The Fare Forward Interview with Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacobs is the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University, and the Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. In addition to teaching, Jacobs has authored numerous books, including The Year of Our Lord 1943 and, most recently, Breaking Bread with the Dead, as well as articles and essays on topics ranging from the value of reading at whim, to education and the university, to cinema and pop culture, to the writings of 20th century poets and intellectuals.
Between The Year of Our Lord 1943 addressing a major moment of social and cultural crisis, and Breaking Bread with the Dead offering strategies for how to deal with our current such moment, Jacobs has a great deal to say on the challenges of our technocratic society and how we might navigate them. We talked to him about reading old books, as well as other strategies for social reform, and what we, as Christians, are to make of the never-ending end of the world. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Interview Conducted by Sara Holston
Fare Forward: I’ve heard Breaking Bread with the Dead described as part of a trilogy with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds; can you talk a bit about the logic behind that trilogy and what your goals were in writing it?
Alan Jacobs: I don’t think the books are a trilogy. They are only in the sense that this is all that I’ve learned from almost forty years of teaching. The first one, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, was very much written for my students and my former students—people who all were readers but had kind of inadvertently turned reading into a challenge. How to Think and Breaking Bread with the Dead are a little different because they are both addressed to my fellow citizens. They were written in the never-ending end of the world era, and I wanted to speak to my fellow citizens—not just of the U.S. but in the rest of the democratic worlds. They’re both about developing strategies for navigating the challenges that we have, and they’re both sometimes explicitly, but pretty much always implicitly, about the pernicious effects of social media. I’ve really gotten to the point now where I just think if I could be Emperor of the world and delete Facebook and Twitter from the face of the earth, I would do so.
That’s what it really is about, though: trying to give people strategies for dealing with social media, which I think are cognitively disruptive and cognitively damaging. I think you need a whole set of cognitive strategies for doing that and How to Think laid out one set of them. Breaking Bread with the Dead laid out another set. While I believe all of my suggestions in How to Think are good suggestions, they’re hard to implement if you’re swimming upstream all the time. Breaking Bread with the Dead is a more radical strategy in the sense that it’s not about just trying to maintain the proper cognitive and moral and ethical orientation, but maybe just finding something else to do other than social media. It’s always easy to tell people “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” but every parent and every teacher knows that you have to give people alternatives. So the idea behind Breaking Bread with the Dead is to provide an alternative to what we have come to call “doom scrolling” that I think yields multiple benefits.
FF: You note in passing that there are many people who are paid very well to write the code that determines what your situations are and how you’ll respond to them. You also have a whole list of social forces that sort of push back against this idea of Christian humanism, which include information overload, social acceleration, and pervasive algorithmic marketing. In light of those, there seems to be asymmetry between the problem, which is structural and civilizational, and the solution you offer, which is very personal and individual. How are we to tackle this social problem with an individual strategy?
AJ: This is such an appropriate and difficult question. I do say in Breaking Bread with the Dead that I’m writing for about 2 percent of the American population. Most people don’t read books and most people who do read books read very recent books only, and there’s just not that many people who are willing to consider the advice that I’m giving here. But I’m giving the advice not because I necessarily think that it’s going to work in some society-transforming way, but because it’s advice I believe in and following this advice has helped me. With the larger social trends and problems, I struggle to think of a proper response. The Social Dilemma, the recent documentary on Netflix, is a series of interviews with dissenters from Silicon Valley. And the central figure of the documentary seems to be Tristan Harris, who has been very prominent in arguing for a more humane technology. Yesterday I read a long response to the documentary and the argument that the author was making was that if you listen all these people, what they’re all recommending is reforming the big Silicon Valley companies–and the assumption behind that is that they can be reformed. When we talk about this, we’re assuming that their business model is not necessarily destructive, that you can revise the business model in such a way that it won’t do the damage that it does now. The author was arguing, however, that maybe we can’t reform these companies, and that the only thing you can do if you want things to get better is to shut them down.
If so, that’s a really big problem, because these companies are not going to be shut down. They are too big or too powerful. They are well on the way to what Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer, talks about in his Mars trilogy, which is the development of what we now call multinational corporations into what he calls transnational corporations, which are more powerful than any except the very largest countries in the world. He imagines them beginning to take on that kind of role. So you have the U.S., China, Germany, and India, and then you have Google, Apple, and Amazon. This is essentially the vision that you get in Pixar in Wall-E, right? What I’m talking about is a tiny drop in the bucket. I am advocating a personal strategy, which is not sufficient to address the larger social problems, but I think it can help some individual people. I’m not hoping to do more than that in this particular book. My hope is that if people can get a little bit of perspective and experience a little bit of tranquility, then they might be a little better disposed to hearing serious arguments for social transformation when those arguments are made.
