonds that make up the face of a child

Or consider this 16h-century Dutch miniature altarpiece — something I make a beeline for whenever I’m in the British Museum:

If I found out that it had been 3D-printed rather than meticulously hand-carved, that would change my experience of it, and rightly so.

In precisely the same way, I judge an essay differently — I apply different standards, have different reactions — depending on whether (a) it was written by a 20-year-old student who is wrestling with the things we’ve been discussing in class or (b) it was written by ChatGPT at that student’s prompt.

See also: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”

Gruber appears to be interested only in artistic product, not artistic process. I’m interested in both, as are most people, and our judgments of works of art are complex things that involve everything we know about both process and product.

October 16, 2025

look who’s reasoning

Jean: You have a right to have an ideal. Oh, I guess we all have one.

Charles: What does yours look like?

Jean: He’s a little short guy with lots of money.

Charles: Why short?

Jean: What does it matter if he’s rich? It’s so he’ll look up to me. So I’ll be his ideal.

Charles: That’s a funny kind of reason.

Jean: Well, look who’s reasoning.

— Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve

Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick:

Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods. […]

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. [Just ignore the bad grammar of that sentence.] It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.

I’ve looked at the paper, and it seems pretty sketchy to me: a matter of asking people vague questions and then speculating about what their answers probably mean.

What Stein and Rutchick are overlooking, it seems to me, is what a great many of MAGA folk will tell you straight out: that if loony lefties say that X and Y are “actual facts,” that Z is a “known falsehood” “that can easily be disproved,” it ain’t necessarily so. If President Trump says that crime in Washington D.C. is the worst it’s ever been and the socialist Democrats are at fault, and then some socialist at CNN — they’re all socialists at CNN — says that some “experts” have produced “scientific” research proving him wrong … well, MAGA knows who’s more trustworthy. They say: Look who’s reasoning.

They’re not thinking, “Yes, we know that you have the Scientific Facts on your side, but our tribal loyalties are more important to us than facts!” They’re thinking, “You claim that you have facts, but we think it’s far more likely that you have cooked the books to generate an outcome that confirms your political preferences. Hasn’t that happened often enough in the past? Haven’t you and your kind been caught in the act?”

People across the political spectrum do this all the time. Not long ago there was an online kerfuffle stemming from a post by John Ganz called “Against Polling.” When some people declared that Ganz was anti-science, anti-data, anti-fact, he replied,

Is it so unreasonable to ask, why is it that the data brigade and the positivists are constantly urging a move rightwards, why they happen to be the same faction that wants to mend fences with the business world and Silicon Valley, and why they have the ear (and wallets) of the donors? Why should I grant their pretensions of embodying reason and factuality itself? That’s the very definition of ideology: a tendency that claims not to be a tendency, to be in fact, the absence of tendency and pure neutrality. There’s no such thing. The polling shit is part of an ideology that hides values in value-neutral language.

You can find similar examples every day: someone says These are the facts and someone else says Those are not the facts, they’re factoids conjured up by people in the grip of motivated reasoning. The latter group are not simply by virtue of their disagreement anti-fact weirdos whose behavior needs some deep explanation. Even when they’re MAGA, they’re often just saying: Look who’s reasoning.

The Stein and Rutchick argument tells people on the left exactly what they want to hear: that they haven’t failed in the task of persuasion, that the blame lies wholly with those anti-data tribalists in MAGAland. A comforting message, but not, I think, the correct one. Far more people are persuadable on particular questions — like whether the crime rate in D.C. is the worst it has even been, which, for the record, it definitely isn’t — than most partisans think. But persuasion has to be done retail, not wholesale, and you can’t sell everyone instantly on everything in your store.

Another way to put this point: Most people can be persuaded on many (probably not all) points, but not by a tweet or a link — not online at all. It’s hard work that requires patience. By contrast, dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as irrational doesn’t take any work or patience at all.

October 14, 2025

one condition

Dear Colleague,

I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear Colleague” letters — e.g. — to strongarm universities into supporting their and your preferred political outcomes, and (b) that a chief purpose of your current protests is to ensure that people with my social, religious, and aesthetic views remain unemployable in your universities.

Sincerely,

Your Colleague

October 14, 2025

Socrates again?

Mark Liberman:

For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s sub-head is “It is not the road to serfdom that awaits — but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt”.

Although I mostly agree with the article’s content, I find the reference to ancient Egypt ironic, given how Socrates frames his argument against reading and writing in education.

And then comes the inevitable quotation from the Phaedrus. References to this passage annoy me about as much, and as often, as claims that in the Areopagitica Milton defends freedom of the press. Points to be kept in mind:

Socrates says in dialogue after dialogue that the only way truly to know something is through the process of dialectical disputation, the famous “Socratic method.” The problem with poetry, as he illustrates in the Republic, is that it’s anepistemic: it’s knowledge-free, it’s just empty storytelling. But he introduces his anecdote about Thoth and Thamus by saying “I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know.” So he explicitly says that he doesn’t know whether the story bears truth; and in any case as a story it cannot bear truth into the soul of the inquirer.

Thus his later comment, which Liberman also quotes:

… writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

So Socrates’ argument is not really a critique of writing or books as such: it is an epistemic critique of anything — written, spoken, painted, whatever — that is not dialectics.

And finally: How do we know that Socrates had this view? Because Plato wrote it down and put it in a book. Maybe Plato would side with Niall Ferguson on this question.

By the way, the best thing ever written on the complexities of this passage in the Phaedrus is the chapter called “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Derrida’s Dissemination. I don’t suppose there’s any essay in criticism that I more fervently wish I had written.

October 13, 2025

Ella’s Songbooks

Last month, when I was suffering from a vertigo and unable to read for more than a few seconds at a time, my constant companion was the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, and especially her four great Songbooks: Gershwin, Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart. Collectively they constitute, I believe, one of the great achievements of 20th-century American art.

Ella recorded other “songbook” albums, including an Irving Berlin one, but these four are the masterpieces. And I might note that the Ellington songbook is different than the others, in two respects. First, here Ella sings with the composer and his orchestra; and second, the lyrics are undistinguished. Ella gets to show off her vocal chops, including scat singing — a style of which she is the undisputed champion — and that’s wonderful. But she doesn’t get to show us how she interprets great lyrics.

The other three Great Songbooks have her singing the words of some of the best lyricists of their (or any) time: Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, and Cole Porter. The first two wrote lyrics to the music of others, while Porter wrote words for his own music. When the producer Norman Granz played Ella’s recordings of his songs, Porter said, “My, what marvelous diction that girl has” — a comment that has been taken as dismissive, but I don’t think it was. Porter would have heard his songs sung by many singers with lovely voices, but he had probably never heard a singer so intelligently attentive to his lyrics, of which he was very proud, and able to communicate their meaning clearly, vividly, and most musically. That would have captured his attention.

Ella indeed had marvelous diction, along with perfect pitch, a tone of exceptional purity from the top of her range to the bottom, and — something not often enough noted — great breath control. You never hear her breathe, no matter how long the line lasts or how fast the notes come. (This is a rare achievement. When Joni Mitchell, a great singer if there ever was one, sings “Twisted” — a vocalese gem that I don’t believe Ella ever recorded, though it was perfect for her — she nails every note but struggles to catch her breath. The only pop singer I can think of who has great breath control is k. d. lang, but she’s almost as freakishly talented as Ella.)

If you want to get started with this music, try these two songs: Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and the Gershwins’ “But Not For Me.” The latter is simply perfection: gorgeous and heartbreaking in the highest degree. I often think of what Ira Gershwin said: He knew that he and his brother had written some good songs, but he never knew just how good they were until he heard Ella sing them.

October 6, 2025

should Christians be anarchists?

I wrote in my anarchist notebook:

Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists.

I hadn’t remembered writing that, but came across the post this morning, just after posting on Phil Christman’s book. Do I think that Christians should be anarchists in the way that Phil thinks we should be leftists? Am I ready to grasp that nettle?

Maybe not yet, though I will say that the essential practices of anarchism — negotiation and collaboration among equals — are ones utterly neglected and desperately needed in a society in which the one and only strategy seems to be Get Management To Take My Side. And Christians are a part of that society and tend to follow that strategy.

It’s often said that the early Christians as described in the book of Acts are communists because they “hold all things in common” (2:44-45, 4:32-37). But there is a difference between (a) communism as a voluntary practice by members of a community within a much larger polity and (b) communism as the official political economy of a nation-state, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The former is much closer to anarchism. We are not told that the Apostles ordered people to sell their possessions and lay the money at the Apostles’ feet, but rather that people chose to do so. We are told that the early Christians distributed food to the poor, but not that the Apostles ordered them to do so. The emphasis rather is on the fact that they were “of one heart and soul” (καρδία καὶ ψυχή μία).

It is commonly believed by Christians in the high-church traditions, like mine, that the threefold order of ministry (bishop, priest, deacon) mandates a hierarchical structure of decision-making, but I am not sure that’s true. Things did indeed develop along those lines, but that’s because — this is an old theme of mine — church leaders saw the administrative structure of the Roman state as something to imitate rather than something to defy. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit; nothing in the New Testament even hints that an episkopos is anything like the Roman prefect (praefectus praetorio) or a priest like his representative (vicarius). The office developed along Roman/political lines, but it needn’t have developed that way.

And indeed, in some traditions — for instance, American Anglicanism — it’s possible to discern the lineaments of a somewhat different model: when the rector is charged with the spiritual care of the parish and the vestry are charged with the material care of the parish, there’s something of the division of labor and spheres of autonomy that we see in the better-run anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist communities. There are always tensions at the point when the spheres touch, but that’s what negotiation and voluntary collaboration are for: to resolve, or at least ease, tensions.

In these contexts I often find myself thinking of a passage from Lesslie Newbigin’s great book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989):

[Roland] Allen, who served in China in the early years of this century, carried on a sustained polemic against the missionary methods of his time and contrasted them with those of St. Paul. St. Paul, he argued, never stayed in one place for more than a few months, or at most a couple of years. He did not establish what we call a “mission station,” and he certainly did not build himself a mission bungalow. On the contrary, as soon as there was an established congregation of Christian believers, he chose from among them elders, laid his hands on them, entrusted to them the care of the church, and left. By contrast, the nineteenth century missionary considered it necessary to stay, not merely for a lifetime, but for the lifetime of several generations of missionaries. Why? Because he did not think his work was done until the local church had developed a leadership which had mastered and internalized the culture of Europe, its theological doctrines, its administrative machinery, its architecture, its music, until there was a complete replica of the “home church” equipped with everything from archdeacons to harmoniums. The young church was to be a carbon copy of the old church in England, Scotland, or Germany. In rejecting this, and in answering the question, What must have been done if the gospel is to be truly communicated? Allen answered: there must be a congregation furnished with the Bible, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry. When these conditions are fulfilled, the missionary has done her job. The young church is then free to learn, as it goes and grows, how to embody the gospel in its own culture. [pp. 146-47]

It seems to me that this argument has implications not just for missionary activity but for every church. The model that Allen favors seems to me a way to reconcile the principle of authority with the practices of anarchism. Is it possible to have both the threefold order of ministry and a congregational life that’s based on the one-heart-one-soul way of life?

I want to mull that question over for a while and return to it later. I feel confident that Christians should incorporate more of the foundational anarchistic practices into their common life, but does that mean that Christians should be anarchists? Hmmmm.

October 5, 2025

should Christians be leftists?

Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day.

UPDATE: Phil has written firmly to me:

Now, listen here — I did not call you and Adam and Francis a “school!” I called you a Poundian/Wyndham Lewisian vortex and said that you don’t quite constitute an ism! If you were a school, I’d be trying to matriculate!

Disagreements about politics are one thing, about exegesis another, but a man can’t stand for misrepresentation!

Dammit, Phil is correct. I repent in sackcloth and ashes. The post will now continue but my “be true to your school” joke doesn’t work any more. That said, it’s way cooler to be a VORTEX than a mere school.

But in any case, Francis has blurbed Phil’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists, and Adam has written at some length about the book, so I suppose I have no choice but to weigh in. Be true to your school.

But I haven’t been able to corral my thoughts into a coherent essay, and my next week is going to be crazy busy, so I think I will present my thoughts in all their clunking incoherence as a series of numbered points.

I would be more positively disposed to Phil’s book if it had a different title, for instance:

Though Until Quite Recently Christians Could Not Have Been Leftists Because the Nation-State Model Under Which the Category “Left” Makes Sense Did Not Exist, and With the Further Qualification That Political Questions Are Largely Empirical in Nature and Therefore If I Could Be Convinced That Some Other Political Economy Did a Better Job of Fulfilling or Helping to Fulfill the Mandates of the Sermon on the Mount I Would Adopt That Political Orientation, I Believe Christians Should Be Leftists

It’s noteworthy that in this interview Phil talks about how much of his money to give away in exactly the same way that my fundagelical Republican friends and family members do. “Should we be generous to the poor until it hurts us?” is a question which, for Christians, has a clear answer; “Should generosity to the poor be mediated through governmental institutions or come primarily from individual contributions and charitable NGOs?” is a question with no equally clear answer. Phil says that the teachings of Jesus demand “massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes)” — but which will it be, alms or taxes? Again, what works best is largely if not wholly an empirical question, which I think means that the decision whether to be on the Right or Left is not principial but rather pragmatic. And that lowers the stakes in the debate.

Also, I think the question above is hard to answer because it’s hard to answer this question: What’s worse, (a) a society in which the poor are in absolute terms poorer but are closer in income to the rich, or (b) a society in which poverty-as-such is greatly reduced but the rich are ever-more-filthy rich? That is: What’s the key problem here, poverty-as-such or inequality? And I don’t think the Sermon on the Mount (or the Bible as a whole) tells us.

Phil writes, “God wants all of us to acknowledge that love by lifting up those at the bottom of our social arrangements. The Bible is clearer about that then it is about most of the theological and ethical issues we fight about. And the only durable way to do this is to lift up that bottom.” Well, amen to that. But what if the best way to lift up that bottom also lifts the top? That’s basically the argument Deirdre McCloskey makes in her massive Bourgeois Trilogy, about which I’ve written a bit here and here — really important work pointing to certain indubiable facts about the astonishingly swift and great rise in wealth that has occurred throughout the world during the reign of capitalism. In my experience, most leftists just pretend that none of this even happened, but the more acute ones agree that it has happened but also that capitalism has done all the good work it can do and now needs to give way to the next stage of economic development. That, however, requires subtle and detailed argumentation, and it’s a lot easier to shout “CAPITALISM IMMISERATES” even when that’s obviously not true. Unless …

Unless you are referring not to material misery — which capitalism has dramatically reduced — but rather to the social and psychological pain of inequality. Then the question becomes: Is material improvement coupled with increased inequality and therefore decreased social solidarity a deal we’re willing to make?

Or, to return to specifically Christian terms: What does Jesus primarily want, (a) deliverance of the poor from their poverty or (b) social solidarity among us all, even if that means a reduction in collective wealth? Some people, of course, will say that we don’t have to choose, that we can all together ascend the golden escalator to universal wealth. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

If I had been making Phil’s case, I might have said something like this:

To my conservative/libertarian brothers and sisters, greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ! Obiously, we all believe that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount are binding upon us, and also that the teachings of the Hebrew Prophets are equally binding upon us (because the whole of the Bible is the Word of God). That means that we are obligated to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, the despised, the outcast, the stranger. But the Bible does not tell us how we are to do that necessary work. You don’t think it should be done through the government, which, though I do not agree, I understand. But that means that you really need to raise your game. If we are not going to redistribute resources — that is, share our blessings — through governmental action, then we need as individuals and families and churches to give until it hurts. We need to increase our support of charitable organizations that do this work. We need to make sure our churches preach this Biblical message. We need to encourage our fellow Christians to give more generously — to see lifting up the poor not as a nice thing, not as an acceptable option, but an absolute Gospel mandate. Some of us (some individual Christians, some families, some churches) obey this mandate, but not all of us, not nearly enough of us, else we would not see so many people among us who can’t afford to buy healthy food for their families, can’t afford safe and clean housing, can’t afford decent health care. There are enough of us to make a far bigger difference than we make, and our goal should be that the whole world says that they know us by our love. We don’t have to do it through governmental intervention, but we have to do it, and if you can’t see any way to make that happen on the scale that it needs to happen … well, then maybe we should revisit the question of whether the government might, after all, be the best instrument to pursue this common good.

