Alan Jacobs

For Bohr, physics was not about finding out what nature is, but about what can be said about it. Quantum mechanics was a complete theory of the behavior of matter and light, and we just have to come to terms with the limitations it places on what can be known, for example as illustrated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Einstein was having none of it. He believed that there is an objective world out there and that it is the job of scientists to describe it. The appearance of probabilities in the theory was, for him, evidence of its incompleteness. …

In the late 1970s, I had the pleasure of talking with John Bell about the Bohr-­Einstein debates during a train journey from Oxford to London. Every seat was taken, so we had to stand. Pressed against me by sullen commuters, Bell summarized his apparently reluctant conclusion as we pulled into Paddington station: “Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.”

Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort and had never heard anything about physics.

Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the technical changes attendant upon the King’s Men’s move to the Blackfriars theatre four years after their candidate’s death. Unlike the Globe, the Blackfriars was an indoor playhouse; it therefore depended on artificial lighting; candles would not burn unattended for the full length of a play, so act-divisions were introduced, during which they could be trimmed or replaced (the audience, meanwhile, was entertained with music). The plays written after Shakespeare’s company began using the Blackfiars in 1608, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale for instance, have what most of the earlier plays do not have: a carefully planned five-act structure. No Oxfordian has addressed this difficulty for their faith. Presumably they would say that Oxford wrote a batch of five-act plays just in case the King’s Men one day happened to acquire an indoor playhouse and that he gave instructions on his deathbed for these plays to be kept in a closet until such a day arrived. That there is no record of Oxford ever having had any contact with any of the King’s Men has not deterred Oxfordians in the past and will not deter them in the future.

For the time present, in case I should be prevented by death to propound and reveal this new light as I purpose, yet I may at the least give some awaking note, both of the wants in man’s present condition, and the nature of the supplies to be wished; though for mine own part neither do I much build upon my present anticipations, neither do I think ourselves yet learned or wise enough to wish reasonably; for as it asks some knowledge to demand a question not impertinent; so it asketh some sense, to make a wish not absurd.

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call “ambivalent” drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption - most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures.

Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment.

Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. “How could a semiliterate country boy have composed works of such power?” Their snobbery is the surest sign of their ignorance. Many of the greatest English writers emerged from the middle or lower classes. Dickens worked in a shoe-polish factory as a child. Keats was attacked for belonging to the “cockney school.” Snobbery mingles with paranoia, particularly about the supposedly nefarious intrigues of Shakespeare professors to keep the identity secret. Let me assure everybody that Shakespeare professors are absolutely incapable of operating a conspiracy of any size whatsoever. They can’t agree on who gets which parking spot. That’s what they spend most of their time intriguing about.

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

Mr Gumpy’s Outing is one of my favorite books ever. Here’s a slideshow/interview with the great John Burningham.

So. The love of God teaches us to see; it teaches us to see God in the face of Jesus Christ. It teaches us to see ourselves in the light of that love; it teaches us to see our neighbour as the object of that same love and that is when the whole face of the earth is transfigured and enlightened by the love of God. And that brings me to the first reading that we had this morning; God has saved Noah and his family from the flood and, as they go back to cover the face of the earth afresh, a new light appears in the sky; God sets in heaven the promise that his love will endure. The rainbow in the sky tells us that God has promised not to destroy the earth, tells us that God has promised to be faithful to his own nature.

And so we Christians who seek to make the love of God, let the love of God be real in our lives; we look for signs that remind us; signs of the covenant. We are here this morning to celebrate Holy Communion and through the history of the church, Holy Communion has been seen among many other things, as a sign of God’s promise. When the bread and the wine are lifted up at this table this morning, it is as if there is a rainbow in the sky. Here as the bread and the wine of Christ’s body and blood are shared, here is the promise of God’s faithfulness. Here the face of Jesus is turned towards us once again. Jesus tells us to do this in memory of him. We are to remember who he is and remember what his love is, and if we can speak like this it is as if God, seeing the face of Jesus, remembers who he is. As the Bible sometimes puts it, he remembers, he brings to mind his promises. And so we learn yet again what is the love that has opened our eyes, what is the love that has set us free.

All I can say for sure is that in all my days, I have never seen a more fitting living metaphor for the state of American culture at the present moment than an overgrown California blubberbutt who infantilizes himself, publicly celebrates his bizarro fetish as just another lifestyle option, and threatens to kill himself if his government check stops coming. Baby Stanley, I salute you: you are America!

vimeo.com/30704658