Alan Jacobs

Business critics say Twitter is falling because the suits don’t know what do to with the service. In reality, it’s failing because our social mobs know just what to do with it. Twitter is getting worse because it helps us argue — and believe — that everyone else is getting worse.  

The debasement of Twitter indicates that many of us are ready to slip into verbal brutality to show that just one worldview — ours, of course — can annihilate the competition. Twitter used to be a place to escape from the uniformity and hyperventilation of the “mainstream media,” where the ideological id has long run rampant. Now, Twitter is a megaphone for the worldview wars. It fosters constant competition among our claims that everyone should care and act as we do.

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I do not know where I came across this image of St. Basil the Great giving alms to the poor and wounded — if anyone can turn up its source, please let me know — but I love it because it captures something of the man who, for me, is the greatest model of Christian leadership the Church has ever produced. The man who was in his time and place the chief defender of orthodoxy against the Arians was also the person who essentially invented the hospital and was relentless in his advocacy for the poor.

In one of his greatest sermons, he said to the wealthy of Cappadocia,

Think, you who call yourselves ‘Benefactor’! Be mindful of yourself, who you are, of what things have been placed in your charge, from Whom you received them, and why you were favored above others. You have been made a servant of the good God; an administrator for your fellow servant…. For a little while these things will give you pleasure; then flowing away from you they disappear, and then you must with exactness render an account of them. But you try to lock them up and keep them hidden using bolts and bars and under seals. You watch them anxiously and think, ‘What will I do?’

‘What will I do?’ Offhand, I would say, ‘I shall fill the souls of the hungry. I shall open my barns and I shall send for all who are in want. I shall be like Joseph in proclaiming the love of my fellow human being.’

Greif is relentlessly sober and earnest about writers who eschewed sobriety and earnestness. He acknowledges “mockery” and “irony,” but I don’t know whether he ever acknowledges the importance of this fact about most of his chosen fiction writers: that they think “man” is, all things considered, a pretty ludicrous figure. For instance, he acknowledges that in Pynchon’s V Benny Profane is a schlemihl because he “cannot get along with objects. Objects are always slipping from his hands, hitting him in the face, failing to work. Alarm clocks won’t ring on time, spades will turn, electronics won’t run.” This is all true, but it’s important to note that this affliction puts Benny in the same general class as … Sideshow Bob when he steps on the rakes. One of Pynchon’s constant themes is that technology makes schlemiels of us all, even as we try to convince ourselves that we are becoming more and more masterful because of all the clever machines we can make and buy.  

In O'Connor’s work, and in Bellow's—and even Ellison’s, in a bitterer vein—comedy constitutes a chief form of critique of the hubris of man. Auden once commented that “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws"—the laws that govern rakes, and alarm clocks, and my neighbor, whose bondage to those laws I laugh at until I am forced by events to acknowledge that the same laws also afflict me. As Auden puts it, "No one … can claim immunity from the comic exposure"—this is a point relentlessly emphasized in the stories of O'Connor (where people usually respond to such exposure with rage), in the novels of Bellow (where the response is usually exasperation), and in the novels of Pynchon (where it is usually befuddlement). We seem never to learn what we need to learn from this exposure, from this relentless evidence that we are not the captains of our fate or masters of our destiny, but subject to the same dreary old physical forces that dogs and plants and stones must contend with. The nature of man, these writers tell us, is to be comically unable to accept constraints upon Being, comically insistent that we can somehow take charge of our lives and our worlds. There is of course a tragic side to this insistence as well.

The bobbies – the name given to the Metropolitan Police – were created in 1829 by Home Secretary Robert Peel at a time when the military was feared. The police force, at its core, was, and still is, seen to serve the community and fight crime by consent, rather than to serve the state. That’s why bobbies were given a smart blue uniform, not red, the color of the militia’s. Even today, they can be seen in Prussian helmets carrying, notably, batons not guns.  

The threat of terrorism, not to mention the number of guns flourishing on the black market, has sparked a recurring national debate about whether Britain’s police should begin to carry firearms. But the police themselves have been the first to oppose such a move, even in the heat of the London bombings in 2005. A survey by the Police Federation in 2006, the latest available, found that 82 percent of its 47,238 members did not want officers to be routinely armed on duty, despite almost half saying their lives had been “in serious jeopardy” during the previous three years.  

