"Tectonic" i's no hyperbole, as you can see from a chart in James Engell's essay "Humanists All" in the January /  February issue of the Harvard Magazine​  The chart, and much more is discussed in my new Then and Now Newsletter.  Here's the Newsletter text (minus the chart, for technical reasons):
 
MARCH 2023 NEWSLETTER
THE THEN AND NOW NEWSLETER
MARCH 2023 (almost )
A Tectonic Shift:
      Nathan Heller’s essay “The End of the English Major”  in The New Yorker .made me wonder if the Humanities in general were reaching the end of their rope.  That question was answer may be contained in a chart in James Engell’s
essay “Humanists All!” in the January / February 2023 issue of the Hravrd Magazine.
 
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/01/features-forum-humanists
 
T-he chart shows the STEM disciplines all gaining majors and the nHumanities all losing them. -
Scroll down to see the chart
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Quotable and Ponderable:
““The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter ,,, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.” “
 
 Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the Harvard English department.
Comment:    The allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne is revealing.   At Bowdoin College, we  are told, he “read widely and received solid instruction in English composition and the classics, particularly in Latin.” The same could probably be said of his classmates including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future U.S. President, Franklin Pierce.  They all knew how to find the  subject and the  verb;  And the time gap of a century or two was for them nothing when  compared to the two millennia or more.that they took in stride   
(Quite a class ’25! I wonder if 2025 will match it.)
We have eliminated that old-time education without finding a substitute for it   No wonder students feel lost.

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The Brave New World of English:
      Another shift is taking place within some disciplines, - not only from past to present, but also , from text to margin. An egregious example is called out in my  blog post of March 28th.
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The Death of the Humanities?
Tectonic shifts do not of ten reverse themselves,  But remember Mark Twain’s comment when a newspaper published an obituary of him-
the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.“. 
Heller’s article in The New Yorker  contains several examples on institutions where the English major is surviving, maybe even flourishing.   (UC-Berkeley;s English department  seems to be one.)  Success stories may be easier to find in other fields. including Classics. .Jane Chaplin provides some guidance from her perch at Middlebury College:
      “”At Middlebury, the ‘crisis’ in Humanities is really a crisis of English majors, and to a lesser extent of American Studies, History, and modern language majors.  Enrollments and majors in Classics have not declined over the past 20 years; in fact enrollments are slightly up (in keeping with a growth in the overall number of students).  Enrollments in Religion, Philosophy, and Art History have also remained consistent.  The co-directors of the Humanities here have made a big push in the direction of digital humanities and humanities in action; it would be nice also to see us embrace what we can really offer – service courses in reading and writing.
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Can Success Stories Be Generalized?
     
The American Council of Learned Societies, under the leadership of Joy Connelly, is trying out a promising approach, “developing a survey of success stories – examples of sustainable approaches to undergraduate teaching and research that enable humanistic study to flourish. These stories make the strongest arguments for the value of humanistic knowledge “  That’s the only initiative that I knowe of in this area.
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Quotable (and Pondrqable,  oo):
“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’” 
            G.K. Chesterton (Thanks to Ros Douthatr).
 
