Alan Jacobs

Pope Benedict XVI:

Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer, for I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings, and is thus also my advocate, my ‘Paraclete.’ In light of the hour of judgment, the grace of being a Christian becomes all the more clear to me. It grants me knowledge, and indeed friendship, with the judge of my life, and thus allows me to pass confidently through the dark door of death. In this regard, I am constantly reminded of what John tells us at the beginning of the Apocalypse: he sees the Son of Man in all his grandeur and falls at his feet as though dead. Yet he, placing his right hand on him, says to him: “Do not be afraid! It is I …” (cf. Rev 1:12-17).

Jürgen Moltmann: 

It is from community life that we draw the strength for discipleship and courage to face the inevitable opposition. In discipleship we find our brothers and sisters of the communal life. The Bruderhof community proves that. I ask myself what the state churches, still trying to lead a Christian life, can learn from such consistently Christian communities. First of all, we have to lay down our old prejudices and heretic-hunting. The closely related Mennonite and Hutterite groups have never – neither in the past nor today – been fanatic enthusiasts or narrow sectarians, but genuine Christian communities. True, their existence represents a criticism of the life of Christians in the established churches. The answer will be to begin learning from them. So I have been asking myself, how can the established institutional church become a living, communal church? How can our church parishes become communities of faith and of life? I believe that this is the way into the future, and I see more and more people going in that direction. We are not looking for the self-righteous Christian sect that despises the world, but for the open church of the coming kingdom of God. This church is open and welcomes everyone, like the Bruderhof does. It is open to the poor, the handicapped, and the rejected, who find a refuge and new hope there because they find Jesus. 

I believe this with my whole heart, and I wish I were better at living up to, or living into, this vision. I don’t have social anxiety as such, but being in any group larger than four people is enormously stressful for me, and that stress has become more pronounced during covidtide, for reasons I can speculate about but do not fully understand. I have often thought that I would rejoice in the opportunity to go to church — if I could make myself invisible. Many wise people have said that there is no vision in the New Testament or the early church of a private Christian faith, but, since I cannot make myself invisible, oh how I wish there were. 

In a reasonable world, most people would be able to distinguish 

• misinformation 
• minority opinions 
• the views of my political enemies 

Me at the Hog Blog on “attentional norms” and Zoom:

It has been interesting to watch over the last two pandemic years as the norms associated with videoconferencing have coalesced. My experience strongly suggests that the attention level expected on Zoom (and other videoconferencing platforms) is quite remarkably low — medieval-churchgoing low. Obviously, there will be exceptions to this norm — no one feels free to look away when the Boss is giving a speech — but I can’t remember the last time I was on a Zoom call in which participants were not regularly cutting their video and audio, or just their audio, to talk to people in the room with them. Or they just walk out of frame for a few minutes. Or they type away furiously on Slack or email or WhatsApp or iMessage. And no one who does this acts inappropriately, because such fidgeting and alternations of attention are permitted by the norms that have emerged. 

It’s fascinating to me how these norms emerge. No one chooses them, they just happen; and when a lot of people are using one technology, they happen quickly. As I say in the essay, they also change, but they seem to change a lot more slowly than they emerge; and there’s nothing any one person can do to change them. When you’re a teacher, as I am, you have to be very observant about those attentional norms and choose the technologies that match your pedagogical purposes. Because you’re wasting your time if you try to enforce norms that are different than those people have absorbed from everyone else. 

UPDATE: Everything I try to say here is said better by Rands: “Do you want to know why you’re fatigued at the end of a long day of video conferences? It’s because your brain has been straining to collect essential information that is no longer there.” 

Gorgeous day on campus today.

