Alan Jacobs

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on his Substack:

Clearly, [Andrew Wiggins is] afraid that the vaccine will have some long-term consequences, even though there is no evidence of it and plenty of experts who don’t believe that is a serious danger. You know who are struggling right now with long-term health problems? People who got COVID-19. The virus can damage the lungs, heart, and brain, increasing the risk of long-term health problems that can last for years.

As I’ve asked before, what specific right is he fighting for? The right to do whatever you want with your body doesn’t exist in pretty much any civilized society because we recognize that those who behave recklessly and irresponsibly can harm others. You do own your body — unless a deadly virus turns that body into a plague delivery system that can kill hundreds of thousands. Today, while Andrew Wiggins was gathering his generational wealth, 2,036 people died of COVID-19 and 71,905 new cases were confirmed. Of these deaths and new cases, 97 percent of them were unvaccinated. Tomorrow and the day after and the day after, more will die and others will face long-term health problems. He could help prevent that. He chose to use his body not to. 

As he says in another issue, 

I think of the situation like those old fire brigades when people stood in a line passing buckets of water to save their neighbor’s house from burning to the ground. Maybe some people were afraid to join the line. But when the town leaders joined in, it encouraged others to do their duty. Today’s celebrities and athletes are like those town leaders. You either join the line to save your neighbor’s home, or you stand by and let it burn because you don’t owe them anything.

I had been very much looking forward to Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Gospels, but now that I know that it features such sentences as 

• “Then he ordered them to have all the people recline in communal cohorts that abutted on the verdant turf. So they reclined by fifties and hundreds, all lined up as in garden allotments.”
• “Happy are the destitute in the life-breath because theirs is the kingdom of the skies.” 
• “But he has it coming, that specimen of mankind through whom the son of mankind is handed over.”

— well, maybe not so much. I understand and in a way approve of the desire to make the character of the Greek visible to the Greekless reader, but when a translation deviates that far from standard English vocabulary and syntax, then I think that the curious reader is better off with an interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Such a text can be forbidding at first, but after a while it becomes a wonderful gift to the person who has no Greek — and (this is what happened to me) it can greatly stimulate the desire to learn Greek. My koine Greek isn’t good, but it’s no longer contemptible, and it’s getting better; and I owe that largely to the time I spent, starting many years ago, in my interlinear New Testament. 

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey and her co-author Jeffrey Polet have written an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Indoctrination Sessions Have No Place in the Academy.” The heart of the essay is, I think, these paragraphs: 

True, many people also understand the university as a place where social justice should be learned and practiced, assuming that we agree on what social justice is and what it requires. But a simple thought experiment highlights the problem with this view. Can we imagine other institutions whose intrinsic purposes are to promote social justice? Of course we can. Hundreds or even thousands of such institutions exist: think tanks, businesses, social clubs, Facebook groups, and nonprofits of all sorts.

Can we imagine, by contrast, other institutions where the free exchange of ideas is valued and promoted as an end in itself? Certainly many other institutions — journals, publishing houses, public-interest groups, advocacy groups, and foundations — engage in the “ideas business.” But these operate on the basis of largely predetermined agendas and shared values. They do not tend to be interested in freewheeling conversation or debate about first principles. A foundation that exists to promote religious liberty, for example, will likely not be enthusiastic about questioning the legitimacy or importance of religious liberty itself.

Only a university invites the contestation of ideas in a ceaseless effort to get at the truth. Free inquiry is, therefore, intrinsic to universities — extrinsic to other organizations. Social-justice efforts can and do take place at universities, of course, but universities could exist without them and still retain their fundamental character. Without the free contestation of ideas, universities would lose their central animating purpose, their raison d’être. 

I think this point — a very MacIntyrean point about the goods intrinsic to a given practice — is correct. “Trainings” or “training modules” that remove disagreement and even mere inquiry from the environment are intrinsically anti-intellectual and anti-academic. The pervasiveness of such “trainings” — I can’t use that silly word without scare-quotes — raises many potential questions, but the one I want to ask today is simply: Why do universities do this kind of thing? 

