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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

January 6, 2025

contractualism

If you look at three earlier posts in this series –

  • First, The Mill on the Floss and George Eliot’s own family experiences
  • Next, the Das family in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
  • Then, Robert Hayden’s poems about his own upbringing

— you’ll see that they concern (in Robert Frost’s words) “what to make of a diminished thing” when the thing that has suffered diminishment is one’s family.

Two features link these three accounts.

The first is that each situation arises from the assumption that — to borrow and adapt a famous distinction originally made by Henry James Sumner Maine — family is a function of status rather than contract. That is, you do not enter into a breakable contractual agreement to be a blood relation of someone else; that relationship is a status that you inherit.

The second is the demonstration in each account of the effects of forgiveness — the healing that arises when people, even people who have been hurt in multiple ways, even people who may rightly claim to be victimized by their family members, forgive them.

Now, let’s be clear about some key points:

  • It would be wrong, I think, for me or you to demand of any greatly wounded persons that they immediately forgive those who have trespassed against them. As a Christian, I believe that forgiveness is indeed what we are all commanded to offer, but for the broken to get to a place where the extension of forgiveness is even a possibility may take some considerable time. Praying for such people is a much more effective strategy than making demands upon them, and is more compassionate also.
  • Forgiveness and reconciliation are different concepts and different experiences. In the Christian account, forgiveness comes first, but reconciliation can only happen when those who have been offered forgiveness repent. (Those who nailed Jesus to the cross had not repented when he pleaded with the Father to forgive them.) I wrote about that process here. In short: the extension of forgiveness is not the end of a journey but the beginning of one, and the person who forgives can never know in advance how the other party will respond — and can never control that response.
  • One consistent theme in the best accounts of forgiveness is the good it does for the forgiver, regardless of what it might mean to the forgiven. In Clear Light of Day, Bim seems to expand and enrich her love her of family first for her own sake, so that she might help to offload the “stupendous caravan of sin” that she is bearing. 
  • Many of the complexities surrounding forgiveness are explored in the current issue of Comment — I highly recommend the entire issue. 

Okay, with those points duly made, I resume.

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

If Scruton is right, and I think he is, then a development I have mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, the growing move of younger people towards cutting their parents wholly out of their lives, is based on a fundamental misreading of what it means to be human. That development — which you can read about here, here, and here — is unlikely for most of its adherents to achieve the “liberation” and “empowerment” they seek. Instead, they are likely to discover that that by trying to sever themselves from “a diminished thing” that have actually diminished themselves.

To accept that being human means that I am bound to my family even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolutely had it with them, is the beginning of something. But only the beginning. The people you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Boundaries must be set, then re-negotiated, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the family members you have most offended will do the same for you.

January 2, 2025

ancestry

As I’ve often noted, it’s been a regular experience for me, over the decades, to have to tell people that I’m not Jewish. My surname is common among Jews (though it’s not exclusively Jewish), people say I look Jewish, and, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe once told me, “You sure talk like a Jew.” My paternal grandfather’s name was Elisha Jacobs, for heaven’s sake.

One I was speaking to a group of rabbis — it’s a long story — all of whom figured I had to be One of Them, and I explained things. I also commented that my explanation tends to be greeted with suspicion: people just think I’m a self-hating Jew. Said one of the rabbis: “There’s some other kind?”

These exchanges happened so frequently that, while I’m not really interested in genealogy, I couldn’t help wondering whether I might be Jewish after all, whether somewhere a few generations back my ancestors were the American South equivalent of conversos. So it was probably inevitable that I would at some point start fooling around on family-genealogy sites and, when the option became available, submit my saliva to a DNA-testing service. 

Of course, neither of those options is highly reliable. So I tried two DNA-testing services and explored several genealogy sites, and got essentially the same answers. That doesn’t mean that the answers are right, of course; but the account is plausible and not without evidence. 

Basically, I’m English. Very English. Two-thirds to three-quarters English, with almost all of the rest being French. No measurable Jewishness. Now, the genealogy sites get far less reliable as you go further back, but for what it’s worth, they suggest that the French elements of my ancestry come in around the time of the Norman Conquest — after that it’s England all the way. The names are Harrison, Brown, Browning, Woodruff, Hale, Hill, Comer, … and, um, Jacobs. 

And they also suggest that almost all my ancestors come from the same general part of England: the West Midlands and nearby counties. Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire. A small handful from Devon and Somerset. My people are from Mercia and Wessex — the realm of Alfred the Great! 

Perhaps this accounts for my strong attraction to authors from the same region: Shakespeare of course, but more important to me Tolkien, George Eliot, the Gawain poet. Those are the writers who make my chromosomes tingle. 

Well, it’s fun to think so. 

One other thing, from the part of the story that’s better-attested: My oldest American ancestors are all from Virginia. Then they start moving down the coast, to the Carolinas and then Georgia; a few to Tennessee. Only in the past hundred years do they come to Alabama. And there’s not one Yankee among them: I appear to have no American ancestors from above the Mason-Dixon line. When I went to grad school at UVA I was returning to my roots — some of my (probable) ancestors were actually from Albemarle County — but when I moved to Illinois and then to Texas I betrayed my people. I shall weep for this. 

December 30, 2024

the angers of that house

Robert Hayden is one of the most acclaimed poets Detroit ever produced.

One of the most famous and widely anthologized American poems of the twentieth century is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Whenever I read it I always note one curious phrase, a gentle and generous evasion: “slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The evasion, of course, is this: Houses are not angry.  

The man we know as Robert Hayden was born in Detroit in 1913 and named Asa Bundy Sheffey. His parents, Asa and Ruth Sheffey, separated soon after his birth, or maybe even before — evidence about his early years is sketchy — and left him in the care of neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who renamed him Robert Earl Hayden. Later in life he would learn that they never formally adopted him. It appears that William and Sue Ellen fought constantly — Hayden believed that his foster mother had never ceased to love her first husband, to whom she had borne three children, and that was one of the points of conflict — but he was not exempt from their rages. As an adult he said, simply, that they “didn’t know how to handle children.” This was generous: he once said, more bluntly, “Worse than the poverty were the conflicts, the quarreling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity. We had a terrible love-hate relationship with one another, and dreadful things happened I can never forget.” And: “I was often abused and often hurt physically.” 

That abuse is depicted in his shattering poem “The Whipping.” The poem begins in the third person, as we see a terrified small boy being chased around the yard by a large woman bearing a stick: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling / boy till the stick breaks / in her hand” … but then, as the boy curls himself into a ball of ineffectual self-protection, shifts into the first person, depicting “My head gripped in bony vise / of knees,” and then what that boy, the poet, the teller of his own misery, saw: “the face that I / no longer knew or loved.” 

Hayden’s bookish introversion — evident from early on, and intensified by extremely poor eyesight that made sports and games impossible for him — was incomprehensible to his foster father and, it seems, also to his natural father when he briefly met with that man at age twelve. He found refuge only in books, and especially in the poetry he read and, later, wrote. His foster parents apparently came to understand that a life of learning was the only reasonable path for him, and supported his study at Detroit City College. From there he went on to graduate study at the University of Michigan, where he fell under the influence, and experienced the encouragement of, a professor who taught there for only a short time: W. H. Auden. 

It is noteworthy that when he recollects the terrors and miseries of his upbringing in verse — however he may have spoken of them in other venues — Hayden always seeks some reconciling vision, some expansive comprehension. He concludes “The Whipping” by showing us not the boy but the one who whipped him: 

And the woman leans muttering against 
a tree, exhausted, purged — 
avenged in part for lifelong hidings 
she has had to bear. 

And whatever his foster father did to him — surely things as bad as his foster mother did — in “Those Winter Sundays” he chooses not to ignore “the chronic angers” of his family but to displace them to the house itself, relieving his foster parents of the burden of them, so that he can remember more clearly something that was also true: that his father faithfully performed some, at least, of “love’s austere and lonely offices.” 

It’s a generosity of spirit greater than anyone could ever demand; greater than we could ever expect. But all the more awe-inspiring for that. 

Sources: 

December 28, 2024

Albion

English cities, towns, and villages I have visited — and by “visited” I mean staying for some hours at least, not just passing through. I’m saving Wales and Scotland for another (much shorter) list.  

  • Ambleside 
  • Bath 
  • Berwick-upon-Tweed 
  • (Higher) Bockhampton 
  • Boscastle 
  • Bournemouth 
  • Bristol 
  • Bury St. Edmunds 
  • Cambridge (including Grantchester, Trumpington, etc.) 
  • Canterbury 
  • Carlisle 
  • Chalfont St. Giles 
  • Chawton 
  • Chipping Norton 
  • Coventry
  • Dorchester 
  • Dover 
  • Durham 
  • Duxford 
  • Ely 
  • Exeter 
  • Fairford
  • Glastonbury 
  • Gloucester 
  • Grasmere 
  • Harrogate 
  • Haworth 
  • Helmsley
  • Keswick 
  • London (everything within the reach of the Tube — I’m not going to list Greenwich or Kilburn or Highgate, etc.) 
  • Newcastle 
  • Oxford (including Binsey, Wolvercote, etc.) 
  • Reading 
  • Rochester 
  • Salisbury 
  • Stratford-upon-Avon 
  • Tintagel 
  • Wells 
  • Winchester 
  • Windermere 
  • York 

Interesting that I’ve managed to avoid the big cities with the exception of London. If I could visit one place in England that I haven’t yet visited, it would be the Norfolk Broads. Or maybe the Yorkshire Dales. 

December 23, 2024

“gentle parenting”

Marilyn Simon: 

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.

December 23, 2024

by the clear light of day

I began this series by reflecting, in a general way, on what conservatism is. Then I wrote about Christopher Lasch’s ideas about the family. I turned from that to a reflection on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the author’s experiences that shaped and formed that powerfully tragic book. Now I want to meditate on another novel about family — about the forces arrayed against it, and the force that it is.

Whenever people talk about neglected masterpieces, the first book that comes to my mind, always, is Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day. What follows will reveal some key elements of the plot, but I don’t think knowing these things will spoil anyone’s experience of this deep, rich, generously meditative book. It’s the kind of book that gets better with re-reading.

The book concerns the Das family of Old Delhi. As the story begins, a middle-aged woman named Tara returns to her home city. Long ago she had married and moved away, but her sister Bimla had remained in their childhood home, working as a teacher and caring for their autistic, or intellectually disabled, brother Baba. Their older brother Raja — who has often indeed behaved in a kingly way towards them — is a source of tension, especially for Bim, and the two sisters warily circle around that topic of conversation.

At the outset we see events primarily through the eyes of Tara, who notices that the old house has become decrepit. She soon discovers that Bim is even more aware of this than she is, and is embittered by it — indeed, is embittered by her whole life, which has been devoted solely to the care of others. She had always been responsible for her siblings — watching over Baba, nursing Raja when he suffered from tuberculosis — while Tara had looked for some means of escape from what was to her an oppressive home, an escape which eventually, through marriage, she achieved.

The first section of the book is set in the characters’ present. The second goes back to 1947 and the Partition of India — a complicated time for the family, because Raja, under the influence of their prosperous neighbor Hyder Ali, had converted to Islam. But this conversion only slightly widened the gaps that had already formed from strong differences in temperament. And anyway, the greater source of tension involves their aunt, Mira-masi, who cared for them after the deaths of their parents but gradually descended into madness. That was when Bim first had to become the primary care-giver for the others. The third section of the book goes back to their early childhood, when their parents were still alive, but, obsessed by social life, largely inattentive to the children. (Nothing much changed for the Das children when their parents died.) And the fourth section of the book returns to the present, as the two sisters try to come to terms with their past and with the very different people they have become. This four-part structure is deeply and resonantly indebted to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also gives the book one of its two epigraphs.

In this final section the point of view shifts to Bim, whose anger comes to a crescendo when she bitterly asks Baba whether he would be willing to leave the only home he has ever known to go live with Raja in Hyderabad (where Raja had moved during the Partition). Bim is simply lashing out, but — she immediately realizes — lashing out at the one person in her life who has no defenses against her. When she sees Baba’s devastated look, she stammers out an apology, and then retreats to her own room in shock at what she has proved capable of.

And lying there in her darkened room, she experiences a revelation. In the shade of her grubby old room

she saw how she loved [Baba], loved Raja and Tara, and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth with whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would live on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.

(Here we should remember Eliot’s references throughout the Quartets to “the pattern,” the shifting weave, and ongoing rebalancing, of forces in a human life.)  

Bim’s relevation continues:

Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect, and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies, and did not extend to all equally. She did not feel enough for her dead parents, her understanding of them was incomplete, and she would have to work and labour to acquire it. Her love for Raja had taken too much of a battering … Her love for Baba was too inarticulate, too unthinking: she had not given him enough thought, her concern had not been keen, acute enough. All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean. 

Trying to think through what she has experienced, Bim “reache[s] out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and place them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unraveling.” The book that she takes up is one Raja had long ago urged her to read: an early biography of Aurangzeb.

