Alan Jacobs

In the preface to Continuities, a collection of his reviews and essays written for magazines, the late great Frank Kermode makes a strong assertion: “Good literary journalism is valuable and rare…. [T]o dismiss it as irremediably ephemeral, and at the same time to promote the preservation of the average doctoral dissertation, is to fall into what could very well be named ‘the common cant’.”  

One of the essays in the book concerns Edmund Wilson, and in that preface Kermode uses the example of Wilson to illustrate his point:

Wilson can deal justly with other writers without neglecting the meditative movement of his own mind, and he can satisfy, without loss of intellectual integrity, the nonspecialist's urgent and entirely proper demand for amenity of exposition and fine texture. This is the kind of journalism I call valuable and rare. It is rare not because those who could easily do it have better things to do, but because it is more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship. It calls incessantly for mental activity, fresh information, and civility into the bargain. Of course I agree that they do not always come. 

I’ve written a lot of literary journalism and will continue to do so — for instance, I have an essay-review on Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads coming out in Harper’s in a couple of months — and I couldn’t agree more with Kermode’s general commendation. Literary journalism is often belittled by academics who haven’t tried to write it and couldn’t write it if they tried. To speak to interested nonspecialists “without loss of intellectual integrity” is an extremely difficult challenge, and while it’s not for me to say whether I have ever managed it, I have certainly made every effort to do so. And that effort seems to me not only worthwhile but often more worthwhile than to publish one more article for a scholarly journal. (Though of course many universities, including my own, don’t recognize the value of such work. My essay on Franzen will not “count” as scholarship because it’s not peer-reviewed.) 

I especially admire Kermode’s list of the desiderata of good literary journalism: “mental activity, fresh information, and civility.” 

As Eve Tushnet has reminded us, “Mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is,” which is something to remember as you read about Shirley Chisholm and George Wallace. 

This Stefani McDade report in Christianity Today about the post-Trump reckoning among charismatic Christian leaders is absolutely superb. 

I am so pleased to be named (by my dear friend Richard Gibson) among my people, the idiosyncratic readers. 

Re: this reflection on printed books: for the last decade, e-books have comprised about 10% of the sales of my books, and that’s been pretty constant. 

Zito Madu, speaking strong and bitter truth: 

The feeling of dread before Saka took his penalty betrayed a truth about the relationship between the Black English players and members of their country. The wish for Saka to score in order to avoid racist abuse only reveals a deeper truth: that respect for him as a person and recognition of his dignity is only possible if he and the other Black players keep making the people who hate them happy. A conditional respect of a person’s humanity, which means that it’s no recognition at all. [...]

It was heartening to see some fans, teams and politicians push back against the bigotry by showering the players with love and support. A group of people decorated the defaced Rashford mural with hearts. Yet, while the players surely appreciate the support, and hopefully will one day have a chance to have success at the highest level, it’s not hard to imagine that they will never forget that many of their supporters see them as sub-human — and no level of sporting achievement will change that.

Above is a painting on the wall of the Commandery, a building said to have been built as a hospital by Wulfstan, then Bishop of Worcester, later St. Wulfstan. The painting is damaged — the chief injuries having been inflicted on it by iconoclasts who erased the faces of the people represented — but the story is easy enough to read. The central figure in the scene is the Archangel Michael, holding scales with which sinners are weighed in the balance. On the left you see a small demon, trying with all his might to drag that pan down to enforce damnation; but on the right the Blessed Virgin Mary lowers rosary beads onto her pan to ensure that the sinner, who seems to be tucked in quite snugly, will indeed be saved. 

It is a vivid drama of our eternal destiny in which Jesus Christ plays no role whatsoever. 

I am of course tempted to say “And that’s why we needed the Reformation!” — and I would say it except that Jesus is just as irrelevant to much Protestant theology and spirituality as he was to the debased pseudo-theology that inspired that wall painting in Worcester. H. Richard Niebuhr famously described the message of liberal Protestantism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” — but what need had those sinless ones for a Christ, with or without a cross? After all, “The Kingdom of God is within you”! (As someone once said, or near enough.)

