David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading (subtitle: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time) was published in 2010 on the basis of essays in the Los Angeles Times (where he had been a book critic) and other publications. Gary Luke, the former editorial director of Sasquatch Books (Seattle) persuaded Ulin to recast his writing and publish his expanded essay as a book in 2010. In 2018 together they published a new edition, with a new introduction and afterword, which expanded his original article and brought it forward to the age of the short-fingered vulgarian casino operator from Queens, in the memorable phrases by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen.
The gist of the essay remains the same: the quiet, focus, and concentration required of deep reading of long-form fiction is hard to summon up in the age of the web, of the shouting multitudes on every side, and of the way that all our concentration and reading attention has been cracked if not shattered by the combination of political and technological disasters of the past decade. "We are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines." (p. xv) Some of the stories are what Ulin (and many others) fear: the stories of racism, the fear of all kinds of others, the ready labeling of disagreement as treason or heresy. "I have come to recognize that all these narratives of incomplete and every one turns out to be unfulfilling, because none of them add up to a vision larger than themselves." (p. xviii) Yet "every narrative is conditional" and "we can live only in our own time." (p. xxi-xxii) Surveying both the positive and horrifying narratives of American history and literature, Ulin writes:
I don't mean to trivialize our situation by referring to it through the lens of narrative, but rather to contextualize. This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside as a way of bringing it to life. it's why we have to be careful about the narratives we evoke or create, because they are bound by (or they bind) the limits of what we can imagine, the limits of our ability to think. . . . [This is] a difficult world in which to be human, in which to try to live with integrity. . . Why do I read? I am looking for authority, intelligence. . . . But even more, I seek engagement—with both the text and the creator of the text. . . . Faith again, some sort of transfiguration, the closest we come to real communion between ourselves and another who shares with us something in common (common cause, common courtesy, common knowledge, common sense). . . . Why should we fear one another's stories? The true act of resistance is to respond with hope. All those voices are what connect us. In a culture intent on keeping us divided, they are, they have been always, the necessary narrative. (p. xxvii—xxxiii)
The connective thread of narratives, both the horrifying and the hopeful, have made 2018 look almost like a preface. Ulin refused to give up hope, and for good reason. Through the ravages of pandemic, policing brutalities, willful cruelty and grift at the highest levels of power, some hope can emerge. The 2020 election answered the grifter in the only way really possible (even as he refuses to acknowledge it). The pandemic has revealed cleavages in America that can no longer be ignored, even though many will try, will deny, will stonewall. In the ravages of pandemic, how can we not all sense this is but a dress rehearsal for the disasters of climate change. People have risen up and refused to give up hope, refused simply to accept corruption, brutality, and incompetence, even though many voted to continue those things exactly. Ulin saw signs of a quiet protest in art, a reclamation of aesthetic faith. As in February 2018, so in November and December 2020, in Samuel Becket's words, "I can't go on, I'll go on." (p. 156)
For those concerned with liberal arts traditions and education, Ulin's essay now reads as a call to memory that became a call to action. Narratives can still connect; we can still imagine our way into a world and inhabit it. In aesthetic terms—in all the arts—we will all only begin to acknowledge, lament, and celebrate the immense disasters, griefs, and passions of this year. That reckoning may (or should) go on for a generation. Unlike the historical response to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, we can't and won't simply ignore it and forget it. The lost of art of reading can lead to the new art of connecting, the new narrative cobbled together on the streets, from disorientation, "art as communion, art as community, art as (yes) resistance in the sense that it invites or provokes us to complexity." Ulin might be willing to extend it, in his own heritage, as tikkun olam: to rebuilt the ancient ruins, repair the breach, and restore the streets to live in.
In a time that is beyond unsettling and strange, I have found some comfort in returning to contemplate what a liberal arts education is or was, and how it interacted with elements in American culture which were horribly flawed with systemic racism. Such an education, when it worked, offered a way out of lying, self-delusion, and social delusion. For me, a liberal arts education above all meant engaging with ancient Greek and Roman writers.
While the label "classics" is unquestionably, unfashionably elitist and redolent of a great deal of European and American imperialism, it points out the way these ancient writers set a template for understanding tragedy, grief, and loss. These writers seem to read us as much as we read them: the warnings they suggest about how a life, world, and culture can fall apart is more pertinent with each passing month.
In these past several disastrous and tragic months, I was enlivened to read Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek. La lingua geniale in the original Italian: "ingenious" is not an incorrect translation, but neither is it sufficient: ingenious suggests superficially clever rather than boldly inventive. The language provides undeniable evidence that ancient Greeks thought in a precise and different manner than how we might imagine them to have thought. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" —especially when the past is so remote and long ago.
I wish to turn to this theme of the utter strangeness of ancient Greek in some longer elegy for the liberal arts and the role the might have or could have played in American culture in the past two centuries. The two elements of aspect and mood in the ancient Greek language carry this water: these elements of verbs structure a different world of thinking through that channel, that language.
In English, the nouns do a great deal of the work of making sense transparent from writer to reader. In Greek, the verbs do the work. Aspect encodes a way of thinking about verbs and actions that go to the heart of Greek sense-making. Because most later languages so lack verbal aspect, it is impossible to describe without using too many words.
Begin with English. English verbs are locked into the iron frame of time: past, present, and future. What the person who acts intends by the action is either beside the point or rendered through adverbs or some other locution. Maybe the action is a layered past —before such-and-so happened, this-and-that had already happened (a past perfect), or some kind of ordering of future affairs: when that-and-this will happen, such-and-so will already have happened (a future perfect). In any case, the verbal periphrastic combinations establish an intricate temporal order.