When I talk about invitation and repair, I think the concept of invitation is a pretty simple and straightforward one. I want to invite people to participate with me in this project of repair. But what is it that I want to repair and how do I want to repair it? … Goodness, it’s hard to say. Strange that I would have so much difficulty articulating even the most basic elements of my project. But let me try:

I believe that that our political and social order is broken, but (a) I am not properly positioned, either professionally or temperamentally, to do anything about that, and (b) I believe that our social and political order are broken because we have failed to care for the underlying culture that alone can give integrity and character to that order. As I've said many times before, I completely agree with Yuval Levin that it is indeed a time to build (or rebuild) our institutions, but the problem is that nobody wants to rebuild the institutions and they don't want to rebuild them because they don't care about them, they don't value them, they don't see what purpose they serve; for them an institution is simply an impediment to the achievement of their desires. In this kind of environment, I don't see the rebuilding of the institutions as an immediate possibility. Americans today perceive institutions as repositories of resources for them to exploit. If you have any doubt about that, just observe how our Representatives in Congress behave. They have absolute contempt for that which they are pledged by their oath to serve. They raid the institution to scavenge money and status. As our leaders, so their followers: What people do with institutions, with any commons, with all (theoretically) shared resources, is to strip-mine them for anything fungible. 

This is a massive problem, and not one to be fixed by passing laws prohibiting this or that, mandating this or that. We have to look deeper, deeper into the culture that precedes and shapes the institutions.  

SO: I think by repair I mean first of all making our broken cultural inheritance lovable again. For me, that means holding up visual art and music and writing and trying to show its beauty so that other people will also think that it's worth conserving and transmitting to the next generation.  

Which brings me to … 

My friend Robin Sloan suggested to me that the Studio Ghibli movie From Up on Poppy Hill might be relevant to my Invitation and Repair project and because Robin is a smart guy I decided that I should watch it. It's been on my watchlist for quite a while; I suppose the main reason I have never gotten around to it is that I knew it was not directed by Hayao Miyazaki (though he co-wrote it) but rather by his son Gorō. That gave me a suspicion that it was probably second-tier Ghibli. And maybe in some senses it is; it certainly quite different than the usual Miyazaki movie, especially in the complete absence of mystical or magical elements. It's a straightforward adolescent love story – but, let me quickly add, an absolutely delightful one. I would adore this movie if only for how well it tells a simple tale of first love.

But there's more to it than that.

The event that brings our two lovers together, in the early 1960s in Yokohama, Japan, is a threat to a battered old house known by those who use it as the Latin Quarter. On the grounds of a an architecturally bland and sparely modern sparely modern high school sits a ramshackle building comprised of multiple architectural traditions, Western and Japanese, thrown together in what I believe to be an utterly charming way. But in relation to the ideals of modern education, it is not fit for purpose, and plans are underway to have it demolished. Advocates for the demolition speak the language of the New, of the need for Japan to become more cosmopolitan, to be seen as “a modern and peaceful nation.” Lurking behind the whole story is the upcoming Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, and there is a palpable anxiety among many to eliminate those aspects of Japanese culture that might be disapproved by visiting foreigners.

The Latin Quarter is comprised of a dizzying array of subordinate units: a tiny philosophy club, a laboratory for aspiring chemists, an editorial office for a student newspaper, and many more. (I don’t think we ever see what’s going on in the tent that has been erected in one of the open hallways.) The only things holding the endeavor together are the gender of the people who use it — all of whom are boys — and a certain obsessive nerdiness about whatever it is that any given participant in the life of the Latin Quarter happens to find fascinating. 

Umi, the movie's protagonist, starts to fall for a young man named Shun, who works on the newspaper and is prone to taking wild leaps, both literal and metaphorical. She helps him with his work, and then when he communicates to her his alarm over the impending demolition of the Latin Quarter, she agrees to help him. She does so first by gathering together a large group of volunteers to clean the place up and throw out its decades of accumulated garbage, making it, they hope, sufficiently attractive that the would-be demolishers will have second thoughts. But though Umi assembles a mighty army of volunteers and the girls and boys of the school work together harmoniously, their efforts don't change the hive-mind of the Powers That Be. So Umi agrees to go with Shun and Shirō, the editor of the student newspaper, to Tokyo, where they hope to gain an audience with a wealthy businessman, an alumnus of the high school who chairs its Board of Trustees. They urge him to visit and see the newly renovated Latin Quarter and, if he is impressed by it, to intercede on their behalf.

There is so much, so so much, invitation-and-repair fodder here.

I want to call attention to a few things. First, I’ll note the point that Shun makes in a debate among the high school’s students about the future of the Latin Quarter: To the modernizers, he says, “Destroy the old and you destroy our memory of the past. Don't you care about the people who lived and died before us? There is no future for the people who worship the future and forget the past.”