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Are Majors the Right Metric?
      It depends on your goals.  If the goal is to produce skilled workers, including Ph.D.’s,, then the number of B.A. majors field by field is a helpful metric. . But if the goal is to help students clarify their values, think and write more clearly, argue cogently, and bring a fresh perspective to bear on perennial problems, then the number of majors is only a small part of the story.  
      We need better metrics, specifically ones that recognize where students are developing capactoes that will enrich their lives and their contrubutions to society.
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The War of the Words:
      What’s happening to our language? An overview in The Economist sketches some of what’s going on. (Thanks to Jane Chaplin for providing the link.)
      The Associated Press through its stylebook joined the War of the Words recently, as Nicholas Kristof has reported. The AP to;d its writers ““We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizlng ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.””
The French?  In response the French Embassy in Washington proposed renaming itself “The Embassy of Frenchness.”
The absurdity rolls on . Good! Such language tinkering usually gets so absurd that it falls on its face.  The sooner the better since the abuse of language can lead to the abuse of friends, colleagues and fellow citizens. Aux armes, cityoens!
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Nietzsche on art (and Riddles)
: "If we think of the original germs of the artistic sense and ask ourselves
what different kinds of pleasure are evoked by the firstlings of art,
for example among savage peoples, we discover first of all the
pleasure of understanding what another person means; here art is a
kind of solving of a riddle that procures for the solver enjoyment of
his own quick perspicuity."
No 119 in the second volume of Human, All-Too Human.  Thanks toClaude Cernuschi who pointed me to this passage reminding me that Nietzsche is not saying that art is itself a riddle but that “our interpretation of art is like solving a riddle, which generates self-congratulatory pleasure.”.
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Word of the Month:  
ghost (vb.):: …
The dictionary says under use 2 of the verb ghost: ”the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.”
 This usage has been around for a long time, but has steadily increased since the 1950s. Ghosting is nasty enough in a face-to-face society, but is more common, and more virulent, in  an age dominated by social media, when one no longer has to look someone in the eye.    The practice very likely exacerbates the current mental health pandemic among adolescents and young adults.
How to deal with it? . A few suggestions can be found in  in  “When People Ghost - and How to Get Over it.”  Other ideas are welcome
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Congratulations to Carolyn Walker Bynum  on being awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Catholic Historical Association.  I hope this results in much happy  feastihgfr the author of Holy Feasts and Holy Fasts  
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News from New College
      The February 29th meeting of the newly appointed  Board of Trustees at New College in the Florida state university system showed their priorities.  They abolish the programs of the college’s  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office..  See the coverage  on CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/us/new-college-florida-board-meeting-reaj/index.html   Prefer the news in print? Here it is.
      The next engagement in the ongoing  Florida higher education battles is House Bill 999 in the Florida legislature.  It’s important because by curtailing the autonomy of state funded  universities it may provide a model for other state legislatures to adopt.
Here’s the text of the bill., and here’s  a statement by the American Historical Association   endorsed by many academic oroganizations. (Thanks to Judith Hallett for calling my attention to it.
 
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A Strange Lenten Abstinence:
No cookie at lunch? No pre-prandial potation?  Not challenging enough.  I decided to give up politics for Lent. No Tr*np, no St*my, no p*lls, no speculation about 2*24.. And, beginning right now, no Fl*r*d*..
      I’ll report on some surprising results in the next Then and Now Newsletter.
 
Generative Artificial Intelligence
”We have passed the point where people argue whether Generative AI (ChatGPT, BARD) are more than a curiosity, and start focusing instead on what they do best, and where they are likely to mislead.  A discussion in Axios is a good starting point. Don’t be surprised if some of the discussion sounds like Plato’s distinction  between the plausible (doxa) and the real.  So far it seems that Generative AI is not very good at distinguishing plausible fictions from true facts.  If so, it will exacerbate an already wide-spread problem in our political culture. .
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Palindrome from Paradise:
      “Madam, I’m Adam.”
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College: What It Was, Is and Should Be:
      A second edition of Andrew Delbanco’s book of that that title mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all.  
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Gold Medal: New Philology Award:
      It’s the job of Philology, as I see it, to blow the whistle on abuses of our language, but also to commend those who use it in fresh vigorous ways to illumine problems obscured by jargon. Example: ,my eyes glaze over when I hear once again about the “serious consequences that will result if global temperatures rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels “.  German Lopez has called attention to  Katherine Hayhoe’s fresh way of presenting the same fact:, a comparison of climate change to a fever: Think about how much worse you feel when you run a fever of 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit, (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. That fever is the equivalent of what the whole planet will soon be experiencing.
      Nice. If I had a gold medal I’d give it to Prof. Hayhow.
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--Ponderable:
“The dead are better than the living in nourishing the soul. After all, they’ve been through it all, so what they leave behind, whether fleeting memories or enduring masterpieces, has already passed one test.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
 
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Beyond the Riddle:
      Is the Zen Koan just a step beyond the riddle?  Try this one”
There was a Japanese Zen master named Nan-in who lived during the Meiji era (1868-1912). During his days as a teacher, he was visited by a university professor curious about Zen.
Being polite, Nan-in served the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but Nan-in kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
       The Master’s response will be in next month’s Newsletter. .
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Quotable:
“Men are divided into two great classes: those who predominantly live in hopes and those who predominantly live in recollection. Both have a wrong relation to time.  The healthy individual lives at once both in hope and in recollection, and only thereby does his life acquire true and substantial continuity.”
 
