Alan Jacobs

Michael Lind:

Today Americans live under two constitutions: the political constitution and the corporate constitution. The political constitution is functioning reasonably well. The corporate constitution, by comparison, is a lawless realm of out-of-control tyranny.

The American political constitution’s system of checks and balances is not perfect, but it has been vindicated during the four tempestuous years of the Trump presidency. Donald Trump lost power in a free and fair election. Numerous courts and state officials and his own vice president have rejected his claims that the election was illegally stolen. He has now been impeached a second time, and his violent supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 are being arrested and those who committed crimes against persons and property will receive due process under the law.

But if our political constitution is that of a flawed but functioning democracy, the same cannot be said of our corporate constitution. In our corporate constitution, giant oligopolistic firms that are essential to commerce, communications, and finance operate in many cases without any regulations other than those which they themselves make.

Justin E. H. Smith:

History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse — the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. Eventually, moreover, a thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences. 

Anyone who happens to know what my most recent book was about will not be surprised at how vigorously I nod my head at this. 

I obviously write about a good many things, but over the last decade my work has been largely devoted to a single overarching theme: what we attend to and what we fail to attend to. This started with the work on my old Text Patterns blog that fed into my 2011 book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and since then I have pursued the various connected issues and problems down several paths. My set of Theses for Disputation, “Attending to Technology,” is my most explicit articulation of these concerns, but even when I didn't seem to be thinking about these things I really was. Even my biography of the Book of Common Prayer was an attempt to understand the prayer book as an instrument for the focusing of the attention of wayward Christians on that to which they should primarily attend. As the BCP almost says, “We have attended to those things we should not have attended to, and we have not attended to those things which we should have attended to, and there is no health in us.” The relevance of these questions to How to Think will be obvious to anyone who has read it, but I could say the same about the two books that I published since then, The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread with the Dead. In each case I am concerned with the forces in our culture that inhibit enriching attentiveness, that enforce enervating distraction, that direct our minds always towards the frivolous or the malicious. (This is of course why I despise Twitter so intensely.) 

The Invitation and Repair project might be understood as circling within this orbit of thought, but it’s also an attempt to go beyond my earlier, more purely diagnostic, thinking and to begin to understand how to embed concrete practices of life in concrete institutional structures. My most recent essay in The New Atlantis is likewise an attempt to forge a new and more constructive direction for thinking about and addressing our culture-wide attentional dysfunction. I have been interested in Chinese thought — looking into each of the Three Ways but especially Taoism — because the Chinese intellectual/spiritual traditions have always striven to identify and defeat the enemies of proper attention. Even something like the I Ching, which is commonly thought of as a straightforward manual of divination, is always said by its most eloquent and insightful proponents to be — as I have said the Book of Common Prayer is — a device for directing the attention. The I Ching doesn't tell you what to do so much as tell you what you should be thinking about as you try to decide what to do – what your primary coordinates for judgment should be.

I've been intrigued by Chinese thought about these matters not because I think the Christian tradition, which I hold as my own, is deficient, though in fact I do believe that the Western church hasn’t been, well, sufficiently attentive to attention. Rather, I'm just trying to surprise myself. China Achebe used to say that he could write well about the traditional ways of the Igbo people because, while he observed them closely, they weren’t his ways, not when he was growing up. His Christian-convert father forbade him to consort with pagans, which just made pagans more interesting to him. He watched them more closely, and learned a lot from them, precisely because they were a step or two away from his ordinary beliefs and practices. 

And that’s the goal, right? — not to think about attention, which is like thinking about your flashlight instead of using it to find your way in the dark, but rather to see more clearly — and, ultimately, direct your mind and heart and spirit towards what can nourish you. Indeed that is the goal; gut sometimes you might be forced to notice that your flashlight is running out of batteries, or isn’t very strong even at its best, so maybe you should try a different one, or see if you have any fresh batteries? 

Such meta-reflection is dangerous, though. I find myself recalling Carlyle’s famous comment about talking with Coleridge: “He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out.” People who talk and write about “productivity” and even “attention” are like that, in a more mundane way. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to achieve ever-more-precise diagnoses of our attentional disorders; I don’t want to continue looking at the light, I want to look along it to see what it illuminates. 

1. The Christian Eriksen story, of course, continues to loom large. It was a beautiful moment when his Inter teammate, Belgium striker Romelo Lukaku, ran to the camera after scoring against Russia to proclaim, “Chris, Chris, I love you!” And equally lovely when Belgium played Eriksen’s Denmark in the next match and the Danish fans, in gratitude, started chanting Lukaku’s name. 

2. Harry Kane desperately needs some rest, and the smart thing would be for Gareth Southgate to sit him down, but I am quite confident that Gareth Southgate will not do the smart thing. England would be better at this point with Calvert-Lewin as striker, Grealish behind him as the number 10, and Sancho on the right wing, with Kane, Sterling, and either Phillips or Rice having a seat. And yeah, I know that Sterling scored England’s only goal so far, but overall he hasn’t been great, and I believe a front three of Calvert-Lewin, Foden, and Sancho would be very dangerous. (In the first two games England’s front three had a total of three shots on target.) 

3. At the very end of France-Hungary, Endre Botka rugby-tackled Kimpembe in the box — ineptly, after which he fell to the ground in double humiliation, faking injury — and VAR said there was no foul. I am as sure as I can be that that happened because the game was played in a stadium full of delirious Hungarians. And after a year of players’ and coaches’ shouts echoing off empty seats, I’m kinda okay with that. The good thing about human error is that it’s human.

4. The two Ringer FC podcasts — Stadio and Wrighty’s House — are my very favorite podcasts, on any topic, and there was an especially <chef’s kiss> moment in the most recent episode of Wrighty’s House, in which Ian Wright, Musa Okongwa, and Ryan Hunn were discussing the England-Scotland draw. Wrighty opined that, in Kieran Tierney and Andy Robertson, Scotland might have the best left side in world football. Sensing that the time had come for a Game of Thrones reference, Musa said “They’re the Iron Bank” — and then, to make it better, “the Iron Flank.” To which Ryan: “They’re the IRN-BRU Flank.” Too good.   

5. Barney Ronay: “The Italian anthem repeats the line ‘We are ready to die’ four times in its second verse. At the Stadio Olimpico Chiellini sang it like it was something beautiful and impossibly tender.” 

Dear reader, I’m sure you have a tough job, but reflect on this: You don’t have to try to decipher Auden’s handwriting. 

This was quite the find at the used book store. Wild Flowers of the United States was a 15-book series, two of which are devoted to Texas. These are beautifully printed and illustrated.

Texas FM 187 (one of the prettiest drives in the Hill Country) above Vanderpool