Alan Jacobs

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2000”] Tableau comparatif des altitudes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Monde, Dessin de Goethe dédié à Humboldt. Source: A. de Humboldt (1807) Essai… p. 134. Image courtesy of “Société des Lettres, sciences et arts ’La Haute-Auvergne’; Archives départementales du Cantal, 28 J, 1 Ai 186.”[/caption]

Ann Buttimer, "Alexander von Humboldt’s Geography of Plants:Bridging Sciences and Humanities."  Click on the image for a larger version.

Royal Museums, Greenwich: A manuscript globe, hand painted and lettered, representing in 3-dimensional form the maps of Mars published in the American astronomer Percival Lowell’s books, Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908) which developed Camille Flammarion’s views. The globe is mounted on a bronze stand. Emmy Ingeborg Brun was a Danish Mars enthusiast who made a small number of globes, many for presentation to particular individuals and institutions. Her inscriptions suggest that she viewed Mars as a potential model for Christian socialist cosmopolitanism on Earth. There are three inscriptions engraved into the globe’s stand. The title — Mars after Lowell’s Globes ca. 1905-1909 — is near the column. On one half of the edge of the base is a quotation frrom the Lord’s Prayer — Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. On the other half of the edge of the base is a socialist slogan — Free Land. Free Trade. Free Men.

David Von Drehle writes:

I say this with love: Folks in Alabama do loyalty and clan as well as anyone in America. That’s a virtue — up to a point. They would go over the falls in a barrel with George Wallace. But they hopped onto the shore when Moore asked them to strap in, and that ought to give pause to the polarizer in chief.

May I make a plea to journalists (and for that matter everyone else)? Don't  say "folks" when you mean "white folks." Ain't a whole lot of black folks in Alabama would go over the falls in a barrel with George Wallace, and there are a lot of black people in Alabama. So let's sort out our folks, shall we?

In yesterday’s election, 93% of black men and 98% — ninety-eight percent — of black women voted for Doug Jones. Meanwhile, 72% of white men and 63% of white women voted for Roy Moore — they weren’t hopping onto shore, they were riding right over the falls with their hebephile-in-chief. Now, in comparison to the previous election for that particular seat, which Jeff Sessions won with 97% of the vote, that’s some slippage. But I think we’d do well to consider than when offered a candidate who — I’ll set aside for now his romantic proclivities — when he was a judge regularly swept aside the law with contempt if it conflicted with his personal preferences, and who as a candidate openly longed for the good old days of slavery because back then “families were united," two-thirds of white voters in my home state said: That’s our man. I’m not celebrating the good  judgment of those particular “folks.”

From my book Original Sin: A Cultural History:

In 1974, the famous theatrical director John Barton staged [Christopher Marlowe's] Doctor Faustus for the Royal Shakespeare Company and chose for the leading role an unknown young actor by the name of Ian McKellan. Shrewd move, that; but he made other decisions that are equally interesting and important, though from a different point of view. The directorial problem with which Barton was faced is simple yet serious: how ... could we [moderns] possibly take seriously the appearance of the Good and Evil angels? And his solution was a brilliant one: he made them into hand puppets, held by Faustus himself, their lines spoken by him.

A brilliant solution on more than one count: not only does he avoid sniggers from the audience at the appearance of the debating spirits, but he simultaneously enables an understanding of Faustus that is perfectly commensurate with twentieth-century psychology. For if it was the genius of Prudentius and his followers to reach into the divided self and pull out its voices, giving them bodily substance and individual identity, it was the genius of Freud and his followers to stuff them all back into the box. When Freud sees the Good Angels and Evil Angels of our stories as projected externalizations of our own inner conflicts — puppets made by us and able to speak only through our acts of ventriloquism — he is simply returning us to the world of Augustine, in which “the devil made me do it” is scarcely a legitimate excuse. Do we sin because we heed the devilish voice in our ears? Or do we heed that voice because we have already sinned? Whatever answer we might give has little practical significance. The divided self is our inheritance no matter what, and in the pain and disorientation of that experience we may not even care whether we were torn from the inside out or the outside in.

The Tin Drum, at Shoreditch Town Hall 

How I would love to see this puppet show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Ten years ago I briefly wrote an online column for the late lamented Books & Culture, and what follows was the first entry. It still seems relevant, to me anyway.

---

Near the middle of Milton's Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael describes for Adam — who has not yet fallen, not yet disobeyed — the War in Heaven between Satan's rebellious angels and those who have remained faithful to God. Throughout this portion of the poem a major figure is a loyal angel named Abdiel. It is his task, or privilege, to cast the first blow against Satan himself: his "noble stroke" causes Satan to stagger backwards and fall to one knee, which terrifies and enrages the great rebel's followers. This happens as Abdiel expected; he's not afraid of Satan, and knows that even the king of the rebels cannot match his strength, since rebellion has already sapped some of the greatness and power of the one once known as Lucifer.

But what if the combat hadn't gone as expected? What if Satan had been unhurt by Abdiel's blow, or had himself wounded the faithful angel? In that case, says one Milton scholar, John Rumrich, "God would by rights have some explaining to do." What right would God have to send Abdiel into a struggle where he could be wounded or destroyed? To Rumrich's claim that most eminent of Miltonists, Stanley Fish, replies: Every right. God's actions are not subject to our judgment, because he's God — a point which, Fish often reminds us, modern literary critics seem unable to grasp.