Jesus is, generally speaking, a distraction and an embarrassment both to religious people and to those who want to be spiritual-but-not-religious — people who check “Christian” when completing surveys but who more truly affirm the Inner Light, or Natural Law, or Judeo-Christian Values, or Holy Tradition, or Mindfulness, or A Christian Nation, or My Personal Relationship With God — basically, anything but Jesus, who is perceived to be … shall we say, unpredictable? More than a little wild. It’s better to evade him, or set him aside, or just look the other way. It’s certainly safer — it leaves us free to make a religion that suits our preferences and our understanding. 

Charles Williams’s book The Descent of the Dove is subtitled “A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” which is rather an ambitious description, and I have often thought of writing a companion book which I would call Evasions: A Short History of Jesus and the Church. 

As for me, Jesus is the only reason I am in this game, half-hearted and inconstant a Christian as I am. I hang on to this one figure with desperation. When all else fails to console, he consoles me. In his famous Divinity School address, Emerson described, with a fastidious moue of distaste, “Historical Christianity” as a movement that “has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.” May all the Emersons of the world say that about me! God forbid that I should fail to give them cause to say it! 

I am drawn magnetically to the Jesus depicted in the canonical Gospels because it seems manifest to me that he is not someone any of us would have invented. (The contrast with the later narratives of his life, especially the Gnostic-inflected ones, is striking: The extravagantly thaumaturgic Jesus depicted therein is precisely the kind of figure a pinwheel-eyed enthusiast of mysteries would invent.) Given the uncompromising strangeness of the canonical Jesus — his oscillation between a prophetic fierceness that rattles us all and an infinite tenderness that may be in its own way even more disconcerting — I find myself warmly endorsing Auden’s statement: “I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.” Which is followed by the real zinger:

Thus, if a Christian is asked: “Why Jesus and not Socrates or Buddha or Confucius or Mahomet?”  perhaps all he can say is: “None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him’.” 

Even those not compelled, as Auden and I have been, to kneel before this man — those who, as one might say, perceive him merely as “this swell figure from the East” — can be affected by the compelling, and in the ancient Hellenistic context utterly unique, depiction of him in the Gospels. Iris Murdoch, pausing in a philosophical exposition to reflect on these strange texts, notes that they “are in a sense easy to read, can seem so (even I would think for a complete stranger to them), because they are the kind of great art where we feel: It is so.” But what they narrate — is it so? “What happened immediately after Christ’s death, how it all went on, how the Gospel writers and Paul became persuaded He had risen: this is one of the great mysteries of history. It is difficult to imagine any explanation in purely historical terms, though the unbeliever must assume there is one.” 

That is an assumption I have been unable to make. And so I cling to Jesus, and only to Jesus. And as I strive to do so, certain words have become touchstones for me, sources of strength and encouragement. Some of them are well-known, like a passage from one of George MacDonald’s novels, and the magnificent answer given by the Heidelberg Catechism to the question “What is your only comfort in life and death?” Others are perhaps less well-known: Reynolds Price’s wrestling with Jesus, in delight and terror, in his Three Gospels; many set-pieces from Romano Guardini’s The Lord; the entry on “Jesus” in Frederick Buechner’s Peculiar Treasures; the chapter called “Yeshua” in Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic. All these draw me back towards the center of things, towards the One who is the heart and soul of all Creation. Every day I want to evade him, to look the other way, and when I do my faith wanes and weakens; but when I look, when I draw near, I remember what I’m all about, what the world is all about. When I look towards Jesus I am caught and held, even if sometimes shattered by what I see. 

Probably the most regular re-centering in my life comes when, in the middle of an Anglican Eucharistic service — for this is a distinctively Anglican thing — we hear what we call the Comfortable Words. I commend them to you all. 

Hear the Word of God to all who truly turn to him.

Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. (Matthew 11:28) 

God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. (1 Timothy 1:15)

If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the perfect offering for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2) 

In an age when the word “dialogue” has acquired so potent a charge of verbal magic, it is worth reminding ourselves that in Plato, who seems to have invented the conception, dialogue exists solely for the purpose of destroying false knowledge. 

— Northrop Frye (1966) 

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years, but at the same time nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them.

— Kinsgley Amis, introduction to Poets of the 1950s

When social media companies say they can’t do anything about filthy, racist abuse on their platforms, what they mean is: We can’t do anything about that abuse without changing our policies in ways that might inconvenience us. Right now the foulest abuse imaginable is being poured out on a 19-year-old English soccer player because Twitter and Instagram can’t be bothered to deal with it. Dealing with it would require money and resources, and might make people less likely to sign up to be surveilled (for financial purposes only, of course). And that’s why they won’t deal with it.

