Alan Jacobs

”The Sermon of the Wolf,” by Eleanor Parker: 

For Wulfstan [preaching in the year 1014] diagnosing his society’s ills as breaches of law was not a source of despair, but an opportunity. It meant he could offer a plan of action. In this sermon his purpose is not just to denounce and lament, to criticize without providing solutions. His aim is to preach repentance and amendment – to convince people that things can get better, even in the shadow of the end times. The end will come; he has no doubt of that, and right now things are almost as bad as they can be. But there are measures we can take in the meantime, he suggests, things that will help. They won’t stave off the apocalypse or keep the Antichrist away. Yet they’re still worth doing – both morally right in themselves and a remedy for present evils.

His message is simple: repent, repair, do better. There’s no pretense that it’ll be easy. “A great wound needs a great remedy,” he says, “and a great fire needs a great amount of water if the blaze is to be quenched.” The worse the situation, the more work and collective effort it will take to mend it. But the promise that it can be mended is, nonetheless, a remarkably hopeful takeaway from such a fierce and angry sermon. 

Is Wulfstan the unofficial patron of this blog? 

A continuation of this post 

Hugh Trevor-Roper doesn’t use the term normie, of course – his key term of disparagement is “philistine.” Paul Fussell: “A Modernist is a late-nineteenth- or twentieth-century artist or artistic theorist who has decided to declare war on the received, the philistine, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic,” and I think it’s fair to say that the philistine in this sense simply is someone whose affections gravitate towards the received, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic. (One could say that those are the four cardinal points of the culture of the Shire.)

We owe this use of the word “philistine” to Matthew Arnold, who in turn borrowed it from a town-and-gown dispute in the German city of Jena. In his great book Culture and Anarchy Arnold sets the Philistine on the side of money over against culture:

The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”

The condescension drips and drips. But like Trevor-Roper, Arnold did not confuse philistinism with stupidity: in a later essay he picks up a category he had briefly mentioned in Culture and Anarchy: the “Philistine of genius.” This category is dominated by three giants: “So we have the Philistine of genius in religion — Luther; the Philistine of genius in politics — Cromwell; the Philistine of genius in literature — Bunyan.” Though appalled by these figures, he has to concede their greatness. The whole project of Culture and Anarchy might be described as a thought experiment for creating a world in which such people could never be recognized as great; but in our real, existing world, such recognition is unavoidable to the honest. 

However, did any of these figures desire money? If so, they went about the pursuit of it in very odd ways. I think the love of money is, for Arnold, just one of the ways a person can live in opposition to true Culture. One also opposes culture by a leveling impulse: Luther against the papacy; Cromwell against the aristocracy; and Bunyan against the state church and its confinement of the ability to preach to the formally educated. And over the course of his career I think Arnold much more consistently focuses on the Philistinism of Leveling rather than the Philistinism of Lucre.  

Many artists and writers – and, I think it’s fair to say, most academics in the humanities – have inherited from Arnold a settled contempt for philistines — which is to say, for normies. This is a bit ironic, because Arnold’s famous dedication to cultivating “the best that has been thought and said in the world” – also from Culture and Anarchy – is now thought a normie ideal to uphold. But Arnold believed that such dedication to high and unphilistine culture was the best means of “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.” That is – and it is important to remember that Arnold’s day job was as an inspector of schools – the cultivation of “the best that has been thought and said” will not reinforce existing prejudices and assumptions but rather will bring about necessary social change. And indeed this is how things worked out: as Jonathan Rose shows in his masterful book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,

Even literature that appeared to be safely conservative was potentially explosive in the minds of readers. This may seem counterintuitive: in the recent “canon wars,” the Left and Right agreed that a traditional canon of books would reinforce conservative values (the Right arguing that this was a good thing). But both sides in this debate made the mistake of believing each other’s propaganda. Contrary to all the intentions of the authors, classic conservative texts could make plebeian readers militant and articulate.

Militant, articulate normies.

UW-M Special Collections

Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?:

For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses.

The latest attempt was led by scholars Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp. The Ptolemies who created the library at Alexandria had a suitably pharaonic vision: to bring every book that had ever been written under one roof. Kestemont and Karsdorp had a more modest goal – to estimate the survival rate of manuscripts created in different parts of Europe during the middle ages.

Using a statistical method borrowed from ecology, called “unseen species” modelling, they extrapolated from what has survived to gauge how much hasn’t – working backwards from the distribution of manuscripts we have today in order to estimate what must have existed in the past.

The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. 

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia: 

Thomasina: Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra’s] ancestors! How can we sleep for grief? 

