Alan Jacobs

I just realized that I need to pause this series for a while. Why? Because I’m reading Ellul’s The Meaning of the City and am finding it so provocative, so maddening, so profound, so bizarre, that it will clearly take me some time to process it. I mean, the guys writes things like this: 

And the Christian, like everyone else, is looking for a solution in laws. What should the Christian position be regarding these problems (which we call "the problems of modern life, instead of giving them their permanent name? Arrange things somehow, make city life possible; moralize the city, its leisure time, its work, its dreams. This is how Christians plan. What to do? God has revealed to us very clearly that there is absolutely nothing to be done. God has given us no commands with regard to the city. He affords us no law. For the city is not an inner problem for man. God can say to us, “You shall not commit adultery,” but he has never said, “You shall not live in the city.” For on the one hand we have a personal attitude with a man, which he can modify according to his readiness to obey God's commandments. And on the other, the city is a phenomenon absolutely removed from man's power, a phenomenon which he is fundamentally incapable of affecting. For man is not responsible for making the city something other than it is, as we have already seen. There is nothing to be done. And the problem does not change. It is still what it was when, forty or fifty centuries ago, they built up those thick walls of clay whose foundations still subsist. For God has cursed, has condemned, the city instead of giving us a law for it. 

What am I supposed to do with that? Such a bold (and apparently crazy?) argument requires further reflection, and the same is true of the rest of the book. Some books need to be read slowly, with much annotation, or not read at all.

Posting will continue, but for a little while it won’t be about Babylon. (And you know what? As the world’s leading advocate of reading at whim, if I happen to read something else before I get to Ellul then it might be a larger while.) 

And just as I’m posting these I see this from Craig Mod — serendipity!

One more.

And as I look through those photos, I find myself thinking: the Lake District — not unattractive!

My beloved! Taken on a trail overlooking Grasmere, 2011. Today we celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary.

Yuval Levin:

This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.

A brilliant essay.

Greenwich Observatory, by Eric Ravilious (1937) 

Robin Sloan:

I want to under score it here: where the internet is concerned, we are in a crisis of discovery. Anyone with inter esting new work to share — their own or someone else’s — rummages in the tool shed, looking for a seed spreader or a slingshot, and emerges with an egg beater and a single unmatched glove. Is this all we’ve got?? 

Every now and then I realize that there’s something going on, somewhere on a random corner of the internet, that I have unaccountable and lamentably missed. Doesn’t happen often, but often enough to keep the flame of hope flickering. And curiously enough, the only site associated with the Big Tech firms where this happens is YouTube. (Make of that what you will; I’m not sure what to make of it.)  

Robin continues: “The strategy is the same as it always was: cultivate small, sturdy networks of affinity and interest. Connect them to each other. Keep them lit.” When I find something, I make a point of sharing it, usually on my newsletter — but I bet I could do a better job of that. 

And at the end of Robin’s post, this vital word, which I’ve been preaching for a long long time: 

I would add: there is power and leverage in not being inter­ested in the stuff everybody else is inter­ested in — the stuff other people insist is urgent.

Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all relevant dimensions: intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously! 

I want to add that to my small hoard of encouraging declarations: Practice Hypomone! Read at whim! Festina Lente! (That’s one of Robin’s faves also.) Ignore strenuously! 

The Bob Marley and the Wailers album Survival (1979) is one of Marley's most politically militant recordings. The imagery of the album cover, which with one exception features the flags of African nations, suggests its theme — the need for Pan-African political unity — and the songs on the album say that that unity is to be rooted in emancipation from the dominance of a global political and economic system, a system which is largely controlled by white people. (The Wikipedia page linked to above explains the flags and the image hiding behind the album’s title.) 