Around the world legislators are lazily considering laws that might force the social media companies to care. I doubt that many such laws will be passed, and I am sure that any that do get passed will first undergo a very thorough watering-down. But even the strongest proposals now being considered are not strong enough to suit me. It’s time for a Butlerian jihad against the social-media giants. Raze them to the ground and salt the foundations. It’s them or us.

UPDATE 12 July: Barney Ronay this morning:

The idea social media companies can’t police this abuse is laughable. This is their property, their coding. Never mind algorithms. A teenage intern could have policed these players’ accounts on Sunday night with a smartphone and a delete button. All that is required is the genuine will to do it. This is step one.

I think the only thing that will change the behavior of these malicious, misery-dealing, greed-besotted people is if celebrities — let’s say, as a start, everyone with over a million followers on whatever platform — boycott those platforms. Those celebrities have the power that even governments don’t seem to have. But my suspicion is that they are as addicted as everyone else….

• Southgate set up to play for penalties, and he just might get his wish. 
• Chiellini spent the entire second half playing way up the pitch, like a left wingback, because he knew England wouldn’t try to attack. (Saka finally had a chance to run at him and old Giorgio dragged him to the ground. Maybe he’ll drop a little deeper in extra time.) 
• Losing Chiesa is huge for Italy — he was their biggest threat by far, and it’s hard to see where their attacks will come from now. Which, again, means that Southgate will likely get his heart’s desire: pens. 
• I’ll venture this: If Grealish comes on in the first half of extra time, England will win; if not, they’ll lose on penalties. 

(Possible updates coming when it’s over.) 

UPDATE: Saka is incredibly mature for his age, but I just don’t understand why Southgate put him in that situation. Southgate did a great job bringing this team together and keeping them together, but he got almost everything wrong tonight. Alas. 

The better team won. And remember: Mancini took over a team that didn’t even qualify for the last World Cup. 

Ross Douthat:

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Whichever fate awaits us, Catholics and Christians of every political persuasion should remember that admonition and prove their fidelity by entering an uncertain future not just as disputants, but as friends.

Serious question arising from this: Are there any American Catholic thinkers for whom “fellow Christians” is a meaningful, operative category? I am inclined to think not. The frivolities of the so-called ecumenical movement of the previous century and the intensity of subsequent intra-Catholic disputes have combined put an end to that, at least for now. And this isn’t just a Catholic thing: as I have often commented in the past, the more strongly Christians feel that the faith is in decline, the less likely they are to think that we’re all in this together. 

One thing about this wild, wild country It takes a strong, strong It breaks a strong, strong mind 

— Bill Callahan, "Drover" 

SciTech Daily:

Planets which are tilted on their axis, like Earth, are more capable of evolving complex life. This finding will help scientists refine the search for more advanced life on exoplanets. […]  

“The most interesting result came when we modeled ‘orbital obliquity’ — in other words how the planet tilts as it circles around its star,” explained Megan Barnett, a University of Chicago graduate student involved with the study. She continued, “Greater tilting increased photosynthetic oxygen production in the ocean in our model, in part by increasing the efficiency with which biological ingredients are recycled. The effect was similar to doubling the amount of nutrients that sustain life.” 

“Orbital obliquity” is one of those scientific terms — like “persistence of vision” and “angle of repose” — that just cries out for metaphorical application.

All of the writers and thinkers I trust most are characterized by orbital obliquity. They are never quite perpendicular; they approach the world at a slight angle. As a result their minds evolve complex life. 

P.S. Another of those metaphor-generating terms: “impact gardening.” 

People keep asking, but I don’t have anything to add to the current brain-dead kerfuffle over “Critical Race Theory” that I haven’t already said. 

The overwhelming majority of people who want to argue about CRT don’t know whether CRT is a man or a horse. 

We teachers, caught between those who want to enforce a particular vision of social justice in our classrooms and those who want to banish that vision, are being told that everything that is not compulsory is forbidden. 

Five years ago I published an essay arguing that the key to the renewal of the university is the rebuilding of bonds of trust, especially between teachers and students — but also among all the other stakeholders of higher education. 

Will Oremus:

Asked for comment on Facebook Bulletin, Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey said, “The nice shiny rings from Sauron were also ‘free.’”