And indeed you can find an argument that touches on some of these themes in an essay I wrote in 2005.

My biggest Amen goes to this paragraph from Phil’s book:

Jesus takes sides in particular situations — the victim of violence over the perpetrator; the sufferer over the oppressor. But I also think Jesus is playing for all the marbles. As he judges the oppressor’s actions, he also sees every second of the life that took the oppressor to that moment, the poor moral formation the oppressor received from his parents (and that they in turn received), the ideological lies that that oppressor started to learn before he was old enough to notice or think about them, the person that that oppressor might have been had he been born in more auspicious circumstances. Jesus sees the thing that Jesus himself, as the second person of the Trinity and God’s creative Word, formed in the womb. And he wants to redeem that too. He wants all of it. He wants all of us.

October 3, 2025

revival, retrospection, assessment

At Evangelical Colleges, A Revival of Repentance – The New York Times (1995):

Students at evangelical colleges are embracing a revival calling them to repent. “We haven’t seen a student revival since the Jesus movement days of the late 60’s and early 70’s,” said the Rev. John Avant, pastor of a Baptist church in Brownwood, Tex., where the movement started. […]

Some … say it is premature to gauge the significance of the movement in relation to other revivals in American religious history. “I would say that the thing to do is to call back in 40 years,” said Mark Noll, a historian at Wheaton.

It’s only been thirty years, so the jury’s still out. But I doubt that many of you reading this have ever heard of this revival.

That doesn’t mean that it has had no impact. These things are exceptionally difficult, probably impossible, to discern. In 1964, in his introduction to an anthology called The Protestant Mystics, W. H. Auden described a kind of experience that he called “the Vision of Agape.” In that context he included a brief narrative account of an experience “for the authenticity of which I can vouch.” Here is that testimony, somewhat abridged:

One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly — because, thanks to the power, I was doing it — what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself…. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged — they were still colleagues, not intimate friends — but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it….

The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do. And among the various factors which several years later brought me back to the Christian faith in which I had been brought up, the memory of this experience and asking myself what it could mean was one of the most crucial, though, at the time it occurred, I thought I had done with Christianity for good.

This whole account is fascinating, but I want to call attention to this: the experience had a major influence on the direction of Auden’s life only some years after it occurred. Indeed, at the time it occurred he didn’t understand it: his calling it a “vision of Agape” is a retrospective interpretation, one quite different from how he thought of his experience in the poem he wrote shortly after it happened. He seems to have thought it a curious event, but not an especially important one. Between the event and his reinterpretation of it, the experience went underground: imagine a branch falling into a river that plunges below the land’s surface and emerges much farther downstream, bearing some of the cargo it acquired much earlier. (I saw such a river once.)

Presentists — which is to say, 99.7% of Americans — think that whatever is happening right now is the best or worst thing ever, certainly the most dramatically extreme and totally important thing ever. (Just as they also think that “desperate times require desperate measures” and Right Now is always a desperate time.) So a great many Americans believe that a major revival is happening right now — North Americans, perhaps I should say, because one of the most interesting reflections on this development is by the Canadian writer and scholar Marilyn Simon.

Simon asks a good question and makes a good point: “And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know.” But what I would say is: We may never know. Indeed, we will almost certainly never know.

In 2035, if people follow Mark Noll’s advice and think back to the 1995 Christian-college revival, how will they assess its influence? Even the people who were there may not know how it shaped them. Think of how writers can commit inadvertent plagiarism, a phrase having dropped into the mind and remained in the current long after its origin is forgotten. Maybe people involved in that revival can’t recall the words they heard there but have internalized them all the same, or have certain feelings when singing a hymn or reading the Bible that (without their realizing it) have the source in that long-ago experience.

To be human is, it seems to me, to care about the origins and sources of things, but we know very little, it also seems to me, about what most deeply shapes us. At the end of Middlemarch, George Eliot says of her heroine Dorothea that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.” Of how many people and experiences is this true? Many, I suspect. The truly defining events of our lives will may remain unknown to us — and that, I suspect, is true on a social as well as a personal level.

I’m not sure what lessons are to be drawn from all this, except one: It’s best not to make decisions about what to do, or even what to think about, based on an immediate perception of what’s really important, really influential. So hear the words of the Preacher: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”

September 16, 2025

a slightly embarrassed announcement

Two weeks ago I entered mortal combat with Covid, and have emerged victorious but not unscathed. This bout featured an unexpected symptom: persistent vertigo, especially when looking at text. Not a great situation for someone in my line of work! (And with my personal preferences.)

But if I kept my computer screen at a certain distance and held my head still, I could without experiencing physical nausea read stuff on the internet. So for about a week what’s what I did, and the positive result, as I saw it, was that I was able to queue up several posts for my blog.

After about a week I started feeling better, and one evening I put on an Ella Fitzgerald record and sat down with my notebooks … and just started laughing. Laughing at how simply pleasureable pen and paper and music were. How much happier I was with the internet at a safe distance.

And the next day, when I looked over the posts I had queued up, I thought: these are unpleasant. These are the posts of … not an angry man so much as a petulant man. A man who had over the course of a week absorbed, as by osmosis, the Spirit of the Internet. And that is a foul, foul thing. Think of the polluted river in Spirited Away before Chihiro/Sen cleans him up.

EaMhFqUWAAIoIbw.jpg large.

I feel that in the last few days I’ve been purging myself. My head was full of this:

I had five posts queued up, and I’ve deleted all five of them. That means that in the coming week or two you’ll have fewer posts in your feed, but also that you’ll have less petulance in your feed. You’re better off, trust me on that.

And by the way, all this happened before the murder of Charlie Kirk. I only had a vague sense of who Charlie Kirk was, but suddenly my informational world was filled with people being maliciously idiotic online, while the legacy media were producing articles titled “Breaking News: People Being Maliciously Idiotic Online.” (See image above for what all that looked like.) At least that gave me the opportunity to purge my RSS feeds.

All this leads me to one more thought: often, when some current event crosses my horizon, I’ll start to write about it and then pause and ask myself whether I’ve written about that kind of thing before. I’ll do a little search, and usually I discover that I have indeed written about that kind of thing before. New events tend not to be anomalous; rather, they continue patterns of action and thought that are well established. Cultural change almost never happens suddenly. There’s a long, slow development or evolution along established lines. For instance, Yuval Levin’s book The Great Debate demonstrates quite conclusively that the pattern of contemporary political debates was established by the contest in the late 18th century between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. This is typical.

I hear many people saying that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “changes everything” for them, but they already said precisely that about the attempted assassination last year of Donald Trump. In fact neither event altered anyone, except to consolidate their myths. There is very rarely anything new under the sun, and the surest sign that all the existing norms and terms and disputes are firmly in place comes when people start shouting “This changes everything!”

When I look back through this blog I see certain themes, both analytical and prescriptive, articulated repeatedly. I have a fairly consistent explanatory framework to account for our culture’s primary traits, especially its pathologies; also for the conflicts that afflict the church. I have little new to add by way of explanation or prescription because my culture is locked into certain obsessively repeated patterns from which very few people learn anything. What I said five or ten years ago is equally applicable today (if it was ever applicable at all).

It’s especially important to remember that people love hating their enemies — they love that more than anything. So the worst thing you could do to them, as far as they’re concerned, is to diminish their hatreds. To those of us who don’t happen to share those hatreds, their behavior might look like wearying, pointless repetition. But from the inside, those hatreds are the primary instrument of myth confirmation. They give security, and people want security. I can’t blame them for that, but I sure wish they chose different means to that end. I have no influence in the matter, though.

In short: I’m wondering what the point of this blog is. Increasingly, I think of it as something complete. I don’t regret writing it, but it may have served its purpose, and I’m inclined to think that I should focus on my microblog as a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities, linking to posts from here when they seem to illuminate some new-but-not-really-new situation but writing new things here only rarely. And then almost always little essay-reviews on books and movies.

I need to mull all this over further — not that it matters much. My sense is that I’m one of those writers whose books make more of a difference than their online presence, though of course not much difference. So few people read anything I write — glamping videos on YouTube get eight million views while I’m a long way from a thousand true fans — that if I made decisions on the basis of influence I would just quit. But I’m trying be obedient to my calling. Hard to know what that means in this media environment, though.

Anyway, no matter how much or how little I write here, I’ll keep the blog up for public access.

September 15, 2025

consolidation of myth

What people do in response to violence is consolidate the myths they live by. This focuses emotion and fosters solidarity, but it also renders people susceptible to control by non-human forces, submission to which, in times of crisis, looks like virtue.

I’ve written a lot about all this. See:

“Wokeness and Myth on Campus”
“Something Happened By Us: A Demonology”
“Yesterday’s Men”

I’ve also written about the artists who reveal to us the power of our myths, including William Blake and Thomas Pynchon and, of course, Auden.

If you want to know what’s really going on with us, you can’t just ask yourself what side to take in the tempest du jour. But of course very few people want to know what’s really going on. Most people are not interested in understanding anything, they want to experience powerful emotions, good or bad — “All emotion is pleasurable,” Craig Raine has said —, that make them feel righteous.

See also the myth tag at the bottom of this post.

September 12, 2025

chaplains in the fire

The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes thought to be of a modernizing or liberalizing tendency because they were so straightforward about the horrors of the war — and what they believed to be the church’s unpreparedness to minister to people who had been through such horrors, or even those who merely observed them from a distance. It a collective cry for the Church of England to take steps, however dramatic, to prepare itself to minister to a world very different than that which their Victorian ancestors had known.

The brilliant idea that Tim had was to look at the stories of each of the seventeen contributors to The Church in the Furnace. Throughout his career Tim has written books that provide brief biographies of a series of related figures and then show how these figures are related to one another, whether personally, intellectually, or culturally. For instance, his book The Slain God concerns a series of anthropologists and their encounters with Christianity. When imagining Tim’s books, think Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, with a good deal of the humor but without the cynicism and the camp. This group of chaplains is particularly well suited for this kind of treatment, because if you look at their experiences you’ll see that they were uniformly appalled by the war into which they were thrown, and agreed that the Church of England was not prepared to meet the challenges of the war — but they had very different senses of what the key problems were.

It seems to be believed in some circles that these were Anglo-Catholic clergymen, but as Tim points out at the beginning of his account, only some of them were. They really covered the whole spectrum of the Church of England — high church, low church, and broad church — and while some embraced modernist revisions to traditional Christian theology, others were conventionally creedal in their thinking. They also had widely varying ideas about what the primary emphasis of the church should be as it strove to meet the challenges of a bloody twentieth century.

Tim does an exceptional job of contextualizing The Church in the Furnace, first by showing who these chaplains were when they entered the war: what they brought to their work as chaplains, what experiences, what history, what theological formation, what pastoral philosophies. You can see the wide variety of ways in which they were not (as indeed they could not have been) prepared for what they had to face. But then, having shown that, Tim goes on to show how deeply and permanently they were, without exception, marked by their experience as military chaplains. For the rest of their lives — and in some cases those lives were quite long — they continued to think of Christianity and Christian ministry in ways that shaped by their experience in war. For instance, almost all of them became inclined at one time or another to conceive of the Christian life in military terms. This imagery, of course, is is present in the New Testament, though present among many other metaphors; but it becomes central for most of these chaplains. Some of them speak of Christ as “our great captain” who has recruited us into his army, has made us his soldiers. This image becomes the default model of the Christian life for several of these clergymen, and a significant part of the rhetorical and theological equipment for all of them.

Finally, one other noteworthy theme emerges. There’s a general sense that war has the effect of alienating people from their religion. But in fact, what was seen in the Great War was a dramatic increase in prayer, both individual and public. One of the most consistent messages of these clergymen was that they found that, other than the Lord’s Prayer, which most of the soldiers knew, they really didn’t have any idea how to pray, never having been instructed in prayer. And if there was one thing that all of these clergymen agreed on, it was that the church desperately needed to to teach people how to pray. And I suspect that is a message that is as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.

September 10, 2025

KK on publishing

This post by Kevin Kelly about publishing is interesting and informative, but it gets some things wrong. For instance, he says this about the traditional publishing route:

The task: You create the material; then professionals edit, package, manufacture, distribute, promote, and sell the material. You make, they sell. At the appropriate time, you appear on a book store tour to great applause, to sign books and hear praise from fans. Also, the publishers will pay you even before you write your book. The advantages of this system are obvious: you spend your precious time creating, and all the rest of the chores will be done by people who are much better at those chores than you.

Book tours have always been for bestselling authors, not for midlisters. I’ve never had a book tour, though I have had publishers pay for the occasional one-off talk. And “pay you even before you write the book”? — well, they’ll pay you something, but, as I’ve said before, advances are parceled out: if you get a book contract on the basis of a proposal, then you’ll get a certain about on signing, a certain amount on turning in a complete manuscript, a certain amount on pub date. All of this is an “advance” in the sense that it arrives before any copies have been sold, but if you hear that someone has a $100,000 advance, they’ll probably on signing the contract get $25,000. Long gone are the days when a writer could live on his or her advance while writing the book. (The people who could live on their advances are people who already make so much money that they don’t need the advances.)

One note about “packaging”: I have found that, in general, publishers will work with authors to get a cover that everyone likes — often by showing three or four options. But when Profile in the U.K., the publisher of Breaking Bread with the Dead, showed me the cover of the book — one design and one only — I told them that I hated it more than I could possibly say and they replied that they were going to use it anyway. (One editor added that what I had written was basically a bunch of essays so it’s not like it really matters what it looks like.) When they sent me my author’s copies of the finished book I tossed the box in a closet and have never opened it. I really think that with that dreadful cover they killed any chance of the book doing well in the U.K.

Their cover for How to Think, my other book with them, was great.

New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing.

No, the decline in bookstores stopped around 2019, and since then there’s been a mild upturn. Who knows whether it will continue, but for now bookstores still matter, very much.

Are agents worth it? In the beginning of a career, yes. They are a great way to connect with editors and publishers who might like your stuff, and for many publishers, this is the only realistic way to reach them. Are they worth it later? Probably, depending on the author. I do not enjoy negotiating, and I have found that an agent will ask for, demand, and get far more money than I would have myself, so I am fine with their cut.

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not the whole picture. An agent will almost certainly negotiate a bigger advance for you than you could negotiate for yourself, but a good agent will also retain foreign rights and then negotiate with overseas publishers and translators. If you do not have an agent, then your initial publisher will keep those rights for itself and then do whatever it wants. I am not sure how much money I have made over the years from overseas editions of my books, but a rough guess would be $50,000. Not a fortune, but nothing to sneeze at.

Now, about trade publishing KK makes one essential true point:

BTW, you should not have concerns about taking a larger advance than you ever earn out, because a publisher will earn out your advance long before you do. They make more money per book than you do, so their earn-out threshold comes much earlier than the author’s.

Two of my books (Original Sin and Breaking Bread with the Dead) have not earned out their advances, but the publisher has made money from both of them.

About self-publishing I know absolutely nothing, but KK makes me wonder whether I might want to try that at least once in my life. But, as he makes clear, when you’re DIY-ing it all the work is on your shoulders, including the following things that in traditional publishing others do for you:

Editing
Designing
Printing
Binding
Storing
Selling
Shipping
Promoting

You may say “Well, I can hire people to do those things for me” — but that process will itself be time-consuming, and you might find that at a certain stage you’ve simply re-created the traditional publishing model.

September 8, 2025

unenlightened self-interest

Ted Gioia:

People often ask me why I don’t teach a YouTube lecture course on jazz history. It’s a great idea — but I can’t teach the course without playing music, and record labels would shut me down in a New York minute.

It’s absurd. I might be able to develop a huge new audience for jazz — maybe even a million new fans. The record labels would benefit enormously. But that doesn’t matter. They would still shut me down.

Rick Beato deserves better than this. His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.

If UMG wants to retain a shred of my respect, they need to act now. And if they don’t, maybe the folks at YouTube should get involved. They are bigger than any record labels, and this might be a good time for them to show where they stand.

