Some things I shared in 2014 are really surprising in retrospect. This Guernica excerpt of Studs Terkel's oral history of death (shared along with a bit of Philip Larkin's The Old Fools) was intended to pay tribute to my neopagan friends and family on Samhain. I knew at the time how much the piece moved me; now I know why. With current events in their state of perpetual turmoil, it's easy to look for political or philosophical arguments for Christianity, but ultimately, we must remember to deal with our mortality. "It’s one thing to write to someone and say you forgive them—it’s another to physically touch them and say you forgive them. It would help me in my healing and him in his, I knew. I felt compelled to do it....
On the way back home, I was thinking about it, and then I talked to Arlene and Father Oldershaw. I said, 'I’ve got it! I know what was happening. I was getting a taste in my body of how much God loves us. He loves us so much that He wants to leap over the table, grab hold of us, and just rock us because we’re his children.' That love, that forgiveness—I got a taste of what it must have been like for Jesus when he was here and walked the Earth among people that he loved so desperately, so wonderfully. I got a taste of it!" You Got Into My Heart Violently, But You’re There
Of course, that's not to say that politics aren't important, even in their most banal, marginally effective forms, as Tim Wise argues here: Your Bumper Sticker is Not a Philosophy: Reflections on Voting and the Limits of Radical Purity "There’s something cathartic (in a juvenile, angst-driven, anarchy-tatted kinda way) about preening as a moral superior because you didn't give in to the two-party 'duopoly,' or whatever the hell Ralph Nader calls it. Maintaining one’s ascetic sense of unsullied ideological purity feels good. So does heroin, of course, but I’m not sure the indulgence of either is one’s best bet for safety in the long run. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that voting is the key to real political change; it self-evidently is not. But to think that it means nothing, or so little as to not recommend the activity is to engage in a dangerous moral conceit...
What it comes down to is this: Voting is harm reduction; just like giving clean needles to addicts. Voting doesn't solve our problems, just like clean needles won’t solve the problems posed by intravenous drug use. But harm reduction matters."
What it comes down to is this: Voting is harm reduction; just like giving clean needles to addicts. Voting doesn't solve our problems, just like clean needles won’t solve the problems posed by intravenous drug use. But harm reduction matters."
I love this piece on London's taxi driver test so much. It's kind of a humanity vs. technology tale, raising some great questions on what technology is for and how we define "progress." Jody Rosen for T - The New York Times Style Magazine: The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS "Given the pace of technological refinement, how long will it be before the development of a Sat-Nav algorithm that works better than the most ingenious cabby, before a voice-activated GPS, or a driverless car, can zip a passenger from Piccadilly to Putney more efficiently than any Knowledge graduate? Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. To support the Knowledge is to make the unfashionable argument that expertise cannot be reduced to data, that there’s something dystopian, or at least depressing, about the outsourcing of humanity’s hard-won erudition to gizmos, even to portable handheld gizmos that themselves are miracles of human imagination and ingenuity. London’s taxi driver test enshrines knowledge as — to use the au courant term — an artisanal commodity, a thing that’s local and homespun, thriving ideally in the individual hippocampus, not the digital hivemind."
In response to a comment on that post, I shared this thought and a quote from Wendell Berry's Feminism, the Body, and the Machine: I disagree that this article is merely Golden Age-ing an “antiquated system.” Perhaps it’s a result of stuff that’s been on my mind anyway, but I think this article is asking some deeper questions regarding the limits of efficiency, how we define progress, and in a deeper sense, even our notions of freedom. Is it better to outsource our knowledge of the places we live – not to mention, established parts of a culture – to profiteering technology firms if it is more financially efficient? Put another way, are there costs to these actions that we aren’t considering? To what extent are we willing to increase our dependence on technology for things people could do?
These are complicated questions, and not new ones. I was re-reading a Wendell Berry essay this morning that has some relevance here (sorry for the long quote):
“What is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future.’ We do as we do, we say, ‘for the sake of the future’ or ‘to make a better future for our children.’ How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race’; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers—not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.
The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need, to be able to get about by any other means. Of course, you could do without an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has satisfied me.
But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability to think about it. Thus if I am partly a writer, and I am offered an expensive machine to help me write, I ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable.”
These are complicated questions, and not new ones. I was re-reading a Wendell Berry essay this morning that has some relevance here (sorry for the long quote):
“What is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future.’ We do as we do, we say, ‘for the sake of the future’ or ‘to make a better future for our children.’ How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race’; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers—not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.
The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need, to be able to get about by any other means. Of course, you could do without an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has satisfied me.
But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability to think about it. Thus if I am partly a writer, and I am offered an expensive machine to help me write, I ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable.”
In the same thread, I shared this Longreads post, excerpted from Nick Carr's The Glass Cage:
“Look closely at Google Maps. When you’re traveling through a city and you consult the app, it gives you more than navigational tips; it gives you a way to think about cities. Embedded in the software is a philosophy of place, which reflects, among other things, Google’s commercial interests, the backgrounds and biases of its programmers, and the strengths and limitations of software in representing space. In 2013, the company rolled out a new version of Maps. Instead of providing you with the same representation of a city that everyone else sees, it generates a map that’s tailored to what Google perceives as your needs and desires, based on information the company has collected about you. The app will highlight nearby restaurants and other points of interest that friends in your social network have recommended. It will give you directions that reflect your past navigational choices. The views you see, the company says, are ‘unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute.’