My friend Adam Roberts’s response to my Tiptree-and-difference post pushes me to clarify a few points. Or rather, to realize that I can’t yet clarify a few points and need to think further. 

Imagine a sliding scale of sexual difference, ranging from, on the far left, ... I don’t know, maybe having sex with a clone of yourself? — to, on the far right, “aliens in the shape of slime-blobs, or sentient piles of concrete blocks” (to quote Adam). Adam’s point is that the sexual xenomania of the man in “And I Awoke” is focused on aliens with a generally humanoid shape — aliens who, if you consider the possible morphologies of sentient life, manifest only minor differences from us.  

So for any given person there will be a Point of Maximal Allurement — a point at which likeness and difference are balanced in such a way as to maximize desire. Tiptree suggests that if we humans ever do encounter aliens, that slider will, for many people, move to the right. New differences lead to new allurements. The question Adam asks is: Will it really happen that way? Is there, as Tiptree seems to think, a latent human xenophila just waiting for its chance to become manifest? (Adam has his doubts.) 

But as I think about this I realize that Tiptree only occasionally suggests that such xenophilia is human — in the stories it is typically, rather, male. (The only exception I can think of is the unnamed, silent wife of the man in “As I Awoke,” and the strong suggestion is that her attraction to aliens is masochistic. The narrator’s sister in “A Momentary Taste of Being” is drawn to another world, another way of being, in a way that seems, to me anyway, unrelated to sexual desire.) And many of Tiptree’s stories represent male desire as a manifestation of male dominance: a man’s libido simply is the libido dominandi. 

And that in turn makes me realize that I have not clearly defined allurement. Desire for intimacy ≠ desire for pleasure ≠ desire for conquest. And even if for men the third of those always displaces the other two, that doesn’t really answer the notorious Freudian question: “What do women want?” Tiptree’s stories — that is to say, stories written by a woman under a man’s name and almost always from the perspective of a male character — tell us a lot about what men want. But what do the women in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” want? In “The Women Men Don’t See,” what does Ruth want when she asks the aliens to take her away? She doesn’t say. Tiptree leaves such matters to the contemplation of the reader. 

But did Alice B. Sheldon think she knew? She herself was twice married to men, but once said, “I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” One could draw any number of conclusions about how her own patterns of desire shaped her fiction, and about why she does so much more to represent male desire than female, but it’s impossible to be confident that any of them are right. 

Lately I’ve been re-reading the stories that Alice B. Sheldon wrote under the name James Tiptree, Jr. and it occurs to me that almost all of them are meditations on the same theme: The way genuine difference, especially but not only sexual difference, simultaneously alienates and allures. Now, I should also add that the Tiptree stories seem unable to imagine this dialectic settling into a healthy tension; almost invariably the alienation and the allurement alike take pathological forms. 

In “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side” we meet a man and, eventually, his wife who are in the grip of a kind of sexual xenomania, obsessively lusting for aliens of various species in a way that the man perceives as pathological but inevitable. Sometimes the man sees in the aliens a kind of beauty, and traits that present in exaggerated form what he finds desirable in human women, but essentially it is the very alienness that obsesses him: His sexual passion is awakened by the impossibility of sexual union. (This is also the theme of Samuel R. Delany’s famous story “Aye, and Gomorrah.”) The story’s title, of course, comes from Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” in which a knight’s life is destroyed by his encounter with a beautiful fairy, an encounter with otherness that infects him with a permanent obsession that becomes a wasting disease. 

But Tiptree’s stories often suggest that pathology dictates the typical patterns of relation between human men and human women. In “The Women Men Don't See” the women of the title are not sexually desirable to the man who narrates the story and are therefore invisible to him; he only sees them at all when he’s trying to decide whether they are potential sex partners, or rather sex objects. One of the women, the mother of the other one, understands this, and says to him, 

“Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.” 

I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.

“Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.” 

“Do they?” 

When, later in the story, Don discovers that the woman has planned an encounter with aliens and wants to be abducted by them, taken away from Earth, his first response is to try to shoot the aliens — but (of course; the story is very on-the-nose in multiple respects) he ends up shooting Ruth instead. She is not badly wounded, and later they have a final conversation. 

“I think they're gentle,” she mutters.

“For Christ's sake, Ruth, they're aliens!” 

