Commonweal Magazine

Why Are We Still Doing This?

Morten Høi Jensen — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:00:41 +0000

Why Are We Still Doing This?

From certain angles, Copenhagen resembles a toy town, a dollhouse city. As one strolls through its center, it seems natural that LEGO was invented in Denmark. Look at the buildings in their pretty pastels of pink, yellow, and red. Look at the draft horses that cart barrels of Carlsberg around. Look at the Royal Life Guards in their red jackets and bearskin hats, marching like an elite squad of tin soldiers.

But nothing in recent memory has made the city seem more toy-like, more make-believe, more childish, than all the pomp and ceremony that surrounded King Frederik X’s ascension to the throne in January. A little context is probably in order: in her annual New Year’s Eve address, former queen Margrethe II announced her decision to abdicate the throne on January 14 of this year, thus ending her fifty-two-year reign as Denmark’s sovereign and installing her eldest son, former crown prince Frederik, as king.

The queen’s shock decision unleashed such a frenzy of mawkish newsprint and fawning media coverage it was enough to make even Kim Jong Un blush. For weeks, Danish media was aglow with tributes to the wisdom and courage of the departing queen. Christian Jensen, the editor in chief of Politiken, a newspaper founded by the left-wing agitator Viggo Hørup, praised Queen Margrethe for having “united, shaped and formulated a common language and direction for the nation.” TV2, a government-owned broadcast and television company, announced plans to create a historical drama series about the life of Queen Margrethe titled By the Grace of God. The theater critic Jakob Steen Olsen mourned the “closing of a chapter of Danish history” and, in prose plumed and crested with every possible cliché, hailed the queen for always putting the monarchy first, even, apparently, at the expense of her own personal needs. (To which one might add that, in 2023 alone, the queen pocketed 92.6 million Danish kroner—about $13.3 million—of taxpayer money).

Then came the excitement and anticipation for the incoming royal couple, King Frederik and his Australian-born wife, Queen Mary. Instantly, six different books by or about members of the royal family shot onto the list of the top twenty best-selling titles in Denmark. It was for some reason deemed newsworthy that the Danish tennis pro Caroline Wozniacki has “a good relationship” with the new royal couple and thinks they’ll do a “fantastic” job. It even made Danish headlines when the New York Times referred to the new Queen Mary as “progressive” and “down-to-earth.” Clearly, the Danish media was not going to be distracted from the coronation by anything less than World War III.

When the day at last dawned, three hundred thousand people (roughly the population of Cincinnati) converged on the wind-scoured capital to witness King Frederik X and Queen Mary take the throne. Actually, since the accession itself was simply a matter of the former queen signing a decree and lasted only a little over a minute, there wasn’t anything for the tens of thousands of people whooping and cheering in the frigid cold to see, but at least they were subjected to two titanically boring speeches by the unctuous Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and the newly crowned king himself.

“I must confess I shed a tear,” Tom Jensen, the editor in chief of Berlingske, later wrote in his account of that day. Standing there with his enthralled fellow Danes, the significance of the occasion dawned on him with the force of an epiphany: “The Sunday King Frederik X was crowned, we were reminded that we’re here together. And that was enough for me. Because that really is everything.”

When I moved back to Copenhagen this past fall, I wanted very much to believe all the recent hoopla about Denmark as a haven for the hip and progressive. But behind the climate-conscious hipster surface is the same old piety and parochialism I remember from growing up here in the nineties and early aughts: according to one recent poll, as much as 79 percent of the population supports the monarchy. The current government has even announced plans to increase funding for the royal family, which already costs about 500 million Danish kroner a year, with barely a whisper of protest to be heard anywhere.

What’s strange is that no one seems to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between Denmark’s vaunted egalitarianism and its slavish royalism—not even the supposedly left-wing parties, which ought to be opposed to the monarchy as a matter of principle. Pia Olsen Dyhr, leader of the democratic-socialist Green Left Party, proudly participated in the Danish parliament’s official ceremony marking King Frederik’s ascension. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party announced in January that it would no longer prohibit its members from receiving royal honors, thus breaking with its own history as the party of the Danish labor movement. To put it a little provocatively, Denmark is a historical anomaly: the world’s first socialist monarchy.

Try to point this out to the average Dane and you’ll be met with the patient, pitying stare reserved for the obviously unwell—or accused of “suffering from spiritual and cultural anemia,” as Karoline Haarder put it in Berlingske. This is not, by the way, an attitude shared only by older generations or the hopelessly retrograde. I have frequently heard otherwise progressive Danes my own age insist on the importance of the monarchy by using terms like “unity,” “stability,” “national cohesion”—using, that is, conservative language implying Denmark’s political institutions and cultural history are insufficient to guarantee some measure of stability and cohesion.

If, as everyone here seems to agree, the new king and queen are so progressive and modern, then why not do the progressive and modern thing and relinquish the sovereign’s executive authority over the government? Safely divested of its political function, the royal family could even remain as the lucrative tourist attraction all Danes stubbornly insist it is. Until such an unlikely time, though, the idea that Denmark is a beacon of progress will remain the country’s most maddening fairytale of all.

Morten Høi Jensen April 25, 2024

The Other Side of Silence

Jared Marcel Pollen — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:05:10 +0000

The Other Side of Silence

In the first half of the twentieth century, literature, like philosophy, experienced a breakdown in its trust of language. This signaled, among other things, a breakdown in the relationship between the word and the world—in the power of language to speak to the essences of things, to name and reveal. In “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967), Susan Sontag points out that, in this respect, modern art had “inherited the problem of language from religious discourse.” Thenceforth, it was artists who took up what had once been the bailiwick of mystics—the pursuit of an uncorrupted utterance. As examples, one could cite Cage, Beckett, and Wittgenstein (who said that philosophy should be practiced as an art). It was a task that would push language to the brink, and tempt many to abandon it altogether.

One cannot look at this phenomenon without considering Clarice Lispector, who is perhaps its supreme exemplar. All of Lispector’s work is preoccupied with the problem of language. Indeed, in reading her, one sometimes gets the sense that she is less a novelist than a mystic for whom the novel is a metaphysical arena for staged confrontations with language. Not for nothing does Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s biographer in English, say that she “has been compared less often to other writers than to mystics and saints.” In all of her novels we see a restless effort to break out of language and into true perception, to generate a kind of writing that can crack the glass that stands between us and reality.

This is present from her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), but one sees it most starkly in her later, experimental works, Água Viva (1973) and A Breath of Life (1978). The book that bridges these periods is The Apple in the Dark, now available in an English translation by Moser. An inversion of the Genesis creation narrative, the novel is a heretical allegory, one that seemingly undermines the whole architecture of Judeo-Christian morality.

“It was a fascinating book to write,” she wrote to a friend after completing the manuscript, but she acknowledged that it was “also a great suffering.” Lispector wrote the novel while living in Washington D.C., where her husband, a diplomat, was stationed for more than a decade. Completed in 1956, The Apple in the Dark fell into limbo for several years and was eventually published in 1961, following a twelve-year silence and two critically unsuccessful novels, The Chandelier (1946) and The Besieged City (1949). Surprisingly, it was a commercial and critical success, after which Clarice (in time, she would be referred to simply by her first name) became a literary phenomenon in Brazil, or in the words of one journalist, “a sacred monster.”

The novel opens with a symbol of mid-century Americana: the automobile. Outside a hotel room, a black Ford idles in the night, as Martim, the protagonist, is born into a void. In the darkness, he is a nonentity—“no more than a thought”—rising into consciousness. At the center of “a great empty and inexpressive space” he hears the sound of his own name, a moment of birthing self-awareness: “So, then, me.” Grunting, wordless, scarcely anything but “indistinctly himself,” Martim metamorphoses into tree, rat, horse, then man, until he realizes: “It must be Sunday.” It is the Lord’s Day, man’s first day, the day of resurrection.

A crime has taken place, but what exactly we don’t know until the end. The crime is already so far in the past that it has started to take on the nature of an abstraction (“his crime now seemed more like a sin of the spirit, merely”). As in Kafka, it appears to be the sin of existence, the crime of having been born. It is “that thing without a name that had happened to him.” It is a primal crime, after which all other crime is redundant. Martim is “proud” of himself as he observes “the demolished world…[t]he world undone by a crime.” One that he can then rebuild “on his own terms.”

Martim is more akin to Milton’s Lucifer than to Adam. He is a co-creator in the abyss, whose revolt occasions self-discovery; it is a transgression that is its own kind of transcendence. But Martim’s self-knowledge is actually a rejection of knowledge—that is, the knowledge of good and evil. As in the Eden story, crime is the inaugurating event, but the novel’s amoral landscape rejects the notion that error is synonymous with evil (“Evil? Why use that dreadful word?” Martim thinks). Unashamed, he reflects that it had actually been “a blessing to have erred.” Only then is he able to create himself “in his own image.” Here, crime is a kind of purification rite. And in refusing judgment for his act, Martim stands beyond good and evil—a savage self-authorizer, a Nietzschean transvaluator.

Martim claims to be an engineer, a man of reason, a world builder (later, we learn he is actually a statistician). In any case, this identity is shed as he grows and embraces a new, feral physicality. When he is reborn, he is on par with the rest of creation, existing at the same frequency as the trees (“The silence of the plants was at his own pitch”). He eschews the dominion given to Adam over the plants and the animals and continuously refuses the temptation to “fall into profundity.” It is an “unintelligible but harmonious” state that he wishes to preserve against the creep of reason. He sits on a rock and watches as the world is born, basking in his own meaninglessness, in the “vast emptiness of himself.”

The first fifty pages of the novel are conducted in this “state.” There is little dialogue or action as the narrative (much like the contours of Martim’s embryonic consciousness) becomes vertebrate. Fleeing into the desert, he comes to a ranch where he is employed by two women, Vitória and Ermelinda, to till the land. There is also a third, nameless woman known only as the “mulatta,” whom Martim takes “like a bull” in order to regain knowledge of the opposite sex. The only other character who shows up at the plantation is “the teacher,” a sanctimonious clerc who holds the women of the house under his influence and whose effusive sermonizing epitomizes the abuse of words—everything Martim, in his contented silence, despises.

As Martim undertakes the task of Adam, he discovers that reality already bears the gendered imprints of language (“the world was masculine and feminine”). He is frustrated by “having to transform the growth of the wheat into numerals.” As we know from cuneiform tablets, this was the first use of writing—not storytelling or the transmission of knowledge or learning, but simple record keeping. But even this seems impossible to Martim. He finds he is unable “to organize his soul into language.” For language, like us, is fallen. The simplest act of language is the naming of things, and we see that from the very first word that the names we give things are inadequate to the things themselves. Martim even fears that assigning names to objects will contaminate the world.

In an allegorical realm in which everything is both itself and something else, all things seem to take on a resonant symbolism. Martim longs for a purely symbolic reality, where the symbol is the thing itself: “I wanted the symbol because the symbol is the true reality and our life is what’s symbolic to the symbol.” The search for a truly symbolic language is the search for the essence of essences, what the seventeenth-century German mystic Jakob Böhme called “the Language of Nature” (Natursprache), in which “each thing speaks of its particular properties.” This, Böhme says, was the language Adam spoke in the garden, a “sensual speech” that we lost with the fall and can never recover: “Today, while the birds of the air and the beasts of the forests may still, each according to their own qualities, understand each other, not one of us understands the sensual speech any longer.” But here, the outcome of the fall is upended. Through his crime and his rebirth, Martim loses “the languages of others” and recovers his own “harmonious” impressions.

Like an ape writing cursive in the dirt, Martim finally scribbles under “thing number 1”: “That.” It is an immaculate referent, seemingly containing anything and everything (“The still-wet phrase had the grace of a truth”). He stops short of adding a second word, for there are already too many, and abandons the task altogether, for nothing, not even “That,” seems sayable: “Everything that had seemed to him ready to be said had evaporated, now that he wanted to say it.” The word is the source of creation, but it inherently corrupts and occludes that creation: “So disloyal was the power of the simplest word upon the most vast of thoughts.”

This could easily serve as a description of Lispector’s literary life. “What gets in the way of writing is having to use words,” she once wrote. But it would be wrong to understand this as mere frustration with the ineffable, the yearning to express what we feel we don’t have the power to express. The worry here is with the smear that words leave upon perception, and the desire is for a perception beyond words (“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees,” as Paul Valéry said). I think the language Lispector tried to find in her writing is something resembling Böhme’s sensual speech, a true consonance, in which an “I” doesn’t stand from without, but is rather part of a single, universal substance.

One can also understand it as a quest to find what Martim at one point calls “that thing without a name.” The task of the mystic, Sontag reminds us in “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “must end in a via negativa, a theology of God’s absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech.” The course of Lispector’s development from the early novels to the later, experimental works is exactly this movement toward what lies beyond speech. “If I could, I would leave my place on this page blank,” she once wrote, “replete with a resounding silence.”

Lispector described writing as “a curse, but a curse that saves.” The envy of silence is heavily present in her work. But unlike Rimbaud or the young Wittgenstein, she was not a renunciator, nor even, like Beckett, a great negator. Instead, what we see in her work is language that attempts to transcend itself through prolonged derangement and disarticulation. This was also the path of the surrealists, the “boundless and systematized disorganization of all the senses,” as Rimbaud phrased it.

The Apple in the Dark lavishly basks in its own unknowing, in its koanlike prose, in the knocking, jostling symbolism of its abstract passages that, despite their declarative character, never seem to reach anything concrete. Indeed, Lispector herself seemed not to fully understand the novel she was writing: “I want to say something and I still don’t know for sure what,” she confessed while working on it. The novel apparently went through elevendrafts, because, she said: “By copying I will understand myself.” As monastic scribes copied psalms until they had internalized them, so Martim seeks to “copy into reality the being that he was.”

The novel’s reversal of the biblical account of creation is clear enough: man creates himself and then creates God in his own image. But it is far more unorthodox than that. Not only does it offer a new definition of what it means to be “fallen,” it plainly rejects the Christian notion of the Word. That is, the Word as the source of creation, redemption, and salvation. In the novel’s closing pages, Martim rejoices in this rejection: “[He] was no longer asking the name of things. It was enough for him to recognize them in the dark…. Then, when he went back out into the brightness, he’d see…those things with their false names.” Lispector’s novel suggests that only once the Word has been rejected can the apple be grasped, without shame, in the darkness, where we know things as they truly are.

The Apple in the Dark has been described as an allegorical novel, but this is perhaps too simple. Like Kafka and Beckett, Lispector approaches the allegorical but deprives us of the easy interpretations that allegory usually lends itself to. If it is speaking of something else, we cannot be sure of what. Perhaps it is speaking of the absence of God itself, or perhaps of that which hides in plain sight, behind the veiling brightness that Martim regards as “nothing more than the other side of the silence.”

The Apple in the Dark
Clarice Lispector
Translated by Benjamin Moser
New Directions
$19.95 | 384 pp.

Jared Marcel Pollen April 24, 2024

How Harlem Saw Itself

Clifford Thompson — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 18:00:17 +0000

How Harlem Saw Itself

“For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” So wrote Alain Locke in the anthology The New Negro (1925), often considered the founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement of which Locke is generally recognized as intellectual impresario. “The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality.”

However, Locke added, “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” That emancipation largely took the form of creative expression—the literature, music, and visual art that flowered in the 1920s and ’30s and reflected the experiences of millions of African Americans who, seeking opportunity, migrated from the South to the cities of the North and Midwest. Many settled in New York City’s Harlem, including writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, as well as music and entertainment luminaries like Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

And when it came to the Black Americans’ effort to, in Locke’s phrasing, “see” themselves, that was the work, quite literally, of the Harlem Renaissance’s sculptors, photographers, and, especially, painters: African Americans using the visual arts to represent who and what they really were, in all their richness, variety, and humanity, to avoid looking to others for cues for seeing themselves. In New York City’s first full-scale museum show since 1987 devoted to the work of that artistic movement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, on view through July 28. Comprising some 160 works of art and curated by Denise Murrell, it is a stunning exhibition.

Harlem, as Locke wrote in The New Negro,

is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another.

Laura Wheeler Waring, Marian Anderson, 1944 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; gift of the Harmon Foundation)

The thoughtful design of the Met’s exhibition seems intended both to emphasize and parallel that great variety, making the diversity of artistic styles apparent not only as viewers move from room to room, but as they shift their attention from one work to the next. While paintings are sometimes grouped by artist, they are more often assembled according to theme. A result is that the work of different artists—prominent among them Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald Motley, William H. Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and James Van Der Zee—is threaded through the exhibition, like multipart harmony through a song.

The first works we encounter are portraits of the movement’s thinkers—Locke, Hurston, Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson—painted by different artists. The German-born Winold Reiss’s respective portraits of Hughes and Locke have in common each man’s faraway expression. They differ in their backgrounds and the rendering of the men’s bodies. Each man, in a jacket and tie, is shown seated, roughly from the waist up. But while Hughes’s dark jacket is painted realistically, Locke’s white suit has so little shading that it almost resembles a line drawing, from which his head and left hand emerge in seeming three-dimensionality. It’s as if Locke himself were asserting his complexity against efforts to deny his full humanity. (Another of Reiss’s portraits, of the writer and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, achieves a similar effect later on in the show.) In Locke’s portrait, the background is completely white, while Hughes’s is surrounded by images of buildings, bedrooms, and blue-and-white musical notes. Together, they might represent the thoughts of this poet and celebrator of Black city life and music.

Other tensions are also at play in the initial portraits. The most traditional is Douglas’s painting of Hurston, depicting the writer in one of her trademark hats. Waring’s painting of Johnson, made after his death, is more fanciful, showing the seated figure of the novelist, memoirist, lawyer, lyricist, and activist against a background that suggests an afterlife, with streams and mountains and two figures walking side-by-side; one is unclothed, the other wears white clothing and a halo. What the portraits have in common is that the subject’s gaze never meets the viewer’s. Locke’s thoughts about seeing come to mind. To avoid looking to others for cues for seeing themselves: the eyes of the nation and the world may have been on African Americans, but these goal-oriented African Americans do not necessarily return the gaze.

The exhibition, as the Met’s website notes, “explores the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life.” Nowhere is this more true than in the section “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities.” In his signature style—eye-popping colors and cartoonish figures—William H. Johnson’s Street Life, Harlem (circa 1939–40) shows a dressed-to-kill couple on the sidewalk, the buildings behind them bending and curving at hilariously wild angles. Meanwhile, Palmer Hayden’s Nous Quatre à Paris (We Four in Paris), circa 1930, with its more subdued palette, shows an indoor scene with four card players in the foreground and two pool players behind them. The card players pay attention to everything but the game; with each of their heads turned sideways, these differently complected Black men are, at least in this moment, more taken with the excitement of Paris than with one another. The glass of wine and cup of coffee situated precariously near the table’s edges suggest that this excitement also brings risk.

Complexities abound in more interior scenes. Jacob Lawrence’s Pool Parlor, from 1942, manages to be both dark and colorful, the bright balls bursting from the forest green of the tables; the pool cues and cords of hanging lamps make for a wild mix of the vertical and horizontal, as do the bodies of the men, some standing as they set up their shots, one all but lying on the table. Archibald Motley’s The Plotters (1933) and The Liar (1936) walk a line between Lawrence’s darkness and Johnson’s vivid color, and while the men’s attention in Palmer’s painting is focused elsewhere, the men in Motley’s concentrate intently on one another. (And in the background of The Liar, there’s that pool table again!) Bold colors, cubist-inspired angles, and the not-altogether-human look of the two figures add to the distinctiveness of Hale Woodruff’s The Card Players (1930).

Taking us back outside are the paraders in Malvin Gray Johnson’s paintings and Van Der Zee’s photographs. The uniformity of the men in Johnson’s Elks Marching (1934), with their light-colored hats, blue jackets, and white pants, has the power of hypnosis, while Van Der Zee’s Parade, Harlem and Untitled, both from the 1920s, offer a bracing contrast with their views of the real men and women of Harlem.

While Harlem was the center of activity during the movement, the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance was alive in other cities, too. The most unusual works in “Everyday Life in the New Black Cities,” for example, are the pages on display from Bert Hurley’s Loose Nuts: A Rapsody in Brown (1933), a 125-page, meticulously illustrated, hand-lettered novella about Black citizens of Louisville, Kentucky. (To this writer’s surprise, the book does not appear to be in print. That should change.)

Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., Self-Portrait, ca.1941 (Gift of Pennsylvania W.P.A.,1943/The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The section “Portraiture and the Modern Black Subject” particularly emphasizes the idea of seeing versus being seen. Here, the artists portray (mostly) single figures or themselves. Self-portraits include those by Motley, Hayden, William H. Johnson, Malvin Gray Johnson, Samuel Joseph Brown Jr., and Horace Pippin. Hayden’s and William H. Johnson’s are particularly notable—Hayden’s because he portrays, in those subdued colors of The Janitor Who Paints (circa 1937), the circumstances under which he creates art (the painting depicts Hayden painting his wife and infant sitting with him in a small, cluttered room), and Johnson’s Triple Self-Portrait (1944) because, in it, two versions of Johnson comfort the third over the death of the artist’s wife. “While many Harlem-based artists blended the refined aesthetics of African sculpture and the compelling figural expressiveness of the European avant-garde with African American folk motifs—an approach encouraged by Alain Locke, the movement’s founding philosopher,” according to the Met’s website, “some of their peers in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other communities employed the graceful naturalism of academic tradition to bestow sitters with dignity and interiority.” Indeed, both the self-portraits and the paintings of other figures display a wide variety of styles, from Elizabeth Catlett’s Head of a Woman (Woman) (1942–44), whose carved-looking features suggest sculpture (Catlett’s primary medium), to Waring’s comparatively realistic and traditional Girl with Pomegranate (circa 1940), to William H. Johnson’s highly stylized and strikingly vivid Man in a Vest (1939–40). What most of the works in “Portraiture and the Modern Black Subject” have in common, again, is that their subjects do not return our gaze.

One exception, at least according to the accompanying text, is Pippin’s Self-Portrait II (1944), in which the artist “gazes confidently at the viewer.” I am not sure I agree. The figure in the painting is indeed confident, but an intriguing aspect of this work is its ambiguity: the artist/subject seems to be looking past or through as well as at the viewer. He may see us, but we are not all he sees.

But if the eyes of the Black subjects were not necessarily on the world, the eyes of the world were apparently on them. The words “Transatlantic Modernism” in the exhibition’s title stem in part from the inclusion of works by European artistic giants of the era—including Henri Matisse, Kees van Dongen, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso—that focus on Black figures. That focus ran in two directions, as the exhibition also includes works that Motley created overseas, including Café, Paris and Dans La Rue (both 1929).

In this context, two paintings are startling in their subjects’ direct gaze at the viewer. Douglas’s Scottsboro Boys (circa 1935), in the exhibition’s “Artist as Activist” section, depicts the faces of two of the nine Black teens famously and falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. Their expressions convey less anger than appraisal and questioning. In “Family and Society,” one of the side-by-side figures in Reiss’s Two Public School Teachers (1925), with her chin in her hand, appears to study us; her companion, sitting very close to her, gripping the edge of a magazine between thumb and forefinger, regards us with something close to indifference.

But most of the figures depicted in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism avert their gazes, including the figure in what may be the exhibition’s most arresting work, Motley’s Brown Girl After the Bath (1931). Found in the section called “Nightlife,” the painting shows a young woman, wearing only shoes and earrings, as she sits at a table in front of a mirror. The lamp on the table provides an aura of light in an otherwise dark room. The woman’s body, half in shadow, is seen from the side, her face mostly turned away; the well-lighted image of her face and torso is a reflection. The woman “gazes at the viewer rather than her own image, projecting a simultaneous directness and interiority that contrasts with the submissive demeanor of the typical historical female nude,” according to the accompanying text. While I agree about the “simultaneous directness and interiority” of the gaze, I disagree, again, with regard to its object. She may be looking at us or at herself, as she has thoughts about which we can only make hopeless guesses, as much in the dark as the objects in her room. If we are sure that her mind and her eyes are on us, it may be time to take a good look at ourselves.

Clifford Thompson April 23, 2024

Distorting the Gospel

Teresa Delgado — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 16:00:48 +0000

Distorting the Gospel

Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide.

When I began studying theology and religion as an undergraduate student, I had no idea there were Catholics who supported the ordination of women. I had attended Catholic school through twelfth grade and, as far as I knew, the prospect of women in the priesthood was the stuff of fantasy. A new world of possibility was opened to me upon reading the works of thinkers like Ann Patrick, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, whose advocacy on behalf of women forced me to reconsider an experience I have come to understand as a “call” when I was a little girl. A precocious child, I began reciting parts of the missalette and forcing my sisters to “play church” with me as the priest. Ritz crackers and apple juice stood in for the bread and wine. We did this often until my father told me I shouldn’t pretend to be a priest because I would never have that chance in real life. Devastated, I ran away (for a few hours) until my mother retrieved me from the steps of the corner bodega.

Years later, in a doctoral program in theology, I studied alongside colleagues who would go on to be ordained in their respective denominations. To actualize my priestly vocational call, they encouraged me to consider the Episcopal and Lutheran churches. But I couldn’t do that because, for me, the question had grown much larger than my fulfillment of a personal vocational call. If I left, I would be forfeiting my ability to challenge the Catholic Church, not just on its stance regarding ordination but also on the many ways it perpetuates white supremacy. Was I willing to do that? I decided to stay, always on the margins, to push the Church to see the connection between its stance on women’s ordination and its dependence on a colonial mentality.

Last year, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery, which has been used for the past five hundred years as a religious and legal rationale to seize lands, objectify entire peoples, and impose white-supremacist authority. I have come to see that the structure of the Catholic Church—with its exclusively male leadership—is connected to its relationship with peoples and lands as a colonizing entity that must be decolonized. For this reason, I’m less interested now than I was in graduate school in the question of women’s ordination on its own. Now, I want to explore the connection between sexual and institutional violence against women and colonial violence against lands and peoples. I believe both derive from an unequal power structure of subject over object, upheld by a hierarchy that maintains the status quo.

