Location of Disagreement

Alan Jacobs, on his tumblog, posted these thoughts that tie in to something that I think about often.

Watching a Twitter conversation unfold today, I was reminded for the hundredth time that debates about same-sex marriage tend to be so fruitless because SSM doesn’t really mark the point of disagreement. There are already preceding disagreements about what marriage itself is and is for, but even those are not foundational. People disagree about all these things because they disagree about what human flourishing (eudaimonia) is, about what kind of life is generally speaking best for human beings to live.

So, it is not the SSM part of that comment that I think about often, it is the "where is the locus of disagreement" part of it that is fascinating to me, but even more interesting than the fact of the disagreement at deeper levels is the "why?" of that fact.  How do we come to disagree at those points?  How do we come to the conclusions, often tacit and even unconscious to our own understanding, that we hold so strongly.  Strongly enough to make major life decisions upon them and even (historically) come to verbal or physical blows with others over.  

"How do we come to our own epistemology heurmenuetic?" is one of the most interesting questions I have ever come across and wrestled with. 

Citation: Jacobs, Alan at <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/46879051145/on-core-beliefs> Accessed 3/2/13.

Alan Jacobs, once again, ROCKS!

Alan Jacobs is one of my favorite thinkers and writers.  His essays (on such diverse topics as Harry Potter, the editing of children's bibles, and commentary on the poetry of W.H. Auden, to name just a tiny fraction of his scope) have stimulated my thinking as much as almost anyone else's writing I can think of. (Okay, I am going to bring him into that list after Lewis, Ken Myers and Tim Keller.  Something like that.) His book on the bio of Lewis was incredibly stimulating.  Of course, the bio was on Lewis, so it would be hard to not be mentally stimulating with that material, but his writing is just darn well put together.

I have followed his blogging essays and reposts for a few years now, and again: challenging, formidable, refreshing.  His refusal to accept too-simple responses to things that may seem simple but are actually more complex than they seem has been uncomfortably confrontational to my own way of thinking, which typically is satisfied with a good-enough answer that doesn't, in the end, take into account all the facts.

So, when I read on his tumblog a series of questions he was asking about a variety of Christian responses to the onset of World War II, my pulse quickened.  He didn't give any answers.  Just a set of questions.  By the time I was done reading his comments and questions, I was wishing I had the time to research the answers.  THEN he said he was writing a book to attempt to address those very questions.

*******The (interior) crowd goes wild******

I am excited about his upcoming book.  Have to wait until 2015 is the downside.  Dang.  Three Cheers for AJ.

You can find the blog post I am referring to here: <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/45675950491/christian-humanism-and-total-war>. Accessed 3/18/13.

Why I like Alan Jacobs' way of thinking about things

Alan Jacob's thinking and writing often refreshes me. He ably rejects generalization in favor of a deeper look at specifics in a way that is instructive.  Here is just one example.

"I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, but mediated in a wide range of ways. Perception itself, neural activity itself, is a mediating activity. I often think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

So we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience. The choices are always among various forms of mediation. I don’t think Heidegger fully realized this, which is why he could speak of writing with a pen as something you do with your hand but typewriting as something alienated from the hand — never acknowledging that we type with our hands too.

Now, if someone wants to argue that the mediation of the pen involves our body in more intimate ways than the mediation of the typewriter, in that (for instance) in writing with a pen we shape the individual letters instead of just striking keys with a uniform motion, I’m ready to listen — as long as it’s okay to point out that writing with my finger on an iPad screen is more intimate still!

Analogically, consider Walker Percy’s great essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he points out that our cultural formation makes it impossible for anyone actually to see the Grand Canyon: only some immense dislocation of our expectations can make is truly visible to us. It is at least possible that some technological mediations could help us achieve that valuable dislocation.

In short, we need fewer binary distinctions and more attention to the detailed phenomenology of particular technologies and their interactions with the mediating powers of our perceptual apparatus."

Citation: a comment Alan Jacobs made at this site, <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/01/responding-to-carrs-digital-dualism/> accessed 3/9/13.

Bonhoeffer on Pleasure

A quote from D. Bonhoeffer

"I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us.  

We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity…. 

