Posts Tagged ‘Alan Jacobs’
“Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are”*…
As we head into the weekend, some food for thought…
A decade ago, the world was, at once, both the seed of today and a very different place: In what was considered one of the biggest political upsets in American political history (and the fifth and most recent presidential election in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote), Donald Trump was elected to his first term. The U.K. chose Brexit. The stock market finished strong, with the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq reaching new highs. (In the 10 years that have followed, the Dow has risen about 150%; the S&P 500, roughly 400%; and the NASDAQ has roughly sextupled.)
It was a big year for pop culture, marked by Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the massive Pokémon Go craze, and the rise of Netflix with Stranger Things, the Rio Olympics, and the loss of icons like David Bowie and Prince.
It was also a big year in tech: Russian hacking and disinfo (especially on Facebook) was a huge story– as was Apple’s elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. Theranos collapsed; and Wells fargo opened millions of accounts for customers without those customers’ permission (for which they were sunsequently fined $3 Billion). And Virtual Reality was everywhere (in the promises/offers from tech companies), but nowhere in the market. TikTok was launched in 2016, but hadn’t yet become the phenomenon (and avatar of algorithmly-driven feeds) that it has become. And in the course of 2016, artificial intelligence made the leap from “science fiction concept” to “almost meaningless buzzword” (though in fairness, 2016 was the year that Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program triumphed against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol).
Back in 2016, the estimable Alan Jacobs was pondering the road ahead. In a piece for The New Atlantis, he coined and discussed a series of aphorisms relevant to the future as then he saw it. He begins…
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The apho-
rist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion
is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers.
– W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, The Viking Book of AphorismsAuthor’s Note: I hope that the statement above is wrong, believing that certain adjustments can be made to the aphoristic procedure that will rescue the following collection from arrogance. The trick is to do this in a way that does not sacrifice
the provocative character that makes the aphorism, at its best, such a powerful form of utterance.Here I employ two strategies to enable me to walk this tightrope. The first is to characterize the aphorisms as “theses for disputation,” à la Martin Luther — that is, I invite response, especially response in the form of disagreement or correction. The second is to create a kind of textual conversation, both on the page and beyond it, by adding commentary (often in the form of quotation) that elucidates each thesis, perhaps even increases its provocativeness, but never descends into coarsely explanatory pedantry…
[There follows a series of provocations and discussions that feel as relevant– and important– today as they were a decade ago. He concludes…]
… Precisely because of this mystery, we need to evaluate our technologies according to the criteria established by our need for “conviviality.”
I use the term with the particular meaning that Ivan Illich gives it in Tools for Conviviality [here]:
I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among per-
sons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this
in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands
made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I con-
sider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal inter-
dependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in
any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount
of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates
among society’s members.In my judgment, nothing is more needful in our present technological moment than the rehabilitation and exploration of Illich’s notion of conviviality, and the use of it, first, to apprehend the tools we habitually employ and, second, to alter or replace them. For the point of any truly valuable critique of technology is not merely to understand our tools but to change them — and us…
Eminently worth reading in full, as its still all-too-relevant: “Attending to Technology- Theses for Disputation,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.
Pair with a provocative piece from another fan of Illich, L. M. Sacasas (@lmsacasas.bsky.social): “Surviving the Show: Illich And The Case For An Askesis of Perception.”
[Image above: source]
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As we think about tech, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that an ancestor of today’s social networks, streaming services, and AIs, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was first demonstrated in operation. (It was announced to the public the following day.) The first general-purpose computer (Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being programmed and re-programmed to solve different problems), ENIAC was begun in 1943, as part of the U.S’s war effort (as a classified military project known as “Project PX“); it was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, where it was built. The finished machine, composed of 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints, weighed more than 27 tons and occupied a 30 x 50 foot room– in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world. ENIAC’s basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (or Hertz). Today’s home computers have clock speeds of 3,500,000,000 cycles per second or more.
