Alan Jacobs

Venkatesh Rao — End-Times Tales:

We are drowning in a sea of reboots, reruns, and recycled stories on television and movie screens for the same reason dying people supposedly see their lives flash before their eyes. The story is ending. Despite living through arguably the greatest era of storytelling technology in history, we have no new stories to tell ourselves.

Now this is not entirely true. I’ve found the occasional fresh new story. Station 11 is an example, a lovely recent TV show, but rather tellingly, set in a post-apocalyptic world where for some reason the survivors perform budget Shakespeare reboot productions in a slightly nicer Mad Max world (really? the world ended and Shakespeare is still the source of the most interesting stories you can tell yourself?).

Yep: really. Anyone who’s ever seen a good production of a Shakespeare play — budget or otherwise — can confirm. Possibly the most powerful evening of art I have ever experienced was a performance of Measure for Measure, by a small company of actors on a bare stage surrounded by folding chairs. (Also, FYI: new performances of a play are not “reboots.”) 

Also, w/r/t this: "Despite living through arguably the greatest era of storytelling technology in history, we have no new stories to tell ourselves” — replace “Despite” with “Because we are” and the sentence makes an important point. 

From a really helpful essay by my colleague David Corey:

Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in contexts where citizens share a robust conception of the good, or of God. But this is not my view. From experience I have learned that friendship does not require that friends love all the same things, much less that they love the same ultimate things. Friendships based on such common loves of course do exist, and perhaps they are of a higher order than those in which ultimate truths are not shared. But friendship is possible where what is loved is simply the person, not the person’s metaphysics or theology. Pluralism thus need not be the death of friendships that are genuine and deep.

But if pluralism does not render meaningful friendships impossible, the tendency to understand politics as a form of war certainly makes them less likely. That was the claim I supported above by distinguishing between friendship and allyship. The second claim I made was that how one understands friendship can affect how one practices politics. Why would this be so? It is because the experience of genuine friendship, which is not merely an intrinsic good but a peak intrinsic good, cannot help but put politics in its place. Politics today makes great claims about its own importance. Yet politics cannot bring meaning to our lives — not deep meaning at any rate — because it is never more than an instrumental good.

This is from an email conversation with my friend Adam Roberts about a recent post of his. N.B.: We’re in medias res here. 

It doesn’t take long to get into intractable difficulties, does it? I don’t know the solution to any of them, of course, but the most obvious one goes something like this, I think:

Though Milton’s God is not always identical with what I would call the Christian God, I do believe he’s in the general vicinity when he says that he made all the rational creatures “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” This suggests that obedience can only be valuable and beautiful when a creature possesses the moral imagination to consider and reject disobedience. You could even say that this is what rational freedom is: the exercise of moral imagination. A creature cannot be virtuous unless it can imagine being vicious.

And imagining sin is not the same as doing it, which is to say that there is some distinction between imagination and will; and that in turn means (as everyone who reflects on these matters ultimately realizes) is it difficult to say when the Fall actually happens, for angels or humans. It’s the crossing of this invisible line from imagining something to willing it. For Milton’s Satan it seems to have happened at the moment that he “thought himself impaired.” (Presumably something very similar happens to all the other rebel angels — if they fell only because they were tempted by Lucifer, then presumably God would extend the same grace to them that he extends to humans.)

So:

1. All rational creatures have both the strength to stand and the freedom to fall; 
2. Their moral imagination allows them to understand what falling might be; 
3. Satan and the other rebel angels move on their own from imagining to willing disobedience; 
4. Adam and Eve also make that move, but as a result of external temptation; 
5. Therefore, God extends grace to Adam and Eve but not to the angels. 

I think that’s coherent, if not necessarily convincing; though of course it leaves a thousand other questions unanswered (e.g. Milton gets himself into an enormous amount of trouble, I think, by having Eve so openly chafe against the authority of Adam).

But to pull back from this scene for a moment: The various scenarios you outline in a previous email — your delineation of (a) kinds created (b) numbers created (c) proportions of the Obedient and the Disobedient — confine themselves to this world, and we don’t know whether this world is the only one populated by rational creatures with moral imagination. So CSL imagines a whole solar system of such creatures and suggests that our world is the only fallen one. What if we extend that to the whole galaxy, the whole universe? Setting aside Fermi’s Paradox, this could be an unimaginably vast universe absolutely full of rational creatures praising their Creator and rejoicing in their obedience to Him … while we alone are the broken ones. Earth, then, becomes the cosmic version of the tiny closet in which the one poor child suffers in Omelas.

Very alien-invasion vibe to the pre-dawn walk in the fog.

Almost all of Tolstoy’s early stories were published by a journal called The Contemporary. Some of them focused on the miseries — and also the human dignity — of the serfs, whose emancipation Tolstoy fervently advocated. (Indeed, he freed his own serfs — he was a nobleman and a landowner — some time before universal emancipation was proclaimed by Tsar Alexander.) But The Contemporary fell under the influence of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who, while praising Tolstoy’s ability, chastised him for being insufficiently devoted to the most radical political positions. Tolstoy, unwilling to alter his writing to conform to Chernyshevsky’s demands for political purity, took his work elsewhere and became, along with his contemporary Dostoevsky, one of the two greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky, meanwhile, took over The Contemporary and banished all writers who did not conform to his political preferences; after his death, though he was always a clunking and tub-thumping writer, he became a great influence — perhaps the greatest single influence — on V. I. Lenin. 

A. N. Wilson, from his biography of Tolstoy (1988): 

Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a “God-bearing” nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country — that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.

How can it be that the country chosen by God, or by the destiny which moves nations, or by the unseen inevitability of dialectical materialism, should have produced, in each succeeding generation, a political system which made life hell for the majority of inhabitants and which, every so often, threw up tyrants of truly horrifying stature? These are questions which have haunted in particular those few Russians who have ever been in Tolstoy's fortunate position of being able to choose whether to stay in Russia or to take the money and run. Today, we read precisely similar tensions in the utterances and writings of Soviet dissidents, and in particular Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose hatred of his country's Government seems almost equally balanced by a fervent patriotism, a tragic knowledge that a Russian can only be himself when he is on his native soil.

Monday November 7 2022 - by Sasha Frere-Jones: 

Scale serves wealth. “Scale” is a polite way of saying “love of numbers” and the numbers are there only in the hope that the money will follow them. Very few people stay on Twitter for any length of time without thinking about income. “It is the thing I must do,” the hardcore user thinks, “because this will bring me more of more and that will improve my work situation.” I’ve had 50,000 followers on Twitter and 5,000, at different points and with different accounts. My life was better with 5,000 — the more recent stretch — but I ultimately have no proof that more people read my work or listened to my music in either instance. The exposure metric indicates only that I am being exposed; it does not prove the quality of any event or even correlation, any more than a song being on the radio proves that someone is listening to it carefully or is likely to buy it. If anything good happened, it was probably me goofing with the friends I already have chats with. 

Via Austin Kleon. See my School for Scale. And me on eyeballs and audiences. Interesting that so many people are thinking about these things as they’re reconsidering Twitter.