enough already
I’m trying to make myself stop talking about politics, for the most part — I will make the very occasional exception for the two issues I am, personally and professionally, deeply invested in: religious freedom and higher-education policy. And even then I want to speak only after a waiting period in which others may be able to state my position more knowledgeably and wisely than I can.
As I explained to a friend earlier today, I’m taking this path (or hoping to) because I worry about the health of many of the good things that politics, properly speaking, exists in order to protect and nurture. I thus find myself remembering this famous letter from John Adams to Abigail, written from Paris:
I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelain, &c. &c. &c. — if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politics and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelain.We can be thankful that John Adams made that decision. But it is not a decision to which we should apply a categorical imperative, because if every person of his time had made the same choice, then several generations could have gone by without the production of Painting, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelain (and most of these are not the sorts of arts that are readily learned from the mere observation of existing examples). I worry about a society that has so lost the taste for such things that it will no longer know what it’s missing when they’re gone. I worry about a politics that has become an all-encompassing end in itself — an endless series of victories and losses and more victories and more losses — rather than a means by which, as Adams understood, room is to be made for pursuits far better than partisan disputation and maneuvering.
The best of the human order is damaged by these political obsessions. The artist who neglects his craft in order to agitate full-time will soon have no craft to exercise — or to pass down to younger artists. The scholar who abandons the archive for the protest march may return — if she ever does return — to find the archive abolished, its contents destroyed, because when the time of decision came there was no one present with the knowledge and love necessary to protect it. Auden once wrote in praise of those who forget “the appetitive goddesses” in order to take the momentous step of pursuing their own weird private obsessions:
There should be monuments, there should be odes, to the nameless heroes who took it first,Likewise, there should be some people in our land unsure who the President is, wholly unaware of the latest legislative wrangle — even when such matters directly affect them — because they are absorbed in something else that they love, that they can’t help focusing on, that they can’t manage to turn aside from. I don’t know how many such people there should be, or whether you should join their company. But I strongly suspect that there ought to be more of them than Facebook and Twitter currently allow. And I want to be one too.to the first flaker of flints who forgot his dinner,
the first collector of sea-shells to remain celibate.
the Gospel as narrative attractor
What I am finding is that the gospel, as a narrative, seems to function as a kind of attractor for me while I am telling stories. Without deliberately alluding to it, or meaning consciously to create any kind of counterpart of it, I seem to keep tracing around it, to keep drawing out partial, wandering, approximate, sometimes parodic or borderline-blasphemous outlines of its shape. Give me a story about a stranger who comes to town and instantly there, nearby, is the possibility that he may be a sin-eater or scapegoat, in some kind of redemptive relation to the ills, individual and shared, of the place he comes to. Give me a comedy of human fallibility, and I start to wonder whether the wisdom of God may be at work in it as well as the foolishness of man; but I also find myself reaching for some of the black paste of tragedy to stir in, because of the Christian story’s insistence on the mortal stakes for which we human idiots play. Conversely, give me a tragedy, and I seem to start tilting it towards laughter, because of the awareness that Easter Sunday follows Good Friday. It’s a tragi-comic religion, Christianity, hopelessly mixed in genre—the only one I know that ends with a death sentence and then a wedding.
Hogwarts School of Art and Music: A Refutation of Ross Douthat
It’s rare for me to disagree with my friend Ross Douthat as strongly as I do when reading this column. Alas, Ross has fallen under the malign influence of Spotted Toad, who in turn has fallen under the malign influence of all those people — cited in both those posts — who think that the right way to read the Harry Potter series is as an allegory of current partisan politics. Ross and Toad accept that essential premise of allegorical reading and merely tweak the algorithms to yield different results. And those results are slightly less bad interpretations of the series than offered by the kind of person who thinks it wickedly subversive to sort Theresa May into Slytherin.
Ross’s view — see his last sentence for a summary — is that the Potter books are “ultimately childish” because they do not serve as a nuanced and subtle Statesman’s Manual. But that critique only makes sense on the prior assumption that books are fundamentally about our own political order, especially the formation of its ruling class. And that’s not a very good assumption.
The chief problem with the idea that wizards somehow stand for the ruling class, and that Hogwarts is therefore the equivalent of Eton and Harrow, or Harvard and Yale, and that the exclusion of Muggles from Hogwarts represents the ways that the ruling class policies its own boundaries and keeps the riffraff out, is simply this: the wizards don’t rule the Muggles. They have as little to do with the Muggles as they possibly can; indeed, many of them are willing to live in uncomfortable circumstances, in conditions that look like sheer poverty, rather than try to make their way in the Muggle world.
And that in itself should be a strong hint of what — if we must allegorize the wizarding world of the books to our own everyday reality, which for the record I deny — a much better connection would be: art and music.
Think about it: In childhood, Harry finds that he has certain interests and gifts that his bourgeois family find weird, useless, and even disgusting — not gifts at all but some kind of perversion. Then, at the cusp of adolescence, he discovers that there is a whole world out there of people who share those gifts and interests, and who believe that, though only some people intrinsically have what it takes to pursue such matters, the ones who do have it must work hard to fulfill their gift: talent must be enhanced by disciplined craft. The vast majority of people who seek such mastery come from families that also value it; very few lack that supportive background in which the requisite abilities seem both natural and praiseworthy.
