Alan Jacobs

After seeing that shambolic defending by Iran, I might have to reconsider my prediction that the U.S. will finish behind them…. ⚽️

Matthew Loftus:

The Church universal also has a set of overlapping responsibilities, but how these responsibilities are translated into the work of individual churches is a tension of its own. Local churches are first obligated to their own members, to preach, worship, disciple, and administer the sacraments. Adding anything beyond this to any individual church is tying on a burden too great to bear. Yet the Body of Christ spread across the world is also responsible for sending messengers of the Gospel to places that have not yet heard it, meeting the needs of the poor (local and distant), and advocating for justice in whatever society they find themselves in. (I would draw primarily from Isaiah 58 as the source of the lattermost impetus.) The Body of Christ also has an obligation to be in communication with itself such that the hand can know if the eye is suffering and then do something about it.

This task might seem impossible, but the power of the Holy Spirit among God’s people allows us to order ourselves according to the moral obligations we have to one another and to the world. We seek in prayer to know which people in need we ought to be in proximity to, and we obey accordingly as we embark on whichever road to Jericho we are called to. Some may physically remain wherever they are; others may move across town, across the country, or across the world. The wealth of believers, once yielded to the direction of the Holy Spirit, also has centripetal and centrifugal forces acting upon it but should in general go to where there is the greatest need and the least knowledge of the Gospel. 

A long, complex essay, incisive and provocative. Every thoughtful Christian should read it. I hope to comment more fully later. 

Barney Ronay:

It feels like a theme park. There’s always been this ridiculous corporate circus, but generally it intersects with a real sense of joy, and you monetise the joy. Here, there’s no joy, just monetising. You feel that this is a place that should in no world be staging this, until you realise: the World Cup is not a festival of football, it’s a travelling city state, a TV show sold to people who can pay the most money. You want a World Cup? This is what a World Cup is.

Dale Ahlquist:

While the Distributist movement gained a much larger following than most historians have acknowledged, and is even experiencing something of a revival these days, it has suffered from being dismissed. Conservatives (and capitalists) accuse Distributism of being too socialist, an enemy of free trade. Liberals (and socialists) accuse it of being too capitalist, an enemy of regulation and the public interest. But more often it is dismissed without a fair hearing – not only by established economists and academics but by most everyone else as well – simply because of its unfortunate name: Distributism. No one knows what it means, and usually people think it means something else. It is understandably conflated with redistribution, which means taking money from a wealthier segment of the citizenry and redistributing it to a less wealthy segment. Sort of like Robin Hood. Or taxation. Yet while the early Distributists recognized that some redistribution of land, wealth, and power would obviously be necessary to achieve their ends, redistribution was never their end goal nor what made their vision compelling to so many.

It is for this reason that the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton recently renamed Distributism. Now, I wish to make it clear that we don’t have any special control over the word “Distributism.” People can keep using the old word if they want. But we introduced a new word because the old word was … well, it was no good!

The new word we came up with is “Localism.” 

I see why they did this, but (a) “localism” is already a term used in other contexts and (b) at least “Distributism” captured the fact that the movement is not just cultural but also a project of political economy. 

Distributism/Localism, like anarcho-syndicalism and several other kinds of anarchism — which I am very much interested in — all think that our social and cultural problems cannot be fixed unless we can wrest economic control from Bosses and put it in the hands of local people. They are all subsidiarist movements, and these are all to some degree rooted in Catholic social teaching, so you would think that people who call themselves conservatives would at least be interested. Not so much, not any more. 

Charles Spurgeon: “I do not know that the prodigal saw his father, but his father saw him. The eyes of mercy are quicker than the eyes of repentance. Even the eye of our faith is dim compared with the eye of God’s love. He sees a sinner long before a sinner sees him.”

Interview with Yiyun Li:

Just as you were starting Tolstoy Together, you wrote in The New York Review’s pandemic journal: “Twice during the most difficult periods of my life, I could do little but read [War and Peace]. There were days when I would hand-copy passages from it just to keep my brain and hands in movement.” What did you appreciate about the experience?

My understanding, from my own experience, is that agitation does much harm to our minds. It is a most time-conscious state — every minute is devastatingly long when one’s perception of time becomes disoriented. I hand-copied passages from War and Peace during two difficult times of my life, several years apart: when I was suicidally depressed, and after I lost a child to suicide. The activity was a defiance against that harmful timelessness: here time does pass from one line to the next.

Lately, I’ve been hand-copying Moby-Dick first thing in the morning, before coffee, to carve out a space for my brain and my hands, to have a definite frame of time. I suppose I do that as others practice yoga or meditation.

