Alan Jacobs

I wrote about what strikes me as a very odd comment by Scott Alexander.

I wrote about what, until I can find a better term, I’m calling conceptual Marxism.

Scott Alexander suggesting the criteria that make someone an Effective Altruist:

1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field.

2. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree.

3. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON'T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY'RE "OBVIOUS" BUT THEN NOT DO THEM! 

Alexander then says, “I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists.” I don’t know how we’d go about measuring that, but I know a great many people who do all three of these things and none of them call themselves effective altruists; I suspect that very few of them have ever heard the term “Effective Altruism.” (For instance, I have been involved in many debates within churches about what charitable organizations to support, and those have invariably been serious conversations that involve, among other things, close scrutiny not just of those organizations’ mission statements but also of their financial reports.) Like many people who either live in Silicon Valley or dwell in the penumbra of its culture, Alexander has no idea how tiny his bubble is; nor is he aware of how many thoughtful givers to charity there are in the world.  

I find this interesting: John Gruber reports that more of his listeners on The Talk Show use Overcast than Apple Podcasts. I used to love Overcast, but about three years ago it simply stopped playing podcasts in the queue. No matter what was in the queue or how I had added it, Overcast played the current podcast and then stopped. So I had to abandon it for Apple Podcasts. 

By the way, I’m mentioning this here rather than on micro.blog because of a Law of Social Media Life: Every time a person reports that an app or a device isn’t working for them, people reply to say “Works for me.” Which is strange, if you think about it. I mean, if someone writes “I broke my leg yesterday,” people don’t reply “My leg is just fine.” 

In most respects, the concerns of Marx & Engels are very different than those of today’s Left, but in certain other respects their work, especially in the Communist Manifesto, provide a template for almost all Leftist thought. There are three especially important ways in which they provide such a template.

One: M & E write,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The key phrase: “in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” The essential point is not that there are different social classes, but that the differentiation is always (a) binary and (b) morally asymmetrical. One class oppresses the other. There are no negotiations, no balance of powers, no possibility of collaboration or reconciliation. Moreover, “the history of class struggles” is the only history – it’s not the main event, it’s the one event. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists.

Two: Oppressors do nothing but oppress. It is their only form of action. Thus, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Oppressors do not – indeed cannot – love children. They can only exploit and oppress children, both theirs and the children of others. It is not possible for the oppressor class to have virtues.

Three: Communism, as Marx & Engels articulate it, is anti-humanistic. That is to say, they have no category of “the human.” As Edmund Wilson points out in To the Finland Station, their contemporaries the Communist League (also known as the League of the Just) adopted the motto “All Men Are Brothers.” This idea Marx & Engels strenuously repudiate. “Workers of the world, unite!” – and unite against your class enemies, with whom you cannot be reconciled, whom you must utterly destroy. A version of genocide – class being the marker of gens – is baked into the system.

At the outset I said that these principles effectively constitute the modern Left. But they constitute the modern populist Right as well. Replace “bourgeoisie” with “coastal elites” and the “deep state”; replace “workers of the world, unite” with Trump’s “I am your retribution” and J. D. Vance’s “Our people hate the right people.” Different targets, same logic. It’s conceptual Marxism — a conceptual order that gets extracted from the political-economic specifics of the argument and then is redeployed.

(This is also, not incidentally, how Judenhass works: Jew and gentile are “oppressor and oppressed”; it is not possible for Jews to have virtues; genocide is baked into the system.) 

The single most significant political division in the Western world today is between those who deploy this logic and those who don’t; between, in other words, Manichaeans and Humanists. The only two parties that matter. 

A lovely collection of Christmas writings, edited by my colleague-of-many-years Lee Ryken.

Bob Dylan is playing geographically appropriate covers.

Jessica Grose:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite Campus, and many of their anecdotes were similar to what Miller shared: anxious kids checking their grades throughout the day, snowplow parents berating their children and questioning teachers about every grade they considered unacceptable, and harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day, dealing with an untenable stream of additional communication.

Mitch Foss, who was a classroom teacher in Colorado for 19 years, told me that when he posted grades, he would hear from kids almost instantly via email or text. Sometimes they’d be waiting outside his classroom door to talk about their scores. “You might get emails from parents questioning the grade, wanting an explanation, and that’s for every single thing,” even assignments that had little bearing on students’ overall marks, “which can be overwhelming.” 