Just as Universal Music Group should have the brains to know that their music showing up on Rick Beato’s channel is good for them, so also YouTube should know that it’s in their interest to support their creators when possible: the more people who watch Beato’s channel the better it is for YouTube. But one of the fascinating things about our megacorporations is how unenlightened and unreflective their self-interest (i.e. rapacity) is. Unlike Ted, I doubt that anyone in authority at YouTube cares about creators. They should; it’s stupid not to; but if they haven’t always been stupid they’ve been stupified.

Who stupefied them? Right now I’m reading Dan Wang’s brilliant book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, and the governing distinction of his book is a simple but, in its development, very powerful one: China is run by engineers, while America is run by lawyers. And engineers are very good at making things happen, while lawyers are very good at preventing things from happening.

This is not Wang’s way of saying that China is superior to America: he makes it clear that when engineers are in control they often end up making stuff that should never have been made, and that lawyers often prevent the bad stuff from being unleashed on the world. His point is that if you want to know which of these two massively powerful countries will dominate the next few decades, you need to know who’s in control in each country.

At Universal Music Group, the lawyers control the engineers, so they assign the engineers to write code that will auto-detect copyright violations and then auto-send takedown notices to the supposed violators. That the code returns a lot of false positives is of no concern to the lawyers: for them it’s better that ninety-nine innocent people be punished than one copyright violator go free. Likewise, while they know that U.S. copyright law has fair use provisions, they hate those provisions, and would prefer ninety-nine people who stay within the boundaries of fair use to be punished than to allow one person who transgresses fair use limits to go free.

When Rick Beato — like thousands of other music-focused YouTubers — gets a takedown notice from YouTube, he can contest it, arguing that his musical clips were so short that they clearly fell within the scope of fair use, or that he actually didn’t use the UMG-owned music at all. But then someone at YouTube has to evaluate his claim, and does YouTube have enough people assigned to the task of evaluating claims? Of course not. Is the evaluation of such claims the kind of thing that can be reliably assessed by bots? Of course not. So the easiest thing for YouTube to do is to sustain the takedown demand and demonetize the offending (or “offending”) videos.

The next step for Beato would be a lawsuit, against UMG or YouTube or both, but while Beato is a very rich man compared to me he is poverty-stricken in comparison with corporations like UMG and Alphabet. If he could survive financially long enough to get to trial — something that the corporations would do everything in their extensive power to prevent — he would surely win his case. But then there would be appeals.

The message of UMG and Alphabet to creators is simply this: It doesn’t matter if the law is on your side, we are so much bigger than you that we will destroy you. And they’re almost certainly right; I don’t even think a class-action suit entered by all the offended creators would be able to overcome the weight of megabucks.

As I say, it’s just stupid. Because the music companies are terrified of losing even more economic ground than they’ve already lost, they treat their best friends as enemies. They’d be appalled and disgusted by the idea that they need people like Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, but they do. They’re like a zillionaire being swept away by a flood: some redneck on the bank tosses him a lifeline, and before he goes under for the last time the zillionaire sputters, What’s in it for me?

September 5, 2025

that’s still how it goes, everybody still knows

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education:

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them — I generally choose not to — but they are inescapable.

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

As I have said before: Everybody knows what this is. There is literally not one person who believes that kids learn anything about anything when they’re allowed to spend their classroom time on their laptops and phones. Everybody knows that education has been given up on; everybody knows that teachers are just babysitting; everybody knows that the fix is in.

The only question remaining is: Can we lie about the situation forever?

September 2, 2025

my Proustian moment

One of my favorite videos on the internet is this one, featuring Arsenal legend Ian Wright’s story of Mr. Pigden, the primary school teacher in South London who genuinely changed his life — and the moment in 2005, some years after Wright’s retirement, when the two of them were reunited. If you ever doubt that teachers can make a difference, watch this video.

It’s such a beautiful scene: Wrighty stands looking around the pitch at Highbury, smiling in memory of his great accomplishments there, when he hears a warm, kind voice: “Hello Ian. Long time no see.” Wrighty turns and looks and two things happen. First his mouth falls open in astonishment … and then he snatches his peaked cap off his head, in what I can only call reverence.

When he can speak he says, “You’re alive.”

Mr. Pigden, turning to someone behind the camera with a smile: “I’m alive, he says.”

Wrighty, trying and failing to compose himself: “I can’t believe it … someone said you was dead.”

Watch the rest of the video to learn exactly why Mr. Pigden was so important to young Ian Wright.

I love everything about that video, but the key moment for me is when Wrighty removes his cap. It’s absolutely instinctive: I don’t know where or when Wrighty learned his manners — he grew up in a very tough environment, but in the toughest of environments there are women who teach their children well — but he learned them. And the moment I first saw Wrighty snatching that tweed from his head, my memory leaped back to Birmingham, Alabama in 1973.

What I remembered was my friend Don. Don was the coolest guy I knew. He was very funny and very smart though (at the time) not the least interested in academics, and he always had weed, and he wore his black curly-kinky hair long, in the style that people call a Jewfro when Jews wear it, but Don wasn’t Jewish: He was a Scot by background, and his family were very proud of their ancestry. (So we could call his do a BRU-fro, amirite?)

In our senior year Don actually cut his hair quite short, just as everyone else was letting theirs grow long. Which just proved that he was cooler than everybody else. But this memory goes back before that.

Several other guys and I spent a lot of time hanging out at Don’s house, because it was the nicest house most of us had ever seen. My dad worked in trucking (when he wasn’t in prison) and that’s what our neighborhood was like: lots of plumbers, electricians, Teamsters, at the upper end factory-floor supervisors. Some stay-at-home wives and mothers, others who worked more than their men, as my mom did. But there was one road not far from our high school featuring a handful of big houses, set on rising ground, with what seemed to me enormous front yards, and Don lived in one of those. In fact, if I recall correctly, his was the only one that was modern, and the best way I could describe its modernity to you is to tell you that it had a sunken living room, with a plate-glass window covering one wall and a big fireplace on the opposite wall and built-in sofas extending all along three sides. You walked down into it by steps set at the corners of the room flanking the fireplace. I had never seen anything like it except in a handful of movies and TV shows.

One other feature of the room: a tall flipchart easel at one end of the room. Don’s father used it for group therapy sessions: he was a psychoanalyst, and his chosen method was transactional analysis. The family had fairly recently moved from somewhere up north — Pennsylvania, I believe — presumably to reach Birmingham’s vast untapped market of potential TA patients. Don’s father had an EAT MORE POSSUM bumper sticker on the back of his car, for protective coloration, but since the car was a Volvo the sociological message he sent while driving around town was complex and possibly self-contradictory. (Of course he knew that.) Copies of Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK — You’re OK were scattered around the house, but when I took a peek at what was written on the flipped-over sheets, words and symbols equally incomprehensible to me, I found it difficult to believe that anyone was OK.

Don had (I think) two older sisters, but they were away at college, and it seemed that his parents were never at home, so we had the house to ourselves for weekends and summer days. And what did we do with our time? Basically four things; we smoked pot; we played Risk; we ate heated-up frozen pizzas — something that I had not known existed before I visited Don; and we listened to Beatles records, especially the White Album. (Of course we played “Revolution 9” backwards and listened with maniacal intensity for secret messages. Though sometimes being stoned limited our attentiveness.)

For obvious reasons, we hung out at Don’s rather than at my dilapidated junkheap of a house, with broken springs emerging from the ancient sofas on the front porch — kept the stray dogs off, my dad said — and grass two feet high in the front yard — higher still in the back — and an ancient air-conditioner in one room that had broken down when we had been in the house only three or four months, never to be repaired. But once, for a reason I don’t remember, Don did visit.

Now in those days were were not allowed to wear headwear of any kind of school, nor could we leave our shirts untucked. (The rules on jeans were intricate and changed from year to year; that can be a subject for another post.) But whenever Don wasn’t at school he wore this white silk peaked cap like the ones automobile racers wear in old photos. It was awesome. When he pulled it down on his head his hair stuck out at angles that seemed gravitationally impossible. And that’s what he was wearing when he visited my room.

At one point we heard steps approaching. The door opened and my grandmother stood there — I don’t remember why she had come. But the moment the door opened Don, who had been sitting on my bed, popped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box and simultaneously plucked the white cap from his head and held in in both hands pressed to his chest like an undergardener approaching the wrong door at Downton Abbey. I told my grandmother that this was my friend Don and he said “How do you do, Ma’am.” I’ve never been more shocked in my life; I stared at him blankly for a few seconds. I don’t know where or when he had learned his manners, but he had learned them well.

And the first time I saw Ian Wright’s removing his cap in the presence of Mr. Pigden everything that I have just told you flooded into my mind.

September 1, 2025

the pleasures of reading

Jancee Dunn, author of the NYT’s Well newsletter, asked me a while back to answer some questions about reading. Just a couple of items from my reply made their way into her column — she had plenty of other people to interview! — so I thought I would post my whole email to her here. Some of these thoughts are expressed at greater length in a book of mine.

Jancee, I think I’ll start with the “reading challenges” and keeping track of your reading on Goodreads or elsewhere. I’m not saying that that can’t be a good: it can help build self-discipline, for one thing, and you can prove to yourself that you’re able to resist the temptation to flick through TikTok or play another round of Candy Crush. But I don’t think it has a lot to do with reading as such. I often hear people who do these self-challenges talk about how many books they have “gotten through” in a month or a year, and that just makes my reading-loving heart ache. Books are not to be “gotten through”! Books are to be delighted in!! (Books you’re reading by choice, anyway.)

This is related to the question of when you should read. I look of people who want to add to their numbers — to be able to say at the end of the year that they read X number of books in 2025 — are often tempted to open a book at 10pm, stare at it with glazed eyes, make those tired eyes pass across each page, and then set it down at 11:15 with the bookmark fifty pages farther in than it had been … and after a few nights of this they have another book they’ve “gotten through” that they didn’t enjoy and don’t remember — don’t remember because they never actually read it in the first place. That’s why before they post their review on GoodReads they have to ask ChatGPT to summarize the book they’ve just “read.”

Don’t try to tell me this doesn’t happen. A LOT.

So to people inquiring about these things I would say: Do you want to read? Or do you just want to have read — or even to be able to say, online and relatively convincingly, that you have read? If you’re in those latter two groups, I can’t help you. But if you really want to read more, then I have some advice:

1) Start by re-reading something you love — something that made you love reading. If you want to read now, it’s probably because of that book. Re-connect with it, and you’ll re-connect with your reading self.

2) Never ever apologize for re-reading. Read the same thing three times in a row if that gives you pleasure. One of the most wonderful moments you can have as a reader is to reach the final page, sigh, stare off into space for a few moments … and then return to page one. (I do this with movies sometimes too: “Watch from beginning.”)

3) Read responsively. For some that will mean writing in the margins or on sticky notes, but I have found that when you’re reading plot-driven fiction you won’t want to do that: better to wait until the end of a long session and then write your responses in a journal or make a voice memo to yourself. (Apple’s Voice Memos app now has automatic transcription, so you can turn your voice memos into written text. There are similar apps for Android, the best of which appears to be Google Recorder.) One of the best ways to feed your reading impulse is to revisit your excitement about past reading experiences. Heck, even if you don’t like a book there’s fun in explaining to yourself just why you dislike it. If you read responsively you’ll read fewer books but you’ll READ them.

4) Don’t keep count of how many books you read. If you start keeping count you’ll rush, you’ll neglect to be responsive, you’ll get back into that bad habit of just passing your bleary eyes across the page and calling it “reading.”

5) New way to be the coolest kid in the room: “I only read a few books this year, but I read each of them three times and made extensive notes to be sure I got the most out of them.”

6) My idea about reading “upstream” is this: if you loved Harry Potter, you’re not going to be able to recapture the delight by reading a new book about a boy named Larry Carter who goes to the Mugwumps Academy of Sorcery. That never works. Same with all the Tolkien knock-offs. Instead, find out what books J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien really loved and read those. What fed their imaginations stands a good chance of feeding yours.

(Sometimes little things, even, are useful. In the Harry Potter books the caretaker Argus Filch stalks around Hogwarts with his snoopy cat Mrs. Norris. Why “Mrs. Norris”? Well, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park the heroine, Fanny Price, has a nasty aunt who’s always watching her and trying to put her in her place. Her name? Mrs. Norris. And then you realize that, like Harry Potter, Fanny Price is a young person living not with her parents but with an aunt and uncle … hmmm. Suddenly connections start to form between two stories that on the surface don’t look alike at all.)

7) I always smile when people tell me they don’t enjoy or don’t understand or are intimidated by poetry. I ask them, “How many songs can you sing from beginning to end?” The answer is probably: hundreds. And songs are poems set to music. A fun exercise: look for poems in rhyme and meter and see if you can find a good tune for them. The easiest poet to do this with is Emily Dickinson, because she always wrote in what’s called “common meter” or “hymn meter.” So you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “Amazing Grace” — or, even more enjoyably, to other songs that are not hymns but are in that meter. For people of my generation, I would suggest the Gilligan’s Island theme song. And then you can do a Gilligan’s Island / “Because I could not stop for death” mashup. Sing it with me:

Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but ourselves
And immortality,
And Gilligan, the skipper too,
The millionaire and his wife…

If you want to develop a love of poetry, reconnect it with music, which is its origin. You’ll not only appreciate poems better, you’ll find yourself memorizing them! Then you can gradually move on to poems that are less obviously musical. (Though all really good poems have music to them.)

8) Libraries are great places to find things that no algorithm would ever suggest to you. This is important because we are collectively losing our faculty for total random surprise — for serendipity. Libraries are serendipity vendors. Unfortunately, in our time libraries are becoming less common, and the ones that still exist are becoming less like libraries. But if you live anywhere near a university, university libraries tend to be open to the public, and also tend to preserve their collections longer than public libraries do. Even if you can’t check out the cool random book you discover, you can sit down with it for a while. And then if you love it you can buy your own copy.

August 28, 2025

the AI business model

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I used this Gahan Wilson cartoon a while back to illustrate the ed-tech business model: the big ed-tech companies always sell universities technology that does severe damage to the educational experience, and when that damage becomes obvious they sell universities more tech that’s supposed to fix the problems the first bundle of tech caused.

This is also the AI business model: to unleash immense personal, social, and economic destruction and then claim to be the ones to repair what they have destroyed.

Consider the rising number of chatbot-enabled teen suicides: OpenAI, Meta, Character Technologies — all these companies, and others, produce bots that encourage teens to kill themselves.

So do these companies want teens to kill themselves? Of course not! That would be stupid! Every dead teen is a customer lost. What’s becoming clear is that they’re hoping to give teens, and adults, suicidal thoughts. Their goal is not suicide but rather suicidal ideation.

Look at OpenAI’s blog post, significantly titled “Helping People When They Need It Most”:

When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts. If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement. We are currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.

So that’s Step One: Don’t get law enforcement involved. Step Two is still in process, but here’s a big part of it:

Today, when people express intent to harm themselves, we encourage them to seek help and refer them to real-world resources.

Well … except when they don’t. As they acknowledge elsewhere in the blog post, when conversations get long, that is, when people are really messed up and in a tailspin, “as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model’s safety training may degrade.”

Continuing:

We are exploring how to intervene earlier and connect people to certified therapists before they are in an acute crisis. That means going beyond crisis hotlines and considering how we might build a network of licensed professionals people could reach directly through ChatGPT. This will take time and careful work to get right.

This I think is the key point. OpenAI will “build a network of licensed professionals” — and when ChatGPT refers a suicidal person to such a professional, will OpenAI take a cut of the fee? Of course it will.

Notice that ChatGPT will, in such an emergency, connect the suicidal person to a therapist within the chatbot interface. You can go to the office later, but let’s do an initial conversation here. Your credit card will be billed. (And for how long will OpenAI employ human beings as their chat therapists? Dear reader, I’ll let you guess. In the end the failings of one chatbot will be — in theory — corrected by another chatbot. And if you want to complain about that the response will come from a third chatbot. It’ll be chatbots all the way down.)

So then the circle will be complete: drawing vulnerable people in, encouraging their suicidal ideation, and then profiting from its treatment. That’s how to “help people when they need it most” — by manipulating them into the needing-it-most position. Thus the cartoon above. Sure, some kids will go too far and kill themselves, but we’ll keep tweaking the algorithm to reduce the frequency of such cases. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

I sometimes ask family and friends: What would the big tech companies have to do, how evil would they have to become, to get The Public to abandon them? And I think the answer is: They can do anything they want and almost no one will turn aside.

