Alan Jacobs

My Harper’s essay on (not?) becoming an anarchist is now online – though paywalled. But why not subscribe? 

My (much briefer) Hedgehog Review essay “Staying for the Truth” has escaped from its paywall and become free for all to read. 

I’m going to be commenting on both of these when I get some time. They’re actually quite closely related, in my mind anyway. 

Newsletter!

Rowan Williams on Ronald Blythe at 100:

“He’s somebody who is very committed to the Christian tradition and he uses it to think with, he uses it as a structure – a Christian year, the round of festivals and commemorations, for him is woven into the round of the calendar year as it would have been for generations before him,” Williams says. “You can think more freely and you may be able to feel more deeply if you’re confident that there’s this steady backdrop. You don’t have to keep making things up. There’s a world you can inhabit, your feet are on the ground, and that means you can walk around, breathe deeply and look slowly. That’s faith.” 

Richard Mabey, in his introduction to the new collection of Blythe’s writings that Williams also contributes to, writes: 

Ronnie's knowledge and practice of scripture are evident in many of his writings. But only in these Wormingford columns does he openly declare his quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith. And as a friend but a non-believer I have to make a reckoning with this. By unspoken common consent we have never discussed religion. But at a dinner with village friends once, I betrayed my metropolitan prejudices by insisting that the church no longer had any influence on everyday social life. Ronnie turned to me and said, quietly, ‘Richard, you don't know what you are talking about.’ And as far as Wormingford is concerned he was quite correct, as these pages abundantly show. It was the closest we have ever come to a row. 

Jonathan Spence, in The Gate of Heavenly Peace, relates that the great Chinese reformer Kang Youwei, troubled by the way China in the late 19th century was dominated by other nations, founded an organization called the Know Our Humiliation Society. We American Christians need one of those. 

Cal Newport: 

The battle for telecommuting is a proxy for a deeper unrest. If employees lose remote work, the last highly visible, virus-prompted workplace experiment, the window for future transformation might slam shut. The tragedy of this moment, however, is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand. Shifting more work to teleconferencing eliminates commutes and provides schedule flexibility, but, as so many office refugees learned, remote work alone doesn’t really help alleviate most of what made their jobs frantic and exhausting. We need new ideas about how to reshape work, and anthropology may have something to offer. 

Newport, to his credit, acknowledges that the common tropes on this subject — “We are wired to do X because our hunter-gatherer ancestors did Z” — are simplistic at best and often misleading. But I’m still not sure his anthropological anecdotes tell us a lot that’s helpful.  

What’s more important is that modern office work is dehumanizing and stress-inducing in ways that even the office work of a hundred years ago was not. (Note: that doesn’t mean that those early patterns of work didn’t have their own problems, some of them major.) I don’t think any anthropological research, or any recent writing about work, captures the differences between the the computerized workplace and earlier modes of work than Mark Helprin’s 1996 essay “The Acceleration of Tranquility” — which even now I think about regularly because it’s not just about work but also about the kinds of material conditions, the furniture of everyday life as it were, that enable flourishing. 

One final note (in this post, anyway; I do want to return to the topic): What Newport is discussing here applies only to office work. There are other kinds of work — including my own, as a teacher — that are grossly diminished when done remotely, and of course many more (surgery, carpentry) that can’t be done remotely at all. But so many people in our society do office work that we really do need to be looking for ways to make it less miserable. 

Ian Bogost:

If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally. It would also be tragic [me: tragic?] for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely — and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

One of Christian’s Gibsons has survived, and here it is being played by the (also great) Julian Lage: