Alan Jacobs

Every department of Knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this, that I am glad at not having given away my medical Books, which I shall again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards.... An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people — it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery: a thing I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your Letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this — in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all the horror of a bare shouldered creature — in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro' the same air and space without fear. 

— Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818), making a very similar case to the one I make in Breaking Bread with the Dead. Pynchon: “Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth,” and in this case intellectual bandwidth — the breadth of understanding that comes from having some understanding of very different disciplines. Keats loved poetry as much as anyone ever has, maybe more than anyone ever has, but he didn’t want to forget his medical training. The more knowledge he has the less susceptible he is to the “heat and fever” of the moment. 

Wes at his first Cubs game, 30 June 1999. He’s singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” along with Harry Caray, and it looks like we’ve just gotten to “three strikes you’re out.” A few minutes later Sammy Sosa hit a home run to win the game for the Cubs. We were sitting behind home plate, right under the catwalk that leads to the broadcast booth, and the guest that Harry interviewed in the booth that day had already come out onto the catwalk and waved to us: Bill Clinton. All in all, a pretty eventful first Cubs game for Wes.

J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith with their grandson Simon, at their home on Sandfield Road, Oxford, 1966. Photo from the Oxford Mail.

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Tolkien was not an easy man to be friends with, as he himself knew. But relatively late in his life he became friends with the poet W. H. Auden, thanks to Auden’s reviews in the New York Times of the first and third volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Those came at a moment when the success of LOTR was by no means assured, and indeed those who hated the book — most notably Edmund Wilson — made a point of including Auden in their denigration. There were moments of tension later on, most notably when a London newspaper quoted Auden as having said that the decor of Tolkien’s home was “hideous”; and Tolkien — so it seems to me anyway — was never fully at ease with non-Catholics. But in the main the friendship remained firm, if rather distant, and was a source of pleasure and comfort to both men. When some medievalists produced a festschrift for Tolkien on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Auden contributed “A Short Ode to a Philologist”; and when Auden received a sixtieth birthday festschrift in the journal Shenandoah, Tolkien offered a lovely tribute, “For W.H.A.,” in both Anglo-Saxon and modern English. 

You can read about their relationship in the biographies that Humphrey Carpenter wrote about each man, and also in Tolkien’s letters. But it seems to me that the relationship is interesting enough that it deserves some kind of artful presentation; perhaps one that portrays their friendship as more intimate than it really was. And I have always been haunted by the fact that, though Tolkien was fifteen years older than Auden, they died within a few weeks of each other: Tolkien in Bournemouth on September 2, 1973, and Auden in Vienna on September 29. 

So I wrote a short play about them. 

There I imagine a conversation between them — taking place probably in 1967, though don’t try to pin me down about that — a conversation based on things they actually said to each other, usually in letters, and things they said or wrote on matters of mutual interest. That is, Auden really did invent a parlor game called Purgatory Mates, and Tolkien really did say that Auden’s proposal to write a book about him was “an impertinence.” Auden’s final words in the play are based on an encounter he had with the young Jay Parini. And so on. So, the play is Based on True Events and Words, even though I seriously doubt that they ever would have had a face-to-face conversation like this. Auden had become by this point in his life too garrulous, and Tolkien too mumblingly reticent. (In both cases excessive alcohol consumption played a part.) So I had to make Auden more shortly-spoken than he was in real life, and Tolkien more articulate. 

Anyway, it’s probably really terrible, but I enjoyed writing it. It scratched an itch. 

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When it gets hot and dry the Lindheimer’s beeblossom seems to become very happy.

[I had here an Andrew Sullivan quote about the recent right-wing fascination with Viktor Orban and Hungary, but while I agree wholly with Andrew’s views, the matter deserves more than a quotation. I hope to spell out my thinking in more detail later.]  

Okay, I’m back. 

When I read the writings of the current enthusiasts for Viktor Orban, the first thing I note is how evasive they are. They won’t quite exonerate Orban. They admit that he’s “not perfect” — as though that’s a significant concession — but in each particular case his authoritarian decisions are either justified or dismissed as insignificant. Any sort of positive vision is hard to find. The evasiveness brings to mind the comfortable British Marxist in Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” who doesn’t dare say “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so” and so, instead, says, 

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement. 

