Alan Jacobs

The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period studying forest theory in Western Europe before migrating in to do field work and possibly mate. The nutrient-rich graduate student is a cornerstone of the forest food pyramid, a conveniently mobile, heated feed bag for a variety of small cosmic horrors. Since there is so little real forest left in Europe, the supply of these initially pink-cheeked graduate students is limitless and easily replenished. If you step quietly, so as not to spook them, you can see them sometimes through the trees, catching frogs with nets, cataloguing the various insects buried in their skin, or peering resignedly into bird holes. They look pale.

As Romek and I walk deeper into the brambles, I find my own interest in the forest reciprocated by a dismaying variety of parasites. Anything with legs, wings and a bloodsucking proboscis has perked up and come to greet us as we enter areas that have gone a long, hungry time since their last warm mammal. The ticks are the most horrifying. Romek is talking to me about the subtleties of forest ecology when I see something with far too many legs run up from his collar directly into his ear canal. He doesn’t notice and keeps talking, but unconsciously pokes at his ear with an idle fingertip as I die on the inside. Moments later, of course, I feel a certain scrabbling at my own hairline. Whatever Romek says for the next hour is lost to me as I claw at myself, every once in a while catching a little facehugger that makes a tiny popping sound between my fingernails.

We can have what Turkle terms a “big gulp of real conversation” — through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the other side of the country. We can embrace the value of solitude and self-reflection, writing a blog post that digs deeply into a personal challenge — perhaps choosing to write anonymously in order to share a deeper level of self-revelation than we’d brave offline. We can truly listen, and truly be heard, because online affinity groups help us find or rediscover friends who are prepared to meet us as we really are.

These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception. We are making that digital shift together — old and young, geeky and trepidatious — and we are only as alone as we choose to be.

Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media’s tendency toward overwrought speculation has been increasingly married to the rhetoric of apocalypse. Today, nearly any event can be explained through apocalyptic language, from birds falling out of the sky (the Birdocalypse?) to a major nor’easter (Snowmageddon!) to a double-dip recession (Barackalypse! Obamageddon!). Armageddon is here at last — and your local news team is live on the scene! We’ve seen the equivalent of grade inflation (A for Apocalypse!) for every social, political, or ecological challenge before us, an escalating game of one-upmanship to gain the public’s attention. Why worry about global warming and rising sea levels when the collapse of the housing bubble has already put your mortgage underwater? Why worry that increasing droughts will threaten the supply of drinking water in America’s major cities when a far greater threat lies in the possibility of an Arab terrorist poisoning that drinking supply, resulting in millions of casualties?

In the last 50 years, the sheer density of the information environment has reached and surpassed the point at which privacy might be maintained by walls. And a legal system built on a presumption of information scarcity has no chance at protecting privacy when personal information is ubiquitous. We shouldn’t worry about particular technologies of broadcast or snooping—for instance, the way Facebook trumpets our personal information or deep packet inspection allows governments to trawl through oceans of Internet data. The most important change is not the particular technologies but, rather, the increase in the number of pathways through which information flows.

I would not speak of this dilemma if it were only mine, but I watch many others race again and again through the cycle of widening concern, frenzied effort, and exhaustion. Whatever the source of conscience—parents, God, solemn books, earnest friends, the dictates of biology—it is adapted to a narrower space than the one we inhabit. Limited to a small tribe or a community of a few hundred people, conscience may prompt us to serve others in a balanced and wholesome way. But when television and newspapers and the Internet bring us word of dangers by the thousands and miseries by the millions and needful creatures by the billions; when pleas for help reach us around the clock; when aching faces greet us on every street—then conscience either goes numb or punishes us with a sense of failure.

I often lie awake at night, rehearsing the names of those I’ve disappointed by failing to give them all they asked. I don’t say this to make myself out as a generous soul. I am hardly that; I feel defenseless rather than virtuous. The truth is that I’ve come to fear the claims that other beings make on me, because their numbers grow relentlessly. I wish to love my neighbor, but the neighborhood has expanded so far, and the neighbors have become so many, that my love is stretched to the breaking point. I’m tempted to run away, beyond reach of the needy voices. So I make of this hut a hiding place.

Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision.

The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We don’t know why. It just works.

