Alan Jacobs

The term “religion” now delimits a particular, limited sphere of activity, a form of life like golf or novel-writing in scope and meaning. The precise nature of the subordination will differ depending upon the polity within which it is enforced, but it will always be there and always enforced. The nation-state brooks no rivals when it comes to establishing a hierarchy of order and subordination, and if some particular set of Christians or Muslims or Jews gets uppity, refusing to acknowledge the state’s hegemony in this matter of establishing hierarchies of loyalty, and claiming, perhaps, unrestricted loyalty and authority in ordering the lives of their adherents, then the state will respond quickly, and usually with violence.

In the American case, the establishment of the appropriate set of hierarchical relations between the state and particular religious groups is now so firmly in place that it has come to seem inevitable and natural, even to those who have been categorized by the state as religious. American Jews and Christians have become, for the most part, just what you would expect of those who have embraced the category “religion” for their Christianness or Jewishness - that is, hobbyists and cheerleaders. The former because their Christianity and their Judaism have become for them a part-time leisure activity; the latter because, so far as the question of the relation of their Christianness or Jewishness to the state comes to mind, they will think of it as one of unambiguous and enthusiastic support - that is, as cheerleaders.

Suppose you wanted to go live at a luxury resort for four years. You’d expect that to cost, wouldn’t you? (No one is going to write an editorial raging about how if you wanted to live at Club Med it would cost you at least $50,000 a year – probably more.) So why are people surprised that it costs a lot – really a lot – to send a kid to college for four years? College is the sort of thing that seems like it should cost a lot: beautiful buildings on nice land, nice gym, nice green spaces, expensive equipment, large staff that have to be well-paid because they provide expert services. If you want to be puzzled about something, figure out how and why it was ever cheap, not why it costs now.

But this thought that colleges and universities are like luxury resorts, so of course it costs, is not very comforting to apologists for the cost of higher ed. Four years of resort living does not sound like a model that can, in fact, be available to everyone. If the democratic dream is that every kid can go to college, and if the dream of college is that every college kid can live for four years in the equivalent of an expensive resort, then the dream dies.

How do you measure a spirit, or dissect a phantom? For many, ghosts are beyond the frontier of what science can interest itself in, one boundary for the discipline. For others, ghosts, being a phenomenon like any other, are equally open to objective study. Yet most interesting of all, the technologies and machines that define the modern world and would investigate the spectral themselves have seemed prone to being haunted.

The process, perhaps, began with the gloomy railways of Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman” or Arnold Ridley’s “The Ghost Train”. But soon it spread to demon-driven cars, to mezzotints, to haunted motorways, ghostly presences in lifts, or confined to a cursed submarine. Most intriguingly, the instruments that ghost hunters themselves would use have seemed spooked: the photograph that freezes a vanishing moment catching the recurring vanishing of a ghost; the tape-recorder left on in an empty room that picks up bodiless voices; the numerous tales of eerie messages on mobile phones or ghostly disturbances within computers. Like our photos, our recordings, our texts and our tweets, the ghost is a trace, linked to technology, detected within it, and somehow inhabiting it. When the familiarities of life are themselves revealed to be haunted and strange – when there are slight deviations from the customs that conceal our relation to death – we are closest to the anxious heart of the ghost story.

Back in 2010 I published this column for the Big Questions Online website. That site has changed a good deal since, and my columns have been taken down. Maybe this one is worth reposting.

Recently John Sentamu, the Anglican Archbishop of York, said that it’s time for people to stop attacking Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

It deeply saddens me that there is not only a general disregard for the truth, but a rapacious appetite for ‘carelessness’ compounded by spin, propaganda and the resort to misleading opinions paraded as fact, regarding a remarkable, gifted and much-maligned Christian leader I call a dear friend and trusted colleague — one Rowan Williams. I say, enough is enough. May we all possess a high regard for the truth.

A couple of years ago I was visiting an Anglican blog, as was then my habit, and came across an article in which a theological conservative — that is, someone on “my side” of the Anglican debates, if we must speak in such terms, God help us — was accusing Archbishop Williams of something like complete epistemological skepticism, effective unbelief. I have heard many of my fellow conservatives speak of Williams in this way. I thought that if they were to read what he writes, or listen to what he preaches — this magnificent sermon, for instance — they would no longer speak of him so dismissively. I wrote a comment on this post, challenging the critique of Williams, linking to sermons, talks, essays that demonstrated beyond any doubt that the charge of skepticism was false.

None of this convinced the author, or other commenters. The general belief was that the Archbishop had not acted decisively for conservative causes, especially regarding sexuality, and therefore anything he said or wrote that savored of theological orthodoxy amounted to protective coloration at best and outright deceit at worst. In their minds he was the enemy of orthodoxy and therefore their enemy, and as such could be granted the benefit of no doubt. Never mind that on liberal Anglican blogs he was simultaneously being condemned for having sold out to the forces of right-wing reaction. (And never mind what Jesus said about loving your enemies, even assuming that Rowan is really an “enemy.”) He was wrong; he had to be resisted by all available means, tarred by any brush near to hand. My response to this attitude towards Williams can be summed up perfectly in Archbishop Sentamu’s recent comments: there was a deeply lamentable “general disregard for the truth.” And from the strict upholders of tradition and orthodoxy!

The author and commenters bristled at my critique. I bristled right back. The argument escalated. At one point I said to myself, all right, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball — and I would have cut loose and said exactly what I wanted to say, except that at that moment my hands were shaking too violently for me to type accurately.

I looked at my trembling fingers for a moment. Then I closed that browser tab and spent a few minutes removing all Anglican-related blogs from my bookmarks and my RSS reader. I stopped reading those blogs and have never looked at them again to this day, and I feel that I am a better person and a better Christian for it.

“Someone is WRONG on the internet”, as the now-famous xkcd cartoon has it, but it’s a particular way of being wrong that generates this kind of heat. I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity. (You’ll see that I am putting this in terms of the classic virtues.)

Late modernity’s sense of itself is built around achievements in justice. Consider Americans particularly: when we look back over the past hundred years, what do we take pride in? Suffrage for women; the defeat of international fascism; Brown vs. Board of Education; civil rights and especially voting rights for African-Americans. If you’re on one side of the political spectrum you might add the outlasting of the Soviet Empire; if you’re on the other side you might add the expansion of rights and gays and lesbians. But the key point is that all of these are achievements in justice.

To this point someone might object: well, of course — those are political accomplishments after all, and politics is, or ought to be, about the pursuit of justice. And that’s right: but one of the key developments of the late modern world is the dramatic increase in public information about political action. We know more about politics, we think more about politics, than our ancestors ever did or could have done. In the eighteenth century, near the beginnings of modern political journalism, Samuel Johnson wrote, “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” But perhaps few late moderns would agree with him. We seek to have almost all that we have to endure cured, or prevented, by laws and kings, that is, politicians.

And so, as we have come to think more and more about politics and the arts of public justice, we have come to consider our private and familial and communal lives more and more in those terms. The pursuit of justice becomes central to, even definitive of, acts and experiences that once were governed largely by other virtues. It is this particular transformation that Wendell Berry was lamenting when he wrote, “Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.” That is, a matter of justice rather than love, an assertion of rights rather than a self-giving.

It is this self-same logic that governs our responses to one another on the internet. We clothe ourselves by the manifest justice of our favorite causes, and so clothed we cannot but be righteous. (“Someone is WRONG on the internet.”) Not only do we fail to cultivate charity and humility in our online debates, we may even come to think of such virtues as in fact, vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy for our causes. And so clothed we go forth to war with one another.

But this comes perilously close to what Thomas Hobbes, 350 years ago, famously called “this war of every man against every man.” And as Hobbes pointed out, such a war may begin in the name of justice, but justice cannot long survive: in such an environment “this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place… . Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” No wonder, then, that Cardinal Sentamu cries out, “May we all possess a high regard for the truth.” No wonder he cries in vain.

reading-as-breathing:

Ceramic book building in Amsterdam. By Sanja Medic, Melle Hammer and Susanne Laws. Photo by Barbro Norman

Jimmy Cross married letters from a girl named Martha. They were not love letters, but Jimmy hoped that one day they would be.

The things they married were largely determined by depravity—or whim, anyway. Once the Supreme Court of the United States finally ruled the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, the walls came down and the floodgates were opened, all bets were off and all manner of marriages were on. Among the things they married were pocket knives, wristwatches, ink-jet printers, microwave ovens, chewing gum, cigarettes, favorite books, boxes of pancake mix, lighting fixtures, heavy machinery, and Star Wars action figures made and sold by Kenner between 1978 and 1983, on and off their display cards, in every condition, with or without their original accessories. These things that they married were things of every shape, size, and weight. There was no rhyme or reason to what people married, once people could marry anything and everything. There were no rules.

After Benito Mussolini’s execution in 1945, his people, brutalized and bankrupted by five years of war, might have been more united in hatred for the Italian dictator than in patriotic pride. One of Il Duce’s nationalistic mandates, however, would have unlikely staying power. Determined to rid his country of outside influences, the dictator had banned all foreign words written or spoken, including those uttered in the new talking movies that arrived in the 1930s. The art of dubbing that grew to fill the hush, writes Italian screenwriter Chiara Barzini, has since given Italians Doppiaggese (“Translationese”), a language stripped of regional dialect and peppered with new words and phrases.

American movie studios tested several workarounds after Mussolini’s ban. Intertitles left Italian viewers, many illiterate, to watch in gloomy silence, so the studios devised technology that played speech over pictures. When, in 1933, Mussolini prohibited even foreign films that had been dubbed into Italian outside Italy, his compatriots developed a voiceover industry, producing “stunningly literal translations” of foreign words, even names. The practice continued long after the ban expired. Louis Armstrong became Luigi Braccioforte, for instance, and an Italian curse word was truncated to sync with the lips uttering its Anglo-Saxon equivalent.

“By the ’80s, a whole segment of Italy’s pop culture existed in Doppiaggese,” Barzini remembers. “As children, my friends and I took pleasure in calling one another the absurd phrases Italian dialogue adapters had invented. We became pollastrelle (‘chicks’), exclaiming ‘Grande Giove!’ (‘Great Scott!’) like Doc from Back to the Future.” Voice actors, who passed down their trade to their children, polished the craft to such an extent that their diction was considered “true” Italian. They were often called to lend their voices even to native speakers such as Sophia Loren, whose regional dialect did not, it was thought, measure up to her sophisticated looks.

Biden-laughs and Ryan-abs, Big Birds and binders and bayonets: There is something fascinating when an event as stodgily ceremonial as the presidential campaign is run through the lulz-filter of social media, secreting a hallucination of phrases and images and videos and, of course, gifs. An army is at the ready to spin off a gag at every turn, to propagate the joke to maximum scope; digital arpeggiations of candidate goofs and campaign blunders are transmitted from host to host through a mere caress of the touch-sensitive screen. Watching debates with that second screen of fast-moving social media streams and text-input boxes begging our thoughts has positioned many of us as hunters for the most shareable, memeiest content, ready to pounce at something, anything, and in the process, changing the overall narrative of an event. We’ve developed a kind of meme literacy, a habit of intuiting in real time the potential virality of a speech act — to hear retweets inside words.

I want to write: “I would rather be devastated by the truth than comforted by a lie” and be able to believe it. But that’s easy to say when you’re outside the drift of the regular world, writing away on your sports column. And I wonder what the ladies on the people-movers would think.

Lance Armstrong is a liar, and a fraud, and an inspiration to millions of people, and one of the trees outside my window has leaves that are almost purple, and it’s almost the end of October, and sports keeps rolling on. The TV guys are yelling about something else. Soon it will be Christmas. I have no idea how Lance Armstrong will be remembered. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if 30 years from now his reputation had been more or less refurbished, if people said, Well, everyone was doping then, and it was complicated, and he did great things. I mean, this is the West, sir; print the legend. Maybe doping will be standard practice in 2042. Or maybe not; but it’s always hard to remember that there were victims in cases like this, and what you do remember — hypocrisy and rule-breaking — doesn’t always look so bad a few years down the line. How you feel about that probably depends on what you think heroism means in America, and whether you picture Halloween or Jesus when you hear that the dead are rising from their graves.

justin-singer:

Historical NYC subway maps from the NY Transit Museum.