Zvi Ankori’s Karaites in Byzantium: the Formitive years, 970-1100 was published fifty years ago and remains an important text in the field. To this day Karaites are still at the margins of Jewish studies, a Jewish sect that arose sometime in the eight century which shows up from time to time but of no great consequence. Ankori (who used to teach here at Ohio State) serves to take Karaites out of their origins with Anan and even beyond the ninth century Mourners of Zion. Ankori is concerned with the next step, to go beyond narrative of great Karaite intellectuals to dealing with the creation of a dynamic Karaite community. In this, Ankori focuses specifically on the Karaite community in Byzantium during the tenth and eleventh centuries. This community serves the interests of Ankori in that it takes Karaites out of their origins, thus presenting a community in flux. This Karaite community lived outside of the Islamic world from which it sprung and now lived under Christian rule. In terms of internal communal dynamics this presented a shift away from the orbit of the Karaite community in Palestine, the center of Karaite authority up until the Crusades. This led to certain practical changes such as a shift away from Arabic toward Hebrew and the accommodation to and eventual acceptance of the rabbinic calendar. This also involved a more fundamental shift in how Karaites understood themselves and how they related to their various opponents, whether Jewish rabbinites or gentiles.
Ankori was a student of Salo W. Baron and Baron’s influence is clearly manifested. Baron opposed what he termed as the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history in which Jewish history is a catalogue of Jewish suffering at the hands of an oppressive gentile world. Such a view sees Jews as distinctively separate from this gentile world and as passive figures in this drama. Baron saw the Jewish communities in medieval Islam and Christendom as dynamic participants of the world that they lived in and not mere passive victims. Jews were affected by the same currents that affected everyone else and not simply shut away on their own. For Baron this is not a matter of were Jews “rationalists” or did they contribute their fair share to the advancement of mankind. Baron was more interested in the Jewish community being part of the medieval world and Jews being products of the general social and economic superstructure.
Because of this Baron’s style of writing has an overlay of intellectual history, but this intellectual history is rooted in a social history, focused on communal and economic structures. Eschewing essentialist views, Baron emphasized variety and change. He brought to his Social and Religious History of the Jews (This work comes out to eighteen volumes and he never even got up to the modern period.) a sense of absolute thoroughness and an emphasis on records but this came at the expense of narrative. Considering the vast scope of his work, this lack of narrative turns his history into a vast parade of material with little in the way of an overarching structure to serve as a guide. This makes his books difficult to read, even for historians, let alone for anyone else.
Ankori's approach to Karaites follows this lead. His Karaites are a part of the Jewish community and of the world at large, interact with them, and are affected by the shifts in both. While the figures of the Karaite Tobias b. Moshe and the rabbinite Tobias b. Eliezer of Castoria cast a prominent shadow through most of the book they are not the subjects of the book. Rather they serve to illustrate the dynamics of Karaite and rabbinite polemics. Ankori is not interested in the back and forth of Karaite and rabbinite debates as an end in of itself, though the book can serve that end. Rather the writings of these two Tobiases serve to illustrate the wider world of Karaite and rabbinite interactions and how fluid and interrelated these two Jewish communities were. Karaites in Byzantium is a social history, emphasizing communal and economic structures. His mastery of his source material is nothing if not awe inspiring. If there is one drawback to the book is that, as a follower of Baron, Ankori has no use for narrative, which makes him difficult to read. His analysis is often brilliant though often shows a tendency to try to overwork his sources beyond what they could possibly supply. The fact that he had to work with such meager amounts of information (He wrote this book decades before the vast Judaic collections held by the Soviet Union in Leningrad was opened to scholars.) leads one to treat this with some level of charity. Ultimately Karaites in Byzantium is a grand monument to scholarship but lacks any sustained narrative to support its wide ended scope, thus making for a book that is inaccessible to all but the few specialists in the field.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Being Part of the Disabled Community Versus Being a Member of a Minority Group (Part III)
(Part I)
(Part II)
The differences separating me, as someone on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, from those on the lower end of the spectrum (and their parents and advocates) was starkly illustrated to me at a recent Autism Speaks Walk in Columbus. I attended the event as a member of Aspirations, an autism support group here at Ohio State. I assumed that the event would be a show of unity and support for autistics across the spectrum. The event was held at the Schottenstein Center, the basketball arena for the Buckeyes, and over nine thousand people attended. I loved the whole atmosphere and being there with my friends from Aspirations. My joy at being at this event lasted up until the moment the first speaker started talking and went down from there. I had to sit in the stands and listen as a parade of people got up and spoke about autism, how it is an “epidemic,” and a “disease” that needed to be “cured.” Sitting in the crowd and listening to these speeches, I felt like I had been used and taken advantage of. This was not what I came for. Imagine a black person going to a civil rights rally only to find himself being called an N-word and hearing that his blackness was a "disease" that needed to be cured.
Believe me, I recognize the incredible difficulties that parents of low functioning autistic children must go through. For that matter, I know that I was not an easy child for my parents to raise. I am sure my parents would have benefited from having someone to explain what was going on with me and to offer support. And parents of autistic children need all the help and support they can get. But that is the point; help and support is not a cure. Even in terms of support, though, there are differences. What my parents needed was not a medical professional to make me “functional” or to act like a “normal” person. Their needs were not all that different from that of parents of gay children. They would have benefited from having a professional tell them that yes I was “different,” that this was not a bad thing, that it was not their “fault” that I was who I was and that there was nothing they could do to “fix” me. All they could do was accept me for who I was, to try to understand my alternative way of life and be the advocates and the support I needed. (All in all, I think my parents did a pretty good job without any professional help.)
As someone with Asperger syndrome, I do not see myself as disabled in any fashion. On the contrary, I thank God every day for giving me the gift of Asperger syndrome. I look at other people and I wonder how they live such dull neurotypical lives. My life may be lonely much of the time but it is certainly interesting. If you offered me a "cure" for my Asperger syndrome I would laugh at you and throw it in your face. More than that, though, the very notion that I would need to be "cured" is an insult; it implies that my way of life is somehow less than other's peoples. This is no different from those who would suggest that homosexuals should be "cured."
Ultimately, there were different interests at stake at this Autism Speaks Walk. It was organized primarily by parents of low functioning autistic children. For them, autism is a disability that needs to be cured. For me, and others with Asperger syndrome, autism is an alternative way of life. These interests directly conflict with each other; the mere existence and public visibility of each side harms the other. Having low functioning autistics in play is detrimental to me because it opens up the charge that I, as an autistic, am disabled as well. Whether it is fair or not, I am tainted by the mere association. On the other hand, while I may be useful as an advocate for autism, I present a tremendous inconvenience for those dealing with low functioning autism. I take away from the narrative of autism as a disability. No one is going to come away from meeting me overwhelmed with pity at the horrible state of those living with autism. Furthermore, the fact that I am as functional as I am raises an implicit challenge to those less fortunate than me. If I could succeed what does it say about those who do not? This may not be fair but it taints them with failure.
I have Asperger syndrome and I am proud of it. My way of life is equally legitimate to that of other people. I will continue to fight for myself and for others with Asperger syndrome so that we should be able to have our stake in our multicultural society.
(Part II)
The differences separating me, as someone on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, from those on the lower end of the spectrum (and their parents and advocates) was starkly illustrated to me at a recent Autism Speaks Walk in Columbus. I attended the event as a member of Aspirations, an autism support group here at Ohio State. I assumed that the event would be a show of unity and support for autistics across the spectrum. The event was held at the Schottenstein Center, the basketball arena for the Buckeyes, and over nine thousand people attended. I loved the whole atmosphere and being there with my friends from Aspirations. My joy at being at this event lasted up until the moment the first speaker started talking and went down from there. I had to sit in the stands and listen as a parade of people got up and spoke about autism, how it is an “epidemic,” and a “disease” that needed to be “cured.” Sitting in the crowd and listening to these speeches, I felt like I had been used and taken advantage of. This was not what I came for. Imagine a black person going to a civil rights rally only to find himself being called an N-word and hearing that his blackness was a "disease" that needed to be cured.
Believe me, I recognize the incredible difficulties that parents of low functioning autistic children must go through. For that matter, I know that I was not an easy child for my parents to raise. I am sure my parents would have benefited from having someone to explain what was going on with me and to offer support. And parents of autistic children need all the help and support they can get. But that is the point; help and support is not a cure. Even in terms of support, though, there are differences. What my parents needed was not a medical professional to make me “functional” or to act like a “normal” person. Their needs were not all that different from that of parents of gay children. They would have benefited from having a professional tell them that yes I was “different,” that this was not a bad thing, that it was not their “fault” that I was who I was and that there was nothing they could do to “fix” me. All they could do was accept me for who I was, to try to understand my alternative way of life and be the advocates and the support I needed. (All in all, I think my parents did a pretty good job without any professional help.)
As someone with Asperger syndrome, I do not see myself as disabled in any fashion. On the contrary, I thank God every day for giving me the gift of Asperger syndrome. I look at other people and I wonder how they live such dull neurotypical lives. My life may be lonely much of the time but it is certainly interesting. If you offered me a "cure" for my Asperger syndrome I would laugh at you and throw it in your face. More than that, though, the very notion that I would need to be "cured" is an insult; it implies that my way of life is somehow less than other's peoples. This is no different from those who would suggest that homosexuals should be "cured."
Ultimately, there were different interests at stake at this Autism Speaks Walk. It was organized primarily by parents of low functioning autistic children. For them, autism is a disability that needs to be cured. For me, and others with Asperger syndrome, autism is an alternative way of life. These interests directly conflict with each other; the mere existence and public visibility of each side harms the other. Having low functioning autistics in play is detrimental to me because it opens up the charge that I, as an autistic, am disabled as well. Whether it is fair or not, I am tainted by the mere association. On the other hand, while I may be useful as an advocate for autism, I present a tremendous inconvenience for those dealing with low functioning autism. I take away from the narrative of autism as a disability. No one is going to come away from meeting me overwhelmed with pity at the horrible state of those living with autism. Furthermore, the fact that I am as functional as I am raises an implicit challenge to those less fortunate than me. If I could succeed what does it say about those who do not? This may not be fair but it taints them with failure.
I have Asperger syndrome and I am proud of it. My way of life is equally legitimate to that of other people. I will continue to fight for myself and for others with Asperger syndrome so that we should be able to have our stake in our multicultural society.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Ohio State is One of the Most Gay Friendly Schools in the Country
As I have been talking about gay rights on college campuses I thought it would be worthwhile to note that according to an article published today in the student newspaper, the Lantern, Ohio State has been ranked as one of the most LGBT friendly campuses in the country by the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index. We were given an overall 5 out of 5. We scored perfect fives in seven out of eight categories. We only scored a 4.5 on housing, though. We were docked a half a point because we do not offer a separate residence hall for LGBT students. Following this logic it would seem that we should dock the school a half a point in terms of heterosexual housing since there is no heterosexual residence hall. Think about it. I, as a heterosexual student, have been robbed of the opportunity to live, study and grow in a gay free environment. (Not that I really care less one way or another.)
As anyone who has ever gone to Ohio State knows there is really only one thing that matters which is of course beating Michigan which we did. Michigan only scored an overall 4.5. I think this is a victory over Michigan that I could do without.