Richard Moran “Notes of Living in Time.”  following Judge William, ‘On the Aesthetic Validity of Marriage,’” who was following Soren Kierkegaard,
 
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A Problem with Race:
“ After all this work, clarity on the basic question of what a race was still lay a long way off, even farther away than it had been before the work had begun.  There was, for starters, no consensus on the number of races, with authorities arguing for numbers ranging from one (the human) to sixty-three.  At one time or another, Franks, Gauls, Caucasians, Americans, Lapps, Celts, Negroes, Border-Scots, Nordics, Irish, Jews, Scythians, Tartars, Mongols, Hottentots, Malays, Slavs, Yankees, and Europeans had been described as separate races.  
 “Nobody knew for certain how many races there were because there was no agreement on what race was, or even where it was.  What was the site of race?  Was it in the skin, hair, bones, blood, culture, language, geography, brains, skulls (shape or volume), teeth, souls, smell, or semen?  All these possibilities had been proposed by someone or other, but by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly understood that the sheer number of them made it impossible to take any of them seriously. “
Geoffrey Harpham in a lecture given at Tulane University.
 
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 Help Wanted:
       Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, etymologies, neologisms, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
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Inflict it on the Innocent and the Vulnerable:
 Please forward this Then & Now Newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it. If they’d like to subscribe, let me know at wrconnor1@gmail.com. (You can unsubscribe there, too.)
Thanks!
Bob Connor
 

Here are the entry level courses in English at one well respected American  private university.  What do you think is going on?
​ ENG 1000  SUPPLEMENTAL WRITING WORKSHOP
 ENG 1100  WRITING: ARGUMENT AND INQUIRY
 ENG 1220  FAIRY TALES IN LITERATURE AND FILM
 ENG 1221  CRIME FICTION
 ENG 1223  DYSTOPIAN FICTIONS
 ENG 1224  THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
 
 ENG 1225  ECODISASTER
 ENG 1226  WAR & WRITING
 ENG 1227  SCIENCE FICTION
 ENG 1228 MENTAL ILLNESS IN LITERATURE
 ENG 1229  WRITING LIFE
 ENG 1231  LITERATURE OF TERROR & SUPERNATURAL
 ENG 1232  LITERATURE ON SCREEN
 ENG 123 3 LITERATURE FROM THE MARGINS
 ENG 1234  POP FICTION
 ENG 1235  CULT CLASSICS, LITERARY TRASH
 ENG 1236  BANNED BOOKS
 

