Alan Jacobs

Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint? No. 

Was the Life of Dorothy Day Too Catholic for the New York Times to Grasp? Yes. 

I want to write here about something I don’t understand.

My friend Robin Sloan alerted me to this post by a passionate advocate of crypto/blockchain’s power to … well, something awesome, I guess, though no matter how many times I read posts like this I can never tell exactly what is supposed to happen.

Now, that may be because writers like this fellow, Jacob, are writing for insiders – people who already know the details, who already have clear use cases in mind, who are already excited about the future of blockchain and crypto and web3. But when I ask knowledgable people about these matters, I always get pointed to posts just like this one, which are, you know, right there on the open web for all to see. So I think questions like the ones I am raising here are legitimate to raise.

So: Jacob is particularly excited about what he calls “hyperstructures”: “Crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries.”

Wow, for free! But hang on a sec … Later, expanding on that definition, he says, “there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.” So when he says that hyperstructures can run for free, what he actually means is that no additional cost is imposed over and above the cost of making transactions, which is something that fluctuates, fairly dramatically, according to supply and demand.

But they run forever! Well … let’s look at the expanded definition of “forever”: “It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.” Okay, so how long is that? “Hyperstructures … can continuously function without a maintainer or operator, and they can run for as long as the underlying blockchain is running — which can be at the very least a decade.”

So “forever” means “at least a decade” and “free” means “whatever the gas cost is when you make an exchange of any kind.”

See, this – along with the seemingly complete inability of anyone involved with this stuff to tell me one thing I could use it for – is what makes people call crypto a big con game. Maybe it isn’t! But I can’t find any of the advocates for it who can, or are willing, to explain why it’s not. 

Stefan Collini’s review of Claire Tomalin’s book on H. G. Wells is very strange indeed. For one thing, he only mentions the book under review in the final paragraph. But more odd still is the refrain with which he begins and ends the review: “It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about,” he says in the first sentence; and then he concludes, “Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.” 

I can easily understand a reader today not thinking highly of Wells’s fiction. But if you can read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica and fail “to see what all the fuss was about,” I don’t know what to say to you. Wells’s fiction touches on most of the major themes and concerns of British culture in his lifetime, and a failure to grasp this is a failure of readerly and historical imagination. You don’t have to think him a great writer to see that he was a ceaselessly dynamic and provocative figure, even if his ever-more-pompous predictions, warnings, and commandments ended up making him look somewhat ludicrous (as in the caricature of him as Horace Jules in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). 

I haven’t read Tomalin’s book — devoted just to the first half of Welles’s career — but I have read Adam Roberts’s “literary life” of Wells, which masterfully puts all of Wells’s voluminous writing into proper context. I’ll leave you with a passage from that book: 

As the world has grown bigger and more complex, as well as more complexly interconnected, a kind of socio-technological sublime increasingly threatens to overwhelm our individual subjectivities like Hokusai’s great wave. Steampunk is, inter alia, an attempt to dress technological advance in the habiliments of a more elegant and refined age, and Wells is one of the ways of focalising that. More, this cultural representation — the boyishly mobile and inventive Wells, the Wells of diverting scientific romances and sexual liberation — speaks, in part, to an ill-focused desire to assert ‘the little man’ (less so ‘the little woman’) in the teeth of this intimidating vastness. There is enough of Wells actual life-trajectory in this to give it bite: the physically small individual from small-scale roots who created himself as a world-class writer and thinker. He takes his place alongside other pervasive cultural myths of the small-man who effects great things in a baffling and alarming world — heroic hobbits, magical schoolboys: contemporary iterations of a fundamentally infantalising legendarium of underdoggishness. One need not deprecate these contemporary myths, any more than one need look down on Wells’s extraordinary achievements in the field of science fiction, to think this sells his larger achievement short. If there has been one through-line in the present work it has been that Wells was a literary artist of immense, underappreciated talent, a writer whose literary genius, whilst it must of course be central to a literary biography, deserves to be resurrected in a much broader cultural context too. 

I was a teenager working in a bookstore when this book, with this cover, came out. One day a lady came up to me and asked, “Do you have Billy Graham’s book Angels Angels Angels Angels Angels?”

Newsletter: Sir Shi and the Wanderer

Can’t stop, won’t stop.

This post on being defenseless has nagged at my mind, reminding me of something, and I finally made a couple of connections.

1. My brilliant friend Sara Hendren’s Substack newsletter is called “undefended / undefeated” – and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Being undefended in this world, putting yourself at risk, but not being defeated by that risk. You can’t repair the world without exposing yourself to pushback, blowback, attack. But the world must be repaired.
2. Simon Tugwell, in his Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality, says that Franciscan spirituality is “a way of radical unprotectedness.” What a phrase. What a terrifying and exciting ideal. 

Gary Saul Morson:

How did Dostoevsky anticipate what would happen? For one thing, he took the beliefs of intellectuals seriously. It is one thing to have ideas, it is quite another to define oneself and others by them (and that is what the Russian word intelligent — not exactly “intellectual” — suggests). Dostoevsky asked: what would people who defined themselves by ideology do if given the absolute power a revolution confers? Solzhenitsyn, who experienced the answer, asked a related question: why were previous evildoers, like those in Dickens and Shakespeare, content with a few murders whereas Bolsheviks executed millions? “The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,” Solzhenitsyn explains, “because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what … gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” The sort of ideology Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn had in mind displays two essential attributes: absolute (“scientific”) certainty and the division of people into purely good and purely evil. One does not break bread with someone from another political party. Once one thinks this way — as ever more people do — literally anything is possible to those commanding sufficient power.