Alan Jacobs

Famous writers, drunk-texting

I am not a programmer often means Go easy on me. Ask yourself: Why would someone go out of their way to ask for empathy in this way?

Sometimes it’s a way for a n00b to test the waters. Newcomers to a software community don’t always know the community conventions for asking for help. Labeling oneself as “not a programmer” is a gentle way of gauging how others react to new folks.

More frequently, in my experience, I am not a programmer is used by people who have been burned in the past. Maybe the user once asked a question and got an answer that was over her head. Maybe the discussion turned sour when the developers looked down their noses at someone who couldn’t understand a few lines of code. When this happens, I am not a programmer is a shield, a preemptive attempt to guard against the abuse that the asker rightly or wrongly expects to receive.

I wrote a post a while back on how this looks from the developer’s point of view. The gist, so far as this use of The Phrase is concerned, is that developers should be as empathetic as possible in these situations. For one thing, treating people with kindness is just the right thing to do. Beyond that, it’s important to the future of the community to extend a hand to potential contributors.

The other common use of I am not a programmer is something like: I’m not technical, so don’t even try to get me to crack the hood, which often amounts to I refuse to make an honest attempt. Do it for me.

Recording the percentage of people who say they are happy will tell you something, to be sure, about how people use words. It’s worth learning. We cannot ever know whether your experience of the color red is the same as mine, no matter how many brain scans we take. (The new hedonism is allied, incidentally, with the new brain science, which merrily takes the brain for the mind.) Nor can we know what red or happiness 1-2-3 is in the mind of God, the “objective happiness” that Kahneman speaks of as though he knew it. We humans can only know what we claim to see and what we can say about it. What we can know is neither objective nor subjective, but (to coin a word) “conjective.” It is what we know together in our talk, such as our talk about our happiness. Con-jective: together thrown. No science can be about the purely objective or the purely subjective, which are both unattainable.

If a man tormented by starvation and civil war in South Sudan declares that he is “happy, no, very happy, a regular three, mind you,” we have learned something about the human spirit and its sometimes stirring, sometimes discouraging, oddity. But we inch toward madness if we go beyond people’s lips and claim to read objectively, or subjectively, their hearts in a 1-2-3 way that is comparable with their neighbors or comparable with the very same South Sudanese man when he wins an immigration lottery and gets to Albany.

Austen published anonymously (as “A Lady”); in her own lifetime she had no public life as a writer among writers. She had a generous critic-champion in Walter Scott, but if her work was read at all (and after her death she was out of print for 12 years) it was thought of as being on the genteel, female margins of literary culture. It’s a teasing conundrum that she could not possibly – could she? – have imagined the scale and the kind of the appreciation that was to follow. (“Did Jane Austen know how good she was?” Mullan asks at the opening of his book; a conundrum even more difficult to unpick.) By the end of the 19th century enthusiasts were making pilgrimages to “Austen-land”, imagining themselves communing with her “mind and heart”, fancying “girlish forms … walking among trees and flowers at Steventon”. Like other pilgrims, Johnson is haunted in pursuit of Jane, disappointed because the cottage at Chawton is “charmless … a functional edifice, not a cosy one”, and by the labels on the furniture: “Although this piano is not the one Jane Austen used, she bought a similar type”, and so on.

Johnson identifies different elements in the enthusiasm. The late Victorians, tired of sensationalism, wrote about her “magic”, and needed her to reinvest “the world with wonder”. She was carried to the remote corners of empire as a talisman of English values; hardened soldiers in both world wars hung on to her disabused clear-sightedness. Kipling writes a short story about the Janeites, mystifying them as a sort of Masonic sub-cult. But what is it about these novels that makes them into the repository for so much longing?

In the domain of religion and science, decisions, actions, attitudes, practices, and conflicts of the present moment require careful assessment for what they mean now and how they may affect the future. Conservative Protestants today, for example, offer many reasons for leaning against or actively combating the consensus of modern scientists concerning evolution. Some of those reasons concern narrowly defined issues of physical evidence or the interpretation of specific biblical passages, while others range to broader issues of theology, philosophy, ethnicity, family order, public education, or government. To offer historical explanations for the standoff, which this paper tries to do, is not the same as explaining the individual motives of those who engage such issues today. But it is a good way to see that contemporary stances represent an amalgamation of discrete attitudes, assumptions, and convictions, and that the components of this amalgamation all have a history.

The purpose of this paper is to specify fifteen of these attitudes, assumptions, and convictions, to indicate when they rose to prominence, and to suggest how they relate to affect contested issues of science and religion.

All it takes is actually bothering to meet a teenager or three and you’ll see what I know to be true from meeting hundreds upon hundreds every year: they’re the same curious, sensitive, smart, compassionate, funny, questioning, brilliant people they’ve always been.

Pews and pew-holders at St. Margaret’s Church

If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis. Like a recipe attempted in an ill-provisioned kitchen, “dreamlike” art relies on substitutions: dutch angles, forced perspective, absurdist juxtapositions, arbitrary transformations, and, as Peter Dinklage’s character points out in the film Living in Oblivion, a lamentable superabundance of dwarfs. Dreams in art either make sense, or they make no sense at all, but they never manage to do both at the same time, the way dreams do while we’re dreaming them.

it is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?

Well, I’m basically a literary and philosophical humanist myself, not a journalist or scholar or expert of any kind, so I do personally regret that people like me don’t have and never again will have the cultural authority that the New York intellectuals had. But history has moved on, and there’s still a place, after all, for us humanists to practice the honorable activity of applying the really matchless moral resources of literature and the philosophical tradition to criticizing society and culture. Still, the work on the front lines now needs to be done by others, the investigative journalists and maverick scholars, people who can do deep reporting or­­­­­­­­ work in the archives. Those are activities that classical public intellectuals—Bourne, Russell, Camus, Sartre, Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte—didn’t have the time or the temperament for. So even though I personally will never be a Glenn Greenwald or a Noam Chomsky, I’m supremely grateful to them. They’re doing what I think needs above all to be done. Cultivating and expounding the humanities will always be essential to the moral health of society. But politically speaking, the literary intellectual is now a kind of auxiliary