Alan Jacobs

Here’s something C. S. Lewis wrote in a 1946 essay called “The Decline of Religion”:

The `decline of religion’ so often lamented (or welcomed) is held to be shown by empty chapels [in the Oxbridge colleges]. Now it is quite true that that chapels which were full in 1900 are empty in 1946. But this change was not gradual. It occurred at the precise moment when chapel ceased to be compulsory. It was not in fact a decline; it was a precipice. The sixty men who had come because chapel was a little later than ‘rollers’ (its only alternative) came no more; the five Christians remained. The withdrawal of compulsion did not create a new religious situation, but only revealed the situation which had long existed. And this is typical of the ‘decline in religion’ all over England.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the situation that obtained at Oxford and Cambridge when chapel attendance was made optional is closely analogous to the religious situation in America today. Everywhere in America, and even in the deep South, being a Christian has ceased is rapidly ceasing to be socially rewarding or even acceptable.* More from Lewis:

One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague Theism with a strong and virile ethical code, which, far from standing over against the ‘World’, was absorbed into the whole fabric of English institutions and sentiment and therefore demanded church-going as (at best) a part of loyalty and good manners as (at worst) a proof of respectability. Hence a social pressure, like the withdrawal of the compulsion, did not create a new situation. The new freedom first allowed accurate observations to be made. When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered.

That’s what we are discovering. The question is whether American churches will have the intellectual and spiritual integrity necessary to recognize and accept how completely they have relied on the social appeal of a “vague Theism” and how little they have spoken to those who go to church because they seek Christ. What’s at stake here is merely life or death.

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*I changed that on reflection — where I live in central Texas, and in the many parts of the Southeast, being known to have a church community is still an index of trustworthiness in some business and social contexts. 

I do not believe that there are any exceptions to the rule that big-budget Hollywood action movies today — within which I include many SF and all superhero movies — possess the following traits:

• They’re at least 30 minutes too long;
• Most of that excessive length results from the decision to stage one massive action set-piece too many;
• The decision to stage one massive action set-piece too many stems, in turn, from the catastrophically erroneous belief that raising the stakes — putting a city or (better) a country or (better still) a planet or (even more better) the universe or (best of all) ALL THE UNIVERSES THERE EVER WERE OR EVER COULD BE at risk — will increase viewers’ emotional investment in the story;
• In order to turn the screw of tension ever tighter, some characters will be made to behave in ways wildly inconsistent with what they appear to be throughout most of the movie, while other characters will be pressed towards the abaolute extremes of heroism or wickedness.

I don’t think my claims here are seriously contestable, which leaves us with two kinds of movie viewers: those who don’t mind, and those who mind: those who can accept these traits as conventions of the genre and move beyond them in evaluating the success or failure of a picture, and those who can’t be reconciled to these traits.

I am in the latter camp, which is why I am not as crazy about Blade Runner 2049 as many of my friends. BR2049 is visually and aurally stunning — and I mean truly stunning: I am very happy that I got to experience the movie at an Alamo Drafthouse, where they really care about both projection and sound quality. But the screenplay is often inept, and the pacing is abysmally bad. During the interminable final fight scene I got seriously drowsy, and and possibly would have nodded off altogether if it hadn’t been for the occasional loud noises.

I read or heard somewhere that Denis Villanueve has said that there won’t be a director’s cut of BR2049 because “This is the director’s cut.” Well, good. But what we need instead is a Phantom Edit-style reduction. Call it The Replicant Edit. My suggestions: first, do away with that last big fight scene, and second (this is even more important), eliminate Jared Leto’s Wallace altogether. Delete him. Wallace is the Jar Jar Binks of BR2049. A number of people have complained about Leto’s performance, but I don’t blame him: the part is horrifically badly written, and literally no actor in the world could have made it work. In fact, everything between the crucial meeting in Las Vegas and the final scene could be done away with: the whole Replicant Resistance is introduced only in order to Raise Those Stakes and give K some information that he could have gotten in any number of other ways.

With all the crap out of the way, we’d have a story that is just as visually and aurally powerful as the version now on display, and one focused more consistently on Ryan Gosling’s K, who is the heart and soul of the movie. (N.B.: soul.) Gosling’s performance is truly remarkable, and his part is brilliantly written, thank God: through K all the questions about what it means to be human that were raised so powerfully and disturbingly in Blade Runner are extended and developed here with a shrewdness that quite overcomes all the fears fans of the original had about the likelihood of ham-fisted answers to subtle questions. If the internal crisis of Gosling’s K could be brought more consistently to the movie’s center of attention, BR2049 would be a worthy successor to the original, and the two films together would make a profound diptych for the emergent Age of AI. As it stands, I’m just looking forward to buying the Blu-Ray and skipping the scenes I hate. I think some important matters might come clear for me then.

