If you had told me in January that the best article about Christianity I’d read all year would be in the New York Review of Books…. And if you don’t need to wipe away the tears after reading it, you’re stronger than I am.
Here’s further evidence that this three-year-old post was correct.
The Iconfactory has just released an app called Triode, and I’m loving it. In essence, Triode provides a simple, clean, and lovely interface for listening to internet radio stations, and the great pleasure of using the app is that nothing about it is algorithmic. It’s the anti-Spotify. Instead of “We have analyzed your listening history and are confident that you’ll like this” it’s “We know nothing about your listening history and have no idea whether you’ll like this or not, but we’re playing it because we think it’s cool.” Unpredictable human preference! Fallible human judgment! What a concept.
One of the chief themes of my book How to Think is the vital importance of characterizing the arguments of those you disagree fairly — ideally, in terms that they themselves would recognize as valid. It’s good for them and it’s good for you: it strengthens your intellectual muscles to contend, as my buddy Robin Sloan has put it, not with straw men but rather with steel men.
⚠️ Warning: Intra-Anglican disputes ahead! ⚠️
I thought about all this recently as I was reading Alex Wilgus’s response to a post by Hannah King arguing that the various Anglican bodies now at odds with one another should begin to seek reconciliation. Here’s how Wilgus characterizes King’s argument:
Rev. King has decided that the 14 year distance between the schism of ‘04 opens an opportunity for Anglicans on both sides to reunite in some way around a desire for friendship, or at least a shared dislike of division. She seems to favor gatherings that heal by giving people the opportunity to “lament” publicly.
So Wilgus would have us believe that King’s post is motivated by a mere “desire for friendship” or a “dislike of division” — as though it were an inclination or preference. But if you read King’s post you’ll find something very different:
As Americans, this politics of polarization is in our bones. We sort and divide and sensationalize without even realizing there is another way. One only needs to follow the news for a few days to realize that our respective political parties no longer speak to each other; instead, they speak about each other. Yet as Christians, as those who adhere to a different polis — one not of this world — we must search and pray for another way. Even if it seems mysterious or impossible to us, we can ask God, for whom all things are possible. We can pray for the prophetic imagination to participate with him in the healing of his Church.
And:
I believe God called me to be a priest in the ACNA. But that doesn’t mean I disparage the Episcopal Church. I am less interested in who is “right” and who is “wrong” than I am in where God is asking us to go from here. None of us has the road map for this; but we do know the Guide. He has given himself to us fully and freely. Indeed, his body was broken for us — and it remains broken while his Church is broken. He has absorbed our separation in his own flesh, holding us together at his expense. As we feed on him and follow him, nourished by his very life, may we find ourselves put back together: reconciled to God and each other, one Body on earth and in Heaven.
So it’s clear that King is not indulging a preference, but rather asking what obedience to a Lord who prays that we will be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21), and is at work reconciling all things to himself (Col. 1:20), might look like in this case. I’d like to see someone respond to a steel version of King’s argument, not one of straw.
King says that she need not disparage the Episcopal Church. Wilgus thinks he must do exactly that, because “the very existence of the ACNA contradicts the ministry of TEC,” and insists moreover that the choice faced by Anglican clergy is strictly binary: “We as clergy are still presented the same choice as those who went before us, to lead our flocks into worship in Spirit and Truth, or to fall back into old habits of approving of sin and error.” Would that it were so simple. It is, alas, perfectly possible to avoid some habits of sin and error while plunging headfirst into others, including, possibly, the habit of taking satisfaction in our divisions rather than prayerfully seeking to overcome them. Hannah King says that “It would be naïve to suggest that such activity is a simple road to reunification; but it would be jaded to deny that it could be a starting point.” Alex Wilgus’s post sounds jaded to me.
I should declare an interest here. There is a faithful and flourishing ACNA parish here in Waco, Christ Church, which I attended for a while. I still miss the people there, clergy and laypeople alike, but the fact of the matter is that Christ Church is very much Anglo-Catholic and I am very much not. So I now attend a faithful and flourishing Episcopal parish, St. Alban’s. The primary reason both churches are growing is simply this: they preach the same Gospel. And that ought to count for something. That ought to be a starting point, as Hannah King says, in our prayers for reunion, for oneness, and (yes) lamentation over our current severances. And I pray every day for that oneness, because I believe that the very same Lord preached in both of those churches is the one before whom, ultimately, every knee will bow, and whose Lordship every tongue will confess.
There’s a scene early in Neal Stephenson’s new novel Fall: or, Dodge in Hell, in which a tech billionaire, sick of the way that misinformation spreads across the Internet like Western wildfires, decides to stage an intervention. He spends about a million bucks — he doesn’t need more — to create and distribute digital “evidence” of a tactical nuclear strike on the town of Moab, Utah. He hires actors, CGI experts, everything you need in order to fake a tragedy and make your creation go viral online. The idea is that once people see that completely made-up shit can utterly dominate the Internet, that there are no guard rails or boundaries to prevent that from happening, they will realize that they are continually being snookered and will grow a carapace of skepticism.
