Jason Kottke, the definitive old-school in-it-for-the-long-haul linkblogger, has announced that “I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future.” For what it’s worth, I will not be making such a pivot and would not do so even if I shared Kottke’s political views to the fourth decimal place. Here’s why:
Blogging is a poor tool for political resistance; clicktivism is not activism. Kottke thinks that the problem is that people don’t know what’s going on — which is why he’s blogging about it — but you can tell that that’s not true from the fact that almost everybody he quotes is writing for very widely-read outlets, from the New Yorker to The Verge to Wired. Everything’s readily available; there’s no real value proposition in Kottke's aggregating it. And Kottke himself has no distinctive political knowledge or expertise. Rather than reading him, you could just put these outlets in an RSS reader and skip the middleman. And even if you did that you wouldn't be one step closer to engaging in meaningful resistance.
But there’s another reason I won’t be headed in Kottke’s direction: I don’t believe there’s anything more morally corrupting than an utterly single-minded focus on defeating your political enemies, even when those political enemies really deserve to be defeated. To think only in terms of Winning and Losing is dehumanizing, both to your enemies and to yourself. It's virtually animalistic, and it makes you forget a lot of things you need to remember.
Kottke says, "I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that" — indeed, but why do we need it? I believe that we need "art and beauty and laughter," and history, but not merely to give us a break from political struggle, but also for political reasons: because only fully human persons, persons formed by wide and generous encounters with the whole of humanity, are able to think and act wisely in the political realm.
That's why I won't be posting on our current political moment.
Right now I am hard at work on my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, and that work is generating a great many sparks — sparks of ideas that probably won't make it into the biography itself, because it has a pretty strict word limit. So There Will Be Posts — indeed, the first of these is up today, and more are queued up.
And then, as the pub date for my Paradise Lost book draws nearer, I'll be posting about that poem, and Milton, and Milton's other works.
You may, or may not, find ideas in these posts that are relevant to our political moment — that will be up to you. Tolkien said that he preferred applicability to allegory, because "one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author"; I'm of the same mind, at least in this case. There's always wisdom to be received when we compare other times and places with our own; but to tell stories about those other times and places only to make some point about NOW is to strengthen the walls of our presentist prison. That I won't do.
Finally: if you think this kind of writing worthwhile, I would be most grateful for your support. It keeps my spirits up and encourages me to keep my mind on the Permanent Things. And to those of you who already support me: THANK YOU.
