I stay away from almost all current kerfuffles, so maybe that’s what I was struck by a couple of things from this report by Kaitlyn Tiffany: (a) that to many Americans it now seems normal for people to devote hundreds of hours of their lives to listening to one podcast solely in order to find something, anything that can be used to shame the podcaster; and (b) that the people who behave in that way think their actions are politically meaningful.
A fantastic point by my friend Noah Millman in response to the question of whether Pulp Fiction could be made today:
The answer is of course not. You couldn’t make Pulp Fiction today. You also couldn’t make Dumbo, a film I adore far more. But you also couldn’t make Blazing Saddles. Indeed, you couldn’t make The Wizard of Oz or The Philadelphia Story or Ghostbusters or whatever other movies you love from the past, because they are rooted in the past. The reason not to bowdlerize these films is precisely that we can’t make them anymore. To “fix” them we’d have to be able to make them from scratch, as wonderfully as they did then, and we can’t. The best proof is that we do keep trying to remake them, and the results are usually terrible.
Read on for further wisdom from Noah.
A wise and useful reflection by Gabrielle Bauer on the "precautionary principle":
Two years into this pandemic, it is high time we learn from our mistakes. We must ask ourselves, at every step, whether our response matches or exceeds the threat. We must have full permission to discuss costs and benefits out loud, without fear of censure. When we invoke the precautionary principle, it must be with discretion and deliberation — with great caution, as it were.
An intractable problem whose intractability needs to be faced: the taking of extreme precautions in one sphere (e.g. infectious disease) will sometimes require a manifest failure of precaution in other spheres (e.g. mental health). The immediate prospect of physical danger generates intellectual myopia.
For good or ill, I have spent more time reading and writing poetry than doing anything else in my roughly three score and ten years of life. My poets, the poets I have grown to love, have become my second family, the family I chose; they constitute the better part of who I am. Diverse as this family is in language, gender, and race, it is still primarily (though not exclusively) a family of white Christian men and white pagan men. Some of them did terrible things off the page; some of them were fascists or fascist sympathizers. Some were spies. Some of them abused or neglected wives and children; some were mentally unstable. Many of them were drunks, perverts, drug addicts, sex addicts, sadists, brownnosers, backbiters. Some, furthermore, were colonialists, slave traders, slave owners. Some were themselves enslaved, or had once been slaves. Most were certainly anti-Semitic. Off the page, I probably would have detested them, and I have no doubt they would have detested me. But on the page they are guardian angels, beloved spirits, the most intimate and generous of guides. What they at their best have taught me is that the gold of the work is not reducible to the shit of the life. And that even the “wokest” of minds can never entirely escape the moral limits of their time and place. The miracle is what still manages to reach us, move us, expanding our understanding of what it means to be alive through someone else’s lived experience, not just despite our differences, but maybe, too, because of them.
Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer, for I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings, and is thus also my advocate, my ‘Paraclete.’ In light of the hour of judgment, the grace of being a Christian becomes all the more clear to me. It grants me knowledge, and indeed friendship, with the judge of my life, and thus allows me to pass confidently through the dark door of death. In this regard, I am constantly reminded of what John tells us at the beginning of the Apocalypse: he sees the Son of Man in all his grandeur and falls at his feet as though dead. Yet he, placing his right hand on him, says to him: “Do not be afraid! It is I …” (cf. Rev 1:12-17).
public and private
It is from community life that we draw the strength for discipleship and courage to face the inevitable opposition. In discipleship we find our brothers and sisters of the communal life. The Bruderhof community proves that. I ask myself what the state churches, still trying to lead a Christian life, can learn from such consistently Christian communities. First of all, we have to lay down our old prejudices and heretic-hunting. The closely related Mennonite and Hutterite groups have never – neither in the past nor today – been fanatic enthusiasts or narrow sectarians, but genuine Christian communities. True, their existence represents a criticism of the life of Christians in the established churches. The answer will be to begin learning from them. So I have been asking myself, how can the established institutional church become a living, communal church? How can our church parishes become communities of faith and of life? I believe that this is the way into the future, and I see more and more people going in that direction. We are not looking for the self-righteous Christian sect that despises the world, but for the open church of the coming kingdom of God. This church is open and welcomes everyone, like the Bruderhof does. It is open to the poor, the handicapped, and the rejected, who find a refuge and new hope there because they find Jesus.
I believe this with my whole heart, and I wish I were better at living up to, or living into, this vision. I don’t have social anxiety as such, but being in any group larger than four people is enormously stressful for me, and that stress has become more pronounced during covidtide, for reasons I can speculate about but do not fully understand. I have often thought that I would rejoice in the opportunity to go to church — if I could make myself invisible. Many wise people have said that there is no vision in the New Testament or the early church of a private Christian faith, but, since I cannot make myself invisible, oh how I wish there were.
In a reasonable world, most people would be able to distinguish
- misinformation
- minority opinions
- the views of my political enemies
attentional norms
Me at the Hog Blog on “attentional norms” and Zoom:
It has been interesting to watch over the last two pandemic years as the norms associated with videoconferencing have coalesced. My experience strongly suggests that the attention level expected on Zoom (and other videoconferencing platforms) is quite remarkably low — medieval-churchgoing low. Obviously, there will be exceptions to this norm — no one feels free to look away when the Boss is giving a speech — but I can’t remember the last time I was on a Zoom call in which participants were not regularly cutting their video and audio, or just their audio, to talk to people in the room with them. Or they just walk out of frame for a few minutes. Or they type away furiously on Slack or email or WhatsApp or iMessage. And no one who does this acts inappropriately, because such fidgeting and alternations of attention are permitted by the norms that have emerged.
It’s fascinating to me how these norms emerge. No one chooses them, they just happen; and when a lot of people are using one technology, they happen quickly. As I say in the essay, they also change, but they seem to change a lot more slowly than they emerge; and there’s nothing any one person can do to change them. When you’re a teacher, as I am, you have to be very observant about those attentional norms and choose the technologies that match your pedagogical purposes. Because you’re wasting your time if you try to enforce norms that are different than those people have absorbed from everyone else.
UPDATE: Everything I try to say here is said better by Rands: “Do you want to know why you’re fatigued at the end of a long day of video conferences? It’s because your brain has been straining to collect essential information that is no longer there.”
Gorgeous day on campus today.