Of course, Orban isn’t a mass murderer, only a would-be tyrant. But if you take that sentence and substitute “Orban” for “Soviet” and “Hungarian” for “Russian,” you have a neat summary of the characteristic rhetorical approach of the Orbanistas.  

Orwell famously says that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” but I don’t think insincerity is the problem with the Orbanistas. The problem is that critics keep wondering about policies and the Orbanistas don’t care about policies. What they care about is hating the right people. They get impatient if you point out to them Hungary’s poverty, or its exceptionally low level of religious observance, or its unfree press, or the high numbers of young Hungarians fleeing the country, not because they think those developments are good, but because they find them insignificant in comparison to the great virtue of effectual hatred. (Donald Trump’s problem, in this light, is simply the ineffectuality of his hatreds.) 

In a thoughtful essay, John Gray describes the work of Eugene Lyons, who wrote in Assignment in Utopia (1937) about the three major types of Western admirers of the Soviet experiment: 

1. Those who have a “professional” interest in being on good terms with the regime (Walter Duranty of the New York Times being the most famous of these); 
2. Those for whom association with the regime offers the opportunity to display their wit and intelligence, to épater le bourgeois; 
3. The “useful idiots,” who suffer from a kind of motivated blindness: according to Lyons, “they were deeply disturbed by the shattered economic and social orthodoxies in which they were raised; if they lost their compensating faith in Russia life would ­become too bleak to endure.” 

I think this is a useful taxonomy to apply to the Orbanistas also. There are clearly some in each camp. 

Brentford 2-0 Arsenal: A fair result, accurately reflecting the quality of the two sides and their management. 

We enjoy caricatures of our friends because we do not want to think of their changing, above all, of their dying; we enjoy caricatures of our enemies because we do not want to consider the possibility of their having a change of heart so that we would have to forgive them. 

— W. H. Auden 

As a follow-up to my recent post on climate change and the various means of addressing it, see this from the Economist:

Some form of geoengineering technology, therefore, would seem inevitable if the world has any hope of meeting the Paris targets.

Despite the uptick in interest, the technologies themselves are nowhere near ready. Resistance from some scientists and environmentalists has made research in the field very difficult. In March, for example, a project in Sweden that would have tested scientific equipment to be used in future experiments to release particles into the atmosphere had to be cancelled after protests from local environmental groups. The locals argued — as have others who oppose geoengineering — that the technology being tested would distract from the more important task of reducing carbon emissions.

That is a worthwhile argument. But preventing research on geoengineering has risks too. There are plenty of technical, ethical and environmental questions to answer about these technologies: do they work as intended at scale? If they do work, who should control them? What are the unintended side-effects of all this climate-tampering? If the technologies are not properly scrutinised and governments don’t agree on rules for their proper use, what’s to prevent a rogue actor (whether a country or a billionaire) from going it alone and doing something dangerous?

Geoengineering cannot (and should not) displace the urgent need to cut global carbon emissions. But in the long-term struggle against climate change, the world will need the best information and every useful tool it can invent.

The argument that the exploration and testing of geoengineering technologies should be stopped is not “a worthwhile argument.” It’s a dumb argument. We cannot afford to put all our eggs in the emissions-reduction basket, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to believe that the world’s governments will impose the necessary constraints. We have to have a Plan B, and also Plans C, D, E, and so on. It is tragically wrong for activists to allow their desire to punish us all for our bad choices, to force us all to confront and suffer for our reckless behavior, to overwhelm the need to stop warming by whatever means available. As the article rightly says. 

Climate activists often say — Kim Stanley Robinson effectively says this in The Ministry for the Future — that the struggle against climate change is a struggle against climate injustice, and you can’t disentangle those: fighting against climate change necessarily entails dismantling the system that produced it. There are many things one might say in response to this claim, but the most obvious and to my mind irrefutable one is simply this: When faced with an enormous problem you don’t know how to solve, it’s not a good move to chain it to another enormous problem you also don’t know how to solve.  