​Can a “Classical Liberal Education” Shape  the 2024 Presidential Race?:
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hopes so. and he’s found a promising way to politicize the phrase.   He has packed the Board of New College, the smallest institution (around 600 undergraduates) in Florida’s public university system.  It’s a school with a reputation as liberal, leftist, progressive-leaning – choose your word.  The new board in turn has fired the president, threatened the tenure rights of faculty, and indicated it hopes to remodel the institution along the lines of Hillsdale College, a  small (1500 undergraduates),  avowedly conservative and “Christian” institution based in Michigan.  New College, they say,  will thereby offer a “genuinely classical liberal education.”  And Florida, will take another step toward becoming, in the Governor’s phrase, “the place where woke goes to die.”  
Background reading: For a blow-by-blow view of the January meeting of the new Board at New College see this account by Sophia Brown in The Catalyst (the student newspaper at New College).  For the views of Matthew Spalding, one of the newly appointed trustees at New College, see this intervie in The Collegian (the student newspaper at Hillsdale).  Dan Tompkins calls our attention to the possibility that this model for higher education will be adopted  by other states.  .  Let us know what happens in your state.
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If so much is riding on the Hillsdale model, let’s take a closer look at the institution.
First, the students. A friend who has lectured there tells me he found the students serious and engaged.  His audience was probably composed of somewhat more men than women (53%:to 47% overall).  Here the data pretty much give out: since Hillsdale accepts no government funding, it is not legally required to report on the diversity of its student body.  Nonetheless, that is an important part of the picture, since students learn from one another.  Why not let us know? 
There is one more bit of data, an important one since students vote with their feet. The graduation rate is 78%, mediocre for a private liberal arts college.
What sort of education are these students getting?  Here’s how Hillsdale structures its undergraduate education.  The college has a real curriculum, not a smorgasbord, as in so many places these days. Its core is Western Civilization, overwhelmingly so. The Greek and Latin classics are well represented, with a departmental faculty of six members, who were trained at major universities and publish in respected journals.  None, as best I could tell, is a real ideologue. I don’t see comparable strength or interest in other civilizations that are already profoundly affecting our future.  Hillsdale reminds me very much of liberal arts colleges of the 1950s, but in the intervening decades things have happened, not least a belated but genuine national effort to come to terms with race, gender, and globalization..  Governor DeSantis knows what a good education is; he graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2001 and from Harvard Law School in 2005. 
Litmus test: Is Hillsdale the sort of place  you (or Governor DeSantis) would recommend to a college-bound teenager in your own family?  .If not, do you think it wise for the public university system in your state to adopts the Hillsdale as a model?  
The issue, of course, is more political than educational. If you were running for elective office, you might find it useful to include a “classical liberal education” as part of your campaign, especially if it lacked well thought out policy ideas.
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The Challenge and the Opportunity: :
       With “a classical liberal education,” in the spotlight those of us who profess the Classics - whether inside or outside academia, should steal the phrase right back, and seize the opportunity to reinvigorate classical education.  But, that requires great clarity about what a classical liberal education means in today’s setting.  Let me hear from you, readers, and I will try to sum up what I am hearing in the March Then & Now Newsletter – along with some fulminations of my own.  .
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 Who Said Virtue Was a Road to Happiness?
The January Newsletter challenged readers to identify the author of this statement:
“There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness  …”
No one guessed it was George Washington in his Inaugural Address (1789).  More important: Does anyone understand happiness that way today, that is, linking it to “virtue”?  If not, are we missing something?”
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Word of the Month:
       Neuroplasticity: In layman’s terms: The ability of the brain to reprogram itself.  We used to be told that the brain stopped growing at 18 or 21 or so. but now scientists tell us it keeps growing, maybe even into old age. 
       Much of the research that has been done on neuroplasticity concerns the ability of the brain to circumvent damage it incurs.  But there is also evidence that an undamaged brain can gain resilience and richness through certain practices; meditation,  practice of the visual arts contribute over time to the growth of the brain.  Apart from one tantalizing article on Chaucer I have found very little  research on whether serious engagement with language and literature has a similar effect, but surely that’s a question that the New Philology wants answered.
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Quotable:
“[We enjoy]  more free time than ever before; but instead of educating ourselves, we entertain ourselves to death.“
Orin Woodward
Without the Humanities What do we lose?
       James Engell answers, “A Lot,” in “Humanists All,” Harvard Magazine February 2023. Thanks to Jean Houston for calling this essay to my attention.
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SCORPIO:
       The perilous art of acronyms is discussed in “Two Thoughts about the Unthinkable Murder in Memphis,” in my blog of January 30th.  
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Towards a New Philology:
Old Philology rarely raised her nose from the text; but now, reincarnated as the New Philology she knows her job description includes blowing the whistle whenever language gets censored or otherwise abused.
Of late we’ve been experiencing a cascade of well-intentioned efforts to purge our language of words and expressions that might be deemed hurtful or offensive   . Should Philology blow her whistle on any of these? 
 
-The American Medical Association:  Their Guide to Language, Narrative and  Concepts, provides a long list of words to avoid when physicians and patients talk.
- A group at Stanford University  tried something very similar.  
 

• Now Roald Dahl’s works are being reworded. . The Telegraph reports that several hundred words in his books for children  have been changed to to make the books more “inclusive.” Among the changes is apparently the removal of “mother and father,”  (family is the correct word).  This has caused a row in Parliament and raised the question of where to stop rewriting: novels for teen agers, young adults, favorite works of vulnerable old folks – Dickens? :Tom Jones?  Shakespeare?  The goal, after all,  is to make sure that readers find themselves “represented” in the texts they read.  That leaves plenty of room for rewriting, guided by  a group that calls itself Inclusive Minds. .

