Alan Jacobs

No Other Options — The New Atlantis:

One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state’s assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.

Important people — prominent politicians, physicians, and judges — promised Canadians that their rights to autonomy would be expanded. But the picture that emerges is not a new flowering of autonomy but the hum of an efficient engine of death. 

It is quite remarkable to hear from doctors and other medical practitioners who find great satisfaction in killing their patients. 

This is Angus. He’ll be joining our family in a couple of weeks. We’re chuffed.

I think the puzzlemakers exclude some words simply because they’re too big.

I just posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

I’m a little nervous about starting this microcast series on Jesus, because I’m not good at it yet – but I hope to improve as I go along. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And Wavelength is a fantastic tool for making microcasts. Thanks for that, @manton!

The first in a series of brief audio meditations on Jesus.

I’ll believe in AI when I can say, “Hey Siri, please hide from me all references to AI. Also every conversation in which journalists snark at other journalists. And, no references to Twitter or Mastodon.” 

Digital Eternity Is Just Around the Corner: 

As these technologies develop and become more accessible, they will increasingly be used in combination, creating “intelligent avatars” of ourselves that continue to “live” long after we have died. We are seeing the beginnings of this with the metaverse company Somnium Space, whose Live Forever mode allows users to create “digital clones” built from data they have stored while alive, including conversational style, gaits, and even facial expressions. 

This sense of immortality may be reassuring, but there is a catch. AI avatars will rely on us feeding their algorithms a huge amount of personal data, accumulated through the course of our lives. If we want our digital selves to live on, this is the exchange we must accept: that the unfiltered beliefs and opinions we express today may not only be archived, but consequently used to build these posthumous personae. In other words, we can have a voice in the afterlife, but we cannot be certain about what it may say. This will force us to reconsider how our behaviors today might influence digital versions of ourselves set to outlive us. Faced with this prospect of virtual immortality, 2023 will be the year we broaden our definition of what it means to live forever, a moral question that will fundamentally change how we live our day-to-day lives, but also what it means to be immortal. 

Notice how the quotes around “live” in the first paragraph disappear in the second. Notice also — this is universal in such discourse — the unexamined “we”: "2023 will be the year we broaden our definition of what it means to live forever.” Depends on who “we” are, I think. I for one am not interested in broadening my definition of what means to live forever in such a way that it isn’t living and doesn’t last forever. But you be you! 

There’s a powerful passage from C. S. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy: 

I had recently come to know an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson who had long since lost his faith but retained his living. By the time I met him his only interest was the search for evidence of “human survival.” On this he read and talked incessantly, and, having a highly critical mind, could never satisfy himself. What was especially shocking was that the ravenous desire for personal immortality co-existed in him with (apparently) a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable. He was not seeking the Beatific Vision and did not even believe in God. He was not hoping for more time in which to purge and improve his own personality. He was not dreaming of reunion with dead friends or lovers; I never heard him speak with affection of anybody. All he wanted was the assurance that something he could call “himself” would, on almost any terms, last longer than his bodily life. 

Whenever I read about someone who sees a technological route to immortality I think about this “ravenous desire for personal immortality” combined with “a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable.” So you want a digital imitation of yourself to live on after you die. But why? 

If your Christmas season doesn’t include a viewing of The Shop Around the Corner, it really really should. 🎞

‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes - The New York Times:

For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal. 

WE’VE BEEN WAITING 

WE KNEW YOU’D COME 

This has some useful reflections on the (often unfortunate) powers of literary executors — a subject about which I have written — but it doesn’t make a sufficiently clear distinction between the impediments imposed by executors and those erected by publishers. You can have the most compliant executor imaginable, but publishers will insist on their rights (which to them are best expressed through the medium of currency).  

Elizabeth D. Samet, in an interview:

World War II gave us a way to look at the world as an unambiguous contest between good and evil. We have used a vocabulary that was inherited from it: Fascism became Islamofascism, the Axis Powers became the Axis of Evil, the second President Bush’s term to describe a constellation of unrelated adversaries. It also left us with the belief that the exercise of U.S. force would always magically bring about victory and would serve the cause of liberating the oppressed. As a result of that, we find ourselves, after decades of war and loss, having to reckon with the fact that our way of thinking and talking about war and about the world is hopelessly out of date. 