Greek verbs live with but the haziest notion of this iron law of past, present, and future. A present aspect is durative: it's happening right now and maybe into an infinite future. (Marcolongo's example, "I'm calling you," καλέω) The aorist aspect (a-orist means indefinite or without bounds; an ὁριστής is a boundary-maker, with the α-negative or privative) is momentary, taken as such (and not necessarily in the past!) (Marcolongo's example: an idea of calling you, "I'll call you," έκάλεσα with no reference to when in present or future.) The perfective aspect is a completed action that stands completed with no going back on it. (Marcolongo's example: κέκληκα, I called you --and you never called back, lost the note by the phone, or are ignoring me). These aspects do not function as temporal "when" signals, but as "how" performative signals that take time, or are not yet in time or stand-or-fall on the facts. Ancient Greek retains aspect of verbs from the fabled proto-Indo-European language (that maybe never was), as does Serbo-Croatian, Hawaiian, and in some was African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
In modern languages, aspect and time become conflated: when it happened is taken to mean how it happened. Many Greek verbs have three distinct stems that are conjugated in different aspects: their suffix-like endings indicate 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and singular or plural (or dual, another topic entirely). "I look and I am looking," όράω is a present durative action: still looking. What grammarians call the "future" ὄψομαι is really much more an indefinite intention: I'll look when I get around to it, I intend to look. The Greeks were not much interested in characterizing the future: it simply had to be experienced, like the will of the gods. The aorist εἷδον is I look, once, and that was enough, because: now the perfect: I am in the state of having seen, which is; I know οἴδα, and finally ὤφθην, I looked and it's a matter of record: it's known that I looked. That all these verb parts are stitched together by grammarians and lexicographers does not mean that ordinary ancient Greeks thought them related: they simply used them as the wished to make themselves clear.
Dividing how an action occurs from when it occurs is obvious only to a modern speaker of a few languages (Serbo-Croatian; Hawaiian). A bit closer to most Americans, the aspectual distinctions in African American Vernacular English, which sometimes obscure tense (time), can be the habitual, perfective, or resultant: "he do be eating," "he have bin ate," "he have done ate" (properly "dən ate"). Those may not tie the past or present action of eating to a time-frame, but indicate how it happens, or happens, or what is the result of it happening. This comparison begins to get at the power of aspect: how it happened.
To their credit, authors of high school or college grammars of ancient Greek, such those by as Herbert Weir Smyth, James Hadley & F. D. Allen, or H.L. Crosby & J.N. Schaeffer, completely fail to mention aspect, which seems to have come into the study of ancient Greek from comparative study of Slavic languages; the first OED entry for grammatical aspect dates to 1853. Joseph Dongell's much more recent Elementary New Testament Greek (2014) incorporates an unavoidably confusing discussion of aspect as internal (inside the event, "I am washing the car"), external (suspended above & viewing the action as a simple singular event: "Today we wash the car," as a flat description), and perfect: once-and-done "I'm happy to say I have washed the car". Dongell then muddies the water a bit with discussion of a perspective chosen by the speaker and not property of an action itself. His example is Jesus' resurrection, always a loaded topic (best stay away from it). When he notes that verbal aspect doesn't tell us very much about how to picture an event in reality, he appeals to the developing idea of a "fuller picture" of a verb called Aktionsart, a "type of action" distinguishing elements of activity, accomplishment, achievement, and state. Aktionsart picks apart categories on a grid of perception to get at a "fuller picture" a verb does, and has little practical consequence. Aspect is the contrary: by distinguishing how an action occurs: how a verb "walks" (as it were), Greeks could pick apart sense from nonsense. Plato wields aspect very carefully (see Timeaus 37e—38c: please don't complain that Timeaus isn't or wasn't by Plato)(See also two entries by Seumas Macdonald here and here.)
This recondite aspective element of verbs combines with a second perspective on ancient Greek verbs: mood. The subjunctive mood in modern English is nearly disappearing, but most of us can still remember the subjective, distinguishing "was he a fool?" from "were he fool." In the first, he was or wasn't a fool, or perhaps we can disagree about that; but the second points to the real possibility that he isn't or wasn't but could be, might be, or might have been. "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you. It's poor salesmanship," Ricky admonishes Elsa in Casablanca. (English also has the infinitive mood, to do something, and the imperative mood, do something! but they don't matter so much here.)
But ancient Greek adds a third mood: optative, the mood of desire. The optative depends on the slight shift in the speaker's desire and the conditions that might allow it. Marcolongo's examples are clear: "I want to sail/intend to sail" (indicative: my boat is docked, I'm ready); "I would like to sail; I might go sailing" (subjective: My boat is docked but the winds are foul); "I would like to sail/I might go sailing" (optative: My boat is docked; I don't know how to sail; I'll have to learn how and then I really want to), finally back to: "I would like to sail/I would have liked to sail" (but I don't have a boat; I live in Kansas; it's a lost cause--indicative again).
What separates those moods? Possibility, the speaker's projection of desire, and perception of herself as strong enough, brave enough, even decisive enough. That volitional optative is completely dependent upon her sense of responsibility and resolve to turn words into action.
Both desire and regret (negative in the optative) might not draw a line between possibility and impossibility, the desire that it might come true versus the historic indicative which indicates that it never will come true. If the odds are ever in your favor, as they say in Hunger Games, it could be optative (or merely subjective: they'll change, you know); if the odds are that you're going to die, the indicative. Between the poles of real and unreal is a whole force field of human desire, likelihood, or impossibility. That's where the optative supplements the subjective—but was utterly lost as Greek spread in the Alexandrian world. Hence in the New Testament, the only real optative is μὴ γένοιτο: may it not be! which the Authorized Version plumped up as:" God forbid!" The optative became a sort of second-string, bench-team subjective.
There are uses of the optative mood: volitional ("I want to write"); potential ("I could write") and oblique ("He said that I would write"), but enough already. When Odysseus says "Would that I were young and my strength firm," his fervent and binding desire is so strong that he uses the optative for the tenacity of his intention to return to Ithaka and reclaim his ancestral seat, even though it is (or seems) impossible. (Odyssey 14:70-71)
Back to our perilous present in which many wait in dread for violence they believe will ensue after the 2020 election. The liberal arts spoke to a nation that had been divided by war, failed to liberate and reconstruct, and stood by while robber barons plundered the wealth of many in the first Gilded Age. Liberal education, nevertheless, offered a way out of predatory capitalism and cultural enslavement to a renewed sense of purpose, even with its blind spots, that resulted in the achievements of the Progressive era and laid the foundations for the New Deal. The means of this education were a steady focus on language, on truth and its expression, on desire, on the aspect of how things come to be, choosing to hope in the optative in the face of impossibility.
