Alan Jacobs

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching… . Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Social psychologists have demonstrated that rich people are likelier than poorer ones to lie, cheat, and disregard traffic rules and, more recently, that they are likelier to believe that social status is a matter of merit. (A study published in August in the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin showed that the wealthier a person is, the more he or she will agree with the following statement: “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than other people.”) So while all parents may ruthlessly put their children ahead of others, the children of affluent parents may be likelier to believe that ends justify means. A Harvard grad who was implicated in the university’s 2012 cheating scandal (in which scores of students submitted similar or verbatim answers on a take-home final) complained to Businessweek about the inconvenience of having to cooperate with the university’s ongoing investigation. “Dragging us into this … now, when we have financial obligations and jobs, seems very unfair.”

When Silicon Valley executives start borrowing metaphors from “The Godfather” maybe we should start to pay closer attention. On Oct. 19, while laying out his vision for the techno-utopian future, Balaji Srinivasan, the co-founder of a genomics company that does DNA testing, compared Silicon Valley’s impact on the established power centers and industries of the United States to that infamous scene in which the Mafia convinces an L.A. studio boss to give a coveted movie role to a friend of la famiglia.

“By accident, we put a horse head in their bed,” said Srinivasan, with a slight smile.

Think about that, for a second. Srinivasan, in the course of explaining why he thinks the technological elite could and should opt out of American politics, cited the murder of a horse by ruthless mobsters as a definition of Silicon Valley disruption. It’s hard to read that message as anything else but, do what we say, or else.

Srinivasan didn’t stop there. Silicon Valley’s “hit list,” he argued, had already knocked off newspapers and the music industry. Next up: “We’re going after advertising, television, book publishing.” Higher education “is next in the gunsights.” That’s three lethal metaphors, brought to you by a man arguing that Silicon Valley should secede from the United States.

In one sense, this dramatic effect of the encounter is not inappropriate to the sort of customer Jacob was. The shady supplanter — the trickster of the birthing place, the manipulator of a blind father in the dark intimacies of private life, is now publicly flawed. He lamed others in the private, family domain; now God has lamed him in the public one. But however we look at it, the result of the struggle with God is a dis-eased life, a dis-abled walk, a pronounced hobbling. It’s notable, of course, that in the New Testament story Christ went out of His way to heal the lame. Cripples, hobblers, the disabled, leapt to their feet and walked away without a limp. And such en-abling has been happily siezed on by Christians — whether they’re determined triumphalists or just those who crave an uneventful, unhindered serene kind of walk with God.

And in certain moods and moments that’s what Charles Wesley would celebrate with tremendous power: ‘My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth, and followed thee’. In other moods, though, Charles Wesley felt, and properly so, both for and with Jacob — alone, in the dark, struggling, questioning, in 'self-despair’, as our hymn has it, confronting an enigmatic deity who is, for the moment, holding back the 'secret’ of his love. And both sets of typologies for the religious life — the liberated, confident walk, and the struggle in the dark that results in a new name, but also a laming — are central to the Jacob experience, and thus also to the Christian story. It would clearly be distortive to place greater emphasis on the one side or the other, to be excessively partial to either as it were, the enticements of religious triumphahsm and the counter-attractions of religious despair or discomfort. But since, nowadays, we are continually incited to triumphalism rather than despair, it seems worth stressing that not only would it be untrue to much Christian experience if we denied the dark side of the God-experience, the darker nights of the soul, the wilderness episodes, the commonly felt sense of God’s having averted for the moment His gaze from His people, it would certainly be untrue to the exemplary Jacob story: transformed by God by renaming and a dramatic empowering; but also transformed by laming, a dramatic disabling and deforming.

There is a tacit contempt for those whose experience and beliefs don’t fit in to the modern world as neatly as they ought to. And that includes not just people of the past, but people of other cultures who haven’t embraced western modernity, either because of material privation or because of cultural resistance.

It is an odd belief, that somehow we know more about reality and that therefore we realise there is no spiritual dimension to reality – because, what? Because we have functioning capitalist societies that are only occasionally on the verge of complete collapse? Or because we understand the molecular architecture of cells better?

[gallery] austinkleon:

Woodcuts by Matsubara Naoko

The distinguished woodcut print artist Naoko Matsubara was born on Shikoku Island into an old Shinto family, and grew up in Kyoto, where her father was a senior priest.

Amazing work! More about her here.

(via)

[gallery] anatomyofbibliomania:

From: The book of knowledge : treating of the wisdom of the ancients … Lilly Erra Pater … Printed for R. Ware, 1745. See: http://library.tufts.edu/record=b2233624~S1

I think there’s some semantic game-playing in how you chose to summarize our debate. My view of journalism absolutely requires both fairness and rigorous adherence to facts. But I think those values are promoted by being honest about one’s perspectives and subjective assumptions rather than donning a voice-of-god, view-from-nowhere tone that falsely implies that journalists reside above the normal viewpoints and faction-loyalties that plague the non-journalist and the dreaded “activist.”

Embedded in The New York Times’s institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, The Times, by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions. Its reporting is no less “activist,” subjective or opinion-driven than the new media voices it sometimes condescendingly scorns.

Gladwell then develops the Idea that dyslexia might be a “desirable difficulty”, a condition that is usually a liability but can also be the engine for extraordinary personal success. He says that it’s hard to believe that the condition could be considered desirable given how many people struggle with it. But Gladwell is impressed by fact that “an extraordinarily high percentage of entrepreneurs are dyslexic”. And he is impressed by people like David Boies, the most successful, accomplished person at the top of a very high legal pyramid, who identifies as dyslexic. Boies is the dream-team litigator who worked on a slew of historic cases, including the IBM and Microsoft anti-trust cases, Gore vs. Bush, and the overturning of California Prop 8.

Gladwell’s idea isn’t just that such people manage to succeed despite their dyslexia. It’s that having dyslexia, and dealing with its consequences, played a causal role in their success. If dyslexia can boost people to stratospheric levels of success in professions like law and finance, and it can stimulate the creative, out-of-the-box thinking that contributes to entrepreneurial success, dyslexia might actually be a kind of “desirable difficulty.” Interesting!

Or disturbing. The answer to the question, “You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?” is, “No, you would not.” Gladwell seems oblivious to how deeply hurtful the “desirable difficulty” suggestion might be to people who have to deal with being dyslexic, and to the parents who struggle, against institutional resistance, to get their dyslexic children help. His light entertainment is likely to make it harder for many dyslexics to gain recognition of their condition from educators, or the early diagnosis and intervention that is effective for many. That would not be benign.

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who rest assured are not dumb and are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV Spring Break on Primary Day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.