We also know why optimists do better than pessimists. The answer lies in the differences between the coping strategies they use. Optimists are not simply being Pollyannas; they’re problem solvers who try to improve the situation. And if it can’t be altered, they’re also more likely than pessimists to accept that reality and move on. Physically, they’re more likely to engage in behaviors that help protect against disease and promote recovery from illness. They’re less likely to smoke, drink, and have poor diets, and more likely to exercise, sleep well, and adhere to rehab programs. Pessimists, on the other hand, tend to deny, avoid, and distort the problems they confront, and dwell on their negative feelings. It’s easy to see now why pessimists don’t do so well compared to optimists.

If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with each other in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on our lives: suburbanization that isolates us from each other, long working-hours and commutes that are required to make ends meet, the global migration that scatters families across the globe, the military-industrial-consumption machine that drives so many key decisions, and, last but not least, the television — the ultimate alienation machine — which remains the dominant form of media. (For most people, the choice is not leisurely walks on Cape Cod versus social media. It’s television versus social media).

oldhollywood:

Louise Brooks & Gustav Diessl in Pandora’s Box (1929, dir. G.W. Pabst) (via)

I want to go back to say a few more words about Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, a book for which I wrote a commendatory blurb, and some of the critiques of it. Ross begins the book with a kind of rough-and-ready overview of American religious history, but his chief concern is to look at the last sixty years or so, and the decline during that period of the broad cultural influence of orthodox Christianity. To the claim that there has been such a decline, there are, generally speaking, three responses. The first is that there has been no such decline. The second is that there has indeed been such a decline, but it’s largely the result of an increasingly anti-Christian cultural elite, especially as manifested in American universities and major newspapers and magazines. The third is that the decline exists and is largely (though not wholly) attributable to the failures of American Christianity itself. That’s Ross Douthat’s view, and mine.

To the first response — that there has been no such decline — I would suggest reflection on a few facts. First, that in 1947 Time magazine featured an adulatory cover story on C. S. Lewis — “His Heresy: Christianity” — followed a few months later by an equally reverent cover story on Reinhold Niebuhr. T. S. Eliot, a self-avowed conservative Anglo-Catholic, was the best-known poet in the English-speaking world. W. H. Auden’s explcitiy Christian poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, and Auden wrote explicitly Christian and deeply theological essays and reviews for The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and many other prominent and intellectually serious periodicals. In the mid-1950s Bishop Fulton Sheen’s television program Life is Worth Living ran on ABC opposite Milton Berle’s show, with which it was highly competitive in the ratings.

Can anyone seriously imagine that such generally public prominence for explcitly Christian ideas and beliefs would be possible in mainstream American media today? Of course not.

The only thing preventing people from acknowledging this strikingly obviously fact is a prima facie insistence that decline-and-fall narratives are always nostalgic and always wrong. But neither of these is the case. One can acknowledge that Christanity has a less powerful public presence today than it had in the 1950s without seeing that decline as inevitable, without seeing it as irreversible, and without seeing it as a wholly bad thing. But to deny that historically orthodox Christianity had a stronger presence in the general American culture in the 1950s than it has today — that’s just crazy talk.

The remaining question is: Why the change? To that there are many answers. For secularists, a Relentless-March-of-Truth account is appealing; for many religious believers, a Perfidious-Mainstream-Media narrative is irresistible. There are other explanations that might accompany these without necessarily excluding either of them: for instance, the rise of broader media contexts that allowed Christian television stations, Christian publishing houses, Christian magazines, and even Christian movie studios to emerge. But even if you take the rise of these Christian subaltern counterpublics seriously — as you should — the question remains: Why did Christians prefer them?

If you’re a Christian, it’s tempting to say (drawing on the Perfidious-Mainstream-Media account) that we were forced into these subaltern modes by the relentless hostility of the cultural elites. That’s a very comforting narrative: we get to cast ourselves as the persecuted minority, and who can resist that temptation? Ross is offering a less consoling explanation: that Christians lost their cultural influence in large part because they lost their connection to historic orthodoxy, preferring comfortably flaccid theologies — of the Right and the Left — that were pretty much indistinguishable from what most religiously indifferent Americans believed anyway.

So for those readers especially hostile to Ross’s account, I have a question: Are you sure it’s not because he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear? — That if you have a marginal place in American culture, the situation may be largely your own fault?