This is what she reads in it:

Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die … He wrote to Prince A’zam … ‘Many were around me when I was born. But now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world … Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back … When I have lost hope in myself, how can I hope in others? Come what will, I have launched my bark upon the waters …’

To his favourite Kam-Baksh he wrote: ‘Soul of my soul … Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’

Reading this, Bim realizes that she has finally taken the right path: not the path of anger or resentment or the accusation of others, but the path of self-cleansing, which is the only path by which she can “mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.”

For a long time Bim has simmered with anger over a crassly arrogant letter Raja had written to her. Now she takes it out and tears into pieces. “Having torn it, she felt she had begun the clearing of her own decks, the lightening of her own bark.”

Surely this is also what the newly-married Mary Ann Cross felt when she got a letter from her brother Isaac, not a dictatorial one but a condescending one, a reaching-out that he could have managed at any time in the previous quarter-century but, being a “Rhadamanthine personage,” made a point of refusing. She could have denounced and repiudiated him, and if she had, one could not say that he deserved anything better. But Mary Ann kept what I have called the calculator of Deserving locked away in a drawer. Instead, as we have seen, she wrote,

It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross

Like Bim, she lightens her bark by casting resentment overboard. She achieves what she calls “the wider vision.” It’s an astonishing thing to manage. I don’t really know how people do it. It is a marvelous grace. 

December 20, 2024

the work itself

Robin Sloan recommends a post by Kyle Chayka on “the new rules of media.” But my immediate question, upon reading it, is: “Rules” for what or for whom? And the answer, when you think for a moment, is clear: Rules for people who want to cut a certain figure in the world, people who want to be independent media creators — people, in short, who want to be influencers. People who don’t really care what they’re influencing others to do or to be as long as they themselves are the ones doing the influencing, and (of course) getting paid for it. 

Perhaps because I’ve been reading and thinking about Dorothy Sayers, for whom the nature and value of work is the essential obsession, I have come to be hyper-aware of the chasm that separates (a) those who desire a certain visible and acknowledged place in the world and (b) those whose desire is to do good work. There’s not one word in Chayka’s post on the quality of what you do; every word is, instead, about commanding an audience. It’s a post full of good advice (probably?) for people who simply and uncomplicatedly crave attention.

(Some of those people crave attention because attention leads to money, but I have a suspicion that more of them are interested in money only as a substantial token of attention. Almost everyone seeking a media career could make more dough in jobs that no one notices.) 

Sayers originally expresses her convictions about the intrinsic value of good work in her detective novels, through the character of Harriet Vane. But the first writing of hers wholly devoted to this question is the play The Zeal of Thy House, which concerns an architect — a real one, William of Sens — who has to learn through great suffering that he does not matter as much as his work: the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. 

2880px-Canterbury Cathedral Choir (40805457492).

(Ginormous version of that photo here.) 

I would submit that it’s not even possible nowadays to think of a media career in terms of the work itself, the value of what one does. And maybe that’s what Robin Sloan is suggesting when, after citing Chayka, he continues: 

Sometimes I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hundred years.) Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a completed book, a coherent album, a season of TV: at least you are TRYING. 

Robin doesn’t present this as a refutation of Chayka, but it clearly represents an alternative point of view, one focused not on the public status of the maker but on the work itself. The maker recedes as the completed thing draws attention to itself. And then the completed thing makes its way into the world, and reshapes the world according to its virtue and power. 

My favorite moment in The Zeal of Thy House comes in an Interlude between the first and second acts. It’s a kind of psalm, and it contains words worthy of remembrance: 

Every carpenter and workmaster that laboureth night and day, and they that give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and watch to finish a work;

The smith also sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth to polish it perfectly.

So doth the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number.

All these trust to their hands, and every one is wise in his work.

Without these cannot a city be inhabited, and they shall not dwell where they will nor go up and down;

They shall not be sought for in public council, nor sit high in the congregation; 

But they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft. 

December 20, 2024

great

I’m gonna beat my favorite antique drum here.

Ross Douthat asks, “Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again? — and the answer, of course, is Nope. Absolutely not. Just as our algorithmic culture enforces inflammation in the political sphere, it enforces mediocrity in the cultural sphere. Great works of art can still be made, but if they are great their social status will be marginal at best; anyone capable of appreciating them will be hard put to find them. (It’s not impossible, mind you; but it’s not easy.) And many people who could in time make great work will be deterred and, reasonably enough, give up before they get started and work instead for hedge funds.

If the truth of this assessment is not obvious to you, I’m not going to try to convince you. But I will say this: I’d bet a large sum of money that if you were to spend a year breaking bread with the dead, immersing yourself in the great works of the past, then at the end of that year the truth of my assessment would be obvious to you.

The good news is that there’s never been a better time to break bread with the dead. A vast cultural inheritance is ours for the taking, and to access is almost all we need is a computer with a web browser. We all know this, but I don’t believe we reflect on it often enough. Think of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, Google Arts and Culture, the websites of the world’s great museums, music of every kind available on dozens of platforms, the astonishing range of cultural achievement available in the BBC archives and the Internet Archive. Many of us can check out e-books from out local libraries and get access to the great collection of films at Kanopy.

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! When the algorithms are trying to sell you mediocrity (or worse) on the sole ground of its novelty, my suggestion is: Vote for something else. Vote with your attention … whenever you’re ready to stop eating grass.

December 19, 2024

five true things

  1. Murder is very wrong. 
  2. Killing a health care CEO in protest against the inequities of the American health-care system is pointless and counterproductive. 
  3. American insurance companies regularly refuse to meet the terms of their contracts with their customers, and consider themselves justified in such refusals because they are “maximizing value for shareholders.” Here’s a case that’s extreme in some respects but typical of the procedural logic. Here’s a less dramatic example from my own experience. 
  4. American laws do not do enough to protect customers from corrupt insurance companies. 
  5. Changing from a for-profit system to a single-payer system will not in itself fix anything. As Kevin Williamson has written, “If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it?” 

All of these things are true, and by affirming or denying one you are saying absolutely nothing about any of the others. Distinguo! 

December 16, 2024

unforgiven

A continuation of this post

~ 1 ~

I don’t suppose that there’s a sadder book in all the world to me than George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Though there are tragic elements and tragic characters in Eliot’s other novels, this book only is simply and straightforwardly a tragedy – and I scarcely know a darker one. It is like Hardy before Hardy; in many ways it prefigures Tess of the d’Urbervilles, though I find Maggie Tulliver a far more appealing figure than Tess Durbeyfield. And while Hardy can seem cold and passionless in his disposition of his dramatis personae, almost the icy voice of Fate itself, the manifest tenderness which Eliot shows to so many of her characters – even unappealing ones like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch – makes poor Maggie’s downfall especially hard to bear. George Eliot herself, her husband reported, wept ceaselessly as she wrote the book’s final pages; and how could she not have done so?

I speak of Maggie, though two people die at the book’s end: Maggie and her brother Tom. But Tom’s death, while it does not please me, causes me no pain or grief; Tom, to me, is one of the great villains of literature. He does not cause Maggie’s death, but he blights her life.

The tenderness that Eliot habitually extends to her characters she offers also to her readers, when she presents this as the epigraph to her book: “In death they were not divided.” In this way she gently suggests to us that at least two of the book’s major characters will die; and we don’t have to read very far into the book before we can make a very good guess about the identity of those who are doomed. We are thus given the opportunity to prepare ourselves for what is to come. It doesn’t really help, though; or anyway it doesn’t help me. But I appreciate the gesture.

There’s something else noteworthy about this epitaph: it’s a quotation, but a deliberately truncated one. The original appears in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, and is part of the song of lamentation that King David sings for two men fallen in battle: Saul, the first king of Israel, whom David replaced, and Saul’s son Jonathan, David’s dearest friend. David sings of them,

Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
and in their death they were not divided:
they were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.

Thus his commendation of two men, one his sometime enemy, the other his dearest friend. This perhaps is meant to tell us a little about Eliot’s views of her two chief characters.

But also: by saying of Tom and Maggie that “in death they were not divided,” she allows the correct inference that in life they very much were divided. And what divides them is Tom’s relentless cruelty to Maggie. Now, to be sure, Tom would say that it Maggie’s sins that divide them, that he merely does his duty. But this is untrue. Tom is in fact not reliably dutiful. His self-image is false. When the call of duty conflicts with the impulse to be cruel, his cruelty always wins.

Very early in the novel, Tom quarrels with his scruffy friend Bob Jakin – a few rungs down the social ladder from middle-class Tom – and calls him a cheat. “I hate a cheat. I sha’n’t go along with you any more.” And thus he ends his friendship with Bob. Though many years later Bob will re-appear in Tom and Maggie’s life, Tom never would have sought Bob again, nor questioned the wisdom of his judgment against Bob. As Eliot comments at the conclusion of that chapter,

Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him, – the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts. Maggie saw a cloud on his brow when he came home, which checked her joy at his coming so much sooner than she had expected, and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently throwing the small gravel-stones into the mill-dam. It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when you have set your mind on it. [Rat-catching is what Tom had planned to do with Bob.] But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.” That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.

(Re: the “Rhadamanthine personage,” Rhadamanthus, in Greek mythology, was a king of Crete who became a judge of the dead, and a strict and inflexible judge too.) And thus it always is. Again and again Maggie acts in ways that she comes to regret; again and again what she desires more than anything else is Tom’s forgiveness; again and again he denies it to her. Sometimes he forgets her sins, or grows tired of punishing her for them; but he never once forgives. In this he exaggerates the tendencies of his father, who not only refuses to forgive his greatest enemy but, when he thinks he is near death, commands Tom to write that refusal in the family Bible: “I don’t forgive Wakem for all that; and for all I’ll serve him honest, I wish evil may befall him.” Mr. Tulliver can think of nothing more sacred than a Bible, though he has no interest in practicing anything that might be taught therein.

Tom is his father’s son in this sense, though in others he is even stricter than his father. For instance, even when Mr. Tulliver is in great need of money he cannot make himself call in a debt his poor and unlucky brother-in-law owes him, because he he knows the pain it would cause his sister. In such a circumstance Tom would never hesitate. In the greatest crisis of Maggie’s life, when she has just barely escaped an elopement with her seducer, Tom turns her away: “You will find no home with me…. You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.” Further: “I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty.” 

You will find no home with me, no haven in a heartless world. You had to come to me — but I do not have to take you in, and I won’t. 

 

~ 2 ~

This I think is the one truly essential point: Tom has not done his duty. He portrays himself as a man of filial piety; he prides himself on having worked hard to rescue his father from debt; he makes his father’s enemies his own. Yet here he refuses to obey the very last commandment his father gave him, in the minutes before his death: “You must take care of her, Tom – don’t you fret, my wench – there’ll come somebody as’ll love you and take your part – and you must be good to her, my lad.” (Mr. Tulliver always refers to Maggie, in the most affectionate tones, as “the little wench.”) This, when Maggie’s suffering is at its worst, Tom refuses to do — even though she had given years of her youth to caring for Mr. Tulliver, while Tom was out making a career for himself. But Tom thinks he has done his duty and Maggie has failed to do hers. This is because “duty” for Tom is a matter of public respectability, and the ascent of the social ladder. That we have a duty to charity and kindness never crosses his mind. 

As I have said: Tom’s cruelty is his treasure, and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He delights to feel himself morally strong, and from that strength to judge those he feels to be weaker than he. When he repudiates Maggie, as he often does, it is hard not to feel that those are to him the best moments of his life: the ones in which he condemns, not his enemy, as his father had condemned Wakem, but his own flesh and blood, his own sister, who loves him more than she loves anyone and has all her life craves his approval. Tom Tulliver is not a good and responsible man who is sometimes overly strict; he is an absolute monster of cold-blooded savagery. His cruelty is limited only by the scope of his power; alas for his ego, he has only poor Maggie to tyrannize over.

Eliot says of Maggie that “she had always longed to be loved,” and that is true, but I think she longs for forgiveness even more, if indeed those two things can be divided. Perhaps she craves forgiveness as a token of love. And while from some who are dear to her she indeed receives forgiveness – that is almost the only thing that sheds light on the dark, dark road she is forced to walk – she is never forgiven by the person whose forgiveness would have meant the most to her: her brother.

Late in the book, Maggie speaks with a pastor, one Dr. Kenn – a wise and compassionate man, as his name might suggest. (Kennen in German connotes personal knowledge, what we might even call wisdom, as opposed to Wissen, which is the knowledge of facts.) Having spoken with Maggie, and having read the penitent letter of her would-be seducer, he says,

“I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle.”

This is of course a shrewdly accurate summation of Tom’s attitude. And Dr. Kenn knows how widespread such attitudes are, even if they rarely appear in such undiluted malignancy as they do in Tom.

After Maggie leaves, Dr. Kenn reflects on the intractable difficulties of her situation, in a passage that quietly harmonizes the voice of Dr. Kenn and that of the author. Eliot thinks (Kenn thinks? They think?) that “the shifting relation between passion and duty” – the very problem with which Maggie has struggled and with which Tom can never imagine there being any struggle, thinking as he does that his passions are his duties – is so complex that it can have no plain general answer. We remember the Jesuit casuists, who declined to be governed by largely-framed rules and could always, it was said, find a way of avoiding an unwelcome bondage to them. (The word casuist comes from the Latin casus, case – a rule that applies generally may not apply to this case.) Such men, Eliot says, “have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed, – the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.”

