Alan Jacobs

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.

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. 

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.) 

My friend Adam Roberts is doing a read-through of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I started to comment on his most recent post and then realized that I didn’t have enough room. So I’m posting my comment here. 

Adam, I think one of the weaknesses of Taylor’s book is that he doesn’t often enough remind us of the scope of his argument (and its limits). But in this case he does say, in a passage you quote, that he’s talking about a change that he believes happened after 1500. So nothing from the early history of Christianity is directly relevant to the argument.

As I read the broad sweep of his case, adding in the proper qualifiers that he sometimes forgets to add, it goes something like this:

1) The Middle Ages in Western Europe is characterized by a long process by which the Catholic Church consolidated an intellectual framework for understanding the world and humans’ place in it. We are porous selves, open to the divine and demonic alike, and the Church uniquely offers access to the former and prevents entry by the latter. By emphasizing its uniqueness, it gradually disciplines and masters much of the theological pluralism that had characterized earlier ages. (You may see this as the gaining of a valuable unity, as Catholics do, or as the imposition of spiritual totalitarianism, as Simone Weil did; but it happened anyway.) This doesn’t mean that you don’t get dissent, but dissent is dealt with. 

2) This understanding was disrupted by the emergence of the various movements we lump together under the category of Reformation. Great social unrest ensued, but for Taylor the significant point is that intellectual confusion ensued. “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” says Donne. “A dissociation of sensibility set in,” etc. So far, so Eliotic. 

N.B. This is where I think we get some serious slippage in Taylor, because the earlier understanding of porous selves nurtured and protected by the Church was a universal one, shared by the unlearned and the learned alike. From this point on, though, I am often confused about whether he’s describing movements among the intellectual elite or within European society as a whole. I think he has a kind of trickle-down theory, but he doesn’t account as he should for the widely varying speed of the trickling in different cultures. Sometimes he writes as if the changes he describes are happening all over Europe, when in fact they’re only happening, in a serious way anyhow, in England and the Netherlands. 

Just as he operates with an implicit trickle-down theory of intellectual change, Taylor also, I think, holds the “ideas have consequences” view of social change: that is, he treats intellectual changes as occurring within a largely intellectual causal environment, after which those ideas have social effects. I think this is wrong. I am not an economic determinist, but I do find much more persuasive those accounts that see economic and intellectual changes in a dialogical or dialectical way, as mutually interanimating — books like Dierdre McCloskey’s bourgeois trilogy or Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches. Anyway, onwards: 

3) Intellectuals respond to this disruption and dissociation by building what Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order, in which human beings are understood as (a) rational, (b) sociable, and (c) buffered selves who flourish through the pursuit of disciplined practices, social and personal, that are in principle available to all. Again, Taylor seems to see this concept trickle down from pointy-heads like Locke to the whole society of increasingly energetic bourgeois. 

4) But this Order, while workable for a while, comes to seem dull and flat, too limited in its understanding of human flourishing, too … secular. And that’s where the Nova comes in. The Nova is a series of increasingly varied ways to pry open those buffers and let the divine back in: Maybe through a Catholic retrenchment (Chateaubriand), maybe through evangelistic revival (the Methodists), maybe through quasi-mystical encounters with the natural world (Wordsworth) maybe through a high metaphysics of the Sacred Self (Rousseau) — or maybe, and you know this argument from me, through artistic experiences that allow us to have a temporary vacation from the Modern Moral Order without radically questioning it. Meanwhile, others double down on the MMO and embrace a wholly secularized world, as when Laplace’s cosmology doesn’t acknowledge God because he “had no need for that hypothesis.” 

In conclusion, sir: Taylor would respond to your post by saying that the Nova initiates an era of intellectual/religious/spiritual pluralism that (a) would have been unimaginable in the year 1500 and (b) is dramatically more pluralistic than the early Christian church because it makes public room for belief systems that have no use for Jesus at all, and maybe not for any kind of God. You rightly note as the great variety of Christian heresies — or of Christian theologies later designated as heresies — but in comparison to a world in which Wesley and Wordsworth and Bronson Alcott, Laplace and Chateaubriand and Ben Franklin, all rub shoulders, it seems to offer a relatively narrow set of options. 

Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, begins with a long and horrific set-piece about a massive heatwave in India, in the year 2025, that leaves perhaps twenty million people dead in a single week. The almost unimaginable death toll kick-starts a serious worldwide determination to deal with climate change; one consequence of this determination is the multinational organization that gives the book its title.

But the Ministry is only one such endeavor. Robinson devotes a lot of time — too much time, for this sometimes glassy-eyed reader — to the description of committee meetings and other workings of a vast bureaucracy, because he thinks that, boring or not, such patient work will make a difference to our climate future, if any difference is to be made. However, as he repeatedly makes clear, bureaucratic action is not the only kind of action there is — systemic inertia and global capitalism being what they are:

The disaster had happened in India, in a part of India where few foreigners ever went, a place said to be very hot, very crowded, very poor. Probably more such events in the future would mostly happen in those nations located between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, and the latitudes just to the north and south of these lines. Between thirty north and thirty south: meaning the poorest parts of the world. North and south of these latitudes, fatal heat waves might occur from time to time, but not so frequently, and not so fatally. So this was in some senses a regional problem. And every place had its regional problems. So when the funerals and the gestures of deep sympathy were done with, many people around the world, and their governments, went back to business as usual. And all around the world, the CO2 emissions continued.

A new government in India, perhaps the first truly representative government in the country’s history, knows that that’s how it goes. So it begins a seven-month campaign of sending cargo planes as high aloft as they will go to release aerosol particulates meant to reflect sunlight away from the earth. Some nations protest; India doesn’t care. India sends the planes because Indians have seen up close what happens when a heat wave occurs that simply overwhelms the resources of the unprotected human body.

Does the seeding help? Probably; a little. It was, one of the pilots thinks, worth a shot no matter what.

Later in the book Robinson describes a more complex technological effort: a massive project of drilling in the Arctic and Antarctic meant to allow meltwater to escape, which in turn slows the shifting and calving of the glaciers. In a related effort, the Russians assume responsibility for dyeing the Arctic Ocean yellow to reflect heat and keep it relatively cool.

I have read many accounts today of the bluntly alarming new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and only one of them (in the Economist) has mentioned technological approaches to addressing the climate crisis — approaches other than those related to the reduction of carbon emissions, which is anyway typically portrayed as a behavioral rather than a technological matter — even though a good deal of research in this field is being done. I’m sure some accounts say more, but certainly the overwhelming message from the media is simple and straightforward: We must reduce carbon emissions, and reduce them by a degree hitherto unthinkable. (And, they add, even that won’t stop significant temperature increases.)

Why so little attention to technological helps unrelated to the reduction of emissions? Well, for one thing, that reflects the emphasis of the report itself; also, that makes for a simple story, and writers of press releases and journalists alike prefer simple stories. But — and this is the meaning of my title — I speculate, I suspect, than something else is at work. Something maybe more important than simplicity.

There’s no doubt in my mind — not one iota of doubt — that we are headed for a global nightmare because of our own greed and self-indulgence. And if technological solutions emerge that slow or stop global warming, then that will mean that we get away with it. We get away with our greed and self-indulgence; we don’t pay the piper, what goes around does not, after all, come around. And that is — for those of us with a strong sense of justice, and I count myself among that number — a bitter pill to swallow. It’s precisely the same impulse that made so many of us choke on the Wall Street bailout a decade ago. They got away with it, the bastards.

Of course, just as I accepted a Wall Street bailout because I believed that it would result in less destruction and suffering than allowing the system to burn down, I would also accept — eagerly! — technological solutions that left us as greedy and self-indulgent and regardless of the future as ever but averted the loss of countess lives (human and non-human) and the destruction of countless square miles of habitat. Surely this is also true of the journalists and climate activists remaining silent about possibly ameliorative technological endeavors.

But here’s the thing: How much hope does any of us really have that the world’s governments will do the right thing? Oh, they may very neatly re-arrange the deck-chairs on the Titanic — but more than that? There ain’t a snowball’s chance in Waco circa August 2075. In his novel, Robinson imagines the emergence of a kind of chastened and de-centralized capitalism — and I want to come back to that in another post, if I have time — but, like Bill McKibben, I fear that “Robinson underestimates not just the staying power of the status quo but also the odds that when things get really bad, we will react really badly.” (KSR may be a better prophet in his anticipation, in the Mars books, of “transnational” capitalism.)

McKibben suggests that such bad reactions could include the emergence of more authoritarian strongmen, and one would have to be naïve to discount the possibility of that, but I think it’s more likely that elected politicians will just find ways to kick the can a little further down the road, again and again and again. Politicians in a democratic order only think as far as the next election — those who win such elections do, anyway — and unelected ones only think of bread, circuses, and mechanisms of intimidation. Long-term thinking about the common good is simply not a political virtue, insofar as “politics” means “gaining and keeping power.” And that is, after all, what politics means.

I, therefore, have nearly zero confidence in political solutions to our changing climate, which means that I am all the more interested in the likely emerging technologies. I wish it was easier to find out about what people are experimenting on, what they are planning. My primary fear for the medium-term future is that, in a time of particular pain, something like Robinson’s picture of a desperate Indian government acting precipitously will come about — and that the consequences will be much worse than those were. This is why I would like to hear less about the reduction of carbon emissions and more about what the scientists and engineers are planning against the Dies Irae.