This is followed by a scene in which an master programmer creates highly advanced bots capable of relentlessly pushing petabytes of inconsistent and incoherent misinformation onto the internet, thus reinforcing the billionaire’s lesson on an unimaginably massive scale. The ENSU project starts by spewing its misinformation about one woman, who cheerfully cooperates:
If everything went according to plan, the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking would now issue a press release announcing its existence and explaining what it was doing. It would include a signed statement, as well as a video clip, from Maeve Braden, announcing that she was completely fine with all of this. Also included were links to servers where all of the code was available in the form of a carefully documented open-source code package, complete with sample projects that programmers could use to modify and extend it in various ways. Following up on an idea that had emerged during the conversation on the jet, ENSU also made public a list of several hundred completely imaginary, nonexistent people against whom campaigns of reckless slander and defamation could now be unleashed, as well as an easy-to-use tool that anyone could exploit to create new such fake persons and reasonably convincing social media shaming campaigns that would make those fake persons the object of real, genuine, sincere obloquy on the part of millions of social media users who were dumb enough to believe everything that scrolled across their screens.
You know the old Justice Brandeis line that the remedy for malicious and deceitful speech is more speech? A version of that is what’s happening here: the remedy for malicious and deceitful memes is more memes. So much malice and deceit and that people will give up believing any of it. Brilliant.
Now fast-forward fifteen years or so:
The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk.
In short, nothing changed. People kept believing whatever they saw online that they wanted to believe. They could actually go to Moab and see that it had not been damaged and was not radiation-riddled, but they didn’t.
Some elements of Stephenson’s anticipated future seem unlikely to me, but not this. This seems not just plausible but highly probable. (Cf. Alex Jones and Sandy Hook.)
Nobody is beyond hope. This is an article of faith for me. But if at this stage of the game, given what we know about how social media work and about the incentives of the people who make TV, you’re still getting your dopamine rush by recycling TV-news clips and shouting at people on the Internet, you’re about as close to beyond hope as a human being gets. There is no point talking to you, trying to reason with you, giving you facts and the sources of those facts. You have made yourself invulnerable to reason and evidence. You’re a Moab truther in the making. So, though I do not in theory write anyone off, in practice I do. It’s time to give you up as a lost cause and start figuring out how to prevent the next generation from becoming like you.
My colleague Philip Jenkins asks: “What are the most influential Christian books of the past decade?” I think the answer to that question is: There aren’t any. In our moment Christians are not influenced by books, at all.
It was said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. The elder asked God to reveal to him the meaning of a certain Scripture text, and God would not reveal it to him. So he said to himself: look at all the work I have done without getting anywhere! I will go to one of the brothers and ask him. When he had gone out and closed the door and was starting on his way an angel of the Lord was sent to him, saying: the seventy weeks you fasted did not bring you any closer to God, but now that you have humbled yourself and set out to ask your brother, I am sent to reveal the meaning of that text. And opening to him the meaning which he sought, he went away.
— Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
David Owen’s new book Volume Control is pretty good, but it made me think way too much about my own hearing. (“Do I have tinnitus? I don’t think I have tinnitus … oh crap, I have tinnitus.”) Here’s one little bit I enjoyed:
In 2018, a reddit user asked hard-of-hearing reddit users what had surprised them the most when they first got hearing aids or cochlear implants. Among the answers: farts; toilet flushes; peeing; refrigerators; the fact that sunlight doesn’t make a sound; the fact that falling rain makes a sound but falling snow does not; the annoying loudness of typing and other routine office activities; cloth rubbing against cloth; hair brushing against hearing-aid microphones; cutlery scraping on dinner plates; clocks ticking; the silence of sharks; the relative silence of cabinet hinges; that vocal intonation can be used to distinguish sincerity from sarcasm; that fire doesn’t sound like a continuous explosion; that voices don’t all sound the same; that songs have intelligible lyrics; that music is more than its bass line; that grocery stores play background music; and “What’s weird is, boobs don’t make a noise, you really think they would.”
I’m pretty sure that only a heavy Reddit user would think that boobs ought to make a noise. (What noise?) But I love the surprises about the quietness of fire and the silence of snow.
The one thing that I wish Owen had gone into more: the effects, psychological and physiological, of the constant booming and grinding and yakking of the world we live in, the near-impossibility, for billions of human beings, of finding silence. (I read the book because I thought that would be among its chief subjects, but no. It’s almost exclusively about aural pathologies and their possible remedies.) Our own moment is not unique in this respect: if you read Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of early Modern England you’ll wonder how any medieval Englishperson managed to remain sane. Still, all the evidence says that noise is debilitating to us. I’d like to know more about that.
It’s time. International break coming up.
And if it doesn’t work out, bring Rafa Benitez back from China. He’d be excellent for this poor beleaguered confused rudderless spiritless team.
Stanley Fish’s new book The First consists largely of repackagings of ideas Fish has already developed: he’s covered free speech in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too, academic freedom and academic culture in Save the World On Your Own Time and in many essays, religious freedom in a handful of essays, including a brilliant one called “Vicki Frost Objects” that’s far better than anything here. But Fish writes as sharply as ever, and The First could be a nice introduction to his writings on the issues emanating from the First Amendment.
But I want to question something that he writes about academic freedom. His argument here centers on a single crucial distinction, which he develops in response to the Chicago Statement on academic freedom:
My challenge to that popular view (the Chicago statement has been endorsed by a number of other universities) depends on a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. Freedom of speech is a democratic value. It says that in a democracy government should neither anoint nor stigmatize particular forms of speech but act as an honest broker providing a framework and a forum for the competition of ideas and policies. In this vision, every voice has a right to be heard, at least theoretically. (In fact, differences in resources will almost always translate into differences in the size of the audience one can reach.) In the academy, on the other hand, free inquiry, not free speech, is the reigning ethic, and academic inquiry is engaged in only by those who have been certified as competent; not every voice gets to be heard. The right to speak in the scholarly conversation does not come with membership; it is granted only to those who have survived a series of vettings and are left standing after countless others have been sent out of the room.
I think Fish knows that this might not be comforting to people worried about professors and administrators who exclude the ideas they don’t like, so he clarifies:
Academic inquiry, then, is not free in the First Amendment sense; it is free only in a very special sense: the path of inquiry is open and should not be blocked either by putting the stamp of approval on particular points of view in advance or by dismissing other points of view before they are heard and evaluated.
But why not? Why shouldn’t those who ”are left standing after countless others have been sent out of the room,” those ”who have been certified as competent,” decide that some points of view actually may (perhaps must) be dismissed before being heard and evaluated?
Fish argues that a scholar like Charles Murray should be treated differently than a provocateur like Ann Coulter, should be given a hearing in venues where she should not, but what if the certified-competent decline that distinction and treat Murray and Coulter identically? I don’t think Fish can offer them any reasons why they shouldn’t. His longstanding belief that academic life is to be regulated only internally, by people engaged professionally in the practices of that life, provides no means by which academic life can be prevented from growing narrower and narrower and narrower.
I’ve been reading Fish pretty carefully for a long time now, and I think he would reply that no such means could be provided — that you cannot write rules and guidelines in such a way that people in power will be unable to abuse them, twist the rules to their purposes, as long as their power is uncontested. (Note that when power is to some degree distributed, rules can be effective: thus the ability of the American judiciary to constrain some of Donald Trump’s impulses.) If this is indeed his view, he may well be correct. For instance, conservative and religious voices — N.B.: those are not the same thing — may alike be so tenuously present in academia that they can do nothing to soften the tyranny of the certified-competent. Certain ”paths of inquiry” are closed and on Fish’s account of the academy must remain closed, despite his lip service to the phrase.
If so, do we simply accept that state of affairs? Or do we look for broad social forces or institutions to which academic institutions might legitimately be held accountable?
One of the fascinating subplots of Kim Stanley Robinson’s great Mars trilogy — though it’s not so much a subplot as an evolving context — relates to the rise of what KSR calls the transnationals: vast international corporations that possess wealth and power exceeding that of all but a few countries. They’ve even taken over the running of many former nations. I’m thinking of the transnationals right now as I contemplate the ongoing crises in California, and the response of certain corporations to them.
Here’s the title of an Apple news release from earlier this week: ”Apple commits $2.5 billion to combat housing crisis in California.” Wow, $2.5 billion! But let’s put this in context: How much cash on hand does Apple have? Not their investments, just the cash on hand, what they’ve tossed into that jar on the bedside table. That would be two hundred and six billion bucks. So $2.5 billion is just a drop in the bucket… or would be it better to think of it as a down payment?
Consider this scenario: At some point in the next couple of years, Tim Cook meets behind closed doors with Governor Gavin Newsom and and a handful of other political leaders. Here’s what he says:
“Friends, you know as well as I that this state is in a mess. The electricity in this part of the state is provided by a company whose idea of dealing with wildfires is to take away people’s power so the old and uninsulated lines won’t shoot out sparks. Many Californians have come to think it perfectly normal to step over homeless people — sometimes sick or even unconscious homeless people — on the way to work each day. Housing costs have forced thousands and thousands of people who work in our cities to live dozens of miles away, increasing the already infamous congestion on our roads.
“And you all have played a role in this. You have constrained the budgets of PG&E because you don’t dare raise people’s taxes. You won’t support affordable-housing initiatives because you fear that the NIMBYs will vote you out of office — and you’re exactly right to fear that. You know what needs to be done to fix things; you also know that the fixes are politically impossible. You have kicked the can down the road again and again and again, but now the road has dead-ended.
“We’re here to help. I’ve been authorized to speak on behalf of some of California’s other major tech companies, including Google, Oracle, and Intel. We’re all famous for getting things done, for innovating our way out of some very tight situations. We have massive resources of data, computing power, engineering expertise, and, above all, creativity. What we don’t have is a free hand to address the problems we see.
“And that’s where you come in. We’re willing to work with the California State Legislature and the Governor’s office to come up with, and then promote, a plan that would turn over much of the responsibility for fixing these problems to us. We will of course need legal authorization that goes beyond what private companies have been allowed to do in the past — authorization of considerable control over the energy grid, for instance, and to, let’s say, cooperate with local police forces. But we’re not going to ask taxpayers to pay any more than they’re already paying: the rest will come out of our pockets. We’re trusted in this state — if I may be honest, trusted more than you are. Your willingness to take advantage of our public-spirited competence will surely reflect well on you. And if anyone complains about the decisions we make, well, we’ll take the heat for that. You have us to insulate you from any anger. I won’t pretend that we’ll get no benefit from this; we will. But what we’ll chiefly get is a better environment in which to live and work — and all Californians will benefit from that.
“It’ll require some careful crafting of laws, and a strong PR campaign. But we’ve been working on all that, and are eager to share our ideas with you. What do you say?”
And thus the reign of the transnationals will begin.
Just remember, I’m busting my hump reading and writing books so y’all can Netflix & chill. I’m not saying that anyone needs to thank me but I’m also not not saying it.
- Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a great, great masterpiece, and you must see it. It is his most linear film since The New World — also a masterpiece, and one of the most underrated films ever made, IMO, for reasons explained by John Patterson here — but in the fourteen years since The New World came out Malick has deepened both his vision and his craft. I will have more to say about it, but only after more people have seen it.