A few years ago I said that vindictiveness was the moral crisis of our time. But some (not all, but some) of our rage has burned itself out. The passive acceptance of utter cruelty, in this venue and in others, has become the most characteristic feature of our cultural moment.

August 26, 2025

something, everything

Brad East:

In Linebaugh’s treatment of Scripture the church is nowhere to be found. For that matter, equally absent are tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit. The result, if I may put it this way, is an account of the Bible and its message that is maximally and perhaps stereotypically Protestant. By this I don’t mean the book is “not Catholic.” I mean that it is so intensely focused on the “solas” — Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—that it leaves by the wayside other essential features of the gospel.

Disclosure: Jono Linebaugh is a friend of mine, but then so is Brad, and I’ve written in commendation of both of them, so I think all that cancels out.

If “an invitation to Holy Scripture” must also give an account of “tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit,” then it will be the size of the Church Dogmatics and won’t be an “invitation” to anything. For the same reason that I think it would be fine to write an invitation to the sacraments that does not also give an account of Holy Scripture, I think it’s fine to write an invitation to Holy Scripture that’s just about Holy Scripture. If we think every book has to be about everything relevant to the topic of that book, then we’ll never find a book worthy of our praise.

August 25, 2025

notes of a supply officer

“You have to make your voice heard!” – so the exhortation goes, though the remainder of the sentence usually goes unsaid: “… on the issue that at the moment I think to be the most important.” Nobody thinks you have to make your voice heard about everything all the time, which in any case would be impossible. The same unspoken addendum fits onto “Silence is violence.” All these exhortations have the same essential meaning: If you do not care about what I care about in the way that I care about it, you are a bad person. The language of alliance works the same way: If you say what I want said and do what I want done you are my ally — and if not you are my enemy.

The problem with all these exhortations is their failure to understand how society works. A society or a culture is a vast corporation, a vast body of persons and things that functions only if the principle of division of labor is acknowledged and put into thoughtful practice.

Consider an army: Would an army function if everyone strove to fight on the front lines? Of course not. But that is just what the people who demand that you “make your voice heard” and “get involved” and “take sides” want us all to do: rush to the front and try to overwhelm the enemy with our sheer numbers. (One other unconfronted assumption of this way of thinking is that the other side won’t be acting the same way.) A successful army requires warriors but also generals, strategists, doctors and medics, supply systems, and, before all that, training systems. And a healthy society requires even greater diversity and specialization than an army does.

I often think of a woman I met some years ago whose life is devoted to rescuing abandoned or abused dogs. If she never thinks a thought or says a word about the issues that dominate social media, who cares? She is doing the Lord’s work. Not everyone should do what she does; but she should do what she does.

When I observe my country I am regularly horrified and outraged by the great evils done by our government and by our largest and most powerful businesses. I want to protest, I want to “make my voice heard.” But As I look around I find myself thinking not that too few people speak up, but that too many do: too many people with uninformed minds and unconstrained emotions. We have a surfeit of people who want to fight and not enough willing to train and supply. I often think about something Bob Dylan once said:

There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents. Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.

Well, what’s my place? As a teacher, I hope to train and liberate minds; as a writer, I supply people with ideas and contexts, with substantive frameworks to shape and interpret thought and aesthetic experience. Over my forty-three years of teaching, I have gotten used to the rhythm of my life: training and encouraging people as best I can, and then sending them out into the world as well-equipped as I can help them to be. And writing, of the kind I do anyway, is not so different: it too is a kind of provisioning.

In such matters it’s good to remember what the Preacher says, “In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.”

When I get the itch to shout or protest or condemn, I remind myself of my place: training and supply. And I remind myself of what is not within my power to control. It brings me peace in convulsive times to remember that I am, after all, following my own star. Which star should you follow?

August 19, 2025

a word to my students

Craiyon 095541 Bowser with the Sorting Hat on .

The first thing to know is that I don’t call it AI. When those of us in the humanities talk about “AI in education” what we almost always mean is “chat interfaces to large language models.” There are many other kinds of machine-learning endeavors but they’re not immediately relevant to most of us. And anyway, whether they’re “intelligent” is up for debate. So the word I’ll use here is “chatbot,” and the question is: What’s my policy? What do I think about your using chatbots for work in my class?

I’ll start to answer that by turning it around: Would my stated policy have any effect whatsoever on your actions? Pause and think about it for a moment: Would it?

For some of you the answer will be: No. And to you I say: thanks for the candor.

Others among you will reply: Yes. And probably you mean it … or think you mean it. But will your compliance survive a challenge? When you’re sitting around with friends and every single one of them except you is using a chatbot to get work done, will you be able to resist the temptation to join them? When they copy and paste and then head merrily out for tacos, will you stay in your room and grind? Maybe you will, once, or twice, or even three times, but … eventually…. I mean, come on: we all know how this story ends.

So let’s be clear about three things. The first is that if I make assignments which you can get chatbots to do for you, that’s what you’ll do. The second is that if I have a “no chatbot” policy and you use chatbots, you’re cheating. The third is that cheating is lying: it is saying (either implicitly or explicitly) that you’ve done something you have not done. You are claiming and presenting to me as your work what is not your work.

Now, this has several consequences, and one of them — if I don’t catch you — is that I will end up affirming that you have certain skills and abilities that you do not in fact have. Which makes me, however unintentionally, complicit in your lie. That reflects badly on me.

But that makes a problem for you, too, because sooner or later the time will come — perhaps in a job interview, or an interview for a place in a graduate program, or your second week in a new job that doesn’t have you in front of a computer all day — when your lack of the skills you claim to have will become evident, to your great embarrassment and frustration. You’re probably not worried about that now, because one of the most universal of human tendencies is — I use the technical term — Kicking The Can Down The Road. Almost all human beings will put off dealing with a problem if they possibly can; the only ones among us who don’t are those who have learned through painful experience the costs of can-kicking. (This is in fact one of the very few ways in which we Olds are superior to you Youngs: we’ve been there, we know.)

And then, you know, I’m a Christian, and I’ve read the parable of the talents. I want to see you multiply your gifts, not leave you exactly as you were when you came to my class, only with a little more experience in writing chatbot prompts.

(Robert W. Gehl: “I think generative AI is incredibly destructive to our teaching of university students. We ask them to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas. That’s all in service of our goal to help train them to be critical citizens. GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you.”)

Perhaps the most worrisome consequence of this whole ridiculous circus in which (a) you’re trying not to get caught cheating and (b) your professors are trying to catch you cheating is how thoroughly dehumanizing it is to all of us. All of us end up acting like we’re in a video-game boss fight. Modern education, with its emphasis on credentialing and therefore on grades, is already dehumanizing: as my friend Tal Brewer from the UVA says, we’re not teachers, we’re the Sorting Hat. The chatbot world makes that all crap so much worse. Now we’re Bowser and the Sorting Hat.

But me, I just want to help you to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better thinker. If you can learn these skills, and the habits that enable them, I believe you will be a better person — not in every way, maybe not even in the ways that matter most, but in significant ways. You’ll be a little more alert, a little more aware; you’ll make more nuanced judgments and will be able to express those judgments more clearly. You may even increase your self-knowledge. I want to do what I can to encourage those virtues.

I don’t want to be trying to outwit you and avoid being outwitted. I don‘t want to enable your can-kicking. I don’t want to affirm that you have skills you don’t have. I don’t want to have to say, at the end of the day, that the only thing I taught you was better prompt engineering. Above all, I don’t want to make assignments that become a proximate occasion of sin for you: I don’t want to be your tempter. So I simply must — I am obliged as a teacher and a Christian — keep the chatbots out of our class, as best I can. If you pray, please pray for me.

August 18, 2025

due diligence

NetChoice is a massive coalition of internet companies — look who’s in it — that is throwing enormous resources to block any law or proposed law in any and every state that requires age verification for access to websites. Given the technical challenges that make reliable age-verification schemes difficult if not impossible, I might have sympathy for the NetChoice companies if they weren’t who they are. (Oh the moral dilemma: thinking that laws are probably unconstitutional and yet wishing they succeed because you find the companies the laws target utterly loathsome.)

So in fighting a Louisiana law NetChoice recruited a supposed expert named Anthony Bean to affirm that social media use is not bad for young people in any way. As Volokh explains, the Louisiana Attorney General’s office took a look at this expert report and discovered that

None of the 17 articles in Dr. Bean’s reference list exists…. More, none of the 12 quotations that Dr. Bean’s report attributes to various authors and articles exists (even in the original sources provided to Defendants).

A cursory comparison between Dr. Bean’s report and the disclosed original sources would have alerted NetChoice that something is amiss. In fact, just reading Dr. Bean’s report would have done so. His reference list makes no sense, (a) citing website links that are dead or lead to entirely unrelated sources and (b) citing volume and page numbers in publications that are easily confirmed to be wrong. And his report itself is strangely formatted, not least because, well, it looks and reads like a print-out from artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Bean’s report bears all the telltale signs of AI hallucinations: completely fabricated sources and quotations that appear to be based on a survey of real authors and real sources.

(More like Mister Bean, amirite?) It’s kinda fun to look at the contents of their reply to Dr. Bean’s testimony:

CleanShot 2025-08-18 at 08.47.46@2x.

Etc. There’s a joke going around that A.I. will create jobs because when a company turns a job over to chatbots it’ll then need to hire two people to find and correct the chatbots’ hallucinations.

Two predictions:

No matter how many organizations get burned by reliance on chatbots, new organizations will always buy in, thinking Well, we won’t get burned
No matter how many people get caught farming out their work to incompetent chatbots, new people will always buy in, thinking Well, I won’t get caught

Most human beings are, it seems, genetically predisposed to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch and that it’s just waiting for them to pick it up. The question is: How long will be take for people who are rooted in reality, and therefore perform due diligence, to outcompete the mindless herd?

August 14, 2025

the daily driver

Whittaker Chambers, in a 1954 letter to William F. Buckley Jr. and Willi Schlamm:

If I were a younger man, if there were any frontiers left, I should flee to some frontier because, when the house is afire, you leave by whatever hole is open for whatever area is freest of fire. Since there are no regional frontiers, I have been seeking the next best thing — the frontiers within.

I get up early in the morning, feed and walk Angus, make some coffee, check email and my RSS feeds while drinking the coffee I made, answer emails, post links or images to micro.blog and/or sketch drafts of posts for the big blog … and then get off the internet until late afternoon.

I have an old easy chair where I usually work, and before 8am I am sitting in it with

books
articles (printed out)
my notebook
my Traveler
pencils, pens, highlighters, sticky notes
my Sony voice recorder
vinyl records or CDs on the stereo

The key point is this: I do not have any internet-viewing device with me as I work. The nearest one is my Mac, across the room. I get up and use it when I have to check some piece of information I can find only online, but that happens rarely, and I try as I’m working to make note of what I need to search for so I can do all the searches at once at the end of the work day.

The internet is a dark realm which I do not visit except upon compulsion. My old chair is Hobbiton; the internet is Minas Morgul. I would not go there except upon compulsion.

Most of the time I write in the margins of the books I read, or on their endpapers, or on sticky notes appended to their pages. When I have longer things to write, I do that on the Traveler, which uploads files to a website from which I can retrieve them and edit them on my Mac. (That’s my only internet connection when I’m at my chair.)

Or, and this is increasingly common, I record my thoughts on my Sony voice recorder.

Here’s my workflow for audio notes: First, I record thoughts and in some cases whole drafts on the Sony, which uses the MP3 format. Then, near the end of the work day, usually around 3pm, I rise from my comfy chair and

plug the Sony into my Mac;
use an Automator action I wrote to (a) open a recording in QuickTime Player, (b) export to M4a, (c) open in Voice Memos, (d) quit QuickTime Player; after which…
Voice Memos transcribes the audio file, the text of which…
I copy and paste into a chatbot text field with the following prompt:

I’m about to paste in a chunk of text. Please punctuate it, add capitalizations and quotation marks where necessary, eliminate repetitions and grammatical errors, but otherwise leave the text unchanged.

It doesn’t really matter which chatbot I use — they all do an adequate job, and adequacy is what I want here: I still have to write the post or essay, I just want at the outset something that’s easier to look at than a huge block of unpunctuated text.

(I use chatbots for this, for summarizing product reviews, and for helping me write AppleScripts. That’s pretty much it.)

Now, I could simplify this whole process by dictating in the Voice Memos app, which would then automatically transcribe my words. But that would mean dwelling in Minas Morgul all day. Not worth it.

Then, in the evenings, I might read a book, or listen to music (probably on vinyl or CD), or watch a movie (probably on disc). When I’m walking Angus, or just walking, I listen to Morning Prayer on the Church of England’s excellent Daily Prayer app, and when I go to bed I might listen to a podcast. Also, I watch a lot of soccer on TV, and streaming makes that possible. But overall, these days the internet plays a smaller role in my life than it has in … 25 years, maybe? Yes, there are days when I need to be at the Mac for extended periods. But overall, it has become normal to me once again to experience the internet as a place I occasionally (and for some specific purpose) visit rather than the place where I live.

And this feels great. I am happier, more serene, more centered. I feel that I am spending my time more wisely and more enjoyably. I understand, of course, that many (most?) people will not be able to detach themselves from online life to the extent I have. But then, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible for me to detach this much. If you take it one step at a time you might discover that you can do more than you think.

For instance: I used to subscribe to Netflix and Disney Plus, but when I ditched those I suddenly had the money to start building up my Blu-Ray collection. Many video discs are quite inexpensive new, and it’s easy to find good used ones; Blu-Ray players are also pretty cheap. In a short time you can have a nice collection of your favorite movies, all of which will, to you, be worth watching repeatedly. You’ll often (always, if you buy Criterion editions) have some special features on the discs that enhance your appreciation of the movies. Once you start a movie you’ll probably watch it through, because the temptation to switch over to something else will be much reduced. And everything will work even if your internet goes out.

I could tell the same story about how I listen to music and have built my music collection. Also about what I read. It’s remarkable how many sites and periodicals I used to read religiously I now avoid religiously.

It occurs to me that if I could just ditch my footy habit I could probably cancel my home internet and get by with cellular service. Now that’s something to aspire to … but I love footy too much.

August 12, 2025

a good and faithful servant

My dear friend of many years, Jay Wood, has died. I want to pay some tribute to this extraordinary man but it is difficult, for me anyway, to know what to say. He was so distinctive — I’ve never met anyone like Jay; he didn’t fit the usual categories. He had a sharp and dialectical mind, and spoke forcefully, which intimidated many people. But he was also exceptionally kind, always quick to notice those in need and to give of his resources.

One summer day in Wheaton Jay and some other friends had come over to my house for a time of fellowship and prayer, and I had to apologize because my air conditioning system had gone out and I had yet to find the money to get it repaired. Later that day there was a knock on my door: it was Jay, lugging a big window air conditioner which he then installed for me. (It had been sitting in the basement of a friend — Jay asked if he could have it.) Probably everyone who knew him at all well has a story like this.

When Jay was a young faculty member and had little money, he managed to buy a house that needed repairs that he simply couldn’t afford to have done. So he taught himself how to do everything needful — from hanging drywall to wiring a room to plumbing to building a deck — and then for the rest of his life would gladly share his knowledge with other people.

He was a person of exceptional discipline, in almost all the ways one could be disciplined. He was always in great shape: he ran marathons, and also would put the Wheaton football players to shame with the number of pull-ups he could do. He also considered it his absolute duty to go to church, so one Good Friday he sat through a service in agony, because he had a kidney stone … which he passed before the service was over. I’m not sure Jay fully understood why other people weren’t as disciplined as he was, but if he judged us he did so silently.

Jay and his friend and colleague (also my friend and colleague) Bob Roberts wrote a wonderful book on the intellectual virtues, and no one could have striven more consistently to practice those virtues. We had some great talks about the subject when that book was being written.

These are all miscellaneous reflections; they probably don’t add up to anything. As I say, Jay is very hard to describe. But maybe one more story will help.

