Alan Jacobs

It is likely that one day we will know much more about how economies work (or fail to work) by understanding better the physical structures that underlie brain functioning. Those structures—networks of neurons that communicate with each other via axons and dendrites—underlie the familiar analogy of the brain to a computer—networks of transistors that communicate with each other via electric wires. The economy is the next analogy: a network of people who communicate with each other via electronic and other connections.

The brain, the computer, and the economy: All three are devices whose purpose is to solve fundamental information problems in coordinating the activities of individual units (neurons, transistors, or people). As we improve our understanding of the problems that any one of these devices solves—and how it overcomes obstacles in doing so—we learn something valuable about all three.

Today, however, a new breed of young intellectual historian is aiming to integrate the spirit of “history from below” with an approach that doesn’t chop American history off at the neck. Young intellectual historians, scholars at the conference were quick to emphasize, have fully absorbed the lessons of the profession’s increased attention to questions of race, class and gender, without losing hold of the premise that ideas matter, even in a culture that still considers “intellectual” a term of abuse.

“We still want to talk about ideas, but we see ideas everywhere,” said Andrew Hartman, a professor at Illinois State University and president of the newly formed Society for U.S. Intellectual History, which sponsored the conference. “Big ideas affect everybody. It’s not elitist to talk about them.”

Now the pathos involved in the triumph of the therapeutic is this: One reason to throw over the spiritual perspective evil/holiness was to reject the idea that our normal, middle-range existence is imperfect. We’re perfectly all right as we are, as “natural” beings. So the dignity of ordinary, “natural” existence is even further enhanced. This ought to have liberated us from what were recognized frequently as the fruits of sin: impotence, division, anguish, spleen, melancholy, emptiness, incapacity, paralyzing gloom, acedia, etc. But in fact these abound. Only now, as afflictions of beings destined for middle-range normalcy, they must be seen as the result of sickness. They must be treated therapeutically. But the person being treated is now being approached as one who is just incapacitated. He has less dignity than the sinner. So what was supposed to enhance our dignity has reduced it.

If we think of the three levels of human linguistic-communicative activity in its broadest sense: one of bodily habitus and mimicry, one of symbolic expression in art, poetry, music, dance; and one of prose, descriptive language; we can say that aboriginal religious life was mainly couched in the first two, but that the culture which emerges from modern Western Reform has largely abandoned these, and confines itself to the third. In this way, it parallels what modern disengaged reason has done to morality. In both cases, the key is to grasp correct prepositional truth — about God and his Christ in one case, about correct action in the other. In the first case, right worship follows, but the forms that it takes are secondary, and can be varied at will. In the second case, a successful imposition of reason brings about right action, but what this amounts to is to be known purely by reason — either the calculation of utility consequences, or the universalizability of the maxim. In no case, is a paradigm bodily emotion seen as criterial for right action — as in the case of New Testament agape.

At the moment of their earliest adulthood, Gen Xers were entering an economy that was inimical to ambition, and they behaved accordingly. Then, fairly suddenly, the economy started rewarding ambition, and the supposedly core psychological attributes of those young people simply vanished, to be replaced by an almost opposite set of attributes. You’d think this transformation would have broken people of their faith in such generalizations, but the desire to attribute people’s behavior to innate character rather than to local context runs deep. It runs so deep, in fact, that psychologists have a name for it: the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is at work when we explain our own behavior in terms of the constraints on us (“I didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because I was late for work”) but attribute the same behavior in others to their character (“He didn’t stop to help the stranded driver because he’s selfish”). Similarly, we fell into the fundamental attribution error when we thought Gen Xers weren’t working hard because they were lazy.

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Why watch Heineken commercials when you can see the original?

CERN Gets Closer to Proving It Broke the Light Speed Barrier

Saturnine storms

Remember too that the battle for full equality will be won in the political center. Liberals are with us already; homophobes will never come around. We have made progress by persuading the persuadable center that our loves and our families pose no harm to others, no threat to mainstream values. Especially now that majority support is swinging behind us, going the extra mile to be reasonable, and to seem reasonable, is essential.

Not every religious accommodation is valid, and it’s not always clear where to draw all the lines. But the smart approach is to bend toward accommodation, not away from it, whenever we can live with the costs. Of course, any kind of discrimination exacts a cost, if only to our dignity. Tolerating intolerance is painful. But the Indiana University students who took their cupcake order to another bakery and called for dialogue got it exactly right. If evangelical students want to have a campus Christian group that requires allegiance to biblical (read: antigay) principles, we can live with that. If Catholic Charities doesn’t want to place children for adoption with same-sex couples in Massachusetts but lots of other agencies will make the placement, we can live with that too. Even if you don’t happen to believe, as I do, that religious liberty is, like gay equality, a basic human right, the pragmatic case for religious accommodations is clear: Being seen as a threat to religious freedom is not in our interest.

So to celebrate the Bible of 1611 is not to genuflect before a timeless masterpiece, to salute a perfect translation; the translators would have been both baffled and embarrassed by any such idea. It is to recognise the absolute seriousness with which they sought to find in our language words that would pass on to us hearers and readers in the English tongue the almost unbearable weight of divine intelligence and love pressing down on those who first encountered it and tried to embody it in writing; those who like Moses and Ezekiel found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer “density” of divine presence, those who like St Paul found themselves dizzy with the number of connections and interrelations between God’s acts over the ages and unable to put it all into a theory, only into a hymn.

The temptation is always there for the modern translator to look for strategies that make the text more accessible; and when that temptation comes, it doesn’t hurt to turn for a moment – for some long moments indeed – to this extraordinary text, with its continuing capacity to surprise us into seriousness, to acquaint us again with the weight of glory – and, we hope and pray, to send us back to the unending work of letting ourselves be changed so that we can bear just a little more of the light of the new world, full of grace and truth.