It is good to despise casuistry in its usual pejorative sense, but not good to refuse the … well, let us say the duty to make discriminations according to different circumstances. We cannot live wisely by ”maxims”:

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, – without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

 

~ 3 ~

But at this point I find myself under an unwelcome conviction. I must pause to note that Eliot says this: “Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” I shall strive to bear it in mind; but I am not confident of success.

The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s most autobiographical novel. The scene is shifted from the West Midlands of her youth to Lincolnshire, but Tulliver family bears close affinities to that of the author, whose real name was Mary Ann (sometimes Marian) Evans. Kathryn Hughes:  

Like her father and his brothers, she rose out of the class into which she was born by dint of hard work and talent. She left behind the farm, the dairy and the brown canal, and fashioned herself into one of the leading intellectual and literary artists of the day. But … she learned what it was like to belong to a family which regularly excluded those of whom it did not approve. When, at the age of twenty-two, she announced that she did not believe in God, her father sent her away from home. Fifteen years later, when she was living with a man to whom she was not married, her brother Isaac instructed her sisters never to speak or write to her again. 

But though her father rejected her for her unbelief, in the last years of his life, when he could not care for himself, he expected Mary Ann to care for him. And she did. Hughes again: 

At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May-June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’. Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next. 

Nevertheless, 

Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’. Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war [that is, during their conflict over her loss of religious faith and consequent refusal to attend church], Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. 

It became for a period, Hughes argues, Mary Ann’s vocation: 

This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare — always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’, she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’ 

So strong was her love for her father that, she wrote in a letter as his death neared, “What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone.” Nevertheless, Robert Evans, who had managed to offer some occasional words of kindness to his daughter in his final months, was ungenerous to her in his will. (It is I think no accident that wills, and second thoughts over wills, play a large part in some of her fiction, especially in Middlemarch.) 

Mary Ann was more generous to her father than he ever was to her — and not least through her portrayal of Mr. Tulliver, whose repeated expressions of affection for “the little wench” are very likely more than Mary Ann ever received from Robert Evans. She gives to that fictional father a warmheartedness which she rarely if ever experienced from her real one. 

 

~ 4 ~ 

But Isaac Evans was a different story. As noted above, when Mary Ann started living with George Henry Lewes — who was unable to divorce his wife for complicated reasons you can read about here — Isaac cut her off completely and demanded that other members of the family do the same. Despite her attempts at reconciliation, he maintained her silence until, a quarter-century later, Lewes died and Mary Ann married a man twenty years her junior named John Cross. When he learned of this marriage, Isaac wrote to her: 

My dear Sister

I have much pleasure in availing myself of the present opportunity to break the long silence which has existed between us, by offering our united and sincere congratulations to you and Mr Cross…. 

Your affectionate brother Isaac P Evans 

The “opportunity” being her marriage — nothing less respectable could have induced him to write. Like the bank-director brother of Silas in Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” he looks upon a disreputable sibling as “just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.” 

The generosity of Mary Ann’s reply is, to me, immensely moving: “It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross.” 

This is of course far better that Isaac deserves, Isaac with his own calculus of Deserving, Isaac with his indifference to any moral excellence he himself does not care to practice — Mary Ann’s faithful care for their dying father (like that of Maggie’s care for Mr Tulliver) earned her no points from her brother. It is hard for me not to hate him, as it is hard for me not to hate Tom Tulliver. But then I hear the voice of George Eliot: “If you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”

December 14, 2024

intellectual furnishings

The photograph above features Victor Brombert, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, who rates an obituary in the NYT not because of his academic career but because of what he did during the Second World War. 

His personal story is a great one, but I like this photo as an exercise in the archeology of what Shannon Mattern calls “intellectual furnishings.” What might have been on a literature professor’s desk in 1985? In this case: 

  • Books 
  • Academic journals 
  • Pen 
  • Pencil (I think that’s a pencil he’s holding, but it’s really thick — maybe some kind of editorial pencil?) 
  • Coffee mug serving as pen/pencil holder 
  • Ink blotter 
  • Home-style lamp 
  • Small Rolodex (or other brand) to hold cards with addresses 
  • Daily calendar (that’s the thing with the little stand on the back, next to the Rolodex: it shows what day it is and when you come in the next morning you tear off Yesterday and throw it away, revealing Today)  
  • Sponge for wetting postage stamps 
  • Paperweights (at least two) 
  • Magnetic box for holding paperclips 
  • Mail (under the scissors-paperweight) 
  • Envelope containing photographic prints, probably picked up from a drugstore on Nassau Street  
  • Small personal notebook (under a sheet of paper next to the coffee mug) 
  • A loop handle (next to his right forearm), presumably attached to something — a small instant camera, perhaps? The camera with which he took the snapshots he had developed at the bookstore? 

What’s absent? There’s no computer — there’s not even a typewriter, though there may be one elsewhere in the room. It’s possible, though, that Brombert had a secretary to type up, when necessary, his handwritten texts. I mean, the guy is wearing an ascot, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that men who wear ascots do not do their own typing. 

December 12, 2024

further contributions to a demonology

Mary Harrington:

Anyone who spends a lot of time online will be familiar with the sense of witnessing a collective hive-mind in action. I linked this recently with a phenomenon of widespread re-enchantment, in which re-attunement to pattern recognition via digital reading has meshed with post-atomic physics to re-open cultural space for the uncanny. And while you can think perfectly well about egregores without agreeing with any of the above, or indeed without opening any old books, it’s also true that many longstanding traditions already exist for understanding egregores – including Christianity. For example we might recall the passage in the Gospel of Mark that describes Jesus casting out multiple demons possessing a man in terms that plausibly map onto what I’m calling egregoric desire: “My name is Legion”, says this collective, “because there are many of us inside this man.”

Many of those now exploring such ideas are ambivalent on the ontology of these non-material realities. But perhaps, if we want to be able to make sense of our moral intuitions concerning a phenomenon such as Lily Phillips, we should consider not re-inventing the wheel. Bluntly: I want to consider the possibility that Phillips’ stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession. 

I would refer the interested reader to an essay I wrote three years ago: 

I am myself a Christian, but I do not write here to issue an altar call, an invitation to be saved by Jesus. Rather, I merely wish you, dear reader, to consider the possibility that when a tweet provokes you to wrath, or an Instagram post makes you envious, or some online article sends you to another and yet another in an endless chain of what St. Augustine called curiositas — his favorite example is the gravitational pull on all passers-by of a dead body on the side of the road — you are dealing with powers greater than yours. Your small self and your puny will are overwhelmed by the Cosmic Rulers, the Principalities and Powers. They oppress or possess you, and they can neither be deflected nor, by the mere exercise of will, overcome. Any freedom from what torments us begins with a proper demonology. Later we may proceed to exorcism.

December 10, 2024

family matters

~ 1 ~

When Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged appeared in 1977, some critics on the Right denounced it as Marxist, while other critics on the Left denounced it as reactionary. On both sides there was, I think, a failure to understand what Lasch was primarily trying to do, which was to demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of then-current social-scientific thinking about the family — and to indicate some of the dire consequences of that inadequacy.

But the anger from the Left is certainly understandable, since Lasch really was goring some of their sacred cows. He had little patience with the then-widespread belief that women could achieve complete and completely equal integration into the workplace at no cost to anyone. (Such integration should happen, Lasch thought, but the costs needed to be inventoried and addressed.) He had even less patience with the tendency among many feminists to blame the “traditional family” for the subordinate social position of women.

In his preface to the paperback edition of his book, Lasch asks his critics, especially his feminist critics, to consider two major points. First, that “indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment, defines the consumption of commodities as the highest form of personal satisfaction, and exploits existing resources with criminal disregard of the future.” And second, that “the problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over the family.” 

By “work” here Lasch means work outside the home, work that someone else pays you to do. This is a point that Wendell Berry would later make repeatedly: that when Americans today talk about work, we always mean work that happens in the marketplace in exchange for money, and no other kind. 

That second point was one that he had emphasized in the final paragraph of the book:

Today the state controls not merely the individual’s body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt; not merely his outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination. The citizen’s entire existence has now been subjected to social direction, increasingly unmediated by the family or other institutions to which the work of socialization was once confined. Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weaken the capacity for self direction and self control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal and political freedom.

For Lasch, the Left and the Right alike consider the family largely sentimentally — the sentiments from the Right being positive, those from the Left negative — rather than analytically. And Haven in a Heartless World, while being in part a contribution to that analytical task, is more fundamentally a plea to Lasch’s fellow scholars to get to work to provide a deeper understanding of the extraordinarily complex situation of the modern family. 

Here again I want to invoke Wendell Berry, who made this very point at some length in his seminal 1992 essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”: 

The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservative” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the main stages of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet seen the father’s thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

This is effectively the conclusion that Lasch came to by the end of his book: that the conservation of the family is something that can only be achieved by politically and economically radical means. (Related: that’s why Lasch, like Berry, can’t be accurately described as a liberal or a conservative. That binary opposition is useless in many contexts.) 

One of the difficult questions Lasch raises is this: Why had parents, in the decades preceding the writing of the book, so often acquiesced in being sidelined? Why had they agreed to allow schools and institutions linked to schools — primarily clinical counseling of various kinds — usurp the role of formation that had once been essential to the family? Perhaps realizing that he had not clearly addressed this issue in the book proper, Lasch uses the Preface to the paperback edition to venture this idea:

The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.

— the idea being, Lasch thinks, to eliminate conflict from the home. A fruitless notion, says Lasch, in his quasi-Freudian mode: “The attempt to get rid of conflict succeeds only in driving it underground.”

My purpose in this post (and subsequent ones, when I can get them written) is to indicate some of the ways in which Lasch’s half-century-old book illuminates current ideas about the family — for the trends he identified in 1978 have continued to this day. And much can learned by juxtaposing the family’s complicity in its own marginalization with another point, one raised by one of Lasch’s critics from the Left. That critic, Mark Poster, rejects Lasch’s argument for the necessity of the family in these terms: “The only way to [ensure] democracy for children is to provide them with a wide circle of adults to identify with, the ability to select their sources of identification, and a separation between authority figures and nurturant figures.” (Poster published a book in the same year, 1978, that the paperback edition of Haven appeared: it is called Critical Theory of the Family and its argument is pretty much what you would expect from that title.)

There’s much that could be said about each of Poster’s criteria for ensuring “democracy for children,” but I think the key one is this: “the ability to select their sources of identification.” I believe that for Poster — and this is true of many, if not most, leftist critics of the family — the ineradicable failing of the family is simply that it is given, not chosen. From this point of view, only what the individual chooses for him- or herself can be valid for that individual. (Except in the case of race, which, as we learned some years ago from the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Rebecca Tuvel, simply though mysteriously cannot be chosen.) Poster’s user of the term “identification” is prescient, especially when one thinks of people who who say things like “I was assigned male at birth, but I identify as female.” I reject what was given and I choose otherwise. And the value of what I choose is determined wholly by the fact that I choose it. It is not something that anyone else has a right to an opinion about. (I find myself here thinking of Roger Scruton’s comment in The Meaning of Conservatism that the primary goal of liberalism is “the satisfaction of as many choices as short time allows.”) 

This mode of conceiving the person can shape how people think about their families as well, something readily seen in a recent New York Times article about people who end all contact with their families. One woman interviewed in that article — who cut off her father because he demonstrated “a lack of interest in my life as I got older” — articulates the key principle of this movement: “It is not a child’s responsibility to maintain a relationship with their parent(s).” In family matters, there are no responsibilities — at least none that bind me; there — again, for me — are only free choices. It would be interesting to know whether people who adhere to this principle think that parents have any responsibilities to their adult children. 

 

~ 2 ~

I was effectively raised by my paternal grandmother, because my mother worked long hours to keep a roof over our heads and my father was in and out of prison. He was a drunkard, and a violent one, so for me things were better when he was locked up. Not that we didn’t have good moments; you just never knew when the pivot to darkness would come. But you did know that it was coming. My mother was in a bad situation and did the best she could; but she was never an emotionally demonstrative woman, and at the end of the working day she didn’t have much energy left. Almost all of the demonstrated affection I received came from Grandma. Often she and she alone kept my head above water.

At age twenty-one, when I married the woman who has now been my wife for forty-four years, I entered a new family. I was not then merely rough around the edges — all my surfaces were abraded and abrasive, and I quiver slightly whenever I think about the conversations Teri’s parents must have had about the boy their daughter had determined to marry. Lord knows they had hoped for, and expected, someone much better than I was. But here’s the thing: once Teri’s father had said Yes to my request for his daughter’s hand in marriage — and yes, that’s how Teri wanted it: not just to give her consent, but to ask for and abide by the consent of her parents — I was his and his wife’s son. From that day forward I belonged to them just as securely and unquestionably as the children of their own marriage. I was not what they had chosen; I was handed to them not on a silver platter but on a chipped dinner plate; but they welcomed me into their home, into their life, into their hearts, and they never looked back. They could have said No; instead they said Yes, to me and all that I was and wasn’t. 

