Alan Jacobs

Am I finally done with Twitter? After years of leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back? If I haven’t learned how to leave Twitter, at least I’ve learned how not to claim that I’m leaving Twitter. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been.

There’s almost never any pleasure in visiting Twitter now, just the utility of finding out what my friends are up to. Still, something in my brain remembers better times, so left to my own devices I check in far more often than makes sense. So lately I’ve been using Freedom to block Twitter except for a brief period each morning and a brief one each evening. I have found that I don’t miss the place, yes, but also that more and more often I forget to visit when the window is open.

Now that Twitter is finally hobbling the third-party clients that make using the site bearable, and is continuing to get bad publicity for its inability to control bad actors on its platform, I’m seeing in my RSS feed a number of suggestions for how Twitter can be fixed. All of them are ideas that have been put forth for a decade now — adding a paid tier, forcing the third-party clients to show ads, improving the ability to block users — so it would be very strange if Twitter started making intelligent decisions at this late date. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t known for his wit, but I think often of what he said some years ago about the creators of Twitter: They drove a clown car to a gold mine, and then fell in.

Twitter’s current leadership are flailing around right now, looking for ways to fix their platform, but there’s virtually no chance that they’ll make good choices. They have never understood their own product, in large part because few of them use it themselves, and a dozen years in that’s not going to change. And for people like me, it’s too late anyway.

There’s a very moving passage in one of Samuel Johnson’s essays about how friendships end that captures much of how I feel about Twitter:

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal. — Those who are angry may be reconciled; those who have been injured may receive a recompense: but when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless; as, when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use of the physician.

But if my friendship with Twitter is dying, I still care for the friends whose company I have enjoyed there. I hope I will hear from them elsewhere — maybe even at micro.blog.

Here’s the promised follow-up my recent post on the university. In one sense I want to think bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do, and in another sense I want to think smaller. Let’s start with “bigger.”

When Ross Douthat recently commented on my new book, he used it to turn his attention to the condition of the humanities in American universities today. I responded to that turn in a couple of tweets that probably have been deleted by the time you read this, so let me quote them here:

I think it’s important to distinguish between the humanities (intellectual disciplines located primarily in educational institutions) and humanism, or humane reading and learning (which have fuzzier and more flexible institutional placement). It is possible to renew humane learning without renewing “the humanities,” and to some extent vice versa. It’s worth remembering that only one of my five protagonists was an academic (CSL), though Auden taught for a while to make ends meet.

All of my protagonists were concerned with education, but none of them particularly with university education. By then, most of them thought — Lewis was particularly explicit about this — it was too late for major interventions into a young person’s formation. Nor were any of them especially concerned with the curricula of lower schools. Rather, what they wanted to shape was a culture in which humane learning was valued — a culture that, for at least some of my protagonists, began with the family and extended into the public sphere. On this model, what happens in schools at any level is downstream from other, more fundamental forces.

I’m attracted to this idea and think it applicable to our own moment — maybe more applicable now than it was 75 years ago. Given the tentacular infiltrations of the internet, the building of a humane culture can begin anywhere, and even if you’re a professor it’s not necessary to confine your efforts at culture-making to the inner structures of the university. You can think of culture as neuronal, branching dendritically, memetic axons carrying information and moral impulses among family, school, public sphere. Indeed it may be the case that if we want to make our universities healthier the best course might be not to aim directly at them but to nourish families and the public sphere, in order to stimulate universities from without. In that sense I am thinking a little bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do.

But cultural nourishment begins at home. While I can think of my interventions occurring along axons that link multiple cells of culture, I can rarely control my levels of access to any given cell or aggregation of cells. To take a very homely example: I am very interested in the informational culture of the institution where I work — the ways the technologies we have adopted shape our reading, our writing, and our pursuit of knowledge, and while there are several faculty committees on campus that deal with these matters, I have never managed to get myself appointed to any of them. Every year I volunteer; every year I hear nothing. (I am not sure why this is — I think it’s a product of some long-standingly perverse politics here at Baylor — but the reasons aren’t relevant to this post.) It is very difficult to see how you can directly help to shape “the university” if you can’t get appointed to the very faculty committees that a great many of your colleagues are trying to avoid having to serve on.

