Alan Jacobs

Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone ‘was that New York fell away … It disappeared. Poof.’ That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones. Gone are the tacit alliances with fellow subway riders, the brief evolution of sympathy with pedestrians. That predictable progress of unspoken affinity is now interrupted by an impulse to either refresh a page or to take a website-worthy photo. I have the nervous hand-tics of a junkie. For someone whose interest in other people’s private lives was once endless, I sure do ignore them a lot now.

Blasphemy, in the Bulgakovian sense, means not only denial of the authority of God, although it certainly does mean that. It also means insufficient humility in the face of the mysteries of nature. Bulgakov is not so reactionary as to believe in a divine or natural order of things which cannot be altered. He was a doctor, after all; he loved the rush of modernity and its machines. The message of A Dog’s Heart is that man must recognise the existence of limits to his powers; that there are realms, divine and natural, where he cannot tread without the danger of creating something blasphemous and unnatural - without carrying out a Satanic act.

It was more useful for the global media. ‘Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices, that simply slowed the general speed of traffic,’ the authors of Blogistan conclude. On 16 June the authorities forbade journalists from covering the demonstrations without permission. Kicking their heels in their hotel rooms, most foreign correspondents began surfing through the blizzard of tweets and video clips to try and work out what was going on. But it was all difficult to verify, and a good part was tweeted from outside the country: to add to the chaos, many overseas sympathisers had changed their location to make it look as if they were in Iran. The point – perhaps – was to confuse the Iranian authorities by opening the information gates, but the flood of unverifiable tweets may have confused the protesters too. Some of what was sent around on Twitter – the news, for example, that Mousavi had been arrested – simply wasn’t true, so the movement’s high-profile foreign supporters were often retweeting rumour and disinformation from the comfort of their desktops. ‘Here, there is lots of buzz,’ the owner of a US-based activist site told the Washington Post. ‘But once you look … you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.’

Then, miraculously, out of the hundreds of nearly indistinguishable stone figurines, my husband found the one we were looking for. We were now standing in the very same place where Ruskin, over a century and a half earlier and Proust 50 years after him, had stood, looking with wonder and delight at the same rather coarsely carved, though touching figure. For the first time that day my experience was in accord with what I had anticipated from reading Ruskin. I felt the force of his argument about why the world looks the way it does. The ‘vexed and puzzled’ little fellow, in all its raw expressiveness and vitality, was the physical embodiment of the stone-carver’s joy in his labor; for why else, as Ruskin pointed out, would the carver have taken the time and care to indicate, rough line by rough line, the wrinkles under the figure’s eye as his cheek rested on his hand? After all, we are talking about a face of a figure smaller than my thumb that is a mere filling of an interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, a figure that passionate pilgrims like my husband and myself failed to notice even when we were looking directly at the carved panel on which it reclines.

Having now seen the tiny Gothic figure that had occupied such a large place in my imagination, I could only wonder at the depth and range of Ruskin’s sensibility contained in that observation. And, I began to realize, I was equally if not more astounded by Ruskin’s acute vision. With thousands of sculpted figures of all sizes and description to fill one’s eye and mind, how hard he must have looked to see that particular tiny, obscure figure, for, unlike us (or Proust), Ruskin had no guide. Instead, my husband ventured, his mind must have been prepared, his eye alert, his attention intensely concentrated in ways that few of us are capable of today. As I felt the page in my hand of Ruskin’s etching, we began to speak of the way cultivated travelers used to memorize and preserve the details of beloved paintings, sculptures, buildings, and landscapes they visited by drawing them or painting watercolors—and in Ruskin’s case, by making his own etchings of his drawings for his books. We thought of the time and mindfulness and care that the handmade world required, how radically opposed it was to today’s automaton picture-taking and instant, disposable ‘messaging.’

opting out of the monopolies

Advent is only secondarily about the baby Jesus. It is primarily about the rending of the heavens (Isaiah again) and the coming of the Lord in power and glory to take the creation back for himself. Until he comes, then, we are the people who put on the armor of light “now in this present time” and by our works point to the One who is to come. So even if we can’t go to Haiti, we can support those who do; and we can help to civilize our public discourse; and we can offer our gifts and encouragement to (for instance) the Diocese of Louisiana as it struggles not only with the aftermath of Katrina but now also with the BP disaster. This is the way that Advent people show that God has not forgotten those who suffer.

Allow me to illustrate with an example. Every few months, I would visit a little whitewashed school in the hills of Indonesian-occupied East Timor. The young teacher who ran the school would cheerfully bring me into her office, and we would chat about small things while her uniformed students would serve us homemade buns and strong coffee in chipped porcelain. Once the students left and the office door closed, the teacher would open her desk drawer and with a shaking hand give me horrifying photos of disinterred bodies. The Timorese resistance would dig up the fresh graves of torture victims, take photos for evidence, and pass them through their underground networks to this teacher, who would then get them out of the country through me and other diplomats. With that information we knew what the Indonesian military was doing in secret. We could better confront Jakarta, and we could assert more pressure on them to stop.

When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. If they were published in The Globe and Mail instead, I would have been thrown out of the country in 24 hours and the Indonesian officials would not have permitted a replacement. The local politicians would have hired a rent-a-mob to stone the Canadian embassy. Their leaders would have told the Jakarta media I was a liar and would have blamed the Timorese for feeding me calumny. And the police would have arrested and killed the young teacher before the week was out.

Small wonder the state department is crying blue murder. Yet, from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of “the war on terror” in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. In recent years, I have found the American foreign service to be somewhat underwhelming, reach-me-down, dandruffy, especially when compared with other, more confident arms of US government, such as the Pentagon and the treasury. But what we find here is often first rate.

It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan’s eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary victory for transparency, and it’s likely to spur the further insulation of the permanent state from scrutiny, accountability or even self-knowledge.

Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.