THEN AND NOW A Now and Then Newsletter December 2023
The brutality of October 7th and the Gaza war turned my mind in an unexpected direction. Rather than focusing on the brutality, I have found myself thinking about patterns of thought and language, especially analogies and their effects. A good analogy enlivens and illumines. Recently, however, we have seen analogies used in ways that make things worse, not better. I want to begin this Then and Now Newsletter by looking at two cases in which analogies have been misused. First, Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of a biblical analogy, then the U.S. Supreme Court’s demand for precedents from 18th century America. The Amalekites: NPR reported that not long after the vicious attack of October 7th Prime Minister Netanyahu told his listeners, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” The Prime Minister was drawing an implicit analogy between the conflict with the Palestinians and biblical passages, including 1 Samuel 15.3: ”Now, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy[a] all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” The analogy to the contemporary situation may seem clear, but the implications of the biblical story are complex, as rabbinical and other scholars have long recognized and as Melissa Florer-Bixler pointed out some years ago. And, of course, such passages do not by any means encapsulate the ethical principles of the Hebrew scriptures. But once analogies get into the hands of politicians they seem no longer troubled by subtleties or inaccuracies. Lesson: Beware of politicians bearing analogies. The Supreme Court in Bruen: You don’t have to go to Gaza to find analogies exploited. You can see that in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, a 2022 ruling by the Supreme Court. In its decision, drafted by Clarence Thomas, the Court declared that the government must show that gun regulations are consistent with the nation's “historical tradition.” That has sent lower court judges and lawyers scurrying to find 18th century analogies to modern day restrictions on carrying a weapon. Can’t find an 18th century restriction on openly carrying a gun? Then, the argument goes, there must not be restrictions in today’s very different setting. Here analogies are being used not to justify brutality but to block common sense actions at a time of unprecedented violence. The confusion caused by the ruling may be clarified by a case currently before the court. As Adam Liptak has put it, the Court must now “start to clear up the confusion they created last year by a landmark decision that revolutionized Second Amendment law.” Lesson: Beware jurists demanding analogies. -- In the Blog: I explore some of these issues and others in my blog - https://www.wrobertconnor.com/blog. There I am joined by guest essayists David Derbes (on black holes) and Hunter Rawlings (on alphabets). -- Brendenheim on Analogies: “Through analogy Then becomes Now, but all too often Now reshapes Then in its own image and for its own purposes.” Maurice Brendenheim Confessions II -- Ponderable: “We have forgotten what it means to exist.” S. Kierkegaard. (Some years ago in The GuardianClare Carlisle explored what Kierkegaard meant.) -- Ponderable in a Different Way: Allan Bloom’sThe Closing of the American Mind appeared in 1987 as a salvo in the Culture Wars. He saw most American undergraduate education as “an intellectual wasteland.” Now the culture wars have broken out again, and some observers find Bloom’s approach of renewed interest. Steven Mintz has a provocative, must-read essay in Inside Higher Ed, and Ross Douthat has an equally provocative opinion piece in the New York Times “Why Liberal Academics Need Republican Friends.” Maybe culture wars aren’t such a bad thing after all, since its debates raise questions we all need to confront. Now, however, there’s a new issue, the infusion of corporate modes of thought into academia. Do students see through such “corporatese”? I’m not sure, but Beth Ann Fennelly says Yes, ”faster than a sneeze through a screen door .... So let me suggest that higher education administrators jettison the corporatese.” -- Slipping out of a Headlock at the Met? “We like to keep history as we’ve learned it in a headlock, to make sure it doesn’t shift or change,” begins Holland Cotter reviewing the Met’s Africa and Byzantium exhibition. He’s right but the Greeks not least in the Byzantine period, have always been skillful in moving across the geographical and cultural divides that separate Europe and Asia and Africa. Now, at the Met, we can see the artistic results of moving across the divides we often impose on ourselves through maps. “One of the many — many — benefits of much-maligned “wokeness” has been its message to relax the hold, toss the charts or, better, revise them: explore blanks, rethink. It’s thanks to this more free-breathing approach to history, including art history, that we’re getting a challenger of an exhibition like “Africa & Byzantium” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the beauty-and-rarity scale it’s way up there: a treasure-chest of fragile and resplendent things — painted books, topline textiles, gilt-flecked mosaics — many on a first-time visit to New York from Africa, Asia and Europe.”