It is impossible for me to overstress how much that welcome meant to me, and how determinative that was for my future. Gradually I became someone not unlike the person they would have chosen if they had been the ones choosing, and one of the most gratifying moments of my life came when I was around fifty years old, and my father-in-law — a working man from Columbiana, Alabama, a simple man with a high-school education and a great big heart — gave me one of his characteristic bone-cracking hugs, looked me right in the eye, and said: “Alan, I’m so proud of the man you’ve turned out to be.” A Nobel Prize wouldn’t have meant so much to me as that word of praise from that man.

But all this began when they accepted me without question and without reservation, and committed themselves to my flourishing, as they were already committed to the flourishing of their biological children. I truly do not know what would have become of me if not for the constancy of their love. They loved their daughter; their daughter loved me; they were therefore called to love me too. So they did. To them it was as simple as that. 

Everything I think about family arises from this experience.

 

~ 3 ~

The phrase “haven in a heartless world” is Lasch’s but it is adapted from Karl Marx, who (in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) wrote that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Lasch’s phrase is thus more ambivalent and ambiguous than it appears to those who do not know what it borrows from, and have not grasped his long argument. That argument is: The modern economic order simultaneously creates the need for family to be a haven and prevents it from serving as a haven. (To get Marx’s argument, substitute “religion” for “family” in the previous sentence.) Lasch: 

The same historical developments that have made it necessary to set up private life — the family in particular — as a refuge from the cruel world of politics and work, an emotional sanctuary, have invaded this sanctuary and subjected it to outside control. 

As our socio-economic order has extended itself into what I call metaphysical capitalism, its power to penetrate and demolish all would-be havens has only increased. It strives to render us all homeless, and then to sell us the goods and services that, it is claimed, compensate for any and all losses. And homelessness is a key concept here. The comforts intrinsic to family life are those that arise from what a family at its best does, which is to make a home.

When people are groping about for a good quote about home, they typically turn to a couple of lines from a poem by Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But the quoters rarely know the context.

Those lines come from a dialogue in verse called “The Death of the Hired Man” (1915). The participants in the dialogue are a farmer named Warren and his wife, Mary. When Warren returns from errands, Mary greets him with the news that Silas — a man who had worked for them but had departed at a time when Warren needed him — has returned. Warren had told him that if he left he could not come back; but he has come back. Silas “has a plan,” Mary says, he has ideas for how he can help them; but, she also and more pertinently says, “His working days are done; I’m sure of it.” In fact, “‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die.’”

Warren “mocked gently” the word “home.” To which Mary:

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

It is in reply to this that Warren says “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the context of this story it’s an ambiguous statement, leaving open the possibility that since “he’s nothing to us” they do not in fact have to take him in. Why does Silas not go to his brother, a wealthy man, “director in the bank”? What might have divided Silas from her brother is not made explicit, but Mary says, “Silas is what he is — we wouldn’t mind him — / But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.” That is, precisely because he is nothing to them, Warren and Mary can accept the shiftless and feckless Silas, but his “kinsfolk” are ashamed of him, reject him: should he ever go to them, he knows, they would not take him in. So, in extremis, to Warren and Mary’s farm he comes.

In any event, Mary’s reply — never cited by quote-hunters — dissents from Warren’s way of putting the matter. She says, instead, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Thus Mary thinks that Silas’s brother “ought of right / To take him in,” regardless of what he deserves. Obligations to family are not, in Mary’s view, to be subjected to a calculus of deserving, even if that is precisely what “kinsfolk” tend to do.

The debate is ended when Warren, urged on by Mary, goes to check on Silas and finds him dead. The hired man has come home, or come to the nearest thing to home he could conceive. And Warren and Mary, however they may have quarreled with Silas, have become the nearest thing to family he could conceive.

Mary’s attitude towards Silas is rather like Teri’s parents’ attitude towards me: I was like a hound wandering in from the woods, nothing of theirs, but they fed me, they took me in. I was “nothing” to them until they took me in and by that very generosity made me something.

Silas’s brother, by contrast, resembles the woman I mentioned in the previous section of this essay, the one who cut off her father altogether for being insufficiently “interested” in her adult self. She has taken out the calculator of Deserving and found her father unworthy. She will not share a home, or anything of her life, with him. But we readers get the feeling, do we not, that she knows perfectly well that if she should ever have to go to her parents, they would have to take her in. They might well do so gladly, and strive to be for her a haven in a heartless world. Be that as it may, perhaps she thinks that she’ll never need such a haven — or that such a haven as she needs can be bought in the marketplace in the form of material possessions, or therapy, or even chatbot friends and companions. 

About all that, time is the great teacher. 

Let’s meditate on these matters for a while. I’ll return to this theme soon, I hope, in a post on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. It’s going to take me quite a few posts, I suspect, to put these various pieces together, but (IMO) that’s what a blog is for: tentative explorations, further developments, second and third thoughts, elaborations and corrections. Complex and difficult issues deserve such gentle treatment. 

December 7, 2024

ars longa

01 notre dame laser scan

Ten years ago I gave a talk at Vassar College and participated in some conversations with faculty of various liberal-arts colleges. During those conversations I met and had some great chats with an art historian named Andrew Tallon. We hit it off, I thought — he seemed at once utterly gentle and immensely intelligent — and I started scheming ways to get him to Baylor. I thought he would be a great conversation partner, particularly for those of us interested in Christianity and the arts — I especially wanted to introduce him to my colleague Natalie Carnes, who works on the theology of beauty. And I also thought that Andrew, who was a Catholic Christian but did not feel especially comfortable being vocal about his faith, might benefit from spending some time around people who are quite public about their Christianity. 

We exchanged some emails, but eventually Andrew fell silent, and later I learned that he was gravely ill with cancer. I never did manage to get him to Baylor. In November of 2018 he died, aged 49.

When I met him, Andrew had already made a complex series of high-resolution digital scans of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris — a building that had obsessed him since he spent a year as a child living in Paris. (His birthplace was Leuven, Belgium.) He told a journalist that “There was a biblical, a moral imperative to build a perfect building, because the stones of the building were directly identified with the stones of the Church” — that is, the people of God. “I like to think that this laser scanning work and even some of the conventional scholarship I do is informed by that important world of spirituality. It’s such a beautiful idea.” It turns out that, however diffident Andrew was, or thought he was, about his faith, that faith informed his work thoroughly. 

And when the cathedral was maimed by a terrible fire in April 2019, just a few months after Andrew’s death, everyone involved in the restoration immediately realized that Andrew’s work would prove invaluable in the enormous task facing them. 

So when I saw images of the completely and magnificently restored cathedral, my first thought was: Well done, Andrew. Well done, good and faithful servant. I hope you can see what you helped to make possible. 

The south rose window, offered as a gift by King Louis the IX, has been restored to its full glory. It’s not the first time it has undergone major works as it had to be reconstructed in the 18th and 19th centuries too.

December 6, 2024

the facts don’t care about your educational philosophy

This post by Freddie is a reminder that about education he has three major points to make: 

  1. In any given population, the ability to excel academically (whether or not you call it “intelligence”) is, like almost all other human abilities, plottable as a normal distribution: that is, a few people will be really bad at it, a few people will be really good, and the majority will be somewhere near the middle. 
  2. Because some people are simply better at school than other than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students; this means that “closing the performance gap” between the worst and best students will only be possible if you use the best strategies for the worst students and the worst strategies for the best ones — and even then the most talented students will probably adapt pretty well, because that’s what being a talented student means. (N.B. I am assuming that “Harrison Bergeron” strategies will not be employed, though maybe that’s not a safe assumption.) Another way to put it: if every student in America were equally well funded and every student equally well taught, point 1 above would still be true. 
  3. Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)  

Each of these three points is incontrovertibly true — indeed, if you think for a moment, the first two are blindingly obvious — but each is unwelcome to those who’d very much like to believe that equal/equal-ish/equitable educational outcomes are possible, and attainable through (a) more money or (b) better methods or (c) both. So again and again readers (a) misread, probably deliberately, Freddie’s arguments or (b) attack his character or (c) both. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. 

December 4, 2024

reasons for tolerance

There are two major reasons to practice tolerance of ideas that differ from, or conflict with, your own: 

Epistemic humility: You may be wrong about some things, and even if you’re not wrong, may not fully understand your own position and may not be equipped to defend it against your opponents. Therefore you extend tolerance not only for the sake of your opponents but also for your own intellectual good. (This is a major theme in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.) 

Political pragmatism: If you’re not powerful enough to silence your enemies, your attempts to do so may bring on a fight you can’t win. Worse, the attempt to silence others may lead to their attempting to silence you — and if they’re sufficiently strong that attempt might just succeed. And then where would you be? 

In our current political moment, it is trivially easy to find strong, confident voices that confirm our opinions. And because we do not understand scale, it is easy to believe that everyone who matters, everyone who thinks, everyone who is decent is on our side. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. It is virtually impossible in such a climate to make an appeal to epistemic humility. Therefore tolerance can really only be recommended on the groud of political pragmatism. 

But even this is difficult for people for whom political opponents are the Repugnant Cultural Other. As I wrote in yet another essay, “For those who have been formed largely by the mythical core of human culture, disagreement and alternative points of view may well appear to them not as matters for rational adjudication but as defilement from which they must be cleansed.” What is happening on the American left right now, in the wake of the recent election, is a struggle between political pragmatism and the deeply felt need for social hygiene. 

Which will win? 

UPDATE: This from John Ganz in The Nation is representative of a typical left postmortem of the election: 

The Democrats don’t need to program differently — they need to think differently. The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic — to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above. They need to reject their allergy to “debate bros” and learn how to argue and debate again; indeed, they need to recover the central challenge of politics — to persuade people. 

But you can’t persuade people when you feel defiled by their very presence. Thus the choice I have pointed to. 

December 2, 2024

memory, gratitude, story

Re: my recent post on the conservative disposition, I said there that the “two major elements” of that disposition “are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.” But you can only be grateful for something you actually remember encountering. Thus the work of our current digital Ministry of Amnesia is corrosive of gratitude and therefore anti-conservative. 

And gratitude is linked not only to memory but also to story. That is, the grateful person is impelled to narrate the causes and consequences of his gratitude. Gratitude and memory alike are impoverished and limited in their reach without this narration.

Thus an old man in Chinua Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savannah: 

To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He gives the eagerness to rise when they hear the call; to rise with racing blood and put on their garbs of war and go to the boundary of their town to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle. And then there are those others whose part is to wait and when the struggle is ended, to take over and recount its story.

The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards — each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? … 

So why do I say the story is chief among his fellow? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters — Recalling-is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus-fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.

December 1, 2024

David Brooks:

Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands. (In one survey, 87 percent of admissions officers and high-school college counselors said the U.S. News rankings force schools to take measures that are “counterproductive” to their educational mission.)

In other words, we’re all trapped in a system that was built on a series of ideological assumptions that were accepted 70 or 80 years ago but that now look shaky or just plain wrong. The six deadly sins of the meritocracy have become pretty obvious. 

Then he lists the sins. One of Brooks’s finest essays, I think. 

November 29, 2024

Substack vs. Indie

Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators, says Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s true, but it’s important to remember that people on Substack, like Ted, are not “indie creators” in the fullest sense — they’re dependent on a platform that sets the terms of engagement. 

Now, to be sure, if I were going to write on any social-media platform it would be Substack. Most people who write there make little or no money, but it’s possible to do very well indeed, and the 90/10 split of the subscription revenue is remarkably generous. (“Remarkably” because if they had chosen 80/20 or even 70/30 — the latter being Apple’s cut for app creators — not many people would have complained.) But: 

  1. Substack is not a profitable company. Its CEO says it could be, but those are just words.
  2. Its unprofitability means that it’s still dependent on investment from venture capitalists, and they can put pressure on the people who run the show to change things up — for instance, to take a bigger cut of the revenues. 
  3. The same pressure could lead to the introduction of ads. 
  4. Their CEO has written that they don’t like the algorithmic determination of content — but also that they’re “not against algorithms” and will use them if that helps their users. What does and does not help their users is for them to determine, and they can change their minds at any time, for any reason or none. (And they already do use an algorithm to feed you what they want you to see in Notes, their version of Twitter or Bluesky, which shows up on your home page and cannot be hidden). 
  5. Not only could the founders of Substack change their minds about any of their policies and procedures, and do so at any time, they could also sell the company. Indeed, this would be the norm for Silicon Valley startups. 
  6. In short, Substack is as subject to enshittification as any other platform. And for Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification “is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.” 

If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now. 

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Substack — Austin Kleon, whom I just linked to, has a great Substack — and what Freddie says is true: 

No matter what the usual suspects say, Substack has dramatically expanded the number of people making money as writers and deepened the engagement of a lot of passionate and talented amateurs, and for that I’m grateful. At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere. 

No such insistence here! I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup. 

P.S. I’ve seen a lot of bad writing both pro and contra Substack lately, but I just had to laugh at this by Sam Kahn: 

On this platform, for instance, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jo Paoletti’s diary — which is well-written and insightful and gives me insight into the mind of this person I’ve never met. There simply is no forum, prior to the launch of Substack (or, let’s say, of the blogosphere), that would have given me access to Jo’s diary. No newspaper would have run it — what is the news hook? — no publisher would have printed it unless Jo had gone on to be, like, a head of state or turned out to be a serial killer. A platform like Substack multiplies by some logarithmic absurdity the volume of expression in the written word. It releases founts of creativity that, for decades or centuries, were buried. 

