Alan Jacobs

The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused. 

— Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)

We planted this Lindheimer’s beeblossom last year, and we’re delighted that it survived our polar vortex just fine and is looking great – because never has a flower been better named. The bees adore it. And all of us need to take care of our bees.

This by Russell Moore is incisive — devastatingly so:

Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different — and jarring — model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.

Thousands upon thousands of young people are leaving evangelicalism because they have been told all their lives that evangelicals hold up Jesus as Lord and the Bible as God’s Word — and have seen all their lives that many evangelical leaders ignore Jesus and ignore Scripture whenever those witnesses conflict with the leaders’ preferred cultural politics. "And what if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.” 

College students are busy, so they practice triage: they decide (a) what must be done now, (b) what can wait until later, and (c) what need not be done at all. If a professor tells students to do something but offers no reward for doing it and no punishment for failing to do it, then it will inevitably go directly into category (c).

This is why I give reading quizzes — a common enough practice. But over the years I have come to build my entire classroom practice around those reading quizzes. My method looks like this:

1. We begin class with a quiz; I allow roughly one minute per question.
2. Then we go over the quiz question by question — and everything else stems from this. Students volunteer answers, which is helpful to me not least because sometimes they have given an accurate answer that I did not anticipate. I also discover which questions they found easy and which they found difficult.
3. After the correct answer is noted, I’ll sometimes ask “Why does that matter?” That is: Why is this a sufficiently important detail for me to put it on the quiz? This opens up the conversation, and sometimes we can spend ten or fifteen minutes unpacking the significance of just one question.
4. In other cases I will simply unpack the significance myself, asking them to turn in their book to passages that reinforce or expand on the point the question explores.
5. When we’re done the students grade their own quizzes, record their grades so they can retrieve them later (and always know how they’re doing), and turn the quizzes in to me.

My notes for the class will typically look like this — from Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which I just finished teaching in one of my classes. (It’s one of my favorite books to teach.) When I make up the quizzes I keep a copy for myself and annotate it, as you can see, so I can not only point to the pages where the answers may be found but also identify other key passages, many of them related, thematically, to the ones I asked the questions about.

Books I teach tend to look like this:

And there are many notes on the inside. I’m thinking that when I retire I should bundle a much-taught book with its annotated quizzes and sell the bundle as my own version of an NFT.

“Kakos really ought to suffer for doing hoti!” 

“Kakos did hoti?” 

“Of course! Haven’t you heard? It’s all over Twitter.” 

“But is there any evidence he did it?” 

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Anyway, I wouldn't put anything past Kakos.” 

“Why not?” 

“Well, he did hoti, didn’t he?” 

In one of his notebooks Wittgenstein wrote, “I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else…. — What I invent are new similes.” Maybe that’s what humanistic thought is essentially: a search for new similes, new ways of perceiving the familiar — better to appreciate it when it deserves appreciation and better to change it when it requires changing. A mode of lateral thinking. A way of restocking the toolbox. 

In such a project, the late great Mary Midgely once argued, religious experience is vital, because "there is a general tendency for new imaginative ways of understanding life to emerge from religious thinking – that is, from thoughts which go beyond current human horizons.” That is, one of the social functions of religious experience — wholly aside from whether any particular religion is true or not — is to create similes, to extend thinking laterally, to add to the toolbox. “The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish ‘folk-psychology’. It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose.” 

The sociologist David Martin — also late and great; he died just a few months after Midgely — thought that this proliferation of similes is indeed essential to humanistic discourse, and thought he knew why. In his late book Ruin and Restoration: On Violence, Liturgy and Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2016) he wrote:

The cultural disciplines, theology included alongside sociology, depend on history. History involves narrative, and narrative involves contingency and subjectivity ... History can only be narrated in ordinary language, in principle available to any competent language user. The same applies to the cultural disciplines. They have no concepts like ‘quasars’ in astrophysics or even ‘metabolism’ in medicine, unless metabolism is used metaphorically. The fundamental role played by contingent narrative expressed in ordinary language means that the cultural disciplines are metaphorical and rhetorical to a degree not found in the natural sciences and they proliferate taxonomies. They sprawl because attended by numerous qualifications dependent on cultural time and space. The setting out of the ceteris paribus clause can be very extended indeed. (p. 9) 

The irony here is that one invokes ceteris paribus — all things being equal — precisely because all things rarely are equal. One must continually account for cultural and social and experiential difference, make “numerous qualifications dependent on cultural time and space.” 

I have made a similar version of this point in particular relation to the need for a theological anthropology adequate to our moment: 

To this claim there may be the immediate response, especially from orthodox Christians, that theology need not be different in this age than in any other, for human nature does not change: it remains true now as it has been since the angels with their flaming swords were posted at the gates of Eden that we are made in the image of God and yet have defaced that image, and that what theologians call “the Christ event” — the incarnation, preaching, healing, death, resurrection, ascension, and ultimate return of the second person of the Trinity — is the means by which that image will be restored and the wounds we have inflicted on the Creation healed. And indeed all that does, I believe, remain true. Yet it does not follow from such foundational salvation history that “theology need not be different in this age than any other.”