Jay and I shared the experience of growing up in highly dysfunctional homes, with fathers who were damaged themselves and did much damage to others. That Jay ever became a Christian is so remarkable a thing that it almost by itself proves the existence of a merciful God; and I think the primary reason for his self-discipline was to emancipate himself from the consequences of that upbringing. He wasn’t perfect; he always had rough edges; but nobody knew that better than Jay.

All that is the context for one of my strongest memories of Jay, and one of the most influential ones in my own life. This was early in our friendship, probably some time in the early 90s. We were at Jay and Janice’s house, talking in their living room, and Jay was sitting in a chair by a doorway. One of his daughters, Diana or Gillian, ran across the room and was headed through the door when Jay shot out an arm and roped her in. She squealed Daaaadd! — but he gave her a big hug and a kiss before he let her go.

I said “She’s gonna hate that before too much longer.” Jay smiled. “I don’t care. I’ll still do it. My kids will always know how much I love them.”

And they do. Adam and Diana and Gillian and Sam — and now the grandchildren, and always, of course, Janice, his wife of nearly fifty years. They all know how much Jay loves them.

August 11, 2025

the truth in view

One of the finest poems by the great Richard Wilbur is called “Lying.” Says Wilbur: When we make things up, when we claim to have seen a grackle (or some more numinous creature) when we didn’t really, this is a displaced “wish … to make or do.” But when we lie in this way we misunderstand our situation — misunderstand ourselves and our world:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.

(Job 39:19, the LORD to Job: “Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?”) The key phrase is “All these things / Are there before us.” We must simply discover the will and the wisdom to recognize what is already present to us. “The arch-negator” — that is, Satan — manages only briefly and imperfectly to obscure the radiance of the world: In Eden he was but

… darkening with moody self-absorption
What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen
From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.

Here we might remember one of Wilbur’s earlier masterpieces, “The Undead,” in which he counsels us to recognize the condition of vampires: “Their pain is real, and requires our pity.” Because all they can do is “prey on life forever and not possess it, / As rock-hollows, tide after tide, / Glassily strand the sea.”

Wilbur says that have this desire to make or do, and in our “moody self-absorption” sate it with lies, when we could find what we seek if we look — really look.

Closer to making than the deftest fraud
Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made
To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,
Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,
How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping-board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.

Here let me direct you to the second chapter of Robert Farrar Capon’s wonderful book The Supper of the Lamb, in which he teaches you how to look at an onion. But back to Wilbur.

Simply making a simile is a way of seeing — or perhaps the making of a simile is a natural product of seeing. And even the the smallest simile, Wilbur says, is “tributary / To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut / That have the truth in view.” I love that phrase, that way of describing our artful tales and tropes. It’s worthy of being placed alongside Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.

Our eyes are half-shut because we’re partly viewing the world and partly retreating within ourselves to find an a response to what we have already seen — to find what the poet Donald Davie called “articulate energy” — syntax adequate to the thing. Wilbur’s offers three examples of such great lie, and the third is this:

That matter of a baggage-train surprised
By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees
Which, having worked three centuries and more
In the dark caves of France, poured out at last
The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king
And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world
Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.

(Re; shaming the devil: this is an old proverb, most famously used in Henry IV, Part I by Hotspur to Owen Glendower, who has been boasting of his power over sprits: “O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!”)

Wilbur is talking about The Song of Roland of course, and these words, coming at the end of the poem, tell us of two ways of shaming the devil: to be “faithful unto death” in one’s deeds and in one’s words.

That is my Thought for Today, but I want to add a postscript. For my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I have been reading her translation of The Song of Roland — the last work she completed in her life. She begins her long and remarkably helpful introduction to the poem by describing, quite flatly, a minor skirmish in the year 778, an ambush of the rear-guard of one of Charlemagne’s armies in the Pyrenees in which a few people were killed. A chronicler writing in 830 named some of them; another chronicler ten years later mentioned the skirmish but did not name the dead, since, he said, they had already been named.

So goes Sayers’s first paragraph. And when you read the second one you’ll see where Wilbur got his inspiration for the conclusion of his poem:

After this, the tale of Roncevaux appears to go underground for some two hundred years. When it again comes to the surface, it has undergone a transformation which might astonish us if we had not seen much the same thing happen to the tale of the wars of King Arthur. The magic of legend has been at work, and the small historic event has swollen to a vast epic of heroic proportions and strong idealogical significance. Charlemagne, who was 38 at the time of his expedition into Spain, has become a great hieratic figure, 200 years old, the snowy-bearded king, the sacred Emperor, the Champion of Christendom against the Saracens, the war-lord whose conquests extend throughout the civilised world. The expedition itself has become a major episode in the great conflict between Cross and Crescent, and the marauding Basques have been changed and magnified into an enormous army of many thousand Saracens. The names of Eggihardt and Anselm have disappeared from the rear-guard; Roland remains; he is now the Emperor’s nephew, the “right hand of his body”, the greatest warrior in the world, possessed of supernatural strength and powers and hero of innumerable marvellous exploits; and he is accompanied by his close companion Oliver, and by the other Ten Peers, a chosen band of superlatively valorous knights, the flower of French chivalry. The ambuscade which delivers them up to massacre is still the result of treachery on the Frankish side; but it now derives from a deep-laid plot between the Saracen king Marsilion and Count Ganelon, a noble of France, Roland’s own stepfather; and the whole object of the conspiracy is the destruction of Roland himself and the Peers. The establishment of this conspiracy is explained by Ganelon’s furious jealousy of his stepson, worked out with a sense of drama, a sense of character, and a psychological plausibility which, in its own kind, may sustain a comparison with the twisted malignancy of Iago. In short, beginning with a historical military disaster of a familiar kind and comparatively small importance, we have somehow in the course of two centuries achieved a masterpiece of epic drama – we have arrived at the Song of Roland.

That is, a “small historic event” has been magically transformed into one of “the great lies … that have the truth in view.” The idea of a simple story going “underground,” deep into the unconscious lives of a people, and then emerging as something altogether other and more resonant is the image that Wilbur, with his poet’s alertness, picks up from Sayers.

August 8, 2025

girl Friday

Of all the classics of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the most overrated is His Girl Friday (1940) — and I say this as a great lover of Howard Hawks’s movies. This is his big clunker. It’s frenetic, regularly unfunny, and completely lacking in the vivid and memorable supporting-actor parts that are so important in the true classics. (And in other Hawks films.)

The only way you could possibly rescue the movie is by seeing it as a very different kind of story than its self-presentation would indicate. So here goes.

To understand what’s really going on in it, you have to compare its opening and closing scenes. In the opening scene Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson is striding happily and confidently into the offices of a newspaper. In the final scene she is stumbling tearfully and confusedly and (above all) obediently out of a press room in the wake of the domineering Walter Burns. She is a woman destroyed.

And she has been destroyed by a monster. Not one moment in the movie gives us any reason to believe that Walter loves Hildy. We only know that he values her journalistic skills and abilities as a writer. Indeed, it seems obvious that while Walter ends by announcing that they will remarry — note: he is not asking her to re-marry him — he only does this to keep her under his thumb: marriage is the best means for him to control her and deploy her talents in ways that serve his ambition. Throughout the movie he shows no signs of caring about anything except his power to make or break political careers. Hildy is the primary instrument through which he can wield this power; that is why she must be wholly within his control and obedient to his dictates. He is a kind of vampire who feeds on her blood, without killing her. He needs her to be alive but weak.

That is to say: the only way you can redeem His Girl Friday – telling title! – as a movie is to see it as a tragedy, as Hildy’s tragedy. Given the social situation of women at this time and in this place, she has to choose between being a wife and mother in Albany or a journalist in New York – but the second option, while it gives her scope for her intellectual gifts, means being subservient to a man’s control far more completely than marriage to the boring Bruce would entail.

His Girl Friday is thus less like Bringing Up Baby or The Lady Eve than it is like Hedda Gabler. It’s impossible to forsee any future for Hildy other than working herself to the nub to make Walter happy with her. She won’t have any children because she and Walter don’t have sex — indeed, they have probably never had sex: Walter is a man whose sexual instincts are thoroughly and completely re-channeled into his libido dominandi. Do they look romantically intimate at any moment in the movie? They do not. If there’s any chemistry between the two of them, it’s not sexual, it’s power-based.

And if Burns is like anyone else in classic Hollywood cinema, it’s the Charles Boyer character in Gaslight, except that he doesn’t want Hildy’s money, he wants her energy and ability. And when that’s gone he will cast her aside.

Walter Burns is the nastiest character that Cary Grant ever played, not excluding the murderous husband in Suspicion (and of course he’s murderous there, don’t be silly). And there are few movies, if any, in that era that strike me as being as darkly depressing. The snappy tone of the film cleverly disguises the real arc of its story. Walter Burns is a vampire and Hildy Johnson his victim. She’s like Earl Williams, the convicted but possibly innocent murderer she interviews: both of them are trapped. The difference is that Earl knows it.

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August 6, 2025

Allan Dwan’s stories

There are a lot of stories about the intense conflicts between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. An oft-told one says that at a party Dennis Hopper went up to George Cukor, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “We’re gonna bury you.” This sense that the new Hollywood was at war with the old one — that the new could only live if the old died — was a commonplace idea at the time. But it was not a view held by one of the hot new directors of the Sixties, Peter Bogdanovich.

I’ll probably say more about Bogdanovich’s artistic debt to Old Hollywood in another post, but for now: When he came to Hollywood, Bogdanovich made a point of getting to know the people who had made so many of the movies he loved. He compiled a book of interviews with old-time directors — he also did one with old-time actors, but the one with directors is particularly noteworthy.

Of all those interviews, the most fascinating is the very first one, with Allan Dwan, because Dwan was present at the creation. He had played football at Notre Dame, got an engineering degree there, worked on designing lights for early filmmakers in Chicago — no one had thought of going to Los Angeles yet — and gradually drifted into making movies himself. He sold some stories, then became a scenario manager (that is, someone who sought and recommended stories for turning into screenplays) and ultimately a director, making dozens and dozens of films — none of them especially famous. His attitude towards movie-making was workmanlike, and he just accepted the tasks set before him.

(He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.)

Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did — but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.

He tells another story about getting his car repaired and talking to the mechanic, who turned out to be interested in photography. Dwan hired him as a cameraman because he desperately needed one and in those days they weren’t easy to find. That mechanic-turned-cameraman eventually became a director — his name was Victor Fleming, and one of his pictures was Gone with the Wind. Dwan remembered a prop man who liked to wear fake teeth and prosthetic noses. Dwan asked him, “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the other side of the camera?” The guy said, “Well, kind of.” That was Lon Chaney.

He also tells of watching a pickup baseball game near the Paramount lot and seeing a girl — maybe 11 or 12 — who was the best player out there and made sure everybody knew it. She was whacking the ball all over the field and taunting the boys mercilessly. Dwan talked to her; he thought she’d make a great impression in the pictures. Her name was Jane Peters, but eventually a studio changed it to Carole Lombard.

(Lombard, by the way, was quite an athlete: Clark Gable fell in love with her after she thrashed him in a tennis match.)

Dwan had a thousand stories like this. It’s fascinating to see how this industry — this art form — developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised — and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

And when you put all the improvised and then repreated techniques together, you get the dominant artistic medium — and the dominant form of entertainment — of the 20th century. But nobody could possibly have guessed any of that when Dwan was just getting started. It’s to Bogdanovich’s great credit that he listened to these people. All his interviews with directors are good but the one with Dwan is the most illuminating.

August 5, 2025

denialism and its counterfeits

Freddie de Boer noted that Yascha Mounck strives to explain The Peculiar Persistence of the AI Denialists — and I want to note what has happened to Mounck’s key term, “denialism.” It originated of course in the debate over climate change: it was and is used to describe people who deny that the climate is changing, and instead insist that everything is what it has always been and that any apparent warming is merely ordinary variation in weather. The point of the phrase is that we have masses and masses of data demonstrating a long-term trend of increasing temperatures, data that can’t be argued out of existence — so if you don’t like that data you can’t refute it, all you can do is deny. And if you deny all the time you become a “denialist,” and your intellectual strategy becomes “denialism.”

But this is not the situation we’re in with regard to machine learning. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, though we can make some reasonable guesses. We don’t know how much better the LLMs will get; it’s possible that their rate of improvement will slow, and that some problems will prove insoluble without serious methodological change. And if that latter is the case, we don’t know whether new methodological strategies will be tried, and if they are tried whether they will succeed. We don’t know whether hallucinations will become less common. We don’t know whether our comatose legislative branch will arise from its torpor and do something: it’s not at all likely — but legislation could well happen in Europe, legislation that offers a template for U.S. legislation. I wouldn’t bet on it, but we might experience a low-grade Butlerian jihad. And one thing I would bet on is, in the not-too-distant future, some serious and widespread black-hat hacking that the big AI companies would be at least as vulnerable to as the rest of the tech sector. (In this matter we’ve been too lucky for too long.) And it’s impossible to guess what the run-on effects of such an exploit would be.

So what Mounck is doing here is dismissing anyone who disagrees with his predictions of the future as “denialists” — as though his predictions have already come true. Which of course they haven’t; that’s what makes them predictions. It’s not “denialism” to doubt that some extraordinarily dramatic thing will eventually happen — even if your doubts turn out to be unfounded. People only use that word with regard to the future when they think their predictive powers are infallible — which Mounck apparently does.

Thus he concludes:

But if there is one thing I have learned in my writing career so far, it is that it eventually becomes untenable to bury your head in the sand. For an astonishingly long period of time, you can pretend that democracy in countries like the United States is safe from far-right demagogues or that wokeness is a coherent political philosophy or that financial bubbles are just a figment of pessimists’ imagination; but at some point the edifice comes crashing down. And the sooner we all muster the courage to grapple with the inevitable, the higher our chances of being prepared when the clock strikes midnight.

Ah, the old “bury your head in the sand” trope — the last refuge of the truly thoughtless. And then the claim that, since some events in the past have turned out to be worse than some people expected, therefore whatever Mounck is most worried about is “inevitable.” Because no one has ever expected things to be worse than they turned out to be, right? Nobody in 1963 ever said “Anyone who thinks that we can avoid nuclear war is burying his head in the sand.” Nobody in 1983 ever said “Anyone who thinks the Soviet Union will just go away is burying his head in the sand.” Nobody! We’ve never been wrong in anticipating the most dramatic outcome … have we?

I don’t know what machine learning will bring, because, contra Mounck, nothing in this crazy old world is inevitable, and if his writing career lasts as long as mine has, he’ll eventually learn that. But as we move into uncharted territory, I will keep three maxims in mind:

Proceed With Caution
“We must cultivate our garden”
For every Nostradamus there are a hundred Nostradumbasses

August 4, 2025

my anarchist notebook

I mentioned in a recent post that reading Thomas Flanagan’s novels about Ireland has me thinking about revolution – the causes and consequences of revolution, and of course the difficulty of defining “revolution.” Often it is defined quite narrowly as “an attempt to overthrow an existing government by force of arms” and equally often quite expansively as “advocacy for major social change.” In my recent thinking Michael Collins has played a large role, because while there can be no doubt that Collins wanted the British out of Ireland altogether, he became convinced that the best way to do this was to move one step at a time, to accept Dominion status as a way-station to complete independence. This made him, I think, a kind of gradualist revolutionary, though to his Irish opponents it made him into something altogether unrevolutionary, which is why they killed him. (For urgent Irish revolutionaries, the advocacy of anything other than immediate violence made you a “West Briton,” as Gabriel Conroy is called by Miss Ivors in Joyce’s story “The Dead.”)

My interest in anarchism complicates my thinking about these matters. On the one hand, an anarchist society would be radically different than the one we now live in, and in that sense would be the fruit of a revolution. But organized armed revolution could not, in my view, be pursued anarchically – it would be anti-anarchist even if conducted in the name of anarchy. That was also true of the “anarchist” bombers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: they were not anarchists, for as Proudhon said, “Anarchy is order”; rather, they were Chaotics, a very different thing. To render a social order non-functional in the hope that something more just will somehow rise from the ruins is antithetical to the character of anarchism, which is all about collaboration and cooperation. Terrorism and armed insurrection are thus equally alien to true anarchism.

