Alan Jacobs

Hello old friend

The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common today. It was also quite common in the 1930s. For instance, in 1937 the British House of Commons was debating whether or how to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of M.P.s insisted that it was necessary to choose between the Fascists and the Communists. But one Member of the House replied,

I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations…. It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself; and, having a strong feeling in regard to the preservation of individual rights as against Governments, and as I do not find in either of these two Spanish factions which are at war any satisfactory guarantee that the ideas which I personally care about, and to which I have been brought up in this House to attach some importance, would be preserved, I am not able to throw myself in this headlong fashion into the risk of having to fire cannon immediately on the one side or the other of this trouble…. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds. 

The Member who so refused to make that choice was Winston Churchill. When many thought that liberalism and democracy were unsustainable, were not long for this world, he stood up for liberalism and democracy anyway. That was the wise course then, and it’s the wise course today. 

It is not that the documentary hypothesis is necessarily wrong in substance; Genesis is clearly made up of a number of traditions which have been combined at different stages. But is it not the task of the critic to try and come to grips with the final form as we have it, and to give the final editor or reactor the benefit of the doubt, rather than to delve behind his work to what was there before? The inventors of the documentary hypothesis believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have I already decreed should be there.

— Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God (1988)

“This time the old mother has forgotten the old creature’s birthday, which if I am not mistaken falls on October 15.” — Nietzsche in a letter to his mother. My friend and colleague Rob Miner explains why Nietzsche loved birthdays. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant on an “illiberalism of the weak”: 

To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or our society to serve a totally independent, autonomous person [which is the person imagined by liberalism] who never has and never will exist. Repeating that lie will leave us bereft: first, of sympathy from our friends when our physical weakness breaks the implicit promise that no one can keep, and second, of hope, when our moral weakness should lead us, like the prodigal, to rush back into the arms of the Father who remains faithful. Our present politics can only be challenged by an illiberalism that cherishes the weak and centers its policies on their needs and dignity. 

This is a strong and vital word. But genuinely to hear it we will have to dethrone the two idols that almost everyone with a political opinion worships: My People and Winning. The goal of almost every political activist and pundit is the same: My people must win, and those who are not my people must lose. Do not be deceived by talk of the “common good,” because the often quite explicit message of the common-good conservatives is: My people are the ones who know what the common good is, and that common good can only be achieved if my people win. A politics of weakness and dependence, a politics of bearing one another’s burdens, can only begin when those two idols are slain. 

UPDATE: Rowan Williams, from a review of God: An Anatomy, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou: 

Stavrakopoulou … takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.

In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.

Arnold Kling:

If you use your economics, then no matter how complex the supply-chain problems might appear, they can be solved using the price system. The price system may or may not be able to call forth more supply, but it certainly can ration demand, and it can do so more efficiently than is being done at present. Everywhere the supply chain is “broken,” higher prices can ensure that scarce goods are allocated to the highest-priority uses.

Wherever you see buyers unable to find goods, you should ask why the rationing takes place by availability rather than by price. If the market were operating smoothly, the shelves would be fully stocked, but prices would be higher.

My hypothesis for why we observe price stickiness is that businesses fear consumer backlash. When the price is high, the consumer blames the business. If instead the product is not in the store, the consumer blames “the supply chain.” In fact, it should be the other way around—the business should be blamed for not raising prices to prevent a shortage, and the higher prices should in turn be blamed on higher costs in the supply chain.

There’s a lot of talk around here about Baylor’s being “an unambiguously Christian university.” I wonder how this fits in. 

Recently I've come across a number of pieces dismissing or critiquing the idea of “narrative” – the idea being that when you call something a narrative you're turning it into a subjective account that isn't subject to empirical verification, or external assessment of any kind. I suppose this critique arises from the increasingly common use over the past decade of phrases like “my truth” and “my story.” 

But maybe it's worth noting that for a long time the primary meaning of the word “narrative” was “faithful account” – that is, to call something a narrative is to proclaim that it tells the truth about something that happened. In the early modern period the word was primarily used in legal contexts; it meant what we might now call “the facts of the case.” 