The ideas that Eliot and Auden and Lewis and Maritain and Simone Weil articulated in response to their moment are still immensely resonant in our moment. We are better as Christians and as thinkers because of what they did.
FF: You say something very similar at the end of The Year of Our Lord 1943. You entreat future generations of thinkers to read the signs of the times more quickly, because the thinkers you discuss in that book initially failed in their project of social renewal through Christian humanism. But at the end of that book, you suggest that it’s not obvious that any Christian in today’s English-speaking world has the kind of platform that those thinkers (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden) did. Is there an intentional counsel of despair at the end of Year of Our Lord that even with platforms such as theirs, they were still unable to succeed in their project?
AJ: I don’t think it’s a counsel of despair, but I do think it’s a sobering story. I would say that there are two sides to this, and we need to think about both of them. One is that the five figures that I discuss, as well as the series of people who are associated with them, sought to intervene in a decisive way in the reconstruction of postwar society. That is, they expected that the Allies would win the war and they expected that the Allied nations would be the dominant nations in the years to come. And they wanted to intervene especially in the educational system in order to try to transform the way people were shaped and formed so that you wouldn’t get into the situation that Reinhold Niebuhr described of winning the war, but losing the peace—winning the war but not being formed in such a way that you can adequately carry out your responsibilities to this world that you have made.
That is what they wanted to do, and it didn’t happen. They did not succeed. Paul Kennedy has this book called Engineers of Victory in which he said the winning of World War II was a triumph of engineering, a triumph of technocracy, and that’s how it was perceived. That’s why, for instance, in 1946 Winston Churchill was booted out as Prime Minister of England and replaced by Clement Attlee—because Attlee was basically a technocrat. He was someone who had a kind of solutionist, policy-based strategy for changing England in the postwar world and that’s what people wanted. And, by the way, they may have been right in making that decision, but it was a rejection of a more humanistic model of politics in favor of a more technocratic model of politics. So they didn’t get what they sought to achieve, that’s true.
Nevertheless, seventy-five years later, a whole lot of us are still reading them. The ideas that Eliot and Auden and Lewis and Maritain and Simone Weil articulated in response to their moment are still immensely resonant in our moment. We are better as Christians and as thinkers because of what they did. So the fact that they didn’t achieve what they wanted doesn’t mean that they didn’t achieve anything significant. But I do think it’s a kind of a cautionary tale in that Christians are in general are slow to discern the signs of the times, and I think historically speaking the Christians who have been most attentive to the signs of the times have been the ones who want to follow the path of the times, right? We need something like the opposite of that. We need Christians to be slow to follow the path of the times but quick to discern where things are going in order to try to articulate a response.
I wrote an essay for Harper’s a few years ago called “The Watchmen,” and it’s about the idea of the “Christian intellectual.” And that was in many ways a history, but it was also a plea for a renewal of genuine Christian intellectuals—that is people who are seriously engaged with their moment, seriously engaged with their world, and who can provide a model for understanding the world that is thoroughly grounded in Christian doctrine and worship. And there are just not very many of these people around, and we need more of them, so that’s what I’m counting on places like Fare Forward to do. You know I’m hoping that you can generate a kind of excitement about pursuing this sort of path, because it’s so desperately needed. We just don’t need Christians who can only echo what the Democratic Party is saying or only echo what the Republican Party is saying. We’re useless if that’s all we can do. There has to be a distinctively, recognizably Christian challenge to the principalities and powers that rule this world. Otherwise what are we good for? I’m hoping that people will take these recent works of mine not as counsels of despair but rather as challenges with the awareness that it’s not going to be an easy challenge to meet.
FF: Related to the idea of challenging this technocratic society, you wrote in a piece called “After Technopoly” about the relationship between the technopoly and myth-making, and one of the points there that I thought was interesting was this idea that it may not be that simple resistance is a sustainable option, but that we are in some sense looking to pass through the technological and into the mythical. Do you see this challenge as helping us to look toward that possibility?
AJ: I think there are overt modes of resistance. Various Anabaptist movements like the Bruderhof, for example, are best known for this kind of thing. Then another more or less overt mode of such resistance is the Catholic Worker movement, which is very visible. There’s also Kierkegaard’s idea of the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, where he writes under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Johannes looks at the knight of faith and he says that the knight is solid all the way through, and that idea of someone who is not maybe as visibly resistant but who is internally resistant is worth considering as well. In relation to the principalities and powers, you can’t too often reflect on Jesus’s very strange response when he’s asked whether it’s OK for his followers to pay taxes and he says “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” after questioning them about whose face is on them, whose image is on that coin. It’s fascinating to me that his response at that moment is such a paradoxical one. I hope what that suggests is that there is more than one way to navigate through this world that is ruled by the principalities and powers—that there is more than one way to be faithful.
