Alan Jacobs

Via my son.

A while back, I wrote this:

To make promises, to stand by one's words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame. That’s legitimately frightening. But if the cost is high, so is the benefit: To be answerable for one’s words is to escape the ineffectual, and to find “the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person.” To move from the linguistically and morally empty world of Projection — in which you can blithely forecast the destruction of whole fields of human activity and the hopes they hold — to the meaning-saturated world of Promise is to risk much. But if Bakhtin is right, you’re betting on the integrity of your own personhood; and if Berry is right, you’re binding yourself to someone else’s future. The promise for which you are truly answerable is a bet on mutuality. 

I’m casting my mind back to this because of some thoughts that keep rising up in the aftermath of my recent Laity Lodge retreat with Sara Hendren. 

One of the points Sara emphasized in her talks was how Olin College of Engineering, where she teaches, spends a lot of time teaching its students the practice of prototyping. As Sara defines and explains that practice, it really does look to me like a “bet on mutuality,” in this sense: To build a prototype and expose it to critique is to make yourself very vulnerable. (Sara mentioned an exercise Olin does in which it has its students build games, and then invites fourth-graders in to judge the games. “Is this fun?” She said that when those terrifying 10-year-olds arrive, some of her students’ hands are shaking.) But you invite people in because you know that you can’t do the thing you want to do without their honest response.

The form this particular bet on mutuality takes could be called a hopeful invitation to a constructive feedback loop. That is, you hope that your critics will give responses that will genuinely help you improve your prototype; and they hope that you will try to improve your project in ways that take their critique seriously. And so on, iteration by iteration. Sara has written of critique and repair, and I have written of invitation and repair, but look what we have here: the invitation to critique as a first step in the process of repair. 

An obvious point, now that I think about it, but then, I often take some time to achieve the obvious. 

When this thought came to me, I realized that I had dealt with it, implicitly, in one of my own talks at Laity. I had contrasted Bob Davey — a man who desperately wanted to restore an old church in Norfolk, England — with Justo Martinez — a man who wanted to build a new church near Madrid, Spain. Brother Justo strove for decades not just to build the church, but also to do it alone — he neither sought nor welcomed assistance of any kind, and often claimed to have achieved by himself tasks that he simply couldn’t have achieved without help. He treated others as impediments and threats. By contrast, Davey worked very hard on restoring that little Norfolk church, but he also sought help of every kind along the way. He gave up complete control of the project in order to draw friends and strangers into his endeavor. His motto seems to have been that great phrase from Wordsworth: “what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how.” He made a bet on mutuality.

That surely meant having to hear other people tell him “You’re doing it wrong” — something Justo, it seems, couldn’t bear to hear. But if we want to repair the world, or any part of our little corner of it, we’ve got not just to accept but invite that possibility. We have to discipline ourselves to welcome it. And we have to encourage those others to stick with us through multiple iterations of whatever we’re prototyping. 

What this might look like through my kind of work … well, I’m just beginning to figure that out. But it’s got to start with doing hard things with friends. 

Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly - by Adam Mastroianni:

In every corner of pop culture — movies, TV, music, books, and video games — a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one. 

Remember when we were looking forward to the era of the Long Tail? Nah, that didn’t happen. At least not in the way predicted. We do, praise God, have unprecedented access to art, books, music, movies — but we often get to choose between the colorless tasteless mega-productions of the oligopoly or very small things made at the cultural and economic margins. 

This works out differently in different art forms, and I want to think more about the details. But it does seem to me that there’s a kind of squeezing-out of the middle. The midlist author is disappearing — heck, in another time and place I might well have been a midlist author, but I could never sell enough books in the current environment to make a living. Also, it seems that only a few bands — good old-fashioned guitar/keyboards/bass/drum bands — can afford to tour any more, and most of those are comprised of people over sixty. Younger musicians tend to work solo or duo, or form short-term collaborations, and thick musical textures tend to be developed (when they’re developed all) through digital instrumentation rather than through people learning how to play together. The new economics of art has been hard on all musical genres, but especially, I think, on jazz. Which was struggling anyway.  

Obviously you can’t generalize too grossly here; the situation in the visual arts is rather different. But in many art forms, it seems to me, we have the massive-in-scale and massive-in-popularity and small-in-scale and small-in-popularity — and not much in between. 

I’m so happy about last weekend at Laity Lodge that I’m posting about it on both my blogs.

