Alan Jacobs

My students, like Allan Bloom’s, live inside music. Their musical lives may well be their spiritual lives. It is hard to say, because they don’t talk about music very eagerly. In class I can get a conversation going about God with no problem. And students love talking about alcohol and its effects on the human mind and spirit, theirs in particular. A conversation about sex is easy to start and quickly goes way further than I’d imagine—and sometimes further than I want. But try asking about music.

Students listen to it for hours a day. They trot around the university grounds with headphones on; they plug into their tunes when they sit at their computers. Music, usually rap, is the iron-hard heart of their parties. There is surely a competition, at least among English-major types, about who listens to the most recondite bands. Sometimes students name them in discussions: the Fruit Bats, the Shins (now no longer obscure), Fatkid Dodgeball, Pimp the Cat, Full Throttle Aristotle, Disgruntled Sherpa Project. I sometimes make up a few myself and throw them into the mix.

But when I ask what role music plays in their lives or why they listen to what they do, there is silence. When I tell them what Plato had to say about music and that he’d disapprove of almost everything they listen to for being far too raucous, far too stirring, far too close to anarchy, they bristle and tell me that Plato is wrong. I ask them if listening to hard-core rap might influence their attitudes toward sex and money—major themes in rap, of course. They tell me that I’m being silly—which to me is a little like saying that the food you eat has nothing to do with how your body feels and how it functions.

Probably the best story about what went wrong with Flickr is this one at Gizmodo, but I’m not sure the Yahoo purchase is related to my own situation. I don’t know what Flickr’s customer service was like before Yahoo stepped in.

Here’s what happened to me: about six months ago a rather disturbed – or, to put it more accurately, complete bonkers – Flickr user decided that I was using one of his images without giving him proper credit. As it happened, I had not used any image of his in any way whatsoever, a point he later acknowledged to be true, but in the meantime he bombarded my Flickr mail with accusations and threats, and, in addition, encouraged everyone he knew to do the same. So I got a load of abusive and threatening messages on Flickr mail, at one of my email addresses, and as comments on blogs I write for. Both his accusations and his incitement to others were obvious violations of Flickr’s terms of service, but when I complained to Flickr they didn’t even acknowledge my emails, much less take appropriate action. That would be negligent in any case, but I was a Pro (i.e., paying) user: surely you’d think that they’d want to keep paying users happy, or at least provide some kind of response to them. But no.

So, with renewal of my Pro account coming up, I decided to delete the whole thing. Interestingly, when you decide to delete your account Flickr not only doesn’t ask you to explain your reasons, they don’t even give you a venue for doing so. Apparently they’re quite pleased to lose customers.

P.S. You want to know why I say the guy is bonkers? When he was finally forced to admit that he had accused me falsely, he insisted that I deserved all the abuse from him and his online posse because I had failed to be sufficiently sympathetic to the pain he felt at having one of his images used without his permission.

Chomsky: And here comes Bilbo Baggins. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. In the books we learn that Saruman was spying on Gandalf for years. And he wondered why Gandalf was traveling so incessantly to the Shire. As Tolkien later establishes, the Shire’s surfeit of pipe-weed is one of the major reasons for Gandalf’s continued visits.

Zinn: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not?

Chomsky: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. The thing to remember is that the crop they are tilling is, in fact, pipe-weed, an addictive drug transported and sold throughout Middle Earth for great profit.

Zinn: This is absolutely established in the books. Pipe-weed is something all the Hobbits abuse. Gandalf is smoking it constantly. You are correct when you point out that Middle Earth depends on pipe-weed in some crucial sense, but I think you may be overstating its importance. Clearly the war is not based only on the Shire’s pipe-weed. Rohan and Gondor’s unceasing hunger for war is a larger culprit, I would say.

Chomsky: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf’s pipe-weed ring. He’s trying to divert it.

Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.

And so, after exchanging a few emails, I found myself at the home of the man who owns and operates the only functional Monotype caster in the country. After chatting for a while about hyphenation and justification (my knowledge of which was woefully inadequate) Harry showed me around the press itself. His office was an organised chaos of computers and printing paraphernalia of varying vintage, and as we sat down at a modern PC he explained to me how the Chepman & Myllar Press differed from a traditional Monotype shop. The text is set, he said, not by a Monotype keyboard but by computer.[11]

I’m ashamed to say that it took me some time to grasp this. When I finally did so, I was intrigued; when Mr McIntosh demonstrated it to me, I was flabbergasted.

Most of all, [Žižek] can’t stand students. “Absolutely. I was shocked, for example, once, a student approached me in the US, when I was still teaching a class – which I will never do again – and he told me: ‘You know, professor, it interested me what you were saying yesterday, and I thought, I don’t know what my paper should be about. Could you please give me some more thoughts and then maybe some idea will pop up.’ F**k him! Who I am to do that?”

Žižek has had to quit most of his teaching posts in Europe and America, to get away from these intolerable students. “I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no?’” You can see what he means, for Žižek cuts a fairly startling physical figure – like a grizzly bear, pawing wildly at his face, sniffing and snuffling and gesticulating between every syllable. “But it doesn’t work! They still trust me. And I hate this because – this is what I don’t like about American society – I don’t like this openness, like when you meet a guy for the first time, and he’s starting to tell you about his sex life. I hate this, I hate this!”

I have to laugh at this, because Žižek brings up his sex life within moments of our first meeting.

Malcolm turned five years old yesterday. Here he is on the day we brought him home. Seems like about a year ago.

I thought the piece Rod Dreher linked to about a gay Mormon man happily married to a woman very engaging. It behooves all of us – on whatever side of the various debates about marriage currently raging – to recognize the great variety of ways humans can make lives for themselves that work.

that regard, I’d just like to point out that, inasmuch as what distinguishes this fellow is, primarily, that he is married to a woman to whom he is not sexually attracted, and that he is sexually attracted to other people (he doesn’t lack a libido), this doesn’t really distinguish him terribly much from the norm through human history. Most marriages in human history were arranged ones, in which neither party had the freedom to choose their partner. While I’m sure in many such marriages some degree of sexual compatibility is achieved, it’s very hard for me to believe that any significant number of such marriages were characterized by what we would recognize as “falling in love with” or even “having a crush on” or “having the hots for” somebody. That doesn’t mean such emotions were unknown, just that they weren’t particularly associated with marriage. The radicalism of modern Western marriage is the assertion that these feelings should have something to do with marriage – indeed, should have primacy over the far more traditional bases of marriage, namely property and eugenics.

60ansdevadrouille:

La Gorge du Dragon sur la rivière Daning, avant de rejoindre le Yangzi. Août 1998.

Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly be called the juvenilization of American Christianity. Juvenilization is the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for adults. It began with the praiseworthy goal of adapting the faith to appeal to the young, which in fact revitalized American Christianity. But it has sometimes ended with both youth and adults embracing immature versions of the faith. In any case, white evangelicals led the way.

What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge here. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful.

The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state. We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.