That's why Frederick Douglas's autobiography is not called an autobiography but rather a narrative: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass’s point in so titling his autobiography wasn’t “This is my truth” but rather “This is what actually happened, so help me God.” Fiction writers who wanted to add an aura of verisimilitude to their stories would sometimes appropriate this usage, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. But this only worked because people generally understood the word “narrative” to mean “true account.” 

Am I a different person when I travel? Yes. A stressed and unhappy person.

My friend Matt Milliner:

Christians have long credited the pagan poet Virgil, in his fourth eclogue, with prophesying Christ. In Chesterton’s day that view was becoming unfashionable, but he defended the interpretation. “Virgil… stand[s] for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice.” But whereas the case that Virgil anticipated Christ is disputable, and still looked upon with skepticism, the case that North American Indians anticipated Christianity is on much firmer ground. Nicholas Black Elk, whose Lakota wisdom is this continent’s analogue to Platonism, did not find that wisdom to be sufficient. He famously converted to Catholicism, brought hundreds to the same faith in his role as Catechist, and is up for sainthood. But that is only the most famous example. Chief Joseph River Wind claims that the entire Sundance ritual is itself a prophecy of the crucifixion, which — it turns out — is a rather common observation in Indigenous Christian communities. Indigenous encounters with Christ during the ecstatic ritual of the Ghost Dance, well documented in Louis Warren’s God’s Red Son, were common enough to frustrate white Christian missionaries who wanted natives to come to faith on their own terms. 

A wonderful essay on Chesterton, cave art, America and Americans, the varieties of paganism, and … well, all the stuff you see in the remarkable paragraph just quoted. 

It turns out that one of the most essential cultural commentators in America today is a 74-year-old retired basketball player. I highly recommend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack newsletter, the most recent edition of which contains an excerpt from a long essay that he has published as a Kindle e-book. The excerpt is fine in itself, but the full essay is absolutely fascinating. Here’s the heart of the story: 

For fifty years I’ve been both defending and criticizing the police. I’ve criticized them when their actions reflected the violent systemic racism that resulted in the deaths of unarmed minorities. I’ve defended them when their good works were overlooked. I especially didn’t want all cops lumped together as a monolithic hive-mind, the way so many have done with marginalized people in this country. They, too, have a voice that needs to be heard. This precarious tightrope act has resulted in venomous backlash from both sides. I’ve been accused of being both a Black anti-cop agitator and an apologist for racist police violence. My ability to see both sides isn’t the result of trying to please both sides; my perspective is the result of having been raised by a Black police officer in New York City during the most tumultuous civil rights upheaval the country has ever been through and of the effect both those influences had on me throughout my life. 

Anyone with even the mildest interest in race in America ought to read Kareem’s essay. It’s that good. Yes, it also has some inaccurate statements about the Capitol riot of January 6, errors that should have been discovered and excised in the editing process. And some of his political claims are debatable — as if any political claims aren’t. But don’t let those things distract you from the complex and necessary message of the story as a whole.  

One insignificant point that delighted me: the apartment that Kareem lived in when he was growing up had a window that overlooked The Cloisters. 

Nobody today could write Cassirer’s Essay on Man, just as nobody could write Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. But when the old idea collapsed something valuable may have been lost. Humanism may be an ideology, but it is also an ideal that the ideology betrayed, and dismissing the one with the other has become a bad reflex among the cynics and cognoscenti who regard all ideals with withering suspicion. While there is much in Cassirer’s book that we might now dispute, it was written at a time when fidelity to humanism appeared not naive but necessary. Though his erudition was distinctively European his political commitments were cosmopolitan in the best sense, and he continued to uphold those commitments even when much of the world fell into darkness. It is still in darkness. But even if we now speak the word with embarrassment, humanism may be the only alternative to inhumanity.

— Peter E. Gordon, from his Introduction to a new edition of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man. It occurs to me that the tag at the bottom of this post provides a good introduction to a topic I desperately want to write more fully about but can’t see the chance to. (Not anytime in the next 75 years or so, probably.) 

