Alan Jacobs

There is a line from Tom Stoppard that I like to quote, one that I suspect is important to Stoppard as well, because he has used it in his plays, with variations, at least twice: “The idea will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.” As I move into the latter years of my career, one of the great pleasures I have is in seeing people come behind me to pick up what I have dropped or neglected.

At about the time that I felt that I had gotten as far as I could with a critique of our technological culture, Mike Sacasas picked up that theme and has written wisely and eloquently about it. I have struggled to find time to write as much as I would like about technologies of text and of the book, but my friend and former colleague Richard Gibson has picked up that theme and has done more interesting things with it than I ever could have: see his recent book Paper Electronic Literature, which I am going to write about at some future point. I haven’t felt the need in recent years to say anything much about what I called Left Purity Culture, because there are plenty of other people doing that work, for instance Jesse Singal. That there is so much good work being done on topics that I once wrote about regularly and still care about is an encouraging thing, in part because no truly important issue can be explored by a single person, and in part because my freedom from doing that particular kind of work allows me to focus my attention on the things that other people aren’t writing about.

Another form of this dynamic: When people take up the same issues that I am writing about but pursue them from a different perspective and with a different toolkit. My work on invitation and repair largely within the world of literature and literary culture has its complement in Sara Hendren’s work on critique and repair from the perspective of design and the human-built world. I’m very much looking forward to further engagement with Sara on these matters, because she is someone that I have already learned a lot from and expect to learn a lot from in the future.

A former colleague of the late and always-to-be-lamented Paul Farmer said that when she asked him how he managed to keep working on global heath issues when so many other people got burned out, he replied that the secret is “doing hard things with friends.” Farmer’s work was infinitely more important and radically more challenging than mine, but still, that’s what I want to do from here on out: hard things with friends. Including the friends who have arrived on the scene after me; and even, in a way, those who will come onto the scene after I’m gone. Hello, friends! Let’s do the hard stuff together.

I am absolutely gutted to learn of the death of Paul Farmer, the only contemporary, I believe, that I have called simply My hero. He fought the long defeat, and he fought it brilliantly. What devastating news. What a loss for the world.

UPDATE: Here is the first thing I ever wrote about Farmer, thirteen-plus years ago. I still believe every word.

Rest in peace — and well done indeed, thou good and faithful servant.

An amazing story by a public defender named Yassine Meskhout. A big wide disturbing window into the American legal system.

Behold the newsletter!

Czeslaw Milosz, from Unattainable Earth (1987):

I don't like the Western way of thinking. I could say: the way Western intellectuals think, but then I would pass over the transformation that has occurred during the last few decades. And the transformation (not a sudden one, though suddenly present, like pubescence or senility) consists in the disappearance of a distinction between the enlightened — the knowledgeable, the progressive, the mentally liberated — and the so-called masses. That great schism has ended and we are returned to a unified world view, as was the case in the Middle Ages when a theologian, a cooper and a field hand believed the same things. Schools, television and newspapers have allied themselves to turn minds in the direction desired by the liberal intelligentsia, and so the victory came: an image of the world which is in force for all of us, under a penalty equivalent to the ancient penalties of pillory and stake: that is, ridicule.

Indeed, this project of unification, and ridicule for dissent, continued and, thanks to the panopticon of social media, intensified. But the attempt to impose Left Purity Culture seems finally to have generated a significant resistance, on several fronts.

Still, for “the knowledgeable, the progressive, the mentally liberated,” is this really such a bad thing? As long as they control the levers of cultural and economic power, isn’t it kind of nice to have the canaille to despise? Especially since, as I have often noted, the primary point of any purity culture is not to achieve specific social or political or moral goals, but to enforce ritual gestures that clearly distinguish those Inside from those Outside. Distinctions for the sake of tribalism simpliciter, not in service to any perceived good.

Thus Freddie deBoer’s recent post on definitional collapse:

Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything. Every last set of orienting principles in politics is being dissolved in the acid bath of culture war, before our very eyes. I am telling you: never in my lifetime have political terms meant less. You can easily imagine a world where vaccine skepticism was left-coded — indeed, in the Trump years it was! — but in this particular reality your thoughts on vaccines overrule your feelings about the means of production. That condition is the product of pure contingency, chance; there is no a priori reason the left-of-center would treat vaccination status as a definitional landmark. But right now that is what yelling people yell about, and there is no ideology anymore, no ideas, only Yooks and Zooks.

In other words there is a vacuum of meaning, in our politics, and the really scary question is what will fill it.

What will happen if we get a genuine strongman, of the Right or the Left — that is, a politician shrewd and competent enough to stimulate and direct the forces of tribalism, and to put the government in service to those forces? (Trump sort of wanted to do this but wasn’t smart or focused enough.) We may ultimately be grateful for social media as an outlet for both ressentiment and bullying — people absorbed by fighting online may not have the time or energy for meaningful political action — but if a strongman ever takes over this country, I, like Freddie, doubt that more than a tiny minority of people will be capable of meaningful (as opposed to merely symbolic) resistance.

William Davies: 

Before March 2020, I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of ‘guided reading’. My daughter (aged eight during the school closures that year) was sometimes required to read the same short passage five days in a row and to perform different tasks in relation to it. Presumably the idea was for her to learn how specific sentence constructions work, in the hope that she would be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere – but the invitation to write autonomously, beyond a sentence or two, never arrived. It wasn’t merely the emphasis on obscure grammatical concepts that worried me, but the treatment of language in wholly syntactical terms, with the aim of distinguishing correct from incorrect usage. This is the way a computer treats language, as a set of symbols that generates commands to be executed, and which either succeeds or fails in that task.

This vision of language as code may already have been a significant feature of the curriculum, but it appears to have been exacerbated by the switch to online teaching. In a journal article from August 2020, ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’, John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. 

Almist every structural element of Western education, on all levels, militates against humane learning. 

Martha C. Nussbaum:

Behind these biases lies a more general failing, which the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial”: the denial that we are animals of a certain type (the anthropoid type), and the tendency to imagine ourselves, instead, as pure spirits, “barely connected to biology.” This mistaken way of thinking has a long history in most human cultures; it remains stubbornly lodged in people’s psyches even when they think they are examining the evidence fairly. Anthropodenial has led, until recently, to a reluctance to credit research findings that show that animals use tools, solve problems, communicate through complex systems, interact socially with intricate forms of organization, and even have emotions such as fear, grief, and envy. (This is a bait-and-switch: emotions have long been denigrated on the grounds that they are not pure spirit, and yet humans also want to claim a monopoly on what they despise.)

A fascinating and provocative essay on several levels.