“All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.”*…
A special Sunday edition: an excerpt from Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s Captive Gods…
Much of my life has been spent in and around religious traditions. I have feasted at Eid al-Fitr with my Muslim cousins, celebrated Seders at home with my in-laws, recited a Sanskrit mantra as I meditated alone, and attended a nuptial Mass conducted by a cardinal. In my childhood, I sang in an Anglican school choir in England, went to Sunday school back home in Ghana in an interdenominational church (dressed in my Sabbath finery), and murmured “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” in prayer each night before I retired. My weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed was quite sincere, even if I always had difficulty understanding how Christ could be of “one substance with the Father”; the words had some extra-semantic resonance. Like millions of people, I have experienced the inward peace that comes from meditation — the sense of oneness with everything that is spoken of in contemplative traditions from around the world; but I have felt that sense of communion, too, at the end of a long season of training, rowing with my fellow oarsmen in perfect concord on the Thames near Henley, when my body was working as hard as it ever has. Then, as in the daily meditations of my teenage years, I felt with the Blessed Julian of Norwich, who lived six centuries ago, that “all will be well and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” As a child, I gained security from a gold cross that hung on a chain around my neck, which had been blessed by a spirit that spoke through the mediumship of a modest Scottish postman, who also reassured me by transmitting benevolent messages from my long-dead English grandfather.
And because much of my childhood was spent in Kumasi, in Ghana’s Ashanti region, I followed my father in pouring libations to our ancestors, who were once as real to me as the God whose presence I felt when I prayed. We would offer spirituous beverage, in particular, to the founder of my father’s lineage, the warrior Akroma-Ampim. Nana Akroma-Ampim, begye nsa nom: Akroma-Ampim, our elder, come take this alcohol to drink. We would honor, too, our formidable greatgrandmother Takyiwah, or her brother Yao Antony, for whom, like Akroma-Ampim, I was named. Mind you, my father was an elder in his Methodist church and considered himself a good Christian; but as a proud Asante man, he also shared the “traditional” beliefs of the world where he grew up. If he dreamed, it meant that his sunsum — a spirit of consciousness — was traveling the realm; when he died, he believed, something would leave his body and join the ancestors, to be given offerings on occasion. He joined in practices related to Nyame, the sky god, as well as to Asase Yaa, the earth goddess, and to other spirits of divers kinds. There were ritual practices and prayers, and professional priests and shrines of varying degrees of authority and various scopes of jurisdiction. (When he visited friends in, say, Sierra Leone, he expected that, just as the people were different there, so the gods would be: alternative technologies of the divine.)
Via the ever-illuminating Alan Jacobs.
[Image above: source]
* Pope Francis (echoing Ramakrishna: “All religions are true. God can be reached by different religions. Many rivers flow by many ways but they fall into the sea. They all are one.”)
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As we embrace understanding, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that Apple Records released George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Inspired by the Hindu god Krishna and the Christian hymn “Oh Happy Day,” it is a call to abandon religious sectarianism (using devices like the blending of the Hebrew word hallelujah with chants of “Hare Krishna” and Vedic prayer).
Harrison’s first release as a solo artist, it topped charts worldwide; it was the biggest-selling single of 1971 in the UK. In America and Britain, the song was the first number-one single by an ex-Beatle.
“Present at the creation”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on what we can learn from our elders…
There are a lot of stories about the intense conflicts between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. An oft-told one says that at a party Dennis Hopper went up to George Cukor, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “We’re gonna bury you.” This sense that the new Hollywood was at war with the old one — that the new could only live if the old died — was a commonplace idea at the time. But it was not a view held by one of the hot new directors of the Sixties, Peter Bogdanovich…
… When he came to Hollywood, Bogdanovich made a point of getting to know the people who had made so many of the movies he loved. He compiled a book of interviews with old-time directors — he also did one with old-time actors, but the one with directors is particularly noteworthy.
Of all those interviews, the most fascinating is the very first one, with Allan Dwan, because Dwan was present at the creation. He had played football at Notre Dame, got an engineering degree there, worked on designing lights for early filmmakers in Chicago — no one had thought of going to Los Angeles yet — and gradually drifted into making movies himself. He sold some stories, then became a scenario manager (that is, someone who sought and recommended stories for turning into screenplays) and ultimately a director, making dozens and dozens of films — none of them especially famous. His attitude towards movie-making was workmanlike, and he just accepted the tasks set before him.
(He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.)
Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did — but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.
He tells another story about getting his car repaired and talking to the mechanic, who turned out to be interested in photography. Dwan hired him as a cameraman because he desperately needed one and in those days they weren’t easy to find. That mechanic-turned-cameraman eventually became a director — his name was Victor Fleming, and one of his pictures was Gone with the Wind. Dwan remembered a prop man who liked to wear fake teeth and prosthetic noses. Dwan asked him, “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the other side of the camera?” The guy said, “Well, kind of.” That was Lon Chaney.
He also tells of watching a pickup baseball game near the Paramount lot and seeing a girl — maybe 11 or 12 — who was the best player out there and made sure everybody knew it. She was whacking the ball all over the field and taunting the boys mercilessly. Dwan talked to her; he thought she’d make a great impression in the pictures. Her name was Jane Peters, but eventually a studio changed it to Carole Lombard. (Lombard, by the way, was quite an athlete: Clark Gable fell in love with her after she thrashed him in a tennis match.)
Dwan had a thousand stories like this. It’s fascinating to see how this industry — this art form — developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised — and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.
And when you put all the improvised and then repreated techniques together, you get the dominant artistic medium — and the dominant form of entertainment — of the 20th century. But nobody could possibly have guessed any of that when Dwan was just getting started. It’s to Bogdanovich’s great credit that he listened to these people…
“Allan Dwan’s stories,” from @ayjay.bsky.social.
* a reference to the belief that Jesus was involved in the creation of the universe, appropriated by Dean Acheson as the title of his memoir.
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As honor those on whose shoulders we stand, we might recall that it was on thus date in 1985 that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure premiered. Following the success of The Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981, Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) was hired by Warner Bros. to write (ultimately with help from Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol) the script for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Impressed with Burton’s work on the short film Frankenweenie (1984), the producers and Reubens hired him to direct. The film was scored by Danny Elfman, marking his first among many collaborations with Burton. It was a success in its initial release and has, of course, become a cult classic.
“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”*…
Per the Oxford Dictionaries, “anarchy” has two meanings:
1. a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.
2. the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism.
It’s fair to observe that, in common parlance, it’s the first definition that rules. The estimable Alan Jacobs puts in a word for the second, and positions it as something beyond the political, something spiritual…
Perhaps the most unusual element of my 2022 essay on anarchism is this: I present anarchism not as a political system but as a spiritual discipline. I don’t put the point quite that bluntly, but I come fairly close:
The first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy — what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power...
It should be obvious that if you are delighted with power politics – if you think the purpose of politics is “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” of your victory – then you won’t be worried about your own will to power. You can just turn off your conscience and go on the attack, thinking only about winning (good) and losing (bad). My suggestion that the desire to impose order on others is a desire that needs to be reflected on will seem obviously silly to you. But there’s another way of thinking about the political order that is equally incompatible with the kind of reflection I counsel in that essay: the libertarian model.
Libertarianism doesn’t want to impose order on others, but its most passionate advocates have a strong tendency to assess existence in terms of winning and losing – winning and losing not in the corridors of political power but in the marketplace; the individual entrepreneur controlling the segment of the market in which he works. As Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, it’s all about DOMINATION; just not domination by law. Anarchism, by contrast — this is my argument in that essay — stands between (libertarian) chaos and (seeking to become) the Man. Some of the most thoughtful anarchists like to say that “anarchy is order” – but order that emerges from collaboration and cooperation rather than being imposed by governmental power. I don’t think it’s possible to create an anarchist system, because an anarchism imposed on people by those in power isn’t anarchism.
