Alan Jacobs

On the one hand, it’s good to stretch yourself intellectually; on the other hand, when you do so you might pull a muscle. In my recent essay on Cosmotechnics, I got in over my head — delightfully so, for me, but it led to at least one embarrassing error.

In my first footnote I talk about Yuk Hui’s use of the word qi and I get it wrong. I received a very kind email from a Sinologist named Nils Wieland explaining my mistake:

qi 氣 is the Qi non-Chinese speakers have heard of as some sort of energy or spirit, which Yuk Hui romanizes as Ch’i.

qi 器 doesn’t have the same popularity, it’s a standard Chinese word meaning container, vessel or instrument, and it’s the Qi from Yuk Hui’s Dao-Qi-duality.

(Both qi’s sound exactly the same, so I guess differentiating them by romanization is a good approach; what’s odd is that he chose the nowadays standard Pinyin spelling for the less famous qi – throwing people off ;) )

Dammit! I knew something like this had to be the case; you wouldn’t believe how long and fruitlessly I googled the question. Again, this is what happens when your reach exceeds your grasp — and (trying to be meaningfully self-reflective here) I think on some level I was afraid that if I contacted a Sinologist I’d get the information but would also be told that my whole essay was nonsense. And I really wanted to write that essay.

I also have received a very kind message from Tongdong Bai, whom I quote in my essay, pointing to other work of his on the political implications (or lack thereof) of Daoism. Nils Wieland suggested some further reading too. So while I am embarrassed at my rookie error I have some interesting next steps to take in this project.

This is a word for myself as well as for my fellow Christians. I’ve said things like this before, but I can’t remind myself too often.

Do people twist the truth or simply lie about us? Are we treated with subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry? Are we mocked and belittled? Might we, soon enough, be facing actual persecution? If so, then we have our instructions:

We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

If people take our coats we should give them our cloaks as well.

We should never return evil for evil, but should strive to live at peace with everyone.

We should treat our fellow Christians, even when they’re liberals, “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Conservative Christians who seek to follow these commandments must be out there — they must — but I’ve struggled to find them online. Instead, I keep coming across people who loudly proclaim their orthodoxy, and give much sage advice to their fellow conservatives, and yet somehow never manage to land on these themes which, in my Bible at least, are pretty prominent. These pundits are fighters; they point fiercely at their enemies and denounce them; they cry that they are being treated unfairly; they mock and belittle those on the other side of the political isle; but if they ever ask God’s blessing upon those enemies and persecutors, or seek to make peace with their liberal sisters and brothers, it doesn’t seem to happen where I can see it.

George Macdonald said something in one of his “unspoken sermons” that I think of often. It pierces my soul, in a way that I try (not always successfully) to think of as a gift, and so I’d like to offer it also to my fellow Christians. Here it is:

Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

My recent New Atlantis essay on the way beyond what I call The Standard Critique of Technology is now unpaywalled. This is an important essay for me personally, though I have no idea whether anyone else will find it valuable. It’s peculiar.

The basic question I ask is this: What if Neil Postman and Ivan Illich and Ursula Franklin and Albert Borgmann are all absolutely correct in their critique of how modern technocracy has developed — but as a result nothing has changed? What do we do now?

The basic answer I give is: There may be considerable resources available to us through the philosophical (as opposed to the religious) tradition of Daoism.

It may seem odd that as a Christian I am looking to Daoism, but again, it is to Daoism as a philosophical tradition (daojia) rather than Daoism as an organized religion (daojiao) to which I turn, and Christian thinkers have typically been open to the adaptation of non-Christian sources of thought. If Thomas Aquinas can appropriate Aristotle then I see no reason why I can’t appropriate Laozi. There are certain elements of Christian spirituality — especially from the Franciscan tradition: as I say in the essay, St. Francis is a kind of Daoist sage — that echo the Daoist approach to technology, but they remain, I think, underdeveloped. That’s something I want to work on in the coming years.

A great many people have criticized the use of the term “cancel culture,” but have done so for different reasons. One group of people simply wants to deny that cancellation is a widespread phenomenon; others are aware that something is going on but don’t think that “cancellation” is the right way to describe it. I myself don’t have a problem with the use of the phrase, but I think there are more accurate ways of describing the very real phenomenon to which that phrase points. I think the two key concepts for understanding what is happening are katharsis and broken-windows policing.

In an essay that I published a few years ago, I talked about the prevalence among those committed to social justice, especially on our university campuses, of a sense of defilement. The very presence in one’s social world of people who hold fundamentally wrong ideas about race and justice is felt as a stain that must somehow be scrubbed away. As long as such people are present, one experiences akatharsia: impurity, defilement. The filth must be cleansed, the community must be purged. (I’m choosing the spelling “katharsis” rather than “catharsis” to focus on this archaic meaning.)