Here are my answers: 

First, academia is a world that is not just strongly left-leaning but also profoundly sensitive to media attention, and the media have agreed that One Must Do Something about social justice (vaguely but recognizably defined) — so a university can create these online click-through slide-shows and say See? That’s Something. 

But why that particular Something? In the American university, the predecessor to these Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Justice endeavors was the need to educate faculty and staff in the legal implications of Title IX. That was especially important at institutions (e.g. the one I work for) with ugly histories in these matters. So online click-through slide shows were made to train us — the word is quite appropriate in this context — in the nuances of Title IX law. And then when the next big problem rolled up … well, why not do the same kind of thing? 

And here comes what I believe to be a vital but neglected point: Universities don’t usually create their own training modules — they buy products from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And those companies want to save money by reusing their old code. So they extract the content of their Title IX courses and simply stuff new content into the existing frameworks. Easy-peasy. And the upper-level administrators of the university, who don’t want to spend any more money on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged monster they’ve been handed. 

But that creates a big problem: the kind of structure needed to communicate to people the contours of a law and the expectations generated by that law is not the kind of structure needed to explore the moral development of a community. It’s just not; it can’t be. As Corey and Polet write, “When the training involves ‘tests,’ the tests usually have only one right answer. The ‘correct’ button must be clicked before one can ‘successfully complete’ the training.” Inquiry and reflection are prohibited by the code. 

All of which leads me to one final point. The re-use of code designed to elucidate law in the very different context of communal values introduces ambiguities — ambiguities that actually might be useful to administrators of a certain cast of mind. 

Imagine that you’re working through a module on Title IX. You’re presented with a scenario in which you’re asked to choose among several possible actions. You click on one option and are told that that option could in fact land you (and by extension your university) in very hot water. You are told to go back and pick another one. The inflexibility of the code exhibits what we literary scholars like to call “imitative form”: it imitates the non-negotiability of the law. 

Now imagine that you’re working through a social-justice module. You’re presented with a scenario in which you are asked to respond to someone’s complaint they they are the victim of an injustice. You click on one option and are told that it’s wrong. But wait a minute, you say to yourself, I don’t think it’s wrong — I think the one you tell me is correct would not in fact contribute to a more just community. But there’s no way for you to say that. There’s nothing to do but choose the answer you’re told is correct. 

This is an experience that might lead you to certain questions about your responsibilities as an employee of your university. Do you have to do what the module tells you is correct? Would you be punished if you failed to — maybe even fired? What are the consequences of dissent? What might be the consequences even of asking questions? Nothing in the module itself, or in the university’s presentation of it, addresses these matters. You’re just told: Do as we say. 

But you keep thinking about it. One possibility is that the administration is just hoping that everyone will comply with the demand, because then they can say to the world, See? We’re doing Something. It might be that disciplining recalcitrant employees is more than they want to deal with, since any employee so disciplined could take legal action the outcome of which would be uncertain. But they don’t want to say that. They don’t want to admit that there will be no consequences for the disobedient, because that would reduce compliance. But, heck, maybe they don’t even care about compliance, they just want to be able to point to the creation and distribution of the “training” as evidence that they’re supportive of the current imperatives. 

Maybe. But, you reflect, the ambiguity is susceptible to a less consoling interpretation. It’s possible that the administration wants you to get this message: Nice tenured position you got there. Shame if something happened to it. 

David French:

We cannot be empathetic only to our allies. We cannot allow fear of law enforcement excess to deprive fellow citizens of the protection they need. And we have to recognize both that threats and harassment are always wrong and that in our present moment they’re especially dangerous. Our nation is playing with fire. It’s imperative that it stop now, or the angry and the cruel will ignite a blaze that we cannot contain.