A personal transformation that happens only for you is a deficient one and a faulty one. It should bear fruit; it’s by our fruits that we are to be known. This is a long way to say that I don’t believe in liberal learning as an end in itself.
FF: You do write that the primary task of Breaking Bread is to explore a model of Christian humane learning as a force for social renewal, which is of course the goal of the five thinkers in Year of Our Lord 1943, but my question is about whether social renewal is always the proper end of Christian humanism. Plenty of advocates of liberal learning would say that it’s an intrinsically good activity with an end in itself. How should we understand the relationship between the intrinsic and the instrumental goods of liberal education?
AJ: The first thing I would say is that I have never been able to make sense of the idea of learning as an end in itself. Perhaps it’s because I’m an Augustinian Christian and Augustine says that God is to be loved and everything else is to be used. I think even when people say that liberal learning is to be an end in itself they don’t mean it. What they mean is that it’s not an instrument to some specific or concrete end, but I think it is. When you listen to people talk about what they mean by learning as an end in itself you discover that they don’t actually think it is an end in itself! They think that it is a means of personal transformation. Therefore it is not instrumental but teleological. That is, liberal learning is something that helps move me toward my goal (or my end) as a person and as a Christian. One of the collects in the Book of Common Prayer says of the worship of God in “whose service is perfect freedom” and that’s the goal, that in the service and the worship of God we achieve perfect freedom. Insofar as liberal learning helps us in that regard, it is not instrumental but it is teleological, and it’s not something that is valuable only in itself but valuable in so far as it helps us toward this greater goal.
Having said all that, I don’t think there is a straight line that goes between personal transformation and social renewal, but I do think that social renewal is one of the consequences—something that personal transformation can aid in. And I think it’s good to think of it that way. If you are someone who is seeking your own personal transformation, but you do not have a vision for the way that your own transformation might be a blessing to those around you, I think you have misunderstood the Christian notion of personal transformation. A personal transformation that happens only for you is a deficient one and a faulty one. It should bear fruit; it’s by our fruits that we are to be known. This is a long way to say that I don’t believe in liberal learning as an end in itself. I believe in it as an aide and a friend in my own personal transformation, and I do believe that if that personal transformation is real, that it will bear fruit socially and communally, and not just inside of me.
FF: You mentioned that 2 percent of people will actually read Breaking Break with the Dead, which is of course an incredibly small proportion of the overall population. Josef Pieper famously said that the basis of culture is leisure, but we know that an increasing proportion of the country don’t have access to leisure. They’re bound by employment and childcare and other responsibilities. You also include in Year of our Lord 1943 the “Interlude” section for other pilgrims and other paths. All of this seems to suggest that the life of the mind and liberal learning is a kind of vocation that may not be open in principal or in actuality to very many people. What prevents this view of vocation from slipping into a kind of elitism?
AJ: It is a possibility but it’s not a possibility that is going to be easily realized. If 2 percent of Americans bought the book, it would be a magnificent bestseller and I would be rich. But those people might be able to have influence on other people as well, and it’s important to understand that a lot of what we call leisure now is actually not leisure. It is unpaid labor on behalf of surveillance capitalism, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. That is, we are all working for Google, we are working for Facebook. I would like to spread a model of reading that is genuinely a leisure activity and that escapes the loop of being unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism. That will start small, and maybe it will stay small, but my hope is that it would be it would be bigger. Even people who have very hard, demanding lives can spend an enormous amount of time in this activity that we have been taught to feel is leisure, but is as I have said unpaid labor.
It’s interesting to see how things come into fashion. Think about how in the last few months we have decided that nothing is more important than the Post Office—that the Post Office is the greatest thing in the world. One of those bandwagons that I’ve been on for my entire life is libraries. I think libraries are just amazing. I grew up in a lower-middle-class, working class family. My father was in prison almost all of my childhood, and my mother worked long hours to try to keep us afloat. My grandmother was the one who took care of my sister and me, and we didn’t have much money for books. There were a lot of books in the house, but that was because members of my family would go to used bookshops and get these like ten cent used paperbacks that had been read ten times and had coffee spilled on them and so forth. So we spent massive amounts of time at the library. Once a week my grandmother and I would go to the library and come out with a great big bag full of books and we would just read relentlessly.
