Alan Jacobs

Just posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

Ross Douthat:

Liberalism cannot easily renew itself, because despite what certain of its detractors and some of its champions insist, it isn’t really a political-moral-theological system in full; rather, it’s a deliberately thinned-out structure designed to manage pluralism, which depends on constant infusions from other sources, preliberal or nonliberal, to generate meaning and energy and purpose. There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

In traditional Roman culture, the focus, the hearth, is all about holding the family together: the family is the essential, immutable, and foundational unit of civilization. What the Romans called the dignitas marriage — as opposed to the concubinatus union, which was merely a formalizing of a sexual relationship. — was meant to ground all the larger elements of the social order. (The young Augustine, as he explains in his Confessions, had a concubinatus relationship while he was waiting for his parents to organize a dignitas marriage for him, and he and his concubine were alike heartbroken when told that their union had to be broken.) Thus the legal, and not just the social, dominance of the paterfamilias — his patria potestas. 

As Carle Zimmerman shows in his seminal Family and Civilization, the Christian church, when it emerged as a force in Roman society, complicated the simple duality of the Roman system. Bishops and priests denounced the concubitanus marriage: legally, it had to be dignitas or nothing. But even dignitas marriage was insufficient, in that it was merely personal and social: true Christian marriage is sacramental, and an image of the relationship between Christ and his church. What the marital family was in secular legal terms came to matter less than what it was in the eyes of God — and the eyes of canon law. (As Zimmerman explains, when in the late-antique and early-medieval world political order grew more fractured and tenuous, this only intensified the power and authority of the Church over the family.) Thus was inaugurated the close connection between the family and the Church that persists in various ways even today. 

There’s absolutely no question, as I have said many times on this blog and elsewhere, that if Western society is going to be restored and renewed, such restoration and renewal will need to begin in the family. Everything about our system of metaphysical capitalism is built around detaching people from both the comforts and the obligations of family. If you have sustained a healthy family in our current environment you have done something pretty special, and achieved it against heavy odds.

All that said, and I’m not taking any of it back, Christians really can’t have a straightforward relationship to family. We can’t simply be Romans, even Christianized Romans. There’s this countervailing force in Christian tradition and practice that has to be accounted for. Jesus says that unless you hate your own mother and father, you cannot be a follower of his (Luke 14:26). Jesus says that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20). Jesus left his home and his family in order to proclaim the kingdom of God, and then to suffer and die; most if not all of his apostles did the same. Saul of Tarsus did not remain in Tarsus, nor did he even remain in Jerusalem, the place that he came to be educated. In the service of the Gospel, he traveled all over the Mediterranean, and died, we believe, in Rome. It was said of Christian missionaries back in the day that they went to the mission field carrying their coffins on their backs – that is, they planned never to return to what had been their home, but to live out their lives in strange lands, so that they could tell people about Jesus. 

And of course Jesus never married; not did Paul, whose attitudes towards marriage were notoriously complex. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25); but the celibate life is superior (I Cor. 7:7). Neither Jesus nor his last apostle were hearth-and-home types, it seems. 

This is why I’ve always slightly hesitant about the project of the Front Porch Republic folks. What they are doing is admirable in so many ways, and yet I worry that they could inadvertently foster a kind of idolatry of place. However wonderful and essential home and family are for almost all of us, the Christian has to be willing to give both of those up in order to follow Jesus. We won’t necessarily be able to do that following in our home towns, though perhaps most Christians will be granted that privilege.

There is then something inevitably cosmopolitan about Christianity, not in the sense that the Christian is at home everywhere but in the sense that the Christian can’t be fully at home at home anywhere, given that our citizenship is not of this world (Phil. 3:20). Our primary loyalty must be to the City of God, and not to the City of Man.

I don’t know how to sort all of this out, but I do know that it makes the business of cultivating focal practices complicated for the Christian. What do the practices of the hearth have to do with the Christian life? And how can a Christian pursue focal practices if she doesn’t have a hearth to return to at the end of the day? No, the essential focal practices of the Christian will have to be something more, and maybe other, than the Roman ones. What are the necessary focal practices for a pilgrim people? 

Richard Gunderman:

Thanks to [Lillian] Gilbreth, workers would be treated not as cogs in a machine, but as people. So great was her compassion for workers that she devoted much of her career to improving the work and home life of persons with disabilities, a population that had exploded as a result of World War I injuries. This required, for example, studying special challenges faced by the blind in performing routine tasks, developing curriculum for teachers of the blind, teaching the blind themselves, and finding opportunities for the employment of the blind in industry. Taylor might have branded such workers inherently inferior, but Gilbreth concentrated on enhancing their capabilities to contribute.

This concern for the worker as a human being instead of an economic tool expressed itself in many practical forms. With Frank, she improved lighting conditions for workers, thus reducing eye strain, and introduced regular breaks throughout the workday. She installed suggestion boxes in the workplace, so the voices of workers would be heard. She required employment contracts to be signed by representatives of both management and organized labor. And when she became the first woman engineering professor (1935) and later the first woman to be promoted to full professor at Purdue University (1940), she focused her considerable energy on opening up careers for women. 

This is a fascinating essay — until reading it I knew nothing about Gilbreth, whereas I know a good bit about her demonic opposite, Frederick Winslow Taylor. That may say something about me, but it also says something about the culture of labor in this country over the past century. 

John Warner:

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to dodge the plagiarism detector, or that you hired someone to write the essay for you.

I sincerely hope that this is the end of the high school English courses that the lamentations are describing because these courses deserve to die, because we can do better than these courses if the actual objective of the courses is to help students learn to write.

On insiders and outsiders.