Alan Jacobs

Science versus Superstition

Paul Kingsnorth:

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both. 

This is too true to be good. 

Romare Bearden, The Visitation (1941) 

Romare Bearden, Baptism (1964)

Vinnie Sperrazza:

Wanting to find out if money does in fact make everything better, I bought a brand-new, confidently-made, 2026 portable CD player, equipped with all the fixings to make playing a CD as smooth as streaming.

So far so good: yesterday, going to Barbes in Park Slope, SMOKE on the Upper West Side, and back home to Bay Ridge, I listened to Daniel Barenboim and Gervase DePeyer play Brahms’ Clarinet Concerto No. 1 enough times to develop a favorite movement (2nd) and to feel that Barenboim is sometimes just too rubato for me. I just wouldn’t have done this with streaming, where endless novelty is the point. Scarcity and necessity are back.

Christopher Beha, from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer :

I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life. What would it mean to start there? To begin with the certain reality of that love and build whatever could be built on top of it? If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?

To believe in love — not as a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain, an adaptive strategy blindly hit upon by the genes in control of us survival machines, but as a foundational reality — means abandoning strict materialism, for the kind of love I’m talking about simply can’t be reduced to physical processes. It also means abandoning the idealism that says that the world we experience is entirely or even largely our own creation, that we project upon the raw facts whatever meaning and value and order we find there. From this perspective, love is a “mood,” part of the subjective apparatus with which we take in the objects of experience. But to really feel love is to be certain that it is not simply a projection, just as to stand in the warmth and the light of the sun is to be certain that the sun exists outside ourselves.

This reminds me of Auden:

One bubble-brained creature said—
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.