Alan Jacobs

One:

But how was he to describe this lesson? The description might begin with his wild internal disorder, or even with the fact that he was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.

Two:

But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. And this is how we teach metaphysics on each other. "You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think."

 

To judge from what gets them going at campaign rallies and on Twitter, Trump supporters think the appropriate response to white working-class decline is to shut the border, keep out Muslims, deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, oppose political correctness about race and gender, lash out at the journalists who supposedly encourage all of the social and cultural trends that need to be turned back and reversed, and kick out the elites leading both parties in favor of vastly smarter and tougher men like Donald Trump.

— Damon Linker. I think Damon is exactly right about this, and that’s not an especially happy thought. Among other things, it means that there’s really nothing the Republican Party can do to appease Trump supporters that isn’t suicidal in a general election.

• The Thrilla in Manila and the End of Boxing
• How I Became a Soccer Fan
• Three related posts: The Value of Disagreement, Disciplinary Bulverism, and Code Fetishists and Antinomians
• The Bought Grace of Life
• Ferrante’s tragedy
• And above all, I think, the series of posts I wrote on something that, as I said in one of them, will be occupying me for years: the technological history of modernity.

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darth

It will be a century this coming summer that the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth began his revolutionary commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. A quiet and studious man of simple tastes, Barth was an unlikely revolutionary. He listened to Mozart, smoked his pipe and read the paper: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” he said. But mostly he sat and wrote. His Church Dogmatics is more than six million words. And no, I haven’t read it all. But his considerably shorter Epistle to the Romans, written earlier, was the decisive turning point in 20th-century theology. It was a book that dropped a bomb on the comfortable assumptions of German liberal thought. And it’s a bomb that needs dropping again – but this time much closer to home.

Which brings me to David Cameron’s message of Christmas cheer, that we are a “Christian country”. Given the rapid decline in the number of church-going Christians, and given Cameron’s sketchy relationship to faith, what he probably meant is that we are a Christian culture; that the ethos of Christianity is woven into the warp and weft of British institutional life. Oh, what a slippery word “ethos” is – Christianity in homeopathic doses. Barth would not have approved. For what is frittered away in this mutually back-slapping accommodation between faith and the state is the ability of the church to stand up to the state’s propensity for war. Indeed, the point of saying that Jesus is Lord is to say that Caesar isn’t. Neither Caesar nor his armies nor his civilising institutions. Which is why Christians should always call time on their religion being used as a deodorant to mask the stench of war and death.

— Giles Fraser. This post comes at an interesting time, for me!

For Schelling, the eighteenth-century university reproduced the effects of information overload in institutional and pedagogical form. It not only hindered the advancement of knowledge but also threatened the integrity of the individual by producing distracted, unreflective young men. The university, especially the Enlightenment university that valued utility above all else, had been complicit in fomenting this epistemological and ethical crisis, and it was incumbent upon a vanguard of thinkers to reimagine the university as not simply an efficient institution, but rather the institutional embodiment of a distinct practice, namely, science. Only science as a practice, as a source of internal goods and virtues, not better textbooks or more complex encyclopedias, could address the epistemic and ethical effects of information overload. The task of the university was to form subjects of knowledge capable of navigating the oceans of print. It was to transform a student’s vision of the world and shape their character, to fuse epistemology with ethics.

— A characteristically provocative and illuminating passage from Chad Wellmon's book Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University, which I am going to review for Books and Culture. There's so much wonderful stuff here that I'm tempted to produce just an anthology of quotations. But instead I fear that I'm going to end up writing a very long review. Spoiler: this is a major, major work of scholarship and everyone interested in the fate of the university should read it.

I have been watching less and less football in the past couple of years, for the same reason that thousands of other people have become uncomfortable with football. I’m not on principle refusing to watch or anything, I just … tend to find other things to do.

But this is a week when football is hard to avoid. A few minutes ago I turned on the TV at the very beginning of whatever bowl game this is featuring Texas A&M against Louisville, and the instant the screen came on I saw a Louisville defender, James Burgess, lower his helmet and hit a Texas A&M player right in the chin. (He managed to injure his teammate at the same time.) Burgess was flagged for targeting, and immediately, even as the medics came out on to the field to treat the two injured players, the color commentator, Andre Ware, began weaving an elaborate defense of the defender, repeatedly claiming that he couldn’t see targeting at all. Me, I couldn’t see anything else, and neither could the officials in the review booth, who confirmed the ruling and ejected Burgess.

Ware just said, “Tough … tough,” and the conversation in the booth focused on this being the end of Burgess’s career. If any of them noticed the two injured players lying on the turf they didn’t think the sight worth mentioning. Some A&M player has received a vicious blow to the head that  may have injured him significantly, but I don’t know; maybe he’s fine. We’re now fifteen minutes further into the broadcast and he hasn’t been mentioned. I don’t even know his name.

