Alan Jacobs

Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, etc, specialize—not in philosophical thought—but in ridicule. And that means the new atheists excel on the only evangelistically-effective playing field that matters—that of human emotion and desire. Most Christian apologists conversely seem content to surrender that ground in their preference for mere rationality. This is a tragic mistake and it’s the primary reason Christian belief is diminishing, marginalized and an easy target for nighttime comedians.

Blaise Pascal said, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is” (Pensees 12).

All too often (especially online) those of us who like arguing for Christian Theism jump to the end of Pascal’s list. We think we have wiz-bang arguments to offer. Unfortunately, we don’t have a worthy foundation for showcasing such arguments. We have not established that Christianity should be revered, nor that it is attractive, nor that it is worthy of affection. We prefer to pull out our five proofs for its “truth” and argue our misguided interlocutors into the Kingdom cold. This is a mistake, for most of our audience see such arguments as power plays, as manipulation, as simply another advertisement out there trying to entice them to buy something.

It was a Wal-Mart, now it’s a public library

These girlfriends are married to executives and small business owners, two of whom are in the insurance business. All of them, I believe, vigorously oppose the ACA. I probably would have too, a decade ago when my husband was earning a six-figure income in home improvement sales and we were owners of an apartment building in addition to our own home. But then my husband’s back gave out and he spent several years trying to do other kinds of work before he was forced to retire at age 47. He now lives in crippling pain every day and takes care of the house. His medical expenses will be covered for the rest of his life through Medicare, a supplementary plan that we pay for, and workers’ comp. He’s eligible, in part, for these benefits because he worked outside the home and was injured at work, while I mostly stayed home and raised children for 20 years.

So, what I’d also like to know is why the family values crowd thinks it’s okay to abandon women like me, who bought into their message and eschewed careers, but then had to re-enter the workforce because of death, divorce, or disability without the benefit of a strong work history? Is this really how they want to repay us? You know, the uninsured mothers who serve as teachers’ aides in their children’s classrooms, or bring them their salad at The Cheesecake Factory, or wipe their aging parents’ bottoms so they don’t have to?

One of Colombia’s mini-libraries, via Good

With Aerotropolis: How We’ll Live Next, John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay have given us a sprawling parable of efficiency that begins with the true story of New Songdo, South Korea, a city already being built but not yet completed. With every square inch wired for the digital age and each residence and workstation equipped for video-conferencing, this “Cisco Smart+Connected” city could be built from scratch anywhere with an Internet connection. According to conventional wisdom, cheap land plus broadband ought to be the recipe for success. If place is elided by advances in communication and information technology, New Songdo—so it might seem—could be built in the middle of nowhere.

But New Songdo’s developers chose to break ground in the middle of everywhere. New Songdo is just minutes away from Incheon International Airport, one of the world’s newest and busiest hubs and the center of Asian air traffic. Along with its sustainability plan and IT architecture, the New Songdo website highlights the city’s accessibility to the rest of the world—”3.5 hours to 1/3 of the world’s population”—suggesting that globalization is at least as much about the efficient movement of people and goods as it is about the transmission of ideas. When complete, New Songdo will be “the urban incarnation of the physical internet.”

But the New York Public Library has since its founding been democratic in a more than simply numeric sense. In 1911, the first request to be filled was for Moral Ideas of Our Time: Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy, a book in Russian. The patron who requested it was David Shub, a 23-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived at 1699 Washington Avenue, in the Bronx. The 1910 census entry for Shub’s apartment building shows that almost all of his neighbors were recent immigrants, with occupations from dressmaker to printer to laborer to clerk. Did they, too, go to the library? It’s possible. Shub, who himself worked a series of manual jobs, was part of that great movement of autodidacticism that swept the Western world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and which was responsible for the flourishing of institutions like the British Museum and the New York Public Library. Back then, ideas like democracy, a living wage, and an eight-hour day were still relatively new, and it seemed possible that the empowerment of the working class would lead to a new world of wide public research, in which every man and woman would be able to undertake a study of whatever interested them—just like the wealthy gentry of the past, who studied poetry, animal husbandry, or whatever else struck their fancy. This would be a productive use for one’s newly acquired leisure, otherwise known as the weekend and the late afternoon.

Shub, for his part, after more than forty years in the New York Public Library, where he met Trotsky and Bukharin, introduced many of his friends to the riches of the Slavic division, and wrote several small-circulation Yiddish texts, offered up the fruits of his research in the form of his one and only English-language book, Lenin: A Biography, which appeared in 1948.

In New York, I ran into a roadblock. My previous libraries either had incredibly long hours, like the University of Washington, or had incredibly long hours and also let me check books out for free, like the University of Montana and my college library. The only exception, the Library of Congress, had mediocre hours and the books didn’t circulate, but the main building happened to be a short bike ride away from my cheap apartment on the edge of Capitol Hill. In New York, in that first year, the only place I could afford was a $560-a-month room in Crown Heights. My one reliable freelance gig—aggregating news articles for a blog—required me to send in my work at 11 AM. I spent the rest of the day working on book reviews. The main branch of the New York Public Library closed at 6 PM. It was an hour away by subway. When I got there, if I found the book I needed, I couldn’t take it home. I hardly ever went.

The other research libraries in town, at Columbia and NYU, refused to admit the public, and there was no way I could afford the fees they charged to get in the door, let alone the even more exorbitant fees they charged to check out their books. Strangely, given all the good books that have been written here, New York was the first place since leaving Idaho that I didn’t have easy access to a good library.

Nothing changed for me immediately. I’d still vote for George W. Bush later that fall; still accuse democrats of being secret communists. But the subtlety of Orwell’s perception, his ability to recognize contradiction, irony, absurdity, had dug in somewhere deep and given me an intellectual inferiority complex. The writing was incisive, devastating without being pretentious or alienating. I trusted his telling of it, his voice. He says in the essay he knew the proper thing to do would be to approach the elephant and gauge its behavior. “But I also knew I would do no such thing,” he writes. “I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would stick at every step.” I was a hunter and familiar with being a poor shot. I could see the elephant in the distance, feel the crowd behind me, watch myself load the shell in the chamber, my hands shaking. I understood Orwell was a man who did not want to act rashly, who considered each party involved, knew there was no real urgency in killing the elephant, but killed it anyway because the inherent inadequacy of the individual in a world of larger, wealthier, more powerful forces.

The fall that year was chilly and the winter was bitter. Come December, I got an A- in the composition class. In April, the first images from Abu Ghraib were broadcast, but now I said nothing. I smoked quietly off by myself. I kept reading and thinking, the fragments I collected connected themselves into larger and more cohesive systems. Eventually I moved to a different city and got another degree. Other essays had more immediate effect on me but none have had one more profound. What happened while I read Orwell’s essay eight years ago was small. I wouldn’t understand it for years, but I was humbled. In the span of a few thousand words over a half-century old, the world got bigger for me in a quiet way. I couldn’t have been prepared for the nature of the truth once it arrived. I thought if I were to ever be indoctrinated, I’d sense it, be able to stop myself from growing diseased. It would be a sudden battle I would know how to fight. I was ready for war. But then, in the quiet, came a small thing.

CDs always felt like cassettes to me — partially because the industry decided to put them in basically a cassette box even though they had a perfectly good, round object that could have gone in a tiny record sleeve — I’ll never understand that one. But they decided to put it in a cassette box.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can’t use the net unless you can read. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Allen Lau, the co-founder of Wattpad, remembers getting a letter from an old man in a village in Africa. The village had no school, no library, no landline, and no books. But it had a mobile phone, and on that they could read and share the Wattpad stories. He was writing to say thank you.

So that’s why I’m judging the Wattpad poetry contest. Wattpad opens the doors and enlarges the view in places where the doors are closed and the view is restricted. And somewhere out there in Wattpadland, a new generation is testing its wings.