Alan Jacobs

We’re at the copy-editing stage of my next book, so it’s too late to add anything, but goodness, I wish I could squeeze in this from Lucy Ellmann:

Some time ago I pretty much decided to read only books written before the atom bomb was dropped, when everything changed for all life on Earth. The industrial revolution’s bad enough, but nuclear weapons really are party-poopers.

I don’t stick strictly to this policy, but I often find it more rewarding to read what people thought about, and what they did with literature, before we were reduced by war and capitalism to mere monetary units, bomb fodder and password generators. And before the natural world became a depository for plastics and nuclear waste.

Anger and alienation have resulted, and they’re fine subjects, but there are times when you’d like to remember some of the higher points in the history of civilisation as well, and the natural world before we learned to view it all as tainted. The intense humour, innocence, sexiness and play of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for instance – could this have been written after Hiroshima? Could Gargantua and Pantagruel? Don Quixote? Emma? I don’t see how. Thanks to the offences of patriarchy, a lot of the fun has gone out of being human, and I like books that look at life in less constricted ways.

I love this statement because of its provocations — provocations that should be assessed with some care. For one thing, I don’t see that the variety of books has especially diminished since Hiroshima — I mean, Chicken Soup for the Soul and The Shack and a whole bunch of adult coloring books have appeared since the end of that war — and if we’re missing the distinctive (and very funny) kind of “sexiness” in Tristram Shandy I think that has a lot more to do with the sexual revolution and its unanticipated consequences than with the atom bomb. 

But the idea that before the industrial revolution, with its accompanying “war and capitalism” and reduction of persons to “mere monetary units,” the natural world was perceived in a radically different way — that’s promising. Though I think the main thing that should be said about pre-modern nature is not that it was untainted but that it was scary as shit. Which is just as much worthy of our interest and reflection. 

We could debate such matters all day — and should! Because there’s no question that the past really is another country, though they don’t everything different there. Trying to understand the continuities as well as the discontinuities is what reading books from the past is all about. 

Anyway, my book is going to be great on all that stuff. Make sure it’s the only book published in 2020 that you buy in 2020, okay? Otherwise, stick with the old stuff. You’ll be glad you did. 

It seems to me that most of those who don’t think Christianity is true believe that it will soon disappear from the world, or all but disappear; that the solvent of liquid modernity really is universal and will inevitably come to all the places where Christianity is now strong, from Nigeria to South Korea. Most of the Christians I talk to about such matters are naturally more hopeful, at least about the Global South. (They tend to be resigned to the marginalization of Christianity in the West.)

But what strikes me about all such expectations (hopes, fears) for the future is how short-term they are. But that’s appropriate for one of those groups only. If you think that Christianity will soon be dead then there’s no reason to think about its long-term future. But if you think Christianity will be around as long as this world lasts, then what’s your excuse for short-term thinking? 

For Western (especially American) fundamentalists that excuse has tended to be: We’re in the end times. Jesus is coming soon. People obsessed with end-times thinking see Christianity as having an even shorter lifespan than the more skeptical atheists do, though that’s only because they’re expecting the whole shebang, “the great globe itself,” to go up in flames. But if you don’t see any reason to believe that Jesus is returning in the immediate future — though of course no one knows the hour — then wouldn’t it be a useful exercise to stretch your imaginative capacities a little bit? Whatever frustrations we Christians are experiencing right now would surely look rather different, and considerably less significant, if we thought in terms of what Mikhail Bakhtin called great time. Someone should write a book called Christianity: The Next Ten Thousand Years. 

Oh, don’t worry, y’all, I’ll be a pro. (Remember, this is my 15th book, or thereabouts. Not my first or even my dozenth rodeo.) There are two moments in the process of publishing a book — when I first have to open MS Word, and when the Author Questionnaire arrives — when I tell myself I’m going to retire from publishing and just blog for the rest of my life. But then I give myself a shake and a big tumbler of whiskey and recover both my professionalism and my gratitude for this opportunity. 

But you say I would indeed await his coming with joy, if I were holy and without sin. I should answer, what relief do you find in fear and flight? It would not redeem you from sin if you were to be filled with terror for a thousand years. The damned are eternally filled with fear of that day, but this does not take away their sin; yea, this fear rather increases sin and renders man unfit to appear without sin on that day when it comes. Fear must pass out of the soul and there must enter in a desire for righteousness and for that day. But if you really desire to be free from sin and to be holy, then give thanks to God and continue to desire to be more free from sin.... There is no one so well prepared for the judgment day as he who longs to be without sin. If you have such desire, what do you fear? You are then in perfect accord with the purpose of that day. It comes to set free from sin all who desire it, and you belong to that number. Return thanks to God and abide in that desire.