That’s a pretty significant parenthetical correction there! It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging. 

Let’s be clear about what Substack is: it’s a blogging platform with a paywall — that’s all. And it’s not the first one: Medium, among others, preceded it. Substack is just the one that happened to catch on, largely because it offers the best (i.e. least revenue-extractive, most flexible) deal to writers. But it doesn’t enable any kind of writing that isn’t already enabled by the World Wide Web. 

November 28, 2024

The New New Class? – by Noah Millman:

Just as Bill Clinton was our first meritocratic president—the first one whose path to success and power ran from someplace like Hope, Arkansas to Georgetown and Oxford rather than from Hope to the army and the local party machines—Donald Trump is our first attention-economy president, our first influencer president. Not Ronald Reagan; Reagan was an actor, and his acting experience served him well as he became the Great Communicator, but he came up as an actor in the old studio system, served as a union president and worked for General Electric before entering California Republican politics as a party man. He was a natural talent, but he was the product of institutions. Trump isn’t really the product of institutions, but neither, for all that he ran a variety of (mostly unsuccessful) businesses, is he the creator of institutions. He is and always has been first and foremost someone good at drawing attention to himself. Everything else flows from that. 

Noah’s description of our cultural move from being led by a meritocratic class to being led by an influencer class is brilliant. 

November 27, 2024

The Ad That Radicalised Me – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian:

I haven’t heard the [assisted-dying] bill’s opponents deny the fact of suffering, however. I have heard the bill’s supporters deny or avoid the trade-off they are proposing. They pretend there will be no cases of coercion, when of course there will be, human nature and the state of our public services being what they are. The most honest argument for the bill — even if it’s not one I buy — is a utilitarian one: that the injustice and cruelty thus perpetrated will be outweighed by the suffering prevented.

But it’s always hard to make utilitarian arguments persuasive because they seem so mechanical and inhuman. Unthinking emotionalism and the avoidance of uncomfortable truths make for better rhetoric, which is why this bill may well pass on Friday. Although I was already leaning against it, intellectually, it was those grotesque ads which really crystallised how I have come to feel about assisted dying. State-managed death is being wrapped up as self-fulfilment. I don’t feel good about that. I feel sick.

November 27, 2024

disposition

Here I am not trying to say anything original; I’m trying to put clearly what are (in some circles anyway) familiar points.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

Therefore,

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Not indicentally, it is because conservatism is a disposition that Oakeshott titles this essay “On Being Conservative” rather than “On Being a Conservative.”

If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.

Note that this highly-valued inheritance takes many forms. It may be a marriage; a larger family; a friendship or network of friendships; a parish church; a university; a body of knowledge; a collection of artworks; the oeuvre of a novelist or poet or composer or painter. It is whatever one is grateful to have received; whatever encounter appears to one as a gift.

I would add that the disposition to conserve one’s inheritance is truly and fully healthy only when it is accompanied by a desire to share one’s good inheritance with others who lack access to it or even awareness of it. To conserve only for oneself and one’s own is avarice. As Lewis Hyde has noted, good gifts find their fulfillment in circulation. This is why I have written so often of repair: repair is often the first step in conservation. We want to pass our inheritance along in better shape than we found it.

The questions that then arise are:

  • What forces tend towards the preservation of my inheritance?
  • What forces tends towards its dissipation or depredation?
  • By what means might I protect it from harm?
  • By what means might I increase its health and extend its reach?

Among the conserving and destroying forces are

  • personal vices and virtues
  • social institutions and practices (healthy and unhealthy)
  • forms of government (healthy and unhealthy)

And the means of conserving are also to be pursued on each of these three axes.

From this outline several conclusions may be drawn. In this post and in subsequent ones I will try to draw some of them.

Let’s begin here: For the person of conservative disposition, the question of what form of government to prefer is secondary and instrumental. That is, it lies downstream of the inheritance one wishes to conserve.

Governance does not create or bestow any genuine inheritance; rather, its fulfills its purpose by safeguarding, or helping to safeguard, and extending, or helping to extend, the good things that are made and found extra-governmentally. Whether to prefer socialism to free-market capitalism or vice-versa is an empirical question, not a principial one. Those empirical reasons may be very strong but should never assume the status of first principles.

Therefore, persons of conservative disposition will not make their preferences in electoral politics, their party affiliations, central to their identity. Those affiliations will always be held relatively loosely, and will remain subject to critical reflection and reassessment.

Moreover, such persons will realize that an over-emphasis on party affiliation leads to a neglect of the other major forces that affect the conservation of their inheritance. They will understand that no matter who is elected to office, possibilities remain for personal formation, the strengthening of families, and the building and sustaining of the institutions of civil society. To be sure, governments can help or hinder such projects, often in powerful ways, but what Oliver Goldsmith wrote 250 years ago remains true:

In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

If we forget this, then we will falsely believe that we can preserve what we have inherited while watching institutions crumble and accepting or even delighting in vice — as though being on the Right Side excuses every other shortcoming. What does it profit a conservative to win an election but lose his soul — and along with it his inheritance?

Some people will read the above and think that my point is that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump. That is not my point. I am arguing that any vote for any candidate in any election (a) should be made with an eye towards preserving one’s inheritance and (b) should be one element in a larger pattern of thought and action that keeps questions of governance in their proper and limited place. I did not vote for Donald Trump and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would do so, but I believe I could come up with a dispositionally-conservative defense of voting for Trump. It would not be a defense that I believe in but rather one that I regard as rational. (I say I could make such a case, not that I will.)

What I’ve done in this post is simply to outline what I think the conservative disposition is and what its key points of focus should be. In future posts I will write about some particular elements of our inheritance and what might be done to conserve them. For instance:

November 25, 2024

Michael Clune:

While academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power. 

I’m not sure it’s an abuse of power as such, because no one takes us seriously when we do crap like that, but it’s an abuse of our vocation; it’s a refusal of our professional responsibilities. And it’s childish. 

November 22, 2024

two quotations: Kingsnorth v. Peterson

Rowan Williams on Jordan Peterson’s new book:

“Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.”

Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.

Paul Kingsnorth:

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction – ‘do not resist evil’ – is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

November 22, 2024

open up!

The best running joke in The Innocents Abroad involves European tour guides. Whenever a guide shows the American visitors some representation of a great and famous European, the Innocents look thoughtfully at it and say, “Is — ah — is he dead?”

“Ah, look, genteelmen! — beautiful, grand, — bust Christopher Colombo! — beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!”

The doctor put up his eye-glass — procured for such occasions: “Ah — what did you say this gentleman’s name was?”

“Christopher Colombo! — ze great Christopher Colombo!”

“Christopher Colombo — the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?”

“Discover America! — discover America, Oh, ze devil!”

“Discover America. No — that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo — pleasant name — is — is he dead?”

I’ve developed my own version of this response when reading some of our current celebrants of re-enchantment. Paul Kingsnorth, for instance, wrote a long series on his Substack about the holy wells of Ireland. Centuries of pilgrims visiting them; thin places; spiritual auras. To which I say: “Yes — very nice — but is, ah, is Jesus Lord?” Because if He isn’t then I don’t give a rat’s ass about holy wells. Even if you tell me about angelic and/or demonic forces at loose in the world, I say: “Wow! Amazing! But, uh, is … is Jesus Lord?”

I understand the thinking behind this approach: it concerns what the great sociologist of religion Peter Berger called plausibility structures. The idea is that if people are open to the possibility of something beyond the strictly material, they will eventually become more receptive to the Christian gospel. And by calling attention to phenomena inexplicable by current science, maybe you shift the Overton Window for religious belief. From this point of view it’s a very good thing that, as Matt Crawford says, “America is ready for weirdness.” Weirdness as a gateway drug to Christianity.

In one very general sense I’m in this camp. I too have long wanted to make Christianity a live possibility for people who do not believe. But I have taken a very different approach. Instead of commending spiritual experience I have tried to make the core beliefs of Christianity comprehensible to a world for which such beliefs are strange to the point of outrageousness. Thus my book on the idea of original sin. Thus my work to explain and illuminate the works of Christian writers and thinkers who flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Even my recent essay in Harper’s on myth and myth-making is an exercise in the same vein, though two or three steps back from Christian faith as such. (However … for those with ears to hear, you know.) And so on.

There are, I think, three major problems with the “openness to spiritual experience” route.

  1. The “science can’t explain this” trope is highly vulnerable for reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer (famously) pointed out long ago: “How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”
  2. It seems to me highly unlikely that anyone will readily move from “spiritual experience” to “Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” As C. S. Lewis, writing around the same time as Bonhoeffer, said about the then-common idea that there is a cosmic “Life-Force” beneficently guiding the affairs of this world, “All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?” Wouldn’t you prefer the cost-free frisson of “spiritual experience” to Paul’s experience of being “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20)? I know I would.
  3. As Ross Douthat wrote last year, “If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.” Or, as another wise man said, “Are you frightened? Not nearly frightened enough. I know what hunts you.”

But back to Paul Kingsnorth. Recently he gave the Erasmus Lecture in New York City, and if you listen to that talk (it starts around the 28-minute mark) you’ll be quite clear about whether he thinks Jesus is Lord. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

November 18, 2024

Weil and antisemitism

Madoc Cairns on a new book on Simone Weil:

Wallace’s subjects attempt to frame Weil’s antisemitism as an exception: a lacuna in her universal empathy, to be explained rather than understood; a psychological quirk, cultural inertia; a darkness (Gordon posits) impervious to interpretation. Wallace echoes one modern apologia: Weil lacked exposure to scholarly peers, who, sharing her concerns, reached different conclusions. But the same could be said of Weil’s eccentric reading of the classics: within her “Greek tradition”, Plato was crowned the “father of occidental mysticism”; Aristotle, by contrast, found no place at all. So too her account of medieval Languedoc as a fusion of ancient Egypt, the Athenian Golden Age and a repristinate – if suspiciously Weilian – Christianity of pacific, cultured humanism. So too the work these misreadings inspired. To excuse her errors is to excise her insights. Dismiss Weil’s idiosyncrasies and you dismiss Weil.

Recognize them, though, and Weil becomes unrecognizable. One exemplum: her disaffection with the Church and her attacks on Judaism are hard to disentwine. Her interpretation of Christianity was one systematically expurgated of Jewish influence. Athens displaced Jerusalem, with the Gospels reread as the “last and most marvellous account of Greek genius”, and Dionysus and Osiris recast as “in a certain sense, Christ Himself”. In Weil’s schema, radically Hellenistic and radically universalizing, non-Christian spiritualities have a place. Judaism – an exclusive revelation, for a people apart – has none.

Here’s what I said in The Year of Our Lord 1943 about Weil’s Judenhass:

The greatest blot on Weil’s thought and character is her extreme antisemitism. Many of her statements about Jews are indistinguishable from the utterances of Hitler. Of the history of Israel, Weil wrote that “from Abraham onwards,” and only “excepting some of the prophets,” “everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!” Even the courageous resistance of the Jews to Roman tyranny is, bizarrely, portrayed by her as a vice: “The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile.” Her comment on the idea that the Jews are the Chosen People of God: “A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.”

Weil’s hatred of Judaism centered on the idea of the Chosen People — which is to say, it bears a close kinship to her repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church’s practices of exclusion.

By “practices of exclusion” I mean Baptism — those baptized are “inside,” others “outside” — and limitations on the reception of Holy Communion. Weil hated every such distinction with a furious hatred. It’s hard to say whether Weil’s antisemitism develops from her rejection of what she calls the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the Roman Catholic Church, or the other way around. She was a very strange person and it is often impossible to discover the roots of her various absolutisms.

November 17, 2024

Shield the Joyous

Chad Holley is a dear friend of mine, but I wouldn’t say this if it weren’t true: his new novel Shield the Joyous is a beautiful and moving book. It’s most obviously a book about boyhood — boyhood in the American Deep South at a certain moment in history, yes, but more accurately boyhood — and yet I find it even more meaningful as a meditation on memory, memory as in some ways a burden, in other ways a comfort, and always a kind of gift to those remembered. 

There are other things I could say, but the story has a unique mood and tone, one to dwell in and with, and I think it’s best simply to ask readers to pay this world a visit. It will amply repay your investment of time and attention, and it will remain with you long after you set the book down. 

November 15, 2024

excerpt from my Sent folder: unions

From an email to a British friend

One more contributor to Trump’s win that hasn’t been sufficiently acknowledged: it’s one of the consequences of the collapse of labor unions. My father (Teamsters) and my paternal grandfather (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen) were both union men. Back in the day, almost every union man in America was a Democrat, because the GOP was the party of Big Business. That is also why the GOP was, it seemed permanently, a minority party. 