(In what follows I’m not saying anything that’s not well-known to film buffs, but, as always on this blog, I’m writing to get my thoughts clear for my own sake.)

So: If Vertigo isn’t the greatest movie ever made, what is? Citizen Kane, as widely believed for so many decades? Maybe. I would not protest the restoration of Kane to the top spot. But if I am allowed to cheat a little, I will select three oddly but closely related movies, what I call the Noriko Triptych.

Between 1949 and 1953 Yasujirō Ozu made three movies that are connected to one another in elliptical and complex ways. (He also made two other movies in that period but we’ll set them aside.) Each of the three — Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Tokyo Story (1953) — deserves to be ranked among the greatest films ever made; taken together, as I think they should be, they constitute an unparalleled filmmaking achievement.

In these three films Ozu began his working relationship with the incomparable Setsuko Hara, and in each she plays a young woman named Noriko. In one sense these are three quite different characters, but in another sense they aren’t: you could say that one Noriko finds herself in three different families — three different situations, each of which reflects something about the transformations that her society was undergoing in the years after World War II — three parallel universes. Except in one key scene in one of the movies, she always wears modern Western clothing in public; she always has a job. She is the Modern Japanese Woman, and some of her friends are too, but she also has complex if cordial relations with older women of a more traditional bent.

(Every now and then we even see a woman — for instance, the sister-in-law in Early Summer — who wears modern dress sometimes and traditional dress at other times. I wish I understood the nuances of what these variations in costume communicated to a Japanese audience at the time the movies were released.)

In one universe Noriko is a widow, while in the other two she’s moving towards marriage, though the man she is to marry is either invisible to us or barely seen. The absence of young men — largely of course through death in the recent war — is a constant theme, a kind of vacuole in all the films. We see this not only through the circumstances of young women like Noriko, but also through the older generation, who have lost their sons in war and now must face losing their daughters to marriage. And as the film scholar Donald Richie notes in his excellent commentary on the Criterion edition of Early Summer, in that culture to have a daughter marry is almost always a real loss: one character says, casually but confidently, that no real man would ever live with his wife’s family.

Each film is an ensemble piece; Noriko is never in the strictest sense the protagonist. Indeed, in Tokyo Story her role is formally secondary to the elderly couple whose struggles to find a place in a bustling postwar world are, for most of the movie, our central interest.

But at some point in each film, and at most points in the other two films, Noriko becomes the point of focus, the nexus, the character in which we can feel the vibrating tensions that strain Japanese society — and especially the Japanese family. Even in Tokyo Story the most profoundly moving scene centers on Noriko, but is about the forces that destroy families. The family photograph that’s the essential image of Early Summer is no joyous occasion — though everyone tries to put on a brave face — but rather a tacit acknowledgement that the members of the family are about go their separate ways, split into three parts, and that there will probably be no future opportunity to get them all into one frame.

Notice the mixture of traditional Japanese and modern Western clothing in that shot.

But as great as these movies are simply as x-rays of a society in traumatic and profound transition, they are greater simply as presentations of the most universal and powerful human emotions — love and loss and grief and resignation and despair and hope. And at the heart of these presentations, always, is Setsuko Hara, whose ability to capture in a single moment extreme vulnerability and extreme resilience is simply … well, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another actor do what she does. She and Ozu were, cinematically speaking, made for each other, and it’s fitting, if sad, that upon his death she retired from acting and lived the rest of her long life out of the public eye.

(That’s Hara with Chishū Ryū, another Ozu stalwart, who in these three movies plays her older brother, her father, and her father-in-law.)

If indeed we can treat these three movies as a triptych, a single work in three parts, then in my view that triptych is the greatest achievement in film to date.

