Subtweets, backshadowing, and Saint Barnabas

In my last post I went after a certain style of punditry and scholarship that scoffs at perceived errors as obviously mistaken—not reasonable differences of judgment but self-evidently foolish departures from objective fact—delivered in a rhetorical performance of casual omniscience. In criticizing this style, however, I engaged in a different style of criticism, but one no less annoying. One word for it is subtweeting; a plainer phrase is just being passive aggressive.

How do I know this? Because I named no names, linked to no articles, cited no sources. Which invites the question: Of whom was I writing? Which author or authors did I have in mind? (Besides, that is, Bill Simmons, whom I did name.) As it happens, a friend texted to let me know—with considerable self-restraint—what he thought about my subtweeting him. At which point my mouth fell open. I did what now?

Timing is an odd thing. I’d been mentally scribbling that post for months and finally found a spare fifteen minutes in the day in which to write it up and post it. But the truth is, anyone might have thought I was writing about them, for the simple reason that I studiously avoided names. I remember a similar instance, some four years ago, when I wrote about academics’ “touchy self-regard.” I realized after the fact that, were they to read it, certain writers whom I respect might take it as having them in mind when other, very different writers were in view. A sort of photo negative of Carly Simon’s chorus: You probably think this song is about you…

In truth, such scabrous screeds as that one are really about myself, because the very phenomenon I’m heaping scorn upon is one I find above all in myself.

Be that as it may, I’m going to leave up yesterday’s post, though I may append an explanatory note with a link to this post. I’m enough of an old-school blogger to dislike erasing mistakes while also hating to leave stupidities unflagged. The post was intemperately written even if ambiguously directed—or rather, the one because of the other. The anonymity of critique permits and even invites a rhetorical counter-performance, one that saws off the shotgun and blasts away anyone within range, bystanders be damned.

As you can tell, the text from my friend got under my skin, not least because it reminded me of my ugliest, most vicious tendencies as a writer. My overarching goal in all my work is to be unexcitable. When I write critical reviews, I bend over backwards to give the author the benefit of the doubt. I hate uncharitable reviews because they don’t give the book or its author the respect they deserve. Even a bad book deserves a fair hearing.

Blogging is most like social media when it degenerates into subtweeting—albeit minus Twitter. Better to just be direct. Better, in other words, either to be constructive (but generic) or to be critical (and specific). Critical-but-generic is the combination to avoid. E.g., in this 2022 post I leave unnamed that I’m criticizing Timothy Burke’s writings about Christian ethics on abortion. I get cute with shortcuts and euphemisms, but I also throw around words like “stupidity” and “ignorance” with abandon. I do so because I’m not writing in such a way as to be answerable for my words. I’m writing to own. And that, to quote my previous post, is childish and small.

I recall Alan Jacobs sharing in How to Think that he learned to take five minutes when he found that his fingers were shaking with anger as he typed. (Alan also shared with me Gary Saul Morrison’s concept of “backshadowing,” which confirms I was onto something in spite of myself.) That’s one of the many reasons why I got off social media. I didn’t deal with anger so much as the temptation to be glib, cute, sarcastic, and superficial. Yet here I am, doing the same thing on my own blog, unprompted. A fool’s foolishness follows him wherever he goes.

So what’s been on my mind over the past year that prompted the last post’s outburst of frustration? Who can I name with honesty but also a degree of charity?

My man Simmons, for one, along with his gambling buddies.

Another is simply the practice of punditry surrounding elections in America. By definition, elections are contingent events. Nobody knows what will happen, even if there are greater and lesser probabilities. Yet the lesson every pundit takes, in retrospect, is what they should have known all along based on the signs, the hints and symptoms, pointing to what eventually happened (read: was always going to happen). It drives me nuts.

A third example: Hollywood hits and flops. Before any movie debuts, you can write the Monday morning quarterback hot takes in advance, because whatever ends up happening will be taken to have been inevitable, nay necessary, and therefore utterly and absolutely non-contingent. Every producer of a hit is a genius who knew the Zeitgeist better than anyone else; every producer of a flop will never be hired or trusted again.

In the academy, the progressive version of this mood is the kind of scholar who describes his moral, political, and intellectual trajectory as a linear line, along which he is quite far, naturally, while others are catching up at different rates. A sub-species of this kind of discourse is progressive Christian scholars who claim expertise on American evangelicalism and describe its transgressions in terms that make Nazism look tame. Those of us in the know have always known, such folks intone, but we’re glad you’ve finally caught up.

I’d rather not name these scholars, but they have been on my mind of late because I’ve been re-reading Bonnie Kristian’s new book, In Defense of Evangelicalism, this week. At the same time, they have a sort of cracked mirror image in certain conservative writers. For instance, I enjoy reading and listening to Charles C. W. Cooke. The man can turn a phrase, and he doesn’t suffer fools. But while Mencken-esque contempt may make for good copy, it’s bad for the soul. And it’s only very rarely called for. Very rarely, that is, are one’s ideological enemies stupid, corrupt, or evil. Typically they’re just wrong, or so it seems to oneself. Conservatives are usually better than liberals about recognizing this. Not always, though.