I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Quote found here: <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/10605420042/i-am-sure-we-ought-to-love-god-in-our-lives-and-in>

Alan Jacobs repost

Alan Jacobs has helped me tremendously as I have been thinking through how to respond to the changes that technology brings our way, which we must respond to one way or another.  Here is something he posted recently

"Life skills for the Technium

I have sometimes, in these pages of pixels, expressed frustration with Kevin Kelly, but his post on“Techno Life Skills” is just fantastic. My favorite point:

You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliciting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).

I’m going to give this to all my students for the foreseeable future."

Citation: Jacobs, Alan. Text Patterns blog on "The New Atlantis" website. 

<http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2011/04/life-skills-for-technium.html> Accessed 4 May, 2011.

Rules for Lecture Attendance

Alan Jacobs, after enduring several uncalled-for behaviors from students coming to listen to a lecture by a visiting speaker (described here) posted the following "Rules for Lecture Attendance".  I thought these rules, and my inner-post-modern knee-jerk disapproval of the autocratic tone were interesting.  I have grown so used to doing things any old way that happens to feel right at the time (a modus operandi that I am trying hard to ween myself from because I think that it is based on sandy foundations), that any firm rule "feels" wrong.  Not that it is wrong.  In fact, I dare say it is very much right!

What do you think?

"I am aware that some situations call for different rules. There are lectures during which it would be appropriate to talk, eat, tweet, and/or fart. Or so I have been told. However, this is rarely the case when lectures are given in academic settings, which are the ones I have chiefly in mind here. One general rule governs everything that follows: Do not make it harder for speakers or listeners to concentrate on the lecture.

---

1) Go to great lengths to be sure you know precisely when and where the lecture will be given. Do not make assumptions.
2) Arrive at the right place on time, or even early.
3) It is especially important to arrive early if you think you will have to leave early. In such a situation, you will want to situate yourself as close to an exit as possible, so that you may depart quietly and unobtrusively. You might also ask yourself whether you need to leave early or would just prefer to leave early. If you would justprefer to leave early, maybe you shouldn't be there at all.
4) You shouldn't be late, but if you must be late, come in as quietly as possible and sit near the door. Sit on the floor if you have to. In no circumstances should you stroll in, scan the venue in a leisurely fashion, and amble towards the center of the room.
5) Turn your stupid, stupid, stupid cell phone off, and never look at it during the lecture.
6) If you plan to take notes, do so on paper. Do not haul out your laptop and make your neighbors try to listen to the speaker over the constant rattling of your keyboard.
7) Shut up. Listen to the speaker. Don't say anything to anyone at any time — unless, during Q&A time, you actually have question you'd like to know the answer to.(Note that almost none of the people who ask questions of public speakers are interested in getting real answers.)
8) Do not eat anything. What are you, some kind of barbarian? Wait until the lecture is over and then eat in a place appropriate for eating. No one listening to a lecture wants to smell your food or hear you chew, swallow, and suck your drink. No one.Thank you for your cooperation."

Citation:
These rules were posted here:
Jacobs, Alan. <https://ayjay.jottit.com/rules_for_lecture_attendance>, accessed 24 March 2011.

Technology and Homeschooling

Alan Jacobs comments on Kevin Kelly's comments about technology

I tend to get frustrated by Kevin Kelly’s technophilia, but this account of his experiences teaching his son at home (a) resonates with my own homeschooling adventures and (b) makes a ton of sense. I especially like this set of principles about technology that he and his wife tried to impart to their eighth-grader: 

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.
• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

The last two are particularly noteworthy, and wise also. And this is best of all: “Technology helped us learn, but it was not the medium of learning. It was summoned when needed. Technology is strange that way. Education, at least in the K-12 range, is more about child rearing than knowledge acquisition. And since child rearing is primarily about forming character, instilling values and cultivating habits, it may be the last area to be directly augmented by technology.”

Citation: Jacobs, Alan.  From his Text Patterns blog on thenewatlantis.com. <http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2010/09/technology-and-homeschooling.html>. Accessed 12 March 2011

How to read a book...

Alan Jacobs made this interesting comment about how to read a book.  And since he has recently completed a book about reading, and is Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton, he might actually have something worth listening to here:

"The other day a homeschooling parent, whose child is in the ninth grade, wrote to me to ask what books I thought are essential for a young person to have read before coming to college. My reply:

"For what it's worth, I don't think what a young person reads is nearly as important as how he or she reads. Young people who learn to read with patience and care and long-term concentration, with pencil in hand to make notes (including questions and disagreements), will be better prepared for college than students who read all the "right" books but read them carelessly or passively."

