Alan Jacobs

Let’s be clear about the meaning of this silly practice of hosting international matches in cold-weather cities: U.S. Soccer is afraid that our lads can’t beat any of those countries in warm-weather cities, where in any case the opponents would have more fans in the stadium than the U.S. would. Playing outside the Land of Frozen Tundra is a risk the bosses dare not take, and that fearfulness tells us just how far the side is from living up to its talent — and also gives a very good indication of why the USMNT so consistently underperforms. The current management, from top to bottom, needs to go.  

Ilana Horwitz:

When it comes to performance, religiously restrained students who live their life for God fare better because they are conscientious and cooperative. This is the case regardless of students’ social class upbringing. Working-class abiders have better grades than working-class nonabiders, middle-class abiders have better grades than middle-class nonabiders, and so on. But this story changes when we look at the next stage involving educational choices.

Since religiously restrained students have better academic performance in high school, we would expect them to make more ambitious choices about higher education.

This is generally the case, except in one social class group: adolescents from the professional class. When it comes to the transition to college, students from the professional class who live their life for God make less ambitious choices about where to attend college than we would expect given their stellar report cards. God-centered students undermatch in the college selection process because educational decisions are social decisions that highlight the effect of the home environment on norms and values surrounding education. God-centered students make choices that reflect their familial and social ties rather than choices that optimize their social class standing. Millions of young men and women do not live to impress college admissions counselors. For them, it is God who matters.

More here  

A while back I wrote a brief essay on the relevance of Emile Durkheim’s sociology to an understanding of our present social tensions. For the last year or two I’ve been reading a lot of sociology and anthropology from the first half of the 20th century, because, on the one hand, the social sciences had not at that time fallen under the sway of a compulsion to quantify: they were willing to think analytically about culture without needing calculations and charts. On the other hand, they also differentiated themselves from earlier humanistic thought in some interesting and useful ways.

One of the key such differentiations is the emphasis, in early sociology and anthropology, on the continuities of human experience. That is, though these thinkers were certainly highly aware of the dramatically different social practices that could be found in the cultures of the world, and researched those varying practices with great care and thoroughness, they nevertheless believed that there were certain permanent human impulses that make their way into every culture.

The most important conclusion to be drawn from that insight is that our belief in ourselves as modern persons, or rational persons, different from the primitives who preceded us and who still might persist in strange corners of the world, is an illusion. We are driven by the same needs as all others humans past and present.

I gestured at this point a few years ago in an essay I wrote called “Wokeness and Myth on Campus.” As I’ve said before, I don’t use the word “woke” any more, but I am still fascinated by Leszek Kołakowski’s idea that in every culture there is a technological core and a mythical core. As a culture develops it does not cease to engage with mythical experience, though the specific content of the myths may change and the ways we articulate our myths to ourselves may change. One of Kołakowski’s main points is that we have rarely understood the mythical core of our culture because we have a tendency to deny that we still experience the world mythically. The great value of these early sociologists and anthropologists is that they understood that we do indeed always experience the world mythically as well as rationally, and they try to unpack that.

So, back to Durkheim. In his early book The Division of Labor in Society, he makes a few points that are worth reflecting on. Let’s start with this: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness” (63). This is one of Durkheim’s most famous ideas. He turns from this definition to a definition of crime or criminal action: “an act is criminal when it offends the strong, well defined states of the collective consciousness” (64). And he goes on to say on that same page that “we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.… An act is socially evil because it is rejected by society.”

Now, all of this is related to the argument that Durkheim develops at length in a later book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in which he says that religion is essentially a means of producing, sustaining, and extending social solidarity. And one of the primary social functions of crime (Durkheim always thinks functionally about these matters) is also to produce, sustain, and extend social solidarity. That is, one of the ways in which we define the collective consciousness is by pointing to acts that violate it, persons that transgress it. It is therefore necessary for social cohesion that we punish malefactors. That punishment is, as Durkheim says “an act of vengeance” (69), but the key purpose of such vengeance is a passionate confirmation of social solidarity.