“I'm used to it,” she says absently. 

Living with men, living with other terrestrial species, living with aliens — it’s all the same to Ruth. (It’s no accident that she shares a name with the biblical character who leaves her homeland to dwell among strangers.) To the aliens, who insist in halting and malformed English that they are students, that they want to learn rather than harm, she will be an object of intense attention — they will see her. But is that kind of being-seen any better, really, than being invisible? She stakes her life on the possibility, however remote, that it will be; because she has no hope at all for the world she was born into. 

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” — another haunting but schematic story — imagines a future in which, by some kind of time-accident, three astronauts are thrown forward into a future world in which all living humans are female clones. They are rescued from their ship and brought into one occupied by five women. Under the influence of a disinhibiting drug, the astronauts reveal their true impulses: one of them is consumed by a mania for domination, a second is consumed by violent sexual lusts, and the third, the classic “beta male,” feels both of those impulses but in a muted way. (I told you the story is schematic.) It seems obvious to the women — who observe these men with a kind of detached curiosity, as, perhaps, the aliens in “The Women Men Don’t See” will observe Ruth and her daughter — that the re-introduction of males into human society, a re-establishment of the old ways of sexual reproduction, would be a Very Bad Idea Indeed. Difference is interesting to them, perhaps, but after several hundred years of life without men it’s not interesting enough to make them want to change their social order. Much alienation, little allurement. 

In the darkest Tiptree stories, the allurements of difference are depicted as fundamentally irrational impulses — irrational, but so powerful that they don’t allow for the calm decisions to separate and isolate that mark the decisive moments in “The Women Men Don't See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” The fantastically weird “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” describes a species of creature, right on the cusp of sentience, one member of which tries to find ways to override the impulse to eat what you love. It turns out, though, that he, being male, isn’t one of the eaters; and that sometimes creatures do what they’d rather not do — if that’s The Plan. And in what seems to me Tiptree’s darkest story, “A Momentary Taste of Being,” the human passion to reach the stars is nothing other than the impulse that drives spermatozoa into a hostile environment where almost all of them will die. 

Difference can be profoundly alluring, these stories seem collectively to say, but we should heed the countervailing feeling of alienation — if we can. It would be rational … but, in the end, how powerful is reason? 

It’s fascinating to read these stories in our present moment, in which race occupies essentially the same cultural territory that sex occupied for Alice Sheldon and other women of her time. I suspect that Sheldon would have thought and maybe even felt differently about the alienation/allurement dialectic if she had had available to her our culture’s passionate commitment to gender as a social construct that is (therefore, so the faulty logic goes) amenable to infinite performative manipulation by individuals. For us, it’s racial difference that is especially often experienced in the way that Sheldon experienced sexual difference. When Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race she was basically making the decision that the women in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” make about men.

The homologies between racism and sexism are not new, of course, and we can trace them back a long way: for instance, it’s worthwhile, I think, to map the concerns of “The Women Men Don’t See” onto the similarly knotted tension between not-being-seen and being-seen-badly in Ellison’s Invisible Man. But because race is such a massive component of our current political disputes, people now commonly choose and indeed embrace alienation in that whole sphere. (I’ve have recently learned that a large family of my acquaintance, well known for its cheerful closeness, has now been divided and broken by disagreements over Donald Trump. And at least some members of the family feel that it would be morally irresponsible not to be so broken.) 

I think it’s because race is so widely seen to be intractably binary — Whites and Others — while gender and even sex are seen as chosen and performative that racial tension has taken hold of our public imagination in ways that the #MeToo movement, in the end, didn’t. Think for instance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: his behavior towards women has been despicable, but he easily survived the outrage, which proved to last only a few days. (Alice Sheldon would not have been surprised by the behavior or the tolerance of it.) If his sins had been equal in seriousness but racist in character — if he had demonstrably treated Black people around him with the same callous manipulative disregard that he treated the women who worked for him — would he have a job now? The question answers itself.

(Of course, if he had been a Republican governor, then he would have had the smoothest sailing imaginable. Openly, bluntly racist figures are perfectly welcome in today’s GOP; it’s only critics of Donald Trump who aren’t. But that’s a story for another day.) 

