I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the events in Egypt and Tunisia – but … the citizens of the Arab world all too often have a choice between a Bad Guy and a Worse Guy. Egypt looks like its choice is between the status quo, the Muslim Brotherhood or a military coup. This is not a 1989-style revolution, there is no Arabic equivalent of Scorpions singing Wind of Change. Successful revolutions normally have a well-organised alternative government, with a clear route towards democracy. Where is the Egyptian Lech Walesa, or the Tunisian Vaclav Havel?
Such wistful desire to evade responsibility exposes the childishness of the adults now preaching the good news of emerging adulthood. They have decided that taking responsibility for other people — spouses, children, employees and subordinates, neighbors, friends, eventually even parents — and relying on them in turn is the heaviest burden that can befall a person. But what if this is instead the means to happiness? Advocates of emerging adulthood share in common with children a proclivity to see the future as nearly infinite and themselves as, for all practical purposes, immortal. In their view of themselves and their world, it is never too late and there is never any rush. But a few-year increase in the average life expectancy has bought us much less time than they think, and it has done nothing to mitigate our potential to make irreversible errors and experience gnawing regret. The indefinite extension of childhood doesn’t even approximate the immortality required to free us from these miseries. In the meantime, putting off all responsibilities and commitments as long as possible to avoid hard realities may only result in missing the opportunity to make these decisions at all.
Who, alive today, will still be famous in 500 years? It’s the kind of question people might ask at dinner parties during a lull in conversation. But it’s one I’ve been pondering for the past couple of years, while writing a novel about three men who were together for a six-month period of bloody battles and lavish parties in central Italy. The story, set in 1502, is almost entirely a true one. The names of the men? Cesare Borgia, Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci.When I first read about this little-known moment in history, I was amazed that the three men should have known one another. In fact, Leonardo was working as Borgia’s military engineer, while Machiavelli had been sent by the Florentine government on a diplomatic mission. But I had never thought of them as contemporaries, perhaps because they are famous for such different reasons. Indeed, two of the three are really infamous rather than famous, and—thanks to the vicissitudes of time and rumor—they are remembered for things they probably didn’t even do.
Unfortunately, however, traditions that are not passed on from one generation to the next die. If an entire generation grows up largely unexposed to a particular tradition, then that tradition can in essence be said to be dead, because it is no longer capable of reproducing itself. It does not matter whether the tradition in question is imagined as the Western tradition, the Christian tradition, or the Marxist tradition (and of course both Christianity and Marxism are part of the Western tradition). Traditions are like languages: if they are not passed on, they die. Most traditions, of course, have good and bad elements in them (some might argue for Christianity, some for Marxism, relatively few for both), and what dies when a tradition dies is therefore often both good and bad, no matter what one’s perspective. But what also dies with a tradition is any possibility of self-critique from within the tradition (in the sense that Marxism, for instance, constituted a self-critique from within the Western tradition), since a tradition’s self-critique presupposes the existence of the tradition. Therefore the death of a tradition is not just the death of the oppression and tyranny that might be associated with the tradition, but also the death of progressive and liberating impulses within the tradition.
— Views: Sorry - Inside Higher Ed. I like much of this, but it is very, very wrong to suggest that there is a Western tradition — there is not even a Christian tradition. Western culture is largely a series of arguments conducted by proponents of different traditions that had their origin in or near the Western orbit. Christianity likewise has, intellectually speaking, been an extended debate about what it means to follow Jesus Christ and to belong to Him.
The great thing about art is that it’s there whether the academic humanities are or not. And if you make the study of literature and the arts your own, which is incredibly easy to do with the internet being what it is, it means so much more than if you passively imbibe received wisdom in classrooms for grades. The academic humanities may have committed slow suicide – but the art is alive and well, much of it many centuries old. It’s freely available to us. It’s ours.
We are unique as a species in our ability to point meaningfully. Chimps may draw saleable pictures and create tools, but they do not point. If I point in the direction a thrown ball has gone for the benefit of my slow-witted border collie, she looks intently at the tip of my finger. Declarative pointing – ‘there’s an eagle!’ – is also one of the fundamental triangulations of our social being. I point; I use my arm and forefinger to describe a line in space; I point at something or someone; but, for it to be meaningful, there has to be another person there to observe and comprehend the gesture. Raymond Tallis’s fourth chapter is concerned with a major exception: that of people on the autistic spectrum, whose inability to appreciate the subjectivity of others is confirmed by a failure to point.
The big difference Facebook and, especially, Twitter has made is that it is easier for critics to hear other people’s opinions. Even then, though, you tend to hear similar views to your own; after all, if you follow someone on Twitter it’s because something about them appeals to you. I tweeted about PJ Harvey’s new album the other day. The excited response I got from followers was amazing. But then, what did I expect? I wasn’t talking to fans of Justin Bieber. We don’t really connect.
Late last year there was a confluence of critical opinion in America the likes of which the nation hadn’t seen in years. Every single film critic in the traditional media – 350 “best” lists, the ads boast – seemed to anoint The Social Network, director David Fincher’s semi-fictionalised account of the founding of Facebook, as the movie of the year, maybe even of the decade. Every single literary critic in the traditional media seemed to agree that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, his saga of a dysfunctional American family, was the novel of the epoch. And just to make it three for three, just about every television critic in the traditional media seemed to genuflect before Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series that depicts the depredations of a mob kingpin in Atlantic City during Prohibition.
Every now and then I see this kind of story about America in the Brisith papers: the kind of story in which a critic says quite absolutely that something is true that is in fact, not at all true. Critical opinions about Franzen’s novel were seriously divided. For instance, Ruth Franklin absolutely trashed the book in The New Republic, a very prominent journal; and she was not alone. It sometimes seems that the English love to tell one another that the whole of America is of one mind about something. Such a claim fulfills desires and fears alike. But you rarely see it done as straightforwardly as here.
None of these observations is intended to condemn technology. They say that we have put in place a powerful technology and have not yet learned to use it in the best way. But these are early days. Just because we grew up with the internet, we tend to believe that the internet is all grown up. It is still up to us to make and shape it. I wrote my new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other to mark a time of opportunity. I criticise the notion of internet “addiction” because addictive substances need to be discarded.We are not going to discard connectivity technology. We need to form a more empowering partnership with it. In some areas the need for empowerment is now urgent, for example, in the area of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has declared privacy to be “no longer a social norm”. In Alone Together, I question such proclamations and the assumptions behind them. For what is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? Privacy may not be convenient for social networking technology, but it is essential to people.
Eagleton suggested three ways we engage with the tragic dimension: “social transformation” which passes through disillusionment; “psychoanalysis” which engages with the person at depth – not the therapeutic fallacy of believing that what matters is what makes you feel good; and Christianity – not the “being nice” variety but the one that brings a sword rather than peace, divides truth from falsehood and puts Christ on the cross. They all have failure in common, said Eagleton, and they are all deeply suspicious of success.The tragic humanist is saying that when we struggle with oppressive powers, or penetrate to the body of human fragility, or confront the darkness of the human soul, we need more than optimism and a few good books on evolution to see us through. This “twice-born” view of life arises out of brokenness and disillusionment. And you have to surrender your old dreams – your ideals or image of yourself or others – to be reborn into something new. Christ could not have said: “OK, I’ll just suffer the agony on the cross and in three days I’ll be up again.” We have to enter the abyss with no expectation, no promise of anything better. This is a very different form of hope to the liberal humanist’s belief in our ongoing moral progress.
And so Eagleton, from his Marxist starting point, enters the terrain of Christian faith.