One of the most constant and powerful images of Rastafarianism is that of the Babylonian captivity. You may get a brief summary of this theme by reading this essay by David W. Stowe, and then, perhaps, go deeper by reading Stowe’s remarkable book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137. Stowe has a lot to say about the version of Psalm 137 with which I prefaced my previous post, “Rivers of Babylon” by The Melodians. I don't suppose there's any song that more fully captures the tone and mood of Rastafari — and the best song on Survival is a kind of extension of it, as though “Rivers of Babylon” were rewritten by a critical race theorist. That song is called “Babylon System," and I'm invoking it here because I think it suggests a different approach to living in Babylon than the two we have already considered: infiltrating the halls of power and praying for deliverance.  

But before I go any further, I need to clarify some things. It’s pretty obvious what I’m suggesting in these posts: that living in Technopoly is best figured as a kind of Babylonian captivity. But do I really mean to compare my situation — as a comfortable, economically secure white person in one of the world’s richest countries — to those who have been uprooted from their homes and sold into slavery, subjected to endless bigotry and oppression both overt and covert? And my answer is: Yes, I mean to compare — but not to equate.

Consider for instance the moment in “The Scouring of the Shire” when the returning hobbits see what has been done to Hobbiton:

‘This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam. ‘Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.’

‘Yes, this is Mordor,’ said Frodo. ‘Just one of its works.’ 

By any rational reckoning, of course, Hobbiton is not “worse than Mordor” — as Sam of all people ought to know, having spent too much time in that blasted land. But you know what he means, you know where the feeling of revulsion comes from: his love of the Shire and his long-cherished hope to return to it, his unreflective expectation that upon his return it would be what he always knew it to be. But would he exchange his condition for that of a prisoner in one of Sauron’s towers, or an Orc soldier? Of course he wouldn’t. The Mordor System is darker and fouler at the center than at the periphery; but its logic is the same everywhere. And what has been learned about it near the center can be used near the periphery as well. That’s the theme of my essay on Albert Murray: white American Christians who think they’re suffering should take some lessons from their Black brothers and sisters, who know what real persecution is. If you feel threatened by the Beast, then maybe you should consult people who have spent generations in that Beast’s belly. 

If I had to choose between (a) raising my child in an environment of material and social comfort but also with the constant preaching of the dark gospel of metaphysical capitalism, and (b) raising my child in an environment of economic hopelessness and racial bigotry, in which he or she must spend a lifetime constantly at tiptoe stance — well, I would certainly choose the former. The first situation has dystopian elements, but also hopeful possibilities and some degree of freedom; the second is dystopian to its core. Those in the first situation can at least learn from the miseries of those in the second. 

Okay, back to Bob Marley. What does Babylon System do? It’s a vampire, sucking the blood of the sufferers; and it builds churches and universities for the express purpose of deceiving the people and keeping them enslaved. That is, to borrow the Marxist terms, it consists of an economic/political base and a cultural superstructure: As Louis Althusser said, it’s a model of political economy that sustains itself not simply by force, or the threat of force, but also through the work of ideological state apparatuses. Foucault borrowed this distinction when he coined the phrase “power-knowledge regime” — the hard power of the state-as-such and the soft power of its knowledge-disseminating apparatuses. 

Not a bad description of life under surveillance capitalism. — at least, once you start thinking about it. If you manage not to think about the costs, life in Babylon can be kinda pleasant at times, and questioning the System can feel risky. But once you start thinking … well, for one thing, to do do all this unpaid labor for social media and AI companies is to tread the winepress, but thirst.

So what do we do? Do we strive to sneak our young men and women into the ruling cadre? Do we pray for deliverance? Or do we do what Bob Marley says we should do: rebel? If we’re drawn to the last, then we have to ask another question: What might successful rebellion look like? 

A common experience for me: 

1. Someone tweets (or “X-es”?) about something I’ve written, maybe with a quotation, maybe with a summary;  
2. Someone else reads that tweet and on the basis of it alone decides what I must have argued … 
3. … and then writes me an angry email refuting the argument they’re sure I have made. 

The situation reminds me of all those ancient writers we only know through the descriptions of their works by others. Those writers’ work is probably unrecoverable; but not so in this case. My emailers could have secure knowledge with a click but they prefer ignorance.