Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 249

why hospitality matters: ancient poetry edition

WI’m reading Emily Wilson’s marvelous translation of The Odyssey this summer, and its emphasis on giving freely to “foreigners and beggars” keeps grabbing me by the throat. When in doubt, listen to the poets! (This passage is from 6.204-219.) pic.twitter.com/WFTDLDqUnf — Dr Catherine Clifford (@CRCliff) June 24, 2018

I’m looking forward to reading Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, though I will admit to being put off a bit by the intensity of some of the praise, which tends to give Wilson credit for something that Homer does and that is fairly represented in pretty much every other translation. (Thus Alexander Pope and/or William Brooke in 1726: “By Jove the stranger and the poor are sent; / And what to those we give to Jove is lent. / Then food supply, and bathe his fainting limbs / Where waving shades obscure the mazy streams.” Etc. etc.) That emphasis is in the poem, not the translation.

It is a key theme in the Odyssey, though, and one that I often call particular attention to when teaching. This is the second major point at which the importance of hospitality to the stranger appears. Earlier, when Athena (disguised as Mentor) is escorting Telemachus around to see a bit of the world, they arrive at Nestor’s home at Pylos and are welcomed warmly and offered roasted meat and red wine and “deep-piled rugs” to sleep on — but when they come to the much grander home of Menelaus at Sparta they are greeted with considerable suspicion by one of Menelaus’s companions. Now, to be sure, Menelaus chastises the man for not being more generous, but Homer is showing us something here about the difference between a household that’s instinctively and naturally welcoming and, on the other hand, one where the welcome is grudging at best. Mentor wants Telemachus to learn the right way to live, and the right way to live requires hospitality to strangers.

When correcting his companion, Menelaus explains why: Could we have made it home from Troy, he asks, if people had not been hospitable to us? This was not a world, as I remind my students, in which you could drive up to a Holiday Inn and pull our your credit card. We do best when we extend a helping hand to those in need, not least because one day soon we could be among the endangered and dependent.

But the lessons of hospitality don’t come easily to those — like the suitors of Penelope, hanging out in Odysseus’s house and eating his food without earning a damned thing for themselves — who think that what they need will always be within reach. They are spoiled, arrogant, grasping; and in all these respects just the opposite of Nestor and his family, of the princess Nausicaa, and even of Odysseus’s poor old goatherd Eumaeus, who even in his poverty takes care of a man he thinks to be a ragged beggar, because “strangers and beggars come from Zeus.”

So be generous to the homeless because it’s the right thing to do; but if you’re not going to do it because it’s right, do it because someday you may need some generosity yourself. And if you don’t, you could end up like those suitors, whose end is — spoiler alert — not pretty.

quality of life

Sara Hendren:

When does a life worth living cease to become so? When one can no longer eat and must use a feeding tube? A ventilator? When one loses mobility, or memory? What about pain—can one live with a little, but not a lot? How much is a lot, exactly? And then there is the monster in its own category that is depression. I know many people living with each of these conditions, and the thing I know is this: the view from outside is invariably impoverished. The human brain just lacks the imagination to fathom a life lived well that is so physically or neurologically different from one’s own. Living without capacities one has come to take for granted is only seen as loss of capacity, and therefore loss in total. A life no longer a life. But ask disabled people, and they will tell you: their lives are worth having.

viewpoint diversity and religion

Religion: A Viewpoint Diversity Blind Spot?:

How could Heterodox Academy address this lacuna? It could, for example, promote the use of surveys or studies to better understand the religious makeup of faculty, administrators, and students — and how they are affected by the lack of viewpoint diversity, the narrowing space for legitimate debate, unfair recruitment and promotion practices, and intolerance of religion on campus. It could highlight the issues affecting religious groups and individuals working or studying in universities and colleges more in its blog posts, weekly updates, and podcasts. It could make a greater effort to involve academics from theology or religious studies fields. It could publish articles parsing the differences between political conservatives and religious academics—not all of the latter are members of the former (and vice versa) —and explore how these differences affect research methods, interests and findings.

Despite the myriad challenges to protecting political viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech in academia today, HxA has boldly undertaken the challenge. Yet, it must now go one step further and also explore the limits and potential of religious belief on campus as well. 

