Alan Jacobs

Jürgen Habermas:

The public sphere is crucial to the intellectual, though its fragile structure is undergoing an accelerated process of decay. The nostalgic question, ‘Where have all the intellectuals gone?’ misses the point. You can’t have committed intellectuals if you don’t have the readers to address the ideas to.

Those who once might have been readers are all shouting at one another on Twitter. One could argue that social media are not an extension of the public sphere but the antithesis of it. Habermas doesn’t want to rule out the possibility of things getting better: “Perhaps with time we will learn to manage the social networks in a civilized manner.” But he doesn’t seem especially hopeful: “I am too old to judge the cultural impulse that the new media is giving birth to. But it annoys me that it’s the first media revolution in the history of mankind to first and foremost serve economic as opposed to cultural ends.”

The really interesting point here is that you can’t have genuine public intellectuals if you don’t have a sizable class of people who are able to read – who can understand arguments and assess them shrewdly and fairly. But anyone has been on social media knows how rare such ability is, how regularly (almost unerringly) people respond to what others have written without having, in any meaningful sense, read it.

So maybe one of the most important questions we who are concerned about our common culture can ask ourselves is this: How do we bring reading back?

Michael Gerson:

According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely group in America to affirm an American responsibility to accept refugees. Evangelicals insist on the centrality and inerrancy of scripture and condemn society for refusing to follow biblical norms — and yet, when it comes to verse after verse requiring care for the stranger, they don’t merely ignore this mandate; they oppose it.

This represents the failure of Christian political leadership — not only from the speaker but from most other elected religious conservatives, too. Even more, it indicates the failure of the Christian church in the moral formation of its members, who remain largely untutored in the most important teachings of their own faith.

“I don’t like the present,” he said. “But I didn’t like the past, either.”

— here

This is very good by Philip Kitcher on Errol Morris’s rather misguided attack on Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When I teach Kuhn I always try to show my students that there is a big difference between (a) epistemology and (b) the sociology of knowledge, and what people think about Kuhn largely depends on which of those two genres Structure belongs to.

Agnes Callard:

Recently a historian of philosophy named Wolfgang Mann wrote a book called The Discovery of Things. He argues, just as the title of his book suggests, that Aristotle discovered things. It’s a bookabout the distinction between subject and predicate in Aristotle’s Categories—between what is and how it is. You may not have realized this but: someone had to come up with that! Many of the things that seem obvious to you—that human beings have basic rights, that knowledge requires justification, that modus ponens is a valid syllogistic form, that the world is filled with things—people had to come up with those ideas. And the people who came up with them were philosophers.

So you are pretty much constantly thinking thoughts that, in one way or another, you inherited from philosophers. You don’t see it, because philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are. So the reason to read Aristotle isn’t (just) that he’s a great philosopher, but that he’s colonized large parts of your mind.

Ross Douthat, in this interview with David Moore, sums up his hopes for his new book concisely and cogently:

I suppose there are three levels in what I’m trying to do. First, tell the story of the Francis era well enough to make it come alive as the great, gripping narrative that it is – a fascinating story about a charismatic leader trying to change an officially unchanging church, with all the theological complexity and human drama that entails. Second, persuade the reader of this story’s importance – that not only is the Francis era fascinating in its own right, but that in its drama the trajectory and ultimate fate of the world’s largest Christian body may be decided, and with it the trajectory of all traditional religion in the modern world. Finally, persuade the reader that I’m right not only about the stakes, but that I’m right about the merits – that the liberalization Francis is pursuing really does risk breaking faith with something essential to Catholic Christianity, to the words of Jesus Christ

Here’s a typical passage from Jordan Peterson:

We have two general principles of discipline. The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

About the first principle, you might ask, “Limit the rules to what, exactly?” Here are some suggestions. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.

On the one hand, Peterson teaches children to be generous, polite, thoughtful, caring of others, responsible for others, and so on. On the other hand, he tells them to behave in these ways because it is in their own interest to do so. The consistent theme is: act generously to others not because those others will benefit but because you will benefit.

There are, it seems to me, several possible ways to evaluate this theme in Peterson’s writing. One could say that Peterson is simply counseling selfishness and that that’s wrong. Or one could say that Peterson knows that people in general and children in particular won’t accept any rule that commands discipline and sacrifice of personal desire unless they see what’s in it for them, so he starts there. Or one could say — this is the view that I think I prefer — that Peterson believes in a kind of higher selfishness, that if we all act not in a narrowly and stupidly self-interested way but in the kind of self-interested way he sketches here, where my self-interest coincides with generosity towards others, then everybody wins. Or, anyway, more people win. And Peterson is deeply committed to winning. He especially disdains “victimizing yourself in the service of others,” and believes that if you stand up for yourself against unfairness and (petty or grand) tyranny you are reducing the scope of unfairness and tyranny in the world and therefore helping others too. He’s trying really hard to imagine a social situation in which each individual is trying to win but somehow in the process makes more winning possible for everyone.

Maybe this makes a kind of sense, I don’t know. I just know that in this context I find myself thinking of what Paul Farmer, the co-founder of Partners in Health, says to Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains: “WLs [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.” And then, late in the book, borrowing a line from Tolkien:

I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory…. You know, people from our background — like you, like most PIH-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.

Malcolm posing for his photo shoot this morning.