Alan Jacobs

The website for the 2017 documentary film Arcadia says that it’s “a sensory journey into the beauty and brutality, magic and madness of our changing relationship with land and each other. The film combines over 100 years of archive film with a grand, expressive new score by Adrian Utley of Portishead and Will Gregory of Goldfrapp.” It’s a kind of nonlinear survey of the various survivals of paganism — sometimes scary forms of paganism — in modern Britain.

Arcadia excited the writer Paul Kingsnorth (author of, among other things, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist) very much. In an essay written to accompany the film — an essay he later withdrew; more about that in a moment — he wrote,

The guardians of our civilisation tell us that attachment to place and tradition is reactionary, backward, dangerous. Like magic and mystery, attachment to land and history are things which belong to a dark and grim past, and should stay there. We are all progressives now. You are romanticising a past that never existed, they tell us. But it did exist, and not long ago. You can see it here, flickering in black and white. I defy any Briton to watch Arcadia and not feel a surge of patriotism; the real kind, the old kind. Not an attachment to monarchy or church, institution or government, idea or ideal, but the old pull of the land you walk on. The ground beneath your feet.

For Kingsnorth, the film Arcadia reminds us that the old “magic and mystery” of the land are not dead. The land still calls to its inhabitants, though faintly. Kingsnorth wants us to watch the film and have our attention to that call renewed.

What happened to our Arcadia? We stopped listening to it. We stopped dancing, we moved away, we started listening to the chant of the Machine instead. It is debt we chase now, not the moon. We are individuals, not parts in a wider whole. In a broken time, it is taboo to remember what was lost, and that fact alone makes Arcadia a revolutionary document. Look, it says. This is how it was. This is what was broken. At night, when you lie awake with your phone flashing under your pillow – do you miss it?

Thus Kingsnorth. Now, Warren Ellis, the great comics writer, in response:

That creepy Heideggerian dasein that fronts as meaning being-in-the-world but actually means being in a familiar landscape surrounded by lovely white people with no connection to the wider culture, preferring localism over multiculturalism and not being disturbed in your eternal idyll in the black forest (or on the dark mountain) by any of those nasty foreign types. This is where landscape writing sheds its leafy cloak and lets you glimpse its colder face – sounding like Steve Bannon, quoting Steve Bannon, black notebooks in hand, gazing from its bench at the little woodland of little England and trying to decide if “benevolent green nationalism” sounds too much like “… well, a nice kind of Hitler.”

We see you for what you are.

So: just as Heidegger wove together the experience of dwelling in his little hut in the Black Forest with his support for the Nazi regime, his black notebooks full of antisemitism, so too Kingsnorth with his racist Arcadia, his Brexit Arcadia, his doors-closed-to-colored-immigrants Arcadia?

This seems … a bit of a stretch to me. But Ellis is not the only one who reads Kingsnorth that way. Richard Smyth digs up nature writing’s fascist roots; “London Permaculture” teases out the fascist, racist snake lurking in the grass of England’s green and pleasant land. And this outcry led to Kingsnorth withdrawing his essay and then posting an explanation — which he also deleted.

I think what prompts these fierce denunciations is this: When we look back on the old ways of English culture — and this would apply to England’s Christian history almost as completely as its pagan one — we see white people, and only white people, enacting them. So how can those ways be praised without also praising exclusive whiteness?

Which raises for me another question: For these critics of Kingsnorth, is there any legitimate way to praise, and to seek to conserve, old rituals and practices? Can you love harvest festivals or Morris dancing or Druidic rites or for that matter Ember Days without being a racist, a fascist, a Nazi? Or is urban cosmopolitanism the only ethically acceptable ideal of human life?

And if you can love and practice those old ways without being a racist — How? What would distinguish morally legitimate attitudes from the ones that Kingsnorth is being pilloried for?

This inquiring mind would really like to know.

Reading this Vulture piece, I took a while to grasp that, for the musicians interviewed, touring — which used to be what bands had to do to make money their records didn’t make — is a net loser. These people are basically paying to go on tour. 

Rodger Sherman: 

What if the UMBC loss was Virginia’s last major letdown before the dawn of a dynasty, the fuel for a fire that burned brighter than any other in college basketball? What if that was the moment that freakishly bad things stopped happening to Virginia in March and freakishly good things started happening instead? What if the Book of Job ended with Job dunking while Satan wept during the “One Shining Moment” montage? (Job’s garbage friends, who argued that God would not punish an innocent man and therefore that Job must have sinned to deserve so much pain in life, wrote the original “Virginia’s system explains why they lost to UMBC” takes.)

I’m a big fan of using Biblical narrative to explain sports. 

Erasmus:

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is concerned about extremism, and with good reason—but not quite (or not only) in the way you might think. The focus of a briefing paper issued by the commission, an advisory body appointed by Congress and the White House to monitor liberty of conscience, is not on violent extremism as such. Rather it is concerned with the way that sloppy charges of “extremism” are used ever more often by authoritarian regimes to clamp down hard on almost any religious group which, for some reason, they don’t like. China, Russia and Tajikistan are mentioned as examples. 

One might add to that list Québec. As I have said before, the logic here is very simple. 

One question that Ian Buruma has never faced — not when he ran Jian Ghomeshi’s essay, not when he gave interviews in response to the protests, and not in this reflection: Why, when women accuse a man of sexual misconduct, is the man’s story the one worth telling? Throughout this essay he talks about accused men, many accused men, he thinks we should hear from. Not once — not once — does he consider the stories that might be told by the women who claim to have been assaulted. Those women simply do not appear on his mental map.

Huge if true

If you’re a writer for the Economist: the people to the left of you are socialists, and the people to the right of you are “alt-right” or “far right” (the terms are interchangeable).

If you’re an AOC worshipper or you feel the Bern: anyone to the immediate right of you is a neoliberal and anyone farther in that direction is “alt-right” or “far right” (again, interchangeable terms).

If you’re a Fox News watcher: the people just to the left of you are liberals pretending to be centrists; the people to the left of them are socialists pretending to be liberals; the people to the left of them are communists pretending to be socialists.

Things I do when I get a new Mac, more or less in order:

• install Homebrew
• use Homebrew to install pandoc
• install BBedit
• install MacTex
• type this into the terminal: defaults write com.barebones.bbedit FullScreenWindowsHogScreen -bool NO
• type this into the terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true (followed by killall Dock)
• enable Night Shift
• install TextExpander
• install Alfred
• install Hazeover
• install Hazel

Everything else can wait; once I have the above in place — plus of course syncing all my existing TextExpander snippets — I can do almost everything I really need to do on a computer, with maximum focus and speed. 

Re: “intersectionality”: Intersections can diminish as well as intensify. Take Kamala Harris as an example. A woman and a minority (a Jamaican father and an Indian mother): the intersection of these theoretically increases her cultural marginalization. But wait: both of her parents were also academics at elite universities, first as students and later as faculty and researchers. Such an economic and cultural placement forms a vector that, intersecting with others, diminishes Harris’s marginalization. (One could go into her story in more detail: for instance, her parents divorced when she was quite young — that adds another vector of social force that should be accounted for. One could also go into anyone else’s story in such detail, if one is interested in a full accounting of a person’s social placement. A big “If,” these days.)

People who fancy themselves theorists of intersectionality are only interested in intensifications: intensifications whether of privilege (white + male + heterosexual) or of marginalization (black + female + homosexual). The diminishments are just as real; but they’re not as useful. At least for those who, while they may like their gender identities on a spectrum, like their political narratives binary.