Justin E. H. Smith:

To say that On the Situations and Names of Winds is a “pseudo-Aristotelian” text is to say among other things that it is the sort of text Aristotle could have written. He did in fact write of the names of the winds in his own Meteorology, and in the History of Animals he also, like Pliny, attributes to the wind the power to impregnate horses. To recognize that a philosopher, indeed “the Philosopher” as he was long known, could have been expected to write about the winds, and to do so in his capacity as a philosopher, is an occasion to think about the shifting priorities of a discipline that is unusually difficult to define. These days you can go to college and take a class called “Philosophy of Sport,” but on no list of course offerings will you find, say, “Philosophy of the Sun”. You can take a class called, “Philosophy of Journalism”, but you cannot take one called “Philosophy of Wind”. We take it for granted that this is how things should be, but a moment’s reflection will force you to admit that, if philosophy is reflection on the most important things in life, then the Sun surely deserves its own class well before “sport” does. There is no “sport” without the Sun, whereas the reverse is obviously not the case. Wind might be less important than the Sun, but I would place it well before “sport” or journalism on the list of things that fundamentally shape our lives. Similarly “Philosophy of Climate Science” is hot stuff these days; “Philosophy of Weather” is non-existent. If I were ever permitted to teach a course on the philosophy of wind, I would begin with the questions: How did the winds lose their names? And what does it mean for us to live in a world of nameless winds? I step outside and I feel a gust. “That’s wind,” I think to myself, and I have nothing more to add beyond that. I don’t know the winds. […] 

It seems to me the last philosopher to write about nature in a way continuous with the classical tradition of natural philosophy was Gaston Bachelard, and this has something to do with the fact that for much of his career Bachelard was a rural schoolmaster rather than an urban, status-anxious university professor. He did not write a philosophy of wind, though he did write a psychoanalysis of fire. Here “psychoanalysis” is not understood in the Freudian sense, and has nothing to do with the subconscious symbolism of fire in our dreams or erotic fantasies. Bachelard, rather, is analyzing the soul of fire itself, trying to figure out what fire essentially is, through the combination of his cultural erudition, his scientific literacy, and his poetic imagination. More recently one might be tempted to cite the name of Peter Sloterdijk, who writes entire tomes on things like bubbles. But as far as I can tell it never takes very long for Sloterdijk to move on from the bubbles themselves to other things that the idea of the bubble might help us to understand, things that are held to be more important than real bubbles (just as “sport” is more important than the Sun), like the metaphorical bubbles of financial markets and so on. Now more than ever, I think, we need to revive the tradition of Bachelard, which as I’ve said is continuous with the way philosophy was understood for most of its history, and to pursue the philosophy not just of wind but of bubbles too, and of fire and of the Sun: in themselves and for their own sake. I’m serious about this.

It’s cool when a friend publishes a new book: 

 And even cooler when that book contains a chapter on another friend’s work: 

From a New York Times correction:

The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from August 2020 to October 2021, not 900,000 since the beginning of the pandemic.

Ah yes, the problem of scale again. I know I beat this drum all the time, but it’s so important. Imagine this correction from the Gray Lady: 

The article also misstated the typical speed limit on American Interstate highways. It is 70 miles per hour, not 1,000 miles per hour. 

Or: 

The article also misstated the highest number of points ever scored by one player in an NBA game. It is 100, not 1,428. 

All three errors are proportionately the same. We can easily see that my imaginary examples are absurd, but how many Times readers doubted the claim of 900,000 children hospitalized for Covid? Not one in 63,000, I suspect. The scale of the phenomenon is just too big for us to have reliable intuitions about accuracy or inaccuracy.  

Recently I re-watched both Citizen Kane and Vertigo, with the purpose of trying to understand how it is that Vertigo could have replaced Kane as Best Movie Ever in the Sight and Sound poll (2012). When that poll first came out I was stunned: I had never thought that Vertigo is even remotely comparable to Kane, and indeed had never seen it as one of Hitchcock’s best — top ten for sure, but I don’t think top five among his movies. Thus my re-watching. I really wanted to give Vertigo my best attention, my most sympathetic attention, and I think I managed that, but at the end I found myself just as puzzled as ever about the movie’s rise to such eminence.

I think I can make my point by comparing it not to Kane but to another Hitchcock movie from four years earlier, Rear Window. Now, to be sure, Rear Window is a more lighthearted movie than Vertigo, so they are not tonally equivalent, but there are interesting points of comparison. For instance, both of them feature Jimmy Stewart dangling in the air by his hands and then falling from a height — which is sort of peculiar, when you think about it.

About tone: I actually think that the consistently sober tone of Vertigo, its narrow emotional range, — and by that I mean the emotions of the audience as well as the characters — is a weak point. One of Hitchcock’s greatest filmmaking virtues is his ability to display a visual playfulness even when he’s telling a serious story: we perceive an evident delight in the construction of scenes and shots that can bring a smile to the viewer’s face even in the most tragic of films. In his famous interviews with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock expresses some annoyance at the negativity of the British press towards Psycho, and the form of his complaint is noteworthy: he says that his critics don’t have a sense of humor. That is, they didn’t see the wit in the construction of the story, the framing of its shots, its cuts and the sequence of its scenes. And I think he’s right about that. Psycho is in a strange way a witty movie — as is, in a more obvious way, Rear Window, which repeatedly takes us with absolute assurance from laughter to profound tension and back to laughter again. The scene in which Grace Kelly sneaks into the murderer’s apartment and is found there by the murderer — in full sight of a helpless and agonized Stewart — is one of the most suspenseful scenes in the history of movies.

There is none of this tonal variety in Vertigo, which is among the least playful of Hitchcock’s films. There are two moments of real visual imagination: the famous descending-into-madness sequence (which for the record I don’t think quite comes off) and the trick — cleverly achieved by dollying the camera backwards while simultaneously zooming in — of representing the feeling of vertigo as Stewart looks down a staircase.

But aside from those two small things, it’s a visually indifferent movie. Yes, San Francisco is nice to look at, but Hitchcock just … shot San Francisco.

Contrast that to the constant visual stimulation that we get in Rear Window, most obviously in the justly famous opening sequence, where the movement of the camera tells a detailed story, filling us in on everything that we need to know to appreciate who our protagonist is and how he got into the situation that he’s in. And then, when he makes the phone call that sets the plot in motion, the camera restlessly pans around the courtyard, introducing us to all the people who will be the object of our protagonist’s voyeuristic attentions for the rest of the film. Vertigo has absolutely nothing like this, and it’s not because Hitchcock fell off in his abilities. North by Northwest is full of such visual interest. Vertigo simply strikes me as a workmanlike job of filmmaking. And I don’t see how a movie so visually unremarkable can be thought of as one of the greatest films ever made.

And in addition to being visually mundane, its pacing is inconsistent: Hitchcock has some trouble getting us plausibly and vividly from the first tragic visit to the mission to the second one. Rear Window, by contrast, is perfectly paced, and every shot counts.

(Parenthetical note: The two movies, in addition to featuring a Dangling Stewart, have a number of odd correspondences. I’ll just note one: In Vertigo we wonder why he’s obsessed with the female lead, and in Rear Window we wonder why he isn’t.)

I’m going to stop there, because I don’t want to overstress the criticism: Vertigo is a terrific movie. Top-ten Hitchcock is by definition exceptional. But it has significant flaws that the movies it’s now frequently compared to simply don’t have.

The best thing about Vertigo, in my view, is the final shot, which indeed perfectly displays Hitchcock’s famously malicious wit: it is a brilliantly creepy moment, as we see our protagonist finally delivered from his obsession and his fear — at the cost of the life of the woman he’s obsessed with. That’s fantastic, but I think Hitchcock does not get us to that point with his customary assurance and visual flair. I don’t think Vertigo is nearly as good a movie as Rear Window, or Psycho, or North by Northwest, or Notorious, or even Shadow of a Doubt. It’s very good Hitchcock but not top Hitchcock, and the idea that it is superior to Citizen Kane,  and Rules of the Game, and Tokyo Story, and 2001 — well, that’s just incomprehensible to me.

I am of course WEIRD, but it just occurred to me that as a Cis-Het Able-bodied White Man I am also a CHAWM. I am a WEIRD CHAWM.