- When you see the film — I admit no doubt on this point — and if you sit through the credits, you will see a card titled “Special Thanks” which contains a list of names. One of them is mine. 😉
“I call bullshit.” I used to see that a lot on social media, back when I was on social media. But what does it mean? It means, “I disagree.” That’s all. The statement has no further content. But “I disagree” sounds bland and flat while “I call bullshit” — well, that sounds badass. You must have some powerful Refutation Mojo if you can call bullshit, just like that, right there on the internet in front of everybody.
When we were kids, on some excursion in a parental automobile, and were leaving the mall or the grocery store or the McDonald’s, someone would shout “Shotgun!” And then one of the bigger kids who hadn’t said anything would calmly climb into the shotgun seat, after which a little voice from the middle of the back seat would whine, “But I called it!” — and would simply be ignored. Calling bullshit is like that.
… MacOS is now more stable than iOS/iPadOS. Which I wouldn’t have believed even a couple of months ago. Marco Arment has gone on an appropriate rant about this, concluding, “Your software quality is broken, Apple. Deeply, systemically broken. Get your shit together.”
I’ve had plenty of problems since iOS 13 arrived, but here’s my most recent story: I was using Instapaper and Fantastical in split screen view on my iPad, and then one of them (I think it was Instapaper) crashed, which brought down the other. Tapped on one, both showed up for an instant, then both crashed. Tapped on the other, same result. Used swipe-up-to-quit both apps, tried again, same result. Re-booted the iPad, same result — the two apps are apparently joined in a suicide pact. So if I want to use my iPad I have to do so without using either of those two apps, both of which are longtime daily fixtures to me. I guess I have to wait for an update to one of the apps or for the next point release of iPadOS.
So I’m on my MacBook, whose keyboard I’m not crazy about — though at least it actually registers the keys I type, and does so only once per keystroke, which sets it apart from the Macs of many users.
These persistent Apple problems have been enough to drive longtime Mac user and developer David Heinemeier Hansson to Windows. But that didn’t go so well.
My beloved is in Prague right now and the evidence suggests that it is hard to take a bad photo there.
Brent Simmons is right: It’s weird to see people bemoan the decline of blogging and do it on Twitter. You can blog! You can blog for free if you want! (Though the best options require a few bucks.) Get over your social-media Stockholm Syndrome and start doing the thing you know is better. Cross-post to Twitter or Facebook if you must, but own your turf and tend your garden. Now that you can register your own domain name at micro.blog you have no excuse: it’s easy-peasy.
I am still hoping for a Blogging Renaissance, but lately I’m thinking that one necessary element of a true renaissance will be to get the readers of blogs on the same page as the writers. Everyone who writes a blog for a while knows that one of the best things about it is the way it allows you to revisit themes and topics. You connect one post to another by linking to it; you connect many posts together by tagging. Over time you develop fascinating resonances, and can trace the development of your thought. Venkatesh Rao has thought a lot about this in his series of posts — he calls it a “blogchain” — on blogs as “elder games.”
But this is not typically how readers read blogs. Not many people read this blog, but those who do typically just read the most recent posts — three days back, max. I add links to earlier posts, but almost no one clicks on them. People don’t click on tags either. And I think that’s because we have all been trained by social media to skim the most recent things and then go on to something else. We just don’t do deeper dives any more. So one of the things I want to be thinking about is: How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?
Granit Xhaka is nothing like the player Arsenal supporters thought he was, or could become, when the club signed him in 2016. The idea then was that he would provide steel in deep midfield, a combination of defensive strength and playmaking from a deep position — something Arsenal haven’t had since the departure of the great Patrick Vieira. It turns out that Xhaka has one skill and one skill only: he can make a good long pass, usually diagonally, when he has plenty of time on the ball. He can’t dribble, he can’t make runs into the box, he can’t shoot except for the occasional long-range blast. On defense he is both slow and positionally unaware, which means that he is always a booking waiting to happen.
But Xhaka is not the problem. The problem is a manager who makes Xhaka perhaps one of the most constant figures in the teams he selects (along with Leno and Auba). Week after week Emery sets Xhaka up for failure and week after week Xhaka experiences precisely what Emery has set him up for.
Torreira can’t make the long passes that Xhaka makes, but in every other respect bar none he is a far superior footballer, and it’s simply stupid to sit him in favor of Xhaka. Maitland-Niles, for all his struggles at fullback, would be better than Xhaka as a holding midfielder. Dani Ceballos could actually make plays from the deep-lying position, though I would prefer to see him farther up the pitch. Emery could pick names out of a hat and do better than he has been doing.
The one trait that we have consistently seen from Emery since he took over Arsenal is this: he makes personnel decisions without reference to what works on the pitch. We started seeing that last year when Arsenal were far more dangerous with Auba and Lacazette on the pitch together, but Emery wants to play a single striker, so they rarely paired up. This year we have seen the team utterly lacking in midfield creativity and playmaking, yet Özil has been completely sidelined and Ceballos plays only occasionally. (I know the problems with Özil, but the team is offensively moribund. Scrappy set-piece goes from your center backs are not a recipe for Premier League success.) Emery is holding desperately to some model of football that he cannot implement nor even articulate. He is stubborn in his commitment to an indescribable will-o-the-wisp.
Every day I check my RSS feed hoping to learn that he’s been sacked. Every day I am disappointed. There’s no reason to give up on this season — Arsenal are a very talented squad, by far the most talented in recent years — but many of the more gifted players are riding the pine. If Emery doesn’t go soon, supporters will need to write off another season. And that simply shouldn’t be necessary.
I don’t think I’m becoming a grumpy old man, but I am, I know, increasingly inclined to heed that voice inside me — let’s call it the Voice of Binky — that always asks “Why should you do this simply because it’s the kind of thing you’re expected to do?”