A number of years ago, when I was teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois, a couple of students asked me if I would consider becoming the faculty sponsor for a club for Southerners at Wheaton — a club to be focused on the real South, in all of its complexity, and one that didn’t give a fig for the Confederacy. They came over to our house for a meal, and Teri and I had a wonderful long talk with them. Those are special young women, we thought — and goodness, was that an understatement. Their names were Sara Hendren and Claire Chamblin — now Claire Holley — and they have remained close friends, and have gone on to do exceptional things in their chosen fields of endeavor. 

Last week we were all together again, at Laity Lodge, where Sara and I offered sessions on the theme of Critique and Repair, while Claire played songs for us and led us in singing — and gave an exceptionally beautiful concert on Saturday evening in the Cody Center. I learned so much from Sara’s talks — she is really doing innovative and compassionate and philosophically rich work on the topics we explored — so it will take me a long time to process it all. Look in the next few weeks for responses, probably piecemeal at first. 

In short: few activities are more rewarding than doing hard things with friends. My mind is full, and my heart too. 

Claire at the piano in the Great Hall (taken by my wife Teri): 

The peace of the river: 

Me: Good grief, it’s just one thing after another. 

T: No kidding. Today the plumber spills toxic chemicals all over our kitchen floor, yesterday it was the sound on the TV going wonky. 

Me: Before that my Kindle died. 

T: Before that the ice maker in our fridge died. 

Me: Before that our internet ran at a glacial pace for several days. 

T: And it’s searing hot. And there’s no rain. 

Me: I got a new vinyl record and it keeps sticking. CDs eventually wear out. Also, the drawer of my CD player keeps sticking. 

T: Your life is suffering. But you know, everything wears out. 

Me: Nothing works. [pause] Well, there’s one thing I can count on. 

T: What’s that? 

Me: Books. They always work. No internet, they still work. No electricity, they still work. Drop them in the bathtub and they get a little wonky, but you can still read them. The books on my shelf — in a hundred years, in two hundred years, they’ll still be readable. The only thing you can really count on in this vale of tears is books. 

T: Truth. 

A Love Letter to the Mountains:

In The High Sierra, [Kim Stanley] Robinson is constantly shifting scale too—shifting scale, subject, angle of attention, even genre. One moment the book is memoir. The next it’s trail guide. Then it’s bibliography, history, ecological meditation, and a discourse on renaming peaks and passes that have culturally unacceptable names. Robinson lets his thoughts scatter and then tracks them down wherever they’ve settled, much like a Sierra sheepherder and his flock in the late 19th century. The High Sierra might be subtitled: A Miscellany — even though it’s a word we don’t use much any more. Robinson registers that the human mind is miscellaneous and invites us to accept that fact. 

I’m not an audiobook guy, but on a lark I decided to listen to this one, read by Robinson himself — and it was terrific. I wouldn’t necessarily want to listen to Robinson reading one of his novels, but because this is a memoir, that voice was perfect. Also, Audible gives you a link to a PDF containing the many illuminating photographs the book features, which is a big help to understanding. 

What a unique and wonderful career KSR has had. I hope he’ll keep writing — and hiking. 

Ever since I learned from Michael Benson‘s excellent book on the making of 2001 that Stanley Kubrick‘s list of actors to play Moonwatcher — the early hominid who first discovers the use of weapons — included Jean Paul Belmondo, all I can think about is Belmondo sitting in full makeup under a rock outcrop on the African savanna smoking a cigarette and longing for the boulevards of Paris.

I posted this yesterday and then, because I wrote it in a moment of anger, decided to take it down. Denunciation is not the ideal mode for me; and it’s not really my post. But Kreider’s piece bothers me, and I think for good reason, so I am putting this back up, with some minor editing. 

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Tim Kreider:

I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back.

Does Tim Kreider realize that there are people out there — probably >99% of the working population — who don’t work because they want to but because they have to? Does he understood the continent-sized iceberg of entitlement lying beneath his casual acknowledgement that he has “learned” what it’s like to “do literally nothing for more than a year”? Has it ever occurred to him that the world is full of people who don’t know what it’s like to “do literally nothing” for one day? Does he grasp that someone who has had the opportunity to discover how his psyche responds when he loafs around for a year or two has absolutely no business writing about “the actual dystopian future we now inhabit,” because whaddya mean “we,” sunshine?