That education was an heir of those who wrote an English language that we have lost the ability to speak accurately. Its speakers picked apart truth and desire because they mattered more than market indices and predictions of future profit. The care with which the far more remote ancient Greeks thought, about how things happen and how they desired them to happen contrasts oddly with their rather simplistic and one-dimensional view of the future. (Greek future verbs are almost an afterthought.) With the (controversial) advent of writing, they picked apart these elements in texts that lack punctuation and diacritics. Their flow of thought depended on particle and enclitics, those little bits of words that signaled the flow of thinking and of speech. Liberal arts educations --there was more than one model--flourished in an America culture that prized language and its use: the Lyceum circuits, Milton, the Bible, even Emerson. That care with language was a direct ally of intensive study of Latin and ancient Greek literatures.
I am working out more thoughts about these topics, using other concepts as well: what I have written is only a workshop model, a sketch, and maybe a bad one. The foundation of the liberal arts, the careful usage and analysis of expressive language, was foundational and now almost extinct outside of few precincts of wealthy institutions. Whether such an education can ever return is another subject.
David Denby, staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker, published (June 29, 2020) an account of reading Crime and Punishment with a Lit Hum class at Columbia taught by Nick Dames, one of its best teachers. "Lit Hum," or Literary Humanities, is a required course for all undergraduates, and depending on the teacher can be anything from brilliant tour to an arduous trek. Under Dames' astute guidance, the students and Denby read Dostoyevsky's impassioned, digressive, and intricate prose and connected the critical passages.
Illustration in The New Yorker by Tom Gauld
The survey course in Spring 2020 took place throughout the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic; eight hours of discussion of the novel took place after the great disapora sent students from on-ground class in Hamilton Hall to a Zoom room wherever each might have landed. For Denby, the novel dovetailed with his life stuck in an Upper West Side apartment, hearing constant sirens, joining the 7:00 p.m. banging of pots at windows, sounds that connected isolated individuals in their social responsibility with the city's life, in the catastrophic solidarity of a Greek chorus.
Denby's moving account resists easy summary; I will not summarize it but pick out two elements that yet resonate now months later. Raskolnikov's haunting dream of social breakdown, a war of all against all in which each, infected by virus-like trichinae, knows that he or she alone is right, "each thought the truth was contained in himself alone . . . . They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good"—this dream struck several readers uncannily. One young student (Julia) saw in it a political science fiction, evoking our present conflicts and mutually-assured contradictions that brook no shared facts or vocabulary. She saw in the faces of demonstrators in Michigan (in April, armed and angry at their state capitol) the unshakeable convictions of blind self-assurance, just as the fury of those infected by the novel trichinae in the dream.
Raskolnikov's dream comes a few pages before the end of novel, an Epilogue that places the reader outside of the feral voices in Raskolnikov's head, so filled with conflict and outrage. Sonya, a teenage prostitute who befriended him in St. Petersburg, and despite his rejection even came to love him, followed him to a camp outside a distant Siberian town. He can no longer avoid confrontation with Sonya's lived, real-world "insatiable compassion" and the implacable necessity of his own suffering. He discovers that "instead of dialectics, there was life." Instead of acrid theories of banal murder, "he could only feel. . . . [S]omething completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness." Denby quotes Nick Dames' remark: "The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy." Denby concludes,
Every day, in Trump's America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov's dream. . . . I kept returning to Dostoyesvsky's book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve along side fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov's dream had conjured: "In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.
The bells led me back to the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps a durable response to Denby's and Rasknolnikov's searches.
The Brothers Karamazov also ends with an Epilogue that ties up most of the complex narrative threads. A family drama, a who-dunit, a coming-of-age novel, and an ersatz romance (among many other angles), the novel is maddeningly difficult both to read and to conclude. Tthe characters' lives seem capable of carrying on with neither author nor reader.
After five hundred pages, an unlikely sort of Greek chorus of schoolboys emerges on the heels of a hitherto minor incident. The impulsive Dimitri Karamzov humiliated an impoverished Captain (Snegiryov) by pulling him out of local tavern by his beard. Snegiryov's proud, frail son (Ilyusha or Ilyuschechka) bitterly resented his father's humiliation and the mocking he had to endure from his schoolmates: he stabbed their leader, Kolya Krasotkin, with a pen knife. When Ilyusha threw stones at them, he accidentally hit Aloysha (Alexei Karamazov), the nineteen-year-old, handsome brother who is the moral center of the book: kind, energetic, and empathetic almost to a fault (as religiously very conservative for his generation). Alyosha reached out to Ilyuschechka and all the boys. They wind up obliquely commenting on adults around them.
The novel careens through Dimitri's trial, who is charged with murdering their wily, fatuous, knave of a father. His brother Ivan organized his brother's defense and orchestrated his planned escape, along with the machinations of two women (Gruschenka and Katerina Ivanovna) who forlornly loved their Mitya. Meanwhile Alyosha and the schoolboys inhabit almost a kind of parallel universe in the small, unnamed town, and the parallel drama of Ilyuschechka's death from tuberculosis two days after Dmitri's sentencing.
As Aloysha rushed from Katerina's decisive encounter Dimitri and Gruschenka, church bells summoned him and the boys to Ilyuschechka's funeral. The melodramatic narrative of alcohol, flowers, Ilyuschechka's frail mother, and the passage of the coffin to the church gives way to solemnity of the boys standing watch by the casket through the service. This bells are no western, tolling bourdon; the extravangant, Russian tinntabulation that builds up overtones and reverberates down the streets conjures the otherworldly play of light, incense, chanting, and movement in the old church, "rather poor, many of the icons were without settings." The author himself experienced such shock, loss, and splendor at the death of his 3-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, as he wrote the book.
Dostoyevsky, turned to Orthodoxy after reading the Gospels in a Siberian prison, and always paid careful attention to liturgical details. After the Epistle (probably I Thessalonians 4:13-17), Snegiryov "suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right," without explanation. During the Cherubic Hymn (sung at the priest's Entrance to the Sanctuary), "kneeling down, [Snegiryov] touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church, and remained lying like that for quite a long time," prostrate before the divine splendor. Though the hymn's text is short, the chant is in a drawn-out, ethereal style, a human supplement to the singing of the heavenly hosts:
We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, And chant the thrice-holy hymn tot he Life-giving Trinity, Let us set aside the cares of life, That we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts.
