Alan Jacobs

So far in these posts I’ve said a good bit about repair but very little about invitation. Let me return to the passage from Michael Oakeshott’s essay “A Place of Learning” that moved me to make invitation central to my understanding of culture:

A culture, particularly one such as ours, is a continuity of feelings, perceptions, ideas, engagements, attitudes and so forth, pulling in different directions, often critical of one another and contingently related to one another so as to compose not a doctrine, but what I shall call a conversational encounter. Ours, for example, accommodates not only the lyre of Apollo but also the pipes of Pan, the call of the wild; not only the poet but also the physicist; not only the majestic metropolis of Augustinian theology but also the “greenwood“ of Franciscan Christianity. A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of light-hearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, neither as long-ago terminated specimens of human adventure, nor as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen and to reflect.

The use of “manifold” as a noun is uncommon and noteworthy. No single meaning recorded in the OED seems to match Oakeshott’s meaning here, but the scope of reference seems pretty clear, and I think we could fairly conclude that he means something like a gathered diversity: a box of treasures; a disorderly library; maybe even a Room of Requirement. I will also admit to being struck by the possibilities of a metaphor based on the word’s use in offshore oil drilling: “an area on which oil pipes from several wells converge,” says the OED, “and where testing, segregation, and re-routing of oil can take place.” The “manifold of invitations” is where cultural possibilities converge and can then be assessed, not just in relation to some pre-existing standard of excellence but in relation to one another.

But note that for Oakeshott the assessments we make will never be final: this “encounter” is “conversational” because so many of our “journeyings” are “unfinished” or “abandoned”; because the journeyings of one (the poet, say) may not be perfectly assimilable to the journeyings of another (the physicist); because so much that comes down to us does so in “fragments.” In response to all this we do not, or should not, make a series of definitive judgments but rather a accept a prolonged period of looking, listening, and reflecting.

This picture is closely related to the one that Robert Nozick gives us, in a passage I quoted in an earlier post: “I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.”

There are few notions more clichéd than that of education as exploration, learning as a journey — and yet I wonder if anyone in our educational system has heard that cliché recently? In our whole society, it seems to me, the impulse to explore, and to invite others to a common exploration, has been utterly eclipsed by a mania for policing boundaries, for marking some people and some ideas as unclean, as defiled and defiling.

“Mania” is one word; another might be demonic compulsion. But it won’t last forever; it’s burning people out, it’s a madness that exhausts. Eventually those who are weary will be ready for something better, maybe even for “light-hearted adventures” or explorations of previously unimagined possibilities. Who will be ready with an invitation?

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

Whatever you think of McMurtry as a writer, it’s worth reflecting on this plain fact: No other writer has ever had a career remotely like his, and no writer ever again will have such a career. The bookshops, the Hollywood screenplays, the novels pounded out on a manual typewriter — and a single dominant theme, something he recognized early on: 

In their youth, as I have said, my uncles sat on the barn and watched the last trail herds moving north — I sat on the self-same barn and saw only a few oil-field pickups and a couple of dairy trucks go by. That life died, and I am lucky to have found so satisfying a replacement as Don Quixote offered. And yet, that first life has not quite died in me — not quite. I missed it only by the width of a generation and, as I was growing up, heard the whistle of its departure. Not long after I entered the pastures of the empty page I realized that the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range. 

And that is a theme no writer will ever again have, either. 

“It’s always a good idea to go to Texas, if you can’t think of anything else to do.” — so says Winfield Gohagen, in McMurtry’s novel Somebody’s Darling. Sage advice. I took it myself. 

I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over — until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother. Give us the Workers in the Vineyard, and we will concoct spurious lessons on The Duty of Contentment or The Moral Aspects of Labor Relations.

Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.

— Robert Farrar Capon

The chief enemies of a culture based on invitation and repair are, in general terms, Powers and Demons. The Powers are, as St. Paul teaches in his letters, the vast and typically impersonal – or, more accurately, transpersonal – forces that direct the general course of this broken world. Demons are the Powers’ malicious agents that manifest themselves in the behavior of human beings. All those people obsessively jacking one another up online, filling their allies with fear and assaulting their enemies? They are driven by Demons. And I’m not sure you would believe quite how literally I mean that.

But the Demons are the agents of the Powers. As I have said in another context, white supremacy is a Power. Surveillance capitalism is a power. Most forms of nationalism, perhaps as opposed to patriotism, are Powers. They are rival sovereignties to God.

I have written a bit about Powers here, and about demons here.

At this stage of my project I am simply laying out what I think will be the major categories for developing a theory of culture, which I will later channel into a theology of culture. But I want to signal even at this point that, at some point along the way, I have to articulate the demonology. Every serious account of culture needs a demonology.

Welcome, small stranger. Live long and prosper.

Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane have produced a volume that, I may say with confidence, I will be relying on for the rest of my life. It is The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. What they have done is something deceptively simple, with only a few elements:

1. Take the 1662 Prayer Book;
2. Replace the prayers for the British monarchy with more general prayers for political leaders;
3. Replace a few terms that have become wholly archaic or have changed in meaning so much that they will not be understood;
4. Add a brief glossary for the unusual terms that it would have been unwise to replace;
5. Present the result in beautiful typography.

That’s it! The distinctive structure of the 1662 BCP — built around the rhythms of Morning and Evening Prayer, following the changing seasons of the church year, and centering always on Coverdale’s Psalter — remains, and it remains because it can’t be bettered. I don’t expect this book to be widely used for public worship in churches, though it certainly should be, but I can’t imagine a greater boon to those of us who would like to pray better in our homes day by day.

And if you’d like to learn more about the history of The Book of Common Prayer, well, there’s a book for that.

Keep your eye clear of their For and Against! There is much right there, and much wrong: whoever looks on becomes angry.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

A four-magazine mail day is my equivalent of finding a four-leaf clover.

Alan Lightman:

Given some ostensibly miraculous event, almost all scientists will insist on a logical, rational, “natural” explanation. (Scientists dismiss the Miracle of the Sun as the result of local atmospheric effects, spurious images on the retina brought about by staring at the sun, and self-delusion.) If no logical or rational explanation immediately presents itself, most scientists will conclude that a scientific explanation will eventually be forthcoming, rather than abandon their commitment to a totally lawful universe. This prevailing view was articulated to me recently by the Nobel Prize–winning biologist David Baltimore: “If I could not find any way out of believing that a miracle had occurred, would I then believe it to be a miracle? I think the answer is that I would still not believe it to be a miracle, only some outcome that I can’t understand.”

C. S. Lewis, Miracles:

In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.