Alan Jacobs

There’s a lot of sentimental and just plain dopey talk about “story” these days. “Tell me your story.” “Everyone has a story.” Yuck. But the remedy for this problem, for Christians anyway, is not to eschew storytelling but to tell better stories – tell stories that are connected to the Great Narrative of salvation history. The only account that Christians can give of what they believe centers on a series of unrepeatable events in history that are invariant in sequence: Creation comes before Fall, Fall before Incarnation, Incarnation before the Four Last Things, and so on. All Christian theology is, intrinsically and inevitably, narrative theology. And that has a personal dimension as well as a world-historical one. I tried to write about that personal dimension in this book, which is summed up, sketchily, in this essay.

(And while fetching the Amazon link for the book I just discovered that the Kindle edition is on sale for $.99. What a deal.)

This is very shrewd and thought-provoking from Adrian Vermeule:

Liberalism both needs and fears democracy. It needs democracy because it needs the legitimation that democracy provides. It fears, however, that its dependence on, yet fundamental difference from, democracy will be finally and irrevocably exposed by a sustained course of nonliberal popular opinion.

In this environment, the solution of the intellectuals is always to try to idealize and redescribe democracy so that “mere majoritarianism” never turns out to count as truly democratic. Of course the majority’s views are to count on certain issues, but only within constraints so tightly drawn and under procedures so idealized that any outcomes threatening to liberalism can be dismissed as inauthentic, often by a constitutional court purporting to speak in the name of a higher form of democracy. Democracy is then reduced to a periodic ceremony of privatized voting by secret ballot for one or another essentially liberal party, safely within a cordon sanitaire. In the limit, as Schmitt put it, liberalism attempts to appeal to a “democracy of mankind” that erases nations, substantive cultures, and the particularistic solidarities that are constitutive of so many of the goods of human life. In this way, liberalism attempts to hollow out democracy from within, yet retain its outward form as a sort of legitimating costume, like the donkey who wore the lion’s skin in the fable.

There are no ideas, no beliefs, no positions that reliably correspond to the phrase “cultural Marxism.” It is a phrase whose use is purely emotive and without denotative value.

I longed for the loan of the Time Machine — a contraption with its saddle and quartz bars that was plainly a glorification of the bicycle. What a waste of this magical vehicle to take it prying into the future, as had the hero of the book! The future, dreariest of prospects! Were I in the saddle I should set the engine Slow Astern. To hover gently back through centuries (not more than thirty of them) would be the most exquisite pleasure of which I can conceive.

— Evelyn Waugh, from the first page of A Little Learning

I ate my breakfast, checked my email, and stood up to head to my gate. As I did, I looked down at the small section of my life situated at that airport dining table: my new Nike Air Max sneakers, my cashmere swacket (that’s 50% jacket, 50% sweater, 100% cozy), my almost-too-soft-to-be-taken-outside leather duffel bag, and my iPhone. All of these objects were central to me – I felt like they defined me – and it was my iPhone that was at the core of it.

— Benjamin Clymer

You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product. And then you die.

— Louis C. K.

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Is Coates seriously arguing, as he seems to be, that the desire for “liberation from the dictates of that we”—or any we, any tribe!—is ipso facto a kind of moral violation? He claims for himself, here and elsewhere, a Mullah-like authority to assert communal possession of other people he deems to be a part of his community. And when those people deviate from what Coates pronounces to be the acceptable group perspective—“West calls his struggle the right to be a ‘free thinker,’ and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom”—he claims for himself the right, not merely to refute a person’s arguments but to deracinate them entirely.

More chilling than the essay has been the rapturous response it has generated among many white liberals who seem somehow too eager to reinforce its dire racial proscriptions. It is undeniable that West has gotten an astonishing amount wrong, but one thing he gets just right is this: Too many people of all persuasions act as though there are views, based on one’s perceived identity alone, that others must share. No matter what else might be said, that is an extraordinarily warped view of freedom.

It’s interesting sometimes to reflect on the major cultural trends that have completely passed you by – and when you get to be my age there are more and more of those every day. I read this and I realize: Wow, vaping is a Really Big Deal. Similarly, since I rarely watch anything except sports on TV, I am regularly semi-surprised, semi-bemused by how much emotional energy people invest in Westworld or The Handmaid’s Tale or whatever it happens to be.

But, as common as this missing-out experience is for me, it went to a whole new level the other day when I was listening to the second episode of the Dave Chang Show and learned just how radically Uber and Lyft have changed the restaurant business. There are, Chang and his interviewer Bill Simmons agree, two elements to this transformation:

1. It doesn’t matter so much now where your restaurant is located. If you’ve created a place that has really great food, then people will find their way to you: they just have to be able to give the address to a ride-hailing service.
2. People can now drink as much as they want. Simmons commented that for years when he went out with friends there was always a complicated negotiation about who was going to drive and therefore could not have more than a single drink – but those days are (for him) over. “The 40-year old drunk is back!”

There’s typically no reason for me to use Uber/Lyft – certainly not here in Waco (though visitors have told me that Uber/Lyft works just as well here as it does in New York or L.A.). And in big cities I usually combine public transportation and walking. I have ridden with friends who have called Uber/Lyft, but have never had either app on my phone. So I was kinda stunned to learn that there are whole industries that have been significantly altered by the ride-hailing revolution.

I may be old, but I can still learn!

It’s ten minutes till eight on Sunday morning. It’s a lovely and cool and I have my windows open so I can feel the breeze and hear the birds — except I can’t hear the birds any more because of the leaf blower that just started up across the street. Leaf blowers, mowers, trimmers, chainsaws — there are no quiet mornings these days. I might as well be in New York City with the garbage trucks crashing down the street.

Nick Phillips:

Intellectual diversity addresses a fundamental problem in human cognition: we seek out information that confirms the views we already have. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, this instinct is well-adapted to creating intra-group solidarity, which is useful when competing for power with other groups. But if the goal is to seek the truth, it’s poison. If everyone in your group shares the same biases, that group will block new information that doesn’t conform to those biases. Since no one is right 100 percent of the time, this dynamic guarantees that falsehoods will persist. 

One solution is to attempt to purge individuals of their biases. But cognitive psychologists don’t yet understand how to do this. The only method that reliably solves the confirmation bias problem is to create groups made up of individuals with different biases. In such an environment, countervailing biases checks one another, prodding at weak points and raising questions a colleague didn’t think to ask. This dynamic is highly adapted to truth-seeking, because it forces every person to justify their biases on grounds other than tribalism.

(See also this 2009 article on “debiasing.”)