Alan Jacobs

A schoolmaster’s calling is usually but poor and very painful, requiring much close attendance; but yet it is of so great use to the common good, and alloweth the mind so much leisure and advantage to improve itself in honest studies, that it is fitter to be chosen and delighted in by a well-tempered mind, than richer and more honoured employments. It is sweet to be all day doing so much good.

The atrocity in Tucson on Saturday was a horrifying act of political nihilism. As everyone knows, six innocent people were murdered, and thirteen more very seriously injured, including Rep. Giffords, who was the main target of the assassin. Obviously, the killer was deranged, but the same could probably be said about Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of William McKinley. That doesn’t make their destructive goals any less political. Nihilism is a charge that a lot of people have thrown around in the last few years, and it has usually been wrong. There are so few actual nihilists that it is usually a mistake to label someone this way, but it seems appropriate in this case. Nihilism is usually the wrong word to use because nihilism is ‘far removed from politics as we normally understand it,’ to use Brooks’ phrase describing Loughner’s thinking, but if anything describes Loughner’s ideas that would seem to be it.

Aside from repugnant opportunism, the main reason why some liberals have tried connecting this atrocity with conventional Republicans and Palin’s demagoguery is that the assassin’s actual politics are so strange and unfamiliar. As horrible and genuinely senseless as it was, the massacre might make some sense if it could be linked to familiar political disputes and woven into ready-made narratives. It might lend the suffering and deaths of all these people some special meaning if they could be seen as political martyrs who were attacked by identifiable extremists from the other 'side’ because of their convictions, but that wasn’t the case. What is disturbing about Loughner’s attack is that it most likely could have been directed against any public official who happened to draw his ire. No one really knows what to do with someone who takes the view of Bazarov when he says, 'Aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles….Just think, how many foreign…and useless words!’ For that reason, many people tend to turn to convenient scapegoats and default villains

Augustine’s Confessions (the very title implies an admission of guilt) is considered the first Western autobiography ever written, or in other words, the first public personal revelation. As in much of Christian first-person literature that followed—Hildegard of Bingen’s visions, Martin Luther’s Tabletalk accounts, John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” Charles Wesley’s journals, C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress—Confessions combines declaration, admission, and revelation all under an awning of transformation.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that this is very much what is happening in live storytelling across New York City. Whether the stories are funny or sad, they are always personal and they always contain a narrative arc, some sort of transformation. And because the stories are live, the audience is a participant, learning as much about themselves as about the storyteller. Furthermore, to call stories in which people detail their often-R-rated comedy of errors or sexcapades ‘confessions’ or ‘defenses’ doesn’t feel like an overstatement either.

Mike Daisey, who is referred to as 'the master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation,’ was raised Catholic. When Allison, who also has a Catholic background, first saw Daisey perform, he couldn’t pinpoint why Daisey was so effective. 'What is it about the beautiful music, the rhythms and volumes and tones of his stories?’ Allison asked himself. 'And then I realized it’s a homily! It’s in his blood, in his upbringing.’

Ruined Armenian churches. More astonishing photos here. Hat tip to Tim Maly.

The Whale and the Reactor (1)

When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost.

I’ve become a big fan of tools like Freedom, which effortlessly permit you to turn off the noise. An hour after you haven’t kept up with the world, you may or may not have work product to show as a result. If you don’t, you’ve just called your bluff, haven’t you? And if you do, then you’ve discovered how powerful confronting the fear (by turning off the noise) can be.

In one view, both the revelations of WikiLeaks and of the Telegraph would, if they became the norm, encourage a more truthful public sphere. Conscious that everything was potentially transparent, we—and especially our leaders—would develop into super-rational beings uncomprehending of the notion of mendacity. Politicians would give the whole range of their thoughts on every subject, in support of their party or otherwise; officials would make public their plans at every stage; diplomats would reveal all conversations and the public would have the maturity to understand and take no unfair advantage of these disclosures. But no conceivable society could live in such transparency. It is more likely that a transparency culture simply causes a displacement of the semi-private into the wholly private—with public figures relying more on public relations to act as a shield, and turning an increasingly bland face to the outside word.

Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked. Google’s general, big-picture algorithms probably haven’t changed much since the days when this was relatively accurate.

But that’s no longer what web content looks like. Now, massive amounts of technically-not-spam sites are generated by penny-hungry affiliate marketers and sleazy web “content” startups to target long-tail Google queries en masse, scraping content from others or paying low-wage workers to churn out formulaic, minimally nutritious pages to answer them.

Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask.

The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:

Why wasn’t I consulted?