Alan Jacobs

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2400”] Owens Salvage, Wellington, Texas[/caption]

For a few years, starting around a decade ago, I blogged at The American Conservative. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, they memory-holed all my posts — without bothering to inform me that they’d be doing so. Classy move, folks! Anyway, I might occasionally re-post stuff I wrote there — assuming I can find the drafts on my hard drive. (If I were desperate to retrieve anything, which I’m not, I could of course eventually find it with the Wayback Machine.) Here’s one to accompany my School for Scale idea. 

I think the world needs a quirky and extremely rich venture capitalist to fund my great project, Cassiodorus College. Tag line: Where the New Liberal Arts Meet the Old. Foundational courses will include:

Memorization and Recitation. An introduction to mnemomics, both through modern techniques and history. Books assigned will include The Art of Memory by Frances Yates and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence. Attention will be given to memorizing long poems, long speeches, meaningful numerical sequences, and nonsense.

Reading: Natural and Formal Languages. An exploration of the very different skills required to read natural languages and formal languages, especially computer programming languages. A key question will be: Why is computer code easier to write than to read, while natural language is generally the other way around. Attention will be given to the neuroscience of reading but also to the conditions under which reading can be intensely pleasurable.

Composition: Natural and Formal Languages. A course devoted to the exploration of three compositional modes: writing English essays, writing computer code, and the mediating experience of writing English essays while using markup languages, primarily HTML and LaTeX. The first part of this course will begin by having students spend extended periods hand-writing memorable poetry and prose in commonplace books, alternating that with typing into a terminal code examples from Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming. Only very gradually will they progress to writing their own essays and their own code.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Stolen directly from Edward Tufte, whose books will be our texts. However, we will also explore the ways in which the various software tools available for making graphs, charts, and the like constrain our organizational and display choices. We will also give attention to the principles of excellent design, including the design of text.

Mathematical Reasoning and Rhetoric. An introduction to mathematics as a mode of thinking and a subsequent exploration of how the best principles of mathematical reasoning are routinely defied when numbers are presented to the public. Tufte is useful here too, for example, on how faulty presentation of data can lead to disasters.

Care of Plants and Animals. An idea stolen from W. H. Auden, who said that in his “daydream College for Bards” every would-be poet should tend a vegetable garden and care for a domestic pet. A great idea not just for bards. 

Please get in touch if you’re filthy rich and want to bankroll this glorious endeavor. 

Some of the trees around here started turning in November, others in December, and a few are turning right now. Climate change has got to be confusing for trees.

Stepping back for a bit of semi-scholarly context. It won’t happen again, I promise.

Senator Ben Sasse says that the real divide in America is between Pluralists and Zealots; I made the same case two years ago but called the parties Humanists and Manichaeans. 

Interesting crop of works and makers entering the public domain this year.

In this book, Ralph Cudworth makes the following fascinating argument: 

Now the Tabernacle or Temple being thus a House for God to dwell in visibly, to make up the Notion of Dwelling or Habitation complete, there must be all things suitable to a House belonging to it. Hence in the Holy Place there must be a Table and a Candlestick, because this was the ordinary Furniture of a Room …  A Table and a Candlestick … suit the Notion of a Dwelling House. The Table must have its Dishes, and Spoons, and Bowls, and Covers, belonging to it, though they were never used, and always be furnished with Bread upon it. The Candlestick must have its Lamps continually burning. 

There must be a Continuall Fire kept, in this House of God’s, upon the Altar, as the Focus of it. 

Cudworth cites the Hebrew of Isaiah 31:9 — KJV: “the LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his furnace in Jerusalem” — and renders it into Latin: Qui habet ignem suum in Sion, et focum suum in Jerusalem, or, “Whose fire is in Zion, and his hearth in Jerusalem.”

(I may be getting too deep into the weeds here, but: Cudworth’s rendering differs from the Vulgate, which has: cujus ignis est in Sion et caminus ejus in Jerusalem. Apparently caminus — which is a straight theft from the Greek κάμῑνος — can also mean “hearth” but is more likely to be used to describe a furnace, an oven, or a kiln. It’s only focus, as far as I can tell, that bears the familial associations.) 

It’s noteworthy that the Hebrew word that the KJV translates as “furnace” and Cudworth as focus is rendered in the Septuagint as οἰκείους — from the root οἶκος, meaning “household” or “home.” The LORD, whose fire is in Zion, and his household in Jerusalem. 

But now, as Christians have always said, through his sacrifice Jesus has himself become the Temple. (See Hebrews 10.) The place of sacrifice has been transformed into a place of feasting — as Paul says in 1 Timothy 3, the ἐκκλησία Θεοῦ (the assembly or church of God) is also the οἴκῳ Θεοῦ (the household of God) — and the focus, the central hearth, of that household is the altar. 