In a Japan somewhat maniacally focused on modernization in advance of the Olympic games, this is a minority viewpoint, but one that might resonate with those who know a little bit about historic Japanese culture and its instinct for continuity. 

Umi has perhaps another reason to be disposed towards protecting the Latin Quarter: she lives in a big rambling house up on Poppy Hill, overlooking Yokohama harbor, that at one point was a small hospital and that is now, because of the poverty of her family in the aftermath of her father's death a decade before, a kind of boardinghouse. But Umi and her family take great care of the place: everything is spotlessly clean and anything in need of restoration has been restored. Umi is very proud of the beauty and the dignity of her old house, and when she shows it to Shun he is immediately struck by the difference between the condition of her house and the condition of the Latin Quarter. So this, perhaps, makes him receptive when Umi suggests that if he and the other boys love that old clubhouse then perhaps they should do more to care for it. 

Which brings me to what may be the most moving moment in the whole movie to me. When Umi and Shun and Shirō manage to get an audience with that wealthy businessman in Tokyo, he is friendly but also wants to know how why the Latin Quarter should be preserved. After all, he reminds them, the population of the school is growing and there's no question that a new building is needed. How can the Latin Quarter be allowed to stand in the way of that? And Umi – I think it's very important that it's Umi who replies to his question, not the two boys whom she has accompanied, and that she uses the first-person plural – Umi answers with simplicity and directness: “Because we love it, and because it makes us feel connected to our past.” 

Well, that's it in a nutshell, isn't it? We care for old stuff, stuff the world doesn't have time or patience for, filth, the fractured and grimy culture we have inherited, because we love it and it makes us feel connected to our past — and therefore, as Shun understood, to our future, to those who will inherit it after we’re gone. That's the project of invitation and repair. A simple imperative, presented to us through a simple story. 

Preview of coming attractions 

It’s clobberin’… um, I mean, newsletter time!

Monday morning, at the desk, preparing to clear my head.

What Was the TED Talk? - The Drift:

The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned. 

I know I’ve made this point about fifty times — the first time here, I think — but once more: “People who habitually traffic in symbolic manipulation — which includes pretty much everyone who spends a great deal of time, vocationally or avocationally, on the internet — tend to overestimate quite dramatically the power of symbolic manipulation.” 

Here

Martin Niemöller, writing to his wife from Moabit Prison in Berlin, 18 August 1937: “You don't have to worry about me; I live my day and it's never long, and should there be occasional rough weather and storms on the surface, at a diving depth of twenty meters there is total calm.” 

Megan McArdle:

Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For a long time, that was a very good deal for Facebook — but when Apple decided to alter the deal, Facebook didn’t really have much recourse. 

There’s a lesson in that, even if you aren’t planning to launch a media site, or a social media platform. Our ferocious arguments about who should be kicked off Spotify, or Twitter, are fundamentally about the same problem: So much of our public life takes place on a handful of technology platforms, where what we see and whom we reach is determined by policies set by some faceless programmer in Silicon Valley. We are all of us tenants of the digital manor — even, it turns out, some of the lords. 

See also my brief reflection on our manorial elite.

The lesson Megan identifies is one I am always seeking to internalize. For the last few years I have been trying to move more and more of my life out of the control of our tech overlords. I read less on the Kindle and buy more codexes; I stream less music and movies and buy more CDs and Blu-Rays; I hang out on the open web and avoid the walled gardens. (I really enjoyed Jonathan Goldstein’s podcast Heavyweight but when it went Spotify-only I cheerfully gave it up.) I don’t want my access to art I love and ideas that interest me to be determined by the whims of the Lords of the Manor. Of course, this means that I have to be more discriminating: I can’t buy everything I might want to read or watch or listen to, so I have to make a point of buying what I think I stand a good chance of experiencing repeatedly. Which is also in itself a win for me, isn’t it? 

I’ve mentioned in my newsletter how deeply I have been touched and healed in recent months by the Church of England’s Daily Prayer. This morning as I was listening to Morning Prayer — that is, the service for the fourth of February (that link should take you directly to the recorded service plus the text) — and it occurred to me that this one service contains almost everything you would need to understand the ancient Christian faith in all its beauty and all its strangeness: gorgeous music crying out to God; the précis of revelation (general and special alike) in that greatest of ancient lyric poems, Psalm 19; the scandal and offense of the Binding of Isaac; the hope beyond hope of the Resurrection narrative; and the sparely beautiful liturgical structure in which they are all embedded. It’s all there, in little more than 20 minutes: a summation of the whole story in which we Christians participate. 

Let’s think about three ways in which technological making can go wrong, using some Ludlumesque naming conventions.

First, there’s the Zuckerberg Imperative: “Move fast and break things” in order to achieve DOMINATION. This is evil by intention: it openly rejects moral responsibility.

Second, there’s the Oppenheimer Principle: which I describe here: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” This is not purposefully evil, but it often leads to evil through neglect of moral responsibility.

And third: the Fëanor Temptation.

Many readers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion tend to think that Melkor (effectively the Satan of Tolkien’s legendarium) is the central figure in that collection of myths and tales, but he isn’t. The central figure is an Elf named Fëanor, who makes the Silmarils, the three jewel-like and yet somehow organic objects for which the book is named – because so many of the conflicts that deface Middle-earth (and even places beyond) are brought about by love and desire for the Silmarils.

Let’s approach the significance of Fëanor in a somewhat roundabout way, as Tom Shippey – whom I’m basically stealing my ideas from, straight no chaser – does in his superb book The Road to Middle-Earth. Shippey asks whether the Elves are fallen in the same way that Men, according to Tolkien’s Catholic faith, are. If so:

A natural question is, what was their sin? To keep the pattern consistent, it ought not to be the same as that of Adam and Eve, by tradition Pride, the moment when, as [C. S.] Lewis said, ‘a conscious creature’ became ‘more interested in itself than in God’. In fact the elves seem much more susceptible to a specialised variety of pride not at all present in Paradise Lost, not quite Avarice or ‘possessiveness’ or wanting to own things (as has been suggested), but rather a restless desire to make things which will forever reflect or incarnate their own personality. So Melkor has the desire ‘to bring into Being things of his own’; Aulë, though subjecting himself to Ilúvatar, creates the dwarves without authority; Fëanor forges the Silmarils. One might rewrite Lewis’s phrase to say that in Valinor, as opposed to Eden, the Fall came when conscious creatures became ‘more interested in their own creations than in God’s’. The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.

Further:

Significantly Fëanor learns not from Manwë, nor Ulmo, but from Aulë, the smith of the Valar and the most similar of them to Melkor; Aulë too is responsible for the despatch of Saruman to Middle-earth…; Aulë is the patron of all craftsmen, including ‘those that make not, but seek only for the understanding of what is’ – the philologists, one might say, but also the scopas, the ‘makers’, the fabbri, the poets. Tolkien could not help seeing a part of himself in Fëanor and Saruman, sharing their perhaps licit, perhaps illicit desire to ‘sub-create’. He wrote about his own temptations, and came close to presenting the revolt of the Noldor as a felix culpa, a ‘fortunate sin’, when Manwë accepts that their deeds will live in song, so that ‘beauty not before conceived [shall] be brought into Eä’; fiction, poetry, craftsmanship are seen as carrying their own justification and as all being much the same thing.

And finally, Shippey brings us to the heart of the matter, with a reference to Tolkien’s comment, in one of his prefaces to The Lord of the Rings, that his story is not an allegory of our era but may well have “applicability” to our era:

Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both. In that view The Silmarillion would have something like the distinctively modern ‘applicability’ of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for all its archaic setting.

You can see from all this that what I am calling the Fëanor Temptation is closer to the Oppenheimer Principle than to the Zuckerberg Imperative. There is no direct intention to dominate, no thought of controlling or even influencing others. We are told that “Fëanor and the craftsmen of the Noldor worked with delight, foreseeing no end to their labours” – they find their work “technically sweet,” you might say.

But in the making of the Silmarils there was something of greater dignity, a love of something not made by Fëanor or any other of the Children of Iluvatar (i.e. Elves and Men): “For Fëanor, being come to his full might, was filled with a new thought, or it may be that some shadow of foreknowledge came to him of the doom that drew near; and he pondered how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable.” The desire to make the Silmarils, then, arises from a delight in the light of the Two Trees made by the Valar, the archangelic demiurges of this imagined cosmos.