What are the alternatives to maintaining the status quo of colonization in our Church? The crumbling of the institutional Church—due in part to the sex-abuse crisis and diminishing clerical credibility—is a sign that the powerful hold of a colonizing mindset is wearing thin and being recognized for the distortion of the Gospel that it is. While promoting women in ordination is important—I would never dismiss its importance—the process of decolonizing our Church requires more than allowing women to lead from the altar. The corrective to colonization of women’s bodies in the Church requires us to learn from women’s ways of “being Church,” particularly those found in Latinx culture and theology. This decolonization has at least five components.

First, it must be centered on accompaniment and solidarity rather than preserving hierarchy or the status quo. Latinas know what it means to walk with one another through misery, hardship, and strife, and of the power of acompañamiento y solidaridad in every facet of our lives. Latinas encircle those who are in need regardless of social status or religious affiliation; I have witnessed this in my own family and in my broader community, as an embodied commitment to never allowing another to walk alone.

Second, our focus must be less on doctrine and more on popular religiosity. Women have told us that the Church’s doctrine is less authoritative than the practices of faith that are life giving and life affirming. From Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango’s seminal text, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, to María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles’s Our Lady of Everyday Life,women’s spirituality resides in prayer, acts of charity, and movements for justice, often in spite of the hierarchical systems within the Church.

Third, we must invest in our communities and not in the institution. If we center our understanding of community as the “body of Christ,” the communal body that nourishes us and calls us to new life in Christ, then this is not bound by an institution or an official Church, but by the people who love us, surround us with care and support, and protect us from harm.

Fourth, we must continue to challenge the institution to be better. While we should be embracing new forms of “being Church,” we can’t let the current institution off the hook. On the contrary: as women, we must lift a mirror up to the Church to show how it has fallen short of its own Gospel message of love and justice.

Fifth, we must remember the injunction to “be not afraid.” Some scholars suggest that a form of “fear not” or “be not afraid” appears over three hundred times in Scripture. Colonization instills fear, which keeps us from changing. The oppression and violence experienced by women also instills fear—and fear of excommunication, isolation, and alienation leads to paralysis. What if women had spaces and places of protection and community, of comfort and autonomy, where they could find refuge and be free from fear? Isn’t this what “Church”—the body of Christ—is supposed to be? “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).

This kind of sweeping decolonization involves the discomfort of living in an uncertain space, an unfinished space. We have to reconsider what it means to be a woman—in relationship to each other, to men, and to the Church. We have been given a framework that upholds the status quo, and it can be disorienting to question it. But this discomfort can be a catalyst for creativity, rather than something that dooms us to complacency. In fact, what emerges out of a place of dis-ease is the prophetic voice, which can motivate a people to change that which is seemingly unchangeable. This is our decolonizing challenge as Catholic women.

This article is adapted from a presentation at the Georgetown University conference in April 2023. It is part of a symposium on women and the priesthood. Read the other articles here:
“Women at the Altar” – Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” – Mary E. Hunt
“Why Not Women?” – Alice McDermott

Teresa Delgado April 23, 2024

A Literary Homeland

Anthony Domestico — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 15:28:42 +0000

A Literary Homeland

Philip Metres’s latest book of poetry, Fugitive/Refuge, starts with an invitation: “Welcome. // You’re among family. // The way is easy. Open.” It’s a striking way to begin, especially since Metres’s writing often centers on those who have not been welcomed, those who have found the way hard and the door closed. In Sand Opera (2015), he gave voice to those “suspended upside / down from the ceiling” in Abu Ghraib. In Shrapnel Maps (2020), he considered those residents of the Holy Land who have seen “the hill gr[o]w barbed-wire perimeters.” Now, in Fugitive/Refuge, he considers migration within the past (his family’s journey from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States in the early twentieth century) and within the present (those fleeing war in Syria and Ukraine or arriving at the southern border from South and Central America).

Metres knows that language—cultural, political, and legal—can, and does, do great harm. He also knows that language allows us to bear witness to this fact, to call it and us to account. “I’ll set my nation’s / whole body on fire,” he writes in “Curriculum Vitae,” “simplify the fractions // of political rhyme. / I’ll skein this skin / to the highest of high wires, // refuse to become / a man of my time.” This is the language of the prophets, and Metres is a master of the prophetic mode.

But in Fugitive/Refuge he also shows how language might not only demand justice but become “a generous hinge / opening us.” It creates a space in which previously ignored pasts can reveal themselves, where the suffering might find solace, where the weary might feel welcomed.

Metres and I corresponded recently by email.

Anthony Domestico: I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about the book’s title: the different meanings of both “fugitive” and “refuge”; the sonic relationship between the words (elsewhere in the book, you note “the seen // in absence” and “the urn in return. & the rue”); finally, what work you see the virgule, that slash between “fugitive” and “refuge,” doing.

Philip Metres: Titles have a way of migrating. At one point, the working title for Fugitive/Refuge had been “Fugitive.” As the book grew, “Fugitive” seemed to speak to only half of the book’s purpose and its tracings of forced human migrations, including my own family’s journey of exile from Lebanon and Mexico. I wanted Fugitive/Refuge to be a place where people could also find refuge, sanctuary. I love the notion, via Sergey Gandlevsky, that literature could be a homeland of sorts (“my homeland is Russian literature”). I have found so much sanctuary in literature. Even when it breaks me open, I am consenting to that breaking open. I can look up at the sky, or around me, away from the page. I can put the book away when it becomes too much. Harder to do that when it’s the whole world crowding in, trespassing my peace.

“Fugitive” and “refuge” share a Latin root, fugere, meaning to flee. The fugitive is one who flees, and the refuge is the place one flees back to. I kept thinking about the ways in which these two words, sonically connected, could speak to the two halves of the book. The virgule, to me, is the punctuation of rupture, interrupting the flow of syntax and meaning, and that’s why I decided it should be the rupture and suture between these two words and worlds—of fleeing and sanctuary.

AD: Fugitive/Refuge is, among other things, a book-length qașīdah, which you describe as “an Arabic poetic form in three parts.” You’ve always been interested in working within and against traditional forms, including the pantoum and the sonnet. (Indeed, there are several lovely sonnets in this collection, including the last poem.) What is it about the qașīdah that seemed well suited for this particular book?

PM: What is poetry without form? To me, the question of form is at the heart of every poem. The qașīdah’s origins lie in the poetry of the Arabs in the Arabian desert. It’s so old that by the ninth century, Ibn Qutayba was already laying out the laws of this poetic genre, a three-part poem that begins with the poet happening upon the remains of the encampment of his beloved, whose caravan has moved on. The qașīdah begins with human longing, moves into the trouble of the world, and concludes with some kind of homecoming. It’s a movement that feels like the origin of half the world’s stories, and I found myself drawn by its structure. My book is also in conversation with Khaled Mattawa’s underappreciated masterpiece Fugitive Atlas (2020), which is full of qașīdahs (his spelling is “qassidas”) and thinking about migration. It’s sort of funny how our titles have overlapped—in 2020, Shrapnel Maps and Fugitive Atlas both came out!

AD: You dedicate Fugitive/Refuge to “the ancestors,” and it’s filled with moments in which the personal and collective past speaks within the present. In one poem, for instance, you speak of “already dead” stars having “seed[ed] time” with their “final signals.” How has your Catholic background shaped your thinking about time: your relationship to the past, certainly, but also to the future?

PM: There’s this dazzling moment in Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: “Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” It’s a wonder to behold—how we come from a lineage of love and care. Every baby is nothing without mother-love. We were all loved up, a dizzying infinity of loving-ups. That doesn’t mean that it was all just soft love. We’re human, hurt and flawed creatures, which means assault or abuse also shadowed that robust and constant care as we grew into independence.

Fugitive/Refuge came from my desire to help my great-grandfather, Iskandar, find peace. It’s strange to put it that way, but it feels right. Iskandar was violently exiled from Lebanon, and about sixteen years later, murdered by bandits in Mexico. That violent uprooting and death, no doubt, wounded my grandfather, who in turn wounded my father, who in turn wounded me—with the sense that a father must make his son tough to survive this hard world.

I wanted to trace their migratory journey—literally and figuratively—as a way of imagining what they endured, and what they could not. This is a way of resurrecting the past in order to bury it properly. In this late capitalist, post-Calvinist, settler-colonial society, so many of us feel so uprooted, so alienated. That’s probably why the United States is such fertile ground for fierce religiosity—looking for ties that bind (the origin of the term religio) in the de-territorialized, genocidal space of this country.

I have such ancestral hunger, a desire to connect with those who have come before. I know I’m not alone in this. So many of us have that deep human longing to mourn our kin and stay connected with them, even when they’re outside time.

In the world development of Catholicism, some space had to be made for the faithful to honor their ancestors. If older pre-Christian practices actively worshipped or venerated ancestors, Día de los Muertos and All Souls’ Day seem to be ways of making space for what is an essential human longing. This longing doesn’t replace God, but it is how God is made manifest in our lives—through the love of those who created space and time for us to exist.

AD: “The Ballad of Skandar II” tells the story of your great-grandfather, Iskandar ibn Mitri Abourjaili. A Christian soldier in the Ottoman Empire, Skandar captured a Muslim man who was accused of siphoning a town’s water only to be shot in the calf and then rescued by his own prisoner. After letting the prisoner go, Skandar was exiled. Your first rendering of this story, a thirty-two-line poem called “The Ballad of Skandar,” was published over twenty years ago. The new book’s version offers Samuel Shimon’s translation of the original poem into Arabic. It also includes extensive footnotes that often take up more than half of the page. Some footnotes gloss the poem’s details; others pose narrative and ethical questions; still others think through the very nature of footnotes. Why return to this poem now, and how did you work your way into this version’s very different form?

PM: I wanted to revisit “The Ballad of Skandar” because I saw how much I left out. I left out Iskandar’s wife, Elena, and her brave part in helping release Iskandar from jail. I left out the reverberations of that story in my father’s life and in my own. I also visited Lebanon for the first time in 2019. Finally, I got to visit Elena’s grave in Queens in 2023 with my cousin Jesse—perhaps the first time Elena had been visited in decades.

It was also a great opportunity to play with the footnote as a poetic form. It’s a lot of fun to play with non-poetic forms, to infuse in them—or to draw out of them—the poetry that is so often hidden in ordinary, academic, or bureaucratic forms. The footnote is something that is supposed to be incidental to the “body” of the text. But what if the footnote is the very thing that the body stands on? It’s good to pay attention to that which has been excluded, set aside, or marked as marginal—because much life pulses there, in the shadowlands.

AD: At the start of the poem’s third and final section, “Of Return,” you quote from Dante’s Paradiso 33. There, Dante writes that his vision of “the Eternal Light,” enabled by grace, allows him to see “how substance, accident, and their relation / were fused in such a way that what I now / describe is but a glimmer of that Light.” Dante was a poet of exile who, to quote from your “Qasida for Abdel Wahab Yousif,” sought “a garden of words / beyond words // that rises.” What does Dante mean to you generally and to this book specifically?

PM: Isn’t it interesting that Dante’s Divine Comedy has a similar parallel structure to the qașīdah—with its Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso? There’s something deeply mythic about that journey. To me, Dante’s journey tells that human story of longing (and all its endless distances) and the longing to come home. Who could ever forget those souls in hell buffeted in the winds of their own desire? Every teenager in the world knows that tornado! Yet we also come to want peace, a place to rest. In the language of the Mass, the priest asks God that those who have died will be embraced: “Welcome [them] into the light of Your face.” I love that so much, that shining.

That “Qasida for Abdel Wahab Yousif” is an elegy for a Sudanese poet, also known as Latinos, who had predicted his own death by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. I kept thinking about his longing, and wanted to make in the poem a place where he could rest. It is the final poem of the second action, and leads us into the last part, where the poems of homecoming emerge.

AD: At John Carroll University, you teach a course called Israeli and Palestinian Literatures and serve as the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program. You’ve previously written about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which a speaker in Shrapnel Maps describes as “Always the / same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” What have you been reading and thinking about since October 7?

PM: How much time do you have? What a nightmare it’s been for those of us who have been trying to contribute to a just peace. Shrapnel Maps was my poetic attempt to bring the voices and lives of Palestinians and Israelis a little bit closer to us—alongside years of dialogue, advocacy, activism, and teaching about the subject. Empire has a way of erasing history, erasing any lives that get in its way. Palestine has been, for quite some time, a word that our empire could not even pronounce, much less say. Still to this day, when you hear “Middle East,” it’s an erasure.

I have not been myself since that day, partly sucked into the vortex of the images coming out of Gaza—what many have been calling a genocide. I’ve done peace walks, organized poetry readings for Palestine, given presentations on the background of the conflict, fasted, prayed, called congresspeople, marched in the streets, chalked on sidewalks, had a thousand conversations with Palestinians and Jews who are hurting beyond words. I can’t bear watching another video of a dead child being pulled out of rubble. It has made me totally deranged to see such cruelty, day after day.

Yet I’m so in awe of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, where Jews and allies have stood in solidarity with Palestinians, who see their futures as entangled and their liberation as shared. I’m in awe of the youth, who refuse to believe that this can’t be stopped. And of Palestinians, who somehow keep living, despite so many wanting them dead.

At the end of the day, there will be either genocide or a shared future where Palestinians and Israelis live together. Only those so closed off in their hurt or their traumatic story would choose genocide. But it’s going to be a long road to peace. What’s so awful is that the United States could stop it almost overnight. It’s actually up to us. I don’t know if my work has made any difference at all, but I want to look back on this time and know that, whatever happens, I did not lose my voice. I did not stay silent.

AD: One poem ends with words from Christana Gamble, a formerly imprisoned woman who is now the chaplain at the House of Refuge in Cleveland: “I was walking down the street and the Lord / spoke to me / and said, open the door // And I’m not afraid of my past anymore // And the door opened.” Another poem begins like this: “Again, the dream: I need to leave, / yet each door I open opens // another room, another door. / The pen in open.” Indeed, the word “open” recurs throughout the book, sometimes as a loving invitation, sometimes as a prophetic demand. What, for you, is distinctive about the kind of openings—of language, of mind, of soul—that poetry enables?

PM: Christana is such a beautiful person. Despite her difficult life (abuse, addiction, incarceration, homelessness, despair), she has this huge heart and faith that each of us is called to something greater. Her House of Refuge is an attempt to create space for other people whose lives have not given them refuge.

About twenty years ago, my wife and I lived in the Quaker Meeting House in Cleveland. There, I discovered the work of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends (also known as Quakers). In his journal, this passage has always moved me:

And I cried to the Lord, saying, “Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?” And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.

The world is always those two oceans—the ocean of darkness and death, and the ocean of life and love. We know it’s always both. We’re swimming all the time, trying for land. But at the end, as Daniel Berrigan once wrote: “Love, love at the end.”

By the way, I love that odd phrase of George Fox, “I had great openings.” Open is a recurring word for me in Fugitive/Refuge, and maybe in life. I love the “O” that the mouth makes when sounding the word, the puff of the lips after, the hum of the n. That space of the O, contained, penned, held in the breath. To me, that’s poetry—a place that the world could be, and is, in fugitive moments.

This interview was published alongside a poem from Metres's latest collection, "The New New Colossus." Read it here.

Anthony Domestico April 23, 2024

Why Not Women?

Alice McDermott — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:44:49 +0000

Why Not Women?

Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide.

Otto Preminger’s film The Cardinal was released in 1963, when I was ten years old, so I guess it was some years later that it appeared on TV. I recall watching it with my mother. I watched many movies with my mother.

Early on, there’s a scene where a young priest tells his pregnant sister’s doctors that they must let her die in order to save her unborn child. I turned to my mother in disbelief. Would that really happen?

“Oh yes,” my mother assured me, placidly enough. “That’s the rule in the Catholic Church. The baby’s life comes before the life of the mother.”

Until then, I’d always pestered my mother about having another baby. I was the youngest of three and the only girl. I wanted a sister. But after seeing The Cardinal, I prayed she would never again take that risk. I knew I needed her far more than I needed some imagined baby sister. Her life was the life I cherished above all others, the life most essential to my own. I suppose I was too young at the time to realize that the pregnant sister who must die could, someday, be me.

This, then, was my first encounter with the diminished value my Church assigns to the lives of women. Not the last, of course.

In those days, I could not be an altar server, as my brothers were, simply because I was female. Throughout my grammar-school years, I watched the middle-aged nuns who taught us—formidable, dignified women—bow and scrape and even giggle whenever the parish priests, some of them mere twenty-somethings, deigned to visit our classrooms.

In my all-girls Catholic high school, we were challenged by our female teachers to read widely, to know world history and Church history, to understand economics—and not just home economics. We were encouraged to debate cogently, whether our subject was politics or poetry or Plato’s cave. We were assured that the big news of the era was true: women could do, could become, anything they set their minds to. And yet we were able to celebrate Mass or line up for Reconciliation only when a local priest agreed to fit us girls into his busy schedule.

Years later, my own daughter asked Sr. Nina, her fifth-grade teacher, why there were seven sacraments for Catholic men, but only six for Catholic women. Sister’s reply? “Good question.”

Our all-male clergy is no big deal, I’ve been told over the years by Catholic men and many Catholic women. Just a small matter of custom or ritual, a harmless tradition. Jesus was a man, the old argument goes; how confusing it would be to the faithful if Christ were represented on the altar by a non-man, a woman. Of course, we don’t worry about that confusion when we make references to Mother Church with all her feminine pronouns.

“Oh, come on,” a smiling cardinal replied with a wink when I pressed him on the issue of women’s ordination. “It’s you women who really run the Church.” In a similar discussion, a laughing monsignor assured me that his priests were “terrified” of the Mothers’ Club at his school. “Talk about power,” he’d said. All in good humor.

But how to separate this “small matter” of an all-male clergy from the insidious effects of ritual misogyny? In his book Turning Point, Robert McClory tells the “inside story” of the Papal Birth Control Commission of the early sixties. The commission, which included married Catholics, found an overwhelming desire among faithful Catholic couples to be able to use birth control—for the good of their marriages but also for the health of the women in the marriage, too many of whom knew the toll of multiple pregnancies, miscarriages, or husbands who must be denied. These were faithful Catholic couples who requested access to birth control in order to protect the very life and physical well-being of Catholic women. We all know how that turned out.

In the early part of this century, I had dinner in Boston with a group of Catholic-school teachers, all women, some of them nuns or former nuns. The abuse scandal had just broken and their collective cry was one of opportunity missed. They could have protected these children from priestly predators, they said, if only the male hierarchy had told them which priests to look out for. If the male hierarchy had shared what they knew about those “troubled men,” the women were certain they could have run interference whenever a suspected priest called a child out of their classrooms.

These women didn’t want to change the power structure in the Church. They weren’t particularly interested in ordaining women. They didn’t even want to see the scandal exposed. They simply wished the cardinal and the other male pastors had trusted them, confided in them, enlisted their help for the good of the children. They wished they had been treated as equals, worthy of full participation in the life of the Church, even in its cover-ups and its failings.

Over the course of my adulthood, I have watched our Church abandon any sincere attempt to confront the complex moral issues that pertain to reproduction in exchange for a simplistic legal solution: overturn Roe. I’ve seen the leadership of the Catholic Church reject the challenge to convince, to counsel, to comfort, or to discern, in favor of promoting secular laws that will only coerce.

All the while, as one war followed another, Catholic men were told by their priests that joining the military and taking up arms is a matter of conscience. Each should follow his own understanding of just war, what counts as morally acceptable self-defense or justifiable homicide for some greater good. They were told military service is a personal, prayerful choice.

I recall another conversation with a charming bishop, who listened sympathetically when I described a young friend’s tragic experience of the in-utero death of her infant. “We who are pro-life need to keep such circumstances in mind,” he said kindly. But then he added, “What I object to are these women who have abortions simply because they want to go on holiday.” I told him I called this the Jezebel defense of abortion bans. He said he didn’t consider these women Jezebels; he thought them hardly human.

I attended Mass the Sunday after the Dobbs decision. I love the Mass. I love the Eucharist. For all the anguish my Church has caused, in the world and in my own heart, I have never been denied the peace, understanding, and renewal of hope and love that the celebration of the Mass has always afforded me. But on that day, I saw my presence in my own church as a kind of collusion—collusion with misogyny, with hypocrisy, with the conviction that to be female is to be the other, to be lesser. Less complex, less moral, less valuable, less intelligent, less worthy, less human.

As Catholics, we are aware of—we celebrate—the outward signs of inner grace. Our rituals are built on the importance of those signs and symbols, and our Church, our spirit, thrives on them as a source of good. But if there are outward signs of inner grace, then surely there are outward signs of inner corruption, signs that betray our faults, our sinfulness, our blindness, our failings. The all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church, my Church, has become for me just such a sign. And so I persist, with varying degrees of hope. I ask and ask again: Why not women? I pray for change.

This article is adapted from a presentation at the Georgetown University conference in April 2023. It was published as part of a symposium on women and the priesthood. Read the other articles here:

“Women at the Altar” - Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” - Mary E. Hunt
“Distorting the Gospel” - Teresa Delgado

Alice McDermott April 23, 2024

Headfirst Downslide

Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:01:38 +0000

Headfirst Downslide

In the opening monologue of the Ron Shelton film Bull Durham, baseball groupie Annie Savoy proclaims her allegiance to the “church of baseball.” She explains, “I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring, which makes it like sex.” Such words could easily be imagined coming from the mouth of Pete Rose. In his 2004 autobiography, My Prison Without Bars, Rose described his relationship with baseball as “my religion.” After fifteen years of public denial, the disgraced all-star finally admitted in this book, without contrition, that he had bet on Major League Baseball games in which he was involved. Previously, in 1989, this alleged violation of MLB Rule 21(d): Gambling had resulted in an investigation and his voluntary permanent ban from the sport he “worshipped.” Eventually, repercussions of the ban made him ineligible for election into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Two decades after Rose’s confession, and thirty-five years into his exile, the 2024 MLB season began with yet another reprise of baseball’s tale without redemption. In his new book, Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, award-winning journalist Keith O’Brien brings current interviews (including twenty-seven hours with Rose himself), “previously unutilized federal court documents,” recently released FBI files, and a fresh look at a copious canon of multimedia sources to retell a story whose details have become hazy with the passage of time. Charlie Hustle’s sixty-four tight chapters, organized in five acts and supplemented by meticulous endnotes, could use a timeline to situate the uninitiated and remind aficionados of the twists in this perennial saga of the unforgiven sin.

The book reads like a psychological profile crying out for a diagnosis. Rose’s gambling trajectory escalates from pitching pennies as a kid to frequenting racetracks to associating with bookies and ultimately to betting on games he was managing for the Cincinnati Reds. His marital infidelities mount, including an allegation of sex with an underaged teen. He has at least one child from these affairs, which results in a paternity suit settled in 1980. Rose finally acknowledged his daughter in 1996 after she filed suit as an adult. Unfortunately, O’Brien imitates Rose’s pattern of neglect by consistently counting among Rose’s progeny only the four children from his two marriages.

With his record-breaking accomplishments and fame came disproportionately riskier behavior, and reading O’Brien’s narrative gives the reader the sensation of Rose steadily approaching the edge of a cliff. Through it all, O’Brien does not allow Rose a handy diagnosis to explain away confounding behavior. Does he have a gambling addiction, a money obsession, an unhealthy attraction to high-risk situations, a narcissistic personality, or a distorted sense of entitlement? Does he lack a conscience? Is Rose’s lying motivated by a pathology, self-preservation, or an aversion to getting caught?

O’Brien deftly handles “the rise and fall of Pete Rose.” He avoids overly detailed descriptions of games and does not mire the telling in an endless enumeration of Rose’s accomplishments. He steers clear of moralizing. The titles of each act provide thematic guidance: rise, shine, fame, fall, wreckage. But there are hints of wreckage throughout this well-paced narrative. Rose makes a mess of his own life, and troubles follow those who are entranced enough to become his enablers. They, too, are victims of Rose’s demons. O’Brien writes about the people caught up in Rose’s orbit:

Those closest to Pete will still do as he says, while others on the outside—on dark planets gone cold—will crack up if they spend too much time remembering what it was like to live in the warm light of Pete’s sun…. They love him or hate him so much that he has destroyed them.

Chasing Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record extends Rose’s career past its expiration date. Innuendos of performance enhancement peek through the cracks—corked bats, amphetamines, a disquieting proximity to a local gym with ties to steroids. None of this is new: bits and pieces have trickled out over the years from MLB’s investigative Dowd Report to sources as varied as Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, and Deadspin. Charlie Hustle is a tragedy without catharsis. O’Brien leaves us with a pathetic Pete Rose, who—now in the last innings of his life—signs baseball memorabilia in strip malls and casinos. For an extra $35, he’ll inscribe “I am sorry I bet on baseball.”

What remains elusive in O’Brien’s otherwise engaging book is a sense of what exactly constitutes “the last glory days of baseball.” From this perspective, Charlie Hustle is a cultural history in need of deeper contextualization. Baseball has a long and complicated history of mixed messages when it comes to gambling. In Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, historian John Thorn presents gambling “not as a latter-day pestilence brought upon a pure and innocent game, but instead the vital spark that in the beginning made it worthy of adult attention and press coverage.” He proposes that gambling provided the spur “not only to the formation of standardized rules but also to the development of statistical measures.” In other words, the same statistics that fuel the sport’s record-obsession feed the gambler useful intel.

O’Brien briefly puts Rose’s transgressions of Rule 21(d) in the context of what led to its codification in 1927. The permanent ban established for betting on games that a player or manager participates in was a response to game-fixing allegations against two future Hall of Famers, including, ironically, Ty Cobb, the all-time hits leader Rose surpassed in 1985. The accusation “of conspiring to throw games so that they could place money with bookies and win” did not shut Cobb out of Cooperstown. Rose’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame five years after his retirement undoubtedly set in motion the 1991 rule change that barred him from consideration. The governing board tied eligibility for election to the Hall with eligibility to work in MLB. This move, in effect, made reinstatement a necessary precondition for Rose.

Rose’s penchant for gambling was an open secret that appears to have produced no effort at intervention. His bets on many sports were accomplished through illegal bookmakers, actions that should alone have merited penalties under Rule 21 (d), which states that “any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee who places bets with illegal book makers, or agents for illegal book makers, shall be subject to such penalty as the Commissioner deems appropriate in light of the facts and circumstances of the conduct.” The majority of Rose’s career occurred during the tenure of MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who suspended pitcher Denny McClain for ninety days in 1970 for bookmaking activity and associations and banned for life Hall of Famers Willie Mays in 1979 and Mickey Mantle in 1983 for taking on employment as Good Will Ambassadors for casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Both Mays and Mantle were reinstated in 1985 by commissioner Peter Ueberroth as exceptions to the rule, yet he observed at the time that changes in the gambling industry and its growing legitimacy would require new MLB guidelines.

Within months of the historic 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down the federal ban on sports gambling, MLB entered a marriage of lucrative convenience with the gaming and sportsbook industry. In November 2018, MGM Resorts became the first Official Gaming and Entertainment Partner of MLB, followed in successive years by partnerships and expanding deals with DraftKings, FanDuel and an ever-growing list of authorized gaming operators. A flurry of activity over the past six years is reshaping the relationship between baseball and betting, state-by-state, and, in the process, reopening questions about the status of Pete Rose. O’Brien observes, “At minimum, it casts Pete Rose in a slightly different light. Under today’s rules, a legalized gambling platform could have sponsored him.” Perhaps, but Ohio didn’t legalize sports gaming until January 2023, and betting on baseball is still actionable in MLB with penalties ranging from suspension to permanent banishment. Easier access to sports betting through multiple platforms also creates more opportunities for gambling and less understanding of each state’s laws governing gambling, especially for international MLB employees. What could possibly go wrong?

Almost thirty-five years to the day after Commissioner Ueberroth announced that his office was investigating troublesome allegations concerning Pete Rose, MLB issued a statement announcing that their Department of Investigations began a formal process looking into allegations involving two-way all-star Shohei Ohtani, now an LA Dodger, and his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara. Whether or not Ohtani bet on any sport, if he had paid off the gambling debt of his friend, he would have violated Rule 21(d) (3) by engaging with a “gaming operation that is unlawful in the jurisdiction.” Sports betting is illegal in California. Will the varying state-by-state laws on the legalization of sports gambling impact future employment decisions by players and others connected with teams? If Ohtani had chosen to play in New York, would his possible involvement have been an issue?

Once more, the shadow of Pete Rose and his unforgivable sin hovers over another MLB season. The timing couldn’t be better to pick up Charlie Hustle; don’t be surprised if Rose petitions MLB to overturn his excommunication again.

Charlie Hustle
The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball
Keith O’Brien
Pantheon
$35 | 464 pp.

Carmen M. Nank… April 23, 2024

American Suburbs Need Help

Nick Tabor — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 12:50:03 +0000

American Suburbs Need Help

For most Americans, “Ferguson, Missouri,” is one of those place names—like “Waco” or “Gettysburg”—that conjures not so much a geographic location but a historical event. In recent years, “Ferguson” has been used as shorthand to refer to everything that happened there in the summer of 2014: the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, the weeks of protests that followed, and the explosion of Black Lives Matter as a national movement. The name is likely to evoke images of violence, poverty, and crumbling infrastructure, burdens that are endured by a mostly Black population.

But Ferguson has another trait that’s easy to overlook: it’s part of suburbia. The town has existed since the nineteenth century, when it was created in partnership with the North Missouri Railroad as an early bedroom community of St. Louis. It expanded during the World War II era, thanks in part to subsidies and mortgage guarantees from the federal government. Up through the 1960s, while exclusionary zoning codes were still in place, Ferguson was white enough that it could have been the setting for Happy Days.

Now, of course, the picture looks very different. The population is more than 70 percent Black and the poverty rate is around 26 percent (well over twice the national average). And Ferguson is shrinking—its population has declined by four percent since the 2020 census.

To say this is emblematic of what’s happened to America’s older suburbs, the ones built up around midcentury, would be a little extreme, especially because Ferguson has had it tougher than most. But it’s not far off the mark. As suburbia has diversified—to a point where it’s now home to 36 percent of the country’s African Americans, compared to 16 percent in 1970—its poverty rates have also shot up, and much of its infrastructure has been left to rot.

Two new books set out to explain these changes in the suburban landscape, each with an eye toward both race and economics. Benjamin Herold’s Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs tells the story through portraits of people of varying races living in different regions of the United States. And Tim Keogh’s In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb drills deep into the social history of Long Island from the 1940s to the ’70s.

Both authors find themselves grappling with different versions of the same question: Why haven’t the newcomers to suburbia, especially families of color, experienced the affluence that previous generations found there?

Herold, a white journalist and longtime contributor to Education Week, now lives in Philadelphia. But he grew up outside of Pittsburgh, in the suburb of Penn Hills, a community that has experienced many of the same trends as Ferguson. Herold started his reporting there in January 2020. He had a big question on his mind: “How are the abundant opportunities my family extracted from Penn Hills a generation earlier linked to the cratering fortunes of the families who live there now?”

His research led him to the work of Charles Marohn, a former municipal engineer who founded the nonprofit Strong Towns. For well over a decade, Marohn has been arguing that suburban development in the United States amounts to a kind of Ponzi scheme. Between the 1940s and the ’60s, when suburbia as we know it was created, the federal government shouldered much of the cost to build roads, sewers, plumbing, schools, and town halls in what had previously been open fields and pastures.

However, municipal governments were essentially on their own for the costs of maintaining all this infrastructure—and thanks to the inefficient, low-density designs of suburban communities, those costs were immense. At the same time, low property taxes were a big part of the draw for the families that developers hoped to attract, and town leaders didn’t want to interfere with that formula. The result is that over the long term, municipalities haven’t brought in enough revenue to pay for upkeep. As infrastructure has worn out—the life cycle tends to be only twenty to twenty-five years—these towns have been forced to take on more and more debt.

Herold introduces an element that’s missing from Marohn’s analysis: race. As he points out, white families were almost the exclusive beneficiaries of the federal largesse that created postwar suburbia. As those suburbs have aged, and the bills have come due, many white families have simply decamped for newer suburbs—moving “one ring farther out” from the city centers, as he puts it—where developers have borne most of the cost of brand new infrastructure. Meanwhile, families of color, upon arriving in those older suburban towns, have often found the roads and school buildings crumbling and the municipal budgets highly leveraged.

Herold has hit on an important chapter in the history of structural racism, one that has gone mostly overlooked. In one sense, it is the sequel to the housing discrimination of the postwar era, a development that has become more widely recognized over the past decade, thanks to the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Rothstein, among others. But it’s precisely because the story is so urgent that Disillusioned is something of a letdown, failing to deliver on its own ambitions and instead revealing why book-length narrative journalism is hard to do well.

Herold’s structure is simple. He tells the stories of five families living in five different locales. There’s a single Black mother and her son in Penn Hills, near Pittsburgh; a multiracial Black mother and her son in Evanston, outside Chicago; a Black family of five outside Atlanta; an undocumented Mexican couple and their two children in Compton, Los Angeles County; and an affluent, Trump-supporting white family outside Dallas. Herold spent extensive time in each of their homes and communities.

This kind of narrative strategy has worked well before. It’s the same one used in at least two landmark works of nonfiction: J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, published in 1985, which deals with desegregation and busing in Boston, and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, from 2010. But in Herold’s case, the flaws lie with his execution.

One reason is that each individual story—and by extension, the book overall—lacks narrative tension. Far too little actually happens. Take the story arc of the Robinsons, the fairly affluent Black family living near Atlanta. They buy a huge, brand-new home in Gwinnett County; their son has behavioral problems at school, and the parents believe (with good reason) that he’s being treated harshly because of implicit bias on the teachers’ part; the mother, a management consultant, has tense meetings with teachers and administrators, which end with the disciplinary measures being curtailed; ultimately, the mother daydreams about moving somewhere else, but settles for remodeling their home instead.

Remarkably, most of the other case studies have even less plot. In fact, Bethany Smith, the woman living in Penn Hills, repeatedly tells Herold that she and her son are doing fine, and that she doesn’t need the journalist barraging her with information about the grim state of the local school system’s budget and infrastructure. Meanwhile, hardly anything changes in Smith’s situation throughout most of the book. This makes quite a contrast with The Warmth of Other Suns, wherein each of the main characters uproot their lives in the South and start anew in Harlem, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

That Disillusioned stretches on for 415 pages—many of them devoted to observing classrooms and parent-teacher conferences in schools—points to another problem with the book: Herold seems to have trouble deciding what it’s really about. He’s clearly more interested in education policy than in suburban development as such. And this may explain why most of the people Herold follows don’t actually fit the framework of his questions about broader trends in suburbia. Arguably none of them are faced with “cratering fortunes.” In three of the five cases, the families in question and the communities they live in seem to be on solid financial footing. Their problems are more interpersonal: for instance, their daughter isn’t being admitted to her school’s gifted program, or the teachers at their son’s school don’t want to read White Fragility.

But arguably the book’s biggest weakness is that Herold fails to interpret the voluminous material he’s gathered in his reporting. He never delivers a convincing answer to the question he poses at the beginning, about how the advantages he and his family once found in suburbia are connected to the challenges these families of color now face. He writes in the introduction that the stories of the book’s five families “reveal something larger” about “why our postwar American dreams are faltering, and about the new dreams trying to rise up in their place.” But he never comes out and says what that something is. Again and again, he shies away from teasing out the meaning and making broad arguments about the events he has described. He seems to hope the material will speak for itself.

This is a common tendency for reporters, and an understandable one. Our newsrooms don’t train us to engage in broad historical analysis, and when we do cast ourselves in the role of historians, some of us fail miserably. But on other occasions, journalists have managed to act as both reporters and historians at once, availing themselves of the best tools of each tradition: think of Robert Caro, Stephen Kinzer, or Rachel L. Swarns, to name a few.

Admittedly, this is a lot to ask for, but it’s also what a book like Disillusioned demands—and, unfortunately, Herold has not risen to the task. In fact, he hews so closely to his individual case studies that he scarcely provides national statistics, for instance, on suburban poverty rates, or construction of new suburbs, or changes in federal funding levels. Whatever lessons are here to be gleaned, each reader will have to extract them for herself.

In contrast to Disillusioned, Tim Keogh’s In Levittown’s Shadow has a tight scope. It focuses on the suburbs of Long Island during the three decades after World War II. It’s also a work of scholarship, not narrative journalism. But that doesn’t mean it’s dry or unclear; in its analysis of the origins of the fabled prosperity of postwar American suburbs, it’s powerfully illuminating.

Keogh calls attention to two popular assumptions about postwar suburbia that he wants to challenge (though not dismiss). The first is that they were tidy, affluent, and almost exclusively white. The second is that their wealth came from federal programs—not only mortgage guarantees and subsidies, but also defense contracts for suburban manufacturing plants—or from the booming economy.

To the first assumption, Keogh’s rejoinder is that there were always poor people of color in suburbia. As he points out, someone had to work the low-wage jobs that white homeowners didn’t want. Those other suburbanites have simply been written out of the story, he suggests, in part because they often lived in substandard housing and weren’t well accounted for. His second argument is related: their cheap labor was an important but overlooked part of how white suburbanites achieved such high levels of material comfort.

As Keogh explains, roughly a third of Black Long Islanders in this era were migrants from other regions, mostly the Jim Crow South, and the education they’d received in segregated Southern schools tended to be inferior. Even those who had received good educations faced rampant discrimination in the job market, thanks in part to federal employment agencies. Vast numbers of suburban African Americans found themselves in precarious, low-wage jobs that weren’t covered by the labor protections of the New Deal.

And they were integral to the local economy: “Defense workers hired babysitters, cleaners, and landscapers to care for their kids, lawn, and kitchens while both spouses worked,” Keogh notes. He goes on:

Their modest wages bought them a single-family house, made possible by federal mortgage insurance and low-wage laborers reducing construction costs. The textile mill down the road subsidized their school tax base, but the mill owner only moved there because he could still profit from low-wage labor. Suburban consumers could shop at the unending strip malls since minimum wages kept food, clothing, and merchandise prices affordable.

It comes as no surprise that Keogh’s dissertation adviser was Judith Stein, a prominent U.S. historian who died in 2017. In her books on economic policy, labor, and race in the twentieth century, Stein engaged in the kind of “ruthless critique of everything existing” that Karl Marx had advocated for.

Keogh’s work similarly upends conventional wisdom: as he notes in his epilogue, liberals often blamed suburbia for the problems of inner cities. By this logic, “redistributing people to the suburbs, or resources from the suburbs,” he writes, “could rectify inequality.” But as he shows, the suburbs were never the fundamental problem. In themselves, they don’t actually create wealth or poverty. In Keogh’s reading, external forces do that—above all, federal policy, which bestows subsidies on some people and leaves others in conditions so precarious they’re willing to work for any wage, however low.

With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting the question Herold posed at the beginning of Disillusioned: How are the opportunities that white families “extracted from Penn Hills” and other places like it connected to the poverty that exists there now? Keogh’s analysis reveals that such framing is misguided. Those opportunities were not “extracted” from the suburbs, per se. If suburban newcomers are stuck in poverty, it’s not principally because previous residents didn’t pay enough property taxes, or because they have since moved elsewhere. A bigger factor is that capital has moved. Arguably the biggest driver of poverty in Ferguson is that the town’s largest employers—including Chrysler, Ford, and McDonnell Douglas plants—shuttered in the 1990s and 2000s. Those waves of offshoring cost thousands of jobs. (It’s also true that many people who were already poor moved to Ferguson recently, and the businesses that remain pay shockingly low taxes.)

Looming in the background of the entire discussion of the suburbs, social justice, and racial inequity is the question of whether it’s individual white families or public policy that’s to blame for our current problems. While Herold does pay attention to policy, he places great emphasis on hearts and minds. He writes in his preface that the cause of the “disillusionment” haunting suburbia is a “mindset” that made white families feel comfortable leaving places like Ferguson and seeking opportunities elsewhere.

Herold also notes in a late chapter that he learned a great deal from the writings of a diversity consultant named Lillian Roybal Rose—in particular, her argument that, in Herold’s words, “white people must come to emotional grips with how whiteness, white racism, and white racial ignorance has affected us before we can make meaningful contributions to larger fights for a more just world.” It’s telling that this assertion comes from a consultant, rather than a historian. On an empirical level, it’s false. Did Lyndon Johnson have to come to emotional grips with “how whiteness had affected him” before he signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act? Probably not.

On the other hand, if the main culprit of suburban poverty and decay is bad public policy, then the solution will have to look very different from a mere shift in mindset. As Keogh writes in his conclusion, the federal government, with its power to run deficits and print money, is uniquely positioned to boost funding for local schools. He also calls for more “elderly care, after-school activities, parks, playgrounds, water quality, and runoff projects,” paired with job guarantees that would provide living wages for suburbanites of all races.

Perhaps this is less emotionally satisfying than the alternative. There’s something seductive about the idea that solutions to social ills must begin with personal self-improvement rather than politics—especially when our current politics are so sclerotic. But Keogh’s remedy is ultimately a more hopeful one, because it calls for concrete action and policies that, at least intermittently, have been enacted before in American life. That doesn’t mean prejudice and bigotry will go away automatically—clearly more work needs to be done to combat those forces, too. But discrimination in employment, housing markets, and school districts always operates in the context of political economy. If we want to make our suburbs and our cities more equitable, inclusive, integrated, and better maintained, then politics, not self-examination, holds the key.

Disillusioned
Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
Benjamin Herold
Penguin Press
$32 | 496 pp.

In Levittown’s Shadow
Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb
Tim Keogh
University of Chicago Press
$26 | 328 pp.

Nick Tabor April 23, 2024

Troll in Chief

Matt McManus — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 19:03:07 +0000

Troll in Chief

Among the many troubling phenomena social media has introduced or amplified in our politics is the troll. Crawling out of the shallow swamps of 4chan or the parts of YouTube not yet dominated by Taylor Swift, internet trolls have managed to rise to surprising heights of notoriety. Trolls like Bronze Age Pervert and L0m3z write best-selling books and big thought pieces for venerable right-wing magazines. A troll disguised as a politician, Vivek Ramaswamy, even ran for the Republican presidential nomination and is now angling to be Donald Trump’s running mate. The term is new, but the reality is not entirely unfamiliar. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre described a rhetorical technique that we might call pre-internet trolling:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

How the troll has come to occupy his role (it’s usually a man) in the collective id is the subject of Jason Hannan’s engaging Trolling Ourselves To Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Hannan, an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, is an eclectic and imaginative thinker writing in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan. He argues that trolls “first emerged as social parasites, digital delinquents who abused the collective trust of an online community. By posting manipulative questions and provocative comments as bait, they lured unsuspecting users into arguments and then relished the ensuing flame wars.” Hannan claims that in their “essence,” early trolls were not much more than “pranksters who got a kick out of sowing discord online.” But things soon got more sinister as many anonymous trolls matured from posting the odd Holocaust-denial joke now and then to actively participating in fascist politics.

One of the most significant factors in the emergence of the troll is, of course, changing technology. Here, Hannan owes a debt to the iconoclastic media theorist Neil Postman, whose Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) inspired Hannan’s title. Postman famously argued that with the advent of television, politics was becoming more one-dimensional and simplistic. During the nineteenth century, when people got their political information from books and newspapers, they found it easier to absorb a high level of complexity and nuance. But TV news boils everything down to five-minute soundbites and makes every story as entertaining and adversarial as possible. Hannan argues that something similar has occurred with the rise of the internet. Social media in particular fosters a “hyperemotional environment of visceral reactions and paranoid instincts” that feeds into the “psychology of reactionary right-wing movements.” It is the manure-rich soil from which figures such as Trump or Boris Johnson can emerge. It rewards anyone who can master the dubious art of the angry three-hundred-character tweet that triggers liberal squares. They and their admirers are “in it for the lols.”

When the troll is not just a provocateur, he is usually a counter-puncher. And this is perhaps one reason so many trolls are right-wingers. As Hannan points out, the contemporary Right is riddled with contradictions: it will defend “limited government” and free markets while also endorsing “government bailouts of private business” and “bloated military budgets”; it will lament the decline of the nuclear family on Sunday and laugh as ICE tears “migrant children away from their parents” and imprisons them in cages the next day. For Hannan, these contradictions make sense if one grasps that the political Right is not so much a principled movement as a reaction against the claims of reason and a blind embrace of hierarchy and prejudice. On this view, the Right is very much a “politics of resentment,” which “does not so much say what it stands for as highlight what it stands against”—anything that undermines the status, wealth, and power of the Right’s constituencies. Grounded in reaction, the Right does better with stylish ridicule than with systematic argument. Distrustful of theory, its natural genre is the one-liner or the tweet.

All this might give you the impression that Hannan is one more in a long line of left-wing Enlightenment critics of the Right, with a lineage going back to Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In some respects, that’s true. But one of the strengths of Hannan’s book is his recognition that there is a dark side to Enlightenment that naturally produces reactionary and prejudicial tendencies. Here, he is very much inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. MacIntyre famously argued that the Enlightenment’s moral project had run into a dead end somewhere around the time of Nietzsche. Constantly seeking a foundation for morality, it ended in emotivism: the conviction that morality is at best a matter of taste, and moral preferences are, in principle, no different from a preference for chocolate ice cream or key-lime pie. As Hannan notes, for MacIntyre, this mapped perfectly with the ideology that has come to govern many developed states: the “culture, values, and ethos of the marketplace.” In this context, people come to treat one another largely as “means” rather than “ends.” Evoking Mad Men, Hannan claims modern subjects are “architects of deception, seeking to persuade, influence, convince, control, shape, mold, deceive, and manipulate each other for the realization of private and individual gain.”

Dark stuff. It gets darker still when Hannan points out how this eminently modern market morality helps produce not just internet trolls, but conservative mega-influencers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. For Hannan, these figures “fought to inoculate conservatives against guilt and remorse for cruel, obnoxious and antisocial speech. They taught conservatives to enjoy their cruelty and to delight in provocation for its own sake. In short, they turned American conservatism into a vast community of political trolls.”

Donald Trump has presented himself as the Troll in Chief. In The Art of the Deal, he claimed that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” what he called “truthful hyperbole.” In the old days, when he was merely a failing businessman, Trump’s “truthful hyperbole” was just typical business bullshit. In politics, the same casual cynicism has had a much more destructive effect. Plenty of centrist commentators have decried Trump’s habitual mendacity and the reflexive hyperbole of his language, as if these things made him an outlier. They fail to recognize the extent to which Trump is very much a predictable symptom of our culture, a postmodern conservative who plays fast and loose with the truth because he has discovered that his audience is more interested in being entertained than in being informed.

Hannan’s Trolling Ourselves to Death is short but vital. Hannan suggests—but only suggests—that a new kind of politics is necessary to keep us from trolling ourselves to death. What exactly this politics would look like isn’t clear. But it would involve more than a change of tone. Hannan’s analysis implies that the morality of the market is the real source of our current ills. Until we change the material conditions that encourage us to look at other people—and the whole world, for that matter—as mere means to our own ends, the troll will survive and proliferate, delighting in easy mockery, peddling brazen lies, and gleefully echoing Pilate: “What is truth?”

Trolling Ourselves to Death
Democracy in the Age of Social Media
Jason Hannan
Oxford University Press
$24.95 | 184 pp.

Matt McManus April 22, 2024

Women and the Priesthood

The Editors — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:29:06 +0000

Women and the Priesthood

From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has encouraged Catholics to recognize women’s contributions to the life of the Church. In last year’s meeting of the synod, he called it an “urgent” matter to give women more responsibility in the ministry and leadership of the Church at all levels.

In response to these calls, Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center hosted an event titled “Faith, Feminism, and Being Unfinished: The Question of Women’s Ordination” in April 2023. Panelists discussed the work of Anne E. Patrick, SNJM, a moral theologian and an organizer of the first Women’s Ordination Conference, held in 1975. While the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate is under consideration at the synod, the Church has definitively rejected their ordination to the priesthood.

We asked four participants in the Georgetown panel to continue the conversation. In what ways are women excluded from and undervalued in the life of the Church? What does the Church lose by marginalizing women? How are women still managing to lead from the margins? Some of the contributors discuss their own frustrated calling to the priesthood. But there are other, subtler ways that, in their roles as ministers, mothers, daughters, scholars, and neighbors, women are made to feel less valuable than men. When women are excluded, it’s the whole Body of Christ that suffers—all of us who could be benefiting from their ministry and their gifts.

Read the symposium articles here:

“Women at the Altar” - Jane Varner Malhotra
“Moving the Center” - Mary E. Hunt
“Distorting the Gospel” - Teresa Delgado
“Why Not Women?" - Alice McDermott

And if you're interested in discussing this series of articles with your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community, click here for a free discussion guide.

The Editors April 22, 2024

Jimmy Breslin’s New York

Dominic Preziosi — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 14:36:50 +0000

Jimmy Breslin’s New York

Jimmy Breslin had been a columnist for a long time when New York’s notorious Son of Sam shooter contacted him in the summer of 1977. “J. B.,” the letter said, “I’m just dropping you a line to let you know I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative.” Those aren’t the words that grabbed people’s attention, though. Breslin, then writing for New York Daily News, used his column to reprint the entire letter, which famously included these lines: “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C., which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks.” Son of Sam, Breslin had to admit, was a pretty good writer. “Whoever he is,” he said in a subsequent piece, “he is probably the only killer I’ve ever heard of who understands the use of a semi-colon.” Breslin was criticized for giving Son of Sam a platform and accused of encouraging him to strike again, but he insisted he wanted him off the streets. He condemned the killer and movingly chronicled the grief of the victims’ families. Son of Sam was eventually caught, yet decades later Breslin was still complimenting the “cadence” of his prose. You can even find clips of him reciting it online.

Those 1977 columns were the first I read by Jimmy Breslin. I was twelve years old, on a family vacation in a small town where a general store within walking distance sold the Daily News. I can’t say that I was hooked; I would have been too young to know anyway. What I did know, in the way young readers do when it happens, is that something had changed for me. Ten summers later, working in a Manhattan office near the Daily News building, I’d occasionally see Breslin on the street. As an aspiring magazine editor and freshly minted New Yorker, I felt it necessary to keep up with his writing and his peregrinations: Breslin by himself was news. “Brash,” “colorful,” and “tough-talking” were the approving descriptions that had long since attached to him. At the time, I found him abrasive. He looked and sounded like some of the men in my family—though they were Bronx-born Italian Catholics and he was a Queens-born Irish Catholic (a big difference). Like Breslin, they had opinions that they shared insistently, occasionally with a raw eloquence. Yet sometimes you wished they’d just shut up and listen. In the 1990s, Breslin used misogynistic, anti-Asian slurs when publicly responding to a colleague who said his columns were sexist. This earned him a two-week suspension from his job—a severe punishment at the time. He had forgotten one of his own tenets of the newspaperman’s work: just shut up and listen.

The Library of America has now gathered what it labels Breslin’s “essential writings” in a 700-plus-page, richly annotated volume—seventy-three columns and long-form magazine articles written between 1960 and 2004, plus two book-length works: How the Good Guys Finally Won (1975) and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002). Readers fond of Breslin’s work—whether they read it hot off the presses or sometime afterward—will find much to revisit and relish anew. This includes seminal examples of the New Journalism he and contemporaries like Joan Didion and Norman Mailer helped pioneer: columns about Clifton Pollard, the man who dug John F. Kennedy’s grave (“It’s an Honor,” from 1962); Albert Turner and the Selma march (“On Highway 80,” 1965); and David Camacho, a young New Yorker dying of AIDS (“His Days Turn to Daze on 8th St.,” 1985). Those who’ve never read Breslin may get a sense of why he was so widely followed and why his work warrants such a thoughtfully curated collection (the editor is New York Times columnist Dan Barry). Those whose feelings about Breslin remain mixed will get the opportunity to reassess. What all will come away with is a fresh understanding of how fundamentally newspaper journalism has changed since Breslin’s time, and how unlikely it is that any writer could ever again command the kind of popular attention he did.

Breslin hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live in 1986, the year he won a Pulitzer. Appearing less than comfortable in front of a national audience, he acknowledges the challenge before him, jokingly admitting the inevitability of obsolescence: “Look at me, at my age, I’m going to spend the next ninety minutes groveling in the dust, trying to make rat nineteen-year-olds like me.” Soon, seeming to find his stride, he reveals the secret to his success: “I wrote about a famous failure, and it made me famous in my own business.” (“Go to the loser’s locker room” was another of his credos; winners make for a less interesting story.) The crowd warms up.

Breslin would continue writing his column for close to another twenty years, churning out a number of books along the way. Writing about sports was how Breslin got his start. But the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune liked the way he turned a phrase and thought he’d make a good daily columnist. He quickly proved the publisher right, implementing what would become his signature approach: go where something was happening, bring the stories of ordinary people to life, take the powerful to task. It was 1963. “With absolutely no direction I invented a new form for news pages, a column based on something happening right now in this city,” he said later. He soon built a large following, starred in a famous, long-running beer commercial, and hosted a short-lived talk show. He courted controversy, enjoyed the spotlight, and took easily to being a public figure—specifically, a public figure in New York. In 1969, he ran for City Council on a shared ticket with Mailer, who campaigned for mayor. “Vote the rascals in” was their slogan. Neither came close to winning.

Breslin also got around. Aside from being in Dallas following JFK’s assassination, he traveled to Vietnam, filing a number of unexpectedly poignant and quietly enraged dispatches about the war. He had a knack, as well, for being on hand when things happened: he was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert F. Kennedy was shot, and in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom when Malcom X was gunned down; his column recounting that event is reprinted in the collection, as is one reported and written on a two-hour deadline the night John Lennon was murdered (“I don’t think there is anybody else who can do this kind of work this quickly,” he modestly said of the piece).

The New York columns are well represented, and with good reason. Breslin fed on the city’s energy, converting it back so he could consume even more. As much as he was made by New York, he would go on making it in turn—a symbiotic relationship. “The Spine of the City” is the title of his column on the necessity of New York’s subway system; it’s tempting to apply the metaphor to Breslin as well. “The lowness of government is revealed by the moral superiority of the people of the city,” he wrote, and he gives the city’s people their due. “Door Opens, It’s Always Stacy” portrays the devastated father of a Son of Sam victim. In “A Smile Gone, But Where?” he tells of his silent, daily street-level encounters with a young woman who suddenly and without explanation vanishes after September 11. Those who recall those dark days of 2001 will feel a jolt of understanding.

Like all true New Yorkers, he recognized charlatans, thieves, and liars when he saw them. Pieces excoriating then-mayor Rudy Giuliani and the scheming, vulgar developer Donald Trump are, to employ an overused adjective, prescient. He deplored police brutality and those who rationalized it. (From his 1999 column “The Threat Lies Within”: “Now the big crimes are committed by police. With 40,000 of them, with their rolling cars and night riders, you have a city of so many humiliated citizens, of illegal search and seizures of citizens of color being shot by the cops.”) He had similarly little use for corrupt Catholic hierarchs. His targets included Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and Bishop Thomas Daily, the latter transferred to lead the Brooklyn diocese as the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” reports were coming out. He reserved special contempt for William “Mansion” Murphy, bishop of Rockville Centre on Long Island, who evicted nuns from their convent “in favor of opulence,” turning it into a residence for himself with a $5 million renovation that included a “cardinal’s suite” and a kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer, six-burner Viking professional range, and a temperature-controlled wine cabinet—details Breslin dispenses like drops of acid. In a column titled “Church Isn’t What It Should Be,” he identifies for readers what the Catholic Church could be, as modeled by a Sr. Ann Barbara Desiano at Our Lady of Mercy parish in Queens: “One sweet moment after the next. We know it as love.”

There is occasional sentimentality, of course, along with a lot of self-regard, and the demands of writing a regular column were at odds with consistently felicitous prose. The longer works included here are well reported, and characteristically sympathetic to their overlooked, underdog protagonists, but Breslin (to me) reads better in short bursts: you can almost hear him spitting the words. Another decade after I first spotted Breslin on the streets, my wife and I moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood he’d become familiar with in covering mobster Joe Gallo and his brothers, which inspired his novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Reprinted in the collection is his 1963 column “The Last Gallo Living at 51 President Street,” about Big Mama Nunziata, their grandmother. The boys are either in jail or in hiding, but their exploits remain fresh: the gun battles, the numbers-running, the pet lion they walked down the street like a dog on a leash. Breslin describes President Street as “dark and shabby and empty.” These days, however, it’s a pretty, tree-lined block, with tidy three-story townhouses on either side. (The original buildings were demolished in 1975 after a cave-in caused by a sewer project.) One of them is numbered “51.” Next to it is a vest-pocket park named for St. Frances Cabrini, bordered by a community garden with wildflowers. Visible from the corner is a waterfront warehouse converted to a Tesla showroom. Suffice to say there are no lions on leashes, though there are plenty of pugs and labradoodles. By conventional, contemporary measures, the neighborhood is “better.” But at what expense—and whose? These are questions that Breslin would have asked, and then set about to answer.

Jimmy Breslin
Essential Writings
Ed. by Dan Barry
Library of America
$32 | 734 pp.

Dominic Preziosi April 22, 2024

Nursery Tales

Kate Lucky — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:24:01 +0000

Nursery Tales

he week before I gave birth to my son, I went to the library and checked out some novels. This was one of the last tasks on my list. I’d stored up diapers and blankets, hung paintings on the walls of his nursery. I’d packed my hospital bag with chapstick, toothpaste, and pajamas. And now, I had my books. I didn’t know who I would be in the days after he was born. But I assumed I’d still want to read.

Having a newborn meant noise, mess, and visitors. My love for my son was so intense it often expressed itself as panic. But those early weeks also created stillness, separate from the world of obligation. While other people were working, going out, or sleeping, I read with my baby.

I read East of Eden in the living room, the baby sprawled asleep on my lap. When I got an infection and nursing became painful—an understatement—I read The Ninth Hour and The Topeka School and Our Man in Havana, stories from Brooklyn and Kansas and Cuba to take my mind away from my body. When I couldn’t sleep, I read works by Julian Barnes, Christian Wiman, and Jamel Brinkley. I read standing up in the nursery, the baby strapped to my chest, swaying and pacing to keep him asleep, eating forkfuls of reheated dinner as my free hand turned the pages.

As the weeks passed, my son began to read, too. At least, that’s what it looked like. He stared intently at the pages of various Curious George adventures and Jamberry. He read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, a fugue state of pink-ink-drinking Ginks and Zans opening cans; Frederick, the radical tale of a mouse who writes poems instead of helping his family lay in food for the winter, a veritable artist’s manifesto; and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, an avant-garde dreamscape of colored letters climbing a coconut tree. Every night, we ended with Goodnight Moon. I watched my son flick his eyes from page to page, taking in color, shape, the pair of mittens and the bowlful of mush.

This was ridiculous. He couldn’t really be reading. I was doing that annoying thing parents do, trying to shape a child in my own image.

But I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty. Teaching my son to love reading felt different than trying to train him up for the sake of my own ego. It was more akin to giving him a set of ethics, a particular vision of reality. Language was powerful, I wanted to insist, even from these very first days of Little Hoot and But Not the Hippopotamus. Language could change things; it was a gift. The world was full of stories and ideas that would shape his imagination, foster his empathy, provoke his delight, win his allegiance—stories and ideas he’d done nothing to earn, but inherited simply by virtue of being human. I watched his mouth make shapes, newly pairing consonants and vowels. He said “wah” and “gee” and “ho” as he studied the slashes and curves on the pages. He was learning to make meaning, learning that it cohered in tales and fables, parables and poems.

Plus: reading was fun! Books were cheap and portable. The same old volumes would always surprise you, revealing something new with each encounter. I felt that way returning to the stories of my childhood, suddenly getting the jokes in Winnie the Pooh and understanding the elegance of The Very Busy Spider.

The books of my adulthood were different, too, now that I was a mother. My son’s birth coincided (not entirely accidentally) with my rereading of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead quartet. In this multigenerational Midwest story, I found myself—not so much in the particulars, but in the “big questions” underneath them. The “big questions,” especially “What are we doing here?” and “What comes next?,” are impossible to ignore when you have a baby. Books were one of the ways I could engage with them, at least in the interval before the baby woke up and needed a diaper change.

Was every novel in the world about children? It suddenly felt that way as I read through my haul from the library, and then the next, as the weeks of my son’s life turned into months, as I started sleeping more and eating at the table and nursing, at last, stopped hurting. It was uncanny how many babies and toddlers and teenagers and adults with parents of their own appeared in these books, crucial to the plots and themes. I hadn’t noticed them before.

At the very least, every novel was about time and its passage. And about the suffering we inevitably experience, the love that inevitably prevails, the great generosity undergirding it all. These were more legible to me now, watching my baby. One day they’d be legible to him, too. For now, he slept. The pile of picture books sat next to the rocking chair, waiting for our next new day.

Kate Lucky April 22, 2024

Apple’s Vision Pro Portends a Dark Future

Alexander Stern — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:10:08 +0000

Apple’s Vision Pro Portends a Dark Future

When I described using the new Apple Vision Pro virtual-reality headset to my mother, she said, “Maybe they come out with all these gadgets so that old people won’t feel so bad about having to die.” From friends I heard similar, if less morbid, reservations. “They should just stop with technology. It’s enough already.” “I want nothing to do with this.”

Of course, it’s not unusual for technological innovation to be met with criticism. Many scoffed at the iPhone when it first came on the market in 2007. Skeptical of the iPhone’s multiple functions, an Apple executive and future CEO of Palm asked, “Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee?” New technology is also frequently met with so-called “moral panics.” In the 1920s, for example, the New York Times worried that listening to the radio too much could make children sick because the body could not “be kept up at the jazz rate forever.”

But much of the negativity about the Vision Pro is neither skepticism about its utility nor panic about its likely effects, but rather a wary resignation—like that of a lab rat tired of all the experiments but aware it won’t be able to resist another bite of cheese. We mostly take it for granted that digital technology comes with serious social and developmental drawbacks, even if these may not justify outright panic. As a result, most of us now look on our devices and the industry that makes them with a kind of dependent contempt. We’ve become reliant on some of their functions and addicted to others. We feel compelled to carry a trap around with us in our pockets.

The latest dubious convenience, suggested—but still only suggested—by the Vision Pro, would integrate the trap directly into our visual field, relieving us of the burden of taking out a device and looking at it.

In essence, the Vision Pro is noise-cancelling headphones for your eyes. It’s a pair of virtual-reality goggles that uses eight outward-facing cameras to capture and track external reality and re-present it to you. This “passthrough” technology, like transparency mode on AirPods, allows you to sense and navigate the world with something approximating normal aptitude. It also means that you can impose apps and windows from the Vision Pro’s operating system on the “real” world outside the device. You can, in other words, “augment” reality with the digital ghosts of your choice. A dial on the top of the device allows you to fine-tune the immersion: all the way up and you’re completely in a virtual environment; all the way down and you’re pretty much in the real world, just twelve milliseconds behind and with a pair of bulky metallic ski goggles strapped to your head. Meanwhile, the device’s eye- and hand-tracking sensors allow you to navigate its apps and settings without any keyboards or controllers. Essentially, your eyes are a mouse cursor and you click, scroll, and swipe through menus and apps with various hand gestures.

In full immersion, the device’s performance is compelling. Photos and videos feel uncomfortably real. At one point in the demo offered at Apple Stores, you’re placed inside a 3D home movie of a child’s birthday party that is so life-like it feels invasive. Slight constraints on peripheral vision still keep you at a remove, but your body is telling you that you should be able to move around these environments even if your brain knows you can’t. Though technologically impressive, these experiences are at the same time lonely and almost elegiac. You’re inserted into a kind of lost world or memory that you can’t share with anyone else. There’s also something creepy about them; they turn you into a paralyzed peeping Tom, lurking in a world you can’t affect. One shudders at the possibility of AI one day generating these worlds for us on command.

But this kind of immersive virtual reality had already established itself as a product category before the Vision Pro, albeit a rather niche one. What the Vision Pro has advanced, though not invented, is “mixed” or “augmented reality” (AR)—Apple calls it “spatial computing”—which allows users to integrate various digital functions directly into their experience of the real world. Apple is marketing the Vision Pro as a supercharged hybrid device mixing iPhone with computer with gaming console with movie theater. It can be used to get work done, Facetime with friends and family (as a video-game version of yourself), guide you as you cook, and distract you while you’re folding clothes—all without isolating you from the world and people around you—or so Apple tries to assure us. The Vision Pro even tries to create a sense of presence by projecting an image of your eyes onto the front of the device, which is as weird as it sounds.

To be fair, Apple is aware that this version of the technology is not ready for widespread consumer adoption. The $3,500 price tag seems as much a way of keeping it in the hands of developers and the tech-obsessed few as a reflection of its actual cost. Apple’s strategy is instead to offer a proof of concept—to show that this field is viable, that Apple should now be considered its leader, and that AR developers should focus their talents on developing useful applications for Apple’s visionOS operating system. It is positioning itself for a future when the tech becomes better, cheaper, less obtrusive, and perhaps also capable of what’s called “optical AR”—which would integrate virtual projections directly into our actual visual perception of the world instead of a camera-mediated version of it (something more like Alphabet’s failed Google Glass).

None of these advances, however, will change the basic facts about a device that is fundamentally isolating—occluding certain aspects of the real world in favor of a personalized “me-world” that can’t be shared with others. It’s fitting that you look like such an idiot while wearing it, since it effectively makes you into what the ancient Greeks called an “idiōtēs,” a private person incapable of participating in public life. “Spatialized computing” is another step in the effort, begun in earnest by the smartphone and earbuds (and echoed in the privatized politics of the neoliberal era), to make public life more private.

In his magnum opus Being and Nothingness, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offers two examples to try to illuminate the basic character of intersubjectivity. In the first, he describes the experience of being alone in a park and suddenly seeing a man in the distance. The lawns and trees that just a moment ago were, in some sense, mine—an environment that seemed to present itself to me alone—are now shared. I’m aware of the man as a subject like me, someone who also has a perceptual claim upon “my” world. “Suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me,” Sartre writes. “It appears that the world has a kind ofclearly drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole.” Importantly, seeing this man as an object who is also a subject is irreducibly connected to the fact that I am both object and subject for him as well. For Sartre, my own subjectivity is inextricably tied to my sense that he senses it.

This comes through even more clearly in Sartre’s second example. Here, I’m peering through a keyhole and pressing my ear to a door to try to find out what’s going on inside when I suddenly hear footsteps in the hall behind me. Without even seeing the other person, I’m suddenly and shamefully aware that I and my subjectivity have become an object for another person.

Sartre uses these examples to make two main points. One is to dissolve a philosophical problem about the existence of other minds: How can I know for sure that other people are genuine subjects like me and not some kind of AI automaton? Sartre turns the question on its head. He shows that its premise—individual subjectivity—already presumes the existence of other minds. I get a sense of my own subjectivity through the (sometimes distressing) awareness of others’ subjectivity. In short, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity. Sartre’s second, less convincing point is that intersubjectivity always involves an antagonism between perspectives. “The essence of the relations between consciousnesses,” he writes, “is conflict.”

If Sartre is right about these ever-warring perspectives, the Vision Pro is a new weapon in the fight. My world no longer needs to “drain away” toward another’s person’s world. I can mold reality to my own specifications and live in a world that is mine alone, inaccessible to anyone else. Meanwhile, the elements of our shared world can become mere items on a menu, to be ordered on demand and forced to compete for my attention with virtual projections unburdened by physical constraints. No longer will we have to retreat to the cozy private worlds of our screens as a refuge against the public; we can now project our own worlds directly onto the world out there, while still remaining secure in the fact that no one else can see them. We can, in effect, become unashamed peeping Toms, able to curate our view as we like with no fear of being exposed ourselves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee profoundly antisocial consequences. The videos of early adopters who’ve taken the Vision Pro out onto the street already offer some rudimentary indications: everyday interactions are overrun by virtual dinosaurs and YouTube videos, while fellow human beings are turned into images on the same level as a Twitter feed. To a troubling extent, the Vision Pro makes it possible to actualize a philosophically mistaken understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Early critiques have tended to focus on the device’s lack of utility. It’s not clear what need this device actually serves. But this is a little like criticizing heroin because it doesn’t increase productivity. The tech industry, ever since Apple helped reimagine its place in our lives with the iPod and the iPhone, doesn’t aim at utility exactly. It aims at addiction—creating products so well attuned to human instinct and perception that they become indispensable even if they seem, at least at first, as useless as a coffee-brewing toaster.

Of course, these devices seek to become indispensable not only so we buy them but also so that, once we’re captive to their “ecosystems,” value can be systematically scraped from us. For the tech industry, every instance of unmanipulated or untracked human attention represents lost value. Headsets like the Vision Pro promise to help capture that value. They present developers and advertisers with enticing new opportunities to track, steer, and monopolize our attention. If you think apps like TikTok and Instagram already addle and addict their users, distort personalities and relationships, and violate privacy norms, imagine them in ever-present immersive 3D tracking your every eye movement.

The Vision Pro may or may not be successful; it still has many hurdles to clear, both technologically and in terms of social acceptance. But it clearly signals that the tech industry will keep trying to strip-mine human consciousness for value no matter the consequences for individual well-being or the common good. This is technological innovation aimed not at satisfying our considered desires—or even our basest impulses—but at hijacking and exploiting our animal instincts.

A stock phrase has emerged among the tech cheerleaders touting the Vision Pro: “And just imagine,” they marvel, “this is the worst this technology will ever be.” If only. I’m afraid it will get much worse.

Alexander Stern April 22, 2024

O. J. Simpson, Again

Paul Baumann — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:15:52 +0000

O. J. Simpson, Again

The death of football phenom, advertising pitchman, movie actor, and accused murderer O. J. Simpson earlier this month brought forth an avalanche of commentary from those who remember the impact his trial and acquittal had on the country. Like many others, I remember exactly where I was when the verdict came down in 1995. I was in Commonweal’s offices on Dutch Street in lower Manhattan.

It was a somewhat derelict building on what was essentially an alley between Fulton and John Streets near the Financial District. Several blocks to the east was the South Street Seaport; farther to the west were the colossal Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The building where we worked was only three or four stories tall, a dwarf among giants, yet there was a skylight in our conference room from which you could view the towers—a poignant memory. There was no security at the building, and our offices were broken into several times, once through the wall in the corridor outside the office. The freight elevator we used had a mind of its own. Still, the place had a certain hardscrabble charm, and the small Commonweal staff, both editorial and administrative, was a convivial group.

On that April day in 1995, I was working at a now-antique computer when I heard a commotion coming from the front of the office, where the administrative staff of three or four worked. When I ventured down the hall to find out what the noise was about, I learned that it was a celebration of Simpson’s acquittal for the murder of Nichole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Brown was Simpson’s ex-wife, the mother of two of his children, and Goldman was her friend. Both were slashed to death with a knife; Brown was nearly decapitated. Nothing, then or since, has seriously weakened the case against Simpson, who spent his final years as a pensioner in Florida after a stint in prison for a different crime.

Like most white people, I was shocked by the verdict and even more by the reaction of some of our staff. I was especially perplexed by the response of one young Black woman, the mother of two or three young children who had impressed me as someone of remarkable diligence and sturdy common sense. She lived in New Jersey and was married to a firefighter, and she often spoke of their desire to buy a house. At one point, she brought a fundraising calendar to the office, which featured beefcake photos of firemen, including her husband. Like her, he was exceptionally good-looking. I remember her shy, giggling response when some of us teased her good-naturedly about the muscle-bound photo of her husband. I believe they were high-school sweethearts. At the time, it seemed like a natural exchange between colleagues, unencumbered by racial overtones. Perhaps I was naïve. On that later day in April, we spoke only briefly. I expressed astonishment at the verdict and surprise at her reaction. If I remember correctly, she simply said that she thought Simpson had been framed.

I grew up in a wealthy and mostly liberal, if inevitably segregated, Connecticut suburb of New York. I then went to Wesleyan, an elite, very liberal university in Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan was one of the first schools to adopt an ambitious affirmative-action program, and 20 percent of my all-male class was Black. We matriculated in 1969, at the height of the Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements. At the time, I thought the Civil Rights Movement, exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., was the most courageous, inspiring, and consequential force for justice in American history. I still do. That it was a movement rooted in the Black Church helped to shape my views on the essential role of religion in American politics, which in turn led me to Commonweal.

But after King’s assassination in 1968, the movement for racial justice took an often violent turn toward militancy and Black separatism. That was certainly the case at Wesleyan, where race relations were a tinder box. As I have written before, the Black Panthers were a presence on campus. The body of one murdered Black Panther from New Haven, suspected of being an FBI informer, was dumped in the woods not far from campus. There were fights and incidents with guns, knives, and even arson. Racial strife had troubled the campus for years, prompting a cover story in the New York Times Magazine titled “The Two Nations at Wesleyan University.” “With rare exceptions,” the Times reported, “white students and black students do not even talk to each other.” That was true. “Solomon,” the Times reporter concluded, “would have been overwhelmed at Wesleyan.”

More than twenty years after the racial antagonism and chaos I had experience in college, it was bewildering and depressing to discover such a profound difference of response to the O.J. verdict between me and a Black person I liked and worked with. I know the arguments explaining why the mostly Black jury in Los Angeles acquitted Simpson. Yes, the LAPD was notoriously racist. Yes, just a few years earlier the police officers who had brutally beaten Rodney King were acquitted. Yes, the prosecution bungled important parts of the case. Yes, the history of the American justice system is a travesty when it comes to Black Americans. But even many Black Americans who welcomed the verdict were willing to admit Simpson’s guilt. I remain puzzled by how the injustice of the Simpson verdict improved the chances of fairness for Black people in the judicial system, or how it could have righted grievous historical wrongs. It seemed at best a pyrrhic victory. Simpson, a very rich man who was notoriously indifferent to questions of racial justice until he was accused of murder, reputedly paid $7 million to the “dream team” of defense lawyers who got him off the hook by means of various theatrical legal shenanigans (“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”). Wasn’t that just another instance of justice for sale? How did that help most Black Americans?

The strategy of Simpson’s lawyers was to put allegations of racial discrimination at the center of the trial, constantly obfuscating the fate of the two brutally murdered victims. It was no secret that Simpson had assaulted Nicole Brown dozens of times before she was killed. She had repeatedly asked for help from the police, telling them at one point “He’s going to kill me.” But Simpson’s celebrity had evidently shielded him from police scrutiny.

In any murder trial, the hardest thing to do is to make the lives of the absent victims real to the jury. Simpson’s lawyers made that impossible by transforming the trial into a case about Simpson’s race. In his book The Killing of Bonnie Garland, psychiatrist and bioethicist Willard Gaylin examined a case somewhat similar to Nichole Brown’s murder. Bonnie Garland was a Yale student from wealthy Westchester County in New York. At Yale, she became romantically involved with Richard Herrin, a Hispanic student from Los Angeles. When Garland broke off the relationship, Herrin killed her by bashing in her skull with a hammer while she was sleeping. At trial, Herrin’s lawyers argued that his ethnic, economic, and social background mitigated his guilt, and he was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. “Bonnie was never present at her own trial,” Gaylin wrote in frustration over the incommensurability of the verdict to the brutal and premeditated nature of the crime. “Her life and her worth were being tried and tested, along with Richard’s. Nowhere in that courtroom was there anyone present to tell her story. Without the voice from the grave, she appeared only as a chapter in Richard’s story. They approached her only as a vehicle for understanding Richard, and in so doing they violated that fundamental imperative of Kant that one never use a person only as a means to an end. But then, by the time of the trial, Bonnie was no longer a person.” By the time of O. J.’s trial, Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were no longer persons either. But as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Last May, I attended my fiftieth college reunion. There were a number of panel discussions about our time at the university, including one organized by Black members of our class. Much to my surprise—even astonishment—the theme of the program was about Black separatism on campus, and why it had been a mistake. The organizers lamented the fact that they had shut down almost all contact with white students, noting that their experience would have been richer, and there would have been less racial strife, if such artificial barriers had not been so strictly enforced by the Black students themselves. When the discussion was opened for questions from the audience, one of my white classmates rose to tell of his experience of race relations at Wesleyan. Late one night, he was unable to sleep because of loud music being played in the dorm room directly under him. He went downstairs, knocked on the door, and politely asked the Black occupant to lower the music. The occupant’s response was to punch him in the face. That incident took place two doors from my room but on the other side of a fire door, which separated our racially divided hall and was usually closed.

My classmate told this story with a wry sense of irony. The reaction from the mixed but largely white audience was one of amused recognition. With a dramatic flourish, the speaker then turned to the Black alum sitting behind him and announced that the two of them had eventually gotten over the incident. The men then hugged and laughed, and the audience applauded.

I was grateful, and humbled, by the gestures of reconciliation my Black classmates made. At least we were finally talking to one another, although the Black and white alums still sat at separate tables during dinner. It has taken fifty years to begin some sort of dialogue, but that is progress of a sort. As our current political divides demonstrate, when it comes to race, justice and mutual understanding remain elusive. However far we’ve come, we still have a long way to go.

Paul Baumann April 19, 2024

Mother of the Unborn God

Brad East — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 19:30:45 +0000

Mother of the Unborn God

In seven years, the Church will celebrate the 1,600-year anniversary of the Council of Ephesus, the third of seven great ecumenical councils common to East and West. The Council came at a time of civil and ecclesial unrest. Rome had been sacked in 410; in 430, St Augustine died as Vandals besieged the walls of Hippo. The controversies of the previous century over Christ and the Trinity were more or less settled. As ever, however, settled business begets more business. The answers to one set of questions generate new questions.

One of those new questions concerned the mother of Jesus. If Jesus is God, as the bishops at both Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) had affirmed, then what does that make Mary? In her song of praise to God, she had prophesied that all generations would call her blessed. At the same moment, St. Elizabeth called her “the mother of my Lord.” So Jesus is the Lord, and Mary is his mother. Does saying so settle the question? It doesn’t—though some future theologians, such as John Calvin, wished it had. Among the faithful, a title arose for Mary: “Theotokos.” The verbal root of the Greek tokos means “to bear.” Hence Theotokos refers to the God-bearer: Mary is the one who bore God in her womb.

Could a woman really do that? Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, argued the negative case. Mary, he acknowledged, was the mother of the man Jesus and thus the mother of the Messiah. But she could not have been the mother of God himself, for God has no mother. God is uncreated, and it is unseemly and misleading to say otherwise. St. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, disagreed. If Jesus is God and Mary his mother, then it follows quite plainly that she is the mother of God. Qualify it as much as you like—say, for example, that Jesus is God in the flesh—but the title stands. As does the scandal. For the scandal of the Theotokos is the scandal of the Gospel itself. The good news of Jesus is that his name is Immanuel: God with us. The Incarnation trips up the world because it says not only that the Creator became a creature, but that he became like you and me in everything but sin. He was a man who could suffer and die. He was a boy who could run and cry. He was an infant, nursing at the breast. He was an unborn child, gestating in his mother’s womb.

Is the womb a fitting residence for the Creator of the universe? Could God become small enough to occupy a uterus? As small as a clump of cells? Infinitesimally tiny—this, the infinite God? Gestating, growing, developing, all the while hidden from view? A secret known only to his mother, his adoptive father, and a few relatives? To all this Cyril said: yes. “He did not consider it beneath him to follow a path congruous to this plan”—namely, the plan that he become human so that we might become divine—“and so he is said to have undergone a birth like ours, while all the while remaining what he was.” As St. Bernard of Clairvaux would say centuries later, “There was never any moment…when that fullness which he assumed at the instant of his conception in the womb was in any way diminished or augmented. He was perfect from the beginning.” And so Cyril concludes: “He was God in an appearance like ours, and the Lord in the form of a slave. This is what we mean when we say that he became flesh, and for the same reasons we affirm that the holy virgin is the Mother of God.”

At the Council of Ephesus in 431, Cyril’s position won and Nestorius’s lost. Two decades later, at the Council of Chalcedon, the title of Theotokos was reaffirmed as orthodox. And ever since, the Church has reaffirmed the truth that, because Jesus is God, Mary is God’s mother.

Does Mary as Theotokos bear on any of the Church’s moral questions? It does, and in the most profound way. God almighty was conceived in the womb of a Galilean girl a little over two thousand years ago. God underwent the typical course of embryonic and fetal growth common to human beginnings. God was born: a baby boy, utterly dependent and defenseless, loved and cared for by his parents. The conception and birth of Jesus thus bear directly on the question of abortion. It is my contention that, even if Christians had no other resources for thinking about abortion, the doctrine of the Theotokos would be more than enough.

Abortion raises theological, moral, and legal questions. In that order, I should add. The theological question concerns the status of unborn human life before God: What is this life? What does God say it is? The moral question follows: How should we treat this life, given what God says? The legal (and political) questions are last: Should the state protect unborn life, and if so, how? Those last questions are far from unimportant. They’re the ones that pro-life Christians in the United States focus most of their attention on. And not just Christians: ask an American about abortion, and he or she will immediately start to talk about laws and policies and constitutional rights.

But the moral question was never in serious dispute in the Church’s history—at least, not until recently. Christians had a reputation in this regard. In the ancient world, they were the ones who did not expose their infants, even when the child was unexpected or physically flawed. They were the ones who welcomed human lives in all their variety, particularly when they were vulnerable or voiceless. So today: the Church does not wonder whether an extra chromosome justifies an abortion. How could it? Each and every human being is created by God, in God’s image. For the sake of each and every soul on earth, inside or outside the womb, Christ died on the cross. In Christian terms, these conclusions are not difficult to reach, however they may conflict with common non-Christian intuitions, and whatever they may imply for the politics of a pluralistic liberal democracy.

But moral judgments are only as firm as their foundations, and the Christian moral teaching about abortion requires theological, indeed metaphysical, grounds. The doctrine of Theotokos supplies these grounds. To be clear, I don’t mean that opposition to abortion was historically underwritten by confession of Mary as Mother of God. I mean that the Theotokos—together with the larger constellation of beliefs about the Incarnation—is part of the deep grammar of a Christian understanding of human origins, unborn life, and God’s intimate presence in procreation. Nor do I mean to suggest that a properly Christian view of abortion is the result of divine revelation alone: natural reason and the empirical sciences offer complementary paths to the same conclusion about life in the womb and the moral demands it places on us. What laws or political strategies follow from this conclusion is another question altogether. That question tends to pull everything within its orbit. For that very reason, I want to bracket it so that we can instead recall the beginning of the Gospel and reconsider the moment when the Incarnation began.

Anyone who has visited the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth can tell you the highlight. There are many things to choose from, not least the row upon row of icons and paintings of Madonna and Child offered as a gift by every nation and culture on earth. The message of these images takes you by force: the God who became a Jew is the God not only of Jews but of gentiles, too. In assuming Jewish flesh, he assumed human flesh. As the one in whom all the nations find their desires fixed and consummated, as the one who draws all peoples to himself, he is infinitely translatable, infinitely depictable. As a Jew to the Jews he is also, and therefore, an Ethiopian to the Ethiopians, a Frenchman to the French, an Indian to the Indians, a Chilean to the Chileans. When they clothe him in their garb, they are honoring the child Christ and the mother whose flesh he took. Yet somehow this is not the most memorable feature of the Basilica. As one descends to its depths, one approaches the cave where, tradition reports, the angel Gabriel announced the good news to Mary. There on the altar is a Latin transcription: verbum caro hic factum est. It’s taken from the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel: “the Word became flesh.” Except one word has been added, hic: “here.”

The Word became flesh here. In this place. At a specific time. In the womb of a woman who said yes, like father Abraham before her. Called, he went; called, she replied: fiat mihi. And as God created the heavens and the earth with his fiat lux, so through Mary’s fiat the Spirit begins the work of new creation. The new Adam starts to form inside her. As Eve was taken from the first Adam, so this Adam is taken from a new Eve. In anticipation “the whole world is waiting, bowed down at your feet,” as St. Bernard writes, addressing Mary. “And rightly so, because on your answer depends the comfort of the afflicted, the redemption of captives, the deliverance of the damned; the salvation of all the sons of Adam, your whole race.” In his poem “For the Time Being,” W. H. Auden has Gabriel say to Mary: “[C]hild, it lies / Within your power of choosing to / Conceive the Child who chooses you.”

This mystery has never been far from the Church’s heart, its teaching, or its theological reflection. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, strictly speaking, Christ did not need to suffer and die for our sins. “From the beginning of his conception Christ merited our eternal salvation,” he writes. The work of Jesus for our sake does not begin in Jerusalem. The story of Jesus does not begin in Bethlehem. It all begins in a cave in Nazareth, in the womb of Mary. Our redemption starts there.

In much recent academic theology, there is a strange silence about Jesus’ life in the womb. We are told that what it means to be human finds its norm and pattern in Jesus. Yet his person and work are presented as if they began either at his birth or at his baptism. But the Annunciation was not cooked up by some overeager pro-lifers; it’s right there in the gospels. St. Luke dedicates two leisurely opening chapters to it. The Apostles’ Creed makes the crucial distinction: conceived by the Holy Spirit / and born of the Virgin Mary. In this distinction lies all we need to know about unborn human life and its relationship to Christ.

Consider the implications if all the following is true. Jesus is God incarnate. The Incarnation begins not with Jesus’ birth, but at his conception. Jesus is like us in every respect except for sin. He is fully God (consubstantial with the Father according to his divinity) and fully man (consubstantial with us according to his humanity). He became human precisely to share all that we are, that we might share all that he is. Jesus, in a word, is the God-man from conception to birth and beyond. The Incarnation therefore comprehends not only natality, but fetality; not only born life, but unborn life; not only the public and the visible, but the private and the hidden. Jesus is God in the flesh. Thus, Jesus is God in the womb. And if he is God in the womb, he is man in the womb, too. What is true of Jesus is, mutatis mutandis, true of all humanity. The unborn are sisters and brothers of Jesus. They, like us, are persons for whom Jesus died. They make claims on us—or rather, through them God makes claims on us. Our response is to be modeled on Mary’s. We welcome and protect these gifts from the Lord. For they, like him, are unseen. And like him, they are destined for glory.

“Universal joy has arrived today! God is on earth, God is from heaven, God is among human beings, God is carried in the womb of a virgin, he who is contained nowhere.” So St. Andrew of Crete cries out in praise, and continues: “You are truly blessed, who alone of all mothers was made ready to be Mother of your Creator.” Do we subtract from Christ in praising Mary so? By no means, according to St. Bernard: “Whatever we say in praise of the mother touches the Son, and when we honor the Son we detract nothing from the mother’s glory.”

Christ’s solidarity is total: in every nook and cranny of human life, he is there. He is there because he was there, beginning with the womb. For nine months, Mary was the ark of Israel. Wherever she went, she carried the Lord’s presence with her. This is why St. John leapt at her approach: like David before the ark, he couldn’t help himself. We shouldn’t help ourselves either. Each unborn life is a little Christ waiting to be born—waiting to be received and held and clothed and loved. We rejoice with Andrew and bow with Bernard and leap with John and fall to our knees with Cyril. For Christians know what pregnancy means: not the prelude to a life but the first chapter of it.

Brad East April 18, 2024

Elegy for a Landline

Sharon Mesmer — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 17:50:42 +0000

Elegy for a Landline

“It’s weird how sad I am,” I texted my nephew Nicholas on my iPhone as I waited for takeout in a Mexican restaurant.

“I’m sad, too,” he responded, “now that I think about it.”

We were discussing how I had canceled my landline earlier that day. I’d read an article about how most people hanging on to their old-school phones were sixty-five or older and living in the Northeast. A sixty-three-year-old resident of the Northeast, it dawned on me that I was fast approaching being a statistic. I had to change that.

“Got that number when I moved to NY 35 years ago,” I thumb-typed to Nick. “Wanted to keep it but I’m paying $125 a month for robocalls.”

I certainly didn’t need the cheap cordless from CVS collecting dust on my nightstand. I’ve had a cell phone since 2001, my husband had his own, and our internet came through cable. Knowing that my texts to him about picking up oat milk (from one room of our apartment to the other) bounced between satellites twenty-two thousand miles above the equator always made me laugh. I used the mobile for everything necessary—like Citymapper telling me when the B train would arrive—but clung to my old phone and its randomly assigned numeric sequence out of nostalgia. The voices of people I loved, converted into electrical energy and then into sound waves, had come through it for all my years in Brooklyn. So many of those voices had become memories, but just having the number tethered me to their echoes. When I called my elderly mother back in Chicago, I’d wait to hang up until she hung up first, to keep her energy vibrating. After she died in 2002, I occasionally called her old number, hoping some spark of her was still alive inside the wires. I used that number to arrange her wake. She’d called me on it to tell me my father had died. Six months earlier, I’d phoned him to announce I’d won a scholarship for my second year of grad school at Brooklyn College.

“You stay in that New York until your dreams come true,” he’d said. “I know they will.”

My husband had reached me on it to ask me out on our first date. Nine years later, Citibank used it to verify his purchase of my engagement ring, which he was trying to keep a secret. Canceling that number felt like sacrificing my connection to those events and people for the sake of economy and “progress.” If I wanted to save money, I could’ve dropped a streaming service or a subscription to a digital magazine I barely read.

As a waiter handed me my quesadillas, I finished texting Nicholas: “But why are *you* sad?”

“’Cause I’ve known that number by heart since I was five.”

How had I forgotten? Those seven digits had been my link to him after I’d navigated to New York’s poetry scene. My sister and I were both living with our parents when he was born in 1984; she was twenty-one, I was twenty-three. I helped raise him for four years. Even when I had my own apartment, I’d head home on the weekends to spend time with him. We developed a bond that was more like little brother and big sister. He’d call me several times a week in Brooklyn with breaking news.

“Guess what?” a message began. “I take vitamins! Call me back, okay?”

A shoebox filled with tapes of his messages, recorded with a handheld mini-cassette player placed in front of my answering machine, still lived in a bin in a closet. I kept his voice on plastic films with magnetic coating the way my parents collected my childhood stick-figure drawings in a scrapbook. I knew there’d come a time when his aunt would not be his first call.

As I entered my PIN to pay for the takeout, I was surprised, and glad, to see part of my landline appearing in that sequence. Using a phone number for a PIN wasn’t brilliant, but when I created it I figured I’d get old and forgetful. And I had. But more important than my old number surviving as data beaming between satellites was that Nick had committed it to memory. Despite my forgetfulness, and both of us getting older and distracted by adulthood’s burdens, it was still “data” in his heart beaming between us.

I wanted to remember my old number so, back at home, I wrote it on a piece of paper and placed it on a bookshelf that I’d re-fashioned into an altar. I propped it between my late mom’s leather change purse from the sixties and a tiny plastic rabbit that my dad had picked up and handed to me as we walked around our old neighborhood the summer I was five. I lit a candle and felt dumb for crying. The Verizon representative said the line would go dead in a couple of hours. It seemed a cold, brutal end for an old friend. I wondered if it had indeed disappeared, so I walked over to the phone, picked up the handset, and listened to the silence. Then I put its black plastic carcass on the altar with the other sacred relics that told the story of my past.

Sharon Mesmer April 16, 2024

Local Adaptations

John T. McGreevy — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:40:22 +0000

Local Adaptations

Gary Bass’s Judgment at Tokyo assesses the trials of Japanese leaders conducted by the Allied powers after World War II—a lesser known and, in Bass’s view, less successful counterpart to the Nuremberg trials in Germany. It will surely become the standard account. Bass and his research team have plowed through more than two years of complex legal proceedings and press coverage in multiple languages. The result is unfailingly lucid and intelligent, if perhaps overly detailed. (“This a long book,” Bass warns us, “necessarily so.”) It is Bass’s third deeply researched book in the past fifteen years. His first book controversially located the origins of modern ideas of human rights in the independence movements of the nineteenth century. His second book described how the Cold War machinations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger included permitting the Pakistani military to slaughter tens of thousands of Bengalis in 1971.

Now Bass tackles the Tokyo trials. Twelve judges from eleven different countries, including three from Asia, supervised the proceedings. Topics adjudicated included the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, the 1940 invasion of French Indochina, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent invasions of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the Philippines. Much of the testimony indicted the Japanese for their treatment of Allied prisoners of war. Nine American pilots, for example, bailed out of their planes during the bombing of Chichi Jima, an island off the Japanese coast. Eight were tortured and executed; four were partially eaten. The ninth pilot, rescued by the Americans, was a twenty-one-year-old from Connecticut named George H. W. Bush.

As Bass shrewdly emphasizes, judges whose own countries had not yet abandoned Asian empires were unlikely to be viewed as making impartial assessments of Japanese colonialism. This undermined the credibility of the trials. The most famous defendant at the trial, former prime minister Tojo Hideki, declared the Pacific war “justified and righteous” because of Japan’s efforts to elevate “all the races of the Greater Asiatic powers.” Given Japan’s own colonial record, Tojo’s cynicism was breathtaking, but the delayed independence of Indonesia (from the Dutch), Vietnam (from the French), and India (from the British) made his arguments plausible. So did the legal racial segregation still marking much of the United States in the 1940s and the more general disparagement of “inferior” Asian races widespread in Europe and North America. Tojo’s animus toward the United States was spurred, at least in part, by racially motivated congressional legislation banning most immigration from Japan and other parts of Asia in 1917. The United States allowed Filipino independence in 1946, but the American firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant that charges of victor’s justice had far greater potency in a defeated Japan than in a defeated Germany.

Because many Japanese contested the convictions of their leaders at the trials, and still do, Bass suggests that the liberal international order in Asia was stillborn. His subtitle—World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia—reflects this emphasis. Yes, Bass concedes, the trials themselves reflected newfound interest in human rights after the Holocaust and the Second World War. And yes, the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is inconceivable without that interest. But his final sentence wistfully invokes a “more and more rare” capacity to invoke “conscience over nationalism.”

This seems too stern. After 1945, Japan became an essential part—not an antagonist—of the liberal international order. The origins and consequences of World War II still occasion intense debate across East Asia, in contrast to Germany, but if General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman had been offered the bargain of close to eighty years of a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Japan, they surely would have taken it.

Admittedly, controversies surrounding so-called “comfort women”—Koreans forced to work as prostitutes in service to the Japanese army during the war—continue to unsettle relations between South Korea and Japan. Leaders outside Japan still use the Tokyo trials for propaganda purposes. Even as his armies invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has defended the Tokyo trials in an effort to ally Russia with China, claiming a shared status as victims of German and Japanese aggression.

The Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo remains a flashpoint, because venerating the war dead there means venerating some of the men convicted of war crimes. The government moved the remains of Tojo Hideki, executed in 1948 after his conviction, to Yasukuni thirty years later, cementing its association with right-wing Japanese politics. One of the most visited statues at Yasukuni is of the Indian judge Satyabrata Pal, who, while denouncing Western powers, refused to convict Japanese leaders for what he said was the normal give-and-take of power politics. If colonialism was a war crime, Pal added, “the entire international community would be a community of criminal races.”

Controversy over the Yasukuni shrine should be of special interest to Catholics. An incident there in 1932, described by scholars such as Klaus Schatz, SJ, and others, provides a footnote to Bass’s grand themes of human rights and international law. It can also be understood as yet another variation on the political and cultural decolonization so evident since the retreat of European empires in the mid-twentieth century.

The incident began when the colonel in charge of the military-cadet program at the Jesuit-run Sophia University in central Tokyo announced that the cadets would walk to the Yasukuni shrine. As they marched across the campus, some of the Catholic cadets encountered the university’s rector, Fr. Hermann Hoffmann, a German Jesuit. They queried Hoffmann: Should they participate in ceremonies at the shrine?

It was not a simple question. Visits to Shinto shrines had long been forbidden for Japanese Catholics, for the same reason that Catholics in the rest of the world were nominally prohibited from attending worship services—even funerals and weddings—in Protestant or Orthodox churches or Jewish synagogues. At best, they could participate “passively,” out of respect for the deceased or the engaged couple. Better not to show up at all. Even being present, according to strict canon lawyers and theologians, signaled that Catholicism was one among many equally valid religions, not the true faith. In 1928, Pope Pius XI had issued an encyclical declaring that ecumenical discussions between Catholics and Protestants would proceed only after recognition of the “authority and supremacy of Peter and his legitimate successor.”

Questions about participation in the larger society were never theoretical for Japanese Catholics. Roughly ninety thousand Catholics lived in Japan in 1930, less than one percent of the population. It was one thing to forbid attendance at a Protestant wedding in, say, Milan, where such occasions were rare. Quite another to resist appearing at Shinto shrines in Tokyo. Evading opportunities to venerate Japanese war dead was even more fraught. In 1931, the Japanese army had invaded northern China, or Manchuria, and installed a puppet government. The cadets at Sophia knew they could soon be drafted into active duty. They also knew that a militarist Japanese government had begun a process of firmly tying Shintoism to the state, and restricting the rights of Buddhists, Christians, and other religious minorities.

Fr. Hoffmann told the cadets they did not have to participate in Shinto ceremonies. A handful of cadets took him at his word, and although precise accounts of what happened vary, two cadets seem to have refused to salute the shrine during the presentation of arms. Two or three cadets also declined to bow their heads. These modest defiant gestures unsettled the officers in charge. Just two days after the cadets visited the shrine, the colonel in charge of the cadets officially complained to Fr. Hoffmann, who tried to explain the Catholic viewpoint. The dissatisfied colonel then contacted high government officials. The vice minister of the Ministry of War personally called Fr. Hoffmann and told him to close the Sophia cadet program because “the spirit of the University [Sophia] does not correspond to the principles of national education.” Given this expression of government displeasure, the future of the university now seemed shaky. Enrollment at Sophia dropped precipitously.

When reports from Catholic leaders in Japan reached Rome, Vatican officials joined university leaders at Sophia and government bureaucrats at the war ministry in pondering just what obligations Sophia students owed the nation-state. They did so in a volatile context. The intense nationalism of the 1920s and ’30s disoriented Catholic leaders far beyond East Asia. Vatican officials signed treaties or concordats with Mussolini’s Italy (1929) and Hitler’s Germany (1934), although neither document protected Catholic institutions in the ways these officials had hoped. More broadly, Catholics in both Europe and Asia aimed to demonstrate that even as members of an international Church, they would remain loyal to their native homelands.

To the relief of administrators at Sophia, local Catholic leaders and Vatican officials eventually changed course and ruled that Japanese Catholics could pay their respects to Japanese war dead at Yasukuni as a civic, and not religious, obligation. Even more significantly, in 1939, the same Vatican officials reexamined a famous 1742 ruling on Chinese rites and allowed Chinese Catholics to venerate ancestors according to Confucian tradition, again defining such veneration as civic and cultural, not religious.

In the cauldron of the 1930s, these adaptations to nationalism in Japan and China seemed sensible. Both decisions—allowing Japanese Catholics to participate in ceremonies at Shinto shrines and reassessing the Chinese rites controversy—are now understood by theologians as victories for inculturation, the idea that Catholics must build Indigenous churches, not simply transplant European Catholic practices. These issues were especially acute in Japan and China. Outsider status in these complex civilizations inhibited evangelization. Lourdes grottoes, the Latin Mass, and neo-Gothic churches could no longer constitute a Catholic vernacular. Rather, Indigenous devotions, languages, and architectural forms offered a strategy for shedding the stigma of a foreign import. Vietnamese Catholics appalled by French colonialism destroyed French-made Catholic statues in local churches in the late 1940s. A leading Filipino Jesuit wrote as early as 1952 that Catholicism must no longer be viewed as a Western import, but instead belonged “fully as much to Asia as to Europe.”

Here is where Gary Bass’s yearning for international human rights and norms, as well as his emphasis on individual conscience, intersects with the challenges faced by religious minorities such as Japanese Catholics. Even as Japanese intellectuals denounced Western modernity for its corrupt individualism and liberalism in the 1930s, so, too, did many Catholics—and not only in Japan. Japan’s leading Catholic intellectual fit snugly within both the Catholic and the Japanese milieus when he lamented a Western focus on the “isolated and abstract individual” and urged a “new East Asian spiritual civilization.”

Inculturation in Tokyo in the 1930s, then, could mean inculturation to a nationalist, antiliberal, and authoritarian military government. Inculturation in Germany and Italy was equally fraught. Over time, reform-minded Catholics would challenge this instinct to conform to the demands of the nation-state. The French Jesuit Henri de Lubac published one of his first essays on the distinction between patriotism (good) and nationalism (troubling). During World War II, de Lubac played a role in the French resistance and wrote against anti-Semitism and racism. He helped draft some of the documents at the Second Vatican Council, and his influence may be evident in the distinction made in Gaudium et spes (1965) between a “generous and loyal” patriotism and a “narrow-mindedness” that foreclosed identification with the “whole human family.” Bishops at the Council invoked—and Vatican officials later beatified—the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and who, as a result, was beheaded in the last months of the war. Jäggerstätter’s witness was deemed admirable because he would not sacrifice his conscience in service to nationalist aims.

Now nationalism seems again ascendant. Pope Francis resists this impulse at every turn, as suggested by his focus on migration issues (which cross national borders) and the environment (which knows no borders). At the same time, he also favors liturgical and cultural inculturation, in part because of his long experience with and sympathy for Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

The trick is to figure out what kind of inculturation makes sense, and when. Those Catholics now dismissive of liberalism should be wary of tying themselves, as in the 1930s, to regimes incompatible with a universal Church. Those eager to diminish distance between Catholic practices and local customs might also tread carefully. After all, too successful an absorption into any one local milieu—Japan in the 1930s or the United States in 2024—could diminish the Church’s capacity to challenge, not simply accept, the ambient culture.

Judgment at Tokyo
World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
Gary J. Bass
Alfred A. Knopf
$46 | 912 pp.

John T. McGreevy April 15, 2024

Who Should Study Philosophy?

Ryan M. Brown — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:59:53 +0000

Who Should Study Philosophy?

The majority of Americans are unlikely ever to take a course in philosophy. Though most colleges offer at least a general introduction to the subject, students who enroll in a philosophy course for the first time are likely doing so either because of core requirements or because of a scheduling mishap. U.S. students whose education ends with a high-school diploma are even less likely to have studied philosophy, since very few high schools offer even an introductory course and even fewer require their students to take one.

The American neglect of philosophical study—and the typically American skepticism of intellectualism—is not shared by some of our peer nations. For example, the French baccalaureate—a comprehensive set of exams taken at the end of students’ secondary education—requires that lycée students complete a full-year course on philosophy. This course goes beyond a cursory introduction to major philosophical questions and challenges students to engage deeply with famously difficult material, such as Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Should we, like France, incorporate philosophy requirements into our university and even high-school curricula? What might be the benefits of doing so?

In Why Teach Philosophy in Schools?, the British philosopher of education Jane Gatley seeks to “provide a failsafe argument for including philosophy on school curricula.” Gatley briefly reviews the history of including philosophy in pre-college curricula, as well as the most common arguments for doing so, which she finds wanting. She then offers her own account of the aims of education and argues that philosophy is especially, and perhaps uniquely, qualified to provide intellectual skills that are essential for achieving these aims.

Gatley’s writing is clear and rigorous, and her book is a fine addition to the literature promoting philosophy at the pre-college level. Because she develops her account of the aims of education along pragmatic lines, her argument should convince even skeptics who consider philosophy a useless luxury. But Gatley’s pragmatism is a double-edged sword: though it may convince some readers who think only in terms of productivity and GDP that it is actually practical to teach students to think philosophically, such a starting point is woefully inadequate for assessing the true value of philosophy, let alone for thinking about what makes for a good life or a good society and how education can contribute to both. Indeed, Gatley’s line of thinking may even lead to Machiavellian conclusions at odds with her politely liberal politics. Fortunately, Gatley’s two main arguments can be set on a firmer foundation.

Gatley argues that any academic curriculum ought to prepare students to “effectively interact” with the world so that they can “achieve their aims.” Unlike other academic disciplines, which use well-defined theoretical concepts to give students the ability to interact with some particular aspect of the world, philosophy can illuminate our ordinary concepts, which are not the province of any particular discipline. Without the illumination that philosophy provides, these ordinary concepts tend to lead us into muddles that have direct and meaningful impacts on our everyday lives. If we seek to solve a problem that involves how mass-bearing bodies attract each other, we can turn to physics, which provides the well-defined theoretical concept of gravity and mathematical procedures that allow us to apply it to the problem at hand. But if we seek to have a meaningful and fulfilling friendship, there is no particular science with well-defined theoretical concepts that will help us. Friendship may be partially illuminated by several disciplines—literature, sociology, neuroscience, and theology—but philosophy is best equipped to navigate the difficulties that an ordinary concept like “friendship” raises. And unlike other academic disciplines that jealously police their own boundaries, philosophy requires an openness to the findings of other disciplines in its pursuit of the whole truth. As a result, it is uniquely able to mediate and integrate various conceptual schemes when addressing questions that require an interdisciplinary answer.

