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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Author: ayjay (page 41 of 160)

February 25, 2019

Kathryn Tanner’s altar call

Consider this a follow-up to my recent posts on metaphysical capitalism and some stories about the commodification of emotion and connection — and also a kind of pendant to Derek Thompson’s story in the Atlantic on the religion of workism. This one’s gonna have some long quotations.

Here’s how Kathryn Tanner describes her task in her new book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism:

Whether amenable to capitalism at its start or not, my own Christian commitments as I hope to show are inimical to the demands of capitalism now. I am critical of the present spirit of capitalism because I believe my own, quite specific Christian commitments require it. But I also suggest over the course of the chapters to come that the present-day organization of capitalism is deserving of such criticism whatever one’s religious commitments, because of its untoward effects on persons and populations, its deforming effects on the way people understand themselves and their relations with others. Every way of organizing economic life is flawed. Besides having especially egregious faults (relative to other ways that capitalism has been organized, this one foments, for example, extreme income/wealth inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and regularly recurring boom/bust cycles in asset values), what is unusual about the present system is the way its spirit hampers recognition of those faults. The present-day spirit of capitalism needs to be undermined, therefore, in order for the current system to be problematized — seen as a problem amenable to solution, an object of possible criticism requiring redress. And in order for that to happen, in order for the spirit of present-day capitalism to be effectively undermined, it needs to be met, I suggest, by a counter-spirit of similar power. Without the need any longer of religious backing, capitalism may now have the power itself to shape people in its own image; its conduct-forming spirit may now be its own production, in other words. But as one of the few alternative outlooks on life with a capacity to shape life conduct to a comparable degree, religion might remain a critical force against it.

That bolded sentence is a reminder that, as I often say, “the liberal order catechizes,” and that it will catechize us right out of Christianity altogether if we don’t provide what I call a “counter-catechesis,” a radically different “conduct-forming spirit.” Tanner makes a very similar argument at length.

In so doing, she repeatedly reminds us that Christianity is, among other things, a counter-economics. Everyone knows how thoroughly economic language is woven into the fabric of the Christian story: we are bought with a price (agorazo); we are bought out of slavery (exagorazo). Though Tanner doesn’t do exegesis in her book, it’s clear that she wants her readers to understand how completely the biblical picture reorients, or ought to reorient, our self-understanding. In a capitalist order it becomes easy, even natural, to think of God as a metaphysical banker, keeping our moral accounts as thoroughly as the hidden gods of capitalism track our FICO scores. But if we can escape that tendency, if we can understand God as the one who has delivered us from bondage, then “rather than being tallied against one’s account, one can be assured one’s sins are forgiven, their burden erased, when casting them upon Christ’s mercy in confession. One can honestly admit faults without fear, assured of God’s mercy in Christ. It is not the lapse that threatens to separate one from Christ but the refusal to confess it, out of fear and a lack of trust in God’s graciousness.”

But if we cannot manage this reorientation of our understanding, then we can come to be terrified of the future and at the same time confined to an understanding of the future as a mere continuation of what now exists:

In order to profit from the difference between present and future, or at least to prevent it from doing any harm, one employs financial instruments that collapse the future present — that is, what the future will turn out to be — into the present future — that is, into the present view of the future…. By virtue of such a collapse of future into present, the future one anticipates loses its capacity to surprise; the future to come simply reduces to the future it makes sense to expect given present circumstances. Those circumstances themselves become a kind of self-enclosed world, as one learns to hope for nothing more from the future than what the given world’s present limits allow, what it is reasonable to expect from within them, assuming their continuance.

To live within these constraints — constraints which our capitalist order teaches us we must think about constantly if we are to be rational actors and responsible citizens — is to be deprived of both imagination and hope. What is required, for those of us so bound, is to be redeemed from this bondage, to be bought ought of slavery to it, and that requires conversion.

So I was delighted to find, at one important juncture in this book, this liberal Episcopalian giving her readers what amounts to an altar call. I’ll close with that call:

The present does not, however, become urgent here due to scarcity. One has everything one needs — more than one needs — to turn one’s life around: the grace provided in Christ. In marked contrast to the efficiency-inducing scarcities of finance-dominated capitalism, it is the very fulsomeness of the provisions for conversion that makes the present an urgent matter, an opportunity to be seized with alacrity and put to good use. There is no point in looking longingly to any past or future with the capacity to make things easier: the time is ripe for action right now and never has been or will be any better. Delaying a present decision to turn one’s life around, and neglecting to make the best of what is currently on offer out of a distracted sense of what was or might be, suggest one is simply never likely to turn one’s life around, no matter how many times one is offered the opportunity to do so in the future. Any such distraction from the present moment is always available as an excuse in the future, so as to produce thereby a never-ending deferral of decision. The present is urgent here not because the opportunities of the moment might be lost but because they are just so good, so perfectly suited to the predicament one is in and the needs one has, because of their not-to-be-passed-up character, so to speak. Instead of being here today and gone tomorrow, what allows one to turn one’s life around in the present — the grace of Christ — is permanently on offer. It has no fleeting character. What prompts one to seize it right away is not the fear of missed opportunity, then, but the immediate, overwhelming attractiveness of the offer…. No failings in the past or present can disrupt the efficacy of a grace designed specifically to save sinners…. There is thus no point in harping on the past or worrying about the future — the present is one’s only concern. Not because one cannot do anything about past mistakes or about an uncertain future — because neither is under one’s control — but because one can let go of the past without consequence — one’s sins are forgiven — and because the future will never be any more threatening than the present is. Contrary to the Stoic-inflected temporal sensibility of financial players, the present is no more under one’s control than the past was or the future will be: at every moment in time, one is enabled to turn oneself to God only by God’s grace and not by one’s own power.

Preach it, sister!

February 24, 2019

three stories to reflect on

Ross Douthat:

The sexual ethic on offer in our own era should make Catholics particularly skeptical. That ethic regards celibacy as unrealistic while offering porn and sex robots to ease frustrations created by its failure to pair men and women off. It pities Catholic priests as repressed and miserable (some are; in general they are not) even as its own cultural order seeds a vast social experiment in growing old alone. It disdains large families while it fails to reproduce itself. It treats any acknowledgment of male-female differences as reactionary while constructing an architecture of sexual identities whose complexities would daunt a medieval schoolman.

From the Economist, “An entrepreneur brings professional grieving to eastern Congo”:

Deborah Nzigere, a 65-year-old Congolese woman, is nervous when she sits down for her job interview. Her hands are clasped tightly together, her words are slow and deliberate; she is blinking too much. “What inspired you to pursue this career?” asks one of the two people on the interview panel. Her answer is garbled, she mentions money. When asked to give a demonstration, she giggles awkwardly and leaves the room. She comes back in crying.

“Bettina,” she howls and throws herself to the ground. “Bettina, Bettina, why did you leave us?” She thumps the floor with a flattened palm, her body convulses with sobs as she moans and wails. The interviewer’s eyes fill with tears. Mrs Nzigire has got the job.

Christopher Mims in the WSJ:

Through Papa, college-age young people can sign up to help seniors by going to the store, doing housework or just hanging out. For these “pals,” Papa works on the same gig-economy model as Uber or Postmates. Ten hours a week of Papa service is covered for members of Humana ’s Medicare Advantage insurance who are in a pilot program in and near Tampa.

Ms. Sumkin’s Papa pals take her on trips to the store since she can no longer drive, and they also help combat her loneliness. Ms. Sumkin says that, aside from occasional visits with her children and grandchildren, her only regular human contact is a bi-weekly stretching class and time with those insurer-provided friends. “They’re all very nice and, you know, I’ll converse with them and find out what they’re doing and studying and so forth,” she says. “It’s for me a very important service.”

February 23, 2019

stock and flow in newsletters

A few years ago my friend Robin Sloan wrote a post in which he applied the economic concept of “stock and flow” to our current media scene: “Flow is the feed,” he said: “It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.” But “Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” And:

Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons — but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Funny thing: I had completely forgotten that another friend, Austin Kleon, had been struck by the same post of Robin’s and wrote about it here. Austin’s post turned up when I was searching for Robin’s original one.

Anyway, it’s a powerful metaphor — because it’s more than a metaphor, really — and I think about it often, but lately I’ve been thinking about it in relation to email newsletters. Probably because I recently started one. It strikes me that there are two basic kinds of newsletter.

The first — and by far the most common — is a device for flow management. You know, the “cool stories I read this week” kind of thing. And those can be useful and illuminating! — I mean no disrespect at all — I subscribe to several such newsletters. But I want to make the other kind.

That other kind is an aid to stock replenishment. Interestingly enough, I think both Robin’s newsletter and Austin’s are of this type: they focus on matters of evergreen rather than topical interest. And that’s my aspiration too. I typically don’t want to link to whatever people have been talking about recently, not because I’m hostile to current events, but because many other newsletters already provide that. Basically, and to put the point in what might be an overly elevated way, I want to point my readers towards things that are true or good or beautiful. And surely we’re not oversupplied with any of those. (I also do “funny.” Or try to, sometimes.)

February 22, 2019

the fish in the fish store window

A writer was invited to teach a religion-and-literature course at a prestigious divinity school, but found himself rather in trouble with his students. One of the works he assigned was King Lear, and some students found it rife with “sexist language.” Another was Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and had he noticed that all of the characters were men? A third text was Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, and its intrinsic racism should have been obvious.