It was this idea that Kai Erickson extended and confirmed in his book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. What Erickson wanted to show was that

the deviant act … creates a sense of mutuality among the people of a community by supplying a focus for group feeling. Like a war, a flood, or some other emergency, deviance makes people more alert to the interests they share in common and draws attention to those values which constitute the “collective conscience” of the community. Unless the rhythm of group life is punctuated by occasional moments of deviant behavior, presumably, social organization would be impossible. (4)

The whole purpose of Erickson’s book is to show in great detail how the Durkheimian understanding of deviance helps us to understand what happened in the Salem witch trials.

At the very end of his book, Erickson points out that in our thinking about crime and punishment Americans find themselves in positions similar to those of their ancestors:

Now, as then, we leave few return routes open to people who try to resume a normal social life after a period of time spent on the community’s boundaries, because most of us feel that anyone whose skids off into the more severe forms of aberrant expression is displaying a serious defect of character, a deep blemish which cannot easily be erased. We may learn to think of such people as “sick” rather than “reprobate,” but a single logic governs both of these labels, for they imply that nothing less than an important change of heart, a spiritual conversion or a clinical cure, can eliminate that inner seed which leads one to behave in a deviant fashion (204–05).

But are there “inner seeds” that cannot be extracted? I have often commented that our society today has many means of punishment but no means of restoration. And that has a lot to do with the essentialism with which so many people think about race and ethnicity, and even in some circumstances sex. There is a kind of taint to whiteness or maleness or cishetness that cannot be eradicated. So what possible avenue of restoration to the community might there be? None, I think. Instead, there can only be a perpetual enforcement of a perpetual shame — because that’s what confirms solidarity among those who want to be in solidarity with one another. Precisely the same thing happens in white separatist and nationalist environments; and indeed in several other subcultures that have an illusory sense of themselves as complete and whole. 

If we want to push back against such fragmentations of our social order, we need counter-myths. Even my project of Invitation and Repair probably requires me to articulate my ideas in ways that will be mythically compelling (in Kołakowski’s sense). Unfortunately, I don’t have those skills; but I know of some writers who do, and I’ll draw on them. 

Many thoughts led to my beginning this Invitation and Repair project, but two of the major ones I have articulated on this blog: 

One: “One of the chief tasks of Christians in our time, I think, is to correct errors: to engage patiently and gently in the tedious work of explaining to people that what they think they know about Christianity is simply wrong.” 

Two: “I do not wish merely to denounce others, but to uphold and celebrate some form of Christian life and belief. Pascal wrote, ‘Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true.’ Have I considered that, if I indeed have a strong conviction that my understanding of Christianity is the right one, there are alternatives to denunciation of others, and a vital one is the difficult task of making my model of Christianity so lovable that people will want it to be true?” 

I do not criticize Josh Wardle, who deserves to get paid for his work — and I can’t even imagine what his hosting costs are — but I’m sorry to see this. When a small endeavor gets bought out by a big media company it is invariably bad news for the people who enjoy that small endeavor. How long, for instance, before every Wordle page is surrounded by ads on three or all four sides? Or before the game goes behind a paywall? Or, more likely, both? 

UPDATE: Counter-take from Kottke here, which I don’t fully agree with, but I do resonate with one person he quotes: “the reality that supporting a small scale thing of beauty at large scale is beyond one person (now) & reasonable options are compromised … is bittersweet.” More “unfortunate” than “bittersweet,” but yes. 

Newsletter: Harmonies and Dissonances.

Anyway, don't you realize that yesterday was a fantastic result for the USMNT? I read our coach's comments. He said we were "dominant." He said that the Canadians "couldn't handle our physicality." Frankly, I don't see how things could possibly have gone better. 

(To me, in all seriousness, these sound like the comments of a man whose job is hanging by a thread and in my judgment ought to be hanging by a thread — at best. In fact, that press conference alone is a justification for sacking.)  

I’m sure what I’m about to say has been said by many before me, but I’m counting on Adam Roberts to let me know about that.