Moreover, Fish notes, Abdiel himself doesn't think that God owes him success, or indeed owes him anything at all. In Abdiel's understanding of what it means to be a creature, all the owing is on his side; all the rights are on God's. As it happens, there are moments in the story when things don't go as Abdiel expects, where his efforts seem futile or pointless — or seem so to us. Yet this doesn't bother him at all. Why not? Because in each case he did what he was made to do: he obeyed. Obedience is the creature's calling; the ultimate outcome and disposition of events belongs to God, and only to God. God does not need to adjust events to meet our expectations, nor must he offer us an explanation when our expectations are thwarted. And if we focus on our own obedience we will not ask such things of God.

In the long and brilliant preface that Fish wrote for the second edition of his landmark book Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost, he calls Abdiel's attitude "the politics of long joy," and sees Milton as a passionate advocate for that politics. Milton himself strove to live by it: having made an impassioned case for freedom of the press in his tract "Areopagitica," he pauses to say that his argument "will be a certain testimony, if not a Trophy." That is, whether his argument succeeded or not (and in fact it didn't), he wrote it simply in order to testify to his convictions. It was within his power to make such a testimony; it was not within his power to control the minds of the members of Parliament.

"The politics of long joy" is an odd phrase, but a rich one. Fish derives it from another moment in Paradise Lost, when the archangel Michael reveals to Adam a vision of "Just men" who "all their study bent / To worship God aright," who then are approached by a "bevy of fair women" and determine to marry them. Adam likes this vision; two earlier ones had shown pain and death, but this one seems to Adam to portend "peaceful days," harmony among peoples. But Michael immediately corrects him. This is in fact a vision of the events described in Genesis 6, when, after the "sons of God" become enamored with the "daughters of man," God discerns that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." "Judge not what is best / By pleasure," Michael warns Adam, "though to nature seeming meet." Instead, Adam should judge according to the "nobler end" for which he was created: "conformity divine," that is, obedience to God. And when Adam hears this rebuke Milton tells us that he was "of short joy bereft." Of short joy bereft: for the joy which comes from judging according to appearances and immediate circumstances, according to what we now like to call "outcomes," is always short. Only the joy of conforming our will to God's is long.

Most important of all, Fish goes on to say, "It cannot be too much emphasized that the politics of being—the politics of long joy—is not quietism. Its relative indifference to outcomes is not an unconcern with the way things go in the world, but a recognition that the turns of fortune and and history are not in man's control and that all one can be responsible for is the firmness of one's resolve." Milton says of the loyal angels fighting against Satan's forces that "each on himself relied" as though "only in his arm the moment lay / Of victory." Or, in Fish's summary, "each acts as if the fate of the world is in his hands, while knowing full well it isn't."

It seems to me that this politics of long joy is the one thing needful for the Christian cultural critic, as for a warring angel like Abdiel or a poetic polemicist like Milton. Perhaps the chief problem with the "culture wars" paradigm that governs so much Christian action and reflection, in the North American context anyway, is that it encourages us to think in terms of trophies rather than testimonies. It tempts us to think too much about whether we're winning or losing, and too little about the only thing we ultimately control, which is the firmness of our own resolve. If the culture warrior would prefer not to be governed by Stanley Fish, or even by John Milton, maybe Koheleth provides an acceptable model: "In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good" (Ecclesiastes 11:6).

It seems to me that the careful dance, the difficult balance, of Christian cultural criticism is to be endlessly attentive to the form and the details of the world around us, while simultaneously practicing the "politics of long joy"—and in this way avoiding an unhealthy obsession with "trophies," and avoiding also being conformed to the ways of this world. It's a tough walk to walk, because one of the peculiarities of fallen human nature is that we find it difficult, over the long haul anyway, to remember that there is a world of difference between "I have no control over this" and "this isn't very important." We tend, against all reason, to diminish the importance of everything we cannot shape or direct. But our joy will be short if it is grounded in circumstances and events, because circumstances and events always change: if they please us now, they will displease us later. And then what will we do?

Central to this discipline, for me anyway, is a constant striving to remember who human beings are and what we are made for. Which brings me to the title of this column. On Bruce Cockburn's 1980 recording Humans there's a song called "Rumours of Glory"—a song about "the extremes / of what humans can be," but also about the imago Dei which each of us bears, the divine image that waits always for the discerning eye to notice it. In the song, perhaps his best (which is saying a lot), Cockburn sees the "tension" between what we were made to be and what we in fact are; he sees that human culture is produced by that tension, which generates "energy surging like a storm." At once attracted and repelled by that energy, "you plunge your hand in; you draw it back, scorched." And the hand that has been plunged truly into the human world is always marked by that plunging: it's "scorched", yes, but beneath the wound "something is shining like gold — but better." The truth of who we are, given the extremes of divine image and savage depravity, is hard to discern; perhaps we can only achieve it in brief moments; perhaps we only catch rumors of the glory that is, and is to be. But even those rumors can sustain us as we walk the pilgrim path.

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.

The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one’s claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

— Ivan Illich, "Energy and Equity" (1974)