Alan Jacobs

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which, perhaps, within a few days, I should dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion: and have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage… . Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity; many, from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender; ‘tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazard her on a battle.

‘I don’t teach writing classes anymore,’ says Le Guin, 'and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, “Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.” I mean, ha.’

The museum has not been redefined so much as it has been disassembled, its coherence shattered as curators, administrators, and trustees grapple with the insoluble problem of operating in that nowhereland between art and life. Everything becomes the justification for everything else. The presence in the museum of Koons and Murakami is justified by relating their work to a taste for popular culture that goes back to such rock solid modern classics as Manet and Picasso. But Koons and Murakami—to the extent that they’ve learned most of what they know from Kmart and comic books—are also used to ratify Manet and Picasso, to give works that some believe are in danger of appearing superannuated a little street cred. And once you’ve embraced Kmart and comic books, why not Deitch’s shows dedicated to skateboards and graffiti? Of course I’m simplifying here. But there comes a time when we need to cut through the high falutin’ intellectual mind games that were featured in “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” the landmark 1990 show at the Museum of Modern Art. Sometimes life is life and art is art. Why must everything always be mixed up? Why must it always be high and low?

One result of the crisis, then, is the catastrophic weakening of the nation’s wealthiest religious body. At first sight, few people would probably feel too sympathetic seeing a powerful institutions forced to suffer for past misdeeds, but the Catholic Church is a large and complex entity. It is a major owner of property in the form of churches and schools, and its charitable enterprises are an essential part of the social safety net. No diocese can afford to lose tens of millions of dollars without cutting back on services, closing facilities and merging congregations.

These changes have most acutely affected already troubled inner city areas, as dioceses have scaled back plans to build new churches to accommodate the enormous influx of mainly Catholic immigrants from Latin America and East Asia. If the abuse crisis had never happened, American cities would probably be in the middle of a church building boom much like that of a century ago, with all that implied for construction, investment, and social capital. Scholar Anthea Butler observes that the Catholic meltdown has neatly coincided with the economic collapse of many big city Pentecostal churches, which had suffered from unwise investments or outright fraud, aggravated by the 2007-2008 economic crash. Combining the two crises has left America’s already troubled urban heartlands far weaker than they might otherwise have been.

SIR – You mentioned research which revealed that shoppers often prefer “50% extra free” to a notionally more generous 30% reduction in price, and you cited this as evidence of irrationality or poor mathematical ability on the part of consumers (“Something doesn’t add up”, June 30th). I think you may be wrong and consumers may be right.

There is, as the advertising sage Jeremy Bullmore observed, a significant difference between a bonus and a bribe. A price tells you much more about a product than merely what it costs. A price cut may be sensibly perceived as a mark of mild desperation on the part of the seller and it is not unreasonable to infer from a price cut that a product is an inferior good. Charging the full price but adding something extra does not convey the same desperation.

In any case this whole debate is silly. If people value 50% extra free more highly than 33% off, then that is an end of the matter. Since all value is subjective, what you are doing by offering the former is simply creating more perceived value at a lower cost. Whether or not the resulting behaviour conforms to some autistic neoclassical idea of rationality is irrelevant. If the sole purpose of life was to be rational, we would have banned golf years ago.

Rory Sutherland
Vice chairman Ogilvy & Mather UK
London

New Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano said he was “deeply disappointed” in the sanctions and the fact that board members had no input.

“I have a fiduciary responsibility to Penn State and I feel like I wasn’t included, just told we are agreeing to sanctions that will impact our university for years to come,” Lubrano said. “I don’t like that. I don’t like the fact I wasn’t involved in the process.”

A writer like Stephen King, in contrast, is less interested in illuminating the everyday than in placing his characters in extraordinary and absolutely decisive moments. The beauty and value of the ordinary don’t really apply when the family dog is going on a homicidal rampage. Or, to take a less caricatured example, we might consider the scene in The Stand when old Mother Abigail staggers back from a devastating but epiphanic experience in the wilderness to give to her followers a message from God – and not just a message, but a command. Reactions to her announcement vary: some believe her wholly; some trust her but doubt the existence or the goodness of the God in whose name she speaks; some mistrust, resist, or even hate her. But though King registers these nuances of response, he also makes it clear that at this crux in the community’s history—in human history—they don’t matter much. Those to whom she has addressed her word of command must obey, or refuse. That is the choice facing them. Nothing else matters. Everything hangs on that decision.