"Let us set aside the cares of life" is exactly what Snegiryov still cannot do in his grief, clutching at the funeral flowers from the casket, as he crumbles bread crumbs for the birds who will keep his son company in his grave, symbolically receiving the King of all on his behalf. But rising from the cares of life is exactly what Aloysha did, when he and the boys came upon Ilyuschechka's standing stone, where the dead boy had cried out against his father's humiliation at Mitya's hands. Aloysha's speech to the boys concludesthe book, "Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon." He commanded them to promise never to forget Ilyuschechka, "whom we once threw stones at—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much."
And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, altogether, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.
Even should one of the boys become the "most cruel and jeering man," he "will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moveover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: 'Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.'" Alyosha implored them, "let us never forget one another . . . I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who united us in this good, kind feeling . . . who, if not Ilyuschechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! . . . . Dear friends, do not be afraid of life!"
And then the thrust of the whole book:
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it really be true as religion says, that we all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyuschechka?"
"Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been," Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.
Then the detail both eschatological and incarnational: "Well, and now let's end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don't be disturbed that we'll be eating pancakes. It's an ancient, eternal thing, and there's good in that too." Kolya cried, "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!"
The book's epigraph reads, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)
Karamazov's bells—ringing for Ilyuschechka, for the resurrection—answers the summoning bells in Raskolnikov's dream. A westerner might assume that the bell's summoning in Crime and Punishment is a single ring, perhaps fast as in colonial New England--but in a Russian city "the bells rang all day," many bells in vivid strike and reverberation. In this Epilogue, too, Dostoyevsky's mastery of liturgical details goes to work. "During the second week of the Great Lent, it was [Raskolnikov's] turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks" (undoubtedly because the whole camp would fit in or even around the church). The Gospel for that Saturday (John 5:24-30) is the same as was used in the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Ilyuschechka: For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself . . . for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. While Rodya moped, Sonya acted on behalf of the prisoners and families stood in for the healing Christ; "they even came to her with their ailments."
"Raskolnikov lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week" when he recalled his haunting dream in this liturgical context—but never named Easter directly. The second week after Holy Week, recovered enough to be put back to work, Raskolnikov walked out of his work shed and looked across a wide, desolate river, to see an utterly different, pastoral people live free, where "time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed." Suddenly Sonya was beside him, "came up almost inaudibly," alluding to Jesus' appearing to St. Thomas and the twelve (John 20:19 ff.), the traditional reading for the second week of Easter. Where Jesus showed Thomas his side, Sonya gives Rodya her hand, and "it was as if something lifted him and flung him down at her feet . . . for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her," that he was capable of love.
"There already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life. They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other." But this is no romantic fade-out: "They still had seven years more, and until then so much unbearable suffering, and so much infinite happiness! But he was risen and he knew it, he felt it fully with the whole of his renewed being, and she—she lived just by his life alone!"
All his past torments began to feel strange to Raskolnikov, unable to resolve anything; "he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life." In response, he took the Gospels from under his pillow, from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus." He did not even open the book; he did not yet know the kind of new life that would not be given him for nothing, which still had to be dearly bought, "to be paid for with a great future deed. . . "
Denby's search for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions finds no easy conclusion in Trump's America now, as Dostoyevsky's found none in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky seemed in retrospect to have sensed all the warning signs of repression, Revolution and the descent into the Abyss of Stalinism (and now Putinism). Whether in the Spring pandemic (and its Summer and Fall continuation), the continuing racial unrest, economic disaster, environmental apocalypse, and craven, hypocritical electoral and judicial politics, many Americans have completely disengaged from the Constitutional order. With all of our society's social and ecological danger signs are blinking red, is this search for signs in literature merely quixotic pursuit of bitter old people teaching impressionable youth?
I must answer No: Dostoyevsky's great books still offer us renewal through remembering our hope and suffering (such as the awakening to past and continuing witnessed this Summer). They can awaken us to responsibility for the ecological, public health, and economic mess that we have made. Both Alyosha and Sonya point to what is greater: "instead of dialectics, there was life," contradictory, complex, compelling and above all creative. Those bells summon us to engage neither domination nor surrender, but memory and hope: to remember the great, humane story of suffering and rebirth that transcends our mess (bad as it is), to the ancient and eternal act of eating pancakes for the dead. In Beloved, Amy said to Sethe while massaging her swollen feet, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." It's hurting now: life instead of dialectics.
These summons also suggest the fevered, prolix, impossibly complex Angels in America. At the end of Perestroika (Part 2) Prior Walter, in his final febrile vision, tells the Continental Principalities (Angels) "I still want . . . My blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive." To which his Angel replies, "You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?" Despite her vivid invocation of more horror than can be borne, Prior insists, "But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do . . . . I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life."
We live past hope, past dialectics, past disease and chaos. In this hinge of history, when horror meets horror and hope seems so much not enough, so inadequate — we still want more life. We still hear the bells summoning us to responsibility, thrice-holy, with the One whom comes invisibly escorted by Divine hosts. We stand at the stone of remembering, live past hope, and eat our pancakes for the dead.
W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) was an essential poet: one who shows us life, who writes us into living and into becoming old. His last poems, collected in Garden Time, were written as he was going blind.
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what
As Chiasson writes, now we know which day: March 12, 2019.
In the clip below, W.S. Merwin talks about writing poetry and about meeting Ezra Pound when he was 18 and still at college and Pound was in the psychiatric ward at St Elizabeth's Hospital. He then reads 'Late Spring', a poem included in his Bloodaxe Selected Poems. This film is from the Academy of American Poets DVD The Poet's View: Intimate Profiles of Five Major American Poets, which features Kay Ryan, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht and W.S. Merwin: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17029
Timothy Snyder (Yale professor) has written two books that not only demonstrate—with exhaustive annotation—the intricate links between Russian and American oligarchs and autocratic fascism, but make pertinent observations about how to respond in a way that can retain and build up democratic institutions.
In this crazy year, these books remain remarkably pertinent in a summer of pandemic, economic meltdown, and long-delayed social turmoil over profound, historic racial injustice.
I will be interested to read his upcoming book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (to be published September 2020). Snyder fell ill on December 29, 2019; he did not have COVID 19. Yet his experience led him to reflect on how American health care is part and parcel of an evolving tyranny of "who deserves and who doesn't." The current pandemic and consequent economic collapse seems to have been precisely aimed at the pretentions of the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity (his terms). Facts come back to bite, as authoritarian fascists are discovering, from Putin to Trump to Bolsonaro to Xi Jinping. Will the world be able to respond in a manner than builds up healthy, human freedom, and economic and racial justice?
I have long loved the elegant verse of David T. W. McCord, "Books fall open, / you fall in, / delighted where / you've never been." Sometimes that's even true. (A poet with a day job, McCord also raised millions for Harvard as director of the Harvard College Fund.)
Several months ago a book fell open for me, one that I had long known about but never really read: Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. I started to read it not long after I resolved to nurture my knowledge of Greek by reading some New Testament daily. I chose Romans because it was there (and because I read much of it for a seminar with the late great Prof. Christian Beker): it demands attention, is linguistically difficult, and seems to be found in the midst of every major turn in Christian history, such as Martin Luther and Karl Barth.
I also chose Barth because I also have access, courtesy of Princeton Theological Seminary Library, to the German text of Barth's second edition, 1922, which open the way for so-called "dialectical theology" and a decisive turn from previous liberal Protestantism by many German-language writers. So I could exercise my Greek, Latin (I read parallel in the Nova Vulgata) and German, languages that I spent a lot of time and effort learning when I was an undergraduate, and which I do not wish to lose at this later stage of my life.
Little did I realize, when I began this project in 2019, that it would become so timely. I began Romans exactly because I have been so dismayed by the slow slide into fascist authoritarianism underway in my native country. (I hesitate to call it my home any longer; I live here as a resident alien.) I had some inkling that it has something to say to my condition. I was little prepared for how much it had to say.
Barth's book came out in successive editions in 1919 (finished in the last days of the War, December 1918), and a second edition in 1922, as well as other later minor alterations, clarifications, and republication, with an English translation by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns in 1933. The Epistle to the Romans established Barth's early reputation as a disruptor; the second edition in particular critiqued (or bulldozed) the cultural liberalism of the Protestant theology of his teachers at Marburg and elsewhere. The term "dialectical theology" which arose in the early 1920s highlighted frequent use of paradoxical formulations and polar opposites by several writers (Barth, Gogarten, and Brunner prominent among them) and was always --given the prominence of "dialectic" among the heirs of Hegel, and especially Marx--something of a misnomer. There is a very great amount of distinguished scholarship regarding the origins and development of "dialectical theology" in the 1920s and the disagreements of its original proponents as time went on (and especially in the 1930s), and I do not intend to rehearse any of that here.
My focus instead is how unexpectedly contemporary the second edition of Barth's Epistle to the Romans now seems to be, despite its readily apparent and important differences with the present moment. I am enough of a historian to remember and acknowledge that history does not repeat itself, or even often rhyme (in words erroneously attributed to Mark Twain), but somehow sometimes retains a certain metrical force, like blank verse in iambic pentameter. Or in Yogi Berra's reputed words, "It's like déjà vu all over again."
When reading the German second edition (available in the Karl Barth Digital Library, or via Hathitrust here (Vorsicht: Fraktur!), I immediately felt great sympathy for the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, translator (13th Baronet of Harewood, County Hereford, and Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). Sir Edwyn faced the daunting challenges of Barth's German which intentionally pushes beyond normal boundaries with multiple-compounded words, neologisms, paratactic paragraph-long sentences, and now-obscure references to contemporaneous events and well-known persons. Sir Edwyn's English version of the German sixth edition (1928) unavoidably presses Barth's free-range German into Oxbridge English, and the language of the Authorized Version. He inadvertently misses or minimizes Barth's Sprachspiel or playing with the language in an attempt to demolish over-familiar and well-worn phrases bearing the echoes of discredited theologies, politics, and cultural outlooks. On the other hand, following Barth's German too closely would nearly completely obfuscate his meaning and significance for English readers, and linguistically daze them.
Barth's German is variously playful, allusive, hortatory, monitory, and nearly aphoristic. (I will give examples in succeeding blog entries.). It reminded me less of the weighty German of Barth's later Kirchliche Dogmatik than of writers associated with German "expressionism:" Georg Büchner (especially Woyzeck, adapted for Alban Berg's opera), Frank Wedekind (Lulu plays, the basis of Berg's opera, and Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening, source of the 2006 musical), Franz von Unruh (especially Opfergang, anti-war drama written during the Siege of Verdun/Schlacht um Verdun). I also thought of writers associated with the Austrian Jugendstil, especially Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Georg Trakl (associated with Der Brenner, influential in the revival of Kierkegaard in German-speaking lands, and a link via friendship to Ludwig Wittgenstein). The influence of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are especially prominent in Barth's second edition of Romans, and has been studied thoroughly.
Barth used his expressive, nearly expressionist language to torpedo the discredited cultural, Protestant hegemony represented above all by his (respected) teacher Wilhelm Herrmann. A "Lutheran Neo-Kantian," Herrmann taught Barth to speak of God dialectically or in opposites: dogmatic/critical, Yes/No, veiling/unveiling, objective/subjective, in line with an emphasis upon the religious experience of the individual (from Friedrich Schleiermacher). So Barth did not repudiate everything that Herrmann taught him. But—Herrmann was one of the 93 signers of Manifesto "To the Civilized World" (An die Kulturwelt: Ein Aufruf), which unequivocally supported German militarism and military actions in 1914, specifically including the "Rape of Belgium" (in essence confirmed by later scholarship despite certain Allied fabrications). Herrman was not the only prominent Protestant theologian to sign An die Kulturwelt: so did Adolf Diessmann, Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Schlatter, and Reinhold Seeberg (father of Erich Seeberg, the eventual Dean of the "German Christian" Protestant theological faculty in Berlin during the National Socialist régime). So Barth's demolition of the language of liberal Protestantism extended his cultural critique of discredited, compromised, fatally flawed accommodation of liberal Protestant theology with German militarism. Barth's citizenship and employment as a Swiss pastor allowed him both access to the German linguistic community and freedom from German war-time censors, however sympathetic the officially-neutral German-speaking Swiss may have been to the German side, and their consequential anxiety of about any kind of wartime dissent.
