Alan Jacobs

On Monday morning I’ll be sending an email to my students reminding them that then need to bring both Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos to class. It’s gonna be a great week of teaching.

I remember about eight years ago spending an afternoon at MoMA and then heading down to Soho for evening drinks at the loft of a friend of a friend. The loft was very well appointed, the space could have fit a productive sweatshop, and the guy who owned it worked at a hedge fund. He served us a bottle of expensive wine and remarked at length about its origins and qualities. I had no appreciation for fine wine because I eschewed discriminating tastes in things I couldn’t afford, and went on to say that I thought the intellectual apparatus that had grown up around the appreciation of food and drink, conflating chefs and vintners with artists and writers, was a sham — ultimately a way for people like him to pat themselves on the back for the way they spend their money and to compensate for the soulless and morally dubious way they made it. He told me I was “the enemy of good things.” We revealed ourselves to each other. Which one of us was the asshole?

— In Defense of Pretentiousness | Christian Lorentzen. Do I have to choose just one?

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“530”] via the 50 Watts Tumblr[/caption]

I always give my students reading quizzes, and this morning, as I was making out a quiz, I found myself writing this:

7) How does gene-level selectionism help to account for kin altruism?

Not a typical quiz question for me. But in my Great Texts of the Twentieth Century class, we're reading Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. I had read it before, of course, but this is the first time I've taught it, and as I have tried to think about it from the student's point of view, I have been reminded of what an absolutely superb explainer Dawkins is. He and Stephen Jay Gould, for all their disagreements, are unparalleled in this respect.

But Dawkins fancies himself a polemicist too, and in that role he’s really awful. It seems that he is amazingly skilled at putting himself in the position of someone who doesn’t know what he knows; but he’s absolutely incapable of putting himself in the position of someone who doesn’t believe what he believes. Which is quite curious, when you think about it.

All of Dawkins’s books have elements of explanation and polemic, but his best ones (The Extended Phenotype, The Greatest Show on Earth) are the ones in which explanation predominates, and his worst (The God Delusion) are the most polemical ones.

The man who wrote "Amazing Grace" lived to be a very old man. For many years he worked as a priest in London. His teaching, his sermons his hymns, inspired many in the struggle against slavery. But in old age he said to one of his friends these words: ‘I am a very old man and my memory has gone. But I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Jesus is a great saviour.’ Now when we come to Holy Communion, brothers and sisters, that is what we are to remember.

We are great sinners, we live so often in blindness; we do not truly see ourselves; we hide from those things in ourselves which we can’t manage. And sometimes we try to bury our history underground. And I think here of those underground pits very near this cathedral, where slaves were once kept. So do we keep part of our own lives underground like that; we cannot face our own failures? …

In so much of our human life we do this exactly the wrong way round. First of all we look at our neighbour and we say ‘I know what you need.’ Then I look at myself and say ‘I am alright’ and then I look at God and say ‘I am alright, aren’t I?’ and I don’t wait for an answer. The Bible turns it upside down: as always the Gospel turns the whole world upside down. First, God in Jesus Christ. Then myself, the wretch who has been saved by amazing Grace, and then the world around, the world that needs my love, my compassion, a world that needs me to speak a word from God to it, a word of challenge; yes; a word of judgement; yes, but above all, a word of promise.

— Rowan Williams, sermon at the Anglican Cathedral in Zanzibar, 2007

There is no more overrated analytical category than the “generation” – it is at least an order of magnitude worse than useless – but here we’re reaching wholly new levels of absurdity. Tomorrow: “How the Great-great-grandchildren of Milennials Will Save (or Destroy) the Planet.”

I think the biggest religious choice I ever made was my decision to teach at Wheaton College. As I suggested the other day, being employed by Wheaton may well have ensured that I would never be allowed to teach at the kind of public university in which I was educated, but I’m okay with that, because it also made it possible for me to unite my Christian convictions and my scholarly interests. And that union has been a great gift to me.

There has never been a greater footballer.

As part of my ongoing reckoning with David Foster Wallace, a writer whose work I have mixed responses to but whom I can’t put out of my mind, I watched The End of the Tour the other night. I have some thoughts.

1) Jesse Eisenberg’s David Lipsky comes off as a little bit of a jerk at times, but far less of one that Lipsky himself does in the book on which the film is based. The real Lipsky seems to want to present himself as someone to be reckoned with, someone who is a better chessplayer than DFW, both literally and metaphorically. He’s always claiming that he perceives DFW’s subtle rhetorical strategies. You don’t hear that kind of thing from Eisenberg’s Lipsky, which is good. You mainly see Lipsky trying to hold his own with DFW, determined not to be overawed, determined (and this is an important element of the movie) not to be physically intimidated on those rare occasions when DFW speaks forcefully. DFW was about 6’2", but Jason Segel is taller than that, and bigger-framed, and the size differential between him and the petite Eisenberg is key to the way the story plays out. Lipsky tries to seize control of the situation by chutzpah and agility, to take advantage, in a not-especially-malicious way, of DFW’s neuroses, but sometimes he pushes a little too hard and DFW becomes testy and seems to increase in size and Lipsky flinches — but doesn’t back off. (And yes, chutzpah: we’re meant to be aware that DFW is a midwestern WASP and Lipsky is a New York Jew.)