By way of conclusion, I’m going to make a simplistic statement that I may perhaps be able to unpack later: I believe that what we need when thinking about all forms of difference is (a) a frank acknowledgement of both allurement and alienation, and (b) an ability to achieve a genuinely tragic sense of history that does not succumb to despair. We should begin, collectively, by reading James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village.” 

Thomas Tuchel is known as a skilled practitioner of modern atacking football, but when he got to Chelsea in the middle of last season the first thing he attended to was his team’s defending. Under Frank Lampard the side had been leaking goals at an alarming rate, and Tuchel was content to set aside his tactical preferences for a while in order to plug the leakage. Chelsea’s first few games under Tuchel weren’t exciting, but they almost completely shut down opposing attacks, and then, with that foundation in place, Tuchel turned to the task of expanding his side’s offensive repertoire.

In these Euros, Gareth Southgate has done much the same for England. I complained in the group phase about his conservatism, but after today’s thrashing of Ukraine, it’s easy for me (and everybody else!) to see the wisdom of his approach. In the group stage they scored one, zero, and one; then against Germany they scored two; and now against Ukraine four. But they have yet to give up a single goal. It seems that this England squad, like Tuchel’s Chelsea, has learned that when you have well-earned confidence in your defending, then you can grow ever more ambitious and creative in attack.

So: a big thumbs-up to Gareth Southgate. 

Looking ahead: On current form an England-Italy final is obviously the more likely, but all four sides are playing well and, even more important, are very well-balanced, with few evident weaknesses. I expect Italy to exploit Spain’s defensive limitations, and England to wear down Denmark; but no result would surprise me, and these are four very likable sides to boot. I will of course be cheering for England all the way, but I would be happy to see any of these four teams lift the trophy at tournament’s end.

The chief theme of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is that, in the midst of World War II, a series of Christian writers and thinkers discerned that the Allied victory over the Axis powers would be perceived not as a victory of democracy over tyranny but rather as a victory of technology. They sought to recommend humanistic models of education that would counterbalance the coming Novus Ordo Seculorum. But they were not successful, at least on their own terms; technocracy arrived, and dominated. Today’s surveillance capitalism is the product, in quite direct ways, of the particular form taken by the Allied victory in World War II. 

I have just been re-reading some books that I first read almost fifty years ago — Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End — and am struck by how much they have in common, and how strongly they echo the themes of my story. Asimov’s three novels were originally published as stories between 1942 and 1950, then stitched together into novels; Childhood’s End was written in 1952. Clarke’s book is far, far more technically accomplished than Asimov’s creaky contraptions, and they differ dramatically in scale and setting: Clarke’s story treats of events that span a century on near-future Earth, while Asimov’s trilogy covers several hundred years and ranges around the entire galaxy. But their core concerns are remarkably similar, and are the product of the same historical moment to which my five Christian intellectuals in YOOL1943 were responding.  

In the Foundation books a man comes to understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, and implements a plan for directing it; in Childhood’s End aliens who understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, come to Earth to implement a plan for directing it. 

In both cases the new planned order successfully displaces an existing political structure quite like our own: unequal, decadent, sclerotic, tired.  

In both cases satisfaction with the new order gives way eventually to a kind of complacency. In Asimov’s fictional world, the planet Terminus, guided by the science of the Foundation, comes to dominate its sector of the galaxy, but perhaps at the cost of its soul; in Childhood’s End, “The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. … It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.” Technocracy is powerful, and once a society experiences its blessings a return to an earlier status quo is unthinkable; yet as time goes by thoughtful people, knowing what technocracy enables, can’t help reflecting on what it inhibits or flatly disables. 

The parallels eventually give way to significant divergences: Clarke is interested in imagining new and strange evolutionary pathways for humanity; Asimov wants to suggest that all empires follow the path Gibbon traced for Rome, energetic success giving way to decadence. But it’s noteworthy that both of them are so deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia — as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states — is a new thing in the world. 

You know, we could really get into the spirit of modern administration and come up with a way to measure the influence of public intellectuals. Perhaps the scale could be based on the Hitchens unit, one Hitchens (h) being the amount of public mindspace occupied by Christopher Hitchens in one year. I could then say that in the most recent fiscal year I delivered 0.02h, down, alas, from the previous year’s 0.035h. I could also articulate a Five-Year Plan for getting annual delivery up to 0.1h, with my really long-term goal being the achievement of a lifetime score of 1h. 

Austin Kleon