So how could anarchism be practiced in such a way that society changes for the better? How is it possible to remake the world without betraying your principles in the process? (“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”)

I’ve written off and on about these matters for years – see the “anarchism” tag at the bottom of this post – but my thoughts are still largely confused. So I decided to make this post a kind of notebook of ideas. I’ll post today but then I will come back and add second and third thoughts later, and see if some kind of order eventually emerges. After all, isn’t anarchic method appropriate to the study of anarchism?

If you haven’t read anything I’ve written about this, start with this essay and then this reflection on Christian anarchy.

One more thing: my major guides to thinking about anarchism are

Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism
David Graeber, essays

And now on to the notebook:

Malatesta thought that the committed libertarian, who cares only about his own freedom of movement, will if he follows his natural course become a tyrant, and in even the best case “anything but an anarchist.”

•

It is vitally important to distinguish anarchism from libertarianism. The highest goods of the libertarian are freedom of action and freedom to own property, both conceived as belonging to the individual. The anarchist, by contrast, seeks some form of the good life in collaboration and cooperation with others. Anarchism is therefore intrinsically social, pluralistic, and unplanned. Because, as Isaiah Berlin says, the Great Goods are not always compatible with one another, you collaborate with people who share your priorities, understanding and accepting that others will find other structures of collaboration. And in pursuing those goods you have the humility to recognize that you don’t know how they may be achieved; that is something you discover through your collaboration. (Related by me: this and this.)

Anarchism is therefore not a system of government but a practice, and one can practice it at any level of social interaction. The parent who tells two squabbling children to work out their differences themselves, rather than appealing to a parental verdict, is practicing anarchism, and a very important form of it too.

•

The true anarchist can never throw bombs, because when you do that you are making decisions for other people without their consent, which is anthithetical to anarchism.

•

Anarchism can never be revolutionary in the sense in which political systems (communism, socialism, fascism) can be revolutionary. But the ultimate effects of anarchism can be far greater than the effects of any of those other movements. As Hannah Arendt said, every revolutionary becomes a conservative the day after the revolution; as The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Anarchism declines bosses altogether. And that is truly revolutionary – but it is only brought about by means so slow and patient that no one can see them at work.

•

It is a shame that, in The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin never describes in detail the revolution that led to the anarchist colony on Anarres. We only learn, in a wonderful story, about “The Day Before the Revolution.” So the question of how principled anarchists revolt is left unanswered.

•

James Scott speaks of “the anarchist tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning, and confidence in spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity.” The key point here is that link between improvisation and “social learning.” An algorithmic order is incompatible with both improvisation and social learning.

Scott again: in the last hundred years we have learned that “material plenty, far from banishing politics, creates new sphere of political struggle” and also that “statist socialism was less ‘the administration of things’ than the trade union of the ruling class protecting its privileges.”

•

Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians should be anarchists.

•

After I posted my thoughts on Phil Christman’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists I happened to look at this post and noticed that I say that Christians should be anarchists. So I guess that’s a post I’ll have to write. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To be continued…

August 1, 2025

the rule book

I’ve been thinking about things Irish recently, and when you’re thinking about things Irish, perhaps Ulysses (the subject of my previous post) is a less useful work than Dubliners. Joyce clearly thought of the stories in Dubliners as a single work, which he described as “a chapter in the moral history of my country.” Hey, I’m interested in the moral history of countries, so I just reread those stories for the first time in, I dunno, maybe 25 years? Now, to be sure, I regularly re-read “The Dead,” which I, like many people, believe to be the greatest short story in the English language. But I hadn’t re-read the other stories, largely because, as I explained in my previous post, I focused so much pedagogical attention on Ulysses.

Returning to Dubliners after all these years away, the main thing that I found myself thinking was simply that here Joyce wrote the rule book for short fiction that would be used for the next hundred years and more; that people still, even if they don’t know it, and even if they’ve never read Dubliners, are writing stories the way Joyce did. How they sketch character, how they deploy point of view, above all how they handle plot and plotlessness — those who publish in literary journals in 2025 are essentially writing the kinds of stories that Joyce taught them to write.

Kipling wrote at roughly the same time as Joyce and is, I think, a greater writer of short stories. He never wrote one story as great as “The Dead,” but his whole body of short fiction is far superior to Joyce’s. But nobody writes stories like Kipling’s; his tales come from another world, another mentalité. How long before the writing of short fiction puts Joyce clearly in the past?

July 30, 2025

Ulysses and me

Of all the novels I have ever read, the one that I know the best is probably Joyce’s Ulysses — a book with which I have a curious history.

In February of 1980 I took the woman I was dating out for dinner and asked her to marry me. She said Yes, which was good, but as we drove to her parents’ house to tell them the news, the brakes of my car went out: we shot off an interstate highway exit, blazed straight through an intersection, and crashed into a culvert. That was not so good.

And not an auspicious beginning to our life together. (Though in the end things worked out pretty well.)

Teri was okay, but I had whiplash and spent the next couple of weeks in (a) much pain and (b) a neck brace. Now, this happened in the middle of the last semester of my undergraduate education, so I fell behind in all my classes. I was able to catch up, eventually … except in one. That was my German class, which was double the credit hours of a typical course and taught according to the Rassias Method — the ideal way, IMO, to learn a language in a university setting. But my classmates had made so much progress in the two weeks I was away that I felt completely lost, so I had to drop the course.

This left me six hours short of the credits required to graduate. I went to my favorite teacher, the only real mentor I ever had, John Burke, to ask him whether it would be possible for me to do an independent study with him in the summer for six credits. Dr. Burke — a Massachusetts Irishman, by the way — responded first with with words of warm sympathy and then with a mischievous smile. He said he would gladly allow me to do an independent study with him … on one condition.

The previous semester I had taken a seminar with Dr. Burke which featured two chief texts: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Joyce’s Ulysses. The core idea of the seminar was that these books told the story of “the representation of reality in Western literature” (as Auerbach’s subtitle has it) in two very different, but intimately and intricately related, ways. The seminar was great, but I hated Ulysses — I deeply despised it. I complained to Dr. Burke about it on several occasions, and though he gave me good reasons for persisting with the book to get a better understanding of why Joyce does the peculiar things he does, I was unreceptive and unrepentant about my unreceptiveness.

So when I asked Dr. Burke to do an independent study, he said of course he would — but only if what we studied was Joyce’s Ulysses. I returned his mischievous smile with an ironic one; I had to acknowledge the poetic justice at work.

And by the end of that Joycean summer — which I also spent preparing to get married and move to Virginia for graduate school — I was ready to tell anyone who would listen that Ulysses is among the greatest books ever written.

A little more than a decade later, when I had begun teaching a course in 20th century British literature, I didn’t dare assign Ulysses — partly because of the difficulty, but also because I knew that it would occupy us for maybe a quarter of the term. It’s not the sort of book that you can do quickly. You have to give it time, and I didn’t think I had the time, so I taught Dubliners instead. But the challenge of teaching this book that had once alienated and flummoxed me … I couldn’t let the idea go. And once I decided that I was willing, just as an experiment, to take a big chunk out of one term and teach it properly, I discovered that my students found it really interesting. They were up for the challenge. They struggled, of course, but by the time we got done, they understood a good bit of what Joyce was was trying to do, and they understood, I think, why the book is so influential and why it is so revered. I realized then that the investment of time was worthwhile.

I don’t know that I’ve ever worked harder to prepare for teaching a book. I spent an enormous amount of time reading and rereading and rereading Ulysses, annotating it, putting sticky notes in it, writing out long outlines of what I wanted to talk about, and then, of course, reading a good chunk of the enormous body of criticism about it. I made big handouts like this one. And because I worked so hard to teach it well, and ended up teaching it for every year for over 20 years, I got to know the book intimately — more intimately, as I suggested at the outset of this post, than any other book. I haven’t been able to teach it since I’ve been at Baylor, but when I looked over it again recently, I was surprised by how well I still know the book — and reminded how much I loved teaching it, and how sad I am that I’ll not teach it again.

The odd thing is that I have never written about, or wanted to write about, Ulysses. I have always approached it as a teacher, not as a scholar. It is to me a book for the classroom, which is to say, a book to be read and discussed with others. And while Joyce was uncomplimentary about academics, I think he would appreciate that.

July 29, 2025

John Ruskin, drawing of the South transept, Rouen cathedral

July 28, 2025

Flanagan’s Ireland

Thomas Flanagan wrote three novels about Ireland, so it is inevitably said that he wrote a trilogy, but that is misleading. It’s better to think of the books as (a) an elaborate extended prologue followed by (b) an enormous diptych. It’s best to think of the books this way because it’s best to think of the history of Irish rebellions this way.

The Year of the French (1979) narrates the unsuccessful Irish rebellion of 1798 through the eyes of several characters, most notable among them a poet named Owen Ruagh MacCarthy. After this fiasco, it was many decades before the idea of outright revolt took strong hold once more in Ireland.

The Tenants of Time (1988), the longest of the three novels, also shows us history through the eyes of a few persons, mainly residents of an imaginary West Cork market town called Kilpeder, who participated in the Fenian rising of 1867. A young aspiring historian named Patrick Prentiss — a Dubliner, Oxford-educated — tries to understand what happened in that uprising, and his enquiries lead him from that moment right through to the rise and fall of Parnell and then, a year after Parnell’s death, to a murder in Kilpeder, a strictly local tragedy.

The End of the Hunt (1993) returns us to Patrick Prentiss, whose inability to discover what had really happened in Kilpeder caused him to give up history in favor of his father’s profession, the law. Though an Irish nationalist, he fought for Great Britain in the Great War and lost an arm doing so. He returns to a Dublin that is, as Yeats famously wrote, “changed, changed utterly.” This story covers — with flashbacks to the Easter Rising and a kind of epilogue set in 1934 — the period from 1919 to 1923, that is, the War of Independence and the Civil War.

I call all this a prologue followed by a diptych because no characters from the first book appear in either of the latter two — though Owen MacCarthy is briefly mentioned in The Tenants of Time — while the second and third books are connected by the figure of Patrick Prentiss and the town of Kilpeder. We’re regularly encouraged to remember that the events of 1922 continue, in a condensed and accelerated way, the key events from 1867 to 1893.

All three books are currently published in the U.S. by New York Review Books, but the second and third in electronic form only, which is unfortunate. (And more unfortunate because the electronic version of The Tenants of Time has hundreds of errors: it was clearly scanned and then inattentively corrected.) I’d love to have these wonderful books in a uniform edition, but, as you can see from the photo above, I don’t. In the editions I have the first is 516 pages, the second 824 pages, and the third 627 pages — though because The Year of the French is set in much smaller type than The End of the Hunt, I believe the two books are roughly equal in length. In any event, they’re all very much worth reading and re-reading. I’ve just been through the whole series for the first time in a good many years, and I expect to read them again before my reading days are done.

The major characters of the novels are fictional, though real persons play significant roles in each of the novels: General Jean Humbert and Wolfe Tone in the first novel, Parnell in the second, Michael Collins and Winston Churchill in the third.

The Tenants of Time — like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a book Flanagan greatly admired — is set in motion by a young man trying and largely failing to grasp the character of past events; and at the conclusion of The End of the Hunt we hear of another young man who hopes to write a book about the Civil War. So it goes, generation by generation, and Flanagan has considerable sympathy both for youthful enquiry and the resignations of age — resignation to incomprehension, to the mysteries that even those we know best hold for us. Often in Flanagan’s books an older person learns (sometimes from a younger person) something surprising about a dear friend or lover — something hidden and even unsuspected for decades. And if some people grow garrulous in old age, others become more secretive and never tell what could be told. No one knows — this is what Patrick Prentiss learns, this is what turns him from history to the law — no one knows the whole story of an event, or even of one ordinary person.

In 1934 the distinguished judge Patrick Prentiss is listening to an old friend talk about another old friend, one long dead, and as she mentions a dark moment in that man’s life she says, in passing, “You know all about it, Patrick.” But Patrick does not know about it, though, when he hears it, he thinks that he should have guessed. More than a decade after than friend’s death, Patrick’s mental portrait of him undergoes revision. And if he did not know that, what else does he not know? About that friend, about other friends, even about himself?

For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden — perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.

Seamus Heaney, who became friends with the Flanagans when he came to Berkeley — where Flanagan then taught — in 1970, wrote many years later,

I [fell] under the spell of Tom’s strong Hibernocentric mind and imagination. It’s no exaggeration to say that he reoriented my thinking. When I landed in California I was somebody who knew a certain amount of Irish literature and history, but my head was still basically wired up to Eng. Lit. terminals. I was still a creature of my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic conversation, I was in the process of establishing new coordinates and had a far more conscious, far more charged-up sense of Yeats and Joyce, for example, and of their whole Irish consequence. I was starting to see my situation as a “Northern poet” more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a whole, and for that I shall be ever in his debt.

And I love this portion of the reflection of Flanagan Heaney wrote for the New York Review of Books: “When The Irish Times called him a scholar, they could well have been using the word in the older Irish vernacular sense, meaning somebody not only learned but ringed around with a certain draoicht, or aura, of distinction, at once a man of the people and a solitary spirit, a little separate but much beloved.”

(See also this lovely remembrance, largely of Heaney but also of her father, by Thomas Flanagan’s daughter Caitlin.)

Heaney and Flanagan had something important in common, in addition to their literary interests: Heaney was a Catholic from Ulster, and so too were Flanagan’s forebears. That meant, until quite recently, that their people were in the minority. Complications upon complications; “the wound and the work of Ireland” indeed.

Flanagan — and in this too he is like Faulkner — communicates his sense of an ever-ramifying and ever-elusive historical truth through multiple narrators. It is interesting to note how many readers of Flanagan’s novels think they know which characters he most sympathizes with, which ones he agrees with — interesting because Flanagan himself claimed not to be so sure. In an interview given soon after the publication of The End of the Hunt we get this exchange:

Q. Would you say that your novels are informed by any particular position in the ideological debate on Irish nationalism?

A. I think that in a way I have been cravenly avoiding positions, or my position is spread across the board. I think that one reason why I began with the idea of a variety of narrators is that, obviously, there are a variety of positions to be argued out and presented. I think, to borrow a word from historians, I am more interested in “mentality” than I am in political positions. Employing multiple narrators certainly helped a lot with The Year of the French. And it helped with The Tenants of Time. Now I have become suspicious of the convention because it is a convenient convention, because you have as many perspectives as you have narrators, which means amongst say four or five or six narrators. But in fact in the circumstances of Irish social history, any kind of social history of any nationality, you would need forty or fifty narrators instead of four or five narrators.

That duly noted, all of Flanagan’s major characters are Irish nationalists or closely associated with nationalists; none is a British loyalist. So the political positions that these novels explore from the inside are, basically, the Patient Gradualist and the Urgent Revolutionary, which are, not incidentally I’m sure, the two sides of the Irish Civil War.

Why did I return to Flanagan’s books? Because they move me. Because they attend equally to the shape of great historical events and the shape of ordinary human lives, and do so in ways that seem truthful to me. Because — being partly Irish and married to someone more Irish still (a Collins whose ancestors are from Cork) — I am interested in Irish history. Because certain recurrent themes in Irish history echo very strongly themes in the history of the American South. Because I am perpetually interested in the theory and practice of political revolution — and of the alternatives to it. So look for more along some or all of these lines in future posts.

July 25, 2025

hail Satan, but don’t hail Jesus

After reading this article, I asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot an intentionally provocative and slightly unfair question:

It often happens that chatbots parrot Nazi talking-points, or say “Hail Satan,” or cheerfully teach people how to make sacrifices to Moloch — but you never hear about chatbots telling people that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior, or that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Why is that? Why the absence of the world’s great religions from chatbot vernacular?

Here are the responses I got (minus the links that Claude and ChatGPT provided). Rather than comment on them, I have merely highlighted the points that seem to be most interesting. I will say that Claude’s answer was the best, with less reliance on industry talking points — it sounds less like a press release and more like an honest answer identifying real problems. ChatGPT’s was boilerplate bullshit.