But when industrial production started moving overseas and the unions got weaker, their leaders tried to play a weakened hand as though it were still a strong hand. (This of course happened in your country as well. I started to write “R.I.P. Arthur Scargill” but did a quick check and he’s still alive!) It was no longer necessary for the Dems to please the unions, and the party soon left them behind — and the people who belonged to them, and the people who never joined unions but did the same kinds of work — and pursued the more interesting clientele of student activists and their professors. 

Meanwhile the GOP continued to be the GOP, so there was no party left to advocate for blue-collar workers. There were of course isolated figures who upheld the old commitments, most notably Bernie Sanders; but Bernie was from the Northeast and therefore an alien to most of the nation’s workers, for whom “socialism” is a dirty word anyway.   

Then Donald Trump came along and said to the workers “I’ll be your defender.” Few politicians could be a less plausible fit for that role, or less likely to keep promises … but he was the only one to show up. It was a classic businessman’s move: He saw a large and wholly untapped market and he moved into it. And here we are. 

I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it. 

November 8, 2024

on linkage and editorials

Interrupting my hiatus for a quick thought: 

Return with me, children, to the days before the recent election. Jason Kottke and John Gruber really liked this brief NYT editorial. And “really liked” is an understatement. Kottke: “Each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! [Effing]! Receipts!” 

Well … it depends on what you mean by “receipts.” The point of the links is not to say “Here’s proof that Trump lies” but rather “Here’s proof that we have been saying that Trump lies.” As Nick Heer rightly points out, each one of these links is to previous pieces, largely (in fact if not always in name) opinion pieces, in the Times itself — and the Times is notoriously reluctant to link outside its domain. I think of this particular editorial simply as a pushback to those critics on the left who think the Times hasn’t been tough enough on Trump. It’s not really an attack on Trump, it’s a self-defense move: Don’t blame us, we endorsed Kodos.

What Kottke and Gruber think a powerful piece of rhetoric I think of as a sign of exhaustion. When I was a teenager and my father got exasperated with me, which happened quite often, he would screw up his eyes and swing his head back and forth and chant “I have told you and told you and told you and told you…” That would go on for quite some time. I was afraid enough of his occasional violence that it usually took me a while to realize that he had gotten into told-you double digits — at which point it finally got funny, because he was working off steam and was therefore unlikely to hit me. 

That’s what the Times editorial sounds like to me. “We have told you and told you and told you and told you….” I.e.: What good would it possibly do us for to say it all again? If you’re a person who takes your opinions from the Editorial Board of the Times, or finds your home-grown opinions faithfully mirrored there, you may well find that editorial powerful. I found it comical. 

But something that Gruber says in his post about hypertext is great, and vividly expresses why I love the kind of writing I’m doing right now. That editorial, he says, 

brought to mind how social media has largely kneecapped true hypertextual writing by not enabling it. You can, of course, add links to web pages in social media posts on any of the various basically-the-same-concept-as-Twitter platforms like X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon, but you do so by pasting raw URLs into posts. (Instagram, by far the world’s most popular such social network, doesn’t even let you paste hyperlinked URLs into the text of posts.) The only links that work like web links, where readers can just tap them and “go there” are @username mentions. On social media you write in plain un-styled text and just paste URLs after you describe them. It’s more like texting in public than writing for the real web. A few years ago these social networks (and private messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp) started turning URLs into “preview cards”, which is much nicer than looking at an ugly raw URLs. But it’s not the web. It’s not writing — or reading — with the power of hyperlinks as an information-density multiplier. If anything, turning links into preview cards significantly decreases information density. That feels like a regression, not progress. 

This is exactly right. Hyperlinks are so great because they allow people who want simply to read a story or an argument to do so unhindered by apparatus — but they also allow people who want to fact-check, or seek further information, to do so. As Gruber says, they provide “information density,” but in the least obtrusive way. You get to experience someone’s writing and then return for a deeper dive. That’s brilliant, and that’s perhaps the chief reason why, if all things were equal, I’d write only for the web. 

All things are not equal, however. Maybe a subject for a later post. 

November 1, 2024

what’s up

The Finnish comedian Ismo has a nice routine in which he describes how hard it is to learn the nuances of spoken English. The best-known part of the routine (justifiably!) is when he explains why he thinks the most complicated word in English is “ass.” But I also like his comment that it took him a long time to learn that the proper response to the phrase “What’s up?” … is the phrase “What’s up”?

I thought about that when I took a look at an essay many people have recently recommended: this one by Nathan Pinkoski. The first sentence of the essay is: “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed.” And my first thought at reading that first sentence was: Has it? Has it really? Because, you know, a whole lot of what I see around me looks a great deal like what I saw around me in the twentieth century. I mean, many things have definitely changed — there’s a lot more internet, for instance. But we have the same banking system, the same car manufacturers, the same hostilities in the Middle East, the same attempts to “dismantle the canon” in university English departments, the same tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the same dumb artistic provocateurs making the same dumb provocations. We’re voting the same way we voted in the twentieth century, except that more of us get to vote early. We’re less religious then we were fifty years ago, but more religious than at other times in our history, and in any case there doesn’t yet seem to be a obvious correlation between irreligion and civilizational collapse. 

But that’s just in America. What about elsewhere? Well, immigration has altered European civilization, but “collapse” seems even there to be a strong word. China and India are richer and more powerful than they were in the twentieth century; China in particular may be headed for trouble, but “collapse”? 

I could go on, but you get the point. 

Who didn’t get the point was me, who for a moment took Pinkoski’s statement as a declaration of fact. My bad! It was actually a liturgical greeting, as when we Anglicans exchange the Peace in the middle of the Eucharistic rite. Technically we should (I think) be saying (1) “The peace of the Lord be always with you” followed by (2) “And also with you.” But usually we say (1) “The peace of the Lord” and (2) “The peace of the Lord.”

Similarly, people who (like me) grew up as University of Alabama football fans know how to greet each other: Salutation: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.” Response: “Howyadoin, Roll Tide.”

Initially, I took Pinkoski’s first sentence as a statement of fact when in fact it was a tribal salutation, the proper response to which is the same phrase: (1) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?” (2) “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed, what’s up?”

But I’m not a member of that tribe, so I didn’t say the phrase. Nor did I read any further. The essay clearly wasn’t meant for me, and it was kind of Pinkoski to begin with the tribal salutation that informed me of that. 

November 1, 2024

just asking questions

Jessa Crispin:

Is it important to read Faulkner? Probably not, but I think you should do it anyway. (I don’t like Faulkner, just fyi.) Because it’s good to do difficult things. Because hating something can be as interesting, sometimes more, as loving something. Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not, but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me. And developing the parts of myself that are unproductive, ugly, and a drain on resources is a beautiful act of rebellion.

But — and I think Crispin would agree with this — we should be clear that the value of rebellious self-development is not a reason to read Faulkner. That’s a reason to “do difficult things,” or perform “a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog.” There are ten thousand ways to achieve that other than reading Faulkner — other than reading literature — other than reading.

Crispin’s post confuses several different things, I believe. In the passage I’ve quoted she asks whether it’s important to read Faulkner; but the prompt for the post is a controversy about whether a white teacher should have read aloud to his class a passage from a Faulkner story that uses the n-word. If you read the report in the NYT, you’ll see that the black student who complained to the teacher did not argue that her teacher shouldn’t have assigned the story. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them. I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” (The professor replied that he didn’t get the difference between reading the word and hearing a white person say it aloud, which strikes me as … obtuse.) 

If you look at the entire context for this debate, you might ask the following questions: 

  • Should white professors avoid uttering racial slurs in class, even when they’re quoting someone else?
  • Should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs?
  • In what kinds of classes should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs? For instance, might it be something to avoid in compulsory general-education courses, but permissible in courses for a major, or pure electives? 
  • Does it matter whether the writer who employs the racial slur is a member, or not, of the group insulted by the word? That is, should we evaluate the use of the n-word by Faulkner differently than we evaluate its use by James Baldwin or Richard Wright? 
  • Is the racist language employed by characters in Faulkner’s fiction one of the reasons to read his fiction — because he is the faithful portrayer of a particular social world — or are we reading him for other reasons, the power of his prose for instance, or his grasp of the tragic character of human life? 
  • How important is it for professors to assign Faulkner, and in what kinds of courses? 
  • If Faulkner should be assigned in at least some courses, which students really need to read him? 
  • If you’re not a university student but want to be well-read, is Faulkner an important writer to encounter?
  • Is Faulkner worth reading?

You will, I trust, notice that each of those questions leads to further questions, but we need to figure out which one is our starting point, because the issues involved in these various cases can be radically different. So many of our arguments are fruitless because we’re not clear on what we’re arguing about. 

October 30, 2024

the Mathom-house

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort. 

— J. R. R. Tolkien, “Concerning Hobbits” 

When I see something online that I think I might want to read, I send it to Instapaper. As I have commented before, if I wait a few days before checking my Instapaper queue, I typically find that at least 75% of the articles I have saved are no longer of interest to me, so I delete them. That has happened to me so often that I have incorporated it into my intellectual method. But usually a few of the things I’ve saved seem worth reading. 

Sometimes when I’m reading them I’ll see something that I know I want to write about — I may even know precisely what I should say about it. In such cases the relevant passage goes straight into a text file and I begin drafting, or anyway sketching out, a post or an essay. 

But often I read something, find it possibly intriguing, but don’t know quite how to respond. In that case it becomes for me a mathom: I have no immediate use for it, but I am unwilling to throw it away. I have always been uncertain what to do about such textual mathoms, and have tried several different strategies over the years, none of which have really worked for me, for reasons too tiresome to explain. 

The best answer has always been available to me: post the passages to this blog, and tag them accordingly so they can more easily be found later and linked to related writings. Now, that practice inevitably creates misunderstandings, because most people online think that if you post something you obviously agree with it, unless you explicitly attack it. Before the day is out I’ll get emails from people shocked, shocked, that I posted something related to Renaud Camus without denouncing him. But spending a few minutes a day deleting angry emails is a relatively small price to pay for having a better way to sift and reflect on what I read. 

So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it. 

October 30, 2024

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to read Terry Pratchett, without success or a great deal of enjoyment. But that may be a result of my starting with the early novels, when he was still learning the craft. In any case, he has now clicked for me in a way that promises much pleasure in the future, so hooray for that. And I find this 2017 post from Adam Roberts enormously helpful in getting a handle on Pratchett’s distinctive value as a writer:

I didn’t know Pratchett personally, although I did meet him a few times at publishers’ dos, bookshop events and the like; and once I was on a BBC Radio 2 bookish roundtable with Simon Mayo, China Miéville and him. And I know people who did know him, with varying degrees of intimacy. When they talk about him they do so with love, and loyalty to his memory; but one thing that comes up is how unlike the cuddly humorous old granddad popular-culture version of him he was in life. He was, I have heard more than one person say, capable of real and focused anger. Injustice and unfairness made him angry. There are many things to say about his novels (and to be clear, before I go any further, I should say I consider him clearly one of the most significant anglophone writers of his generation) but the two things that stand-out for me most are: his extraordinary command of comic prose, a very difficult idiom to master and doubly difficult to maintain at length; and the repeated and unmissable ethical dimension to his writing. He was a moral writer above all, arguably even before he was a comic one, and certainly (I think) before he was a worldbuilder, or a creator of character, or a popular metaphysician about gods or existence or death or anything like that; important though all those elements were to his writing. Nor can his moral purpose, and his anger, be separated out.

October 30, 2024

Harrington on Camus

Mary Harrington’s three essays on Renaud Camus and the implications of his work are fascinating.  

One: “In what follows, the first of a three-part series, I’ll argue with Camus that replacism is not a conspiracy. And yet, polemic aside, it addresses something real: a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.” 

Two: “I’ll set Camus’ reading of [Frederick Winslow] Taylor against my own of Martin Heidegger’s classic 1954 lecture on technology, looking in particular at the epistemological violence Taylorism both enacts and occludes: a kind of unseeing, that I’ll connect with Camus’ own coinage: ‘nocence’. I’ll discuss how this manifests in our built environment, and in the wider sociocultural implications of what I’ve called ‘the nomos of the airport’. And with these references in place, I’ll explain how Camus’ work deepens my own inquiry into the the industrialisation of humans: what we might call the replacism of the body.” 

Three: “I’ll link this framework more closely to my own ongoing enquiry into the relation between women, family, and the technological mindset. I’ll draw on Ivan Illich to show how the replacist anthropology is inextricable from the history of modern family relations, how this order is a core precondition for modern market society, and how this culminates in an increasingly literal technologisation first of women’s bodies and finally of ‘human’ bodies whose sex has come to be understood as an optional bolt-on.” 

Her concept of “globo homo economicus” dovetails nicely with her powerful analysis elsewhere of “Meat Lego Gnosticism.” 

October 30, 2024

In (Partial) Defence of Jeff Bezos – by Ian Leslie:

In the early twentieth century, as information became more valuable, newspapers put more emphasis on being accurate reporters of reality. Journalism developed into a profession with a commitment to the truth regardless of political interests. These two roles, advocacy and objectivity, have co-existed somewhat uncomfortably ever since; embodied, in the US, by the separation of opinion and editorial departments.

