Alan Jacobs

Adiaphora: As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great

A new study in the journal Science examined the contents of more than 500 million Twitter messages sent in 84 countries over the course of two years, looking for signs of good moods and bad. It found what a lot of us could tell by looking at our own lives.

Optimism is reborn with each new day and slowly erodes as we work, study and go about our quotidian affairs. Our mood lifts as we head home to friends, family, entertainment and beer. Our outlook tends to be sunnier on weekends. And speaking of sun, when it starts to pile up in the spring or disappear in the fall, that affects our mood, too.

Most professors are not going to go out of their way to provide career counseling: you have to ask for it, and then you risk seeming more interested in the job than the “Life of the Mind.” There is usually a feeling that you are wasting the professor’s time with issues that can be answered by some combination of career services and peer mentoring. At elite schools, I suspect there remains a belief that graduates can get jobs on the basis of reputation rather than a professional approach to the market. That’s where the graduates of programs outside of the top ten can succeed with good career advising.

From the professor’s point of view, effective career advising takes time away from research, and–more important–it requires some honesty about academe that is risky to share with a student. If graduate students we’re forced to acknowledge what’s happening to the academic labor system–and the kind of risks they are taking with their livelihoods–they might leave the program. Most would be right to do so. They will never be competitive for a job that provides healthcare. That’s a conversation no advisor want to have: not while undergraduate courses need teaching assistants and graduate faculty members need people to take their seminars. “So, focus on how much you love your project on Emerson, Milton, and Death. Don’t worry. All of our graduates are employed, if they are talented and hard working.”

Hilobrow is great.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

And all of this on Google’s dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don’t use Google’s web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation.

Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

Why is e-mail volume getting ever worse? I believe it’s because of a simple fact: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as “What are your thoughts on this?” Or a link to a Web page. Or an attachment. And it may be copied to a dozen other people, all of whom will soon chime in with their own comments. Every hour spent writing and sending messages consumes more than an hour of the combined attention of the various recipients. And so, without meaning to, we’re all creating a growing problem for one another.

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric.

That future which only yesterday was the future now today is the present. Just like we mark eras using BC and AD, now we will have BF811 and AF811. Where were you on Sept. 22, 2011, when the world changed? I, unfortunately, was holed up in my grubby little office in a small town in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I will never forget this day. Never. Ever. How could I? This is the day when Timelines was introduced. Timelines! It is, in a word, profound. Deeply, profoundly profound, in fact. “Facebook Just Schooled the Internet. Again” is how MG Siegler put it on TechCrunch. Which is a pretty amazing feat, coming as it does just a year and a half after “Facebook Just Seized Control of the Internet” as MG Siegler wrote in April 2010. It is pretty amazing, after all, to seize control of the Internet. That was bad-ass enough. But to then school the Internet that you’ve seized control of? Who but Facebook could do that? Good Lord I have to sit down and just think for a minute because my mind is reeling …

And all of the rest of the world seems shabby and dull and boring and ancient – just as Mashable predicted. Google, poor old Google, looks like ass. My brand-new MacBook Air, which only last week gave me joy unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life, now sits on my desk, just a dead, lifeless hunk of brushed aluminum. Everything, in fact, has lost its color. I go outside and stand in the yard and gaze up at the sky and I say, Why? Why, sky? Why do you look like shit? You look just the same as ever, just blue sky and white clouds. Why can’t you change the way Facebook changes? And my house, and my dog, and wife and kids — blah. Nothing. Nothing! They are all just the same, just old and tired and ancient and boring and completely lacking in profound beauty. So back to Facebook I go and just immerse myself in the magic. Ahhhh. So much better.

I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us. We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity….

I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain.

I believe the novel is a moral form. We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue. Through the tales fashioned by thoughtful writers we discover or reaffirm what we believe to be right and good. Our eternal subject is the nature of the well-lived life. So here’s a theory of what has happened to the middle classes and the novel. A hundred years or so ago the language of idealism changed. As Christianity fractured, the imagination of those who wanted to make a better world was seized by a new idealism: socialism. In this new understanding of society the working class had virtue and was the future; the middle class had power and was the past. Bourgeois values came to be seen as vices. The middle-class consumers of art and literature gradually found themselves cast in negative terms, as exploitative, parasitic and reactionary.

By the last decades of the 20th century, as these perceptions became the orthodoxy of the educated elite, writers and artists found they faced a fork in the road. They could please their middle-class audience and be condemned as comforters of the oppressors, seeking sales and riches over truth; or they could challenge, shock, offend and bewilder their audience, and so retain their claim to righteousness.

Challenge is necessary, and shock is salutary. There’s a vital place for a literature that, like the sermons of old, preaches to us our weaknesses and shames us into leading better lives. But if all serious literature becomes punitive, the crucial next step in the process is lost. Yes, we’re guilty. Yes, we deserve to be mocked and pitied. But what are we to celebrate?