— from Martin Luther’s sermon on the Second Coming of Christ (1522)

In response to this post, Christopher Evatt wrote thoughtfully and incisively (I post with his permission): 

Beyond what you mention, I think equating "protection of white, Western cultural heritage" with white nationalism or white supremacy is foolish. It plays into one of many false binaries afflicting our current society - that in order to oppose racism, one must reject Western culture in toto. In the process it gives up far too much. I'm a classical pianist, and most of my work involves performing the music of dead European composers. In that sense, one could say that I have devoted much of my life to the protection and preservation of white, Western cultural heritage. (Of course, the words "white" and "Western", while meaningful to some extent in present-day American society, elide a lot of finer distinctions otherwise.) But I'm certainly no white nationalist or supremacist because of that. There's no way I'm going to give up Bach or Beethoven to cosplaying Nazi-wannabes. Just because some people want to use the masterpieces of Western culture to claim superiority for themselves despite not having contributed anything to culture themselves doesn't mean we should declare appreciation of Western culture as inevitably linked to racial supremacy. I know it's human nature to swing the pendulum all the way to the other end in reaction to some form of excess (and to be fair, Morris' piece is among the better of the ex-evangelical genre of writing to which it belongs), but that's all the more reason why we need to be cautious in our reactions, against all the incentives our present politics and culture hold out to us.

Annalee Newitz:

What would “internet realists” want from their media streams? The opposite of what we have now. Today, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to make users easy to contact. That was the novelty of social media — we could get in touch with people in new and previously unimaginable ways.

It also meant, by default, that any government or advertiser could do the same. Mr. [John] Scalzi thinks we should turn the whole system on its head with “an intense emphasis on the value of curation.” It would be up to you to curate what you want to see. Your online profiles would begin with everything and everyone blocked by default.

Where I come from we call that an “RSS client.”

My preferred pronouns? None. You should use nouns only when referring to or addressing me.

If I had to name only one thing I have learned in my many years of making arguments, it would be this: You cannot convince people of anything that they sense it’s in their interest not to know. I thought about this often as I was reading Alex Morris’s Rolling Stone story about American evangelicals’ love of Trump. 

One such moment came when Morris related a conversation with her family: 

“Do you think because Jesus is coming soon that the environment doesn’t matter?” I eventually ask.

“Alex, the Earth is going to be all burned up anyway,” my aunt says quietly. “It’s in the Bible.”

“But according to billions of people, the Bible is not necessarily true.”

“All we can do is love them.”

“No, we can cut back on carbon emissions. There are a lot of things we can do.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to be here.”

Maybe the first thing I want to say here is “according to billions of people, the Bible is not necessarily true” is not a great reply. Morris could have pointed out that the Bible itself says no one knows when Jesus will return, and that the Earth will be renewed and restored, and that in Genesis we are given stewardship over all Creation, a responsibility never to be taken away. She could — I’m getting carried away here, I know — she could have given her aunt N. T. Wright’s essay “Jesus Is Coming — Plant a Tree!” 

But setting all that aside for now: It is very much in the interest of Morris’s aunt, and in the interest of millions and millions of other people, not to know that we are, through our economic choices, bringing ruin to the planet that we’re supposed to be the stewards of. And so she doesn’t know. Like so many others, she makes a point of not knowing. 

But I think the problem of motivated not-knowing isn’t found only on the conservative evangelical side of things. Here’s one passage from Morris’s essay that seems to be drawing a lot of attention: 

“The white nationalism of fundamentalism was sleeping there like a latent gene, and it just came roaring back with a vengeance,” says [Greg] Thornbury. In Trump’s America, “‘religious liberty’ is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage.”

In that second sentence, the clause “In Trump’s America” is a problem. What does it mean? In one sense, the entire nation is “Trump’s America” right now, whether we like it or not; but maybe Morris means something like “Americans who enthusiastically support Trump,” or “the parts of the country that are strongly supportive of Trump.” Impossible to tell. Thornbury didn’t use the phrase, but presumably he said something that led into his line about “religious liberty” as code for something else. 

So the passage is unclear, but I’d like to know what Thornbury means. I’ve written a good deal about the importance of religious freedom on this blog and elsewhere — just see the tag at the bottom of this post — so does that mean that I am using that topic as “code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage”? If so: explain that to me, please.  

