Alan Jacobs

VP Mike Pence says, “Criticism of Christian education in America must stop.” No it musn’t. Nobody and nothing is above criticism. Demanding that others stop criticizing your preferred group is a cheap identity-politics move. It would simply be a good thing if the critics made some effort to understand what they’re criticizing, though of course that’s not going to happen. I can’t imagine a cohort less likely to inform itself about conservative Christianity than the cohort of American journalists.

Venkatesh Rao:

I suppose there’s a 2×2 here: sane versus crazy, alive versus dead.

The possibility of sane and alive is the hope that drives rationalists. The possibility of crazy and alive is what fuels the stack-lucky, and increasingly, the latter is a better bet.

But neither bet is a certainty. The reality of sane and dead is what brings down the rationalists. The reality of crazy and dead is what brings down the weird.

Crazy and dead is apparently the ground state of human civilization. When things break crazy, the lunatics end up running the asylum.

A lunatic, by my definition, is a stupid person in Cipolla’s sense: a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Yep, these people now run the world.

One of the best books I read last year is The Stone Table, by Francis Spufford. But don’t look for it on Amazon or Google Books, because you won’t find it. For legal reasons it can’t (yet) be published, and if you think about the title you might be able to guess what those legal reasons are.

It’s a small masterpiece. I so, so hope you’ll get to read it some day.

SRO for Jemar Tisby at Baylor

It’s fun, but it’s also work.

Alternative headlines:

• Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe “that God spoke the heavens, the earth and all living things into existence in six days”
• Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that Salvation Comes To Us “through faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone, unaided by human effort”
• Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe “that Jesus Christ will physically return in the air to take the church out of the world to be with Him forever”
• Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that “The unbelieving dead of all time will then be raised and given eternal bodies to face God in final judgment after which they will be thrown into the lake of fire to eternal torment”
• Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe that “Mankind’s continued unbridled wickedness brought further judgment, which destroyed the earth in a worldwide flood”

There’s something almost charming about the NYT’s dismay that a school which holds to the doctrines listed above would fail to comply with the NYT’s view of human sexuality. But the story at least serves to remind us what the “news that’s fit to print” is these days.

Sure, go ahead and reject the only person who can fix this mess. (Via Nina Massey)

Kevin Berger:

Hidalgo is among the premier data miners of the world’s collective history. With his MIT colleagues, he developed Pantheon, a dataset that ranks historical figures by popularity from 4000 B.C. to 2010. Aristotle and Plato snag the top spots. Jesus is third. 

This is one of those statements that ought to create immediate skepticism. If we think only of the present moment, we can easily discover that there are approximately 2.3 billion Christians alive today, all of whom have heard of Jesus — but how many have heard of Plato and Aristotle? 

So if you go to the Pantheon website, you find this description of their methods: 

To make our efforts tractable, Pantheon will not focus on culture, as it is understood in its broadest sense, but on cultural production. In a broad sense, culture can be understood as all of the information that humans — or animals — generate and transmit through non-genetic means. At Pantheon, however, we do not focus on the entire range of cultural information, but in a subset of this information that we define narrowly as cultural production. That is, we do not focus on cultural information such as passed on family values or societal trust, but on cultural production as proxied by the biographies of notable historical characters. 

Why they believe that “the biographies of notable historical characters” form a reliable proxy for “cultural production” they do not say. Isn’t there a great deal of cultural production that is non-biographical in character? Art, music, literature, clothing, cooking, moral guidelines and taboos, religious teaching … the overwhelming majority of we typically think of as "cultural production” is non-biographical, it seems to me. So I’m already scratching my head. 

But even setting that aside: the Pantheon website directs readers to cite the article that presents the structure of Pantheon 1.0, and if you consult the preprint of that article available here you’ll see that the dataset draws heavily, I think it’s fair to say primarily, from … Wikipedia. And similar sources. By the way, an earlier attempt at the same kind of ranking — one that Pantheon tries to improve on by using more foreign-language Wikipedia sites — put Jesus at the top, followed by Napoleon (?) and then Mohammed. 

This is all poppycock and balderdash. It’s interesting and perhaps even useful to see what data dominates Wikipedia, but Wikipedia, in any and all languages, is not a reliable indicator of universal historical “popularity” — whatever that means — and still less of “cultural production.” I think the Pantheon database will be valuable, but it won’t ever do what its makers are saying it already does. 

We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities.

But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe. 

— Christophe Guilluy. This seems exactly right to me. The "cool and progressive" left has chosen sexual self-definition as its only real cause, its version of the Civil Rights movement, and has less than zero interest in the economically marginal. Indeed, it maintains its own character as cool and progressive by creating an ecology of consumption that depends on the economically marginal remaining that way. Social justice warriors not only aren’t interested in but are positively appalled by the specter of economic justice. For our elites — nominally Left, nominally Right, nominally Centrist, it’s crony capitalism all the way down. 

The abandoned working-classes-and-below have responded to this state of affairs by saying, in effect, “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down.” (“You think you got it all set up / You think you got the perfect plan.”) That takes different forms: marching on Paris, say; or electing a blustering ignoramus President of the United States. Some of these are better than others, but none of them is genuinely constructive, none of them stands a real chance of altering the neoliberal social order. And that’s because nowhere has a leader emerged who possesses the combination of charisma and shrewdness to channel the frustrations of the economically marginalized into a meaningful program of reform — or revolution. 

Such leaders also take different forms: Nelson Mandela was one, and so was César Chávez, and so was Lenin. It is possible that the union of the global neoliberal order and the big media companies — which serve as the Ministry of Amnesia for that order — will be able to prevent the emergence of such a leader. But I don’t think so. I believe that eventually and somewhere such a leader will arise. And when that happens the cool and progressive Left will be so, so screwed. 

However, I suspect that if it happens here so will I. 

Tsundoku. Always tsundoku.