So, as needed, you get more local. You start with your classroom, or your personal blog (hi), or whatever is, as Heidegger might put it, zuhanden. One of my favorite scenes in Dickens’ Bleak House comes when the indefatigable Mrs. Pardiggle tries to enlist our heroine Esther Summerson in her “militant” evangelism among the poor — which is in truth not evangelism at all but rather relentless moral hectoring. Esther finds it appalling, and overcomes her characteristic diffidence sufficiently to resist:

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.

This is what I counsel in relation to fixing the university: note what is to hand, make your interventions locally, see where they take you, and “try to let that circle of duty gradually and natural expand itself.” This is not a matter of “think globally, act locally”: you are thinking and acting locally. But if you do so faithfully and consistently, then maybe over time your “local” becomes rather more expansive.

Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon respond to my response to their essay. (They respond to Cathy Davidson too.) Got all that?

My first thought is that if I had known that my blog post would be taken even this seriously I would have spent more than ten minutes writing it. (You live and you learn.) But now I’m digging into the subject more fully and thinking more seriously … and just getting more confused.

The stories I read about the American university just yesterday told me, with illustrative examples, that it’s a place where any dissent from leftist orthodoxy is being ruthlessly crushed; where the tyranny of deep-pocketed donors is driving out any resistance to free-market capitalism; where powerful humanities professors rake in big money for purveying pseudo-radical ideas while demanding sexual favors from younger colleagues and grad students; where soon enough there will be no humanities professors or humanities departments, and precious few humanities courses.

Again those are stories I read yesterday. Aside from the variety of the narratives, the chief thing that I would note about them all is that each claims to be saying something at least characteristic and perhaps definitive of “the University.” All tales about “the University” are morality tales, with very explicit lessons that are presumed to be transferable to any and every particular institutional context.

And that’s what makes all these narratives bullshit. It’s not that the events they describe didn’t or don’t happen; rather, it’s unsustainable imposition of definitive and universal judgments based on handfuls, at most, of anecdotal material.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that nothing of general validity can be said about “the University” – and not much about any given university in toto. Different schools and programs within the university conveyor very different purposes and characters. Even departments that seem relatively closely related, according to the taxonomy of academic disciplines, can sometimes lack a common vocabulary, common goals.

All of which means that I myself wrote too generally and abstractly in my earlier post. It is true that the people who make the biggest financial decisions tend do so along the lines I suggested, as Daniel and Wellmon agree. (Universities “have increasingly adopted the practices, technologies, and professional expertise of late capitalism…. In many places, these activities and idioms are gaining such purchase that they threaten to exert a decisive influence on what universities most basically do, to the exclusion of core academic considerations.”) But much else is going on – not all of it Good – throughout every university, and its many nooks and crannies. More on this later.

For now, though, I want to note that Daniel and Wellmon are not as afraid as I am of speaking in general terms, and make a broad recommendation: that the American university renew and intensify its (historically variable) investment in the American democratic project. “The democratic model” can offer a “normative ideal” for the university, and should be grasped as such.

My essential problem with this suggestion is that I do not know what it means. I think there are two broad possibilities:

• The pedagogical: Universities should take on the responsibility toe educating students to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens in a democratic order.
• The demographic: Universities should seek to serve a broader constituency than is characteristic of elite institutions, bringing in students from historically underserved populations and helping them to come into their inheritance as persons and citizens.

Maybe (probably) both of these are at work, but I suspect that the latter is the stronger emphasis. I’d appreciate clarification on this point.

I also don’t know how to understand this renewal of the democratic model as regulative ideal in relation to what Daniel and Wellmon say elsewhere in the essay about the university-as-corporation: “Too frequently, the question of how and whether they make the university a better university — by advancing teaching and research — is never seriously considered.” Does “advancing teaching and research” necessarily contribute to the democratic project? Or must teaching and research be adapted to make that happen?

Moreover: Let’s say that I sign up for this project. How do I contribute? To judge by his job title — “senior associate dean for administration and planning” at UVA — Adam Daniel may have some input into his university’s overall strategies. And Wellmon recently led a revision of UVA’s undergraduate core curriculum. But what should a teacher like me do? Try to get myself appointed to the right committees? Write essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education? Obviously I don’t expect Daniel and Wellmon to produce a blueprint. But I would like a better idea of how an academic might support a renewal of the democratic project, and how anyone might recognize the signs of such a renewal, were it to begin.

I said earlier that I would say more about the great variety of goods that are being pursued in any given university, but I’m going to save that for another post. Stay tuned.

In the Diocese of Allentown, for example, documents show that a priest was confronted about an abuse complaint. He admitted, “Please help me. I sexually molested a boy. “The diocese concluded that “the experience will not necessarily be a horrendous trauma” for the victim, and that the family should just be given “an oportunity to ventilate.” The priest was left in unrestricted ministry for several more years, despite his own confession.

Similarly in the Diocese of Erie, despite a priest’s admission to assaulting at least a dozen young boys, the bishop wrote to thank him for “all that you have done for God’s people. The Lord, who sees in private, will reward. “Another priest confessed to anal and oral rape of at least 15 boys, as young as seven years old. The bishop later met with the abuser to commend him as “a person of candor and sincerity, “and to compliment him” for the progress he has made “in controlling his “addiction.” When the abuser was finally removed from the priesthood years later, the bishop ordered the parish not to say why; “nothing else need be noted.”

— The grand jury report on clerical sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses. You need a strong stomach to read much of it; I couldn’t manage more than a few pages. But this was the passage that, though not explicit about what the priests did to children, most caught my eye. Even when the priests knew they were doing terrible things, even when they wanted to be held accountable, even when they desperately desired for children to be protected from them, the bishops refused. Faced not only with horrifically abused children, but also with abusers who cried out to be restrained, they did nothing. They all but forced the abuse to continue — they could not have done more if they had themselves desired above all things the destruction of lives.

The Lord, who sees in private, will reward.

I am very grateful to Jeffrey Bilbro for this extremely thoughtful and thorough response to my new book. For now I just want to respond to one passage:

Jacobs’s project includes elements of both history and argument; he’s narrating a particular intellectual history, and he’s defending the wisdom these figures provide. For the most part, these dual purposes are compatible, but at times I found myself wanting more synthesis and analysis. Much of the book is content to interweave the thinking of his five protagonists without teasing apart the inherent tensions among them or mustering an argument about which view Jacobs thinks is best. He compares his narrative mode to the cinematic method of Orson Welles, and I appreciate the challenges of crafting a unified story from the lives of five individuals who rarely, if ever, interacted directly with each other. Nevertheless, I kept wishing Jacobs was more explicit regarding his own evaluation of their ideas.

My response: God willing, I am not done writing books yet. Stay tuned.

A brief addendum to the previous post:

1. It goes a long way towards explaining why in my writing I so often try to resurrect abandoned metaphors and neglected or forgotten terms. These are not necessarily better than the languages that are dominant today, but they are different and than in itself is valuable.
2. Difference is valuable in itself because of a phenomenon that has never been described better than Kenneth Burke described it decades ago in his great essay on “Terministic Screens”: every vocabulary brings certain aspects of reality into clear view while simultaneously screening out others.

What I really am, by vocation and avocation, is a historian of ideas, and when you’ve been a historian of ideas for several decades you’re bound to notice how a certain vocabulary can take over an era — and not always in a good way. Consider for instance the period of over half the 20th century in which Freudian language completely dominated humanistic discourse, despite the fact that it had no empirical support whatever and was about as wrong-headed as it is possible for a body of ideas to be. Some tiny number of people flatly rejected it, a rather larger group enthused over it, and the great majority accepted it as part of their mandatory mental furniture, like having a coffee table or refrigerator in your house. (“It’s what people do, dear.”) Eventually it passed not because it had been discredited — it had never been “credited” in the first place — but because people got tired of it.

This exhaustion of a vocabulary happens more and more quickly now thanks to the takeover of intellectual life by a university committed to novelty in scholarship. But that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, when you do this kind of work you develop — or you damn well ought to develop — an awareness that many of our vocabularies are evanescent  because of their highly limited explanatory power. You see, in a given discipline or topic area, one vocabulary coming on as another fades away, and you don’t expect the new one to last any longer than the previous one did. I think this makes it easier for you to consider the possibility that a whole explanatory language is basically useless. But while those languages last people get profoundly attached to them and are simply unwilling to question them — they become axioms for their users — which means that conversations cease to be conversations but rather turn into endlessly iterated restatements of quasi-religious conviction. “Intersecting monologues,” as Rebecca West said.

Often when I’m grading essays, or talking to my students about their essays, I notice that a certain set of terms are functioning axiomatically for them in ways that impede actual thought. When that happens I will sometimes ask, “How would you describe your position if you couldn’t use that word?” And I try to force the same discipline on myself on those occasions (too rare of course) when I realize that I am allowing a certain set of terms to become an intellectual crutch.

Moreover, I have come to believe that when a conversation gets to the “intersecting monologue” stage, when people are just trotting out the same limited set of terms in every context, that says something about the inadequacy of the vocabulary itself. Not just its users but the vocabulary itself is proving resistant to an encounter with difference and otherness. And that’s a sign that it has lost whatever explanatory power it ever had.

I think that’s where we are in our discourse of gender. And that’s why I am strongly inclined to think that there’s nothing substantial behind that discourse, it’s just a bundle of words with no actual explanatory power. And even if that’s not the case, the only way we can free ourselves from bondage to our terministic axioms is to set them aside and try to describe the phenomena we’re interested in in wholly other terms.

This, by the way, is the origin of all great metaphors, the “metaphors we live by”: the ones that make a permanent mark on culture are the ones that arise from an awareness of how our conventional terms fail us. Those coinages are (often desperate) attempts to throw off the constricting power of those terms. It was when Darwin realized that the explanatory language of natural history had reached a dead end that he coined “natural selection,” a term whose power is so great that it is hard for most people to realize that it is after all a metaphor. Our whole discourse of gender needs Darwins who can’t bear those constrictions any more and decide to live without them. And the first term that should go, as I suggested to you earlier, is “gender” itself.

I appreciate this from Joe Carter on the times when theological correction needs to be “sharp” — which I think is a better term than “harsh,” the term Joe uses through most of his post. (“Harsh” almost always has pejorative connotations.) But of course I have some doubts about the argument.

First, if you’re going to say that St. Paul tells us to be sharp (Titus 1:11–12), you really need also to acknowledge some of his other advice. “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col 3:12). “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness” (Gal. 6:1). “I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received: with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, and with diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1–3). “A servant of the Lord must not be quarrelsome, but he must be kind to everyone, able to teach, and forbearing. He must gently reprove those who oppose him, in the hope that God may grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:24–25). It’s a very strong theme in Paul.

And before any of us presumes to correct anyone, we would do well first to meditate — and I mean very seriously to meditate — on this: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” This doesn’t mean that we never presume to correct; but it definitely does mean that correction can properly be risked only after the would-be corrector has engaged in some serious self-examination and penitence. Even when I do seek to correct my brother or sister, I need to face the very real possibility that I am in greater need of correction than he or she is. (And when it comes, how will I receive it?)

Might that discipline make correction less frequent? Probably. But a dominical commandment is a dominical commandment. We just have to deal with it.

Finally: A great many of intra-Christian disputes these days happen on social media. What do we have more of there? Meekness and gentleness? Or excessive harshness?

“What do you do for a living?” the supervisor asked.

I knew this question was coming. I detest this question. I know from experience that if I tell CBP up front that I’m a civil rights lawyer, they’ll let me go in a flash. As a general rule, I don’t — because it’s not fair. I shouldn’t have to be a lawyer to get equal treatment under the law. I travel internationally six to eight times per year, and it doesn’t surprise me to get stopped at least half of those times. Every time I mention I’m a lawyer, they release me immediately. Funny how that works — they know they’re illegally profiling me because of my name, skin color or religion.

— Qasim Rashid

At the beginning of Two Serious Ladies, the great Jane Bowles novel, one little girl asks another to play a new game. “It’s called ’I forgive you for all your sins,’” she says. “Is it fun?” asks the other. “It’s not for fun that we play it, but because it’s necessary to play it.” This, undoubtedly, is just why religion is so queer; it’s not for fun that we play it.

— Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied”