Alan Jacobs

Self-portrait as I begin eight months of research leave

Your periodic reminder from Leszek Kołakowski: It’s possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist. 

Okay, so, first we have Andy Crouch’s book The Life We’re Looking For.

Then we have Brad East’s essay-review on Andy’s book in The New Atlantis.

Then we have three follow-up posts by Brad: one, two, and three.

Got all that? Trust me, it’s all worth reading. Okay, then let’s proceed. (Oh, also: I know both Andy and Brad so I will be using first names.)

Those follow-up posts concern Brad’s reservations about Andy’s book, but as he rightly points out, his review is a positive one, and we shouldn’t forget that. The reservations can be summed up in this passage from the review:

[Crouch’s] counsel is wise. But I worry that it understates the problem we face, particularly the extent to which it has infiltrated, and is already integrated with, each of our households. For Crouch agrees that the evils of Mammon and Digital and Acedia amount to something like a globalized conglomerate or racket. Before such an overwhelming power, how could my household be in a position to “choose a different vision,” even for its own members? We are too beholden to the economic and digital realities of modern life — too dependent on credit, too anxious about paying the rent, too distracted by Twitter, too reliant on Amazon, too deadened by Pornhub — to be in a position to opt for an alternative vision, much less to realize that one exists. We’ve got ends to meet. And at the end of the day, binging Netflix numbs the stress with far fewer consequences than opioids.

This is the burnout society, as Han calls it; or the Machine, in the label of Kingsnorth, who learned it from R. S. Thomas. We are sick. It would be unfair to fault Crouch for lacking the cure. The terrifying fact may be that there is none. Moreover, Crouch insists as a matter of principle that the life he commends to us is a life worth living for its own sake, not because it will Change The World. He is right about that. He is right as well to warn against the temptation to look for a magical elixir in the manner of the alchemist. That way lies danger: the quest for power to match the might of Mammon. As he writes, most people who want to influence the culture want to be a force, whereas “Jesus calls us to be a taste.” The book succeeds in offering us a taste, and it is unquestionably a taste of the good life. Whether that life is truly available to most of us, and how, is another matter.

My chief response to this is that I don’t read Andy’s book the way that Brad does, at least in the sense that I don’t see Andy making heroic demands upon us. There’s a point near the end of The Life We’re Looking For where Andy is talking about his use of his iPhone:

It would not be quite right to say that it is entirely up to me whether my iPhone, or future computational technology yet to be developed, becomes an instrument or a device – although it is true enough that every day I can choose which way to use it, within the limits of the programs and interfaces that others have designed it to provide.

But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.

That last sentence is the real key. I see the core purpose of Andy’s book to be not a denunciation or even a critique of technology but rather an attempt to orient us towards a vision of the kind of life that we want, individually and collectively, with the emphasis that if we really understand “the life we are looking for” we will be able to alter our technological environment, albeit in incremental ways. That doesn’t seem to me to require heroism; in fact, I would say that it’s pretty sober: our choices will not bring down the power of what Brad calls the Digital and what Andy (I think more accurately) calls Mammon – the Digital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon – but I think that those choices can create a subtle and over time significant redirection of our energies.

So I’m inclined to think that Brad’s question of whether “the good life … is truly available to most of us” is not the best one to ask. A better question – I think Andy pushes us towards this one, though maybe it’s just me who’s doing the pushing – is Augustinian in that it’s about orientation. Orientation is one of the most fundamental Augustinian concepts. He believed that caritas is “the motion of the soul towards God”; by contrast, cupiditas is the motion of the soul towards itself, which makes one incurvatus in se, curved in on oneself. For Augustine the initial question to be asked of anyone is: Which way are you facing? And I think what Andy is trying to do in his book is get people facing in the right direction – towards the life they really desire, as opposed to the life that Mammon wants to sell them – so that they may begin their pilgrimage, become true wayfarers. Wayfarers often have a long road ahead of them, but one of the best reasons to read Augustine, and to think along with that great saint, is to be reminded that what matters most is not the distance from our goal but whether we are facing it. Even if we never achieve “the good life” — in the Christian sense or even in a Stoic sense — surely we can today orient ourselves a little more accurately towards it than we did yesterday. (Maybe start by reading some Dickens?)

It’s true, as Brad suggests, that mighty Powers are arrayed against the wayfarer, such that we may end up looking more like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History than Gandalf plodding towards the Shire; but better to be the Angel of History than one who strolls smilingly into Mammon’s glamorous emporium.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus

Yann Kebbi’s drawings for the movie C’mon C'mon

Well, the North London Derby will be kicking off in a few minutes, and my nerves are tingling. I won’t be watching the match — I’m gonna practice meditation or something. But I have some thoughts. 

I don’t expect Arsenal to win — Spurs are playing at home and they need the points more than Arsenal do — but that doesn’t mean anything because I never expect Arsenal to win. My son asks me before every Arsenal match how I think it’ll go, and I always explain, patiently and rationally, why they can’t possibly take all three points.  

It may therefore come as no surprise that I would’ve been absolutely shocked at the beginning of the season — and even more after the first three matches of the season — to learn that the Gunners would be in the top four in May. But then everyone else would’ve been shocked also.

So, whatever happens from here on out, the lads have been great, and they deserve plaudits.

You might therefore expect that I am fully supportive of the decision to extend Arteta’s contract. In fact I am not —I am seriously doubtful about the decision. The achievements of this year are mainly due to the excellent construction of the squad, which has enabled a degree of success even in the face of many injuries. And that’s down to the front office. They’re the ones who deserve the same applause we give the players. (That said, with European football coming next season, they need to do some major reinforcement work in the offseason.)

Arteta, I think, has been the weak link. The problem is that he’s very poor at one aspect of the manager’s job: making in-game adjustments. He’s good at general strategy — though there he has a lot of help from the front office — and good at setting up his tactics for any given match. But when things go wrong (and in soccer you must expect that things will regularly go wrong) he seems befuddled. Several of Arsenal’s losses could have become wins if Arteta had acted more swiftly, decisively, and intelligently to make changes, whether in formation or personnel or both. But making the necessary adjustments just doesn’t seem to be in his skill set.

But I’m only doubtful that his contract should have been extended, not certain that it shouldn’t have. He may get better; and there aren’t many clearly superior candidates out there. (Though that Emery guy at Villarreal — he’s impressive! I wonder if he could be talked into moving to London….) And in any case the deal is done. But while I always worry about Arsenal, a good deal of that worry centers on whether Arteta will be able to handle the demands of a tough match. Arteta is my second-biggest concern; the first, as always, is whether Xhaka will decide that he needs to get himself sent off.  

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UPDATE: For “Xhaka” read “Holding.” Arteta’s complete inability to teach his players on-pitch discipline — very few of their many red cards in recent years have been undeserved — is another mark against him. 

I love this idea from my buddy Austin Kleon: not listing but rather mapping the books you’ve recently read. I have never thought of this but am convinced that I need to try.

A friend of mine wrote the other day to commend some of my recent posts for being “bloggy.” There can be no higher praise. I love blogging bloggily, but it’s not easy to do.

I’ve spent decades practicing the craft of writing for book publishers and periodicals, and that craft requires me to seek clarity, coherence, and completeness. But those aren’t the virtues of blog writing: the Blog Imperatives are exploration, experimentation, and iteration. You’ve got to be willing to try out ideas that you’re not wholly comfortable with, ideas you don’t yet have a firm grasp on; and then you need to circle back later to revisit and reconsider. 

In fact, one of my writerly tasks in the coming weeks is to read through old posts here and see if I can find some dots to connect; if I do, I will connect them through linkage and tagging. Keep an eye peeled for these Posts of Revisitation. 

If you think my bloggy work here is valuable, you may support it through my Buy Me a Coffee page — see the link at the top of this page. I wrote an update for my supporters today: you may read it here.