We may indeed believe in some universal human nature and nevertheless believe that certain frequencies on the human spectrum of possibility become more audible at times; indeed, the dominance of certain frequencies in one era can render others unheard, and only when that era passes and a new one replaces it may we realize that there were all along transmissions that we couldn’t hear because they were drowned out, overwhelmed. The moral and spiritual soundscape of the world is in constant flux, and calls forth, if we have ears to hear and a willingness to respond, new theological reflections that do not erase the truthfulness or even significance of former theological articulations but have a responsibility to add to them. In this sense at least there must be “development of doctrine.” 

Note that the invocation of a “soundscape” is itself an attempt at coining a useful simile. It may be related to the concept of stochastic resonance in reading. It is probably not wholly compatible with the metaphor of vendoring culture. You generate the similes, you try them out, you discard some and lean on others. You hope that at some point you’re able not just to invent them but use them to aid understanding: there’s no point in having a big sprawling toolbox if you don’t put the tools to work. But right now I’m working on the development of those tools. 

Or am I sowing seeds in my blog garden? This business of simile-generation is complicated. 

Don’t give me any ideas.

I found this to be a moving, frustrating, painful, and yet somehow also heartwarming story about a young man who deserves a whole lot more than his society is allowing him to have. It’s a story about many things, but above all, I think, about the search for meaning and hope in an economic order that can’t, or doesn’t, provide either.

I pay for four Substack newsletters, but am on the free tier for several others, and the writers I follow who are huffily declaring their departure from Substack because Substack will tolerate [insert taboo object here] perfectly illustrate Left Purity Culture. What’s sad/funny about this is that the platforms they are decamping for are no more pure than Substack. (You think no right-wingers use Tinyletter? Also: You’re announcing your purgative action … on Twitter? Wow, you can’t get more ideologically pure than that.) It’s a useful reminder that ritual cleanliness bears no resemblance to actual cleanliness. It’s just a matter of making the approved gestures. But it may have the self-fulfilling prophecy effect: Eventually the claim that “Substack is just a venue for right-wingers” may be largely true.

Paul Kingsnorth in his new newsletter “The Abbey of Misrule”:

I will attempt to write here without becoming evil, fighting for what I love and not against what I don’t, avoiding too many abstractions, trying to practice kindness and mercy. I will expect those who comment here to do the same, and will (mercilessly) deny publication to anyone who attempts to bring the fragmentary oppositions of the world into this little Abbey of mine.

I wonder how many other online writers would be willing to take — genuinely to take — that vow.

Ian Leslie:

Imagine if this virus had emerged two decades ago - perfectly plausible, and nothing in historical terms. Scientists would have not have had the wherewithal to crack the code of the virus or to share it globally and instantaneously. Office workers, in firms and in governments, would not have been able to meet over video, businesses would have not been able to reinvent themselves. Friends and family would have even less connection with the outside world than before. Food and other essential goods and indeed non-essential goods would have not have remained accessible to nearly so many people. Neighbours wouldn’t have been able to look after each other as easily. Governments, health services and businesses wouldn’t have been able to gather data or share information nearly so efficiently. A huge part of the reason we were able to adapt as we have is down to technologies that didn’t exist or were not in widespread use twenty or even ten years ago. It’s enough to make you believe in progress.

I’m teaching Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch right now, and in my introductory comments I mentioned that one of the curious things about this book so full of fear and anxiety is the complete absence of what would have been, at the time of the book’s publication in 1965, the most common source of fear and anxiety: the Cold War, and the possibility that it would erupt into a very hot nuclear one. As Dick imagines the world of 2016, all of that has somehow been resolved or faded into insignificance. What has happened instead is a kind of unspoken and largely unacknowledged collaboration between the United Nations, which seems to be the only government that’s functioning, and what we have recently learned to call surveillance capitalism. It’s the UN that forces people to leave the overcrowded and overheated earth to live at a subsistence level on colonies elsewhere in the solar system, and it’s also the UN that turns a blind eye to the “pushers” who sell to the colonists the drugs they need to make their miserable experience tolerable. Symbiosis.

When people talk about Dick as a prophetic writer, this is the kind of thing they have in mind: an ability to envision from 1965 not a continuation of that time’s politics but instead a tacit union between the interests of government and the interests of the world’s most powerful corporations.

But Dick takes his anticipations to another level, a level that I am especially interested in. It is of course famously difficult to say exactly what happens in this novel, because the essential question that the major characters have is always: What is actually happening? But at least one major potential timeline, perhaps the most likely timeline, tells a story like this: Palmer Eldritch is a titan of capitalism, in many respects the Jeff Bezos of this world, and he travels to Proxima Centauri on a quest that is ambiguous in character but certainly involves financial motives. Eldritch discovers on Proxima Centauri a substance that the sentient beings of that solar system use in their religious rituals — a substance he thinks he can manufacture and sell and thereby win a victory over the currently dominant corporation called PP Layouts. But on his return from the Proxima system he is — well, perhaps the word is possessed by a sentient creature from some other part of the galaxy. And this creature is at least for a time interested in distributing its consciousness, through the mediation of Palmer Eldritch and the substance he has discovered, into the consciousness of human beings.

I said in an earlier post that I am interested in demonology, and that adds to my fascination with this novel. Because Dick is imagining what might happen if an unprecedentedly powerful union of government and surveillance capitalism is taken over by what might fairly be called a demonic power. Now, you might say that what Dick describes is not a demon, but simply a creature dramatically more powerful than we are and capable of imposing its will upon us. I call that a distinction without a difference. This is, it seems to me, a sort of Foucauldian image a few years ahead of Foucault’s key works on power and domination, a picture of a world in which powers that we may be tempted to call supernatural are disseminated through the existing structures of the neoliberal order. And it doesn’t look pretty.

Of course, this is not the only possible explanation of what is happening in the book. It is certainly possible that there is no alien being possessing Palmer Eldritch; rather, Eldritch himself has, through a combination of economic leverage and biotechnology, assumed equivalent powers. That is, it may be possible for surveillance capitalism to generate its own demons. Whether this is a better or worse fate than the one I previously described I leave as an exercise for the reader.

It was in that class that I first began to learn that every problem, whether serious or trifling, may be solved by the application of an always identical method, which consists in contrasting two traditional views of the question; the first is introduced by means of a justification on common-sense grounds, then the justification is destroyed with the help of the second view; finally, both are dismissed as being equally inadequate, thanks to a third view which reveals the incomplete character of the first two; these are now reduced by verbal artifice to complementary aspects of one and the same reality: form and subject-matter, container and content, being and appearance, continuity and discontinuity, essence and existence, etc. Such an exercise soon becomes purely verbal, depending, as it does, on a certain skill in punning, which replaces thought: assonance, similarity in sound and ambiguity gradually come to form the basis of those brilliantly ingenious intellectual shifts which are thought to be the sign of sound philosophizing.

Five years of study at the Sorbonne boiled down to acquiring skill in this form of mental gymnastics, the dangers of which are nevertheless obvious.  

— Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 

"I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!"

— Lesslie Newbigin

Is Christianity declining where you are? Is it, rather, growing in power and influence? Is persecution coming for you? Or is cultural success around the corner?

None of it matters. Our calling is precisely the same, in what we call times of ease and what we call times of struggle. And the Good News is always News and always Good. Don’t bother being an optimist or a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!

When, therefore, we see in Him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they are appropriate to nothing else but the primal and ineffable nature of deity, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder and knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds One returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death. 

— Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John

Jessica Martin's Maundy Thursday homily at Ely Cathedral.

From Ely today, The Preaching and Proclamation of the Cross.

Via Ken Myers, an absolutely superb 30 minute overview, with key excerpts, of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

The Rock Church, Cranfills Gap, Texas

It’s rare for me to disagree with Ross Douthat as thoroughly as I disagree with this reflection on Christian intellectuals. I disagree not because I doubt his particular judgments, but because I think he has misconceived the entire subject. He has done so, I believe, by approaching the role of Christian intellectual as a matter of strategy, when it is more properly a matter of vocation. As the bearer of a vocation — a particular calling within the general calling of the Christian life — the Christian intellectual engages in a practice — and (following MacIntyre here and therefore following both Aristotle and Aquinas) to be a practitioner in this sense means that your calling is circumscribed by the requirement to exhibit certain virtues, virtues the possession of which enable you to follow your calling faithfully — and, therefore, virtues the absence of which will compromise or vitiate your ability to fulfill your calling. And for the Christian those must be, to start with, the core Christian virtues. (To which are added certain specifically intellectual virtues.)

To me, then, it’s noteworthy that some of the people he singles out as exemplary Christian intellectuals are people notorious for their belittlement of, their mockery of, their contempt for pretty much anyone, Christian or not, who disagrees with them. Douthat’s exemplary Christian intellectuals seem often to think that, because (in their view) they hold the right positions, and have the right strategy, they are therefore exempt from any of the Biblical commandments about how to deal with our Christian siblings and our enemies alike.

That habitual sneering at dissenters is not especially relevant if you think of the Christian intellectual life simply as a mater of strategy; but it matters very much if you think of that life as a vocation which has certain standards intrinsic to it, standards that emerge from the Christian account of the virtuous (the Christlike) person. Considering Christian intellectual life as a matter of vocation might lead to a different list of exemplary figures than the one Ross employs — and would demand a different conceptual framing too.

It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambidextrous person, I endorse this verdict. Though — if I must be truthful — I’m not in any straightforward sense ambidextrous, because while there are things that I do much better with my left hand and things I do much better with my right hand, there is almost nothing that I do equally well with both hands. I think I would’ve been more left-handed except that my parents when I was very young encouraged me to use my right hand for things they noticed, like writing and throwing. But things that they didn’t pay attention to  — brushing my teeth, combing my hair, shooting pool, archery — I did, and do, with my left hand. (Well, not brushing my hair, because my hair is too short to brush. But when I buzz my head or trim my heard, I hold the clippers in my left hand.) In general, my right hand is the Hand of Power, and my left hand is the Hand of Precision. Anything that requires fine motor skills: left. Anything that requires strength, like opening a tightly-sealed jar: right.