When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.Last May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet, then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door. …
For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.
It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year.If you recheck your anecdata after looking up the numbers, you’ll recall that on that last trip to Florence or Barcelona you were struck by the huge number of German (or maybe they were Dutch or Danish) tourists around everywhere.
The truth is that countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard. Platitudes aside, it takes considerably more “effort” to be a rice farmer or to move sofas for a living than to be a New York Times columnist. It’s true that all else being equal a person can often raise his income by raising his work rate, but it’s completely backward to suggest that extraordinary feats of effort are the way individuals or countries get to the top of the ladder. On the national level the reverse happens—the richer Germans get, the less they work.
what one thing
Ah, so big a question! That is the whole question of theology, you see! I should say, I hope that during your studies you have visited yourself earnestly with the message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament. And not only of this message but also of the Object and the Subject of this message. And I would ask you, are you trained to visit not only yourself now, but a congregation with what you have learned out of the Bible and of church history and dogmatics and so on? Having to say something, having to say that thing. And then the other question: are you willing now to deal with humanity as it is? Humanity in this twentieth century with all its passions, sufferings, errors, and so on? Do you like them, these people? Not only the good Christians, but do you like people as they are? People in their weakness? Do you like them, do you love them? And are you willing to tell them the message that God is not against them, but for them? That’s the one real thing in pastoral service and that is the question for you. If you go into ministry to do that work, pray earnestly. You’ll do difficult work but beautiful work.Karl Barth, answering the question from a student, “What one thing, sir, would you tell a young pastor today if you were asked, is necessary in this day and age to pastor a Church?” Best advice I’ve read in a long time. (via wesleyhill)But if I had to begin anew for myself as a young pastor, I would tell myself every morning, well, here I am; a very poor creature, but by God’s grace I have heard something. I will need forgiveness of my sins everyday. And I will pray, God, that you will give me the light, this light shining in the Bible and this light shining into the world in which humanity is living today. And then do my duty.
Mark Bernstein: Christianity and The Future Of The Book
Mark Bernstein: Christianity and The Future Of The Book
For instance, Mark says, “The reflexive assumption that new books will be worse, that bibliophiles won’t find them appealing, that their aesthetic experience must be worse, is neither reasoned nor reasonable.” I agree! Thank goodness I didn’t say that crap.
I didn’t say that new forms of the books will be worse. In fact, I say that the “key virtues [of the codex] can be preserved, and perhaps even extended, in forms other than the paper codex.” But I don’t think that the new technologies will be better in every single way than their predecessors — because new technologies never are. There’s always something that you sacrifice. Mark writes, “The pen in my pocket is much better than the pen my father carried to war in the Philippines, and that pen was a marvel compared to the quill his grandfather, a learned man, must have used in the Pale” — which is true from most points of view. But if you want a writing technology that costs very little, that is easily replaceable, that is bio-degradable when disposed of, that requires no advanced energy-consuming technology to make, and that can be shaped to suit your particular writing preferences, then a quill pen might be just the way to go. Modern pens are inferior to quills in all those respects. Now, I’m not going back to quill pens because those aren’t my top priorities, but in every technological development that are some trade-offs, and not everyone will want to make them. That’s my point.
Thus: “Even when the aesthetics [of e-readers] are improved, as they surely will be, that development may not proceed in directions bibliophiles find very appealing.” NB: may. But I could have made the point more strongly and it still would have been right: as some quotations from elsewhere in my essay show, some people — most of whom are bibliophiles, or think of themselves as bibliophiles — simply will never be reconciled to books that aren’t made of paper. (There are people who won’t drive or ride in cars; Wendell Berry won’t use a computer.) Even people who will use e-readers for the sake of convenience will in many cases think that paper codices are aesthetically superior. This seems to me an absolutely obvious and incontestable point.
Most important: Mark writes, “This posits the readers (and the communicants) as passive beneficiaries or helpless victims adrift in a sea of technological forces they cannot master. … [But] people are not really like this.” Again, a misunderstanding of my point. I say that technologies shape our minds and our lives, I do not say that they completely determine our minds and our lives. Mark is working only with absolutist positions here — technological determinism or utter human freedom — but I’m not. I think widely-used technologies are powerfully influential but not determinative. The more widely used a technology is the more it pushes — or the people who use it and sell it push — us in certain directions. That pushing can be resisted, but often it’s difficult. Don’t we all know this?
So I don’t think Mark is actually responding to my arguments, but to a straw man who holds positions far more extreme and simplistic than the ones I hold and have expressed.
P.S. Mark also seems to believe a number of common myths about the historical relations between Christianity and learning: this book would be a good place to smart if he wants a more accurate picture of things.
P.P.S. For the sake of full disclosure, I have to acknowledge that Mark is the creator of the amazing Tinderbox, so he’s one bad dude.
My real criticism of [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. The Pevensie kids become the kings and queens of Narnia: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the year (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops; but this is where the story starts, surely – what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world – would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that’s exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things. Grrr!
some things I published this year
First of all, two books, both of which are linked to on the right side of your screen: my little essay The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and my critical edition of W. H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety.
I published a few things that aren’t online, but here are the things that are: a few words for The Atlantic on Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary and a commemoration for the same digital rag of Tom Wolfe’s account of the space program.
For the Wall Street Journal I wrote a little piece about Pitzer College’s proposed “secular studies” program that — I discovered soon after when people from Pitzer started writing to me — relied on highly contested information. They’re having a vigorous debate about this program at Pitzer and I’m eager to hear what comes of it.
I wrote a few words about The Best Technology Writing 2010. I produced a longish essay-review on Auden, focusing on his critical magnum opus The Dyer’s Hand, and a probably-too-short review of some recent books about managing information and acquiring recondite knowledge.
I am relatively pleased with my pretty long piece about Marshall McLuhan but I don’t think anyone else is. So it goes.
I was glad to offer a commendation (coupled with a little critique) of the remarkable Iain Sinclair, too little-known on this side of the Atlantic.
And I wrote at great length about “Christianity and the Future of the Book”.
There were many blog posts and a few thousand tweets too, but I’m not listing those here. I wonder what next year will bring… .
Let me start my own speculations [about life-prolongation] with what might seem a frivolous topic: pet dogs. For those who love their dogs, the disproportion between the human and canine lifespan is already painful. I know of dog-lovers who just can’t bring themselves to get a new puppy after they’ve lost one too many. How would one feel at, say, 370 years of age, contemplating pet number 30-something? The physical energy required for a new puppy is nothing compared to the psychic energy. So, I don’t think it’s absurd to worry about the effects of extremely long life on our commitments, aspirations, and receptivity to new life and love.Perhaps we won’t find it disturbing to be so out of sync with the rest of creation (particularly not if we take a chosen few, like our dogs, with us into hyper-longevity). Our human companions, in any case, would be equally long-lived. But how would human relations be affected? How would monogamy fare? It’s not doing great as it is, but could one even imagine the vow “till death do us part” when death might be nine centuries away? If monogamy simply disappears as a promise and an expectation, we might be confronted with the human version of the puppy problem: would there be enough psychic energy for ever-renewed love? Life takes its toll on the spirit as well as the body. What would the tally of disappointments, betrayals, and losses be over a millennium? Would we love other people more or less than at present? Would we be better partners, parents, friends, and neighbors? What would it be like to experience the continued vitality of the body in conjunction with the aging of the spirit? Would it mean the best of both worlds: the vitality of youth with the wisdom of maturity? Or the worst of both worlds: the characteristic vices of age with the strength of will to impose them on others?
Christopher Hitchens, by common consent the greatest man of the last century and probably in the entire history of the world, has just died. But this fact has been shamefully ignored by the Guardian. So far I have only found half the front page, a double-page news spread, a cartoon, a leader, a full-page obituary and half Simon Hoggart’s column. Where are your priorities? Can I look forward to a special supplement soon?
Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.
Fold out maps! “‘Liber Floridus’ (Book of Flowers), a Medieval encyclopædia produced some 900 years ago by Lambert, Canon of St Omer, in the NE France/Flanders/Belgium region.”