What Did J.K Rowling Do Wrong?
Insults, boycotts, and death threat. against J. K Rowling, famed for the Harry Potter series, ,provoke two kinds of reactions: the feeling that  she must have said something nasty about transgendered people to provoke such hostility, and, on the other side, people, philologists really, who ask what she actually said.. A good starting point for the inquiry is the essay by Pamela  Paul “In Defense of J.K. Rowling” in the New York Times of February 16th. 
       A brown paper bag to the rescue!  The Stanford code mentioned above may inadvertently provide a way to avoid  much nonsense. :  When the code condemned “brown bag lunch” for its alleged racism, the whole edifice came tumbling down.  The University repudiated the code and people began to laugh at its absurdity.  Perhaps throughout the English speaking world we are approaching a reductio ad absurdum.
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The Other Side of the New Philology:
       Blowing the whistle on the abuse of language, whether it comes from the left or the right, is one side of the philologist’s new job description.  The other is more fun, asking “What do Typos, Puns, Riddles and Palindromes Have in Common?”  Let’s begin with palindromes.
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A Palindromic Short Story set in a Doctor’s Office:
Thanks to Mark Saltveit for telling us about Peter Hilton who entered this palindrome in a contest among Bletchley Park code breakers during World War II: .
"Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."
Hilton came up with that without paper, pen or pencil; he had the gift of simply visualizing the words in his head, lying back on his bed -- a skill that obviously helped him break the Nazi codes, as well as leading to an illustrious career as a geometer.
Here's a link to Mark’s article on the topic.
.      Question: Hilton’s palindrome is virtually a short story. Are there any limits, practical or theoretical, on the scale of a palindrome?  It can morph into Ring Composition (arranging a story in A B C C B A order).  I called attention to this way of writing  in the appendices to my Thucydides, but the pattern is all over classical literature. 
On my To Read list:  Mary Douglas’ work on ring composition: Thinking in Circles ..
       One more step? What about  Macbeth?  Is it a palindrome on steroids? Consider how the Witches’ scene at the outset comes back in Act V when “Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane.”
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A Riddle of Alexander the Great, still unsolved:
“The story is told that Alexander the Great at one of his banquets proposed the riddle, 'What is that which did not come last year, has not come this year, and will not come next year?' The answer suggested by one of his officers was 'Our arrears of pay', which' is said to have procured the speaker not only his arrears but an increment as well. “
E. S, Forster
Clever all around, BUT what solution was Alexander expecting when he posed the riddle?  What’s your solution to this riddle?
Palindrome:
       I thought “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama” was as good as palindroms get, but ,then my attention was called to this Latin one: anonymous verse found in a poetry textbook called Tractatus de Versibus by Christanus Campililiensis,
 
Arte mala mere vidi vere mala metra.
which Bill Berg translated as “I've seen verses of consummately bad art, truly bad."
 
Your Favorite Typo, please:
Can you top this one? A respectable journal I know left the letter L out of “public affairs.”
 
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Squares:
Move over palindromes, try squares:
 
The Most famous of squares is the Latin: construct evoking Publius Vergilius Maro and the long journey Venus’ son, Aeneas, took before he reached the shore of what would eventually become Rome:
AMOR
MARO
ORAM
ROMA
Can you come up with a four letter square that works in English? I can only do a mediocre three letter one.  Please help.
 
Summing Up: Riddles, palindromes, squares, even typographical errors teach us to   feel the texture of language, hence they are not to be deplored but enjoyed by Philology and her devotees. The pleasure  involves savoring individual words and phrases, rolling them around in your mouth as if tasting that bottle of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild 1959 which you tucked away in years ago, forgot about and only recently rediscovered.  Every word should be like tasting a sip of a $7,000 wine.
Don’t be put off by the price; it’s not the most expensive wine in the world
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Big Bad Bog Bodiess::
       More discoveries  have now been published about the Bog People, as reported by the New York Times.  The study traces  bodies buried in bogs in northern Europe many of whom were apparently murdered
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You’ve Heard them, Now Hold a Connor Classical Guitar in Your Hands: Look here!
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Drinking Games,  Ancient Cottabus:
       Heather Sharpe, an associate professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, has carefully recreated the ancient drinking game called kottabos-in Greek.  She played it, however, with diluted grape juice, not that Chateau Lafitte.  Here’s how it’s done. 
 
Concerned about Democracy?  Want a glimpse into a Harvard Classroom?  Try Danielle Allen’s Democracy Renovation Newsletter.
 
Ponderables:
“We don’t need a metaphor to tell us the soul needs nourishment; we need a metaphor to help us  recognize what it is that will do the nourishing.”
Maurice Brendenheim Confessions
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“No one can take this source of happiness from them. It is theirs so long as they live and continue to choose it. It does not depend on anyone else’s judgment or approval, and it does not require a long life or a string of achievements.” 
Paul   Woodruff, Living toward Virtue “
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The Happiness Series Continued:
“And Pascal captures something important too in how the incessant anticipation and preparation to be happy can tend to make happiness itself unreachable.  But he is wrong to see our various attachments to the past and to the future as examples of ‘wandering in times which are not ours’, for they all belong to us and we belong to all of them equally.”
Richard Moran
 
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January Riddle Solved at Last:
       “What goes up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?”  Answer: An umbrella. --
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Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, squares, neologisms, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
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Do you have any friends? If so, please forward this Then & Now Newsletter and ask if they’d like to be on the mailing list. Then, just send their addresses to wrconnor1@gmail.com. (You can unsubscribe there, too.)
Thanks!
Bob Connor 

​       Scholars have been troubled by a passage in which Thucydides observes that during the Peloponnesian War
Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague. All this came upon them with the late war. (1.23.3):
What do earthquakes, and eclipses have to do with the actual military operations of the war, these scholars wonder.  .  Did Thucydides mention all these disasters just to magnify the significance of his subject matter, the war itself? Or , as some have suggested, did he here let slip an otherwise  suppressed superstition or religiosity, a feeling that the war  might have been shaped by the gods?
       Ask the Syrians. 
They’ve been through it all under the tyrannical regime of Assad– war, Covid, cholera, hunger, and now a devastating  earthquake.  They would say, I believe,, that you don’t understand any one of these disasters if you don’t  understand their interconnection, the cumulative psychological toll they exact from anyone caught in the violence.  If your goal as a writer is  to  explore  human suffering, pathos, and what it does to human beings, then you have  to imagine the totality of the experience. 
The Syrians know all that, first hand.
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My wife and I travelled in Syria before the tyranny of Assad.  The experience was enriching in many ways and the people we met were consistently kind to us,. Won’t you join s in supporting the hospitals and other medical service provided by Syrian American Medical Services–They are doing good work under extreme circumstances. Don’t worry:  they are not likely to bother you with a barrage of electronic solicitations; they don’t do  very sophisticated fund raising- they just do the work.
Address:
 Syrian American Medical Society Foundation
PO Box 34115                                           
Washington, DC  20043              
 

​The Pope’s official title is pontifex maximus, “the greatest bridge builder.”  Not all who have held that office have  taken that etymology seriously.  Now, beginning this Friday, as Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury travel together in misery-filled South Sudan, they will find plenty of bridges to start building together.

​   “Scorpion”  as a Name for a Police Squad:
Naming a special police unit ‘Scorpion” did not cause Tyre Nichols’ death, but it should have been a warning to those setting up that unit.  Scorpions are not choosey about who gets hit.  These poisonous critters will bite the hand that feeds them, make no mistake about it, and a clever acronym, “Street Crime Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods” should not have obscured the perils that lay ahead. Scorpions are asunpredictable as they are poisonous. Watch out.
    Even in a well-intentioned plan the rectification of language matters
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How Many Does It Take to Make a Mob?  
      In a mob each participant eggs the other on to do things they would not do individually.  At some point mob psychology kicks in.  So, how many does it take to make a mob? I’d usually guess in the dozens, if not in the hundreds, but maybe five is quite enough.

