Alan Jacobs

Maya Jasanoff's idea that “The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like those of Scandinavia” — because Colonialism! — is (a) the platonic ideal of an NYT opinion piece and (b) a perfect illustration of Clement Atlee’s comment that "the intelligentsia … can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject.” The pomp of the British monarchy is the point; the ceremony is the substance — for good reasons and bad. When the ceremony is discarded the monarchy will be too. And rightly so. 

I told them a while back that this is a word, but they obviously didn’t listen. Anti-liturgical bias at the NYT!

September update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

Elizabeth II: a constant queen whose failings were rare: “She possessed, apparently, the unique skill of being able to position a tiara on her head perfectly without a mirror.” No, not unique — I too have this skill, though I have had fewer opportunities to exercise it than the late Queen did. Sad. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if we do not suffer from our ancestors’ sins, then we have no need of their virtues. This truth has about as much validity as the one I’m riffing on, but it is if anything more firmly believed. To our great loss.

The late Queen Elizabeth II played the hand she was dealt about as well as it could possibly have been played, and this required her to exercise virtues that few of our public figures today even know exist: dutifulness; reliability; silence; dignity; fidelity; devotion to God, family, and nation. We shall not look upon her like again; her death marks the end of a certain world. Its excellences, as well as its shortcomings, are worthy of our remembrance. 

This may perhaps be a good time to listen to the small but sumptuous motet that Ralph Vaughan Williams composed for the Queen’s coronation: 

I know this kind of thing is totally normal now — one of the most characteristic ways for journalists to use Twitter — but let’s be clear what it’s saying: I already know what the thesis of my story will be, so please write if you can confirm my thesis. He doesn’t want to hear from anyone who might offer an alternative account to the one he has already settled on. 

The Woman Who Became a Company:

Since corporations can claim trade secrets, [Jennifer Lyn] Morone decided to resist pervasive data capture by incorporating herself, so that the company, JLM Inc., contains the intellectual property and activities of the human Morone. If a corporation can be a person, perhaps a person could be a corporation and so protect their data! The articles of incorporation enable Morone’s data to qualify as intellectual property and thus purport to offer protections from the data marketplace. The human Morone’s privacy is possible because it is the product and trade secret of the company, JLM Inc., which is incorporated in the state of Delaware. With its own Court of Chancery that hears cases involving corporate law, Delaware’s legal structure is favorable to business. The state also does not collect corporate taxes from those that do business outside the state or tax “intangible assets” — like data. […] 

As JLM Inc., Morone has an obligation to refuse the terms and agreements that permit apps and websites to share data with their parent tech companies, alongside third and fourth parties. She must protect the secret formula of who she is so that she can sell it, making it a challenge for her to participate in many of the interactive information streams common to the 21st century. She can’t use apps, websites with cookies, or most search engines. They track her and collect data about her. That data is the property of JLM Inc. and so she must not engage these services. The problem with maintaining the marketplace as the point of reference for data governance is how it reinforces exploitative practices that don’t have clear, long-term safeguards for participants. Morone’s experience shows that the corporation doesn’t provide a solution to the extractive practices of these apps, platforms, and sites for a human who wants to live, work, or socialize today. 

Everything about this story is deeply sad. 

Ivan Illich, from In the Mirror of the Past: 

Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the z-axis, the idea of vernacular work: unpaid activities which provide and improve livelihood, but which are totally refractory to any analysis utilizing concepts developed in formal economics. I apply the term ‘vernacular’ to these activities, since there is no other current concept that allows me to make the same distinction within the domain covered by such terms as ‘informal sector, ‘use value,’ ‘social reproduction.’ Vernacular is a Latin term that we use in English only for the language that we have acquired without paid teachers. In Rome, it was used from 500 B.C. to 600 A.D. to designate any value that was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold it in the market. I suggest that we restore this simple term, vernacular, to oppose commodities and their shadow. It allows me to distinguish between the expansion of the shadow economy and its inverse the expansion of the vernacular domain. 

One of Les Murray’s collections of poems is called The Vernacular Republic, and while that title is usually thought to refer to Australia simpliciter, I don’t think that’s right. The Vernacular Republic is more an ideal image of Australia, what it might have been and perhaps (with repentance) still could be. 

I think if we take Illich’s understanding of the vernacular domain, and add to it the image of an alternative but “more comprehensive” economy that Wendell Berry writes of, then we have a rough outline of what a genuine Vernacular Republic would be. The Vernacular Republic is an “informal sector” that opposes the logic of commodity and gradually but steadily practices the Kingdom of God. 

Mary Harrington:

We can also kiss goodbye to the “marketplace of ideas”. This might have seemed plausible when everyone aspired to long-form, deliberative, rationalism and a broadly shared moral framework. When these are things of the past, we all absorb disaggregated, de-contextualised snippets of information at speed, our reading material rewards us for not concentrating long enough to think something through, and we can see everyone else thinking in real time on our screens? 

Ah yes, I remember it well: that halcyon era when everyone sat around reading Hobbes’s Leviathan and earnestly buttonholing passersby in impassioned search for a shared moral framework.

Harrington relies heavily on a melancholy essay by Adam Garfinkle on the subject of Literacy Lost, and for people like Harrington and Garfinkle I have some questions: 

Do you know anything — anything at all — about the history of literacy? About what people in any society, any society in the whole world, at any point in history, could read and did read? For instance: what percentage of people in France in 1900, or England in 1850, or China in 1800, or the U.S.A. in 1950, had ever in their lives read a single book? If they had read books, how intellectually demanding and substantive were those books? If they were assigned those books in school, did they actually do the reading? How were the books taught to them? That is, were the best qualities of those books explored in ways that were comprehensible and meaningful to the students? How common, or how rare, was the education in “deep reading” that you commend? 

I ask because if you don’t have this information, then you have no business making comparative judgments between our own moment and any moment in the past. And this information is hard to find. What we do know mainly makes us want to know more. You may wish that more people read, and read good books — I certainly do — but without actual data you can’t compare us to our ancestors. 

I will just say this: I think the hidden assumption in essays like Harrington’s and Garfinkle’s is that if people weren’t on social media and staring at their iPhones they’d be reading books instead. And I don’t believe for one second that that’s a safe assumption.