Alan Jacobs

60ansdevadrouille:

Lanzhou, jardin des Cinq Sources. vérire oasis dans la ville la plus occidentale le long du Fleuve Jaune. commandant le couloir du Gansu, c’est le départ de la Route de la Soie août 1985.

We are especially nostalgic for the mechanical. We miss the weight of objects, the sounds of gears and levers, the clicks and thumps, the ringing bells and clacking keys—and so we have a whole range of modern skeuomorphs, or derivative objects that retain ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Noisy Typer adds the sound of typewriter keys to a computer keyboard, and USB Typewriter (“A groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence!”) allows any manual typewriter to be converted to a keyboard for an iPad or PC. Several iPhone covers are available that mimic the look of a vintage Leica or Hasselblad film camera. Instagram filters turn digital photographs into imitation Polaroids. None of this adds functionality. Nearly every one of the iPhone/iPad’s built-in apps uses an icon that refers to an outdated, much earlier version of itself: the Frank Sinatra stand mike, the vintage tube television, the spiral-bound address book, the envelope. Yet many smartphone users are too young to have used most of these objects in real life (consider the inconvenience of carrying them around); the nostalgic design of the interface feeds upon a set of reconstructed memories divorced from the experiences that generated them, creating a culturally-shared yearning for lost golden moments. The latest iteration of Apple’s iCal looks like a desk blotter—an item that’s been obsolete since we stopped writing with fountain pens. Ask ten people under the age of 30 if they know what a desk blotter is or what it was used for, and see how many have a clue what you’re talking about. Nostalgic design serves as a kind of safekeeping, preserving images of beloved objects so they don’t completely disappear from the collective unconscious.

If the language of war tends to centralize power, does the rhetoric of “culture war” tend in some way to deform or even centralize culture? Modern warfare is a winner-take-all, unconditional surrender affair and when a society thinks about culture and a “culture war” in that fashion, it would seem nearly impossible for the culture itself to remain untainted. Local nuances and idiosyncrasies would tend to be obliterated by the perceived need to circle the wagons and defeat the enemy. Nuance has no place in all-out war, and it is surely a casualty of the culture wars where the “enemy” is depicted in the worst possible light and absolute loyalty is the litmus test of the faithful. A bland, homogeneous, lowest-common denominator pseudo-culture is the result of forcing culture into the idiom of war….

Culture war suggests a battle to the death. But the metaphor is wrong and therefore fosters poor thinking. A culture is not something with which to do battle, either as an offensive weapon or an object of attack. A culture is a living thing, an inheritance, passed on from generation to generation. It is preserved by loving care not militant brow-beating. It cannot survive as a merely negative opposition to something perceived as its opposite. It is a creative, developing expression of a people’s view of the world that reaches ultimately to the highest things: to the good, the true, and the beautiful. To weaponize culture is, therefore, to destroy the very thing for which the battle is ostensibly waged.

A few years ago, newspapers and nonprofits set up fact-checking squads, rating campaign statements with Pinocchios and such. The hope was that if nonpartisan outfits exposed campaign deception, the campaigns would be too ashamed to lie so much.

This hope was naïve. As John Dickerson of Slate has said, the campaigns want the Pinocchios. They want to show how tough they are. But the result is a credibility vacuum. It’s impossible to take ads seriously. They are the jackhammer noise in the background of life.

This is the paradox. As campaigns get more sophisticated, everything begins to look more homogenized, less effective and indescribably soporific.

If things go a certain way, this fall from grace could be the best thing that ever happened to Jonah Lehrer. In spending the past decade striving to be The Next Malcolm Gladwell, he has fallen victim to Gladwell’s besetting sin, which is glibness. In the Gladwellian intellectual cosmos, immensely complex ideas and experiences get boiled down to simplistic binary oppositions or are run through a single interpretative filter (here’s the tipping point, there’s the blink of instantaneous judgment).