But in the twenty-first century, the world is overflowing with opinion and activism, and desperately short on fair, objective reporting. Newspapers should still host individual opinion columns, which help people think about the news, but their most important and valuable function is to bring the news. The idea that they should endorse political candidates or positions as institutions makes as much sense as it does for universities. It’s not just that doing so is superfluous; it’s that, as Bezos says, it actually undermines journalism at a time when the profession is in crisis.

October 30, 2024

essaying architecture

Elisa Gabbert, “The Essay as Realm”:

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? When an essay starts to get a bit ungainly, I often think about the Winchester Mystery House, which, it won’t surprise you to hear, I read about in that book from my grandmother. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns. On the advice of a medium, she attempted to appease them by building them a house. The house is full of peculiar, seemingly useless features like one-inch-deep closets, stairs leading up to the ceiling, doors on exterior walls of upper stories that open onto nothing. It was under continuous construction until she died.

As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” The sub-realms in an essay needn’t actually be named — though they can be, as in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, with its many little titles, for each sub-realm and sub-sub-realm: “The Fear of being Touched.” “The Open and the Closed Crowd.” “Invisible Crowds.” “Slowness, or the Remoteness of the Goal.” But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying. 

This is beautiful. I love essays about essays, especially when they’re this imaginative. I’ve written a few myself, including this one. 

October 28, 2024

Court and Spark, half a century on

Joni Mitchell’s album Court and Spark begins with its title song. Give it a listen, and then maybe take a look at the sheet music. Some things to notice, mentioned by the guy who made the transcription: 

Points of interest include the 3 against 4 rhythms between the hands, the parallel (not relative) major/minor tonalities of E and E minor (by now a familiar feature of Joni’s composing, as well as Paul McCartney’s incidentally) and the frequent use of suspended “chords of inquiry,” as she called them.

“Chords of inquiry” is Joni’s term for sus chords — which “suspend” (i.e., don’t play) the third of a triad and instead go down to play the second or go up to play the fourth. When you remove that third the chord itself also becomes as it were suspended between major and minor. It is ambivalent; it moves us to inquiry into its character. 

“Court and Spark” is a piano song, but Joni was in her younger days an exceptional guitarist and used many alternate tunings to help her find and play more elegantly those chords of inquiry. You can hear a classic example of how she liked to play guitar here — a live recording made in a café in Ottawa in 1968 by a Joni fanboy. The recording was lost for half-a-century and only saved at all because that fanboy was … Jimi Hendrix. (By the way, here’s the guitar tablature for that song. Look at all those sus chords! And in a “Joni tuning,” with four strings tuned to D!) 

Back to the description of “Court and Spark”: the piano part’s three-against-four is noteworthy, but also you should listen for the big change in the rhythm (though not strictly speaking the tempo) at 1:14. And I haven’t even mentioned the singing: her endlessly flexible and imaginative timing, her trademark sliding up to target notes, etc. Or the distinctive elegance of the lyric.

So there’s a lot going on in this song, in pretty much all the ways that a song can have things going on. It’s haunting, meditative, reflective, full of musical inquiry — and this is how Joni Mitchell decided to start her album, which … 

… went to Number Two on the Billboard chart, and finished as the thirteenth-best-selling album of 1974. 

The big record labels today mastermind every step of a record’s making: they bring in songwriters and song consultants to write, edit, tweak, and doctor songs — Beyonce’s Lemonade famously had so many that no one seems to know the exact number (some say 60, some say 72). Then you get multiple producers and engineers, and arrangers who think only of whether songs can cross the 30-second mark on Spotify so people will get paid. The great majority of songs use four chords, the Axis of Awesome progression or one closely related. 

But fifty years ago an eccentric Canadian singer-songwriter, armed only with her own unique voice and musical imagination, wrote and sang — and produced! She’s the one who roped in the extraordinary musicians that play on Court and Spark — an album of songs that went almost to the top of the charts then and still sounds brilliant today. There’s a lesson here for those with ears to hear. 

UPDATE: From a 2004 profile of Joni: 

“I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That’s why I spend my time now painting.” 

October 28, 2024

articulation

To call a person “articulate” is to say something rather complex. One element of articulateness is the quick and easy summoning of words — but if the words summoned are not appropriate, we don’t call the person articulate but rather a chatterer, a windbag, a babbler. We call what comes out of their mouth “word salad.” Appropriate words are precise and also information-rich. The articulate person is able to speak fluently but also to the point. 

I say all this by way of noting something curious: The current Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are surely the least articulate Presidential candidates in American history — the least able to speak in reliably coherent complete sentences, the least likely to summon relevant information in discussing a topic, and most prone to extended and expansive servings of word salad. 

During the 2020 Presidential campaign a meme arose comparing Biden and Trump to Kennedy and Nixon debating in 1960, and sure enough, if you listen to the 1960 debates it’s astonishing how … well, articulate both men are. They navigate their way smoothly from subject to verb to object in every sentence; they have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. The only Presidential candidate of this century who wouldn’t sound foolish in their company is Barack Obama. 

Sixty years ago, and throughout previous American history before that, a certain level or articulateness was thought essential to Presidential leadership. Not everyone had it in the same degree, or was articulate in the same way — Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, for instance, both used biblical cadences, but Lincoln was straightforward and measured (in his high-pitched voice) while Bryan was an orotund thunderer. Calvin Coolidge was notoriously laconic, but terseness can be a form of articulateness also; his style of speech was essential to his self-presentation. Only someone like Eisenhower, whose appeal to the American people was grounded in something wholly other than his command of language, could get away with being a poor speaker. 

The one great exception to this rule, at least if H. L. Mencken is to be trusted, was Warren G. Harding. The “G.” stands, remarkably enough, for Gamaliel, and Mencken insisted that Harding spoke in an idiolect best called Gamalielese. 

I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. 

Such linguistic incompetence was noteworthy at the time; now it’s the norm. We may only choose between pish and posh, between flap and doodle, between balder and weave. 

The question is: How did we get here? How did we get to the point at which our Presidential candidates are actually less articulate than the average person? How did we manage to create a Presidential campaign season which resembles nothing so much as a pack of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights? 

I dunno. But I have one theory: To speak articulately, in an age in which one’s every utterance is recorded and analyzed, is to court refutation and correction. Perhaps this is evolutionarily adaptive behavior for politicians: nobody can call you out if you just hang the tattered washing on the line. 

Or maybe we’ve just ceased to care about anything being done well. So let’s enjoy the word salad while we can. Because we’re about three elections away from Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Though, come of think of it, President of America Camacho is pretty articulate, in his own distinctive way. 

October 23, 2024

juxtaposition

Yesterday I began my Great Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries class by asking my students to turn to the last chapter of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Our discussion was mostly complete, but there was one more thing I wanted to cover. I pointed out that Austen seems less interested here at her novel’s conclusion in resolving her love story than in pressing us to reflect on what is, after all, the book’s great theme, and one common in Austen’s fiction: the education of young women.

We see “poor Sir Thomas” reflecting at length, and with great chagrin, on the failures of “his plan of education” for his daughters Maria and Julia. His “mismanagement” had two aspects. On the one hand, he had never effectively countered the constant “flattery” and “indulgence” of the girls by their aunt Mrs. Norris. But more important:

Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

The key word here is “disposition,” because Austen, in her Christian-Aristotelian way, thinks of virtue as a settled disposition to moral excellence. And while Maria and Julia might have been taught to refrain from certain grossly sinful deeds, they were never taught to love and desire the good — especially what is good in and for others — or to seek the excellent even when the impulses of the moment might lead one in a different direction.

In Austen’s work, this failure of disposition is not just a problem for young women: here in Mansfield Park, for instance, Henry Crawford loses his chance to marry Fanny Price because when he re-encounters Maria Bertram, with whom he had once flirted, “Curiosity and vanity were both engaged, and the temptation of immediate pleasure was too strong for a mind unused to make any sacrifice to right.” But young women in this society are more vulnerable than young men in many ways, and their shortcomings less readily (or never) forgiven, so it is their situation that Austen particularly attends to. She wants to show that if girls are merely taught to be charming and decorative and to avoid obvious sin, their minds and hearts alike will remain unformed, and they will never become all that they ought to be. They will become indolent and thoughtless like Lady Bertram, or sniping and manipulative like Mrs. Norris; they may well marry unwisely, like Fanny’s mother.

There are, Austen suggests, so many ways that the education of young women can go wrong, and so few that it can go right. But any genuine Christian morality, she indicates here and elsewhere, will consist in training in virtue. And this is not simply the avoidance of vice, but the cultivation of a steady inclination for the good, the true, and the beautiful. (It’s noteworthy that Fanny is profoundly formed by her knowledge and love of poetry, especially the poetry of William Cowper.) One must learn to steer wisely between extremes, finding the path of virtue that lies between two opposing ways of vice. On this account, the Christian life is a life of moral virtue. We are occasionally reminded that Fanny is a young woman of faith who brings her religion “into daily practice,” and that her beloved, her cousin Edmund, is about to become a country vicar who hopes to teach his people virtue by both precept and example.

“It’s all very beautiful,” I said, setting the book down and picking up the next one we were to discuss: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. “But what happens when the God you serve and follow orders you to kill your own son?”

October 22, 2024

a complaint about complaining

I am of course an Arsenal supporter, but I don’t like what the club is turning into: a whining machine. Mikel Arteta’s ceaseless complaints about unfair treatment — which sound exactly the same when he has a strong case and when he doesn’t have a leg to stand on — have now become the default position for the players and for the fanbase. The result has been twofold.

First, it has tended to make what had been a dynamic and exciting young side extremely unlikeable. Nobody likes whiners, and Arsenal never stop whining. I love Arsenal with a kind of helpless love, but I don’t like this side. They’ve become obnoxious.

Second, the moaning about unfair treatment has deflected the players’ attention from their own behavior. By making it a habit to blame everybody except themselves, they have lost the discipline and focus needed to succeed against top competition. William Saliba is a great defender, but his brain-dead red card against Bournemouth not only cost his team that match but may well be catastrophic for the upcoming test against Liverpool. And I truly believe that he would not have had that lapse in concentration if his manager (over the past few weeks especially) had spent less time complaining and more time teaching accountability.

You could scarcely have a more obvious red-card offense than Saliba’s against Bournemouth, but of course a large chunk of the fanbase is baying for the ref’s blood. As I say, the moaning and whining have become habitual now, a matter of reflex. Arteta has finally woken up enough to say that these red cards — three in eight matches! — need to be “eradicated,” but will he be able to change his own habits of finger-pointing? After all, Arsenal have been plagued with red cards since Arteta took over — five more than any other Premier League side in that period — and he seems not to have asked himself any hard questions. Now his strategy for dealing with the constant indiscipline is to ignore it and hope it will go away.

Time will tell, and the season is still young, but the Premier League is an unforgiving one, and it seems to me highly unlikely that Arsenal can overcome both Man City and Liverpool. The title may already have slipped from Arsenal’s grasp, and if so, it’s not the refs’ fault. It’s Arsenal’s fault, and primarily Mikel Arteta’s.

UPDATE: More evidence for my thesis. 

October 21, 2024

trustfulness

I know some people who teach at Columbia University, and I’ve been worried about them. Reading the reports of student unrest there, and especially of the surge in antisemitism, I’ve wondered how they have been holding up in what must surely be impossible conditions for teaching. Feeling guilty for my neglect, I decided I needed to check in. 

Turns out they’re doing just fine. Yes, they have to show their ID cards to be admitted to what had previously been an open campus, but that simply revealed just how many of the protestors last spring had no connection to Columbia. On the first day of classes a protest was held just outside the gates, and the local TV stations — thinking like old-time movie directors on severely constrained budgets — placed their cameras to make the crowd look enormous. But one of the professors I know happened to be arriving on campus at that time and paused to count them: forty-two people. And after an hour or so they all wandered away. 

This fall there have been rallies on campus — pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — but it appears that those have been both brief and relatively uneventful. Yes, there are a handful of extremely noisy and aggressive student protestors, but one professor tells me that a number of students who got involved in the protests last spring are now feeling embarrassed about the whole business and glad to be able to return their focus to their classes. Indeed, for some, and maybe for a great many, classrooms where serious ideas can be explored and discussed provide a welcome refuge from overheated political tribalism. 

Reading such reports, I started laughing — ruefully — at my naïveté. I realized that, though I know perfectly well the almost inevitable over-dramatization of events by journalists desperately for eyeballs and clicks, I had somehow suspended my usual skepticism in this case — maybe because it’s New York City, which on other grounds is typically described as a city in crisis. I was, I realized, imagining professors navigating the life-threatening horrors of the subway only to arrive at the second hellscape of Morningside Heights, where police in riot gear marched through clouds of tear gas to break up roving gangs of masked (and possibly armed) protestors. 

I slightly exaggerate. And I don’t mean to suggest that New York doesn’t have real and serious problems. But I’m reminded that several New Yorkers have complained to me that the whole subway system is frequently described as broken, when in fact the problems are largely confined to certain lines at certain times. Now, to be sure, they themselves may be downplaying the seriousness of the issue — people who have invested their lives in a place don’t often want to think the worst of it. But when you hear only reports from an industry principially devoted to alarmism, even a little civic boosterism can be a useful corrective, and a reminder not to be overly trusting in news reports. 