Here’s what I think can be done: Try, in every way we can think of, to increase the number of situations in our lives in which we are neither dehumanized by an omnipotent state nor engaged in ceaseless competition with one another in an omnipotent marketplace. As Wendell Berry has written, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” We should assume that privilege whenever we can, and take it upon ourselves as a collaborative of equals to determine what, in any given case facing us, justice and mercy are. In other words, what I call the anarchic imperative is an attempt to rebalance what Berry has called “the two economies”:
For the thing that so troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, it is probably natural to pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out. And we can say without presuming too much, that the first principle of the kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it, we may say, whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it. That is to say that the kingdom of God is orderly.
Amen to that. But what is the nature of that order? Eschatologically, it certainly ain’t anarchic: it is the kingdom of the archē, the source of all things, the Lord. But to understand and instantiate that Kingdom here and now – when, as St. Augustine says, the City of God and the City of Man are inevitably and confusingly mixed – we need to collaborate with one another to increase both our knowledge and our ability to act effectively.
I have argued at some length that Christians aren’t pluralists – we believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10) – but in our current position we should expect, accept, and even embrace plurality. We need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to a plural world, and we can do that by expanding the sphere of voluntary collaboration, negotiation among equals, emergent order, even when such expansion makes life more difficult for us. That’s anarchism as a spiritual discipline…
Charting a course between libertarianism and autocracy: “Anarchism as a spiritual discipline.”
[The image above is from Jacobs’ Harpers essay— eminently worth reading]
* Ursula K. Le Guin, who created Odo (and Odoism) in The Dispossessed
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As we choose, we might recall that it was (probably) on this date that the first edition of what we know as the Gutenberg Bible was published.
While many believe that Johannes Gutenberg first work using moveable type was the Bible, it was probably the second or maybe even third. [Indeed, there was an earlier (32 line) version of the parts of the Bible, labeled an “indulgence.”] The Gutenberg press was in operation by 1450, and it is known that a German poem had been printed before the Bible. However, it is known that Gutenberg began the painstaking process of hand placing every letter for every page of the new Bible during that same year. It is believed that the 42-line Gutenberg Bible [the one we know as “The Gutenberg Bible”] was completed on this day in 1456. About 180 copies of the book were printed, which seems rather small for a first edition…
“The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on the (glorious) novels of Robertson Davies, and (what Jacobs suggests is) a central question running throughout them: What ways of Wisdom have been discarded by modern Knowledge?…
Long ago every village in England had a cunning man, or woman—an untrained but intuitive healer, a person with a good nose for other people’s troubles and a tactical shrewdness about how to handle them. If your problems were simple and obvious, if you needed a broken bone set or a bad tooth pulled, you’d go to the surgeon. Everyone knew that. But what if you weren’t quite sure what was wrong with you? What if your spirit was troubled but also your digestion, and you didn’t know which was causing which, or if they were separate miseries? Then you needed to consult the cunning ones.
The Cunning Man is the last novel by the great Canadian writer Robertson Davies, and its titular figure is a man of the late twentieth century named Jonathan Hullah, who grew up in a remote outpost in northern Ontario and got his first ideas about healing by hanging around with Elsie Smoke, an Ojibwa herbalist and healer, a “wise woman”—a cunning woman. Hullah ultimately becomes a doctor and a practitioner of what some now call “holistic medicine,” though that term is not used in the book by Hullah or anyone else. Hullah thinks of himself as a disciple of the great Renaissance physician Paracelsus— the first person to theorize that physical disease can be the product of what we now would call psychological distress. As Hullah comments, “The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.” It is a problem because people are happy to speak of their diseases but reluctant to acknowledge their wretchedness.
