Alan Jacobs

The issue of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist reminded me of something he wrote several years ago that it’s always useful to remember: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.

The phrase “long march through the institutions” is often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but in fact it was coined in the 1960s, by a German Communist named Rudi Dutschke. But the misattribution is understandable, because it’s a very Gramscian point.

When Gramsci coined the term hegemony, he did not mean mere “domination,” which is how the term is often used today. When poorly informed people talk about “American hegemony” they mean American military power; when more knowledgeable people use that phrase, they mean it in a Gramscian sense: A military/political power that is immeasurably strengthened by cultural dominance. Hegemony arises from the control of forces far greater than those of the state. “In the West,” wrote Gramsci, “there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”

Gramsci’s purpose in thus describing the situation was to explain that a frontal military attack on the existing order by revolutionary forces was unlikely to succeed because of the strength of the structures of civil society. A direct attack, a “war of movement,” could only be successful if it were preceded by a patient remaking of civil society, a “war of position.” Thus the need for what Dutschke called a “long march through the institutions.”

You sometimes hear Dutschke’s phrase from conservative commentators frustrated by the success of the left in making just such a march through American civil society, through the media and the arts and the universities. They are correct that this has happened, but they rarely draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Instead of imitating the patience and persistence of the leftist marchers, they long for a strongman, a Trump or an Orban, to relieve them of the responsibility for reshaping civil society. If reshaping those institutions seems hard, then why not dream of someone powerful enough to blow them up and start over? Dreams of an omnicompetent strongman are the natural refuge of people too lazy and feckless to begin, much less complete, a long march.

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action — such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism — these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today. 

— W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941) 

Adam Roberts:

I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms. And, as a regular user I know that, more often than you might think, a tweet does hit the sweet spot that Lockwood captures so well in her Part 1: a tweet that is funny, or clever, or thought-provoking, or poignardesque. But most of Twitter, the vast majority, is drivel. Chaff. Irritable gestures, smugnesses, narcissisms, randomness, phatic fumbles of the finger on the iPhone typepad. But still all aphorisms. The form of the website mandates that. Which gives us a huge unspooling aphoristic megatext that is neither pedagogically worthwhile, metaphysically tantalising nor even deconstructivistically labyrinthine. That is, rather, just banal. Banal on an epic scale. A huge ongoing drama in which the aphorism has become the main vehicle for the radical, collective banalism of life today. Perhaps the reason ‘we’ (for certain metrics of ‘we’) are so addicted to Twitter is precisely because it satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality rather than an aphorism of profundity; an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses, that glues us together in our shared pettiness.

George MacDonald, “The Voice of Job”:

In the confusion of Job’s thoughts — how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked? — while he was not yet able to generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might be inflicting or allowing the torture — that such suffering as his was granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect — I can well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God’s righteousness, and the next cried aloud, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,’ there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God.

Our social science may make us very wise or clever as regards the means for any objectives we might choose. It admits being unable to help us in discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate, between just and unjust, objectives. Such a science is instrumental and nothing but instrumental: it is born to be the handmaid of any powers or any interests that be. What Machiavelli did apparently, our social science would actually do if it did not prefer — only God knows why — generous liberalism to consistency: namely, to give advice with equal competence and alacrity to tyrants as well as to free peoples. According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e., regarding their soundness or unsoundness; our ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and hence blind preferences. We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues — retail sanity and wholesale madness. 

— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953)

Since 2009, I’ve been keeping my bookmarks online in service called Pinboard. It’s a service that displays your bookmarks — with tags and text excerpts, both very important for me — in a simple and readable form. Obviously I wouldn’t have used it for so long if I didn’t like it, but two things have consistently bothered me. One is that it has never had a responsive design: though some gestures in that direction have been made recently, if you want to look at your bookmarks in a mobile device your best option is to manually add the letter “m” and a period before the URL. The other says more about me than about Pinboard: I bookmark too many pages. Way too many pages. The result has been that I forget almost everything that I have there, including the things that I really want to remember. Yes, search is available, but when faced with a wilderness of bookmarks it can be difficult, for me anyway, even to understand what to search for.

Nevertheless, when, a few months ago, the owner of Pinboard asked longtime users to make a contribution to the ongoing maintenance of the site, I agreed to do so. After all, I had paid once, twelve years ago, and had been using the site ever since. It seemed a reasonable request. But then, very soon afterward, I started having problems with the site and wrote to ask for assistance. Those emails have not been answered. I have to say, it’s just a little bit annoying to have tech support fall silent right after you give the company money, but this is the world we live in. Still, despite my stoic resignation, it struck me that this was an opportunity for me to rethink my bookmarking practices. After all, as Manton Reece reminds us, “The only web site that you can trust to last and have your interests at heart is the web site with your name on it.” Pinboard is on the open web but it could still disappear today and I would have no recourse.

So here’s my plan: I will bookmark-with-excerpts less often, but when it happens it’ll happen here on blog.ayjay.org, where I already have a tagging system in place. After all, I am equally interested in what I say and what others say on any given topic; and comparing my thoughts with theirs is a useful exercise.

A new semester starts today, so I won’t be doing as much blogging blogging as I did over the summer. But this site may be even more active, just in a quotey sort of way. Caveat lector.

Finally: I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter — a new issue went out this morning.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“560”] lithograph from “High Street” (1938)[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_40577” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”] Dangerous Work at Low Tide (1940) © The Estate of Eric Ravilious. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York - DACS, London[/caption]