As anyone who has ever gone to Ohio State knows there is really only one thing that matters which is of course beating Michigan which we did. Michigan only scored an overall 4.5. I think this is a victory over Michigan that I could do without.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Being Part of the Disabled Community Versus Being a Member of a Minority Group (Part II)
(Part I)
The relationship between a high functioning paraplegic to the general physically disabled community parallels the relationship between Asperger syndrome and the general autistic community. My interests, as someone with Asperger syndrome, are very different from people on the lower end of the spectrum. As I have previously argued, what I require from society is not charity or help as a disabled person but to be recognized as a member of a minority group with its own, equally legitimate, way of looking at the world. I should be placed on the multiculturalism umbrella, neurodiversity in my case.
The conflicts that I tend to get into with neurotypicals are the sort of conflicts that come about when a minority is faced with a member of the majority culture, who lacks proper multicultural awareness. For example, I once got a bad grade on a Spanish test. The problem was that, in keeping with my Asperger way of thinking, I took a number of questions very literally and did not give the answers that the teacher wanted. For example, I listed lizards as an animal that one would find in the ocean. This is technically speaking true. A Komodo dragon is a lizard and it does spend a lot of time in the ocean. I went over to the teacher and proceeded to try to explain my case. As someone with Asperger syndrome, I tend to speak in a highly theatrical manner. I speak loudly and I gesticulate a lot with my hands. I also tend to hunch my shoulders and bear down on people. So here I am, a six-foot male, standing over a female, not much over five feet tall, speaking loudly, waving my hands and bearing down on her. From the perspective of someone wedded to neurotypical assumptions, this looked like me threatening her. The teacher ended up asking me to go to her supervisor. Not only that but a bystander ended up calling the cops. In truth, though, I was not threatening the teacher. I was simply speaking in a manner that was in keeping with my Asperger being. From the perspective of pure reason, this mode of speaking is equally legitimate to neurotypical styles of speaking. I did not strike the teacher nor did I cause her any physical harm. It is only the neurotypical bias that interprets this as aggressive behavior. This incident is no different from a white or a heterosexual teacher misinterpreting the verbal and physical cues of a black or a gay student as something threatening. The fact that the teacher felt threatened is not my fault. (Or at least not completely.) The real fault lies with the teacher who lacked the cultural sensitivity to appreciate the utter relativity of her own cultural assumptions.
This story has a happy ending. I sent the teacher an e-mail in which I explained what Asperger syndrome was and that I was not threatening her in the least. I apologized to her for the misunderstanding and the matter was dropped. I was even awarded some of the points I had lost on the test. For better or for worse I had to be content with this. If I were black, gay or some other minority group with more cultural clot than Asperger syndrome maybe the university would have sent me an apology, assuring me of the university's commitment to maintaining a neurologically diverse environment. Maybe the teacher would have been forced to undergo sensitivity training and would have received a reprimand telling her to get with the neurodiversity agenda of the university or find other employment.
To strengthen my case, I, as someone with Asperger syndrome, actually have certain innate advantages over neurotypicals, unlike people who are black or gay who have no advantages beyond their own personal skills. Because I have Asperger syndrome I have a certain knack for interpreting texts. While I may have certain difficulties with dealing with other human beings and processing non-analytical information such as body language, I am very proficient when it comes to reading analytical information such as texts. Think of Asperger syndrome handling textual information as the equivalent of being seven feet tall and playing basketball. So not only should universities recruit me as a student, create an Asperger friendly environment for and, when the time comes, hire me as a professor as a matter of neurodiversity they should be doing these things out of pure self-interest. In essence, I should be receiving everything that blacks and gays receive and more.
(To be continued …)
The relationship between a high functioning paraplegic to the general physically disabled community parallels the relationship between Asperger syndrome and the general autistic community. My interests, as someone with Asperger syndrome, are very different from people on the lower end of the spectrum. As I have previously argued, what I require from society is not charity or help as a disabled person but to be recognized as a member of a minority group with its own, equally legitimate, way of looking at the world. I should be placed on the multiculturalism umbrella, neurodiversity in my case.
The conflicts that I tend to get into with neurotypicals are the sort of conflicts that come about when a minority is faced with a member of the majority culture, who lacks proper multicultural awareness. For example, I once got a bad grade on a Spanish test. The problem was that, in keeping with my Asperger way of thinking, I took a number of questions very literally and did not give the answers that the teacher wanted. For example, I listed lizards as an animal that one would find in the ocean. This is technically speaking true. A Komodo dragon is a lizard and it does spend a lot of time in the ocean. I went over to the teacher and proceeded to try to explain my case. As someone with Asperger syndrome, I tend to speak in a highly theatrical manner. I speak loudly and I gesticulate a lot with my hands. I also tend to hunch my shoulders and bear down on people. So here I am, a six-foot male, standing over a female, not much over five feet tall, speaking loudly, waving my hands and bearing down on her. From the perspective of someone wedded to neurotypical assumptions, this looked like me threatening her. The teacher ended up asking me to go to her supervisor. Not only that but a bystander ended up calling the cops. In truth, though, I was not threatening the teacher. I was simply speaking in a manner that was in keeping with my Asperger being. From the perspective of pure reason, this mode of speaking is equally legitimate to neurotypical styles of speaking. I did not strike the teacher nor did I cause her any physical harm. It is only the neurotypical bias that interprets this as aggressive behavior. This incident is no different from a white or a heterosexual teacher misinterpreting the verbal and physical cues of a black or a gay student as something threatening. The fact that the teacher felt threatened is not my fault. (Or at least not completely.) The real fault lies with the teacher who lacked the cultural sensitivity to appreciate the utter relativity of her own cultural assumptions.
This story has a happy ending. I sent the teacher an e-mail in which I explained what Asperger syndrome was and that I was not threatening her in the least. I apologized to her for the misunderstanding and the matter was dropped. I was even awarded some of the points I had lost on the test. For better or for worse I had to be content with this. If I were black, gay or some other minority group with more cultural clot than Asperger syndrome maybe the university would have sent me an apology, assuring me of the university's commitment to maintaining a neurologically diverse environment. Maybe the teacher would have been forced to undergo sensitivity training and would have received a reprimand telling her to get with the neurodiversity agenda of the university or find other employment.
To strengthen my case, I, as someone with Asperger syndrome, actually have certain innate advantages over neurotypicals, unlike people who are black or gay who have no advantages beyond their own personal skills. Because I have Asperger syndrome I have a certain knack for interpreting texts. While I may have certain difficulties with dealing with other human beings and processing non-analytical information such as body language, I am very proficient when it comes to reading analytical information such as texts. Think of Asperger syndrome handling textual information as the equivalent of being seven feet tall and playing basketball. So not only should universities recruit me as a student, create an Asperger friendly environment for and, when the time comes, hire me as a professor as a matter of neurodiversity they should be doing these things out of pure self-interest. In essence, I should be receiving everything that blacks and gays receive and more.
(To be continued …)
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Being Part of the Disabled Community Versus Being a Member of a Minority Group (Part I)
I have a friend who is a quadriplegic. While he gets around in a wheelchair, I would not, though, view him as disabled; he leads a perfectly functional life and, to the best of my knowledge, is completely self-sufficient. Everything he does, though, takes thought and planning. For example, he can drive, but he needs to use a special contraption that allows him to control the breaks and the accelerator by hand. (FDR used something similar when he drove.) Getting in and out of a car is an elaborate ritual. He has to break his wheelchair down in order to get it into the back. To get out he needs to put the wheelchair back together and shift his body from the seat of the car into the chair. I admire him for how he is able to live, particularly since I am certain that I, put in a similar situation, God forbid, would not be able to cope like he does.
To make the issue of disability more complicated, my quadriplegic friend has certain advantages over other people. Since his lifestyle requires such constant awareness, he possesses a set of thinking patterns that most other people do not have. I imagine that it is only a matter of time and advocacy until people in the general business community realize that the skills that people like my friend have are a lot more valuable to a company than a functional pair of legs and start actively hiring people in wheelchairs not as a matter of charity or goodwill but as a matter of simple self-interest. We may see a time when “wheelchair thinking” becomes a valuable skill to be taught even to those not in wheelchairs.
From a perspective of disability advocacy, my friend is a two-edged sword. On one hand he is a poster child for what people can do even from a wheelchair. On the other hand, having someone like him can be counter-productive. He does not inspire pity; people do not come away from meeting him thinking what a horrible situation he is in and how miserable it must be to be a quadriplegic. He inspires hope and hope can be a dangerous thing. He creates a standard that is hard to live up to. What does one say to those quadriplegics who never become as functional as he is; are they “failures?” As I see it, the needs of my friend are very different than that of a traditionally disabled person. His situation is a closer fit to being a minority. He does not need people to “help” him; what he requires is tolerance, a certain awareness and understanding on the part of society. People need to get over their ambulatory biases and realize that there are people who live their lives without a functional pair of legs and that this is a perfectly legitimate lifestyle option.
My friend’s situation as very high functioning quadriplegic is not that different from being black or being gay. I work and study on a college campus. We have black advocacy groups to make sure that I, as a white person from a middle-class background, do not immediately assume that if a male black student comes into class wearing baggy jeans, a baseball cap in backward and several gold necklaces that he is a criminal likely to mug me on my way home. Similarly, there are gay advocacy groups to make sure that I, as a heterosexual male, do not freak out and assume that if a gay student comes over to me and compliments me on my fashion sense that this student had a crush on me and is trying to tempt me into having gay sex with him. I should not feel threatened by having gay students. As their history teacher, I should not be yelling at them that they are evil sinners, going against nature and are bound straight to hell. I should also not try to “turn” them straight or tell them that I am praying for them to change their ways. I need to understand that my way of life and my values do not apply to everyone. That other people have alternative lifestyles that are perfectly legitimate. Being on a college campus means living in a multicultural environment; if I cannot manage that I should find employment somewhere else.
(To be continued …)
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Michael Moore Learns about Patriotism: Some Thoughts on American Carol
Before the film, American Carol, started there was an ad for the National Guard. It featured National Guard troops in action spliced with Dale Earnhardt Jr. driving in a NASCAR race with heavy metal music in the background. I take it as a good sign that I am capable of looking at something like this with a mixture of confusion and amusement. I take it as a sign that I am not some mindless drone of the conservative movement. I am not certain what Dale Earnhardt Jr., who I am sure is a wonderful guy, and a patriot who supports our troops, and NASCAR has to do with the National Guard. The dramatic high point of the ad was a scene in which a Humvee full of American soldiers is driving full-throttle through the dusty streets of a Middle Eastern town when all of a sudden a soccer ball crosses the Humvee’s path. The Humvee breaks and comes to a complete stop right in front of the soccer ball. A soldier gets out and with a nod from his commanding officer kicks the ball over to a Muslim boy, who looks back at the American soldier with a look of awe, gratitude, and respect. Upon seeing this, I broke laughing; this was too over the top to bear. I think it is a problem when you cannot tell the difference between a propaganda piece and a piece of satire.
American Carol bills itself as the first conservative film to come out of mainstream Hollywood and is devoted to sticking it to the liberal establishment. (I would point to Team America: World Police as a film that preceded it.) It is a send-up to Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and spoofs Michael Moore. It features an overweight radical leftist documentary filmmaker in a Michigan State baseball cap named Michael Malone in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. Malone despises all things American, including his tall good-looking all all-American nephew, who is serving in the Navy. He hates America so much that he wishes to abolish the Fourth of July. The night before he is to speak at an abolish the Fourth of July rally, Malone is visited by the spirits of John F. Kennedy, George S. Patton, and George Washington, who teach him the true meaning of patriotism.
I laughed my heart out through the film’s eighty-plus minutes and would have loved to have gotten more. I am not sure what was my favorite bit; a group of black slaves breaking out into hava nagilah while picking cotton or the shootout with ACLU zombies out to deliver injunctions to make it impossible to check the bags of potential terrorists and destroy the Ten Commandments. (This still does not compare to season four of Twenty-Four when the villain, upon finding out that one of his people had been captured, calls a group named Amnesty Global to inform them that an innocent man was being illegally held by CTU. A lawyer from Amnesty Global then shows up with a court order, banning CTU from questioning the person they hold. Fortunately, Jack Bauer ignores this and proceeds to break the guy’s fingers one by one until he gives over the information necessary to save the day and stop a nuclear device from wiping out Los Angeles.)
I feel that I can recommend this film to everyone across the political spectrum, without any sense of guilt, as a hands-down brilliant piece of political satire. I am not saying this simply because I agree with the film’s politics. I enjoyed watching Michael Moore’s films too. Bowling for Columbine was absolutely hilarious and even Fahrenheit 9/11 had its share of good moments. I think that Michael Moore is a brilliant filmmaker whose work can be enjoyed regardless of one’s politics. (I also think that Leni Riefenstahl’s films are genius despite the fact that they are Nazi propaganda.)
While I enjoyed the film I had a number of problems with it. These problems may seem like quibbling on my part but I do see these things as a cause for concern. The film has Patton show Malone an alternative universe where Lincoln had followed Malone in thinking that violence never solves anything and did not fight the Civil War. Malone finds that his family has moved to the South and that he is now a major slaveholder. A very funny bit without any question. The problem is that Patton came from a Confederate family. His grandfather fought under Robert E. Lee. Of all the people that the film could have picked to make their point, Patton might not have been the best choice. Patton also takes Malone to the Munich conference of 1938 where Neville Chamberlin shines the shoes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. It was great having Hitler strumming a guitar and singing a peace song, but, and maybe this is me being the nitpicky historian, it bothered me that Tojo was put in Munich. Japan had nothing to do with Munich.
These small historical bloopers could be laughed off if it were not for the fact that it is part of a larger assault on academia. The film clearly has a gripe with academics. Malone even gets to visit a peace studies course at Columbia University where the professors break out into their hippy selves and sing about how it is 1968. While I have my problems with academic culture, I am not comfortable with this sort of head-on attack, mainly because I suspect that what lies behind it is not just a rejection of the academic culture as it exists at present but also a rejection of academia of any sort. Whatever problems I may have with academic culture as it exists at present I am a believer in the academic process. Universities, even the radical leftist parts, have an important role to play in our society. I am not certain, though, that the filmmakers share my concern. If they did they would have bothered to get their history right.
As an academic on the right side of the political spectrum, I believe that radical changes need to be made to the university system. I think that the hard-left culture that dominates campuses is a problem. That being said, I do not think that the solution is for a right-wing takeover. I fear that too many on the right are not just against liberal academics but would seek to destroy all academia.
American Carol bills itself as the first conservative film to come out of mainstream Hollywood and is devoted to sticking it to the liberal establishment. (I would point to Team America: World Police as a film that preceded it.) It is a send-up to Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and spoofs Michael Moore. It features an overweight radical leftist documentary filmmaker in a Michigan State baseball cap named Michael Malone in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. Malone despises all things American, including his tall good-looking all all-American nephew, who is serving in the Navy. He hates America so much that he wishes to abolish the Fourth of July. The night before he is to speak at an abolish the Fourth of July rally, Malone is visited by the spirits of John F. Kennedy, George S. Patton, and George Washington, who teach him the true meaning of patriotism.
I laughed my heart out through the film’s eighty-plus minutes and would have loved to have gotten more. I am not sure what was my favorite bit; a group of black slaves breaking out into hava nagilah while picking cotton or the shootout with ACLU zombies out to deliver injunctions to make it impossible to check the bags of potential terrorists and destroy the Ten Commandments. (This still does not compare to season four of Twenty-Four when the villain, upon finding out that one of his people had been captured, calls a group named Amnesty Global to inform them that an innocent man was being illegally held by CTU. A lawyer from Amnesty Global then shows up with a court order, banning CTU from questioning the person they hold. Fortunately, Jack Bauer ignores this and proceeds to break the guy’s fingers one by one until he gives over the information necessary to save the day and stop a nuclear device from wiping out Los Angeles.)
I feel that I can recommend this film to everyone across the political spectrum, without any sense of guilt, as a hands-down brilliant piece of political satire. I am not saying this simply because I agree with the film’s politics. I enjoyed watching Michael Moore’s films too. Bowling for Columbine was absolutely hilarious and even Fahrenheit 9/11 had its share of good moments. I think that Michael Moore is a brilliant filmmaker whose work can be enjoyed regardless of one’s politics. (I also think that Leni Riefenstahl’s films are genius despite the fact that they are Nazi propaganda.)
While I enjoyed the film I had a number of problems with it. These problems may seem like quibbling on my part but I do see these things as a cause for concern. The film has Patton show Malone an alternative universe where Lincoln had followed Malone in thinking that violence never solves anything and did not fight the Civil War. Malone finds that his family has moved to the South and that he is now a major slaveholder. A very funny bit without any question. The problem is that Patton came from a Confederate family. His grandfather fought under Robert E. Lee. Of all the people that the film could have picked to make their point, Patton might not have been the best choice. Patton also takes Malone to the Munich conference of 1938 where Neville Chamberlin shines the shoes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. It was great having Hitler strumming a guitar and singing a peace song, but, and maybe this is me being the nitpicky historian, it bothered me that Tojo was put in Munich. Japan had nothing to do with Munich.
These small historical bloopers could be laughed off if it were not for the fact that it is part of a larger assault on academia. The film clearly has a gripe with academics. Malone even gets to visit a peace studies course at Columbia University where the professors break out into their hippy selves and sing about how it is 1968. While I have my problems with academic culture, I am not comfortable with this sort of head-on attack, mainly because I suspect that what lies behind it is not just a rejection of the academic culture as it exists at present but also a rejection of academia of any sort. Whatever problems I may have with academic culture as it exists at present I am a believer in the academic process. Universities, even the radical leftist parts, have an important role to play in our society. I am not certain, though, that the filmmakers share my concern. If they did they would have bothered to get their history right.
As an academic on the right side of the political spectrum, I believe that radical changes need to be made to the university system. I think that the hard-left culture that dominates campuses is a problem. That being said, I do not think that the solution is for a right-wing takeover. I fear that too many on the right are not just against liberal academics but would seek to destroy all academia.
Friday, October 3, 2008
On the Comforts of Reading Isaac Asimov
I spent this past Rosh Hashana with a family in the community here in Columbus. Right before the holiday began I was wandering through their living room and I came across an Isaac Asimov novel. I picked it up and started reading simply to see what it was about and immediately fell entranced into it. Despite the fact that I had brought other books with me I ended up abandoning those books and reading the Asimov novel instead. I would compare reading Asimov to drinking a twelve dollar bottle of Moscato d’Asti. It might not be high class but it also is not some cheap junk; it requires a certain level of sophistication to appreciate, but not too much so that it ceases to be fun.
There is a simplicity to Asimov that makes him such a readable writer. While Asimov was a science fiction writer, who usually wrote about societies far across the galaxy and far into the future, he kept his work grounded in our world. One never doubts that Asimov’s characters, despite the exotic worlds they live in, are anything but twentieth-century humans. This may make for bad science writing but it is great science fiction. Practically any other writer trying to do this would end up sounding drab and preachy. It is Asimov’s genius that he was able to pull it off. As with J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, the question that you have to ask with Asimov is not whether this is good writing in any technical sense. The question that you have to ask is, granted that this is not what is usually understood as good writing, why does it still hold together and work despite its obvious flaws.
There is a certain comfort in being able to curl up on a couch and escape into Asimov’s universe. One knows that the world that he is writing about is really our world and his version of our world has very clear-cut heroes and villains and a clear message as to how to solve the issues of our day. There are the heroic scientist characters, usually professional scientists but sometimes just lay individuals who think along the lines of the scientific method. They fight to maintain and advance the flame of reason against the vast hordes of ignorance and superstition, aided and abetted if not actually caused by the forces of religion. Reading Asimov, one can lie back, just for a moment, and actually believe that the world was really that simple. This is simply a secular version of the comforting certitude of religion. Religion offers a set answers to the world that are comfortable, in large part, because they are direct and simple. Most people, I think, want some set of simple answers to make themselves comfortable; it does not really matter if it is a religious or secular set of answers.
While Asimov might not be fitting reading for Rosh Hashana this Asimov novel, Nightfall,[1] ironically enough did sort of fit the holiday spirit. Nightfall is about the apocalyptic end of a world. It is about a planet, Kalgash, that has six suns. The people on this planet have no experience dealing with darkness and are particularly unsuited for it; being exposed to darkness for even a few minutes is enough to cause nervous breakdowns and even permanent insanity. Every 2049 years, though, the planet, due to a complex alignment of the celestial spheres, undergoes a worldwide blackout. This blackout is about to happen. Over the course of a day everyone on this planet will undergo several hours of darkness. By the end, the entire civilization will be destroyed as most of the population goes insane and riots, burning down entire cities just to create some light. The essential conflict of the book is the race to prepare for this end, to be in a position to pick up the pieces and rebuild a new civilization once everything has been destroyed. On one side is a scientific community centered around Saro University. On the other side is a religious cult, the Apostles of the Flame. The scientists want to save the knowledge of their civilization so that the world does not completely fall into a dark age. The Apostles of the Flame see the coming blackout as the fulfillment of the prophecies told in their book of Revelations, a book written in the aftermath of the last blackout. They believe that the blackout is a punishment from the gods upon the sinners of the world. Once the world is “cleansed” they hope to be able to establish a new godly civilization, complete with restrictions on what sort of bathing suits women will be allowed to wear.
Early in the book one is tempted to think that maybe the scientists and the religious people are really not so far apart, that they really want the same things and that they are going to be able to work together. In other words, one almost thinks that Asimov, for once, got it right and created a world in which the lines between religion and science are blurry and it is not simply a matter of heroic scientists battling fanatical religion. Asimov disabuses us of this notion soon enough. The religious characters are as bad as we might have suspected them to be.
Asimov was an example of a secularist who crafted his worldview with the help of the Whig historical narrative and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in particular. (See here) Asimov’s Foundation series (his best work and what people will, hopefully, remember him for) is a science fiction retelling of Decline and Fall. Nightfall is also premised around Gibbon’s version of the end of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Middle Ages. A golden age of civilization is about to end and everything is going to fall to the forces of barbarism and religion. It is only a question of allowing some flicker of knowledge to survive so that one day the flame of progress can be reignited.
My world would be a lot simpler if it was all God, his Torah, and the Jewish people, if my Rosh Hashana could be solely about going through the long prayer services, getting right with God, and doing all the fun Jewish customs, such as eating apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year. But my world also includes Asimov, his science fiction and his secularism. Not having Isaac Asimov would make things easier and a lot more comfortable and sometimes I need to curl up with a book that gives me that world. I choose, though, to live in my life in a complex world, with its God, Day of Judgment and its Asimov.
[1] I should point out that this novel was co-authored by Robert Silverberg, who I assume did most of the actual writing. This novel is based, though, on an earlier Asimov short story and is written in a very Asimov fashion. So even if Silverberg was the real author he still was imitating Asimov and probably doing it, at the very least, with Asimov’s help.
There is a simplicity to Asimov that makes him such a readable writer. While Asimov was a science fiction writer, who usually wrote about societies far across the galaxy and far into the future, he kept his work grounded in our world. One never doubts that Asimov’s characters, despite the exotic worlds they live in, are anything but twentieth-century humans. This may make for bad science writing but it is great science fiction. Practically any other writer trying to do this would end up sounding drab and preachy. It is Asimov’s genius that he was able to pull it off. As with J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, the question that you have to ask with Asimov is not whether this is good writing in any technical sense. The question that you have to ask is, granted that this is not what is usually understood as good writing, why does it still hold together and work despite its obvious flaws.
There is a certain comfort in being able to curl up on a couch and escape into Asimov’s universe. One knows that the world that he is writing about is really our world and his version of our world has very clear-cut heroes and villains and a clear message as to how to solve the issues of our day. There are the heroic scientist characters, usually professional scientists but sometimes just lay individuals who think along the lines of the scientific method. They fight to maintain and advance the flame of reason against the vast hordes of ignorance and superstition, aided and abetted if not actually caused by the forces of religion. Reading Asimov, one can lie back, just for a moment, and actually believe that the world was really that simple. This is simply a secular version of the comforting certitude of religion. Religion offers a set answers to the world that are comfortable, in large part, because they are direct and simple. Most people, I think, want some set of simple answers to make themselves comfortable; it does not really matter if it is a religious or secular set of answers.
While Asimov might not be fitting reading for Rosh Hashana this Asimov novel, Nightfall,[1] ironically enough did sort of fit the holiday spirit. Nightfall is about the apocalyptic end of a world. It is about a planet, Kalgash, that has six suns. The people on this planet have no experience dealing with darkness and are particularly unsuited for it; being exposed to darkness for even a few minutes is enough to cause nervous breakdowns and even permanent insanity. Every 2049 years, though, the planet, due to a complex alignment of the celestial spheres, undergoes a worldwide blackout. This blackout is about to happen. Over the course of a day everyone on this planet will undergo several hours of darkness. By the end, the entire civilization will be destroyed as most of the population goes insane and riots, burning down entire cities just to create some light. The essential conflict of the book is the race to prepare for this end, to be in a position to pick up the pieces and rebuild a new civilization once everything has been destroyed. On one side is a scientific community centered around Saro University. On the other side is a religious cult, the Apostles of the Flame. The scientists want to save the knowledge of their civilization so that the world does not completely fall into a dark age. The Apostles of the Flame see the coming blackout as the fulfillment of the prophecies told in their book of Revelations, a book written in the aftermath of the last blackout. They believe that the blackout is a punishment from the gods upon the sinners of the world. Once the world is “cleansed” they hope to be able to establish a new godly civilization, complete with restrictions on what sort of bathing suits women will be allowed to wear.
Early in the book one is tempted to think that maybe the scientists and the religious people are really not so far apart, that they really want the same things and that they are going to be able to work together. In other words, one almost thinks that Asimov, for once, got it right and created a world in which the lines between religion and science are blurry and it is not simply a matter of heroic scientists battling fanatical religion. Asimov disabuses us of this notion soon enough. The religious characters are as bad as we might have suspected them to be.
Asimov was an example of a secularist who crafted his worldview with the help of the Whig historical narrative and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in particular. (See here) Asimov’s Foundation series (his best work and what people will, hopefully, remember him for) is a science fiction retelling of Decline and Fall. Nightfall is also premised around Gibbon’s version of the end of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Middle Ages. A golden age of civilization is about to end and everything is going to fall to the forces of barbarism and religion. It is only a question of allowing some flicker of knowledge to survive so that one day the flame of progress can be reignited.
My world would be a lot simpler if it was all God, his Torah, and the Jewish people, if my Rosh Hashana could be solely about going through the long prayer services, getting right with God, and doing all the fun Jewish customs, such as eating apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year. But my world also includes Asimov, his science fiction and his secularism. Not having Isaac Asimov would make things easier and a lot more comfortable and sometimes I need to curl up with a book that gives me that world. I choose, though, to live in my life in a complex world, with its God, Day of Judgment and its Asimov.
[1] I should point out that this novel was co-authored by Robert Silverberg, who I assume did most of the actual writing. This novel is based, though, on an earlier Asimov short story and is written in a very Asimov fashion. So even if Silverberg was the real author he still was imitating Asimov and probably doing it, at the very least, with Asimov’s help.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Amazing Grace: Eighteenth Century Evangelical Protestantism in its Proper Context
A few years ago I was privileged to attend Rabbi Aryeh Klapper’s Summer Beit Midrash program in Cambridge MA. It is a combination of a traditional yeshiva and a think tank on matters of Jewish law. Rabbi Klapper encourages his students, at least in the narrow theoretical framework of his program, to come up with creative approaches to Jewish law based on a critical analysis of textual sources. Each summer is devoted to one specific topic. During my summer with him we dealt with the issue of divorce and the legitimacy of the argument that a marriage was entered into on false premises and if one of the parties had known the truth they would not have agreed to wed. A topic that he did in a subsequent summer was on the status of Christianity in Judaism, particularly Christian holy places and Christian hymns. One of issues that he had his fellows write on was whether it is permissible to sing Amazing Grace. The fellows had to do some research into the back story of the song. It was written by John Newton, an ex slave ship captain turned Anglican preacher and abolitionist. Another issue that his fellows had to confront is what does the word “grace” mean in the context of the song. Take the hymns famous opening stanza:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
From a Jewish perspective there does not seem to be anything wrong with these words nor with any of the subsequent stanzas. There is no mention of Jesus or the Trinity. The problem begins once you have to define what grace means. If grace simply refers to a general sense of mercy or favor, which is how most people think of the word, then there is not a problem. The problem is that we are dealing with an Evangelical Protestant and in Evangelical Protestantism grace means something very specific. There are the saved, who have been granted grace as a free gift from heaven, and the unsaved, who do not have grace and are therefore condemned. One cannot earn grace. Grace is simply something granted by heaven to an elect few. Grace, understood in these terms, becomes a highly problematic issue, one that most Jews could not accept.
This hymn, and the story behind it, plays an important role in a recent film, appropriately titled Amazing Grace. The film focuses on someone whom John Newton mentored both as a Christian and as an abolitionist, William Wilberforce. It was Wilberforce, a close friend of William Pitt the younger, who led the fight in the British Parliament to ban slavery, a struggle that took decades and took an incredible physical and emotional toll on him.
In a sense the film also has its struggle with how to understand grace and to place it within its Evangelical context. It would have been very easy and tempting for the filmmakers to have turned William Wilberforce into a modern liberal. He was a social crusader for all the “right” things; in addition to his opposition against slavery, he pushed for free education and fought against cruelty to animals. He was a gentlemen botanist, who took an active interest in studying the natural world. The film, though, does not pull any punches when it comes to Wilberforce’s evangelical beliefs and places it at the front and center of his struggle against slavery.
The film does a wonderful job at capturing the mindset of eighteenth century radical Protestantism, which Wilberforce is an example of. We are at the dawning of a new age of enlightenment in which mankind shall gain knowledge that would have astounded earlier generations. Since one is taking part in this new era of enlightenment it is only natural that one takes an interest in, one, the natural sciences and, two, in the creation of a new and more just society. The reason for all of this is that, through grace, one has come to know Jesus and accept him as the one and only true savior. It is Jesus who is revealing all of this new knowledge to mankind and it is Jesus who is opening the eyes of all believers and is guiding them to create a new godly society worthy of his grace. The kingdom of God is coming and everyone has best be ready. Slavery is not just a bad thing it is an affront to God and it is holding back his kingdom. Slaveholders are not just sinners they are enemies of God and are going straight to Hell. Fighting slavery is not just a fine moral thing it is a necessity in order to achieve the salvation of a person’s immortal soul. This is not modern liberalism. On the other hand, though, this is not modern Evangelical Christianity. Modern Evangelical Christianity is as much of a product of modernity as modern secularism. Eighteenth century Evangelical Christianity is something that existed in its own time and place and most be understood on its own terms. It had the luxury of the naive optimism of not fully appreciating the consequences of what they were about to unleash.
Now, as moderns, we know that in the end Wilberforce’s brand of social activism will create modern secular liberalism. We know that Wilberforce’s brand of nature study is going to lead to modern secular science. We as moderns can appreciate how all this could so easily turn into modern secularism. All one has to do is take away the parts about Jesus, the kingdom of God and all stuff about hellfire and the salvation of one’s immortal soul. We understand how easily eighteenth century natural theology could be stripped of its religious moorings and become secular naturalism once one is willing to contemplate the possibility that nature does not require a metaphysical first cause. It would be so tempting to turn the people in the film into moderns, to have them be aware of where things were heading and make them more like us. Thankfully the filmmakers resisted this temptation and kept everyone in period not just in costume but in thought as well.
What we have here is a film that is not only an exquisite piece of work in terms of its acting, writing and costumes. This film is an example of responsible historical thinking. While the film takes its fictional liberties, something that is necessary given the demands of trying to create an engaging coherent film that is less than two hours, the film remains true to the spirit of the times. It neatly captures the mindset of eighteenth century England, how its distinct brand of religious fundamentalism came oppose slavery and eventually brought it down. It is willing to face up to what grace truly meant to those who first sang Amazing Grace.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
From a Jewish perspective there does not seem to be anything wrong with these words nor with any of the subsequent stanzas. There is no mention of Jesus or the Trinity. The problem begins once you have to define what grace means. If grace simply refers to a general sense of mercy or favor, which is how most people think of the word, then there is not a problem. The problem is that we are dealing with an Evangelical Protestant and in Evangelical Protestantism grace means something very specific. There are the saved, who have been granted grace as a free gift from heaven, and the unsaved, who do not have grace and are therefore condemned. One cannot earn grace. Grace is simply something granted by heaven to an elect few. Grace, understood in these terms, becomes a highly problematic issue, one that most Jews could not accept.
This hymn, and the story behind it, plays an important role in a recent film, appropriately titled Amazing Grace. The film focuses on someone whom John Newton mentored both as a Christian and as an abolitionist, William Wilberforce. It was Wilberforce, a close friend of William Pitt the younger, who led the fight in the British Parliament to ban slavery, a struggle that took decades and took an incredible physical and emotional toll on him.
In a sense the film also has its struggle with how to understand grace and to place it within its Evangelical context. It would have been very easy and tempting for the filmmakers to have turned William Wilberforce into a modern liberal. He was a social crusader for all the “right” things; in addition to his opposition against slavery, he pushed for free education and fought against cruelty to animals. He was a gentlemen botanist, who took an active interest in studying the natural world. The film, though, does not pull any punches when it comes to Wilberforce’s evangelical beliefs and places it at the front and center of his struggle against slavery.
The film does a wonderful job at capturing the mindset of eighteenth century radical Protestantism, which Wilberforce is an example of. We are at the dawning of a new age of enlightenment in which mankind shall gain knowledge that would have astounded earlier generations. Since one is taking part in this new era of enlightenment it is only natural that one takes an interest in, one, the natural sciences and, two, in the creation of a new and more just society. The reason for all of this is that, through grace, one has come to know Jesus and accept him as the one and only true savior. It is Jesus who is revealing all of this new knowledge to mankind and it is Jesus who is opening the eyes of all believers and is guiding them to create a new godly society worthy of his grace. The kingdom of God is coming and everyone has best be ready. Slavery is not just a bad thing it is an affront to God and it is holding back his kingdom. Slaveholders are not just sinners they are enemies of God and are going straight to Hell. Fighting slavery is not just a fine moral thing it is a necessity in order to achieve the salvation of a person’s immortal soul. This is not modern liberalism. On the other hand, though, this is not modern Evangelical Christianity. Modern Evangelical Christianity is as much of a product of modernity as modern secularism. Eighteenth century Evangelical Christianity is something that existed in its own time and place and most be understood on its own terms. It had the luxury of the naive optimism of not fully appreciating the consequences of what they were about to unleash.
Now, as moderns, we know that in the end Wilberforce’s brand of social activism will create modern secular liberalism. We know that Wilberforce’s brand of nature study is going to lead to modern secular science. We as moderns can appreciate how all this could so easily turn into modern secularism. All one has to do is take away the parts about Jesus, the kingdom of God and all stuff about hellfire and the salvation of one’s immortal soul. We understand how easily eighteenth century natural theology could be stripped of its religious moorings and become secular naturalism once one is willing to contemplate the possibility that nature does not require a metaphysical first cause. It would be so tempting to turn the people in the film into moderns, to have them be aware of where things were heading and make them more like us. Thankfully the filmmakers resisted this temptation and kept everyone in period not just in costume but in thought as well.
What we have here is a film that is not only an exquisite piece of work in terms of its acting, writing and costumes. This film is an example of responsible historical thinking. While the film takes its fictional liberties, something that is necessary given the demands of trying to create an engaging coherent film that is less than two hours, the film remains true to the spirit of the times. It neatly captures the mindset of eighteenth century England, how its distinct brand of religious fundamentalism came oppose slavery and eventually brought it down. It is willing to face up to what grace truly meant to those who first sang Amazing Grace.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
A Gift for Rosh Hashana (Part II)
(Part I)
As I have mentioned in previous posts, this past summer I underwent a very difficult breakup with someone whom I loved completely and whom I thought I would marry and spend the rest of my life with. She was everything that I could have dreamed of; she was smart, well read and had a spunky personality. She was someone whom I could talk to for hours on end. She brought something out in me. She helped me become a more outgoing person and to open myself to the world. If nothing else I will always be grateful to her for that.
Because of my Asperger syndrome it is difficult for me to tell if people are upset with me or if a relationship is going south. I suspect, though, that even a neuro-typical would have been caught off guard in my situation. Last I checked if your girlfriend suddenly gets over her aversion to having you spend money on her, asks you to buy a plane ticket to visit her, has you take her to see a Broadway musical and gleefully tells you that if you were not religious you would so be getting laid then one assumes that things are in good shape. Be that as it may, she dumped me. She asked if we could still be friends and I agreed. I was angry and hurt but I sucked in my pride. I knew that she was going through some difficult times. She needed to simplify her life and I am what she simplified. She was having me pay the price for her mental stability but I agreed. If she needed me I would be there for her.
This “friendship” lasted for two weeks until suddenly she did the one thing that I had many times begged her never to do to me because it would put me in a dangerous depressive spiral; without any warning, she cut off all contact with me. Because of my Asperger syndrome, I am not good at dealing with issues up in the air; I need things said straight out. Because of my depression, I am very vulnerable to anything that hints of abandonment. (See here) For the next two weeks, I lived on the edge. Had she done this one thing that she knew could hurt me? Was she just busy? Was she just upset at me over something or did she decide she needed a bit of a breather from me? I did not want to bother her. By the end of this time period my depression had caught up with me and I crashed for several days. I tried talking to other people, but the person I really needed to speak to was her. The fact that I needed to speak to her but seemed unable to do so made everything all the worse. I ended up putting myself into the emergency room. Throughout my worst bouts of depression in high school, I had never once had to be put in a hospital. I tried getting in touch with her directly. That failed. I tried through intermediaries but to no avail. My rabbi even called her but she flipped him off as well.
Now Rosh Hashana is coming. I admit that I am tempted to pray that my girlfriend should take me back or that she should be run over by a truck. (I know that these represent opposite extremes, but that is the nature of love.) What I want for Rosh Hashana is just a chance to speak to her one more time so that I can forgive and be forgiven.
I do not understand what I have done to cause her to do this to me, but I assume there must be something. I do not believe that I am a saint; the fact that I have Asperger syndrome makes it quite likely that I did something hurtful without intending to. Strangely enough, I find the thought that I have wronged her to be comforting. If I have done something wrong then I can try to make it up to her; at the very least I could hope to ask her to forgive me and that she will consent. It is better than the alternative that I am the innocent victim of her malice. If she is simply a horrible evil person, who maliciously tried to hurt me, than I am stuck at a dead end. Being the completely righteous one may be empowering but it is rather lonely. What comfort is there in being justified in shaking your fist at the world?
Living in doubt, wondering if I had potentially done something wrong, though, is particularly debilitating for me. Am I such a monster that someone would find themselves unable to speak to me? I must be because otherwise she would have spoken to me; at the very least she would have sent me a message telling me that she was breaking off contact. But, if I am a monster, what is my crime? Is she afraid of me? When have I ever given her reason to think that I would hurt her? I am left with the specter of potential sins, which I cannot identify and therefore cannot banish, leaving them to haunt me.
In addition to being forgiven, I also want to forgive. Soon after I was cut off, I wrote a “J Accuse” letter, which set forth in very specific detail my case against her and how she “wronged” me. I was sorely tempted to post it, but I refrained from doing so. It would have been difficult to defend in terms of loshon hara, gossip, but what really stopped me was the realization that I would be defining myself in terms of hate and I would be stuck with that. I do not want the burden of carrying all this hate no matter how dearly I earned the right to carry them. It does not matter how right I am; this is a poison and I want nothing of it. I have no particular desire to remain part of her life. For all I care, she can go her way. I do wish, though, that we can go our separate ways as friends.
On Rosh Hashana, there is a custom called tashlich where we go to a body of water and cast bread crumbs into the water. This is to symbolize that our sins have been thrown away. I do not want to carry my sins and the sins of others against me. To the person whom I speak of, if you are reading this (I like to flatter myself that you might still actually read this blog) please understand. I do not want to fight you. I do not want to yell at you. I am not trying to convince you to come back to me or even to continue talking to me. All I want is to know is that you do not hate me that you forgive me for anything that I have done to you. I want to be free of my own anger against you, to say to you that I forgive you and mean it with all of my heart. Can we do a tashlich together? You can cast away all your claims against me and I can cast away all claims against you. And we can just let all of this float away so that all that would remain are the many happy memories that we shared. You could then go your way and I could go mine. We need never see or speak to each other again, but we would still be friends.
This Rosh Hashana all I want is to be forgiven and to forgive.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, this past summer I underwent a very difficult breakup with someone whom I loved completely and whom I thought I would marry and spend the rest of my life with. She was everything that I could have dreamed of; she was smart, well read and had a spunky personality. She was someone whom I could talk to for hours on end. She brought something out in me. She helped me become a more outgoing person and to open myself to the world. If nothing else I will always be grateful to her for that.
Because of my Asperger syndrome it is difficult for me to tell if people are upset with me or if a relationship is going south. I suspect, though, that even a neuro-typical would have been caught off guard in my situation. Last I checked if your girlfriend suddenly gets over her aversion to having you spend money on her, asks you to buy a plane ticket to visit her, has you take her to see a Broadway musical and gleefully tells you that if you were not religious you would so be getting laid then one assumes that things are in good shape. Be that as it may, she dumped me. She asked if we could still be friends and I agreed. I was angry and hurt but I sucked in my pride. I knew that she was going through some difficult times. She needed to simplify her life and I am what she simplified. She was having me pay the price for her mental stability but I agreed. If she needed me I would be there for her.
This “friendship” lasted for two weeks until suddenly she did the one thing that I had many times begged her never to do to me because it would put me in a dangerous depressive spiral; without any warning, she cut off all contact with me. Because of my Asperger syndrome, I am not good at dealing with issues up in the air; I need things said straight out. Because of my depression, I am very vulnerable to anything that hints of abandonment. (See here) For the next two weeks, I lived on the edge. Had she done this one thing that she knew could hurt me? Was she just busy? Was she just upset at me over something or did she decide she needed a bit of a breather from me? I did not want to bother her. By the end of this time period my depression had caught up with me and I crashed for several days. I tried talking to other people, but the person I really needed to speak to was her. The fact that I needed to speak to her but seemed unable to do so made everything all the worse. I ended up putting myself into the emergency room. Throughout my worst bouts of depression in high school, I had never once had to be put in a hospital. I tried getting in touch with her directly. That failed. I tried through intermediaries but to no avail. My rabbi even called her but she flipped him off as well.
Now Rosh Hashana is coming. I admit that I am tempted to pray that my girlfriend should take me back or that she should be run over by a truck. (I know that these represent opposite extremes, but that is the nature of love.) What I want for Rosh Hashana is just a chance to speak to her one more time so that I can forgive and be forgiven.
I do not understand what I have done to cause her to do this to me, but I assume there must be something. I do not believe that I am a saint; the fact that I have Asperger syndrome makes it quite likely that I did something hurtful without intending to. Strangely enough, I find the thought that I have wronged her to be comforting. If I have done something wrong then I can try to make it up to her; at the very least I could hope to ask her to forgive me and that she will consent. It is better than the alternative that I am the innocent victim of her malice. If she is simply a horrible evil person, who maliciously tried to hurt me, than I am stuck at a dead end. Being the completely righteous one may be empowering but it is rather lonely. What comfort is there in being justified in shaking your fist at the world?
Living in doubt, wondering if I had potentially done something wrong, though, is particularly debilitating for me. Am I such a monster that someone would find themselves unable to speak to me? I must be because otherwise she would have spoken to me; at the very least she would have sent me a message telling me that she was breaking off contact. But, if I am a monster, what is my crime? Is she afraid of me? When have I ever given her reason to think that I would hurt her? I am left with the specter of potential sins, which I cannot identify and therefore cannot banish, leaving them to haunt me.
In addition to being forgiven, I also want to forgive. Soon after I was cut off, I wrote a “J Accuse” letter, which set forth in very specific detail my case against her and how she “wronged” me. I was sorely tempted to post it, but I refrained from doing so. It would have been difficult to defend in terms of loshon hara, gossip, but what really stopped me was the realization that I would be defining myself in terms of hate and I would be stuck with that. I do not want the burden of carrying all this hate no matter how dearly I earned the right to carry them. It does not matter how right I am; this is a poison and I want nothing of it. I have no particular desire to remain part of her life. For all I care, she can go her way. I do wish, though, that we can go our separate ways as friends.
On Rosh Hashana, there is a custom called tashlich where we go to a body of water and cast bread crumbs into the water. This is to symbolize that our sins have been thrown away. I do not want to carry my sins and the sins of others against me. To the person whom I speak of, if you are reading this (I like to flatter myself that you might still actually read this blog) please understand. I do not want to fight you. I do not want to yell at you. I am not trying to convince you to come back to me or even to continue talking to me. All I want is to know is that you do not hate me that you forgive me for anything that I have done to you. I want to be free of my own anger against you, to say to you that I forgive you and mean it with all of my heart. Can we do a tashlich together? You can cast away all your claims against me and I can cast away all claims against you. And we can just let all of this float away so that all that would remain are the many happy memories that we shared. You could then go your way and I could go mine. We need never see or speak to each other again, but we would still be friends.
This Rosh Hashana all I want is to be forgiven and to forgive.
Bureaucratic Evil
Tobie has an excellent piece discussing the nature of evil in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength. The Magisterium of His Dark Materials, the forces of Hell in the Screwtape Letters and the N.I.C.E. of That Hideous Strength are all evil forces that are notably bureaucratic. From my perspective, what I find so compelling about Screwtape as a character is that, while he may Hell’s Undersecretary of Temptation and is devoted to ensnaring souls for “our father down below,” the fact that he is a bureaucrat puts a human touch to him. He is not “evil” in the sense of having horns and a tail and gleefully plotting the destruction of the world; he is someone who goes about his job and does it with absolute efficiency. One can easily imagine Screwtape as a mid-level manager of a firm, a company man; the sort of fellow who might strike one as a bit standoffish, but is a model employee who claims the respect of all who know him. This human portrayal of demons is a part of Lewis’ notion of the fallen state of man. If a fallen angel such as Screwtape is really not all that different from your average company man, doing their job without any particular moral concern, then your average company is also not really that different from a fallen angel and is walking down a path straight to Hell. When he gets there he will fit right in.
Friday, September 19, 2008
A Gift for Rosh Hashana (Part I)
We are now approaching Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Like the secular New Year, Rosh Hashana is about taking stock of one’s actions and making resolutions for the upcoming year. Unlike the secular New Year, though, Rosh Hashana is also the first half of the Day of Judgment. In Jewish tradition, on Rosh Hashana God’s decrees are written and on Yom Kippur they are sealed. The resolutions that one makes take place within the context of this Day of Judgment. While it may be out of fashion today, Judaism does believe in a judging God. We are the religion of the Old Testament. The God we believe in has very specific ideas about right and wrong and about sin. Each individual is responsible for his actions and there are penalties for failing to live up to one’s responsibilities. The classic Christian trope is to create this bifurcation between the judging God of the Old Testament and the loving forgiving God of the New Testament. For me, the notion of a loving and forgiving God only makes sense within the context of a God of judgment. If sin means nothing then what is there to judge and if there is nothing to judge what is there to forgive and what need is there for love? It is only once we acknowledge the reality of sin and that we are being rightfully judged for it that we can even begin to talk about forgiveness and love.
Of course just because sin and judgment are real it does not mean that love and forgiveness are also real. Sin and judgment allow there to be love and forgiveness but it leaves them as faint echoes, incredible rumors that come from far away. Is it really possible that this whisper from a faraway land can stand against the concrete reality of sin and judgment? This is something that so defies the mind that Christianity needed to come up with the claim that God himself came down in human form and allowed himself to be crucified so that they could justify believing in it.
The Jewish belief is far more radical. We believe that the same wrathful judging God is willing to forgive us. We believe that this wrathful judging God is sitting there and waiting for us to come and ask him to forgive us. This is something that is completely absurd and that requires absolute gall. What right do we have to be forgiven? How dare we ask for forgiveness? Judaism asks us to take a leap into the absurd far more radical than any Christian claim of incarnation or vicarious atonement. We are asking our rational God to do something that transcends the bounds of reason.
This brings us to the second aspect of this Day of Judgment, your fellow man. On Rosh Hashana, we also ask those we have wronged to forgive us. In fact, our sins against people are the more serious concern on this Day of Judgment. God can only forgive those sins that we commit against him. That which we do against our fellow man can only be forgiven by those whom we have sinned against.
So we ask both God and man to forgive us at the same time. These two actions are connected to each other and, in a sense, it is a blessing that these are being done simultaneously for the later can help us believe in the former. The act of people seeking forgiveness from other people helps us to believe in the reality of forgiveness. There are two parts to forgiveness, asking for forgiveness and granting it. Yes, there is a miracle in finding forgiveness in the eyes of others, but the true experience of the miracle comes in forgiving. How does it happen that one knows that they are in the right and yet somehow decides to let go of that right? For me, this is particularly difficult to fathom. As my father used to tell me: “You would rather be right than be happy.” Forgiveness is not one of my natural virtues and I often struggle to find it in me to forgive others even when I want to yet I have experienced moments where, for some unfathomable reason, I find myself able to just take my pain, hurt, anger and sense of my being right and just let it float away. This is nothing less than the miracle of Grace. This miracle allows me to believe in other miracles. Because I have experienced this miracle of my being able to forgive I can also believe in the miracle of others forgiving me and I can even believe in that ultimate miracle, that God can forgive me.
(To be continued …)
Of course just because sin and judgment are real it does not mean that love and forgiveness are also real. Sin and judgment allow there to be love and forgiveness but it leaves them as faint echoes, incredible rumors that come from far away. Is it really possible that this whisper from a faraway land can stand against the concrete reality of sin and judgment? This is something that so defies the mind that Christianity needed to come up with the claim that God himself came down in human form and allowed himself to be crucified so that they could justify believing in it.
The Jewish belief is far more radical. We believe that the same wrathful judging God is willing to forgive us. We believe that this wrathful judging God is sitting there and waiting for us to come and ask him to forgive us. This is something that is completely absurd and that requires absolute gall. What right do we have to be forgiven? How dare we ask for forgiveness? Judaism asks us to take a leap into the absurd far more radical than any Christian claim of incarnation or vicarious atonement. We are asking our rational God to do something that transcends the bounds of reason.
This brings us to the second aspect of this Day of Judgment, your fellow man. On Rosh Hashana, we also ask those we have wronged to forgive us. In fact, our sins against people are the more serious concern on this Day of Judgment. God can only forgive those sins that we commit against him. That which we do against our fellow man can only be forgiven by those whom we have sinned against.
So we ask both God and man to forgive us at the same time. These two actions are connected to each other and, in a sense, it is a blessing that these are being done simultaneously for the later can help us believe in the former. The act of people seeking forgiveness from other people helps us to believe in the reality of forgiveness. There are two parts to forgiveness, asking for forgiveness and granting it. Yes, there is a miracle in finding forgiveness in the eyes of others, but the true experience of the miracle comes in forgiving. How does it happen that one knows that they are in the right and yet somehow decides to let go of that right? For me, this is particularly difficult to fathom. As my father used to tell me: “You would rather be right than be happy.” Forgiveness is not one of my natural virtues and I often struggle to find it in me to forgive others even when I want to yet I have experienced moments where, for some unfathomable reason, I find myself able to just take my pain, hurt, anger and sense of my being right and just let it float away. This is nothing less than the miracle of Grace. This miracle allows me to believe in other miracles. Because I have experienced this miracle of my being able to forgive I can also believe in the miracle of others forgiving me and I can even believe in that ultimate miracle, that God can forgive me.
(To be continued …)
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Stanley Fish and the Wine Hoax
I consider Stanley Fish to be one of the great public intellectuals of our day. I may not always agree with him, but I have great respect for him. He is one of the world’s foremost scholars on John Milton and he also manages to be a highly coherent and readable political thinker. He might be one of the leading advocates of post modernism, but he is the sort of post modernist that I can accept. He is someone who uses post modernism as an analytical tool and not something to be worshipped for its own sake.
With all due respect to Fish, though, he suffers from an inability to get over the fact that he was connected, if only tangentially, to the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal Hoax has become a legend among critics of post modernism as the moment that post modernism was called out as an emperor with no cloths. Here is what happened. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, sent a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University and considered to be one of the main organs of post modern thought in America. This paper was full of post modernist jargon and not something that could be easily understood by members of the lay public. Apparently the editors of Social Text could not understand Sokal either or were just too lazy to bother so they simply published the article, relying on the fact that Sokal had a PHD and his article sounded good. Once the article was published Sokal revealed to the public what his article was actually about; it argued that the laws of physics and mathematics were cultural constructs, with no inherent validity. While it would seem that Fish was not involved with the publishing of Sokal’s essay, he taught at Duke at the time. Fish has never gotten over this embarrassment and has repeatedly inveighed against Sokal for the “unfairness” of it all and declaring that it proves nothing.
Recently Fish returned, once again, to this issue, responding to a similar hoax played on the magazine Wine Spectator by critic Robin Goldstein. Goldstein created a wine list for a completely fictitious restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido, and managed to get a rating from the magazine. Fish brings down Wine Spectator’s Executive Editor Thomas Matthews’ response that yes his magazine was taken in by a hoax, but that it was a very elaborate hoax. Goldstein went through the trouble of providing them with an address and phone number and even went so far as to create a website for his nonexistent restaurant. As far as Matthews is concerned it is unreasonable that the readers of his magazine should expect them to actually go to the restaurant and see if they actually have the wines they claim to have.
Fish sees a parallel between what happened to Wine Spectator and what happened to Social Text. They both accepted submissions on good faith, which turned out to be hoaxes. For Fish this says nothing about the intellectual legitimacy of either institution. They operate on the assumption that those who submit things to them are acting on good faith. For support Fish refers to Simon Blackburn, who, in response to Sokal, argued that, as someone whose expertise is in philosophy, he could not be expected to judge the historical validity of articles submitted to him. The example he gives is of someone sending him an article arguing that Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was influenced by his experience in Venice.
With all due respect for such eminent scholars as Fish and Blackburn, this is nothing less than an apology for intellectual laziness. Part of being an academic is that you are not inclined to take things on good faith. The whole point of academic publishing is that a book or article is to be peer reviewed and not simply one person’s opinion. When I, the reader, pick up a piece of published academic literature I am supposed to assume that not only is it the work of an accredited academic scholar but also that it was read by other accredited scholars, capable of judging the piece, and that these scholars, at the very least, found no reason to object to it. I, the reader, am the supposed to take what I am reading on good faith, but the only reason why I can do that is because I am taking it on good faith that those who screened what I am reading were not talking the author on good faith.
Off of the top of my head I would not be able to tell you if Hobbes was ever in Venice or not. I do know that he spent a significant amount of time on the continent after he fled England due to the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. If a paper came across my desk, something maybe written by a student, with the thesis that Hobbes was influenced by his experience in Venice I would bother to actually check if Hobbes was ever actually there. If do not readily find such information and the student proves incapable of producing it then that student will fail.
I am about to take my general exams. The people on my committee will demand that I not only sound like I know what I am talking about but will also insist that I actually know what I am talking about and will call me on it if there is any hint that I am bluffing. When I write my dissertation I will have to defend what I write in the face of knowledgeable scholars, who will have no hesitation in taking what I have written, ripping it up in my face and telling me that my work is garbage. I do not claim to be perfect, but I do hold myself to a certain standards and there are people who will hold me to those standards.
This is what academic scholarship is about. We are supposed to demand a high standard of ourselves and if we are not qualified to comment on something we should excuse ourselves and remain silent. This is what separates us from the rest of society and this is what gives us our authority. While it may be perfectly acceptable for Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge to simply pass on any bit of information that supports their cause without careful investigation, academics, if they wish to claim greater legitimacy than Limbaugh and Drudge, must make it obvious to everyone that they operate on a higher standard. This is particularly true for those who are in the humanities. Since we do not deal in hard empirical facts our very legitimacy rests on the unchallengeable quality of our scholarship. People may disagree with our conclusions but they must never have the grounds to challenge the intellectual process that have gone into our conclusions. If we cannot live up to this goal than there is no point to our enterprise.
The people who read Sokal’s essay and agreed to publish it are a disgrace. They should have all been fired from their possessions and never allowed to work as academics again. Their incompetence endangers not only post modernism but all academic scholarship. Sending hoax articles to journals should be a common occurrence in order to keep people honest. Those in the lofty position of editing journals should have to be on their guard. Allow a hoax to be published on your watch and your reputation and your career will be at an end.
With all due respect to Fish, though, he suffers from an inability to get over the fact that he was connected, if only tangentially, to the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal Hoax has become a legend among critics of post modernism as the moment that post modernism was called out as an emperor with no cloths. Here is what happened. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, sent a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University and considered to be one of the main organs of post modern thought in America. This paper was full of post modernist jargon and not something that could be easily understood by members of the lay public. Apparently the editors of Social Text could not understand Sokal either or were just too lazy to bother so they simply published the article, relying on the fact that Sokal had a PHD and his article sounded good. Once the article was published Sokal revealed to the public what his article was actually about; it argued that the laws of physics and mathematics were cultural constructs, with no inherent validity. While it would seem that Fish was not involved with the publishing of Sokal’s essay, he taught at Duke at the time. Fish has never gotten over this embarrassment and has repeatedly inveighed against Sokal for the “unfairness” of it all and declaring that it proves nothing.
Recently Fish returned, once again, to this issue, responding to a similar hoax played on the magazine Wine Spectator by critic Robin Goldstein. Goldstein created a wine list for a completely fictitious restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido, and managed to get a rating from the magazine. Fish brings down Wine Spectator’s Executive Editor Thomas Matthews’ response that yes his magazine was taken in by a hoax, but that it was a very elaborate hoax. Goldstein went through the trouble of providing them with an address and phone number and even went so far as to create a website for his nonexistent restaurant. As far as Matthews is concerned it is unreasonable that the readers of his magazine should expect them to actually go to the restaurant and see if they actually have the wines they claim to have.
Fish sees a parallel between what happened to Wine Spectator and what happened to Social Text. They both accepted submissions on good faith, which turned out to be hoaxes. For Fish this says nothing about the intellectual legitimacy of either institution. They operate on the assumption that those who submit things to them are acting on good faith. For support Fish refers to Simon Blackburn, who, in response to Sokal, argued that, as someone whose expertise is in philosophy, he could not be expected to judge the historical validity of articles submitted to him. The example he gives is of someone sending him an article arguing that Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was influenced by his experience in Venice.
With all due respect for such eminent scholars as Fish and Blackburn, this is nothing less than an apology for intellectual laziness. Part of being an academic is that you are not inclined to take things on good faith. The whole point of academic publishing is that a book or article is to be peer reviewed and not simply one person’s opinion. When I, the reader, pick up a piece of published academic literature I am supposed to assume that not only is it the work of an accredited academic scholar but also that it was read by other accredited scholars, capable of judging the piece, and that these scholars, at the very least, found no reason to object to it. I, the reader, am the supposed to take what I am reading on good faith, but the only reason why I can do that is because I am taking it on good faith that those who screened what I am reading were not talking the author on good faith.
Off of the top of my head I would not be able to tell you if Hobbes was ever in Venice or not. I do know that he spent a significant amount of time on the continent after he fled England due to the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. If a paper came across my desk, something maybe written by a student, with the thesis that Hobbes was influenced by his experience in Venice I would bother to actually check if Hobbes was ever actually there. If do not readily find such information and the student proves incapable of producing it then that student will fail.
I am about to take my general exams. The people on my committee will demand that I not only sound like I know what I am talking about but will also insist that I actually know what I am talking about and will call me on it if there is any hint that I am bluffing. When I write my dissertation I will have to defend what I write in the face of knowledgeable scholars, who will have no hesitation in taking what I have written, ripping it up in my face and telling me that my work is garbage. I do not claim to be perfect, but I do hold myself to a certain standards and there are people who will hold me to those standards.
This is what academic scholarship is about. We are supposed to demand a high standard of ourselves and if we are not qualified to comment on something we should excuse ourselves and remain silent. This is what separates us from the rest of society and this is what gives us our authority. While it may be perfectly acceptable for Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge to simply pass on any bit of information that supports their cause without careful investigation, academics, if they wish to claim greater legitimacy than Limbaugh and Drudge, must make it obvious to everyone that they operate on a higher standard. This is particularly true for those who are in the humanities. Since we do not deal in hard empirical facts our very legitimacy rests on the unchallengeable quality of our scholarship. People may disagree with our conclusions but they must never have the grounds to challenge the intellectual process that have gone into our conclusions. If we cannot live up to this goal than there is no point to our enterprise.
The people who read Sokal’s essay and agreed to publish it are a disgrace. They should have all been fired from their possessions and never allowed to work as academics again. Their incompetence endangers not only post modernism but all academic scholarship. Sending hoax articles to journals should be a common occurrence in order to keep people honest. Those in the lofty position of editing journals should have to be on their guard. Allow a hoax to be published on your watch and your reputation and your career will be at an end.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
The Return of Martin Guerre and the Feminist Fantasies of Natalie Davis
(Since, in my last post, I talked about Natalie Zemon Davis and her book, the Return of Martin Guerre, I thought to share with you a review I wrote a few years ago, while I was still an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, on the book. We were assigned the book in class and, as an assignment, had to write a review of it. To the professor's surprise most of the papers were very hostile; a good example of how different the Yeshiva University student body is from a normal college campus. My review was one of the more hostile ones. Back then I was much more the fighting conservative than I am today. If I were to rewrite this I would probably tone it down a bit. It definitely is a great book, despite its flaws, and I have every intention of using it when I have students of my own.)
The integrity of the field of history rests upon the assumption that the writing of history is a fundamentally different sort of undertaking than the writing of historical fiction. While even the most rigorous historian inevitably colors the facts with his own speculations, (Ranke is a prime example of this) history is supposed to about the interpretation of past events through the lens of documentary evidence. The writing of historical fiction on the other hand[1] is centered upon the attempts of an author to speculate upon the hidden stories and motivations that lie outside the realm of documentary evidence. While the art of historical fiction may be of value to the historian, it is not history. To blur this line is a disservice to the field in that it renders the study of history as mere partisan propaganda. This is so particularly when such writings are done in support of an ideology. If one is going to be a historian then one has to convince the reader that there has been a genuine attempt to check one’s ideology at the door.
An example of this issue can be seen in the Return of Martin Guerre by the noted feminist historian, Natalie Zemon Davis. To be sure, it should be noted, that whatever the book’s flaws, it is a fascinating and well-crafted bit of writing. The stated facts of the case which Davis discusses are these: In mid 16th century France, Martin Guerre, a peasant of Basque descent, abandoned his wife, Bertrande, and child, Sanxi, over a fight he had with his father over some grain. Eight years later a man named Arnaud du Tilh came around, claiming to be Martin Guerre, and was initially accepted as such by Bertrande, the rest of the family, along with everyone else in the village. Doubts began to rise however and Martin Guerre’s uncle, Pierre Guerre, along with Bertrande, come to accuse Arnaud of being a fake. The case was resolved when the true Martin Guerre, after twelve years, came home, minus a leg that had been shot off by a cannonball in Flanders. Arnaud was hanged, Martin Guerre resumed his proper place and Bertrande was absolved of having committed adultery, as the impression of the court was that she had been tricked into believing that Arnaud was her husband and was not a party to his fraud. These are the facts as the Parlement of Toulouse seemed to have understood them and according to the generally accepted rules of historical explanation, baring any evidence to the contrary, this version of events should stand; any attempt paint a different picture should carry the burden of proof upon it.
It would seem that Bertrande was a simple housewife, whose main concern in life was trying to keep body and soul together, who, tragically, was abandoned by her husband and tricked into living with an impostor for four years. This interpretation of events evidentially does not suit Davis, not because she has contradictory evidence, but because such a picture does not take into account the feminist conscience that Bertrande “must” have had. As such Davis offers an alternative reading of the events, one that takes into account the fact that Bertrande possessed “a concern for her reputation as a woman, a stubborn independence, and a shrewd realism about how she could maneuver within the constraints placed upon her sex.”[2]
This rewriting of events begins even before the departure of Martin. Bertrande and Martin did not have a child for the first eight years, or so, of their marriage and it was assumed that the couple was under some curse, which prevented Martin from impregnating his wife. This “curse” was lifted, if we are to take the written accounts at their word, when, at the advice of a “wise woman.” Martin and Bertrande “had four masses said by the priest and were given sacred hosts and special cakes to eat.”[3] This resulted in the birth of their son, Sanxi. To a historian still schooled in "outdated," "patriarchal," modes of study, it is not certain why Martin and Bertrande, unable to produce a child, still stayed together. This could have been for any number of plausible reasons; maybe the families would not have allowed it, Bertrande may have actually been in love with Martin or she might have been scared to death of what he would do to her if she left. For Davis the explanation for this is obvious; Bertrande, while not wanting to be married yet to Martin, did not wish to end up back under her father’s control. She thus, by allowing it to be claimed that Martin was cursed, manipulated the situation so she could be both outside of her father’s control and exempt from the normal duties of marriage. “Then when Bertrande was ready for it, the old woman ‘appeared suddenly as if from heaven’ and helped to lift the spell.”[4] (I.e. this was a scam worked out between Bertrande and the old woman.) Does Davis offer us a source that has someone, from that time, making the claim that Bertrande manipulated the situation? No. Does Davis even bother to bring down a case, from that time period, in which a woman played such a game and thus allow us to draw some sort of comparison? No.
Davis’ insinuations do not stop there. After Martin’s disappearance, Davis wonders if Bertrande was comforted in her solitude by that “wise woman who had counseled her during her bewitchment.”[5] This of course, makes perfect sense as it is well known that women, in 16th century France, were secretly organized under the banner of the female conscience and merely went “along with the system, passing it on through the deep tie and hidden complicity of mother and daughter.”[6] It would seem that the existence of such a secret system seems so obvious to Davis that she does not bother to offer us a single source as to the veracity of such a claim.
Davis’ most egregious claim is that, far from being duped by Arnaud, Bertrande was well aware, from the very beginning, that Arnaud was a fake and simply went along with the charade because she wanted a husband. Davis takes it as a given that “the obstinate and honorable Bertrande [was not] a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like Pansette. By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference.”[7] Now we know that Arnaud was slick enough to fool Martin’s own sisters, who knew Martin for longer than Bertrande did. The reason why it is unlikely that Arnaud fooled Bertrande, according to Davis, is that “as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking ‘the touch of the man on the woman.’”[8] The most obvious problem with such claim is that it is not backed, as far as I can tell, by any sort of empirical data; I would love to see the study that a test group of blindfolded women could recognize a man based on how they were touched. Lacking that I can see no reason what so ever why this bit of folk wisdom would be relevant. (Imagine a conservative saying something like this and getting their book published by the Harvard University Press and being made the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Study at Princeton University.) What is even more amusing is that Davis’ source for this, which she only indicates in her end notes, is a 17th-century historical work[9] by Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), titled Les Recherches de la France. I must say that there seems to me to be something just a bit disingenuous when someone, who has a consistent track record of treating folk wisdom about women, written by men, with absolute scorn, turns around and builds a thesis around such folk wisdom merely when it suits their purpose.
Davis crosses a certain line here where her writing ceases to be a matter of putting objective facts, tied together with the writer’s speculations, on the table and instead becomes a forum for the writer to give her speculations, tied together with some historical facts. The challenge for Davis is to explain why her telling of the Martin Guerre case is intrinsically more deserving of the title History than a top of the line work of historical fiction such as the Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Killer Angels chronicles the events, in the form of a novel, of the battle of Gettysburg. This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1974, and is considered a classic of American literature. No one, as far as I can tell, has ever offered a sustained attack on Shaara’s presentation of the battle of Gettysburg. Nevertheless, no one would ever consider Killer Angels to be a history of the battle. The reason for this is that Michael Shaara, in the end, had the people involved in the battle say and do things that cannot be justified strictly in terms of documentary evidence. In truth, though, one could say that Shaara was simply trying to resurrect the style of historiography used in antiquity by Thucydides and Josephus.
In many respects Killer Angels is superior to Martin Guerre; it is demonstrably evident that Killer Angels is on far firmer grounds, factually, than Martin Guerre. By the standard of historical events, Gettysburg was a very well documented battle. We can track, down to the hour, what the major figures in this battle, such as Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hancock, Meade and Chamberlain, were doing. All of these people left numerous volumes in memoirs and correspondence discussing their actions and their motives, which Shaara put to good use; we can be fairly certain that whatever was really said at the battle of Gettysburg was not that far off from what Shaara had his characters say. This is in contrast to the events described in Martin Guerre. Neither Martin Guerre nor Beatrice nor Arnund actually left any written records. All that we have is a slim book written by the judge in that case, Jean de Coras, and also Gullaume Le Sueur’s Historia. We have little in the way of solid ground to portray their mindsets. As such anyone who would wish to tell their story is forced to rely on his or her own imagination.
To be fair to Davis, one could argue that unlike Killer Angels, Martin Guerre gives its sources and, unlike Shaara, Davis points out where historical evidence ends and her suppositions begin. My response would be that even if Shaara would have bothered to put out an annotated edition of his work, documenting his sources, pointing out to the reader where he had allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks and offering a defense of these intuitions, Killer Angels would still be considered historical fiction, albeit one that contained a useful “study guide” to the real events.
In the end, Martin Guerre, while it may not fit in as history, cannot merely be pushed aside as historical fiction. Davis may take too many liberties for it to be considered history yet Martin Guerre is not structured like a novel, it is too self-conscious; most of the work contains Davis’ surmises upon the events. Rather than either of these two categories, Martin Guerre should be viewed as a running commentary to a work of either history or historical fiction that unfortunately does not, as of yet, exist. In this sense, Davis has performed an admirable service for the student of history in that she has allowed the reader to get a glimpse into the thought processes of a genuinely talented historian and has offered an invaluable look at the thought processes, struggles and issues that go into writing genuine history.
[1] The type at least that honestly engages the issues instead of merely using real events as a background for the author’s fantasies.
[2] Davis pg. 28
[3] Davis pg. 21
[4] Davis pg. 28-29
[5] ibid pg. 34
[6] ibid pg. 31
[7] ibid pg. 44
[8] ibid
[9] Pasquier actually put out numerous editions of this work throughout his lifetime. The first edition was put out in 1560, this was followed by editions in 1596, 1607 and 1611, in which the author added large amounts of information to. The one Davis makes use of was published in 1621. (See http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_History/nzdavis.htm)
The integrity of the field of history rests upon the assumption that the writing of history is a fundamentally different sort of undertaking than the writing of historical fiction. While even the most rigorous historian inevitably colors the facts with his own speculations, (Ranke is a prime example of this) history is supposed to about the interpretation of past events through the lens of documentary evidence. The writing of historical fiction on the other hand[1] is centered upon the attempts of an author to speculate upon the hidden stories and motivations that lie outside the realm of documentary evidence. While the art of historical fiction may be of value to the historian, it is not history. To blur this line is a disservice to the field in that it renders the study of history as mere partisan propaganda. This is so particularly when such writings are done in support of an ideology. If one is going to be a historian then one has to convince the reader that there has been a genuine attempt to check one’s ideology at the door.
An example of this issue can be seen in the Return of Martin Guerre by the noted feminist historian, Natalie Zemon Davis. To be sure, it should be noted, that whatever the book’s flaws, it is a fascinating and well-crafted bit of writing. The stated facts of the case which Davis discusses are these: In mid 16th century France, Martin Guerre, a peasant of Basque descent, abandoned his wife, Bertrande, and child, Sanxi, over a fight he had with his father over some grain. Eight years later a man named Arnaud du Tilh came around, claiming to be Martin Guerre, and was initially accepted as such by Bertrande, the rest of the family, along with everyone else in the village. Doubts began to rise however and Martin Guerre’s uncle, Pierre Guerre, along with Bertrande, come to accuse Arnaud of being a fake. The case was resolved when the true Martin Guerre, after twelve years, came home, minus a leg that had been shot off by a cannonball in Flanders. Arnaud was hanged, Martin Guerre resumed his proper place and Bertrande was absolved of having committed adultery, as the impression of the court was that she had been tricked into believing that Arnaud was her husband and was not a party to his fraud. These are the facts as the Parlement of Toulouse seemed to have understood them and according to the generally accepted rules of historical explanation, baring any evidence to the contrary, this version of events should stand; any attempt paint a different picture should carry the burden of proof upon it.
It would seem that Bertrande was a simple housewife, whose main concern in life was trying to keep body and soul together, who, tragically, was abandoned by her husband and tricked into living with an impostor for four years. This interpretation of events evidentially does not suit Davis, not because she has contradictory evidence, but because such a picture does not take into account the feminist conscience that Bertrande “must” have had. As such Davis offers an alternative reading of the events, one that takes into account the fact that Bertrande possessed “a concern for her reputation as a woman, a stubborn independence, and a shrewd realism about how she could maneuver within the constraints placed upon her sex.”[2]
This rewriting of events begins even before the departure of Martin. Bertrande and Martin did not have a child for the first eight years, or so, of their marriage and it was assumed that the couple was under some curse, which prevented Martin from impregnating his wife. This “curse” was lifted, if we are to take the written accounts at their word, when, at the advice of a “wise woman.” Martin and Bertrande “had four masses said by the priest and were given sacred hosts and special cakes to eat.”[3] This resulted in the birth of their son, Sanxi. To a historian still schooled in "outdated," "patriarchal," modes of study, it is not certain why Martin and Bertrande, unable to produce a child, still stayed together. This could have been for any number of plausible reasons; maybe the families would not have allowed it, Bertrande may have actually been in love with Martin or she might have been scared to death of what he would do to her if she left. For Davis the explanation for this is obvious; Bertrande, while not wanting to be married yet to Martin, did not wish to end up back under her father’s control. She thus, by allowing it to be claimed that Martin was cursed, manipulated the situation so she could be both outside of her father’s control and exempt from the normal duties of marriage. “Then when Bertrande was ready for it, the old woman ‘appeared suddenly as if from heaven’ and helped to lift the spell.”[4] (I.e. this was a scam worked out between Bertrande and the old woman.) Does Davis offer us a source that has someone, from that time, making the claim that Bertrande manipulated the situation? No. Does Davis even bother to bring down a case, from that time period, in which a woman played such a game and thus allow us to draw some sort of comparison? No.
Davis’ insinuations do not stop there. After Martin’s disappearance, Davis wonders if Bertrande was comforted in her solitude by that “wise woman who had counseled her during her bewitchment.”[5] This of course, makes perfect sense as it is well known that women, in 16th century France, were secretly organized under the banner of the female conscience and merely went “along with the system, passing it on through the deep tie and hidden complicity of mother and daughter.”[6] It would seem that the existence of such a secret system seems so obvious to Davis that she does not bother to offer us a single source as to the veracity of such a claim.
Davis’ most egregious claim is that, far from being duped by Arnaud, Bertrande was well aware, from the very beginning, that Arnaud was a fake and simply went along with the charade because she wanted a husband. Davis takes it as a given that “the obstinate and honorable Bertrande [was not] a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like Pansette. By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference.”[7] Now we know that Arnaud was slick enough to fool Martin’s own sisters, who knew Martin for longer than Bertrande did. The reason why it is unlikely that Arnaud fooled Bertrande, according to Davis, is that “as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking ‘the touch of the man on the woman.’”[8] The most obvious problem with such claim is that it is not backed, as far as I can tell, by any sort of empirical data; I would love to see the study that a test group of blindfolded women could recognize a man based on how they were touched. Lacking that I can see no reason what so ever why this bit of folk wisdom would be relevant. (Imagine a conservative saying something like this and getting their book published by the Harvard University Press and being made the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Study at Princeton University.) What is even more amusing is that Davis’ source for this, which she only indicates in her end notes, is a 17th-century historical work[9] by Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), titled Les Recherches de la France. I must say that there seems to me to be something just a bit disingenuous when someone, who has a consistent track record of treating folk wisdom about women, written by men, with absolute scorn, turns around and builds a thesis around such folk wisdom merely when it suits their purpose.
Davis crosses a certain line here where her writing ceases to be a matter of putting objective facts, tied together with the writer’s speculations, on the table and instead becomes a forum for the writer to give her speculations, tied together with some historical facts. The challenge for Davis is to explain why her telling of the Martin Guerre case is intrinsically more deserving of the title History than a top of the line work of historical fiction such as the Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Killer Angels chronicles the events, in the form of a novel, of the battle of Gettysburg. This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1974, and is considered a classic of American literature. No one, as far as I can tell, has ever offered a sustained attack on Shaara’s presentation of the battle of Gettysburg. Nevertheless, no one would ever consider Killer Angels to be a history of the battle. The reason for this is that Michael Shaara, in the end, had the people involved in the battle say and do things that cannot be justified strictly in terms of documentary evidence. In truth, though, one could say that Shaara was simply trying to resurrect the style of historiography used in antiquity by Thucydides and Josephus.
In many respects Killer Angels is superior to Martin Guerre; it is demonstrably evident that Killer Angels is on far firmer grounds, factually, than Martin Guerre. By the standard of historical events, Gettysburg was a very well documented battle. We can track, down to the hour, what the major figures in this battle, such as Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hancock, Meade and Chamberlain, were doing. All of these people left numerous volumes in memoirs and correspondence discussing their actions and their motives, which Shaara put to good use; we can be fairly certain that whatever was really said at the battle of Gettysburg was not that far off from what Shaara had his characters say. This is in contrast to the events described in Martin Guerre. Neither Martin Guerre nor Beatrice nor Arnund actually left any written records. All that we have is a slim book written by the judge in that case, Jean de Coras, and also Gullaume Le Sueur’s Historia. We have little in the way of solid ground to portray their mindsets. As such anyone who would wish to tell their story is forced to rely on his or her own imagination.
To be fair to Davis, one could argue that unlike Killer Angels, Martin Guerre gives its sources and, unlike Shaara, Davis points out where historical evidence ends and her suppositions begin. My response would be that even if Shaara would have bothered to put out an annotated edition of his work, documenting his sources, pointing out to the reader where he had allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks and offering a defense of these intuitions, Killer Angels would still be considered historical fiction, albeit one that contained a useful “study guide” to the real events.
In the end, Martin Guerre, while it may not fit in as history, cannot merely be pushed aside as historical fiction. Davis may take too many liberties for it to be considered history yet Martin Guerre is not structured like a novel, it is too self-conscious; most of the work contains Davis’ surmises upon the events. Rather than either of these two categories, Martin Guerre should be viewed as a running commentary to a work of either history or historical fiction that unfortunately does not, as of yet, exist. In this sense, Davis has performed an admirable service for the student of history in that she has allowed the reader to get a glimpse into the thought processes of a genuinely talented historian and has offered an invaluable look at the thought processes, struggles and issues that go into writing genuine history.
[1] The type at least that honestly engages the issues instead of merely using real events as a background for the author’s fantasies.
[2] Davis pg. 28
[3] Davis pg. 21
[4] Davis pg. 28-29
[5] ibid pg. 34
[6] ibid pg. 31
[7] ibid pg. 44
[8] ibid
[9] Pasquier actually put out numerous editions of this work throughout his lifetime. The first edition was put out in 1560, this was followed by editions in 1596, 1607 and 1611, in which the author added large amounts of information to. The one Davis makes use of was published in 1621. (See http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_History/nzdavis.htm)
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