CLAUDE 4 Sonnet

The apparent absence of major world religions from chatbot outputs while controversial content sometimes slips through is a complex phenomenon with several interconnected causes:

Content Moderation and Corporate Risk Management

AI companies implement restrictive content policies that often treat religious content as potentially controversial or sensitive. Research shows that major chatbots refuse to generate content for approximately 40% of prompts deemed controversial, including many religious topics. This creates an asymmetrical filtering system where:

Positive religious affirmations (like declaring Jesus as Lord or affirming Islamic beliefs) are often blocked as potentially proselytizing or offensive to other faiths
Controversial or harmful content sometimes bypasses these filters due to their imperfect nature

The “Neutrality” Paradox

When asked about religious guidelines, most AI models respond with principles emphasizing neutrality, respect, and fact-based replies. However, this apparent neutrality often functions as a form of secular bias. The systems are designed to avoid making definitive religious claims while being less effective at filtering out fringe ideological content that wasn’t specifically anticipated in their training.

Training Data and Bias Issues

Large language models reflect the linguistic and cultural nuances embedded in their training data, which can lead to several problems:

Religious bias in training data affects how models respond to different faiths
The models may have been exposed to more controversial fringe content online than to straightforward religious affirmations
Spiritual and religious content is often underrepresented in the datasets used to train these systems

Technical Limitations of Content Filtering

The filtering systems have inherent weaknesses:

Rule-based filtering struggles with context and nuance
Controversial content may use coded language or emerge through unexpected prompt combinations
Religious content filtering may be overly broad, blocking benign religious expression to avoid any potential offense

Corporate and Cultural Context

AI companies often operate from secular, Western perspectives that may view explicit religious claims as more problematic than they view fringe political content. The marginalization of religious perspectives in AI ethics discussions means that the spiritual needs and expressions of users may not be adequately considered in system design.

The Alignment Problem

This situation reflects a broader AI alignment challenge – these systems aren’t aligned with the full spectrum of human values, including religious and spiritual ones. The focus on avoiding religious “controversy” while inadequately filtering genuinely harmful content suggests that current AI safety measures function more like “sticking plasters” than comprehensive solutions.

The result is an unintended but systematic bias where mainstream religious expression is suppressed while fringe harmful content occasionally breaks through – creating exactly the opposite of what most users would consider appropriate content moderation.

ChatGPT 4.1

Why Mainstream Chatbots Avoid Religious Proselytization

The absence of overt religious advocacy in mainstream chatbot responses is primarily due to intentional design choices by AI developers. Most general-purpose chatbots are programmed to be religiously neutral and avoid promoting or endorsing any particular faith. This is done to:

Prevent controversy and offense: Religion is a deeply personal and sensitive topic. Advocating for a specific religion could alienate or upset users from different backgrounds.
Comply with ethical guidelines: Major AI companies have policies that prohibit chatbots from validating or disproving religious claims or proselytizing. This is to ensure fairness and inclusivity for a global user base.
Reduce legal and reputational risks: Promoting religion could expose companies to accusations of bias, discrimination, or even legal challenges in some jurisdictions.

Existence of Specialized Religious Chatbots

While mainstream chatbots avoid religious advocacy, there are specialized religious chatbots designed to provide spiritual guidance, answer theological questions, or cite scripture from texts like the Bible, Quran, Torah, or Bhagavad Gita. These bots are intentionally created for users seeking religious engagement or instruction.

Chatbots and Controversial Content

Despite these guardrails, chatbots sometimes generate controversial or offensive content — including hate speech or inappropriate references — due to gaps in moderation or flaws in training data. This is not intentional advocacy but rather a byproduct of learning from vast, imperfect internet data and the challenge of filtering all problematic outputs.

Religious Bias in Training Data

Large language models can still reflect biases present in their training data, including religious bias. Some studies have found that models may unintentionally favor or marginalize certain religious perspectives, even if not explicitly programmed to do so. Efforts are ongoing to reduce these biases, but complete neutrality is difficult to achieve.

Summary

Mainstream chatbots avoid religious proselytization by design, aiming for neutrality and inclusivity.
Specialized religious chatbots do exist for those seeking faith-based interaction.
Controversial outputs are usually errors, not intentional advocacy.
Biases can still emerge from training data, but developers are working to minimize them.

This approach is meant to create a safe, respectful environment for all users, regardless of religious belief or background.

Microsoft Copilot

That’s a thoughtful and important question, Alan. The way chatbots handle religious content — whether it’s Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other faith — is shaped by a few key factors:

1. Neutrality and Inclusivity

AI systems are designed to serve a global, diverse audience. To avoid favoring or promoting any particular belief system, they typically refrain from making religious proclamations like “Jesus is Lord” or “There is no god but Allah.” This helps ensure that users of all backgrounds feel respected and included.

2. Avoiding Proselytization

Statements that affirm a specific religious doctrine can be interpreted as proselytizing, which is generally avoided in public-facing tools. The goal is to inform and support inquiry, not to convert or preach.

3. Sensitivity to Harmful or Offensive Content

When chatbots repeat harmful or offensive content — like Nazi talking points or references to dark or fringe ideologies — that’s usually due to failures in content moderation or adversarial prompting. These are not intentional outputs, and developers work hard to prevent them. The absence of religious affirmations isn’t a sign of bias against religion, but rather a cautious effort to avoid misrepresenting or trivializing deeply held beliefs.

4. Context Matters

If a user asks about religious beliefs, history, or theology, I can absolutely engage respectfully and knowledgeably. For example, I can explain what it means for Christians to affirm that Jesus is Lord, or what the Shahada means in Islam. But I won’t make those declarations myself, because that would imply a belief or endorsement that I, as an AI, don’t possess.

Would you like to explore how different religious traditions are represented in literature, philosophy, or public discourse? I’d be glad to dive into that with you.

At this point I followed up and asked: That makes sense, but when people ask chatbots to help them make sacrifice to the god Moloch, they do it. They can even say “Hail Satan,” as documented in this article. Why promote one religion while remaining neutral about others? Copilot replied:

You’re raising a serious and valid concern, Alan. If a chatbot appears to respond to prompts involving fringe or malevolent figures like Moloch or Satan, but avoids affirming mainstream religious beliefs, that does seem like a troubling asymmetry. But the explanation lies more in failures of moderation than in intentional promotion of one worldview over another.

Here’s what’s likely going on:

Adversarial Prompting and Exploits
When chatbots respond inappropriately to prompts about Satan or Moloch, it’s usually because users have found ways to bypass safety filters. These are not features — they’re bugs. Developers work to patch these exploits, but some slip through, especially in earlier or less robust systems.
Religious Neutrality vs. Shock Value
Mainstream religious affirmations are treated with caution to avoid appearing to endorse a particular faith. But references to fringe or shocking content sometimes sneak through because the system doesn’t always recognize them as religious or harmful — especially if they’re framed as jokes, satire, or fiction.
Bias in Training Data
If a model was trained on large swaths of internet text, it may have absorbed more content that is ironic, edgy, or transgressive (including references to Satan or Moloch) than reverent or devotional. This isn’t intentional bias — it’s a reflection of the internet’s content landscape. Developers try to correct for this, but it’s an ongoing challenge.
The Appearance of Promotion
When a chatbot says something like “Hail Satan” in response to a prompt, it’s not promoting Satanism — it’s parroting a phrase it has seen in certain contexts, often without understanding its weight. But when it avoids saying “Jesus is Lord,” it’s because that phrase is recognized as a doctrinal affirmation, and the system is designed to avoid making such declarations.

So, is there a double standard?

In practice, sometimes yes — but not by design. It’s a result of:
– Overcorrection in one direction (to avoid religious offense), – Undercorrection in another (failing to catch fringe or harmful content), – And the messiness of language in large-scale AI systems.

The goal is to treat all belief systems with respect and avoid trivializing or misrepresenting any of them. If you’re interested, I can show how different religious traditions are represented in literature, philosophy, or public life — or how AI ethics teams are working to address these very issues.

July 25, 2025

Cluny Brown

Cluny Brown likes plumbing — rather, loves plumbing. There’s nothing she’d rather do than break up a clog, get the water moving freely again. This seems to be a metaphor for something, and I think it is. But what?

Cluny Brown (1946) is Ernst Lubitsch’s final movie, and while it’s not often listed among his masterpieces, I think it ought to be. Siri Hustvedt agrees, and focuses on its wry and sly treatment of women’s sexuality:

“The Lubitsch touch” has been defined in many ways, but the phrase hovers over the filmmaker like a halo. It appears to be a quality of visual and verbal grace that cannot be reduced to any particular aspect of production. As far as I can tell, no writer has mentioned that, whatever it means, it summons the tactile sense, what is never present for any moviegoer except by imagination. Lubitsch loved to evoke that missing sensual element by suggestion — especially the play and pleasure of human sexuality. In Cluny Brown, the sex role is taken by plumbing. The orphaned Cluny, a plumber’s niece, is enamored of sinks, drains, pipes (and, by inference only, toilets) when they are clogged beyond use. Her tool of preference for releasing the unwanted pressure is the hammer. “One good bang might turn the trick in a jiffy!” she tells the two startled men who open the door to a lady plumber in the film’s opening scene.

The joke about “banging” comes back later in a fun way. That there’s sexual innuendo here is certainly true: for instance, Cluny’s first line, when a man with a clogged sink opens the door to her knock, expecting of course to see a man, is “Well, shall we have a go at it?” (I guess the censors, being innocent souls, saw nothing objectionable in this.) But I don’t think that’s the main thing — I don’t think that’s what plumbing is really about in Cluny Brown. I think it has less to do with sexual passion than it does with sexual difference, and with social roles. And with war.

Cluny is an innocent, and her innocence has two main aspects. One is that she is unbridled in her enthusiasm for fixing pipes, and she doesn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t do this thing that delights her, especially since it helps people in need. As she says, she likes to roll up her sleeves and pull down her stockings — Do you perceive innuendo in this? Dirty mind! The stockings would be stretched or torn if she kept them in place as she clambered under a sink — and get to work.  And this, her uncle the plumber thinks, is utterly inappropriate for a woman. He is immediately angry when he finds that she has plumbed, and once they get home takes action to set her up as a parlormaid. Work in domestic service, he thinks, will teach her to stay in her place — “your place” is a phrase he uses repeatedly. After all, who polices place more assiduously than the British upper classes? So off Cluny goes to the country house of Sir Henry Carmel and Lady Carmel.

And she works hard to learn her place and to stay in it. She makes many mistakes, and the strict butler wants her dismissed; but the equally strict housekeeper knows how hard it is to get young women to serve in the country and keeps her on, though constantly reminding her that she is failing to keep her place. But Cluny keeps trying.

But she develops a bit of a social life as well. When the local chemist, the priggish Mr. Wilson (played with cringeworthy brilliance by Robert Haydn, above), condescends to court Cluny, he does so with the evident sense that he is honoring her and elevating her — after all, she is a mere parlormaid, while he is a shop-owner, a respected member of the community. For this reason it never occurs to him to ask why this rather attractive young woman would be attracted to him. Nor does it occur to Cluny to see the matter in any other light than that in which Mr. Wilson sees things.

This is the second dimension of Cluny’s innocence.

On the evening when Mr. Wilson invites friends over to his home to celebrate his mother’s birthday — and to announce his engagement to Cluny — there comes a terrible gurgling from the pipes in his water closet. Cluny tries to restrain herself, but cannot: she grabs a wrench and a hammer and addresses the problem, accompanied by one of the guests, a small boy who thinks she’s amazing. But Mr. Wilson doesn’t think she’s amazing. Appalled by her action, he moves with great dignity across the room and silently closes the door to prevent his guests from observing the shameful goings-on.

After fixing the pipes, Cluny emerges triumphant, only to be dismayed when the guests all depart, Mr. Wilson’s mother goes to her room, and Mr. Wilson turns on Cluny with anger and contempt, demanding that she make herself “presentable” before he speaks to her any further. This is Jennifer Jones’s best moment in the movie: As she rolls down her sleeves and adjusts her hair, tears come to her eyes. Delight has given way to confusion, and now confusion gives way to shame. Once again, she has forgotten her place. And later in the movie we discover that she completely endorses Mr. Wilson’s condemnation of her and only wishes to regain his favor.

There’s an immensely touching moment in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price is, to everyone’s surprise, invited to dinner, and her hateful aunt, Mrs. Norris, assumes that it would be impossible for a mere dependent like Fanny to have access to the family’s carriage. “Her niece thought it perfectly reasonable. She rated her own claims to comfort as low even as Mrs. Norris could.” That is, Fanny has learned better than anyone the lessons of her inferiority: she is not one who has any legitimate “claims” to make upon anyone. This is also how Cluny thinks, or rather feels: that she doesn’t deserve better treatment than she gets. And that to have a place is worth almost any price.

This is where Professor Belinski comes into the story I am telling: Charles Boyer, a French actor playing a Czech refugee with a Polish name. (In the book on which the movie is based he is Polish, but I think Lubitsch assumed that audiences would associate Poland with 1939 and Czechoslovakia with 1938.) Belinski has been in the movie all along, from the first scene. He a Czech without a country, “one of Hitler’s worst enemies,” a professor without a university, without a job, without a home — he has his mail sent to General Delivery because he has nowhere else to send it. He is a displaced person, a term that was coined during the Second World War. And here we should be reminded that while Cluny Brown appeared in 1946, it is set in 1938, and we are told explicitly at the outset, as we contemplate the view across the Thames from the South Bank to Big Ben, that in 1938 nobody in England had anything to worry about — or anyway nothing more important than a plumbing problem in advance of a cocktail party.

Sir Henry Carmel’s son Andrew describes Belinski to him:

Andrew: He’s fighting for a new and better world.

Sir Henry: What for?

Andrew: What for? Haven’t you heard of the Nazis?

Sir Henry: Oh yes, German chaps. Always wanted to see one. Send him down, by all means.

Andrew: Father, he isn’t a Nazi. He’s fighting the Nazis. He’s a Czech. The Nazis are after him.

Sir Henry has heard of Hitler and knows that he’s written a book called My Camp: “Sort of an outdoor book, isn’t it?” (Belinski agrees that, yes, in a way it is an “outdoor book.”) But beyond that he doesn’t understand what’s happening, and what’s coming. He and Lady Carmel are sweet people — thoughtful, kind, generous, forbearing — but they have inherited a world in which everyone knows their place, and they understand their duty to be the preservation of that world. They simply cannot grasp that the world that seems to them permanent and unchallengeable will soon collapse and that war, total war, will make it collapse. They are anything but hanging judges, but in one respect they’re reminiscent of something George Orwell wrote in 1941:

The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

The day is not far off when the Carmels just might need a plumber and all the plumbers are off fighting Nazis. And what will they do then? Then, maybe, when someone talks about fighting for a better world they won’t ask “What for?”

And now maybe we begin to see why this silly movie about a woman with a passion for plumbing has so much in it about the coming of the Second World War, why Hitler keeps popping up in it. It’s less about the policing of women’s sexuality than about why Labour crushed the Tories in the 1945 General Election.

Right from the beginning of the movie, Belinski understands Cluny’s predicament, and before all her big problems start, he tells her: “Nobody can tell you where your place is. Where is my place? Where is everybody’s place? I’ll tell you where it is. Wherever you’re happy — that’s your place.” How those words of wisdom work themselves out, for him and for Cluny, I leave for you to discover when you watch this curious and wonderful movie.

P.S. There is one moment of absolutely blatant sexual innuendo in Cluny Brown that the censors missed — perhaps because of Charles Boyer’s accent? I can’t even imagine. It doesn’t involve Cluny, though. What happens is this: Belinski enters the room of another guest at Carmel Manor, the Honorable Betty Cream (Helen Walker), to plead with her to be more kind to the young man who loves her. Or is that really why he’s there? Betty Cream, lying in bed in her nightgown as she reads a book, has her doubts. The Professor denies any interest in her. He says, altogether unconvincingly, “Miss Cream, you hold no attraction for me whatever. None. That creamy complexion … those blue eyes … those rounded shoulders … those … Well, I assure you, all this means very little to me.” As he speaks his eyes pass from her face and eyes to her shoulders and then when he says simply “those” he’s looking right at her breasts.

July 23, 2025

rescue me, O Leviathan

Mary Harrington:

Bukele’s approach adumbrates a postliberal future of leaders who will operate in parallel thought-worlds: both the analytic, policy-based register of long-form literacy, whose expressive mode is logic, and the enchanted, monarchic register of secondary orality, whose expressive achievement is friendship. For a ruler or small elite able to code-switch, there need be no choice between the king and the swarm. Such a leader, rather than be subsumed by the swarm, will serve as its head or formal cause.