And in the case of Columbia University, I am grateful to have on-the-ground evidence that many students and faculty, while they know perfectly well that protests continue, manage without much difficulty to keep their focus on the studies that brought them to the university in the first place. Others may feel the effects of the protests more strongly, of course; but consider this as an account from actual insiders who have been watching and reading news reports with bemusement and annoyance. I was told, “Come and see for yourself!” 

To be sure, one correspondent reports that a fresh-vegetable stand has popped up just outside the gate where he typically enters the university. But, he says, he just walks boldly past the looming asparagus and mushrooming mushrooms. New Yorkers are made of stern stuff. 

October 17, 2024

true believers

David Brooks:

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

This is brilliant by Brooks, so read the whole thing. But than I would think so, wouldn’t I, because this converges with points I have been making for years. When the Repugnant Cultural Other becomes the Repugnant Religious Other — when the Other is a heretic out to destroy your very soul — then being “buried within the walls of your own catechism” is the Prime Directive. (“For the love of God, Montresor, don’t tear down this wall.”) 

Wow, that’s three allusions in, like, ten words. I should be on BookTok or something.

Anyway, this analysis helps to explain one of Brooks’s key points, which is that none of the priests who lead these two competing religions seem interested in making converts, only in dissing the other side.  As I wrote in another post, 

Recently I was reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, and while I venerate GSM just this side idolatry, I don’t think the book quite works as intended. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll say that its core argument is (a) that our culture is dominated by a set of fundamentalisms — “At the heart of any fundamentalism, as we define it, is a disdain for learning from evidence. Truth is already known, given, and clear” — and (b) that the fundamentalist mindset is incapable of persuasion, of bringing skeptics over to its side. 

All of which is true, but (and this is a major theme of my How to Think) what if people don’t want to persuade others? What if they don’t just hate their Repugnant Cultural Other but need him or her in order to define themselves and their Inner Ring? 

If I may cite myself one more time: Hatred alone is immortal. This is our problem in a nutshell. 

October 16, 2024

two roads diverged

A number of people I know and respect — including Phil Christman — think that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message is a very good one. I, on the other hand, believe it to be one of the worst books that I’ve read in years. Normally when I bounce off a book that hard I don’t finish it, but I kept hoping that it would correct itself. (I’ve seen Coates do that in the past.) I lost all hope when his primary reaction to a visit to Yad Vashem was to sneer at what he calls “the moral badge of the Holocaust,” but I was close enough to the end that I decided to keep going. I found Coates in this book to be intellectually and morally incurious and strangely self-absorbed — self-absorbed in ways that make for bad writing, as Parul Sehgal shows in this review.

Or at least I think she shows it. Presumably the people who like the book wouldn’t agree.

So what do you do when your response to a book is so different than that of other readers whom you admire and know to be thoughtful — especially when your own response is strongly negative? One strategy is to simply say de gustibus non disputandum est and go on with your life. Certainly that’s what I’m tempted to do in this case. I suspect, though, that I have failed in charity, which would not be good. I don’t want to let myself off the hook with the de gustibus line.

But: I really hated the book and find myself resenting the time that it cost me, time that I think I could better have spent in other ways. Revisiting it now would feel pointlessly self-punitive; plus, I doubt that I could read the book any more charitably while in this frame of mind.

So I will wait. I will just live with the uncertainty and the cognitive dissonance and in the meantime hope that, at some point down the line, I’ll be able to revisit the book in a cooler mood and see if it strikes me differently. There is of course a good chance that I’ll never get around to it; other challenges, other difficulties, the tyranny of the urgent always tend to crowd out such revisitation. But that’s life, you know? There are always things we want to think about, to pause and reflect on, but the flow of experience keeps moving. As Kierkegaard famously said:

It is quite true what philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.

I just wanted to dislike a book in peace, and now I have this existential dilemma facing me! Man, self-examination sucks.

October 10, 2024

Rorty’s bastard children

Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “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.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

UPDATE: This essay by Joshua Rothman — with the telling title “Do They Really Believe That Stuff?” — is a useful addendum to this post. 

October 8, 2024

AI Week!

Hey, AI Week at Baylor is coming! And to judge from that webpage, Baylor is the place to be if you want to feel really good about the giant AI companies. But if you want to think about

  • how those companies — especially now that OpenAI is abandoning its nonprofit status — follow in the footsteps of other recent Silicon Valley juggernauts in striving to make every human being on the planet utterly dependent on their services
  • the grossly unethical practice of harvesting and re-using, for profit, the words and sounds and images that human beings have labored their whole lives to make
  • the massive environmental damage that is sure to come from the ever-increasing demands for energy from the AI companies’ enormous server farms

— well, I don’t think those issues are being raised.

Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit — ecologically, ethically, and humanly. This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle. A Christian university ought to be saying so, or at the very least should be putting some challenging questions to our new AI overlords. We’re not going to achieve that utopian future without first confronting the largely dystopian present.

Also: I think instead of teaching our students how to use whatever Silicon Valley happens to be selling them we should be teaching them how to tend the digital commons. And the issues about attention and reading I’ve been talking about forever — see for instance this talk from a decade ago — are even more urgent now. But none of this is on Baylor’s radar, as far as I can tell.

October 4, 2024

Auden’s allusions and my errors

So I’ve done three Auden Critical Editions now, and each time I have experienced much joy in the labor … but also some frustration afterwards when discovering things I missed. It’s not surprising, of course! Auden was staggeringly widely-read and had an exceptionally adhesive mind: almost anything that entered into it was retained and later put to use. The sheer allusiveness is overwhelming. I can’t think of a better example than my recent post on Saturn and Mimas — only by pure accident did I discover the origin of a strange passage in The Age of Anxiety, one that could easily have remained inexplicable forever. And of course I didn’t discover it in time to put it in the book.  

There are many ways to be wrong, some of them more excusable than others. I missed another reference in The Age of Anxiety simply because I am not British, which worries me, because there’s nothing I can do about being a non-Brit. 

But I’m furious with myself that I missed the reference to Pausanias in “Winds” — the first of the “Bucolics,” the sequence with which The Shield of Achilles begins — that Adam Roberts caught. And I’m annoyed that there’s no way to go back and insert it!  

And here’s another one from that same volume, just shared with me by my friend Tim Larsen. The long lyric “Ode to Gaea” concludes with this image: “That tideless bay where children / Play bishop on a golden shore.” As Tim reminded me — I perhaps should say told me, because the story is so vague in my mind that I barely remember the outlines — this is a reference to a famous event in the early life of St. Athanasius: 

Once when Bishop Alexander was celebrating the day of Peter Martyr in Alexandria, he was waiting in a place by the sea after the ceremonies were over for his clergy to gather for a banquet.

There he saw from a distance some boys on the seashore playing a game in which, as they often do, they were mimicking a bishop and the things customarily done in church. Now when he had gazed intently for a while at the boys, he saw that they were performing some of the more secret and sacramental things. He was disturbed and immediately ordered the clergy to be called to him and showed them what he was watching from a distance. Then he commanded them to go and get all the boys and bring them to him.

When they arrived, he asked them what game they were playing and what they had done and how. At first they were afraid, as is usual at that age, and refused, but then they disclosed in due order what they had done, admitting that some catechumens had been baptized by them at the hand of Athanasius, who had played the part of bishop in their childish game. Then he carefully inquired of those who were said to have been baptized what they had been asked and what they had answered, and the same of him who had put the questions, and when he saw that everything was according to the manner of our religion, he conferred with a council of clerics and then ruled, so it is reported, that those on whom water had been poured after the questions had been asked and answered correctly need not repeat the baptism, but those things should be completed which are customarily done by priests.

As for Athanasius and those who had played the part of presbyters and ministers in the game, he called together their parents, and having put them under oath, handed them over to be reared for the church. 

So Rufinus of Aquileia in his church history. As Fred Sanders explains in this post, drawing on the work of Marcia Colish, this story would in the Middle Ages become the key text for some intense debates about what makes for a valid baptism. 

I just wish I had been able to put a note to this effect in my edition. Sigh. 

October 4, 2024

writing for money

A while back I wrote a post about my financial history as a writer, situations in which I have made money, situations in which I haven’t made money, etc. Phil Christman does his version of that post here, and adds a taxonomy of writers based largely (though not wholly) on the results they get from shakin’ their money-maker. It’s a great post and an example of why Phil’s work is worthy of your support.

At one point he writes: 

When I look at what I do on this newsletter, and then compare it to the amount of worthwhile writing that someone like Alan Jacobs or Adam Roberts gives away for free, I feel like I’m opting to be part of a decivilizing trend by charging people money for what is basically focused blogging.

I have some comments. 

First, there is no one like Adam Roberts. Not remotely. So I’m going to factor him out of this discussion, while strongly recommending his blog, for instance this terrific recent post. But you can support that blog financially if you want. 

The same is true for me, because I have a Buy Me a Coffee page. You can pay for what I write on this blog if you want, and God will surely bless you if you do, but you don’t have to. IIRC, I have suggested to Adam that he’d be a good candidate for Substack, but I don’t know why he hasn’t done it. 

As for me, I haven’t gone to Substack for three reasons: 

  1. I am an enthusiast and advocate for the open web — see that tag at the bottom of this post — and want to write here if I can possibly manage it. 
  2. By any reasonable standard I am well paid. I am a “Distinguished Professor” with an endowed chair, and while my salary wouldn’t go a long way in Cambridge MA or Brooklyn or Palo Alto, it goes pretty far in Waco, Texas. I can afford to make my online writing free. 
  3. What I do, in contrast to Phil’s work on his Substack, is unfocused blogging, and I would feel bad charging directly for it. 

So I’m sticking it out here on the open web. But Phil deserves to get paid for his writing, and it’s not “decivilizing” of him to say so. If the publishing industry were properly functioning Phil would be making a decent living from writing essays and reviews, the way Elizabeth Hardwick and Dwight Macdonald did back in the day. 

However, I will — when I get out of the Slough of Despond I am in — be changing how I write here. The big thing I have learned from emails I’ve received in response to this post is: Even people who really like my writing miss a lot of what I do here. Especially the series I write — like the one on the City of God, the one on Babylon, the one on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — get very few readers who track them from beginning to end. 

Now, I like writing the series, because they enable me to take my time in thinking through a topic. But if people aren’t reading them, what’s the point? So when I have time to write here again, I’m going to write fewer but longer posts — I won’t post something until I have achieved a complete arc of thought, or nearly so. 

So stay tuned. 

October 3, 2024

Saturn and Mimas

Adam Roberts’s recent post on images of Saturn gave me a flashback — a sudden return to a moment fifteen years ago when I was working on a critical edition of Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety. One passage especially puzzled me:

For athwart our thinking the threat looms,
Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn
Over modest Mimas.

Well, take a look at this painting by Chelsey Bonestell, titled “Saturn as Seen from Mimas”:

saturn

I think I have found my solution. Bonestell’s painting appeared in the May 29, 1944 issue of Life magazine; Auden began writing The Age of Anxiety a month or so later. Surely Bonestell’s painting remained fixed in his mind. I can’t imagine what else could account for so strange a passage.

October 2, 2024

administrivia

I haven’t been writing here much lately. I’ve been busy with teaching, of course, but that I’m used to. No, I have been absent from the blog because of an avalanche of administrivia — forms to fill out, mandatory Zoom meetings, online “trainings.” 

  • There are trainings about Title IX. 
  • There are trainings about racism. 
  • There are trainings about mental health and mental illness. 
  • I have to read and sign forms relating to students who need “accommodation” for various struggles. (As I have previously noted, about these matters my own knowledge is neither solicited nor welcomed.) 
  • I have to sit through a 90-minute Zoom meeting on how to book travel. 
  • “The purpose of this short class is to help all Baylor’s faculty and staff understand their rights, responsibilities, and necessary actions with both the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).” 
  • “This is your second reminder that your OAI Disclosure Profile is awaiting an update. You are required to complete this update to confirm that you have disclosed a complete and accurate list of your outside activities and interests as dictated by institutional policy. Follow the link included in this email to log in and complete a Disclosure Profile update.” 
  • “As part of the Business Transformation Initiative, Business Offices have been established within each division. To ensure continuous improvement in the services provided, feedback is needed from individuals who regularly interact with Financial Administrators and Financial Managers in their respective Business Offices.” 
  • “The Committee on Committees has identified appointments for the 2024-2025 academic year, and your appointments are listed below. Thank you for your willingness to serve on University Committees.” 
  • I must serve on a Working Group meant to articulate an approach to technology that’s consistent with Baylor’s new Strategic Plan. 

This is a partial list. Obligations of this kind increase every year, and the only general goal I can discern is the gradual transformation of an academic position into a bullshit job. But whatever the purpose, such tasks make writing in-term nearly impossible. 

September 27, 2024

parochialism

I’ve seen a great many essays of this kind over the decades. I’m no longer surprised by them — I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused — but we shouldn’t forget that the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing. Manvir Singh thinks Christianity is dead (murdered by “the natural sciences”) — someone should tell the world’s two billion Christians — and that suspicion of our moral self-justification began with Nietzsche — someone should tell St. Paul. But for Singh, ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Manvir Singh.” 

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