Barth began his project of demolishing the whole discredited line of Protestant piety focused on individual experience (and accompanying social and political irrelevance) in 1919 but by 1922 his second edition reflected his dismay with the disaster then unfolding in revolutionary Russia as it morphed into the early Soviet Union. Barth's demolition extended both to the right (socially mainstream, bürgerlich Protestantism), to the left (red to redder socialism), and the Roman Catholicism already susceptible to revanchist or restorationist, imperialial-fascist fantasies in Austria, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere). Safe in stable Switzerland, he nevertheless experienced (with the rest of Europe) the disorienting political and cultural shock of imperial crackup, and the cowardice of German wartime leaders, especially the Kaiser, Tirpitz, and Ludendorff. Nor did economic disaster spare Switzerland: the general strike (Landesstreik) in November 1918 strained civil society more than any time since the Sonderbund war of 1847-1848. The H1N1 "Spanish" influenza epidemic 1918-1919 hit Switzerland very hard, and the inadequate official response brought the nation to the brink of civil war.
Barth wrote his second edition, then, in a lightly industrialized (weaving) town in the midst of entrenched economic disaparities, national and international political dysfunction, and pandemic. This is not the same world as 2019-2020, but it seems eerily adjacent. Even more, the collapse of a public theological or religious rhetoric associated with denuded assumptions of political, cultural hegemony and the thorough discrediting of its moral authority (in Europe then), can only remind one of the cultural bankruptcy of American evangelicalism now, so thoroughly colonized or even weaponized by the current chaotic American régime. In America in 2020, as in Europe in 1922, all these deteriorating conditions reflect both acknowledged and unacknowledged wounds and diseases left festering for decades.
Barth's response was vigorous social critique and withering theological appraisal reflected his wide reading and wide-ranging cultural allusions that extend far beyond normal academic theological discourse. He speaks with a preacher's or prophet's voice, not the voice a professor (although he is certainly academically well informed). The world of his text —what it presumes, upon which it comments, whose pretensions it exposes—will be the content of further blog entries.
I have written previously about Matthew Battle's 2003 book Library: An Unquiet History (Norton)—see this link for text rescued from a previous blog, and page down to January 24, 2011 (or just page-search "Matthew Battles" and it's the second occurence). I took part in a recent informal conversation about this book at a recent library conference, and I enjoyed re-visiting it.
Battles seeks to "read the library" (page 14).
I explore the library's intertwined relations of fancy and authenticity, of folly and epiphany, of the Parnassan and the universal. My method . . . mirrors that of Eugene Gant [a character is Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River]: I pick up a volume . . . . [and] follow a trail. . . I drop on passage to follow another, threading my way among the ranges of books, lost among the shelves. . . . What I'm looking for are points of transformation, those moments where readers, authors, and librarians question the meaning of the library itself.
pages 20-21
Battles does not seek either a reductive account nor a comprehensive exposition of the history of libraries, but points out transformations of text, reader, author, and librarian. His pursuit takes him to ancient Mesopotamia and classical antiquity, ancient China, the Aztec realm and its predecessors and successor, Renaissance and early modern Europe, all the way to Nazi Germany and the ethnic wars of southeast Europe. His most recent example is probably the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban which sought iconoclasm and destruction to enforce their lethal, ideologically pure, and ethnically cleansed mockery of Islam.
One of Battles' major points is that the same insight that has led some cultural, political, or military leaders to found, build, and sustain libraries is the insight that has led to their destruction: a library is a source of power, prestige, and memory, and when power changes hands, prestige is re-distributed, and memories (in the new leaders view) must be extinguished, libraries are destroyed. Whether or not the library of Alexandria was in fact torched by Romans, Muslims, or Christians, whether or not the First August Emperor (Shi Huangdi) of China in fact destroyed all records of previous states as well as élite or Mandarin writings, libraries have withered and been dispersed as surely as they have been built. Nazi German librarians made a Faustian bargain to preserve themselves, some of their books, and their profession by subordinating it to fictions of Volk, blood, and soil, only to see themselves even further marginalized in war and the subsequent re-founding of the German states (Jahre Null). Libraries have an unquiet history not despite their development and success, but exactly because of it.
The years since Battle's 2003 publication have only confirmed this, alas. Islamist insurgents fleeing Timbuktu before advancing French soldiers torched two library buildings in 2013, destroying priceless and unique Sufi manuscripts --the Sufis insufficiently Islamist in their view (many of the manuscripts were subsequently found to have survived). Many other manuscripts of this center of Islamic learning had been (or have been) moved and recorded elsewhere (and subjected to the dangers of humidity levels never occurring in Mali). In 2012 and after, manuscripts had to be protected again, in a remarkably multi-pronged and multi-part effort brilliantly described in Joshua Hammer'sThe Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or Syria, ISIL or ISIS or Daesh) destroyed many cultural artifacts of ancient civilization in their crude, terroristic, and bigoted reign, including the Central Library of Mosul, the University of Mosul, the library of a 265-year-old Latin (Dominican) Church, and the Mosul Museum Library. The Peoples' Republic of China has determined to destroy Uighur culture and many artifacts and collections of Kashgar and elsewhere in Xinjiang, a remarkable example of Han Chinese racism and bigotry that goes hand-in-glove with Han Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture.
Digital destruction is also certainly possible of a kind that marginalizes Nicholson Baker's carefully enacted, idiosyncratic, and self-hyped outrage at the "loss" of newspapers that were already acidifying (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001). By "digital destruction" I mean the promulgation of (anti-) social media and its assault on any concepts of truth, such that cultural memory is relegated to the memory hole. The infuriating, bland shallowness of Mark Zuckerberg leads as example one, but many others follow, including Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Steven Huffman and Alex Ohanian of Reddit, who celebrated "freedom from the press." These panglossian, superficial, and flashy developers with the sketchiest, and most desultory, slap-dash notions of "freedom of speech" and neo-liberal deregulation have unleashed hordes of edge-lords whose only real goal is to burn it all down: language, truth, discourse, respect for other points of view, and tolerance for disagreement. They join the insufferably woke of right and left to rend any democratic policy and polity, and to worship authoritarian ideologies masquerading as enlightened thinking. Their red pills become the cyanide tablets concealed by the romantic spies of the thrillers. All this digital destruction is as assuredly an assault on the web of language, concepts, habits, skills, and dispositions that build and enact libraries and inquiry, as the depredations of Communist Chinese, Islamists, and fascists of every stripe and country, an assault that moves forward 24/7/365.
What might save libraries? Ironically: burial, or going off-line, inaccessible, and impossible to locate. What goes around comes around, in the long run, but it can be a very long run. The arc of history may or may not bend towards justice, but it does oscillate between truth, power, brutality, and lies, and in the end the truth is surprisingly durable. How else did anything at all survive from antiquity, whether classical, Asian, or Meso-American? One of the keys is librarians —who remain slightly suspect and patronized by academic leaders because they know, deep down, that librarians don't only work for them and their institutional goals and objectives. Librarians have something bigger in mind —as Michael Moore knows, and said ten years ago when HarperCollins attempted to intimidate him, and require a re-write of his book Stupid White Men to tone down his criticism of George W. Bush.
I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?
Well, not the ass end of everything. Rather like Balaam's Ass (Numbers 22:21-39): inconvenient both to Balaam and the rulers of the Moabites, seeing an angel blocking the narrow passage to the future, and pointing out injustice, inaccuracy, and lies. It's a tougher job than many might think, rarely recognized, and frequently obscured by librarians' own professional commitments —but speaking through the unlikely and the disparaged, and shining a light on truths, nevertheless. Caveat lector.
Monica Potts' beautiful In the Land of Self-Defeat in today's New York Times (October 6, 2019) accurately portrays the fragile realities of community in a very small place: Clinton, Arkansas. Self-defeated is a way of describing the lives and attitudes of many people there: just about anything a governmental body can do is a sad waste of money. Potts describes a fight over library financing and the salary of a librarian (that would have paid her $25 per hour or about $42,000 per year) as a step too far for the residents, whose median household income is often not more than $25,000. Self-defeated is about much more than finances, but about an entire attitude and expectation of individual lives and community life that the word describes.
Particularly telling is one resident's dismissal of the value of the librarian's degree or the work of the library. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.” That remark is not about Dewey. It is a willful dismissal of what the library there does: provide a portal to so much of the world beyond Clinton for those who cannot afford it or even imagine it. The evocation of Dewey itself is a telling dismissal: a nineteenth century system of relative shelf location is taken as the be-all and end-all of what can be known --not just a library, but what a library can point to.
In Potts' telling, the politics and mind-set of scarcity defines Van Buren County, Arkansas, and "people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use." The Chair of the library board points to a conversation, "They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” (The Chair pointed out that he doesn't have children and never uses the public school.) Social discourse becomes even more impoverished than community finances. In Potts' words:
A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families. . . . They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library.
I was left thinking, "what about the children? What about the young people? Is there any hope here for the future? How is the next generation to live?
One of the premises of all education is that somehow things might become better, smarter, wiser, more effective, from theory to very practical results. When education is seen as strictly a private good, that benefits only the person enrolled, and strictly as job training, to do work that is done right now, then any sense of hope for betterment has vanished. And a school or university becomes simply a credential mill, properly certifying new workers to do what is done now. This is wildly dissonant with ideas about innovation (disruptive or incremental) or any kind of increased efficiencies or synergies. "Self-defeated" portrays those withdraw, pull back, turn aside from any hope that things could be better than they are in any way whatsoever.
Potts' writing haunts me (I look forward to her book) because I know these people, and grew up with them in Bridgeport, Michigan. Bridgeport is or was probably a step above Clinton, Arkansas, but only a small one. In the 1950s and 1960s the attitude there was one-dimensional: work in the automobile plants, get 30-and-out, and retire early. Maybe the UAW can help, maybe not. In retrospect many people regard those times as better than they were; in reality the economy there was heavily boom/bust and the busts were not pretty. (See Daniel Clark's Disruption in Detroit, Univ of Illinois Press, 2018) In this decade Bridgeport is a shadow of its former self (which wasn't much to begin with), and the same mindset of withdrawal and going-it-alone is pervasive throughout the township. Saginaw County's population has declined dramatically since 1980 from 228,000 to 190,000 (while the USA grew from 226 million to 327 million). The neighboring school district went bankrupt, was taken over by the state, and dissolved; the local school district was in similar difficulty but seems to have become more stable in the past few years.
Potts quotes a resident of Clinton, Arkansas, "“If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it." Many from Clinton took her advice and left; many from Bridgeport, Michigan have taken similar advice, as did I. The potential for a life at anything more than just above the poverty line are very limited in both places. More than that statistical, financial poverty line is the poverty of spirit, a refusal to see what could be possible, a reluctance to band together to fight for what could be better, and a real willingness to disparage any achievement elsewhere as a sad waste of money and time.
I try to balance Potts' article with the blogs by James and Deborah Fallows that look at places in America that are re-inventing themselves, Our Towns. I try to square the demoralized, self-defeated residents of many rural corners with the attractive idea that needs further research, that some young professionals are intentionally moving away from expensive urban centers to places where life is both more affordable and more relaxed. Potts article warns: those places are not just everywhere or anywhere. For a community to re-invent itself, to fight against the self-defeatism that reigns in Clinton, Arkansas, or Bridgeport, Michigan, such a community needs a core of dedicated people, both leaders and followers, who see what an area could be, what it could offer, how it could be better --in short, a set of people who can hope and then get to work. In too many rural communities, those people simply have left, frustrated with the poverty of mind, imagination and spirit.
Potts does not mention a curious fact about Clinton, Arkansas: it has seen another, useful government intervention (with private assistance). A 1982 flood of the Archery Fork of the Upper Little Red River severely damaged the town and a subsequent channelization project sought to prevent another one. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy and the state Game and Fish Commission supported a cantilevered stream bed, a trail, and habitat restoration. I can't imagine that anyone in Clinton would be in favor of another 1982 flood (but I can imagine, "That project. What a sad waste of government money.") I can definitely imagine a familiar dismissal of the later re-engineering to provide better habitat, so that flood control would divide the community less sharply, even though I imagine few would want the old channel back. It must be an improvement, but will be dismissed as a waste. If my suspicions are correct, this is a prime example of how a community can defeat itself: a refusal to hope, a willing refusal to work together. No wonder anyone who can gets out. How poorly these people are served by the very ideology and individuals they select to preside over their local, state, and national communities.