Citation:
Jacobs, Alan.  "Answers to Important Questions". Text Patterns Blog on "The New Atlantis" website. <http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2011/03/answers-to-important-questions.html>. Accessed 4 March 2011.

The Social Trap

While I certainly don't expect others to adopt "David's way" of living in this cultural soup that we find ourselves in, I do hope to be at least understood.  (I find that even this more modest hope is itself a nearly impossible task.)  And since I tend to make decisions slowly and after lots, and lots, and lots of puzzling over things, it often happens that my reasons for doing things can't be stated in a quick one-liner.  It often takes plenty of conversation to grasp the bolus of my thinking on a topic. (NOTE: I don't pretend to think that I have come to the "One Right Decision", but I have come to a conclusion, which leads to decisions, which then can also be tempered by additional thoughts and concerns of others.)


One of the primary reasons for this blog in particular is a hope that those that may read it (and my Dad in particular) will, by reading the things that I am reading, be able to have productive conversations because we are both speaking in the context of having read or heard the same things.


Thus, I have put a "Forum" page link on the top row of buttons, because ultimately I don't want this to be a monologue, but a dialogue, and the Forum is simply one way of doing that.  (I also occasionally send out hand-written letters as another form...and even (sharp-intake-of-breath) occasionally talk face-to-face with someone.


That being said.  One of my decisions has been to choose not to partake in the Facebook revolution.  I think that there is a potential for me to use it in a disordering way...not interacting with others in a way that is consistent with how I want to participate in the world.


And here are some thoughts that contribute to my general view of relationships.


(Feel free to argue.)


Alan Jacobs posts here on the topic of the nature of human interconnectedness:

"Andrew Keen:

"Today's digital social network is a trap. Today's cult of the social, peddled by an unholy alliance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and communitarian idealists, is rooted in a misunderstanding of the human condition. The truth is that we aren't naturally social beings. Instead, as Vermeer reminds us in The Woman in Blue, human happiness is really about being left alone. On Liberty, the 1859 essay by Bentham's godson and former acolyte, John Stuart Mill, remains a classic defence of individual rights in the age of the industrial network and its tyranny of the majority. Today, as we struggle to make sense of the impact of the internet revolution, we need an equivalent On Digital Liberty to protect the right to privacy in the social-media age. Tapscott and Williams believe that the age of networked intelligence will be equal to the Renaissance in its significance. But what if they are wrong? What if the digital revolution, because of its disregard for the right of individual privacy, becomes a new dark ages? And what if all that is left of individual privacy by the end of the 21st century exists in museums alongside Vermeer's Woman in Blue? Then what?"

But this is just replacing one untenable generalization with another. As everyone knows, surely, we want and need to be alone sometimes and to be with others sometimes. Mental and spiritual health is found in the proper balance of the two, which must be different for different people. Every the most solitary crave connection sometimes; even the most social need time alone to re-charge. It would be hard to deny that the internet has been a profoundly rich and healing place for many lonely people. The questions are, or should be: What is the right balance for me? and, Have I achieved that balance?

As I commented in a post some months ago, advocates of the Big Social like Steven Johnson think we have been too solitary and too disconnected and need — as a society anyway — to move towards more connection, because connection generates ideas. My response to that was that (a) the generation of ideas is not the only social good, and (b) it’s hard to look at the proliferation of social media that I and my friends are occupied with and think that we don't have enough connections. My suspicion is that we need fewer connections, but (as I suggested in my previous post) more multi-dimensional ones. Keen overstates the value of privacy and under-rates the value of social connection, but he’s surely write to think that solitude is right now the endangered condition."

Citation:

Jacobs, Allan. "The Social Trap". Text Patterns Blog on The New Atlantis website.

<http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2011/03/social-trap.html>

Be not conformed to this world

This quote is from A Visit to Vanity Fair, by Alan Jacobs.  In fact, it is the very first sentence from the very first essay:  

"In a famous passage from Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead gives this counsel to scholars in the various historical disciplines:

"Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which controversialists feel it necessary explicitly to defend.  More important and more telling for the deep understanding of a culture are the fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose.  Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming.  Indeed, they do not know that they are assuming anything, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them."