“Once I become genuinely engaged in a project,” Kreider boasts, “I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative.” Well, that’s nice. But does Kreider even begin to understand that there are millions and millions of people in this country — just in this country — who would give a couple of digits to be able to spend even a dozen hours on such a project, but can’t because they’re too busy making enough money to feed and shelter themselves and maybe their family?

“It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam,” the title of his essay tells me. And do what instead? There is, he says, “a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.” Again: What’s with the “we”? And again: What does Kreider expect his readers to do? Quit their jobs and … pay their rent how? Feed themselves and their family how? Get adequate medical care how? Save enough to avoid an impoverished old age how?

You know what’s even worse than a bullshit job? A writer who has had the enormous good fortune to avoid bullshit jobs chastising people for not quitting their bullshit jobs.

Andrew Hickey:

[Brian] Wilson’s post-Pet Sounds career, like his pre-Pet Sounds career, is an extraordinary mix of the bizarre, the shockingly bad, the beautiful, and the awe-inspiring, often in the same song. Wilson appears to have no filters, and while this means his music at its best is the most emotionally truthful I’ve ever heard, it also means he has no quality control. His best work is as likely to be an allegorical fairytale about a prince with a magic transistor radio, written while listening to a Randy Newman album on repeat, or a two-minute as-yet-unreleased song about baseball, or a song about Johnny Carson done in mock-Weimar cabaret style backed by a Moog set on “fart sounds,” as it is to be an eight-minute psychedelic country epic about the Rio Grande.

Artificial Creativity? – O’Reilly:

AI has been used to complete Beethoven’s 10th symphony, for which Beethoven left a number of sketches and notes at the time of his death. The result is pretty good, better than the human attempts I’ve heard at completing the 10th. It sounds Beethoven-like; its flaw is that it goes on and on, repeating Beethoven-like riffs but without the tremendous forward-moving force that you get in Beethoven’s compositions. But completing the 10th isn’t the problem we should be looking at. How did we get Beethoven in the first place?  If you trained an AI on the music Beethoven was trained on, would you eventually get the 9th symphony? Or would you get something that sounds a lot like Mozart and Haydn?

I’m betting the latter. 

A story from qntm:

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image workloading but also the KES case, the Whitney case, the Seafront Experiments and even Poulsen's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology, and that fiction which did was far less widely-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it at the time of his uploading. 

As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in. If asked to speculate, he guesses that he may have been booted for the IAAS-1 or IAAS-5 experiments. At the time of his scan, IAAS-1 had been scheduled for August 10, 2031, and MMAcevedo was indeed used for that experiment on that day. IAAS-5 had been scheduled for October 2031 but was postponed several times and eventually became the IAAX-60 experiment series, which continued until the mid-2030s and used other scans in conjunction with MMAcevedo. The emulated Acevedo also expresses curiosity about the state of his biological original and a desire to communicate with him.  

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads. However, MMAcevedo's innate skills and personality make it fundamentally unsuitable for many workloads. 

Charlie Stross: 

Here's the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading/replication or super-human intelligence. (The latter need not be AI; it could be uploaded human minds able to monopolize sufficient computing substrate to get more thinking done per unit baseline time than actual humans can achieve.) Some people are, once again, clearly superior in capability to born-humans. And other persons can be ruthlessly exploited for their labour output without reward, and without even being allowed to know that they're being exploited. […] 

Our intuitions about crimes against people (and humanity) are based on a set of assumptions about the parameters of personhood that are going to be completely destroyed if mind uploading turns out to be possible.

Andy Crouch:

What I say to students is, you are not unhealthy people in a normal world, despite these statistics that show how anxious, lonely, and depressed young adults are. What you are is normal people in an unhealthy world. It's not healthy to be anxious, lonely, and depressed, but it is a natural response to a world that is not asking you to become anything, and is not giving you confidence that you can overcome difficulty — one that's dissociating the different parts of you, compelling you to spend a good part of your time with your body disengaged and your mind occupied. It's totally understandable that our young people are experiencing such distress, because the world we're asking them to live in — this world of easy everywhere — this world of superpowers, is not good for them. It would be very odd if, in this world, people were doing just fine. It's not at all surprising that they're struggling and feeling disconnected. 

You can be almost certain that people who sneer with ready contempt at today’s college students don’t spend much time around them. Our young people have been given a raw deal, and most of them play it better than we have any right to expect. And the ones who don’t? They’re twenty years old. How put-together were you at age twenty? 