I’m the only person in my family who went beyond high school—in fact I’m the only person in my family to graduate from high school. Yet we read all the time. We always had a TV on in our house, but nobody ever watched it. A characteristic thing in my family would be me, my mother, my grandmother, my sister when she got old enough, sitting in a room with the TV on, the sound turned down, and we were all just sitting there reading books. That was everything to me. It opened the door for everything that I’ve done in the rest of my life. I owe so much to the city of Birmingham, Alabama’s, public libraries. I think when I was doing that I was simultaneously engaging in genuine leisure while also being formed as a thinker and as someone who could kind of step out of the flow of the moment and acquire perspective and tranquility. So I believe that I’m recommending something that is widely available, even to people who have very little money and very few resources, and I know that from my own childhood.
If Christian humanists can make themselves scientifically and technologically literate, they can give people who are wholly within the STEM orbit a good reason to pay attention to them. All Christians have to be good at code-switching.
FF: You discuss in Year of Our Lord a few methods for renewal that differ from the Christian humanism project, particularly Niebuhr and his support of political intervention, which he saw as more likely to be effective than intellectual transformation. Are those two strategies necessarily at odds? Might there be a possibility for the two to go hand in hand?
AJ: Each of us is limited in the amount of energy that we have, in the capacity of our minds, and in the hours in our day, so everyone is going to have a bit of a specialization. But I think one thing we need more of among Christians is interaction between people who have different roles within the social ecology of the Christian world. Academics like me tend to talk mainly to other academics, and pastors tend to talk mainly to other pastors, and social activists tend mainly to talk to other social activists. The interactions between those different roles are too limited. It’s also the case that all of us need to be speaking to people who are doing the same things that we do, but outside of the Christian orbit.
When I was still a relatively young person, maybe in my mid-thirties, I was so confused about what my path was going to be. There was a part of me that wanted to be a scholar, and there was a part of me that wanted to speak to my fellow Christians, and there was a part of me that wanted to speak to the possibly mythical common reader that Virginia Woolf talks about. Year after year, I was saying to myself “Which path am I going to follow? What am I going to set aside in order to follow one path?” When I had been thinking and praying about that for a long time, I came to the realization that I was never going to choose, that I would always be doing all of those things. There’s no doubt that I have done less scholarship than I might have done otherwise if I didn’t have these other roles. But I am so happy that I ended up deciding not to give up on any of those, because I think it has been so good for me as a thinker and as a writer to continually have to adapt what I say to different audiences and to try to talk to those who are very uncomfortable to talk to.
For instance, that essay on the Christian intellectuals, “The Watchmen,” would have been a really easy piece to write for a journal like First Things, or for Books and Culture, but that was a hard essay to write for Harper’s. It was a challenge to make that topic interesting and relevant to a Harper’s audience, but how could that not be good for me as a thinker, and for that matter as a Christian? It’s important to learn how to speak graciously and charitably to people who don’t share my beliefs. So on the one hand, we’re all going to have specific roles and that’s OK. But I also think that there is a kind generality of thought and discourse that is appropriate for Christians. There’s a reason why St. Paul says that he strives to be “all things to all people.” There’s a sort of internal diversity that Christians should practice. You know, sometimes I envy my scholar friends who only address their fellow scholars, but I wouldn’t actually trade the complications of having these three roles for anything, because they have been so enriching to me.
FF: How do we think about those who are in fields or areas in STEM, which is increasingly funded and supported by universities, even over and against the humanities? How might students who are enrolled in STEM programs, or people who are working in technology, cultivate Christian humanism?
AJ: I’m not sure you can have a robust Christian humanism that is not scientifically and technologically informed. If Christian humanism, in our day, is not responsive to our scientific and technological environment, then I have some real doubts about how effective it’s going to be. And the more that humanists reach out intellectually toward the scientific and technological worlds, the more that encourages people who live wholly within the STEM worlds to move toward the more humanistic learning that many of them crave. I am in an interesting situation in that in the Honors College at Baylor (where I teach), about 75 percent of our students are in STEM. So one of the things that I’ve done from time to time is teach a class called “The Two Cultures,” based on C. P. Snow’s famous lecture on the two cultures of the sciences and humanities and then various responses to that that came from both humanists and scientists. And then there is a capstone class we offer to STEM students that is a humanities course, but if you want to teach it effectively you have to be aware that the people in your classroom are habituated to thinking as scientists, not as humanists. So you have to find ways to make it relevant and interesting to them and at the same time prevent them from thinking of it a distraction.