This sounds like the Hell that would be designed specifically for me. 

As a counterpart to my post this morning about musical demos, see Richard Gibson’s brief essay on notebooks and unfinished novels.

I wrote about why musical demos are so often better than the finished product. One of the most common effects of modern musical production is to make songs and performances sound worse.

Nick Heer: “None of this made the web better for people. This formula of insubstantial content already reeks of something generated by a system rather than written by people, and that was true before any of it was machine-produced.” Machines are learning to write “like people” from people who already write like machines.

I recently listened to a 2020 BBC radio documentary on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Very interesting in several respects, two of which I’ll mention today.

1. The production didn’t always make it clear who was speaking at any given time, but one guy made the fascinating comment that, in the Beatles, George was to the guitar what Ringo was to the drums: he didn’t play many solos, and when he did they tended to be worked out carefully in advance for the purpose of enhancing the songs. No guitar hero stuff; no drum hero stuff. (Of course, Ringo famously played only one solo in his career as a Beatle.)
2. There’s an excerpt from an interview with Harrison during which he remarks on his dismay when he first heard Phil Spector’s production of “Wah-Wah”: “I hated it.” Then, he says, he got used to it, came to like it. But at another moment in the documentary, the engineer Ken Scott, who participated in the making of All Things Must Pass, talks about getting together with Harrison thirty years later to work on an anniversary edition of the album. They sat down to listen to it and simply laughed out loud at how bad it sounded. The interviewer didn’t like hearing this. He loves the sound of Spector’s production. He says it sounds contemporary. Yeah, I silently replied, contemporary crap. Compare Spector’s wall-of-crap sound with the demo that Harrison did with just his guitar and Klaus Voorman’s bass. The latter is infinitely superior.

Or so I think, and I don’t believe I am alone. You could make a plausible case that modern pop-music production on average makes songs worse than they would be if recorded as simply as possible. And that might help account for the otherwise odd fact that record labels reliably make money — not tons of money, grant you, but a profit — through releasing outtakes, alternative arrangements, and demos: those versions sound better.

Example: Flowers in the Dirt is one of Paul McCartney’s better solo recordings, but the finished record is a pale shadow of the acoustic demos Paul made with Elvis Costello. Those demos are, I think, the very finest work Paul has done in his post-Beatles career.

Example: Listen to the album version of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi.” Good song, right? Now listen to the mostly-acoustic version, a sparer, simpler performance with a classic blues walking bass. Fantastic song.

Example: The Daniel Lanois-produced version of Dylan’s “Most of the Time,” from Oh Mercy. Cool — but not nearly as cool as this acoustic version, which sounds like it could’ve come straight from Blood on the Tracks.

Example: Noel Gallagher was doing a run-through of a song at a studio in Dublin — he didn’t even know he was being recorded — and, with just his voice, his acoustic guitar, and a supporting piano player, happened to come up with the performance of his career.

And wasn’t this the appeal of MTV Unplugged? — and also why some performers didn’t want to do it? Take away the studio tricks and you’re left with … you. Not everyone passed the test, but those who did created some magic. Nirvana is the most famous case, not unjustifiably, but there were some other cool surprises also — for instance, it was while watching Unplugged that a lot of us discovered that 10,000 Maniacs was a great band. (Even though they look like some assistant professors of English at your local university, playing music to distract themselves from the terrors of their upcoming tenure decisions.) 

Brian Dillon: 

Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say — I can't prove it yet — that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it's worth my attachment to it seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth's-worth of stray threads. You might say I'm torn. 

Well, yes: exactly. 

Wikipedia: “The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 by excavators led by the Egyptologist Howard Carter, more than 3,300 years after his death and burial.” I had no idea Carter was that old when he made his great discovery. Young folks: Don’t let death, burial, and the passage of three millennia prevent you from realizing your dreams!

John Stuart Mill:

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. 

Neil Gaiman, as quoted by Cal Newport: “people are leaving [social media]. You know, Twitter is over, yeah Twitter is done, Twitter’s… you stick a fork in, it’s definitely overdone. The new Twitters, like Threads and Bluesky… nothing is going to do what that thing once did. Facebook works but it doesn’t really work. So I think probably the era of blogging may return and maybe people will come and find you and find me again.”

If you don’t shut up I’m gonna give you such a

[I’m taking this one down — didn’t intend to make an enemy, but evidently that’s what I did. And it’s just a blog post after all, no loss to the world.] 

The blur