Ayana Mathis:

When I first conceived of this essay, I imagined it would be purely literary. Then, the presidential election arrived with all of its turmoil. I suddenly cared very little about aesthetics and the nuances of figurative language. I was at a loss until I remembered that much of Baldwin’s writing came to exist during moments of American crisis: the civil rights movement and its aftermath, the decimation of the Black Power movement, the rise of Reaganomics, the devastating AIDS epidemic. Baldwin was forged in the crucible of an America perpetually teetering on the edge of self-destruction, unwilling to heed the warnings of those who understood the immensity of the peril. The result of that heedlessness, as we’ve seen in these pandemic months, is quite literally death. It occurred to me, then, that John’s experience, and Baldwin’s novel as a whole, is an act of bearing witness to the bitter realities of his life as a young man — and to the Black church as a place of existential and spiritual nourishment, even as it was parochial and unyielding.

Perhaps Baldwin left the church because he knew he would not have survived its stifling rigors, and had little desire to try. Certainly the exacting and capricious God of his upbringing — these characteristics that, not coincidentally, also describe Gabriel Grimes — was anathema to him. And yet in his 1962 essay “Down at the Cross: Letter From a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin wrote of his vexing childhood religion: “In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.”

As an endlessly corrupt World Cup begins, the American college-sports-industrial complex says, “Hold my beer.”

Ralph Ellison in his Harlem apartment, 1986 

After a brief period on Mastodon: It’s exactly like Twitter. People have taken all their Twitter habits — lecturing, hectoring, making demands, sneering, mocking, belittling, preening, self-congratulating — and transferred them unchanged to a new platform. No one, it appears, learned anything from what even they called the “hellsite.”

Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hellsite; myself am Hellsite; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Hellsite I suffer seems a Heaven. O, then, at last relent! Is there no place Left for wisdom, none for kindness left? None left but by deletion….

UPDATE 2022-11-22: It occurs to me that when Mastodon decided to implement its version of the retweet (they call it the “boost”) its fate as Undead Twitter was sealed. If you could blame only one thing for the ruination of Twitter, it should be the RT. The RT is a frictionless way to spread whatever arouses users emotionally, and what arouses users emotionally is almost always something deceitful and/or malicious. The RT is the death of charity, the death of peace, the death of truth. And therefore for me the death of Mastodon.

Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon, by Sasha Frere-Jones:

I developed a new way of thinking about how we listen to music, together or alone. My alliterative schema for the various listening environments, designed to be annoyingly mnemonic, is corner, club, cathedral, and cocoon. The corner (as in street corner) is where people take priority over sound, and this model encompasses both a block party using a multi-speaker sound system on the street and the digital commons of web radio stations and streaming platforms like Mixcloud and SoundCloud. One of my favorite web radio stations, LYL Radio, was established by Lucas Bouissou, who stated his view firmly: “About audio quality, honestly, I don’t give a shit.” LYL Radio is very much the corner, in every sense.

The cathedral is an environment built by the audiophile, where reflection is the norm. You don’t have to be alone, but if there are a bunch of listeners together, you’re not talking to one another. You listen, and only listen. One arrives here with a certain amount of time and money, introducing an exclusive element, which I don’t love, but if I imagine a house of worship with its doors flung wide open, I am less uneasy, because the resources are oriented toward establishing a common good.

The club is halfway between these two points, presenting a certain level of audio quality, but not at the expense of interaction. If there is an emphasis in the club, it is about people connecting through music. The cocoon, meanwhile, is where most people find music now, through earbuds and headphones, locked into the cycle of wage labor or exercise. 

Emphases mine. I like this taxonomy. I am very much a cathedral guy, though without either the budget or the inclination to be an audiophile. (As Free-Jones says later in his excellent essay, “An obsession with the quality of recordings is, on some level, antithetical to the spirit of mindful listening.“) Let’s say that my preferred environment isn’t a cathedral but rather a mere chapel. 

“Not in word list.” Sigh. It’s not that esoteric a word!

Twitter right now is mainly about Twitter but also a little about Mastodon. And Mastodon is mainly about Mastodon but also a lot about Twitter. Both places seem to be pretty chaotic, but here at micro.blog @manton & co. are keeping things smooth and steady. It helps that there don’t seem to be many drama-addicted folks around here.

It is noteworthy, and not in a good way, that an essay by Wendell Berry called “Peaceableness Toward Enemies” — written in response to the 1911 Gulf War — is relevant to the divisions that now exist among Americans. Two passages in particular stood out to me. The first:  

Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution. It is the only way by which we can cease to look to war for peace. 

Notice how in all these ways peaceableness escapes the abuses inherent in hatred, which always is used for bad ends, always does offer opportunities for profit, etc. 

The second should be read with the thought that there are non-physical forms of violence: 

Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion or jubilation that follows war. It is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and a practicable method, it is nothing. As a practicable method, it reduces helplessness in the face of conflict. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.

These passages should be read in conjunction with a poem Berry wrote around that time, called “Enemies.” 