Thinking about Skin Color: If you can visit the Met’s Africa and Byzantium exhibition, ask yourself this question and tell me what you think. These works of art clearly show an interest in skin color. Why not? Byzantium, like the Greek and Roman civilizations that preceded it, covered a lot of ground and a wide range of cultures. But test this hypothesis: nowhere in Greek antiquity was skin color viewed as a marker of personal worth. They were curious about the fact that different people had different skin colors, but they did not, as best I can see, ever develop a racial ideology on this basis. Am I right? If so, bigotry based on skin color is a relatively modern phenomenon, and, let’s hope, a short lived one, too. You can test these speculations about race in modern times by prowling Geoffrey Harpham’s website at theoriesofrace.com . -- Limerick of the Month: The limerick is furtive and mean; You must keep her in close quarantine Or she promptly will run To the slums and become Disorderly, drunk, and obscene. Footnote: Limericks value anonymity; that way they can have more fun. But in this case we know the author: Morris Bishop, of whom Louis Untermeyer wrote he "has achieved the almost impossible: he has composed dozens of limericks that are decent but, nevertheless, funny.”
Limerick of the Fortnight: There was a young man from Peru Whose limericks stopped at line two. -- The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of College: 2019 was a continental divide in Americans’ views of higher education. Before that most Americans had a positive view of colleges and universities. After that a majority of Americans no longer believed that college education was having a positive effect on America. The divide, pro and con, largely coincided with a split between Democrats and Republicans, as the Pew Research Center reported. That shift, and that divide, help explain why support for public universities has been so problematic in recent years. We have had a ringside seat on these battles here in North Carolina where “In recent years, North Carolina Republicans, who control the State Legislature, have asserted vast power over the state university system, stamping its assorted boards with allies who have shaped campus personnel decisions, altered research ambitions and influenced the fate of a Confederate statue on the campus in Chapel Hill,” as Julie Bosman describes the ongoing drama which has now resulted in the decision of the Chancellor to leave Chapel Hill and become the President of strife-afflicted Michigan State.“ Now the colleges and universities find themselves on new and slippery terrain, as the Gaza war has its vicious counterpart on American campuses. Leaders who have struggled to encourage free speech on their campuses have been caught flat-footed when arguments about the Gaza war have turned into accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. At Penn the president has resigned. Other heads are likely to roll, especially when anti-Semitic speech and actions alienate long-standing supporters. What will happen after the 2024 election? Unclear but the Wall Street Journal has reported that Donald Trump has promised to take funds from the endowments of private universities to fund on-line courses leading to the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, and “impose new standards on colleges in an effort to defend “the American Tradition,” and much, much more. ---- Therapeutic Tragedy: In a time of strife it sometimes makes sense to step back, way back, to Aeschylus even, whose “tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. I’ve always been amazed by Aeschylus’ play “The Persians.” It was performed only eight years after the major battle that would eventually secure Athenian victory over the Persians, and it was written by a man who fought in that battle. And it is written from the Persian vantage point and elicits sympathy for the Persians, in all their hubris and suffering. It teaches us to be empathetic to all those who suffer, not just those on our own side. From this sort of work, we learn to have a contempt for sadism, for anything that dehumanizes, and to have compassion for the everyday people.” David Brooks “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” -- The Edith Hamilton Way to Ancient Civilization: “How did a retired Latin schoolteacher (Hamilton was 62 when The Greek Way was published), with limited formal education and almost no scholarly credentials, come to be one of the most influential “classicists” of the 20th century?“ That’s how Emily Wilson, writing in the Nation, phrases the core question behind Victoria Housman’s new biography American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton. Well phrased, but to this list of Hamilton’s disabilities should we not add “American”? For she was writing at a time when the British and the Germans dominated discussion of the classics. For an American to trespass on this territory was bold, presumptuous, justifiable only if she saw those classics in a distinctly American way. Hence, the first word in the title of Housman’s biography, American. But, what was that American perspective? Not, as is often suggested, an emphasis on Western Civilization. That problematic phrase was not in the title of The Greek Way when it first appeared in 1930. Could it be that she caught on to something that British and continental scholars had missed – that these texts could speak to everyone, if they were allowed to do so? And perhaps one could go further and recognize their liberating and democratizing power, if we allow them to assert it. -- Best Title for a Book: “What Is The Name of This Book?” by Raymond Smullyan . The subtitle is good, too: The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles. -- Reception Theory? “When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took -- the same as me!
