Using the availability bias to demonstrate the survivorship bias. Ted Gioia conveniently extolls making art as the fastest bid for immortality in our age by invoking Shakespeare

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-achieve-immortality

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Sometimes this immortality of art happens in surprising ways. I recently watched the TV miniseries Capote Vs. The Swans—and it documents author Truman Capote’s shameful betrayal of his closest friends.

He took their secret scandals—told to him in private—and used them as plot points in his unfinished ‘gossip novel’ Answered Prayers.

I condemn what Capote did. But this miniseries makes something clear to me I’d missed before.

Babe Paley and the other friends he betrayed, come across as more positive and endearing figures than Capote himself in this miniseries—they now seem heroic compared to him. And they have been effectively immortalized by the way their lives intertwined with his, despite all his bad intentions.

They will still be remembered a hundred years from now—and recalled sympathetically—because of Capote’s artistry, which will prove more durable than his friendship or betrayals.

This is more common than most people realize. One of my musician friends spent a lot of time with Jack Kerouac back in the 1950s. My buddy ended up as a character in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur, and even got portrayed in a movie adaptation. I have other friends and acquaintances who also became characters in Hollywood biopics.

This is what art does. Even at secondhand.

If you’ve crossed paths with a great artist, some of that immortality might even rub off on you.

That’s a different way of surviving—and one that no tech bro can match by getting injections of teenager blood or gulping down 100 nutritional supplements per day.

It’s useful to remind ourselves of this genuine immortality of art and of the great deeds praised by the ancients—especially in an age that worships tech and marginalizes all other pursuits.

 

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The availability bias is that you go with the easiest, most immediately available exemplar of X that springs to mind at your first thought.  It is the heuristic I have relied upon when I wanted to think of who would be most likely to use the survivorship bias in making a case for something.  Thus I have gone with Ted Gioia's claim that through art people can achieve immortality, if not by making art that is "immortal" by being depicted in art that is immortal and which thus grants them a kind of second-hand immortality.

But do ancient religious texts promise that kind of vicarious immortality or is the immortality of some other kind?  Doesn't texts that refer to physical resurrection of actually dead people in Judaism and Christianity suggest that those texts had a more literally, well, literal take on immortality?  

Besides, Gioia can roll out any easy examples of artists who have been canonized and are required reading in school programs to make his case.  His case depends on the most overt survivorship bias possible.  What about all the poems that no one can read because they haven't survived?  Did the person who wrote "Here I sit all broken-hearted" in a bathroom stall really achieve immorality?  Who was that person?  I indulge in the reductio ad absurdum here for what I take to be obvious reasons.  Sure at some point there once was a man from Nantucket but who made that limerick?  

I read George Steiner's In Bluebird's Castle a few years ago after reading his book get denounced by John Borstlap and Richard Taruskin.  I think that both men took a rather melodramatic stance against Steiner's book, which openly asks whether the demise of "literacy" and literacy as the basis of "high culture" suggests that the bid at immortality through the arts that has been valorized since ancient Greece hasn't turned out to be something of a shell game.  That's a crisis for someone who was committed to the idea that the humanities actually ought to humanize, perhaps.  It's also a melodramatic reflection to anyone who regards life as more than the accumulation of books you've read or have been told you should have read before you die.  What both Taruskin and Borstlap seemed to miss was Steiner concluded that the age of literacy had ended but this meant that kids-these-days were not quoting ancient Latin and Greek poets so much as they were sharing musical references saturated with pop and classical music.  What seemed to the great literary minds and critics of the mid-20th century to be a possible crisis of letters might have turned out to have been a paradigm shift in which there was a new literacy replacing the old one.  For those committed to the old paradigm of "literacy" the loss was insuperable but would generations capable of triangulating half a millennia of musical references across multiple continents regard the ability to juxtapose memories of Bob Dylan songs with Baroque keyboard music feel they were illiterate?

Different people read different books in profoundly different ways.

But what Steiner touched on at various points in his book was the observation that immorality gained through the arts was, if we're honest, a somewhat dubious way of defining immortality.  It may have been a Greek notion of immortality and a Roman notion of immortality but did Judaism or Christianity really define that as "immortality"?  Steiner's conclusion was a rather simple one, no. 

Alan Jacobs has approvingly quoted Roger Scruton on unchosen ties that bind, which reminds me why I have so often found Scruton both frustrating and unpersuasive, his selective double standardized appeals to a vernacular aesthetic for architecture but not music

Alan Jacobs had a short post recently on how John Milton’s Areopagitica was not, its giant reception history withstanding, anything close to a case for what has long since been called the libertarian theory of the press.  Back in my journalism student days textbooks on theories of the press took it for granted that Milton’s work was a case for the liberation theory of the press, and the most definitive one at that.

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/areopagitica/

 

Milton may not have been the most orthodox Puritan but he was Puritan enough to want no Papists getting their tracts published in England.

 

Elsewhere Jacobs has written about how the real Theodor Adorno was not the kind of person who would have sympathized with 1960s era student protesters and didn’t believe academics had obligations to back them.  Whatever contemporary conservatives may tell you about the “real” legacy of Adorno there’s a world of difference between what they tell you “about” Adorno and slogging through what the guy actually wrote.

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-real-adorno/

 

Even the late Roger Scruton functionally conceded that no conservative philosopher worth anything can afford to ignore Adorno’s ideas and arguments.

 

Jacobs even cites Scruton from his final book, on the opera Parsifal.  If I may, here’s a somewhat lengthy extract:

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

 

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

 

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

 

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

 

If we do live in the age of metaphysical capitalism I think a possible oversight in Alan Jacobs’ ruminations is that this age can be full of gurus who extoll the potential necessity of cutting ties with toxic family who are not just, say, progressive neoliberals.  

an inevitable defense of Christian worldview thinking from an inevitable partisan: if Warren Cole Smith and The Calvinist International had doubts about Christian worldviewism then Doug Wilson's gotta speak up in favor of it

On February 5th Warren Cole Smith published a review of a book by Simon Kennedy called Against Worldview.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-worldview

 

Naturally Doug Wilson wrote "In Defense of Worldview Thinking" and published that on February 10.

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/books/in-defense-of-worldview-thinking.html

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In conservative Christian circles, worldview thinking was quite a hot item for a while. Most recently, I reckon it became “a thing” among us during the Francis Schaeffer times, and it then burgeoned into something of an industry. ...

 

Of course that was the problem, according to Warren Cole Smith, Alastair Roberts and, conspicuously Simon Kennedy. There could be an irony lurking in that Wilsonian observation, that worldview industrial generation of metacultural analysis from Christians in the 1970s could be to critical theory in the 1930s through 1940s what Christian rock that began to take shape in the 1970s was in relationship to rock `n roll from the 1950s.

 

Back when Adorno and Horkheimer claimed there was a culture industry that sold “us” an illusion of freedom via products and that it was selling a simulacrum of freedom passing itself off as real freedom, they may not have necessarily anticipated that the kind of metacultural criticism of “the way we live now” was going to burgeon into a kind of evangelical/fundamentalist Christian version of the same.