Blogs have disappointed Alan Jacobs

Link: Goodbye, Blog - Books & Culture.

Now, if Alan Jacobs, the author of the cogent and literary Lewisian biography, The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis, wrote this latest post for the Social Affairs Unit instead of Christianity Today's Books & Culture, it would have been entitled, simply, "Alan Curses Blogs."

Mr. Jacobs, who seems to be the anointed littérateur of the Evangasphere, has troubled himself to publish a critique of "blog architecture." He produces some meaty morsels. No one can -- or should -- deny that blogs are the black hole of the ADD collective. There is a post, for example, by an important person on an important topic, and a hive of opinions cluster on the comment column. Then there is a swarm of derivative comments on comments. Then there are other threads introduced. Then the swarm scatters into solo bug flights. Then, nothing.

He points out, correctly, that more times than not, the level of scholarship in a blog is not what it should be. No doubt, similar thoughts have sparked in not a few cortices while rolling over this very screen.

He also discusses a defect of the blogosphere that has troubled moi aussi:

As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as "that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation." For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

He suggests, rightly, that the very architecture of the blog ("blogs have no nature," he tells us -- sheesh) promotes the business of caricature and cheap slogan, where scholars are "converted into bad journalists."

Well, Mr. Jacobs, I like your stuff in general, and I agree with most everything you said in this essay.

But the fact remains that what you said is true about everything on the Internet: the infamous e-mail lists that afflict the Orthodox community are perturbing examples, especially, of what happens when scholars retrogress into combatants at an annual parish meeting.

The retrogression of conversation into a Hyde Park morass is true of everything in the media in general, and -- truth be told -- it holds for most of what goes on in the flyswarmed vestibule otherwise and more politely called academia: an important person publishes an intriguing opinion, which elicits footnotes and monographs, which gets talked about at the MLA convention and other watering holes, which gets journalized and published on Oprah's list and gets talked about on talk shows, and then -- the death knell -- gets mummified in textbooks.

Come on, Alan, you and I both love C. S. Lewis. But only an Oxford/Cambridge don would ever suggest that the Reformation could have been avoided by debate -- that instead of the wars, the divisive issues "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure."

I'm all for fruitful debate at boundless leisure. I am quite a fan of the latter, and occasionally I screw up my courage for the former. Unfortunately, I find it confined to few conversations, built up in fellowship over time. Oddly enough, I find, for those of us who do not have, in our neighborhoods, the equivalent of The Eagle and the Child, we do have, instead, something more on the order of The Flying Inn. The blogosphere is like that, a pub. Most pubs are smelly places. Most of the conversation in those places are not of the urbane sort (urban, yes). Most of the talk of scholars, even of the saintly and mature sort, gravitates toward football or the nature of lawns, but occasionally effervesces into sparkling causerie: as Samuel Johnson once averred, That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.

Despite Mr. Jacobs cursing the shoddiness and the vitriol of the blogosphere, the fact remains that this same agora is like Chesterton's Flying Inn, the last of places for untrammeled conversation. Lookit (to coin a populistic term), the architecture of the blog, besmirched as it is, has elicited a flowering of the essay form, à la Montaigne, once again. The thoughts may not be footnoted properly, and heaven knows that the grammar is usually regrettable. Nevertheless, more people are expressing thoughts in written form, and more of these are read and answered.

I call that a higher form of literacy than what we had in the last twenty odd years. Mr. Jacobs at Wheaton can sniff all he'd like at the pungeancy and vagrancy of opinions and comments, but complaining about the ephemeral and vapid scholarship of the blogosphere is a lot like complaining about the weather, and remarking that there's too much of it outside.