Alan Jacobs

Hello old friend

The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common today. It was also quite common in the 1930s. For instance, in 1937 the British House of Commons was debating whether or how to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of M.P.s insisted that it was necessary to choose between the Fascists and the Communists. But one Member of the House replied,

I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations…. It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself; and, having a strong feeling in regard to the preservation of individual rights as against Governments, and as I do not find in either of these two Spanish factions which are at war any satisfactory guarantee that the ideas which I personally care about, and to which I have been brought up in this House to attach some importance, would be preserved, I am not able to throw myself in this headlong fashion into the risk of having to fire cannon immediately on the one side or the other of this trouble…. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds. 

The Member who so refused to make that choice was Winston Churchill. When many thought that liberalism and democracy were unsustainable, were not long for this world, he stood up for liberalism and democracy anyway. That was the wise course then, and it’s the wise course today. 

It is not that the documentary hypothesis is necessarily wrong in substance; Genesis is clearly made up of a number of traditions which have been combined at different stages. But is it not the task of the critic to try and come to grips with the final form as we have it, and to give the final editor or reactor the benefit of the doubt, rather than to delve behind his work to what was there before? The inventors of the documentary hypothesis believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have I already decreed should be there.

— Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God (1988)

“This time the old mother has forgotten the old creature’s birthday, which if I am not mistaken falls on October 15.” — Nietzsche in a letter to his mother. My friend and colleague Rob Miner explains why Nietzsche loved birthdays. 

Leah Libresco Sargeant on an “illiberalism of the weak”: 

To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or our society to serve a totally independent, autonomous person [which is the person imagined by liberalism] who never has and never will exist. Repeating that lie will leave us bereft: first, of sympathy from our friends when our physical weakness breaks the implicit promise that no one can keep, and second, of hope, when our moral weakness should lead us, like the prodigal, to rush back into the arms of the Father who remains faithful. Our present politics can only be challenged by an illiberalism that cherishes the weak and centers its policies on their needs and dignity. 

This is a strong and vital word. But genuinely to hear it we will have to dethrone the two idols that almost everyone with a political opinion worships: My People and Winning. The goal of almost every political activist and pundit is the same: My people must win, and those who are not my people must lose. Do not be deceived by talk of the “common good,” because the often quite explicit message of the common-good conservatives is: My people are the ones who know what the common good is, and that common good can only be achieved if my people win. A politics of weakness and dependence, a politics of bearing one another’s burdens, can only begin when those two idols are slain. 

UPDATE: Rowan Williams, from a review of God: An Anatomy, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou: 

Stavrakopoulou … takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.

In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.

Arnold Kling:

If you use your economics, then no matter how complex the supply-chain problems might appear, they can be solved using the price system. The price system may or may not be able to call forth more supply, but it certainly can ration demand, and it can do so more efficiently than is being done at present. Everywhere the supply chain is “broken,” higher prices can ensure that scarce goods are allocated to the highest-priority uses.

Wherever you see buyers unable to find goods, you should ask why the rationing takes place by availability rather than by price. If the market were operating smoothly, the shelves would be fully stocked, but prices would be higher.

My hypothesis for why we observe price stickiness is that businesses fear consumer backlash. When the price is high, the consumer blames the business. If instead the product is not in the store, the consumer blames “the supply chain.” In fact, it should be the other way around—the business should be blamed for not raising prices to prevent a shortage, and the higher prices should in turn be blamed on higher costs in the supply chain.

There’s a lot of talk around here about Baylor’s being “an unambiguously Christian university.” I wonder how this fits in. 

Recently I've come across a number of pieces dismissing or critiquing the idea of “narrative” – the idea being that when you call something a narrative you're turning it into a subjective account that isn't subject to empirical verification, or external assessment of any kind. I suppose this critique arises from the increasingly common use over the past decade of phrases like “my truth” and “my story.” 

But maybe it's worth noting that for a long time the primary meaning of the word “narrative” was “faithful account” – that is, to call something a narrative is to proclaim that it tells the truth about something that happened. In the early modern period the word was primarily used in legal contexts; it meant what we might now call “the facts of the case.” 

That's why Frederick Douglas's autobiography is not called an autobiography but rather a narrative: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass’s point in so titling his autobiography wasn’t “This is my truth” but rather “This is what actually happened, so help me God.” Fiction writers who wanted to add an aura of verisimilitude to their stories would sometimes appropriate this usage, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. But this only worked because people generally understood the word “narrative” to mean “true account.” 

Am I a different person when I travel? Yes. A stressed and unhappy person.