The school was Harvard Divinity School, the professor was Frederick Buechner, and the year was 1982. He describes the experience in his memoir Telling Secrets. It all happened thirty-seven years ago, if you weren’t counting: sometimes today’s kerfuffles were also the kerfuffles of yesteryear, which more of us would know if we had some temporal bandwidth. That could help us to get some context, and a grip.

You might take Buechner’s side on all this, or you might take his students’, but in either case the really interesting thing, to me, is how much more confident those students were about their political commitments than about anything that could even half-plausibly be described as “religious belief.” Thus this memorable passage:

Harvard Divinity school was proud, and justly so, of what it called its pluralism – feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians, all pursuing truth together – but the price that pluralism can cost was dramatized one day in a way I have never forgotten. I had been speaking as candidly and personally as I knew how about my own faith and how I have tried over the years to express it in language. At the same time I had been trying to get the class to respond in kind. For the most part none of them were responding at all but just sitting there taking it in without saying a word. Finally I had to tell them what I thought. I said they reminded me of a lot of dead fish lying on cracked ice in a fish store window with their round blank eyes. There I was, making a fool of myself spilling out to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes.

And then one of his students, an African, said: “The reason I do not say anything about what I believe, is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.” But no one was afraid that their political commitments would be shot down. Perhaps — and perhaps for that reason — there wasn’t anything “beneath the level of their various causes.”

I’ll leave you with Buechner’s reflection on this exchange: “At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.”

February 18, 2019

teaching the Gorgias

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching Plato’s Gorgias, and today I’ve been reviewing it. It strikes me, as it always does when I read this dialogue, that this is Socrates at his worst, and I find myself asking, as I always ask when I read this dialogue, whether Plato knew that.

Socrates’s chief opponent here, Callicles, is contemptible in his frank hedonism and lust for power, but he makes one point (482e) that I find compelling: He says that Socrates pretends to care about truth, but in fact only tries, through subtly shifting the terms of an argument, to manipulate people into admitting inconsistencies which he then pounces on. A little later on (485e) he calls this habit adolescent — and that seems right to me. Socrates offers the occasional noble speech about wanting to find the best way to live — or rather, about how he has found and embodies the best way to live — but in actual dialectical disputation seems to care only about trivial point-scoring based on shifting the meanings of words. (“Aren’t we claiming that people who feel pleasure are good? And that people suffering distress are bad?”)

No wonder Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles all get thoroughly exasperated with him, at first giving answers “on cue,” as Callicles puts it, and then simply declining to respond, so that for an extended period of the dialogue Socrates is reduced to answering his own questions. And even when Callicles starts responding again, it’s only “so that you can get on and finish the argument.” (Though later still — as Socrates doggedly pursues his cheese-paring course — he wonders, “Can’t you speak without someone answering your questions?”)

Now, one way to explain this is to say that Socrates’s three interlocutors are completely lacking in the philosophical temperament — like many of their fellow Athenians, who will, we are sometimes reminded obliquely in this dialogue, eventually put Socrates to death — and that my own sympathy with their exasperation suggests that I lack that temperament as well.

But if so, why does Plato have Socrates make so many arguments that (as every decent commentary points out) are simply bad? Just to emphasize the contempt that Socrates has for these people? That doesn’t seem likely.

The Gorgias is a very strange dialogue and poses all sorts of pedagogical difficulties. Because if what I have said here about Socrates and his interlocutors is correct, no one in this dialogue makes good arguments.

February 15, 2019

two thoughts on Twitter

After being away from Twitter for a few months, I have two thoughts.

The first is that I wish I had departed years ago.

The second is that when I peek at Twitter, the whole enterprise seems so weird. It’s not that it seems worse than I had remembered, nastier or stupider; rather, the fact that people spend time on that platform now strikes me as absurd, inexplicable. And I was tweeting for eleven years before I departed! It’s remarkable how quickly my mind has re-set itself to the pre-Twitter norm.

February 14, 2019

furthermore….

An addendum to the previous post: Not many people on the left seem to realize it, but the metaphysical capitalism I described in my previous post is fundamentally incompatible with a socialist political economy. According to the gospel of “I am my own,” everything around me — the social world and the material world, the whole shebang — is best described as a body of resources for me to exploit in my quest for self-realization. But “exploiting,” then, is precisely what I will do, and if we all do that then the world around us will be devastated — or rather, further devastated. This is why the details (such as they are) of the Green New Deal are so fanciful: its crafters have to imagine a future in which we save the planet without circumscribing our own liberties and possibilities. It’s a perfect illustration of something Paul Farmer said a long time ago now: that white liberals “think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves.” That hasn’t changed, and won’t change. But if the left can find a way to combine metaphysical capitalism with a socialist political economy it will sweep all before it.

February 14, 2019

on cultural socialism and metaphysical capitalism

My buddy Rod Dreher is talking a lot these days about “cultural socialism.” I wish he wouldn’t. Rod believes that the term “cultural socialism” is justified because, like actual socialism, it’s about the redistribution of resources — in this case the resources of access, prestige, etc. But if so, then much of McCarthyism was cultural socialism. McCarthy sought to pull down the privilege of communist fellow travelers in cultural high places (Hollywood) and replace them with God-fearing Americans. The social wing of Wilberforce’s movement, which sought to drive slave-owners from polite society while bringing in formerly excluded people like Olaudah Equiano: cultural socialism!

If Rod places a lot of emphasis on this term, then here’s a preview of the first review of his forthcoming book: “We’ve already read this book, under a slightly different title: Jonah Goldberg wrote it and called it Liberal Fascism. This is just Goldberg’s idea but with a hat-tip to the alt-right’s cries against ‘cultural Marxism.’”

Rod absolutely right, and right in a very important way, that the strategies that Christians and conservatives and, in general non-socialists used to survive under Soviet-sponsored socialism are likely to become immensely relevant to many American Christians and conservatives in the coming years. (I may say more about that in another post.) But that doesn’t mean that what we’re battling against is a form of socialism, cultural or otherwise. I would argue rather that it’s the ultimate extension of the free market — a kind of metaphysical capitalism. The gospel of the present moment is, as I have frequently commented, “I am my own.” I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. That some kind of redistribution of access/prestige/attention and even economic resources might be needed to bring this gospel to those who have not previously been able to enjoy its benefits should not obscure for us what the core proclamation really is.

February 12, 2019

welcome to the new Twitter

Hi, and welcome to the New Twitter™! Over the years, many of you have told us how tiresome and time-consuming it is to type your tweets. Well, we have listened, and we have a solution! From now on, you won’t need to type your tweets at all. Instead, you’ll just click or tap to choose one of the following words, which we have put in hashtag form to promote ease of searching:

  • #cuck
  • #disrupt
  • #inclusive
  • #innovate
  • #intersectionality
  • #loser
  • #MAGA
  • #privilege
  • #sad
  • #whitesupremacy

We’re confident that these ten words faithfully represent the full intellectual content everything that users of Twitter say — but with the added bonus of concision and clarity! From now on, to use Twitter you’ll just need to select one of these words and hit the “Tweet” button. And you’re done! — with less bother and fuss for you, and lower bandwidth costs for us. It’s a big win all round!

And one more thing: you’ll see that our new, custom-designed “I am literally shaking with rage RN” emoji will be automatically added to each tweet. Yet another way that we’re here to serve your needs!

February 11, 2019

defilement and expulsion

A couple of years ago I wrote this:

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.

I’d like to pair that brief reflection with an essay I published around the same time, in which I made this claim: “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.”

It is this sense of defilement that makes people want to cast out wrongdoers, to expel the contagion they carry. It seems increasingly common on the right to cast all this in Girardian terms — my friend Rod Dreher does this a lot — but that wouldn’t be quite right even if Girardian terms were valid, which they are not. (The nearly absolute uselessness of Girard’s thought is patiently and thoroughly demonstrated by Joshua Landy in this essay.) The scapegoat is by definition innocent; the malefactors our punitive society casts out are not, but their crimes are so small in comparison to their punishment that they seem like scapegoats.

But if we understand how the experience of defilement functions we will also understand its punishment. The University of Virginia has an honor code which punishes violators with the “single sanction” of expulsion: one either has honor or one does not. Similarly, the woke social order has a single sanction: either your presence does not defile me or it does, and in the latter case the response is and must be expulsion. This is what Phillip Adamo of Augsburg University learned when he used the n-word in class — or rather, quoted James Baldwin doing so. This he was removed from the class he was teaching and then suspended from all teaching, “pending the outcome of a formal review.” The separation of the source of defilement from the community must always be the first step, when one’s responses arise from what Kolakowski calls mythical core.

If you really want to come to grips with what’s happening on many college campuses today, and in social media countless times every day, put down thy Girard; take up thy Kolakowski.

February 6, 2019

the beginning of the end of the republic of podcasts

For the last couple of years I have been hearing — from Marco Arment quite regularly — that podcasts are great because they’re the last refuge of the truly independent web. Looks like that’s changing. I can’t imagine that Spotify would make this investment without requiring you to sign up for a Spotify account in order to listen to Gimlet Media podcasts. And I’m sure other big media companies will follow suit, buying up popular podcasts and podcast networks. (What’s your price, Radiotopia?) And so back into the silos, and behind the paywalls, we go. There’s nothing about podcasts that makes them intrinsically independent.