Here's the January 2023 edition of  my Newsletter. I hope you like it. If so, send me an email and  I'll put you on the subscription list.
-
 Breaking News:   There’s some movement for the return of the Parthenon marbles from Britain to Greece.  Here’s some background:
Vatican Sends Its Parthenon Marbles Back to Greece
   The Vatican is restoring a few pieces of sculpture from the Parthenon. including a rather fine male head.  You can see it and get the story here.  ,
-  This surely increases the pressure on Britain to do the same -- big time. . If the Vatican can do the right thing, why can’t the British Museum?
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The Color of the Classics:
In the late 1930s, British Museum masons “skinned” some of the Elgin marbles, that is, in an ill-judged cleaning operation much of the patina on these Parthenon sculptures was literally scraped away with wire brushes, copper chisels and coarse carborundum. The idea was to scrub off the rich, honey-hued surface to make it conform to then dominant views of classical beauty.  Now  efforts are being made to manufacture highly accurate replicas of the marbles to which “some degree of color” will be added to “immunize [them] somewhat from academic criticism,” as reported in a New York Times  article, “The Robot Guerilla Campaign to Restore the Elgin Marbles.”
   Aesthetic ideas change over time, sometimes for the better.  Now both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston have changed the installations of their classical collections to make it easier to recognize the bright, to our eyes maybe garish, palette of ancient Greek art.
But there’s a story museum curators may be less eager to tell – the deliberate removal, , of traces of color on many works of art including Byzantine ivories.  That story is told in Carolyn Connor’s article “Ivories and Steatites“ in the recent Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture.
Hippocrates to museum curators: First, Do No Harm!”
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Please think with me about color as a metaphor for other sensory aspects of ancient civilizations that run counter to our social, political or ethical predilections.  What are we consciously or unconsciously scrubbing away?
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Stolen Scythian Gold, and much, much more.
      Russian forces have systematically looted Ukrainian museums and other collections despite the fact that both Russia and Ukraine are signatories to a 1954 Hague “Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property i the Event of Armed Conflict.”  It clearly applies to art objects looted in war. When a settlement to the Ukraine war is finally negotiated, we must all insist on the return of these objects.
Quotable:  
“ … any damage to cultural property, irrespective of the people it belongs to, is  damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity, because every people contributes to the world’s culture.” Preamble to the Hague Convention just mentioned
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“Liberty” in a Gun Magazine and on Campus: -
plus
Glib Bilge
are recent blogposts at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog .
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A New Philology?
   These blog posts and other work I’ve been doing have led me to start thinking about the need for a New Philology. one that cherishes the richness of language but blows the whistle on those who misuse it for political or other gain.
   Credo: language shapes thought and thought shapes action.
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Milman Parry:
The story of the revolution in our understanding of the Homeric poems remains one of the great tales of 20th century classical scholarship.  Robert Kanigel adroitly retells the story in a brief article in a recent Harvard Magazine.  (Thanks to Jean Houston for calling it to my attention.)
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In Case You Missed It:
   “The Key to Success in College is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned “ by Jonathan Malesic can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html
Pass it on!
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Oral exams in undergraduate courses? 
They work, says Molly  Worthen in “If It Was Good Enough for Socrates, It’s Good Enough for Sophomores.”
Examination viva voce may be the best antidote we have to the burgeoning capacity of Artificial Intelligence to produce essays, research papers - and even haikus.
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AI is not coming; It’s Here:
I made a probe and it fizzled- see “What will Artificial Intelligence Do For (or To) Us?“  (blog post of December 17 2022), but there’s no doubt it will change things throughout society – for the better, if we are smart enough t use it right.
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Congratulations to Greg Hays whose translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations was number one just before Christmas on Amazon’s list of books on Greek and Roman Philosophy.  Santa was choosing well.
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And Congratulations to American historian Bill Leuchtenburg on his 100th birthday.
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Four and Twenty Bronze Statues Mired in a Spring:
In case you missed this extraordinary find, check it out here:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/03/1138904735/italy-ancient-bronze-statues-discovery-tuscany  Thanks to Kate Faherty for alerting me to this story.
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A palindrome from Alexander Nehamas:
Νίψον ανομήματα μή μόναν όψιν.
“Wash your transgressions, not just your face.”  Can you top that?
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Solved!  The Riddle in the last Then & Now Newsletter:
   The riddle was:
 “ Alive my braying voice could drive a man to tears;
Dead my knobbly bones will bring pleasure to your ears.
What am I?”
First to report a solution to the  riddle was  David Konstan, who proposes “an ass,” whose  bones are knuckle bones.“  Or were they made into a recorder, an aulos? 
One of our  riddles was  solved by a 13 year old granddaughter of David McCullough, reminding him of a riddle from childhood: “What goes up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?” (Answer in next Then &No Newsletter)
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More on the Rectification of Language Series, a.k.a. Getting Words Right and Getting the Right Word:
Jean Houston called my attention to this report, “The ‘Closer” who Finds the Right Words When Climate Talks Hit a Wall.”
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Potemkin’s Bones and Putin’s Surname – two attempts to get at the psychology behind Russia’s actions.  Both are in my blog: scroll down at https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog
 
