Alan Jacobs

One of the failings of Marvel—as of other franchises, like the “Superman” series—is the vulgarity that comes of thinking big. As a rule, be wary of any guy who dwells upon the fate of mankind, unless he can prove that he was born in Bethlehem. Superheroes who claim to be on the side of the entire planet are no more to be trusted than the baddies who seek to trash it, nor is the aesthetic timbre of the movies in which they both appear. I remember the joy of reading David Thomson’s entry on Howard Hawks, in “A Biographical Dictionary of Film”; the principle underlying Hawks’s work, Thomson argued, was that “Men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world,” and his adage rings true far beyond “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” or “The Big Sleep.” All movies thrive on the rustle of private detail—on pleasures and pains that last as long as a smoke—and there has been nothing more peculiar, in recent years, than watching one Marvel epic after the next, then sifting through the rubble of gigantism in search of dramatic life.

The gods descend over Chicagoland last night. Via @yayitsrob on Twitter.

When I am done with my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I will — God willing — write a rather large book about certain vital cultural events that occurred in the early months of the year 1943. But when that’s done, I have another book I want to write. It may be years and years before I get to it, and I may not get to it at all — I’m old enough now to be aware how unlikely it is that I’ll be able to write all the books I want to write — so I thought I’d sketch it out here. It’s about the relationship between technological modernity and the genre of fantasy, which, it turns out, is much more complex that the repudiation of what Tolkien called “the Machine” that’s so central to The Lord of the Rings. The story looks something like this:

1. What we now call “fantasy” is something closer to “realism” in the pagan world, which is populated by many powers capable of acting upon what Charles Taylor calls “porous” human selves. In the pagan world success in life is largely a matter of navigating safely among those powers, which are unpredictable, beyond good and evil, and indifferent to human needs. (Such indifference means that they can help as well as hurt, but also that their assistance can never be relied upon.) In this environment, fantastic creatures are at the very least personifications or embodiments of powers genuinely believed to exist. This is especially true of Faery, which Tolkien rightly called “that fair and perilous land.”

2. The Christian world is alien to the pagan world primarily in its concentration of all power in the hands of an almighty God, from which everything else has only derivative strength, virtue, and indeed existence. People fully shaped by this account of the world, with its emphasis on the need to account for the very being of the cosmos, will necessarily find fantasy insufficiently curious about where the powers that afflict human lives come from. (Many pagan mythologies have no creation stories or thin, minor ones.) Also, for people fully shaped by the Christian account of the world a “buffered” self becomes a possibility for the first time, largely because any of the powers that afflict us are secondary, derivative, conquerable. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). “In all this we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). Attachment to the One True Power makes possible the absolute defeat of all others.

3. In this light, the progress of modernity can be seen as the movement from “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” to “I can do all things.” The possibility, and desirability, of a truly buffered self remains even when belief in Christianity wanes.

4. What follows from this is the generally increasing recognition that a purely buffered self is isolating, anxiety-producing. See Emerson on the “melancholy discovery” that we exist, existentialism, “the age of anxiety,” “the lonely crowd,” etc. (Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age explores this development exhaustively, exhaustingly.)

5. Accompanying this realization, and causally connected to it in subtle and highly complex ways, is the acceleration of the pace of development of technological modernity. This is perceived by many as proof that we can indeed do all things, and that if technology exacerbates alienation and anxiety it can also alleviate them. Others see this as the end of the age of the buffered self, because we are now porous to our own technological creations — or rather, to the people who control those creations. Thus Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

6. It is in this environment that fantasy literature comes to be increasingly central, both as a form of nostalgia for a day when the porous self was at least surrounded by other sentient beings, and as a kind of allegory of our own condition — an acknowledgment that the great problem of the pagan world, how to navigate as safely as possible through an ever-shifting landscape of independent and unpredictable powers who are indifferent to human needs, seems to be our problem once more. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is an especially important text for this moment, because it rightly identifies technologies as gods and simultaneously sides with the older gods as being intrinsically closer to the proper human lifeworld. Imaginatively, we are pagans once more.