What I do know is that all of the interest, and all of the sympathy, of ESPN’s crew is with the player who did the injuring, not the opposing player who was injured. How unfortunate this is for Burgess! It doesn’t even seem to occur to anyone that getting a helmet in the chin is somewhat unfortunate as well — maybe even, if a person’s health is what you care about as opposed to a heart-warming conclusion to a collegiate sports career, a tad more unfortunate. And you could see taking such a blow as something to care about even if you thought Burgess didn’t commit a penalty.

One of the odd things about this scenario is that Andre Ware was an offensive player, a quarterback: in his career he was on the receiving end of hits like that, he didn’t deliver them. And yet all his thoughts are for Burgess. To watch this broadcast you’d think that what’s wrong with football is not CTE, but the unjust persecution of people who launch their helmets into others’ heads. And that’s what’s wrong, what’s very seriously wrong, with far too many of the people who watch and cover football.

I’m going to keep watching this broadcast to see if ESPN deigns to mention the A&M player who got rocked. I still don’t know his name. I think his number was 4.

It will not do to note that 99 percent of the time the police mediate conflicts without killing people, any more than it will do for a restaurant to note that 99 percent of the time rats don’t run through the dining room. Nor will it do to point out that most black citizens are killed by other black citizens, not police officers, anymore than it will do to point out that most American citizens are killed by other American citizens, not terrorists. If officers cannot be expected to act any better than ordinary citizens, why call them in the first place? Why invest them with any more power?

Legitimacy is what is ultimately at stake here. When Cooksey says that her son’s father should not have called the police, when she says that they “are supposed to serve and protect us and yet they take the lives,” she is saying that police in Chicago are police in name only. This opinion is widely shared. Asked about the possibility of an investigation, Melvin Jones, the brother of Bettie Jones, could muster no confidence. “I already know how that will turn out,” he scoffed. “We all know how that will turn out.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

In one of the prefaces to The Epistle to the Romans, Barth comments ruefully on having written a bestseller; and while the book is quite difficult in places, the energy and urgency of it — the passion and directness with which Barth engages Paul — make its bestseller status not wholly surprising. (And hey, Piketty’s Capital, a rather less urgent book, has been a bestseller too. These intellectual oddities turn up from time to time.)

After finishing Barth, I went on to John Barclay’s new book Paul and the Gift, and just in terms of the experience of reading, the contrast between the two books is pretty extreme. Aside from those prefaces (Barth wrote one for each edition of his book and the English translation contains them all), Barth simply plunges into Paul’s letter and provides the what he thinks to be the necessary context as he goes along. Barclay’s approach, conversely, reminds me of Carlyle’s famous pen-portrait of Coleridge: “You put some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way, —” …

So: Barclay’s topic is “Paul and the Gift,” but how can he write about that without first exploring the possible definitions of gift, based on the history of ideas and previous scholarship on the subject? (Seventy pages.) And how can he proceed without noting the copious history of biblical exegesis of Paul’s notion of grace? (One hundred and ten pages.) And how can he approach Paul’s writings without understanding the role of divine grace in Second Temple Judaism? (One hundred and twenty pages.) So eventually Barclay starts to tell us about Paul … on page 325. And then just a few pages after getting us into Galatians he goes back to summarizing other scholars, in this case four previous interpretations of the letter. Once he starts engaging Paul directly he does so vigorously, and certainly he offers a far stronger understanding of the Jewish and Palestinian contexts of Paul’s writing that Barth would ever deign to do; moreover, he is scrupulously fair to every other scholar he treats, even the ones he disagrees with … but to an outsider to the discipline Paul and the Gift can be a taxing read, because, unlike Barth’s commentary, Barclay’s is basically a guild book.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that: indeed, such books are necessary if a given guild is going to be corrected when it goes wrong and set on more profitable pathways. But it’s frequently a slog for the non-guild reader. At least for this one. YMMV. Still, I learned a great deal from Barclay and if I have time I’d like to juxtapose his reading of Romans 9-11 with Barth’s. (But I may not have time; a new semester is approaching and I have other reading to do.)

But let me make one more point. There’s an admirable humility to Barclay’s patient engagement with other scholars, his willingness to give them his time and attention — in a way, to share his readers’ attention with them — and this gets me thinking about a scholar with a very different approach: N. T. Wright. It’s not that Wright doesn’t cite other scholars, or is nasty to them; but he has limited time for them. Rhetorically he’s all about making his own case, in which he is absolutely confident, and as the momentum of his own reading of Paul sweeps him along, he expects us to be swept along too — and we often are. In that respect, though not in the substance or method of his interpretation, Wright is like Barth. That sublime self-confidence, often sliding into sheer arrogance, is a large part of what makes them compelling storytellers; that’s how they can write bestsellers. And they end up influencing their own guild powerfully, because most of the other members feel that they have to respond to these sweeping, powerful narratives. It makes me wonder whether, if a scholar really wants to shape his or her guild, writing a guild book is not the best way to do it. If you have the panache and chutzpah to make a bestseller, maybe you should do that.