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Useful Jargon of the Month: “Collective Efficacy.”  The negative sense is powerful: as social institutions fail, distrust and violence result. But is the opposite also the case?
Check out: “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.“
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Gross National Happiness: Bhutan has adopted an index   to measure happiness among its people and to develop policies to increase it.  It may be working!   The BBC explores the  setting, while  Sean O’Connell and others at UC-Berkeley take a look at the evidence here..
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Ponderable:-
“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Also Ponderable:
“Spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. If the coin is not counterfeit, it will be made of unalloyed joy.” Maurice Brendenheim )
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Useful Jargon of the Month:
entrainment
The social sciences borrowed it from biology, and now no one has a monopoly on its use, for example, “The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number of hours we have in a day. “ Jenny Odell.
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“Searching Friction:  
It’s always fun to peek into the classroom of a talented teacher.  In Henry Petroski’s  “The Push and Pull of Friction,” Ameican Scientist  November – December 2022, you can watch aspiring engineers still struggling with Newton’s Laws.
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What Is a Classic, anyhow?
   C.A Sainte-Beuve asked that question in 1857, T.S. Eliot in 1944, and J.M. Coetzee in 2002.  James Tatum trac es the question back to Fronto and Aulus Gellius, and has a surprising answer of his own in “What Was a Classic?” in Classical World 114,1.
 
And here’s a palindrome in honor of that irrepressible Latinist Jim Tatum:  
Tatum non mutat.
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Quiz in the Happiness Series:
 
“There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”
Guess who said that? Send your answers to me at wrconnor1@mail.com and tell me whether you agree or not.  Answer in the February Then & Now Newsletter.
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Help Wanted:
Please send me your favorite palindrome, riddles, neologisms or nominee for Word of the Month, and links to articles you think other readers might enjoy.
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Do you have any friends? If so, give them a subscription to Then & Now  a now and then newsletter. Just send me their email address.
Thanks!
Contact: wrconnor1@gmai.com
 
Bob Connor 

​… Waiting my turn in the barbershop I thumbed through the magazines until I got stopped short by Guns and Ammo. There I came across a full-page ad headed “Defending Liberty since 1844.” The NRA? Nope - Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale Michigan.
     Why, I wondered, would a college pay for a full-page ad in a gun magazine?  Does it help attract students?   Donors?  Or is this evangelical college using the word to fire a shot across the bow of the competition. the Fallwells’ Liberty University in Virginia?
     Maybe all of the above plus a grander strategy,  as is now becoming evident in Florida   Michelle Goldberg points out in “DeSantis Allies Plot the Hostile Takeover of a Liberal College,“   Hillsdale is being held up as a model for restructuring liberal-leaning New College into a genuinely conservative institution.  That part of the Hillsdale story can be found here.
    But what about the word “liberty” itself?  In these contexts it sounds as if it is being exploited by being made into a slogan for one political position, rather than recognized as a goal all Americans value, not least when we argue how best to attain it.
    OK, philologists: Is it not our job to help reclaim such words, or at least to blow the whistle when they are abducted – in this case at gun point.
 

​      Over the last generation or so scholars have become increasingly aware that language is not just the way people talk; it’s a way of shaping the mind for action.  We can call that insight the New Philology, and put it to work in understanding what’s been happening in Washington..
    In his 1981 inaugural address Ronald Regan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. “    It was cute, cleverly phrased and memorable, but no one  took it literally – until recently.  It was just talk.
     A year ago, though, a group who took this glib bilge  quite literally decided to storm the Capitol. Now inside the Capitol a small but fanatical group seems to be applying it to the selection of a Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Some of them are explicit about their motives; “Tear it down,” they say.  Why not, if government is really the problem?
     The moral of this story is clear: Better watch what you say, and if you detect someone else spewing glib bilge call it out before it turns into
action.