That’s Seth Kaplan of Johns Hopkins. Kaplan is right that the viewpoint-diversity movement, especially as represented by Heterodox Academy, has been focused on bringing conservative or even centrist ideas into the academic conversation rather than on finding a place for religious views. I think there are two reasons for that. 

Any appeal to religious belief or doctrine as a justification for an intellectual position, or even as an explanatory matrix for cultural phenomena, is effectively ruled out by the academy’s universal commitment to methodological naturalism, whereas politically or socially conservative ideas may be articulated fully within the canons of that naturalism. 
Many scholars who are serious religious believers teach at religious colleges, and those institutions have explicit commitments to certain orthodoxies — real orthodoxies, not metaphorical ones. Heterodox Academy says that “The surest sign that a community suffers from a deficit of viewpoint diversity is the presence of orthodoxy, most readily apparent when members fear shame, ostracism, or any other form of social retaliation for questioning or challenging a commonly held idea.” So obviously HxA is not going to be comfortable with institutions that don’t merely “shame” people for holding the wrong ideas but may actually fire them. 

If indeed members of HxA have these reservations, they are reasonable ones. All meaningful conversations happen within certain structures of constraint, and methodological naturalism has done a pretty good job of providing those structures, and has done so for so long that most academics are not even aware that they are methodological naturalists. Richard Rorty’s famous claim that religion is a conversation-stopper need not be true, but one can see why he thought it was. 

So can anything be done? If there were two good reasons for the discomfort, maybe there are two possible solutions: 

Methodological naturalism is an academic/scholarly component of what Charles Taylor calls living within an “immanent frame,” and, as Taylor also points out, that “frame” is not simple or obvious — not something that simply emerged when religious belief is “subtracted” from human experience — but rather a great achievement, a built structure of constraint. But like all such structures, it simultaneously enables certain conversations and disables others. (This point is best articulated, I think, by Kenneth Burke in his famous essay “Terministic Screens.”) I think it would be intellectually productive for HxA to reflect on the historical origins of its core commitments and the costs that those commitments inevitably incur — even while still maintaining the the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. These are intellectual goods that engagement with religiously-committed scholars can encourage. 
HxA has emphasized viewpoint diversity within institutions, but that’s not the only way to think about these matters. There is value in intellectual diversity between institutions. That is, not all colleges or universities need to have the same intellectual mission — especially in the United States, with its rich history of both private and public universities. It is possible that religious institutions, even if they place constraints on internal intellectual diversity, may contribute to the overall diversity of American academic culture. 

Whether or not I’m right about any of this, it seems to me that these are issues that viewpoint-diversity advocates need to debate. 

American Legothic

(click link for details)

when critique dissolves

From Ross Douthat’s column today:

But perhaps the simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.

This reminds me very much of an argument Paul Kingsnorth makes in his provocative Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist:

We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability’. What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the non-human world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centred piece of politicking, disguised as concern for ‘the planet’. In a very short time – just over a decade – this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced by the president of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and many people in between. The success of environmentalism has been total – at the price of its soul.

“Sustainability,” then, is the magic word that allows the worldwide corporate-scaled environmental movement to become utterly comfortable with transnational capitalism. As Kingsnorth points out, the movement’s single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions allows the energy companies to offer lucrative-for-them “solutions” to carbon-based “problems,” which may well lead to the utter despoiling of places that environmentalists used to care about preserving, even when that meant not sustaining our current levels of consumption. “Motorway through downland: bad. Wind power station on downland: good. Container port wiping out estuary mudflats: bad. Renewable hydro-power barrage wiping out estuary mudflats: good. Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.”

Environmentalism has made the same deal that (per Douthat’s argument) today’s American feminism has made. Both movements were scrupulously attentive to the depredations of transnational capitalism up to the moment when transnational capitalism said “We can give you stuff you want at no additional cost — to you, anyway.” Then the critiques dissolved.

the world of the deal

In Trump’s world, you fit into one of three categories. You may be a mark, you may be leverage, you may be a loser.

Trump wants to make deals, which means he wants to win deals. His understanding of deal-making is that someone fleeces and someone gets fleeced. It is his ambition to be the fleecer.

