Alan Jacobs

Cecilia Giménez, the Spanish woman who really messed up when she tried to restore a 19th-century fresco of Jesus, now wants a piece of the action from the 2,000 or so euros ($2,600) her church has collected from tourists coming to see the ruined artwork. Spain’s El Correo reports, according to Gawker’s translation, that the 80 -year-old Giménez has hired lawyers to make her case. A court battle is expected. Ars Technica says the church has also lawyered up.

I think elegy is an inevitable outcome of utopia. I do think I have a sense of belatedness, of always having arrived a little too late. I think it’s a very common American characteristic going back to our earliest times – always feeling you missed it by a little bit!

Having grown up in a kind of utopia myself, and having seen that utopia fade, having been part of all that, has made me sensitive or alert to the inherent melancholy of utopian ideas.

On Having Roots in More than One Place | The American Conservative

What Salman Rushdie Didn’t Say | The American Conservative

Thomas Nagel is Admirably Fair-Minded | The American Conservative

Introducing … myself | The American Conservative

The good folks at The American Conservative have been kind enough, and unwise enough, to give me a place to blog. I am very grateful. I will continue to post here, but probably not quite as often — though I will link to my blog posts, for those who might find that convenient. Basically, over there I will link to many of the kinds of things that I link to here, only adding more of my own commentary and allowing for conversation in the comments. I leave it to you to determine whether all that is good or … whatever. Cheers!

Unfortunately, these few niceties can’t make up for the fact that Twitter took nearly everything that was original or innovative about the app and threw it out with the bath water. This app used to be a perfect example of what was useful and unique about the iPad and its bigger screen — but now feels like little more than a blown-up iPhone app. To see Twitter crack down on the utility and feasibility of third-party options and simultaneously ruin its showcase app on the most popular tablet in the world is a hard pill to swallow.

This naturally invites questions about the practical value of Mr. Rorty’s own ideas. He thinks they will free us from the worship of science and from the notion that we can attain a “God’s-eye view” of the world or learn to speak “nature’s own language” (as opposed to the many languages that we invent). This liberation will make us better liberals in the broadest sense of the term: we shall be able to appreciate a diversity of views and thus be in a healthier position to continue the conversation of mankind. What we must do is see science and philosophy as on a par with imaginative literature. Naturally, this sort of stuff goes down well with some literature professors, who now find that they own Plato and Newton as well as Shakespeare and Milan Kundera.

The main problem with this idea is that not even Mr. Rorty himself can stay faithful to it. By his own lights, he ought to argue not that pragmatism is right but that it is useful. In fact, for the most part he uses good old-fashioned philosophical arguments to support it. It is hardly surprising that he seldom gives reasons for believing that pragmatism is somehow more helpful than its alternatives, since that is a most implausible claim. Science has been pretty successful even though most, if not all, of its major practitioners have taken themselves to be describing the world. How can Mr. Rorty be so sure that it would be even more successful if they dropped this idea?

And how does he propose to prevent the conversation of mankind from degenerating into the blathering of mankind? The Rortyan vision of heaven on earth, in which people merely tell enlightening tales and abjure the search for truth, sounds like a gathering of tipsy old sea dogs swapping dimly remembered stories of past voyages of discovery. If the earlier explorers had all been Rortyan pragmatists, the sea dogs would have had nothing to reminisce about.

Pretty Things & Monsters: A soldier and his squirrel.