February 5, 2019

Nietzsche and Montaigne

Today I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion of my friend Rob Miner’s new book Nietzsche and Montaigne. This is the outline of my talk.

On Health

Introductory thoughts

  • First of all, what a superb book this is!
  • My learning is not comparable to Rob’s, so all you’ll get from me is a kind of riff on a theme that, when I was reading Rob’s book, struck me as especially interesting, and that theme is health.
  • The question of what makes for a healthy human life — and I want to stress the importance of this idea of health as opposed to something like Aristotelian eudaimonia, — is an essential one for Montaigne, and Nietzsche picks up on that, at first endorsing but ultimately revising Montaigne’s understanding.
  • I’m going to unpack that claim very briefly and suggestively here, and claim (there’s no time today to argue) that insofar as the two thinkers differ, Montaigne has the better of it.

Health in Montaigne

  • As Rob writes (p.45):
    • “Montaigne understands philosophy as a power or virtue that dwells in the soul, making it and the body healthy. It aims to have a certain effect on its practitioner. What is this effect? Philosophy, he writes, ‘should make tranquility and gladness shine out from within, should form in its own mold the outward demeanor, and consequently arm it with graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented and good-natured countenance.’ [The anticipation of Nietzsche’s designation of true philosophy as a “gay science” should be obvious. Rob now comments,] Here two aspects of the human person are distinguished: an inward and an outward. Philosophy brings these aspects togerther, so that the outward expresses the inward, resulting in the rare condition that Montaigne calls ‘healthy.’ Health is the condition that philosophy brings about; it is not the default condition.”
    • Rob then quotes a passage from the essay “Of Presumption”: “The body has a great part in our being, it holds a high rank in it; so its structure and composition are well worth consideration.”
  • Now, I would like to suggest — and I make this suggest under correction by nobler minds — that in his later essays Montaigne shifts this emphasis somewhat. Consider this famous passage from “Of Repentance”:
    • “Meanwhile I loathe that consequential [or ‘accidental’] repenting which old age brings. That Ancient who said that he was obliged to the passing years for freeing him from sensual pleasures held quite a different opinion from mine: I could never be grateful to infirmity for any good it might do me…. Our appetites are few when we are old: and once they are over we are seized by a profound disgust. I can see nothing of conscience in that: chagrin and feebleness imprint on us a lax and snotty virtue. We must not allow ourselves to be so borne away by natural degeneration that it bastardizes our judgement…. My temptations are so crippled and enfeebled that they are not worth opposing. I can conjure them away by merely stretching out my hands. Confront my reason with my former longings and I fear that that it will show less power of resistance than once it did. I cannot see that, of itself, it judges in any way differently now than it did before, nor that it is freshly enlightened. So if it has recovered it is a botched recovery. A wretched sort of cure, to owe one’s health to sickliness.”
    • He then argues for a kind of commensurate exchange of virtue between the mind and the body: “Let the mind awaken and quicken the heaviness of the body: let the body arrest the lightness of the mind and fix it fast.”
    • And at this point Montaigne does something rather unusual, for him — he quotes a Christian authority, St. Augustine, from the City of God: “He who eulogizes the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and who indicts the nature of the flesh as an evil desires the soul with a fleshly desire and flees from the flesh in a fleshly way, since his thought is based on human vanity not on divine truth.”
  • So I think Montaigne may have reached a position near the end of his life where he might not believe, as he once did, that “philosophy [is] a power or virtue that dwells in the soul, making it and the body healthy.” He might say rather that whether one is capable of philosophy depends as much on the “power or virtue” of the body as to the excellence of the mind — and that, by ignoring this fact, we come to think that we have become true philosophers, fully enacting our philosophical commitments, when in fact we have only suffered debilitation of the body. We interpret bodily disease as mental strength.
  • Montaigne does not seem to think that we can do anything about this: we cannot make the body strong again when through old age or some other affliction it begins to fail. But we can at least know our own true condition.

Health in Nietzsche

  • In a crucial passage near the end of his book, Rob returns to the matter of health — not for the first time, mind you — and explores the notion of “great health” that Nietzsche introduces late in The Gay Science (#382). There are many things that one could say about this exceptional section of Nietzsche’s great transitional work.
    • Nietzsche introduces the concept thus: “We who are new, nameless, hard to understand; we premature births of an as yet unproved future – for a new end, we also need a new means, namely, a new health that is stronger, craftier, tougher, bolder, and more cheerful than any previous health.” (Note the persistent emphasis, which wwe see also in Montaigne, on cheerfulness).
    • And at the end of the section he suggests that only great health can produce a new great seriousness: “the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often enough appear inhuman for example, when it places itself next to all earthly seriousness heretofore, all forms of solemnity in gesture, word, tone, look, morality, and task as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody – and in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with it that the great seriousness really emerges; that the real question mark is posed for the first time; that the destiny of the soul changes; the hand of the clock moves forward; the tragedy begins.” (Isn’t that last clause rather startling?)
    • But I want to focus on something else in the section, something almost buried and yet vital: “Anyone who wants to know from the adventures of his own experience how it feels to be the discoverer or conqueror of an ideal, or to be an artist, a saint, a lawmaker, a sage, a pious man, a soothsayer, an old-style divine loner – any such person needs one thing above all – the great health, a health that one doesn’t only have, but also acquires continually and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up!”
  • Why must one give it up, and what does that mean?
    • Here we need to turn to Nietzsche’s last book, Ecco Homo, where he quotes the entirety of the section of The Gay Science I have just explored, and connects it to Zarathustra as an ideal type: he says that “great health” is the physiological precondition of Zarathustra, and therefore of what Nietzsche wants to be.
    • And yet, still in Ecce Homo, immediately after citing this passage Nietzsche writes, “Afterwards” — that is, after writing the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or as Nietzsche would say after “finding” it — “I lay ill for a few weeks in Genoa. This was followed by a melancholy spring in Rome, when I put up with life — it was not easy.” This does not sound like someone in great health!
    • But his point here is that the achievement of something great inevitably depletes one’s energies, is costly to one’s health. When walking in the mountains to “find” his book, he says, “my muscular agility has always been at its greatest when my creative energy is flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired: let’s leave the ‘soul’ out of it… I could often be seen dancing; in those days I could be walking around on mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of tiredness. I slept well and laughed a lot — I was the epitome of sprightliness and patience.”
    • Then came what he calls the crisis: “everything great, be it a work or a deed, once it has been accomplished, immediately turns against whoever did it. By virtue of having done it, he is now weak — he can no longer endure his deed, can no longer face up to it. To have something behind you that you should never have wanted, something that constitutes a nodal point in the destiny of humanity — and from then on to have it on top of you!… It almost crushes you.”
    • A little later Nietzsche says of this kind of experience: “This is how a god suffers.” But another way to put the point is: Because I suffer so profoundly, I must be a god.

Concluding thoughts

  • So let me now try to draw these threads together.
    • For Montaigne, it is surely true that health is mens sana in corpore sano, but because we are mortal, because we age and decline, the healthy mind must also be one that accommodates itself to the body’s inevitable changes. This means that a healthy mind in a less-than-healthy body must seek a kind of self-knowledge that is hard for prideful human beings, who always want to give themselves credit they don’t deserve. Montaigne believed that one should always, as the Stoics taught, strive to live “according to nature,” and since it is our nature to grow old and feeble before we die, that Stoic mandate requires a certain ironic acceptance of declining powers. This is the kind of health appropriate to a changeable mortal.
    • For Nietzsche, by contrast, this might be all well and good for the “higher cattle” — but not for one who aspires to the great seriousness. For one of the Zarathustra type, life is an endless dialectic of boundless, ecstatic energy and exhausted disease. Indeed, this is, I think what great health is: not the energy alone, but the energy and the exhaustion in inevitable exchange.
    • And this is why it is impossible to conceive of Nietzsche as an old man.
February 5, 2019

the deviant’s tale

From this article by Kathleen McAuliffe:

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust — basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat — numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity, support for authority and hierarchy, sexual conservatism, and distrust of outsiders.

Now, imagine that the article had said this:

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust — basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat — numerous studies have found that low levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “liberal ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as a dislike of tradition, low religiosity, a lack of support for authority and hierarchy, sexual exploration, and trust of outsiders.

Can’t really imagine it being written that way, can you?

In social science and popular writing about social science, liberal views are always the norm and conservative views are always deviations from that norm, deviations in need of explanation. Liberal views don’t need to be explained — after all, they’re so obviously correct.

February 1, 2019

Roberts’s Churchill

All my adult life I have had a strong appetite for books about Winston Churchill. It began, I suppose, when I read the first volume of William Manchester’s biography, which was frankly hagiographical but vividly told. I have read much since then, including much work highly critical of the man. I can readily understand people disliking or even hating Churchill; I could never understand someone who doesn’t find him fascinating. So, unsurprisingly, I have very much looked forward to the new biography by Andrew Roberts.

I haven’t finished it yet — so much else to do right now — but I think it’s fair to say that like Manchester’s book it is a very strong narrative, and like Manchester’s, it is largely hagiographical. I have been particularly struck by Roberts’s approach to Churchill’s eventful experience in the Great War: his chief principle seems to be that Churchill’s judgment may be questioned or even condemned, but that his character must be vindicated at all costs. Roberts accepts ungrudgingly Churchill’s many mistakes in advocating for and the overseeing the Gallipoli campaign, but he will not countenance the suggestion that Churchill fell into those mistakes because of his character flaws. Personality flaws, perhaps — impetuousness, for instance — but not flaws of moral character.

Consider this passage:

Lloyd George needed no persuasion to throw over his old friend and ally. The price of the Conservatives joining a national government was that Churchill should be sent to a sinecure post with no executive portfolio attached. ‘It is the Nemesis of the man who has fought for this war for years,’ Lloyd George told Frances Stevenson that day. ‘When the war came he saw in it the chance of glory for himself, and has accordingly entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands, in the hope that he would be the outstanding man in this war.’ There was bitterness and jealousy in that remark, but little factual accuracy.

But Roberts quotes Churchill on many occasions not only expressing excitement for the war, but demonstrating constant awareness of how his performance in it could pave the way for him to become Prime Minister. He told Violet Asquith at a dinner party in early 1915, “I know a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment – and yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.” A man who could not only think this but say it out loud is a man who might legitimately be suspected of pursuing “a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands.” He said himself that that suffering didn’t disrupt his delight in the war even for a second.

Similarly, Roberts quotes the Prince of Wales — the future King Edward VIII and, after his abdication, Duke of Windsor — saying, “It is a great relief to know that Winston is leaving the Admiralty … one does feel that he launches the country on mad ventures which are fearfully expensive both as regards men and munitions and which don’t attain their object.” To which Roberts comments, “It was for this feckless young man that Churchill would later nearly sacrifice his career.” No doubt the Prince was feckless, and would become still more so, but to describe Gallipoli as a “fearfully expensive” venture “both as regards men and munitions” that did not attain its object is to state the simple, inescapable truth.

One more example of Roberts’s habitual attitude: when the government of the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was on the verge of collapse, and some kind of coalition had to be formed, the other parties to the coalition made it clear that they would not participate unless Churchill were sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill wrote to Asquith to plead that he be kept on anyway, to which Asquith replied, “You must take it as settled that you are not to remain at the Admiralty … I hope to retain your services as a member of the new Cabinet, being, as I am, sincerely grateful for the splendid work you have done both before and since the war.” Roberts’s comment on that letter: “Asquith could treat Churchill harshly partly because the First Lord had so few supporters.” Treat him harshly? In no circumstances could Asquith have kept Churchill on — that had been made perfectly clear to him — so he is refusing to hold out any false hope, but nevertheless offering to keep Churchill in his Cabinet, which the other members of the coalition did not want. Asquith could do that much for Churchill only by spending some valuable political capital, and it would not have been “harsh” had Asquith banished Churchill from the government altogether.

Churchill’s attitude towards the loss of his position? “My conviction that the greatest of my work is still to be done is strong within me: and I ride reposefully along the gale. The hour of Asquith’s punishment and K[itchener]’s exposure draws nearer. The wretched men have nearly wrecked our chances. It may fall to me to strike the blow. I shall do it without compunction.”

Again, Roberts admits that Churchill makes mistakes; but he prefers to identify those mistakes himself, and when he quotes any criticism of Churchill from contemporaries, he tends to (a) dismiss it and (b) indicate his low opinion of the character of the critic. And in all this he faithfully reflects Churchill’s own interpretation of his role in the Great War.

As for me, I am inclined to agree with the journalist A. G. Gardiner, who wrote that Churchill “is always unconsciously playing a part – an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator.”

January 31, 2019

insincere controversialists

Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy’s arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy’s arrangements. But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.

— G. K. Chesterton, from What’s Wrong with the World (1910)

January 30, 2019

Plutarch and the end of the oracles

In my History of Disenchantment class, we’ve been discussing Plutarch’s essay on the cessation or the silence or the failure of the oracles. (The key word there, ekleloipoton, seems to be an odd one — I’m trying to learn more about it.) I read it long ago, but this is the first time I’ve taught it, and goodness, what a fascinating piece of work.

It was widely recognized in Plutarch’s time (late first and early second century A.D.) that the great oracles of the ancient world — the most famous of them being the one at Delphi, of course — had largely ceased to provide useful guidance or had fallen silent altogether. Some of the once famous shrines had been abandoned and had fallen into ruin. But no one understood why this had happened. Plutarch’s “essay” is a fictional dialogue — narrated by one Lamprias, who also takes the leading role in the conversation and may well be Plutarch’s mouthpiece — in which a group of philosophically-inclined men debate the possible reasons for the oracles’ failure.

In the opening pages of the dialogue, some of the participants deny that there is any real problem. They point to the inaccessibility of some of the shrines, and the lack of population in the surrounding areas: for them the issue is merely one of low demand leading to low supply. But this view is not widely accepted; most of the philosophers are uneasy about the oracles and feel that something is up. And after all, if low demand leads to low supply, why is there low demand? Even if the oracles are located in remote places, surely people would take the trouble to make a pilgrimage there if they believed that by doing so they could receive wise guidance for their lives.

To one of the participants, the answer to the whole problem is obvious: The gods are angry at us for our wickedness and have punitively withdrawn their guidance. But, perhaps surprisingly, no one finds this a compelling explanation. For one thing, it’s not clear to them there was any less wickedness in the earlier eras when the oracles flourished; and more to the point, are oracles given by the gods in the first place?

If they are, then shouldn’t they continue forever, since the gods themselves are immortal, unless they are specifically withdrawn? Not necessarily, says one: “the gods do not die, but their gifts do” — a line he says is from Sophocles, though I don’t know its source. Maybe the oracles lived their natural course and have now fallen silent, as one day we all will.

But what if oracles do not come from the gods, but rather from daimons? In that case the oracles might die because the daimons do. This leads to a long discussion about whether daimons are mortal, and if mortal or not whether they are necessarily good. (The one truly famous passage from this essay — in which someone recounts a story about a sailor instructed to pass by an island and cry out “The great god Pan is dead” — assumes that Pan was not a god but rather a daimon, the son of Hermes by Odysseus’s famously loyal wife Penelope.)

And this in turn leads to a very long conversation about the beings that populate the world and whether there might be other worlds populated differently and, now that we think about it, how many worlds are there anyway? (The most popular answer among the discussants: 185.) As I told my students, this is by modern standards a bizarre digression, especially since it takes up about half the dialogue, but our standards were not those of Plutarch’s time; and in any case the discussants might plausibly say that we can’t come up with a reliable solution to the puzzle of the silenced oracles unless we have a good general understanding of the kind of cosmos we live in.

In any event, the discussion eventually circles back around to the initial question, and in the final pages Lamprias gets the chance to develop the argument that he has been hinting at all along. In brief, he contends that oracles are always situated in or near caves because from those caves issue “exhalations of the earth”; and that certain people with natural gifts and excellent training of those gifts may be sensitized to the character of those exhalations, and in that way come to some intuitive and not-easily-verbalized awareness of what the world has in store for people. It’s almost a Gaia hypothesis, this idea that the world as a whole acts in certain fixed ways, and those “exhalations” attest to the more general movements of the planet. But these processes are, like all processes in Nature, subject to change over time. As a spring might dry up, or a river after flooding alter its course, so too the conditions for such exhalations might change so that there is nothing for even the most exquisitely sensitive and perfectly trained priestess to respond to.

The first and overwhelming response to Lamprias’s explanation is: Impiety! One of the interlocutors comments that first we rejected the gods in favor of daimons, and now we’re rejecting daimons in favor of a purely natural process. That is, Lamprias’s position is fundamentally disenchanting. To this Lamprias replies that his position is not impious at all, because they had all agreed earlier that in addition to humans and daimons and gods, none of whom create anything, we also have, abobe and beyond all, The God, “the Lord and Father of All,” and He is he first cause of all things, including exhalations of the earth and priestesses.

But whether it’s impious or not, Lamprias’s account is disenchanting, because it removes power from spirits and gods and concentrates them in a single transcendent Monad. His monotheism is a big step towards the religion of Israel, which tells us in the very first words of its Scriptures that the sun and moon and stars are not deities at all, but rather things made by YHWH, who alone merits our worship. Lamprias’s position, like that of the Jews, looks to those accustomed to polytheism as a kind of atheism. And by their standards that’s just what it is.

January 28, 2019

all the productivity guidance I got

I have very little time for the productivity cult, and think it especially injurious to the craft of writing — for several reasons, including those named by the late Jenny Diski here; but I do care about doing good work, and completing the work I have agreed to do. Especially when it comes to writing, I have two principles, and two only, that I follow. 

I pay myself first. That is, if I need to get writing done then writing will be my first task of the day. If I try to get all the other stuff done before turning to writing, I’m usually too tired to write much or well. 

When I work I work and when I play I play. When I’m writing I deny myself access to email, to social media, to fun internet sites. I don’t write a hundred words and then reward myself by watching a YouTube clip or arguing with strangers on Twitter. I just write until I have to do something else or am too worn out to write any more. 

That’s it. That’s all the productivity advice I got. 

January 27, 2019

“Gen Z” and social media

Christopher Mims of the WSJ has talked to a few members of Gen Z and is here to define the entire cohort’s use of social media for us. As someone whose job requires me to deal with members of that generation every day, and who has for the past decade taught classes on negotiating the online world, I think some of what Mims so confidently asserts is right, but other generalizations are very wrong.

The first of his seven points is: “Gen Z doesn’t dis­tin­guish between on­line and IRL.” This is, frankly, a ridiculous thing to say, first of all because any universal statement about an entire generation is (as I have often but fruitlessly commented) indefensible. Generational cohorts — even within a given country — are divided in serious ways by social class, by economic condition, by culture, by education. The only people Mims talks to are university students and people who work in, or study, the tech sector. It is, to put it mildly, not safe to assume that those people are representative of an entire generation.

But to the specific point: most of my students are very aware of the distinction between interacting online and IRL, and I have seen a distinct upturn over the past few years in insistence on the value of being present when with friends and not always checking your phone. (That’s noticeably stronger among my recent students than people five or six years older. My 26-year-old son tells me that he is almost the only person he knows who makes a point of putting his phone away when hanging with friends. He’s trying to set a good example.)

Mims’s second point: “Pri­vacy on­line? LOL.” This is true to my experience, though (see above) I can’t assume that the young people I know are representative. But for what it’s worth, almost all of my students understand, in theory anyway, that anything they post online could come back to haunt them some day. I might add that every term I have students who are not on any social media at all, and when I ask them why, they usually cite privacy concerns as their chief reason for abstaining.

“3. Face­book is out, In­sta­gram is in.” True, but Facebook has been out for a long time. Most of my students from a decade ago already saw Facebook only as a place to (a) post pictures of themselves for their grandparents and (b) find high-school friends they had lost touch with. Also, while Instagram is definitely big, not all use it in the “self-branding” way Mims assumes is normal. Many of my students have their Instagram accounts set to private, and I’m pretty sure that’s a trend. (Though it’s not really related to the privacy issues mentioned above, because people know that even their private posts can be screenshotted.)

“4. So­cial me­dia is how they stay informed.” Also true, to my long-time frustration — though I am increasingly inclined to think that there’s no real difference between getting your news from social media and getting it from, say, the Washington Post, since so many journalists today take their marching orders from Twitter mobs. A small data point: Baylor buys access to the WSJ for everyone with a baylor.edu email address, but I have only ever met one student who has the WSJ app installed on his phone.

“5. Video is im­por­tant, but it isn’t every­thing.” No, video isn’t everything, but it’s hard to overstate the centrality of visual communication (especially edited still images — Snapchat-style even when made outside Snapchat — and emoji) among most of my students.

Mims also quotes in this context a Pew report claiming that the “Post-Millennial” generation is probably going to be the “best-educated ever,” but by “best-educated” Pew means simply having the most years of education. And that is, ahem, not the same thing. But that’s a subject for another day.

“6. Gen Z thinks con­cerns about screens are overblown.” Some do, some don’t. The really interesting question is this: Even if we could determine what percentage of them are concerned about overdependence on screens, which would be hard, how will those views change over the next decade? When today’s college students are 30, will they be more or less dependent on their screens, especially their phones?

“7. But they’re still sus­cep­ti­ble to tech addic­tion and burnout.” Indeed. Mims quotes a young woman who says, “I def­i­nitely think we all know that we’re ad­dicted to our phones and so­cial me­dia…. But I also think we’ve just come to terms with it, and we think, that’s just what it is to be a per­son now.” I have seen, often, just this helplessness and defeatism, but I have also encountered many students who are not just aware of their condition but determined to do something about it.

January 23, 2019

“the instantaneous awareness of so much folly”

The in­stan­ta­neous aware­ness of so much folly is not, I now think, healthy for the hu­man mind. Spend­ing time on Twit­ter be­came, for me, a deeply de­mor­al­iz­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. Of­ten, espe­cially when some con­tro­versy of na­tional im­por­tance pro­voked large num­bers of users into tweet­ing their opin­ions about it, I would come away from Twit­ter ex­as­perated al­most to the point of mad­ness.

I thought of a verse from the 94th Psalm: “The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are van­ity.” Af­ter an hour or so of watch­ing hu­man­i­ty’s stu­pidi­ties scroll across my screen, I felt I had peeked into some dread­ful abyss into which only God can safely look. It was not for me to know the thoughts of man.

— Barton Swaim

January 23, 2019

social media, blogs, newsletters

Tim Carmody:

The blogs I’ve written for (Kottke notwithstanding) have only had so much ability to retain me before they’ve changed their business model, changed management, gone out of business, or been quietly abandoned. They’re little asteroids, not planets. Most of the proper publications I’ve written for, even the net-native ones, have been dense enough to hold an atmosphere.

And guess what? So have Twitter and Facebook. Just by enduring, those places have become places for lasting connections and friendships and career opportunities, in a way the blogosphere never was, at least for me. (Maybe this is partly a function of timing, but look: I was there.) And this means that, despite their toxicity, despite their shortcomings, despite all the promises that have gone unfulfilled, Twitter and Facebook have continued to matter in a way that blogs don’t.

I’d very much like to dismiss what Tim says here — but I don’t think I can. He’s probably right. (And the asteroid/planet metaphor is an especially fertile one.) In light of Tim’s account of his experience, I’ve been reminded that my own opting-out of social media is a luxury — and I am therefore all the more grateful for that luxury.

I wrote in a recent edition of my newsletter,

On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all.

After reading the Brooks column I checked in on the social media I have access to, and I cannot readily express to you how strange the commotion seemed to me. The responses of people to this issue struck me as — this is going to sound very strong, but I promise you that it’s precisely how I felt — it struck me as the behavior of people in the grip of some manic compulsion, of some kind of mass hysteria. There are no rational criteria in light of which what happened between those people on the National Mall matters — none at all.

And then I was filled with relief that I hadn’t got caught up in the tsunami — which, if I had been on social media, I would have been as vulnerable to as the next person, I’m sure — and filled with determination to make my way to still higher ground. Maybe you can’t do that, but if you can you probably should. (And, to be perfectly straightforward, there are a great many people who say they can’t disconnect from social media who in fact just don’t want to, or are afraid of what will happen if they do.)

Relatedly: I was chatting with the wonderful Robin Sloan about these matters earlier today, and Robin expressed his hope that “a tiny, lively, healthy Republic of Newsletters is possible — it really is!” I love everything about that formulation: Republic of Newsletters, yes, but also that it’s “lively” and “healthy” — and tiny. Numbers, metrics are not what matters here. What matters is relation. What matters is “Only connect.” I replied to Robin,

I think so — I really really do. Opt in, read or don’t read as the fancy strikes you, and if you have a comment or a question, hit reply. What could be simpler? (As you and Craig Mod commented in that recent WSJ piece, email may be the Tom Bombadil of internet communication: last, as it was first. Well, you didn’t use that metaphor, I admit. But it’s fascinating that the pattern, for some of us anyway, seems to be internet to open Web to walled gardens to open Web to internet.)

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace. We’ve moved a long way from Tim Carmody’s planetary metaphor, which, as I say, I feel the force of, but whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

 

January 18, 2019

can’t stop, won’t stop

VP Mike Pence says, “Criticism of Christian education in America must stop.” No it musn’t. Nobody and nothing is above criticism. Demanding that others stop criticizing your preferred group is a cheap identity-politics move. It would simply be a good thing if the critics made some effort to understand what they’re criticizing, though of course that’s not going to happen. I can’t imagine a cohort less likely to inform itself about conservative Christianity than the cohort of American journalists.

January 18, 2019

these people now run the world

Venkatesh Rao:

I suppose there’s a 2×2 here: sane versus crazy, alive versus dead.

The possibility of sane and alive is the hope that drives rationalists. The possibility of crazy and alive is what fuels the stack-lucky, and increasingly, the latter is a better bet.

But neither bet is a certainty. The reality of sane and dead is what brings down the rationalists. The reality of crazy and dead is what brings down the weird.

Crazy and dead is apparently the ground state of human civilization. When things break crazy, the lunatics end up running the asylum.

A lunatic, by my definition, is a stupid person in Cipolla’s sense: a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Yep, these people now run the world.

January 18, 2019

The Stone Table

One of the best books I read last year is The Stone Table, by Francis Spufford. But don’t look for it on Amazon or Google Books, because you won’t find it. For legal reasons it can’t (yet) be published, and if you think about the title you might be able to guess what those legal reasons are.

It’s a small masterpiece. I so, so hope you’ll get to read it some day.

January 16, 2019

it’s worse than you thought

Alternative headlines:

  • Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe “that God spoke the heavens, the earth and all living things into existence in six days”
  • Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that Salvation Comes To Us “through faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone, unaided by human effort”
  • Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe “that Jesus Christ will physically return in the air to take the church out of the world to be with Him forever”
  • Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that “The unbelieving dead of all time will then be raised and given eternal bodies to face God in final judgment after which they will be thrown into the lake of fire to eternal torment”
  • Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that “Mankind’s continued unbridled wickedness brought further judgment, which destroyed the earth in a worldwide flood”

There’s something almost charming about the NYT’s dismay that a school which holds to the doctrines listed above would fail to comply with the NYT’s view of human sexuality. But the story at least serves to remind us what the “news that’s fit to print” is these days.

January 14, 2019

most popular people EVAR

Kevin Berger:

Hidalgo is among the premier data miners of the world’s collective history. With his MIT colleagues, he developed Pantheon, a dataset that ranks historical figures by popularity from 4000 B.C. to 2010. Aristotle and Plato snag the top spots. Jesus is third. 

This is one of those statements that ought to create immediate skepticism. If we think only of the present moment, we can easily discover that there are approximately 2.3 billion Christians alive today, all of whom have heard of Jesus — but how many have heard of Plato and Aristotle? 

So if you go to the Pantheon website, you find this description of their methods: 

To make our efforts tractable, Pantheon will not focus on culture, as it is understood in its broadest sense, but on cultural production. In a broad sense, culture can be understood as all of the information that humans — or animals — generate and transmit through non-genetic means. At Pantheon, however, we do not focus on the entire range of cultural information, but in a subset of this information that we define narrowly as cultural production. That is, we do not focus on cultural information such as passed on family values or societal trust, but on cultural production as proxied by the biographies of notable historical characters. 

Why they believe that “the biographies of notable historical characters” form a reliable proxy for “cultural production” they do not say. Isn’t there a great deal of cultural production that is non-biographical in character? Art, music, literature, clothing, cooking, moral guidelines and taboos, religious teaching … the overwhelming majority of we typically think of as “cultural production” is non-biographical, it seems to me. So I’m already scratching my head. 

But even setting that aside: the Pantheon website directs readers to cite the article that presents the structure of Pantheon 1.0, and if you consult the preprint of that article available here you’ll see that the dataset draws heavily, I think it’s fair to say primarily, from … Wikipedia. And similar sources. By the way, an earlier attempt at the same kind of ranking — one that Pantheon tries to improve on by using more foreign-language Wikipedia sites — put Jesus at the top, followed by Napoleon (?) and then Mohammed. 

This is all poppycock and balderdash. It’s interesting and perhaps even useful to see what data dominates Wikipedia, but Wikipedia, in any and all languages, is not a reliable indicator of universal historical “popularity” — whatever that means — and still less of “cultural production.” I think the Pantheon database will be valuable, but it won’t ever do what its makers are saying it already does. 

January 13, 2019

when they find a leader

We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities.

But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe. 

— Christophe Guilluy. This seems exactly right to me. The “cool and progressive” left has chosen sexual self-definition as its only real cause, its version of the Civil Rights movement, and has less than zero interest in the economically marginal. Indeed, it maintains its own character as cool and progressive by creating an ecology of consumption that depends on the economically marginal remaining that way. Social justice warriors not only aren’t interested in but are positively appalled by the specter of economic justice. For our elites — nominally Left, nominally Right, nominally Centrist, it’s crony capitalism all the way down. 

The abandoned working-classes-and-below have responded to this state of affairs by saying, in effect, “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down.” (“You think you got it all set up / You think you got the perfect plan.”) That takes different forms: marching on Paris, say; or electing a blustering ignoramus President of the United States. Some of these are better than others, but none of them is genuinely constructive, none of them stands a real chance of altering the neoliberal social order. And that’s because nowhere has a leader emerged who possesses the combination of charisma and shrewdness to channel the frustrations of the economically marginalized into a meaningful program of reform — or revolution. 

Such leaders also take different forms: Nelson Mandela was one, and so was César Chávez, and so was Lenin. It is possible that the union of the global neoliberal order and the big media companies — which serve as the Ministry of Amnesia for that order — will be able to prevent the emergence of such a leader. But I don’t think so. I believe that eventually and somewhere such a leader will arise. And when that happens the cool and progressive Left will be so, so screwed. 

However, I suspect that if it happens here so will I. 

January 11, 2019

humans, humanity, humanism

At the outset of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 I describe my narrative method using a cinematic metaphor: I compare it to the famous opening tracking shot of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. A couple of people have asked me whether a musical metaphor wouldn’t have been more appropriate, given that I explore different voices, and indeed at one point I considered employing one, but it seemed a little too obvious — and in any case, polyphony implies harmony, and I didn’t want to suggest that. Along these very lines, I’ve been wanting to say a little more about how I understand my own book, and I’m given an excuse by Chad Wellmon’s generous reflection on it, which you should read less as a review than as an illuminating and provocative essay about the uses and limitations of the language of humanism and the human. Please read it and then come back!

Okay. As I was saying, I have some thoughts about what my story adds up to — which may sound like an odd thing to say, but the book really is a story rather than an argument, and while I don’t think my views about what the story says are necessarily better than anyone else’s, I do have views, and I want to describe some of them here. I’ve also done that in two long interviews about the book, one with Wen Stephenson and one with Robert Kehoe.  As I have explained in those interviews, the book began when I noticed that in January of 1943 three thinkers — Jacques Maritain, C. S. Lewis, and W. H. Auden — were all writing with great intensity about education, which struck me as a strange thing to be doing in the middle of a war. Later, I saw that T. S. Eliot and Simone Weil were working along similar lines, and realized that I had five figures to write about, not just three. And their ideas, I discovered, went in and out of sync with one another in fascinating ways — ways that would be lost if I wrote a conventional academic sort of treatise in which I wrote one chapter about each author and sandwiched those with an Introduction and Conclusion. I would have to write a braided narrative in order to pick up properly on the moments of synchronization and the moments of asynchronization, or, to pick up that rejected musical metaphor, moments of harmony and moments of dissonance.

(By the way, getting the braiding right was the chief challenge I faced in writing this book, and I don’t know what it means that almost no one reviewing the book has commented on how it’s structured — Philip Jenkins being an extremely gratifying exception to that rule. I am going to assume that people haven’t talked about the narrative structure because I handle it so elegantly.)

Among my five protagonists, the one who is most consistently out of sync with the others is Simone Weil. She is the odd person out in several ways — the only woman, the only Jew, the youngest of the five — but in any group of any kind Weil would be the odd person out, because few minds have ever been as distinctive and original as hers. Again and again she offers philosophical and historical arguments that set her quite apart from the analytical frameworks of the other figures. (None of the others could have seen a causal chain leading from the Catholic campaign against the Cathars in 12th-century Languedoc to 20th-century National Socialism.) Looking at my book now, I find myself thinking that Weil is the central figure, the one indispensable figure, in it, and the one who, despite her intellectual eccentricities and even perversions, has the most to say to us now.

When in his essay Chad sets Karl Barth against the five figures in my book, I think he misses this; I think he attributes to them more unity of purpose and even vocabulary than they had, and especially fails to note just how radically strange Weil’s ideas are. Also, he attributes to all five of them a nostalgia that I think is actually characteristic only of the three older figures: Auden and Weil understand with absolute clarity that neither previous forms of humanism nor Christendom can be revived, and that the attempts to go back to either are misbegotten. Consider, to take just one example among many possible ones, Auden’s review of Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture:

Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.

“Spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” is a great phrase. (By the way, I have written about the importance of Cochrane’s book here and about benzedrine here. Just FYI.)

Anyway — and this continues my response to Chad — my five protagonists also differ from one another in their use of the term “humanism.” Perhaps only Maritain uses it in the way that Chad critiques in his essay; Auden uses the term rarely and Lewis not at all (except to describe the humanist movement of the early modern period). I describe these variations at considerable length in my book, and yet if Chad sees all my protagonists as standing under this humanist umbrella, it’s largely my fault, because despite all my reservations I use the word myself — and even allowed it a place in my subtitle.

I say “allowed” because the subtitle I submitted was: “Christian Intellectuals and Total War.” But when my editor, Cynthia Read, changed it to “Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis” I didn’t contest the change. Partly that was because I know from experience how insistent editors can be about titles and subtitles, and at least my title wasn’t being questioned; partly because I wasn’t sure how widely understood the term “total war” is; partly because my book isn’t about “Christian intellectuals” in general, and I didn’t want to give a false impression on that count; and partly because I think “humanism” encompasses better than any other term I can think of the general interests that bind my five protagonists, that make the story I tell a coherent one. So I remain ambivalent about that subtitle, and especially about the term “humanism,” but don’t really know what the alternative would be.

I think there are certain points that all five of my protagonists would have agreed upon: That they were living in a moment when it was important to stress that there are certain things that all people have in common, regardless of race or nationality; that the great authoritarian and totalitarian movements of their time tended to obscure those great commonalities; that there is such a thing as “human flourishing” (though none of them would have used that term); that such flourishing happens neither when people are reduced to faceless units in a collective nor when they conceive of themselves as atomistic “individuals”; that Christianity provides the best account of what a flourishing human person is and how such flourishing may be achieved. Do we call that “Christian humanism”? Can the term be retrieved and redeployed to good effect? (Maybe?)

Would Karl Barth have dissented from any of that? I don’t think so. He would have differed from my protagonists — as they differed among themselves — about what public language is adequate to the expression of these ideas. More substantively, I think, Barth might have questioned my protagonists’ belief in the role that the study of humane letters, and of the liberal arts, might play in educating people in a rich and deep account of, to borrow a phrase from Bruce Cockburn, “what humans can be.” In any case he, more than any of them, would have made a place in theological reflection for Mozart, who “heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time — the whole context of providence.”

Karl Barth

January 9, 2019

the emperor and the boy scout

What was presented to [the young G. B.] Shaw as the Christian faith was not Christian but unitarian, the eternal religion of this world. The greater the social prestige and political and economic power of the Church, the greater must always be her temptation to ‘confound the Persons and divide the Substance,’ i.e. to make God the purely transcendent First Cause of the Greek philosophers, the absentee landlord of the universe, and herself His bailiff. The Word made Flesh must then be either safely imprisoned, like the Emperor of Japan, within the ecclesiastical organization — the danger for Catholicism — or safely ‘humanized’ and turned into a good boy scout — the danger for Protestantism. In either case the Christian faith has been abandoned for a political religion, more agreeable to the bourgeois Haves in society. Unfortunately, in attacking this heresy, the bohemian Have-nots are tempted to make God purely immanent, in a Great Man, a race, or a class, to deny the Father in the name of the Son.

But this too is a political religion and, moreover, only tenable so long as one is the opposition and therefore without positive political responsibility for human suffering, so long as one is not in a position to make good one’s promise of creating a heaven on and out of earth.

— Auden, review of a biography of George Bernard Shaw, 1942

January 8, 2019

and now to sum up

it occurred to me this morning that almost all of the books and essays I have written for the last dozen years or so have arisen from the implications of three interlocking propositions: 

  • Humans worship idols. 
  • Idols kill their worshippers. 
  • We’re all humans. 
January 7, 2019

the circulation of Roma

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Those who say that the personal is the political are wrong, but the error is understandable, and it’s probably better to make the equation than deny the connection.

Many years ago the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt wrote, not to deny the distinction between the literary and the non-literary, but to affirm that “the literary and the non-literary circulate inseparably.” So too with the personal and the political. In our moment, which finds it virtuous to bring every personal experience to be judged at the bar of politics, it’s good to be reminded that life doesn’t work that way and (Deo volente) never will. In our actual experience the personal often displaces the political, only for the political to loom unexpectedly into view, dominate the scene for a while, and then retreat into the background again. We experience the ceaseless circulation of the political and the personal.

If you are not convinced, then I would ask you to watch Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. I would ask you to watch it anyway — after preparing yourself emotionally — because it’s simply a masterpiece, one of the great films of our time and probably of any time. There is nothing about it that’s not masterful, from the composition, lighting, and movement of the camera, to the pacing, to the narrative structure, to the acting — it beggars belief that Yalitza Aparicio had never acted before. Iris Murdoch once wrote of the Gospels that “they are the kind of great art where we feel: It is so.” That’s how I felt watching Roma.

But right now I just want to talk about the film’s approach to politics: the politics of family, of labor, of race — all of them play a role and all of them circulate inseparably with the manifold loves that touch, and sometimes fail truly to touch, our hearts. The whole film is a masterclass by Cuarón in artistic unveiling, in the opening-up of worlds of human experience so as to deepen and enrich and trouble the viewer’s moral and emotional life without ever once descending to preaching.

You cannot watch the film, I believe, without being convinced that Cleo loves the family she works for and that they love her. You also cannot avoid seeing the very specific ways in which that love, on both sides, is shaped and circumscribed by the nature of paid labor, by social class, by race, by language (Cleo’s first language is Mixtec), and even by the urban/rural cultural divide. (For some of the details, see this essay by Miguel Salazar.) Love is love, it really is. But politics exerts pressure on it. The circulation is endless, and like the circulation of our blood, has a systolic/diastolic rhythm. How Cuarón captures that rhythm so vividly and so compellingly, without even an instant of pedagogical leading of the viewer, is beyond me. But then, that’s what an artistic masterpiece always is: something beyond us. And right there with us at the same time.

January 7, 2019

Farewell, John Burningham

The author of Mr. Gumpy’s Outing, one of the most essential and beloved books of my family’s life together, has died. Rest in peace, Mr. Burningham. You gave us great joy — and will continue giving that joy to us and to many others.

January 6, 2019

request for permissions

Justin E. H. Smith:

Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse looks essentially the same to me as these videos that have been appearing on YouTube using copyright-unrestricted lullabies and computer graphics designed to hold the attention of infants. “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa,” for example, now has countless variations online, some of which have received over a billion hits, some of which appear to be parodies, and some of which appear to have been produced without any human input, properly speaking, at all. It is one thing to target infants with material that presumes no well-constituted human subject as its viewer; it is quite another when thirty-somethings with Ph.D.s are content to debate the merits of the Marvel vs. the DC Comics universe or whatever.

Okay, but could I please have a list of topics it’s okay for thirty-somethings with Ph.D.s to talk about? Also somewhat older people with Ph.D.s? 

January 6, 2019

scruples

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that writing an eight-thousand-word world-historical explanation for why you can’t get through your to-do list is not the best use of your energies and abilities. Think about how many tasks on her to-do list Anne Helen Petersen could have accomplished in the time it took to write such an essay!

More seriously: Is this really a generation-specific problem? I too have tasks that I roll over from week to week to week, but I don’t think I need a Universal Socio-Economic Theory of Generational Paralysis to explain why. Some tasks are annoying and I’d rather do other stuff. Over the years I’ve developed some decent strategies for coping with my reluctance — most of them belonging to the structured procrastination family — but I’ve never overcome my lack of efficiency. (Ask my wife.) I’m not sure this needs or deserves a thorough explanation. Maybe a shrug is more appropriate.

Auden once wrote, “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone. The scrupuland is a nasty specimen.” I would amend that to say that the scrupuland — the overly scrupulous person — is a tired specimen. Nothing is more exhausting than ceaseless self-examination, self-reflection, self-criticism.

The word “scruple” comes from the Latin scrūpus, a rough pebble. A little pebble stuck in your sandal that the scrupuland can’t manage to ignore, try though she might. But if you can’t remove the pebble, I think continuing to try to ignore it would be preferable to writing an eight-thousand-word essay on how the pebble got there, complete with an account of the relationship between Roman roads and the transition from Republic to Empire.

If I were a full-on curmudgeon, instead of a intermittent curmudgeon, I might shout, “Get over yourself!” But that’s not the problem here: whatever might be wrong with a Petersen’s essay, it’s not too much self-regard. I do think, though, that scrupulands need to find ways to get out of themselves, to direct their gaze away, towards other human beings, towards the natural world. But that is difficult for people of any generation who are extremely online — who are, primarily through social media, always on display. When technologically-enabled self-fashioning is a 24/7 job … well, it’s very hard to get that pebble out of your shoe. Maybe those rules for auricular confession and self-examination apply also to participating in social media: Be brief, be blunt, be gone. That won’t get those items on your to-do list done, but it might allow you to think of procrastination as a normal human imperfection rather than a generational curse and a source of ongoing angst.

January 5, 2019

Serial, Season 3

I made it through three episodes, set it aside, came back to it, set it aside again. My problem: How hard Sarah Koenig and crew labor to make sure that you come to precisely the conclusions they want you to come to. It’s strange, in a way, because they also assume that you’ll share their views about everything. They know that their audience will find Judge Gauls (episode 2) just as appallingly insensitive as they do — and yet they can’t stop themselves from critiquing him again and again and again, just in case you waver, I guess. At one point in that episode Koenig reminds the audience, with evident incredulity, that an offender named Vivian had had to come back to to Judge Gauls repeatedly “for three-and-a-half years and counting, for fewer than five grams of cocaine.”

But that’s not true. Vivian keeps getting sent back to Judge Gauls primarily for theft — in one case for stealing and using a friend’s credit card. And she keeps failing drug tests too. Her situation is not about “fewer than five grams of cocaine,” even per Koenig’s own reporting. In her determination to reject Jodge Gauls’s methods and to show that Vivian would have been better off in drug court, Koenig misdescribes her own account of Vivian’s history.

Based on what Koenig & crew tell me — which is of course all I know — I’d also send Vivian to drug court. I too find Judge Gauls smug and condescending and insensitive. But why not let me come to those conclusions on my own? Why must Koenig remind me again and again and again what I ought to believe? Enough with the lecturing — just tell me a story, please. I mean, come on: they’re already editing the story in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to see these things in any way other than the way they do. The ceaseless and repetitive commentary just pounds the reader’s head with an interpretative mallet. Now I have a massive headache.

January 5, 2019

he’s always the boss

LARRY: Well, she’s, she’s seeing Sy Ableman.

RABBI SCOTT: Oh.

LARRY: She’s, they’re planning, that’s why they want the get.

RABBI SCOTT: Oh. I’m sorry.

LARRY: It was his idea.

RABBI SCOTT: Well, they do need a get to remarry in the faith. But this is life. For you too. You can’t cut yourself off from the mystical or you’ll be — you’ll remain — completely lost. You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will. You don’t have to like it, of course.

LARRY: The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.

RABBI SCOTT: Ha-ha-ha! That’s right, things aren’t so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry. [Rabbi Scott gazes out, marveling.] Just look at that parking lot.

— The Coen Brothers, A Serious Man

December 28, 2018

Science and the Good

Denunciations of “scientism” are a dime a dozen these days, but this isn’t that kind of book. (It doesn’t even use the term “scientism.”) Rather, it’s a patient and careful exploration of the question, “Can science demonstrate what morality is and how we should live?” — and more than that, a genealogy of the question. Hunter and Nedelisky (H&N) are especially skillful in exploring why and how so many people came to believe that science is the only plausible “rational arbiter” of our disputes about how best to live, individually and collectively.

The core finding of the book is that the “new science of morality” is able to use science to establish our moral path only by defining morality down — by simply ignoring ancient questions about how human beings should live in favor of a kind of stripped-down utilitarianism, a philosophically shallow criterion of “usefulness.”

Here’s a key passage from early in the book:

While the new science of morality presses onward, the idea of morality – as a mind-independent reality — has lost plausibility for the new moral scientists. They no longer believe such a thing exists. Thus, when they say they are investigating morality scientifically, they now mean something different by “morality“ from what most people in the past have meant by it and what most people today still mean by it. In place of moral goodness, they substitute the merely useful, which is something science can discover. Despite using the language of morality, they embrace a view that, in its net effect, amounts to moral nihilism.

H&N are clear that very few of these “new moral scientists” believe themselves to be nihilists, or want to be. They have fallen into it inevitably because they are not equipped to think seriously about morals. Much later in the book, H&N comment that

What is confusing [about this situation] is that the language of morality is preserved. The new moral science still speaks of what we “should“ or “should not“ do – but the meaning has been changed. Normative guidance is now about achieving certain practical ends. Given that we want this or that, what should we do in order to obtain it?

The quest, then, has been fundamentally redirected. The science of morality is no longer about discovering how we are to live – though it is still often presented as such. Rather, it is now concerned with exploiting scientific and technological know-how in order to achieve practical goals grounded in whatever social consensus can justify.

For this reason, “in their various policy or behavioral proposals, the new moral scientists never fail to recommend that was sanctioned by safe, liberal, humanitarian values.“ Science done in WEIRD societies, then, faithfully reflects WEIRD values — a phenomenon that, H&N point out, proponents of the science of morality seem constitutionally unable to reflect on. They think they are just doing science, but it it really likely that the assured results of unbiased scientific exploration will unfailingly support so consistently the policy preferences of the educated elite of one of the world’s many cultures?

It’s not likely that this book will convince many proponents of the new science of morality that their quest is quixotic; such people are deeply invested in believing themselves Objective, able to achieve the view from nowhere; moreover, the depth of our social fissures really does call out for some arbiter, and the idea that science, or SCIENCE, might be that arbiter is both attractive and superficially plausible. But upon reflection — the kind of reflection offered by this book — the claims of these new scientists become harder to sustain.

One can only hope that Science and the Good will prompt such reflection. For if we must have a morality guided by science, we need that science to be better than it currently is — and that will only happen if the moral thought prompting it is better. At the very least, we need some New Scientists of Morality to turn some of the skepticism on their own assumptions and preferences that they so eagerly devote to all previous moral traditions.

December 21, 2018

advice for Der Spiegel

In Der Spiegel’s report on how their star reporter Claas Relotius got away with fabricating stories for years, Ullrich Fichtner writes, “Already, every text printed in DER SPIEGEL goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article.” But immediately after making this claim he demonstrates that is is not true (Where are the fact-checkers??) and indeed could not be true. After mentioning a few small facts that could be and were checked, he continues,

But the problems with Relotius’ articles relate not to details like that, but to his on-the-ground reporting. That work is based on the fundamental trust the editorial staff bestows on all journalists under their oversight. The fact-checking and research department at DER SPIEGEL is the journalist’s natural enemy — and that’s just how DER SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein wanted it. But the department also assists with reporting, providing information and details while also seeking to prevent mistakes. Ultimately, the department is also working to put out the same product. The idea that a colleague would deliberately cheat is not part of everyday considerations in journalism. The honest effort to seek truth and veracity is the rule. Cheating is the exception.

There is simply no way to find out whether Relotius was telling the truth when he describes the music he heard playing in an abortion clinic in Mississippi. Could you, if you were a Der Spiegel fact-checker, even know whether he visited the abortion clinic at all? Perhaps you could, by demanding in advance that he photograph every place he visited when researching his story. But that’s quite a demand, and Fichtner is right to suggest that it would be hard, and probably counter-productive, to sustain such an adversarial relationship between reporters and fact-checkers. And it would be too expensive, as well as kinda creepy, to send fact-checkers along with reporters on their travels.

So Fichtner is right to say that when editors send reporters out they basically have to trust them to tell the truth. The need for trust cannot be eliminated from the equation. The problem posed by Relotius’s fabrications is basically insoluble.

But I do have a suggestion for Der Spiegel, and it’s based on this evisceration of Relotius’s story about Fergus Falls, Minnesota. The first thing to note is that Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn point to a great many factual errors in Relotius’s piece about their town that could have and should have been caught by fact-checkers. The second thing to note is that several of the claims he made in his story — for instance, that there was a sign at the town limits reading “Mexicans Keep Out” — are prima facie highly implausible and deserved some serious looking into.

But the third and most important thing to note is that none of the ridiculous things Relotius says about the residents of Fergus Falls would be implausible to an educated German — and here we get close to the heart of the matter, at least for me. Reading Fichtner’s postmortem I couldn’t help noticing that most of the Relotius stories that are almost wholly fictional concern the United States, and it seems highly likely that Relotius knew exactly what kinds of stories about this country would lull the fact-checkers to sleep: stories that confirmed all of their prejudices about the culturally limited, fearful, Bible-thumping yahoos who elected Trump and support capital punishment and oppose abortion. If he had written stories that challenged any of those stereotypes, no doubt the fact-checkers would immediately have roused themselves from their slumbers. But Relotius knew better than to do that: he spoon-fed them their own bigotries, and they slipped back into their snoozing. And so he was able to spend years just making up a bunch of crap and winning awards for doing it.

So my suggestion for the editors and fact-checkers of Der Spiegel is this: In the future, when one of your reporters starts smoothly murmuring in your ear precisely what you want to hear, immediately strive to awaken your comatose suspicions. You’ll need them.

December 19, 2018

knowwedge is what bwings us togeddah today

I’ve explained before why I believe generational thinking to be more harmful than helpful. But people who are addicted to generational thinking have a disproportionate share in our political discourse. They might think that older heads are wiser heads, or they might think that we need an infusion of youthful energy, but they agree that you can tell a lot about a politician by noting his or her age. I don’t believe it. Being young  doesn’t make you a hobbit, nor being old a wizard. (Anyway, that’s just Peter Jackson sucking up to a demographic whose money he craves.) Others say that what matters is race, or class, or sex, or sexual orientation, and while those markers may be more meaningful than age, none of them is especially important either.

You know what matters? Knowwedge Knowledge. If you’re running for office, I couldn’t care less how old you are — unless you’re over 80, in which case actuarial issues kick in. What I care about is this: What do you know? Can you summon to mind the general outlines of the Constitution of the United States? Are you aware of any distinctive, or especially controversial, laws of the state you live in? If you were to be elected to office, can you make a reasonable guess at the legal and political issues that are likely to confront you, and how they are affected by existing laws? Do you understand that there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment? Do you understand how Facebook makes money? Do you grasp why a rogue employee can’t tinker with Google’s algorithms to punish conservatives? Have you seen, and do you comprehend, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change? What do you know? 

People sometimes refer to the Trump administration as an idiocracy: rule by the idiotic. I  don’t think that’s quite right, first because Trump has a certain serpentine cunning, but also because the idiot, etymologically, is the private person, the person in his own world. Idiots don’t run for office, neither do they vote.

Others call the current regime a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. It’s a reasonable designation. The more I have thought about it the more convinced I have become that Americans elected as their President the single most comprehensively disqualified public figure for the job: a man disqualified by temperament, by character, by inexperience, by vulnerability to blackmail — and by sheer ignorance.

And it’s that last point that makes me want to call the current regime by a different name: it is, I think, an agnoiocracy — rule by the ignorant. Rule by know-nothings. Most of the people who voted for Trump are not as crassly venal as he is, but they tend to be equally ignorant. It was their ignorance (or denial — it amounts to the same thing) of the facts of our political order that made them think that Trump could be a successful president, and their ignorance of Trump’s non-televised history that made them think that he could be trusted to keep any promise that is not in his direct interest to keep.

When children are small they make messes, and they do so because they’re ignorant. It’s not their fault: they haven’t been around very long, they don’t have a lot of experience with cause and effect. So they pour orange juice on the carpet, and take Sharpies to the walls — leaving messes for their parents and other guardians to clean up.

Our infantile agnoiocracy — and I include in it the legislative as well as the executive branch, and Democrats as well as Republicans — is making enormous messes that later on we’ll all have to clean up, if we can. And that’s why, from now on, when I’m looking at people running for office, the chief question I’ll be asking will not involve their positions on issues. I’ll ask: What do you know? Have you sufficiently remedied your natural ignorance that you are unlikely to make messes as big as the ones we’re now faced with?

But watching all the flailing and floundering and whining and fit-pitching of our political elite has had another effect on me: it has made me increasingly sympathetic to arguments, like Jason Brennan’s, for the replacement of democracy by some kind of epistocracy. The only thing holding me back: the people responsible for creating the epistocracy are the members of our current agnoiocracy. I envision a Central Committee of this nation’s intellectual elite featuring Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Laura Ingraham.

December 18, 2018

it’s all very simple

First, insist in a very loud voice that you are a vigorous supporter of religious freedom. 

Second, add the following: “But of course I’m no supporter of bigotry.” 

Third, describe every religious opinion you don’t share as bigotry. 

December 18, 2018

newsletter news

A note for those of you who don’t look at my micro.blog: I have deleted my TinyLetter account and moved my newsletter to buttondown.email. If you have already subscribed through TinyLetter, you should also be subscribed to the new one. If you have not subscribed, you may do so here. 

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