“Having police officers patrolling neighborhoods and being routinely armed could be seen as a more military type of police service, which is unlikely to be supported by either the police or the public,” says Steve White, a former firearms officer and chair of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers.

I don’t know exactly what Benedict Option evangelism might look like. I don’t know what kind of diminished numbers of converts we might see in the coming decades as a result of the collapse of American “Christendom.” But I do imagine that if Christians decide to do what Griffiths recommended in his blog post—if we begin to polish and attend afresh to our own practices of discipleship and faithfulness—we may end up seeing many more people embrace what the church teaches about marriage as both comprehensible and convincing. It has happened already for some, and it will go on happening, please God.

(a) Approving the outcome of a judicial decision
(b) Accepting as valid the legal reasoning in support of that outcome

(a) Believing in the need to enshrine in law a great social good
(b) Believing that that social good is already enshrined in the Constitution

(a) Believing in traditional Christian teaching on a given subject
(b) Believing that that teaching needs to be enshrined in secular law

(a) Wishing to commend to the whole society the excellence of Christian teaching
(b) Believing that legislation is the best way to do that

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houghtonlib:

Miller Bros. 101 Ranch. Wild West Show. Daily review : program, 1929.

MS Thr 586 (25)

Houghton Library, Harvard University

The issue of gay marriage has come up a lot since the Massachusetts court decision. Tell me what you think about it. Why do evangelicals care so much about this in particular?

Evangelicals care about gay marriage because they care about Christian marriage. The tradition of Christian marriage has been uniform throughout the history of the church. It is a monogamous and permanent union between one man and one woman. That’s the way that it has always been. Anything other than that has been seen as deficient, at best.

For instance, there are cases in which Jesus authorizes divorce, but he thinks of divorce as always a tragedy, as always something that is deeply regrettable. Then other deviations from that norm, that standard, are typically presented as being sinful.

Evangelical Christians care about Christian marriage, therefore they care about marriage as it is understood by the state. My own view is more a non-view than it is a view. I feel that the church is so confused about what sexuality is and is so confused about what marriage is that … all of my energies have been devoted to trying to increase the church’s understanding of what sexuality is, and what the biblical and historically Christian picture of marriage is. I haven’t had any time left over to worry about what the state thinks that marriage is.

But you’re speaking about your church, right? The Episcopalian Church?

Well, I think there is obviously a crisis right now in the Episcopal Church over what are the appropriate expressions of human sexuality and what Christian marriage is or should be. But that just happens to be the denomination that’s at the center of the controversy right now.

I think throughout the church, and including even in evangelical churches, there is a lot of confusion and a limited understanding of what the biblical picture of sexuality and marriage is. So I focus my interest on that. Perhaps I should be more interested in what the state thinks that marriage is. But that seems to me to be very much secondary for a Christian to the question of what the church thinks that marriage is.

[gallery] Clementa Pinckney’s memorial service is being held in Charleston today. Well done, good and faithful servant. May you rest in peace and rise in glory.

Simply put, mutual responsibility towards offspring naturally demands a long-term commitment (at least 18 years) while mutual attraction and erotic desire does not. What we see in the modern world is the fracturing of a very lofty ideal of marriage back into two different kinds of relationships: those which are primarily focused on children, and those which are primarily focused on erotic love. The battle over the institution of marriage is basically a battle over whether which of these two purposes of marriage ought to have primacy.  

The answer that the Supreme Court has given by ruling in favour of same-sex marriage is basically a ruling in favour of erotic love. This should surprise no one. It’s the more culturally popular option, and it’s the view of marriage that the vast majority of heterosexuals already subscribe to. It’s also, in practice, the definition that we’ve been using for a long time. The truth is that most of the material and social supports that exist to help parents with the task of raising children are no longer associated with the institution of marriage in any way – and unfortunately, the pro-family groups that could be providing financial, emotional and practical support to people who are choosing traditional marriage tend to waste their resources fighting fruitless political battles instead.