Alan Jacobs

university presses

reader’s report: Jane Smiley

The problem, as it appears to me, is that we are using the wrong language. The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited 'ecosystems,’ 'organisms,’ 'environments,’ 'mechanisms,’ and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

PHILADELPHIA—Historians at the University of Pennsylvania announced the discovery this week of a personal diary from the late 18th century that reveals the first U.S. flag sewed by Betsy Ross was originally intended as a shirt for her flamboyant gay friend Nathaniel.

‘This has completely upended the accepted narrative behind the first American flag,’ said historian Kenneth Atwood, who led the team of scholars analyzing the long-forgotten journal of prominent Philadelphia homosexual Nathaniel Linsley. ‘Now we can say with certainty that our nation’s most enduring symbol of freedom, strength, and prosperity is actually just the result of Nathaniel’s desire for a sassy, tight-fitting top.’

'We’ve all been taught that the 13 stars and stripes of the first U.S. flag represented the original 13 colonies, but this is simply not the case,’ Atwood added. 'In fact, Nathaniel thought that stripes were slimming, and he just really, really liked stars.’

Then, just last month came the well-publicised British study that suggested that a little drinking during pregnancy is healthy, and that children whose parents drank a little bit were in fact, if anything, slightly more intelligent than children whose mothers refrained entirely. One might think this new evidence would challenge the absolutism of our attitudes about drinking and pregnancy, the near-religious zeal with which we approach the subject, but it’s equally possible that it won’t actually have much effect. Our righteousness and morally charged suspicion that drinking even the tiniest bit will harm an unborn child runs deeper than rational discussion or science; we are primed for guilt and sacrifice, for the obsessive monitoring of the environment, for rampant moralism and reproach, even before the baby is born.

busyness continues . . .

… which means that I haven’t been able to blog here. I have managed, though, to post some quotes to my tumblelog. A poor substitute, I know, but hey, they’re pretty cool quotes.

I look forward to the day where studying biology is a prerequisite for a PhD in Classics, and biblical criticism can help round out your doctorate in evolutionary biology.

I can be influenced as an artist by all kinds of people I have very little chance of meeting – Kurosawa’s death has no relevance to his influence on my work, the fact that Scorsese and Mel Brooks are still on the planet has equally little relevance. As a writer you pick your company, and you can go anywhere you want. The limits are your willingness to grapple with other languages, your willingness to engage with other art forms. Intellectual promiscuity is at the heart of whatever it is that you do.

Rather than focus on passing laws, Gushee conveyed an alternative approach: He urged pro-lifers to study data on why women seek abortions and to systematically address those factors. This approach recognizes that the right to life and the right to choose are not antithetical. In fact, they’re aligned to the extent that women don’t like abortions. Help women avoid pregnancies they don’t want, and you’ll wipe out the vast majority of abortions without having to enact a single restriction.

I don’t expect pro-lifers to stop fighting for restrictions. But I did notice some of them—notably, Helen Alvare, the former spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—using the term “pro-life” to describe the broad spectrum of Americans who are morally but often not legally opposed to abortion. If you’re going to claim these people as part of a pro-life majority, represent them. Pursue a culture of life, not a legal regime.

— What pro-lifers can learn from the Princeton abortion conference

One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic speech production area known as Broca’s area. But also active was Wernicke’s area, the brain region for language comprehension, suggesting that not only do the brain’s speech areas produce silent inner speech, but that our inner voice is understood and interpreted by the comprehension areas. The result of all this activity, I suggested, is the narrative self.

Since then, much more neuro-imaging data has supported this idea. Sukhwinder Shergill, a psychiatrist at King’s College London, has contributed mightily, investigating the neural bases of schizophrenia symptoms, including auditory hallucinations. By generating and monitoring inner speech in ingenious ways, his functional MRI studies consistently show activity in neural areas involved in speech production, comprehension and internal monitoring during silent inner speech. This fits nicely with Gazzaniga’s idea about the left hemisphere interpreter’s role in creating the autobiographical self.