What we call “genre fiction"—like Ursula LeGuin I think the term useless but can’t quite get beyond it yet—tends to focus on moments like that. It strips away the usual and familiar contexts of our lives and replaces them with radically simplified environments: a small crew on a spaceship, a detective trying to stop a killer before he can reach another victim, a lawman in a Western town confronting a lawless gang, a superhero trying to track down a psychopathic criminal mastermind bent on destroying a whole city. It does this kind of thing in the belief, which is as fully justified as the belief that we lose sight of both the pain and the beauty of our daily lives, that such pared-down and dramatically focused moments are revelatory. They tell the characters who they really are, or what in the course of life they have become. We tend to identify with those characters and in so doing try to learn something about ourselves, by proxy if not directly.

These killers are primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones.

Yet, after every rampage, there are always people who want to use these events to indict whatever they don’t like about society. A few years ago, some writers tried to blame violent video games for a rash of killings. The problem is that rampage murderers tend to be older than regular murderers and they tend not to be heavy video game users. Besides, there’s very little evidence that violent video games lead to real life violence in the first place.

These days, people are trying to use the Aurora killings as a pretext to criticize America’s gun culture or to call for stricter gun control laws. (This doesn’t happen after European or Asian spree killings.) Personally, I’ve supported tighter gun control laws. But it’s not clear that those laws improve public safety. Researchers reviewing the gun control literature for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, were unable to show the laws are effective.

And gun control laws are probably even less germane in these cases. Rampage killers tend to be meticulous planners. If they can’t find an easy way to get a new gun, they’ll surely find a way to get one of the 200 million guns that already exist in this country. Or they’ll use a bomb or find another way.

Looking at guns, looking at video games — that’s starting from the wrong perspective. People who commit spree killings are usually suffering from severe mental disorders. The response, and the way to prevent future episodes, has to start with psychiatry, too.

When I think about what the Christian church can be at its very best, I think back to Cappadocia in late Roman times. The central figure in that world was Basil of Caesarea, later St. Basil the Great. And he was great: no Christian that I know of has ever been greater. He preached the Trinitarian Gospel fearlessly and in the face of Imperial opposition, defended the use of pagan literary texts in Christian education, and laid the foundations for Eastern monasticism.

All that would have been enough to cement his place in history, but he also was a tireless advocate for the hungry, the sick, and the destitute. In a time of famine he preached eviscerating sermons to the wealthy of Cappadocia demanding that they “empty their barns” to feed the poor. (“I would like you to take a short vacation from works of iniquity, and give your calculations a rest, so that you might seriously consider the kind of end towards which these preoccupations are heading…. People, what’s the matter with you?”) To those who were willing to give to their fellow Christians but not to Jews, Basil demanded that food be made available freely to all who were hungry. He established what may have been the first hospital, and supported his magnificent sister Macrina in caring for women and children abandoned by their men. By the way, Macrina is also a saint, as are six other members of their extraordinary family.

A church is a community constituted by certain foundational beliefs, but among those beliefs a key one is that the word of the Lord must be obeyed. That is, there are practices that are intrinsic to Christian belief properly understood, and among those are the obligations to feed the hungry, heal the sick, tend to the widows and orphans in their distress, train up children in the way they should go, and be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Thus religion, in the Biblical sense, involves not just holding certain beliefs but acting on them, and the institutions the church creates to help us carry out those commandments are just as “religious” as worshipping congregations. From that it follows that “freedom of religion,” if it is to mean anything, must be extended just as fully to those institutions as to parish churches. Otherwise the church is crippled in its obedience. Which is bad for the church, but also, and more important, bad for the world — unless you happen to think that the State, and the State only, is the proper vehicle for charity and social service. My own view, in political and not specifically Christian terms, is that to yield such service wholly to the State — or to the State’s power to define and circumscribe such service — is a profound impoverishment of human community. And as you can see I have my Christian reasons for thinking this way also.

Consider all this an expansion of my recent post explaining why I support my employer’s lawsuit against the recent HHS contraception mandate: not because I am opposed to contraception, but because I am opposed to a federal agency acting on its own to amputate the full and proper definition of “religious freedom.” And if you want to read more about the amazing Cappadocian Christians, read the book by my friend Susan Holman, The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia.

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