The whole post is good and important. Always remember: there are people out there — the professional media and social media are dominated by them — who want us to hate one another, who make bank when we hate one another. Flee those people as you would flee the plague, because they are a plague. Don’t threaten them; don’t attack them; just get away from them. Don’t feed their fire with the oxygen of your attention, or else, as David says, we’re not gonna be able to extinguish those flames. 

The Greenwald has a point about the current anti-Facebook energy:

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth.

In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the factory in which the Tramp works in the opening scenes is controlled by a boss whose image appears in certain strategic places in order to issue commands:

— and even to order back to work employees who sneak into the toilet for a quick smoke:

Hey Charlie, read any Jeremy Bentham lately?

In this film industrial capitalism and the state work hand in glove, and they work by the manipulation and display of images. The boss’s image (ubiquitous and available in any size necessary) is a primary instrument of control; images of workers, conversely, are used to control them. Paulette Goddard’s gamine gets a reputable job as a dancer, but it’s her mug-shot image that allows the police to track her down and arrest her:

Note that what she’s wanted for is, primarily, vagrancy: being “without visible means of support.” See, relatedly, this essay of mine on passports, passport photos, and the technologies by which states and their allies in the corporate world make us legible and therefore controllable. (A good deal of the movie takes place in factories and jails — remarkably similar environments, though the Tramp strongly prefers jail.)

To work, this movie suggests, is to subject oneself to panoptic surveillance and to ceaseless state and corporate control. By the movie’s end the gamine is, though better dressed and more elegantly coiffed as a result of her brief employment, close to despair over the inescapability of the system:

But if there’s one thing the Tramp knows it’s … well, how to be a tramp. How to survive, however frugally, off the grid, out of the System, beyond the panopticon’s lines of sight — illegibly.

So off they go. After twenty years of dominating the screen, Chaplin’s Tramp says goodbye to us all. And this final view of him is the only time that he clearly takes his wandering way with a companion.

David Lowery's The Green Knight is a wonderful movie, but it shouldn't be thought of as an adaptation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In saying that I am not criticizing it: it's a mistake to expect a movie that claims to be an adaptation of a novel or some other kind of written text to actually be an adaptation. It almost never is; it's often better to think of film adaptations as riffs on the originals. But Lowery's The Green Knight is not a riff on the poem so much as a photographic negative of it. 

Lowery's Round Table is a foreboding place in a cavernous dark hall — something like a brugh; Arthur’s court in the poem is a bright and airy environment of festivity and ease, less Heorot and more Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry: 

The Gawain of the poem is the most accomplished and most fastidiously elegant member of that smart set, precisely the opposite of Lowery's Gawain, who is callow, self-indulgent, uncertain about his direction in life – basically a caricature of a millennial. Given the contrasting initial positions of the poem's protagonist and the movie's protagonist, their stories will necessarily trace very different arcs.

I think the arc followed by the movie is consistently interesting, and well presented. (Also, Dev Patel is fantastic.) The movie is visually glorious, often in ways that precisely and movingly illuminate Gawain's psychological state. However, it's the sort of story that we, today, are pretty comfortable with: a boy-man in failure-to-launch mode who finally finds something he believes in enough to bring him to the point of launching. The poem tells a very different kind of tale, one that we aren't nearly as interested in hearing: it's a story about how even the most celebrated and admired person in a particular society can be afflicted by the vices endemic to that society as a whole. And should that person ever come to the point of recognizing his own frailties and failings, which are to an even greater degree the frailties and failings of his society, then you can be sure that the society will make a point of not learning any of the lessons that he has so painfully learned. That's what the poem shows us. 

It's hard for me to imagine a film director today choosing to tell that one, though you might get a glimpse of what it would look like if you imagine an alternate final scene of The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg, instead of saying “I’m not a bad guy,” says, mournfully, “I’ve come to understand that I am a very bad guy” — only to have his confession laughed off.