2) Jason Segel is really fantastic, way better than I thought he would be, but he doesn’t quite play DFW as he was at that time. The real DFW, if things like the Charlie Rose interview from 1996 are anything to go by — and in his comments on preparing for the role Segel always mentions that interview — was a little bit more of a smartass then Seigel’s DFW, a faster talker, a guy who seemed wired all the time, a guy whose neurotic mania is right on the surface. Mary Karr, who dated Wallace in the pre-Infinite Jest years, once said (and in his book Lipsky quotes this): “Data went into his mind, and it would just shoot off sparks. Wildly funny, unbelievable wattage, such a massive interest in and curiosity about his place in the world. He had more frames per second than the rest of us, he just never stopped. He was just constantly devouring the universe.” That “more frames per second” image is brilliant, and watching him talk with Charlie Rose you see it.

You also see the nervous tics, the intense and nearly-disabling self-consciousness. When DFW says something less perfectly than he wants to, he grimaces and drinks more water. Throughout the show he sips and sips and sips. When Rose asks him to explain all the endnotes in Jest his hyperarticulacy falters, he stumbles, he mutters to himself, and then says:

DFW: Well, I’m just going to look pretentious talking about this.

ROSE: Why — quit worrying about how you’re going to look and just be!

DFW: I have got news for you. Coming on a television show stimulates your what-am-I-going-to-look-like gland like no other experience.

You don’t get so much of the high-speed processing with Segel, just the self-consciousness which verges at times on self-disgust. You don’t get the smartest-guy-in-the-room vibe, which was clearly very much a part of DFW at that point in his life. Ten years later that had got sanded down and he was far less manic, and in fact the pace and tone of Segel’s DFW is closer to the guy who gave the “This Is Water” speech in 2005 than to the Wallace of 1996. But nevertheless the performance works. It really works. It’s impossible not to be touched by this guy, so smart and so successful and yet so unsure about himself. (Though I do wonder how much of that comes across to people who haven’t read anything by or about DFW.)

3) There’s a really great scene at the end when Lipsky is going through DFW’s house and describing for his tape recorder whatever he sees. (It’s in the book that way too.) And I love how that Jesse Eisenberg plays the moment when he sees the prayer of Saint Ignatius, and just reads it to his tape recorder.

Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve You as You deserve; to give and not to count the cost, […] to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, save that of knowing that I do Your will.

He’s obviously puzzled by it, doesn’t know what to make of it, but he has a very small window of time in which to record his impressions. He just stares at it a moment and then clicks off his recorder. It’s noteworthy that the prayer appears in the book too, in the same scene, but Lipsky quotes less of it and merely comments that it reminds him of “the AA prayer” (i.e. the Serenity Prayer). Donald Margulies, the writer of The End of the Tour, and James Ponsoldt, the director, seem to realize that it deserves more attention.

Yet there’s another similarly interesting moment from the book that the film treats more briefly. In the film, just before the tape-recorded survey of the house, DFW mentions that he likes going to dances at a local Baptist church. But in the book, he specifies that it’s a “black Baptist church,” and adds: “There’s a few of us who go to this, there’s this church up near campus, and that church is kind of good friends with this black Baptist church.” A slightly indirect confession that he is a churchgoer. (It was a Mennonite church, as it happens.)

There are a good many Christians for whom DFW has become a kind of saint, a secular saint maybe but nevertheless One of Us, but he really wasn’t. He was someone who clearly wanted the consolations of faith but equally clearly was not able to achieve them, at least not consistently. That his tenuous connection to faith would be represented in the movie in these two tiny things that emerge near the end, the Saint Ignatius prayer and the time he spends dancing at the Baptist Church, seems to me very appropriate. They are little mysteries which neither Lipsky nor we can see the full significance of. And I think that’s the way it was with DFW in general. So much going on on the surface, and yet so much more invisible, lurking deep below.

What is at issue here is a species of vision that breaks down the rigid lineaments of a world that interprets itself principally according to the brilliant glamour and spectacle of power, the stable arrangement of all things in hierarchies of meaning and authority, or the rational measures of social order and civic prestige … The scale of the reversal cannot be exaggerated: when Jesus stands before Pilate for the last time, beaten, derided, robed in purple and crowned with thorns, he must seem, from the vantage of all the noble wisdom of the empire and the age (which wisdom Nietzsche sought to resuscitate), merely absurd, a ridiculous figure prating incomprehensibly of an otherworldly kingdom and some undefined truth, obviously mad, oblivious of the lowliness of his state and of the magnitude of the powers into whose hands he has been delivered. But in the light of the resurrection, from the perspective of Christianity’s inverted order of vision, the mockery now redounds upon all kings and emperors, whose finery and symbols of status are revealed to be nothing more than rags and brambles beside the majesty of God’s Son, beside this servile shape in which God displays his infinite power to be where he will be; all the rulers of the earth cannot begin to surpass in grandeur this beauty of the God who ventures forth to make even the dust his glory. There is a special Christian humor here, a special kind of Christian irreverence: in Rome the emperor is now as nothing, a garment draped over the shoulders of a slave and then cast aside. Christianity is indeed a creed for slaves, but in neither the subtle Hegelian nor the crude Nietzschean sense: in contrast to Hegel and Nietzsche—to dialectic and diatribe alike — Christian faith speaks of the slave as God’s glory, the one who lies farthest out in the far country, to whom tidings of joy are sent from before the foundation of the world, and from whom the free and infinite God cannot be separated by any distance, certainly not that between the high and low, because he is the distance of all things.

— David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite