One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our two-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------

* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships

I should know better than to write about reviews of books rather than the books themselves, but I've been lazy lately, and since this review irritated me enough to start me writing, I'll go with it.  Remember, though, that I haven't yet read the book in question, and that I'm writing about the review.

So I happened on this review at the Guardian's website, of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm, published in December by Oxford University Press.  My beef is primarily with the reviewer, Peter Conrad, who writes as if he's never read a book about gay history before.  While that's true of many people, including gay ones, I expect a little better from a reviewer in a prestigious newspaper.

Evidently the book focuses on the brutal persecution of "the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them," and Conrad says it's all the fault of Christianity as he grimly but pruriently insists on detailing the punishments that our fore-uncles suffered.  "As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was 'male-male sexual intercourse or desire."  Conrad here echoes gay Christian apologetics of the 1960s through the 1990s or so, which argued that the story of Sodom was not about male-to-male buttsex but about violations of hospitality.  This line reached its peak in John Boswell's influential Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), which strained mightily to prove that Christianity was not hostile to homosexuality at all.  Boswell was effectively rebutted by numerous gay scholars, but his work remains popular (if largely unread) by gay laymen.  I'll just note that Conrad overlooks the prohibitions of male-to-male sex in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), which commands the execution of both partners, and in Romans 1, without referring to Sodom.  He also overlooks the hostility to receptive partners in Greek and Roman antiquity, expressed in heated rhetoric that presaged the ranting of medieval theologians on the subject.  That hostility is often found among gay men today.  While male-to-male sex was clearly common and popular in Roman society, an equally popular way to discredit one's political or other enemies was to accuse them of enjoying sexual passivity.  This let the accuser wallow in elaborate exciting fantasies about other people's practices, as bigots have done ever since.

The persecutions of sodomites weren't as consistent as Conrad implies either.  That doesn't excuse them, but it does indicate that religion wasn't the only or determining factor.  In Florence, for example, moral panics came and went.  According to Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), authorities realized that draconic punishments made it harder to get convictions, so they changed the penalties to fines. "Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death," Conrad writes; well, sometimes, but not always or "automatically."  If the Florentine sex cops were driven by religious fervor, they should have maintained the beheadings and torture.  Conrad even acknowledges this: "The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse for confiscating their wealth."

Conrad may not be aware of it, but gay scholars have been investigating these matters since at least the 1970s.  In addition to Rocke, I think of a paper in The Gay Academic (ed. Louie Crew, Etc. Publications, 1978, pp. 73-78) on a sodomite hunt in the Netherlands that led to the execution of at least fifty-nine men, plus the harassment and expulsion of many more, in 1730.  Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History (Crowell, 1976) has a long documentary section on official violence against gay people. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (California, 1985) details the public torture and executions of English sodomites in the late 1700s. And so on: these are just off the top of my head.  I imagine Noel Malcolm is aware of his predecessors, even if Peter Conrad isn't.

I look forward to reading Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, possibly this year; the Kindle edition is reasonably priced, so I intend to buy it soon.  But I found this bit, the end of Conrad's review, off-putting: "Announcing that he has 'come to this subject with no personal investment in it', Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of historians who double as gay activists and back-project 'anachronistic sexual significances' on to blameless friendships between medieval men."  For a moment it was as if I were reading about a publication from the 1970s or earlier, with the author distancing himself from his subject (he's not that way, he's impartial and objective!), as if anyone cared anymore.  Even worse is that bit about "anachronistic sexual significances" and "blameless friendships."  I've written about that before.  Erotic love relations between men are also blameless, and there's nothing anachronistic about wondering if same-sex friends were also erotic partners. The ancient Greeks, for example, were sure that the Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were erastes and eromenos - though they couldn't agree on which was which.  If anything, gay scholars like Alan Bray and David M. Halperin have done the opposite of what Malcolm says, denying erotic elements in medieval friendships.  So I'll have to see Malcolm's remarks in their context.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2023

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio posts them.  Have a look, and see what you think.

If Corporations Are People, What About Black Holes?

NPR strikes again.

I've noticed before how their news programs use astronomy as an excuse for flights of erotic fancy.  Last Thursday, though, they took a further step into feel-good, Culture-of-Therapy inanity, giving three minutes of their valuable airtime to an astrophysicist named Regina G. Barber.  Google News kindly sent it my way, showing that the Internet is malicious (if that wasn't already obvious).  "Black holes can teach us how to live our best lives," read the headline, and it was entirely accurate. 

One of my favorite celestial objects in the universe is the black hole.

Granted, I'm an astrophysicist. But I know I'm not alone. People love black holes. They seem to hold a near-mythic status in movies and pop culture.

People, movies, and popular culture love serial killers and zombies too.

What lessons do black holes have to teach us, according to Barber?  Here's the first one.

Lesson One: Push the limits, even if others doubt you

From there she tells how black holes were theorized and their existence eventually confirmed.  Apparently they were sitting out there, light-years away, patiently waiting to be found, pushing the limits against old meanie Albert Einstein's doubt about them.  But his obstructionism "didn't work," and they emerged to take their place in the sun.

And so on.  If you want to know the other two lessons, click through.  Barber concludes:

So, next time you're feeling unsure about your place in the world, remember: "Just because you are not seen, it doesn't mean that you are not there or that you are not, you know, playing a very, very important role," says [fellow astrophysicist Priyamvada] Natarajan.

Black holes have feelings too, just like you.  They too are Somebody.

This is of course all bullshit.  Planets don't dance with each other or kiss each other, and black holes were not waiting for astronomers on Earth to prove their existence.  I'm working on a blog post about meaning and purpose in scientific accounts of the universe, and despite what some philosophers and scientists will tell you, there was never any danger that personification of Nature was going to go away.  I don't know what Barber thought she was doing here; I suspect it's another attempt to make Science and Scientists look like nice guys instead of mean old grinches who want to take away all your illusions.  Luckily for us, black holes are too far away for people to try to pet them.  Barber and Natarajan would be first in line.

The Democratic Establishment Also Believes, and Trembles

 

This is pretty good, but I think it's misleading to take all the "Red Wave" predictions from Fox. I don't watch Fox. I do listen to NPR every morning, and they were just as sure as Fox News that the GOP would win big last November; also as disappointed when it didn't pan out. And I can't help wondering what Chris Hayes was saying before the fact. Don't misunderstand me, I think the lefty-Democratic resurgence is great news and I hope it continues. But corporate news coverage is mostly terrible, and Hayes himself as a booster of "meritocracy" is opposed to democracy.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition aired a brief interview on the UAW strike with Bernie Sanders, which they sought to balance with comments from a guy from the Brookings Institution. Does NPR "balance" its interviews with right-wing politicians and pundits by talking to people from the left? They do not.  If they can, they'll talk to commentators who are further to the right.

Oceania Has Always Been at War with Democracy

A few days ago the MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan jeered at the very idea of democracy, with a bogus quotation from Winston Churchill.  Yesterday:

Kissinger infamously said, “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."  But what, on Hasan's assumptions, is so bad about that?

P.S. Mehdi Hasan has shown a symptomatic confusion about democracy before.

Surely I Am Coming Literally; or, the Messiah Has All the Lines

Then there was this one.

Followed by:

And later by:

"Simplistic" isn't the word I'd use, but ...

Liberal Christians and secularists love to mock conservative Christians for taking the Bible literally.  They're wrong about that, since conservatives believe the Bible to be inerrant, an illusion that requires a lot of non-literal interpretation to sustain.  Ironically, perhaps, Julian Sanchez here takes the Bible literally: he assumes that the gospel of John is a literal, factual report of Jesus' interaction with Jewish elites.  Anyone who has had any contact with New Testament scholarship will find that especially amusing, because the Fourth Gospel (as scholars often refer to it; it was probably not written by the disciple John) is known as the most "spiritual" gospel, even in Christian tradition.  It doesn't match up with the other three in chronology, style, or its portrayal of Jesus.  Yet, despite their dismissal of the Bible as the fantasies of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds and peasants, they frequently do as Sanchez did here, and take it as straight reportage.  The commenters under his posts follow suit.

The great teacher who must contend with the foolishly literal-minded inquirer is a staple literary device of "spiritual" writing, from Plato's Socrates and the Buddha down to Zen masters and Carlos Castaneda's equally fictitious Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.  It's also common in any kind of propaganda, religious or political: of course the outsider or unbeliever is a foil, dumber than a box of rocks and existing only to be schooled, though it's probably a vain effort.  The trope allows the teacher to hold forth at great length, and it doesn't hurt that the script is written so that the teacher gets all the gotcha lines, while the opponent can only gape helplessly and confess his stupidity.  It's fun to chuckle at Nicodemus, as Sanchez does, but it's disturbing to realize that he thinks Nicodemus was really that dumb and Jesus was really that smart, and that he himself is very clever to have spotted it.

In one post Sanchez balks at taking John's anti-Jewish polemic at face value, but this is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.  I agree that "It’s [sic] seems awfully unlikely, e.g., that the historical disciples really went around talking about 'the Jews' like some foreign group," but I see no reason to take the rest of the gospel material as gospel either.  Does he really believe that a writer who caricatured Jesus' opponents in this one respect would depict them accurately in others?

Another irony is that apologists like to claim that in olden days nobody took religious statements literally, that everybody from high priests on down knew better than that.  This is probably false, but it's true that people in Jesus' time and region were given to elaborate interpretations of religious teachings.  Not only the Hebrew Bible (the New Testament came along later) but the epics of Homer were treated as inerrant texts to be mined for hidden wisdom.  It's said that the Sadducees, the Judean faction who controlled the Temple at the time, insisted on interpreting the Torah literally.  That's unlikely in practice, even if it was their principle, but Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a sect very fond of non-literal readings of Scripture.  The Dead Sea Sect also had secret spiritual teachings, and interpreted the Torah for their own ends.  In all disputes, though, propagandists find it convenient to mock the literal absurdity of their opponents' beliefs and practices (the heathen believe that their graven idols can hear their prayers!).

The gospels do contain material that shows Jesus teaching in riddles so as to confound his hearers, not only those outside but his inner circle of disciples.  The fourth chapter of Mark consists of the Parable of the Sower, the disciples asking what it means, and Jesus explaining the parable while declaring that he teaches in parables in order to prevent outsiders from understanding, repenting, and being saved.  The parallel versions of the story in Matthew and Luke soften this as much as they can, but they retain the idea that no one could understand Jesus' teaching until after he died and was resurrected.  Only then could the Scriptures be opened to their true meaning.  But this idea isn't sustained throughout the gospels.  Most of the time the crowds and Jesus' opponents understand his meaning entirely too well, for example in Mark 12:12 and parallels: "And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them." 

I also think that Julian Sanchez gives Jesus far too much credit for profundity.  Why should Nicodemus have understood Jesus' claim that one must be born again to see the kingdom of Heaven?  His question about it, far from being stupidly literal-minded, is simply feeding Jesus a chance to explain himself -- which, as usual, Jesus takes, though his follow-up is as usual as clear as mud.  Does Sanchez thinks he understands Jesus' pretentious bloviation about sin and salvation in the Fourth Gospel?  He recognizes that "born again" is a pun in the original Greek -- it can also mean "born from above," which isn't self-explanatory either -- but still thinks it means something.  Maybe it does, but what?  I can understand a Christian apologist taking this stance, but why would a self-styled secularist do so?  What does Sanchez thinks "the kingdom of Heaven" refers to?  It's a Christian commonplace that Jesus' Jewish contemporaries had wrong ideas about the Messiah and the kingdom he would establish, but I don't agree that Jesus' ideas, whatever they were, were correct.  Considering that the kingdom he promised did not arrive within a generation, as he promised, it's a safe bet that his ideas were wrong.  (Trying to interpret his teaching to get around that basic stumbling block is a hallmark of fundamentalism, not of secularism.)  The Christian churches have changed their understandings of Jesus' teaching over the millennia, and modern scholars disagree on just about everything aspect of it. 

As an atheist, I am free not to think "the Kingdom of Heaven" has any real referent.  Based on my experience with both modern scholarship and lay atheists' confused efforts to appropriate Jesus' teaching for their own purposes -- efforts which make no sense to me at all -- I don't think they know any more about it than Nicodemus did.