In self-defeat is written the story of our national decline. How then is the next generation to live?
Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.
To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,
[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .
Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."
Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120
This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!
That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:
Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.
The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!
Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.
Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.
The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison
(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)
Milano - Castello sforzesco - Michelangelo, Pietà Rondanini (1564) Foto Giovanni Dall'Orto, 6-jan-2006 - 05. Source: Wikimedia; CC-BY-2.0
I've been mulling Arthur C. Brooks article in The Atlantic, "Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think" -- cheerily subtitled "Here how to make the most of it."
My first thought was: this article has an important core, but somehow was badly edited. The title seems to have been made up by someone for whom such a prospect seems distant. The subtitle is straight-up advice-column mush. Worse, Brooks seems to have buried the lede --something that he does not do elsewhere in his writings,, and is done here in such a way that it's not a sign of his alleged decline. I cannot avoid wondering whether somehow The Atlantic's editors were nervous about this article, and whether it touched some raw nerve, perhaps in an editor closer to Brook's age than the one who titled the article.
Brooks lede is important, and worth reading and emphasis. In the course of the article, he recounts their stories, and concludes, "Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin. How does one do that?"
Well, not by working for a think-tank, no matter how distinguished. Some of Brook's nervousness seems to me to be a product of the Massachusetts Avenue hothouse in DC: the American Enterprise Institute is right next door to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and across the street from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Peterson Institute of International Economics. (I regret slighting other worthy organizations on those blocks.). Just a little competitive, no? And from this perch is one supposed not to feel old past 45?
Maybe because I've always worked in higher education I'm used these past decades to being an old person amidst the young --since I was 28, in fact. I have known so many young people, and like them, work well with them, and certainly am not threatened by them. I see their youth and ingenuity up close well enough to know that being young "before professional decline" can be a great, good thing --and not, much of time. Especially now, in the age of locked-down anxiety.
Years ago a wonderful Benedictine monk, the Rev. Fr. Gabriel Coless, who has the serene, very long-now outlook of his order, taught me a lasting lesson. Coless was reflecting on a common experience: a mannerly University building operations worker was reviving a recalcitrant air conditioner on a warm September day in a seminar room, while several students gossiped about a particularly idiotic, recent scandal involving a certain professor of theology, and the spouse of another one. Just after the uniformed, sweaty, good-natured mechanic left the room, Coless commented, "the order of practical wisdom and the order of academic intelligence have nothing to do with each other." The mechanic knew nothing of Scholastic theology, but treated people well and was intensely loyal to a wife with a long-term chronic illness. His practical wisdom outshone any of the supposed academic brilliance reposing in that other asinine, arrogant professor. Young people, no less than their elders, can confuse academic brilliance with practical intelligence, and one suspects nowhere so much as in Washington think tanks.
Brooks draws on British psychologist Raymond Cattell's distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, and finds that fluid intelligence has special valence for young people. He's right, but sparkling fluid intelligence is not much use to a considerable majority of young people, who either don't have much of it to begin with, or must cope with circumstances very different from the denizens of think tanks and the academy. Brooks example, perhaps drawn from Cattell: poets done with half their creative output by age 40, on account of the waning of their fluid intelligence? If the other half is done by, let's say, age 80, that's a lengthening and changing of creativity, but hardly its senescence. Just lately I've been reading the late W.S. Merwin, who produced such amazing work in his 80s--exactly because he was setting his mental and creative habits when he was in his 20s and 30s. His later work was nothing he might have imagined fifty years before, but he could not have done it without his earlier work. Perhaps I am merely cherry-picking a contrary example, but I believe that there are many others, as well. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, published 2004, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year later--when she was 62-63, and twenty years after her earlier well-received fiction, Housekeeping. Her writing took a long time to crystalize. Does that mean she lost her fluidity of expression and imagination, or merely removed the incidental to reveal the essential, sculpted away the unnecessary stone to reveal the true figure?
That is Brook's most arresting and poignant metaphor --shaping his life by subtracting what is extraneous.
What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.
Printed version, July 2019, page 73
After listening to the wisdom of the Hindu sage Acharya ("Teacher"), Brooks makes four specific commitments:
Jump (leaving his current status and prestige)
Serve (fully sharing ideas in the service of others, primarily by teaching at a university --more about that in a moment)
Worship refreshment of the soul, pursuing one's spiritual heritage, shaping work itself as a transcendental commitment
Connect --becoming more conscious of the roots that bind us together, each to each (as aspen trees).
Brooks avoided E.M. Forster's "Only connect" --by now maybe trite, but still just resistant enough to mere sentimentality.
These worthy commitments and important insights were unfortunately buried under a load of repetitive citations from social science and real editorial nervousness. I wish Brooks had started his article with his account of his earlier, unhappy career as a professional French Hornist. That story leads directly to Brook's specific commitments, and foreshadowed his later encounter with some famous, bitter old man on a plane. Then distill the social science before the conclusion.
That no one can maintain peak professional performance indefinitely is no news, however many people (especially men, but sometimes women) attempt it. How many failed intimate relationships are the collateral damage of such fantasies! That intelligence and imagination changes as one ages is also no real news.
The poignant force of Brook's piece is that he realizes all this from his vantage point in elite Washington, and is willing to step away before others might wish he had. How different are the current, comparative cases of Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas --the later seems simply to have soured in self-imposed isolation beyond what even many conservatives can stomach, while the former must watch many of her life's deep commitments under assault every term. Her grace and wit outshines his embittered silence.
Brooks apparently desires to teach in a universtiy, and I wish him well. I doubt that he will have to get sucked into the machinery of academic life --advising, committee work, and empty sloganeering from so-called thought-leaders (much less the poisonous atmosphere of freedom-versus-safety controversies). I've certainly seen enough academic colleagues simply rot on the vine (in some cases with alcohol), and in other cases turn so rancid that their colleagues dearly desire their departure under any circumstances whatsoever. I've also watched faculty in the later years connect with students in a manner that changes their lives (both the students', and sometimes the teacher's). I hope the latter for Brooks, knowing that such connection is forged in a lifetime of experience, some of it unhappy, and in thinking and re-thinking about what is really important.
May the sculpture of his life reveal a strength and liveliness that would be lost in a think-tank, and may his students rise and bless his memory decades later. Only connect.
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