Hullah’s creator almost certainly learned about Paracelsus through reading Carl Jung, who was perhaps the most important guiding figure of Davies’s intellectual and religious life. From my point of view, which is that of a generally orthodox Christian, Davies’s embrace of Jungian ideas is a convenient way to get all the benefits of belief in transcendent order with none of the obligations of obedience to a personal God. Nevertheless, there is much in Davies’s picture of the cunning man—and in closely related ideas that he developed in the latter part of his career as a novelist—from which thinking Christians can and should learn. Above all, I think, we should adopt a kind of historically aware intellectual pluralism, a willingness to learn from and make use of the past, and especially those elements of the past that have been discarded by modernity as refuse and waste. The thoughtful Christian should be a cunning practitioner of filth therapy.
In Davies’s wicked and wonderful novel The Rebel Angels, a scholar named Clement Hollier—whom Davies refers to as a “paleo-psychologist,” a student of ancient and discarded ways of thinking—grows fascinated by what he calls “Filth Therapy.” He suspects that a scientific colleague is pursuing a similar path: “He works with human excrement—what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to mankind—and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth.”…
…
… In his many novels Davies returns over and over again to this theme. He portrays modernity as a world in which we love our crowns even as we despise and try to rip up our roots. The Rebel Angels is the first novel in what has come to be known as the Cornish Trilogy because it deals with the Cornish family, and in the novel that follows it, What’s Bred in the Bone, a young painter named Francis Cornish struggles with his love of Renaissance painting— struggles because he doesn’t just admire the Old Masters but wants to paint as they painted. And yet, he thinks, “surely one must paint in the manner of one’s day?” Anything else is “a kind of fakery, or a deliberate throw-back, like those PreRaphaelites.” And he has a very specific reason for believing that one must choose between “the manner of one’s own day” and a historically informed “fakery”: “Even if you are a believer, you cannot believe as the great men of the past believed.”
Cornish’s mentor, a brilliant restorer of art named Saraceni, disputes this, and constantly holds out to young Cornish the challenge of acquiring “the ability to work truly in the technique and also in the spirit of the past.” And Cornish achieves this ability, at least to Saraceni’s satisfaction; but when his masterful painting is discovered to be new rather than old, it is immediately and universally decried as a fake— even though Cornish never pretended that the painting was by anyone else. For artists and connoisseurs of our age, only the crown—the thought-world of the moment—can provide an authentic and valid mode of artistic (or religious) experience. To work from the root is necessarily to be inauthentic…
…
In a city in Paraguay you may find a curious assembly of musicians called La Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura—the Recycled Instruments Orchestra of Cateura. But these instrumentos are not professionally designed and built objects that have been discovered and repaired: they have been made out of recycled materials. Violins are constructed from cans and bent forks, a discarded oil drum forms the body of a cello, a saxophone somehow emerges from a drainpipe and a few bent spoons. Most of the musicians are teenagers from Cateura, which is a slum, and a slum built on and around a landfill. They too are among the world’s discards, thought to be without value, people in whom society invests no hope. But Fabio Chavez, the creator and director of the orchestra, has invested in them. He has said, “People realize that we shouldn’t throw away trash carelessly. Well, we shouldn’t throw away people either.”
In The Rebel Angels Maria’s mother healed the souls of great instruments that had been damaged by time and use. This is a wondrous art and worthy of great praise.
But then what praise is appropriate for those who have taken the filth of the world and given it souls, souls capable of the loveliest utterance? And what wonder is adequate to the imaginative dedication of Fabio Chavez, whose name should be known throughout the world? “The world sends us garbage,” he says. “We send back music.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Filth Therapy: A Cunning Word.” Also eminently worth reading: every one of Robertson Davies’ novels.
This essay dates from 2017. Jacobs brought it back up in response to his reading of a fascinating new book: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Tabitha Stanmore. It’s on Google Books, here.
* Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
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As we find treasure in trash, we might recall that it was in this date in 1953 that John Kraft (the younger brother of James Kraft, the founder of Kraft Cheese [later Kraft Foods]) received U.S. patent No. 2,641,545 for the manufacture of soft surface cured cheese. Just one year earlier, the company had introduced Cheez Whiz.
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