I love this notion of the church’s altar as the hearth of the Lord’s House, the place where we gather to warm ourselves and to receive nourishment — the focus of our worship in a distinctively familial and homely sense. 

Albert Borgmann talks about the relationship between focal practices and focal things — “things” being a poor choice of words here, because he means something more like “what or whom those practices centrally attend to.” When two people get married they are the central figures in the practice the old Prayer Book calls The Solemnization of Matrimony, but they aren’t things. I don’t know why Borgmann doesn’t just talk about focal practices and foci, but that’s what I will do: Participation in a service of Holy Communion is a focal practice whose focus is in one sense the altar — but in another and deeper sense Jesus Christ himself. 

Dominic Sandbrook:

There’s no way our podcast, presented by two white Oxbridge-educated middle-aged men, would be commissioned by the BBC these days. Instead of just letting us talk, they would bring in some alleged comedian to make it ‘accessible’ to younger audiences.

And not a single week would pass without the appearance of some ultra-woke U.S. academic to lecture us about slavery or to flagellate us about the imagined sins of the British Empire.

The great irony is that while the average age of Radio 4 listeners is 56, more than half of our listeners are under 34. So if the BBC want to know what’s happened to its younger audience, the answer is that they have signed up to The Rest Is History.

When did this practice of writing accusatory and dictatorial headlines begin? It’s universal now. It must get clicks, but why would people want to read stories whose headlines accuse them of error and demand that they change their ways? I never read stories that are headlined in this way.  

I declared 2021 the Year of Hypomone and 2022 the Year of Repair. I have not ceased to need hypomone — the New Testament word for “patient endurance” — nor are the good things of my world in any less broken. And it seems to me that there’s a close relationship between the two themes, because those who would engage in tikkun olam, the repair of the world, will more than most others require hypomone. But how to get it? How and where to find the resources that enable the patient endurance that in turn enable us to pursue the work of repair? I declare this the Year of Focal Practices. 

What do I mean by that? It’s a concept from Albert Borgmann’s seminal 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. As Borgmann’s career moved on he became a clearer and more straightforward writer, but in 1984 … not so much. He was still, then, too Heideggerian to be lucid. So rather than quote I am going to try to summarize, drawing chiefly on chapters 9 and 23.

Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household. Various members of the family were responsible for some element of hearth-maintaining — one would chop or gather the firewood, another bring that wood into the house, another make the fire, another add logs when the fire got low or stir it to enliven it, still another to cook the family’s food over the flame — and each member benefitted from its warmth. The heath was a place for preparing food and for keeping warm; it was therefore also the place where the family gathered, where its unity and wholeness were made manifest. The household gods — the lares and penates — were above all the guardians of the hearth. They preserved and in various ways represented the family’s focus. 

Controlled fire is of course the paradigmatic technology: Prometheus’s gift of fire to humans is the definitive extension of our natural abilities, an augmentation of power, a prosthesis. But, Borgmann shows, fire-as-focus is much more than that: it generates a set of focal practices that strengthen the bonds among members of the family. Contrast the hearth at the center of a home to a central heating unit, which instead of binding us to one another invites us to go our separate ways. The central heating unit is not a focus that links us to one another; it is rather a device that facilitates our separation. 

The idea that our technological prostheses are meant to generate independence from one another is a way of thinking about technology that Borgmann calls the device paradigm. To summarize an argument I have made here, the device paradigm promises freedom but in fact — after all, it cannot be modified to suit our needs — enforces what Ursula Franklin calls a “culture of compliance.” It is, as Ivan Illich would put it, a manipulatory technology, whereas the hearth is a convivial one. 

We have good reasons for installing central heating in our homes, but we miss the hearth and look for ways to replace it. The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson often says that our evolutionary descent predisposes us to be fond of certain actions, like throwing objects at other objects and sitting around a fire telling tales. The latter impulse, he believes, draws us to the movie theater, where we gather in the darkness facing a bright light and enjoy stories — but while that provides a certain form (or simulacrum) of communal connection, it’s the television that becomes the replacement for the family hearth. Here’s a photo I took a few nights ago — I title it Focus One and Two: 

When I decided to put our TV over the fireplace, I didn’t realize the symbolic heft of my decision. But one evening, when I mused that it would be easier to show a fireplace video from YouTube than actually build a fire, all the ironies suddenly came home to me. 

Let me be clear: I loved re-watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my family as a fire crackled away in the fireplace. It was truly wonderful. But it was not, in Borgmann’s sense, a focal practice. In fact, I am inclined to think that we could enjoy it as much as we did because of other practices that have bound us as a family, practices that are truly focal. 