Because people who lack that family background don’t quite act right, talk right, look right, they can be disdained in spite of their gifts, and can find themselves feeling excluded — or at best treated as second-class citizens — both by their bourgeois family and their new, supposedly enlightened community. But in general that community is built around a shared commitment to what they all believe in, and all can do: their disdain is typically turned outward, towards those outside, those who Just Don’t Get It. They reject all the trappings of that contemptible world: they don’t want its money, they don’t want the false prestige it offers. They mark their alienation from that world by where they live, what they eat, perhaps above all how they dress. When they appear in the bourgeois world they are immediately recognized as weirdos, but they don’t care. They don’t care because they know what really matters.
Hogwarts isn’t a school for the ruling class; it’s an arts school. The series isn’t about the One Percent, it’s about the artsy counterculture.
And that’s if you insist on reading the books as political allegory. I don’t insist on that, and indeed, I’d prefer not to, because frankly, in our hyper-politicized environment that’s how people interpret almost everything. It’s a hazard for us all, not just for political columnists like Ross. I’d suggest an effort to redirect our attentions to what the books are really and directly about, which I think we can achieve by looking at the two epigraphs of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The first is from Aeschylus:
Oh, the torment bred in the race, The grinding scream of death And the stroke that hits the vein, The hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, The curse no man can bear.The second is from William Penn’s More Fruits of Solitude:But there is a cure in the house, And not outside it, no, Not from others but from them, Their bloody strife. We sing to you, Dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground – Answer the call, send help. Bless the children, give them triumph now.
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.Such matters, while often absent from “adult” novels in our time, are anything but “childish.” Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
definition as poetry
ABER, adj., sharp, acute, as an edge-tool; clear, well-defined, as a cloudless sky; eager, as a hungry fish at a bait; secure, as a knot on a line; ardent, severe; v., to sharpen, as a knife; to stir up and make bright, as a fire.— A piece of Shetland dialect, reported poetically in James Stout Angus’s A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect – as we learn from Robert Macfarlane
Anglicans and the echo of history
There are impulses at work in the Church, on both the right and the left, a desire to sweep away the tired old past and to start over again. This desire is founded on an illusory hope. The demands of “justice,” “love,” or “truth” will not sustain the weight pressed upon them as the single interpretive tool to order the Church’s life. These demands cannot trump orthodoxy, or the rich experience of the Church in the past, which is the context of orthodoxy. History is where God works and reveals his will. Those who want to sweep away the mistakes of the past by escape from it are more likely to perpetuate those same mistakes, in the very process of wielding their own theological and pastoral “broom.” The history of the Church is littered with examples; of course, you have to have a commitment to history to notice.
transcendent experience
I became interested in ecstatic experiences when I was 24 and had a near-death experience. I fell off a mountain while skiing, dropped 30 feet, and broke my leg and back. As I lay there, I felt immersed in love and light. I’d been suffering from emotional problems for six years, and feared my ego was permanently damaged. In that moment, I knew that I was OK, I was loved, that there was something in me that could not be damaged, call it ‘the soul’, ‘the self’, ‘pure consciousness’ or what-have-you. The experience was hugely healing. But was it just luck, or grace?Interesting how from its title onward — Religion has no monopoly on transcendent experience — this piece is absolutely desperate to avoid considering the possibility of a living God. People often say that it's quite unfair that God expects us to believe in him if he doesn't make himself evident to us. But what if he does and we choose to interpret the experience in some other way?
Thus C. S. Lewis at the beginning of his book Miracles: “In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing…. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.”
Vengeance
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.
how not to headline a story on religious freedom
Earlier today I tweeted this:
Lede: accurate Dek: misleading Hed: utterly ridiculous https://t.co/yyNnRLayvA pic.twitter.com/TmbRfJuBpf
— Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) June 26, 2017
Emma Green, the fine reporter who wrote the story (though not the headline), asked me to clarify, so here goes:
- That the story lede (the first sentence) is accurate will be seen from what follows.
- I called the dek (the description below the headline) "misleading," but that is generous: it's simply wrong. And Emma Green — who, again, is a superb reporter and rarely makes errors like this — gets it wrong in her story when she writes the source of the dek: "It is also the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that governments must provide money directly to a house of worship." No: it is not true government "must" provide money to a house of worship or to any other organization. The ruling, rather, is that if a state or local government says that it will provide money to organizations in return for providing certain services — in this case, the maintaining of a playground available to children throughout the community — then it cannot withhold that money from churches simply because they are churches. (The New York Times get it wrong in its headline too, and in the same way: "States Must Aid Some Church Programs, Justices Rule.") I understand that you can't squeeze everything into a headline, but the distinction between "governments must give money to churches" and "governments cannot exclude churches qua churches from projects for civic improvement" is not an especially subtle one.
- The idea expressed in the hed that this decision "Strikes Down a Major Church-State Barrier" is simply absurd. What is the "barrier" that existed before this ruling and if now gone? What does this ruling do to establish a state church? After all, the ruling applies equally to churches, mosques, synagogues, and atheist community centers: by what torturing of logic could such a ruling be said to establish a state religion? Just as the Civil Rights Act helped to enfranchise people of color without disenfranchising white people, so this ruling excludes prejudice against churches qua churches (in this one minor matter) without infringing on anyone else's rights.