Septimus: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sopocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, Like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. 

Not the most convincing consolation by Septimus. 

14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture: This is very good by Ted Gioia, as always, but I would contend that the past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture. 

The Architectural Drawings at All Souls College, Oxford: Wren and Hawksmoor

Good to see these guys back.

Perhaps the key theme in C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man is his emphasis on the importance, in much classical and almost all medieval thought, of the chest as the seat, the location, of our moral intuitions and convictions. Our mind cognizes and analyzes, the rest of our body simmers with passionate humors, but the chest synthesizes thought and impulse and converts that synthesis into meaningful moral action. 

One of the chief appeals of social media, for many of us, is the ease with which we can “get something off our chest.” But maybe there are feelings and convictions that ought to remain on our chest, even if their presence burns us. 

I should put my cards on the table here: In the past week we have, in multiple ways, seen the pervasive moral corruption of the socially-conservative and at-least-nominally-Christian world of which I have been a part (though an often discontented and uncomfortable part) most of my life. It is impossible for any fair-minded person to deny that that world has surrounded itself with a vast fortress of lies within which it hopes to take refuge: lies about the 2020 election, lies about immigrants to the USA, lies about its own commitments to “traditional morality,” lies about its adherence to biblical authority, lies about its embodiment of genuine masculinity. From within that fortress the cry continually comes forth, The woke libtards are trying to destroy us! — to which the most reasonable reply is: You’re destroying yourselves faster than any external enemies ever could.  

And that’s as far as I’m going to go by way of getting anything off my chest. I could certainly continue the denunciations, and continue at great length — there’s no shortage of material. But I don’t want to consume my anger and pain by shoveling them into a red-hot social-media furnace. Denunciations do no good. 

I want to keep my anger and pain close to me, inside me, even though it hurts, and find some proper outlet for them — as I say, to synthesize my thoughts and my feelings into meaningful moral action. 

On this blog I will continue to focus my attention on praising the praiseworthy and celebrating the good, the true, and the beautiful, because that’s my calling, that’s my lane. As Bob Dylan once said, “There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place.” And my place, vocationally speaking, is not to be a politician or a pundit. It is, rather, to invite my readers to join with me in a quest to repair the world — from the inside of us out, as it were. To change hearts; to heal and strengthen the seat of our affections.  

But that doesn’t mean that I can take no political or social action in response to the pervasive corruption I see and lament. I am asking myself some questions that I think all of us would do well to ask in these times: If there were no social media — no Twitter, no Facebook, no blogs even — what would I do? Whom would I seek to address and how would I address them? Would I use words only, or would I take action? And if the latter, what would proper action be? Imagine that all the familiar means of “getting things off my chest” were denied to me — what would I do then? 

In the coming days I will be pondering those questions. And meanwhile, on this blog, regular service will resume next week. 

I spend a lot of time just watching these guys come and go.

This seems like a good time to go silent for a few days — to pray in silence. I’ll be back, probably next week. 

When I grow up, I wanna be like Pop. And you should too.

Pete Wehner:

For abuse to happen under any circumstances is gut-wrenching; when it happens in a church setting, and is perpetrated by people who are viewed as spiritual leaders, who are entrusted with the care and formation of the young, it’s that much worse. And when those in positions of leadership not only fail to step in to help victims of abuse, but actually attack them, it becomes even more wicked and grievous. Brown’s haunting phrase — soul murder — is what happened within the SBC, and it’s only the latest in a string of recent scandals that have rocked the evangelical world.

The other thing that makes the SBC scandal so twisted and ugly is how leaders of the denomination used the Bible and spiritual language as weapons against the innocent victims, as when Boto invoked Satan to discredit the survivors. That is yet another level of depravity. 

We need a word worse than “depravity” for this. See also Russell Moore on this tragic situation. It’s time for pretty much everyone in the current and recent leadership of the SBC to take the Profumo Option. 

Reformation in the Church of Science — The New Atlantis:

Fake news is not a perversion of the information society but a logical outgrowth of it, a symptom of the decades-long devolution of the traditional authority for governing knowledge and communicating information. That authority has long been held by a small number of institutions. When that kind of monopoly is no longer possible, truth itself must become contested.

This is treacherous terrain. The urge to insist on the integrity of the old order is widespread: Truth is truth, lies are lies, and established authorities must see to it that nobody blurs the two. But we also know from history that what seemed to be stable regimes of truth may collapse, and be replaced. If that is what is happening now, then the challenge is to manage the transition, not to cling to the old order as it dissolves around us.