Well, this is surely Adam's best post title ever, but the post is really fascinating also. A key passage: 

But let’s go back to this magic clod. What’s going on here? Pindar’s word is βῶλαξ (bōlax), a poetic form of the word βῶλος (bōlos) — a term still in use in English today, of course (though a bolus is more likely nowadays to refer to a lump of chewed food, than a lump of soil). In Homer the word ἐριβῶλαξ [Odyssey 13.235 and often in the Iliad] means ‘bountiful land’, literally ‘large-clod-place’, and in Theocritus [17:80] βῶλαξ is used to describe the abundant soils of the Nile. The connection, clearly, is with fertility. Pindar describes the magic clod as ἄφθιτον Λιβύας σπέρμα (afthiton Libyas sperma), ‘the indestructible sperm of Libya’, and the word βῶλος is etymologically linked to βολβός, ‘bulb’, which is to say: seed. This makes sense, I suppose. Egypt is dry and barren except where the Nile brings its fertile mud. Cyrene, Herodotus [4:158] tells us, has rain where the rest of Libya has none. Thira’s soil is enriched by its volcanic ash. Good for growing. 

Reflecting on the myth that underlies Pindar’s poem, Adam notes that in that tale “the βῶλαξ comes from a divine source — the clod of God — and that’s what makes it so powerful, so consequential.” When I read that I was immediately certain that βῶλαξ or βῶλος had to be the word used in the Septuagint for the earth from which Adam — Adam our common progenitor, not Adam the novelist — was formed (Genesis 2:7). I fairly ran to my reference books, and … nope. My certainty was misplaced. The only place in the whole Bible where βῶλαξ is used is Job 7:5: “My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; My skin is broken, and become loathsome.” The Septuagint renders the Genesis passage as χοῦν (dust) from γῆς (earth). 

Oh well. I record this because one should acknowledge one’s strikeouts as well as one’s home runs. 

Effective altruism is an admirable movement, and I hope it spreads. But one of my chief concerns about the movement is how obsessively focused it is on financial matters. The question seems always to be “Where should I put my money?” This is not surprising, since the movement is so closely associated with wealthy engineers, and more specifically with Silicon Valley, where “scaling up” is often treated as a necessity. The EA emphasis is always on measurable goods, and on “maximizing utility,” with maximization primarily defined as “numbers of people helped.” If that’s how you orient yourself, then of course you end up with longtermism, because the future gives you the requisite scale. EA is thus the most perfect distillation yet of metaphysical capitalism. 

So: Imagine a person who is both chronically ill and desperately lonely.

An EAer committed to longtermism would be on principle opposed to paying for the medical treatment of one person living now: that doesn’t scale and therefore doesn’t maximize utility. (I don’t think any effective altruist would disagree with this; the movement places a premium on eschewing sentimentality.) 

The matter of loneliness is more interesting. It would probably be invisible to the EAer because nothing about loneliness or human connection is easily measurable, nor obviously addressable with money. (Not that people haven’t tried.) The ill and lonely person, if given a choice, might prefer illness within a loving community to rude good health in continued isolation; but that’s not something that the EAer can readily factor in. 

But EAers need to think about this. Perhaps their monetary gifts can contribute to a future world in which disease is unknown and lifespans are dramatically extended; but what if those magnificently healthy people are miserable? What if they despise their long lives? It is certainly true that “thousands have lived without love, not one without water” — but have the loveless ones lived well?

What would EA look like if it asked not just about physical well-being but about the human need to love and be loved? For one thing, it would be less tempted by the abstractions and airy speculations of longtermism; for another, it would have to reckon with the limited power of money to address human ills. It would call into question its commitment to what Dickens, in Bleak House, called “telescopic philanthropy.” It would have to consider the possibility that the best way to ensure human flourishing in the future would be to strengthen our bonds with one another today. 

This alternate-world EA might even take as its model someone I have mentioned in an earlier post, a character from that same novel, Esther Summerson. Esther is trying to avoid being recruited by Mrs. Pardiggle, a Victorian predecessor of EA perhaps, who has a “mechanical way of taking possession of people” and wants Esther to do the same.  

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself. 

P.S. Maybe, given the clear correlation between religious commitment and happiness, even in the absence of robust physical health, the best thing the altruist who wants to be truly effective could do is support religious institutions. Making them stronger today would help them to be stronger in the future, so even the longtermist could sign on to such a project. Yay utilitarianism! 

My prediction for Group B in the World Cup ⚽️:

1. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
2. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
3. 🇮🇷
4. 🇺🇸

I mean this. I think the USMNT is a shambles, largely because of inept coaching. I devoutly hope I’m wrong.

I would watch any NBA game called by Doris Burke (play-by play) and 89-year-old Hubie Brown (analyst). Yeah, Doris doesn’t usually do play-by-play but she’s great at it. They would make an incomparable duo. 🏀