Gatley concludes that, without philosophy, “any theoretical curriculum is suboptimal,” for it will fail to use the best resources available to address head-on our students’ most pressing questions about ordinary concepts, and it will also fail to provide our students with the tools they need to integrate the different disciplines they encounter in their studies. If philosophy can really help students with these two problems, as I think it can, then there is good reason to include it in the curricula of both universities and high schools. We would be wise, then, to push our local school boards (and perhaps also our state and federal governments) to find a place for philosophy in the curriculum and to dedicate enough resources to teach it well. Ideally, it would be taught by actual specialists in courses specifically dedicated to it, not simply by having teachers in adjacent disciplines raise “philosophical questions.” There would be practical obstacles to doing this: Where to find more time in an already overly busy school day? Where to find the money in already overstretched budgets? How to navigate parental concerns about the content of such a course? But these kinds of difficulties could all be resolved, and they certainly don’t outweigh the value of incorporating philosophy in a high-school curriculum.

Unfortunately, Gatley’s account of the aims of education tends to undermine her own case. There is nothing wrong with preparing students to interact effectively with the world so they can achieve their own ends. But everything hinges on how we interpret this. Someone like Augustine might say that philosophical education is fruitful because it helps students understand the true meaning of happiness. Such an education, Augustine would say, allows us to determine how best to engage with the world so that that we might lovingly respect it.

But Gatley is no Augustine; her background assumptions seem to be more aligned with those of classical liberals like John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Such a liberalism tends to promote the cultivation of an arsenal of means without making any judgment about the value of the ends to which those means may be directed. Indeed, a dogmatic liberalism may refuse to make judgments about the value of various ends, as long as those ends do not interfere with anyone else’s pursuit of her own ends.

The value of philosophy interpreted along such lines consists only of its utility—how well it helps us achieve our ends, whatever they happen to be. Thus, Gatley takes the “general utility” of an academic education that includes philosophy to be one of its key strengths. But “utility” for what? While something may have utility for many good ends and can thus be said to have “general utility,” we still need to know what the ends are before we can assess the value of the means.

Following the work of the Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard, Gatley proposes to replace the popular philosophical distinction between instrumental goods and intrinsic goods with two other distinctions: intrinsic versus extrinsic and final versus instrumental. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction relates to the location of value: Is the value always present in the good (intrinsic), or conditionally present based on surrounding circumstances (extrinsic)? The final/instrumental distinction relates to the way in which one chooses the good: Is it chosen for its own sake (final), or for the sake of some further good (instrumental)? While most philosophers treat intrinsic and final goods as the same thing (since what is good per se is also worth pursuing as an end in itself), Gatley’s revision allows her to suggest that a good can be intrinsic without being final, or vice versa.

If final value is not the same as intrinsic value, then final value becomes something to be determined “by each individual, rather than by the nature of the activity valued.… Since there is no clear relationship between intrinsic and final value, there is no reason to stipulate that students ought to value the pursuit of truth as an end in itself.” Thus, by separating intrinsic and final value, Gatley subjectivizes ends: what is finally valuable to me may not be finally valuable to you, and that is just because we happen to be different people with different interests. As a result, Gatley claims that the “educational value of truth could rest on its extrinsic and instrumental value” since “there is no moral imperative to value some things rather than others.” Indeed, Gatley takes it as a strength of her strictly pragmatic view of education that it “avoids commitment to more complex goals with potentially controversial ideas about the good life and society.”

But is this avoidance really a strength? It seems difficult to reconcile Gatley’s claim that there is no moral imperative to value some things rather than others with her judgment that it would be “wrong to teach ways of understanding the world that are clearly misleading or false, such as outdated scientific theories or holocaust denialism.” If education is “about the pursuit of useful ways of understanding the world” (emphasis mine) rather than truth (whatever its utility), and if there is no moral imperative to assign final value to things, then what is to prevent a Holocaust denier from directing the conceptual skills she has learned from philosophy toward spreading historical falsehoods? One might think, pragmatically, that pursuing the useful tends to direct you toward the true, but if everyone determines for herself what counts as having final value, then things that are generally useful may be directed to any end, true or false, good or bad.

Shouldn’t education also provide us with guidance on how to discern genuinely valuable ends, since there is a truth about what is genuinely desirable, a truth that philosophy is uniquely equipped to discover and articulate? An education directed solely to the cultivation of generally applicable conceptual skills may produce students better able to interact with the world according to their whims, but this is what ancient philosophers called a “powerless power.” In focusing exclusively on means, we are likely to drive ourselves toward ends that don’t in fact fulfill us. The sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius compared a person in this predicament to a drunk stumbling about because he doesn’t know which path will bring him home.

Why Teach Philosophy in Schools?
The Case for Philosophy on the Curriculum
Jane Gatley
Bloomsbury Academic
$84 | 210 pp.

Ryan M. Brown April 12, 2024

Words with Friends

David Skinner — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:09:33 +0000

Words with Friends

About ten years ago, Sarah Ogilvie, a former editor at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), had some time on her hands. She was awaiting a visa that would bring her to the United States for a new job. With little else to do, she visited her favorite hangouts in the town of Oxford, soaking up the sights and smells of the place she was about to leave. One day, she stopped in at the OED’s archives in the basement of the Oxford University Press for a final look around.

Although the dictionary was not founded at the university, the OED might be described as the Oxford of dictionaries, so revered is it among reference works and books in general. It is the gold standard of academic English-language lexicography and a key tool behind many research projects into the history of English, including many other dictionaries. “It is as unthinkable that any contemporary lexicographer be without the OED,” wrote Sidney Landau in Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, first published in 1984, “as it is that a professional photographer fail to own a tripod to support his camera when needed.”

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, as it was originally called, expounded a new model for dictionaries—the historical dictionary—teaching readers, many for the first time, to think of linguistic form and meaning as historically mutable. Words change—this is the OED’s great lesson, taught one dictionary entry at a time. Such change is documented and illuminated by quotations from historical and contemporary sources. The dictionary organizes the meanings of words into meticulously delineated senses, including obsolete ones. Together these methods help deliver a richness of context and background that is hard to find elsewhere.

But it is not a dictionary built for convenience. Many entries are exceedingly long. The entries for “go” and “run”—with more than 600 sense discriminations each—are currently the longest, according to Ogilvie. Hoping to translate that length into print terms, I checked the twenty-volume second edition of the dictionary, published in 1989; “go” goes on for fifteen pages and “run” runs for twenty.

Though the OED is published by Oxford University Press, it is, in many respects, the spiritual and intellectual opposite of an elite university. For one thing, its admissions policy is quite forgiving. The dictionary is not reserved for an elite fraction of the English language. With some exceptions—dirty words, for example, were suppressed for many years—all words are welcome because the OED was conceived “with an impartial hospitality,” as Richard Chenevix Trench, future Anglican archbishop of Dublin, said in his 1857 lectures to the Philological Society, which led directly to the founding of the OED.

A little over a hundred years after Samuel Johnson’s mold-breaking dictionary had introduced illustrative quotations to English-language lexicography and cast a powerful light on the great importance of sense discrimination, Trench was trying to envision what an ideal dictionary would look like. He struck a very different note than one found in Johnson, who was quite ambivalent about change though finally confessed himself helpless to arrest the ravages of time. With Trench, we see the beginning of a great about-face that led to a more detached approach among lexicographers and a greater respect for words as they exist.

A dictionary, said Trench, “is an inventory of the language.” As for the lexicographer: “It is no task of the maker of [a dictionary] to select the good words of a language.... The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad.” Or, as the OED’s exuberant founding editor, philologist Frederick Furnivall, said, “Fling our doors wide! All, all, not one, but all must enter.”

Furnivall was talking about words, of course, but he might have been talking about people as well. For the OED was created with the help of many hands, male and female, English and foreigner, living inside Britain and all over the world. These readers—incredibly helpful, unpaid volunteers who read what they wanted, but in some cases accepted rather exacting assignments—helped make the OED what it is: a singular treasure trove of English-language history.

A crowdsourced effort, the dictionary was led by a small professional staff who understood their success was utterly dependent on the selfless amateurs working for them. It had been done before (German dictionaries had crowdsourced lexicography work), but it was still extraordinary, for it marked the end of the era of the one-man dictionary, when individuals (Johnson, Webster, and many others), by themselves or with a little help, could make a dictionary from scratch. With the OED lexicography adopted the managerial methods of modern industry and contracted help from a large work force motivated by national and linguistic pride.

That day when Ogilvie visited the OED archives she happened upon a box. “It was lighter than the others. I placed it on the floor and lifted the lid. There, right on top, was a black book I had never seen before, bound with a cream ribbon.”

The book belonged to James Murray, who took over as editor of the OED from the lively but disorganized Furnivall, leader of the project for its first decade, which was not a very productive one. A schoolmaster turned lexicographer, Murray put everything into the dictionary. Unstintingly thorough, he involved his wife and children in the work and brought it with him on family vacations. For good and ill, Murray made the extreme personal sacrifice necessary for the dictionary to thrive. Even so, it grew so slowly that its own editors, one after the other, wondered if they would live long enough to see it completed.

The cream-ribbon-bound book of Murray’s that Ogilvie discovered was the linchpin of the whole enterprise. It contained the names and addresses of the many volunteers who sent in quotations for the dictionary from their readings. The pages were annotated with a code and included shorthand for work delivered and promised as well as updates on whether the reader had moved, married, given up, died, or otherwise gone silent. Who were these people? Ogilvie wondered. The Dictionary People is her answer.

Organized into twenty-six alphabetical chapters, each one presented under the heading of a salient characteristic (“H for Hopeless Contributors,” “I for Inventors,” “J for Junkie”), Ogilvie has written a dictionary of human beings who helped create the OED. The Dictionary People even mimics a reference work in its use of cross references. Rest assured, though, the book is a straightforward and compelling series of stories, not any kind of synoptic treatment of lexicography.

If there is a “seamy underbelly” of lexicography—as David Foster Wallace once insisted in an essay on the so-called “grammar wars” between prescriptivists and descriptivists—this might be it. Take Chapter 3, titled “C for Cannibal.” John Richardson and his daughter Beatrice were among the first 147 volunteers working under Furnivall, sending in slips with quotations. Richardson covered the poetry of Robert Burns and earlier works of Scottish literature, while Beatrice read novels by Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But, quickly, this sketch of domestic bliss turns dark. A surgeon by training John had, many years earlier, been a part of John Franklin’s 1819 expedition to find a Northwest Passage, in which eleven men died of starvation and three were killed. Richardson himself killed one man who had fed Richardson and others meat they later suspected was that of their murdered peers.

“Q for Queers” is the seventeenth chapter. But “queer” (with its various and barbed meanings) only begins to describe Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who bonded over their shared enthusiasm for dictionary work. They were indeed lovers and housemates, but also related by blood as aunt and niece. Additionally, they were cowriters who published together under a single pen name, Michael Field. Field’s poetry was compared to that of Swinburne and Shakespeare and praised in the Spectator. Bradley and Cooper even kept a joint diary.

“Queer” is an example of a word that might have been admitted to the dictionary much sooner, as Ogilvie shows. Kept out of the OED until 1982, “queer” was later found in the notorious missive that the Marquess of Queensberry wrote almost a century earlier to Oscar Wilde, which expressed disgust at Wilde’s relationship with the Marquess’s son and led to a pair of trials and Wilde’s imprisonment for gross indecency. (The imprisonment, in turn, led to the “Ballad of Reading Gaol.”) In that same decade, the 1890s, Ogilvie mentions, Havelock Ellis explored the idea of the “invert” in his book Sexual Inversion, which understood homosexuality as a gender reversal. Ellis collaborated with John Addington Symonds, whom the OED credits with the first use of “homosexual” in 1891.

Ogilvie’s investigation of Murray’s notebook turned up an amazing amount of material. Dictionary People is especially thick with tweedy eccentrics. There is Frederick Elworthy, a sheep farmer in Somerset who, according to Ogilvie, “had one of the world’s largest private collections of folklore charms and amulets.” Henry Spencer Ashbee, a family man and the manager of a London trading firm, also “owned the world’s largest collection of pornography and erotica.” A middle-class housewife in Kent, Mary Vernon also volunteered for the British Rainfall Organisation, measuring rainfall and tracking other weather phenomena for that rather different crowdsourced effort. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and one of the more skilled readers called in to help with special problems, led the Sunday Tramps, a group of intellectuals who walked and hiked together on Sundays—as agnostics, they emphatically did not reserve the day for churchgoing.

Among the most prolific readers for the dictionary the subject of mental illness comes up a lot. Those already familiar with Simon Winchester’s absorbing take on the OED, The Professor and the Madman, will be surprised at how much more there is to tell on this score. “All of Murray’s top four contributors had connections to mental asylums,” writes Ogilvie, “one as an administrator and three as inmates.” This comes in “L for Lunatics” (Ogilvie’s headings occasionally indulge in pre–politically correct language), which happens to be the longest chapter in the book.

John Dormer was not only a reader but a subeditor who could be assigned especially consuming jobs. For example, he was asked to create “Lists of Special Wants,” which required him to “examine over 200,000 slips; sort them into senses; order them chronologically; and identify any gaps in the quotation paragraphs that needed filling.” One does not need great familiarity with the inner workings of a dictionary to tremble at the thought of such a task. Surely, at some point, a kind of snow blindness sets in, making the direction of forward progress nearly impossible to make out. At the age of thirty-five Dormer began hearing voices and became convinced his next-door neighbors were drilling holes into the wall of his house to shoot at him and kill him.

The French call the members of their dictionary academy “immortals.” Ogilvie’s word nerds are all too human for such a moniker. They are outsiders and autodidacts. They struggle with vices. They lose their minds. They adopt quixotic causes such as spelling reform. Murray himself was one of several people involved with the dictionary who were advocates for Glossotype, a simplified spelling system that, if adopted, would have made his dictionary an instant artifact. Yet the cause of the dictionary added prestige and even gave shape to the lives of its contributors. A. Caland, a Dutch schoolmaster whom Murray called one of the dictionary’s “most devoted and helpful voluntary workers,” wrote, not long before his death, that “this interest was the one thing that kept me alive.”

There is a curiously nostalgic cast to the many popularizing books published in recent years about reference works and the fading culture of print. Ogilvie’s valuable contribution, however, brings with it a refreshing directness that at once illuminates the history of the OED while connecting us to our predecessors, people like us, people of the book and of books, stalkers of information, obsessives one and all, for whom words mean even more than perhaps they should.

The Dictionary People
The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
Sarah Ogilvie
Knopf
$30 | 371 pp.

David Skinner April 11, 2024

All a Matter of Tense

Anthony Domestico — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 18:59:02 +0000

All a Matter of Tense

You could construct a history of modern literature just by writing about boxing. Start with the Marquess of Queensberry, who both helped codify the rules of the sport and, by leaving a calling card addressed “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]” in 1895, started the chain of events that led to Wilde’s conviction on charges of gross indecency. Then you could write about the first time Ernest Hemingway met Wyndham Lewis. The encounter took place in Hemingway’s Paris studio, where one burly modernist, Hemingway, was teaching another, scrappier modernist, Ezra Pound, how to box. (“Ezra had not been boxing very long,” Hemingway remembered, “and I tried to make him look as good as possible.”) To talk about midcentury fiction, you could focus on Norman Mailer, who wrote a book on the 1974 bout between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Then you could move on to Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote in her 1987 classic On Boxing that “the boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind’s collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness.”

Of course, boxing is less central to sports, and to literature, than it once was. We can posit a number of explanations for this cultural fact, from our growing awareness of the neurological damage done in the name of the sport to boxing’s celebration of a particular kind of masculinity. As Oates wrote, “Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.” There were and are female boxers and female boxing fans, but you get Oates’s point.

Over the past several years, though, a new contender for best writer on boxing has stepped into the ring: the critic and poet Declan Ryan. Ryan’s vision of the sport, as outlined in essays for the Baffler, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and elsewhere, differs from that of someone like Mailer. He doesn’t mythopoeticize the sport. For him, boxing is largely about class, time, and the violence that these two forces contain. He came to love the sport from watching it with his working-class father in north London in the 1990s. Ryan’s family was originally from County Mayo in Ireland, and as a boy he sensed an identity between his dad, at the mercy of “unscrupulous contractors,” and the men he saw fight in the ring: “Boxing, like the world of work my father was in, was a trap—of sorts—overseen by corrupt, self-serving men getting rich off the work of—usually—first and second-generation immigrants.” In boxing and in labor, one hoped that the trap wasn’t actually a trap, that the willingness to take a punch or clock long hours would ultimately be rewarded:

The glory the sport seemed to offer, or at least hint at, was a light at the end of a long tunnel, but this was more likely a train coming the other way. The tantalizing hope that by dedication, luck, and perseverance, its participants might free themselves from the old life, one of sacrifice and denial, abided, suggesting there might be something tangible to show for all those years of deferred gratification. For a lucky few, there would be, at least fleetingly—belts, big pay days, glory nights. But the only people who seemed consistently to thrive operated outside the ring, controlling the purses and taking their generous share.

This is false consciousness in its purest form, and we know how intoxicating false consciousness, with its promises and obfuscations, can be. Ryan both unmasks boxing as a mug’s game and recognizes, and makes the reader feel, the nobility that can be achieved within it. “Boxing can provide a haven, a shelter, if the ring is a safer, more controlled version of the chaos outside it,” he writes. “It can be eulogized, elevated, turned…into a canvas onto which more articulate fears are projected. But in the end, it is a fight.” Boxing involves illusion, feinting and juking in the ring, and it allows a new self to be performed into existence. Yet it also involves, as Ryan has said in an interview, a radical kind of “exposure” and self-honesty: fighters ultimately “can’t hide from their intention. There isn’t that ability to pretend you didn’t mean what you were doing as there is in so many other parts of ordinary life.” Ryan’s stance toward boxing is one of profound ambivalence—and, as Oates writes, “no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders.”

To be clear, Ryan writes on subjects other than boxing, too. More specifically, he’s an excellent poetry critic, able to think microscopically about form. (In a piece on Catherine Barnett, for example, he notices her occasional use of “rhyme to suggest something like a rare moment of certainty.”) Watching one kind of “sweet science,” boxing, has been good preparation for another kind, poetry. Both are games of angles, requiring energetic movement within severe constraints. Both demand that every action be precise. Both court disaster for a chance at triumph.

Now, with Crisis Actor, Ryan has published his first full-length book of poems. The collection opens with an epigraph from Sonny Liston: “Some day they’re gonna write a Blues song for fighters. / It’ll just be for slow guitars, soft trumpet, and a bell.” Here, Ryan has taken two sentences spoken by Liston after defeating Floyd Patterson in 1962 and broken them into two lines. By treating Liston’s speech as if it were poetry, Ryan allows us to see that Liston’s speech is poetry. The first sentence rushes forward while the second slows down. After making a prediction about a future song, Liston begins to create one: lingering over the instruments that will be needed, dilating upon the imagined performance, and, in doing so, making us hear it.

Other poems in the collection use this technique as well. In “The Young God of the Catskills I,” we read words spoken by Mike Tyson: “I try to catch them right on the tip of the nose, / because I try to punch the bone into the brain.” By breaking the lines, Ryan allows us to hear the run of “t” sounds give way to the brutish consonance of “bone into brain.” Ryan doesn’t so much confer as recognize the musicality of Tyson’s violent language. (This taking of found language and breaking it into poetry resembles what Robert Lowell did with his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters in his collection of sonnets, The Dolphin—a literary historical drama that Ryan has written on for Poetry.) “My Son, the Heart of My Life” ends with the great Rocky Marciano, defeated finally and only by death:

When Marciano’s mother is told the news she will say

‘Figlio mio, figlio mio, core di mamma!’

Joe Louis will kiss the lid of the closed casket,

look at the ceiling of the funeral home,

and say, ‘Something’s gone out of my life. I’m not alone;

something’s gone out of everyone’s life.’

Someone will run down the aisle to hug him,

and see if he's alright.

Again, Ryan’s line breaks clarify and amplify the language Joe Louis used when kissing the casket of a man he once lost to and now mourns: the language of first-person grief (“my life”) is held alongside a collective sorrow (“everyone’s life”). The poem moves without strain between different kinds of language: the plaintive beauty of Marciano’s mother’s lament; the quiet but pleasing assonance of “will kiss the lid” sliding into the alliteration of “closed casket”; the simplicity of Louis’s diction borrowed by the speaker (Louis’s “something” leading to the speaker’s “someone”).

Ryan mines boxing because it’s the stuff of his childhood and what are poets to mine if not their childhoods? “The memory isn’t easy to control,” Ryan writes in “The Rat.” We often remember not so much what we will as what we must. Boxing, as Ryan describes it, is not just an entertainment but a discipline. It shapes its practitioners in body and soul. It also shapes its viewers, and watching and thinking and writing about boxing has attuned Ryan to a particular kind of psychological and physical landscape, even when he’s not writing about the sport. The book’s first poem, “Sidney Road,” opens with this five-line stanza:

A lookout on the world: next door’s wisteria,

its purple leaching out, half hides

a railing that needs paint;

nine wooden planks, enough to stand on.

My freedom as a ‘free lance’.

The wooden planks are enough to stand on, barely, as is a freelance critic’s pay. In this poem, on this road, color has leached from the world, paint has worn away, and the freelancer’s freedom is experienced primarily as a lack, or a series of lacks. The speaker lacks community: “I know fewer names than the years / I’ve been here.” The street lacks foliage: “Rows of identikit SUVs / line the road in lieu of trees / I’ve seen cut back, then down.” This neighborhood, and this life, lack security: “[T]oo many rugby shirts around to feel at ease.” Later, in the title poem, Ryan describes this general sense of life as dwindling. We become habituated to loss and despair until we come to almost long for them:

An urge to be part of something to the side

of what was left; a margins fetish, a letting things go by

on purpose, then by mistake; the years of afternoons

coffees into brandies, somehow always walking in the rain

to Warren Street or Tottenham Court Road, regretting each step

away from whichever ‘you,’ repression as passion.

One line from “Sidney Road” sums this emotional tonality up nicely: “I was the future, for a week, a while ago.”

Time is an obsession in Crisis Actor. In poem after poem, Ryan considers how we experience time, how we speak of it, and how the way we speak of it shapes the way we experience it. “How can you be gone when I still love you?” the speaker asks in “Halcyon Days.” “When I can call out to you in whichever tense / I choose. Come home.” “Halcyon Days” is a love poem of sorts. There are several others in the collection, all excellent. Ryan writes well of romance, how often it gives way to failure and how often that failure opens up to renewed hope. There’s always a comeback, in boxing and in love. It’s all a matter of the tense you choose.

Many of the best poems in Crisis Actor have nothing to do with boxing, though they dramatize much that one suspects Ryan learned in part from boxing: the absolute attention to the smallest slivers of time (when it comes to getting up off the mat, the difference between ten and eleven seconds is one of kind, not degree); the regret that comes from the passing of years (“Apparently we’re old enough / for it to mean this won’t happen again / in our lifetime,” he writes in “Promises Had Been Made”); the suffering and exhilaration that come from being an embodied being. In a physically and emotionally observant poem called “Fathers and Sons,” the speaker remembers his father, home from a long day at work. The child notices his father’s “hair flat against his head / from the hard-hat or the rain”; he observes his “watery blue shirt / torn at the armpit, / undone more than half-way down, / the patched-up vest / hanging on for another month”; he sees the bone-deep tired man “dozing in front / of the television by 7:30 p.m. / The absence of anything like pleasure.” Then, despite this weariness, in a gesture of love, father brings son upstairs: “Finally, upstairs to put me to bed, / leading us in the song / he made up when he missed me, about my coming back.”

I imagine that the song the speaker’s father makes up is a lot like the blues that Sonny Liston imagines: slow and soft, turning sorrow into music. The book’s final poem, “Trinity Hospital,” ends with a speaker meeting his beloved in “her new favourite spot: / a home for retired sailors; / squat, white, stuccoed, / with a golden bell.” In the presence of love, the space becomes like “a lost Greek chapel, / a monument to light.” And finally, in the last stanza, the blues gives way to another kind of song entirely:

but as you turned towards me

the golden bell rang to witness

that I, being of sound mind,

will be delivered through orange groves

to you, the white church of my days.

Crisis Actor
Poems
Declan Ryan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$26 | 80 pp.

Anthony Domestico April 9, 2024

Experiencing the Total Eclipse

Jonathan Malesic — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:57:55 +0000

Experiencing the Total Eclipse

You need those special glasses. This is true.

It’s also true that “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him,” as Annie Dillard writes in her essay, “Total Eclipse.” “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.” I had seen two partial eclipses of 70 percent or so in recent years. They impressed me at the time. But they were trifles compared to what I saw on April 8.

I had a minimal viewing plan: go to the park a block away just before the sun went dark. Maybe I was prepared to be disappointed, because clouds were forecast in Dallas for most of the day. And indeed, it was overcast in the morning.

At noon, after writing a long work-related email, I went for a bike ride around the lake. On the far side of the lake, I realized it was the perfect place to view the eclipse. It’s a pretty location in its own right, on slightly elevated ground, with a view of the entire lake and the city skyline beyond. People had set up their tents and telescopes and seemed to be having a nice time. I cursed myself for not thinking of this sooner. I didn’t have my glasses with me, and I didn’t have time to bike home, get the glasses, and bike back. I needed a real plan.

I decided that it was a good idea to be around a lot of people, so I biked over to the university where I teach. At the site where a new business school building is going up, a passerby handed out glasses to the construction workers. On the university’s lawn faculty, administrators, neighbors, sorority sisters, and fraternity brothers sat in groups of two or ten, as if for a free concert or fireworks show. I put on my glasses and looked up. The sun was an orange sliver. Then it vanished. Was that the eclipse? A few screams went up. But no—it was just a cloud. Maybe we wouldn’t see anything.

Then we got lucky. The clouds thinned as the sun slowly disappeared. My experience of the partial eclipses made it all seem intelligible. And then, very suddenly, something new appeared.

It’s a cliche to say that time stood still during the total eclipse. It’s a cliche, though, because it’s true. Time stood still. My hand reflexively covered my mouth. My breath quickened. I took off my glasses.

I had read that you see a hole in the sky, with blazing, but not blinding, light behind it. This is accurate. The sky was not completely dark. The space where the sun should have been was completely dark. Around it, yes, a perfect, silver ring, and then what I understand to be the sun’s corona, a wispy blur much, much larger than the black hole.

Tears filled my eyes, doubling and then tripling the image. My mouth quivered. I do not cry frequently. Had I not been in public, I would have utterly broken down. “I had never seen anything like it”: another cliche. Also true. I had never seen anything like it. I could have looked forever.

You don’t have to be in a pretty place to view the eclipse. You don’t need the lake or the city skyline or a broad river valley. You do not look at them. You look at the shocking event in the sky.

After some time, a tiny red dot appeared at the 5:00 position on the ring. The dot did not seem to change for a long time. Then it exploded into the greatest brilliance. In an instant, the sunlight was once again overwhelming in its ordinary way. We applauded. I applauded.

“Well, back to work, I guess,” people around me said. It’s true, we had to go back. The students went to their next classes. The construction workers resumed constructing. Lawnmowers started up again. I walked my bike to a bench and ate a sandwich.

Lately, I have been thinking of Immanuel Kant, whose 300th birthday is in two weeks. Kant wrote, concerning the sublime, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” But the sublime, on his account, is not staying forever in the shadow of the moon, screaming or crying or breathless. It’s being in that shadow, then returning to normal life, somehow elevated. You see or feel something that entirely exceeds your capacity to understand, and then you come back to yourself, amazingly able to think through what you have seen. I understand now why people travel to eclipses around the world, chasing that high.

“It was evening all afternoon,” Wallace Stevens writes in his poem about looking at a blackbird. After the eclipse, it was morning, then afternoon again. The crescent sun sat in the live-oak limbs.

Jonathan Malesic April 9, 2024

Whither the University?

Dominic Preziosi — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 17:30:32 +0000

Whither the University?

Nicholas B. Dirks is president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, a professor of history and anthropology, and former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. His new book is City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge University Press). He spoke recently with Commonweal editor Dominic Preziosi for the Commonweal Podcast about the challenges facing higher education and the humanities. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length, but you can hear the full episode below:

Dominic Preziosi: I want to ask about speech on college campuses, especially since the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s ongoing response in Gaza. Universities are under pressure on one side from donors and alumni, and on the other from academic departments and student bodies about how to respond. Politically, they’re getting challenged from both the Right and Left. Last fall, Tom Ginsburg, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, made the case for university silence in the online publication Persuasion: “When school administrations speak authoritatively about contested questions, they not only discourage individual inquiry, but also unleash a politics of lobbying that can never be satisfied.” What should universities do in moments like these? Should they be silent?

Nicholas Dirks: I was chancellor of U.C. Berkeley at a time that was pretty contested in terms of political debates. So I feel like I’ve lived through a lot of this. The University of Chicago has a position that is quite distinctive among universities today. It goes back to the 1967 Kalven Report, which enunciated a position of institutional neutrality. It’s important to remember that in 1967, there was growing pressure on university administrators around things that began in Berkeley with the Free Speech movement in 1964, but that, of course, took off in relation to civil rights and increasingly around Vietnam, and then Cambodia. Universities were contested places in those days, so none of this should be entirely new. What Chicago was trying to figure out was how not to take positions on political issues around, for example, military recruitment on campus or support of the war in Vietnam. I wasn’t in university yet, but I soon would be, and I felt that universities needed to be more outspoken and certainly needed to accommodate the concerns students had about involvement in what we thought at the time was an unjust war.

Having said that, I was younger then, and I have since been a student, a professor at every level, a dean, and then a chancellor. I have increasingly come to recognize that in positions of administrative authority, one has to adopt a somewhat neutral and independent perspective precisely in order not to chill the conversations taking place, the positions that are held, and sometimes even the protests conducted from very different political positions. So, I came to hold that a certain level of institutional neutrality was, in fact, necessary.

Now, lobbying takes place, and I’ve been lobbied repeatedly to make comments. I tried not to make comments that were directly about, say, foreign policy. I tried to say that the purpose of the university was to encourage deep and learned study, but also serious and impassioned debate about issues of the time. And, therefore, the university as such should not take a position with respect to them. But I also recognized that statements I made, and statements that colleagues across other universities made, articulated values of the university that were seen by some (mostly on the Right, but sometimes on the Left as well) as political. It’s very hard to actually draw a line and say, “This is where I’m going to be neutral. And this is where I’m going to talk about values.”

DP: You’re a vocal proponent of the humanities in higher education. Yet it seems that humanities are on the budget chopping block not only at public universities, which rely on state funding and so face greater cost pressures, but also at the nation’s most prestigious and well-endowed institutions. How do you make the case for the importance of the humanities, especially when people seem to see higher education mostly as a way to train for careers?

ND: I’ve been a passionate advocate for the humanities for my entire career, and I’ve been watching the decline with growing alarm. The decline began in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2009. I think there was a direct correlation between the shakeup of our financial system and the growing concern of students and their parents to focus increasingly on an education that could yield a well-paying job. I understand that. Of course, universities from their origins have been concerned with preparing students for careers. But the move away from the humanities is more than just a reflection of that, I think. It goes back to a growing belief that the humanities are not really that important.

In some ways, the modern humanities began when the university stopped teaching theology, religion, and moral values in a direct way. In the aftermath of World War I, when there was the sense that Europe was going to seed, there was an explicit effort on the part of universities like Columbia, Chicago, and others to install a general humanities curriculum that would show students the great works of art, literature, and culture to restore trust in Western civilization, and to use that civilization as a kind of moral compass for the lives these leaders would go on to have. But in the aftermath of World War II, intellectual, political, and social movements increasingly began to debunk high culture, and the humanities played a role in that critique. Rather than just celebrating the past, they called attention to issues of exclusion around race, gender, ethnicity, and engaged in radical forms of deconstructive theory that took everything, as it were, as an object of critique. Even the text itself was destabilized as a result.

So you could say the humanities have hoisted themselves on their own petard. Then the cost of higher education goes up, and students are no longer thinking about what they’re doing as a rite of passage; they’re thinking about it in relation to what kind of career they can get, and whether they can pay back their loans.

But the humanities are still the place to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human, what it means to lead a good life, what it means to try to construct a decent society, and how to understand not only ourselves but our neighbors, and indeed, not just our proximate neighbors, but neighbors around the world. In many respects, humanities are more important than ever. When you confront issues ranging from fear of dramatic climate change and extinction risks to the role that artificial intelligence plays in our everyday life, there’s a growing space for the humanities. The function they have in our education seems to me ever more critical, and I believe we need to find a way to re-valorize the role they play.

DP: Access to an education like this is a real issue. At the moment, there’s the question of who gets to attend college, who can afford it, and how to bring the cost of a college education within reach. Last year’s Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and President Biden’s debt-relief plan gave these issues new resonance. What are some ways to ensure greater accessibility? Does this compel us to ask what and who higher education is for?

ND: These are always good questions, and we have to ask them with a new kind of urgency. The amount of debt around higher education is staggering. It plays a huge role in the lives that people lead after they leave a university, hopefully with a degree but many times not, and in the way they think about higher education and who it’s for. Disallowing affirmative action, which began in California in 1996, has had a chilling effect on the sense of possibility for many young people, particularly from backgrounds that have not been well served by our society and certainly not well served by higher education. Affirmative action was an important way of acknowledging that and using admission to colleges and universities to try to redress the effective exclusion of people from various backgrounds from the best of higher education.

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, places like Berkeley were beacons of opportunity. They were publicly funded and the cost was very low. I was reminded of this periodically by Gov. Jerry Brown, who kept telling me that when he went to Berkeley in the early sixties, he only paid seventy dollars a semester. I reminded him that was because the state was paying the rest. The state was contributing far more; it was giving 75 percent of the budget, whereas when I was at Berkeley, it was providing only 12 to 13 percent. To address questions of accessibility and cost, we have to find other ways to fund students who can’t otherwise afford to go.

This is not a conversation we can defer much longer. But it’s going to require talking about more than just affirmative action. It requires us to think about cost, to think differently about what accessibility means and how to create a more diverse set of opportunities.

DP: This leads to another question. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies recently announced a $250 million initiative to create new high schools around the nation that will graduate students directly into high-demand health-care jobs with “family-sustaining wages.” Is this the kind of program that could impact higher education in a positive way, or are there drawbacks?

ND: I feel a certain level of ambivalence about these kinds of programs. On the one hand, they provide a well-funded fast track for jobs that are important for people to have and critical for our health systems. But on the other hand, I see a lot getting lost in the shuffle. I’ve always felt that one of the great things about America versus Europe, for example, was that we don’t track students at an early age and separate them into either a higher education track or a vocational track. Although I see the urgency of having real pathways, I also fear that this becomes a way of simply avoiding the kind of discussion I was just referring to, which is that we need public support for public higher education at an excellent level, both in high school and in post-secondary educational contexts.

DP: You write in your book City of Intellect that agency is primarily about the quest to find and make meaning. What are some of the challenges today in that quest? Where and how do you think it can still be fulfilled?

ND: In the preface to my book, I talk about issues of human agency at two levels. First, there was a course I took in college on free will and necessity. It was taught by a philosopher of religion on the one side and a behavioral psychologist on the other. One thought that human agency was basically governed by a sense of freedom, the other was of the conviction that human agency was basically dictated by stimulus and response. I found that incredibly interesting, in part because two very smart people with arguments that seem to be endless could agree to disagree in a very amiable way. I thought that kind of model was what a university should be, and it has certainly informed my idea of the university going forward.

The second level, as I confess, is that I lost my own religious faith when I went to college. To some extent, I took up questions of philosophy, literature, and even politics as a way of thinking about issues of meaning that were new, in the sense that they were no longer being governed by my relationship to a church and, in particular, the church I went to when I was growing up. So, I think a lot about the role of the university vis-à-vis these kinds of questions, especially when institutional pillars of community, church, family, and the like no longer seem to have the pull they did once upon a time. Because of the age of their students and the things that universities allow you to do—namely, to delve deeply into the thoughts, cultural expressions, and musings of very interesting people across time and place—universities are ideally suited for this kind of search for meaning, and for finding a social anchor for that search. They provide a community that will support those reflections and the conversations that advance one’s own sense of self and how one thinks about these questions.

But the same generation yearning for meaning isn’t taking courses in the humanities. The question then is, in part, has the university just become one of those institutions that, like the Church, has been jettisoned in favor of something else, or found wanting when it comes to actually addressing young people’s concerns? Here, too, I’m concerned that the hyper-professionalization of the university has gotten in the way. I’m also concerned that some of the debates in humanities have gotten in the way. You have, on the one hand, the sense that everything has to be critiqued, and on the other, the sense that the literary sources considering what it means to be human can only be accessed around a sense of who I am, and not who somebody else is.

What is the condition of our humanity more broadly? If we’re abdicating a role we might play in that search for meaning, all the other questions affect this as well. If college costs so damn much, and it really is a luxury, it’s not going to be a viable place for people to seriously take on those questions. So they turn to the internet, or they turn to other forms of privatized exploration. And that is something the university has to think very long and hard about, to try to recapture the role it used to play. It’s a great question you ask, and it underwrites a lot of what led me to write this book. But it also fills me with concern about what we’re not doing right in the university today.

Dominic Preziosi April 4, 2024

Klimt's Exquisite Abundance

Robert Rubsam — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:50:13 +0000

Klimt's Exquisite Abundance

Few modern artists are so endlessly pretty as Gustav Klimt. In the paintings of this fin de siècle Austrian, a woman’s skin is always luminous, her cheeks forever rosy, her plump body drowning in diaphanous silks and richly patterned robes. His compositions are bright, bold, and flat, all gold leaf and flowers, their outlines easy to read in reproduction. Has any work been printed on so many tote bags or been thumbtacked in so many dorm rooms as The Kiss? Klimt’s paintings seem ready-made for decoration, and are for that reason readily dismissed.

Get yourself in a room with one of these paintings, though, and its gorgeous over-muchness—all that delicate skin and gleaming gold and dense textural diversity—will drag you in, revealing a subtle wealth of detail. Not pretty, no; beautiful. This is certainly true in his landscapes, currently the subject of an underwhelming exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie. Seen from a distance or printed in a book, they become a welter of repetitive strokes in which bushes, canopies, lawns, and garden beds melt into one another, generating a warm green blur in your mind, certainly the lesser part of his oeuvre. In person, Klimt’s landscapes are spaces of exquisite abundance: rich blooming expanses adorned with pointillist arrays of fruit and flowers, gardens whose curtains of foliage are as flat and impenetrable as the backdrop in a theater. He subordinates nature to his grand aesthetic vision.

Klimt was born in 1862, the eldest son of a gold engraver and a musician manquée. He studied at the Vienna school of applied arts and crafts, a decorative education that gives many of his works their iconic qualities. His artistic life was one of continual transition, beginning with the era’s dull academic classicism and moving quickly through symbolism, impressionism, japonisme, and more. Klimt’s Landscapes begins with some of his earliest works, which feel like the output of an unrelated and far less inspired artist. These include a pair of dully accomplished allegories from the 1880s, which show classical figures adrift in darkly realistic forests. His decorations for Vienna’s Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum are more accomplished, finely illustrating all the trappings of an imagined antiquity. But there is no life in them; they trap the energy of his obsessions under thick layers of technique.

Klimt’s canonical status belies what a poor fit he was for the establishment of his day. His monumental paintings for the Vienna Faculty were denounced as pornographic and survive only as photographs. In 1897, Klimt and his colleagues founded the Vienna Secession in opposition to the official Society of Vienna Artists, which many younger artists considered stuffy and exclusive. In the first issue of the Vienna Secession’s literary magazine Ver Sacrum (“The Sacred Spring”), the critic Hermann Bahr wrote: “The choice between commerce and art is the issue at stake in our Secession. It is not a debate over aesthetics, but a confrontation between two different spiritual states.”

The aim was a fusion of multiple art forms—painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and design—into one holistic vision: the total artwork, or Gesamstkunstwerk. Such a work would require the harmony of diverse subjects and forms within a single expansive artistic project. Ver Sacrum published stories by international modernists like Knut Hamsun alongside reproductions of Secessionist artworks. Klimt served as the first president of the Vienna Secession, and his background in design served the new group well: he designed their exhibition posters, and painted a grand frieze for Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession Building, a grand Grecian temple crowned with a golden dome.

Klimt’s bold Beethoven Frieze is a good illustration of the powerful tensions at work in the Secession. Painted in a fluid, sketchy style, the work brims with a youthful enthusiasm for new styles and possibilities, deploying the simplified forms of illustration and graphic design to transform human bodies into decoration: they drift, float, and congregate, liquid and light, a million miles away from his earlier work for the Burgtheater, with its leaden imitations of Greek antiquity. Yet these figures of the Beethoven Frieze are also classical in their way. The Secession artists took Athena for their patron symbol, and Klimt’s poster for their first exhibition was topped by an illustration of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. In seeking artistically novel means of illustrating ancient themes, Klimt and his compatriots in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and elsewhere anticipated Ezra Pound’s command to “make it new”—to construct the future from the materials of the past.

Klimt’s best works are all about precisely calibrated tensions. In a painting on display on the Neue Galerie’s second floor, the creamy skin of Adele Bloch-Bauer stands out against her dress of thickly encrusted gold. Inspired by Japanese woodcuts and Orthodox icons, the persistent flatness of Klimt’s work allows him to place competing textures within the same frame, juxtaposing the delicately blended reflections on the surface of a lake, for example, with the trees and buildings on the shore, which he renders with thick daubs of paint. In Kammer Castle on Lake Attersee I, the style actually advances at the waterline: impressionism below, expressionism above. I experienced a kind of whiplash as my eyes leapt between the two.

Klimt painted his landscapes on and around the Attersee, a lake near Salzburg where he took his annual Sommerfrisch. They are images of real places, yet they are as sublimely false as his allegories, as richly artificial as his portraits. His tree trunks are so thin and fragile that they hardly seem able to hold up their fertile, fruitful canopies. In the exhibition’s best loans, The Park and Pear Trees, Klimt gazes upward into great pointillist blocks of greenery where one canopy blends seamlessly with another. The images are both abstract and illustrative, like one of the postcards produced by his colleagues at the Wiener Werkstätte. This flattened perspective turns every building into a little model, a flimsy construction tenuously nestled within a billowing natural world. In one of my favorite paintings, the Upper Austrian Farmhouse actually seems pasted into its space in the pear orchard, a small set of vertical boards hesitantly shimmering inside all the circles formed by leaves, pears, flowers, and stalks.

That particular painting isn’t on view at the Neue Galerie; nor are any of his dramatic garden views, whose heavy-headed sunflowers droop like tragic heroes. In fact, Landscapes has a mere seven landscape paintings on display, two of which are part of the Galerie’s permanent collection. Most of the exhibit’s four rooms are given over to photographs, posters, early paintings, drawings, several issues of Ver Sacrum, one unfinished portrait (also from the permanent collection), and twenty-seven prints from a rare collection of Klimt’s complete works. There is even a digital slideshow of Attersee photographs taken during Klimt’s lifetime.

They all provide insight into his early years, his relationship with the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, the places where he painted, and his very modern affection for decoration and reproduction. But they do not do much to help us understand how Klimt saw the natural world, and they tell us almost nothing about the important relationship between his landscapes and his portraits. There are so few outdoor scenes and so many prints that I had to wonder whether a series of more ambitious loans fell through, so that the curators had to fill in the gaps with images from their own permanent collection. The result is an exhibition stuck somewhere between an overview of the artist’s career and an argument for a neglected aspect of his oeuvre. In short, it lacks cohesion.

While Klimt was painting the natural world as an interlocking set of gleaming tiles, his contemporaries—whose work is on display downstairs—were transforming the landscape into far more radical images. The cubist Lyonel Feininger’s Blue Cloud renders a grand vista in a handful of richly simplified shapes, subordinating land and sea, cloud and shadow to the same set of clear geometric principles. Expressionists like Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff saw nature as something madly energized—a swaying, rushing, overblooming riot of color and texture. Their canopies of their trees blur; their roots wiggle their way up out of the ground; the whole landscape seems to writhe. Klimt’s landscapes feel so restrained by comparison.

Yet his paintings need that restraint, the accomplished classicism that he holds in tension with everything vivid, life-giving, and physical in his paintings. Klimt’s affinity for decoration has made his work into something easy to reproduce but hard to properly appreciate. To borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, Klimt’s mystical work has lost the greater part of its mystique; the imperatives of commerce have long since won out over those of the art. The photograph, the print, the jpeg irons the tension out of his textures, dims the blood blooming in all those soft feminine cheeks, makes The Kiss mundane, generic, memeable. Without the physical object, there is no tension, no edge to take hold of, nothing that allows you to pierce the surface of the paintings and access the deeper state that gave rise to them in the first place. It’s all just decoration now: easy to take in, and even easier to ignore.

Robert Rubsam April 3, 2024

Life, as Pasolini Saw It

Griffin Oleynick — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 15:12:06 +0000

Life, as Pasolini Saw It

In addition to nineteen novels, British writer Tim Parks is the author of several books of nonfiction and numerous critical essays. A resident of Italy since 1981, he has also translated classics of Italian literature, including works by Niccolò Machiavelli, Giacomo Leopardi, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. Most recently, he translated poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “scandalous” and notoriously difficult novel Boys Alive (1955), published last fall by New York Review Books. He spoke about it via video conference with Commonweal associate editor Griffin Oleynick. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Griffin Oleynick: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) is enjoying a resurgence in the United States. There’s the recent biopic by Abel Ferrara, starring Willem Dafoe. Besides Boys Alive, new translations of his novel Teorema and his critical collection Heretical Empiricism were also published in 2023. Could you give us a sense of Pasolini’s life? Who was he as an artist and public intellectual?

Tim Parks: Pasolini was a towering figure in Italy, and in many ways still is. When I speak to Italians who lived through the sixties and seventies, they say he was the one author who really made them sit up and listen whenever one of his pieces was published, or whenever one of his films came out in theaters.

Pasolini was born in Bologna in 1922, during Fascism. Unlike most Italians, he moved around a lot as a child (his father was a military officer, his mother a schoolteacher). He didn’t have a home city, or a home dialect, which is very important for Italians. During the Second World War, he moved with his mother to a small rural village near Udine, in the northeast, where he studied literature and wrote poetry in the Friulian dialect. He was drafted in 1943, before the armistice. But he managed to escape action, living incognito and working as a teacher.

It was then that Pasolini also realized he was gay. He’d fallen in love with one of his students, and came out publicly, with disastrous results. Just after the war ended, he was accused of molesting three adolescents. There was a court case. He was immediately expelled from Italy’s Communist Party and fired from his teaching job. Neither of the major orthodoxies of the time, Catholicism or Communism, would accept him. And Pasolini’s private world at the time was quite violent: his younger brother, who’d fought with the partisan guerillas during the war, had been killed. His father returned home from the war with a lot of anger. So Pasolini and his mother escaped to Rome in 1952.

Pasolini arrived in the capital as an outcast, thinking that all avenues of a conventional career in culture were closed to him. He’d been canceled, as we’d say now. He had never been to Rome, and it proved immensely stimulating. There, Pasolini discovered the gritty suburbs, where he was forced to live since he had no money. He also discovered the Roman dialect—aggressive, violent, full of earthy humor. And he fell in love with all the young, working-class boys and their chaotic energy, and with the idea that there could be a life outside the bourgeoisie. That formative moment is absolutely crucial for understanding Pasolini: his enemy is the piccola borghesia, small-minded middle-class people whom he attacked—in the press, in his films—for the rest of his life.

GO: That “peripheral” Roman world, especially its idiosyncratic language, is central to Boys Alive. Could you talk about how the book unfolds?

TP: Correct. There’s another strange thing about Pasolini: generally, when Italians move from place to place within Italy, they don’t learn the local dialect. Instead, they use standard Italian. But Pasolini threw himself into it, learning Roman dialect and using it to write short stories about the young men he was meeting. He found a young publisher, Livio Garzanti, who was willing to take a risk and, after heavy censorship, he strung the episodes together into what eventually became Boys Alive.

The book’s action takes place over a period of seven or eight years, from when the boys—there’s no single protagonist, really—are adolescents until they’re around twenty. All the episodes, which are often quite long, are set during the summer, during hot days and nights that seem to go on forever. They begin innocuously enough, with petty theft or a visit to a brothel, but then intensify in unpredictable, often violent ways.

Pasolini gives us a lot of life and intensity, but he never offers any moral take on the situation. This is in sharp contrast with neorealism, the dominant artistic mode in postwar Italy. Instead of critiquing the Italian state and deploring Italy’s poverty and social degradation, Pasolini actually seems to have a kind of enthusiasm for these wild boys.

The original Italian title, Ragazzi di vita, literally “boys of life,” is ambiguous. Most immediately, the term means boys who are living by expedience—that is, stealing, gambling, male prostitution. That strand is certainly there, and other translations have rendered them “hustlers.” But the idiomatic expression in the original title also invites a question: Is the book just about male prostitution, stealing, and so forth? Or is it also about kids who are immersed in life?

More importantly, what is Pasolini’s position with regard to these boys? (We know that he visited male prostitutes right to the end of his life—in fact, he was killed by one of them on a beach in Ostia in 1975.) In one sense, here’s Pasolini, a writer of immense talent, celebrating a form of “low” life that was a smack in the face for his middle-class readers. But in another, here he is placing a group considered beyond the pale of respectability at the very center of literary attention, giving them dignity. And he does so against the rigid legalism and moral rules of the bourgeoisie.

Pasolini believed in the importance of being yourself, which, as he once put it, means being unrecognizable, inasmuch as a person changes from day to day. That’s a difficult position to hold, but Pasolini was a difficult, contradictory person. He reveled in the interplay of clashing viewpoints.

GO: There is a certain tendency to sanitize and reduce Pasolini—many on the Left claim him as a kind of hero, others (some Catholics, for instance) claim him as a mystic. I think of him as an iconoclast. Do you agree?

TP: I’m not so sure. For one thing, Pasolini clearly loved images. He made strongly symbolic movies, about the gospels, ancient myth, and medieval literature. I don’t think he was so much against the icon or the image as such, as against the rigid ideologies that sustain it. Pasolini wasn’t somebody pulling down statues, as it were; instead, he was constantly trying to expose the small-mindedness of public discourse, of any system of thought that arrogated to itself the right to lay down rules about how other people should behave.

I suppose the nearest you could get to Pasolini’s “ethos” is a kind of vitalism. Pasolini was intensely attracted to life, and especially to danger. It’s as if he has to go and touch danger in order to feel alive. He has some grotesque descriptions of sex with male prostitutes on the beach in the late posthumous novel Petrolio: “Every night I risk getting killed,” he writes. “One of these nights I won’t come back.” As the novelist Alberto Moravia informs us, Pasolini really did engage in this kind of behavior compulsively, as if he had a kind of physiological need for it.

It’s rare for a person to be as talented and as lucid as Pasolini was. But people like him are incredibly useful for a society, even if they’re not guiding it, because they’re constantly provoking us to examine our own narrow-mindedness. For example, in the sixties, Pasolini made an absolute gem of a film, a little documentary called Comizi d’amore (“Love Meetings”). In it, he simply travels around Italy and talks to young people about sex. It’s a fantastic piece of work: not only does Pasolini get their opinions, but he then confronts them with how narrow and circumscribed some of their opinions are. Today, the film wouldn’t be radical; we’ve traveled a long way since then. But here, Pasolini is something more than a contrarian who just takes the opposing side. He foresees the whole trajectory of a culture of political correctness that would go on to become, at least at the level of speech, just as censorious and repressive as Fascism had been.

GO: You’ve told us what Pasolini is against, and what kind of life he’s attracted to. The problem is that Pasolini seems to lack a program. What does he want? What would he like to see?

TP: It’s true that Pasolini is more comfortable criticizing than proposing. And he doesn’t go into politics officially. It seems to me that insofar as Pasolini wants anything, he wants people to be honest—that is, he wants people to feel free to actually say what they think. If you think about it, can you imagine anything further away from the reality we live in today?

In Pasolini’s allegorical films, there’s always a character, one who usually appears to be an idiot or a “holy fool,” that just comes out and says what he thinks. That’s not by chance. Pasolini remained intensely attracted to religious art throughout his life. Remember that his 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew is on the Vatican’s list of the greatest films of all time. We can even say that there’s a kind of sacredness to Pasolini’s art: as you move toward life and, because of its intensity, death, you enter into an enchanted, sacred space that gives life meaning—and without which life has no meaning.

Pasolini clearly wasn’t on board with any major religion and famously declared himself an atheist. But he had an immediate affinity with the extremes of religious experience: things like the Crucifixion or visions of the Virgin Mary. Pasolini’s approach to these subjects is interesting because he has an enormous respect for the emotions involved, even if he doesn’t share the metaphysics or beliefs that sustain Christianity. He loathed the institutional side of religion, how figures in power use rules and dogma to coerce others. He wants to be back with the revelation and the miracles, so to speak, not with St. Paul figuring out how the Church can get through the next five centuries.

GO: Pasolini’s spiritual homelessness seems to mirror the lack of a linguistic and cultural home that you mentioned earlier. Did you pick up on that as you were translating Boys Alive? What guided your rendering of Pasolini’s use of Roman dialect into English?

TP: Roman dialect is wild and intense, and Pasolini didn’t know it perfectly. He was also fond of literary allusions, which he folds in at the edges. Translating him was challenging, not least because it’s the Roman dialect of 1950, not now. His publishers had asked him to tone it down, but he insisted on keeping it because, for Pasolini, dialect is closely attached to life—and that includes all kinds of complicated hand gestures. Even when the boys stick their hands in their pockets, that means something.

A translator has to understand the difference between a problem and an impossibility. A problem can be solved; an impossibility can’t be, and the trick is to render things in a way that won’t make the book even worse. For example, William Weaver’s translation of Pasolini’s Una vita violenta (A Violent Life) puts dialect in the language of the Bronx. With respect, that’s a huge mistake, because dialect is closely tied to geography. Pasolini’s action isn’t set in New York; every page of Boys Alive is packed with very specific Roman place names. It’s as if he’s saying this is the kind of story that could only happen in Rome, and only in those years.

Translation, in this sense, is a loss—a huge one, almost as if it’s not the same book. Roman dialect has a very special position in Italian life and culture: Italian comedies and crime movies are often in Roman dialect. But an English reader is not Italian, and that lost context simply can’t be recuperated. So I used English that was very energetic and aggressive, but not geographically located—not particularly American, not particularly British, or any other place.

Even more difficult to translate are Pasolini’s long, lyrical descriptive passages of the Roman cityscape, where dialect words and phrases blend with standard Italian in loosely syntactic sentences. It’s hard to make them work in English, to give them the same impressionistic fluency. Pasolini is being very deliberate here: it’s as if the city, the time, the weather, the summer, the heat, and the boys are all one thing. The boys’ behavior, the names of streets, the flickering of a welding machine in a factory—all of it is tensely wired together. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever translated.

But again, that difficulty—that’s Pasolini, and that’s why he’s worth reading. Books are no longer at the center of culture as they were back when Pasolini was writing. Maybe that’s something to fear, maybe it isn’t. Pasolini was attracted to fear, but he also wanted to overcome it. I don’t know whether we should praise or criticize Pasolini; it’s not clear to me that he could have lived any other way. His insight was that fear, especially bourgeois fear like our worries about property and social status and material security, is what gets in the way of living. Fear is deadly: it prevents us from engaging with life.

Griffin Oleynick April 1, 2024

Christianity in the Middle East

Joseph Phillip Amar — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:47:39 +0000

Christianity in the Middle East

On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike near St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City caused a wall of the church to collapse, killing eighteen Palestinian civilians who had taken refuge there. If, as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated, the deaths were a case of “collateral damage,” what happened two months later at Holy Family Catholic Church was targeted and premeditated. Pope Francis had been in regular communication with this parish, where most of Gaza’s Christians had taken refuge since the war began. On December 16, 2023, two Christian refugees, Nahida (Umm Emad) and Samar—an elderly mother and her daughter—were walking from the church to a convent within the parish complex. Snipers from the IDF shot and killed Nahida. Then they shot and killed her daughter as she tried to carry her mother to safety. Seven others, fellow refugees from the siege of Gaza, were wounded. A statement released by the office of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, was exceptional for its directness. It noted that “no warning was given, no notification was provided. [The two women] were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish where there are no belligerents.” In his Angelus address the following day, Pope Francis echoed the same level of concern. “I continue to receive very serious and sad news about Gaza where unarmed civilians are the targets of bombs and gunfire. This has happened even within the parish complex of the Holy Family where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and with disabilities in the care of religious Sisters.”

Nahida Khalil Boulos Antoun and her daughter, Samar Kamal Antoun, who were killed at Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza (X/@ChristiansMENA)

Most Christians in the West have no understanding of the crushing pressures bearing down on their sisters and brothers in the Middle East. Their incomprehension was on full display nearly ten years ago in a reaction to a Christian attempt at national diplomacy. On April 9, 2014, a delegation of bishops from the Syriac Orthodox Church was received by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. They came to introduce the man they had elected nine days earlier as the new patriarch of their church, His Holiness Ignatius Aphrem II. Reports of the visit, including photos of the newly elected patriarch and President al-Assad, were carried by Arabic media throughout the Middle East. But when news of the meeting was picked up in the West, social media lit up with reactions ranging from disbelief to utter horror. Why, commentators asked, would leaders of a church that traces its origins to the preaching of St. Peter in Antioch associate themselves with a ruthless dictator who was waging a brutal war against his own people? An American pundit went so far as to observe that the benighted Eastern prelates who met with Assad might learn a thing or two from the Jeffersonian doctrine of separation of church and state. It was a classic case of deep ignorance and blaming the victims.

Middle Eastern Christians are well aware of their minority status in their native countries. Without sufficient numbers to influence the political dynamics of the region, they have no choice but to support whatever party, faction, or strongman comes to power. In Syria, this dilemma has translated into unquestioned allegiance to the Assad family. Throughout their more than forty years of draconian rule, the Assads, père et fils, aided by their Russian handlers, have manipulated Syria’s Christian and Muslim minorities—which include Kurds, Druze, Isma’ilis, and Alawites—by stoking fears of a Sunni fundamentalist takeover. In exchange, these groups give their support to the regime, which the Assads then trumpet as evidence of their benevolent protection of Syrian minorities.

Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the Middle East have long relied on local variations of this dynamic, which, though far from ideal, have secured an uneasy peace for an embattled minority that has no control over its circumstances. This all changed in 2003 with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration sold the invasion to an American public traumatized by the horror of 9/11 on the unlikely premise that, once planted in Baghdad, democracy would spread throughout the Middle East. It has since been shown that not even the most vocal advocates of the invasion believed this claim, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein clearly did not bring democracy to Iraq or the Middle East. Instead, it unleashed a cycle of death and destruction that contributed to a refugee crisis that has reached far beyond the region. In December 2023, the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that in Lebanon alone, the number of refugees from the wars in Iraq and Syria stood at 1.5 million, in addition to more than three hundred thousand Palestinians who have sought shelter there since the creation of the state of Israel.

The final betrayal came on October 6, 2019, when President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from a large swath of territory along Syria’s northern border with Turkey, a region that is the ancestral homeland of Aramaic-speaking Christians who trace their origins to the first Jewish followers of Jesus. Not only was the decision made against the advice of the administration’s top generals; it was executed without coordination with U.S. allies, including Syrian Democratic Forces opposed to the Assad regime. The result was a massacre unleashed against a mixed population of Christian, Kurdish, and Yazidi refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. How did we get here?

Once the preoccupation only of popes and archbishops of Canterbury, the disappearance of Christianity from the lands of its origin has entered mainstream media, including the New York Times Magazine (“Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?” July 2015); the Atlantic (“The Impossible Future of Christians in the Middle East,” May 2019); and the Guardian (“Persecution of Christians ‘coming close to genocide’ in Middle East,” May 2019). Iraq was once home to more than 1.5 million Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq triggered a mass exodus of Christian and Muslim minorities seeking refuge in the West. Countless others died trying to escape. Today, the number of Christians in Iraq is estimated to be less than eighty thousand. The invasion contributed to a humanitarian crisis that continues to engulf the region, but it also foreshadowed worsening conditions for Iraqi Christians.

On July 3, 2023, Iraqi president Abdul Latif Rashid revoked the government’s formal recognition of Cardinal Louis Sako as patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church (see “A Patriarch Flees Baghdad,” September 2023). The move came at the instigation of Kata’ib Babilyun, “the Babylon Brigade,” a faction of the Iraqi government with ties to Iran. In addition to dealing a serious blow to the Chaldean Catholic presence in Iraq, the move was seen as a direct affront to Pope Francis, whose historic visit to the country in 2021 augured hopes for more peaceful relations between the Iraqi government and Iraq’s Christian minorities. Innocent Iraqis are not the only victims of a reckless military intervention. By displacing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the deaths of millions and has contributed to a refugee crisis that is damaging the prospects for democracy in the region.

There is an unspoken assumption that the problems facing Christians in the Middle East began with the arrival of the Arab Muslims in the seventh century. The reality is more complex. Under Islamic law, non-Muslims were considered ahl al-dhimmah (“protected peoples”) who were guaranteed certain freedoms. Originally limited to Christians, Jews, and Sabians, the umbrella of “protected peoples” eventually widened to include Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists as Islam spread into central Asia. The inferior status of minority populations under Islamic governance was reinforced by al-jizyah, the tax levied against non-Muslims, as well as by restrictions placed on public displays of religion.

Left: Syrian Orthodox archbishop Mar Swerios Malki Murad washes the feet of congregants on Holy Thursday at San Marcos church in the Old City, East Jerusalem (Eddie Gerald/Alamy Stock Photo).
Right: Easter Mass at the Syriac Orthodox Mart Shmoni Church in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq, 2022 (DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy Stock Photo)

Even when restrictions against non-Muslims were officially mandated, how they were interpreted and enforced varied dramatically from one region to another. In Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, Christians rose to positions of influence in Islamic government and participated in high-profile religious debates with their Muslim counterparts. As “protected people,” Christians were by no means equal to Muslims, but they were not merely tolerated either. They were respected and relied on for their learning and expertise.

Western scholars often observe that, under Arab Muslim rule, the Christians of the Middle East were Arabized. While this is obviously true, what these scholars fail to mention is that Arabic was also being Christianized. The ritual invocation bismillah, “in the name of God,” that stands at the head of the surahs, or “chapters,” of the Qur’an, was countered by bis-mis-saleeb, “in the name of the cross,” which Arabic-speaking Christians began using as a greeting and as an introduction to formal documents and letters. Arabic-speaking Christians would go on to spearhead al-Nahda, the Arabic literary renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of this notably departed from the circumstances in which many Middle Eastern Christians found themselves before the coming of Islam.

When Muslim armies first arrived in the Middle East, they found a deeply fractured Christianity. The cities of Palestine that figured prominently in the New Testament—Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Emmaus—as well as Damascus and Antioch in Syria, were firmly under the control of Christians whom Muslim Arabs quite accurately identified as al-Rum, or “Romans,” former subjects of the Eastern Roman Empire whom Muslim armies had driven from the region. In the West, the Eastern Roman Empire is often referred to as the Byzantine Empire.

But as Muslim armies pressed farther east into rural areas of Syria, they encountered other Christians who identified not as al-Rum but as Syriac Orthodox and who had been forced to maintain a less public profile. By professing a single nature in Christ, the Syriac Orthodox Church opposed the Christological definitions of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which defined Christ as fully divine and fully human. Judged to be heretics by the Great Church of the Roman Empire, the Syriac Orthodox would be joined by the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Coptic Church of Egypt, which were also deemed heretical and therefore enemies of the Christian Roman State.

Under the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, Syriac Orthodox bishops were exiled from their dioceses, imprisoned, or murdered. The churches, monasteries, and convents under their jurisdiction were torched or ceded to bishops who signed on to the imperially mandated formula of Chalcedon. Syriac Orthodox Christians were driven underground. That they survived at all was due to the heroic efforts of Jacob bar Addai, an itinerant bishop who traveled under cover of night to secretly ordain priests and bishops. It was because of Jacob’s efforts that Western Christians pejoratively labeled the faithful of the Syriac Orthodox Church “Jacobites.”

With the arrival of the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century, Roman armies sent to eradicate heretical Syriac Christians were driven out of Syria. Under Islamic rule, the once-persecuted Syriac Orthodox Church came out of hiding and was granted the status of “protected people.” They were not the only Christians who benefited from the policies of their new Muslim overlords. As Muslim armies pushed farther east into what are today Iraq and Iran, they encountered still other Christians who had run afoul of the Roman Imperial Church. The Assyrian Church of the East had been declared heretical by the Council of Ephesus in 431. As enemies of Christian Rome, Assyrian Christians were driven from the empire and took refuge in Central and Far Eastern Asia. During his Apostolic Journey to Mongolia in 2023, Pope Francis deplored the persecution and exile of the Assyrian Church. Speaking to a delegation of Assyrian churchmen, he recalled the courageous efforts of Assyrian Christian missionaries who took the Gospel as far as China.

The common notion of Christianity divided between “Latin West” and “Greek East” effectively erases an entire Christian culture that predates either of these designations. The indigenous Christians of the Middle East are not culturally Greco-Roman; they are Semites who speak Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke. Syriac-speaking Christians originated as a breakaway movement among Jewish communities in Adiabene, a region whose capital, Arbela, is the modern Iraqi city of Irbil. The Jewish-Christians of Adiabene continued to pray, read the scriptures, and live their faith in Aramaic.

Fr. Behnam Konutgan celebrates Mass at the Virgin Mary Church in Diyarbakir, Turkey, for the last Assyrian families in the town (Sipa USA/Alamy Stock Photo).

The ecumenical outreach that followed the Second Vatican Council has gone a long way toward healing the tragic consequences of these early Christian doctrinal disputes. Mutual excommunications that had as much to do with engrained cultural prejudices as with doctrine have given way to dialogue and reconciliation. In 1964, Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople repealed the mutual anathemas their two churches pronounced against each other in 1054. This was followed eleven years later by a Common Declaration of Christian Unity between Shenuda III, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and Paul VI. In 1994, John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, signed a Common Christological Declaration. Pope Francis and Mar Gewargis III, successor of Mar Dinkha, moved further along the path of reconciliation when they signed a Common Statement on Sacramental Life in 2017.

While these efforts have gone a long way toward healing ancient wounds, the more recent history of the Middle East has given rise to a new set of problems. The early modern Middle East was dominated by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which survived for more than four centuries before being dismantled in the wake of World War I. The Ottoman Turks swept in from central Asia in the thirteenth century. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), Turkish armies conquered Arabia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and North Africa, lands that had been under Arab Muslim rule since the seventh century.

Under the Ottomans, religious minorities that included Christians and Jews were organized into millets, from the Arabic milla, meaning “nation.” Like the earlier dhimmi status of non-Muslim minorities, the millet system allowed for a degree of self-determination by making the leaders of indigenous churches responsible for their community’s relationship to the Turkish government. The millet system was far from perfect, but it resulted in an overall reduction of tensions among Christian denominations.

In 1569, the Ottoman Empire granted economic and commercial rights to European powers in the region. France, which had maintained close ties to Christians in western Syria and Lebanon since the time of the Crusades, supported Catholics. Russia assumed the role of protector of Orthodox Christians. In time, this was followed by an influx of Protestant missionaries whose efforts were directed at converting Muslims and Jews. When this failed to produce converts, the missionaries trained their sights on “converting” the indigenous Christians of the region. American Protestant missionaries, in particular, saw themselves as the bearers of civilization and progress to Christians laboring under centuries of what they referred to as “Catholic superstition.” The Vatican, for its part, seized on the opportunity to re-establish a unity with the churches of the East that had never in fact existed. The effort was not without success.

In 1724, the Greek Catholic (Melkite) Church severed ties to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and professed allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. An Armenian Catholic Church was created in 1740 when the Armenian Archbishop of Aleppo, who had previously identified as Catholic, was elected Patriarch of Cilicia in Turkey. In 1783, the Syriac Catholic Church was formed when Ignatius Michael III Jarwa was elected patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church but soon afterward declared himself Catholic. These so-called “uniate churches,” which identified as Catholic, found themselves on the receiving end of much needed material support, including educational opportunities for both girls and boys. But these advantages came at a price. Churches that professed allegiance to Rome underwent a process known as “Latinization,” which meant that their ancient traditions were suppressed and replaced with Roman Catholic rites and practice. This further alienated them from local Christians with whom they shared a history and culture.

The Churches of the Middle East are heirs of a rich theological vision of Mary in the life of the Church. But their unique contribution was often buried by imports from Catholic Europe. Middle Eastern churches in union with Rome saw a proliferation of Italianate devotional art, which replaced the tradition of native iconography. This was joined in the twentieth century by a proliferation of replicas of the Grotto of Lourdes outside Catholic churches and institutions in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. These contributed to the view of Christians as “Other” in their own lands.

The formation of the Uniate Catholic Churches was part of the Vatican’s long-term strategy to bring the Orthodox Churches of the East into union with Rome. In reality, the piecemeal approach to unity created fresh tensions between Catholics and Orthodox. In 2018, while addressing a delegation from the Patriarchate of Moscow, Pope Francis acknowledged the harm done by Uniatism. He voiced his preference for pursuing unity through “the outstretched hand, the fraternal embrace, (and) thinking together.”

While European and American involvement in the Middle East created new tensions, it also resulted in the establishment of schools and hospitals that served both Christians and Muslims, as well as a recent influx of Jewish immigrants to the region. In 1866, the Syrian Protestant College was founded; it is known today as the American University of Beirut. Nine years later, French Jesuits established St. Joseph University in Beirut. Not only have both institutions survived Lebanon’s tumultuous recent past, but their continued presence in the face of ongoing sectarian violence remains a beacon of hope. These institutions were followed, in 1919, with the establishment of the American University in Cairo, an outreach of the United Presbyterian Church of North America.

In 1932, the year in which the League of Nations granted independence to Iraq, four French Jesuits arrived in Baghdad to found Baghdad College, which was open to both Christian and Muslim young men. This was followed in 1955 by the creation of Al-Hikmah (“Wisdom”) University. The fact that these institutions refrained from proselytizing was an irritant to their American Catholic donors. Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston complained that the Jesuit mission in Baghdad was “the biggest waste of money and manpower in the history of the Church,” for not producing a single convert from Islam. Al-Hikmah University was closed and the Jesuits were evicted from Iraq in 1969 when the Ba’ath Party seized control of the government. Today, Jesuit Refugee Service brings much needed humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq. Jesuits also serve heroically in apostolates in Jordan.

The growing influence of European and American Christians in the region fueled resentments that led to violence. Angered by what they saw as the rising economic and political fortunes of their Christian neighbors, Muslims retaliated. Between 1850 and 1860, Christian homes and businesses were attacked in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. By far the most widespread and devastating violence took place in Lebanon. What began in May 1858 as a dispute between Maronite Christian sharecroppers and their Maronite landlords erupted into full-scale sectarian violence between Maronite peasants and Druze landlords, who belonged to an offshoot of Isma’ili Islam. More than twenty thousand Christians were massacred before the conflict spilled into neighboring Syria. In Damascus alone, between ten and fifteen thousand Christians were killed, while European consulates were torched. The slaughter spread to Aleppo, a major Christian economic and cultural hub, and eventually to Nablus and Gaza in Palestine. The carnage continued until August 16, 1860, when an expeditionary force of six thousand French troops intervened on behalf of their Maronite Christian clients in Lebanon.

French intervention on behalf of the Maronites was not exceptional, but the arrival of the French fleet signaled a departure from previous efforts. Rather than docking in the coastal cities of Batroun or Jounieh in the Maronite heartland, the flotilla continued south along the coast to the international port of Beirut. The French were sending a message to anyone who would threaten the Maronites of Lebanon. What began as a struggle between competing religious minorities had acquired a political component.

Violence against Christian minorities would continue into the twentieth century. In 1915, a joint force of Ottoman and Kurdish infantry murdered 1.5 million Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians. Although the Turkish government continues to frame the killings as accidents of war, the systematic slaughter has been deemed a genocide.

The Coptic Orthodox Christians of Egypt have been subject to the most recent—and arguably the most horrific—persecution. Coptic Christians account for a tenth of Egypt’s population, followed by smaller Protestant and Roman Catholic minorities. Between 2011 and 2017, the Muslim Brotherhood began attacking churches, convents, and monasteries. In 2015, twenty-one Coptic Christians were beheaded by ISIS on a beach in Libya. Two years later, suicide bombers entered two churches during Palm Sunday Mass and detonated explosives. Three hundred sixty-three Coptic faithful were killed; more than five hundred sustained serious injuries. In a historic show of unity, Pope Francis and Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, travelled to Egypt where they joined Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church to solemnly commemorate the Coptic martyrs. In 2023, Francis, in consultation with Pope Tawadros II, added the names of the twenty-one Coptic martyrs to the Roman Martyrology.

The significance of Lebanon for the future of Christianity in the Middle East cannot be overestimated. As the most Catholic country in the region, Lebanon has been the recipient of unflagging attention and support from the Vatican. In 1964, Pope Paul VI made a brief stop there on his way to the Eucharistic Congress in Mumbai, India. John Paul II visited in 1997, followed by Benedict XVI in 2012. In 2021, Pope Francis hosted a meeting of Lebanon’s Catholic and Orthodox religious leaders at the Vatican. He had to cancel a planned visit in 2022 because of poor health. Today, Lebanon is gripped by political dysfunction and economic collapse that make such a trip unimaginable anytime soon.

Tragically, when it comes to Lebanon, there is blood on everyone’s hands. Between September 16 and 18, 1982, Lebanese Christian militias, in collusion with IDF charged with security, entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut and indiscriminately opened fire. At the request of Christian militia leaders, Israeli troops took up positions at the exits of the area to prevent those living in the camps from escaping the carnage. Over the course of two days, 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians were mowed down. An independent commission chaired by Seán MacBride, assistant to the secretary general of the United Nations, determined that the massacre constituted a genocide.

Today, Lebanon risks becoming a failed state. The country has been without a president since October 2022. Political infighting has paralyzed the parliament. Gross mismanagement and corruption in the banking system have plunged more than 80 percent of the population into poverty and fueled the exodus of Christians from the country. As if all this were not enough, mounting tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which controls Lebanon’s southern border, threaten to erupt into full-scale war.

The abandoned village of Killit, near the towns of Savur and Mardin, Turkey, which was once inhabited by Syrian Orthodox Christians (MehmetO/Alamy Stock Photo)

It was once common to hear Middle Eastern Christians wonder why their co-religionists in the West had abandoned them. These days, they speak more often of betrayal.In 2014, In Defense of Christians (IDC), a group that identifies itself as “an institute of the Institute on Religion & Democracy,” hosted a three-day summit that brought together Arab Christians and their leaders from across the Middle East. Most of the panels were of a religious nature, but American political figures were also invited, including Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was the featured keynote speaker.

Cruz began his remarks by claiming that President Assad of Syria, Hezbollah, and ISIS were indistinguishable from each other. This was preamble to a remark calculated to provoke Cruz’s Arab Christian audience. The Christians of the Middle East, Cruz asserted, “have no greater ally than the Jewish state.” The audience, which up to this point had listened with polite attention, erupted with boos. Cruz had achieved his goal. He continued undeterred. “Let me say this: those who hate Israel hate America. And those who hate Jews hate Christians.” With this, the heckling grew louder. Cruz expressed sadness for the fact that there were those in the audience who were “consumed by hate,” and left the stage.

Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post, “I support Israel, but what Senator Cruz did was outrageous and incendiary.” Dent was not alone in his criticism. Mark Tooley, then-president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which hosted the event, noted that Cruz was “a savvy politician” who “knew the reaction he would provoke…and he maximized his political moment before the many cameras.” The real question is why IDC invited Cruz—with his well-earned reputation for grandstanding—in the first place.

With Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal response, the situation for Christians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza has become more dire. On December 29, 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in for a sixth time as prime minister of Israel. His previous term in office was plagued by charges of corruption and sweeping attempts to reform the judicial system in ways that would have protected him and jeopardized the country’s democratic institutions. Tens of thousands of Israelis, including the military and business establishments, took to the streets to express their outrage.

Netanyahu’s return to power was spearheaded by a coalition of ultranationalists and ultra-Orthodox religious parties. In exchange for their support, Netanyahu vowed to expand West Bank settlements deemed by human-rights organizations to be in violation of international law. Netanyahu made good on his promises. According to figures compiled by the UN, in 2023 alone, there were on average ninety-five attacks per month on Palestinians living in the West Bank. Armed Israeli settlers have terrorized and killed Palestinians, torched their homes, and cut down ancestral olive groves, while Israeli soldiers stood idly by.

Attacks directed specifically against Christians have also increased. Nuns and priests are cursed and spat upon. Churches and holy sites are vandalized and desecrated. Jewish settlers have attempted to seize church property in the Old City of Jerusalem. On February 4 of this year, CNN aired footage from security cameras in the Old City showing Christian pilgrims processing with a large cross being spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews mumbling “F*** Jesus.” Buoyed by Netanyahu’s extremist views, some ultra-Orthodox Jews have turned to the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who considered the establishment of the state of Israel as a step toward “saving the world from the filth of Christianity” (Shemonah Kevatsim, vol. 2).

The involvement of Western Christians in the Middle East brought much needed support to Christians throughout the region, but it also drove a wedge between the communities that received that support and the broader society in which they lived. Christians came to be viewed as a fifth column, representatives of foreign interests. This perception was not helped by the fact that Christians on the receiving end of Western largesse increasingly identified with the cultures and religious sensibilities of their patrons.

All the popes going back to John XXIII have alerted the world to the accelerating eradication of Christian communities throughout the Middle East. In spite of their warnings, these communities are now on the verge of extinction. It is often said that, in the relentless cycles of violence that have consumed the Middle East, there are no winners. A better way of saying this might be that in the Middle East everyone just keeps losing.

Joseph Phillip Amar April 1, 2024