But is there in Fëanor, perhaps, a certain desire to compete with the Valar? The Valar themselves seem not to have been concerned: “Varda [the Queen, as it were, of the Valar] hallowed the Silmarils, so that thereafter no mortal flesh, nor hands unclean, nor anything of evil will might touch them, but it was scorched and withered; and Mandos foretold that the fates of Arda, earth, sea, and air, lay locked within them.” Yet there is cause for concern in the next sentence: “The heart of Fëanor was fast bound to these things that he himself had made.”

So strong is the hold of the Simlarils over Fëanor that when Melkor offers him shelter for them he is briefly tempted; and though he fiercely rejects Melkor – indeed he is the one who renames Melkor as Morgoth, the Black Enemy; and when Morgoth kills Fëanor’s father we are told that “his father was dearer to him than the Light of Valinor or the peerless works of his hands.” He is no monster; or not for a long time. But when Morgoth steals the Silmarils Fëanor becomes (quite literally, I think) insane with rage, and he and after him his sons are willing to defy the Valar and kill anyone who might stand between them and the recovery of those gems.

They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name even of Ilúvatar, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them if they kept it not; and Manwë they named in witness, and Varda, and the hallowed mountain of Taniquetil, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the World Vala, Demon, Elf or Man as yet unborn, or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession.

The gems are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy. Shippey again: the Fall of the Elves occurred “when conscious creatures became ‘more interested in their own creations than in God’s’. The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”

And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.  

Nicholas Carr:

It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The anxiety of the deep fake had not yet taken hold of the subconscious. The reason we talk so much about authenticity now is because authenticity is no longer available to us. At best, we simulate authenticity: we imbue our deep fakeness with the qualities that people associate with the authentic. We assemble a self that fits the pattern of authenticity, and the ever-present audience applauds the pattern as “authentic.” The likes roll in, the views accumulate. Our production is validated. If we’re lucky, we rise to the level of influencer. What is an influencer but the perfection of the deep-fake self? 

This is usefully provocative of reflection — Nick specializes in that — but I don’t think he’s right about authenticity. See Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity, based on lectures given in 1970. He already saw the shift from an ethos of sincerity to one rooted in an ever-elusive quest for authenticity. See also Charles’s Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), where the fourth chapter is a brilliant capsule history of the the various meanings of “authenticity.” It’s especially interesting that Taylor believes that the debased and trivial way that authenticity is defined today is not the only one — that there is a nobler understanding of authenticity as a “moral ideal” that is worth defending. 

UPDATE: Also, see the recent Hedgehog Review issue on authenticity. 

I like this photo of the renovations being done at my church because it reminds me how the nave of a church gets its name (from navis, ship). We’re all in this ark together.

James Wood:

This objection to the free will argument seems decisive. It raises the most uncomfortable questions about why God bothered to create the world at all. If Heaven was not created on earth, then earth is a testing-ground for Heaven. But there is something more. For a world without freedom would be a world in which God controlled all our actions, it would be a world in which God spoke directly to us without the need of faith. We would all believe. Faith is, apparently, part of the test visited on us. I have always found Philip’s cry to Jesus in John 14, piercing: ‘Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.’ It seems obvious to theologians like Richard Swinburne that a world of limited freedom and absolute transparency of knowledge, in which not one of us was in any doubt about our creator, would be a limited, useless place. But it would not, presumably, be useless to God. It is what Heaven would be like; and why, before Heaven, must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal, this desperate antechamber in which so few of us can find our way?

Kołakowski:

There are people who claim to be able to break this perplexing code (albeit only in part, never fully); but they do not necessarily attribute their success to some kind of gnostic initiation or privileged access to an esoteric treasury of knowledge. Rather, they claim to have adopted a special spiritual attitude, opened themselves up to the voice of the meaning-carrying mind; and they say that anyone can “tune in“ in this way. They might be wrong, of course, and certainly those of us who do not wish to hear this voice cannot be brought round by their arguments; rather, we will classify them as victims of delusions. But if they are right, and the voice really is audible to anyone who wants to hear it, then the question “Why is the message hidden?" is the wrong question.