Cooke’s buddy Kevin D. Williamson is guilty of a similar style, as evidenced in his review of the vice president’s new book. A friend of mine called the review “unhinged.” I recognize the characteristic gonzo style, and the one-liners do indeed have the intended effect. But the insults curdle fast. And the general air in all his writing of common sense against the idiots neither persuades nor edifies, even if it entertains.

I’m not meaning to write against polemic or boldness of tone. I’m not even meaning to write against any of these authors, scholars, or trends per se. I’m trying to suggest—against myself as much as anyone else—that because the world is difficult to understand, because genuine thought is difficult and thus a real achievement when it happens, any suggestion that implies otherwise is a failure to do the very thing one finds lacking in another.

And as for myself, I have come over the years to see my particular charism as a professor, teacher, and writer not to be criticism, not to be polemic, but instead to be encouragement. Saint Barnabas is my model, not Saint Athanasius. What do I mean? I mean, on one hand, that like Ebert contra Siskel, I do not want to be parsimonious in my joy, in the joy that I take in art and thought and writing. I want it to be capacious and full, not cramped or suspicious. And I mean, on the other hand, that I have learned that I am good at connecting people, at providing input and feedback and pointing to resources, at cheerleading, advising, and acting as a sounding board. I’m a good parent in the stands and coach on the sidelines.

By contrast, I’m tempted to suppose I’m the protagonist, the star; I’m tempted to get in the mud and fight. That’s when I pen the worked-up post aimed everywhere and nowhere. That’s when the blast radius expands far beyond the microscopic scale I imagined. That’s when I go astray from the path and neglect what small gifts I’ve received. Gifts are meant to be shared, to bless others. Saint Barnabas isn’t Saint Paul. But he goes to Tarsus and finds him and brings him back to Antioch. He’s a servant of the servants of God. When he forgets that, he loses his purpose. When he remembers it, he fulfills his calling.

Quit podcasts

“Quit Netflix.”

Matt Anderson has made that phrase something of a personal slogan. Among the many controversial things he’s written—he’s a controversialist, after all—it may be the most controversial. We like our shows in the age of Peak TV. And what he wants to do is take them away.

Okay, not exactly. But he thinks you—all of us—would be better off if we canceled our Netflix subscriptions. For the obvious reasons: Netflix is a candy bar, a sedative, a numbing device by which we pass the time by doing nothing especially worthwhile at all. It turns out that’s true not only of Netflix but of the so-called Golden Age of TV as a whole. It’s not that there are no good TV shows. It’s that, in almost every circumstance, there are dozens of better things you could be doing with your time. (You might be inclined to resist this claim, but in your heart you know it’s inarguable.) Add to that the fact that watching Prestige TV has become, in the last dozen years, a vaguely moralized social obligation for a certain subset of upper-middle class white-collar professionals, and perhaps Matt is right that Christians not only may but should quit Netflix.

Point taken. Now allow me to swap out a different activity for your quitting consideration.

Podcasts.

Podcasts, as you well know, are the new Prestige TV. They’re ubiquitous. Not only does everyone have a favorite podcast. Everyone has a podcast, i.e., hosts one of their own. Or is starting one. Or is planning to. Or has an idea for one. They just need to get the equipment and line up some guests . . .

I live and work right next to a college campus. If you see someone walking on campus and that person is under 40 and alone, almost certainly she has air pods in her ears, and chances are those air pods are playing a podcast. (Maybe music. Maybe.) What is the podcast? Who knows? There are literally millions today, on every topic under the sun. “Have you listened to [X] podcast?” is the new “Have you seen the latest episode of [X]?” Just last month our pediatrician asked me, in the middle of a check-up for one of our kids, given my job, whether I was listening to the Mars Hill podcast. Alas, I had to say no.

Now, this post is two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. I’ve been listening to podcasts for nearly 15 years. My first was Bill Simmons’ old pod for ESPN, whose first episode dropped while I was living in an apartment in Tomsk, Russia, early in the summer of 2007. I’ve been listening to Simmons off and on ever since. My podroll has increased as I’ve aged, and some of my typical listens are among the usual suspects: Ezra Klein, The Argument, Zach Lowe, The Watch, The Rewatchables, Know Your Enemy, LR&C, Tyler Cowen, Mere Fidelity, The Editors, a few others here and there. Washing the dishes or cleaning the house, it’s a pleasure to listen to these folks talk about sports and entertainment and news and politics and theology. It’s background noise, their voices become like those of friends, and occasionally you even learn things.

So unlike the scourge of Prestige TV—which is little more than a Trojan horse for reinforcing the single greatest collective habitual addiction besetting our society for nearly a century—podcasts aren’t All Bad, nor are their benefits mainly a function of rationalization and self-justification. I’m not worried about them in the same way.

Having said that. Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to be a little more skeptical of them. So as to decrease your podcasting, and maybe even to quit it.

First, podcasts are filler. They’re aural wallpaper. They’re something to have on in the background while you do something else, something that requires your actual focus and attention. If that’s true, can they really be that substantial? Aren’t they, as often as not, little more than snack food for the ears?

Second, if you really want to listen to something (say, on a road trip or a long walk or while working out), why not listen to an audiobook? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the book will be worth your time—a four-course meal—in a way the Cheetos-posing-as-Michelin-starred-podcast will not. You could buy audiobooks or sign up for Audible, as a way to patronize authors, or you could use Overdrive or Libby. You have more or less every great work of literature and prose in the English language available to listen to for free; sometimes the work was composed with the express purpose of hearing it read aloud, rather than reading words on a page. Why not give it a try?

Third, those first two points suppose it’s not a problem, us walking around incessantly filling our ears with the voices of others, thus blocking out the noises—and silences—of the real world. Isn’t it a problem, though, this anxious need to fill even the smallest of snatches of time with meaningful noise, lest we be oppressed by the stillness and quietness (or, if you’re in a big city, the parading loudness) of life? Or perhaps we feel anxious to Do Something Productive with our time: If our attention can manage it, surely we Ought To Be Learning/Listening/Thinking? Nonsense. If to cook is to pray, so is every other daily “mindless” habitual activity that doesn’t demand the totality of our attention. Such activity may, in fact, permit our attention to be at ease, or to meditate on other matters, or to examine our days, or to wander as it pleases. Or, as the case may be, to choke on emotions we’d rather not address, indeed would rather numb and sedate and repress through unremitting distraction. Perhaps podcasts are a kind of noise pollution but on an individual level, self-chosen rather than imposed from without. We just have to refuse the urge to put the pods in and press play.

Fourth, podcasts almost invariably trade on the new, the latest, the exclusive-breaking-this-just-in-ness of our forgetful presentist age. In this they’re analogous to Twitter: an infinite scroll, not for the eyes, but for the ears. Doubtless some people listen to podcasts while scrolling Twitter. (The horror!) The podcasts play on, world without end, one blending into another, until you forget where one begins and one ends. Of all the podcasts you’ve ever listened to—and I’ve surely listened to thousands—how many discrete episodes can you point to, from memory, and say, “That one, right there, was significant, a meaningful and substantive and life-giving episode”? I’m not saying you couldn’t pick out a few. I’m suggesting the batting average will be very low. Again, like remembering individual tweets. That’s why podcasts are so disposable. The moment they lose their immediate relevance, they are cast aside into the dustbin of history. It’s what makes writers who become podcasters so sad. Books and essays and columns stand the test of time. Pods do not. Bill Simmons, whom I referenced earlier, stopped writing five or six years ago. He likes to say his fingers stopped working. The truth is, a combination of market inefficiency plus the convenience of podcasting meant taking the time to draft and revise and draft and revise, under an editor’s watchful eye, was less convenient and more time-demanding than hopping onto a podcast seconds after a game ended—plus advertisers are willing to pay for that in a way they don’t for individual columns. So a writer who came onto the scene and made a name for himself because of his writing simply ceased to practice his craft. That’s something to lament. Beyond that individual case, though, it’s a parable for our time. And Simmons is someone with an audience in the millions. Yet his thousands upon thousands of podcasts from the last decade will never be listened to a second time, now or in the future. They might as well be lit on fire ten days after going online. The same goes for politics podcasts. They’re talk radio, only rarefied and highbrow. But they have the same shelf life. And they partake of the selfsame contemporary obsession with The New that all people of good will, but certainly Christians (and Jews and Muslims), should repudiate in all its forms. Go read Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News and you’ll realize just how unimportant—in general and to your own daily life—“keeping up with the news” is. That goes for politics and sports and entertainment (but I repeat myself) as much as for anything else. Stop reading the news translates to stop listening to the news, which I will gloss here as stop listening to podcasts devoted to The New.

Fifth, podcasts have increasingly become niche and personalized, as so much in our digital economy has. You, the individual consumer-listener, pay the individual content-maker/podcaster, perhaps become a Patreon supporter, and thereby receive Exclusive Access and Personal Benefits and other just-for-you paid-for goods and services. Am I the only one who finds all of this ever so slightly weird, even gross? I don’t begrudge anyone hustling to do their thing or to find an audience, precisely outside of the decaying and desiccated institutions that act as gatekeepers today. But there’s something icky about it nonetheless. In the same way that news-watchers can exist in entirely different moral and epistemic universes—one presided over and mediated by Fox News, the other by MSNBC—so podcast-listeners curate their own little private aural worlds with nary a glance at or interruption from another. It doesn’t help that this ecosystem (or ecosphere?) overlaps substantially with the gig-cum-influencer economy, where fame and fortune are always one viral moment away, for anyone and everyone. We’re all always already potentially (in)famous and affluent, if only the digital stars will align. We try to nudge those stars by flooding the market with our content, a sort of astrology or spell-conjuring with ones and zeroes, or in this case, “Thanks for following; while you’re here, check out my SoundCloud.”

In any case, those are at least some of the reasons for increasing your skepticism quotient in this matter. More than a slightly more skeptical eye, though, consider whether you ought to go all the way. For there’s a solution lying close to hand.

Quit podcasts.