Alan Jacobs

See also one of my favorites among my own essays, “Filth Therapy.” 

I appreciate the respectful tone of this essay, but … I guess I am bemused by the widespread feeling that the American South needs to be explained. (And is susceptible to explanation.) The view seems to be that people born elsewhere — Iowa, in Jeff Taylor’s case — constitute a norm from which the South is in various ways, some good and some bad, a deviation. Taylor is a native midwesterner who lived in the South for three years and is now explaining it; I am a native Alabaman who lived in northern Illinois for twenty-nine years, but it would never occur to me to write an essay explaining the Midwest. 

Lunch!

David Hockey, from A Rake’s Progress (1963) 

Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?:

Most professors, students said, grasp that the American campus has changed—big time. That the paradigm has shifted. Professors want a comfortable perch that looks nice on their résumés where they can write their articles and books and get ahead—just like the students want to get ahead, just like the universities want to get ahead. (Sam Beyda, the Columbia economics major, pointed out that his own school’s administration had been accused of manipulating data to game the U.S. News & World Report rankings.)

A recent Yale University graduate said his professors had encouraged him to get diagnosed with ADHD so he could get more time to finish homework or take exams. One student he knew received extra time for “academic-induced depression.” He smirked when he said it. 

I hear from my fellow professors all the time that recent technologies (and not just the new chatbots) have simply exposed for all to see the heretofore unspoken deal between teachers and students: We pretend to teach them and they pretend to learn. Henry James Sumner Maine may have talked about the move from status to contract as the foundation of the social order, but what we have in academia is an unwritten contract that allows both parties to increase their status. 

I know this will be hard to believe, but: We genuinely do things differently here in Baylor’s Honors College. Why? I think it’s a combination of (a) the presence of Christian commitments, among both professors and students, that encourage us to remember that education is personal formation; and (b) the fact that Baylor as a whole is not an elite institution. Students who come here tend not to think that they’re gonna rule the world someday; they want to do well in life, of course, but they’re not set on a lifetime of climbing Success’s greasy pole. And we can help them think about how to pursue good things in life that don’t involve stock options. 

This Arsenal side is playing some absolutely gorgeous football. What a delight to watch. ⚽️

Over at Plough, the tag is: Another life is possible. This ought to be a mantra for most of us. We can live in defiance of the mandates of technocracy and metaphysical capitalism; we can’t make those demonic Powers go away, and we probably can’t live uninfluenced by them — but we can reduce their power over our lives, one small step at a time. Independence is not gained in an instant, but I think there’s a growing body of people who want it. 

There’s a funny passage in James Pogue’s recent report on right-wingers relocating to the West: 

Resistance to “globalism” is a new organizing force of right-wing politics. “These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.” It could have been Alex Jones talking. 

Well, maybe. But it certainly could’ve been Bernie Sanders talking. And isn’t that noteworthy? 

It would be nice if people found it so. Recently Michelle Goldberg wrote about recent studies showing the damage that social media platforms are doing to the mental health of young people — but as soon as some politicians on the right called attention to those studies, reactive nitwits on the left, of which there are many, fled to alternative explanations. Because Josh Hawley can’t be allowed to make a valid point about anything, now can he? Goldberg: 

The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well. I’m not sure if banning social media for young people is the right way to start fixing the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids. But we’re not going to find any fix at all if we simply start with our political priors and work backward.

If people — people on social media all the freaking time, naturally — could manage to take a few minutes’ break from their Pavlovian virtual cages, they might discover the possibility of consensus — consensus on the vital necessity to restrain the predatory megacorporations that are destroying our society, and, if their recent adventures in chatbots are any indication, are very much looking for new worlds to ruin. 

Any day I can take a step back from my political priors, take a step back from absorption in Technopoly, take a step back from the commodification of myself, is a good day. That some of us find that extremely difficult is perhaps a good Lenten meditation. 

