Alan Jacobs

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.

I have many, many thoughts about Morgenbesser. I have often thought of writing little vignettes about him doing mundane things in New York City: “Morgenbesser Eats a Pastrami on Rye,” “Morgenbesser Takes In a Knicks Game,” “Morgenbesser Observes the World Trade Center.” Each vignette would be an opportunity for one of those absurd-but-maybe-also-profound Morgenbesserisms.

One of my favorites among the real ones: Someone told Morgenbesser that the most essential philosophical question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He replied, “So what if there was nothing? You’d still complain!”

Or is that a real one? You can’t tell, so many stories seem to attach to him. But it seems to me that his primary achievement in life was to perform Morgenbesser in such a way that he became a magnetic attractor of a certain kind of story. And in that sense, even the stories that aren’t true are true. They embody Morgenbesser whether they “actually” happened to him or not.

I keep thinking about this by Rivka Galchen in the LRB:

Berman is keen to dispel the notion that those who refuse vaccines suffer from an information deficit problem. Anti-vaxxers collect evidence in order to disrupt or conceal the truth, not to uncover it. For those who are sceptical of vaccination without necessarily being anti-vaxxers, the most effective public health strategy remains unclear. Berman argues that ‘reactive’ responses, such as mockery, are counterproductive. He cites a series of studies that demonstrate what we might feel instinctively: showing people information that contradicts their beliefs rarely makes them change their minds, and often hardens their convictions. Factsheets like those used by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tend not to work, both because they are less powerful than personal narratives and because the other side produces misleading literature in the same format. Online bots and trolls are a source of both pro and anti-vax messages, in more or less equal amounts: the amount of contradictory and unstable information is as much, if not more, of a problem as the information itself.

Maybe some problems can’t be solved. If every imaginable way to persuade people to change their views on a subject only serves to confirm them in those views … what then? My suggestions: 

• Don’t invest much hope in changing minds; 
• But don’t absolutely write anyone off; 
• Be patient and gentle; 
• Vary your methods and arguments; 
• And above all, focus 95% of your energy on younger generations — on people who haven’t yet screwed up their lives by being Extremely Online — in hopes of helping them to have better habits than their benighted elders.