This quote made me want to laugh and cry.  It is this very act of seeking to understand the assumptions that I have in common with all others in this age of the world that has been my quest for the last several years.  It is of particular importance to me as a Christian because Paul tells us in Romans 12.2

"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

It is interesting to note that the Greek word "world" in that verse is "αἰών" or aion...meaning "age" of the world.  Insert the idea of "this world", to which we are not to be conformed, into Alfred North Whitehead's quote, where he uses the word "epoch" and you will see what I am driving at, maybe.


Citation:
Jacobs, Alan. A Visit To Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age. Brazos Press, 2001.

Alan Jacobs thoughts on centralization

This is a repost of an Alan Jacobs blog post where he is currently reviewing a book, The Whale and the Reactor, which he is reading:

The Whale and the Reactor (7) by Alan Jacobs 

The idea that Reagan Ruined Everything seems to dominate, silently, the next chapter, “Decentralization Clarified.” I take this passage from its last paragraph to be its central idea: 

'In Kropotkin’s of G. D. H. Cole’s time it was still possible to imagine an entire modern social order based upon small-scale, directly democratic, widely dispersed centers of authority. Industrial society had not yet achieved its mature form; it was thinkable that decentralist alternatives might be feasible alternatives on a broad scale. Today, however, ideas of decentralization usually play a much different role, an expression of the faint hope one may still create institutions here and there that allow ordinary folks some small measure of autonomy.'

A melancholy statement, and one that is truer now than when Winner wrote it. After all, it was about halfway between the writing of this book and out own moment when Scott McNealy told us, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” 

Which in alternate moments makes me want to give up and makes me want to renew my determination to escape from Google. Ah, my early and innocent determination, how beautiful it was — and how distant it now seems. . . ."

Citation
Jacobs, Alan. "Text Patterns." Online Posting. 26 January 2011.
<http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2011/01/whale-and-reactor-7.html>. Accessed 26 January, 2011.

An Anglican's Response

Those that have been keeping tabs on me for a while will know that I have been considering the Anglican Church as a possible way of expressing my faith and worship. I first started considering this as an option when I discovered how many of the authors that influence my thinking are Anglican.  (C.S. Lewis, Os Guinness, Jeremy Begbie, J.B. Phillips, G.K. Chesterton-who was Catholic, nee Anglican, Alan Jacobs, and probably most importantly Ken Myers.)  


These are all men who, as authors and thinkers, I deeply admire, and whose thoughts I ponder.  As I realized that Anglicanism was a common thread, I decided to explore for myself.  


In the middle of that, I happened upon Alan Jacobs e-mail address.  His blog, which I follow, was having a comments issue, so he posted his e-mail address in order to rectify the problem.  I took that opportunity to write to him with a question, "Why are you Anglican?" (a question which I introduced a little less abruptly in the e-mail.)


A.J., the "Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English" at Wheaton, was polite enough to respond, and here is a part of his e-mail, which was a copy and paste of something he wrote for his church's website:


"We are heirs of CATHOLIC tradition: we draw for our sustenance upon
teaching and practices that go back to the Apostles but flowered fully
in the Church's first several centuries. The foundation laid for us,
and for all subsequent generations of thoughtful Christians, by the
Early Church Fathers is a rich legacy. From those early times we
inherit our Creed, our sacramental worship, and our sacramental
theology; these we share with Christ's true Church wherever it may be
found. We see that kinship in powerful ways when we look upon our
brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Orthodox
world. In that sense we claim, and rejoice in, catholicity.

"But we also acknowledge that that Church has not always faithfully
preserved its theological and spiritual inheritance, and that, in His
love and care, in the sixteenth century God raised up great men of
faith to REFORM the church, to call us back to the Bible as the
ever-living Word of God, the reliable testimony to his grace and favor
towards us in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. In that
Word we see clearly that we are saved by God's boundless grace, and we
appropriate that grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It is this
message -- which we share with all the churches that trace their
lineage to the Reformation -- that we proclaim in our preaching and
enact in our worship.

"We strive to be a church that is fully catholic and fully reformed;
and this is what we think it means to be ANGLICANS."


This short essay was particularly interesting because I had recently decided to stop acting as if history didn't exist as I pursued loving God and loving others.