Ben Shahn, The Alphabet of Creation (1954)

Tom McTague:

Being in London this week has been like having your home teleported somewhere else: You look around and everything is the same, but isn’t. The air is like Florida’s, hot and heavy to touch, the haze like a postcard of Los Angeles. My son went to school this morning in shorts, a vest, and a baseball cap that he turned backwards, as if he were actually in America. A mosquito buzzed in my ear as I sat in my darkened living room, the curtains drawn tight to keep the sun out. We don’t have air-conditioning in England, you see. That is the kind of thing people have in other countries, where the weather is extreme, where you go indoors to escape the heat—and where there are mosquitoes. 

I just wrote an email to my friend Adam Roberts, who, like almost everyone in southern England and Western Europe, has been having a rough go of it: 

Two years ago, when we had the Big Freeze here in Texas — three days without power, 35º F in most of the house, some warmth generated in one room only and by a rapidly diminishing supply of firewood (a friend eventually brought some over in his pickup) — the people responsible for the power generating stations said that their equipment wasn't prepared for that kind of cold, and why should it have been, it was a freakish thing, once in a lifetime, etc. To which more reasonable people replied that that excuse works only once at most. From now on, they said, given the swings of temperature that we'll surely be seeing, the Texas power grid will need to prepare for cold the way it prepares for heat.

It seems to me that the opposite may need to happen in northern Europe: an infrastructure preparing for heat the way it prepares for cold. And a mild-weathered place like Britain might need to invest in better preparation for both ends of the thermometer.

Fortunately, your nation and my state are blessed with exceptionally competent governments — they really know how to Level Up!!

Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what's done, is done.

As regular visitors to this blog know, I recently read the four extant volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and if there is a single message that Caro hammers relentlessly home it’s this: LBJ was a titanically horrible person – mean, vindictive, cruel, thieving – who nevertheless made vital things happen (electricity in the Texas Hill Country, massive national civil rights legislation) that would have been delayed a decade or longer if anyone else but him had been manipulating the levers of power. And then Caro leaves you, the reader, to decide whether you’re okay with the trade-off. Whether the good outweighs the bad.

Which brings us to the final season of Better Caul Saul, and particularly the ninth episode of the season, which explicitly calls into question our usual practices of double-entry moral bookkeeping.

Throughout the series, but especially in the last couple of seasons, we have seen the two sides of Kim Wexler: on one hand the woman who enjoys, with her lover and then husband Jimmy McGill (AKA Saul Goodman), con-artist “Fun and Games” – the bitterly ironic title of this episode – and on the other hand a dedicated public defender, a friend of the friendless, a skilled lawyer who even when she worked for a fancy law firm insisted on leaving plenty of time to do pro bono work for the insulted and the injured. Doesn’t the good outweigh the bad?

Season 6 episode 9 is the moment when Kim decides that the answer is No. Or rather: It’s the wrong question, the wrong system of accounting. She’s not willing to do the comparative weighing any more. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next, but she won’t do that.

Almost simultaneously, Mike Ehrmantraut visits the father of Nacho Varga, the young drug dealer and servant of the cartel who died in the third episode of this season. Mike wants to tell Mr. Varga that his son “had a good heart,” that he wasn’t like the other criminals, “not really.” Mike is surely thinking of his own son, whom he taught to be a crooked cop; and perhaps of himself also. But Mr. Varga isn’t having it. “You gangsters,” he says. “You’re all the same.” He won’t participate in double-entry accounting. And, along the same lines, he scorns Mike’s claim that “justice” will come to the Salamanca family at whose hands Nacho died. He knows that it’s mere vengeance.

“What’s done can be undone.” That’s what Jimmy/Saul says when Kim rejects the balancing act she’s been performing for almost the entire series. But the entire message of this fictional world — from Breaking Bad to Better Call Saul — is that it can’t be. Lady Macbeth knew: “What’s done cannot be undone.” Thus we’re all left to pick up the pieces, if we can. No system of accounting can rescue us from that dark obligation.

LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election [PDF] — very well done, patiently detailed and thorough.

Is there a more user-hostile website on the internet than Patheos? I saw that my colleague Philip Jenkins had a new post and — momentarily forgetting what a bad idea this is — clicked the link rather than sending it straight to Instapaper. This is what I saw. Patheos thinks it a good idea to make the writing they publish impossible, and I mean impossible, to read without in some way bypassing the site itself. (The Mac/iOS Reader View usually works to achieve this, but occasionally gets confused by all the ads.) Even more than readers I feel sorry for the site’s writers, since many visitors will leave without discovering what those writers say.