They already guide blind and disabled people; now dogs are to be trained to help people with dementia. The duties of these “guide dogs for the mind” will include reminding their owners to take medication, as well as encouraging them to eat, drink and sleep at regular intervals.

The dementia dogs will be trained to respond to sound triggers in the home that prompt them to perform tasks. These could include delivering a bite-proof bag of medicine with a note inside reminding the patient to take it, or waking them up in the morning.

With conventional software that runs on your PC, forced upgrades are nearly impossible. Millions of people choose to run Windows XP, a decade-old, theoretically-obsolete operating system. Heck, some people are still running IBM’s OS/2, which never caught on in the first place. But with web-based services such as Gmail, forced upgrades are not only possible but guaranteed. It’s part of the price you pay for allowing a big company to manage your software for you. And the fact that Gmail is a free, ad-supported service probably doesn’t help. Customers who pay for their software have far more leverage than us freeloaders.

So an age ended, and its last deliverer died In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath: A kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.

Only the scupltors and the poets were half sad, And the pert retinue from the magician’s house Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad

To be invisible and free; without remorse Struck down the sons who strayed in their course, And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.

I’ve been struck recently by how many of my clients are ashamed to go to their friends for help: both material or financial help, and emotional support, the love in time of distress which might be thought of as one of the key purposes of friendship. I’ve written before about my own struggle with the temptation to keep my troubles to myself and not seek help because I don’t want to burden others, so I totally sympathize with this dilemma. But as I’m trying to teach myself, love in a time of need is what you have friends for. St. Aelred’s emphasis on transparent honesty with one’s friends may be considered an antidote to the shame we feel at exposing our own needs and weaknesses.

One of the biggest tasks at the center, at least for someone with my style of counseling, is to help the woman find the sources of love and support already available to her in her own life and community. I try to help her identify and strengthen those connections. And I’ve been startled by how often people will identify a friend as a possible source of desperately-needed strength, and then admit that they’re ashamed to rely on that friend. “Well, if she were in need, wouldn’t you want to know?” I ask, and that helps a bit. But the tight old relationships—not only friendship but the fictive kinship relations of godparenthood and godsisterhood, and maybe even the extended-family relationships of cousinhood—seem to be weakening. A renewal of friendship would be good for everybody, but maybe especially good for the poor.

Slate: Have you seen the research connecting football to brain injury?

Green: Yes. From what I’ve gathered, it’s all anecdotal. No one has come up with conclusive evidence. There are suggestions of long-term effects, and in fact they may be true, but so far I don’t see any proof. The most compelling evidence that’s been brought to light so far deals with NFL players. And anyone that suggests college football reaches the same levels of intensity as the National Football League, well, that person just hasn’t experienced both college and pro football.

And so Turkle’s piece and others like it resonate despite the theoretical shortcoming that make certain scholars cringe. What difference does it make that some study showed that a statistically significant portion of the population reports feeling less lonely when using social media if I can’t get the person standing two feet away from me to treat me with the barest level of decency.

The question remains, however, “Are smartphones at fault?” This is always the question. Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us lonely? Are smartphones ruining face-to-face conversation? Put that way, I might say, “No, not exactly.” That’s usually not the best way of stating the question. Rather than begin with a loaded question, perhaps it’s better simply to seek clarity and understanding. What is happening when cellular phones become part of an environment that also consists of two people engaged in conversation?

Millennials were also less likely to say they did things in their daily lives to conserve energy and help the environment, and less likely to agree that government should take action on environmental issues. With all of the talk about Millennials being “green,” I expected these items to be the exception. Instead, they showed some of the largest declines. Three times as many Millennials as Boomers said they made no personal effort to help the environment.

Millennials were slightly less likely to say they wanted a job that was helpful to others or was worthwhile to society. This is directly counter to the Generation We view predicting that Millennials would be much more concerned for others. Volunteering rates did increase, the only item out of 30 measuring concern for others that did. However, this rise occurred at the same time that high schools increasingly required volunteer service to graduate.