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.

Lightspeed politics

I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.

But I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I want to share why listening to the book has caused me a fair bit of political whiplash. It was written around 2013 or so, at the height of Obama’s national unpopularity and the Tea Party’s ascendancy. Cooke adroitly saw a window for the proposal of a new vision for the GOP: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, with an emphasis on limited government and classical liberalism. And listening to him read the book, you can understand why that proposal appeared plausible at the time. And yet, in hindsight, nothing could have been less likely either for the GOP’s rank and file to get behind or for the GOP’s electoral prospects at the national level. Trump comes along just a few months after the book’s publication and torpedoes the whole project. More than that, the proverbial “quadrant” of fiscally conservative and socially liberal is the polar opposite of the most nationally popular but under-served voting bloc in America: socially conservative but fiscally liberal. Bracketing the merits of the proposal, at the level of strategy it is dead on arrival.

Elements of the book also capture, as though in amber, a moment in political time that seemed, then and there, to be perennial, even eternal, but was finished within mere months—or, at most, by the next election. One reference in particular, to Glenn Beck, reminded me of a similar moment in Ross Douthat’s otherwise outstanding book Bad Religion, published in 2012. There Douthat uses Beck to open the book’s eighth and final chapter, framing the argument that follows. Now, neither Douthat nor Cooke is especially enamored of Beck; they aren’t enlisting him in a joint cause. But they permit themselves somewhat spellbound rhetoric to describe the “phenomenon” of Beck and his “extraordinary” popularity “outside” the media “mainstream.”

That’s all fine and good. But does a serious (however popular) work of intellectual history really need central casting to call in a shock jock conspiracy theorist for the concluding discussion of (in this case) American nationalism? Both authors write about Beck the way all journalists did at the time: with a mixture of repulsion, admiration, and envy.

And yet, just as the libertarian moment vanished in a puff of smoke, so Beck’s ubiquity died away without anyone really noticing. He’s still out there—I checked so you don’t have to—but he’s no longer Part Of The Discourse. His time has passed. His presence in these two books, however, written around the same time, testifies to an important feature of our politics as well as how it is observed and chronicled by our journalists in real time.

That feature is this: Politics moves at the speed of light. But while you’re watching it, it seems somehow unchanging, even atemporal. The result of this combination is that nothing is so dated as the verities and common sense of a particular slice of political time, especially when it is caught and put into words immediately, illic et tunc.

For us today, who have lived through this radical, perhaps epochal, set of changes in only half a decade, this is a worthy reminder of two things. First: What seems fixed and permanent in politics in the moment is far more likely to be the opposite: wholly malleable and subject to rapid and profound variation. Second: Politically speaking, what appears impossible is probably anything but.

That said, it takes imagination to cast the truly transformative vision and to find the means of making it a reality. Preferably, though, the right imagination.