Arguments like this, and Lehrer makes a lot of them, can only seem plausible if you have that zinger of a quote to clich the case, that utterly perfect illustration of the argument. But what if you can’t find the quote? What if nothing has happened that demonstrates your point just so? Your deadline isn’t going away, and you live by your writing — you don’t have another career to fall back on — so maybe you fudge a bit. And that’s what Lehrer did, and that’s what he got caught doing.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s not worth it: maybe the neat little points you make that way aren’t intellectually substantive enough to justify the risks you take on their behalf. There could be a better way to go about this business of trying to understand human behavior and explain it to others. That other way will require more patience, more research, possibly more education (Lehrer has two bachelor’s degrees); and it will probably result in books that don’t sell as well, so the lifestyle will take a hit. But if you can make a real and lasting contribution to the human understanding of ourselves, the tradeoffs are more than worth it. I hope Jonah Lehrer finds that better path.

The point at issue—whether homosexuality, capitalism, colonial slavery, or something else—is never the whole of what is at stake. Nobody has to make a decision about that and that alone. It would be nice to purify the question to the point when it was about one thing and one thing only; but if we had done that, it would already be nine tenths solved. The question is always, what does it mean, in this constellation of circumstances, to approve or disapprove this or that line of conduct? What relations are present to us in and through it? How do the various refractions of the demand of love within the moral law come together to form an understanding of where we stand? So what looks “small” at first glance can become the subject of the day, the focus of everyone’s attention, the test of where each and every person is morally situated, the divide between old friendships and new ones. From outside the historical context it may be hard indeed to comprehend why; but it is part and parcel of historical understanding that we should recognize how one issue acts as a conduit for others.

Are you one of those English professors who writes garbage in his books but just so much of it that other godless leftists I mean people think it must mean something so they hire him?

The good news for [Jonah] Lehrer is that rehabilitation isn’t far off. Remember the Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarism scandal? Probably not, but you may well remember a subsequent bestseller by Goodwin, and the warm welcome she got on PBS and NPR during her book tour. For a country considered puritanical, America is actually a pretty forgiving place.

There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of the past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a next context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.

This may be of no interest to anyone, but it involves a key moment in my own career, and I’ve never mentioned it in print before, so… .

Like many academics, I had a hard time finding a publisher for my first book, which was on W. H. Auden. (It was not my dissertation, by the way; my dissertation was too weird ever to be published.) I probably sent it to twenty-five or thirty academic presses before finding a taker: The University of Arkansas Press. Not the most prestigious venue in the world, but they had done some good books on modern poetry, and seemed genuinely interested in the project, so I happily signed the contract. We went through the copy-editing process, and I got typeset galleys — which I liked the look of very much — and all seemed ready to go. And then I got a call from my editor, Brian King, saying that funding for the Press had just been cut off: it was going to be closed down, and the book wouldn’t be published after all. All they could do was to send me a floppy disk with the Quark Xpress file of the typeset text and wish me the best.

Well, that news knocked the breath out of me. Unexpectedly, my book was back on the open market again, and I had to resume my circuit of the presses. I recalled that perhaps the nicest and gentlest of my many rejections had come from Oxford University Press, and thought it might be worth my time to let them know that the book was available once more — but this time already copy-edited and typeset. Might that make a difference?

Indeed it might. The editor checked with her superiors, and got the okay to take the book, and I was suddenly lifted up from the pits to the heights. Talk about a fortunate fall! I celebrated immoderately.

And then Brian King from Arkansas called back. He had some strange news: hearing about the forthcoming closure of the press, the good people at Tyson Chicken (one of the largest employers in Arkansas) had come through with a grant to keep the press afloat. My book could be published after all. Though the press had formally released me from my contract, they asked me to sign a new one and come back.

So, to sum up:

• I had no publisher for my book,
• then I had one publisher,
• then I had no publisher again,
• then I had one publisher again,
• then I had two publishers.

I was in agony. Obviously an OUP publication would mean a good deal more to my professorial prospects than a UAP publication. I had the opportunity to jump-start my whole career, to expand perhaps dramatically my future options. To pull the book back from Oxford seemed like sheer foolishness. And yet the Arkansas people had wanted the book when no one else did; and they had done the work of copy-editing and typesetting. Moreover, publishing the book would simply mean more to them than to Oxford, which was (is) a huge press with many, many titles.

So I took a deep breath and wrote to Oxford and explained that I was taking my book back. Arkansas published it and has kept it in print all these years. My decision wasn’t, in the usual sense of the word, the smart one, but I feel sure it was the right one. And I don’t think it has hurt me all that much.