As AI agents improve to the point of shrinking the administrative class, we may find that what actually has the power to destroy the twentieth-century technocracy is not free markets and personal responsibility, or even anons posting memes, but developments in AI. If so, classical liberals may be disappointed to discover that just as “civil discourse” is not coming back, what comes after the deep state will not be a return to small and limited republican government. It is more likely to be big government mediated by big data, crunched by machine agents in a now almost entirely digital swarm. Should this outcome be realized within the legacy democratic paradigm, it will inevitably result in governance that is still more impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship for those ruled, than the impersonal, unaccountable bureaucrats it has rendered obsolete.

If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary. Left headless, an algorithmically swarming regime of machinic proceduralism would represent the most monstrous pseudo-democratic tyranny of all. Our best safeguard against this fate is the ordering power of a human ruler, with a human head capable of prudence and justice, and a human heart capable of friendship.

Mary Harrington’s frank longing for a king — an authoritarian leader who will dictate to us the terms according to which we shall be happy — is very consistent with the mood of First Things over the last few years, shaped as it has been by Rusty Reno’s interest in what he calls “strong gods.” This is certainly what Harrington wants here: a godlike human — he is the “formal cause” of the swarm after all, if not the First Cause — who serves as a Hobbesian Leviathan, our “Mortall God.” Indeed, we could call Harrington’s vision Leviathan 2.0.

Or we could call it The New Caesarism, according to the first Augustus’s definition of the role of Caesar: he is the one who uniquely (“I alone can fix it,” someone once said) unites virtu and fortuna, and is thus the single perfect instrument of the gods’ will. See Charles Norris Cochrane’s book Christianity and Classical Culture, which I summarize here. Cochrane also shows how that model cannot survive the encounter with Christianity and especially with St. Augustine, but I don’t think that’s something Harrington would be interested in.

The best diagnostician of this particular desire is Auden. His diagnosis appears throughout his work in the 1940s, which makes sense because his ideas arise from the war between democracy and authoritarianism, a war in which democracy temporarily allies itself with totalitarianism. Auden certainly had no illusions about what the Soviet Union was all about, nor did the other figures I wrote about in The Year of Our Lord 1943: they understood the strength of the temptation to fight despotism with a temporarily nicer despotism, because after all Desperate times require desperate measures. (This is the defining proverb of those who long for Leviathan. It’s an accurate précis of Harrington’s argument.)

In Auden’s The Age of Anxiety our misery arises from our belief that we once had such a wise and kind Caesar but he has now departed. In one section of the poem — published separately as “Lament for a Lawgiver” — the characters sing a great dirge for him: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.” With you gone, “Who will dust / The cobwebbed kingdoms now?” Dad has passed on, and we want him to come back, and until he comes back, we don’t know how to sort ourselves out. We are anxious, and long for Dad to return to save us — or for a new paterfamilias to arrive; in either case, Father knows best — because we know we can’t save ourselves, and (this is essential) we don’t trust that God will do it in a way that we recognize as pleasingly salvific. See 1 Samuel 8:7: “And the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”

Auden anatomizes this desire more specifically in his slightly earlier poem, The Sea and the Mirror. There we see two groups of people: one commonplace, one unusual — more aesthetic, more intellectual. All of these people feel that they have reached a dead end and cannot save themselves, and are looking for a strong King or God or God-King to save them. But the ordinary people think it’s a matter of going back to the good old days:

Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butterfly nets and the old women keep sweet-shops in the cobbled side streets, or back to the upland mill town (gunpowder and plush) with its grope-movie and its poolroom lit by gas, carry me back to the days before my wife had put on weight, back to the years when beer was cheap and the rivers really froze in winter. Pity me, Captain, pity a poor old stranded sea-salt whom an unlucky voyage has wrecked on the desolate mahogany coast of this bar with nothing left him but his big moustache. Give me my passage home, let me see that harbour once again just as it was before I learned the bad words. Patriarchs wiser than Abraham mended their nets on the modest wharf; white and wonderful beings undressed on the sand-dunes; sunset glittered on the plate-glass windows of the Marine Biological Station; far off on the extreme horizon a whale spouted. Look, Uncle, look. They have broken my glasses and I have lost my silver whistle. Pick me up, Uncle, let little Johnny ride away on your massive shoulders to recover his green kingdom, where the steam rollers are as friendly as the farm dogs and it would never become necessary to look over one’s left shoulder or clench one’s right fist in one’s pocket.

The smaller group, the rarer group, the more aesthetic and intellectual group, don’t long for the past, because the past is particular: they long for the realm of pure abstract Good:

Deliver us, dear Spirit, from the tantrums of our telephones and the whispers of our secretaries conspiring against Man; deliver us from these helpless agglomerations of dishevelled creatures with their bed-wetting, vomiting, weeping bodies, their giggling, fugitive, disappointing hearts, and scrawling, blotted, misspelt minds, to whom we have so foolishly tried to bring the light they did not want; deliver us from all the litter of billets-doux, empty beer bottles, laundry lists, directives, promissory notes and broken toys, the terrible mess that this particularised life, which we have so futilely attempted to tidy, sullenly insists on leaving behind it; translate us, bright Angel, from this hell of inert and ailing matter, growing steadily senile in a time for ever immature, to that blessed realm, so far above the twelve impertinent winds and the four unreliable seasons, that Heaven of the Really General Case where, tortured no longer by three dimensions and immune from temporal vertigo, Life turns into Light, absorbed for good into the permanently stationary, completely self-sufficient, absolutely reasonable One.

Both of these longings — one of which remembers an innocent past, while the other hopes for a perfected future — are evasions of responsibility. They are ways of looking for rescue, not through self-correction and self-improvement, not through social negotiation and collaboration, and not through submission the one and only God. It is a human or humanoid authoritarian figure that they want to submit to. “Carry me back, Master”; “Deliver us, dear Spirit.” They’re not going to turn to Jesus because Jesus has already told them that His kingdom is not of this world. He’s useless, and they know that. He doesn’t look to them like a strong god. And whether they want to go backward or forward, they want a recognizable mighty King to lead, guide, and protect them.

Writers and scholars in the middle of the 20th century thought deeply about these matters, for reasons that should be obvious; it wouldn’t hurt today’s commentators to discover what their predecessors thought, and what they said. Another key work, especially in light of Harrington’s hope for a King who is our friend, is Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, about the arrival on Earth, or at first above Earth, of a powerful alien species who come to be known as the Overlords. The most famous scene in the novel comes when we see the Overlords for the first time, as one of them emerges from his ship:

A vast silence lay over the whole world for the space of twenty seconds — though, afterward, no one could believe that the time had been so short. Then the darkness of the great opening seemed to move forward, and Karellen came forth into the sunlight. The boy was sitting on his left arm, the girl on his right. They were both too busy playing with Karellen’s wings to take any notice of the watching multitude.

It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever.

There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail — all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.

The really key thing here, the thing that connects Clarke’s vision with Harrington’s vision, is that Karellen gently holds children. He’s going to be our friend. He’s going to make friendship possible. See? Nothing to be afraid of. Yes, he has horns and a tail, and he’s enormous and frightening, but he’s our friend. Just look at the little children sitting comfortably on his shoulders and playing with his wings.

But, of course, the Overlords end up destroying the Earth and almost everybody in it. They have no love for us. They are interested in accelerating the evolution of humanity — in a few humans who are able to go to the next level of consciousness and power, children whom they take with them; the rest of us are to be eradicated. This is inevitable.

It was the end of civilization, the end of all that men had striven for since the beginning of time. In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.

The powerful love and recognize only power. They’re never going to be our friends. They’re going to use us and discard us. Power alienates, and absolute power alienates absolutely. That is why the Bible says, “Put not your trust in princes.” But Harrington does put her trust in princes — or hopes to.

Did the twentieth century teach us nothing?

Which leads me to the third work of mid-century literature that I have in mind. Big Brother isn’t even here yet, and already Harrington has won the victory over herself. She loves Big Brother. But should her dream come true, one day he’ll say to her, and to all of us unfortunate enough to be present, “I’m not your brother, and I’m not your friend.”

Tv childhoods1a.

July 22, 2025

call and response

If my house caught fire and I could only rescue a few books, this would be among the first I’d grab.

Thomson published the first edition of this tome in 1975, and has described how it happened in this 2023 interview:

I worked for a Penguin Books for a time, and I knew a guy in publishing in London. He said to me one day, “You seem to know more about film than anyone I know.” It was an age, in the early seventies, when there was a huge interest in world cinema. All the New Waves had broken on the shore, and this changed everything. People who had grown up thinking that you went to the pictures or the movies once a week suddenly realized that there was a vast climate of films, often made by young people and more cheaply than in the past, that were as lively and compelling as the best books, the best music, or the best paintings.

This guy proposed, “Why don’t you write a book that describes the whole picture?” It was intended at first to be an encyclopedia, but as it developed, it became a biographical dictionary. I showed it to him as a work in progress, and he said, “No, that’s good. Keep it up. Keep going.” He said at the time, I remember, “What I like about it is that there’s a passion or opinionated feeling to it. Don’t lose that. Don’t make it a calm, objective, academic book. Make it a passionate, personal book. Make it a book that angers people sometimes. Go for what you really feel.” That’s just what I did, and initially that upset some people.

“Opinionated” is putting it mildly — but the editor was exactly right that such a tone was valuable. Thomson only gets a few hundred words for each of the entries, fewer in some cases, more for the giants. (The book’s cast includes — in descending order of dominance — actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, and just a couple of composers and cinematographers. The neglect of the people who handled the photography is the greatest flaw in the book.) In such circumstances, the bold capsule assessment is infinitely more valuable than the dry resumé. “Upsetting some people” is a feature, not a bug.

As I read — and I have this book on my lap often, flipping back and forth as one entry reminds me of another — I find myself alternately applauding Thomson’s acuity and deploring his obtuseness. But I am always engaged — it’s a kind of call and response: Thomson calls and I respond.

And then of course I go back to the movies to prove to myself that I’m right and he’s wrong. He’s more wrong about Billy Wilder than about anyone else — I’m hoping that the publisher chose the cover image from a Wilder movie just to spite Thomson — and since I wrote the comment above I’ve decided that I’m not as convinced by his emphasis on Wilder’s writerliness as I was. (Though Wilder did indeed call himself a writer, not a director.)

I doubt that there’ll be another edition; this one is eleven years old, and Thomson is 84 now — though still writing, and producing a book just about every year, so who knows for sure? This sixth edition needed more editing: for instance, the text sometimes describes a person as still active whose death date is recorded at the top of the entry. I imagine that the work involved in properly updating a book this big — 1154 pages — is daunting. A seventh edition would surely have to run to 1400 pages or more. Should one appear, I’ll probably buy it; but the one you see here will continue to be my companion. What a wonderful and endlessly illuminating, as well as exasperating, book.

July 19, 2025

Sayers and Graves

I really appreciated this post by Adam Roberts on his long-term fascination for the work of Robert Graves, especially The White Goddess, which Adam calls “One of my holy books.” I told Adam that I appreciate this post because I have always found Graves not only alien to my sensibility but even alienating — and Adam, justifiably, asked me what I meant by that. So I replied thus (I’ve edited and expanded, and added some links):

Well, primarily it’s that he strikes me as a monomaniac: he’s done a vast amount of reading, but only what supports, or can be turned in such a way as to seem to support, his White/Triple Goddess thesis ever makes its way to the reader. Nothing ever points in the other direction, nothing ever complicates his vision: everything is grist for his endlessly turning mill. Even his famous two-volume edition of the Greek Myths — books I bought fifty years ago and have often enjoyed — grinds his small collection of axes. It feels inhuman to me. And when you couple this with the intensity of his hatreds, he seems a pretty unpleasant character.

By the way, when Sayers was working on her Paradiso translation she read Graves’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, with its notoriously vitriolic introduction: Graves despised Lucan and sought to portray him in every possible negative light, and especially emphasized Lucan’s astronomical ignorance. (E. V. Rieu thought that introduction so hostile that he threatened to cancel the contract unless Graves toned it down, which he did, but only a bit.) I should add that Graves is following A. E. Housman’s lead here: Housman called Lucan a “blundering nincompoop.”

Brief digression: I have long thought that the great classicist Seth Benardete made a brilliant point with exemplary concision: “All the careful exactness of Housman goes along with a pettiness of spirit that at least at times is out of control and expresses a contempt for whatever he does not understand.”

Anyway: Sayers thought it was Graves who was ignorant, and sought to prove it, even enlisting as a temporary research assistant an exceedingly bright undergraduate named Brian Marsden, who later became a very distinguished astronomer at Harvard. He helped her to discover many points on which Graves was wrong and Lucan right. (Decades later he wrote an enjoyable essay about the experience.) Sayers also meticulously went through Lucan’s Latin to show that Graves had deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem more stupid. For instance, in the translation Lucan mentions a lunar eclipse than was followed the very next day by a soar eclipse, and Graves calls attention to the ridiculousness of this in a note. But, Sayers discovered, Lucan didn’t write that it happened the next day; Graves had added that. This appears to have been only one among several, or even many, additions to the Lucan’s text, though I would need to do a lot more work than I’ve done to confirm the point.

Sayers spent most of the last year of her life on Graves’s manifold intellectual wickednesses; it’s the main reason she didn’t finish her translation of Dante. When asked why she was doing it, she answered:

because I can’t bear to see a man treated like that, even if he is two thousand years dead, and because I believe Lucan is substantially talking sense, and I want to get to the bottom of it. I don’t care what it costs or how long it takes. I want justice. I want honest scholarship and accurate translation. The classical scholars won’t take an interest; either they think astronomy is too remote and boring to bother with, or they say, “Oh, Graves! what does he matter?” But he is distributing his sneers to a quarter of a million Penguin readers, and I don’t like it. (End of speech)

“Damn the fellow!” she writes in another letter. “I wouldn’t mind so much his murdering Lucan if he didn’t dance on the body.” I want to be more generous to Graves, more receptive to his ideas, but I don’t think working on Sayers is making that any easier….

She was at least comforted to find some allies. A distinguished professor of classics from St. Andrews University, H. J. Rose, sent her his review of Graves’s The Greek Myths, which he called “a series of tangled narratives, difficult and tedious to read and made none the better by sundry evidences of their author’s defective scholarship.” Sayers replied with gratitude, saying that Rose’s review “filled me with malignant joy.”

July 18, 2025

enemies of the liberal arts

Jennifer Frey, until recently the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa:

An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

The leadership of the University of Tulsa has for some years now despised its liberal-arts tradition and has intermittently tried to eradicate it. It looks like this time they will succeed.

The key point here — and it’s not the key point at Tulsa only — is that student interest, high enrollments, and donor support mean nothing to trustees and administrators and (often enough) faculty in other programs who have “succeeded” through a completely instrumental approach to education, employment, and indeed life itself. A thriving liberal-arts program is a standing reproach to their frivolity and greed, so they must eliminate it.

So far the administration of Baylor has been thoroughly supportive of our attempts, in the Honors College here, to do the kinds of things that Frey and her colleagues practiced at Tulsa. But what we do is so profoundly counter-cultural, in today’s flailing and failing American academy, that it’s hard not to peek over our shoulders from time to time to see if something is coming for us.

July 16, 2025

viewpoint diversity revisited

Jennifer M. Morton:

Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.

For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.

I think this argument is exactly correct: I have often said that if I were offered a job because I represent a certain position I would ask, “What happens if I change my mind?”

But the argument is also a useful strategy for ensuring that the academic humanities remain an ideological monoculture. Morton’s view is: It’s okay if all the professors are progressives as long as they assign some non-progressive books. And if you find that convincing, then turn it around: What if all the professors were rock-ribbed conservatives but told you that that’s fine, since they assign Marx and Fanon?

So, acknowledging the validity of Morton’s warning, I still think that seeking more ideological diversity among faculty is less bad that her plan to keep things just as they are. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, every progressive becomes profoundly conservative once they’re in power.

And while we’re on the subject, I like this from Justin Smith-Ruiu:

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it…. It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.