So you could be his mark, the one he wants to fleece. That’s what the American electorate was in the 2016 election. That’s what Kim Jong Un was recently, which is why Trump didn’t mind flattering him. (As a general rule, if Trump praises you that means he hopes to fleece you.)

Or you could be leverage, which is what the children in the Trump/Sessions detention centers are. They are not human beings, they are tokens or counters to be used to try to get a deal with the current mark, which is Congress.

But if you attempt in any way to impede the deal, or if you refuse to participate in it, or protest it, or even just call it what it is, you are a loser.

In Trump’s world there can be no compassion, no fairness, no justice, no truthtelling, no principles, no standards, no ethics, no convictions, no respect for others, no self-respect, no friends, no allies, no prudence, no thought for the future, no discernment, no wisdom, no religion, no humanity. Only deals. Only marks, leverage, and losers.

tragic humanism

Terry Eagleton:

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

Richard Powers and the third kind of story

An interview with Richard Powers::

The modern human assumption that trees, plants and all other wildlife are “just property” is, to Powers, the root of our much greater species problem. “Every form of mental despair and terror and incapacity in modern life seems to be related in some way to this complete alienation from everything else alive. We’re deeply, existentially lonely. 

“Until it’s exciting and fun and ecstatic to think that everything else has agency and is reciprocally connected we’re going to be terrified and afraid of death, and it’s mastery or nothing.” To that end, Powers hopes his book will be part of the restoration of a tradition that has all but ceased to exist in modern literature. “We are incredibly good at psychological and political dramas, but there’s another kind of drama – between the humans and the non-humans – that disappeared in the late 19th century, once we thought we had dominion over the Earth. Because we won that battle. 

“But now we know we didn’t, actually. And until you resolve that question, how do we live coherently at home on this planet, the other two kinds of stories are luxuries.”

The Overstory is next on my reading list.

more on temporal bandwidth

Two comments about my essay in the Guardian today, both of them regarding points that had to be cut in editing:

1) There’s no sense in which a Hillary Clinton administration could have mean “death” to Christians and conservatives, but, as I’ve argued often, the next time Democrats control the federal government they’ll make life much harder for all Christian institutions. In relation to all this, the question that has arisen in my mind in the past year or is this: If a Trump administration makes life easier for me and my fellow Christians but harder for many of the most vulnerable people in American society, do I not have an obligation to support my neighbor in preference to myself? (I still don’t expect to vote for either of our two major parties, though.) 

2) I have of course known for many years about the great “temporal bandwidth” passage in Gravity’s Rainbow, a book I have taught several times, but the relevance of that passage to our present moment was brought to my attention by my friend Edward Mendelson in this essay. That debt was registered in my own essay but didn’t make it through the editing process. (My excellent editor, Amana Fontanella-Khan, had to curb some of my loquaciousness.) 

Also, I have to admit to taking some pleasure in the fact that in the past 24 hours my writing has been published in the Guardian and the Weekly Standard. 

on the sky island

Earlier this week I drove from my home in Waco to West Texas: first to the little town of Goldthwaite, then South through San Saba, Llano, Fredericksburg, Kerrville; then a long westward haul on I-10. On such a drive you start in mostly flat farm country — corn, soybeans — and move gradually into the Hill Country, with its limestone escarpments and ridges mostly covered in junipers. (People in Texas call those trees cedars but they aren’t.) Gradually the trees become smaller and sparser until, eventually, you find yourself in the Chihuahuan desert.

There’s a nice new rest area on I-10 between Fort Stockton and Balmorhea that looks like this: 

The temperature when I took the photo was 106°. I got back in the car and resumed my journey. I took the Balmorhea exit and started headed up into the Davis Mountains. About half an hour later, here’s what I saw: 

That’s the McDonald Observatory, on Mount Locke. But just look at that grass! — a veritable greensward. And all those trees! (Also, the temperature was 87°.) All this just half an hour from sheer desert. What’s the deal? 

The deal is that the Davis Mountains constitute a sky island. Far above the desert that surrounds them, the mountains, the tallest of which is Mount Livermore at 8200 feet, have their own distinct climate. They get far more rain than the desert does, and as a result support quite different species of flora and fauna. Sometimes those species can evolve in distinctive ways, just as they do on actual islands, because of their isolation from other communities of their kind. 

It’s a fascinating phenomenon — and the transition is really something to experience.