As someone with a great sympathy for anarchism — and indeed for the Mondragon-style anarcho-syndicalism that KSR often commends — I would certainly like to see transnational capitalism dismantled. It is my fervent hope that that happens, ideally through a peaceful process of subsidiarist devolution. But we don’t know how to do that, and even if we ever figure out how to do it, the process of devolution will be very long. (The idea that you can simply sow chaos and expect something better to emerge, somehow, from that is just childish.) In the meantime, if it’s possible for the current global capitalist order to develop technologies that will ameliorate climate change, then I think that would be a very good thing indeed. 

UPDATE: This additional piece from the Economist usefully suggests the difference between, on the one hand, reckless and overbold forms of geoengineering and, on the other, more limited and responsible forms. 

UPDATE 2: One more along these lines, from Todd Myers: “On The Dispatch Podcast last week, Sarah Isgur and Jonah Goldberg expressed the hope that a future Norman Borlaug would do for reducing CO2 emissions what the original Borlaug did to feed the world. There may be a climate Borlaug out there, but it is far more likely that climate change will be solved by a million Borlaugs — small innovators whose efforts add up to big changes. The cost of innovation has declined radically since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, and we are already seeing an explosion of new carbon-reducing technologies.” 

I’ve just read Ross Douthat’s forthcoming memoir The Deep Places and it is truly exceptional: a vividly narrated account of his disorienting spiral into chronic illness, and of his eventual recovery. (Not quite a complete recovery, I take it, but nearly so.) Ross manages a really remarkable thing here: to weave together his story of a body’s pain, a mind’s vacillations, and a spirit’s struggles with an account of how the medical establishment deals with, or simply refuses to deal with, conditions it does not understand — and, as if all that isn’t enough, an account of how, in response to the establishment’s failures, sufferers form communities that sometimes carry them to healing and at other times take them down long paths of confusion and illusion. That Ross can weave all this into a unity and even make the book a kind of page-turner — that’s something special.

Let me close by pointing out one more layer of meaning: Ross’s illness happened to him in an era of self-presentation through social media — an almost universal phenomenon, yes, but one that’s intensified for public figures like Ross. I’ll end with this passage from the book, in which Ross discusses meeting, during his various professional travels, a kind of hidden nation of sufferers, most of whom were rather older than him:

There was comfort there, of a sort: I was just living under a storm front that had rolled in a little early. But there was also a feeling of betrayal, because so little in my education had prepared me for this part of life — the part that was just endurance, just suffering, with all the normal compensations of embodiment withdrawn, a heavy ashfall blanketing the experience of food and drink and natural beauty. And precious little in the world where I still spent much of my increasingly strange life, the conjoined world of journalism and social media, seemed to offer any acknowledgment that life was actually like this for lots of people — meaning not just for the extraordinarily unlucky, the snakebit and lightning-struck, but all the people whose online and social selves were just performances, masks over some secret pain.

This is a follow-up to my recent post on not reading the Bible. There I quoted Heidegger on the “hermeneutic circle,” and while I think what is has to say is extremely important for every would-be reader of the Bible, his image can in certain respects be misleading or troubling — because to some anyway it suggests fruitlessness, not getting anywhere, a hamster running in its wheel. I don’t think that’s what Heidegger meant to convey, so let’s try a slightly different image that might capture the key point. 

“Prayer I” might be George Herbert’s most famous poem. Every phrase in it is worthy of reflection, but I want to focus on three words from the penultimate line: “the soul’s blood.” 

We don’t know precisely when “Prayer I” was written, but I suspect that it was after 1628, which is when William Harvey published his landmark work on the circulation of the blood, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. That is, I think that Herbert is elaborating an analogy: As blood is to the body, so prayer is to the soul. Prayer then is a circulation. I think we see something like this in the Bible, in which prayer is figured both as our knocking on God’s door (Luke 18) and God knocking on ours (Revelation 3): a back and forth that can be initiated by either party. God calls Abraham and Paul; Job and Jeremiah cry out to God. Call and response; question and answer. 

It’s in this sense that reading the Bible is, ideally, circular. 

(I’ll keep coming back to the issues I’ve raised, but probably in small reflections like this one. Attempting to piece together some thoughts, one fragment at a time.)