I actually started college as a physics major, and I often say to people that if only the Ptolemaic cosmos had been true, I would’ve stayed in physics, but instead we have these things like elliptical orbits! It would’ve been so much easier if things just went around in circles, but instead these things speed up and slow down and the math is complicated. Why make my life so hard? But God did that, and so I eventually came into the humanities but still with a love of science and an interest in technology—that’s why a lot of my writing is about technology. If Christian humanists can make themselves scientifically and technologically literate, they can give people who are wholly within the STEM orbit a good reason to pay attention to them. All Christians have to be good at code-switching. That’s one of the modes of code-switching that I would like to see us do better: to be aware of what’s going on in science and technology so that we can have meaningful conversations between scientific people and humanistic people.
What do we want to give our energies to so that we will have something beautiful and good to pass down to the people who come after us?
FF: I’m curious how we can strike a balance in our relationship to technology, because as you said, technology and science are not inherently evil. So is having the kinds of conversations you describe enough to strike this balance without falling too far into the pitfalls of technocratic society? Are there other ways we should be thinking about how not to throw the baby out with the bathwater?
AJ: There are a couple of ways to do this. Something I always say to my students is “never accept the defaults.” One of the things about the technologies we use is that they all come with defaults—ways that they are set up to be used out of the box. In the great majority of cases there are alternatives to those defaults, but people don’t find out what they are. And so just because it’s easier and less time-consuming, you just do the thing that is preset for you. There are couple of ways to resist the defaults. One is simply to avoid using the technologies whose defaults are not conducive to human flourishing. And sometimes it does come to that. In other cases, there are ways to employ the technologies but to do it on your terms.
So for instance one of the coolest things about the Internet is the technology called RSS—really simple syndication—that allows you to subscribe to feeds on a wide range of websites. A lot of people don’t do that because they think, “I just get my news from Twitter” or, “I get my news from Facebook.” But Twitter and Facebook are terrible ways to get the news! But if you have an RSS service that you subscribe to, then you can tailor your information consumption to exactly what you’re interested in. It’s not a huge investment of time and it doesn’t require any real technological knowledge. It’s the tiniest bit of pushback, but with that you can get all the information you feel you need but you can also get that information in ways that filter out all the crap that you otherwise have to deal with when you’re on social media. RSS should not be a minority technology. It should be a majority technology. It’s not as good as reading old books, but it’s a heck of a lot better than getting your news from Twitter or Facebook.
FF: You have also mentioned the “Gandalf option,” this idea of Gandalf as a steward. I’m curious if you could explain to us what the Gandalf option is, since that is related to the idea of social reform.
AJ: Gandalf says to Denethor near the end of The Lord of the Rings: “The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?” There are a lot of very vocal Christians out there who are only loud about what they hate, or what angers them. You can’t tell what they think is good. They’ve gotten caught up so much in the ragefest of the worlds they live in—mainly online—that there’s nothing left of what it is that they wish to nurture, or to be stewards of. Sometimes I think, “What if we just didn’t talk anymore about what we hate?”
A big part of the reason I wrote Breaking Bread with the Dead is to try to pass along my love of these old books to people who haven’t acquired that love. The argument that I’m making here is congruent with an argument being made in literary studies these days by a Professor at the University of Virginia named Rita Felski, who has written about the limits of critique. So many of us have been trained in critique and we believe in the power—and not just the power but the necessity—of critique. But Felski says your critique is a very limited thing, it’s a very limited way of approaching the world. Bruno Latour, the great sociologist, has asked if critique has run out of steam. Those are two different critiques. Latour says, “Does critique even work?” Felski says, “Does this make me a better person?” I think the answer to both questions is often no. So what if we turn that around and started saying, “What do we want to nurture?” What do we want to give our energies to so that we will have something beautiful and good to pass down to the people who come after us? That is the Gandalf option, and I have increasingly over the years tried to think that way.
Maybe the time for critiquing technology—the type of critique we see in Neil Postman, Albert Boardman, and Ursula Franklin—is over, and it’s time instead to do something different. And that is certainly what this most recent book is about.
FF: What is your favorite thing that you’ve read at whim lately?
AJ: My favorite thing that I’ve read at whim lately is related to an ongoing whim of mine. It’s Roy Porter’s London: A Social History. I love everything about London. It is just endlessly fascinating to me, and Roy Porter is one of the great historians of our time. I now have hundreds of anecdotes about the history of London that I can bore my wife and my son with— big victory!
Many thanks to Alan Jacobs for taking the time to sit down with us for this interview.