The authors don’t attempt to say how this transition should be managed, which is probably wise. Their point, and I fear that it’s quite correct, is that the transition is happening: What counts as scientific truth is now contested in many of the same ways that what counts as religious truth was contested in the Reformation period. 

First post in a series 

When Hugh Trevor-Roper was a young historian he became friends with with the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Berenson was fifty years older than Trevor-Roper, and rarely left his home outside Florence, so Trevor-Roper enlivened his octogenarian friend’s dull days with maliciously gossipy letters, especially about his colleagues at Oxford. Here is what he had to say (on 18 January 1951) about C.S. Lewis:

Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reever or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity; a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature, and, of course, poetry; a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favorite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man.

The first thing to say about this is that it’s very funny. The second thing to say is that it makes no pretense to accuracy. I’m sure Trevor-Roper knew perfectly well that The Abolition of Man is not what Lewis hopes for but what he fears, and that he does not detest literature and poetry but rather adores them. Old Hughie’s having his bit of fun.

Still, there’s no doubt that the letter reflects Trevor-Roper’s actual attitude towards Lewis, and I want to zero in on the key phrase: “a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism.” It’s a double judgment: he detests Lewis as a philistine – but he doesn’t hesitate to credit him with “a powerful mind.” I think that’s very important, not just for understanding how Trevor Roper thought but for understanding how the intelligentsia, especially within the academy, has been orienting itself to the world for the past hundred years or so.

For Trevor-Roper, the problem with Lewis isn’t that he stupid. Trevor-Roper is perfectly aware of Lewis’s exceptional intelligence, and if pressed he might even have acknowledged that Lewis was more intelligent than he himself – certainly more profoundly learned. What Trevor-Roper despises is Lewis’s aesthetic and emotional response to the world, his moral taste – in a word, his affections, in the Augustinian and Jonathan-Edwardsian sense. Trevor-Roper was appalled by Lewis because Lewis showed that a person could be prodigiously intelligent and nevertheless in other respects be – well, a normie.

I’m going to use that as a technical term here: a normie is someone whose responses to the world, whose affections, are close to those of the average person. This is not the only way it’s used, of course: in Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies normies are essentially political centrists, people who accept the status quo rather than embracing revolutionary change from the right or the left. But I think a more accurate sense of the word’s connotations is outlined in a post on the Merriam-Webster “Words We’re Watching” blog that wrestles with it: “The term normie has emerged as both a noun and an adjective referring to one whose tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude are mainstream and far from the cutting edge, or a person who is otherwise not notable or remarkable” – but then, at the end of the post, there’s an acknowledgment that “the word has lately flattened out and is now occasionally embraced as a term of ironic self-mockery. The emergence of the term normcore, which evokes a fashion style noted for being deliberately bland and unremarkable, might have helped to neutralize normie and bring the word back into the realm of cool — however that adds up.”

A rather hand-wavy conclusion. But in essence: “Normie” began as a term of disparagement but has been claimed by (a) the committed ironists and (b) the very people against which it was originally deployed – a relatively common event in the history of disparagement, as illustrated by the history of such words as “Methodist” and “Quaker.”

But whether you use the word in a pejorative or a commendatory sense, it’s important to recognize that normieness is a matter of “tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude” – or, as I prefer, affections – rather than intelligence. It is hard for people who disparage normies to keep this in mind, and maybe even for the rest of us. To stick with the Inklings for a moment: early in his wonderful book about Tolkien, The Road to Middle-Earth, Tom Shippey makes the offhand comment that “Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile.” When I first read those words I was somewhat taken aback, because I was not accustomed to thinking of Tolkien’s mind as a subtle one. But the more I reflected on it the more convinced I became that Shippey is correct: Tolkien’s mind is exceptionally subtle, though his tastes and affections are simple – hobbitlike, as he himself often said: he once wrote in a letter, “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size).”

My initial reflexive skepticism about Shippey’s claim suggests a deeply-buried sense that the normie is unreflective in comparison to the person who takes a more adversarial attitude towards the conventional; an unfortunate assumption for me to be making, since I am pretty much a normie myself – but perhaps an understandable one, since I am a scholar of modernism, and modernism is essentially, as Paul Fussell pointed out many years ago, adversarial to the norm. So all the more credit to Hugh Trevor-Roper for managing to despise Lewis as a normie while crediting him with a powerful mind. 

But the specific term that Trevor-Roper uses to describe Lewis’s orientation is not “normie” but rather “philistinism.” We’ll get into that in the next post in this series (whenever that may be). 

A festive harvest in the mail today. Listening to Wood Works right now and it’s utterly enchanting.