That sounds appealing, but it’s limiting. Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic. What is arguably the most important way of looking at a city, as a public space shared not just with your pals but with an enormously varied group of strangers, gets lost. ‘Google’s urbanism,’ the technology critic Evgeny Morozov has written, ‘is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.’ Expedience trumps all.” Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future
“Look closely at Google Maps. When you’re traveling through a city and you consult the app, it gives you more than navigational tips; it gives you a way to think about cities. Embedded in the software is a philosophy of place, which reflects, among other things, Google’s commercial interests, the backgrounds and biases of its programmers, and the strengths and limitations of software in representing space. In 2013, the company rolled out a new version of Maps. Instead of providing you with the same representation of a city that everyone else sees, it generates a map that’s tailored to what Google perceives as your needs and desires, based on information the company has collected about you. The app will highlight nearby restaurants and other points of interest that friends in your social network have recommended. It will give you directions that reflect your past navigational choices. The views you see, the company says, are ‘unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute.’
That sounds appealing, but it’s limiting. Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic. What is arguably the most important way of looking at a city, as a public space shared not just with your pals but with an enormously varied group of strangers, gets lost. ‘Google’s urbanism,’ the technology critic Evgeny Morozov has written, ‘is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.’ Expedience trumps all.” Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future
Alan Jacobs again, with a wide-ranging Medium post on lots of things: The Devil's Bargain. I shared this with a quote from Ursula K LeGuin's National Book Awards speech: "Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art...
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings."
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings."
Abraham Lincoln's 1842 speech on persuasion and empathy to the Springfield, IL temperance society, printed in Lapham's Quarterly: Better than a Gallon of Gall
America, in so many ways, needs to repent corporately of its many sins; sadly, it's too easy to valorize and justify our actions, claiming they don't truly represent us. Peter Beinart argues in The Atlantic that Torture Is Who We Are: "America has tortured throughout its history. And every time it has, some Americans have justified the brutality as necessary to protect the country from a savage enemy. Others have called it counterproductive and immoral. At different moments, the balance of power between these two groups shifts. But neither side in these debates speaks for the 'real America.' The real America includes them both. Morally, we contain multitudes."
I've shared Ken Kalfus's The Folly of Mars in n+1 twice, and I doubt it will be the last time; people F*cking Love Science, or something, but it's really just Bread, Circuses, and Rockets: "It’s not the planet Earth that’s fragile—it’s the human organism that’s extraordinarily delicate and needy, unable to survive beyond very narrow physical limits, the conditions for which exist naturally nowhere else in our solar system. To keep even a few people alive in space or on another planet requires from those left behind the expenditure of enormous resources. It’s not necessarily backwards-thinking, or anti-technology, or anti-exploration, to wonder if those resources could be better employed. The fantasy of a future new life for the species allows us to shrug off climate change and other global challenges with the thought that if we fail to make this planet livable for the billions of people who inhabit it, another is promised for us somewhere else."
It's a little funny looking back, but I was a little nervous to share something from Christianity Today, not knowing how it would be perceived. But Alissa Wilkinson is SO GOOD. Can Our Art Deal With Our World? "Today, our consumption habits are shaped by our own curation... Most people who read the Internet are seeing things posted by their Facebook friends—and frankly, few of us have Internet friends who don't think like us. A Pew Research study published on October 21 points out that liberals and conservatives inhabit different corners of the Internet. Liberals are more likely to defriend someone because of their conservative politics; conservatives are more likely to not be friends with liberals at all.
This also shapes how we engage with media. We click through, read, and watch things our friends watch. What we see is shaped by what we already like. In other words, our Internet lives function as echo chambers for what we already believe."
This also shapes how we engage with media. We click through, read, and watch things our friends watch. What we see is shaped by what we already like. In other words, our Internet lives function as echo chambers for what we already believe."
Edward Mendelson on The Secret Auden for the New York Review of Books: "By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.
On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive."
From Neil Gaiman's great novel American Gods: "'No man,' proclaimed Donne, 'is an Island,' and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever really looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us that a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain on our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."
On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive."
From Neil Gaiman's great novel American Gods: "'No man,' proclaimed Donne, 'is an Island,' and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever really looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us that a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain on our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."
Some tragic local news closed out the year: Cyclist Killed in Roland Park; How Can We Make Baltimore Safer for Bikes? (Baltimore Fishbowl - Rachel Monroe) "People who ride bicycles already take protective steps. It is up to people driving cars to recognize that a person on a bicycle has a full right to be in the road, and to drive carefully and safely at all times, not just when around people on bicycles....
We don’t call crashes like this 'accidents.' Distracted driving is not an accident. Leaving the scene of a crash is not an accident. This was a completely avoidable crash."
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