Alan Jacobs

Yesterday 2 lectures, re-drafting findings of Committee on Emergency Exams …. and then a great event: an evening Inklings. I reached the Mitre at 8 where I was joined by C.W. and the Red Admiral (Havard), resolved to take fuel on board before joining the well-oiled diners in Magdalen (C.S.L. and Owen Barfield). C.S.L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: 'Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: 'That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’

Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in unnecessary ways? What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like? Arthur Weasley’s fascination with Muggle tech in the Harry Potter books is simply comical – though a great source of fun in the books. I’d like to see a writer imagine what technologies would arise in a fictional world where magic rules but is not the only game in town. Is that too much to ask?

What I think we lack sometimes is confidence that in the long run of things, a certain kind of homespun wisdom wins out in culture. When you look at the social transformations of the last two centuries in many societies, there are some you can credit to the forcible intervention of the state or dominant social classes, but a lot that just sort of incrementally and complicatedly happened. Sometimes because things that used to make sense just stopped making sense, or the cost of a certain kind of practice became higher for pervasive and unplanned reasons. Sure, you can keep talking about why guns are a bad idea, or why the fantasies of certain gun-owners are just actively dangerous or wrong. (Say, that it would have helped anything for there to be three or four guys carrying handguns in Aurora. Anybody with police or military experience, any responsible gun owner, knows that’s stupid bravado.) The conversation can continue. I think the more curious, the more exploratory, the more interested in the range of actually-lived practices people are (on all sides), the more possible it becomes for real change to occur, for the great knotted muscle at the heart of contemporary American life to relax, unwind and open up.

The structure here is not easy for the lay viewer to decode. [Rhythmic gymnastics] has its own language, which non-RG initiates mostly perceive as a series of ultrasonic clicks and emoji hearts. What, for instance, is the precise distinction between the tournaments Miss Valentine 2012 (Tartu, Estonia, February 10-12), Pearls of Varna 2012 Academic (Bulgaria, July 2), and the 4th International Waves Cup (Germany, March 24)? I have read the rulebook in effect for the Olympics, the 125-page Code of Points: Rhythmic Gymnastics 2009-2012, and let me tell you — you thought football had a lot going on. Between the aggro-ballet terminology (fouetté, entrelacé), the extensive use of pictograms, and the radical linguistic uncertainty (“The French version is the official text,” the front cover proclaims, in English), this thing reads like Finnegans Wake as drafted by the unicorn debate team. It’s atavistically beautiful, like middle school cave art, until you realize that all the squiggly shapes represent positions to be assumed by the human body. At which point it becomes … extremely terrifying.

The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.

Chick-fil-A should not be prevented from opening business because of the views of its leaders, or his donations to anti-gay causes. But gays and lesbians in Illinois and Massachusetts have the right to be free from discrimination in employment based on who they are. They also have a right to protest, boycott, and make Chick-fil-A’s customers aware that their purchases fund anti-gay activism. If Chick-fil-A discriminates in hiring or refuses to serve customers on the basis of sexual orientation, the local authorities can and should hold him accountable.

Until then, the politicians should get out of the way.

Some people — in comments, on Twitter and elsewhere — are defending what Emanuel and Menino are doing on the ground that the Chick-fil-A is not being punished for the views of its CEO, but because it donates money to Bad Groups (i.e., conservative groups), and since money is not speech, there is nothing wrong with this. Aside from the fact that the city officials do not even claim this to be the case (they’re open about the fact that they’re acting to punish the company for the political views of the CEO), suppose a town in Alabama or Montana or Central California were to enact this ordinance:

Any resident found to have donated money to a group advocating same-sex marriage or abortion rights — including, without limitation, Human Rights Campaign or Planned Parenthood — shall be barred from opening or operating a business in this city.

For those offering the defense I just referenced, what possible grounds would you have for objecting to such an ordinance (other than to say that it’s OK when the state punishes views that you dislike, not ones you like)?

But liberals should recognize the parallels between even this stronger argument and the (once successful, but ultimately failed) public health arguments for Prohibition almost a century back. The consumption of alcohol, like the ownership and use of firearms, carries all kinds of second-order risks, and it’s easy to run a Foer-style argument against the claim that the happiness people derive from beer and wine and liquor is worth the toll that alcoholic beverages take on life and limb and happiness: (How many of the thousands of Americans killed by drunk drivers every year does your desire for a cold Dogfish Head justify? How many lives ruined by alcoholism? How much spousal abuse? Etc.) It’s true that gun ownership is not as culturally ubiquitous as drinking, but it’s pretty ubiquitous indeed: 47 percent of Americans report having a firearm in the home, and there may be as many as 270 million privately-owned guns in the United States. So if you actually wanted to put a real dent in accidental firearm deaths, you would need not just a ban on large magazines or stiffer background checks for gun purchasers, but an actual Prohibition-style campaign, complete with busts and raids and so forth, whose goal would be not only be a simple policy change but the rooting-out of a very well-entrenched aspect of American culture. And the experience of Prohibition itself suggests plenty of reasons to be dubious that such a campaign would ultimately be worth the cost.

A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.

“We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse,” Serra told Reuters. “In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years.”

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.

Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration; — diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.