I am inclined to think that the cultivation of genuinely focal practices — on the familial level and on that of whole communities — is essential to the development of hypomone, and hypomone is essential to the work of repair. I want to think about these matters quite a bit in 2023, and so I have added a “focus” tag to this post — to prompt me to keep thinking and writing on this subject. We’ll see how it goes. 

My kind of year-end list: the 10 best films of … 1932.

Just give me one import from Latin

George Giusti

Nearly eight hundred people attended the Christmas Eve services at my church, St. Alban’s Waco — the most people ever for one day at this ordinary small-city Episcopal church. The mission of St. Alban’s is “to proclaim to all, in word and deed, the grace of God in Jesus Christ” — and that’s what Aaron Zimmerman, our rector, and the rest of the staff do, day after day. And because Christ is proclaimed, without reservation and without a political agenda, people come. I am so proud of our leaders and so grateful to God.

There’s no current soccer player I dislike as much as Cristiano Ronaldo, but if he had gone to Sporting KC I would’ve loved him. CR7, dude! You coulda been the next Graham Zusi! ⚽️

“Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of” – The best brief overview I’ve seen of the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of the decentralized social web.

One: I don’t do year-end lists, and I typically don’t read those of others. (Those of you who write them: Please forgive me!) I make note of books I’ve read, music I’ve listened to, and movies I’ve watched, but I do it in my paper planner. I like seeing my aesthetic experiences in their Lebenswelt: I watched The Awful Truth after making steak frites for my family; I read Trickster Makes This World while our floors were being refinished. To take those experiences out of those contexts seems, to me, to transform them into mere calculations. (I also record some of these experiences on my micro.blog page, but I’m not super-disciplined about it.) 

This means that I also never have any idea how many books I’ve read or movies I’ve watched in any given period of time; and of course if I’m not keeping track of that, I can’t have any “reading goals.” And I don’t want any reading goals: it’s a matter of, again, the And Then What? problem. Some books should be savored — read slowly, meditated on, returned to — but if I’ve made it my goal to read X number of books or watch Z number of movies, then I won’t give such works the time they ask of me. I’ll rush through them so I can mark them off my list and move on to The Next Thing. 

Two: There’s some good stuff in the Guardian, but there’s also a lot of incurious leftist reflexiveness, and, moreover, a pervasive (almost obsessive) anti-Americanism. I don’t mean critiques of American politics and American culture — Lord knows we deserve all of that we get, and more — but a kind of newspaper-wide tic, an inability to resist mocking and sneering at anyone and anything American, even when America and Americans have nothing to do with the subject at hand. (There’s a lot of that in the paper’s sports section.) At some point this year I got sick of it and simply removed every Guardian feed from my RSS reader. And you know what? I didn’t miss it. Not for one second.  

This got me thinking about what I read and listen to by mere habit, even though I am frustrated by it. I decided to do a reverse Marie Kondo and ask, “Does this spark annoyance?” I went through my RSS feeds and deleted many more sites; I started realizing how many podcasts I subscribe to through an obscure feeling of duty but don’t really want to listen to. So let’s say I listen to one of them: and then what? Listen to some more just to cross them off my list? Why? I deleted a bunch of those subscriptions too. 

Three: I made it through another year, my third in a row, without getting on an airplane. My wife, who has to fly several times a year, has commented that not only have passengers stopped wearing masks, they now don’t even cover their mouths when they cough — they’ve descended into a kind of barbarism. On her last trip she didn’t contract Covid, but she did pick up RSV and had a cough for a month. Passengers behaving badly, airline staff undertrained and impatient, delays and cancellations rampant, security theater now in its third decade of mindlessness … Why would I ever voluntarily subject myself to this kind of crap? 

I do hope to travel overseas again, someday, and when I do I’ll gladly get on a plane. But I’m now seriously wondering if I can simply not fly within the U.S. any more, and drive whenever I need to get somewhere. The problem with this, of course, is that I live deep in the heart of Texas, and it is one hell of a long way to anywhere else. On the other hand, it’s a two-day drive from most places in this country I’d ever have a need to visit. (It’s almost exactly the same distance from Waco to Washington D.C. and to Los Angeles.)

I’ve twice made the drive to and from Charlottesville, VA, and while it’s no fun having to stop in a hotel overnight, I do enjoy the scenery, the thinking time, even the occasional audiobook (typically not my thing, but enjoyable on a long drive). And it’s nice simply to throw whatever I think I might need into the car, not worrying about having to go through security and getting sneezed on by strangers. Maybe it’s time for me to read Matt Crawford’s book on driving and embrace “the philosophy of the open road.” 

So, you’ll note, 2022 was at least partly a year of removals, of excisions. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t plan to, but I eliminated a lot of noise, and therefore a lot of frustration. It has felt good, and I want to do more of the same in 2023.