Professors give lectures, so why don’t you give lectures? Don’t want to. Look, this proliferation of administrative offices is just the way life is in the university today, so why don’t you adapt? Don’t want to. This country has a two-party political system, so quit complaining and just pick a side. Don’t want to.
You hand me all the defaults and say Do these. I say, “Toss them out of the window.”
Most political discourse is epideictic, which is to say, it’s about credit and blame. For instance, whenever we get an economic downturn in this country, the party not in the White House will blame the President, and the President and his supporters will blame his predecessor, whose bad policies have finally come home to roost, or a recalcitrant Congress, or bad judicial decisions, or whatever. If there’s an economic upturn, the President will take the credit, while his detractors will insist that he is merely benefitting from the wise decisions of his predecessor.
The problem with these disputes is that they are almost always irresolvable, and they’re irresolvable for two reasons. The first is that political and economic circumstances are so immensely complex, with so many forces mutually interacting, that it is simply impossible to know which ones have the greatest influence. And our inability to understand that complexity is related to a second factor: we can’t rewind the tape of history. We don’t know what would have happened if the former President had pursued policies similar to those of the current President, or if some particular judicial decision had gone the other way, or if Congress had passed the bill that the President wanted to have passed. Understanding how our ungoverned and ungovernable world works is not something we can do in laboratory conditions; controlled experiments are, and always will be, beyond our capabilities.
But political partisans don’t understand these factors, or refuse to consider them. They construct explanatory schemes that reinforce their political preferences, and then decry all alternative explanations as fake news. And this behavior will continue no matter what Facebook does to monitor the factual status of political statements on its platform.
Lisa Marchiano, a psychoanalyst, describing her encounter with a student who had a “panic attack” during an exam and didn’t want to take any more exams:
I asked this young patient of mine what in fact had happened during the first exam. She responded again, I had a panic attack. I lightly pressed her to move beyond the jargon and tell me about her actual experience as she took the exam. Eventually, she was able to tell me that, as the papers were being handed out, she become flushed and light-headed. Her heart was pounding, and her hands felt clammy. What happened then? I asked. She felt like running out of the room, but she was able to calm herself down enough to take the test. Though she successfully completed the first exam — and did okay on it — the fear that she might have another “panic attack” had prevented her from attempting the second exam.
What had happened here? One way of understanding this young person’s experience is indeed that she had had a limited-symptom panic attack. According to the diagnostic criteria for panic attacks in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a limited-symptom panic attack can be diagnosed based on a pounding heart, sweating, and shaking. Of course, as anyone knows who has ever taken an exam, performed in front of an audience, or asked someone they like out on a date, these are in fact utterly normal reactions to feeling nervous. I gently attempted to reflect this back to my young patient. “So you were nervous about taking the exam, but you didn’t run out of the room. You did it. You pushed through the fear feelings.” I wanted her to see this as a success, one that she could build on, that could help alter her stuck story that tells her she is too anxious to function adequately. Her response to my positive reframing was telling. She looked up at me from under her brows and held my gaze. “Yes,” she responded firmly. “But I had a panic attack.”
Reflecting on this experience, Marchiano raises a key issue: “I found myself wondering where she had learned that she ought not to be expected to tolerate ordinary distress or discomfort. How have we come to the point where we believe that emotional disquiet will cause harm, that we ought to be soothed and tranquil at all times?”
Some years ago I had a student — I’ll call her M — who came to me and said that she could no longer take the reading quizzes that I give at the beginning of many classes. If she had to take them, she preferred to do so in the office on campus that deals with students who have disabilities, even if that meant missing most or all of my classes. And M clearly, though in no way angrily or aggressively, expected that I would do as she preferred.
I ended up talking with the case worker assigned to M, and the case worker told me that M was anxious about not having time to finish the quizzes, and, further, that M had problems, not to be disclosed to me, that made it necessary for me to accommodate her preferences.
Several elements of this situation puzzled me. First, M was usually among the first to complete her quizzes. Second, she had the highest quiz average in the class, and it wasn’t even close. Third, her very intelligent contributions to class discussions about the quizzes added significantly to the value of our class time. And fourth: those facts, and my observations, had absolutely no bearing on the expectations my university had for me. M’s feelings and preferences, as interpreted by her case worker, were all that mattered — I was strongly discouraged from sharing with M any of my thoughts, no matter how positive.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I agreed to make any accommodation necessary. But M kept coming to class, kept taking the quizzes, and kept excelling in them. Why she didn’t follow through on her request I can’t say. Maybe her knowledge that I would do what she wanted was enough to relieve the pressure the had been feeling.
I’m glad M stayed in class, and that there was a peaceful resolution to the situation, but the whole sequence of events troubled me then and troubles me now. The first, and larger, problem is that we’re now in a moment at which any attempt to resist the pathologizing of perfectly ordinary experiences of nervousness or uncertainty is tagged as indifference (at best) or cruelty (at worst). To encourage students to believe that they can overcome their anxieties is, it appears, now a form of abuse.
And second — perhaps not as important but still significant to me — there is the marginalization of the teacher-student relationship. It was made very clear to me that the case worker — who had never been in my class, who had never observed either M or me — could dictate the response to M’s concerns. I didn’t push back, because I didn’t want to bring any further anxiety to a student who was already anxious, but I wonder what would have happened if I had insisted that my own view of the matter, which was after all backed by some experience, should be taken into account.