Early in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, our narrator comes across an artilleryman who seems to be the only survivor of his company, which was otherwise obliterated by the Martians’ heat ray. The two men part, but then near the end of the book meet again, and by this time the artilleryman has done some thinking. He has decided that direct confrontation of the technologically superior Martians will be fruitless — “This isn’t a war…. It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants” — but that some other form of resistance might, over the long term, work. He imagines a future in which the Martians keep some human beings for … well, he doesn’t know what for. He does not suspect what our narrator has learned, that the Martians want humans for food. But in any case, he is sure that the majority of people will meekly welcome their new Martian overlords. But, he also thinks, other, more determined and resourceful, humans will move underground to build a resistance movement, will avoid the Martians and bide their time, will read books and study science and grow in knowledge and power — until they are ready to strike back.

Meanwhile, in The Time Machine (written a couple of years earlier) Wells imagines a far future in which humanity has branched into a passive, infantile race bred for food and a second race that lives a more active and technologically sophisticated life underground — and of course eats the others.

What if we were to imagine a coherent H. G. Wells Fictional Universe in which both of the stories are true? At the end of The War of the Worlds the Martian invaders die from exposure to microbes, against which they have no defenses, but the Martians are a technologically advanced civilization and apparently in great need of a better life environment — Mars is dying — and more reliable sources of food, so one might very well infer that they learn from their unsuccessful first invasion and on a second attempt achieve their aims, setting up precisely the kind of social arrangement the artilleryman envisions, just with the meek obedient humans as their chief food. Suppose that this arrangement lasts hundreds of thousands of years, during which time the humans used for food become increasingly docile and infantile – a development accelerated and intensified by selective breeding – while the underground resistance gradually becomes better adapted for life in the dark. Eventually the Martians die, or are killed, or depart for more attractive planetary alternative, but by that point the two halves of humanity have taken such different evolutionary roads that they seem and perhaps reproductively are different species – which means that the Morlocks feel that no taboo is violated if they replace the Martians as apex predator and continue the practice of raising Eloi for food.

It all fits, I think.

Again, surely earlier readers and critics have already made this point; and in any case almost every reader of Wells knows that he’s obsessed, at this stage in his career, with selective breeding and eugenics. Thanks to certain prominent figures, these themes were omnipresent in late Victorian culture. (Later also: they’re essential to the projects of Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.)

But the rise of hopes and fears surrounding artificial intelligence has been accompanied by the decline of the hopes and fears surrounding eugenics. Gattaca gives way to A.I. and then Ex Machina; Ishiguro writes Never Let Me Go but then, fifteen years later, Klara and the Sun. Why go through the lengthy trouble of breeding humans to be slaves when one can manufacture slaves? So can the themes of eugenics and selective breeding of humans still have the claim on our imagination they once had?

Tolkien’s own drawing of Sauron’s fortress Barad-dûr, with Mount Doom in the distance. 

If Christians are ever again taken seriously in this country, it won’t be because they own the libs and rout the woke; it won’t be because they triumph over their enemies and enjoy the spoils of victory; it will be, it only will be, because Christians act like this. There is one Way. And whether we take it is our only truly meaningful choice. 

Musa al-Gharbi:

In the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent polls and surveys presented people with pictures of Obama and Trump’s inauguration crowds and asked which was bigger. Republicans consistently identified the visibly smaller (Trump) crowd as being larger than the other. A narrative quickly emerged that Trump supporters literally couldn’t identify the correct answer; they were so brainwashed that they actually believed that the obviously smaller crowd was, in fact, larger.

Of course, a far more obvious and empirically plausible explanation is that respondents knew perfectly well what the correct answer was. However, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media (“Even Trump’s supporters don’t believe his nonsense!”), so they simply declined to give pollsters the response they seemed to be looking for.

As a matter of fact, respondents regularly troll researchers in polling and surveys – especially when they are asked whether or not they subscribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a conspiracy that held that Barack Obama was born outside of the US and was legally ineligible to serve as president of the United States). 

This is an absolutely vital point. 

Well, this was different.

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I sort of hate my office, but I just yesterday (after eight years!) realized that the windowsill makes a decent standing desk.