Alan Jacobs

Fear of a Female Body - Jill Filipovic:

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world. 

Two thoughts about this: 

Cf. Matt Yglesias's comment: “Our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.” This is especially true in elite institutions, and I wonder if we are approaching the point — think for instance about the recent behavior of students at Stanford’s law school — at which some organizations will begin to see a degree from an elite institution as prima facie evidence of unemployability. 

I also wonder if some on the left are beginning to perceive the problem with this power move of claiming “harm” now that — as in the situation Filipovic is commenting on — religious and social conservatives are learning how to use the same language. It’s like that moment in the Harry Potter books when Cornelius Fudge has to explain to the Prime Minister that both sides in the wizarding war can use magic. 

Zena Hitz:

The traditional monastic rule against particular friendship is the great bogeyman of the cinematic representation of religious life. Who can forget, once seen, the dreadful episode in The Nun’s Story (1959), where the nun befriended by the protagonist confesses their attachment in the chapter of faults, and both are asked to scrub the floor in atonement?  

[Dumb comment deleted. I misread this! I am so accustomed now to seeing singular “they” and “their” that I read it here when it didn’t exist. It’s not “the nun’s attachment” but “the attachment of the two women.” Duh. I do think, though, that while this certainly bears witness to my dim-wittedness it also bears witness to the ways that the overuse of singular “they” and “their” — overuse, I say, because it’s perfectly appropriate in many circumstances and always has been — sows confusion among readers.] 

Description of the first-year seminar I’ll be teaching in the fall. 

RETRO: How and Why the Past Comes Back

In this course we will explore retro culture – our persistent tendency to become infatuated with cultural modes and artifacts of the past, often in ways that idealize that past. We’ll look at retro movements in music, movies, television, gaming, fashion, and especially technology – because using technologies from the past is one of the most common ways we express our fascination with it. We’ll explore the phenomenon of nostalgia. And we’ll try to understand how retro culture differs from the preservation of a living past – a past that still thrives in the present.

Readings for this class will be in the form of PDFs that you will be asked to download and print out; you will sometimes be asked to watch videos and listen to music; and we will bring objects to class that in some way exemplify retro culture.

First light in the canyon

From Laity Lodge

A bluntly powerful essay by my friend and colleague Jonathan Tran:

What began as a struggle of and for the dispossessed has devolved into a culture war fixated on harms, microaggressions, and sensitivity trainings. No one can live up to the standard of being sensitive to every possible sensitivity, setting everyone up to fail. More importantly, almost none of this has anything to do with repairing and redistributing structures and systems.

Nothing captures antiracism’s mission drift better than the explosive growth of its billion-dollar diversity industry, which promises to address inequality by diversifying the faces of gatekeeping institutions—the very institutions that facilitate upper-middle-class mobility precisely by leaving inequality in place. These antiracist initiatives, often staffed by well-meaning and high-minded people, bring with them all the conviction but little of the power to actually get anything done, at the end of the day achieving so little that one begins to wonder if futility was the point.

The Jellyfish Tribe - by Paul Kingsnorth:

The growing loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years is like nothing else I’ve seen in my lifetime. When, I wonder, did that contract begin to expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the US and UK launched the Iraq war were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or perhaps when the near-collapse of the global economy in 2008 brought the real impact of Machine globalisation, which had long been felt in the poor parts of the world, home to people in the West. Or maybe in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European ‘populism’ happened, and suddenly liberal globalism was under attack in its heartlands. From then on, we learned that populism was fascism and elected presidents were Russian agents and nationhood was white supremacy and free speech was ‘hate speech’, and while we were still trying to work through all that, along came covid and we all fell into the rabbit hole forever.

An excellent find, in excellent condition, and for eight bucks! Also a neat little window into classical music culture ca. 1972. 

I get the security concerns that have prompted the move to passkeys, but the new strategy forces us to have our smartphones on us at all times. For someone like me who wants to carry my smartphone less and less, this is a major frustration.