More seriously, it seemed to me that the case worker was constructing, or allowing M to construct, a narrative in which I was M’s antagonist and it was the case worker’s job to intervene to assist M in her struggle against her antagonist. The idea that I might be on M’s side and want to help her, and indeed should, as part of my job, help her was never considered.
The work done by the “bias prevention units” or “diversity offices” that have proliferated in many universities might seem to be a very different phenomenon, but that work has a similar effect on the relationship between teachers and students. A key premise — sometimes unstated but sometimes quite explicit — of such administrative offices is that faculty are often the enemies of diversity and the perpetrators of bias, and therefore these programs must step in to correct the injustices inherent in the system. Again the faculty member is cast as the students’ antagonist, or at least as a possible antagonist. I do not know of any circumstances in which the “learnings” or “training modules” produced by these offices — which are often mandatory for all students — have received any faculty input, though I suppose some faculty may occasionally be involved. The “learnings” seem to be designed to emphasize the untrustworthiness of teachers.
I think students in general have a pretty good grasp of these dynamics. My observations suggest that disgruntled students these days rarely take their complaints to department chairs or deans, but rather to these amorphous “offices” which exist independently of the faculty structure and are typically empowered by the university to impose decisions without consulting anyone in that faculty structure.
I also think that this way of doing our academic business exacerbates, quite dramatically, one of the worst features of academic life, which is its legalism. Knowing that they are being overseen by these distant and almost invisible “offices,” faculty end up writing more and more detailed syllabuses, working to close every possible loophole which might be exploited by students to get what they want even when, from the faculty point of view, they don’t deserve it. And the more desperately faculty look to close such loopholes, the more the students search for them. It’s no way to run a university — at least if the university cares about learning.
There were certainly flaws in the old way of doing these things, in which individual teachers almost certainly had too much power. But certain experiences of learning were possible in that system that the current, or emerging, system is rapidly making impossible. The marginalizing of the student-faculty relationship is not a good recipe for addressing those old flaws.
iPadOS has rendered my iPad unusable, with a very strange combination of errors. For instance:
- The screen freezes in many different apps, usually requiring the app to be quit and restarted, sometimes requiring the iPad to be rebooted
- The Smart Keyboard Folio occasionally fails to connect to the iPad
- When the Smart Keyboard Folio connects, sometimes it types in ALL CAPS and cannot be made to stop doing so without a reboot
- All Bluetooth connections are inconsistent and unreliable
- Some iCloud folders will not sync from other devices, even after days
I’ve used the iPad a lot over the past couple of years, despite the fact that it is a far less powerful and capable machine than a Mac. I have done so because it has been rock-sold stable and everything about it has Just Worked. Now it’s going in a drawer for a few months.
(Strangely enough, while everyone else has been having miseries with Catalina it has worked great for me: in particular, it seems to have fixed the Wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity issues that have plagued my Macs for the past several OS X releases. Go figure.)
At the very heart of the academy we find a series of genres — discursive genres, which are also genres of social interaction — the mastery of which constitutes, more or less, mastery of the academic profession itself. Some of these are universal: that is, they may be found in all academic work. Others are specific to certain disciplines or disciplinary families. Some of them are performed in relation to colleagues, others in relation to students. Here are a few that I, as a professor of humanities, have had to practice:
- the classroom lecture
- the “job talk” lecture
- the invited public lecture
- the short lecture that you give when you’re on a panel at a conference
- the conference-panel discussion
- the “Socratic” seminar discussion
- the symposium based on a paper everyone is supposed to have read
- the peer-reviewed article
- the book review
- the peer-reviewed monograph
Some of these wear, over several decades, better than others. Some I will probably never do again (the peer-reviewed article, the job talk); others I will be doing to the end of my career (the classroom discussion, the monograph). Some I enjoy, some … not so much.
But I have one definitive and unshakeable opinion: I never want to hear, or deliver, another lecture as long as I live.
For one thing, lectures are very, very hard to do well. I’ve surely heard more than a hundred public or semi-public lectures in my life, and only one of them has been excellent: when I was a grad student at UVA I heard Stephen Greenblatt deliver a lecture that later became his famous essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” and it was electrifying. (I was sitting next to one of my professors, and at the end of the talk he leaned over and said to me, sotto voce, “Do you still have your wallet?”) Otherwise they have been not-crushingly-boring at best. And while I work hard to make my lectures vivid and interesting, I am always aware that there are better ways to accomplish what the lecture is supposed to accomplish.
The lecture is an unfortunate holdover from the pre-Gutenberg age. It makes no sense to have me come and talk to you on a subject in circumstances in which I could write something, send it to you, and have you read it and think about it, after which you could bring me to your institution for a conversation. That would be more intellectually productive for everyone concerned. Of course, one might reply that a lecture is not as polished as a finished, publishable essay or article. Indeed: that’s a major reason why lectures aren’t much fun to listen to. Better to embrace the tentative and unfinished character of your thoughts by having a conversation about them instead.
It is true that fewer people can participate in such a conversation than can attend a lecture. But note the difference between “participate” and “attend.” Certain kinds of intellectual exchange simply do not scale. I truly believe that if, instead of asking me to deliver a lecture at your institution, you asked me to come prepared to talk with four different groups about my published work, or even my work-in-progress, the experience would be better for all of us. (And I would be much more likely to say yes, since I wouldn’t be committing myself to all those hours of lecture-writing — a problem for me, because my conscience won’t allow me to deliver the same lecture repeatedly at different places.)
Well, one can hope. Or lose hope. But this I am sure of: When I am lying on my deathbed, I shall heave a breath and whisper to whoever is near, “Thank you, Lord. I shall never have to attend, or deliver, another lecture.”
Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation:
Anxiety and panic over the effects of new technology date back to Socrates, who bemoaned the then new tradition of writing things down for fear it would diminish the power of memory.
Well, it wasn’t Socrates, in was a character in a story he told, but anyway, was he wrong?
Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson both warned that communal relationships would suffer as industrial societies moved from rural to urban living.
Were they wrong?
Radio, video games and even comic books have all caused consternation.
Was the consternation justified?
Television was going to bring about the dumbing down of America.
Did it?
This is encouraging by Adam Silver. Maybe that NBA League Pass is not out of the question after all?
A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for the first time, I would definitely be buying NBA League Pass. Now? No. I’m not standing on definitive principle; it’s simply that thinking about the league leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The two most important figures in the NBA, Adam Silver and LeBron James, have issued their warnings against the “consequences” of critiquing the Chinese regime. We now know that if Beijing rained bombs onto Hong Kong not one word of criticism would pass the lips of anyone in the NBA. And that’s not easy for me to forget.
Since Berhalter’s appointment was announced last December there have been no results that exceeded expectations against good teams; there is currently no reason to believe that the US would be anything but makeweights at Qatar 2022, should they qualify. And there is a lack of clear evidence that the team is trending in the right direction, despite individual positives such as the continued improvement of the midfielder Weston McKennie.
Yep.
Let’s all face certain facts about the USMNT:
- Gregg Berhalter has no ideas. “Bring on Zardes to score a late goal” does not qualify as an idea.
- Weston McKennie is a good soccer player. Christian Pulisic is a decent soccer player. Zack Steffen is a fairly promising keeper. Josh Sargent may well be a good soccer player someday. Nobody else on the team is any good at all. (Michael Bradley now has the mobility of a cigar store Indian and should never get another cap for the USMNT.)
- None of them, coach or players, cares very much. They are, without exception, going through the motions, without energy or commitment.
- We are at least a decade away from the USMNT playing any significant role in world soccer, and even that statement is a gesture of blind faith and hope. Berhalter has to go, and almost the entire crop of current players should go as well. Maybe there are some 12-year-olds out there who will flip the script.
The plan that the national federation established when it hired Jurgen Klinsmann was the right one, even if it didn’t work out the way that everyone had hoped. That plan was to hire a coach who had succeeded at the highest level, who could challenge American players to develop their skills in the most rigorous conditions, and who could oversee a long-term player development program. Nothing short of all that will work.
So wake me when this country has a soccer team. I won’t be holding my breath.
Also, if you set the over/under on Pulisic-to-the-MLS at 3 years, I’ll take the under.
My buddy Rod Dreher: “If religious liberty is the most important public issue to you — and, as a religious believer, should it not be? — then the Barr speech should be front to mind as you consider voting.”
The question of whether religious liberty should indeed be “the most important public issue” to me is one I have been wrestling with for the last few years. I’m not convinced it should.
For instance: Stretch your mind and imagine a POTUS who supports religious liberty but who also pursues reckless, thoughtless, and inconsistent policies both domestically and abroad. Imagine that he is cruel to the helpless, treacherous to longstanding allies, cozy with authoritarian regimes, incapable of sticking with a plan, prone to judge everyone he meets strictly by their willingness to praise and defer to him. Imagine that he is colossally ignorant of domestic and foreign realities alike and yet convinced of his matchless wisdom.
You might, first, ask whether such a President is a reliable ally of religious freedom. Would he work to guarantee liberty of conscience for those who on religious grounds criticized his own policies? Don’t make me laugh.
But let’s say he can be counted on. Even so, should religious believers care about their own well-being above that of their neighbors? If, per argumentum, our religious liberty comes at the cost of great suffering for others, is that a deal we should make? Should we place our good ahead of the common good?
Perhaps believers in different religions will answer this question variously. But I’m not a generic “religious believer,” I’m a Christian, and as far as I can tell I am commanded to sacrifice what’s best for me and choose instead what’s best for my neighbor. And if I fail to do that, why should anyone take my Christian witness seriously?
Christians remember with praise and gratitude our mothers and fathers in the faith who chose to suffer themselves — and sometimes include their own families in their suffering — rather than inflict suffering on others. Their example should be in our minds and hearts as we reflect on what we are called to do.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Kevin Williamson before the whole Atlantic fiasco, but since he has returned to National Review he’s been writing one superb piece after another. Here’s the most recent example.
A while back I wrote about a scholarly mystery: what appears to have been the sale of certain ancient papyri by someone who had no right to sell them. Now we have an update by the Egypt Exploration Society:
On 25 June 2019 the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) posted a statement on its website that it was working with the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) to clarify whether any texts from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection had been sold or offered for sale to Hobby Lobby or its agents, and if so, when and by whom. This was in response to the online publication by Dr Brent Nongbri, following its release by Professor Michael Holmes of the MOTB, of a redacted copy of a contract of 17 January 2013 between Professor Dirk Obbink and Hobby Lobby Stores for the sale of six items to Hobby Lobby, including four New Testament fragments probably of EES provenance. This statement reports our findings to date.
With the help of photographs provided by the MOTB, the EES has so far identified thirteen texts from its collection, twelve on papyrus and one on parchment, all with biblical or related content, which are currently held by the MOTB (see the attached list). These texts were taken without authorisation from the EES, and in most of the thirteen cases the catalogue card and photograph are also missing. Fortunately, the EES has back-up records which enable us to identify missing unpublished texts.