In almost all democratic countries today, the ruling party appears rudderless, spiritless, bereft of ideas; energy may be found only in opposition.

A recent Song Exploder episode features Rostam — best known for being in Vampire Weekend — talking about his song “Bike Dream.” Rostam seems to do most of his composing on his laptop, but describes how he brought analog sounds into the making of this song, and in one of the most interesting moments in the interview explains that musicians who work as he does can become too visual: their understanding of the song they’re working on is fundamentally, maybe too fundamentally, shaped by the waveforms they see in Logic Pro (or whatever app they use). They come to depend on the regularity of digitally produced waveforms, and the irregularities of analog sounds start to look kind of weird, and not in a good way. Yet, especially in rhythm tracks, irregularity is where the groove is. So, Rostam thinks, sometimes you have to override that cognitive preference for the visually regular — if you want to find a groove.  You have to let the analog preferences of the ear have their way. (Listening to “Bike Dream” I find myself wishing that Rostam would take his own advice more seriously.)

There’s a great moment in one of the World Out of Time records that David Lindley and Henry Kaiser made in Madagascar 25 years ago when they’re just sitting around with a handful of musicians, including a famous flute player, an elderly man named Rakoto Frah, and they fall into something:

(They just happened to be recording at the time.) Afterward, Lindley couldn’t stop talking about those drummers. “You can’t get drummers in L.A. to play like that,” he said. One of the primary reasons session drummers didn’t play that way — free, loose, grooving — is that they were already, in those relatively early days of digital recording, playing to click tracks that kept them in time. So even when the regularities of digital imagery weren’t getting in the way of free music expression, the regularities of digital audio were.

Lose the digital; find the groove.

To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.

— Mission statement of Way of the Future (2017)

In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end. That is what we are working to. When you are asked, "Where is God? Who is God?" stand up and say, "I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends."

— George Bernard Shaw, “The New Theology” (1907)

This is a terrific post by Matt Thomas on living by the seasons: “when you think of things in terms of seasons instead of a single day, the entire year becomes your canvas.” Matt makes me want to be governed more by the seasons, but my thoughts and moods are linked much more tightly to the rhythms of the academic year. Which are of course not unrelated to the seasons: the practice of dismissing children from school for the summer is a throwback to an agricultural world in which, during the growing season, all hands were needed on the farm. But the academic rhythms are their own thing now, and last year, when I had a sabbatical, I was genuinely disoriented when August came around and I had no classes to prepare for, no syllabuses to write, no instructor’s copies of books to pick up. I certainly enjoyed my time to write, but I have to say that it felt good this August to feel those old patterns reassert their old claim on me. Because the academic seasons have been my seasons for more than half-a-century now.

Politics is the art of living together and being ‘just’ to one another — not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life. The art of peace; the art of accommodating moralities to one another.

— Michael Oakeshott, in a notebook

A culture, particularly one such as ours, is a continuity of feelings, perceptions, ideas, engagements, attitudes and so forth, pulling in different directions, often critical of one another and contingently related to one another so as to compose not a doctrine, but what I shall call a conversational encounter. Ours, for example, accommodates not only the lyre of Apollo but also the pipes of Pan, the call of the wild; not only the poet but also the physicist; not only the majestic metropolis of Augustinian theology but also the “greenwood“ of Franciscan Christianity. A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of light-hearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, neither as long-ago terminated specimens of human adventure, nor as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen and to reflect.

— Michael Oakeshott, “A Place of Learning.” The idea that "a culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers" is one of the most beautiful and illuminating depictions of historical understanding that I know.

This is just a placeholder for a future, more-properly-thought-out reflection: since last November’s election I’ve noticed, in posts and articles trying to understand and explain the current American social disorder,  two figures assuming a prominence in our public discourse that they haven’t had in a while (if ever). One, invoked mainly but not exclusively on the right, is René Girard; the other, invoked mainly but not exclusively on the left, is Hannah Arendt. Now, for what it’s worth, I’m #TeamArendt all the way — I think Girard’s work is almost totally worthless, having, as Joshua Landy has demonstrated, roughly the same evidentiary foundation as Scientology — but what I’m really interested in is the rise of these two figures, among all that people could invoke, to explain the American scene today. That’s fascinating in itself.

Many typos and missed auto-errors now fixed; sorry about those

I find myself thinking often about this 2014 essay by Pat Deneen, one of the smartest political thinkers I know and one of the most incisive commentators on matters Catholic. The core distinction the essay makes seems to me vital. It concerns two rival models of Catholicism that have emerged to replace the old distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” Catholicism.

On the one side one finds an older American tradition of orthodox Catholicism as it has developed in the nation since the mid-twentieth century…. Its basic positions align closely to the arguments developed by John Courtney Murray and others. Essentially, there is no fundamental contradiction between liberal democracy and Catholicism. Liberal democracy is, or at its best can be, a tolerant home for Catholics, one that acknowledges contributions of the Catholic tradition and is leavened by its moral commitments. While liberalism alone can be brittle and thin — its stated neutrality can leave it awash in relativism and indifferentism — it is deepened and rendered more sustainable by the Catholic presence….

On the other side is arrayed what might be characterized as a more radical Catholicism…. The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism.

In the four-and-a-half years since this essay appeared, two significant developments have occurred that alter, but only to some extent, the story Deneen tells.

First, the collapse of liberal Catholicism — which Deneen in the essay takes as a given — has, it’s safe to say, been postponed. I doubt Deneen would see any substantive reason to question his belief that “Liberal Catholicism has no future — like liberal Protestantism, it is fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation”; but that leaves unanswered the question of whether “liberalism simpliciter” could come to run the Catholic Church, at least for a while. In any event, that’s an intra-Catholic issue and not one that I’m concerned with here. (Though I have my preferences about how it all falls out.)

Second, though: his “radical Catholics” — rad-trads, tradinistas (the latter being, I think, a subset of the former) — have grown in power and have taken over some territory that once belonged to that older conservative tradition. In 2014 Deneen could confidently identify First Things as a magazine exemplifying the older tradition, but in the intervening years the rad-trads have become much more vocal there, to the point that the older conservatism is certainly a minority position in the magazine and may eventually disappear altogether. And in at least one sense that is a welcome development: as I have noted several times over the years, my primary disagreement with Father Neuhaus, the founding editor of First Things, centered on what I felt was his too-great comfort with the American project and his consequent reluctance to subject it to as thorough a critique as it has often deserved.

But though I admire the rad-trad willingness to subject the liberal order to comprehensive critical scrutiny, there’s another feature of the movement that I’m not so happy with: its general lack of interest in, and in many cases even disdain for, for non-Catholics. This is an old theme with me, but re-reading Deneen’s essay has given me a new understanding of the phenomenon.

If I were writing an essay instead of a brief blog post, I’d spell this out with examples, and maybe some day I’ll do that, but for now I’ll just say this: I’ve had many conversations with rad-trads and have had no success in persuading them that any non-Catholic thinker has anything meaningful to contribute to their project. If you want to tell them that you agree wth them, they’re happy enough with that, but they’re not interested in finding intellectual resources outside the Catholic tradition (narrowly conceived) or in hearing commentary from outside the Catholic tradition. In other words, though the rad-trads in my experience rarely have anything good to say about Vatican II, they are the children (or grandchildren) of ressourcement.

More power to them, I guess — but I say that with a bit of sadness, because that older conservative tradition which they repudiate (and may be supplanting) had an interest not just in strengthening the liberal order but also in strengthening ecumenical ties among all Christians, but especially those of the small-o orthodox variety. And it now strikes me that those two projects were closely related: that is, one of the key ways to strengthen the liberal order was through drawing Christians together towards a more unified front, and one of the key ways to pursue ecumenism was through claiming a shared role for all Christians in the liberal order. So I guess the rad-trads have decided that if you want to get rid of the one you have to ditch the other as well.

There may be other factors as well: for instance, many of the rad-trads are converts to Catholicism, and continuing to value anything from the Reformation traditions might feel like a less-than-complete submission to Mother Church. (Dunno. Can’t read minds.) But in any case, I hope that in the next few years they’ll rethink their approach.

Just a couple of examples: Can the pro-life cause really thrive if Catholics and evangelicals don’t work together? Is it really the case that, as the aforelinked Tradinista Manifesto suggests, contemporary Western militarism can only be challenged by “the traditional requirements of the Church’s just war theory”? Might not the Mennonite tradition have something to say to Catholics — even rad-trad Catholics?

All this to say: I continue to think that, given what we’re collectively facing in this dark time, we Christians need one another — and need one another in intellectual collaboration as well as in common prayer. It would make me very happy if more of my Catholic friends agreed.