Maybe there’s something that Greg Thornbury and Alex Morris have an interest in not knowing: that even if millions of white Americans abuse the concept of religious liberty, religious liberty could nevertheless be in some danger. Indeed, I think this is one of the key points that progressive Christians make a point of not seeing, because if they did see it then they might sometimes have to come to the defense of people (especially evangelicals) they don’t want to be associated with. They know that as long as they denounce white supremacy and homophobia, and endorse (or at least remain silent about) abortion, they won’t run afoul of the progressive consensus. Why put their status at risk by defending willfully-blind bigots? 

One answer might be: Maybe the cultural consensus won’t always be in your favor. Almost a decade ago I warned conservative Christians that if they sought to deny religious expression to Muslims they might someday find the shoe on the other foot, and in the obviously hypocritical position of demanding rights for themselves that they tried to prevent others from exercising. (Update: they didn’t listen.) Perhaps progressives believe that that could never happen to them, that, even if they lose the White House from time to time, they can never find themselves out of cultural power and in need of powerful people to come to the defense of their rights. Well … Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I’m in an odd place with regard to all this: As a person who thinks we’re ruining the planet; who has consistently condemned the Trump administration and its enablers, especially the Christian ones; who believes that white supremacy is demonic; but who is also strongly and I hope consistently pro-life, I find that I am publishable but not employable in the circles my progressive friends inhabit. Funny old world.) 

One of the most (unintentionally) comical articles I’ve read in recent weeks is this Ian Millhiser piece at Vox. Millhiser is in a kind of moral agony over the forthcoming Supreme Court case of Tanzin v. Tanvir: 

Muhammad Tanvir, the plaintiff at the heart of the case, and this first story is likely to inspire a great deal of sympathy among liberals. Tanvir says he was approached by two FBI agents who asked him “whether he had anything he ‘could share’ with the FBI about the American Muslim community.” After Tanvir told the agents that he did not wish to become an informant, those agents allegedly threatened him with deportation and placed him on the “No Fly List.”

Because of this treatment, Tanvir also claims that he was unable to fly to see his ailing mother in Pakistan, and that he had to quit a job as a long-haul trucker because he could no longer fly home to New York after a one-way delivery.

The core issue in Tanvir’s lawsuit is whether he may sue these FBI agents for money damages under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a federal law protecting religious liberty.

Why is Millhiser in such a state about this case? Because, while he is deeply sympathetic to Tanvir’s plight, “If the Supreme Court holds that such lawsuits are permitted under RFRA, the biggest winner is unlikely to be religious minorities like Tanvir. Rather, the biggest winner is likely to be the Christian right.” Oh shit! What a calamity! How can I ensure that people I approve of get religious-freedom rights while people I don’t approve of are denied them?? 

In the coming years, I predict, there will be a clear answer to this dilemma from the left, including the progressive Christian left: Sorry, Mr. Tanvir. Sucks to be you. Liberal proceduralism is so, so dead.

Much of my written work has focused on stepping back from whatever it is people in my field — or people more generally — happen to be discussing or debating at any given moment, stepping back in order to ask: Why are we talking about this? How did our discursive frame happen to take this form? How would things look different if we made different assumptions, or if our institutioms were constituted differently so as to prompt different ways of speaking or different speech genres?

Looking back, far back, I’m inclined to think that one of my most formative intellectual experiences happened when, in grad school, I read Foucault’s great essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” That didn’t make a Foucauldian of me, really, but it did give me a permanent habit of thinking genealogically. And I’m grateful for having developed that habit. It has been useful to me and sometimes, I think, even to a few others.

That essay is often seen to mark Foucault’s transition from an intellectual archaeologist — someone obssessed in classic 19th-century style with tracing an idea or a phenomenon back to its archē, its origin or source, its Ursprung or Quelle — to the more skeptical character of the genealogist, who sees belief that an Origin can be found as a romantic delusion and is interested instead in tracing all the ramifications over time of thought and practice.

The average thinker will always be an archaeologist, I think, because the average thinker mainly wants someone to blame for whatever he or she laments. (This is why, as I often comment the intellectual vacuity of generational thinking has such lasting appeal.) But what if you want to understand? Then you’ll have to work harder.

It seems to me that we especially need more genealogists of our current political order.

There’s a very good chance that next November Americans going to the polls to vote for President will be asked to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I am less interested in which of those I should choose — in fact I won’t choose either — than in how the hell we got that choice. Or look at the U.K., whose major political parties are led by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, two people manifestly unqualified to lead anything. How did that happen? If we don’t know how we came to this pass, can we find our way to a better one?