Culture as Metastasis - by Mary Harrington:

All the way back in 1994, Baudrillard could see that the emerging culture after the revolutionary “orgy” of the 1960s was one increasingly free of any grounding in material causality, constraint, or telos. He characterises art, sexuality and finance alike in these terms, sketching how each of these domains has become a kind of metastasising domain that refers only to itself:

“Ours is a society founded on proliferation, on growth which continues even though it cannot be measured against any clear goals […] There is no better analogy here than the metastatic process in cancer: a loss of the body’s organic ground rules such that a given group of cells is able to deploy its incoercible and murderous vitality, to defy genetic programming and to proliferate endlessly.” 

In Baudrillard’s view, stagnation is also endless, directionless self-replication: “where there is stasis, there is metastasis”. He could be writing today, about the endless recycling that now dominates the culture industries — a model of production that realises, at scale, what that since-vanished visionary of fandom-first culture recycling envisaged back in my noughties wilderness years.

One thought about that incredibly creepy Snapchat TV ad — so creepy that I’m not even going to link to it — the interesting thing to me about it is not, in fact, the creepiness, it’s the fact that the big selling point is using augmented reality to deprive the people around you of their own faces and substitute faces (human, animal, vegetable, whatever) you prefer. It’s not accidental, I think, that the ad is set in a subway car, because public transportation confronts you with the plain old humanity of those you live among. Snapchat, the ad says, can relieve you of the burden of living among other human beings. It’s an ad made by sociopaths for sociopaths. 

Eduardo Galeano:

In the morning, one of the prisoners who hadn’t yet lost track of the calendar recalled, “Today is Easter Sunday.”

Here’s a beautiful meditation by Eleanor Parker on the Cross and the medieval poem “The Dream of the Rood.” I recently read Parker’s book Winters in the World, which is a delight and a treasure-house. 

Re: this essay by Alexa Hazel — of course people think we’re in a computer simulation. We always conceive of our minds as a dominant technology of our moment. As Gary Marcus wrote a few years ago, “Descartes thought that the brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the nervous system through the body. Freud compared the brain to a steam engine. The neuroscientist Karl Pribram likened it to a holographic storage device.” But, Marcus insists, when we say a mind is a computer this time we’re right. Say others, No we’re not. 

Me, I think we’re always wrong. We make idols and worship them — we remake ourselves in the image of our own technologies. See Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary to understand how this works, but John Calvin put the point most forcibly when he said that “the mind is a perpetual forge of idols” — thus critiquing this practice and exemplifying it at the same time, a neat trick. 

Hazel continues:  

When I talk to friends who don’t live in Palo Alto, they suggest that I have been here too long. I hear things like, you have drunk the Kool-Aid. No one wants this, they say. No one will use these devices.

Meanwhile, a lab at Stanford has already manufactured an effective retinal implant. The clunkiness of existing VR headsets is beside the point. How our lives will become more digital is undecided. That they will become more digital seems to me basically inevitable. To gesture to Meta’s slumping stock price in order to clinch the argument for VR’s irrelevance is to draw attention away from the question of who’s steering the ship, to what end, and why. 

This strikes me as the despair of a humanist forced to dwell in the molten core of the Californian ideology. The truth is that many lives will become more digital, but some will opt out of that bullshit. Be one of the opt-outers. 

If I were a journalist and given the task that Nathan Heller had, here’s the primary (though not the only) thing I'd have done: 

First, I’d have approached professors of English and related humanities fields and said this: “Enrollments in your discipline have been declining for quite some time, and declining dramatically — a decline I assume you’d like to reverse. What do you do in your classes? That is, how do you teach the books you assign? What are your key concerns, your primary educational purposes? What do you most want for your students? And why should they want for themselves what you want for them?” 

Then, having gathered and sorted through answers, I’d have approached students and told them what the professors had said in reply to my questions, and I’d have asked: “Does that sound like something you’d want to pursue?” 

Nathan Heller didn’t do any of this, as far as I can tell.