Alan Jacobs

Very glad to see the NYT printing a lengthy obituary of the great Kinky Friedman, though they don’t emphasize the fact that his run for Governor of Texas featured the best campaign slogan ever: “How Hard Could It Be?”

I deleted my big-blog post on today’s big SCOTUS ruling. I think I have a useful point, but today’s not the time to make it. People will be too heated. I’ll save the post and publish it in 2034.

Just a gentle reminder of a point I’ve often made: if you read the actual text of Supreme Court opinions instead of journalists’ descriptions of them, you’ll see (a) the existing law which the court is interpreting, and is legally bound to respect; (b) the relevant precedents which they’re professionally bound to reckon with; (c) the reasoning — complete with clarifications, distinctions, and the setting of boundaries — which both majority and dissent employ to reach their decisions; and (d) the diversity of opinion even among justices who are on the same side of the question. You can’t fairly judge a decision simply on the basis of whether or not you like the outcome’s implications for the present moment.

“What lies have I ever told? There is no need for lying, seeing that mankind are such fools … tell them the truth and they will mislead themselves by their own vanities and save me the trouble of invention.” — Mephistopheles, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Devil to Pay

“Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter from Paris to William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871):

A new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. 

A recommendation more important now than ever. 

Sometimes I think that the best writing set-up I ever had was 30 years ago when I had a PowerBook 100, wrote in Word 5.1, and kept my notes and ideas in HyperCard.

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey:

At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event. […] 

Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus? 

A sharp and fair-minded report. I would add that almost all of these endeavors are rooted not in conservatism but in classical liberalism — which is how they attract non-conservatives. This is not a MAGA project but an Enlightenment project, especially the Enlightenment of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. (Thus the centrality of political philosophy — literature and the other arts just come along for the ride, but they seem to be welcome.) 

I especially appreciate this paragraph from late in the piece: 

The final challenge these schools face, in our view, is to articulate their programs as a renaissance rather than a reaction. Many of the faculty members moving to these schools bring with them powerful memories of elements of their own academic training that are underappreciated: great books programs at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, courses in grand strategy at Yale University, curricula that focus on the American founding or British constitutionalism. To be part of a renaissance that endures, efforts to revive neglected subfields and forgotten courses must resist the temptation of nostalgia for a lost golden age. The Renaissance we remember did not simply revel in old texts of Cicero, it gave birth to novel forms of art and thought that focused on the distinct challenges of its moment.

I’ve seen a number of comments from LPC* academics about these new programs, and their view, unsurprisingly, seems to be that they’d rather see the humanities destroyed altogether than see such programs succeed. I get it; it’s hard, when one has wielded unchallenged power for so long, to deal with resistance. 

* Left Purity Culture 

Philip Jenkins, who recently wrote so kindly about The Shield of Achilles, has noted how cursory is the English Wikipedia page for Auden’s great poetic sequence the “Horae Canonicae” — in dramatic contrast to the extraordinary Swedish Wikipedia page. Perhaps I should move to Sweden….

Just sent this to my friend Adam Roberts.