Alan Jacobs

Procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning ‘to put off for tomorrow’) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as 'one of the general weaknesses’ that 'prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,’ and lamenting the tendency in himself: 'I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.’ And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.

According to the analysis of procrastination I have developed in my work, one reason that procrastination is so common—much more common, presumably than resolute and dramatic acts of senseless self-destruction—is that it can proceed via choices that are individually negligible. The procrastinator’s voluntary, individually negligible steps may add up to a thoroughly unwelcome result without the procrastinator ever directly choosing an option that is, in and of itself, seriously damaging. Suppose, for example, one wants to avoid becoming noticeably heavier. No particular culinary incident, whether it involves carrots or cake, will make or break one’s chances of succeeding, and so one can choose cake without choosing defeat. Of course, if this choice becomes the rule rather than the exception, one is, in effect, choosing defeat, though there is no particular point in time at which the momentous choice is made.

But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a ‘social imaginary,’ which functions as an 'understanding’ on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the 'intellectualism’ of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as 'thinking things,’ and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is 'carried’ in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious 'knowledge’ are going to look problematic.

In this vein, I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules. Surveys like this mistakenly assume that everyone who plays the game (of religion) can also articulate the rules. I think Charles Taylor gives us good reason to be suspicious of such assumptions.

So, assuming that copyright holders will never be able to stop or even slow down copying, what is to be done? For me, the answer is simple: if I give away my ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing, I’ll attract readers who buy hard copies. It’s worked for me – I’ve had books on the New York Times bestseller list for the past two years. What should other artists do? Well, I’m not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette’s attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won’t get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.

Yet I continue to love American (and Canadian) trains. I am trying to rebrand my debilitating and expensive fear of flying as Steampunk Travel and – at a certain level – I find I am convincing at least myself that rail transportation is a good and lovely, as well as an ecological, option. US trains are roomy, their passengers have no expectations and therefore often eschew UK passengers’ lapses into frenzied disappointment and rage when they are delayed, misled, or ignored. Plus, US trains are still rich in the iconic elements that I, lover of black and white movies that I am, find intoxicating. They are monumental: they still roll majestically into stations with their bells ringing like harbingers of strange mortality, they still hoot across the countryside in the manner of wistful mechanical whales, the conductors still wear little round blue conductor’s hats and the Red Caps still wear red caps – although sometimes they’re baseball caps … From my first exposure to a real live US train around 20 years ago in California, I have been in love with them. It glided and wailed along the sunset into a wood-canopied rural station full of cicada songs and moist heat and my heart was lost.

the binding of the vanities

spruce wood

Arboretum, west side

Over the years I’ve come to adopt a pretty extremist view on this, and I think I’m even prepared to accept the reductio ad Hitler case. Had it been feasible to coordinate the population of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. into a mass campaign of non-violent resistance to German occupation I think that would have brought even Hitler down.

Peter Callesen, Dead Angels.