“The market-girls an' fishermen, The shepherds an' the sailors, too, They 'eard old songs turn up again, But kep' it quiet -- same as you!
“They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed. They didn't tell, nor make a fuss, But winked at 'Omer down the road, An' 'e winked back -- the same as us!” Rudyard Kipling Introduction to the Barrack Room Ballads -- Two Comments on Ancient and Modern: “The ancient Greeks teach one to be modern.” A. E. Stallings. -- “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.“ Paul Valery: -- Word of the Month: Tattoo (noun and verb): You’re right; there are more tattoos around these days. 32% of American adults report having one or more tattoos, according to the Pew Research Center. What’s behind it? Dunno: Older white males with a graduate degree are pathetically underrepresented among the ranks of the tattooed. But we can look back and find that the Polynesian word came to Britain in 1769 when Captain Cook reported on his voyages. Soon sailors and other raucous types were getting tattooed and the word became part of everyday speech. Europeans, however, were getting tattooed long before the word began circulating. This was especially true of pilgrims to the Holy Land, such as “Jean de Thévenot who was knighted as a chevalier in the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulcher in 1658 on his return to France. At a time of hostilities with Spain he left the Holy Land without the documents that would have helped him gain safe passage home, but by “getting marks put upon our arms, as all pilgrims commonly do,” he could show he was really a pilgrim. For the full story see E. Marie-Armelle Beaulieu “The Seal on Your Arm.” -- Ponderable on Tattoos: “One must treat one’s body as if it were a book borrowed from a lending library - one should enjoy it as fully as possible, but when the time comes return it in as good condition as possible, allowing, of course, for normal wear and tear, and the occasional mishap, but without dog earing, underlinings or exclamations in the margins.” Maurise Brendenheim Confessions II-- -- Etymology of the Month: weird (adj.) “c. 1400, ‘having power to control fate,’ from wierd (n.), from Old English wyrd "fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates,’ literally ‘that which comes,’ from Proto-Germanic *wurthiz ....The sense of "uncanny, supernatural" developed from Middle English use of weird sisters for the three Fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the goddesses who controlled human destiny. They were portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in Macbeth.” Etymonline. The mythic power of three sisters is deeply rooted. Consider the ancient antecedents of these weird sisters, the three Fates of Greek myth, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, and the three Parcae, “Sparers” of the Romans.
Jargon of the Month: Intersectionality (noun) “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.... through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us.” Oxford Languages, a.k.a. Google Dictionary. How nice! But when the concept is misapplied it can blur issues of personal responsibility and moral judgment. David Brooks scorns it as one of the paradigms that have fallen victim to the Israeli-Hamas war since it implies “It’s not necessary to know about the particular facts about any global conflict, because of intersectionality: All struggles are part of the same struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed.” -- Best wishes for the holidays and many thanks for ideas, leads and links go to: David Derbes Geoff Harpham Judith Hallett Josiah Hatch Jean Houston Rick McKim Gary Pence Catherine Petrosky Brent Shaw And, as always, to Callie Connor -- STOP PRESS: Just out in the December 3rd Atlantic: “What Happens When a Poor State Guts Its Public University?” by Michael Powell. It’s West Virginia, of course, but others may follow suite.