This kind of thing is sometimes referred to as scapegoating, but it isn’t, not at all. Essential to scapegoating is the belief that the unclean social order can be made clean by casting out or sacrificing something that is itself pure and undefiled. In the cases I am discussing here, the logic is more straightforward: the one who is perceived to bring the defilement must himself or herself be expelled. Scapegoat rituals have a complex symbolism. Katharsis culture doesn’t.

Now, such katharsis may be accomplished in several ways. Sometimes it involves actions for which the term “cancellation” is the best one: an announced lecture is canceled and the lecturer disinvited, or a television program that had been scheduled is canceled. But katharsis takes many other forms. For instance, James Bennet had to be fired from the New York Times because by authorizing an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton in the newspaper he had defiled its pages. The op-ed itself could not be erased, so, through a compensatory kathartic action, Bennet had to be removed.

Our society has largely forgotten the symbolism of defilement and purgation, so we don’t know how to call it by its proper name. When people feel that they have been defiled, what they say is that they feel unsafe. Everyone knows that such people are not in any meaningful sense unsafe; it is a singularly inapt word; but people use it because living in a publicly disenchanted world has deprived them of the more accurate language.

All this explains why Ben Dreyfuss’s preference for the language of “snitching” is not especially helpful. But that word does capture something relevant, which is the way that katharsis culture always involves appeals to authority: rarely do we see attempts at direct action against the sources of defilement — which is good, because that would require the more drastic and clearly illegal actions we saw on January 6 in Washington D.C. Rather, the existing authorities are asked to assume a sacral role and to enact the necessary purging. This return of archaic religious impulse, then, serves to reinforce existing power structures rather than to undermine them, which is why so many leaders accede to the demands of the mob: it’s good for their authority, it establishes them more firmly in place. And also, like George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant,” they are being driven by the mob which they may seem to be leading, and in the eyes of that mob they can’t bear looking like fools. Thus they are doubly incentivized to carry out the sacral duties of their leadership position.

But there is another element to this behavior that likewise could be described in religious terms but might be more easily graspable if a more mundane analogy is invoked. Those who demand the expulsion from their community, whatever they perceive their community to be, of the producers of defilement do not just address their acts to the presently guilty: they seek to address all of us as well. The message is: Our vigilance is constant and you cannot hope to escape our surveillance. No matter how small or insignificant you are, we will find you and we will punish you. This ceaseless surveillance of public space by self-appointed cops, then, is a kind of broken-windows policing. It’s a way of letting everybody know that the space is watched, the spaces cared for. If trivial offenses are so strictly punished, more serious violators have no hope of escaping undetected.

In this sense, the hyperaggressive and absolutist pursuit of purging the unclean thing – no one ever thinks it adequate for people like James Bennet to be to apologize or to take a leave of absence or even to undergo anti-bias training, they’re always given the ultimate punishment possible – is meant less for the offender of the moment then for all the bystanders: thus Voltaire’s famous line about the British Navy hanging admirals pour encourager les autres. You can see, then, that what I’m calling katharsis culture has a double character, the sacral and the disciplinary. We are all invited to look upon the holy rite — to look, and to tremble.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the offside rule is. Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the handball rule is. What’s called offside in one match will be called onside in another; handball calls are if anything even more arbitrary. And VAR seems to have increased rather than decreased the inconsistency of rulings.

Consequently, the players cannot adjust either their expectations or their performance to meet the ever-changing rules, because changes in the rules don’t affect how calls are actually made, by officials or by VAR.

The only logical response to this ongoing farce is to eliminate VAR. However, FIFA is obviously absolutely committed to VAR, and I cannot see any circumstances in which they would abandon it, despite the almost unanimous hatred of it by players, coaches, journalists, and fans. (The complete insulation of FIFA from the game it is meant to serve is perhaps a topic for another post.)

Therefore, given the inevitable absence of logic, I make the following recommendation: Let VAR go on as it has been going in all other cases, but whenever there is a sniff of a question about handball or offside, VAR will take the form of a coin flip: Heads is offside/handball, tails is onside/no-handball. I think it will be easier for everyone concerned if the pretense of standards is abandoned, and the arbitrariness that actually governs calls is embraced.

Reading this story about an obsessively malicious online troll I’m reminded that when the big tech companies say “We simply can’t monitor all the traffic that we get” what they really mean is “We would rather people’s lives be destroyed than to make hires that would cut into our profits.”

In A Writer’s Notebook (1949), Somerset Maugham wrote: “I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a wartime port. I do not know on which day it will sail but I am ready to embark at a moment’s notice. … I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the cardtable, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon departed. I am on the wing.” Maugham died sixteen years later.

For Malcolm, affection is like being groomed: something to tolerate if there’s a biscuit at the end of it.

These are the books I’m teaching this term.