There still seems to be reluctance on the part of EES, and indeed anyone else, to say “Dirk Obbink stole papyri from our collection, sold them, and kept the money for himself” — but by this point it has become difficult to imagine any other explanation.
The post adds that the EES “is also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have or may have been illicitly removed from its collection,” so this story may not be over. And the post concludes by saying that the “broader legal issues arising from these findings … are under consideration by all the institutions concerned.” Does that mean that they may not press charges? Perhaps if the offender makes full restitution?
I’ve been trying to think about Apple’s deep embedding in a corrupt and tyrannical Chinese regime, and what that means for me, for my long-term commitment to Apple’s products. My first approach to the problem was a rough sketch of the issues involved in the use of any technology:
But as soon as I did this I realized that I was conflating certain categories that might better be kept distinct. For instance, “usefulness”: What makes something useful? A leafblower is useful in the sense that it moves a great many leaves around quickly; but a rake, while it moves those leaves much more slowly, gives its user more exercise without endangering his or her hearing, and those are valuable features. The ideal balance of the different kinds of usefulness will vary from person to person. It drives me nuts when I’m sitting outside and a lawn service shows up at a nearby house: here comes the deafening racket of the leafblowers, which will drive me inside for the next half-hour at least. But those guys are trying to make a living, which the use of rakes would make it considerably harder for them to do. I get that. I hate it, but I get it.
Or: Linux is useful in the sense that I can do almost any computer-related task on it, but such a task will often be, for me anyway, dramatically more difficult than on more polished systems. So I rank Linux as not especially useful to me.
The other axis, that of ethics, is even more difficult. Apple’s Chinese entanglements massive compromise the ethical status of the company, and in more than one way. (Which is worse, obedience to the demands of the Chinese government or the exploitation of Chinese labor?) But Apple also deserves some praise for its commitment to privacy and its truly wonderful work in making its computers accessible to a wide range of users. I don’t know how to make an ethics spreadsheet, as it were, that assembles all the relevant factors — including comparisons to the available alternatives — and gives them proper weighting.
In the end, I think most of us make this kind of decision by some kind of sixth sense, an un-unpackable feel for what’s the best, or the least bad, option in the given circumstances. I wonder if that sense is wholly irrational or whether, on some deep and inaccessible level, it’s actually finding a means to weigh what we don’t consciously know how to weigh.
(Of course, the problem for me in all this is that I am as implicated in Apple’s ecosystem as Apple is implicated in the Chinese economy. If Apple’s policies don’t change, then I hope I will have the courage to buy no more Apple products. My current Apple devices are fairly new, so that leaves me with four years or so to find an alternative. Maybe my fifth time committing to Linux will be the one that finally sticks, but who knows.)
I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese authorities were playing a long game, biding their time and building their power, and I do not think they were relishing an immediate confrontation with Western capitalism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Beijing clearly perceives these protests as an existential threat, and have decided that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the center of the table … and the capitalists immediately folded like a Chinese-made lawn chair.
NBA officials are bowing and scraping to Beijing and begging forgiveness while trying to tell Americans that they’re not really apologizing. (Adam Silver says he’s not apologizing for Daryl Morey’s exercise of free speech, but then what is he apologizing for?) ESPN/Disney is muzzling its employees. Apple is banning apps that Beijing wants banned, for whatever reason.
This has all gone better for Beijing than CCP officials probably dared hope, but in fact they held the strongest hand. Tim Cook, who got his job as Apple CEO after spending years proving that he was a wizard of the supply chain, knows better than anyone that China has a stranglehold on Apple’s supply chain, and it would take years or even decades to loosen that hold. I don’t know how much revenue the NBA gets from China, but even if it’s far less than they get in this country, that Chinese revenue can be cut off altogether in an instant; by contrast, not one American NBA fan in ten thousand will care enough about what happens in China to stop buying jerseys and tickets and League Pass.
If nothing else, this whole shameful display should put an end, once and for all, to the ridiculous idea that there is some natural and intrinsic connection between democracy and capitalism. There very obviously ain’t. When shareholders and the bottom line are not benefitted by democracy, then democracy gets flushed down the toilet. American big business has firmly decided for a totalitarian regime and against people who want democratic freedoms. The business of America really is business after all.
But here’s an interesting question: How woke will our woke capitalists remain if an emboldened Chinese regime starts to rail against moral perversion in the form of homosexuals and trans people?
UPDATE: This:
“Believe me, the China situation bothers me. . . . But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my owners to make money,” then–NBA commissioner David Stern said in a 2006 interview. He may not have known then where his allegiance to the bottom line would lead the league and the game he helped to grow.
To hear him tell it then, Stern was intent on turning the NBA into an exporter of American values. Under his leadership, the league began its “Basketball Without Borders” program, which initially sent NBA players to run basketball camps in geopolitically tense parts of the world. “NBACares” television spots dominated game breaks. “We’re going to keep right on showing them,” Stern told Sports Illustrated when asked about public annoyance with the frequency of the ads. “Because social responsibility is extremely important to us.”
You know it was an article of faith for Stern that “make money” and “social responsibility” could never come into irreconcilable conflict with each other. No doubt Adam Silver and Tim Cook have been similarly catechized. But their religion is in vain, so what will they do? They’ll keep making money and tell themselves that they are also socially responsible, no matter what happens on the ground. For faith is the evidence of things not seen.
UPDATE 2: Paul Farmer, in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, on WLs (White Liberals): “I love WLs to death, they’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves.” (More about Farmer, on related themes, here.)
© 2019 Snakes and Ladders
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑
