Alan Jacobs

Unapologetic: Bread and wine

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Action cards from The London Game, designed to be played around the capital’s underground network (at things)

Cover of Graphics World magazine (Nov/Dec 1988), designed by Phil Baines; via All About Lettering

Alan Jacobs, almost certainly Wheaton College’s most public public intellectual, will be at Wheaton College no more, he announced on Twitter last night. Jacobs, part of Wheaton’s faculty since 1984, will serve as distinguished professor of the Humanities at Baylor University’s Honors College.

Well, I think, personally — and I’m sticking my neck out here — that we should stop having a department of pastoral theology or ministry that is somehow disjunct from or separable from the central pillars in the curriculum.

There, of course, is still a necessity to learn particular skills. But I don’t think they should be, as it were, dislocated from the hard, intellectual, interdisciplinary effort of making these points of connection.

In my view, the best way to learn those skills is actually alongside very demanding interdisciplinary courses which look at the institutions of, say, jails, and look at how they were themselves founded on theological principles in the early modern period but have lost their moorings and become secularized — yet theological questions are still implicit in what they do.

So training people in an interdisciplinary way alongside students from law school or the public policy school strikes me as the way to change the future here out in the field.

Ministry is not easier and more dumb than doing theology. It’s actually more demanding, because you need all your systematic theological inputs plus all these other interdisciplinary connections.

I have no reason to think that Coursera, or any other MOOC, has anything but noble intentions when it comes to data collection and data mining. I certainly believe that the leaders of the companies are motivated by a desire to improve education. But Coursera is a for-profit business, backed by venture capitalists. Sooner or later, it will have to make money, and, given the current excitement in Silicon Valley and elsewhere about the commercial potential of “Big Data,” it seems inevitable that the company and its investors will explore “other business purposes” for its data, including ones that would bring in revenues.

In their excitement to join forces with MOOC providers, university administrators and professors may not be giving enough thought to all the data that’s going to be collected and all the research activities that are going to be pursued. It’s an oversight they may come to regret.

Ask yourself: Why is it so vital that I be smoothened? There’s no functional advantage to eliminating clothing wrinkles—unless you are competing in a timed event that favors reduced drag coefficients. What you’re really doing when you leave your house in ironed clothes is engaging in an elaborate signaling ritual. You demonstrate that you have devoted time and resources to ironing (or to compelling other people to iron for you), which in turn connotes respect for a (silly) social compact. You use your crisp clothes to advertise yourself as a rule-follower, and you hope that in turn you will derive benefit from being perceived as one who follows rules. “Oh, he took the time to press his shirt before he showed up for this job interview. So I guess he must be a reliable and trustworthy employee.” It’s thinking like this that encourages broad-based evil to fester.

When mass-produced cars appeared, they had an impact on the whole of society. What might be the equivalent social implications of driverless cars? And who might go the same way as the buggy-whip makers? Electronics and software firms will be among the winners: besides providing all the sensors and computing power that self-driving cars will need, they will enjoy strong demand for in-car entertainment systems, since cars’ occupants will no longer need to keep their eyes on the road. Bus companies might run convoys of self-piloting coaches down the motorways, providing competition for intercity railways. Travelling salesmen might prefer to journey from city to city overnight in driverless Winnebagos packed with creature comforts. So, indeed, might some tourists. If so, they will need fewer hotel rooms.

Cabbies, lorry drivers and all others whose job is to steer a vehicle will have to find other work. The taxi and car-rental businesses might merge into one automated pick-up and drop-off service: GM has already shown a prototype of a two-seater, battery-powered pod that would scuttle about town, with passengers summoning it by smartphone. Supermarkets, department stores and shopping centres might provide these free, to attract customers. Driverless cars will be programmed to obey the law, which means, sadly, the demise of the traffic cop and the parking warden. And since automated cars will reduce the need for parking spaces in town, that will mean less revenue for local authorities and car-park operators.

When people are no longer in control of their cars they will not need driver insurance—so goodbye to motor insurers and brokers. Traffic accidents now cause about 2m hospital visits a year in America alone, so autonomous vehicles will mean much less work for emergency rooms and orthopaedic wards. Roads will need fewer signs, signals, guard rails and other features designed for the human driver; their makers will lose business too. When commuters can work, rest or play while the car steers itself, longer commutes will become more bearable, the suburbs will spread even farther and house prices in the sticks will rise. When self-driving cars can ferry children to and from school, more mothers may be freed to re-enter the workforce. The popularity of the country pub, which has been undermined by strict drink-driving laws, may be revived. And so on.

wwnorton:

What ho? The primary decree of the fisticuffs guild!

h/t our friends at San Diego’s Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.

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The Pininfarina workshop, c.1960, from Turin European Metropolis