A very interesting point! Because World War II was “the Good War,” American politicians regularly attempt to create a linguistic association between their own endeavors and that one. I wonder how long that will last, especially since the last WWII veterans are rapidly disappearing from the scene. 

Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade | Ars Technica:

Ars: Given what has happened over the last few years and what is expected to come, do you think the activity we're seeing in low-Earth orbit is sustainable?

Moriba Jah: My opinion is that the answer is no, it's not sustainable. Many people don't like this whole “tragedy of the commons” thing, but that's exactly what I think we're on a present course for. Near-Earth orbital space is finite. We should be treating it like a finite resource. We should be managing it holistically across countries, with coordination and planning and these sorts of things. But we don't do that. I think it's analogous to the early days of air traffic and even maritime and that sort of stuff. It's like when you have a couple of boats that are coming into a place, it's not a big deal. But when you have increased traffic, then that needs to get coordinated because everybody's making decisions in the absence of knowing the decisions that others are making in that finite resource.

Ars: Is it possible to manage all of this traffic in low-Earth orbit?

Jah: Right now there is no coordination planning. Each country has plans in the absence of accounting for the other country's plans. That's part of the problem. So it doesn't make sense. Like, if “Amberland” was the only country doing stuff in space, then maybe it's fine. But that's not the case. So you have more and more countries saying, “Hey, I have free and unhindered use of outer space. Nothing legally has me reporting to anybody because I'm a sovereign nation and I get to do whatever I want.” I mean, I think that's stupid. 

It is stupid, but a familiar kind of stupid. I must have seen a dozen essays arguing that if you can find any examples of people collaborating with regard to shared goods then the tragedy of the commons argument is wrong. Which is also stupid! If we can sometimes resist the temptations to abuse any given commons, that’s not an argument that such abuse is unlikely to happen. Of course the abuse of common goods isn’t inevitable; but it is distressingly common and we should always be on the lookout for it. In space we aren’t paying sufficient attention. 

Brian Phillips’s new podcast episode on Pelé reminds me that, back in the day, when I was contributing to his site The Run of Play, we had a kind of sideways dialogue about that genius. Here’s my post, and here’s Brian’s. 

In response to my post on my readerly annotations, my friend Adam Roberts writes: 

I buy a lot of second-hand books, and previous owners' annotations are almost always a mere irritation. But then I think of Coleridge. From before he settled at Highgate, but very much once he had settled there, his marginalia were specifically, particularly prized. People would lend him books, sometimes very rare and very valuable books, specifically in the hope that he would annotate them, which he did so far as I can see as automatically as a dog pees on a lamppost, simply because it was what he did. And then the people who had loaned him these books would retrieve them from the Gillmans' house with glee. STC died 1834: the first publication of his marginalia was 1836, and magazines like Blackwoods continued to print examples of them throughout the century. By far the most expensive-to-produce element in the Princeton/Bollinger Collected Coleridge set are the five volumes of Marginalia, partly because each is 1000 pages long, but also because the marginalia are printed in a different colour font to the text being annotated, and the volumes come with lavish photos of representative STC pages.

The thing that strikes me about this (speaking as somehow who's read a lot of it) is that the marginalia themselves are, probably, per proportion, something like 20:80, interesting/incisive:blather. So what was the appeal? Some must have been the same that inspired generations of autograph hunters ... and I wonder if that's a hobby that has died out in the digital age? But some of it must have been the way owning a book that Coleridge had annotated brought you closer to the idea of Coleridge himself reading a book. STC was a great writer (obviously you'd expect me to say so) but he's perhaps an even greater reader, and there's value, as you put it, in the sense that by reading STC's marginalia you are as it were peering over STC's shoulder as he reads. 

I think this is a fascinating comment, and, because I have work facing me that I want to put off, I shall now expand on it. 

I’ve just read David Marno’s fine book Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, which is largely about John Donne but also about what people in the seventeenth century thought attention is. Marno points out that philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche talk about attention a good deal, see it as essential to the task of philosophy, but also never define it. They don’t bother to do so, Marno claims, because everyone already understood attention through its religious contexts, its centrality to Christian prayer. Such philosophers thus secularized the act (or faculty) of attention; and as those religious contexts moved from the cultural center to its margins, attention eventually had to be defined, a project still ongoing today. 

Marno further argues — or rather, I guess, implies; I am somewhat overstating his case here — that when Donne’s poetry was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and became greatly celebrated (most famously by T. S. Eliot), the focus on “holy attention” in his sacred poems became matters of scholarly interest. Critics like I. A. Richards continued the work of secularizing attention by seeing the challenge of attentiveness that Donne describes as a challenge for 20th-century readers also. As Donne strove to attend to Christ on the Cross, so Richard’s students strive to attend to Donne’s poetry. Marno notes that Richards isn’t at all interested in the Christian context of Donne’s meditations, and so, rather than suggesting that his students learn something about either Catholic or Protestant devotional endeavors, he points them towards Confucian practices. 

What I want to suggest here is that Coleridge is a kind of bridge spanning the 17th-century and the 20th-century accounts of attentiveness. He is, for his contemporaries, a kind of icon of holy attention — but the holiness resides not in the objects of his attention (which are typically poetic, historical, and philosophical) but rather in the particular character of his own mental dispositions and practices. Yes, Coleridge had deep theological interests, and those intensified as he grew older, but those who saw him as the ideal reader and wanted to collect the sacred relics of his reading didn’t necessarily share his interests or his beliefs. For them, the holiness was not in the text but in the reader. 

What the Hell Happened to PayPal?:

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

An obvious point, but one worth making: We tend to think of social-credit systems as the province of governments, but the big American tech companies are right now imposing their own such system — and in some ways are better placed to do it than our government would be. 

As I have been saying for several years now, the "ideology [is] lacking clearly defined ideological contours” because it’s not an ideology, it’s a feeling of defilement and a consequent need to be purified, cleansed. I should do a long readthrough here on the blog of Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil…. 

So I just re-read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World — a book I read not long after it came out, but uncarefully. Now I have read it with great care and attention, and … well, you can look at the image above to get a sense of how immersed in it I have been. I will have more, much more, to say about its key themes in due course. 

But for now I want to talk about something else. 

Among the many — too many — things I own, the most valuable to me are books that I have read and annotated as thoroughly as I have read this one. Family photos? I have digital copies of those. Similarly, my computer could be replaced, as could my guitars. Furniture, ditto. I could buy replacements for my guitars, my camera, my clothes. But the annotated books? Irreplaceable. Oh sure, I could buy other copies and annotate them, but those markings would be different than the ones I now have. (I’m especially fond of books that I have read multiple times, with different annotations at each reading — here’s an example.) 

But the really interesting thing about these heavily annotated books is this: they are extremely valuable to me, but have virtually no value for anyone else. Think about it this way: If I put this book up for sale, I would be unlikely to get any offers for it. I mean, why would anyone want it? What meaning would all those tabs and scribbles and highlights have to them? Wouldn’t a fresh copy of the book be a better use of money? 

But suppose someone said they would offer me twenty bucks for it. I wouldn’t consider that for a moment — and not because of the IKEA Effect. That is, the value of the book to be does not lie in the work I put into it in the past, but rather the value I expect it to have in the future, as I return to consult it, think about it, maybe write about it. If I were never going to use the book again I might well sell it — and in such circumstances the IKEA Effect would kick in, and I’d want a dollar amount that corresponded, in my mind, to the effort I put into annotating it; which would definitely be more than $20. But at the right price, sure, I’d sell it. People talk about “sentimental value,” but I am not a sentimental guy, not in this respect anyway. 

Knowing that I will use it again in the future, though, alters my calculus radically. Obviously, I could buy another copy, re-read it, and annotate it all over again — but would I notice the same points? I could well miss some important ideas and implications reading the new copy that I caught the one I sold. (After all, didn’t I read it badly the first time? Maybe the stars have to align for a person and a book to make the sweetest connection.) The whole situation would be fraught with uncertainties; I therefore would be reluctant to sell the book for any imaginable price. 

And by “imaginable” I mean that if someone offered me ten thousand bucks for it I’d agree before they could change their mind. 

I think reading and annotating books is the thing I do best — it’s my most sharply-honed skill. But that in itself has almost no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting.